Skip to content

Vološinov: Language and the Cycle of Behavioral and Systemic Ideology

V.N. Vološinov claims in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that, “without signs there is no ideology”.  Ideology does not exist except in its semiotic manifestations of pictures, art, architecture, and especially words.  There can be no consciousness without inner speech.  Language and ideology are inseparable for Vološinov.  He believed we cannot rely on psychology to analyze ideology, but we should look to ideology to analyze psychology. Vološinov does not define ideology directly; ideologies are the basis for the study of scientific knowledge, literature, religion, and all other social and economic practices.  Ideology holds meaning and as such is a sign and as a sign reflects and refracts reality.  Established systems of ideology (literature, art, science, etc.) are the “crystallizations” of what Vološinov terms behavioral ideology.  Behavioral ideology is an “atmosphere of unsystematized and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows our every instance of behavior and action and our every ‘conscious’ state with meaning (91).  Behavioral and systemic ideologies reinforce each other in a cyclical fashion with signs serving as the connective material.  Ideological systems can only change when conflicting behavioral ideologies overpower, in a semiotic sense, established and accepted meaning.  

Language is the key to ideology for Vološinov; words connect one consciousness to another in a cascading fashion.  If Vološinov is correct, language, as Terry Eagleton writes, is also the site of contestation for ideological beliefs.  Evidence of this fairly obvious fact can be found in the use of words in political campaigns; the Republican Party in the last U.S. Presidential election wielded redistribution, socialism, and terrorist as ideological linguistic weapons.  They cascaded through the crowds packing Sarah Palin rallies crystallizing behavioral ideology in the minds of the believers.  The ideological beliefs of the far right (or furthest from the ideologies of the Democrats) gained strength.  While it seems obvious to think of words as the basis for ideology, Vološinov’s concept of a cyclical behavioral and systemic ideology constructed and reinforced through inner and outer speech remains an important consideration in the development of a sociocognitive model of ideology. 

Posted in V.N. Vološinov.

By admin
December 15, 2008

7 comments

Habitus and Context Models

In Ideology, Teun van Dijk dismisses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “psychologically inadequate” and only loosely defined in a cognitive sense.  Habitus, according to van Dijk relies on “structured dispositions” to explain social practices “which precisely need to be explained in terms of other cognitive representations”.  Cognitively, the concept is circular and presents no insight into the mental structures that form social practice.  For van Dijk, habitus does not compare to the concept of social cognition as a basis for the cognitive analysis of ideology.  I agree that habitus, even when compared to generative grammar for its combination of social and autonomous factors (dispositions) in the subject’s creative interaction with the world, seems more classificatory than cognitive in that it works well as a tool for typifying social practice and ideology.

Habitus is intellectually slippery and vague.  I have read a number of applications of the theory that seem to draw on differing perspectives of the concept.  Perhaps habitus is not a concept that cognitively links the social and the mental in the way that social cognition does.  Maybe habitus is an interface that selects and arranges mental spaces within the mind based on social cognition.  Maybe habitus is the structuring structure that creates van Dijk’s context model.  Context models, according to van Dijk, are selected scripts and schemas that I believe are formed into a platform of mental spaces that include Fouconnier and Turner’s grounding mental space, but also includes other spaces of background knowledge, place, tone, etc. for the purpose of contextualizing thought.  Further research will be required, but I believe habitus may be the cognitive process of selection and arrangement of context.  The context of any given social situation, action, or discourse is different in each encountering mind; elements of context schemas could be selected and arranged based on Bourdieu’s notion of disposition; a disposition that is generated anew for each thread of socially engaged thought.    

I believe that Bourdieu was attempting to link mental activity and social cognition in his definition of habitus taken from The Logic of Practice 1990:

“Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor (53).”

Almost all cognitive activity related to conceptual matters occurs below conscious thought.  Dispositions generate and organize practices and representations according to the definition, but maybe they only generate and organize the scripts and schemas that in turn generate and organize the practices and representations.  This seems like a fine distinction, but it is a crucial one; dispositions need contexts in order to form.  Habitus arranges context models that serve to form dispositions.  In an Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu invokes the idea of context when he states:

“Through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus’s operations of invention.  As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions and no others (95).”

The problem I have always had with habitus is its form.  Is it some form of mystical consciousness or is it metaphysical?  Brining together context model and disposition gives habitus a form; it is a selection and arrangement mental activity similar to conceptual blending.  Some specific cognitive sequence brings context schemas and scripts into specific context models that allow us to ground (in the Peircian sense) our thought. 

This thesis requires far more research and I believe it will be an interesting addition to the sociocognitive work of van Dijk on ideology.  Group belief systems are reliant on context and context on disposition; habitus may be the cognitive process that explains context formation.  

Posted in Bourdieu, Context Models, Teun van Dijk.

By admin
December 15, 2008

6 comments

Conceptual Blending and the Grounding Space of Ideology

Conceptual blending begins with the premise that language in itself is mere form, powerful, but empty without the dynamic mental processes that construct meaning.  Language is only the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of meaning construction and is only the form produced by deep and unconscious activities within the mind (Fauconnier and Turner6).  These activities are a result of what Fauconnier and Turner refer to as the three “I’s” of the mind: identity, integration and imagination (7).  Identity, or the recognition of sameness or equivalence, is not a product of language, but a “finished product provided to consciousness after elaborate work” (6).  Integration, the determination of similarities and oppositions, occurs in “backstage cognition” where dynamic and structural properties are subject to operational constraints of complex conceptual integration (6).  Finally, imagination makes meaning from identity and integration; imaginative simulation is the product of the conceptual blending (6).  Conceptual blending is not a special process related to complex figures and schemes such as metaphor, “Complex blending is always at work in any human thought or action, but it is often hard to see.  The meanings that we take most for granted are those where the complexity is best hidden” (25).

Conceptual blending is based on Gilles Fauconnier’s mental space theory.  According to Fauconnier, “Mental spaces are partial structures that proliferate when we think and talk allowing a fine-grained partitioning of our discourse and knowledge structures” (1996 11).   Mental spaces contain the elements of discourse that can be mapped onto one another.  For example, in the simple sentence “Martha is John’s wife” a base mental space that contains John and Martha is created in the mind of the receiver alongside a mental space that contains the roles of husband and wife.  The receiver maps husband to John and wife to Martha from the role space the base space of discourse elements.  As physical entities in the brain, mental spaces are “sets of activated neuronal assemblies, and the (mapping) lines between elements correspond to coactivation-bindings of a certain kind” (Fauconnier and Turner 40).  Mental spaces are partial in nature and are structured by frames of “long-term schematic knowledge” (40).  In our simple example, the frame of marriage is employed.  Frames developed out of work in frame semantics and artificial intelligence where Minsky developed the frame as data structure model.  A frame contains slots for relevant fillers of data.  The data model of frames allows for individual differences in frames, as different minds will utilize different slots and fillers (Coulson 19).  This aspect of the conceptual blending model is extremely important for critical discourse analysis and will be discussed in detail later in the paper.

The conceptual blending model consists of four main elements: inputs, cross-space mappings, generic space, and a blended space.  An input is a mental space that contains discourse elements.  Cross-space mappings are the connections between discourse elements in the input mental spaces.  A generic space is a mental space that contains what each input space has in common.  Finally the blended space contains certain elements from each input space to create a new and emergent structure (41).  According the Fauconnier and Turner, the emergent structure is the key element in the conceptual model.  Three cognitive process construct and conceive the blend: “First composition of the elements from the inputs makes relations available in the blend that do not exist in the separate inputs…Second, completion brings additional structure to the blend…the running of the blend is called elaboration” (43-4). 

Composition refers to the utilization of discourse elements located in the inputs to create discourse elements that do not occur in either input mental space.  Completion refers to the access of background knowledge frames, “pattern completion is the most basic kind of recruitment:  we see some parts of a familiar frame of meaning and much more of a frame is recruited silently but effectively to the blend” (48).  Completion is the key element of blend construction for critical discourse analysts.  It accounts for aspects of discourse such as presupposition, which Fauconnier describes as a “powerful expressive feature because it allows structure to be propagated by default through the lattice of mental spaces built up as part of an ongoing discourse” (1996 60).  According to Fairclough, presupposition is a key marker of ideology and hegemony in discourse (106).  For example a speech given by the CEO of Exxon entitled Meeting Growing Energy Demand and Addressing Climate Risk (Tillerson 1), presupposes that there is an imminent solution for climate change and that Exxon will be the solution provider.  Presupposition hides the ideology behind what is considered common knowledge, Fauconnier believes minds view “presuppositions for given information as prototypical.  From a space viewpoint, presuppositions are linguistically efficient (mentally and communicationally) because they allow a quick (implicit) filling in of spaces; they are also, as often noted, communicationally devious in making the hearer feel they are already somehow given and therefore difficult to question or refute” (1985 108).

Elaboration refers to the running of the blend in the mind of the receiver.  The meaning of the blend is interpreted in the given context.   A blend that contains powerful completion elements such as presupposition can become entrenched where its blended nature becomes invisible (conceptual metaphors are an example).  Entrenchment is the cognitive element of conceptual blending that best accounts for ideology and hegemony.  The following section describes an example discourse analysis that presents a possible accounting of ideological entrenchment.

Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson, in their paper Metaphoric Language in Discourse, analyze an interview between radio host Dave Davies and counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke.  The paper examines metaphor utilizing the conceptual blending model.  Their purpose is to demonstrate the pragmatic effects of the blending of multiple input spaces involved in a metaphoric description of the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate the attacks of September 11, 2001 given the intelligence available.  The metaphor in question is to connect-the-dots.  The following is an excerpt from the radio interview (italics stand for emphasis of speech) analyzed by Oakley and Coulson (45-46):

Clarke:            

(1) there’s uh some,

(2) …uh dots,

(3)  which are meaningless unless you put them together with

         lots of other dots.

(4)  and

(5)  I understand what he’s saying.

(6)  but there are some dots that come out screaming at you.

(7)  uh, to do something about me now

(8)  …that would be the kind of dot,

(9)  uh, that didn’t need a lot of connecting.

There is a double layering of metaphor at play here; first the metaphor of connect-the-dots and the elaborated metaphor of dots that scream to be connected.  Figure 1 is based on Oakley and Coulson’s model and diagrams the conceptual blend of the connect-the-dots metaphor.  Circles represent mental spaces.

Oakley and Coulson contend the metaphor had the pragmatic effect of saying that the Bush administration had all of the intelligence information required to predict the September 11th attacks and were unable to put them together in a way that would have prevented the disaster (37).  They connected the dots, but still failed to act.  Oakley and Coulson utilize the term grounding space for Fauconnier and Turner’s generic space as the mental space that contains the participants, the situation and the setting.  Langacker (1999) developed the concept of a grounding space as “the actual speech event, its participant, and its immediate circumstances” (quoted in Oakley and Coulson 30).  A grounding space expands the generic space, which included only generic elements common to the inputs to include the basic elements that form context: base, situation, and setting.  The grounding space model seems to correlate with van Dijk’s concept of a context model.   I contend that the grounding space is also the place if ideological development and the source of hegemony.  A conceptual blend requires the context of the grounding space in addition to the long-term knowledge of the appropriate frame to run the elaboration.  Figure 2 diagrams the addition of the screaming dots metaphor. The grounding space includes a fourth ring that serves as a placeholder for ideological belief.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this case ideology that matches a pro Democrat and an anti Republican belief system is strengthened while the opposite is weakened.  Clarke has used the same connect the screaming dots metaphor in numerous television, newspaper, radio, and Internet interviews, as well is his best selling book, Against All Enemies.  It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze the specific beliefs effected, but as Fauconnier states in Mapping in Language and Thought, “When a blend gains consistence, it reorganizes our categories and allows thought to move in new directions” (1996 23).  The thought in this particular study of a specific metaphor has the effect of strengthening or weakening ideological belief.  The strengthening and weakening in question is negligible in terms of the single discourse example of the radio interview, but consistent repetition of the metaphor could result in an entrenching of the blend. 

It can be argued that the frame of a discourse is the element of the conceptual blending model shifted by ideological entrenchment.  If we see frames as structures of knowledge stored in long term memory that provide context for the discursive event, then the blend occurs in concert with background knowledge and does not create it.  The growth of the grounding space could alter background knowledge and future instances of the blend will be received in an altered fashion.  For example, the first time a mind runs the connect-the-screaming-dots blend the effect on the ideological thought ring of the grounding space may be significant but transitory.  Subsequent runs of the blend encounter background knowledge familiar with the pragmatic effect of the metaphor and the frame is shifted in one direction or the other depending upon the original ideological makeup of the frame.  Consistent exposure to the blend creates a cyclical reinforcement that alters the ideological beliefs held in the grounding space that in turn change the knowledge frame that alters the grounding space on the next running and so on.  The cyclical entrenchment of blends that enhance the ideological ring of the grounding space could account for the consensus aspects of hegemony.   The grounding space with which we formulate context and common sense (including resistance to the hegemonic common sense that the example provides) is susceptible to blends that incorporate identity, integration and imagination.  The individual mind imagines the blend and embeds meaning in the appropriate frames with the result being actions based on blends become the perceived will of the person.

The application of conceptual blending theory to critical discourse analysis presents a potential for the analysis of the entrenchment of ideology and the formation of hegemony.  Even within an American hegemony of Even within an American hegemony of my country right or wrong, there exists a hegemony that follows the government is always right belief system and a hegemony that believes the other political party is always inept.  The ideologies involved are deeply entrenched and hegemonic and complex.  The example of the connect-the-screaming-dots metaphor is only a fragment of the entire discourse.  It is possible a critical discourse analysis of the entire text will yield a different set of critical conclusions, but the structural model developed via conceptual blending theory remains applicable as it opens up a study of repeating blends throughout various corpuses that cyclically entrench ideological beliefs.  There are many questions yet to be explored: What is the level of repetition required, five, fifty exposures to blend, that will result in a cyclical entrenchment between grounding space and knowledge frames?  Are ideological shifts even possible, or does the running of conceptual blends only serve to entrench existing beliefs?  Does ideology cognitively form a Boothian “identification of minds” for society as a whole the way irony mentally connects sender and receiver (111)?  These are a few of the questions an application of cognitive models such as conceptual blending to critical discourse analysis will begin to answer.         

A Google search of Richard Clarke and connect-the-dots results in over 300 different media reports that include the metaphor.  Over eighty percent of these reports are original.  Clarke rode this metaphor a long way and with great success as his book topped the New York Times bestseller list.

Works Cited

Booth, W. (2006). Empire of Irony. In W. Jost (Ed.), The Essential Wayne Booth.

            Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Coulson, S. (2001). Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending in

            Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dancygier, B. (2008). The Text and the Story: Levels of Blending in Fictional Narratives. In T. O. a. A. Hougaard (Ed.), Mental Spaces and Discourse Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Arnold.

Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental Spaces. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press 

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Coceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, A. (1997). Sociology. 3rd Ed. Cambridge: Polity Press

Hougaard, A. (2005). Conceptual Disintegration and Blending in Interactional Sequences: A Discussion of New Phenomenon, Process vs. Products and Methodology. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(2005), 1653-1685.

Hougaard, A., & Oakley, T. (2008). Mental Spaces and Discourse Analysis. In T. Oakley & A. Hougaard (Eds.), Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction (pp. 1-26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (2008). Connecting the Dots: Mental Spaces and Metaphoric Language in Discourse. In T. Oakley & A. Hougaard (Eds.), Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Sweetser, E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-Body Metaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Van Dijk, T. (1993). Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor & S. Yates (Eds.), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (pp. 300-317). London: Sage Publications.

Van Dijk, T. (2006). Discourse, Context and Cognition. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 159-177.

Williams, R. (2008). Guided Conceptualization” Mental Spaces in Instructional Discourse. In T. Oakley & A. Hougaard (Eds.), Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Wodak, R. (2006). Mediation Between Disocurse and Society: Assesing Cognitive Approaches in CDA. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 179-190.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Conceptual Blending, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner.

By admin
December 11, 2008

4 comments

Ideology - Teun van Dijk

Van Dijk begins his treatise on ideology by examining ideas and belief.  Ideas are products of mental activity that form in the mind as a result of thought.  The designation of idea is given to a formulated thought while the acceptance (on behalf of the individual mind is defined as a belief.  Beliefs take many forms including opinions, judgments, facts, propositions, systems, and networks.  Van Dijk contends that beliefs are not necessarily subjective while knowledge is objective, all thought begins as a belief, and knowledge is only a category of belief where the socially and culturally designated truth regime has declared a belief to be true.  Beliefs are mediations of the real world; they are about the objects, properties, events, actions or situations of this external world as long as we realize that such an experience presupposes a socio-culturally controlled projection of beliefs. 

Ideologies are clusters of beliefs in our minds.  They are expressed and enacted in symbols and discourse, but are primarily products of the social mind of the individual.  Van Dijk defines a path of analysis that denies the reductionist theories of social and cognitive construction.  Ideologies are not completely determined by socio-cultural factors, nor are they purely mental constructions (as all social interaction and discourse are constructs and products of the mind).  Van Dijk takes a cognitive approach combined with a social analysis.

Van Dijk moves on to social beliefs that form the basis of ideology.  Social beliefs are simply shared beliefs about the world where socio-cultural truth regimes have approved such a belief.  Social beliefs are stored in the social memories of individual minds to form social belief systems.  Ideologies are a form of social belief system, there is no such thing as an individual ideology; ideologies are social in nature.  It is possible for an individual to conceptualize an independent version of an ideology, but the foundational beliefs remain social.  I believe a cognitive model of ideological formation is to be found in this conceptualization process and I will explore this possibility further in later posts. 

Van Dijk separates cultural beliefs from group beliefs in order to demonstrate the difference between knowledge and ideology.  Cultural beliefs have met a specific cultural truth criterion: the world is round; France is a nation etc.  Such knowledge can be presupposed in discourse and social interaction.  Cultural knowledge is the basis of all evaluative beliefs such as opinion, attitudes and ideology.  Ideology forms when a specific group builds a common set of beliefs onto culturally held beliefs.  Van Dijk provides an example of immigration ideology where a group could believe Turks should not be allowed to immigrate to France for a number of economic reasons.  It is presupposed that the nations of Turkey and France exist and that Turks immigrate to France.  The point is that ideologies are based on culturally held beliefs.  In the example the addition of ideological beliefs is clearly visible, but often the layering of ideological beliefs is veiled in common values as Van Dijk describes in later chapters.

Van Dijk makes the case for the inclusion of attitudes in the discussion of ideology.  He finds the exclusion of attitudes from socially reductionist theory an error in analysis.  Even though they are unobservable, attitudes exist in their consequences and warrant postulation and theorizing. 

Van Dijk redefines social cognition for his analytical purposes.  He does not dismiss the current social psychological metaphor of information processing as it applies to individual social memories, but adds a dimension of social action and function between group members.  Ideologies are not metaphysical or otherwise vaguely localized systems ‘of’ or ‘in’ society or groups or classes, but a specific type of (basic) mental representations shared by the members of groups, and hence firmly located in the minds of people given that minds are to a degree, socially constituted.  Ideologies form the foundation of group beliefs.  They are contestable and rhetorical in nature.  Ideologies are a form of social belief where one group in a society proposes their belief as social action.

For Van Dijk, ideologies are structured as schemas that define group conflict.  Ideology defines the identity and goals of a group.  An ideology (in most cases) cannot exist with a foil; Us vs. Them; free market capitalism vs. socialism etc.  Van Dijk does not spend much time on the actual contents of ideology except to mention that ideologies cannot be cynical.  They will always imply a positive motive and presentation. 

Values are an important element of ideology.  A culture and society adopts value systems such as freedom, democracy, and equality as a whole.  Group ideologies appropriate vale systems as the foundation of their beliefs.  Neoliberalism commandeers the value of freedom to promote freedom of markets and disdain for government intervention and protectionism.  

Posted in Uncategorized.

By admin
December 1, 2008

4 comments

Hegemony, Cognition, and Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysts root out the ideological and hegemonic underpinnings of common sense.  Hegemony, as a concept consists of a social and a cognitive dimension; as van Dijk observes that the minds of the dominated can be influenced in such a way that they accept dominance, and act in the interest of the powerful out of their own free will.  There are elements of social cognition involved that allow the same values and beliefs to be present in individual minds as schemas of long-term memory (Hougarrd and Oakley 14).  For the majority of critical discourse analysts, the evidence of hegemony as manifested discourse is the site of analysis; the proof of hegemony is found in text and speech, and how individual minds perceive, accept, and construct hegemony is unanalyzable or inconsequential.  There are a few scholars in the discipline, however, who are beginning to investigate the cognitive aspects of ideology and hegemony.  Tuen van Dijk investigated cognitive elements in discourse analysis as early as 1984.  In Prejudice and Discourse, van Dijk analyzed the formation of stereotypes and prejudices from a cognitive perspective and determined production and reproduction to be the result of the storage of individual experiences as event models in episodic and long-term memories (Wodak 184).  Van Dijk’s work today focuses on context, which he believes is cognitively constructed as he states:

If contexts control discourse at all, this is only possible when we conceive of them as cognitive structures of some kind. And only in this way are we able to define the crucial criterion of relevance, that is, in terms of a selective focus on, and subjective interpretation of some social constraint as defined by the participants. This also explains why discourse may be influenced by alternative, fictitious or misguided definitions of the social situation, as long as the speaker or writer sees it that way. Thus, it is not objective gender, class, ethnicity or power that control the production or comprehension of text and talk, but whether and how participants interpret, represent and make use of such external constraints, and especially how they do so in situated interaction (163)

Van Dijk believes the theory of mental models introduced by Laird-Johnson (Mental Models 1983) is the best method to abstract how participants “interpret and represent” context, he states in Discourse, Context, Cognition

…that mental models are not only relevant for discourse production and understanding, but also for any other kind of meaningful interaction and understanding. Hence, they cannot be reduced to text or talk. In discourse processing they explain understanding, as well as a host of other properties of discourse, such as anaphora, local and global coherence, topics, presuppositions, and so on. They also explain how we may falsely recall information from discourse that was never explicitly mentioned in such discourse at all, or how we may remember some event but do not remember whether we have read about, heard about it or seen it as images on television (170).

Van Dijk believes context is the mental model of a discourse participant’s experience of a communicative act (170).  He has begun work on a context model “that is the basis of our pragmatic understanding of discourse” (170).  Context models are integral in the production and reception of discourse.  Van Dijk’s context model is in the early stages of development and does not as of yet have a final structure, but the potential of his work for the future analysis of context is exciting. 

George Lakoff, in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, develops an analysis of the establishment of mental frames in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.  Lakoff found that George Bush was successful due to his team’s establishment of a Republican friendly frameset in the initial debates and that John Kerry was unsuccessful due to his inability to shift the frame of discussion back to his own agenda (Wodak 185).  As Wodak points out, it is unlikely that such a frame shift actually changed viewer’s ideological beliefs, but the work is valuable in demonstrating the cognitive effect of rhetorical strategies.  In 1990, Eve Sweetser introduced a model of domain mapping based on Laird-Johnson’s mental model theory to account for the complex pragmatic accounts of modal verbs in the analysis of discourse.  Sweetser’s work was some of the first to introduce cognitive models into the study of pragmatics (1990).   A number of conversation analysts (a branch of discourse analysis that focuses on grammatical, structural, and pragmatics in speech) have adopted Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual blending (also referred to as conceptual integration by conversation analysts) as a model for the study of the pragmatic implications of speech.  Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson have apply conceptual blending to the pragmatic study of metaphor (2008), Barbara Dancygier studies the levels of blending in fictional narratives (2008), Robert Williams analyzes blending in instructional discourse (2008), and Anders Hougaard studies blending and interactional sequences of conversation (2005).  Conversation analysts and linguists specializing in pragmatics are leading the way in applying cognitive models such as conceptual blending to the analysis of discourse.  Critical discourse analysis can also benefit from the application of conceptual blending to not only enhance analysis of textual elements themselves, but also as a model for the cognitive space of ideology and hegemony.  

Posted in Critical Discourse Analysis, Hegemony, Teun van Dijk.

By admin
December 1, 2008

10 comments

Gramsci and Hegemony

If, as Vološinov insists, ideology is signification, who produces and disseminates the signifiers?   It is Antonio Gramsci who is credited with the theory of hegemony as it relates to lived ideology or as Terry Eagleton puts it, a transition from a system of ideas to social practice.  Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense of the term, is a dynamic system of signification that encompasses all facets of what he defines as civil society: cultural, institutional, political, and economic formations.  Hegemony includes ideology, but is more of a practice; a continual stream of signification based on ideological principles or world view.  The more a world view permeates the connecting threads of society - religion, literature, media, economic system, and government to name a few - the more consent is derived from the various classes that define the society.  Hegemony is a continuum of consent and coercion, with the most powerful hegemonic regimes falling far closer to the former than the latter. 

The current hegemony of neoliberal capitalism is dominant because it manages to connect its basic ideological tenants to the intrinsic sense of identity psychologically maintained by individuals.  And it manages to do so in what Gramsci terms a spontaneous manner.  Spontaneous in the sense that the freedom of markets and trade ideologically espoused by neoliberalism aligns with the human subject’s psychological sense of a free identity.  Western (and Northern) cultures signify the ideology of neoliberalism through language, literature, movies, television, and news media.  Political institutions promote the ideology through coercion, sometimes by force (see Iraq), but most often by manipulating non-conforming governments (the IMF and World Bank require economic and political practices that match neoliberal ideology before they will support a developing nation).  Cultural coercion of the individual mind layers itself upon the political manipulation to form a powerfully entrenched hegemony.

Posted in Gramsci, Hegemony.

By admin
December 1, 2008

2 comments

The allegorical construction of ideology

The following is a position paper for the University of Waterloo Conference on Cognitive Allegory June 26th, 2009

Ideological belief systems assume their status as natural common sense for groups of minds by reification, which Georg Lukács defines as the abstraction of relationships and processes into ideological objects of thought, and which is one of the most common operations of allegory. Conceptual blending offers a model of this process in allegory that is particularly revealing, and I claim that such a model extrapolates well to ideological systems generally. Allegory, that is, with its walking and talking reifications, provides an excellent testing ground for ideological belief formation and maintenance, and the lessons conceptual blending can teach us about the cognitive dimensions of allegory can teach us more broadly about the cognitive construction of ideology.

Ideological beliefs are reified through abductive inference, where observation and interpretation blend with attitudes and values to form mentally objective abstractions out of subjective processes and relationships.  The resultant reified beliefs chain into ideological belief systems to form the basis of ideological thought.  I believe allegory reifies thought while at the same time dereifing ideological beliefs.  Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual blending theory (2002) and Teun van Dijk’s theory of context models (2008) model the dereifying effect of allegory on ideological mental spaces and in so doing form new mental spaces of ideological belief.

Allegory achieves dereification of ideological belief systems by forming blended mental spaces that weaken the reified nature of ideological belief spaces.   Allegorically blended mental spaces result in a mental foregrounding of ideological spaces through what Mark Turner refers to as a waking up the generic space (1996).  The generic mental space contains elements that the input spaces of an allegory have in common and is itself a blend of other mental spaces including ideological belief systems.  I believe generic spaces to be platforms that hold a wide range of mental space categories from beliefs of truth and fact to opinions, values, and attitudes.  Generic platforms create what van Dijk refers to as a context model or the group of blended mental spaces that serve as interface between discourse and conceptual integration.

Allegorical blends shift the generic platform by disrupting categories of belief.  Beliefs of truth subsumed by ideology may be revealed to be opinion.  Allegory does not disprove or reject ideological beliefs; derification may reaffirm or disavow depending on the individual and the context model constructed.  Dereified belief spaces immediately reify back into concrete abstractions that form new ideological spaces as the chain of blending continues.  It is in the instant when reified beliefs lose objectivity that allegory has its cognitively rhetorical effect on the construction of ideology. 

Posted in Cognitive Rhetoric, Reification.

By admin
December 1, 2008

3 comments

Althusser: Ideology and Subjectivity

Louis Althusser views ideology as a sum of material institutions and practices.  Ideology has little to do with consciousness as these institutions and practices of ideological state apparatus (ISA) perform the constant and eternal work of subjecting the individual.  Ideology interpolates or hails the individual and in so doing creates the subject.  Althusser gives the example of how religious ideology calls to the individual through scripture and ceremony and how the inevitable response creates the subject.   ISAs include institutions such as religion, political parties, and media, but they are also found in the subtle social practices of shaking hands, linguistic forms of greeting, and politeness codes (to name only a few).  Ideology for Althusser is material and not the result of false consciousness or commodity fetishism.  Ideology creates the subject and the subject cannot exist outside of ideology and its material manifestations.  It is possible to see the ideology of another subject, but not that of your own subjective position.  Ideology is not, as Lukács suggests, a reified consciousness so much as it is the manner in which the subject lives with the reification of belief.  

Althusser describes this thesis if ideology as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.  Althusser brings Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis into the theory of ideology.  If an individual could be consciously aware of the deterministic manner in which ideological apparatus subjects them, the result could only be depression. Althusser suggests ideology works on the unconscious of the individual to form the subject.  Althusser believes we recognize ideological practices, but we do not have knowledge of them.  These practices and institutions are inseparable from personal belief as they manifest in action.  Knowledge is only attainable through scientific theorizing and even that takes place within ideology. Terry Eagleton finds Althusser’s reading of Freud and Lacan to be flawed in the sense that the subject Althusser refers to would be closer to Freud’s superego and Lacan’s ego and other than either man’s conception of the subject.  This flaw is important because it opens the door for the individual’s rejection or ignorance of the ideological hail.  Lacan’s other is a complex and shifting psychic entity that would allow for some form of individual determinism.

Althusser’s conception of a completely material ideology seems to dismiss any attempt to discover a cognitive explanation for ideological formation.  Terry Eagleton questions the complete materiality of ideology by bring meaning back into the picture.  Institutional and social practice can be performed unconsciously, but inevitably practice will demand meaning, how else can Althusser’s notion that individual belief is enacted through material action?  In order to form a belief meaning must be determined.  Conceptual integration of ideological apparatus must take place that links belief with action through meaning.  Conceptual integration must also take place for the mind to accept the reification of abstract ideas into material form.  

Posted in Althusser, Subjectivity.

By admin
December 1, 2008

No comments

Lukács and Reification

In History and Class Consciousness, Hungarian born philosopher Georg Lukács reinterprets Marx within a framework of Hegelian totality.  Lukács’ notion of totality calls for the unveiling of ideology as a projection of the bourgeois class.  Life is a social process created through the actions of human beings; totality refers to the whole process as a historical period.  Bourgeois society is fixated on specific “facts” of the process as if they stood fixated on one tree without the awareness of the forest surrounding them.  The totality of the social situation reveals the transitory nature of scientific laws.  This totality, however, is hidden from the consciousness by ideology.  For Lukács, ideology is less a false consciousness as it is a partial cognition.  Before examining this conceptualization in detail, it is important to understand Lukács theory of cognition; according to Leszek Kolakowski, knowledge for Lukács is not a “reflection’ of an external reality, there is no duality of thought and being.  Lukács believes in a dialectical relationship that relies on Marx’s theory of praxis where thinking about the world is dialectically connected to changing it. Understanding and changing the world are the actions of a liberated consciousness.  Cognition brings together the objective world and the subjective mind in an active process that should lead to the understanding of the totality of our social situation.

I use the word “should” because in practice the ideology of bourgeois society mystifies, to use Kolakowski’s term, consciousness.  The bourgeois cannot have anything but a false consciousness, to understand the totality of a historically based social situation would be contrary to their own economic self-interest.  Ideology, constructed from bourgeois false consciousness is projected on the proletariat through what Lukács terms reification.  Lukács reification is the conversion of the abstract and the subjective into the concrete and objective.  Lukács uses Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as the basis for reification.  Marx states in Capital that [reification] is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses…It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (quoted in Lukács 86).   Commodities and exchange value define human relationships; subjects are reified into objects of labour value.  Defining oneself becomes a calculation of the rationalized parts of our economic life: what we possess, in what manner do we convert our labour into things contribute to the sum of our being. 

One of the best (reified?) examples of the phenomenon of reification is found in Don Delillo’s White Noise. Delillo places the modern consumer in the role of Lukács’ proletariat In the novel, Jack and Babette Gladney return home from the supermarket and Jack observes:

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls – it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening (Delillo 20).

The things in the shopping bags define Jack and Babette, they reify relationships, security, and contentment.  The objects of consumption provide figures for calculations that externalize the consciousness.  They are the facts that Lukács and Marx see as obstructing cognition of the totality or the whole of social relations.  The bourgeois false consciousness forms obstructions in the form of reified abstract emotions and relations in the consciousness of the proletariat.  It is in this sense that I believe Lukács views ideology as partial cognition.

What is interesting is that the Bourgeois Jack is aware of the reifying effects of the consumer culture that surrounds him.  The result is what Lukács refers to as a reification of the phenomenon of reification until it becomes independent and permanent…a timeless model of human relations.  In other words, the reification of subjects into objects is natural and must embrace every manifestation of the life of society if the preconditions for the complete self-realization of capitalist production are to be fulfilled.  From a cognitive standpoint, Jack is able to recognize the fact of reification, and perhaps even the effects, but is unable to escape the naturalness of the experience (as manifested in the sense of well-being).  Reification begins as the objectification of the relation of commodity and consumer, but as Lukács states, it stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man: his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. 

Lukács goes on to describe how depth to which reification has formed the basis of man’s cognitive construction of his social world leads to the creation of laws.  Individual laws are formulated to deal with individual situations, but in aggregate they come to form a set  “general” (common sense) laws; laws become reified.  Laws are removed from the basis of their intent.  Laws become reifications of the particular relations of commodity and consumer in the capitalist system and are oblivious to the truth of the totality of society (in Lukács’ view the totality is the true state of proletariat oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisies obscured by the reified obstacles of false consciousness).   It is not until a crisis hits that the incoherence between general common sense laws and the totality becomes apparent. The financial crisis we face today is a perfect example of this incoherence.   Six months ago, the reifications of the financial markets were deemed a part of the general law, common sense dictated that unfettered markets drove growth and credit swaps that bet on mortgage defaults (a text book example of a reified process or practice) were deemed an acceptable financial practice.  Today these laws or practices have uncovered incoherence between the reified ideological practices of Wall Street and the totality of economic relations.  Today it is not a question of oppression as much as it is about greed, but Lukács’ concept of reification still applies.    

Posted in Lukács, Reification.

By admin
December 1, 2008

1 comment