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.