novel ways of saying nothing
The view that ideology is a consequence of the mode of production itself is succinctly stated in Marx's famous dictum: "The call to abandon their illusions about their conditions is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions."
To study ideology is to study the ways that meaning in social discourse is mobilized for the purpose of maintaining relations of domination.
That ideology could function as a linguistic arbiter of permitted dialogue reveals its origin in asymetrical relations of power, for domination cannot be exercised or sustained without the ability to make things mean, without an hegemony of signification. Who but someone with the power of the President of the United States, for example, could have the lexical discretion to rename an army of mercenary torturers "freedom fighters," and nuclear missiles "peacekeepers," and have this Newspeak enter the "objective" vocabularies of wire-service journalists?
Legitimacy for a system of hierarchical power is established in many ways, but it is chiefly accomplished by portraying socially constructed reality as natural and inevitable. Inequities that were once explained by religious mythology as divinely ordained are now countenanced by sociobiology as evolutionarily adaptive and genetically determined aspects of "human nature." The atemporality of such an essence obliterates history and imbues the alienated activity of humankind with the illusion of permanence. Conditions which are natural and inextirpable must, therefore, be legitamate, and by implication so must be our powerlessness to change them.
"...[B]reaking the appearance of inevitablity is crucial to overcoming the moral authority of oppression." - Barrington Moore
The dissimulative function of ideology involves the concealment or denial of aspects of social life -- intolerable realities, which if clearly visible, might cause subordinate groups to oppose the conditions of their domination.
To study ideology is to study the ways that meaning in social discourse is mobilized for the purpose of maintaining relations of domination.
That ideology could function as a linguistic arbiter of permitted dialogue reveals its origin in asymetrical relations of power, for domination cannot be exercised or sustained without the ability to make things mean, without an hegemony of signification. Who but someone with the power of the President of the United States, for example, could have the lexical discretion to rename an army of mercenary torturers "freedom fighters," and nuclear missiles "peacekeepers," and have this Newspeak enter the "objective" vocabularies of wire-service journalists?
Legitimacy for a system of hierarchical power is established in many ways, but it is chiefly accomplished by portraying socially constructed reality as natural and inevitable. Inequities that were once explained by religious mythology as divinely ordained are now countenanced by sociobiology as evolutionarily adaptive and genetically determined aspects of "human nature." The atemporality of such an essence obliterates history and imbues the alienated activity of humankind with the illusion of permanence. Conditions which are natural and inextirpable must, therefore, be legitamate, and by implication so must be our powerlessness to change them.
"...[B]reaking the appearance of inevitablity is crucial to overcoming the moral authority of oppression." - Barrington Moore
The dissimulative function of ideology involves the concealment or denial of aspects of social life -- intolerable realities, which if clearly visible, might cause subordinate groups to oppose the conditions of their domination.