The Dictionary of Human Geography (99 page)

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ideology
Ideology originally referred to a ?science of ideas?, proposed by French ration alist philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century. It is now more widely used to refer to any system of beliefs held for more than purely epistemic reasons. Some theories of ideology are neutral when it comes to accounting for the role of ideas and beliefs in social life. Others involve normative claims about how knowledge and belief function epistemologic ally to reproduce power relations. In this sec ond set of theories, ideology is understood as a distorted, inverted, upside down or false view of reality. In this usage, ideology is therefore implicitly or explicitly counterposed to some mode of knowing that sees reality in a true and accurate way. The most influential source for this second type of understanding is Marxism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite never having been clearly worked through in his own work, ideology is arguably Marx?s most powerful bequest to modern so cial theory. In the German ideology of 1845, Marx and Engels argued against idealist phil osophies that saw ideas as the prime movers of historical change (see idealism), asserting in stead that ?social being? determined people?s ?consciousness?. This is a basic axiom of ma terialist analysis (see historical material ism). They also argued that in class divided societies such as those of capitalism, the rul ing ideas would be those of the ruling class, since they owned and controlled the means for producing and circulating the knowledge, beliefs and values through which people made sense of their own experiences. In Marx?s early work, this ideological determin ation of people?s consciousness is theorized in terms of the alienation of the working class, who come to see social relations in inverted form. The argument was subsequently later reformulated as commodity fetishism. In 1867, Marx argued in Capital that under generalized capitalist commodity production, the social dimensions of human labour and interaction take on the appearance of free standing obj ects, and commodities take on apparently magical qualities independent from the labour processes that produce them. Commodity fetishism is a theory of how people come to misrecognize reality through the medium of distorted appearances. This kernel of a mature theory of ideology was further refined in 1923 by Gyorgy Lukacs, in History and class con sciousness, with the concept of reification, whereby people appear to each other as things rather than as active agents of historical pro cesses, which he held to be a form of false consciousness. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The epistemological understanding of ideol ogy as a generalized system of misrecognition in the interests of capitalist reproduction was systematized into models of base and super structure, in which economic processes are seen to be the prime movers shaping other aspects of social formations, such as law, reli gion or general modes of consciousness. The vast Marxist literature on ideology is beset by the recourse to functional explanation (see functionalism), drawing of loose analogies, and imputing of structural isomorphisms be tween economic patterns and behaviour and belief. It is not too strong to suggest that the Marxist theory of ideology is ?partly anecdotal, partly functionalist, partly conspiratorial, and partly magical? (Elster, 1982a, p. 199). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marxist theories of ideology share two fea tures: a formal aspect, in which ideology is understood to be a medium for the inversion or obscuring of reality; and a content, in which ideology is held to function in the interests of particular classes, by presenting their particu lar interests as if they were the interests of all classes. In both respects, there is a presump tion that ideology is politically effective by making social relations and historical pro cesses appear natural, inevitable, objective or a historical. This is the strongest legacy of the Marxist heritage of theories of ideology, which lives on in a widespread assumption that the task of critical social science is the exposure of naturalized, de historicized, objectified appearances as historical products and social constructs (see criticaL theory). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A recurrent theme in Western Marxism from the 1920s onwards was how to under stand the means by which capitalist exploit ation was legitimized through the active consent of those who were the main sources of economic value and the primary victims of injustice. The prevalence of this problem of reproduction helps account for the flourishing of Marxist cultural theory (Anderson, 1976). The absence of widespread political upheaval against capitalism was identified as a failure at the level of culture, attributed to the oper ations of ideology. In short, sophisticated the ories were developed to explain capitalist reproduction on the assumption that ?people must have been got at? (Sinfield, 1994, p. 22). Some of Marxism?s most important contribu tions emerge from this explanation of capital ist reproduction as a problem of culture and ideology. These include a shift away from fo cusing on false consciousness towards a con sideration of the unconscious dynamics of personality formation, in the work of Herbert Marcuse for example; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer?s seminal account of the cul ture industries; Antonio Gramsci?s account of cultural hegemony; and V.N. Volosinov?s ac count of the inherently social qualities of the linguistic sign. The development of Marxist theories of ideology relied heavily on non Marxist traditions such as psychoanalysis, Weberian sociology and semiotics. For all the sophistication of this tradition, it led to a curi ous ?blindspot? in Western Marxism, which came to think of cultural media such as radio, television or film primarily as ideo logical devices, neglecting to analyse these practices as sources for the production and distribution of surplus value (Smythe, 1978). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The nemesis of Marxist theories of ideology came in the figure of the avowedly Marxist phil osopher Louis Althusser. Combining Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with Gramsci?s account of hegemony, Althusser (1971) recast the con cept of ideology in ways that still resonate in a range of cultural theory. He argued that ideol ogy was not something that people could be liberated from, but was, rather, a constitutive dimension of all social formations: ideology was the mechanism through which individuals were made into subjects. The formation ofsubjectiv ity worked through the practices embodied in institutions such as churches, schools and universities. These he called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). For Althusser, ideology referred to the ?representation of the imaginary relationships to their real conditions of exist ence?. Imaginary in this formulation does not mean false or unreal. It refers to the idea that this relationship is always, necessarily, mediated by way of images. In short, Althusser claimed that misrecognition was the constitutive mech anism of subjectivity in all societies, not just under capitalism; therefore it was not some thing that people could be liberated from. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Althusser?s account of ISAs laid the basis for a generalized analysis of cultural practices in terms of practices of subject formation rather than consciousness. The notion of ideological subjectification in ISAs served as a crucial way station for the development of feminist theories of subjectivity, psychoanalytical the ories of sexuality, and for the eventual super vention of ?ideology? by concepts of discourse, discipLinary power, governmentaLity and other notions drawn from Michel Foucault?s work (Barrett, 1991). The class content of ideology that Althusser took for granted was filled by other identities: ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality. The assertion that subject ivity was formed in ISAs was instrumental to the recognition that that struggles within civil society were a crucial dimension of counter hegemonic political struggles (it also tended to flatter academics? sense of their own centrality to these struggles). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The traces of Althusser's account of ideol ogy are still evident in theories of culture, dis course, governmentality and hegemony, even if the concept of ideology is rarely used in a strong analytical sense any more. There are three such traces of ideology in cultural theory, post Marxism and post structuralism: an em phasis on practices of subject formation; an emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of this process, understood in terms of the naturaliz ing or de historicizing of contingent relation ships through the medium of representations; and an emphasis on how macro level pro cesses of subordination, exploitation and oppression are reproduced through this micro level process of subject formation. These related conceptualizations are given a geograph ical inflection by analysing the ways in which spatial forms (such as boundaries, scale rela tions or place identities) are inscribed in the representations that are supposed to function as mediums for subject formation. The primary emphasis ofpost Marxist, post structuralist the ories of discourse and hegemony remains on the ways in which people?s subjectivities are socially constructed (see social construction). Human geographers have largely ignored the more pro ductive turn towards analysing ?ideology' in terms of rhetoric, focusing on the relationships between active, socially constructing human subjects negotiating various argumentative di lemmas in everyday situations (Billig, 1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marxist theories of ideology have not fared well in recent social theory. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1980) challenged the idea that ideology was a crucial factor in the reproduc tion of capitalism, calling attention to the de gree to which this assumption depended on a functionalist view of society as a tightly inte grated totality, whose parts contribute to the better operation of the whole. Criticisms of this sort have led to the revival of more neutral accounts of ideology. Thompson (1990) de fines ideology as any system of signification that facilitates the pursuit of particular inter ests by a social group. Mann (1986) defines ideology as one of four sources of social power (along with economic, political and military sources), involving the mobilization of values, norms and rituals. In this sense, ideology is not false, although it does involve holding beliefs that surpass experience. These sorts of defin itions see ideology in general as a ubiquitous feature of human affairs, while particular ideologies can be analysed for their practical effects and normative implications. Neverthe less, all concepts of ideology remain dogged by the problem that while it may be plausible to assume that ideas are produced with certain intentions to influence and effect people, it is conceptually and empirically very difficult to account for just how these intended purposes actually come off successfully at all. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Theories of ideology, and their successors, are faced with two fundamental limitations. First, they emphasize the cognitive and epi stemological dimensions of knowledge and be lief, and assume that non cognitive grounds for belief are at least suspect, if not false. This is an impoverished view of what it is to be a functioning human being, and it leads to a deeply problematic understanding of the pol itics of critique (Hanssen, 2000). Second, the ories of ideology and their analogues face a persistent problem in justifying and account ing for their own epistemological claims (see epistemology). The persistence of modes of ?ideological' problematization in academic an alysis might even be interpreted as a symptom of scholasticism the process by which the untheorized conditions of separation, distan ciation and detachment that enable academic reflection are projected on to objects of critical analysis (Bourdieu, 2000). cb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Barrett, (1991); Billig (1996); Eagleton (1991); Thompson (1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
idiographic
Concerned with the unique and the particular (cf. nomothetic). The term originated at the end of the nineteenth century when two German philosophers, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, made a famous distinction between the idiographic and the nomothetic sciences that, so they claimed, entitled history (by virtue of its cen tral concern with the unique) to be regarded as radically different from other forms of intellec tual enquiry (see kantianism). Their argu ments were challenged by other philosophers, but they made a forceful entry into geography in the middle of the twentieth century through the Hartshorne Schaefer debate over excep tionaLism, when traditional regionaL geog raphy was seen in parallel with history as essentially idiographic and not directed to wards generalization. These claims were inten sified during the quantitative revoLution, which was widely advertised as re establishing geography within the mainstream of the sci ences as a nomothetic system of knowledge ?after the lapse into ideography? (Burton, 1963). The term is rarely used today, and the idiographic/nomothetic binary has largely dis appeared from most framings of geographical (NEW PARAGRAPH) enquiry, but the issues it signals continue to animate geographers concerned with articulat ing theoretical claims with empirical particu lars (see Burt, 2006). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH)
image
?According to ancient etymology the word image should be linked to the root imi tari? (Barthes, 1977). Thus we go to the heart of a problem first posed in Pliny?s Naturalis Historia, later refined by Renaissance aestheti cians and subsequently up ended by modern ists and postmodernists alike. Is the image (eikon) a particular kind of medium through which the world is most persuasively relayed to our understanding? Or is the image a graphic language that ?invisibly? encodes whole systems of value a history, geography, a morality, an epistemology? Whatever the case, to consider the image is to be aware of a trick of consciousness: an ability to see something as ?there? and as ?not there? at the same time; to appreciate that while the image might duplicate reality, it is itself not ?real?. With the status of the mimetic challenged by both the conceptualism of twentieth century Western art and the critical charge launched by the textual or ?cultural turn? from the mid 1970s onwards, the image is now most commonly considered as a cultural encoding of a particular kind: as visual mode that in volves the intervention of language and thus relies on those arbitrary, though convention alized, signs to be accessed and read cor rectly. The image, in this sense, is what displays itself most and hides itself best. Accordingly, much contemporary geog raphy (Daniels, 1993; Duncan and Duncan, 1992; Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]) has focused on the ideological force and function of the image; the ways in which by rooting itself in the apparent obviousness of the visible, the image effectively conceals the practices of its making. (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the power of the image does not consist merely in being a vehicle for interrogating what it occludes or for interpreting the rela tionship between expressed visual content and external or referential context. The image also interprets us. It does so in the sense that our attempts to understand the precepts and prac tices within we make our critical, political and epistemological choices are organized by tacit images, by a panoply of visual structures (e.g. the photographic ?freeze?, cinematic mobility, digital malleability and its global relay) through which we create our orders of time, space and subjectivity (see film; vision and visuality). (NEW PARAGRAPH) What emerges is a vast aggregate of things that go by the name of the image, deputized across a variety of methodologies, institutions and disciplines. Thus while some contempor ary geographers have been concerned with the encoding and deciphering of pictorial or tech nological images (e.g. landscape painting or photography), others have examined imagery in its proper or literal sense (graphic or plastic artefacts such as maps, diagrams, monuments and buildings). More abstractly, geography has considered various metaphorical exten sions of the concept at work within literature (the image as ornamented language in travel writing, for example), epistemology (the image as idea in the ?eye of the mind?), physics (the image in optical theory), psychoanalysis (the image as dream, memory, fantasmata) and even, conceivably, within the possibilities of biotechnology (the genetic code as image). (NEW PARAGRAPH) While it is impossible for so many category definitions to settle into comfortable coexist ence, contemporary debates about the image share a degree of critical consensus: a rejection of truth as a matter of accurate imaging and an understanding, instead, of its cultural signifi cance, historical circumstance and its power as epistemological constituent. All images, whether visual, graphic, textual, perceptual or psychic, are thus viewed as reflective medi ations of objects, concepts and affects. Ac cordingly, all are disorderly and riddled with error. The misconception, then, is to think that we can know the truth about the world by knowing the right images of it. But the other misconception is to think that we can know anything about the world without im ages. One need not favour the postmodern conviction of reality as a depthless simula crum (Baudrillard, 1983), nor want to oppose such cynicism with a more corporeal and per formative approach (see performativity), to acknowledge that since the image is all we have to work with, we need to regard it not only as a site of semiotic or perceptual convention but as a starting point for a dialogue with convention that leads us to its limits. This includes investi gating what might lie outside or beyond the image, as well as thinking about the relation of the image to the non image, of vision to not seeing, to invisibility and even to blindness. jd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Crary (1990b); Melville and Readings (1995); Rose (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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