Knowledge, Ideology and Discourse: A Sociological Perspective

256 Pages·1991·6.55 MB·English

by  Tim Dant

Knowledge, ideology and
discourse
A sociological perspective
Tim Dant
London and New York
Contents
Acknowledgements via
1 Introduction 1
2 Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge 9
3 The inheritors of Mannheim’s legacy 33
4 The origins of the theory of ideology 56
5 A modern Approach to ideological critique 76
6 From signification to discourse 99
7 Discourse, knowledge an3 critique 120
8 Science and language 141
9 Culture and the perspective of women 165
10 Knowledge, ideology and discourse 184
11 Analysing knowledge as ideological discourse 207
12 A future for the sociology of knowledge as
discourse analysts? 228
Bibliography 237
Name index 247
Subject index 250
Acknowledgements
This book was derived from a doctoral dissertation, work that was
supported by a studentship from the Social Science Research Council. I
would like to thank Andy Tudor, who supervised my thesis and patiently
read and commented on various drafts. Michael Mulkay, Jonathan
Potter, Barry Sandywell and Janet Wolff also read and commented on
various parts of the doctoral dissertation. With their comments in mind
and with the aim of making a more readable statement, I derived this
book from the dissertation. I am grateful for their interest and their
comments - all errors, omissions, elisions, oversights and slips arc of
course mine.
Without Mollie’s support, encouragement and critical reading I
would never have managed to write it. And then write it again but
smaller. Without Jo to remind me what life is really all about it would
not have seemed worth it.
1 Introduction
Knowledge is a key feature of societies. It is part of what binds
individuals and groups of humans into that larger group which we call
society. It is a link between each of us and everyone else who shares our
society and its culture. But it is also a key feature of the fragmentation
between social groups. Differences in what people share as knowledge,
not only in terms of their beliefs but also in terms of that unspoken
knowledge hidden within social practices and customs, mark the
differences between social groups. Knowledge is both part of what joins
people in groups and what divides groups; it is a dimension of human
life that involves agreement and disagreement, debate and negotiation.
And yet, we tend to live as if knowledge could be settled, as if there is
only one true knowledge which we are striving for and which we, each of
us, is getting closer to. Together with those who share our perspective
we agree on something which we might call ‘truth’. But the knowledge
of those with whom we disagree we treat as ideological, as being mere
ideas, as not knowledge in the sense of something consistent with our
lived reality.
As we negotiate with those who share our views and dispute with
those who disagree, we do it through language. We talk, we write, we
argue, we communicate - we even represent ideas in pictures, music,
dance and movement, in material forms including sculptures, archi­
tecture and tools. All of these forms of cultural communication can be
treated as discourse in the sense that they involve human beings
exchanging meanings about the world in which they live.
Since the mid-1960s sociology has become increasingly concerned
with knowledge. As the interpretative nature of systematic approaches
to discovering social facts has been clarified and the presuppositions
underlying scientistic methodologies have been opened up to question,
so attention has been turned towards social actors’ own accounts of their
social world. Methods of social research have been developed which
attempt to use actors’ knowledge of their own experience and of the
world they live in. These methods are no longer exclusive- to
methodological clubs (‘symbolic interactionism’, ‘ethnomethodology’,
‘phenomenological sociology’) but have become part of a plurality of
methods available to social researchers.
During the same period, the study of culture has also enjoyed great,
attention but with a shift of emphasis from the study of elite culture and
its aesthetics towards the mainstream culture of newspapers, magazines,
films and television. The studies of these mass media have addressed the
various social processes surrounding the production of culture - the
organizations and institutions which manage and control these organs
of culture. But cultural studies have increasingly paid attention to the
interpretation of the meaning of cultural products. These meanings
which are consumed by so many members of the society are treated as a
significant representation of the culture as a whole - they are taken to
embody the values and concerns of society, or at least identifiable
sub-sections of it. Whether it is because society is seen as determining
of or determined by the media, its cultural products are treated as a
summation of the common knowledge: knowledge which is potentially
available to everyone in the society.
The period has also seen a shift of emphasis in social theory away
from the attempt to sum up the whole of society, towards an explanatory
framework into which any empirical data of different types would fit and
towards an interest in philosophy and language. Since the mid-1960s
social theory has been influenced less by sociologists and more than ever
before by linguists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers. Of
particular importance have been writers in the European critical theory
and structuralist traditions and some of their work will be the focus of
later chapters.
And yet there has been little synthesis of these three trends: the
methodological shift towards qualitative methods, the increasing
significance of mainstream culture, the piecemeal borrowing of social
theory. While all these trends have been deeply concerned with
knowledge (the knowledge of social actors, the embodiment of
knowledge in cultural products, the presuppositions of knowledge
about the social world) the sociology of knowledge has been increasingly
neglected as an arcane and unproductive area.
The chapters of this book will progressively introduce theoretical
issues from different approaches - the sociology of knowledge, the
theory of ideology, structuralism, discourse and cultural analysis. As
these different approaches are introduced some of the connections and
common ground will be marked and some of the wavs (hr different
Introduction 3
perspectives compliment each other will be suggested. As a whole, thd
book is intended as a sustained argument that the sociology of
knowledge has a renewed relevance ill contemporary sociology and can
be developed in the light of theoretical and methodological advances
relating to the critique of ideology and the structure of meaning.
The theme of the book is that knowledge, ideology and djstouyse are
social processes that are inextricably linked; a sociological perspective
of one necessitates consideration of the other two. But the aim of the
book is more optimistic than just pointing to the links between these
three processes. The real aim is to shmy jbat sociological analysis of
knowledge and jdeolSgy~Trpossible through the empirical analysis of
discourse. This aim is not so grancf as7t Sounds - much contemporary
workls already doing this, although often not under the heading of the
sodol^^ofknowledge, and some of it will be referred to in Chapters 8
and9?By situatlng~certain types of discourse analysis in relation to the
sociology of knowledge and the theory of ideology, those analyses can be
established as contributions to sociology, and so to the critique and
development of society.
The aims of the book are largely theoretical, drawing out the links
between different types of existing work to establish bridges between <
what are often, at the moment, separate areas of inquiry. Once these
bridges have been established however the attention will turn in the final
chapters of the book to the practicalities of undertaking empirical
analyses within the sociology of knowledge, taking into account the impact
of the (Eeoryof ideology and utilizing techniques of discourse analysis.
KNOWLEDGE
The sociology of knowledge is both an important starting point and an
appropriate topic to conclude with. It is the sociology of knowledge that
gives, the approach being developed its sociological perspective in
contrast to much of the work that will be referred to in the sections on
the theory of ideology (with its origins in political analysis) and on
discourse (with its origins in linguistic ahd cultural analysis). The”
sociology of knowledge is a perspective which emphasizes the social
character of knowledge. What we treat as knowledge is created by
people in groUps. It is the sociological features of the group that in large
measure determine the content of knowledge and in even larger
measure determine its (form. Knowledge is produced as the people who
make up society, work out their lives together. What is generated as
knowledge and what is taken as knowledge reflects the values and the
soriolcn’icnl fontoroc; of (ho <;or-v'tv
4 Knowledge, ideology and discourse
This perspective that lies at the heart of the sociology of knowledge
exists in tension with at least two opposing versions of the determinants
of knowledge. In one version the origins of knowledge are located
beyond human control, in an omniscient force - god. In this version god
makes available knowledge to human beings through a variety of means:
visions, the teachings of emissaries and prophets, religious writings,
interpretations of these texts by holy men and the rulings of religious
leaders. In the other version, the origins of knowledge are located within
human beings. Knowledge is made available directly through particular
actions of their own. In this second version, by following rules and
procedures, those of ‘science’, the workings of the world are revealed to
the minds of women and men.
In the religious version it is god who controls the revelation of
knowledge and in the science version it is particular human activities
that control the process (although there arc always constraints: nature
itself, lack of resources for following scientific activity, the limits of
existing knowledge to pose questions and understand answers). But to
put things so starkly is to imph a simple state of affairs; that ‘versions’
of the process of knowledge exist independently and in contrast. There
is no practical reason why the ;e two versions should not co-exist and
even intermingle. All societies and most people seem to subscribe to
both the religious and scientif c versions of knowledge to some extent.
These two versions may eve i be drawn on simultaneously although
there are points of contradiction that are difficult to reconcile - the
account of the origin of species for example.
The sociology of knowledge is a relatively new version of the process
of knowledge which, in Mann icim’s account, emerged at a certain point
in the breakup of the unita y world-view provided by religion. This
breakup is the consequence )f the scientific version of knowledge (for
Mannheim, rationalist thought) being successful in challenging the'
unified and all-encompassing power of the religious version. The soci­
ology of knowledge emerges )y explaining its own origins sociologically
without recourse to the dogrr atic formulae of cither religion or science.
This ability of the sociology of knowledge to consider not only
knowledge in general; but ilso the knowledge produced by its own
practice, involves a rcfiexivit; that is both a strength and a weakness in
the sociology of knowledge serspective. The spectre of relativism that
accompanies rcflexivity is ol.len seen as a weakness but the ability to
treat itself in the same way ; s the knowledge it studies means that the
sociology of knowledge can sever merely be an excuse for judging the
merits and value of different ypcs of knowledge.
It will help if I offer definitions of the categories of knowledge,
Introduction 5
ideology and discourse that I am using. By knowledge I mean the
constnial of relations between abstract entities that are taken to represent
the world of human experience, that can be shared by humans through
communication and that can be used by them both to understand their
experience of the world and to guide their actions. The origins of the
sociology of knowledge in the work of Karl Mannheim will be the focus
of Chapter 2 and will be developed in Chapter 3 with a brief account of
how those origins were responded to.
IDEOLOGY
The mode of description utilized by the early sociology of knowledge
was characterized not only by a disarming, sometimes crippling,
reflexivity but also by a form of critique that is characteristic of
describing false knowledge: the analysis of ideology. By analysing the
social siluatecThess of all world-views on the same basis using what he
called the ‘total conception of ideology’, Mannheim was not aiming to
dismiss or disregard that ideology as knowledge. He understood that
what he called the ‘particular conception of ideology’ was effective as a
political strategy because it pointed to the social situatedness of
opponents’ views (their basis not in ‘truth’ but in class or self interest).
The same strategy for discounting opposing views has been found in
scientists’ strategies for accounting for others’ errors (see Chapter 8).
But analysis using the ‘particular conception of ideology’ always speaks
from a position of superiority, assuming that its own perspective is not
socially situated. Mannheim’s ‘total conception of ideology’ incor­
porated the recognition that all perspectives were ideological and
socially situated. To point to the social contingency of a particular
knowledge claim is a traditional way of devaluing it; it is a discursive
strategy. Yet the aim of the sociology of knowledge is precisely to focus
attention on the social contingency of all knowledge. However, in
contrast, to the critic of particular ideology or scientists’ errors, the
sociology of knowledge does not need to contest the validity of
knowledge because the perspective is agnostic as to truth or falsehood.
The development of the theory of ideology has moved away from the
criticism of the particular conception of ideology - but it has not lost its
potency as critique. The contemporary theory of ideology describes a
process of socially contingent values, interpretations and taken-for-
grajfited knowledge that is necessary for the operation of society. In this
fprinulation, ideology is cast not as the bogey of false knowledge to
contrast with the purity of science as truth, but as a process that is
intertwined with all other social processes including science. The
analysis of ideology demonstrates that cultural forms which obscure the
concrete relations between human beings do not do so wilfully by
following the conscious intentions of particular humans. Although
some early accounts treated ideology as obscuring a ‘true’ version of
circumstances which waited to appear once the ideological cloud was
lifted, recent accounts take a more complex view.
A modern analysis of ideology recognizes that the repair and-
conccalment of contradictions in the concrete form of human relation^
is necessary if those relations are to be lived. The acceptance of ideology
as a characteristic of social being docs not preclude transformation
either of the lived or the imaginary relations of existence. But the
achievement of liberation from domination does not follow from a neat
qpistemological solution or even from a transformation of the level of
consciousness. What the modern theory of ideology does suggest is that
through a critique of the process of ideology, the process can, at least
partially, be made accessible to the will of human beings rather than
contingent on the extant conditions of existence.
What I mean by ideology, then, is the general determinative
relationship between the social and material conditions of existence and the
abstract relations construed in knowledge. The generality of this
relationship refers to the necessary FbrmTor the production of abstract
relations, in particular the reduction from complex relations to more
simple ones and the'concealment of contradictions. Chapters 4 and 5
will look at the development of the theory of ideology in a Marxist
tradition and at the problems of attempting to distinguish ideology and
science or truth in a political account of society.
DISCOURSE
As the aims and perspective of the theory of ideology merge with those
of the sociology of knowledge, techniques of reflexivity and critique can
be refined to guard against the tendencies to dogma and mechanism
present in the religious and science based versions of the process of
knowledge. But a problem remains - how shall substantive analysis of
knowledge/ideology proceed? What will be the object of study and what
techniques shall be utilized? Mannheim took ‘thought’ as his object of
study; sometimes ‘modes of thought’, or ‘world-views’. As an object of
empirical study ‘thought’ is difficult to pin down because it docs not have
a material form that can be located in time and space prior to
summation and interpretation by the analyst. Mannheim’s insights on
conservatism, the intelligentsia, utopianism and the tension between
generations seem to be arrived at despite any clear or convincing
iiiiiouiuuon
articulation of where another analyst should look for the ‘thought’ iffi
the early sociology of science, the most successful development from
Mannheimian sociology of knowledge, analytical attention was focused
on the social origins of knowledge rather than on the contents of
knowledge. The contents of knowledge (scientific knowledge) were
largely taken for granted; the problem was to find out how such
knowledge was produced.
‘Discourse’ emerges as an appropriate object of study in a number of
places at more or less the same time. Within the tradition that is
concerned with the critique of ideology, attention was turned towards
hermeneutics and the pragmatics of communication. Another branch of
the same tradition is enmeshed with an approach that derives from
structural linguistics. In structuralism and ‘post-structilralism’ a variety
of techniques for the analysis of discourse are explored. The object of
study ranges from the single Utterance, to the text, to the episteme but
all are related to each other as constituting ^discourse’. In characterizing
the linguistic production of human beings as ‘discourse’, the
structuralist approach takes seriously both the form and content of
language. The various contents of discourse are related according to
their form. The consistency of structural features; of discourse is also
related to Social features of the context of utterance: the processes of
power, the presuppositions that underlie discourse, the connotative
references to other discourses and other social processes obscured by
taken-for-granted participation in discourse.
By discourse then, I mean the material content of utterances exchanged
in social contexts that are imbued with meaning by the intention of utterers
and treated as meaningful by other participants. Intentionality marks the
exchange as meaningful but, although it may contribute to it, does not
constitute the meaning of discourse. Meaning is a property of the
structural features (both synchronic and diachronic) of discourse.
Chapters 6 and 7 will look at the development of structuralism which
both delivers a particular way of understanding knowledge and within
which a number of ways of studying discourse emerge.
While the philosophical rumblings of critical theory and structuralism
generated an object of study in ‘discourse’, the empirical and academic
traditions of linguistics and the sociology of science developed tech­
niques of inquiry that are appropriate for the analysis of the interactive
features of everyday speech or major debates at the frontiers of
knowledge. Language, including non-linguistic modes of communicating
'meaning, is shown to mean more than just what utterers say.
Interpretation of discourse by looking beyond just the content, draws on
three contextual settings which contribute to the construal of meaning: