Is There an End of Ideologies?: Exploring Constructs of Ideology and Discourse in Marxist and Post-Marxist Theories

212 Pages·2015·1.215 MB·English

by  António Lopes

Is There an End
of Ideologies?

Is There an End
of Ideologies?:
Exploring Constructs of Ideology
and Discourse in Marxist
and Post-Marxist Theories
By
António Lopes
Is There an End of Ideologies?:
Exploring Constructs of Ideology and Discourse in Marxist
and Post-Marxist Theories

By António Lopes

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by António Lopes

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7551-1
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7551-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10
Discourse: The Intricacies of Defining an Elusive Concept
or Why Critical Discourse Analysis is Not That Critical

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27
The Problem of the Origins or the Origins of the Problem:
Some Epistemological Concerns

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 34
Parodying Saussure or “Who’s Afraid of Valentin Vološinov?”

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 51
The German Ideology: Against the Language of Philosophy
and Towards a Philosophy of Language

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 71
Ideology B. C. (Before Capital) and Later Reactions

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 83
The Fetish Hiding (in) the Structure

Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 88
Is There a Place for Revolution in Structural Determinism?
The Responses of French Structuralism

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 103
Exposing an Orrery of Errors
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 112
La Palice, von Münchhausen, Lord Kitchener: Pêcheux’s Investigations
into Discourse and Ideology

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 133
The Role of Discourse on the Post-Marxist Agenda

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 160
The Discourse of Discourse Theory

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 170
Some Concluding Reflections

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 173

Index ........................................................................................................ 191
FOREWORD

Ideology and discourse analysis is currently a major research area
within cultural studies, critical studies, political and philosophical studies,
and many other current areas, postgraduation courses and research
projects. This field of study includes, in many cases, theories on
hegemony, power, knowledge, liberalism, libertarianism, neoliberalism,
utilitarianism, communitarianism, socialism, etc. These keywords could be
circumscribed to a series of key names that everyone will recognize as
familiar to these questions: Marx, Gramsci, Heidegger, Althusser,
Saussure, Barthes, Lacan, Zizek, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Foucault.
António Lopes has contributed to the debate on the reconceptualization
of ideology and discourse in contemporary terms that go beyond the post-
Marxism proposals. He starts reexamining the concept of discourse in
Critical Discourse Analysis, following a historical perspective, and
including a revision of the epistemological problem of the origin of
discursive formations on discourse and ideology, arguing that both
dimensions belong to a specific historical and political setting. Foucault’s
The Order of Things (2002), Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics and
Valentin Vološinov’s philosophy of language provide him the necessary
theoretical framework to prove that the use of language by Critical
Discourse Analysis is not totally new since Marxists have already
underlined the importance of language in the ideological structuring of
society. Lopes’ argument is summed up this way: “if CDA is purportedly
critical of the dominant discourses and abides by a specific political
agenda (…) and if it integrates in its jargon terms like class, ideology and
hegemony, is it not then clear that Marxism constitutes one of its major
sources? And if so, why do most of CDA theorists avoid explicit
involvement with Marxism, especially in terms of engaging in an in-depth
discussion of such authors as Marx, Engels, Vološinov or Althusser?” (p.
45). These research questions are discussed with a strong belief that we
cannot exclude two major intellectual traditions(cid:237)Saussure’s linguistics and
Marxist philosophy of language(cid:237)which are behind so many works
appeared throughout the nineties and the first decade of the twentieth
century (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Howarth, Mouffe, Torfing), suggesting,
with Terry Eagleton, that symptoms of political crisis always affect the
way we communicate and form our social discourse.
viii Foreword

This way, the post- Marxist approaches to discourse imply what Lopes
calls “the textualization of the social,” which means that we cannot inquiry
discourse only within the boundaries of texts and speeches, but rather in
all social relations and processes that involve our participation in
contemporary sociosphere. Quoting Howarth, as to summarize his main
argument(cid:650)”discourse theorists seek to locate these investigated practices
and logics in larger historical and social contexts, so that they may acquire
a different significance and provide the basis for a possible critique and
transformation of existing practices and social meanings.” (Howarth,
2000b:129)(cid:650), Lopes sees in these words the light of a new project for
revising the relationship between individual consciousness and social
reality.
The literary text is not the only possibility to use ideology as a creative
system of ideas and an opened ground for digging discourse. Critical
exercises like the one offered by António Lopes prove that the theorist is a
producer of ideology taken from many non-textual experiences. The
critical practice of reading texts and their theories is no less ideological (in
any sense) from what one can achieve in the production of knowledge
motivated not only by what we read but also by what we live as well.

Carlos Ceia
Full Professor
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
PREFACE

Prompted by the need to set up a theoretical framework for my
doctoral research on British communism in the thirties, I found myself
drawn to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their concept
of discourse and the theoretical perspective underpinning it seemed
particularly apt to discuss the way in which the Communist Party of Great
Britain sought to negotiate meanings, representations and identities in the
period of the People’s Front—a time when it was necessary for the party
to reach out to sections of society that had until then remained suspicious
of Communism and distrusted the intentions of the Soviet Union. I had
already read extensively on ideology, especially those authors identified
with the Marxist tradition. However, despite the countless meanings that
each of them attached to the term, it invariably involved an idea of stasis,
which raised some theoretical difficulties in my attempt to account for a
period in the history of the party and of the nation marked by rapid identity
changes.
From other readings, it soon became clear to me that both ideology and
discourse, in spite of the conceptual gap that exists between them, are
sometimes confused by a significant number of authors. Thus, I decided
that the initial part of my thesis should be dedicated not only to
disentangling these two categories, but also to ascertaining the way in
which each of them could be applied to my historical inquiry as analytical
tools.
This work seeks (a) to trace the genesis and evolution of both concepts
in Marxism and post-Marxism, (b) to understand how they are interrelated
and (c) to assess their applicability in empirical research. It is not my
intention to exhaust the discussion of each category. Whoever is looking
for the contributions to the theory of ideology made by influential authors
such as Lucáks, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Stuart Hall, Habermas or
Jameson, just to name a few, will notice that little or nothing is said about
them: not that I do not recognize their value, but the focus of my attention
was not ideology alone. Neither was it discourse tout court. To develop
my project I needed to place myself at the crossroads where ideology,
language and discourse meet. I had to be particularly selective about the
thinkers and their work, so as to secure, on the one hand, an articulation—