A New and Superior Theory of Ideology?

AuthorWOLCHER, LOUIS E.
PositionReview

J. M. Balkin, who teaches law at Yale, does a fair job in Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) of describing the overall intellectual terrain in which most of the important theories of ideology deployed. And the second chapter's elucidation of "bricolage," a concept invented by the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, is a useful reminder that it is best not to view cultural products such as ideology as autogenic entities having no connection with other aspects of culture. Rather, they always seem to be built from the materials that history has delivered, in the way that a handyman (bricoleur, in French) appropriates whatever tools and implements lie at hand, even if his purposes are not the same as the toolmaker's. (Think, for example, of how many conservatives have picked up ideas from Martin Luther King as weapons in their political struggle to abolish affirmative action.) Balkin also manages to trace some interesting connections between theories of ideology and the work of such postmodern thinkers as Michel Foucault, whose writings on the relations between knowledge and power explicitly reject any reliance on the concept of ideology, and Jacques Derrida, who has repeatedly said that the practice of deconstruction that he founded needs and relics on no concept to ground it, let alone the concept of ideology. But Cultural Software is hardly a work of intellectual history. Balkin claims to have identified "a deeper phenomenon" (p. 3) than anyone else has noticed, and he offers an ambitious theory of ideology of his own--one that he repeatedly touts as superior to all of its competitors. Unfortunately, instead of finding deep waters, I could get no more than the soles of my feet wet in this particular pond.

Approaches to Understanding Ideology

Most theories of ideology define their object of study in terms of certain entities, or arrangements of entities, believed to constitute or produce human mental phenomena and states of consciousness. The names of the usual suspects include "ideas," "conceptions," "categories," "meanings," "beliefs," and "ways (or systems) of thinking." Just as Kant's categories of understanding supposedly transcend the individual thinker, so ideology is supposed to transcend the individual actor--the difference being that Kant thought his transcendental subject represented humanity's universal faculty of understanding, whereas today's analyst tends to project ideology, somewhat more modestly, onto a subset of humanity: the ways that people sharing a particular social location think at a particular point in history, for example. If modern social theorists are attracted to this kind of analysis, it is usually because they suspect or presuppose that there is a causal relation (either linear or reciprocal) between our ideology and our behavior, and hence between our ideology and the worlds that our behaviors make, or are made by.

Classical Marxism holds that ideology is a product of the material world, including "real" social relations, and that ideology helps to maintain the status quo by creating "false consciousness" in the minds of oppressors and oppressed alike. The prototypical analyst of ideology, however, is somehow able to avoid its snare (Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," in Karl Marx: A Reader, edited by Jon Elster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 23-28).

In the theories of ideology following the tradition established by Karl Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985]; first German edition, 1929), it is generally stipulated that no one is immune from the ideologizing effects of his own social and historical context; hence, both the analyst and the analysand are caught, inextricably, in ideology's web, and it no longer seems to be much of an insult to speak of someone's way of thinking as ideological. In this, its most important non-Marxist form, the study of ideology is essentially the same as the sociology of knowledge. Thus, outside an ever-narrowing circle of Marxist intellectuals, these days the concept of ideology usually gets articulated as one element in the more general thesis that all of reality is "socially constructed" (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge [New York: Doubleday, 1966], pp. 123-25).

Alternatively, the charge of ideology-mongering (or something like it) is sometimes used as a reproach against people who are said to peddle their own point of view as the "standard for point-of-viewlessness" (Catharine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 [Summer 1983]: 635-58) or who suppose that it is possible to know and to theorize in such a way that they are able to transcend their language and their social location (Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies [Durham: Duke University Press, 1989], pp. 356-98).

Concepts of ideology have even found their way into rational-choice theory, especially the work of those curious and commendable few who want to understand not only how and what people choose, but also why they choose it (Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], pp. 35-56).

Ideology Equals Software?

For Balkin, as for Mannheim, ideology is not an aberration, and no one is immune from its effects. But what exactly is it? Balkin rejects the traditional identification of ideology with beliefs and systems of belief (p. 44); instead, he makes ideology a subset of something called "cultural information." He thinks that cultural information in general--sometimes referred to as "cultural know-how" (p. ix) or "tools of understanding" (p. 1)--is neither good nor bad: it is necessary. Balkin christens this entity "cultural software," both in the title and in chapter 1, and he defines it as the "collectively created tools that constitute us as persons and that we use to make new tools of understanding the world around us, interacting with others, and expressing our values" (p. 31).

Unfortunately, the extended metaphor of cultural software fizzles badly. For even though Balkin spends many pages drawing analogies between cultural understanding and computers, he seems unaware that computer scientists use the term software loosely as a label for various kinds of computer programs, all of which owe their existence to programming languages (A. J. van de Goor, Computer Architecture and Design [Wokingham: Addison-Wesley, 1989], pp. 22-38). In mathematical terms, a programming language is a formal language that allows programmers to produce certain well-formed expressions and strings of expressions called programs. A program is a finite sequence of characters that meets a set of...

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