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MA Psychosocial Studies 2012/13
Tess Carota
Distorted Understandings and Understanding Distortion:A critical reading through of the critique of ideology
and hermeneutics
3,994 words
9 January 2013
A critical approach to the social sciences will
always hinge, implicitly or explicitly, upon
assumptions about how knowledge is possible. One can
say with little hesitation that language always
mediates knowledge inasmuch as it provides a structure,
a distributive mechanism for the known. This
theoretical starting point may shed light on how we
know what we know and how knowledge is acquired, but,
most troublingly for the social sciences, we’re left
with two sticky problems: the extent to which the
“object” of knowledge can be known and the process by
which it comes to mean. On the one hand, it might seem
beneficial to concede that experience will always
escape representation to some extent. On the other, it
might seem necessary to concede that experience has no
2
value until it is coded in some way, as experience
can’t have the possibility of meaning, even for the
person who has experienced it, until it is made
available to representation. Hermeneutics and the
critique of ideology approach this doubly articulated
problem from both sides. Represented in the ensuing
discussion by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur,
phenomenological hermeneutics proposes a negotiation of
the mode of being that is always already in
understanding with “objective” knowledge systems
through interpretation. The critique of ideology, here
represented by Louis Althusser and Ernesto Laclau,
insists that meaning is always distorted, in that it is
always embedded in relations of power. Points of
convergence and divergence amongst these, ultimately,
four differing perspectives on the problem of knowledge
and meaning in the social sciences will emerge. As no
single perspective can account for every force or
element encountered in the study of society, it will be
3
necessary to regionalize each approach to the
problematics it is most fit to address.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to clarify the
terms offered above. “Phenomenological hermeneutics”
here refers to Heidegger’s resuscitation of
hermeneutics beyond the interpretation of texts and
towards the more fundamental, existential problem of
understanding as a non-mediated state of being-in-the-
world. The critique of ideology, as it will be deployed
in what follows, is brought under the post-marxist
critique of essentialism. Already, it is clear that
these two modes of thinking speak from different
ontologies. For phenomenological hermeneutics,
hereafter simply called hermeneutics, understanding
still turns upon an essence, which whether available to
thought as itself or not, marks experience with
presence. Hermeneutics in this way endeavors to
ontologize epistemology. The critique of ideology, on
the other hand, turns upon the absence of an essence
4
and, accordingly, takes on the task of epistemologizing
ontology. It is difficult to bring these two epistemo-
ontological planes into a coherent conversation, as
they fundamentally disagree on that which is. Thus each
will be engaged in parallel conversations that will
overlap and diverge according to their orientation to
being.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer follows Heidegger’s
articulation of the ontological problem of knowledge in
arguing that one cannot address the extent to which
things can be known without first considering the more
primary state of understanding as a mode of being. The
defining characteristic of understanding as a mode of
being is its historicity, its finitude in space and
time. Put another way, a subject’s very capacity to
understand is predetermined by the historical condition
into which he is born and which bestows upon him the
categories through which he can know the world.
5
Knowledge of an other will always be structured by this
historically determined capacity to understand.
A human being discovers his finitude in the fact that, first of all, he finds himself within a tradition or traditions. Because history precedes me and my reflection, because I belong to history before I belong to myself, prejudgment also precedes judgment and submission to tradition precedes their examination. (1989: 111)
The ineluctable qualifier that a subject “belongs” to
history constitutes the hermeneutic circle that directs
all of Gadamer’s inquiry in Truth and Method. The
subject’s status as belonging will always prevent him
from fully distancing himself from the historical
conditions that frame his understanding. The
impossibility of distantiation appears to qualify the
human sciences in what would be a disquieting way, as
it would seem to render knowledge of an other
impossible.
To begin to address this dilemma, Gadamer rescues
the concept of prejudice from its philosophical
dismissal as bias, and therefore as anathema to
understanding. He argues that all understanding is
6
necessarily prejudicial. He reclaims this term from its
etymological past as “pre-judgment”, which is to say as
a particular structure of expectation that makes
judgment possible. The rejection of prejudice as a mode
of being arose, according to Gadamer, as a result of
its having been opposed to reason. For Gadamer,
however, prejudice is not the opposite of reason, as
reason is also marked by its own prejudice. The
subjugation of prejudice likewise rests on a
misunderstanding of authority, insofar as authority
derives from prejudicial knowledge. The efficacy of
authority is not exhausted by domination, manipulation,
and blind obedience. Authority is in a more fundamental
sense also accepted on the basis that the one subjected
to it recognizes its better judgment.
It is true that it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is based, ultimately, not on the subjection and abdication of reason, but on acceptance and recognition—recognition, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence, i.e. it has priority over one’s own. (1989: 248)
7
One’s capacity to understand an other is always limited
by a primary, ontological prejudice. Gadamer backs
away, however, from any notion of relativism or
subjectivism. Instead, as both of the passages
excerpted above would indicate, he appeals to the
related notions of tradition and authority as
qualifications for dialogue. Knowledge is produced by
engaging oneself in a dialogue that operates on the
basis of recognition, recognition of mutual tradition,
and the acceptance of authority.
Accordingly, the fundamental model for knowledge
is the conversation or the “fusion of horizons”. A
conversation presupposes that the interlocutors are
seeking to arrive at mutual agreement about the matter
at hand and always occurs in language. Language, for
Gadamer, constitutes our “being in the world”. “Being
that can be understood is language. The hermeneutical
phenomenon here projects its own universality back on
to the ontological constitution of what is understood,
8
determining it in a universal sense as language and
determining its own relation to beings as
interpretation.” (1989: 470) The necessarily linguistic
character of being, understanding, and knowledge,
however, does not amount to linguistic relativism.
Gadamer’s conceptualization of language is, in the
final analysis, at the service of being not the other
way around.
Gadamer’s appeal to the metaphysics of authority
and tradition in the domain of understanding is not
without its limitations. As his debate with Jürgen
Habermas explicates in greater detail, the
phenomenological reappropriation of authority based on
recognition lacks a language to speak of domination and
of authority that acquires its power through
misrecognition. This is precisely the point from which
the critique of ideology starts.
Althusser takes his lead on ideology from Marx,
though the former reformulates the latter in ways that
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preclude any ontology of emancipation. The traditional
Marxist theory of ideology follows from the distinction
between base and superstructure. The economic base—the
modes of production, divisions of labor, and property
relations that sustain material existence—wholly
determine the cultural and intellectual character of a
society. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life.” (Marx, 1978: 155) Ideology in
Marxist terms is perpetuated by and through “false
consciousness” which mystifies the economic base and,
most importantly for this discussion, would vanish upon
the emergence of the unalienated state of being in
human emancipation. Althusser rejects both the agency
of the base and the prospect of human emancipation.
Instead, ideology is proposed as the active agent of
reproduction for relationships of dominance and,
furthermore, as an eternal qualifier of knowledge.
Borrowing his vocabulary from Lacan, Althusser
proposes that "ideology represents the imaginary
10
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence" (2001: 109). This is not to say, however,
that material life is without consequence. "Ideology
has a material existence" (2001: 112) through its
reproduction in ideological state apparatuses,
including schools, the family, systems of law, and so
forth, which traverse the base-superstructure divide.
Through the various ideological state apparatuses that
structure social relations, the subject is supplied
with the categories necessary to be aware of himself as
a subject in society.
It follows, then, that subjects are always already
ideological. But Althusser’s claim is even more far-
reaching than this. The category of “subject” itself is
an ideological one, insofar as it is produced and
reproduced to maintain relations of power. Althusser
terms the subjectification of individuals,
interpellation. This is the process by which the
subject is, on the one hand, constituted as such and,
11
on the other, provided with a historically and
hierarchically constituted capacity to know the world.
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ (1984:18)
The simple act of being called a “you” marks out the
domain of possibilities for a subject within the social
field and within itself. Regimes of authority maintain
control by reproducing subjects who believe their
domain of possibilities, which is circumscribed by
their position within society, to be natural. At this
point in the reading of Althusser’s critique of
ideology, one can hear echoes of Gadamer’s reclamation
of prejudice. Despite their divergent epistemological
and ontological orientations and their apparently
contradictory aims, Gadamer and Althusser offer
somewhat related remarks on structured limitations to
knowledge and the impossibility of distantiation.
12
Althusser, however, ultimately maps out a path to
distantiation through science, or Marx’s dialectical
materialism.
Instead of appealing to authority per se and
tradition per se as Gadamer does, Althusser reclaims the
Marxist formulation of historical materialism, which,
while no longer the motor of history as Marx had it,
contains within its horizon the analytic possibility of
restructuring social relations. Althusser argues that
it is through the analysis of social formations on the
basis of a dialectical materialism, the ideological
operation can be exposed.
An ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society. [...] ideology, as a system of representations, is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function (function as knowledge). (1969: 231)
Knowledge engendered through analytical science,
Althusser claims, can successfully oppose itself to the
self-contained, self-fulfilling logic of ideology. The
13
purpose of a scientific inquiry into ideology is not,
as indicated in the contrast with Marx above, to reveal
an essence that has been veiled by an imaginary
appearance of order. Instead, social formations in
their materiality will be shown to have been
overdetermined by the symbolic order that gives them
their meaning. This move would up social formations to
new possibilities of meaning and thus of existence.
It is at this point that Laclau picks up on
Althusser. He is critical of the latter’s appeal to
analytical science as deliverance from existing forms
domination, even if he and Althusser fundamentally
agree that the symbolic overdetermination of social
formations marks the key instability for overturning
old knowledge systems. Insofar as Althusser’s notion of
ideology constitutes itself in opposition to science,
“the determination of the distortion brought about by
ideological representation, the alienated character of
the subject, depend on the analyst’s knowledge of what
14
social reproduction actually is—a knowledge which
includes understanding the mirroring mechanism.” (1996:
300) Laclau argues that there can be no such neutral
gaze upon the illusory character of social
structuration and neither can this be the case within
Althusser’s own epistemology. Laclau instead endeavors
to offer a critique of ideology wherein the partiality
of the analytic gaze is constitutive rather than
surmountable.
Following from his criticisms of Althusser, the
basic notion of ontology outside of epistemology, or
even epistemology as such outside of epistemological
articulations, vanishes completely from Laclau’s
interpretation of ideology. He deploys Althusserian
language to the extent that. Things, he is at pains to
make clear, do still exist. What he rejects is any a
priori categories of being, any dialectic of appearance
and essence that would influence the logic of social
relations. More to the point, the category of being as
15
such is tautological for Laclau. When discussing the
economic determinism of classic Marxist strategies, he
says, “it is important to note that the problem under
discussion is not that the economy should have its
conditions of existence. This is a tautology, for if
something exists, it is because given conditions render
its existence possible.” (1985: 98) But if all
knowledge, all understanding, all interpretation, all
meaning is perforce a distortion, and there are no a
priori, existential categories with which to contrast
that which is distorted, how is critique possible? To
put this question another way, what gives the theorist,
or indeed anyone, the ability or capacity to recognize
a distortion? We’ll recall that both Gadamer and
Althusser, who start at a formally comparable place of
partiality, must at this point appeal to some kind of
authoritative position to make knowledge possible.
Laclau instead proposes that distortion is the
condition of knowledge in general.
16
The crux of Laclau’s argument is that social
categories only maintain a discursive identity at the
behest of an illusion of coherence. All knowledge
starts from this illusory coming together of identity.
Put another way, representation allows knowledge to be
shared and operates on the basis of an identity with
what it purports to represent. This task is both
necessary and impossible. Representation in general is a
mechanism of distortion that requires the “creation of
the illusion of closure” which is “indispensable to the
constitution of the social link.” (1996: 320) From the
start, the production of meaning is qualified by
contingency. By Laclau’s account, the process begins
when floating signifiers, which he calls elements, come
together in so-called moments. Moments are born of a
circumstantial relationship between a signifier and a
signified to form meaning. Moments then line up into
chains of equivalences, which are bound by metonymical,
contiguous, and politically motivated relationships
17
between the constellation of moments. The meaning of
the chain of equivalences is produced differentially
through the political and lexical antagonisms that
necessarily abut its frontier. This process works so
far as it generates knowledge, and but it always fails
in the end, as it is based on contingent identities
that were themselves never actual but always
overdetermined.
The transition from elements to the moments is never entirely fulfilled. A no man’s-land thus emerges, making the articulatory practice possible. In this case, there is no social identity fully protected from a discursive exterior that deforms it and prevents it becoming fully sutured. Both the identities and the relations lose their necessary character. As a systematic structural ensemble, the relations are unable to absorb the identities: but as identities are purely relational, this is but another way of saying that there is no identity which can be fully constituted. This being so, all discourse of fixation becomes metaphorical: literality is, in actual fact, the first metaphor. (1985: 111)
If all knowledge is constituted through representation,
and all representation is in the first order
metaphorical, it follows that all knowledge is
metaphorical. While this seems like something of a
death sentence for the social sciences and, indeed, for
18
any science, or even for our ability to know anything
at all, Laclau insists this is not a fatalistic
perspective. He instead points to the failure to close
identities as a space for hegemonic rearticulation.
The main argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,
which Laclau co-wrote with Chantal Mouffe, places the
struggle for hegemony at the center of the political
struggle. In the Gramscian model, hegemony is
constituted through the substitution of the interests
of one social group for the whole. Since knowledge is
always already distorted, Mouffe and Laclau argue for a
strategic rearticulation of a counter-hegemonic
position that would embrace the necessarily incomplete
character of discourse. “It is only when the open,
unsutured character of the social is fully accepted,
when the essentialism of the totality and of the
elements is rejected, that this potential becomes
clearly visible and ‘hegemony’ can come to constitute a
fundamental tool for political analysis on the left”
19
(1985: 192-193). Changing the terms of political
discourse away from essentialism and towards a
polysemic communicative structure will, in turn, allow
multiple subject-positions to be articulated within the
field of the social.
Thus far, little has been said about Laclau’s
conceptualization of the subject. He insists upon the
term subject-position, since, following Althusser’s
notion interpellation, subjectivity is itself an
ideologically and discursively constituted political
position. “The category of subject is penetrated by the
same ambiguous, incomplete, and polysemical character
which overdetermination assigns to every discursive
identity.” (1985: 121) Furthermore, subjects for Laclau
have no agency in experience and cannot be "the origin
of social relations—not even in the limited sense of
being endowed with powers that render an experience
possible—as all ‘experience’ depends on precise
discursive conditions of possibility” (1985: 115). With
20
no subjectivity behind the subject, as it were, to
interpret the system of signification constituting the
social according to his own experience, it might seem
difficult to account for why representation should be
seen to be polysemic and, ultimately, failed. This is
as much a question for hermeneutics as it is for the
critique of ideology. And, indeed, the polysemy of
language is one of Ricoeur’s primary concerns.
Ricoeur seeks to resolve the problem of
distantiation—which however derived from
phenomenological considerations has nevertheless
implicitly informed all three positions outlined above—
with “belonging to history”, in Gadamer’s terms.
Ricoeur argues that the text is the key figure in
overcoming alienating distantiation in “that it is
communication in and through distance.” (1985: 131)
This position is based on his efforts to fold back
together, though not collapse, a distinction borrowed
from Ferdinand de Saussure between langue (language) and
21
parole (voice or spoken words), which he interprets as
language and discourse. Language provides a structure
or code for communication; discourse is a communicative
event in the form of speech. The linguistic structure
persists in time, while discourse is temporal and
situated within the event of its being spoken. Language
has no speaker, while discourse always refers back to
the subject doing the articulating. Language generates
itself insofar as it is a structured relation of signs,
while discourse is about something else, something that
is not a product of its own logic. Language in its
articulation becomes discourse, which is constituted as
an event and, by being understood, the event becomes
meaning.
It is in the linguistics of discourse that event and meaning are articulated. This articulation is the core of the whole hermeneutical problem. Just as language, by being actualized in discourse, surpasses itself as a system and realizes itself as an event, so too discourse, by entering the process of understanding, surpasses itself as an event and becomes meaning. (1985: 134)
The text is thus both event and meaning, inasmuch as it
emerges from a dialectic of both. The meaning of the
22
text simultaneously recalls the discursive event of
articulation and surpasses it in the process of being
understood.
From this point Ricoeur offers a formulation of
the subject who understands that serves as a generative
counterpoint to Laclau. The relationship between text
and reader is not one of dialogue, as it is for
Gadamer, since the text is not addressed to the
individual reader. The address is only constituted and
reconstituted in the encounter between reader and text.
“To understand is to understand oneself in front of a
text.” (1984: 143) This moment marks the point where
distantiation can be overcome, insofar as the subject
is not fully constituted by the text, nor is the text
fully constituted by the subject. Each produces and
overwhelms the other. “As a reader, I find myself only
by losing myself.” (1984: 144) Elsewhere, Ricoeur
offers a more analytical description of the subject who
comes to know itself in texts. “There is no self-
23
understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols,
and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding
coincides with the interpretation given to these
mediating terms.” (1996: 15) The text is always open to
interpretation by the reader, who in turn constitutes
himself in the text. This conceptualization of the text
and the subjective relations of meaning and
interpretation in which it engages, Ricoeur argues,
extends beyond literary theory and into the
hermeneutics of knowledge in the social sciences. “The
Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as
Text,” positions meaningful action as analogous to
discourse in the sense described above. The
meaningfulness of the action comes to be known through
a dialectic of explanation of and understanding.
Ricoeur proposes yet a third dialectic related to
that of event and meaning described above, sense and
reference, which will flesh out the interpretative
function in discourse/action/event. A sentence refers
24
in a certain situation according to a certain use,
wherein words are applied to reality. This act of
speech is an event, but the event is structured as
meaning by sense, which “traverses the intention of the
speaker.” (1976: 20) The intentionality of the speaker
is retained in the referential function of language,
but once uttered it enters into the world of meaning,
where it is open to endless interpretation.
Only this dialectic [sense and reference] says something about the relation between language and the ontological condition of being in the world. Language is not a world of its own. It is not even a world. But because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations, and because we orient ourselves comprehensively in those situations, we have something to say, we have experience to bring to language […] the notion of bringing experience to language is the ontological condition of reference. (1976: 20-1)
Language only means insofar as it is spoken by a
speaker, who carries with him his own intentions, and
received by a listener or reader, who brings his own
experience to the linguistic reference offered to him
by the speaker. Meaning is never closed not because of
a constitutive distortion inherent to representation,
but because meaning is produced in, through and by
25
interpreting subjects who constitute and reconstitute
their world through meaning and meaningful action ad
infinitum.
The extent to which the object of study can be
known, and the related of question of how things come
to mean, seems to depend upon the ontological location
of subjectivity. Distortion and domination characterize
the conditions of knowledge for the subject who is
always already embedded in discourse. The subject who
exists in understanding, in a state before meaning and
thus before discourse, maintains a more open,
dialectical relationship with knowledge. And it’s clear
that neither offers a complete explanation for the
vicissitudes of social reality. Where the critique of
ideology fails to speak of subjectivity in a manner
that leaves space for experience, hermeneutics offers
an underdeveloped language with which to speak of power
formations. Ricoeur himself admits this shortcoming and
calls for a regionalization of strategies depending on
26
the object of study. If we follow Ricoeur’s advice,
then, the question of how knowledge is possible for the
social sciences presents a number of possible
diagnostic, analytical and interpretive tools to be
chosen according to their appropriateness to the topic
at hand.
27
Works cited
Gadamer, H.G. 1989. Truth and Method. (London: Sheedand Ward)
Althusser, L. 1984. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Essays on Ideology. (London: Verso)
Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. (London: Allen Lane)Marx, K. 1978. “The German Ideology” in The Marx-
Engels Reader. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company)Laclau, E. and Mouffe, Ch. 1985. Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy. (London: Verso)Laclau, E. 1996. ‘The death and resurrection of
the theory of ideology’ in Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3
Ricoeur, P. 1996. Oneself as Another. (London: University of Chicago Press)
Ricoeur, P. 1984. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press)
Ricoeur, P. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. (Fort Worth: Texas University Christian Press)
Other Works Consulted
Palmer, R. 1969. Hermeneutics. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press)
Moran, D. and Mooney, T., Eds. 2002. The Phenomenology Reader. (London: Routledge)
Ricoeur, P. 1991. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. (Hertfordshire: Simon & Schuster)
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