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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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,

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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”

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(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

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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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