Re-Energizing Ideology Studies: The Maturing of a Discipline by Michael Freeden

Author:Michael Freeden [Freeden, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815377153
Google: RkIqswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39219151
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-31T13:09:28+00:00

Post-structuralist discourse-political theory: towards an understanding of ideology as the re-contextualizing potential of mediatized politics

The post-structuralist social theory of discourse takes as its point of departure the ‘radical contingency’, ongoing fluidity and complexity, that traverses late modern societies and comes to suggest that discourse, by ascribing a particular, relatively fixed, meaning, to concepts that are principally ‘empty signifiers’ (without any immanent meaning), gives rise to social practices through which the fluidity of the social is temporarily organized and ordered.38 The discursive ordering of the social, however, if anything, mystifies the very condition of radical contingency that traverses the latter; discourse construes social relations as effectively fixated and consolidated while, in principle, they are open-ended and precarious. This ‘ontological misrecognition’ of social relations as givens in the regimes of meaning that discourse creates, crucially, differs from the Marxist ‘epistemological misrecognition’ of social relations as classless and eternal in the (false) consciousness of the working class; but it is still taken by discourse theorists (through a rather neo-Marxist/Gramscian prism) to establish and sustain the domination of a cluster of (class, gendered, nationalist, etc.) interests in the form of hegemony.39

Political science, being rather hostile to post-structuralist discourse theory, has not yet systematically embarked on debates around re-contextualization and its relevance to the study of ideology, although there have been significant initiatives to this direction. Michael Freeden’s work on the ‘conceptual morphology’ of ideologies40 could be an exemplar in this regard. Freeden espouses the post-structuralist principle of radical contingency, which he construes as inherent indeterminacy and contestability of political discourse, thereby rejecting the essentialist conception of ideology as a doctrinaire belief system. Quite the contrary, he argues that although concrete ideologies are usually treated and studied as sets of ideas, ideology, in its conceptual generality, is the process of producing political ideas through the effective decontestation of political meaning. In other words, what in post-structuralist discourse theory described as the ordering capacity of discourse, Freeden perceives as ‘a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts’41 without, however, ever resulting in a total decontestation of political discourse.

From this point of view, ideologies may be seen as (discursive) formations, relatively open-ended and porous in their boundaries (permeability), with their concepts acquiring meaning always in relation to other concepts that are closely linked to them42 or, as I would put it, in re-contextualizing terms, in relation to the context within which they are resituated. Some of these concepts, Freeden suggests, are ‘core’ and, therefore, ineliminable and some others are ‘adjacent’ and ‘peripheral’ and, therefore, subject to change (priority),43 a principle which reminds us that discourse by re-contextualizing ideas and practices, simultaneously, (re)orders and organizes them. Finally, Freeden draws our attention to the fact that some concepts are allotted relatively more space than others in an ideology (proportionality).44 That is, crucially, a matter of inclusion and exclusion of certain socio-historical referents, and of their topical connotations, in the process of re-contextualization.

Freeden, however, does not espouse the ‘Manichaeism’ of post-structuralist discourse theory

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