Knowledge, Ideology & Discourse

A Sociological Perspective

Tim Dant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317829485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This student textbook, originally published in 1991, tackles the traditional problems of the sociology of knowledge from a new perspective. Drawing on recent developments in social theory, Tim Dant explores crucial questions such as the roles of power and knowledge, the status of rational knowledge, and the empirical analysis of knowledge. He argues that, from a sociological perspective, knowledge, ideology and discourse are different aspects of the same phenomenon, and reasserts the central thesis of the sociology - that knowledge is socially determined.

1 Introduction

Knowledge is a key feature of socleties. It is part of what binds individuals and groups of humans into that larger group which we call society. It is a link between each of us and everyone else who shares our society and its culture. But it is also a key feature of the fragmentation between social groups. Differences in what people share as knowledge, not only in terms of their beliefs but also in terms of that unspoken knowledge hidden within social practices and customs, mark the differences between social groups. Knowledge is both part of what joins people in groups and what divides groups; it is a dimension of human life that involves agreement and disagreement, debate and negotiation. And yet, we tend to live as if knowledge could be settled, as if there is only one true knowledge which we are striving for and which we, each of us, is getting closer to. Together with those who share our perspective we agree on something which we might call ‘truth’. But the knowledge of those with whom we disagree we treat as ideological, as being mere ideas, as not knowledge in the sense of something consistent with our lived reality.

As we negotiate with those who share our views and dispute with those who disagree, we do it through language. We talk, we write, we argue, we communicate – we even represent ideas in pictures, music, dance and movement, in material forms including sculptures, architecture and tools. All of these forms of cultural communication can be treated as discourse in the sense that they involve human beings exchanging meanings about the world in which they live.

Since the mid-1960s sociology has become increasingly concerned with knowledge. As the interpretative nature of systematic approaches to discovering social facts has been clarified and the presuppositions underlying scientistic methodologies have been opened up to question, so attention has been turned towards social actors’ own accounts of their social world. Methods of social research have been developed which attempt to use actors’ knowledge of their own experience and of the world they live in. These methods are no longer exclusive to methodological clubs (‘symbolic interactionism’, ‘ethnomethodology’, ‘phenomenological sociology’) but have become part of a plurality of methods available to social researchers.

During the same period, the study of culture has also enjoyed great attention but with a shift of emphasis from the study of elite culture and its aesthetics towards the mainstream culture of newspapers, magazines, films and television. The studies of these mass media have addressed the various social processes surrounding the production of culture – the organizations and institutions which manage and control these organs of culture. But cultural studies have increasingly paid attention to the interpretation of the meaning of cultural products. These meanings which are consumed by so many members of the society are treated as a significant representation of the culture as a whole – they are taken to embody the values and concerns of society, or at least identifiable sub-sections of it. Whether it is because society is seen as determining of or determined by the media, its cultural products are treated as a summation of the common knowledge: knowledge which is potentially available to everyone in the society.

The period has also seen a shift of emphasis in social theory away from the attempt to sum up the whole of society, towards an explanatory framework into which any empirical data of different types would fit and towards an interest in philosophy and language. Since the mid-1960s social theory has been influenced less by sociologists and more than ever before by linguists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers. Of particular importance have been writers in the European critical theory and structuralist traditions and some of their work will be the focus of later chapters.

And yet there has been little synthesis of these three trends: the methodological shift towards qualitative methods, the increasing significance of mainstream culture, the piecemeal borrowing of social theory. While all these trends have been deeply concerned with knowledge (the knowledge of social actors, the embodiment of knowledge in cultural products, the presuppositions of knowledge about the social world) the sociology of knowledge has been increasingly neglected as an arcane and unproductive area.

The chapters of this book will progressively introduce theoretical issues from different approaches – the sociology of knowledge, the theory of ideology, structuralism, discourse and cultural analysis. As these different approaches are introduced some of the connections and common ground will be marked and some of the ways the different perspectives compliment each other will be suggested. As a whole, the book is intended as a sustained argument that the sociology of knowledge has a renewed relevance in contemporary sociology and can be developed in the light of theoretical and methodological advances relating to the critique of ideology and the structure of meaning.

The theme of the book is that knowledge, ideology and discourse are social processes that are inextricably linked; a sociological perspective of one necessitates consideration of the other two. But the aim of the book is more optimistic than just pointing to the links between these three processes. The real aim is to show that sociological analysis of knowledge and ideology is possible through the empirical analysis of discourse. This aim is not so grand as it sounds – much contemporary work is already doing this, although often not under the heading of the sociology of knowledge, and some of it will be referred to in Chapter 8 and 9. By situating certain types of discourse analysis in relation to the sociology of knowledge and the theory of ideology, those analyses can be established as contributions to sociology, and so to the critique and development of society.

The aims of the book are largely theoretical, drawing out the links between different types of existing work to establish bridges between what are often, at the moment, separate areas of inquiry. Once these bridges have been established however the attention will turn in the final chapters of the book to the practicalities of undertaking empirical analyses within the sociology of knowledge, taking into account the impact of the theory of ideology and utilizing techniques of discourse analysis.

Knowledge

The sociology of knowledge is both an important starting point and an appropriate topic to conclude with. It is the sociology of knowledge that gives the approach being developed its sociological perspective in contrast to much of the work that will be referred to in the sections on the theory of ideology (with its origins in political analysis) and on discourse (with its origins in linguistic and cultural analysis). The sociology of knowledge is a perspective which emphasizes the social character of knowledge. What we treat as knowledge is created by people in groups. It is the sociological features of the group that in large measure determine the content of knowledge and in even larger measure determine its form. Knowledge is produced as the people who make up society, work out their lives together. What is generated as knowledge and what is taken as knowledge reflects the values and the sociological features of the society.

This perspective that lies at the heart of the sociology of knowledge exists in tension with at least two opposing versions of the determinants of knowledge. In one version the origins of knowledge are located beyond human control, in an omniscient force – god. In this version god makes available knowledge to human beings through a variety of means: visions, the teachings of emissaries and prophets, religious writings, interpretations of these texts by holy men and the rulings of religious leaders. In the other version, the origins of knowledge are located within human beings. Knowledge is made available directly through particular actions of their own. In this second version, by following rules and procedures, those of ‘science’, the workings of the world are revealed to the minds of women and men.

In the religious version it is god who controls the revelation of knowledge and in the science version it is particular human activities that control the process (although there are always constraints: nature itself, lack of resources for following scientific activity, the limits of existing knowledge to pose questions and understand answers). But to put things so starkly is to imply a simple state of affairs; that ‘versions’ of the process of knowledge exist independently and in contrast. There is no practical reason why these two versions should not co-exist and even intermingle. All societies and most people seem to subscribe to both the religious and scientific versions of knowledge to some extent. These two versions may even be drawn on simultaneously although there are points of contradiction that are difficult to reconcile – the account of the origin of species for example.

The sociology of knowledge is a relatively new version of the process of knowledge which, in Mannheim’s account, emerged at a certain point in the breakup of the unitary world-view provided by religion. This breakup is the consequence of the scientific version of knowledge (for Mannheim, rationalist thought) being successful in challenging the unified and all-encompassing power of the religious version. The sociology of knowledge emerges by explaining its own origins sociologically without recourse to the dogmatic formulae of either religion or science. This ability of the sociology of knowledge to consider not only knowledge in general; but also the knowledge produced by its own practice, involves a reflexivity that is both a strength and a weakness in the sociology of knowledge perspective. The spectre of relativism that accompanies reflexivity is often seen as a weakness but the ability to treat itself in the same way as the knowledge it studies means that the sociology of knowledge can never merely be an excuse for judging the merits and value of different types of knowledge.

It will help if I offer definitions of the categories of knowledge, ideology and discourse that I am using. By knowledge I mean the construal of relations between abstract entities that are taken to represent the world of human experience, that can be shared by humans through communication and that can be used by them both to understand their experience of the world and to guide their actions. The origins of the sociology of knowledge in the work of Karl Mannheim will be the focus of Chapter 2 and will be developed in Chapter 3 with a brief account of how those origins were responded to.

Ideology

The mode of description utilized by the early sociology of knowledge was characterized not only by a disarming, sometimes crippling, reflexivity but also by a form of critique that is characteristic of describing false knowledge: the analysis of ideology. By analysing the social situatedness of all world-views on the same basis using what he called the ‘total conception of ideology’, Mannheim was not aiming to dismiss or disregard that ideology as knowledge. He understood that what he called the ‘particular conception of ideology’ was effective as a political strategy because it pointed to the social situatedness of opponents’ views (their basis not in ‘truth’ but in class or self interest). The same strategy for discounting opposing views has been found in scientists’ strategies for accounting for others’ errors (see Chapter 8). But analysis using the ‘particular conception of ideology’ always speaks from a position of superiority, assuming that its own perspective is not socially situated. Mannheim’s ‘total conception of ideology’ incorporated the recognition that all perspectives were ideological and socially situated. To point to the social contingency of a particular knowledge claim is a traditional way of devaluing it; it is a discursive strategy. Yet the aim of the sociology of knowledge is precisely to focus attention on the social contingency of all knowledge. However, in contrast to the critic of particular ideology or scientists’ errors, the sociology of knowledge does not need to contest the validity of knowledge because the perspective is agnostic as to truth or falsehood.

The development of the theory of ideology has moved away from the criticism of the particular conception of ideology – but it has not lost its potency as critique. The contemporary theory of ideology describes a process of socially contingent values, interpretations and taken-for-granted knowledge that is necessary for the operation of society. In this formulation, ideology is cast not as the bogey of false knowledge to contrast with the purity of science as truth, but as a process that is intertwined with all other social processes including science. The analysis of ideology demonstrates that cultural forms which obscure the concrete relations between human beings do not do so wilfully by following the conscious intentions of particular humans. Although some early accounts treated ideology as obscuring a ‘true’ version of circumstances which waited to appear once the ideological cloud was lifted, recent accounts take a more complex view.

A modern analysis of ideology recognizes that the repair and concealment of contradictions in the concrete form of human relations is necessary if those relations are to be lived. The acceptance of ideology as a characteristic of social being does not preclude transformation either of the lived or the imaginary relations of existence. But the achievement of liberation from domination does not follow from a neat epistemological solution or even from a transformation of the level of consciousness. What the modern theory of ideology does suggest is that through a critique of the process of ideology, the process can, at least partially, be made accessible to the will of human beings rather than contingent on the extant conditions of existence.

What I mean by ideology, then, is the general determinative relationship between the social and material conditions of existence and the abstract relations construed in knowledge. The generality of this relationship refers to the necessary form for the production of abstract relations, in particular the reduction from complex relations to more simple ones and the concealment of contradictions. Chapters 4 and 5 will look at the development of the theory of ideology in a Marxist tradition and at the problems of attempting to distinguish ideology and science or truth in a political account of society.

Discourse

As the aims and perspective of the theory of ideology merge with those of the sociology of knowledge, techniques of reflexivity and critique can be refined to guard against the tendencies to dogma and mechanism present in the religious and science based versions of the process of knowledge. But a problem remains – how shall substantive analysis of knowledge/ideology proceed? What will be the object of study and what techniques shall be utilized? Mannheim took ‘thought’ as his object of study; sometimes ‘modes of thought’, or ‘world-views’. As an object of empirical study ‘thought’ is difficult to pin down because it does not have a material form that can be located in time and space prior to summation and interpretation by the analyst. Mannheim’s insights on conservatism, the intelligentsia, utopianism and the tension between generations seem to be arrived at despite any clear or convincing articulation of where another analyst should look for the ‘thought’. In the early sociology of science, the most successful development from Mannheimian sociology of knowledge, analytical attention was focused on the social origins of knowledge rather than on the contents of knowledge. The contents of knowledge (scientific knowledge) were largely taken for granted; the problem was to find out how such knowledge was produced.

‘Discourse’ emerges as an appropriate object of study in a number of places at more or less the same time. Within the tradition that is concerned with the critique of ideology, attention was turned towards hermeneutics and the pragmatics of communication. Another branch of the same tradition is enmeshed with an approach that derives from structural linguistics. In structuralism and ‘post-structuralism’ a variety of techniques for the analysis of discourse are explored. The object of study ranges from the single utterance, to the text, to the episteme but all are related to each other as constituting ‘discourse’. In characterizing the linguistic production of human beings as ‘discourse’, the structuralist approach takes seriously both the form and content of language. The various contents of discourse are related according to their form. The consistency of structural features of discourse is also related to social features of the context of utterance: the processes of power, the presuppositions that underlie discourse, the connotative references to other discourses and other social processes obscured by taken-for-granted participation in discourse.

By discourse then, I mean the material content of utterances exchanged in social contexts that are imbued with meaning by the intention of utterers and treated as meaningful by other participants. Intentionality marks the exchange as meaningful but, although it may contribute to it, does not constitute the meaning of discourse. Meaning is a property of the structural features (both synchronic and diachronic) of discourse. Chapters 6 and 7 will look at the development of structuralism which both delivers a particular way of understanding knowledge and within which a number of ways of studying discourse emerge.

While the philosophical rumblings of critical theory and structuralism generated an object of study in ‘discourse’, the empirical and academic traditions of linguistics and the sociology of science developed techniques of inquiry that are appropriate for the analysis of the interactive features of everyday speech or major debates at the frontiers of knowledge. Language, including non-linguistic modes of communicating meaning, is shown to mean more than just what utterers say. Interpretation of discourse by looking beyond just the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge
• 3. The inheritors of Mannheim’s legacy
• 4. The origins of the theory of ideology
• 5. A modern approach to ideological critique
• 6. From signification to discourse
• 7. Discourse, knowledge and critique
• 8. Science and language
• 9. Culture and the perspective of women
• 10. Knowledge, ideology and discourse
• 11. Analysing knowledge as ideological discourse
• 12. A future for the sociology of knowledge as discourse analysis?
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index