Christina Schffner
Institute for the Study of Language and Society, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK |
| Studying texts and discourse and their social context provides evidence of ongoing processes, such as the relationship between social change and communicative or linguistic change, the constitution of social identities, or the (re)constitution of knowledge and ideology. Promoting a fruitful and interdisciplinary debate on such topics is the main aim of Current Issues in Language and Society. Since terms such as interaction, cognition, discourse, and ideology are regularly used in various disciplines, it appears appropriate to look at them in more detail. |
| The notion of ideology is a fairly complex and controversial one. According to Williams (1976: 126), the word 'ideology' 'first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word idologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy', to denote the 'science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics'. In addition to this scientific sense, there is a more pejorative sense of the word in the philosophical tradition, originating from the 19th century and popularised by the writings of Marx & Engels (1976). For them, the ruling ideas of an epoch were 'nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships', and failure to realise this produced ideology as an upside-down version of reality. This is reflected in the notion of ideology as 'false consciousness'. There is also a more neutral sense of ideology in Marx' writings, ideology as a 'set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests' (Williams, 1976: 129). This sense was elaborated by Lenin for whom ideology is the system of ideas that are appropriate to a social class, usually an economically defined class, identified by a qualifying adjective: proletarian ideology, bourgeois ideology, etc. |
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