3.4.9. Ideology as Cultural Violence
Ideology as specific form of knowledge is according to Galtung a form of violence. Habermas (1971) assumes that there is an inherent connection of knowledge and human interests. He argues that critical knowledge has the potential to understand the variant and invariant dimensions of reality and to use ideology critique for unmasking ‘ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed’ (310) so that unreflected consciousness is substituted by reflected knowledge and has a potential to become ‘critically mediated knowledge’ (310) that can become the foundation of transformations of reality. Ideology furnishes ‘our actions with justifying motives in place of the real ones’ (311)
Ideology is a semiotic level of domination and exploitation – it practices the production and spread of information and meanings in the form of ideas, belief systems, artefacts, systems and institutions so that domination and exploitation are justified or naturalised. An ideology is a social knowledge product that represents and justifies one group’s or individual’s power, domination or exploitation of other groups or individuals by misrepresenting, one-dimensionally presenting or distorting reality in symbolic representations.
Adorno has described ideology in a Lukácsian sense as ‘a consciousness which is objectively necessary and yet at the same time false, as the intertwining of truth and falsehood’ (Adorno 1954, 189). Ideology:
is justification. It presupposes the experience of a societal condition which has already become problematic and therefore requires a defense just as much as does the idea of justice itself, which would not exist without such necessity for apologetics and which has as its model the exchange of things which are comparable (Adorno 1954, 189–190).
From the existence of ideology in class-based society follows for the Frankfurt School the necessity of the critique of ideology, which Adorno defines as ‘the confrontation of ideology with its own truth’ (Adorno 1954, 190). The critique of ideology ‘is the negation defined in the Hegelian sense, the confrontation of the spiritual with its realization, and has as its presupposition the distinction of the truth or falsity of the judgment just as much as the requirement for truth in that which is criticized’ (Adorno 1954, 191).
3.4.10. Ideological Knowledge, Identity and Non-Identity
Also Adorno’s second and third study of Hegel’s epistemology make important contributions to the question what ideological knowledge is and how it can be deconstructed. In the second study, he discusses the non-identity of the immediate and the mediated. Adorno (1963) stresses that for Hegel immediacy is not really immediate. ‘One can no more speak of mediation without something immediate than, conversely, one can find something immediate that is not mediated’ (59). For Hegel, existence is not what it appears to be, its essence is hidden behind appearances. The ‘concept and the thing itself are not one and the same’ (70–71). Existence is for Hegel only actual if it becomes true. Hegel’s critique of immediacy ‘becomes the figure of a comprehensive commitment to a lack of naiveté’ (64). Hegel’s philosophy would be anti-positivist (65). He ‘demonstrated that concept, judgement, and conclusion, unavoidable instruments for ascertaining through consciousness something that exists, always end up contradicting that existing thing; that all individual judgements, all individual concepts, all individual conclusions, are false by the criterion of an emphatic idea of truth’ (76). Ideologies in contrast are identity thinking, they aim to deny and delegitimise non-identical moment that can go beyond immediate existence and have potentials for the transformation of society.
102
Critical Theory of Communication