An ideology (from the Greek idea (image, form, idea) and logos (system of thought, discipline) can be understood as a set of aims and ideas that direct one’s action within the world. The term may refer to a worldview, to a political philosophy or, in Marxian sense, to an instrument of social reproduction – the ruling class’ means to justify the social order. In epistemology, ideology is often synonymous with paradigm (a broad philosophical and theoretical framework); in semiotic theory, it signifies ‘a unitary object that incorporates complex sets of meanings with the social agents and processes that produced them’ (Hodge 1999). Foucault’s notion of discourse (an entity of sequences of signs (enouncements) that assign specific repeatable relations to objects, subjects and other enouncements (Foucault 1969)) is comparable to ideology, though the former is concerned chiefly with verbal systems. For the purpose of this short essay, however, it appears quite apposite.
My aim here is not to present a detailed discursive or ideological analysis of academic writing (which besides is well beyond the abilities of any one writer), but rather to consider briefly that which is ‘left out’ in such an approach. I am interested in the limits of the discursive representational form on which academia is predicated, in the modes of thought and symbolisation that are excluded through an emphasis on verbal communication. To extricate myself momentarily from this thicket of irony, and to clarify, I offer this vivid invocation from Isadora Duncan, the mother of modern dance: ‘If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it’.
It has been argued by authorities from diverse fields that there are two (or more) orderings of reality simultaneously present in humans. Freud compared the unconscious processes of dreaming to symbolisation in the arts, and contrasted these with the structured systems of speech. Gregory Bateson, the founder of cybernetic theory, drew a similar distinction between verbal (or digital) and iconic (or analogue) coding, a duality that he related to the conscious and unconscious levels of the mind. For Bateson, the messages and meanings communicated by art forms are achieved at least in part at an unconscious level, or at the interface between conscious and unconscious levels. The devices of propositional language and verbal discourse – tense, simple negatives, modal markers, etc. – are here absent, yet the iconic can communicate with an intensity of experience that is largely unavailable in speech. For the communication of ideas and experiences, then, language may both help and hinder.
What is it to argue that language constrains? To the extent that discourse sets ‘the laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it’ (Foucault 1972:91), it is certainly true that individuals are not only constrained but indeed constituted by language. Unlike those forms of iconic communication discussed previously, language consists of strict conventions to which we are obliged to adhere, lest all meaning be lost. (Poetry is perhaps an exception to this rule.) As such we are constrained, but not only that. For in thought itself, in our eternal inner monologues, we are slaves to verbosity. Language defines not only what we can say, but also what we can think.
Professor Ivanic invokes a theory of practice to situate the self as writer; we both shape and are shaped by the structures of language. Yet this is a Pyrrhic victory. For the greater part we are ‘subjected’ to language, blind to ‘resemblance’ (Foucault 1966) and ‘the form of life’ (Wittgenstein). Thus, writing is to ideology (in its purest sense) a pollutant; the perfect system of thought is inexpressible.