Where are ideologies located?
In this article I would like to address a quite simple, but deeply philosophical question: Where are ideologies located? I claim that the manner in which we answer this question will have important consequences for ecolinguistic research and practice.
In order to answer this question, I will need to make a brief description about how ideologies, from now on understood as linguistic (and symbolic) structures, emerge in the history of our lineage Hominidae.
Michael Tomasello (2014), in a vast series of experiments, has found that what distinguishes humans from other big apes is the presence (at a very early age) of dispositions towards coordinating actions with others: children are spontaneously drawing other people's attention to look at objects; children care about where the gaze of grown-ups is directed and they spontaneously follow it. Great apes do not have these kinds of dispositions. Tomasello (and I agree with him) claims that these dispositions are the basis for complex and recurrent behavioral coordinations such as words, abstract thought, social norms, institutions, gender, writing, etc... in one word, culture.
Since what interests me in this article are words and language, I can argue that in order for words to come to existence in the history of our lineage, three conditions must have been fulfilled: (i) there needs to be a motivation to create them, (ii) there needs to be a domain that allows for regular behavioral coordinations and (iii) there needs to be a mutual/social agreement so that words actually make reference to what it is commonly established that they make reference to.
Tomasello argues that condition (i) is fulfilled simply by the need of coordinating behavior, i.e. gathering food together, alerting others from danger, etc. Condition (ii) is fulfilled by the previously described human dispositions to coordinate behavior with others; and also by love, what Maturana (2006) calls the "passion for living together", which is the emotion that holds any human community together. Condition (iii) is fulfilled by conditions (i) and (ii), namely that the motivation for coordinating behavior with others opens up a space for creating new domains of consensual/conventional behavioral coordinations. These are, in evolutionary order, gesturing, pointing and pantomime, and then words (Tomasello, 2014).
Therefore, words (i.e. consensual distinctions of aspects of lived experience) are first and foremost, social phenomena: they emerge out of domains of regular interactions between humans, oriented towards coordinating behavior with others.
Where are words located then? The first step to answer this question is understanding that words are a type of signs. Charles Peirce defines a sign as "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (cited by Kohn 2013). Words are types of signs that are called symbols.
Symbols are signs that arise out of consensual/conventional domains, such as the human domain with its dispositions and motivations for coordinating behavior and communicating with others. Kohn (2013) argues that signs in general cannot be properly located, since they are in constant movement, expansion and reproduction. He affirms that:
An example may make this point clearer. Buscher et al. (2012) describe a process of expansion of capitalist ideology (the expansion of a symbolic structure, and therefore, the expansion of a sign, one can argue): the prospect of the environmental crisis raised the idea (out of capitalist ideology) that we were destroying nature because nature does not have a price. Since in capitalist ideology humans are economically rational units, putting a price on nature would logically lead to rational use of nature. We have thus the beginning of pricing methods for ecosystems, coral reefs, whales, and the Earth itself (Costanza et al. 1998). In this case, ideological expansion concerns not only the human minds that think in these terms but living beings themselves and the way economists and politicians treat and think about them. It concerns the expansion of the ideology that nature is a resource, and of the idea that the resource frame represents the only valid and realistic way of thinking about nature.
I argued that originally, words are founded on the emotion of acceptance, namely that there needs to be a willing agreement that a certain vocal production makes reference to a certain aspect of lived experience. This is how they get instituted. However, this only holds at their origin, since afterwards words and language become a milieu, a transparent domain in which humans are constantly coping. This is true for example in the fact that when children grow up in language, they do not need to actively believe that vocal coordinations make reference to aspects of experience, they are just embedded and submerged in this symbolic milieu, where they realize themselves and coordinate behavior with others.
Let's take the example of money. Money is a symbolic institution just as words, since at its origin there needs to be an agreement that certain pieces of paper can be exchanged for products. However, in daily life one does not have to be actively trusting that the pieces of paper one holds can be exchanged for products. Even if one individually stops believing that these pieces of paper have any worth, the symbolic structure of money still exists in the world and shapes everyday life within modern cosmology. Jacques Lacan would understand symbolic structures as having a decentred nature, which is consistent with the idea that signs (symbols included) cannot be properly located or reduced to things, since they are in a constant dynamic, expansion and movement: going from bodies to the world, and then minds, emotions, to tools and technologies, social norms, etc.
The idea that since language is ready-at-hand and transparent to us because of our embeddedness in it, represents the basis for the claim that ideology is hidden. Namely, that we are blinded to the specific ways in which words and ideologies conceptualize reality, and the socio-ecological consequences that these ideologies have in establishing cultural practices and institutions. I have personal experience in this. I was formed in economics for several years, and during this time the ideology of economics (the concepts of natural resources, consumers, producers, utility maximizing, exploitation, economy) seemed to me as corresponding perfectly to what happened in the "world out there". This hidden quality is evident in the language of Stibbe's book "Ecolinguistics" (2015) . Ideologies and stories need to be "revealed", "uncovered" and "exposed" (p.5), one needs to "shed light" upon them (p.10) ; they are "not immediately recognizable" (p.5) and they are "underlying" (p.9).
Some concluding remarks: After reading Arran Stibbe's book "Ecolinguistics", one gets a clear picture that the ecological and social crisis is fundamentally an ideological issue. The question that arises and that is difficult to answer is: How do we solve ideological problems? How do we effectively undermine destructive ideologies?
It would be conceivable to propose an ethical solution to this: if one makes people aware of their own ideology and of its socio-ecological consequences, this gives freedom to people to choose whether they accept the consequences of their ideology (if they want to live in it) or if they do not accept them and thus change of ideological domain. This might be logically true, but I claim that this issue is more complex. Slavoj Zizek (link here) argues that people love their ideologies, since they are the milieu in which they realize themselves as individuals (as consumers wanting fashionable products and technologies, as capitalists accumulating fortunes, etc.) and that stepping out of ideology is a painful process, because one needs to let go of the coordinates that served as a foundation for what is "real" and "meaningful", i.e. for one's existential identity.
The second point is that since ideologies, institutions and symbolic structures are "distributed", "decentred" or in "constant dynamic", we need a clearer understanding about the ways in which we can effectively undermine hegemonic destructive ideologies, in a way that does not reduce them to specific things: whether these are minds, buildings, infrastructures, words, etc.
References
Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J., & Brockington, D. (2012). Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation. Capitalism nature socialism, 23(2), 4-30.
Costanza, R., De Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., Limburg, K., ... & Van Den Belt, M. (1998). The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. Ecological economics, 25(1), 3-15.
Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Univ of California Press.
Tomasello argues that condition (i) is fulfilled simply by the need of coordinating behavior, i.e. gathering food together, alerting others from danger, etc. Condition (ii) is fulfilled by the previously described human dispositions to coordinate behavior with others; and also by love, what Maturana (2006) calls the "passion for living together", which is the emotion that holds any human community together. Condition (iii) is fulfilled by conditions (i) and (ii), namely that the motivation for coordinating behavior with others opens up a space for creating new domains of consensual/conventional behavioral coordinations. These are, in evolutionary order, gesturing, pointing and pantomime, and then words (Tomasello, 2014).
Therefore, words (i.e. consensual distinctions of aspects of lived experience) are first and foremost, social phenomena: they emerge out of domains of regular interactions between humans, oriented towards coordinating behavior with others.
Where are words located then? The first step to answer this question is understanding that words are a type of signs. Charles Peirce defines a sign as "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (cited by Kohn 2013). Words are types of signs that are called symbols.
Symbols are signs that arise out of consensual/conventional domains, such as the human domain with its dispositions and motivations for coordinating behavior and communicating with others. Kohn (2013) argues that signs in general cannot be properly located, since they are in constant movement, expansion and reproduction. He affirms that:
[...] signs are more than things. They don’t squarely reside in sounds, events, or words. Nor are they exactly in bodies or even minds. They can’t be precisely located in this way because they are ongoing relational processes. Their sensuous qualities are only one part of the dynamic through which they come to be, to grow, and to have effects in the world. (p.33)Although it is evident that ideologies and stories have a neurophysiological manifestation (Lakoff (2010) would say that they are physically real in the form of neural circuits), we cannot reduce and locate ideologies in "minds" or bodies", because it would conceal how ideologies are in constant dynamic and how they manifest themselves in practices, technologies, and in general in the manner how the social space is designed.
An example may make this point clearer. Buscher et al. (2012) describe a process of expansion of capitalist ideology (the expansion of a symbolic structure, and therefore, the expansion of a sign, one can argue): the prospect of the environmental crisis raised the idea (out of capitalist ideology) that we were destroying nature because nature does not have a price. Since in capitalist ideology humans are economically rational units, putting a price on nature would logically lead to rational use of nature. We have thus the beginning of pricing methods for ecosystems, coral reefs, whales, and the Earth itself (Costanza et al. 1998). In this case, ideological expansion concerns not only the human minds that think in these terms but living beings themselves and the way economists and politicians treat and think about them. It concerns the expansion of the ideology that nature is a resource, and of the idea that the resource frame represents the only valid and realistic way of thinking about nature.
I argued that originally, words are founded on the emotion of acceptance, namely that there needs to be a willing agreement that a certain vocal production makes reference to a certain aspect of lived experience. This is how they get instituted. However, this only holds at their origin, since afterwards words and language become a milieu, a transparent domain in which humans are constantly coping. This is true for example in the fact that when children grow up in language, they do not need to actively believe that vocal coordinations make reference to aspects of experience, they are just embedded and submerged in this symbolic milieu, where they realize themselves and coordinate behavior with others.
Let's take the example of money. Money is a symbolic institution just as words, since at its origin there needs to be an agreement that certain pieces of paper can be exchanged for products. However, in daily life one does not have to be actively trusting that the pieces of paper one holds can be exchanged for products. Even if one individually stops believing that these pieces of paper have any worth, the symbolic structure of money still exists in the world and shapes everyday life within modern cosmology. Jacques Lacan would understand symbolic structures as having a decentred nature, which is consistent with the idea that signs (symbols included) cannot be properly located or reduced to things, since they are in a constant dynamic, expansion and movement: going from bodies to the world, and then minds, emotions, to tools and technologies, social norms, etc.
The idea that since language is ready-at-hand and transparent to us because of our embeddedness in it, represents the basis for the claim that ideology is hidden. Namely, that we are blinded to the specific ways in which words and ideologies conceptualize reality, and the socio-ecological consequences that these ideologies have in establishing cultural practices and institutions. I have personal experience in this. I was formed in economics for several years, and during this time the ideology of economics (the concepts of natural resources, consumers, producers, utility maximizing, exploitation, economy) seemed to me as corresponding perfectly to what happened in the "world out there". This hidden quality is evident in the language of Stibbe's book "Ecolinguistics" (2015) . Ideologies and stories need to be "revealed", "uncovered" and "exposed" (p.5), one needs to "shed light" upon them (p.10) ; they are "not immediately recognizable" (p.5) and they are "underlying" (p.9).
Some concluding remarks: After reading Arran Stibbe's book "Ecolinguistics", one gets a clear picture that the ecological and social crisis is fundamentally an ideological issue. The question that arises and that is difficult to answer is: How do we solve ideological problems? How do we effectively undermine destructive ideologies?
It would be conceivable to propose an ethical solution to this: if one makes people aware of their own ideology and of its socio-ecological consequences, this gives freedom to people to choose whether they accept the consequences of their ideology (if they want to live in it) or if they do not accept them and thus change of ideological domain. This might be logically true, but I claim that this issue is more complex. Slavoj Zizek (link here) argues that people love their ideologies, since they are the milieu in which they realize themselves as individuals (as consumers wanting fashionable products and technologies, as capitalists accumulating fortunes, etc.) and that stepping out of ideology is a painful process, because one needs to let go of the coordinates that served as a foundation for what is "real" and "meaningful", i.e. for one's existential identity.
The second point is that since ideologies, institutions and symbolic structures are "distributed", "decentred" or in "constant dynamic", we need a clearer understanding about the ways in which we can effectively undermine hegemonic destructive ideologies, in a way that does not reduce them to specific things: whether these are minds, buildings, infrastructures, words, etc.
References
Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J., & Brockington, D. (2012). Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation. Capitalism nature socialism, 23(2), 4-30.
Costanza, R., De Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., Limburg, K., ... & Van Den Belt, M. (1998). The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. Ecological economics, 25(1), 3-15.
Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Univ of California Press.
Maturana, H. (2006). Desde la biología a la psicología. Editorial Universitaria
Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.
Tomasello, M. (2014). A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press.
Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.
Tomasello, M. (2014). A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press.
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