4. Thesis Layout
1.3. Discourse Does Ideological Work
CDA focuses on the practices of the dominant class, which exercises hegemony not only via violence (social power) but also via reconciliation, consent, and convincing (cognitive power).75 That said, ideology comes to be an indispensable part of any CDA project.76 This presumption is simply explained by Caroline Coffin: CDA is “an approach to language analysis which concerns itself with issues of language, power and ideology.”77 Terry Eagleton in his seminar publication found how ideology stands between language and power by defining it as “sets of discursive strategies for displacing, recasting or spuriously accounting for realities which prove embarrassing to a ruling power; and in doing so, they contribute to that power’s self-legitimation”.78 Furthermore, Louis Althusser, again with much relevance to this Marxist-based conceptualisation of CDA scholars, argued that ideology is also necessary for sustaining these relations of power, that it enables every social formation to reproduce the conditions of its production.79 Althusser gave ‘the state’ more prominence in running ideology. He argued that the state is not only a class state, as Marx
74 Van Djik, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E.
Hamilton (London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001), pp. 352-71 (p. 352).
75Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, trans. by David Fernbach (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), p .47. 76 See also, for example, James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (London ; New York : Routledge,
2008); Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and European
socialism (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989); Lawrence Venuti, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London :
Routledge, 1992)
77 Caroline Coffin, ‘Theoretical Approaches to Written Language: A TESOL Perspective”, Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader, ed. by Anne Burns and Caroline Coffin (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 93–122 (p. 99)
78 Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Longman, 1994), p. 8.
79Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology, (London: Verso, 1984, 1976), p. 2. Althusser gave the example of capitalists who are always in need
to maintain all conditions leading to the production of materials in their factory. In order to secure these materialistic needs, a woollen yarn factory owner would not only needs the continued supply of yarn from farmers and machine parts from engineers, but also means to sustain this relationship of ‘submission’.
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contended, but also regarding it as a ‘machine of repression’ that enables the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class. Named as ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs), they include the media, schools and the museums.80 For example, the media, or the communications apparatus as he calls it, fills every ‘citizen’ with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, and moralism.81 However, Althusser found school as the greatest ISA with a determinant dominant role in the reproduction of the relations of production. Going to school, children not only learn the ‘know-how’, but also ‘the rules of the established order’ as well as respect for these rules.82 Learning from history text books on the October 1973 War , as far as this study is concerned, also ventures down that road of ‘subjection to the ruling ideology’ of the mastery of its ‘practice’.83 In this thesis, I deal with two of these ISAs, namely media and schools, and also weave into the analysis a broader ‘national narrative’ that includes other ISAs, such as museums and religious institutions.
In CDA, language in itself is taken as an ideology. According to Robert Hodge and Gunther R. Kress, language is both an instrument of control as well as communication.84 This ideological manipulation is inevitable because communicable perceptions in society have to be necessarily coded and even language format in order for the latter to create what Berger and Luckman called ‘social construction of reality’ or what Whorf called ‘science’.85 The Whorfian account, based on the a priori assumptions embodied in and learnt through language, even found the power of language ‘scientific’, and more significant than official sciences, since it acts unconsciously. This provides language with the ideological power of
80Althusser, p. 17. 81 Ibid, p. 28. 82 Ibid, p. 6. 83 Ibid.
84 Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress explained in their book that linguistic forms allow significance to be conveyed and to be distorted:
“Hearers can be both manipulated and informed, preferably manipulated while they suppose they are being informed”, Robert Hodge and Gunther R. Kress, Language as Ideology (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 6.
85 See Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. by John B. Carrol (Cambridge: Technology Press of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956); Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
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indirectness and deceit. 86 Although ideology has for some considerable time been used as a negative term f,87 CDA employs it objectively as a medium. Roger Fowler explained elements of this power in his analysis of the role of the press in the “(re)production of ideology”. For example, the ideological power of newspapers, such as Ahram in this study, stems from “their ability to say the same thing to millions of people simultaneously”, and from “mediating ideas from particular perspectives” related to the economic and political circumstances of the newspaper industry.88 However, the imposition of ideologies is not always an easy ride as they could be faced with ‘anti-ideologies’, as was the case in post-war Europe.89
In this study, I investigate the role of ideology in association with power relationships. For example, Chapters Three and Four explain how language is ideologised through certain tropes such as repetition and legitimisation by linking it to myths, religion, and national identity. Furthermore, Chapters Five and Six explain how ‘relations of production’ at Ahram had guaranteed the continuation of the dominant discursive formulations and the marginalisation of others on the 1973 War.