Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Dialectic of Ideology
- 1 In and of This World: The Dual Status of Thought
- 2 The Immanent Destruction of Functional Ideology Critique: Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser
- Part II On Ideology and Violence
- Part III A Marxist Theory of Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Immanent Destruction of Functional Ideology Critique: Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser
from Part I - The Dialectic of Ideology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Dialectic of Ideology
- 1 In and of This World: The Dual Status of Thought
- 2 The Immanent Destruction of Functional Ideology Critique: Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser
- Part II On Ideology and Violence
- Part III A Marxist Theory of Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As instrumental, reason assimilated itself to power and thereby gave up its critical force – that is the final disclosure of ideology critique applied to itself.
Jürgen HabermasToday, however, we have reached a stage in which this weapon of the reciprocal unmasking and laying bare of the unconscious sources of intellectual existence has become the property not of one group among many but of all of them. But in the measure that the various groups sought to destroy their adversaries’ confidence in their thinking by this most modern intellectual weapon of radical unmasking, they also destroyed, as all positions gradually came to be subjected to analysis, man's confidence in human thought in general … There is nothing accidental but rather more of the inevitable in the fact that more and more people took flight into skepticism or irrationalism … What we are concerned with here is the elemental perplexity of our time, which can be epitomized in the symptomatic question “How is it possible for man to continue to think and live in a time when the problems of ideology are being radically raised and thought through in all their implications.”
Karl MannheimPower in the way Foucault sees it, closely linked to domination, does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim. It cannot be a “victimless crime,” so to speak … Something must be imposed on someone if there is to be domination.
Charles TaylorThe Self-destruction of Radical Critique
These passages from Habermas, Mannheim, and Taylor all warn against the overextension and attendant collapse of what we have described as “functional ideology critique.” In general terms, we have defined “functional ideology critique” as a form of criticism that seeks to reveal the role played by certain beliefs and theories in the perpetuation of oppressive social arrangements. In other words, the critique of functional ideology focuses upon beliefs and theories as social instruments or weapons, not principally as the outcome of some potentially legitimate and broadly well-formed attempt to cognize the world. It thus largely disregards the epistemic features of beliefs, including their intentional capacities, representational structure, truth-value, and logical relations, and it focuses instead upon the noncognitive properties of beliefs, upon their associations, origins, effects, functions, and modes of transmission.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and IdeologyThe Epistemology of Social and Political Critique, pp. 65 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016