[New-Poetry] ideology defs.

[Alexander Dickow]

Bob,
Geuss actually provides a quite diplomatic survey of
definitions of the term "ideology"; the one I provide
is of more or less direct Marxist provenance, and is
pejorative where other definitions are neutral. Your
own definition is included by Geuss, in one of the
neutral (and now very widespread) definitions:
however, I think it's worth noting that a given "body
of concepts about some field" does not necessarily
entail "internal consistency": I would say discourse
on culturally determined differences between genders
and/or sexes constitutes an "ideology" with certain
(relatively permeable) boundaries: but I certainly
would not claim that that ideology is "internally
consistent!"
Sorry to hear that about Runaway Spoon, since there
were some good books to be read in there, it seemed to
me.
Amicalement,
Alex

Bob Grumman wrote:

>Alexander Dickow wrote:
> "he was looking for a term to
> describe how one can be so far inside a literary
> tradition (scholarly,
> religious, philosophical, etc) that one can no
longer
> distinguish the
> tradition from 'reality'."
>
> Wouldn't the term he's looking for be "ideology"?
> Defined as the false belief that received ideas or
> values are "natural"? (cf. e.g. Geuss, _The Idea of
> Critical Theory_).
> Amicalement,
> Alex
>
>   
I would never define "ideology" as you do here, Alex. 
Many ideologies 
are founded outside received ideas.  I prefer
"ideology" to be, as most
 
dictionaries have it in their primary definitions of
it, "an internally
 
consistent body of concepts about some field."  This,
of course, is not
 
what people who want to be able to believe anything
they want to could 
like, so they have made it into an insult.

Of course, there are bad ideologies--mainly the ones
that are
 internally 
consistent but not consistent with reality. 
Ideologues are them what 
believes in such ideologies.

--Bob G., ideologist but not, I hope, an ideologue


www.alexdickow.net/blog/
   
  les mots! ah quel désert à la fin
  merveilleux. -- Henri Droguet