Cultural Software http://yupnet.org/balkin A Theory of Ideology Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:29:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.20 Chapter 13: Knowledge Made Flesh http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/19 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/19#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:23:55 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=19 In this book I have tried to explain the phenomenon called ideology and the larger cultural predicaments that give rise to it. I have done so through a master metaphor of cultural software and four subsidiary concepts. Each cap understanding; each conveys different features of the general argument.

The first concept is tools of understanding. Our tools of understanding enable us to grapple with our world, to understand what is happening in it, to interact with others, and to express and articulate our values. Our tools of understand bricolage and recursive manufacture. We modify and reuse the old to create the new. Moreover, each tool, no matter how useful, carries its own limitations, for no tool is perfectly adapted for every occasion. As a result, there are inevitable drawbacks and side effects as our tools of un inserted into new contexts and situations.

A second concept is the heuristic. The tools of understanding are better suited for some purposes than for others, and, one hopes, good enough for the purpose at hand. The notion of a heuristic captures the simultaneous adequacy and inadequacy of our cultural know-how. Each ability created carries with it a necessary disability, each perspective opened up carries with it a necessary blindness. In our cultural software benefit and advantage are yoked together, and so our attitude toward our cultural software can be neither positive nor neutral nor pejorative. It must be ambivalent.

A third concept is the meme. It captures the idea of culture as a system of inheritance. Cultural know-how is a product of transmission. It spreads through communication and social learning. It is tied to the past through lines of memetic descent. Cultures are populations of relatively similar bodies of cultural software, which survive and reproduce in ecological niches. Each person is a carrier of culture, with a slightly different set of cultural heuristics and tools of understanding. Memes grow, mutate, reproduce, survive, or perish in the ecology of our minds and our technologies of information storage. The evolutionary success of cultural software depends on its ability to spread widely and reproduce itself reliably in a particular ecology.

This leads naturally to the fourth concept, that of the virus. Cultural software is a symbiont, which not only invades the self but also helps constitute it. Cultural know-how is passed from self to self, sometimes with deliberate in element of choice. Its evolution is a process distinct from biological evolution that does not necessarily enhance human survival. Cultural software has its own interests in survival and reproduction that may be beneficial, neutral, or even harmful to human interests.

These ideas are brought together under a master metaphor of cultural soft metaphor emphasizes the role of cultural know-how not only in enabling human thought but in constituting persons as persons. It is the most basic conception because it reflects a most basic feature of human life: we exist as embodiments of cultural information.

Our Informational Existence

All living things embody information in their genetic materials. But what is special about humanity is that we transcend both our genetic materials and our environment. We are more than those creatures for whom our genes formed the original blueprint. And we are more than genetic blueprints shaped by subsequent environmental forces. We are more than a haphazard marriage of nature and environment. We are persons: human beings who embody cultural know-how. Cultural software dwells within us and is part of us.

The human being who absorbs and embodies cultural software, who becomes the incarnation of certain forms of cultural know-how, becomes more than genetic information, more than environmental influence, more even than a combination of the two. We become agents and embodiments of history.

The metaphor of cultural software emphasizes this informational aspect of our existence; not simply the information coded in our genes but the cultural information that is made part of our flesh--that is, incarnated within us. It is encapsulated not only in our thought processes and in the materials of our brain (in ways we do not yet fully understand) but even in our facial expressions, our gestures, and our bodily movements. This enfleshment is best symbolized by the fingers of the jazz pianist, trained not only to respond to the keyboard but to improvise upon it. The pianist's fingers possess a second nature. They know where to go. But their responses are not foreordained. They are not automatic. The fingers of the pianist respond to the moment, they improvise, they create works of great beauty that never existed and never were thought of before.

Our informational nature is also our historical nature--our being in history. We exist in history and history exists in us. We are imbued with information and understandings peculiar to our time; this information and these under passed on to be embodied by still others. We find ourselves in a great chain of historical being; we exist in lines of memetic descent, in which we play roles not fully acknowledged or understood. Alongside the course of human events--the wars and famines, earthquakes and diseases, the rise and fall of mighty empires-- there is the transmission of cultural software, multiplying and mutating, culminating and dissipating, dispersing and rejoining. We travel and participate in a vast sea of knowledge, custom, and convention, lifting us up, taking us we know not where.

Billions of years ago, a great tide of genetic information and genetic trans began, a tide that still carries us and of which we are still an integral part. Only a few million years ago, a new tide arose on this planet--a tide of cultural information and cultural transmission. It has steadily gained power and influence, using us as its partly witting and partly unwitting vehicles. Through human technology and colonization, this tide has reshaped the ecology of our planet, confronting and redirecting the older tide of genetic transmission like two great waves colliding on a rocky shoreline.

The collision of the genetic and cultural tides is not only the result of overpopulation and pollution. Our science has made us conscious of the genetic tide itself and how to manipulate it. We have already learned to shape the genetic information of plants and animals in primitive ways, to limit and extinguish other species by brutal choice and careless accident. Soon we shall be able to reengineer our own genes. Then the two tides of genetic and cultural information will swirl around each other, reshaping each other in ways we can only guess.

The Career of Reason

Human reason is an integral part of the tides of memetic evolution. It has a cultural and historical component. And because it has this component, human reason is not a finished product. It is an ongoing project, a collection of historically accumulated tools of understanding, each imperfect and provisional, which metamorphose and meld, spreading and dissipating throughout human populations. Human reason is a feature of populations and cultures as much as of individuals. We are its carriers and its developers, its subjects and its agents. Through the evolution of culture, knowledge is made flesh and dwells with in us.

Throughout this book I have portrayed the devices of human thought and their historical evolution as the source of both understanding and misunderstanding, of both empowerment and confusion. Some will think that this portrait debases reason, or makes it impossible for reason to improve itself and see through injustice and illusion. It does not. Such misunderstandings reflect, I think, the failure to be fully reconciled to the ramifications of our historical existence.

One might object that the picture of reason as an assortment of ambivalent tools fails to explain the adequacy and efficacy of human reason. Beyond the various devices of human thought must there not lie another, purer faculty of reason, which lacks the ambivalent character of all the others and therefore arbitrates over them all? Perhaps our understanding does make use of meta structures. But surely our ability to deconstruct them indicates that there is some general faculty of reason that allows us critically to reflect on them. For if there were no general faculty of "good reasoning," how could we see through the cognitive illusions that this book describes? The various heuristics and devices of thought--in metonymy, and narrative construction, among many others--are merely supplements to this purer form of reasoning, invoked when convenient, but ultimately unnecessary to critical reflection. In the alternative these devices merely provide raw materials that this other higher faculty of reason sorts, culls, and purifies without needing to employ them in the process of purification.

This objection rests on two confusions. First, it confuses belief in the ex better and worse ways of understanding the world with belief in a separate capacity of critical reason that arbitrates over lower and more fallible forms. Second, it wrongly assumes that if human reason is a motley collection of tools of understanding, it cannot be efficacious, self-reflective, and self correcting.

Behind this objection is a familiar desire--a desire to preserve human reason from its imagined detractors. It seeks to preserve the power and purity of human reason by identifying some part of human understanding as "reason" and attempting to separate and distinguish it from the remainder. This strategy projects error and illusion onto this remainder in order to reassert the power and mastery of what it labels "reason." But our processes of understanding cannot be divided and separated in this way.

Human beings can and do discover the better and the worse argument. Metaphors can be deconstructed, analogies can be dismantled, narratives can be dismembered. But we do all of these things using cognitive tools (like language) that in other contexts and situations can have ideological effects. There is no pure analytic capacity of "good reason" that is separate from the many devices of human understanding. Reason is a bundle of devices that build on each other and counteract one another's ideological effects. Good reasoning is not so much a matter of purification as a form of triangularization, of imagination and reconsideration, in which we attempt to make use of the many different tools we possess.

Taken by itself, each of our cognitive tools has weaknesses and limitations, yet taken together each can compensate for the others' respective deficiencies. Human reason is like a collection of slender twigs, which, taken separately, bend and break easily, but when bundled become difficult to snap. Human reason is like a roof made of a motley assortment of overlapping materials, which individually let in the cold and the rain, but woven together provide a relatively effective shield against the elements.

If the mind is the product of evolutionary forces, both natural and cultural, the nature of reason could hardly be otherwise. The human brain arose not as a general-purpose problem-solving machine but as an organ that solved par how to recognize danger, how to find food, how to find a mate, how to engage in social cooperation and punish defectors, how to avoid contagious disease, and so on. Evolution is conservative and economical: It always solves the problems before it, not the more general difficulty that might arise at some point in the future. It always draws on the devices available to it; it does not redesign from scratch. So when Nature designed us to be able to recognize defections from social cooperation, she did not necessarily optimize our abilities at psychological introspection or mathematical calculation. When she enabled us to organize expectations of events in narrative form, she did not necessarily optimize our ability to do analytical philosophy. When she instilled a healthy respect for certain indicia of health, she did not prepare us for an era in which these heuristics and behaviors might be counterproductive. Rather, what biological evolution tends to produce is a collection of special-purpose gadgets that work tolerably well for specific environmental challenges, even if they lack more general abilities and efficiencies.

Along these lines, cognitive scientists recently have suggested that the mind might be fruitfully compared to a sort of Swiss Army knife, containing multiple reasoning capacities called "Darwinian algorithms."1 If we take an evolutionary approach seriously, we recognize that the mind is as motley as it is powerful. The mind is a collection of tools of understanding, each fairly good at the tasks for which it evolved but relatively limited outside its domain. There is no general-purpose faculty of reasoning and problem solving, but together, the various gadgets that we collectively call reason can do an acceptable job.

Like the bundle of twigs or the thatched roof, the mind's performance is not flawless. Our minds display interesting gaps in abilities, much as our senses occasionally deceive us in optical illusions. As with optical illusions, we can work around them by using our other faculties. One might think that our ability to work around cognitive illusions supports the notion of a general faculty of "good reasoning." Indeed, it demonstrates precisely the opposite proposition. These cognitive illusions, these gaps and lapses in our cognitive competence, are proof that our reasoning powers are the process of evolutionary bricolage, that we are dealing not with a smooth undifferentiated surface of reason but rather with a mosaic of overlapping materials, the joint product of natural and cultural development. Both the existence of these lapses and our ability to compensate for them are signs of evolution at work.

Indeed, if our faculty of reason were smooth and undifferentiated, if we did possess a general-purpose faculty of reason, this would be a strong argument against our minds' having been the product of evolutionary development, whether natural or cultural. The gaps and inadequacies of our reasoning pro the mind, both natural and cultural. A mind produced by evolution will display both "spandrels"--abilities that later prove useful but which are mere side effects of previous evolutionary design--and "panda's thumbs"--compromises of design created from previous materials that work tolerably well but imperfectly. The person who demands a general, undifferentiated faculty called "good reasoning" does not understand that she is also asking for a being who is not the product of temporal forces of evolution.

One might fall back on the hope that culture's overlay on our mental faculties has successfully smoothed out its rough edges. After all, we have developed language and propositional argument, science and experimental methods. But cultural tools are also historical products: they are the evolutionary result of generations of memes that were able to take root in human minds and spread widely to the minds of others. The cultural component of reason is also a collection of new gadgets superimposed on and merging with the older ones that we have inherited from previous development. Together, this set of tools can recognize and solve many problems. Together, the tools of our understanding can produce what is roughly equivalent to a general-purpose problem But it still betrays its rough edges, its gaps, its inefficiencies. And it is still limited in many ways.

Even so, it is important to distinguish the claim that reason is motley from the claim that reason is unreflective--that it cannot improve itself through conscious analysis of its own beliefs and operations. Perhaps this is the real source of the objection to the picture of reason that I have offered in this book. If there were no separate capacity of "good reasoning"--for example, one represented by propositional discourse--one might fear that human beings could not rationally reflect on cognitive illusions and improve their thinking processes. They would be doomed forever to be the slaves of unreflective customary modes of thought.

Ironically, this objection is itself an example of bad reasoning, for the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Precisely because human thought is self-reflective, it must have a layered, heterogenous, and cumulative character. Human thought is the product of bricolage, and the modification and improvement of human thought through reflection and argument is part of the process of that bricolage.

Human beings can and do transcend unreflective prejudice and custom. The conflict of human wills creates the occasion for conscious reflection about our factual and normative beliefs; these reflections can be assimilated to become the background assumptions and tools of a later era. Through sociability and strife, through human cooperation and human competition, our cultural soft Hence there is a continuous dialectic between custom and reflection on custom, between habitual practices of thought and criticisms of these practices, between what is con "reasonable" at any point in history and reasoned attacks on this rationality.

If human reason is the product of such a dialectic, we would not expect our reasoning abilities to be smooth and unified. Rather, we would expect them to be jagged and variegated. Human reason would tend to look like an old build renovation, with old walls halfway broken down, new plumbing joined to older lines, electrical wires shunted through ancient walls, bits of old plaster peeping through newer layers, and dust and refuse everywhere.

One cannot have it both ways. If human reason is to be improved through reason, it must bear the marks of renovation. It must be cluttered, unkempt, and untidy. It must be improved in some respects and disturbingly recalcitrant in others. And it will always be so, as long as the renovations continue.

Indeed, precisely because human reason is corrigible, always capable of self always continue to be limited in some ways, better at some tasks than others. This, too, is a consequence of its historical production. Biological evolution does not perfect organisms in the sense that it produces creatures equally well adapted to all environmental challenges. Quite the contrary, it tends to produce creatures exquisitely adapted to the environments they find themselves in. By analogy, we can expect that the forces of cultural evolution will not produce forms of human reason equally good at every task. Our tools of understanding always respond to the problems handed to us; they are devised to solve these problems and not others. We cannot know in advance what all of these problems will be, even though some of them will surely be the un consequences of our own previous actions. The human mind will not eventually become a general-purpose problem-solving machine because life does not present us with general-purpose problems.

The belief in the ultimate perfection of human reason is a temporally ex of the belief in the human mind as a general-purpose problem turn, yet another version of the belief in a pure, unsullied form of rationality that arbitrates over all of the other facets of human understanding. There is no such smooth, undifferentiated device, equally good at responding to all of the problems and difficulties that may be thrown at it. All tools, precisely because they are useful, are more useful for some things than for others. This trade-off is inherent in the nature of design, and it does not vanish, even when our tools become more sophisticated. Quite the con trade-offs of design often become increasingly urgent as technology grows in sophistication.

I noted earlier that we human beings exist in a great tide of informational evolution. Yet our participation in the tide of cultural evolution does not mean that we lack agency. Our cultural software surely affects our behavior; our actions always have unintended consequences. But it is a far cry from recognizing this to inferring that we are mere instruments of memetic evolution. We must reject a simplistic either/or view which insists that either we are in full control of the development of our memes or they are in full control of us.

Human beings are not simply an inert environment in which memes com breed. Our minds select and reject, combine and reconfigure the memes we are exposed to. We do this both consciously and unconsciously, both deliberately and as a side effect of everyday life. We are active participants in the growth and spread of cultural software, even if we do not have full control over the terms of its evolution.

Just as we must not confuse our subjection to hermeneutic power with a lack of freedom, we must not confuse our role in the development of cultural software with a lack of agency. Being the bearers of cultural software does not eliminate our agency but, rather, creates it, shapes it, brings it into being.

Human beings imbued with cultural software are unique and remarkable creatures. They are knowledge made flesh, produced through the interaction of their biological capabilities and memetic invasion. Through this interaction they transcend the power of both their genes and their memes. They become agents of culture and, equally important, agents of justice.

Ironically, the only thing beyond our choice is whether we will affect the growth and development of cultural software. For this growth and development is history itself; and we cannot absent ourselves from history, just as we cannot exit from culture. We take part, every day, in the production and reproduction of cultural software, through language, through participation in social conventions, and through all of the various systems of social meaning. We can avoid affecting the ecology of memes only by refusing to act, refusing to understand, refusing to innovate, refusing to create, refusing to communicate in any fashion at all. But that would be utterly foreign to our natures. For we are beings made of knowledge, and we must communicate to live. To participate in the growth and development of cultural software is our historical destiny. It is our informational fate.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/19/feed 0 Chapter 12: The Power of Understanding http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/18 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/18#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:23:33 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=18 A theory of ideology must offer some explanation of how the object of its study--whether beliefs, symbolic forms, discourse, or cultural software-- has power over what individuals do and how they think. Thus the study of ideology is necessarily also a cratology--a study of power.

It is possible to have a social theory that ascribes no independent power to the understanding. One could argue that all behavior is structured by the economic or material base of society. Most theorists of ideology, however--in Marxist tradition--have assumed that ideology is an important phenomenon precisely because the way that people understand the world causes them to act against their best interests or to behave unjustly to others.

Conversely, it is possible to have a social theory that overestimates the role of ideology in its theory of power. One might try to reduce military, economic, or technological power to ideological power by arguing that such power is exercised by individuals and groups who are themselves simply the product of ideological or discursive forces. But such a reductionist project is too simplistic. Although ways of thinking do have power over individuals, we must recognize that they do so in concert with many other forms of power that exist in society.

The theory of cultural software offers an account of ideological power. It is a theory of the power of understanding, and hence I call it a theory of hermeneutic power. But it is not a complete theory of power, because it focuses on the power over human beings created by their tools of understanding.

In discussing the relation of cultural software to ideological power, I shall use the work of Michel Foucault as my major foil. I do so because his theory of power/knowledge has been particularly influential, especially given the post modern turn from theories of ideology to theories of discourse. I shall argue that Foucault's theory of power/knowledge shares many of the same problems as previous theories of ideology, and I shall argue that the theory of cultural software offers a superior theory of power.

The Study of Ideology as the Study of Power

Foucault's theory of power/knowledge rejects the very term ideology; it attempts to change the focus of inquiry to disciplines and practices of power. Foucault identified ideology with what he understood to be the traditional Marxist model. He objected to it on three different grounds. First, the Marxist model was tied to an unhelpful distinction between economic base and ideational superstructure.1 Once this distinction was made, enormous efforts had to be expended in explaining their proper relationship. In contrast, Foucault argued that knowledge was inextricably intertwined with social systems of behavior. Knowledge arose out of disciplines of knowledge, so that there were various "knowledges" produced by social systems and enforced by their conventions of behavior. Thus one did not have to claim that ideas had power over individuals. Power lay in disciplines and practices, and knowledges themselves were just forms of disciplinary practice.

Second, Foucault objected to the Marxist model because it presupposed a subject who was somehow affected (or deluded) by ideology.2 Instead, Foucault wanted to insist that there is no deeper, truer, or more authentic nature of subjects that ideology perverts or disguises; rather, to be a subject is to be created by the various disciplines and practices that exist in one's Society.3

Third, Foucault believed that the Marxist model necessarily made a distinction between ideology and truth. But Foucault thought the proper focus of study should be the various discourses through which true and false statements can be made; these discourses themselves are neither true nor false.4

Foucault's general critique of ideology is really directed at a particular in the concept. None of his objections applies to all theories of ideology; in fact, many different versions either agree with or anticipate his claims. Many theories of ideology (like Geertz's and Thompson's), do not depend upon the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, and many acknowledge the interrelationship between knowledge and social practice. Althusser's theory of ideology anticipates Foucault’s claim that the subject is constituted by culture, as does Geertz's theory of ideology as a cultural system and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Finally, not all theories of ideology make a sharp distinction between ideology and truth; as discussed in Chapter 5, neutral conceptions of ideology by definition do not do so.

Thus, although Foucault's theories of disciplinary practice, discourse, and power/knowledge purport to replace the concept of ideology, in fact they bear significant resemblances to many different theories of ideology. This is hardly surprising. As noted previously, Gadamer's theory of tradition, Barthes's notion of a semiotic system, Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and Wittgenstein's concept of a language game also bear significant resemblances to the basic concept of ideology, even if they differ among themselves in important respects. My point is not that ideology should be regarded as a master concept, with all others explained in terms of it, but rather that we should not be blinded by the different terminologies that various theorists use. Each of these theories is concerned with how language and culture have power over individuals' thoughts and actions. Thus one may speak loosely of Foucault's theory of ideology, even though Foucault himself would have rejected the word.

Moreover, although Foucault tried to distinguish himself from previous theorists of ideology and especially from Marx, his theories nevertheless face many of the same difficulties that other theories of ideology face. Even when one changes the focus from ideology to discourse, the basic issues underlying the theory of ideology-the evaluative stance of the analyst, the need for a conception of justice, the causes of ideological effects, the explanation of shared beliefs, the question of ontological commitments, and the problem of self reference-do not vanish. They simply reappear in new guises.

Within the framework discussed in Chapter 5, Foucault's theories offer a neutral or nonevaluative conception. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he does not claim that one episteme is better than another, and in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality he does not assert that one disciplinary practice is superior to any other. He merely attempts to describe these systems of power and their effects on human beings, or, as he so often calls them, "bodies."

In Chapter 6 I argued that neutral conceptions of ideology ultimately can not maintain their neutrality because one cannot really describe the effects of ways of thinking on people without evaluative and normative judgments. This point applies equally to Foucault's work. His studied neutrality in description is often merely an attempt to show that the conceptual systems and practices of the past cannot be condemned as easily as we might wish and that they throw an unsavory light on our own current systems and practices. By examining the forms of power/knowledge in the past, we can see how systems of power infiltrate our own lives today. Yet this philosophical tu quoque cannot be performed without a normative conception-in particular, a conception of justice.

On the other hand, Foucault's conception of a subject completely constructed by disciplinary practices raises the puzzling question of why one should even care about what happens to individual human beings if their very individuality is the result of social practice. If subjects are simply the intersection of various disciplinary practices, if they are merely the mouthpieces for various forms of struggle directed by nobody in particular, it is hard to see why we should care about them and their fates. It may be true that bodies are manipulated, watched, cut into, inscribed, and tortured, but that is becasue they are objects in a never-ending game of power. We should no more feel sorry for these bodies and what happens to them than we should feel sorry for cartoon characters whose ways of thinking and behaving have been drawn by a car the sympathy we feel for the victims of surveillance, torture, and other disciplinary practices is simply due to the disciplinary practices of morality and sympathy that are the product of our own cultural moment. We are cartoons crying over the fate of other cartoons.

An analogous problem arises with truth. As Foucault argues, truth is some thing that arises within the particular discursive structure available to us in the culture in which we live. Different "games of truth" emerge at different points in history and these games cannot be compared in terms of superiority or inferiority, adequacy or inadequacy.5 Nevertheless, as Charles Taylor points out, a significant portion of Foucault's project involves unmasking-he wishes to reveal the truth of power behind sanctimonious claims about truth, scientific inquiry, and professional rigor.6 Yet the very idea of unmasking implies two things: first, it implies a reality behind surface appearances, and second, it implies a notion of truth that is not limited to our particular cultural moment.

Foucault's insistence on unmasking the operations of power leads to the familiar problem of self-reference: When Foucault acts as ideological analyst, he discovers how power is exercised in a society by agents who do not under power. Yet as Foucault himself would hardly deny, his own interests and his own researches are effects of power/knowledge. Thus he is in a position similar to the analysands he studies: his thought, as an effect of power/knowledge, may mask the power relations that constitute it. Like the subjects he studies, he may be blinded to the effects of power on his own thought and behavior. If so, his analyses of the operations of power in other societies (as well as his own) may be limited or distorted, or may miss the mark entirely, just as these subjects could not grasp the existence and effect of the power relations that constituted them.

Foucault's view of the construction of subjectivity has been further criticized by Poulantzas and others on the grounds that it leaves no room for resistance.7 In response, Foucault argued that resistance arises out of the regime of power itself and is never exterior to it. Indeed, Foucault argued, every regime of power creates its own resistances. Resistance is produced simultaneously with power, much as the back side of an object comes into being as soon as it has a front side. As Foucault says, resistances "are inscribed in [relations of power] as an irreducible opposite.8 Thus resistance, rather than being impossible in a network or system of power relations, is in fact part and parcel of its existence.

This answer creates more problems than it solves. It seems at odds with Foucault's general hostility to totalizing explanations of power, as well as his insistence that power works on many different conflicting and overlapping levels at once.9 Foucault's solution to the problem of resistance is Parmenidean: there is only the One-the regime of power--and all resistance to the regime is actually part of the regime.10 Like Parmenides, Foucault faces the problem of explaining change and motion. Parmenides solved this problem by holding that change and motion were illusions. Unfortunately, this is not a solution easily available to Foucault, because his genealogical method is de signed to explain change.

In his writings, Foucault emphasizes that many alternative ways of thinking and living have been crushed underfoot by successive regimes of power/knowledge.11 But this phenomenon is hard to square with his theory of resistance. Do these alternative ways of thinking and living offer resistance to the regimes of power/knowledge? If they are forms of resistance, then they should be pre power--indeed, they would al assume that they are not the sort of resistance that Foucault's theory explains. (In the alternative, perhaps these previous regimes offered no resistance at all.) In either case, Foucault has not really answered his critics. They want to know how combat with or resistance to a regime of power/knowledge is possible.

Just as Foucault's theory of resistance does not show how an older regime can ever resist a newer one, his theory of resistance does not explain how a new regime can ever supplant or subjugate another that resists it. If the new regime of power replaces another, we must assume that it resists the regime of power currently in place; otherwise, it is difficult to see how it could overcome it. But if it offers resistance, it must already be contained in the existing regime. Hence a new regime of power is impossible. We thus have the curious result that although Foucault speaks of "subjugated knowledges" in his essays on power/knowledge, his theory of resistance gives us no explanation of how they were ever subjugated.12

One possible reply to these objections is to revert to a form of humanism. The above arguments assume that networks, regimes, or strategies of power can offer resistance to other networks, regimes, or strategies of power, when in fact only people offer resistance to networks of power. But this resurrection of the individual subject as the locus and source of resistance is unavailable to Foucault. Rather, he would have to acknowledge that resistance is a network of relationships, strategies, and behaviors, just as power is. That is why he is able to hold that the structure of resistance is built into the structure of power.13

Parmenides' doctrine of the One was defended by his fellow Eleatic Zeno, who created a series of paradoxes to show that motion and thus change were impossible. In Foucault's case, however, similar paradoxes would be quite un would use Foucault's doctrine of resistance to show that change in a regime of power is impossible. No regime can ever change into another because no regime can ever be faced with resistance exterior to it that could transform it or overthrow it.

In his archaeological period Foucault claimed that one episteme miraculously transformed into another almost overnight. Given the problems that flow from his theory of resistance, the necessity of making this amazing claim seems more understandable. Foucault could not have asserted that one episteme changed gradually into another, because this would mean that resistance to the episteme could arise from outside the episteme. In any case, Foucault offered his theory of resistance not during his archaeological period but during his genealogical period, when he had seemingly abandoned the structural coherence and totalization of archaeological explanations. Nevertheless, the totalizing character of this theory of resistance is more consistent with the spirit of his earlier work.

In fact, Foucault's theory of resistance is inconsistent with his genealogical approach. His theory of genealogy argues that changes occur from a collision of contending forces or strategies. These conflicts emerge like armies that suddenly find themselves facing each other in a clearing and are thrown into battle.14 Foucault's theory of resistance, on the other hand, is premised on a closed system in which the structure of resistance is already contained in power relationships. But a genealogical system cannot be such a closed system. It must be the result of evolutionary mechanisms activated by chance events and un his genealogical approach, he must give up his Parmenidean theory of resistance.

A final difficulty with Foucault's theory of power and knowledge concerns the cognitive mechanisms of knowledge involved in relations of power. Because Foucault identifies knowledge and power with practices, he directs all of his attention to outward manifestations of culture. To be sure, Foucault is not a behaviorist, and he does not appear to have a behaviorist theory of the mind. The problem is rather that Foucault does not seem to have any theory of internal mental processes or cognitive structures. Thus there is a sense in which Foucault is not simply antihumanist, he is also "anticognitivist." First, he pays little attention to mechanisms of cognition and understanding. Second, he writes as if operations of power work exclusively through practices and disciplines that are applied to human bodies. Thus he writes as if power arises out of behavior and activity rather than from mechanisms of cognition.

Two features of Foucault's work reflect and reinforce this comparative ne first is his claim that discourses and disciplinary practices constitute the subject. Because these discourses and practices are embodied in technology, symbolic forms, and external behaviors, Foucault does not ask how the mind is in fact constructed by them. He simply takes for granted that mechanisms of socialization and cognition supply whatever is necessary for disciplines of power/knowledge to have their requisite effects.

Nevertheless, disciplines and practices cannot have these effects unless they are understood and internalized by individuals with a cognitive apparatus. So construction on the order that Foucault proposes requires elaborate mechanisms of understanding that must perform a great deal of work in shaping and constituting the individual's identity and thought. Foucault's account lacks any description or concern with these internal cognitive processes. This criticism should not be confused with a claim that Foucault denies that subjectivity is constituted by culture, or by processes of shared meanings, or even by language. He advocates all of these things. Nevertheless, he wants to advocate all of them without reference to how each individual processes information, or to what is going on inside her head. His view of culture is largely external-it consists in symbolic forms, statements, technologies, architectures, and behaviors.

Foucault's recurrent use of the image of the "body" to refer to human beings also reflects his relative lack of interest in internal mental states. He often speaks of disciplines of the body and of things being done to the body.15 Foucault's "body" is a metonym for a human being. His use of the term has the obvious rhetorical effect of depersonalizing and defamiliarizing human in model, as discussed in Chapter 11.

The metonym "the body for the human being" identifies the whole with the part. A metonymic model "B for A" understands A in terms of B and hence may confuse properties of B with those of A. Simultaneously, it suppresses relevant differences between the two. For Foucault, disciplinary power is what happens to bodies: how they are cataloged, inscribed, separated, or gathered together in time and space, how regimens of behavior are prescribed for them, and so on. The problem with this metonym is that bodies can not understand, internalize, or carry out social practices. Bodies do not practice disciplines or devise strategies for dealing with other bodies. In short, bodies cannot understand and cannot act meaningfully, although human beings can. Bodies can be the objects of power/knowledge, but they cannot be its agents-they can be acted upon, but they cannot perform the necessary meaningful actions that sustain a regime of power. Somebody has to be doing something to all of these bodies. The question is who. The answer is a human being with a particular cognitive apparatus, with historically generated tools of understanding. Ex emphasis on discourse and practice projects the study of cultural understanding outside of mental processes and onto behaviors, symbols, and cultural artifacts. This leaves only a body that is subjected to these external influences, and a system of power that is "intentional but nonsubjective."16

Thus Foucault's recurrent metonym of the body unwittingly symbolizes one the most serious problems of his theory of power. The fundamental dif understanding human beings as bodies and understanding them as human beings concerns their cognitive processes-their ability to un ability to engage in behavior that has and is understood to have meaning. Foucault's regimes of power/knowledge cannot get off the ground without the cognitive apparatus that makes human beings more than bodies. His theory of power/knowledge thus lacks an account of how the understanding exercises power over the subject.

Foucault's theory also faces the problem of ontology that I described in Chapter 1. For Foucault, epistemes, disciplines, and practices serve the same function as an Objective Spirit or a collective consciousness. They exist over and above individual human beings and are the source of power over them. We might even think of them as "material" versions of these well-worn concepts. Foucault has rid himself of idealism, but he has simply re-created the same Hegelian or Durkheimian formula at a behavioral or material level.

Finally, Foucault faces a problem of differentiation. Foucault's reliance on epistemes, disciplines, and practices explains and enforces uniformity, but at the price of suppressing and failing to explain individual differences in under among individual understanding and individual behavior are left unexplained or are ignored within the mode of explanation that Foucault offers. Thus his is the most puzzling of genealogies: it is a genealogy without individual variation, which is, in evolutionary explanation, the engine of change.

An important shift in Foucault's work occurs between the first and second volumes of The History of Sexuality. In the introduction to the second volume, Foucault suddenly announces that he is shifting course. This change can best be summarized as a movement from disciplines of the body to technologies of the self. The change is not merely terminological. It is in many respects a fundamental reorientation. Rather than asking how social processes arose that did things to human bodies, Foucault now asks how subjects came to under understanding their place in the social order and the principles of proper conduct within it.17 This is the question of how an individual comes to recognize his (in volumes 2 and 3 it is almost always a man) ethical duties toward others and appropriate sexual relationships with others.

The sudden shift between volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality, so late in Foucault's career, dramatizes what had been missing in his theory of ideology: the need to understand the processes of ideology from the self's point of view. Thus, Foucault argues, he must now study "the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals."18

In the final two volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault rediscovers the individual subject long buried beneath his concern with disciplinary practices. Yet his shift to a "hermeneutics of the self " makes all the more urgent the need to understand ideological phenomena in cognitive as well as behavioral terms.19

The problems that I have identified with Foucault's theory of power are interrelated. His account of the creation of subjectivity through disciplines and practices must be supplemented by an account of how power arises through the development of cognitive processes and tools of understanding. He needs an account of how power is created through the act of individual understanding, and how this power produces both intersubjective convergence and individual variation in understanding. In other words, to offer a theory of ideological power, one needs to solve the problems of ontology, causation, and differentiation that I posed in Chapter 1. Because Foucault has no satisfactory solution to these problems, his theory of power is also incomplete.

Cultural Software and Power/Knowledge

The theory of cultural software outlined in the preceding chapters is concerned with precisely these matters. It tries to explain the power exercised over individuals because and to the extent that they employ various tools of understand interact with others, and express their values. Because this form of power arises from the operations of understanding itself, I call it hermeneutic power.

Hermeneutic power should not be confused with the many other forms of power (and forms of violence) that exist in a given society. Hermeneutic power causes us to feel the force of cultural symbols and codes and to behave in accordance with these codes. It bears important relations to other kinds of social power, and other kinds of social power make use of it. But it is not identical with them.

Because his focus is outward to the world of behaviors and practices, Foucault's theory of power/knowledge lacks an adequate account of hermeneutic power. The theory of cultural software can provide such an account. This theory has much in common with Foucault's concept of power/knowledge. First, it offers a genealogical account of cultural development. Second, it asserts that ideological power arises from the nature of subjectivity; it argues that power is implicated in the very acts of knowing and understanding. Third, it holds that power arises from relationships of communication. Fourth, it emphasizes that hermeneutic power is ubiquitous.

The development of the tools of understanding through conceptual bricolage is consistent with Foucault's notion of genealogy. That is because Foucault's "genealogy" is simply another version of the fundamental insight of the philosophy of culture: that much of human culture is the product of the un Although Foucault identifies the idea of genealogy with Nietzsche, his application of it also owes much to Levi- Strauss's concept of bricolage. In fact, a theory of genealogy is really a theory of bricolage, because it assumes that existing features of culture will be put to new and unintended uses, with new and unexpected effects and developments. Thus when Foucault claims that the genealogist discovers "the secret that [things] have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms," he is describing the process of conceptual bricolage in a different way.20

Like Foucault and Althusser, the theory of cultural software argues that ideological power is created by and exercised through the formation of individual subjectivity. The power of cultural software is the power that software has over a person who is partially constituted by that software, who is the person she is because of the software that she possesses. Thus cultural software has power over people because it constitutes people; it produces ideological effects in society because people must make use of it in order to act in society.

The hermeneutic power involved in ideological effects is simply a special case of the power that cultural software has over individuals generally. In essence, the entire previous discussion of ideological effects has been concerned with the mechanisms of ideological power. In previous chapters we have seen how many of the basic tools of cultural understanding that we inevitably and necessarily employ in our understanding of the social world-heuristics, narratives, metaphors, categories, and networks of conceptual associations-shape our thoughts and hence our actions in important ways. Whenever we offer an account of an ideological mechanism, we also explain how it produces power over our imaginations. Thus, within the theory of cultural software, the con understanding and power-between ideology and cratology are fundamental.

Ideological power is an inevitable consequence of the operations of subjectivity, because hermeneutic power is an inevitable consequence of being a person existing in a culture at a particular moment in history. Because individuals must understand the social world through use of their cultural software, they are inevitably subjected to various forms of hermeneutic power merely by existing as persons equipped with and constituted by cultural software. Each act of cultural understanding is a potential source of ideological power over the individual because each act of understanding is a source of hermeneutic power over the individual. Hermeneutic power, and hence ideological power, is not something wholly imposed on a subject from without; it results from the interaction of the social world with a subject already programmed to receive information in a certain way. As Stanley Fish notes, the force of ideology is not an external force, and ideological power does not operate like a gun at your head. There is no gun at your head: "The gun at your head is your head."21

Because individuals are constituted by their cultural software, they are con immersed in forms of hermeneutic power without noticing it. Thus Foucault's claim about the ubiquity of disciplinary power is also true of the hermeneutic power of cultural software. Take, for example, cultural codes con appropriate and attractive dress ex For some, these cultural expectations are oppressive, but they are oppressive in part precisely because they are internalized-the individual feels that she is being forced by com individual does not mind wearing high heels and even thinks that they make her look more attractive, she does not feel oppressed or disempowered by the cultural codes that require them.

We may make a partial analogy to the forces of nature. When a swimmer swims with the ocean tide, she does not necessarily feel the tide as a force. Nor do we feel the force of the air that presses against us, unless there is a sudden drop or increase in pressure that produces wind. Nor do we feel the inertial force of the earth's accelerated motion around the sun (produced by a gravitational force), or the solar system's motion within the galaxy. By analogy we might think of hermeneutic power (and ideological power) as a sort of back existence. Like normal air pressure or the acceleration of the earth around the sun, it is a necessary albeit unnoticed element of our lives, a background force that accompanies and produces our life on Earth. We do not feel the force of the various background forms of ideological power until we oppose them in certain ways. Then we are like a swimmer who tries to swim against the tide and suddenly feels its strength.

The example of air pressure is important for another reason: not only do we not notice normal air pressure but our bodies are designed to operate correctly only within tolerable deviances from this normality. If air pressure be survive. To continue the analogy, there may be an important sense in which hermeneutic power is not felt in ordinary circumstances partly because our ability to participate in a culture or a shared set of conventions or expectations requires this power to be present. Without this force, our culture, and our cultural identities, could not long survive. The power of cultural software binds members of a culture together and makes following, participating, and developing cultural conventions possible. The fact that this power can be used for good or for ill does not change the fact of its ubiquity; its capacity for good or bad use is implicit in the ambivalent conception of cultural software.

Cultural Software as an Alternative to Power/Knowledge

Although the theory of cultural software bears many similarities to the Foucauldian approach, it also has important differences. These differences resolve the problems that I have previously identified with the Foucauldian model of power/knowledge.

The theory of cultural software differs from Foucault's theory of power/ knowledge in six ways. First, the theory emphasizes that disciplines and tech come into being or be sustained without cognitive mechanisms of understanding. Second, the theory of cultural software is overtly normative and evaluative; it presupposes an idea of justice that subjects the analyst's own beliefs to scrutiny. Third, it provides a catalogue of cognitive mechanisms involved in the constitution of subjectivity and hermeneutic power. Fourth, because the theory locates the source of hermeneutic power in each person's individualized tools of understanding, it does not need to postulate a version, whether material or otherwise, of a collective consciousness or an Ob for the same reasons, it does not need to assume that all forms of resistance are already contained within a larger system of power. Sixth, because the theory is premised on an ambivalent rather than a neutral or pejorative conception of ideology, it can acknowledge cultural software both as a source of power over individuals and as a source of individual autonomy. In this way it escapes the excesses of Foucault's antihumanist conception.

Foucault explains power through outward manifestations in behavior and practice. The theory of cultural software emphasizes how processes of under argues that power arises out of cognitive mechanisms as well as out of technology and social practices. In the first chapter I noted that without cultural software our technology becomes useless and our institutions fall apart. One can make the same point about Foucault's disciplines. Disciplines require the existence of cultural software to support and make meaningful the practices and techniques of normalization. Technologies of power require and presuppose cultural software.

Unlike Foucault's histories, the ideological analysis of cultural software does not purport to be nonevaluative. It rests on an ambivalent conception of ideology. As noted in Chapters 5 and 6, this conception necessarily depends upon an idea of justice that can be used to critique the analyst's own views as well as those of the analysand. As we have seen, Foucault's theory of power/knowledge purports to be neutral, but is really pejorative. The normative bite of his analysis stems from the horror at watching our lives completely constituted by ever tightening chains of power. Foucault's theory has all of the problems that attend nonevaluative theories of ideology: he cannot describe what he wants to describe without taking some sort of normative stand about what is true and what is just.22

Mechanisms of Hermeneutic Power

Unlike Foucault and his emphasis on external practices and disciplines, the theory of cultural software offers a series of mechanisms that describe how subjectivity is shaped and constituted and how acts of understanding exercise power over the individual imagination. Hermeneutic power over our subjectivity occurs in four ways.

First, cultural software has power over individuals simply because it enables understanding. Enabling and limiting are two sides of the same coin. To enable understanding is always to enable it in certain ways rather than in others. This empowerment opens up certain possibilities for conception and understanding while foreclosing others, in the same way that biological evolution creates pos morphological development by foreclosing others. For example, the historical development of animal structures meant that locomotion would occur through the development of legs but not through the development of wheels.23 The development of reason through history is the development of certain mental structures, but not all structures can coexist simultaneously. Some ways of thinking may not be possible given the tools available at a par always directs thought in some ways rather than others; it always makes some kinds of understanding easier than others, and it makes still others impossible given the tools that lie to hand.

Not only is the enabling of understanding a kind of limitation, but under presupposes a certain kind of structure and hence a certain kind of limitation. As Gadamer points out, in order to understand, we need preconceptions and prejudgments.24 These preconceptions and prejudgments not only affect our understanding, they undergird it; without them, we cannot un open mind is an empty mind.25 To understand, one needs tools, but these tools are necessarily better designed for some tasks than for others, just as an automobile is better employed for driving than for brain surgery. Thus cultural software enables by disabling: it opens possibilities for understanding by foreclosing others; it ex limiting them; it manufactures judgment through partiality; it creates personal freedom through mental regulation; it produces the pos blindness.

Second, cultural software has power over individuals because we come to depend upon it, not only for getting about the world but for our very identities as individuals. Cultural software not only allows us to understand but in doing so helps produce the "we" who understands.

In some respects, the power of cultural software is similar to the power that all tools have over those who regularly employ them and hence come to rely on them. We might offer a partial analogy to our increasing dependence on technology. Our technological tools have a certain power over us because they allow us to do things that we could not otherwise do without them. Because they enable us, we come to depend more and more on them. We use them to perform the tasks of everyday life--indeed, we define the meaning of "everyday life" and our expectations of the normal and the ordinary increasingly in terms of what our technology allows us to do. In this way our technology becomes woven into the fabric of everyday expectations and everyday existence. We fully recognize the power that our technology has over our lives only when it breaks down or malfunctions. A stalled car, a power outage, a crashed computer, or a dead telephone line bring forcefully home how greatly our lives assume and depend upon the existence and availability of certain forms of technology.

Nevertheless, the power and effect of cultural software over subjectivity is, if anything, even more profound. Persons are constituted by their cultural soft they are not constituted by their cars, their telephones, their bank accounts, or their Xerox machines. One's cultural software cannot be cast aside as easily as one can sell a car, break a Cuisinart, or lose money in the stock market. The tools of understanding cannot be discarded at will. As we noted earlier, even when we attempt to be unbiased or to engage in critical self-inquiry, we are not really discarding our tools of understanding; rather, we are using some of them to think about the adequacy of others, or about themselves.

To be sure, there is an important sense in which personhood includes one's property and one's uses of technology; technology does help constitute us as the people we are. We might even expand our definition of "person" to include a person's possessions and access to technology. But technology does not (yet) seem as fundamentally constitutive of personhood as does cultural software. We use technology instrumentally to further our ends, but our use of cultural software is more than instrumental, for the person who uses cultural software is partly the thing she uses. Instrumentality usually presupposes a person who employs an instrument. But this person does not come into being until she is constituted by her cultural software. Thus we might say that cultural software is also preinstrumental, in that it creates the conditions for what could constitute an instrumental use of cultural software as well as technology.

Third, power over the subject occurs through the act of change in our understanding that occurs through understanding itself. To understand, we must process information, and this means that we must open ourselves up to the possibility of new experiences and the influence of other persons. To un benignly expressed--to re precondition of understanding. To risk understanding is to risk change through understanding, and there is no guarantee that the change will not in some cases be for the worse.

Fourth, the process of understanding through cultural software can have power over us even without significantly altering our cultural software. Ideological power can also arise from the manipulation of our existing cultural software that occurs when we understand others. To risk understanding is to risk not only change but also manipulation. The most obvious example is ad associations (Pepsi-Cola with being young and having fun, for example), but at other times it merely exploits the associations that we already have. In the latter case, it does not so much rewrite our cultural software as pander to it. It attempts to "push our buttons"-to invoke powerful images and associations that we already possess in order to cause us to act in certain ways. But advertising is only the most extreme and visible example of a general phenomenon. Communication and the understanding of communication always presuppose the possibility of manipulation. Indeed, what we pejoratively call manipulation is only a special case of a general feature of communication and understanding. Symbols and rhetoric always make use of an audience's cultural software--the common associations, heuristics, and metaphors of individual understanding within a culture-- to persuade or otherwise affect behavior.

Obviously, the line between the third and fourth forms of hermeneutic power-between changing our cultural software and manipulating it--is hardly clear-cut. Indeed, we would not expect it to be. A person's new tools of understanding must be made out of her old ones. If we assume that all of our communicative experiences have some effect, however slight, on our hermeneutic apparatus, then the line between change and manipulation of our cultural software may be one of degree rather than kind.

The Economy of Hermeneutic Power

Because the theory of cultural software locates the source of hermeneutic power in each person's individualized tools of understanding, it does not need the sort of problematic explanation of resistance that Foucault provided. In particular, it does not need to assume that all forms of resistance are already contained in a larger system of power.

The theory of cultural software does not view individuals as the products of networks of hermeneutic power but rather understands networks of power as the result of interactions between individuals with similar (though not identical) cultural software. This software in turn is continually written and re written through these interactions. As described in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, this process creates an economy of exchange and development that regulates similarity of understandings while also producing variation and differentiation. Just as we saw earlier that a Zeitgeist or a "spirit of the age" is an effect of the economy of cultural software, so, too, are the networks of hermeneutic power that exist at any time in society. Because the source of hermeneutic power over the individual lies in each person's individualized cultural software, we do not need to dissolve the subject into some larger set of forces in order to explain social power. Nor do we have to postulate some version, whether material or otherwise, of an Objective Spirit, a collective consciousness, or an episteme that ensures that common social understandings are shared and enforced.

We should distinguish this picture from Foucault's claim in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality that power exists at various macro and micro levels that are constantly interacting.26 Foucault's division of different kinds of power is not a reassertion of the individual subject. Rather, Foucault argues that various strategies, disciplines, and practices can exist at larger and smaller levels, in more general and more local spaces, and that the larger and more general forms of power may opportunistically take advantage of the smaller and more local forms in place, even as they can also be said to be produced by them. The interaction that he contemplates is an interaction not between human beings within an economy of power but between different levels or forms of power that produce human beings. Human beings as autonomous agents still do not exist in his system.

Antihumanist accounts like Foucault's are attractive because they appear to simplify the process of guaranteeing intersubjective agreement and shared un Antihumanism responds to an underlying fear in social theory: the fear that the human mind is too private, too closed off, too inaccessible to other minds to explain the shared features of our existence. On the other hand, if culture creates individuals rather than the other way around, if the individual is just the intersection of cultural forces, the problem of intersubjectivity vanishes. Yet it is only replaced by new difficulties. The problem now becomes how to explain differentiation and disagreement, or, in Foucault's terms, resis­tance.

This difficulty highlights the comparative advantages of the theory of cultural software. We are all participants in the economy of cultural software. Each of us is continually engaged in writing and rewriting our own cultural software and the cultural software of others. Thus the problem of accounting for dissimilarity and resistance, which so troubled Foucault's theory of power/ knowledge, does not arise. Resistance is guaranteed by the fact that each of us is an individual with unique cultural software. This economy of exchange simultaneously produces similarities and proliferates differences.

Individuals exist in fields of hermeneutic power, continually absorbing and sending out information to one another, continually exchanging memes that travel from one host to the next like viruses, mutating and developing as they spread. Unpalatable as this metaphor may be, it nevertheless emphasizes how limited the privacy of our thinking process really is. The concerns that motivated antihumanism turn out to be exaggerated; for in society we discover not a group of individual minds isolated from each other but a network of nodes of memetic transfer and cultural communication through which information continually flows. We find people constantly connected to others directly or indirectly, constantly assailed by messages, idea-programs, instructions, and signs, constantly exposed to a host of attempts to rewrite or otherwise manipulate their cultural software. The memes in our minds are continually being invaded by memes from elsewhere, and they have constructed elaborate de assault. The amount of hermeneutic power, like the air pressure around us, is enormous, even if it is largely unfelt.

Our inherent susceptibility to change and intersubjective regulation comes from the same features of human existence that have made us susceptible to ever new forms of memetic invasion. As noted in Chapter 3, our ability to absorb informational symbionts may have had distinct evolutionary advantages. Once memes began to spread and take over human minds, however, they paved the way for the absorption and spread of ever new varieties. Precisely because people became good at internalizing memes that might help them, it also became possible for human beings to absorb memes that were neutral or even harmful to their emerging interests as persons. Thousands of years of human civilization have not altered this basic predicament.

There is an interesting connection between this memetic account of our susceptibility and Gadamer's ontological hermeneutics. Gadamer argues that in order to understand we must open ourselves to the possibility of change in our own beliefs.27 One can reinterpret this account of hermeneutic openness in terms of hermeneutic power. Understanding requires openness to the object of understanding, which requires employment of cultural software to absorb the information we find in the object. As a result, understanding involves susceptibility to the resulting effects produced on our cultural software. Openness is vulnerability, and vulnerability is susceptibility to hermeneutic power. Conversely, susceptibility and vulnerability are preconditions of cultural understanding. To risk understanding is to risk a certain kind of memetic invasion, which can sometimes reconfigure and readjust the memes that we have already internalized.

Thus the economy of cultural software operates effectively because understanding itself is a source of power over the individual. We ordinarily think of understanding in terms of mastery and hence control. Yet this mastery is also a form of vulnerability. For example, there is an old saying that the study of law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. There is much truth in this: legal education does change individuals who enter law schools; they gain knowledge and mastery over certain skills, but at the same time their ways of thinking are altered. They submit to a certain form of reprogramming as the price of their mastery and control.

Because understanding requires the possibility of changes in ourselves, it can be transformative even as it produces new skills and new forms of knowledge. The process of understanding is invasive in the deepest way, for it offers the possibility that we will become different from what we are now through our acts of understanding. The converse is also the case: people may resist understanding precisely to avoid change. The theory of cognitive dissonance argues that people sometimes try not to understand things because the new information threatens their sense of themselves. Information and new experience can change the self, and by changing it, disturb it. Dissonance arises when the self senses a threat to its self-conception. We might even think of some varieties of dissonance reduction as ways for the self to fail at understanding as a kind of self-defense. By selectively remembering events and disregarding recalcitrant evidence, the self attempts to resist changes to the self system that might occur if information were accepted and assimilated into the self and its tools of understanding. The phenomenon of dissonance reduction is evidence of the potential power that change through understanding has over the self, just as some astronomers think that the brilliant light of quasars is evidence of an enormous gravitational pull exercised by a black hole.

Our potential for change through understanding is essential to cultural un Moreover, our ability to participate in culture or in shared con requires that we be susceptible to hermeneutic power. First, our cultural software produces the hermeneutic power that binds members of a culture together and makes following, participating, and developing cultural conventions possible. Second, in order for conventions to be shared, cultural software must be replicated in members of a culture in a way that allows them to coordinate their activities in cultural conventions, whether this coordination turns out to be benign or malignant. Third, in order to reproduce cultural software in others, people must be able to rewrite one another's cultural software through acts of communication. That is how education proceeds. Thus not only is cultural understanding potentially transformative, it is necessarily so--the transformative features of understanding are necessary for the reproduction, growth, and development of culture.

As a shared way of living and thinking, culture is made possible by our ability to assimilate (and thus be changed by) new meme complexes. Just as we can survive only if we ingest foreign substances into our body as food, so, too, our culture can survive only if our cultural software can be rewritten through interaction with others. Both food and culture enter into us; in normal circum stances, we no more notice the invasiveness of cultural understanding than we do the invasiveness of food. All of this changes, however, when people fear an inappropriate influence or a bad effect from their exposure (or the exposure of others) to certain forms of communication. Then they may fear this communication just as they fear exposure to poison or a carcinogen in the food they have taken into their bodies.

Hermeneutic Subjection as a Source of Freedom

The economy and distribution of cultural software has important consequences for our conception of individual freedom within a culture. Cultural software is both a source of power over individuals and a source of individual autonomy.

There is a significant temptation to move from the insight that human beings are socially constructed to the assertion that they are socially deter presented here--of an economy and distribution of cultural software--is social constructivist but not social determinist or antihumanist. Individuals manipulate and rewrite each other's cultural software while them selves being affected (and enabled) by their own cultural software. Thus individuals are both the agents and objects of hermeneutic power. This power does not occur "from the top down" but through a continual process of interaction between individuals, or between individuals and the symbolic forms created by other individuals.

Through acts of communication, individuals mutually participate in her power. They are both the purveyors and the objects of this power. Those who can manipulate the forms of our social understanding can gain power over us because they can manipulate or alter the very conditions of our understanding of the social world. On the other hand, they can employ this power only because they, too, are subject to it. They can use cultural software to persuade others only because they themselves can be persuaded; they can manipulate others only because they themselves are potential subjects of manipulation.

Individual autonomy and subjection to hermeneutic power are two sides of the same coin. Autonomy within culture means the ability to articulate one's values and act according to one's desires. But this is done through cultural software; hence it is done using the very means through which one is subjected to hermeneutic power. Hermeneutic power simultaneously facilitates autonomy and subjection.

This conclusion is consistent with an ambivalent conception of ideology. Understanding involves a kind of power over the self, but not all such power is malignant, just as not all communication is manipulation and not all instruction is brainwashing. Some aspects of hermeneutic power are cooperative and beneficial; others are harmful and deleterious. But the difference between the helpful and the harmful, the enabling and the limiting, is not a difference between that which produces hermeneutic power over the individual and that which does not. Rather, both what we call maturation, or mastery, or freedom, or autonomy and what we call delusion or limitation involve the power of cultural software.

Foucault argued that we should not see truth and power as necessary op we can be oppressed by socially constructed "games of truth." In contrast, I contend that we should not maintain a false opposition between the freedom of an individual and hermeneutic power over that individual. Ordinarily we assume that an individual lacks autonomy to the extent and to the degree that someone or something has power over her. Hence the power that cultural software exercises over individuals must be a power that denies them autonomy. This line of reasoning seems to lead us ineluctably from social con­struction to social determinism and antihumanism. Yet hermeneutic power operates differently. Hermeneutic power and autonomy do not constitute a zero-sum game. The ability to decide, to understand, to interact with others, to articulate and express one's values are all hallmarks of individual autonomy. Yet all of these features are developed through cultural software, which is to say that they are developed by being subject to various forms of hermeneutic power. Being a subject of cultural software-which means being subject to various forms of hermeneutic power-creates degrees of freedom. Hence our attitude toward the development of cultural software must be ambivalent rather than negative. To understand is to be given, at one and the same time, new tools of potential understanding and new chains of potential enslavement, and the two are not easily separated.

Foucault also offers a theory of the productive nature of cultural power, but its contours and consequences are quite different. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that power is positive rather than prohibitory. Power does not merely repress subjectivity but actively shapes and produces it. Relations of "bio-power" produce human personality, desire, and preference rather than simply stifling or blocking them. Relations of power create new expectations and hence possibilities of social interaction and social behavior. Thus the human subject is produced by power rather than being merely subject to its pro this disciplinary power.28

Although Foucault says that power is positive and productive, he does not mean that it is positive in the sense of being a good thing or promoting human freedom. Rather, he believes that as forms of discipline and discourse proliferate, they increasingly entangle us more deeply in webs of bio-power. Thus Foucault offers a pejorative conception of the positive production of power. His view is akin to Max Weber's dread of the iron cage of bureaucracy, or Heidegger's concern about the advance of technology.

Foucault offers as an example of his thesis the development of discourses on sexuality. These discourses did not eliminate sexuality as a concern; quite the contrary, they have made sex increasingly important to us. The secrecy and regulation implicit in sexual repression is merely a tactic in a larger strategy. Sex was made a secret so that we might discuss it constantly, devote enormous energies to examining our sexual motives and urges, and devise, prescribe, and follow different regimens of conduct to ensure that our sexual desires were appropriately and effectively channeled. Hence Foucault says that sexuality is "deployed" as one would deploy a set of forces or supplies for battle. Through the deployment of sexuality, the discourses of sexuality proliferate. As they proliferate, they become a more and more pervasive part of our lives, even in our most determined efforts to keep sex a secret or to regulate it. Indeed, the more effort we put into regulating sexuality, the more important it becomes, and the more we must discuss it and those things related to it.

Even attempts to liberate ourselves from the forms of overt sexual repression are just another method of proliferating sexual discourse. Foucault claims that the notion of liberation presupposes the discovery of a deeper, truer self that is freed to express its real desires. Yet this conception is a sham: the very idea of a deeper truer sexual self is itself the product and the effect of the regime of bio-power. The discourses of sexuality create both the idea of the deeper self and the social apparatus that appears to suppress its "true" nature.

Thus, for Foucault, cultural proliferation is not a means of increasing free rather a means of increasing submission and control over bodies. Even our ideas of liberation are just another ruse, just another opportunity for bio lives.

The concept of proliferation is central to Foucault's argument about power. It has obvious analogies in the world of technology and institutions. Technologies proliferate, because technological developments create new needs and new frustrations and lead to new forms and combinations of technological in recognized, institutions proliferate, creating in frameworks.

Once again, although Foucault's description of proliferation appears to be merely descriptive and nonevaluative, his view of cultural proliferation is essentially pejorative. The result of the proliferation of discourses is the Foucauldian nightmare: an ever tightening network of power exercised over human beings.

Foucault's account of cultural proliferation betrays the deficiencies of a pejorative conception of ideology. His analysis is unidirectional and ignores the problem of self-reference. He gives us no account of how he has been able to recognize and unmask the proliferating devices of power that have fooled everyone else. He cannot explain how has been liberated to recognize that discourses of liberation are delusory.

In contrast, an ambivalent conception recognizes that the proliferation of culture and cultural tools facilitates and constitutes human autonomy as well as human bondage. An ambivalent conception can explain how Foucault as ideological analyst could comprehend what is happening to him. Among the tools of understanding produced by cultural proliferation are those that allow us (and in particular Foucault) to understand the proliferation of cultural power.

An ambivalent conception does not paint a uniformly rosy picture of culture. It appears optimistic only when contrasted to the Foucauldian nightmare. Once again, an analogy to technological proliferation may prove helpful. We might argue that the proliferation of telephones and the technologies to which they have given rise has thoroughly infiltrated and altered our lives, changed our conceptions of privacy and good manners, and created new ways for us to be harmed (telephone advertisements, anonymous threats, obscene phone calls, and wiretapping, to name a few examples). Moreover, it has subjected us to an ever tightening set of expectations concerning our accessibility to the com demands of others. It has produced a need, a desire, and a responsibility to be accessible to others, including supervisors, coworkers, and clients, as well as family and friends. This insatiable demand for accessibility has led to the development of pagers, mobile phones, and cellular units that allow individuals to be in contact with and thus at the beck and call of anyone at any time. Hence we might conclude that the proliferation of this technology has led to an accelerating enslavement of mankind.

This is a pejorative account of technological proliferation. Although accurate in many respects, it is nevertheless incomplete. An ambivalent view of technological proliferation would note all of these problems. Yet it would also recognize that the development of telephone technology has had definite ad saved lives, lowered costs, facilitated the exchange of information, and made possible many of the desirable features of social life that we take for granted today. Unfortunately, the benefits of this proliferation have not come without the costs noted above. Indeed, the two have arisen together, and they are not easily separated. We may attempt to ameliorate these problems through further technological innovations. But these innovations, too, will inevitably produce ripple effects in social structure and social expectations perhaps every bit as serious as the previous innovations had. The only way we can fully eliminate the deleterious effects of our tech forswear its advantages as well. The recognition that there is no such thing as a "free lunch" in cultural development--or even in the critique of cultural development--is the essence of the ambivalent conception.

Foucault's concept of cultural proliferation is a one-sided vision of the pro cultural articulation introduced in Chapter 2. There I argued that one of the most important features of culture, and of cultural software in particular, is that it allows us to articulate our values. Because this process is one of bricolage, its adequacies and deficiencies are linked. Thus I argued that an am development flows from a proper recognition of the process of cultural articulation.

Foucault's concept of proliferation views the process of cultural articulation through the distorting lens of a pejorative conception of ideology. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault offers an account of the cultural articulation of human values through technology, institutions, and cultural soft sexuality" is actually a broader phenomenon. It is the cultural articulation of sexual desire, as well as of the various virtues that grow out of this desire or in opposition to it. These include, among other things, our values of love, self-control, propriety, and beauty. Through culture, individuals come to recognize and understand their sexual desires, and they develop conceptions of virtuous behavior with respect to these desires.29

In The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault changes his focus from the proliferation of sexuality to the problematization of sexuality. By "problematization" Foucault means the process of a subject's understanding what constitutes problems or difficulties and why they are considered to be a subject of concern. Foucault's shift of terminology in these last two books mirrors his new emphasis on the subject and the subject's point of view. In fact, problematization, like proliferation, is just another perspective on cultural articulation. It is cultural articulation understood from the perspective of the individual subject. In The Uses of Pleasure, for example, Foucault focuses on the importance in the ancient world of the concept of sophrosyne, or self-mastery. The problematization of sophrosyne is the flip side of the cultural proliferation of sexual desire. Because sex is constructed and understood in a certain way, the issue of self-control becomes an important value, and vice versa. Moreover, like proliferation, problematization is simply a perspective on the process of cultural articulation of values. Problematization means discovering what is important to us and why it is important. Thus it is a form of cultural articulation of human values.

Foucault's twin concepts of proliferation and problematization are incomplete because they do not recognize that through the articulation of human values, human beings can achieve freedom as well as enslavement. The concept of sophrosyne provides an example. Through the exercise of self-mastery, the ancients believed, an individual achieved a degree of freedom. Viewed from the standpoint of Foucault's theories, the discourse of self-mastery is just another variety of subjection to bio-power, just like the discourses of sexual liberation in the twentieth century. Indeed, the ancients' conception of self-mastery is a particularly heinous form of enslavement because it is not even recognized as such; instead, it is disguised as a form of freedom.

Yet the ancients were not wholly deluded. Self-control and self-mastery, even though culturally created-and indeed, precisely because they are culturally created--are forms of autonomy. To be able to control oneself-for ex without unbridled passion or violence--is a kind of freedom. Similarly, to have knowledge and skill--even if these arise only through cultural practices, and disciplines-is a kind of empowerment.

In his Conjectural Beginning of Human History, Kant uses the story of the expulsion from Eden to make a similar point. For Kant, the fig leaf that Adam and Eve don is the symbol of humanity's entry into culture. Foucault might say that wearing clothes for the sake of modesty marks a beginning of the proliferation of the discourse of sexuality, or the human problematization of sexuality. But Kant sees something more. The fig leaf, he argues, "reflects consciousness of a certain degree of mastery of reason over impulse." In this event, Kant argues, we see "a first hint at the development of man as a moral creature." Finally, Kant notes, the entry into culture marks not only the beginnings of moral rationality but also the beginning of the cultural articulation of values. Through the act of modesty, Kant argues, humanity moves from the experience of sensuous pleasure to an appreciation of the beautiful.30

Thus what Foucault might see as the beginnings of human enslavement to disciplinary practice, Kant sees as the beginnings of the articulation of our values, and the beginnings of the development of our culturally created reason. Moreover, Kant argues, as human beings attain the capacity to reason, they attain the capacity to be free. Thus both morality and freedom are made possible by the process of cultural articulation.

The most satisfactory approach to the philosophy of culture would temper Kant's optimism with Foucault's pessimism. It would recognize that both thinkers describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives. Through cultural proliferation, human beings acquire new skills, new abilities, and new forms of knowledge; yet in the process they make themselves subject to ever new forms of hermeneutic power.

Culture, in short, is a predicament, and the theory of ideology stands as a particularly apt symbol of this predicament. The study of ideology is the study of the deficiencies of our thought, but it is made possible only because our thought has already provided the means to think them. It is the study of the powers exercised over our understanding, but it is accessible only because our understanding has already created the power to understand them. It is the study of the limitations of our imagination, but it is conceivable only because our imagination has already bestowed upon us the freedom to imagine them.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/18/feed 0 Chapter 11: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Cognitive Models http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/17 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/17#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 18:22:58 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=17 Earlier I mentioned Clifford Geertz's suggestion that cultural under through classical rhetorical figures like metaphor and me have taken this insight one step further. They argue that metaphor and metonymy are special cases of cognitive modeling that people use to understand the world.1 People create more complex cognitive models from existing ones through imaginative extension. This process of imaginative extension also resembles the classical rhetorical tropes of metaphor and metonymy.

Cognitive Models

Like other forms of cultural software, cognitive models like those involved in metaphor and metonymy can be distributed widely through human language. On the other hand, many people share the same cognitive models because they create similar ones independently through their own experiences. George Lak for example, that the most basic cognitive models derive from our experiences as individuals living within a body.2 Many familiar metaphors are based on models of bodily movement; metaphors of improvement are often based on forward motion. Like good bricoleurs, human beings use their experiences as embodied individuals as models or image schemas to understand other parts of the world around them; these basic models, in turn, are the building blocks of increasingly intricate and complicated cognitive mod Some of the most basic image schemas are those of objects in a container, source-path-goal, linkage, part and whole, center and periphery, up and down, and front and back.3 All of these primitive schemas are originally derived from bodily movements and embodied experience.

The idea that cognitive structures emerge from bodily experience has a long history.4 The approach has interesting similarities to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus. A habitus is a set of generative principles of understanding shared by members of a given culture. Like Lakoff and Johnson, Bourdieu argues that conceptual development of the habitus often involves analogies to bodily experiences and bodily movements.5 A still earlier anticipation of the idea appears in Giambattista Vico's New Science, where Vico states that a universal principle of etymology is that "words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit."6

Although these thinkers stress the role of the human body in shaping very basic conceptual schemas, it is hardly necessary that every human being individually re-create all of her cognitive schemas through bodily experience. Cog in others through communication and social learning. The theory of cognitive models assumes a historical development from basic sets of perceptual schemas that have a basis in human morphology. Further developments and modifications of these schemas, however, are culturally relative, so we should not expect to find the same cognitive models in every culture. Cognitive models and schemas, like other forms of cultural soft­ware, survive and reproduce with different degrees of success in different ecologies. Hence we should expect different cultures to produce different cognitive models and thus to employ different metaphors and metonymies.

Metaphoric Models

Metaphoric understanding operates according to the formula X is Y. The is is not the is of identity. It connotes the modeling of one thing in terms of another, or, more generally, the mapping of one domain of experience onto another.7 An example of such a model is the metaphor "understanding is seeing." This metaphor does not assert the identity of seeing with understanding. Rather, it models the process of understanding on the experience of sight. Other common examples of metaphorical modeling include "time is money," "rational argument is war," and "anger is heat." Like networks of association, metaphorical models are cultural heuristics. They help us understand some things in terms of others that we already understand.

Everyday language offers abundant evidence of metaphorical modeling. Be model understanding on seeing, we also routinely describe under standing in terms of sight and vision, as is evident in expressions like "I see what you mean," "He needs to make his views clear," or "She saw through his deception." Moreover, we often use multiple models to understand the same phenomenon. For example, there are at least two common metaphorical models for arguments. An argument can be a building ("She constructed an excellent thesis") or a journey ("I don't see where she's going with that line of reasoning").8 Similarly, we understand time as money (when we spend or waste time) or as movement (when time passes).

Because A is modeled on B, properties of B are assumed also to apply to A, or A will be understood or described as having corresponding features. Thus metaphorical models have conceptual or logical entailments. If an argument is a building, for example, then it must be supported by foundations just as a building is. If its foundations are weak, then the argument is shaky. On the other hand, if an argument is a journey, its conclusion is the end of the journey.9 If the argument is deficient, one goes nowhere with it, or one goes astray. If the argument is effective, one reaches the desired conclusion-one goes in the right direction. These conceptual entailments are part of the power that metaphorical models possess as heuristics. When we compare A to B, we see elements within A and their relations to each other because we already under they relate to each other. Thus a metaphorical model not only describes but also structures understanding. It not only com its signal value as a heuristic. A metaphorical mapping imports and applies a ready-made structure that is already understood.

Metaphorical models can be combined with other metaphorical models, producing increasingly complex structures of metaphorical entailment.10 An example of a complex metaphorical model is the relation between ideas and minds. It combines two metaphors: "ideas are objects" and "the mind is a container." Taken together these produce the model of "ideas are objects con entailments: we "grasp" ideas, we "hold" them in our minds. When we understand, we have the right idea "in" our mind: we "get" it.

This model interacts with others in turn. A common metaphor for communication is sending. Under this model, people communicate by sending ideas contained in linguistic expressions (words) from one place to another. When people communicate, the ideas in one person's mind (contained in her words or expressions) travel to and are received into another person's mind. This model combines a number of metaphors: "ideas are objects," "minds are containers," "linguistic expressions are containers" and "communication is send logical entailments. We see this in expressions like "Your reasons came through to me," "I didn't quite catch what you meant," "I wish I could put my ideas into words," or "There's a lot packed into what he is saying."11 We can find evidence of cognitive modeling not only in common expressions but also in etymology. Metaphorical extension is a useful way of creating new words. Tracing the roots of a word often reveals the metaphorical models that allowed new meanings to be created out of old ones.12

Metaphoric models differ from structuralist homologies in two important ways. First, unlike structuralist homologies, metaphorical models or mappings do not necessarily involve relations of conceptual opposition. In the sentence "They camped at the foot of the mountain," for example, the mountain is understood in terms of the human body. The base of the mountain is compared to a human foot, which is the lowest part of the body and supports the body when it stands. This metaphor maps the relation of foot to body (which is a relation of part to whole) onto a physical object. If we were to try to state this mapping in terms of a homology, we would say that body : foot:: mountain base of mountain. But the relation between the body and foot is not one of conceptual opposition. It involves at least three relations: (1) part to whole (synecdoche), (2) relative position (lowest part), and (3) function (support).

Second, metaphorical mappings make use of schemas or gestalts that cannot always be reduced to relations between two opposed terms. We compare a mountain to a body in the expression "foot of the mountain." Nevertheless, a body has many parts that bear many different relations to each other. The source-path-goal schema underlying metaphors like "life is a journey" obviously has more than two items. The metaphor "ideas are objects in the mind" (which relies on the metaphor that "the mind is a container") involves a com metaphor is made possible by a gestalt or visual model that allows us to employ it--a gestalt that includes the understanding that containers have an inside and an outside, that things can be placed in them and out of them, and so on. This gestalt contains many different features, not merely two.

Ideological Effects of Metaphoric Reasoning

Metaphors produce ideological effects because they are selective accounts of experience. Understanding X in terms of Y emphasizes only some features and discounts others. It organizes our imagination about X in one way rather than another. We model X according to the features and relationships between elements found in Y, although we might have modeled it on a completely different set of elements and relations.13 A common way of speaking of rational argument in our culture, for example, is through metaphors of war and combat.14 The metaphorical model is “rational argument is war.” We speak of demolishing an opponent's arguments, of marshaling evidence, and so on. Taken together, these military metaphors form a coherent set of mutually reinforcing entailments. If rational argument is war, then the other person in the argument is an opponent and the goal of rational argument is to win the argument. One does this by preparing the best defenses, attacking the other person's weak points, shooting down her arguments, and forcing her to capitulate. The parties contend with each other until one party is unable to continue and either surrenders (by agreeing, which signifies that she has lost the argument) or retreats (by changing the subject). In this way the metaphor "rational argument is war" paints an entire portrait of human relations and appropriate behaviors in rational argument.

The potential for ideological effects from this metaphorical model flows directly from the ways in which the model is partial and selective. Comparing rational argument to war captures certain features of rational argument: that individuals strive to better each other in rational argument, that argument is a test of a certain type of strength, and that the participants regard each other as opponents or adversaries. At the same time, this metaphor directs us away from other possible features. The combat metaphor is not the only possible way to understand rational argument. Consider the metaphor of rational argument as cooperation or as a joint enterprise: Rational argument is a co enterprise designed to achieve some mutually desired goal--for example, truth, justice, or accommodation of interests. The parties work to perspectives. When agreement is reached, it is not the defeat or overpowering of one's opponent but the satisfactory attainment of a shared goal.

The combat and the cooperation models of rational argument focus on different features of rational argument. Both explain many of the same features of rational argument, but each does so in a different way. Under the combat model, for example, argument can also lead to truth, but the process has quite different ramifications. One example is the adversary system of justice in Anglo contest of adversaries in adjudication is designed (ideally) to lead to truth. Another is the familiar justification of free speech in terms of a "marketplace of ideas," in which individuals compete with each other to persuade their audience, just as they compete for market share in the economic marketplace.15 In the adversary model truth emerges not from cooperative striving for accuracy and validity but from the conflict of opposing stories, and from the partial, self-interested motives of the opposing sides. Moving from the example of law to that of science or the humanities, the adversarial model in the academy suggests that truth best emerges from individuals who seek to increase their reputational capital by promoting their pet theories and demolishing the competing theories of other academics.

As we might expect, this model of striving toward truth by demolishing the claims of opponents suppresses other aspects of rational argument-for example, the view that truth might best be approached by sharing different perspectives and by attempting to understand perspectives quite different from one's own. The adversarial view also downplays aspects highlighted by a more cooperative view of reason: that progress is cumulative rather than mutually destructive, and that reasoning builds on other people's insights rather than clearing them away to replace them with one's own. In the specific context of legal disputes, the adversarial model deemphasizes the possibility that dispute resolution might best be served by trying to make the parties understand each other's different points of view, with the goal of reaching a mutually acceptable accommodation of their interests.

Thus we can see two different ways in which metaphoric models produce ideological effects. First, metaphoric models selectively describe a situation, and in so doing help to suppress alternative conceptions. By imagining the world one way, we make it more difficult to imagine it in other ways. As Lakoff and Johnson put it, using such a metaphor, "which allows us to focus only on those aspects of our experience that it highlights, leads us to view the entailments of the metaphor as being true," or natural, or what "goes without saying." Metaphors like "rational argument is war," they point out, "have the power to define reality ... through a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others.16

Second, and perhaps more important, metaphorical description positively produces social reality as much as it suppresses aspects of it. A metaphor like "rational argument is war" defines and "structure[s] ... what we do and how we understand what we are doing when we argue."17 Thus it is important to understand that a metaphor does more than simply allow us to understand the process of argumentation. This metaphorical model also helps to constitute social conventions of argument and hence helps constitute social reality. Metaphors like "rational argument is war" define the parameters of appropriate social conduct. If argument is war rather than cooperation, we are likely to treat the people we argue with differently, and we will expect different treatment as well.

To be a member of a culture that thinks about argument in these terms is precisely what makes it possible for us to win and lose arguments, for the other person to be an adversary or opponent, for one to be able to gain and lose ground in argument, to plan and execute attacks, and so on.18

The constitutive function of metaphor, in short, does not simply distort reality. Rather, it makes reality; like narrative construction, metaphor has the power to "make itself true" in social practice. The prevalent social metaphor that rational argument is war creates a series of real expectations about intellectual activity and appropriate behavior in intellectual life that one neglects at one's peril. Indeed, the metaphor even shapes the possible modes of its denial. Suppose, for example, that a person claims to have won an argument with us. To dispute the claim is already to accept elements of the metaphorical scheme. It becomes quite difficult to avoid talking in terms of winning and losing an argument when others insist upon employing this metaphorical model; to join in the fray means that the metaphor has already worked its power. In politics it is often said that one side has successfully "defined the terms of debate" that the other side must follow. If metaphor were merely a convenient way of de this could be so. But if a set of socially enforceable conventions and expectations are being created and main could be wielded.

Metaphorical models are classic examples of the ambivalent nature of cultural software. They assist understanding in some respects even as they hinder it in others. Their power stems precisely from their ability to empower understanding by shaping and hence limiting it. To counter this power, we must deconstruct the metaphorical model. We must reveal its metaphorical character by demonstrating that the figural mapping is not logically compelled and showing how it suppresses or downplays important features of a situation.19 Nevertheless, often one cannot demonstrate this without offering a competing metaphorical model. We may not realize how the adversarial model of argument is limited until we think about argument as a cooperative venture. We need a new vantage point from which to see the limitations of our previous vantage point, a vantage point that a contrasting metaphorical model provides.

This shift of heuristics is characteristic of the way cultural software operates. Metaphorical models assist understanding by prefiguring it; without them, un may be difficult or even impossible. Thus one often can counter the power of a metaphorical model and its logical entailments only by substituting a competing metaphorical model that can serve as an alternative heuristic. One can attempt to move parties from confrontation to mediation, for example, by redescribing what they are doing as a cooperative venture. One tries to show that the parties actually have a common shared goal (peace, jus in the interests of both to reach that goal.

Metonymic Models

A second kind of cognitive model is a metonymic model. In classical rhetoric, a metonymy substitutes one thing for another that it bears some relationship to. For example, we often associate institutions with their geographical locations. Thus we speak of "Washington" to mean the U.S. government, the "Pentagon" to refer to the Defense Department, and "Hollywood" to refer to the American movie industry. Note that each of these associations is slightly different. The American movie industry was once actually located in Holly places, but its capital is Washington. Other implicit conceptual relations in metonymies can be between a piece of clothing and the person who wears it ("Who's the suit?"), a part of the body and a person ("We need a fresh face"), an object and the person who uses it ("There's a new gun in town, sheriff"), a person who controls an institution and the institution controlled ("Bush defeated Hussein"), a producer and a product ("Do you want to listen to some Mozart?"), a place and an event that occurred there ("No more Vietnams”), and a part and the whole (“I’ve got some new wheels”).20 The last example has a special name in classical rhetoric-synecdoche. But for purposes of this discussion I shall treat synecdoche as a special case of metonymy.

A metonymic model generally takes the form "B for A." A, the target concept, is understood as B, the metonymic. The relation between A and B is defined by a conceptual schema. This schema may be a gestalt (for example, a body), a familiar form of association (for example, between users and objects they use), a causal relation, or a standard script or narrative. In our first ex institutions exist in places. In the sentence "I got here by hopping on a train," the implicit cog embarkation stands for the entire process of traveling.21

Like metaphorical models, metonymic models are heuristics. One reason to understand A as B is that B is more salient or easier to remember. For example, it is easier to think about a typical case than a distribution of differing entities. But like metaphorical models, metonymic models can produce ideological effects because the features of B can be confused with those of A. We may confuse effects with causes, symbols with the things they stand for, parts of a social system with the social system itself, individual actors with the institutions they represent, and so on. Some varieties of what Marxist theory calls reification may be metonymic in character because they confuse products of a social system with the system of social relations and social power.

Some of the most important and pervasive ideological effects of metonymy arise from a special kind of metonymic model, in which an instance of a cat category. One example of such a metonym is a social stereotype, another is a paragon or exemplary case. These metonymic models are special cases of the many cognitive models employed in human categorization.

Cognitive Models of Categorization

Human categorization is a complicated psychological process. In the past twenty-five years, psychologists and cognitive scientists have discovered that people often categorize in ways that do not conform to commonsense views about categorization and predication. These commonsense views are sometimes called the classical theory of categories. According to this theory, members of each category share common properties that are necessary and sufficient for membership in the category. These defining properties apply equally well to all members. There are no "second-class" members of a category, at least if the common properties they share have been rigorously defined.22

The classical model of categories can be a theory of human mental operations or a theory of the underlying logical structure of the world. As a theory of human mental operations, it has come under increasing attack. Numerous philosophical, linguistic, and psychological studies have suggested that human intelligence categorizes in several different ways, some of which do not fit the classical conception of categorization.

We can think of Wittgenstein's famous notion of family resemblance as an early critique of the classical model. Wittgenstein noted that the word game does not fit the classical description of a category because there is no single feature that all games share. Instead, games have what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance"; like members of a family, different games have different properties in common but need not share any single property.23

A systematic challenge to the classical theory of categories arose out of psychological studies conducted in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch.24 Rosch demonstrated that people do not experience all members of a category as equally good examples of the category. Subjects asked to rate particular examples of a category (like "bird" or "chair") judge certain examples as more representative than others. Most subjects, for example, rated a robin as a more representative example of a bird than an ostrich or a chicken and rated a desk chair as more representative of the category "chair" than a rocking chair, barber chair, or beanbag chair. Rosch called these more representative examples prototypes. Her experiments showed that such prototypical examples gave rise to many unexpected psychological phenomena, which she called prototype effects.

Prototype effects occur when one member of the category, the prototype, displays asymmetrical or hierarchial relationships with other members of the category. The prototype may thus be seen as more representative of the category than other members. Subsequent experiments showed that prototypes displayed other interesting features. When subjects were asked to identify whether an example was a member of a category or not, response times were generally shorter for prototypical examples. Subjects were more likely to offer prototypes as examples when asked to list or draw representative members of the category. Subjects applied the notion of similarity asymmetrically when comparing more and less representative examples of categories. Americans who thought of the United States as a highly representative example of a country were asked to give similarity rankings for pairs of countries. These subjects thought that Mexico was more similar to the United States than the United States was to Mexico. Finally, subjects also were more willing to generalize new information about a prototype to a less representative example than to infer that new information about a less representative example was also true of the prototype. Thus sub an island would affect ducks than the other way around.25

Usually a representative example of a category has a bundle of different properties; less representative examples share some of these properties but not all of them, and different examples share different groups of features. The result can be analogized to a central example with different links of similarity shooting out from it in different directions to other less representative examples. Hence this type of category is called a radial category.26 Radial categories manifest prototype effects and Wittgensteinian family resemblances.

It is important to distinguish between the claim that categories display prototype effects and a different claim about categories-that categories have fuzzy boundaries. It is difficult to tell, for example, where the concept "tall" begins and ends. In the case of "bird," however, there is no dispute that robins, ostriches, and penguins are all birds, and yet subjects still report one of these examples as more representative than the others. Wittgenstein's famous ex different features of categories-fuzziness and the presence of prototype effects. Wittgenstein as fixed in advance to be used effectively, and he also asserted that the concept of "game" had no single property in common but only family resemblances. Pro resemblances can occur in concepts that have fuzzy boundaries, but they can also exist with respect to examples where there is no dispute about boundaries.

The psychological research of Rosch and her successors seems to show that human categorization employs several different models, some that appear to behave like classical categories, and many others that display prototype effects and family resemblances. It is by no means clear that these nonclassical models all operate in the same way. Prototype effects are precisely what their name implies-effects of cognitive models-and many different kinds of cognitive models can produce them.27 Psychologists and cognitive scientists are still divided over how many and what different kinds of models are involved in human Categorization.28 Nevertheless, even though different cognitive models may create prototype effects, we can refer to prototype effects collectively as examples of metonymic thinking, regardless of the cognitive model that produces them. They are metonymic because, whenever these effects occur, prototypes, ex subcategories serve as metonyms for the category. Prototypes, exemplars, and subcategories are used either (1) to represent an entire category, (2) to draw inferences about the entire category, or (3) to provide a normative model for the category. Understanding a category in terms of a prototype, exemplar, or subcategory is often a useful aid to understanding and working with the category and its members. Yet like all heuristics, sometimes metonymic thinking can go terribly wrong.

One of the most pervasive examples of metonymic thinking is the tendency to view all human categories as classical categories. This employs the classical category as a metonym-and hence as the normative and descriptive model classification. Precisely because this heuristic is so pervasive, it is an inexhaustible source of ideological effects.

In general, metonymic thinking produces ideological effects when nonclassical categories produce prototype effects whose existence and scope are not fully recognized. As a result, prototypes are improperly employed to make inferences and judgments. In these situations reliance on the assumption that all human categorizations conform to classical categories is misplaced.

Here are some examples of the kinds of prototype effects that, in the right circumstances, can produce ideological effects. They generally fall into two categories: prototype effects that involve some form of stereotyping, and prototype effects that involve some form of unspoken norm.

Overgeneralization

People may assume that all members of a category have the same characteristics as prototypes or prototypical examples. From a prototype of woman, for example, people may infer assumptions about all women's behaviors, preferences and abilities. The classic example of this ideological effect is a social stereotype.29 Stereotypes can be positive or negative, and they can be derived from other forms of cultural software. Stereotypes about men and women, for example, may be produced by social scripts, conceptual homologies, and net man may be viewed as rational and stable, while the stereotypical women is viewed as intuitive and emotional. These symmetrical stereotypes, in turn, can lead to equally symmetrical overgeneralizations and inappropriate inferences.

Prototypes as Indicators of Relative Prevalence

People may view prototypes or prototypical examples as the most common version of the category, so that other members of the category are viewed as rare, unusual, or exceptional cases, even though in fact these "exceptions" may be just as common as the prototypical examples. In the media in the United States, for example, one often finds a prototype of young black males as un involved with criminals, gangs, or drugs, easily prone to violence, and likely to get in trouble with the law. When one discovers young black men who do not fit this prototype, they are assumed to be rare and exceptional cases. Indeed, such individuals may be assumed to be especially bright, especially hardworking, and so on. Moreover, viewing them as exceptional and special means that the prototype remains unchallenged and may even be reinforced.

Salient Examples

A special kind of stereotyping involves salient examples. This phenomenon is also related to the availability heuristic discussed in Chapter 8. Prototypical examples often are constructed from or identified with familiar, memorable, or salient examples of a phenomenon (as opposed to typical or frequent examples). People then use these salient examples to make judgments about the probability of events or features of an unknown situation, even if salience and probability are not correlated. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman discovered that when a group of people were asked for the probability that an earthquake causing a major flood would occur in California in 1983, they tended to give higher probability estimates than a similar group who were asked to estimate the probability of a major flood in North America in 1983.30 Politicians often use salient examples to suggest inferences that are unwarranted or at the very least con Ronald Reagan's anecdotes about "welfare queens" driving expensive cars to pick up their welfare checks confirmed a set of stereotypes about poor people as undeserving members of minority groups.

Prototypes as Default Characterizations

People use prototypes as "gap fillers"--to flesh out or supply features of unknown or partially known events or members within a category. If we hear that a man is a bachelor but know nothing else about him, we may create a picture of him in which we assume that he eats out often in restaurants, lives in an apartment, spends lots of money on clothes, and so on. We will use the features borrowed from a commonly employed social stereotype of a bachelor to fill in what is unknown about him. These features may, of course, be widely divergent from the bachelor's actual existence; he may love to cook at home or be a monk, for example.31

Asymmetrical Inferences from Prototypes to Nonprototypes

People routinely assume that inferences about prototypical examples apply to all members of the category, but inferences about nonprototypical cases are not routinely assumed to apply either to the category as a whole or to proto ideology of white supremacy, blacks are associated with criminality and whites with lawfulness. (This is another example of pro the prototype of the category "black" is associated with criminality, then examples of blacks who commit crimes or black politicians who are corrupt tend to produce or reinforce inferences that all blacks are untrustworthy. By contrast, numerous examples of law- blacks are generally trustworthy. Conversely, because noncriminality is projected onto whites, no amount of crime by whites or examples of unscrupulous behavior by white politicians will lead to the conclusion that whites are criminals or that white politicians cannot be trusted. Thus District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry's conviction for cocaine use reflected badly on all black politicians in ways that Richard Nixon's criminal activities did not reflect on all white politicians.

Prototypes as Reference Points

Prototypical examples are more likely to be used as reference points for comparing or understanding phenomena. Thus if Kansas City is seen as a prototypical American community, then its citizens' tastes and preferences are more likely to be seen as representative of tastes and preferences of Americans in communities like New York, New Orleans, and Miami than the other way around. This heuristic partially explains the often-noted phenomenon of the "white norm" or the "male norm" in everyday understandings of the social world. If people judge males and whites to be more representative examples of human beings than females and blacks, white males become a prototype for the category "human being." Hence the experiences, preferences, and under will more naturally be viewed as reference points for evaluating the social world. Conversely, the experiences, preferences, and un will be seen as less representative, special, unusual, quirky, different, or even deviant.

Prototypes as Evaluative Norms

Prototypical examples can also be viewed as the "best example" in an evaluative sense. Instead of a stereotype that represents the most common feature of a category, a prototype can be a norm or ideal. A paragon is one example of a normative prototype. George Washington might be viewed as a normative prototype of a politician. A second kind of normative prototype is an ideal type--for example, the economist's conception of a perfectly rational individual with complete information. A third kind of normative prototype involves a set of norms for appropriate behavior. Thus a normative prototype of a father might be someone who spends time with his children and makes sacrifices for their welfare and their betterment. When people employ a normative prototype, members of the category that fail to match the prototype are to that degree viewed as imperfect, deficient, less valuable, or abnormal. Fathers who do not live up to the normative prototype of fatherhood, for example, may be considered poor examples of fathers. Thus there are two different ways that we can say that an individual is not a good example of a category. On the one hand the individual may be atypical, or may lack many of the most common features of the category. On the other hand, the individual may fail to live up to a normative conception of the category. Often people conflate these ways of not being a good example. This confusion may also produce ideological effects.

Although I have discussed these seven effects of prototypes separately, they often overlap or work in tandem. Lakoff offers a good example of the cumulative effects of metonymic reasoning through an analysis of the expression "working mother."32 The qualifier "working" suggests that working mothers are somehow special and different from the most representative examples of mothers. Yet changes in economic and social conditions have led more American woment to work outside the home than ever before. Why then aren't working mothers prototypical examples of motherhood in American culture?

Lakoff argues that the expression "working mother" is based on an implicit cognitive model of motherhood in our culture based on nurturance. Many other models of motherhood are possible, including being a birth mother, a genetic mother, the wife of the child's father, and so on. The nurturance model of motherhood, in turn, yields a prototypical case of nurturance in our culture-- the kind of nurturance that the housewife-mother provides for her children--and thus it offers a prototypical example of motherhood, the housewife-mother. Moreover, there is a prototypical concept of work, which is done away from home and does not include the rearing of children. The term "working mother" is defined in contrast with the prototype of the nurturance-mother and in conformity with the prototype of work as work done away from home. Because the concept "working mother" is informed by these cognitive models--each with its own paradigmatic cases--it signifies more than simply the intersection of working people and mothers. Lakoff offers the example of a birth mother who gives her child up for adoption and then takes a full-time job outside the home. She is working and she is a mother, but most people would not think that she is a working mother.33

Thus, powerful forms of metonymic reasoning are implicit in everyday concepts like "working mother." Instead of classical categories of work and motherhood, we have cognitive models that stand for these categories. The nurturance model stands for the category of motherhood as a whole, and the representative example of this model, the housewife-mother, stands for the category of all mothers. This is confirmed by the following English sentences:

la. "She's a mother, but she doesn't take very good care of her children."
1b. "She's a mother, but she takes very good care of her children."
2a. "She's a mother, but she works away from home."
2b. "She's a mother, but she doesn't work away from home."34

Sentences lb and 2b seem surprising or unusual, while sentences la and 2a seem more conventional if traditional. That is because "the word but in English is used to mark a situation which is in contrast to some model that serves as a norm."35 The implicit norm is the nurturing housewife mother.

If the nurturance model serves as the most representative model of motherhood, and the housewife-mother serves as the most representative example within this model, we might expect to see one or more of the following prototype effects:

1. People view non-housewife-mothers as exceptional or deviant cases. (Prototype as most common example of category.)
2. People assume that characteristics, preferences, and other features of housewife-mothers apply to all mothers. (Prototype as "gap filler" or salient example.)
3. People assume that housewife-mothers define the norm of appropriate nurturance and motherhood; conversely, they assume that women who do not correspond to this model are deficient or insufficiently nurturing. (Prototype as paragon, ideal type, or normative model.)

In contemporary U.S. society, a large number of women work outside of the home. Changes in society will gradually undermine the prototype as most common example, although it is also possible that people's estimates of the percentage of women in the workforce lag behind actual numbers precisely because of this prototype effect. Nevertheless, these changes in expectations may not change the tendency to view the housewife-mother as the salient example for inferences about mothers. Equally important, they may not change the tendency to view the housewife-mother as a normative model of appropriate nurturing behavior. Prototypes do not have to be the most common examples to function as paragons and ideals.

The structuralist models that we discussed in Chapter 10 would note similar effects produced by different means. The cultural meaning of "working mother" is produced through a network of cultural oppositions: mother : father:: nurturance : work:: family : market:: private : public. These homologies are both descriptive and evaluative; they distinguish the opposed terms and suggest their appropriate authority and normative significance. For example, work outside the home is differentiated from and privileged over nurturance. At the same time, these homologies "distribute": they assign appropriate roles for which each party or each concept is best suited.

The category "working mother" is a mediation or subcategorization of this homology. Working mothers are opposed both to so-called nonworking moth and to working fathers. This produces the following homologies:

"nonworking" mother : working mother :: mother : father :: nurturance : work :: family : market;
and
working mother : working father :: nurturance : work :: family : market.

In a patriarchal system that privileges women only in roles assigned to the "feminine," working mothers are assessed a double penalty. In both of these homologies working mothers are assigned the inferior associations of each term, and the opposite concepts of nonworking mother and working father receive positive and superior associations. The cultural meanings conveyed are that working mothers are less good at the private responsibilities of family and nurturance than nonworking mothers, and they are less good at the public world of work and exchange than working fathers.

These homologies have ideological power because they implicitly demarcate normal, natural, and privileged associations about mothers and fathers, nurturance and outside work. Many so-called nonworking mothers are less nurturing than many working mothers, and many working fathers are less com associations--with its double pen features (nonnurturance, incompetence) of nonworking mothers and working fathers invisible and projects them onto working mothers.

This example shows how different forms of cultural software can produce similar ideological effects. There are two different explanations for this. The first is that conceptual homologies and cognitive models do not really correspond to different tools of understanding. Each of them is simply a model for the same cognitive process, and the two happen to converge to describe the same basic ideological phenomena. Further experience will show which model is the best description of our understanding, or will reveal an even better model. A second possibility is that there are really several different ideological mechanisms and that they tend to be mutually reinforcing in certain situations, though not in others. This would mean that patriarchal or racist attitudes, for example, are overdetermined by many different forms of ideological mechanisms and ideological effects.

My guess is that both these possibilities have a grain of truth in them. We may eventually discover that the structuralist models developed by Levi-Strauss and others are special cases of the cognitive models that produce metaphor and metonymy; or we may eventually discover that both types of models point obliquely toward a third as yet undiscovered cognitive mechanism that subsumes both.

Nevertheless, I do not think that all of the various ideological mechanisms that I have described are ultimately one and the same. The heuristics and biases that Tversky and Kahneman discovered cannot easily be reduced to the mechanisms of ego defense implicit in Festinger's cognitive dissonance model, nor can either be readily assimilated into the narrative, structuralist, or metaphorical models of cultural understanding.

In the past four chapters, for example, we have seen how racist ideological effects can be produced by dissonance reduction among subordinate groups, by conceptual imperialism among dominant groups, by faulty inferences from prototypes and salient examples, by conceptual homologies that oppose black projection of superior and inferior associations, by social scripts featuring stock characters and expectations about ethnic groups, and by recurrent cultural narratives about the American "savage war." It is highly unlikely that all of these effects are produced by the same mechanism. It is much more likely that racial attitudes are produced by many cross-cutting forms of human understanding, which, taken together, have deep roots in our tools of cultural understanding and hence possess great power over our imaginations. Racism and sexism are motley and variegated, despite their admitted power in our lives. They are produced by many different kinds of cognitive tools, and these tools have repeatedly been used to create new ones, carrying into each innovation their potential ideological effects. Unjust attitudes about race and gender are woven deeply into the fabric of our thought; and in this weaving more than one stitch and more than one thread have been used. Ideological mechanisms are the result of bricolage and circumstance; their heterogeneity and disorder are the best evidence of their historical emergence.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/17/feed 1 Chapter 10: Homologies and Associations http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/16 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/16#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 18:22:14 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=16 Because language and symbol are the most pervasive forms of cultural transmission, they offer a rich trove of cultural software and ideological effects. This chapter examines the cultural software that is used to form social meanings transmitted through language in the form of conceptual oppositions and networks of conceptual associations.

Much political and social reasoning draws on conceptual oppositions. A simple and powerful example concerns American attitudes about race. American culture understands whiteness and blackness as opposites, even though there are several races in the United States, and the boundaries between those groups are hardly distinct. More important, the opposition between whiteness and blackness is understood in terms of a network of evaluative conceptual oppositions: law abidingness as opposed to criminality, morality as opposed to immorality, higher intelligence as opposed to lower intelligence, knowledge as opposed to ignorance, industry as opposed to laziness, and so on.1 This network of associations is an important ideological mechanism in producing an image of black Americans as an inferior Other onto whom all manner of unsavory characteristics are projected. Moreover, this network of cultural associations helps sustain unjust stereotypes about whites and blacks, wrongly presents them as separate, homogeneous, and unified groups, and helps perpetuate misleading assumptions about American society. For example, many American whites as blackness, and politicians regularly play on these associations, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly. Nevertheless, a majority of drug users, welfare recipients, and criminals are white.2 Thus the network of cultural associations projects criminality and immorality onto blacks and away from whites. This has a dual ideological effect, identifying blacks as the cause of America's moral problems, and making white criminality and immorality relatively invisible.3

Semiotic Systems as Cultural Software

To explain how networks of association operate, I will use a well-known theory of cultural meaning-structuralism. Structuralism argues that cultural meaning is produced when subjects understand the social world through conceptual op may be between things (sun and moon), directions (left and right), abstract concepts (reason and passion), degrees or qualities (higher and lower), classifications (male and female), and groups of persons organized by gender, race, ethnicity, or social class (men and women, blacks and whites).

People make sense of the cultural world not through isolated conceptual oppositions but through networks of linked conceptual oppositions. When people understand two things or concepts as opposed, they relate this opposition to other oppositions they are already familiar with. The difference between A and B is understood in terms of the difference between C and D. A's association with C is mirrored by the association of B with D. New conceptual oppositions are fashioned by analogy to, and understood through association with, previous conceptual oppositions. The process of concatenation and collation of conceptual oppositions goes on indefinitely. In this way, a huge network of associations develops that produces rich sources of cultural meaning.

This approach to cultural meaning is the basic insight of structuralist theory; it also underlies the semiotics (or semiology) of later thinkers like Roland Barthes.4 For this reason, I shall speak of structuralist and semiotic analysis interchangeably. By each I refer to the basic strategy of studying cultural mean conceptual oppositions.

Nevertheless, structuralism is also often associated with two more controversial claims about human cognition. The first is belief in innate ideas (associated with Noam Chomsky); the second is belief in universal structures of the human unconscious (associated with Claude Levi-Strauss). The idea that cultural meaning is constructed through networks of conceptual oppositions, how assumptions, and the theory of cultural software is committed to neither. To the contrary, I shall argue that the structuralist or semiotic method does not identify stable or permanent conceptual oppositions, though structuralist theory often presents them as such. Rather, what this anal software as it evolves and combines in different cultures.

When Levi-Strauss offered his views about innate human ideas, he at the problem that faces all accounts of cultural understanding: to explain why and how shared meanings are shared. His solution, like Chomsky's, was Kantian-style: every person possesses the same unconscious structures; hence each has the same tendencies to understand the social world in terms of networks of conceptual oppositions. Nevertheless, Levi-Strauss's account does not really explain why particular substantive ideas are opposed to each other, why we find different combinations of ideas opposed or connected to each other in different cultures, or why people in the same culture might have different sets of cultural associations. Nor can his account explain how networks of cultural associations might change over time. At best he offers a formal and a historical account of cultural understanding.

Moreover, his assumptions are largely jettisoned in later versions of semi semiology: semiotic studies of advertisements and the fashion system, for example, do not presuppose universal unconscious structures. They are concerned with codes and meanings that change historically, often quite rap idly.5 But when semioticians ignore Levi-Strauss's assumptions about the human unconscious, they simply beg the question of how these cultural codes are created and shared.

A distinct advantage of the theory of cultural software is that it can offer answers to these questions. The human mind readily absorbs and memorizes conceptual oppositions and networks of conceptual association, just as it does in the case of narrative structures. This tendency may be innate, or it may be a side effect of other very basic forms of cultural software. Whatever the cause, networks of association can be and are widely dispersed through communication and social learning. For example, the cultural associations of whiteness and blackness that I mentioned above are stamped into innumerable cultural symbols and messages that Americans absorb from their very earliest years. They are woven into countless sets of expectations and social meanings that we de daily encounters with others. That is one reason why racist forms of thought are so powerful, pervasive, and difficult to eradicate. Never always existed; they are the products of memetic evolution. And one day, we may hope, they will again cease to exist in the minds of human beings.

The theory of cultural software also accounts for the ubiquity of certain conceptual oppositions despite cultural change. Very basic conceptual oppositions and associations (like male/female, day/night, or sun/moon) are likely to be found in some form in almost every culture, though each may have different associations. Like other forms of cultural software, their ubiquity can be explained in several ways: These basic oppositions may be dispersed to many different civilizations through memetic descent. Or they may have been independently created because people in many different cultures have faced similar experiences and dealt with them in similar ways.

Conversely, a memetic approach allows us to account, in ways that a Levi-Straussian cannot, for diversity across cultures and dissensus within cultures. There is no reason that particular conceptual oppositions would be equally salient for all persons in all cultures. For example, we would not expect that oppositions like right/duty or hardware/software would exist in every culture. Over time the kinds of associations that spread widely among members of a culture might change, with older ones transformed and newer ones emerging. Finally, if networks of association are a form of cultural software, they will exist in populations, with slight differences in each person's tools of understanding. Although communication and social learning can harmonize the understand members, no two persons will have exactly the same set of cultural associations.

In this way we can explain convergence of understandings without having to assume Levi-Strauss's universal structures of the unconscious. And we can explain the forms of divergence, dissensus, and historical change that his theory could not account for. In short, the theory of cultural software shows how we can reinterpret structuralism in terms of individual thought and belief. Structuralism can be freed from its questionable metaphysics, and its insights can finally be appreciated by even the methodological individualist.

Structuralist Homologies

The central focus of structuralist analysis is conceptual homology. A homology is an association of conceptual oppositions. For example, given oppositions between A and B and between C and D, we might have the conceptual ho A : B:: C : D. Although this form of analysis is best known through its application to the culture of primitive societies, I shall offer an example taken from contemporary American law: the contrasting roles of the judge and jury in American legal thought.

An American trial involves both questions of law and questions of fact. In the American legal system, citizen juries are the triers of fact, while the judge is responsible for determining the law to be applied to those facts. At the end of the trial, the judge offers instructions to the jury about the law that they must apply to the facts that they find. Reliance on lay juries to find facts and apply law in many different types of legal controversies is a peculiar feature of American legal culture. In England, for example, the jury has been eliminated in most civil cases (except, interestingly, in cases of defamation). In civil law jurisdictions, the lay jury has never had the importance it has had in America.

Gerald Torres and Donald Brewster have noted that the common under division of labor between judges and juries in the American legal system is linked to a number of conceptual oppositions: these include not only law versus fact but also reason versus passion.6 Thus judges, who construe the law, are associated with reason, while jurors, who must sort out the particulars of the factual situation, judge the credibility of witnesses, and act as the conscience of the community, are associated with passion and emotion. The judge is a learned professional who understands legal doctrine, while the jury is unschooled in the law, having only a "brute" sense of justice. The judge presides over many different cases and issues rulings of law that are entitled to precedental effect. A particular jury sits on only one case and is dissolved after doing its work. It does not create durable rules of law but offers a ruling on only one factual situation; its finding has no general precedental effect (al parties in future litigation).

This analysis produces the following homologies: judges are to juries as law is to fact, as reason is to passion, as formal justice is to informal justice, as the permanent is to the transient, as justice through application of general rules is to justice in the particular case. The association of these conceptual oppositions is a tool of cultural understanding. Like all other such tools, it both enables and misleads understanding. This network of associations allows people to un judges and juries, but it simultaneously produces prejudgments, prejudices, stereo and overgeneralizations about judges and juries. In this way the system of networked associations both assists cultural understanding and creates ideological effects.

The above homology explains a surprising amount about how people con respective roles of judge and jury. Because the jury is associated with passion, for example, the jury, and not the judge, needs to be controlled. The emotional and discretionary functions of the jury are necessary to justice. Yet the jury must be disempowered, held back, for its own good. Otherwise, it will be a "runaway" jury (a term that connotes a wild beast--the symbol of dangerous passion). Hence American law contains a set of rules of evidence that are said to "constrain" jury discretion (as one would constrain a wild animal or a capricious child). Evidence is excluded when it would unduly prejudice the jury (the evidence of a rape victim's prior sexual history, for example) or inflame the jury (particularly gruesome evidence of a murder). Failure to abide by these rules can be reversible error. Thus to the previous homology of conceptual oppositions we should add the additional opposition of constraining: requiring constraint.

Our semiotic analysis of the way people think about and talk about judges and juries should not be confused with an assertion or a proof that judges really are more rational than juries or that juries really are more emotional than judges. Nor is it a claim that this is the proper or morally appropriate way of thinking about judges and juries. Rather, we are trying to identify patterns of existing cultural thought about judges and juries, and it is entirely possible that this way of thinking may be misleading or unjust.

Moreover, this analysis does not offer us a series of rules that people con follow when thinking about judges and juries. People do not recite the homology "judges are to juries as reason is to passion" to themselves and then apply it. Rather, the homology that we discover in symbolic forms is evidence of a cognitive construction that has already occurred, which the semiotician codifies into a set of organizing rules or principles after the fact. The semiotic analysis shows us the results of a series of generative tools applied to a particular aspect of social life. Because of the network of associations that people use in thinking about judges and juries, they construct what they consider appropriate roles for the social institutions of judges and juries, and their associated social institutions. Thus, it is not surprising that semiotics finds a set of structures in what was produced according to these generative tools. Nor is it surprising that, when asked to defend the institution of judges and juries, or the particular features of this institution, people will respond in terms of the network of oppositional categories that structuralism discovers.7

Although homologies are not rules consciously followed, they do seem to have an important hermeneutic function. Such analogies offer people a way of understanding conceptual oppositions and the opposed concepts themselves. The homology A : B :: C : D not only links A and C (or B and D); it also helps us to understand the nature of A in terms of C, and the nature of C in terms of A. It also helps us understand conceptual opposites (like A and B) in terms of each other. A homology of conceptual oppositions is mutually explanatory. It sheds light on the thing to be explained but also reflects light back onto that which is used to explain.

Mediation, Subcategorization, and Nesting

Although people employ conceptional oppositions to understand the world, the world does not always easily conform to on/off categories. Many situations arise that fall between the poles of existing conceptual oppositions; many situations resemble both sides of a given opposition, depending on how they are described or understood.

In fact, many legal situations mediate between the network of oppositions of judge and jury, law and fact, reason and passion. For example, judges in the American system are sometimes involved in factual issues. If judges can be associated with law rather than fact, how does the conceptual system that we have just discussed comprehend this situation? Often the mediation is treated as a subcategorization of one of the terms of a conceptual opposition, resulting in a new conceptual opposition. Instead of thinking of judicial fact-finding as a mediation between or mixing of the roles of judges and juries, for example, we might think of it as splitting the category of fact-finding into two categories--facts found by judges and facts found by juries. This produces a new opposition of judicial fact-finding and jury fact-finding. The mediation of op of one term in a conceptual opposition into two opposed terms, produces a second-level opposition, an opposition within an opposition. This phenomenon is called nesting.8

I have noted that people understand new conceptual oppositions in terms of older oppositions in a cultural system. The same phenomenon applies to oppositions created from subcategorization. A second-level opposition replicates the associations that are linked with the first-level opposition. Put sym C : D. If the judge is associated with reason, law, and restraint of passion, judicial fact-finding will be characterized according to these criteria in oppostion to the fact-finding of juries (who are associated with undisciplined passion). That is to say, judicial fact -finding is to jury fact-finding as judges are to juries, as reason is to passion, and as law is to fact. Judges engage in a more "reasonable" and disciplined type of fact-finding, or a fact-finding that cultivates reason and restrains pas their rights to a jury trial, and the judge acts as the trier of fact. In such cases, judges often dispense with many of the rules of evidence that they use to shield evidence from juries, on the grounds that unlike juries, they will not be unduly swayed (that is, that they are more reasonable). Moreover, because judges already know the law, they can easily sort out the admissible from the inadmissible evidence.

Even in jury trials, the judge engages in some kinds of fact-finding. Often, for example, the judge has to rule on whether certain evidence is admissible by reference to the facts. The judge's fact-finding in these circumstances is in aid of reason because it helps restrain the jury's unreasoning passion. In addition, a judge in the American system must follow the evidence presented at a jury trial in order to act as a check on jury discretion. If the jury's verdict is too unreasonable given the weight of the evidence, the judge may order a new trial or, in extreme cases, direct a different result notwithstanding the jury's verdict. Finally, the judge may remove a certain question from the jury if the testimony presented by the parties is such that no reasonable jury could come to a contrary conclusion. Thus the judge finds facts in order to police the boundaries of reasonableness. Not surprisingly, such questions are called questions of law in the American system, even though they clearly involve factual inquiry.9

The concept of oppositions nested within oppositions is a corollary of a fundamental structuralist tenet: the meaning of a cultural event or artifact comes from its opposition to other cultural events or artifacts--in short, the context in which it is considered. The identification of judges with reason and lack of prejudice arises only in the context of an opposition with juries. Al though judges are associated with reason in comparison with juries, there is great concern in jurisprudential debates over the possibility that judges them opposition is no longer identified with judges as a group versus juries as a group; it is now used to understand a division within the category of judges themselves. The context has changed, and with it, the associations between conceptual oppositions. Nevertheless, the terms of this debate are a variation on the reason/passion homology that we have been studying. Indeed, we might even understand it as a subcategorization or mediation of the opposition be as juries are to judges. The prejudiced judge is lawless, and therefore needs con perform her proper function; hence she must submit to the con reason of the law. The law itself, which the judge applies, therefore acts as a constraint on the judge; it ensures that her actions are in accordance with the reason of the law. Thus we have a mediation of the original homology. Judge constrained by law : judge unconstrained by law :: reason : passion. Once again, passion is dangerous and in need of control. Once again, reason is in charge of restraining passion.

Homologies and Hierarchies

We thus see two basic features in the structuralist theory of cultural meaning. The first is the notion of clusters of linked conceptual oppositions: judge/jury, reason/passion, law/fact, restraining/needing restraint. The second is the no oppositions-the idea that mediating categories or subcategories reproduce prior associations in a new form.

Clusters or networks of oppositions do not merely differentiate situations and things. They also have evaluative significance. A differentiation can be a comparative evaluation or a statement of comparative importance. It can also assert a hierarchy. This hierarchy can be one of comparative value, of existing power or status, or of legitimate power or status. Thus the division between judges and juries may carry with it unspoken assumptions about the appropriate distribution of power and authority between them. That is because we are not neutral about the relative value of reason and passion, their relative importance in our lives, or the relative authority that each should have.

If we prefer reason to passion, then we also are likely to prefer that which is associated with reason to that which is associated with passion. We will think it important that reason be in control of passion, and hence that things associated with reason should be in control of those things associated with passion. Passion is at its best when it serves its appropriate function and is in its appropriate place. That is when it is subservient to reason or less powerful than reason (as in the case of judicial control of juries), when it resembles reason (as in the case of judicial fact-finding or a jury not swayed by unnecessary emotion), or when it acts to further the goals of reason (as in the case of juries supervised by judicial control).

Conceptual oppositions that form hierarchies of comparative value, status, power, or authority can be associated with other hierarchies of comparative value, status, power, or authority. Thus the hierarchy of judges over juries can be buttressed by analogies to other accepted or prevalent forms of hierarchy or comparative evaluation. Put more generally, the hierarchy of A over B can be supported by analogy to the hierarchy of C over D. Thus the homology A B :: C : D not only explains or clarifies the nature of A and B but also supports the comparative evaluation between them.

Torres and Brewster, for example, have suggested that the way that people talk about juries is also the way they stereotype women.10 Juries are said to be capricious and unpredictable, easily swayed by emotion, and yet, on the other hand, intuitive, perceptive, and merciful; while judges are associated with the "masculine" stereotypes of reason, law, rules, and order. This analysis does not claim that men and women are actually the way that masculine and feminine stereotypes portray them to be. It assumes only that these stereotypes exist and that they occur widely in American culture. Thus, the use of "feminine" meta judges and the cultural hierarchy of patriarchy--the ideology that values men and things associated with men over women and things associated with women. Stereotypes that justify one kind of hierarchy become linked to other hierarchical oppositions and serve to justify them as well. In this way, the associated hierarchical oppositions mutually reinforce each other.

Indeed, patriarchy itself is supported in part by a series of analogies to other oppositions in culture and nature. The hierarchical relation of men to women is explained by, understood by, and justified by the relation of this opposition to other conceptual oppositions. These oppositions, in turn, are linked to still further ones, and so on indefinitely.11

We must be careful not to infer from the above example that the judge/jury relationship directly reproduces or supports patriarchy, or that the judge /jury system is an inherently "male" institution. This misunderstands the nature of the ideological effect. People use hierarchies they are already familiar with in order to explain other hierarchies. A hierarchy is made to seem more natural by analogizing it to another hierarchy that already has some cognitive force. Moreover, two conceptual hierarchies may mutually reinforce each other by being associated. Nevertheless, the effect is not perfectly symmetrical, because some conceptual oppositions are more basic, or more powerful, or more central to our thought than others are. Thus, in theory, the opposition of judges and juries might reinforce the hierarchy of male and female or the opposition be and passion just as the latter two conceptual hierarchies tend to explain, justify, and support it. In practice, however, it is more likely that the power of explanation runs largely in one direction. The hierarchical relations of male and female stereotypes and of reason and passion are probably more deeply rooted in our culture than the relation of judges and juries and therefore offer more support to the reproduction of the hierarchy between judges and juries than that opposition does to either of the other two.

The "feminization" of discourse about the jury is more than merely a de more than an evaluation. It also assigns roles of comparative authority and power. One way of establishing and justifying the superior power of judges over juries and reason over passion is to link this opposition with other oppositions in which one term has greater power over the other, or with oppositions in which one term should have greater power over the other.

In the standard conception of judges and juries, the jury and passion must be associated with lesser power because passion is not necessarily less powerful than reason in all of its manifestations. Passion can sometimes be more powerful than reason; consider a mob or a violent animal. Thus, the jury is "fem subordinated, less powerful version of passion-to avoid the dangerous implications of a passion that could be more powerful than reason. This discourse thus trades upon (or rather assumes) the comparative powerlessness of women in order to establish the sub the point, it trades on or assumes the patriarchal attitude that it is appropriate that women should be less powerful than men.) Thus when Torres and Brewster claim that the jury is feminized and therefore thought less powerful, they borrow an insight from feminist scholars that feminization of a concept is a way of dominating it.12

The association of women with less power than men is a standard patriarchal assumption. Even so, I must stress that the concept of women's power is a problem for patriarchal ideology. It is more correct to say, from the stand that whether or not women are less powerful, they must be associated with lesser power. The association of women with weakness or with lower hierarchical status must be established and reinforced and reproduced just as much as the association of lesser power for juries must be established, reinforced, and reproduced in the ideological construction of judges and juries. Thus patriarchal thought has many strategies for handling potential associations between women and power. Powerful women are seen as dangerous and unfeminine. Images of powerful women are generally unflattering stereotypes of deviance: witches, for example, are women who possess the power of magic. The power that women are permitted within patriarchal con never threaten the larger power of men, and must ultimately be subservient to male authority. These ideological strategies are never fully successful; even so, they may still be pervasive.

Once again, the structuralist analysis does not assume that the stereotypes implicated in the homology

masculine : feminine :: more powerful : less powerful

necessarily reflect current social realities about men and women. Rather, the assignment of stereotypical male and female characteristics is one of the ways in which subordination of things associated with the feminine is justified or made to seem natural. This assignment is a source of ideological power. The consistent use of feminine metaphors to describe a nonsexual concept like a jury is not so much evidence of differences between men and women as evidence of an ideological strategy of justifying particular relations of power. In the story of power relations, the one who plays the part of "the girl" is the one who is subordinated and whose power or dangerousness must be eliminated. (Indeed, the identification of woman with "girl"--a child--itself reflects a homology of greater power/lesser power.) Thus as a result of this analogical strategy, passion has its proper place within a system controlled by reason. A properly functioning jury can be emotional only as long as it is assigned the sort of values that patriarchy stereotypically associates with women who "know their place"--sympathy, mercy, intuition, and so on. The feminization of the jury thus solves the problem of keeping the jury in its proper place.

Note, moreover, that such analogies work in the opposite direction as well. The identification of the jury with passion and with feminine stereotypes not only justifies its constraint by the judge and the need to subordinate its passion and rough sense of justice to the judge's reason and knowledge of law; it also establishes the connection between the judge and reason, thus justifying the judge's superior position. Just as the jury is feminized (emasculated) in discourse, the judge is associated with the “male” metaphors of reason, authority, and justice.

The Economy of Oppositional Logic

I have argued that networks of oppositions evaluate by combining conceptual oppositions that are evaluative or hierarchical. In our example, the hierarchy of judges over juries was supported by the hierarchy of reason over passion. This discussion assumed a general preference for reason over passion. Nevertheless, in conceptual oppositions like that of reason and passion, we do not always privilege one term over the other, and hence the two terms do not have a unitary set of hierarchical or evaluative associations. Each opposition is a conceptual tool that is used over and over again in many different contexts; through this usage, it becomes linked to many different oppositions, and it forms many different networks of association. Thus, although conceptual op hierarchies or comparative evaluations, they can do so in many different ways, for each has many different associations connected to its terms, and these associations display the terms of the opposition in many different lights.

There are many good or superior associations connected with reason in its opposition with passion, for example, as well as many bad or inferior associations. There are contexts in which reason is viewed as better or more powerful than passion, of greater authority than passion, or needing to be in control of passion, and other associations where the reverse is true. That is because we do not in every case prefer reason to passion or think that reason should always be in control of passion. In matters of artistic expression, a cold, logical, and unfeeling person may be thought to be at a comparative disadvantage with a person who we say is "in touch with" her emotions. In physical activities, people often report that it is better simply to act according to their feelings than to think consciously about what they are doing. To return to the example of legal controversies, legal decisions must be tempered with qualities like mercy, sympathy, and intuition if the law is truly to be just.

Similarly, in the many different contexts in which the conceptual opposition of mind and body is used, mind is sometimes the favored term, while body is sometimes more favored. There are both good and bad associations with mind in its opposition to the body, as well as good and bad associations with the body in its opposition to the mind. Thus we favor body over mind when we prefer the solid, practical, down-to-earth person to the impractical dreamer, the effete intellectual, or the pedant. Conversely, we may favor mind over body if the body is associated with the dangerous elements of passion, or with earthly troubles, while the mind is associated with reason and the more honored "life of the mind." Under this network of associations, the philistine or savage is unfavorably compared to the person of culture, and the grasping merchant to the dispassionate scholar. It follows that the same conceptual opposition can have quite different meanings depending upon the context of associations combined with it. The savage can be noble or brutish, the person of culture wicked or civilized, depending upon the play of associations. The power of ideology, then, seems to come from its ability to emphasize some of these conflicting associations to the exclusion of others.

Let us call the preferred or privileged term in a conceptual opposition the dominant term and the other term the subordinate term. Let us call associations of superior authority or superior value of a term in relation to its opposite "associations of superiority" or "superior associations" and associations in which the term has lesser authority or lesser value in its relation to its opposite "associations of inferiority" or "inferior associations." We can thus state our point more generally: The terms in a conceptual opposition have both superior and inferior associations, depending upon their place in different networks of conceptual oppositions. When a conceptual opposition is used in a network of evaluative or hierarchical oppositions, one term is dominant and the other sub the inferior associations are deemphasized or suppressed. At the same time, the inferior associations of the subordinate term are manifested and the superior associations are deemphasized or suppressed. Even though the other associations are forgotten in the process of buttressing a particular hierarchy or comparative evaluation, they do not disappear. The deemphasized associations of the dominant and subordinate terms do not vanish. They are simply suppressed or forgotten in the particular associational network. They will emerge again in some other cultural context. They can also be used to attack or to deconstruct the evaluative hierarchy. Thus the networks of association that the structuralist identifies have a certain ideological force. But this force is hardly immune from attack. It can always be undermined by bringing into play an alternative network of associations in which some of the previously suppressed associations are brought to light.

Conceptual oppositions like those of mind and body or reason and passion appear in culture in many different ways that look conflicting and contradictory if they are examined together. Traditional patriarchal attitudes provide a good example of how the same conceptual oppositions are employed in quite differ privileges the male over the female, although, as I shall discuss in a moment, this general privileging is accompanied by privileging the female in distinct and limited areas of cultural life. The conceptual opposition of mind versus body is used in a patriarchal ideology in two ways-- one that connects the superior associations of the mind with the male and one that connects the superior associations of the body with the male. The first way simultaneously connects the inferior associations of body with the female, while the second does so for the inferior associations of mind.

Thus, if we take the homology male : female :: mind : body :: reason : passion, we obtain a familiar set of patriarchal stereotypes: Men are reasonable while women are too emotional. Men can distance themselves from a situation and consider its merits abstractly, while women are too contextual and too caught up in the feelings generated by a situation. Men think, women feel. In each of these stereotypes, the male association is preferred, and thus the associations of mind are preferred to those of the body. Yet if we now consider the homology male : female:: body : mind:: active : passive, we can produce another set of patriarchal stereotypes in which the male association is still favored, even though it is now conjoined to the body. Thus women cannot do jobs that require the strength of men, men are practical while women are impractical, men act while women worry, men work while women gossip, and so on. Here the associations linked to the body are preferred to those of the mind. Jeanne Schroeder has summed up this phenomenon aptly when she states that in patriarchal thought, a thing is privileged not because it is male, but is called "male" because it is privileged.13

One might wonder how patriarchy can operate successfully if it employs a conceptual opposition like mind and body in completely contrary ways. Why doesn't the apparent contradiction of privileging and then deprivileging the same term in different contexts lead to the intellectual incoherence of patriarchal thought and thus destroy its power over our imaginations? This situation is puzzling only if we assume that a way of thinking is powerful because it is coherent or orderly. But as I have argued, cultural software is the product of cumulative conceptual bricolage. It is not a rationally designed structure of conceptual relationships, but a historical jerry-built product. Patriarchy, like the panda's thumb, is designoid rather than designed. It may have the surface appearance of design, but closer inspection reveals its historical and adventitious development.

The network of conceptual oppositions that we identify with patriarchy is the product of repeated applications of a relatively small number of conceptual oppositions in new and different situations. Conceptual oppositions can be used in many different ways and contexts because their terms have many different features and many different associations. Conceptual oppositions, in other words, are like versatile tools that can be used in many different ways for many different tasks, with correspondingly different results, and corresponding ad female, dark and light are employed over and over again to understand various features of the cultural world. As a result they are repeatedly stamped, like a marker, onto many different aspects of human culture, and the products that they ex associations with them as they are in turn used to explain or understand further aspects of culture. In this way, conceptual oppositions like mind and body or male and female become ubiquitous through recursion.

Thus our cultural understanding of gender is the result both of the many different conceptual oppositions used to understand the opposition of male and female, and of the many uses of the opposition of male and female to under stand other aspects of culture. This process will evidence no grand design, although in hindsight people may see pattern and order; it may even look as if culture is the result of a grand patriarchal conspiracy. Yet once we recognize the historical construction of patriarchy, we should be surprised by its relative coherence and consistency, rather than by any lack of these features.

Nested Privileging

We have just seen that conceptual oppositions can be used in conflicting ways to buttress a comparative hierarchy or evaluation. We should now note the converse phenomenon: a network of conceptual oppositions does not privilege the same elements to the same degree in all cases. Consider once again the example of judges and juries. The cultural characterization of judges and juries that we have been examining generally privileges the judge over the jury to the extent that it views juries as ruled by passion and in need of judicial control. Yet this general ideological privileging is not a claim that judges are superior to juries in every respect. Indeed, ideological privileging often works by designating particular areas in which the subordinated term appears to be dominant or privileged in some way. A large-scale ideological privileging of judges over juries contains smaller-scale areas or pockets where ideology attributes superior associations to juries.

The system of cultural beliefs about American judges and juries that we have been examining assumes that juries and judges have their proper roles and their proper places in a scheme of adjudication. Although judges need to supervise juries, juries have specific tasks to perform in the American trial system. The system relies on the jury to resolve conflicts of testimony, to judge the credibility of witnesses, and to apply concepts like sympathy, intuition, common sense, and "rough justice." These tasks are considered inappropriate for the judge unless the parties have agreed to a bench trial. If the parties have not so agreed, it is improper for the judge to usurp the jury's role, even though the judge is in charge of controlling the jury and ensuring that it conforms to reason and law. If a judge improperly takes a factual question away from a jury and substitutes her own judgments of fact, for example, a higher court will usually reverse her. In short, within certain specified boundaries, the jury has a role that it performs better than the judge, or, more accurately, in which it has greater moral, political, or institutional authority to act than the judge.

It is therefore incorrect to say that the privileging of judges over juries is systematic in every area of the legal system. Juries and not judges are the privileged institution in some aspects of the trial process. This privileging is limited, however; it is of a secondary or subsidiary order. Although juries have positive associations in particular areas of the system, these areas of the system are in turn subordinated to the areas where judges are privileged over juries. The subordinated term, in short, is awarded first prize, but only in second-class contests. The jury is celebrated as long as, and to the extent that, it knows its place and performs the tasks assigned to it under the larger ideological schema. An ideological schema therefore works not only by evaluation but also by distribution--that is, it assigns particular places or situations in which the subordinated term will receive positive evaluations or some limited degree of hierarchical position or authority.

One can see the process of distribution at work in the context of traditional patriarchal stereotypes about men and women. Traditional patriarchy associates the opposition of male and female with the oppositions of the market and the family, or the public world of work and the private world of the home. This reflects the homology male : female:: market : family:: public : private:: out patriarchy, women are not devalued in all areas of life. Rather, they are specifically valued for their con traditional stereotypes, men are thought incompetent at, or at least not as skilled as women in, the tasks to which women are assigned--housework and child rearing. According to traditional patriarchal views, married men who become full-time "househusbands" are devalued accordingly. They are subjected to social obloquy because under traditional stereotypes they are regarded as lazy, unambitious, parasitic, or effeminate.

Men, of course, do work in the house even within traditional patriarchal stereotypes. This is reflected in a mediation or subcategorization of the original homology. Thus male : female:: public world of work : home:: men's house be "handy around the house," but this does not refer to child care or to cleaning and cooking but rather to a type of "housework" that is appropriate for men--tasks like repairing machines or electronic equipment, carpentry, plumbing, mowing the lawn, and so on. (In than work in the house, which uncannily reflects the homology of male : female :: public : private:: outside : inside.) Under traditional stereotypes, it is thought unusual or even unfeminine for women to engage in this type of activity, even though such tasks are also clearly "housework" in the most literal sense.

When men engage in traditionally female housework, they are subjected to a "double whammy." This double whammy also involves a form of conceptual mediation or subcategorization, but it works in the opposite way from the example of the "handyman." The idea of being handy around the house is a conceptual mediation that preserves male privilege by conceptualizing certain work as male even though it is associated with the home. On the other hand, the phenomenon of the househusband, who deliberately undertakes tradition patriarchal male roles. The mediation is therefore viewed as a bad example, deviant behavior or incompetent performance in two directions. First, househusbands are viewed as working in a sphere inappropriate to their talents. So they are as incompetent at housework and child rearing, or at least less competent than women are. Second, because they adopt "women's work," they are acting in an "unmanly" fashion. They are assumed to lack manly virtues or to be failures at living up to expectations of male identity. The double whammy is the double penalty for crossing a boundary established by an association of two conceptual oppositions-it involves a penalty assessed from both sides of the association. In this case, it is the belief that a man who does women's work is a comparative failure both at doing this kind of work and at being a man.

The double penalty works equally in the other direction. Women who adopt roles, traits, or attitudes that are assigned to men are subject to criticism in two directions. First, their performance in the male occupation and role is suspect. Second, they are criticized as unfeminine. Moreover, even their traits and attitudes are interpreted in negative terms. This is possible because traits and attitudes have both positive and negative associations. Consider, for example, a woman who is relatively unemotional. This trait violates the homology male : female:: reason : passion. Thus she may be criticized as being unfeminine. But she may also be assigned the negative traits associated with lack of emotion: coldness, dullness, ruthlessness, and secretiveness, whereas a male with a similar countenance might be assigned the positive associations of stability, reasonableness, dependability, and depth.

Nested forms of privilege and evaluation are also present in American race relations. At the beginning of this chapter I noted the homology white : black :: knowledgeable : ignorant. The existence of knowledgable, intelligent blacks presents a problem for this homology, which is solved through a nested privileging. Knowledgeable and intelligent blacks are viewed as more "white" than other blacks. Nevertheless, they are also regarded as somehow less accomplished than the most accomplished whites. Stephen Carter has described a "Best Black" syndrome, under which black professional and educational ac­complishments are routinely judged against the standard of other blacks but not against those of whites.14 A successful black scholar in a particular field thus becomes the best black but not the best scholar. This phenomenon offers black intellectuals some degree of status, but it is an inferior grade of status that ultimately suggests that blacks cannot compete with whites.15 Blacks are considered successful, but only within a greatly circumscribed arena of com by race-conscious affirmative action programs, but it probably existed long before these programs arose.

More generally, black accomplishments and culture are often valued and appreciated in relatively narrow segments of society (sports and music, for example) which are subordinated to more "serious" concerns. Association of whiteness with the mind and blackness with the body leads to expectations that blacks will naturally excel in things having to do with the body or with the emotions, whereas whites will excel in things having to do with the mind, with intelligence, and with mental discipline.

This opposition between mind and body is reproduced even in the world of American sports, where black talent is particularly valued. Black athletes are thought to display "natural talent," but white athletes are said to become ac work, emotional maturity, and mental toughness. In this way black accomplishments and black culture are permitted to reign, but only in second-class fiefdoms.

Traditional attitudes toward homosexuality offer excellent examples of the ideological power of conceptual homologies and the operation of the double penalty. Many theorists argue that discrimination against homosexuals is linked to the preservation of traditional gender roles and stereotypes, which are both heterosexual and patriarchal.16 Masculinity and femininity are defined in terms of attraction to the opposite sex. This produces the homology male : female :: attracted to women : attracted to men:: attractive to women : attractive to men. This homology, in turn, is linked with the homology male : female:: manly feminine:: dominant : subordinate. Homosexuality, and especially male ho traditional male and female gender identities and hence the clarity of appropriate male and female social roles, authority, and power. By confusing the network of gender associations, gay men appear both to surrender their masculine privileges and threaten the masculine privileges of other males. In like fashion, lesbians threaten the conceptual order because they refuse their roles as wives and mothers within a traditional heterosexual family.17

Thus homosexuality mediates between the conceptual network of associations that define femininity and masculinity. But because this mediation is seen as destabilizing, it is interpreted pejoratively and assessed a double penalty. Homosexuality is viewed by heterosexual culture both as a failed case of het gender crossing.18 This is because gen of desire for the other gender, yielding the conceptual homology heterosexual male : homosexual male:: masculine : feminine:: better example of masculinity : worse example of masculinity. A classic stereotype of homosexuals, for example, is that they display cross-gender behavior: lesbians are viewed as aggressively masculine, and gay men are viewed as effeminate. Homosexual men are stereotyped as wanting to dress in women's clothing or as seeking "feminine" jobs. Because this is not a man's "true nature" (which is to desire women and be associated with "manly" things) the homosexual man is doubly a failure. He is a failure as a man (because he does not desire women and attempts to behave like them); and he is a failure as a woman (because he is a man).

As part of the double penalty, homosexual men and women are also as negative stereotypes of the opposite sex. Thus gay men are not only viewed as failures as men but are also described in terms of the negative stereotypes of women--as being bitchy or passive, impulsive or overly emotional. Conversely, lesbians are not only viewed as failures at femininity but are also assigned negative associations of masculinity, like aggressiveness and coldness.

Categories as Nested Oppositions

Structuralist analysis shows us that networks of conceptual oppositions produce ideological effects because hierarchies of value, power, or authority are justified and sustained by their association with other hierarchies. A second type of ideological effect stems from the division of the social world into exclusive and opposed categories that are then opposed hierarchically.

To discuss these ideological effects, I will use deconstruction. Many kinds of critiques have come to be called deconstructive. In this chapter, however, I refer to my own theory of deconstruction, which, as I have argued elsewhere, makes the most sense out of many of the textual techniques employed by Derida and other deconstructionists. 19 This approach to deconstruction is called the theory of nested oppositions.

A nested opposition is a conceptual opposition in which the two terms bear a relationship of mutual dependence as well as differentiation. Put metaphorically, it is a conceptual opposition where the opposed terms "contain each other." This relation of containment or mutual dependence may take one of several different forms, including similarity to the opposite; being a special case of the opposite; conceptual overlap with the opposite; historical, conceptual, or ontological de from the opposite; or transformation into the opposite over time.20 These relations do not have a single property in com resemblance." The idea that conceptual opposites are nested is very old-mystical versions of this insight may be found in pre-Socratic thought in the West and in Taoist philosophy in the East.21 The idea of a nested opposition is vividly captured in the symbol of yin and yang, which are traditionally portrayed as tearshapes of opposite colors that seem to grow out of each other. In many portrayals of the yin/yang symbol, a small dot of the opposite color is placed in each figure in order to emphasize the mutual similarity and dependence of opposites.

The theory of nested oppositions can be stated simply: every conceptual opposition can be reinterpreted as some form of nested opposition. To deconstruct a conceptual opposition is to view that opposition as a nested opposition. It is simultaneously to recognize the similarity and difference between opposites or the mutual dependence and differentiation of opposites. The idea of mutual dependence and differentiation between concepts underlies Derrida's notion of difference.22

Although the theory of nested oppositions claims that every conceptual opposition can be viewed as a form of nested opposition, it does not assert that all nested oppositions are false oppositions or false dichotomies. The fact that two concepts are thought to be similar or mutually dependent in some context does not mean that they are identical in all contexts. This is a confusion of similarity and identity; it betrays an insensitivity to the many changes in context that are the primary concern of deconstruction.

The analysis can work in the opposite direction: we can also find difference among things normally judged to be similar. Instead of discovering that the terms of a conceptual opposition bear a relation of similarity, we can discover a conceptual opposition among things that were previously judged to be similar. In some contexts of judgment we do not notice any conceptual opposition at all but see only similar things. The theory of nested oppositions reminds us that this similarity can become a difference-and hence a conceptual opposition--if the context of judgment is sufficiently altered. Just as deconstruction does not show that all conceptual oppositions are false dichotomies, it does not show that all similarities are false unifies. The latter conclusion would also be insensitive to the subtleties of contextual judgment.23

Although every conceptual opposition can be seen as a nested opposition, we often do not recognize the nested nature of such oppositions. Thus an important ideological mechanism is the suppression of similarity within con suppression of difference within categories. Indeed, to some degree all thought necessarily suppresses the nested nature of conceptual oppositions. The very act of categorization involves the creation of a conceptual opposition (things inside versus outside the category) and the sup or dependence across the conceptual boundary). This is yet another example of how an ideological mechanism makes use of the same conceptual tools as so-called ordinary or nonideological thought. Indeed, we might even say that the opposition of ideological and nonideological thinking forms a nested opposition whose nestedness has been forgotten.

Suppression and Projection

Let us apply the concept of a nested opposition to the example of judges and juries. In our previous discussion of structuralist analysis, we noted that the homology of judge : jury :: reason : passion :: law : fact :: rule of law justice in the individual case characterized the respective roles of judges and juries. We can reveal the nested nature of these oppositions in many ways. One way is to reverse the associations. We can deconstruct the homology of judge : jury:: reason : passion by showing how the judge, the law, and the rule of law itself can be the embodiment of unreasoning passion, prejudice, and partisanship, while the finder of fact, and the purveyor of justice in the individual case, the jury, is actually the embodiment of reason and fairness.

It is obvious that as judges are human, they can sometimes be prejudiced, and the rulings that they make will reflect their biases. The judge can therefore be prejudiced or swayed by passion. More fundamentally, however, the law itself can sometimes embody prejudice or unreason. This may seem strange at first because we normally associate passion and prejudice with volatility and changeableness (consider the homology reason : passion :: cool : hot:: stable volatile). Yet the prejudice or the unreason of the law is a prejudice and an unreason in a relatively fixed medium.

How can the law reflect unreason or prejudice? Sometimes the law is too harsh: it fails to take into account the special circumstances of cases, or it lumps dissimilar cases together mechanically and insensitively. In such a case, the jury may ameliorate the harshness of the law by "finding" facts that, when applied to the law, produce a less harsh result. During the era of industrialization in Britain and America, for example, the courts established tort doctrines that allowed defendants to escape liability for negligence (for example, manufacturing defective products or maintaining unsafe working conditions) if the plaintiff also contributed to her injury in any way. These doctrines had such a draconian effect that eventually juries would often "find" that the plaintiff was not negligent at all--even though the evidence indicated the contrary-- and would award her a slightly reduced amount of compensation. The sub rosa manipulation of facts by juries might thus be compared to the Solomonic judgment an attack of unreason but actually conceals a deeper rationality.

Indeed, sometimes the law may be not simply clumsy and insensitive but actively unjust--it may be the product of bigotry or prejudice or a denial of human rights. In such cases a jury may refuse to enforce the law as written, a process called jury nullification. One of the most famous trials in American history involved the prosecution during the colonial era of the newspaper editor Peter Zenger for seditious libel--that is, for accusing a government official of improper conduct or otherwise holding the official up to public scorn. Under the existing colonial law, the crime of seditious libel was so harsh that one could not even defend oneself on the grounds that the matter asserted was true. Over repeated threats by the sitting judge, who was determined to force a conviction, the defense counsel argued to the jury that the concept of free speech required the right to speak the truth without fear of prosecution, not libel. The jury refused to enforce the law and acquitted Zenger. The origins of free speech doctrine in America thus began with an act of jury nullification. Indeed, Akhil Amar has argued that the right to trial by jury was later placed in the American Bill of Rights as a recognition of the importance of citizen juries as defenders of human rights through jury nullification.24 In these circumstances, then, the jury may seem to be a more reasonable institution than the judge or even the law, and it may even be necessary for the jury to exercise control over the law. The possibility of justified jury nullification or sub rosa manipulation of the facts subverts the homology of reason : passion :: judge : jury :: law : fact :: controlling : needing to be controlled. It does so by offering a new homology in its place: reason passion :: jury : judge :: fact : law :: controlling : needing to be controlled.25

Our deconstruction suggests an important feature of conceptual homologies. The identification of judges with law and reason and juries with facts and passion is not only an explanation, evaluation, or hierarchization. It is also a suppression and a projection. Associating the judge with reason and things associated with reason (for example, the rule of law) simultaneously suppresses elements of judicial behavior that might be unreasonable or "passionate," and projects them onto the judge's opposite, the jury. In psychoanalysis, the term projection is used to describe the patient who sees in others traits, characteristics, or desires that she does not wish to acknowledge in herself. The homology

judge : jury :: rule of law : justice in the individual case :: reason : passion

involves a different kind of projection. It is a suppression or a forgetting of certain traits or characteristics that might apply to one side of the opposition by assigning them to the other side of opposition. By identifying the judge and the law with reason in opposition to passion, the homology forgets, deem that inheres in judges and in the law itself. We might also call this process a distribution: it distributes reason to one side of the homology and passion to the other.

Suppression and projection help to maintain a hierarchy or comparative evaluation in a conceptual opposition. The reason/passion opposition subordinates the latter term to the former. Passion, in its more powerful and dangerous forms, is a threat to reaon; if it is to be useful and nonthreatening to reason, it must be seen as under reason's control. In order to be seen as under control, passion must be externalized and projected onto an Other that can be disciplined, subordinated, or supervised. Control through externalization requires that passion (unreason) must be located outside of the materials of the law and the system of rules. Hence the prejudice that might be located in the judge (or the legislature) is projected instead onto the jury, where it can be supervised and subordinated. This control can take the form of actual legal doctrines and institutions, or it can simply rest in the general sense that it is juries and not judges who present a problem that needs addressing. Without this projection, the nonrational element might be seen as emerging from the judges themselves or the law itself; this would destabilize and delegitimate the view of law as reasoned, ordered, and impersonal; it would undermine the comparative evaluation or hierarchy that supports judges and the law.

The deconstructive analysis of homologies has a curious consequence. We have deconstructed the homology of

judge : jury :: reason : passion :: rule of law : justice in the individual case

by substituting a counterhomology. It follows that this new homology, precisely because it is a homology, will also involve its own form of suppression and projection. Thus our attempted subversion is as deconstructible as the original homology it attempted to subvert. We can deconstruct our deconstruction by noting that the portrait of the wise and rational jury it paints is much too optimistic. Few subjects can arouse the concern and indignation of lawyers and judges more than jury nullification. Judges are particularly incensed by lawyers who dare to argue, as did the defense counsel in the Zenger case, that the jury may disregard the law and substitute its own judgment about what is reason Such an argument, they might insist, strikes at the very heart of the concept of a rule of law; more practically, it also strikes at the heart of the control of judges and lawyers over the lay jury. It is no accident that judges make clear repeatedly in their jury instructions that jury members have sworn an oath to obey the law, and that they must apply it whatever their private reservations about the case. (Note the homology implied here of public law private opinion:: reason : passion.)

The nullifying jury is the epitome of the "runaway" jury, the jury that takes the law into its own hands. Such a jury is the embodiment of unreasoning passion; it is an invitation to anarchy. If a jury can nullify a verdict, to protect human rights, it can also nullify a verdict to satisfy its own racial or religious prejudice. If a jury can find Peter Zenger innocent of seditious libel, it can also nullify a homicide charge against a white racist who murders a black civil rights protester. Only adherence to the judge's instructions, and hence to the rule of law, can constrain the prejudices and passions of the jury. If the original ho projected passion and unreason away from the judge and the law onto the jury, our deconstruction of it projects and distorts in the opposite direction. The jury is now viewed romantically as the guardian of rough justice and common sense, while the unreasoning and dangerous elements of passion are projected onto legal administrators and the content of the law itself.

Neither the deconstruction of the original homology nor its reassertion captures the whole truth about the relation of judges and juries. Each homology involves a forgetting, a suppression, and a distribution of different sides of an opposition to different elements within the homology. Nor is this an accidental feature of this example. Indeed, I claim that this forgetting, this suppression, and this distribution constitute a commonplace ideological mechanism.

A homology distributes opposed properties or concepts (like reason and passion) between two other opposed properties or concepts (like judge and jury). This distribution is always both a projection and a suppression. The homology A : B :: X : Y neglects the Y-ness of A and assigns (distributes) it to B; it forgets the X-ness of B and conveys it to A instead. This process works in reverse as well: the A-ness of Y is forgotten and distributed to X, while the B-ness of X is similarly forgotten and distributed to Y. When one finds linked together a large network of associated oppositions-for example, that of

judge : jury :: law : fact:: reason : passion :: rule of law : individuated justice

and so on--it becomes clear that many different forms of suppression and projection are involved and hence many different types of deconstructions be come possible.

Indeed, the possible deconstruction of the homology we have been work virtually limitless. For example, our discussion so far has left unquestioned the assumption that passion is a dangerous thing that must be controlled by reason. We merely argued that the dangers of unchecked passion can be present in judges and in the law itself as much as in juries. Thus we still were contrasting undesirable elements of passion to desirable features of reason. But we might challenge these assumptions about reason and passion. We can do this in several ways.

First, we might note that reason in the law can take undesirable forms reasoning, rigid formalism, and "logic chopping," for example that need to be checked by desirable forms of passion, qualities like mercy, sympathy, and equity. The development of courts of equity to supplement and supervise courts of law is a historical embodiment of this recognition. (We should note that historically courts of equity became just as rigid and technical in their doctrines as the law courts that they were designed to supplement. This suggests that law is continually in need of equity, even in those institutions and doctrines originally designed to promote it.) We thus might argue that reason has dangerous and deleterious aspects that need to be checked by the virtues of passion. This suggests that the just judge, the one who performs her proper function, does not put aside passion and the qualities associated with it but rather incorporates them into her judging.26 Similarly, as justice Oliver Wendell Holmes believed, law gains its ultimate legitimacy and intelligibility from its reflection of the sentiments of the larger community.27 This deconstruction thus subverts the earlier homology by uncovering the good or praise asserting their centrality.

Second, we could distinguish between the idea of reason, which we continue to hold a good and desirable thing, and its concrete historical embodiment in institutions like law. We can argue that what passes for reason in law is some conceals its own forms of unreason, bias, and prejudice. In other words, although reason in the abstract may be desirable, its concrete manifestations often possess significant elements of undesirable passion. Conversely, what people think is merely the exercise of passion and emotion by juries and those entrusted with discretionary decisionmaking often turns out to have sound principles of reason behind it. This type of deconstruction works by driving a wedge between an abstract ideal and the concrete embodiment of the ideal. It also attempts to uncover a kind of suppression and projection. By identifying a concrete phenomenon with an ideal (identifying, for example, an actual legal institution with the idea of reason) people downplay the ways in which the concrete phenomenon fails to live up to the ideal model.

Third, we have so far assumed that reason and passion are separate entities. We can also show that the opposition between them is nested by showing that reason and passion depend upon each other, or that concrete examples of reason and emotion have a great deal in common that goes unnoticed .28

Finally, we can show that the opposition between reason and passion is nested by showing how the two terms produce each other or are transformed into each other over time. The reason embodied in law, for example, becomes a kind of passion (prejudice) unless it is made flexible and is subject to questioning and reconceptualization over time. The same is true of beliefs held for a long period of time without question, or of unquestioned obedience to an authority that represents reasoned inquiry.29

Conversely, the passion embodied in a jury's act of nullification--as in the Zenger trial--may cause people to change their minds and see the greater reason in the free speech position espoused by the jury. We see the beneficial effect of passion on reason in many other situations as well: protest and civil disobedience are often necessary to bring home to the audience the injustice of current conditions and laws. Often a highly charged emotional experience (like witnessing a person who is helpless, injured, or suffering) allows people to "see reason" and to change their minds about matters they had been firmly committed to. Thus an experience that touches us emotionally may melt a congealed prejudice that goes by the name of reason and lead to a more reasonable outlook. These examples suggest both that reason can degenerate into prejudice and that passion or emotion can be the wellspring of a more just reason.

Conceptual oppositions have power over human thought because they facilitate thought; and this facilitation is the source of their ideological effects. Conceptual oppositions divide the world into comprehensible categories, but they also suppress similarities and distribute characteristics onto an opposite or an Other. Networks of oppositions help us understand and evaluate the world, but they also reinforce unjustified hierarchies of value and authority. Conceptive oppositions are necessary and deceptive, ineluctable and illusive; they are consummate examples of the equivocal nature of our cultural tools.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/16/feed 1 Chapter 9: Narrative Expectations http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/15 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/15#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:21:31 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=15 Our theory of how ideological effects are produced requires us to search for cultural heuristics with three basic features: First, they must be transmitted through social learning or communication. Second, they must be stored in the memory of many different individuals. Third, people must use them to reason about the social world. Narratives fit these three criteria particularly well. Narrative and narrative structures are ubiquitous and pervasive features of cultural life. They are easily transmitted through communication. They are deeply en this chapter, human thought uses narrative structures for a wide variety of purposes.

Narratives are pervasive forms of human thought because narrative structure is a particularly efficient form of human memory storage. Our minds are comparatively well designed to remember and understand narrative sequences. For example, people are better able to recall complex sequences of events in stories than complex lists of words and numbers. Indeed, translating information into narrative form is often an excellent method of memorization. This fact explains the importance of bards and epic poets in oral cultures, where information storage through writing is difficult, costly, or unavailable, and memorization skills are at a premium.

Human beings pick up narrative structures easily from watching and ob We naturally seem to create narrative explanations for events or abstract narrative structures from our experiences. We glean narrative structures from life; we impose narrative order on the world. For all of these reasons, the memes associated with narrative structures find a particularly hospitable environment in the ecology of human minds.

Narrative memory is memory of expectations of events in time. It is more than an ability to recall strings of sequences of events; it also involves the ability to store expectations about what usually happens under certain conditions. These expectations are coded in narrative form. People recall that A happened and then B happened, but they also remember that C is usually followed by D.

Our comparative abilities for narrative memorization have probably been shaped by evolutionary forces. Narrative memory structures are particularly useful for remembering what kinds of things are dangerous or advantageous, making complicated causal judgments about the future, determining what courses of action are helpful, recalling how to do things in a particular order, and learning and following social conventions that require sequential or script events and ex information in propositional form.

Whether or not there is an evolutionary advantage to narrative memory, human beings have a particularly well-developed capacity for it. As a result, people use narrative structures for many different mental tasks and operations. These multiple uses are examples of cultural extapation or bricolage--a mental ability or characteristic developed for one purpose is now put to many different purposes. And this particular extapation has far-reaching effects on the development of human culture.

Here are only a few of the things we use narratives for:

1. Remembering events in temporal sequences.
2. Ordering and organizing the past.
3. Explaining human action in terms of plans, goals, and intentions.
4. Understanding our own selves and motivations through autobiography.
5. Giving causal explanations of events.
6. Creating expectations about the future.
7. Internalizing expectations about how to behave in social situations and interact with others.
8. Providing scripts that tell us how to understand social situations, en conventions, and assume social roles.
9. Creating notions of what is ordinary and extraordinary, expected and unexpected, canonical and deviant in social life.
10. Accounting for deviations from what is ordinary, expected, or canonical.
11. Creating social myths and shared memories that unite groups we are a part of, frame their experience of contemporary events, and produce shared expectations about how the group is supposed to behave.

In short, narrative is simultaneously a method of memory storage, a method of framing and organizing experience, a method for indexing and retrieving information, a method of internalizing cultural expectations, and a method of explaining deviations from cultural expectations. Because narrative is such a ubiquitous tool of understanding, it can also be the source of many different and powerful ideological effects.

Narratives as Networks of Expectations

In general, narrative thought organizes the world into a sequence of events, involving characters and their actions. This is the "plot" of the narrative. The plot and its constituent elements define each other: the plot situates and makes sense of the characters, actions, and events, and these in turn help constitute the plot. Usually the characters in a narrative have reasons for what they do, and their actions have goals. The narrative either assumes or directly ascribes purposes, beliefs, and intentions to the characters. Nevertheless, purely causal stories-for example, the gradual creation of a canyon due to water erosion anthropomorphic elements in such stories--we ascribe actions to particular inanimate "characters," like a river, even though we do not believe that they have plans or goals or act with intention.

The words of a story are only surface phenomena of its narrative structure. Equally important is the set of cultural expectations behind a story; they make a story comprehensible to us and allow us to draw inferences from it. When we tell a story we do not mention everything that happened; much is left to implication. For example, if I say that I had breakfast with Mr. Smith at Joe's Cafe, I do not mention every mouthful of food I ate. My listeners naturally assume that we went to a restaurant, that someone took our order, that both of us ordered food, that we ate the food, and so on. We do not speak about such events unless there is a reason to do so. We always understand a story against a background of other expectations that are also organized and stored in narrative form.

Many simple propositional sentences are actually narratives in disguise. Con sentence, "Mr. Smith and I discussed the game over breakfast at Joe's Cafe." This sentence not only states a fact; it also tells a story. But it does so only because it implicitly draws on a whole set of cultural expectations--for example, how to have a discussion, how to eat a meal with someone else at a restaurant, what kinds of things one usually eats at breakfast, and so on.

Thus, at its most basic level, narrative structure is a structure of expectations, which are embedded in and connected to larger networks of expectations. These expectations play a dual role. First, they frame our understanding of what is happening. They give meaning to events. We attempt to understand what is happening in terms of expectations we already possess. We recognize patterns of behavior as meaningful in terms of patterns we are already familiar with. We create a story about what is happening based on stock stories- expected sequences of events--that already lie to hand. Second, the expectations that frame our understanding create the possibility of deviations from what is expected. These deviations call for explanation, and we employ stories to explain them.

Thus behind all narratives lie understandings about what is canonical, ex ordinary. These understandings are themselves narratively organ stored in sequences of actions and events: this usually follows that; this is done on Sundays and that on Mondays; this is how you are expected to behave under these conditions; and so on. But these cultural ex information in this way simultaneously de extraordinary in a situation. It creates an agenda for what does not fit our stock of existing narratives and therefore has to be explained. That explanation, in turn, will be phrased in terms of a story that ascribes motivations, intentions, and beliefs to an actor and relies on other stock stories about human behavior.

This is the dual character of narrative thinking: it focuses on, frames, and uses what is expected in human life, and it bestows legitimacy and authority on the expected. At the same time, narrative thinking lets us organize the exceptional and the unusual into a comprehensible form.1 It allows us to learn by letting us match and reconfigure old expectations in light of new experiences. In this sense, narrative thinking is a heuristic device. It is one of the most basic of cultural heuristics.

Narratives as Norms

Cultural expectations also act as norms. The word norm has two meanings--a benchmark of what is ordinary or average, and a standard of what is appropriate. Similarly, the word normal can mean what is expected and what is appropriate to a situation. Narrative thought combines these two meanings. Our cultural expectations help us understand what is happening by reference to norms of what is expected in a situation and what is appropriate to the situation. Thus cultural expectations, stored in narrative memory, help frame social reality. As Erving Goffiuan pointed out, the frame we use to understand events shapes what we believe is happening and what is socially real. Events that seem normal or obvious in one frame become bizarre or inexplicable in another.2 When the frame becomes controversial or blurred, it loses its framing character and our sense of what is socially real is disturbed.

Human beings organize their cultural behavior around expectations because this strategy saves effort in thinking and in determining how to act. Much of what we call cultural know-how involves expectations about what kind of situation we are facing and how to proceed in such a situation. Cognitive psychologists call these expectations scripts.3 A standard example of a cultural script is knowing how to order and eat a meal in a restaurant. Situational scripts save us time and energy in figuring out what is going on and what we are expected to do. They are ready-to-hand narrative constructions that we adapt to various social situations. They offer us roles to play and ways to behave. We can think of them as narratives in which we are one of the actors, plots in which we play some of the characters. Scripts do the work of Goffinan's cultural frames. They set up expectations about what things mean, and they offer a background against which events and statements can be understood. Because of our restaurant script, when the waiter says to us, "OK, what will it be?" we understand that he is asking about our order and not the nature of the universe.

Much conventional behavior is oriented around such scripts, which is another way of saying that much conventional behavior is organized around coordinated sets of cultural expectations. When people go into a restaurant, they know what is likely to happen and hence they know how to behave appropriately. Moreover, they assume that others will behave in similar or complementary ways. They assume that the waiter will approach them to take their order and not to extract their wisdom teeth. Thus most cultural understanding begins with a postulate of "situational normalcy": unless there are good reasons to the contrary, people tend to behave normally in accordance with the social situation that they believe themselves to be in, and according to the social roles expected of them in that situation.

This rule of situational normalcy underlies Paul Grice's theory of conversational interpretation. His Cooperative Principle is really a baseline of expectations about communication: we assume, without evidence to the contrary, that communications will be brief, truthful, relevant, and perspicuous.4 When people deviate from these expectations, they cause us to search for explanations. Because people have departed from the ordinary scripts of conversation, we must make sense of their behavior in some other way.

Social scripts offer background expectations about what is happening, what is ordinary, and what things mean. These expectations literally go without say do not usually speak about them. That is why our replies to the waiter are brief and perspicuous, to use Grice's terminology. Indeed, it defies cultural expectations for people to attempt to articulate the nature of a script that they are following in detail. Suppose a waiter approaches us and we say: "I see that you are a waiter. You are here to ask me what food I would like. The piece of paper in your hand is a menu. Give it to me and I shall tell you what I would like to order." The waiter would think we were crazy, or obnoxious, or performing some sort of psychological experiment. To talk about frames is to make them lose their character as frames--to make them a possible subject of analysis and contestation, which must be framed by some other set of expectations. Much deconstructive argument--and many artistic effects-- involve shifting cultural frames or making us self-conscious about them in order to disturb our sense of normalcy.

What is ordinary about the ordinary is precisely that we don't comment on its ordinariness, don't feel that it needs explanation or explication. Only deviations from the normal are worthy of comment. Cultural know-how, in this sense, is the ability to understand the ordinary and have our expectations confirmed by experience. Conversely, to lack cultural know-how is to fail to recognize the ordinary as ordinary, to lack expectations about what is going on and how to behave. So if a person asked us, "Why did that man walk over to you and give you that piece of paper?" and we thought that she was sincere in asking the question, we would think that she did not understand the cultural norms involved in eating in a restaurant. The remark would be evidence that this person lacked a certain kind of cultural know-how.

Matters are different, however, with acts or events that seem to deviate from the ordinary or the canonical. These things create puzzles that need to be solved or given meaning. Here again narrative structure plays a dual role. Narrative structures offer norms that give meaning to human action, but they also create the possibility of deviations from these norms. People must also be able to make sense of these departures as meaningful human actions. They also use narratives for this purpose.

When we encounter a person who seems to be acting in an unusual or unexpected fashion, and we ask why, we usually get an explanation in terms of a story that ascribes reasons, beliefs, and intentions to the actors involved. That is how one might account for the earlier example in which a customer elaborately described his actions to the waiter: "He told the waiter all these things because he is a social psychologist," or "He said all these things because he is a jerk." Often these explanations are offered in terms of their appropriateness to some other script or set of cultural expectations: for example, how psychologists test people's reactions by doing strange things, how uncouth people tend to tease others, and so on. These actions make sense in terms of these alter scripts. Justifications and excuses are familiar forms of narrative explanations. To excuse or justify behavior is to tell a particular kind of story about beliefs, intentions, and actions.

Yet narrative is not only a framework for making behavior meaningful; it is also a framework for understanding the psychology of others and attributing mental states to them. Narrative structures organize our use of psychological concepts like purpose, desire, intention, and belief. When we explain people's behavior through narratives, we simultaneously ascribe purposes, desires, in the restaurant because he heard that his house was on fire"; "He arrived at the meeting thirty minutes late because he wanted to get an advantage in the negotiations." Narratives ascribe mental states to others (or to oneself) to justify or account for deviations from what is culturally canonical or socially expected.5 Conversely, our ascriptions of belief and purpose make sense because they implicitly rely on background cultural expectations. It makes sense to believe that a person has certain beliefs or desires because of the way she reacts against the background of existing cultural conventions. In this way narratives mediate between beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and actions on the one hand, and existing cultural conventions on the other. They understand the former in terms of the latter. In short, narrative structures are a medium through which three facets of human life are understood and explained in terms of one another: (1) cultural conventions, (2) human behavior, and (3) beliefs, plans, goals, and desires.

Narratives as Stock Stories

As forms of cultural software, narrative structures can be passed to others through communication, imitation, or other forms of social learning. Many narrative structures are transmitted through mass media, through artistic ex legends. Much art is based on narrative structures, and our understanding of art is based on absorption and appropriation of these narrative structures. Adults and especially children like to hear stories told over and over again, just as they enjoy hearing a song played repeatedly. Listening to a familiar story can be pleasurable because it fulfills our expectations. Hearing new stories reinforces or alters the existing stock of narrative structures that we use to make sense of what is going on in the world. Art manipulates and plays on our storehouse of stories, retelling them with inter And art can also replenish and expand our stock of stories by exposing us to new narrative structures, new ways of behaving, and new ways of understanding.

Although art is a crucial method of memetic transfer, one of the most important ways that we assimilate scripts and social expectations is through watching other people. The transmission of narrative structures through ob spread of memes differs from a simple copying of information. Usually people do not transmit social expectations like messages that are coded and uncoded. Rather, watching others acting out social scripts in front of us creates expectations in our own memories. Moreover, because people have different bodies of experience and different sets of prior expectations, they carry away different things from their social encounters. They assimilate behaviors and produce expectations in slightly different ways. As a result, each person in a given culture will have a slightly different set of social scripts, with slightly different expectations, and therefore each will un others slightly differently. Furthermore, social scripts are not simply routines that we must invariably follow blindly. They are platforms for innovation and improvisation. Precisely because narrative structures give us a sense of the world around us, they enable further development. People play and experiment with narratives and social scripts, producing new expectations that can, in turn, be passed on to others.

People employing similar narrative structures will understand the world in similar ways. Shared social meanings and conventions are not supraindividual entities but result from the interaction of distributions of relatively similar memes. There is no grand restaurant script in the sky, only different but relatively similar restaurant scripts stored in each of us. Nevertheless, these scripts often have an interlocking character. Our expectations about restaurants in from others and what it is normal for others to expect from us. We not only expect that some things are the norm, we also expect that other people also expect that they are the norm, and that other people also expect that we expect that they are the norm. Interlocking expectations can have a stabilizing effect on social conventions and keep them from diverging too widely.

As each of us grows up, we gain a library of social scripts and stock stories. At any time we have an enormous number of stories and parts of stories in our memory. When we want to understand what is happening in society, we try to understand events in terms of an existing story or script. Our recognition of events as an example of an existing storyline creates expectations about how events are to continue. Events may surprise us, and then we try to reinterpret them as following yet another story line. In this way, we try to assimilate what is new in terms of what is old, improvising and playing different stories off against one another to explain deviations from our expectations.

It is important to emphasize the creative aspect of this process. Narrative understanding is not simply a matter of rote; it is also a framework for improvisation and growth. Our library of stories and scripts is constantly increasing. We modify stories and scripts in the light of new experiences; these modifications become part of our memory, used for understanding subsequent events. Suppose, for example, that we go to an Ethiopian restaurant where no silver Over time we may develop a special set of expectations for Ethiopian restaurants. We may even be surprised if we find a fork on the table at the next Ethiopian restaurant, and we may conclude that the owners are catering to the tourist crowd. (Note how we ascribe motivations to explain deviations from what has now become culturally canonical.) New experiences rewrite our storehouse of narrative expectations, and we improvise on old stories to respond to them. In this fashion our cultural software is continually rewritten. An increasing variety of narratives adds flex consequently our understanding of them. A person who has "seen it all before" is a person who has many different stories to draw on.

Like other forms of cultural software, new stories are created from older ones through bricolage. Parts of stories or scripts may be combined or grafted onto each other to form new ones. As a result, many of the stories and scripts that we possess bear structural resemblances to one another, even if they are used for widely different purposes. In the same way, we should also expect that many narratives and scripts widely dispersed in the larger culture will be strikingly similar, because they are common descendants of older stories and scripts that have been adapted to new ends.

Narrative understanding is a simultaneous process of organization and matching. To see the present as connected to the past we must already have begun organizing it into narrative form. There is more than one way that one can do this, because every event has many different "hooks" or indices that can connect it to many different stories or scripts. In my memory of a dinner I may recall that the waiter seemed rude, while my friend the oenophile will remember the quality of the wine. I connect this meal to previous stories of rude waiters while she connects it to previous experiences of great wines. Thus it is possible for different people to remember the same events in different ways because each sees its similarities to different kinds of stories and stores it dif memory.6

Narrative structures shape our thought because they organize our memory of experience and our methods of memory retrieval.7 Narrative structures provide "boxes" into which subsequent events can be categorized, indexed, and stored for later use. Stories and scripts are linked to other stories and scripts through this process. Experiences that do not conform to our existing forms of memory storage are more likely to be lost from memory.8 Indeed, large amounts of our everyday experience are discarded because they do not mesh with our modes of storage. Many aspects of life will be lost to us or re interpretive matrix for categorization and memorization. Just as a pigeon cannot make sense of Hamlet, so a person with only a very small set of stories and scripts will not glean or recall very much information from her experiences.

Not only do we tend to retain memories that conform to our existing narrative structures, we also tend to alter our memories to conform to our canonical expectations about and representations of the social world. Memories that cannot be altered to fit to our expectations may be forgotten or may be deliberately highlighted as exceptions that need explanation. In one famous experiment, college students were asked to tell each other a Native American tale. They either forgot the elements that were unconventional from their own cultural standpoint or transmuted them into something more conventional and expected.9 This result is hardly surprising. If we don't understand what is going on in an experience, it is more difficult to remember it; it is much easier to understand events in terms of our existing stock of stories. This is consistent with an evolutionary model of memetic development: our minds form an ecology in which certain memes are more likely than others to take root and thrive.

On the other hand, we can, with sufficient effort, gain new sets of cultural expectations. This will change our mental ecology. If we study Native American culture, the previously alien elements of the story gain significance for us and we can remember them when we retell the story. We may even highlight them to our audience as an example of what is distinctive about the culture.

Political and legal rhetoric gains much of its power from these features of narrative framing. People naturally attempt to explain gaps in events for which they have no direct evidence, or events that they do not wholly understand, in terms of familiar stories and scripts. Once they have settled upon a story to frame events, it can exercise great power over their imagination, leading them to make unwarranted inferences and prejudicial judgments.

During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, Professor Anita Hill accused him of sexually insensitive conduct. Because of conflicting testimony, it was difficult to know whom to believe. Thomas's defenders, however, invoked the plot of a contemporary movie, Fatal Attraction, to paint Hill as a spurned lover who was seeking to destroy her former boss's reputation and career. Hill's accusations could then be reinterpreted as those of a calculating, unstable vixen. Thomas himself invoked a stock story about whites who attempt to keep "uppity blacks" in their place, and he accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of staging a "hi-tech lynching." These narrative framings had enormous rhetorical power and may have helped turn the tide in favor of Thomas's eventual confirmation.

Trial lawyers have long understood the power of narrative framing. They attempt to lay out a story of how events occurred during their opening arguments in the hope that the jurors will use the story to frame the evidence they hear. Getting the jury to accept one side's story as the most plausible frame tantamount to winning the case. That is because once a story is accepted, it is used to filter and organize all of the evidence subsequently presented. Like most people, jurors tend to discount or ignore evidence that does not fit their organizing story, and they will alter or simplify information so that it does conform. Evidence that can be made to fit actually tends to reinforce the power of the story, because it seems to confirm it, even though the same piece of evidence could also be consistent with a very different story. Because narrative framing is so powerful, lawyers faced with the other side's story realize that if they are to win the case they must offer an equally plausible counterstory that also fits most of the evidence. Often the only way to dislodge a narrative is with another narrative that also fits most of the facts but shows them in a very different light.

Personal Narratives

Judgments of human character are also organized around narratives. We form expectations about people's behavior and ascribe attitudes to them that are consistent with these expectations. When we describe what individuals are like, we often do so in terms of stories about the sorts of things they usually do or the kinds of things we normally expect of them. We often judge people and explain them to others through anecdotes that reveal their characteristic behaviors and attitudes. Family members often have stock stories that they tell about other members. These stories not only describe the character of particular family members but also their place in the family, as beloved firstborn son or black sheep.10 We also use anecdotes to characterize organizations and even entire cultures. Travel guides often contain a wealth of anecdotes that create expectations about how members of a given country are likely to behave.

Just as social scripts are made from fragments of older ones, our expectations about people are created from expectations about other people who seem similar to them. Moreover, in our culture we have a well-developed set of stock characters-the miser, the ladies' man, the clinging mother, the neurotic in our understanding of others. These stock characters are templates of expectations that we use as building blocks to form our expectations of particular people that we meet. Although our expectations about people may change greatly as we learn more about them, the initial framing of individuals as fitting a certain stock character may have a significant effect on the future development of our expectations about them. That is because we will tend to behave toward them according to our existing expectations. In this respect, it may well be true that first impressions are lasting ones.

Often our pool of stock characters is tied to ethnic and gendered stereo stock stories about how whites and blacks or American tourists and French waiters normally behave (and therefore are expected to behave) with respect to each other. We have literally hundreds of stock stories about how men and women behave, for example, with all sorts of variations--the macho man, the passive wallflower, the stupid hunk, the femme fatale, the henpecked husband, the ditzy blonde. Each of these stock characters can form a template for organizing and giving meaning to our encounters with others. They are important parts of stereotypical thinking and often have significant ideological effects.

Narrative structures are extremely important in interpersonal interactions, and especially close personal ones. Individuals in the early parts of an intimate relationship often talk incessantly with each other so that they can create a set of expectations about who the other person is and what he or she is like. They create cultural software in each other for mutual understanding. As time goes on they tend to spend less time in this sort of talk because the pictures are starting to become more fully formed and they have less need for new information. Getting to know people is, in a large sense, creating a set of expectations about them and about their behavior, and ascribing attitudes to them on this basis. In the early stages of a relationship, surprises and unexpected be desirable, because they are opportunities for learning more about the other person and developing new expectations. Later on in a relationship, surprises may have the opposite effect--they may lead to the unsettling feeling that we do not really know the other person any longer.

In times of crisis, people often need to reconfigure their views about each other, and they may start talking a great deal again. One reason people in long relationships "never talk anymore" may be that they don't feel that they have to. But when ways of behaving are no longer satisfying--because of a crisis, for example, or because people have grown apart--their old expectations may no longer be adequate. At this point, the fact that people "never talk anymore" becomes a real problem. As a result, people may feel compelled to start intensive discussions about themselves again, in order to reconfigure their expectations about each other and preserve their relationship.

We use narratives not only to describe our personal experiences to others but also to understand them ourselves. Often people feel the need to talk about their experiences to others so that they themselves can comprehend them. The act of talking organizes experience into narrative form so that it can be under talk and describe what has happened may be especially great with regard to emotionally powerful experiences. People must connect these experiences to narrative constructions that they already understand and to features of their lives that they already recognize. This may require considerable narrative work.11

Narrative construction of personal experience is inevitably partial; it selects certain features of experience as meaningful because narratives are organized in terms of what is already understood to be meaningful. What cannot be so organized is usually and eventually forgotten over time. As a result, narrative memories of the same event by different people can vary widely. Each person remembers what is most salient to her, given her existing cultural software and her special preoccupation.

Just as people ascribe purposes and motivations to the behavior of other people so that they can understand it, they do the same with their own behavior. When asked to describe themselves, people often give stories about what they have done in the past and why they did it. They offer anecdotes about their past that symbolize the kind of people they believe they are and the way they usually behave. They describe events that have shaped them and have made them who they are today. Equally important, people construct narratives of their lives. They understand who they are, what is happening to them, and what they should do next by means of narratives. These narratives are stories in which they are the protagonists. Such stories often fit well-established pat adventure story, or the picaresque novel. They portray people's lives as comedy, tragedy, or even farce.12

Personal narratives organize and give meaning to previous experience. They also provide a form of justification. We justify who we are to ourselves in terms of a story about what we were before and what we have gone through. Perhaps most important, autobiography is a form of prophecy.13 Our personal narratives--whether comedies or tragedies--can be seen as a kind of script. And scripts are meant to be followed. A personal story has a trajectory, a trajectory that demands to be filled out through future action. A personal story is a set of expectations about the self that demand to be fulfilled in practice. If we see the story of our lives as a tragedy, we may understand what we must do next and what will eventually happen to us in tragic terms. The role of personal narrative in framing the possibilities of our future actions, and thus in limiting or empowering us, cannot be overstated. In extreme cases, we can become the slaves of our personal narratives.

Although autobiographical narratives are deeply personal, they also make use of stock stories and elements available in the surrounding culture. We understand whether we are successes or failures, good or bad persons, in terms of social roles, stock stories, and stock characters. Our own narrative under that we get from the larger culture--from movies, television, family anecdotes, social mores, and cultural expectations.

Moreover, our individual narratives are strongly influenced by our cultural heritage. Our ethnic and religious identity forms a template of expectations about how to behave toward others, how to be a man or a woman, how to act toward our children or our parents, and so on. Our understanding of ourselves as Jewish or Italian, Korean or black, already preshapes and constrains the possible stories we build upon and the kinds of futures we feel that we can have. These effects on personal narrative are another example of the inextricable relationship between the personal and political, the individual and the cultural.

People use and develop scripts for their interactions with others. Just as people learn how to order meals in a restaurant by watching others, so, too, they learn how to get along with others, handle and avoid conflicts, love and be loved by watching their parents and others close to them. They develop narrative expectations for how to be a friend, a lover, and a parent. They modify and rework the scripts they have learned in previous social settings to form scripts for dealing with people in new situations. Our expectations about social relations with others are produced through bricolage from previous relation ships.

People learn how to be parents, for example, from watching their own parents; this learning helps them create roles that they naturally slip into in their dealings with their own children. People absorb lessons about how to deal with and love others from their parents and others close to them; they apply these lessons to their subsequent relationships with others. These scripts may be particularly awkward examples of bricolage--old tools badly adapted to fit new social situations. Yet people cling to these scripts because they do not know how else to perform these roles.

We often employ the narratives of others consciously or unconsciously as models for our lives. We may absorb the stories of our parents into our own personal narratives, for example, using them as the raw materials to develop our own personal stories. As a result, we may feel unconsciously compelled to play out parts of these stories in our own lives. A man whose father failed at business may absorb this story into his own personal narrative and reenact it as part of his own life story. Although we are hardly doomed to repeat the narratives of our parents in exact detail, parts of their stories may still be important elements in what we eventually do construct. And, as is so often the case with bricolage, even our modifications and innovations may bear the char upon.

The narrative nature of human self-understanding and human social inter explains why psychological therapy has historically turned to narratives as a means of treating patients. Much psychological therapy involves recount reconstructing the patient's story and critically examining the scripts she employs.14 Through recounting and revising stories about her self, the patient begins to recognize how she became the person she is today. She learns to identify the sources of the scripts and expectations that underlie her reactions to people and events. She tries to see how living according to these scripts and expectations is keeping her from a happy, healthy, life. Together the patient and therapist try to modify her scripts and expectations by substituting new narratives for old ones.

In short, successful therapy teaches the patient to develop new scripts and write new cultural software through repeated narrative construction by patient and therapist. The patient learns to reorganize the past in new ways, to see previous events in a different light, and to form new expectations. The hope is that these new expectations will lead to new and more positive behavior.

From a purely physical standpoint, it has often seemed puzzling how the mere recitation of stories could effect any improvement in a person's mental condition. But if people's behavior is shaped by the narrative constructions that they use to understand themselves and interact with others, if much social thinking relies heavily on scripts and expectations, the idea of a "talking cure" is not at all far-fetched. Supplementing or replacing old narratives and scripts with new ones might change people's behavior for the better. The problem is that the means of doing this must necessarily be as much an art as a science. And it is by no means clear that there is only one route to the creation of new and healthier scripts.

There is an important analogy between the personal narratives and scripts that hinder our development and make us unhappy on the one hand and the ideological effects of cultural software on the other. Just as people's cultural software contributes to social injustice, it can also contribute to their personal unhappiness. Indeed, some conceptions of justice do not draw a sharp distinction between these two concerns. Under those conceptions, the idea of justice also applies to the self, so that one can speak of people being unjust to them selves. This injustice is not a matter of bad behavior toward others (although this can be involved). It is rather an injustice to the possibilities of what we could be.

The narratives of our lives and the social scripts that we employ in inter others can lead us repeatedly to act in self-destructive ways or in ways that prevent happy and fulfilling relationships with others. We may seek out lovers who abuse or manipulate us, for example, because we are replaying scripts about how to love and be loved that we began organizing in early child out for situations that happened long ago, strategies that are inadequate to the situation that now faces us. We may generate unhappiness and conflicts with our children because we are following scripts of how to be a parent that we assimilated from our own parents.

These personal scripts and narratives and their unfortunate consequences for our lives are like the ideological effects of cultural software, except that they act at a very personal level, and our concern with them is not that they produce social injustice but that they hinder personal growth and personal happiness. Just as we must take an ambivalent attitude to our cultural software because it has the capacity to produce injustice, we must take an ambivalent attitude to produce personal unhappiness. Personal scripts and roles that we have assimilated may be partially adequate to deal with many of the problems and situations we face in our lives. That is probably why we developed and adopted them in the first place. But in new contexts and new situations, their inadequacies become increasingly apparent, and they begin to hamper our lives. The goal of successful therapy is to build newer, more adequate expectations out of older, less adequate ones.

Group Narratives

Just as individuals have stories that they use to understand themselves and the world around them, so do entire cultures and countries. Each society has stock stories drawn from its past that are told over and over, and, in this retelling, take on a mythic status. These stories symbolize what is most important to the society, its values, its sense of itself, and its relationship to the outside world. The stock stories of a society are abstracted and condensed through frequent retelling, and eventually can even be encoded as single icons, which can be either persons or events. Examples in American history are "Lincoln," "Pearl Harbor," or "the Alamo." Each of these icons condenses and thus represents a story with a rich set of historical associations, often contradictory and con­tested. Such narrative icons invoke not only a particular order of events but also a tradition of interpretations that grows up around these events.

These stock stories and icons form part of what is variously called collective memory or social memory. It is an excellent example of widespread memetic transfer and assimilation. Social memory is an example of an endemic cultural virus. Narrative memory is spread from generation to generation through com shared cultural software of a culture or society. Members of a society or culture repeatedly tell each other stories about important events in their history. These events often have deep emotional res long after the events have passed. Examples are wars and revolutions, depressions, riots, strikes, famous trials, and genocides.15 These important events become bench comparison with later events, an index through which to understand what is happening to the culture. As the memories are passed on through the generations, they are stylized, pared down, and altered, much like any other story. These social memories are thus at the disposal of storytellers, the mass media, and even the state, to rework and reorient.

People share social memories because they are members of a common meme pool. As a result, entry of new individuals into the meme pool can alter social memory; even though widely shared memories can be assimilated into the new members, they may also bring with them new stories from different cultures.

Social memory is distinct from other endemic cultural software in an important way. The memory of important events is not simply shared by members of a culture. It also unites them or divides them, gives them something in common or produces a bone of contention. Some especially divisive events, like the Vietnam War, the Dreyfus trial in France, and (most likely) the O. J. Simpson trial in the United States, retain their ability long afterward to invoke conflicting meanings and reinstitute old social and ideological divisions.16

Sometimes the divisions created by a momentous event will be resolved or mediated by the creation of a stock story that is roughly satisfying to most of the contending groups. American culture has produced such a narrative of the Civil War: the North fought for freedom, but the South is acknowledged to have fought valiantly and bravely, and the conflict is seen as deeply tragic. The noble figure of Robert E. Lee--who gave up the chance to command the northern armies in order to defend his homeland of Virginia--plays an important role in symbolizing southern heroism against enormous odds, as well as the deep, familial connections between the two sides even in the midst of a vicious war. This narrative allows both sides to accept and even celebrate the outcome of the Civil War--through the staging of mock battles and the collection of memorabilia, for example. Of course, this narrative is most appealing to American whites, since it sees the conflict as one between honorable brothers who are eventually reconciled. It operates only by downplaying the evils of slavery and the subjugation of an entire people. Thus it is not a completely effective narrative resolution. And it breaks down precisely in moments of heightened racial awareness.

Just as a person draws on a stock of stories to frame and understand what is currently happening, so members of a culture draw upon its stock of stories or myths to frame and understand what is happening to them. These myths organize experience and the culture's reaction to that experience. The value of myth is that it helps us understand what is new in terms of what is already understood. As we saw previously, stories save time and energy in figuring out what is going on, what is socially real, what it is appropriate to do, and what is likely to happen in the future. The myths of a culture reorganize the world to take on the appearance of a story that is already well understood. Thus an attack on American interests is readily envisioned as another Alamo or Pearl Harbor. If the new experience fits the old story well enough, the myth will be strengthened and confirmed. But experience is often recalcitrant. Although we try to understand social events in terms of stories that lie to hand, the world will not always so easily conform. Viewing every conflict as the moral equivalent of Pearl Harbor and every war as World War II is a recipe for disaster. So a culture's myths are gradually adjusted and reconstituted in order to take account of the changing world it faces. The stories of the past are given new glosses and new meanings. In this way old icons like "the Winning of the West" or "the Civil War" take on multiple and conflicting associations. Widely shared stories serve as a springboard for future improvisation. Like other memes, myths are transformed as they are communicated to others in new circumstances. Thus the myths of a society are not simply handed down; they are subtly remade in each generation for its own purposes, even as that generation is guided and shaped by what it works with.17

Occasionally new stories and icons replace older ones. "Vietnam" has be permanent fixture in American consciousness, with a highly conflicted and ambivalent set of meanings. Yet as with all cultural bricolage, the new is always built on the old. A culture's new stock stories are constructed out of variations on older narratives, which in turn were based on still older frame works originally used to understand the problems of the distant past. Thus it is hardly surprising to find that the stock stories of different cultures have many elements in common, even if these elements have now come to be used for widely different purposes and have quite different meanings.

Because a culture's stock stories are a shared way of understanding the shared past, present, and future of its members, media of mass communication take on a special importance in the creation and development of social myths. They are a crucial determinant of the ecology that narrative memes face. The stories and genres produced by mass media are evidence of a culture's most pressing and abiding concerns. Yet the products of mass media cannot be taken as the endpoint of analysis. They are not simply and faithfully absorbed by members of a culture. Like all memes, narratives take root depending on the existing cultural software of the people who absorb them. Viewers and listeners appropriate and reinterpret the narratives produced by mass media. They are the raw materials for the work of cultural memory performed by individuals. And the sum of these individual appropriations and reinterpretations of stories, in turn, shapes the way that the mass media will present these stock stories in the future.

Richard Slotkin has argued that a central myth of American consciousness is the story of the frontier: a story of repeated separation, regression, and re violence.18 According to this story, Americans leave civilization-- whether Europe or (later on) the cities of the Eastern Seaboard--and spread out into the wilderness, where they find that they must live more prim who threaten their survival and whom they must conquer. American progress comes from leaving the old world behind, temporarily regressing to a more primitive or natural state, tam separate themselves from the older authority structures and class privilege of civilization and defeat the savage of the western wilderness. The familiar icon of "Cowboys versus Indians" is only one of the many variants of this central myth.

In this account, the American hero is one who confronts the wilderness and makes it his own. The American hero is one, like Natty Bumppo or Daniel Boone, who "knows Indians" and absorbs this knowledge to transform himself and civilized society. For these American heroes, the war against savages is mirrored by a struggle in their own souls in which they conquer and discipline the savage side of their own natures.19

The story of the frontier has several corollary stories, including the myth of bonanza: even though the frontier is dangerous, it is often a place of un which great wealth can come from comparatively little effort. Freedom comes from conquering the frontier and making use of its manifold opportunities.20 Repeatedly, events in American history--from the California Gold Rush to the Roaring Twenties to the deficit-financed boom of the 1980s and the hi-tech expansion of the present--have been conceptualized in terms of the boundless wealth of the frontier. In the myth of the bonanza, all things are possible and everyone can grow rich, at least until the gold reserves dry up, the stock market crashes, or the savings and loans go bankrupt.

The myth of the frontier has been used repeatedly by Americans to un they are as a nation and how they should behave in the many crises that have faced them. The story of the "savage war" has been used not only to justify the expropriation and extermination of the Indians but also to understand many other crises and problems, both domestic and international.21 Labor conflicts, race relations, the Cold War, and the war in Vietnam have all been readily envisioned as new versions of the mythical "war against the savages," in which annihilation of the enemy is the only acceptable way to preserve American civilization. The conception of the savage war projects the difficulties of American life outward onto some hypothesized Other--whether it be Native Americans, labor unions, immigrants, international communism, or the con male-who is seen as a dangerous element that must be defeated or controlled, and "who becomes the only obstacle to the creation of a perfect republic."22

One might contrast this stock story of American life with the stock story of Judaism. Because Jewish culture is much older, it has a wider range of narratives to draw from. Nevertheless, the most enduring stock story of the Jews is a cyclical myth of dispersion, persecution, and redemption. It is, roughly speaking, the story of the Exodus. In this story, God reveals himself to the Jews and promises them his everlasting protection if they will obey him and spread his wisdom to other countries. The Jews are then dispersed from their homeland (usually because of their previous misbehavior) into foreign countries. They are, as Moses says when he flees into Midian, "stranger[s] in a strange land." Like Joseph, they benefit their adopted lands and rise to prom "a new King ... who knew not Joseph"-who does not understand the value that the Jews bring to civilization. The new political forces persecute the Jews: "He set over Israel taskmasters to afflict them with burdens. And he made them serve with rigor." God hears the cry of the Jews and remembers his promises to them. He delivers them from bond "with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders." He then reveals himself to them, gives them his Law, and delivers them to their Promised Land. This story is implicitly cyclical. The Jews begin and end in their homeland. Once in the Promised Land, they can then be dispersed again for their misbehavior, and the cycle begins anew.23

This story has enormous pull over Jewish culture and thought. Many Jewish holidays are organized around the myth or various stages within it. The most obvious is Passover, when Jews are directed to tell their children the story of the Exodus. The Passover Haggadah even instructs them that they are to regard themselves as if they personally had been delivered from Egypt. Two other major festivals, Succot and Shavuot, celebrate different aspects of the redemption story--the dwelling in the desert and the reception of the Law. The story of Mordecai and Haman in the Book of Esther is yet another version of the myth, as is the story of the Maccabees celebrated at Chanukah. The fast day of Tisha B'Av commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the beginning of two different diasporas. The most recently added Jewish holiday is for the commemoration of the Holocaust. In one sense the Holocaust fits well into the governing myth of Judaism, because it is a catastrophic ex ample of oppression, which is followed by the founding of the State of Israel. In another sense it severely strains the myth, because the sheer scope of the persecution involved in the Holocaust seems to dwarf any previous misbehavior by the Jewish people and any promise of eventual redemption, even the creation of a Jewish homeland. The Holocaust is an example of a historical event that has tested and reshaped the fundamental myth of a culture.

Each of the myths just offered is derived from previous sources. For ex American myth of the frontier probably borrowed from the story of the Jews in the wilderness who gain the land promised to them by God. Note, however, that these two stories take on very different trajectories and that the wilderness serves very different purposes in each of them. If anything, the myth of the American frontier seems to borrow most heavily from the story of the Jewish wars to conquer Canaan and the divine injunction to destroy the Amalekites.

The great danger of myths, like personal scripts, is that they not only frame our understanding, they also invite us to play them out in our lives. Narratives are not only tools of understanding but also tools of action. As heuristics, they save time in understanding a situation because they provide ready-made social meanings to events and ready-made roles to play in them. Narratives are scripts, and scripts are made to be followed. Yet cultures are by no means destined to play out their constitutive myths over and over again. Any culture that has existed for long periods of time has many different stories and myths to choose from. Moreover, social myths are not simply a script to be followed blindly; they provide opportunities for reinterpretation and a platform for in serve the needs of the present. Social myths lend themselves to this reinterpretation precisely because they have such deep resonances and such a wealth of associations. People can and do draw on countermyths; they can reinterpret, reread, and rewrite existing stock stories to meet present-day con have not only the myth of the frontier but also the story of Thanksgiving, in which the Indians aid the Pilgrims and the two share the bounty of the land and jointly give thanks to divine providence. This version of the Thanksgiving myth, one might think, would be much more helpful to a country that is trying to live down the sorry history of previous persecutions and trying to accommodate people of many diverse cultures, than is the myth of the savage war.

These examples show how narratives function as cultural heuristics. They help constitute much of our social understanding and make possible much of our social existence. Yet at the same time it is clear that they can have serious ideological effects. They can produce stereotypical thinking or lead us to reenact them in wholly inappropriate situations. Hence our attitude toward them, as toward all cultural software, must be ambivalent.

Moreover, as heuristics, narratives are necessarily partial. They can describe and store in memory only certain features or aspects of a situation. The world is too complicated and multifarious to be captured in a single narrative account or even in a series of narrative descriptions. This inadequacy of narratives is the flip side of their advantage to us. Narratives are useful memory structures precisely because they select and organize our experience--they categorize and store events into scripts or indices that we can use for later comprehension and comparison. Narratives are useful tools of understanding because they create social expectations that frame our understanding of what is and should be hap Because narrative structures work in these ways, they necessarily lead our un in some directions rather than others. They categorize future experience in terms of preexisting indices and expectations. This produces the familiar trade-off of any heuristic-although these expectations may be good enough for some purposes, they may seriously hinder our understanding and promote injustice in others.

Narratives and Justice

Narratives are intimately connected to questions of justice. We use narratives to describe human plans, goals, and intentions, which are often necessary to judgments of what is just and unjust. Moreover, our explanations of what is just or unjust in a situation often depend on a narrative account of how that situation came to be. Narratives connect-and sometimes fail to connect-the misfortunes and inequalities of the present to the events of the past. The fact that my wallet is empty looks very different depending on whether I spent all my money or it was taken from me; my injuries have a different meaning depending on whether I have tripped over something or have been kicked.24

To be sure, theories of justice need not be based on the events of the past. Under some theories of justice, we can judge something as just or unjust simply on the basis of the existing distribution of resources. But the explanation of why that distribution is unjust inevitably will rest on some narrative account that describes either the meaning or the consequences of the distribution. For example, one might hold that a distribution of resources is unjust because it conveys a certain meaning about the worth or dignity of the individual or because it is likely to prevent equal chances for human happiness in the future or is likely to have oppressive or wrongful consequences. In each case, we still offer a narrative account of the evils of the present state of affairs. Our sense of justice inevitably has a narrative character, whether our concerns are corrective or distributive, whether our theory is deontological or consequentialist, and whether our vision of justice is forward or backward looking. Indeed, the very fact that our notion of justice looks in any direction at all means that some narrative underpins our accounts of what makes a situation just or unjust.

Because of the connections between narrative and justice, social memory is an essential framework for judging questions of justice and injustice, and con an important ideological tool. The history that has produced present holdings and present injuries is usually important in assessing whether people have been treated justly or unjustly. If people forget the past or if it is disguised from public view, the world seems a blank slate or a level playing field: past injustices are forgotten and present debts are wiped out. A person's or a group's social situation and respective life chances are more easily seen as no one's fault in particular and as primarily the responsibility of each person or group. If narratives of previous injustices are forgotten, distorted, or replaced by false narratives of reconciliation and recompense, serious injustices may go unacknowledged and unremedied. Loss or distortion of social memory can bury past injustices and make present distributions of power, wealth, and other social goods seem unfreighted with previous wrongs. It is no accident that the words amnesty and amnesia come from the same Greek word meaning "to forget."25

Yet the memory of previous injustices is not always an unqualified good. If past injustices become deeply and pathologically lodged in our identity, they can adversely affect how we deal with others. Fixation on the memory of past wrongs may be necessary to preserve the memory of unremedied injustices or as an important lesson for future generations, but it can also hinder our personal growth. Both forgetting and remembering can be pathological.

Narratives and the Canonical

Narratives can also have ideological effects because they shape our sense of what is canonical and normal, and hence our understanding of what is different and deviant. Our sense of the canonical includes not only expectations about behavior in restaurants but also expectations about how blacks and whites or men and women are likely to behave. Race and class relations are organized around stock stories about members of different groups. Debates about welfare policy and immigration are often based on anecdotes about the behavior of welfare recipients and immigrants.

Expectations about social groups have both a descriptive and normative character; they can describe not only how things usually are but how they are expected to be. Situations that conform to canonical expectations require no special explanation or justification. But deviations from the canonical--like a black man walking in an all-white suburb or two men kissing in a public park-- either explanation or justification.

Moreover, people often understand majority or superordinate groups as canonical in both descriptive and normative senses. Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, and the physically and mentally disabled are generally viewed as being "different." This "difference" arises from an implicit comparison to ca maleness, heterosexuality, and lack of disability.26

Understanding people as "different" often means identifying their differences from the canonical as the cause of any disruption of settled expectations. What is canonical forms the baseline of expectations; because it is regarded as normal, it is not in need of special justification. Thus a person in a wheelchair cannot climb stairs to enter a building, while "normal" people can. The cause for this situation is located in the disability of the person in the wheelchair, not in canonical social expectations and settled social institutions. Accommodations disabled people may require adding ramps, widening doors, and providing elevators. Such accommodations may be understood as special treatment even when they are done in the name of equality. The notion that equality entails "accommodation" or "special treatment" preserves a sense of what is canonical even as it authorizes deviations from it. It locates difference--deviation from the canonical--in the minority or subordinate group rather than in the social relation between groups.27

Our narrative expectations about what is canonical and ordinary are far more than isolated sets of beliefs about men and women or about whites and blacks. They are forms of cultural know-how in the truest sense, for they offer us scripts about how to possess a particular identity in a culture and expectations about what to expect from people with different identities. Cultural know- canonical and to have our expectations confirmed in social practice. This is not necessarily an unmitigated good. Some of these expectations are essential mechanisms in the preservation and reproduction of unjust hierarchies. Considerable cultural knowledge is necessary to behave according to the dictates of a status regime, including an unjust one. One of our most finely tuned social skills is the skill of understanding our status relative to others and the consequences of that comparative regard. This skill is used over and over again in our everyday interactions.

Children are taught how to operate within status regimes through social learning and imitation. They absorb new cultural software that makes them socially competent to be racist or homophobic. People who lack the requisite cultural software may commit social faux pas because they do not understand the social meaning of situations; they do not discriminate in the same ways that others will.

In the previous chapter I compared racism to a virus or disease transmitted through social learning. But such a "virus" is also a form of cultural know- also understand racism as a social skill, often deeply ingrained in the cultural software of individuals. It is not a lack of cultural knowledge but a particular manifestation of it. We often say that racism is born of ignorance, but in another sense this is hardly so. The truly ignorant person is the one who does not understand the system of racial caste and therefore does not know how to behave within it. To participate in a regime of racial status requires delicate and complicated social understandings. It demands a considerable degree of fluency in the language of injustice.

Narratives That Make Themselves True

Narratives do more than simply distort or limit understanding. They also have the ability to "make themselves true" through their use. Because social meaning is part of the social world and is constructed in part by narrative understandings, narrative organization is folded into the social world, becoming part of its fabric and shaping its future evolution.

First, shared narrative structures help create intersubjective social meanings. People use narratives to understand the nature of a social situation; when many people share the same set of expectations about what is happening--for ex conventions and similar assessments of social meaning--their interlocking expectations establish what is the case socially. If people in a society share the view that people with darker skin have lower status, for example, then people with darker skin do have lower status in that society, whether or not this is just.

Second, narrative structures reconfigure and add to the meaning of past events. Narratives cannot change the past, but they can change how people remember the past and what the past means to them. People remember the past in terms of a set of narratives. These narratives bestow meanings to past events that the participants in those events may not have shared. The American Revolution is a good example. The Revolution, like any other part of the past, does not arrive in a premade narrative package with premade social meanings. The meaning of the Revolution must be constructed out of the memories and stories of the persons who participated in it, those who witnessed it contemporaneously, and those who come afterward. These narratives do not exhaust what happened during the Revolution. They are partial in both senses of the word-they are both incomplete and biased in their organization and characterizations. Yet they add something to the social meaning of the American Revolution. The narratives produced about the Revolution become part of the understanding of the people who lived through those times as well of those who came later. These understandings are then passed on to others, who in turn add their own interpretations and stories about these events.

In this way a tradition of understandings and narrative expectations about the American Revolution grows up. This tradition is always in flux, shedding old meanings and gaining new ones. Its associated memes develop and mutate as the tradition is passed on from person to person and from generation to generation. The resulting narrative structures are folded into the tradition and become part of the social meaning of the American Revolution. They need not form a homogenous whole and may be in conflict with each other. As a result, the social meaning of the American Revolution may be contested and contradictory. Nevertheless, the cumulative social meanings of the Revolution are quite real, even if they embellish or mischaracterize events. The existence of a tradition of representations and the palpability of its effects are distinct from the accuracy of the representations themselves.

Third, narrative structures can make themselves true in practice because they subtly direct the actions of people who frame experience according to these narratives. People tend to characterize situations that they face according to the scripts or narrative accounts that they possess. These scripts not only describe the nature of what is going on but also offer the nature of a proper response. Depending on the narrative structures that we possess, the same behavior can be interpreted as a mere social slight, a misunderstanding, an aggressive action, or a vital threat to national security. This interpretation can shape our response; the response, in turn, can induce behavior from others that confirms our worst fears.

Antagonistic cultural groups and nations often understand each other's actions according to a previously prepared script of expectations that both reflects and reproduces distrust. Their internalized story lines about the social meaning and the likely course of their relationship may exacerbate tensions between them. Their expectations may lead to mutually self-destructive behavior unless the parties learn to interpret each other's actions and intentions in different ways.

Stock stories are one of the most powerful sources of social and personal prejudice, not merely because they frame the nature of events but because they are mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy. People with particularly powerful stock stories have expectations that tend to dominate their interactions with others. They tend to make the world fit these stories by understanding events as confirming examples of their powerful and well-worn narratives. Seeing the world and the behavior of others in this way tends to place others in the roles designed for them. In this way scripts can sometimes "make themselves true." If we see the actions of others continuously in terms of expected slights to our ego, for example, we may well behave in ways that bring about what we fear most. People whose personal scripts end with rejection or abandonment may orchestrate events so that rejection or abandonment becomes likely. If we have stock stories in which a certain group of people is worthless and undeserving, they are likely to treat us with disrespect and hostility, confirming our bad views of them. Nations whose social memory is organized around certain forms of conflict and defeat will often find that they create the very sort of enemies that they expect and deserve.

Of course, no script, no matter how powerful in our imaginations, can completely reorient the behavior of others. But others are also attempting to understand our behavior according to a set of narratively coded expectations that they already possess. Hence our responses to them can often redirect the ways they are likely to respond to us. The people whom we treat as threatening may not become threatening simply because we expect them to; but our aggressiveness toward those people may cause them to act aggressively toward us in return, which then confirms our estimation of their dangerous tendencies.

I noted earlier that a familiar set of American cultural expectations understands opposition and adversity in terms of a "savage war" in which Americans must dominate and conquer their enemy. Such a script followed to its logical conclusion often tends to provoke violent responses from the group that is assigned the role of the "Indians," thus providing the country with the conflict it expects and deserves. Yet this behavior may have disastrous consequences, as in the case of the war in Vietnam: Although the United States responded to the crisis in terms of its traditional script, the Vietcong were not Indians, the American soldiers were not Cowboys, and the result was not the winning of the Old West.

Ironically, narrative framing can make itself true because narrative structure is irrelevant to truth. What is true and what might be true are both expressed, understood, and memorized in narrative form. In addition, narrative structures are both a set of frames for experience and a set of directions for action. Narrative structures do double duty in social memory and social convention. The distance from explanatory story to cultural script is not very far, because both are constructed from the same cognitive materials.

Because both history and conventions for social behavior are stored in narrative form, there is an inevitable tendency for the two to nourish each other and be confused with each other. The importance of history to the human mind is precisely its tendency to make us want us to reenact it, to follow its lead, to see the path ahead of us in terms of the path that was lately trod. Professional historians deliberately resist this impulse--for they are interested precisely in discovering and showing the strangeness of other times and lands. But this is an acquired tendency that not even the professional historian can fully adhere to. History inspires; it inspires us to reenact it, to see its relevance to our own time. It presses its events and expectations on us like a dancer whose bodily movements entice us to imitate them, like a musician whose playing energizes us to beat time to its rhythms. History's narrative construction draws us subtly and inevitably into a web of imitation and mimicry, a conflation of history and script, memory and expectation. Santayana had it precisely backward, for it is those who learn from history, who absorb the narrative structures of the past, who are most drawn to and destined to repeat them.

Even the student of history who studies it to avoid its mistakes, as Santayana suggested, is drawn into this web. For when we learn from history, we still engage in mimicry. We imagine ourselves at the scene of the battle so that we can remake the fateful decision. We view ourselves in the situation where the mistake was made, and not in a wholly new one. We see a law that binds together the past situation and our present one as of the same general sort. We postulate a cause and effect that occurred in one setting and that will occur again if we do not choose otherwise. In this way we are still repeating history, still framing our expectations about what will happen in terms of the narratives of the past. We are simply trying to tell the story differently from a certain point on. And the scripts of the past still have a hold on us. For they suggest that it was this mistake that we should learn from, and not another--one that might have occurred to us if we did not compare our present situation to that particular one but to yet another not in view. Perhaps we think we will not make the same mistake as Napoleon at Waterloo, but perhaps we have already made a mistake in thinking that Waterloo is the appropriate analogy.

Yet even as our expectations are played out, they are in the process of changing. We do learn from experience; that is the flip side of our ability to memorize and repeat. So our myths and stories mutate partly in response to recalcitrant experience, an experience always mediated by our narratives and frameworks as well as those of the others we interact with. Narrative shapes the way history will proceed, but the procession of history is absorbed into memory and reconfigures our expectations and reconstitutes our governing myths. Americans may always think of themselves as Cowboys battling Indians, but the Vietnam War was not the Wild West. Nor was it even Custer's Last Stand. The war in Vietnam has reconfigured American memory and American myth in important ways; it has become its own cultural icon: Vietnam. Just as Americans remind themselves to remember Pearl Harbor, they now assure themselves that there will be no more Vietnams. Thus when Americans fought the Persian Gulf war against Iraq, they developed the military doctrine of "overwhelming force," so that they would not suffer yet another defeat at the hands of the Vietcong. America has surely learned lessons from Vietnam; what is unclear is whether it has learned the right lessons.

The more pervasive and powerful a form of cultural software in understand world, the more pervasive and powerful its potential ideological effects. Narrative thought is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Because narratives are so central to our thinking, they create particularly compelling ideological mechanisms. Moreover, narratives produce ideological effects not only because they present a partial or misleading picture of the social world but because they are ways of intervening in the social world and of influencing the responses of others. Narrative structures do not simply reflect the world badly, they shape the world to their own distorted lens. They are not only illusion but prophecy. It is as if one could make one's face become ugly by looking at it repeatedly through a funhouse mirror. Indeed, the optical metaphors of distortion are entirely inadequate to describe the variety of ideological effects that narrative thought can have on the social world.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/15/feed 0 Chapter 8: Cultural Heuristics http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/14 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/14#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:20:51 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=14 Our discussion so far has been aimed at dissolving the study of ideology into the larger study of cultural understanding. Now we must take the opposite approach: we must break ideology down into smaller and distinctly analyzable parts. The goal is to replace the study of ideology with the study of ideological mechanisms and ideological effects of cultural software, which, taken together, produce what previous theorists have called ideology.

A great failing of traditional Marxist models of ideology has been that they have usually not offered very detailed explanations of how ideological beliefs are formed in individuals and how these beliefs could be produced by psycho Instead, traditional models have tended to focus on the distorting content of beliefs and on whether these distortions tend to serve or disserve the interests of various classes.

By contrast, the theory of cultural software focuses on the mechanisms that produce ideological effects and the means by which they spread widely among human minds. This task requires a study both of social psychological mechanisms and of the ways in which people share their understandings of the social world through the spread of language and symbolic forms.

To this end, the next four chapters offer a partial catalogue of the ideological mechanisms produced by different forms of cultural software. The examples I offer here are not intended to be exhaustive. A comprehensive study of the various devices of human understanding and their possible ideological effects is the work of many lifetimes. Rather, I wish to offer a sample of the wide diversity of tools of human understanding and the many different ways in which these tools can misfire and help produce and sustain injustices.

My goal, however, is not simply to show that different kinds of cultural software can produce ideological effects. It is also to show that these ideological effects are cultural-that they are widely distributed among members of a culture through memetic transmission. When previous theorists have spoken of ideology, whether in neutral or pejorative terms, they usually have meant shared ways of thinking. For example, a Marxist might hold that many members of the pro their lot; a feminist might point out that most men tend to view certain occupations as inappropriate for women, and so on. But the idea of "shared" ideology brings us back to the metaphysical puzzles that we encountered in Chapter 1. How can these beliefs be shared without presupposing unworkable theories of causation or implausible supraindividual entities? Because traditional theories of ideology have tended to focus on the distorted content of beliefs, or the interests or functions they serve, they have not faced this question squarely.

The theory of cultural software does provide an answer to this question: people experience similar ideological effects because they share similar cultural software and because this cultural software is employed in similar contexts with similar results. If ideological effects are shared, they must be produced by the kinds of memes that can spread widely and reliably through a single population or a group of related populations. This epidemiology produces the effect of shared ideology.

There is no reason to think that memes that produce ideological effects have the same nature or operate in precisely the same way. They need only share an ability to spread widely among human minds. Indeed, the next several chapters will examine very different features of human cognition, including narrative construction, cognitive dissonance reduction, heuristics of decision, metaphor, and metonymy. My examples will be drawn from a wide variety of sources and social scientific models. Often they will have been identified and expounded by theorists with very different theoretical commitments. I shall consider, for example, ideological mechanisms identified by methodological individualists and structuralists, positivists and antipositivists, cognitive theorists and anthropologists, social psychologists and literary critics. It is likely that several of the scholars whose work I draw upon would object strenuously to being discussed together. They would no doubt disagree heatedly about the right way to approach the study of human understanding.

Nevertheless, I must ask the reader to see beyond their various methodological disputes and focus instead on the products of their respective researches. Each of them has, I believe, identified isolated examples of a single, central phenomenon. Each theory, suitably reinterpreted, reveals aspects of human thought with two basic features. First, in each case we have a cognitive mechanism that is "ambivalent": it serves human understanding in some cases and contexts, yet hinders or frustrates it in others. Second, each of these cognitive mechanisms is cultural, in the sense that it can be and is spread to many different people through communication and social learning. In short, each of these theories reveals a kind of cultural software that, under the right conditions, can act like an ideological virus.

This, I believe, is the proper way to approach such diverse theories about human understanding. The advantage of the theory of cultural software is that it allows us to see how very different research projects can be reinterpreted and united under the umbrella of memetic evolution. Appropriately, this approach is itself a form of bricolage, for it cobbles together different ways of under standing human understanding in the hope of providing a more powerful and unified account. Because human understanding is itself a process of bricolage, we might think of this method as a sort of "metabricolage."1

The next four chapters consider a wide variety of phenomena, each of which operates differently from the others. The present chapter takes up heuristics of decision and strategies of cognitive dissonance reduction. Chapter 9 concerns the cultural software contained in narratives and scripts, Chapter 10 discusses networks of association, and Chapter 11 explores metaphoric and metonymic models. The variety of these examples amply demonstrates that cultural soft have ideological effects, as long as it can spread widely among a population. Yet as we shall see repeatedly, human language plays an important role. Language is the most effective carrier of memes and is itself one of the most widespread forms of cultural software. Hence it is not surprising that many ideological mechanisms either have their source in features of language or are propagated through language.

Mechanisms Hot and Cold

I begin with heuristics of decision and strategies of cognitive dissonance re shall build largely upon the work of Jon Elster. Elster, in turn, built on the work of two different theories of social psychology: Leon Festin and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s studies on heuristics and cognitive biases.2 My goal in this section is twofold. First, I wish to describe the kinds of ideological mechanisms that Elster identified. Second, I want to show the limitations of his approach, and how it can be reinterpreted more broadly and fruitfully in terms of the theory of cultural software.

Elster's work is admirable because he is one of the few theorists of ideology working in the Marxist tradition who has attempted to break down ideology into its component parts and ask how beliefs are caused rather than focusing on the interests they serve. He has turned to the theories of heuristics and cognitive dissonance to provide "micro-foundations" for the Marxist theory of ideology and to put it on a firmer scientific footing.3 Unlike the structuralists I shall discuss in the next chapter, Elster's approach is motivated by a com Because he hopes to explain as many social phenomena as possible in terms of individuals, their actions, and their beliefs, he tries to explain ideology in terms of individual psychological mechanisms.4 His project thus attempts to reduce the Marxist theory of ideology to a theory of individual psychology.

Elster divides ideological mechanisms that distort belief into two groups, which he calls "hot" and "cold."5 These correspond roughly to the theories of Festinger on the one hand, and Kahneman and Tversky on the other. "Hot" mechanisms are motivational; they are attempts to reduce cognitive dissonance. "Cold" mechanisms are cognitive; they involve heuristics or cognitive biases.6

Festinger's theory is only one of several motivational theories that might explain ideological effects. Moreover, the theory of cognitive dissonance has undergone considerable innovation since his original formulation.7 Cognitive dissonance is now thought to be produced not by the mere fact of conflict or contradiction but by the self's need to preserve its view of itself.8 Thus, we might call "hot" mechanisms self-preserving or ego defense mechanisms.

In contrast, Kahneman and Tversky's approach explains distorted beliefs not by the need for ego defense but through various failures in cognitive pro include heuristics or cognitive rules of thumb that op limited situations but are extended to situations in which they do not apply.9 These are classic examples of tools of understanding stretched beyond their usefulness.

Together these two theories of social psychology offer causal explanations for many of the ideological effects described in Marx's writings. For example, one can replace the familiar "dominant ideology" thesis by showing that op defeating strategies and hold self-defeating beliefs. These strategies and beliefs result from cognitive and motivational biases of the oppressed group rather than being imposed from above by dominant groups. Nevertheless, these biases and illusions may benefit dominant groups, even if they had no hand in producing them.10

Elster's central example of a motivational bias produced by the need to reduce cognitive dissonance is wishful thinking: people form beliefs because they prefer a world in which the beliefs are true to a world in which the beliefs are false. Elster's formulation of wishful thinking is inadequate because it relies on Festinger's original formulation of dissonance theory. Later theorists have pointed out that mere self-contradiction among one's beliefs does not necessarily produce dissonance reduction because people are able to live with all sorts of contradictions. Only contradictions that threaten the self's view of itself will cause people to reduce dissonance.11 So people engage in wishful thinking not merely because they prefer a world in which a certain state of affairs is true to one in which it is false. They engage in wishful thinking because accepting that the world is a particular way would significantly threaten their views about themselves. A person might change her beliefs, for example, if holding a certain belief would make her seem less moral, less worthy, less capable, or less in control of her life. People try to preserve belief in states of affairs when they have a personal or existential stake in them.

The need to reduce cognitive dissonance may also cause changes in a sub and preferences. One example of this is the phenomenon of "sour grapes."12 People adapt their preferences to value what they believe is potentially available to them. Conversely, they tend to undervalue that which they believe to be impossible or unattainable. Another example of dissonance re states of affairs in which we have a stake or which otherwise advantage us are not too immoral or too unjust, or do not show us in a particularly bad light. Lawyers who participate in the adversary system, for example, often have to represent reprehensible clients and argue for positions that they do not believe. They can justify their activities on the grounds that it is demanded of them by the legal system. But if they believed that the legal system was fundamentally unfair, this justification would be se their activities would look much more morally problem to believe either that the system as a whole is basically fair and just or that precisely because the system is so unfair and unjust to people like their clients, they are entitled to bend the rules to level the playing field and make it more just.

Dissonance reduction seems to explain a number of ideological effects as the Marxist theory of ideology. Exploited and oppressed groups, for example, may sometimes believe in the justness, propriety, or adequacy of their fate because this allows them to reduce cognitive dissonance. Such beliefs "may indeed give short-term gratification, but cannot be said to serve the interests of these classes well at all.”13 More often, oppressed groups may harbor no such illusions: they may bitterly resent the special favors they feel are granted to more privileged classes. But they may still engage in dissonance reduction. For example, they may openly spurn greater income, more privileged lifestyles, and the symbols of privilege as morally bankrupt or corrupt. At the same time, they may believe that improving their situation is impossible and that their condition therefore must be accepted. Although these distortions in belief may benefit dominant classes, the dominant classes have not caused them. They are caused instead by the need of oppressed classes to reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by coming to terms with the difficulty of their situation.

Elster also argues that Marx's account of the ideological character of religious belief-that religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature"--can be explained as a kind of motivational distortion.14 Following Feuerbach, Marx argues that oppressed classes project the essence of humanity onto a supernatural being; in this way human beings are enslaved to the products of their own imagination. Elster reinterprets this projection as a form of wishful thinking. Human misery causes people to imagine a great and good being who has their interests at heart; this allows them to feel better about their lot because they know that God is watching over them. People create an object corresponding to their wishes and desires; then they understand it as an entity existing external to them so that they can appropriate it through religious devotion or prayer. Again, Elster emphasizes, what is important about this account of religious belief is that it does not explain religious ideology as a function of what serves dominant interests. Rather, it explains religion as the "spontaneous invention of the oppressed, not an ideology imposed by their oppressors."15

Motivational biases also produce ideological effects in the beliefs of dominant or ruling classes. As Elster points out, one of Marx's most important ideas is that "the bearers of a particular class interest tend to represent it as the general interest of society."16 Wishful thinking helps explains this phenomenon. The desire to reduce cognitive dissonance causes individuals to believe that what is in their interest is in the interest of society as a whole. It also causes people to have a distorted image of social conditions that support such a view. Thus people can alleviate their sense of guilt or responsibility about poverty by believing that the problems of the poor are exaggerated or that many of their problems are due ultimately to their bad character or immorality.

Finally, wishful thinking can produce strife between classes that might otherwise have common concerns. Middle- and working-class people who face economic insecurity caused by economic restructuring may blame the poor and governmental assistance to the poor for their problems. This both alleviates a sense of guilt or obligation toward those even less fortunate and allows middle - and working-class people to feel morally worthy by comparison.

Cognitive biases explain a different set of ideological effects. For the most part these involve the misplaced use of heuristics; thus we might call them heuristic biases. Like motivational biases, cognitive biases can affect both our views about social conditions and our preferences. A cognitive bias that affects our beliefs about facts is the availability heuristic: "the tendency to believe that the world at large is similar to the part of the world one knows."17 The availability heuristic assumes that evidence ready to hand is a good source of evidence about parts of the social world not directly experienced by or available to us.18 A cognitive bias that affects our preferences is a shift in the framing of a problem. When a medical procedure or policy program is described in terms of its potential gains, for example, it seems more desirable than when it is described in terms of its potential losses.19

Excessive reliance on the availability heuristic is a particularly common cause of ideological effects. Often it leads to faulty generalization, where "the believer generalizes certain features of his local environment, wrongly believing them to hold in a wider context."20 This phenomenon is reminiscent of Mann groups tend to extrapolate their experience to all other situations.21 A second and related cognitive bias is "conceptual imperialism" which occurs when a thinker uses the categories of her own society "to understand the social structure of other societies or secondary structures within the same society." For example, a thinker might apply specifically capitalist categories to understand precapitalist or noncapitalist social structures. Or she might try to apply American constitutional and political structures to solve the political problems of very different societies with very different his Anachronistic thinking and ethnocentrism are familiar examples of this sort of cognitive bias.22

A third form of cognitive bias is the fallacy of composition: "the tendency to believe that causal relations that are valid locally, or ceteris paribus, retain their validity when generalized to a wider context." A special case of this fallacy involves the "natural cognitive tendency to believe that statements which are true from the point of view of any individual agent remain true when applied to the totality of all agents." Because of the fallacy of composition, "there is a natural tendency for the exploited to believe in the inevitability of exploitation.”23 The proletariat commit this fallacy when they assume that because they would be worse off without the particular employer who oppresses them, a society without such employers or employment relations would be even worse.24 Similarly, even if a working-class woman in a patriarchal society would be worse off if she were not in a traditional marriage relationship, it does not follow that all women would be worse off if the institution of marriage were significantly changed. The fallacy arises from assuming that the conditions of choice for members of the subordinate group would remain unchanged.

Elster's approach to the Marxist theory of ideology is a genuine advance because it tries to provide causal explanations of ideological effects and because it tries to differentiate ideological phenomena according to their disparate causal sources. Instead of attempting to describe some monolithic entity called ideology, Elster's approach implicitly recognizes that ideological effects result from the confluence of various motivational and cognitive mechanisms.

Nevertheless, Elster's theory is necessarily limited by two features. The first is his adherence to the basic Marxist problematic of economic class.25 In ad psychological mechanisms just described, Elster also attempts to explain the relationship between ideology and modes of economic production. He views the theory of ideology as essentially concerned with economic class.26 This is due in part to his ambition, as the title of his book suggests, to "make sense of Marx." Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the motivational and cognitive mechanisms that he identifies have no necessary connection to eco traditional Marxist criteria. Racial and religious groups, for example, may also engage in strategies of dissonance reduction that cause them to engage in self-justifying views of their present situation; ethnic and other social groups may also mistakenly assume that the social world is similar to that with which they are most familiar. Thus the irony of Elster's social psychological approach is that it shows once again how unnecessarily limited is the Marxist approach to ideological explanation.

The second basic limitation on Elster's analysis is that he pays little attention to culture and language as sources of ideological effects. This is partially due to his reliance on social science models that bracket away questions of culture and emphasize individual cognitive processes. It may also be due to his general suspicion of supraindividual entities as explanatory factors. Nevertheless, many ideological effects--including those that Elster is concerned with --occur through the use of shared linguistic and symbolic meanings and shared forms of cultural understanding. Elster's theory of ideology is unduly restricted because he cannot easily assimilate the notion of cultural understanding into his model. In fact, as I shall argue, his own psychological model is actually a special case of what it seems to exclude and marginalize. The heuristic and cognitive biases he describes operate through the use of shared forms of cultural understanding.

Cultural Heuristics for Understanding Human Action

To develop this point, I want to turn first to the work of two quite different social theorists, Paul Ricoeur and Clifford Geertz. Ricoeur adopts a pejorative view of ideology, which assumes that ideology is a distortion, while Geertz adopts a neutral view of ideology as a system of social understanding. What unites these thinkers, however, and what differentiates them from the sort of approach we see in Elster, is that both emphasize that social reality is under stood through (or, in their terms, mediated by) shared cultural symbols. Each argues that people use culture to understand their own actions and the actions of others. And each argues that in order to understand how ideology works one must understand that ideology is inextricably linked to the symbolic char understanding.

Ricoeur views ideology as a form of distortion of a very special kind. Ideology distorts our understanding of social practices (praxis). Ricoeur argues that people need shared cultural meanings about human action before they can understand their actions and those of others. Hence people always understand social practices and human action through the use of shared symbols. Indeed, social action itself is always mediated through symbolic understandings. Our understanding of what we are doing--an understanding mediated by shared meanings and symbols--is an important component of the choices we make and the actions we perform. Thus, Ricoeur insists, a system of symbolic un action, or what Ricoeur calls a "symbolic structure of action," must be in place before we can even speak of ideological distortion.27 Shared cultural meanings about human action must already exist before ideology can do its work.

Geertz emphasizes that social understanding--and hence ideological un occurs through the use of interlocking and interrelated figures of speech. The symbolic mediation that is necessary to understanding occurs through tropes similar to the classic rhetorical figures of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron, and personification. As an example, Geertz offers the statement that the Taft-Hartley Act (a piece of labor legislation opposed by organized labor) is a "slave labor act." A supporter of organized labor who makes this statement is not literally claiming that the Taft-Hartley Act reduces people to a condition of slavery. Rather, she is offering a metaphor.28

Metaphor and other rhetorical tropes are tools for understanding social conditions, describing them to others, and persuading people about them. The persuasive power of a rhetorical figure like metaphor is not diminished by its lack of literal correspondence to the social world. To the contrary, its power arises precisely from the fact that it compares things that are admittedly dif obvious difference and ends with a recognition of similarity. A successful metaphor "transforms a false identification ... into an apt analogy."29

Moreover, the ability of a metaphor to ring true or false depends upon an existing set of cultural associations in which it can be located. Preexisting cultural software determines how arguments are to be framed, how comparisons can be made, and how rhetoric can be wielded. It provides the framework in which the apt description and the inappropriate comparison can occur. Thus, for Geertz, ideology is a cultural system of interrelated associations, symbols, and figures. In other words, ideological effects depend on an individual's par Geertz argues, "the sociology of knowledge ought to be called the sociology of mean for what is socially determined is not the nature of conception but the nature of the vehicles of conception."30

These analyses suggest why Elster's bracketing of cultural and linguistic sources of ideological effects is too limited. Indeed, what is ironic about Elster's oversight is that he uses metaphors to convey the difference between his two varieties of causal explanation. "Hot" connotes effects produced by emotion or affect, while "cold" implies effects produced absent emotion. Hence we speak of "cool reason" as opposed to the "heat of passion."31 Elster's own use of these terms is the most telling demonstration that ideological effects can occur as much through metaphor, figure, symbol, and rhetoric--which involve shared categories of meaning--as through individual preservation of the self system or individual cognitive biases or heuristics. These mechanisms cannot easily be fit into his system.

The limitations of Elster's analysis become most apparent in his treatment of tradition and the practice of borrowing traditional symbols in political discourse, a practice that produces "the apparently conservative character of many revolutions." In his discussion of Marx's essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Elster describes borrowing from tradition as a source of ideological distortion. He attempts to fit it into his model as an example of conceptual imperialism. He argues that it is produced by misuse of the availability heuristic. Nevetheless, Elster admits taht this causal explanation of ideological discourse, a practice that an explanation of men's conception of the future in terms of the historical tradition, not their present position." The problem in these cases is that people "have to do with the conceptual luggage they carry with them, even at the very moment they grope around for a way to jettison it."32

The ideological distortions created by the use of traditional symbols involve more than idiosyncratic failures of cognitive processing. Elster is describing tools of understanding that involve or employ shared cultural meanings. Thus these tools of understanding are more than individual heuristics--they are shared or cultural heuristics. As heuristics, they cannot be wholly detrimental. As noted previously, a heuristic and a bias are simply two sides of the same coin; what is a cognitive heuristic or aid to understanding in one context or situation can also be a cognitive bias or distortion in another. This is simply another version of the argument about conceptual bricolage that underlies the ambivalent conception.

Moreover, as cultural heuristics, these tools are partly constitutive of individuals. To say that people are situated in culture is also to say that cultural tools are situated in them. As we saw in Chapter 1, this puts the concept of "tradition" in a very different light. Tradition is not simply something we live within; it is something that lives within us.

Being part of a cultural tradition is a condition of historical existence. To exist as a historical being is to have a set of tools available to hand that are the legacy of the past. Existence in human history (as opposed to the natural existence of a mountain or a glacier) is existence in culture. It means that one is composed of cultural heuristics shared by others who are similarly constituted by them.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx takes a largely negative view of the cultural tools that constitute tradition. Near the beginning of the essay he offers his famous statement that "the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Marx thought that "precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crises [people] anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.”33 Although in this particular essay Marx is critical of the use of the past, and of the mawkish and opportunistic use of political props from the past, there is a larger sense in which (as Marx himself emphasized) the phenomenon of borrowing from the past is unavoidable and inevitable. Indeed, political grandstanding--like a French senator dressing in a toga to call up the idea of the Roman Republic, or a modern American politician identifying himself with the Founding Fathers--works only because there is a shared stock of cultural symbols that facilitates a shared political life.

This suggests an important connection between cultural heuristics and the public rhetoric that we use to persuade and influence others. As Aristotle noted long ago, the successful rhetorician builds upon what the rhetorician and the audience have in common.34 And what the two have in common are shared cultural meanings and symbols. Thus rhetoric is also a sort of bricolage, and the skillful orator is a sort of bricoleur: out of the old and familiar, she con metaphor and figural language in general are effective--because they relate the new to the old, the strange to the familiar, what we come to know to what we already grasp. Indeed, even Marx uses metaphor to make his points: He speaks of the past as weighing "like a nightmare on the brain of the living"--a mixed metaphor to be sure, but a metaphor nevertheless.

Our search for ideological mechanisms thus takes us far beyond the limited confines of Elster's model, important as that model remains. Indeed, our anal heuristics and biases that Elster identifies in a new light. If human action and social practices are always understood symbolically, then Kahneman and Tversky's heuristics and cognitive biases are already embedded in and make use of a set of shared meanings about human action. These heuristics and biases already possess a cultural component; they are already a kind of cultural heuristic.

Elster tried to view the cultural heuristics of traditional thought as a special albeit exceptional case of his psychological model of ideology. In fact, it is quite the other way around. We should rather try to think of social psychological mechanisms, cognitive heuristics, and biases as special cases of a larger category of cultural software that includes many different types of shared cultural meanings and symbols.

Consider, for example, the mechanism of dissonance reduction. The liter cognitive dissonance has gradually come to recognize that what lies at the root of dissonance reduction is the preservation of the "self system." Mere contradiction or conflict does not lead to dissonance reduction unless the self's view of itself is threatened. But what is the source of the self's view of itself, and what is the source of what the self regards as a bearable or unbearable conflict? In large part the source of both must come from culture and cultural norms internalized by the individual. Put another way, the preservation of the self system involves the self's looking at itself through the eyes of what it imagines others in its culture would think about it. This process is in many ways reminiscent of Mead's idea of a "generalized other" that shapes individual behavior and conscience.35 Thus, although the basic mechanism of dissonance reduction is individual, the content and context of what drives this mechanism is cultural and social.

Moreover, we can describe the mechanism of dissonance reduction in explicitly memetic terms. Each individual mind is a kind of ecology, more hospitable to some memes than to others. Beliefs that do not fit well into the existing ecology of the mind are more likely to be altered, rejected, suppressed, or forgotten. Although the ecology affects the kinds of memes that will survive within it, the memes it absorbs also can affect the ecology itself. Thus new experiences sometimes alter existing beliefs, and new beliefs sometimes are altered to conform with beliefs already held. Strategies of dissonance reduction adjust beliefs and attitudes so that they can survive together in the existing ecology of the individual mind. People whose ecologies are similar-because of their common interests, their common situations, and the commonality of their previously existing beliefs-will provide similar ecologies for new memes. Thus they will tend to engage in similar strategies of dissonance reduction.

We can also interpret "cold" mechanisms consistently with the theory of cultural software. In their research on heuristics and cognitive biases, Kahne not discuss whether these heuristics or cognitive biases are "hardwired" or whether they are culturally generated. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think that at least some of them are a kind of cultural software transmitted from person to person. First, individuals can learn to avoid these cognitive biases when they are pointed out. Second, only a certain percentage of individuals fall prey to these errors and biases in psychological ex­periments. This suggests that these heuristics are learned, adapted, and adopted in new situations and, conversely, that people also can learn when these heuristics are badly adapted to solving particular types of problems.

Of course, neither of these facts conclusively proves that all of these heuristics and biases are produced by transmissible cultural software. To the con and biases may produce ideological effects because of the absence of cultural software. Some meme complexes may act like cultural "patches" that allow people to work around the deficiencies of their hardwired heuristics. In that case the reason why only some people fall prey to errors is that they have not yet assimilated the necessary patches through social learning. So we must assume that the group of cognitive heuristics and biases comprehends some combination of the cultural and innate. Nevertheless, even so- concepts of human action to do their work. Transmissible cultural software still may be a necessary condition for most ideological effects to occur, even if it is not a sufficient condition.

Nothing in what I have said suggests an abandonment of Elster's basic thesis: a theory of ideology must attempt to offer causal explanations of ideological effects. My point is that causal explanations cannot bracket away the realm of culture. As Jerome Bruner puts it, "In the end, even the strongest causal explanations of the human condition cannot make plausible sense with human culture."36

The many ideological effects produced by language and culture fall into the category of cognitive or "cold" mechanisms. They are ideological effects produced by the mediation of social understanding through language, meta Indeed, they constitute a much larger category of effects than the examples that Elster offers as paradigmatic of "cold" or cognitive mechanisms. Like other cold mechanisms, the tools of linguistic or cultural understanding operate as a kind of heuristic that can produce ideological effects in particular situations. Moreover, it is not easy to separate out their beneficial from their harmful uses. The possibility of ideological effects is built into the very concepts and structure of symbolic under culture. Yet once again, while studying these tools for the ideological effects that they produce, we must not forget the extent to which such tools are empowering or enabling. Psychological and cultural heuristics are just that-heuristics that under some conditions perform well enough as rough guides to reasoning but that are misleading in other contexts. The study of ideology, then, might be summarized as the study of "when good heuristics go bad."

To study the many features of human cognition and cultural understanding that can produce ideological effects, we have to cast a wide net. We have to bring together many different fields of study and many diverse types of theories about cultural understanding and the social construction of thought. This should hardly be surprising, for the theory of ideology is a necessarily and fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavor. In addition to the Marxist tradition, the sociology of knowledge, and the various theories of social psychology just discussed, we might also include structuralism and semiotics, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus, Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of tradition and horizon fu classical theory of rhetoric, as developed by Aristotle and many others.

Nevertheless, this synthetic project of metabricolage is complicated by two factors. First, the motivations behind these various theories are often considerably different. Some of these theories (like Wittgenstein's or Gadamer's) are philosophical accounts of cultural understanding. They attempt to evaporate certain confusions concerning how understanding works. Nevertheless, they do not offer anything like a causal or evolutionary explanation of ideological effects.

Second, many of these theories (for example, Wittgenstein's and Foucault's) are either unconcerned with or actively hostile to offering accounts of the internal processes of the human mind. Instead, they view features external to the mind--like social behavior or symbolic forms--as the object of their study. This, in my view, is the most serious failing of the theory of discourse that has come to replace the theory of ideology. When discourse is viewed as the structure or content of messages or practices, it casts the study of cultural under standing out of the mind and into the world of behaviors, writings, and articulated symbols. Yet one must do more than identify particular discourses and their structures and effects. It is also necessary to ask how these discourses could be produced by individual human minds, and how what produces them could, in turn, be produced and reproduced in many other individual human minds.

There is a great irony here. The interpretive turn in the human sciences understood itself in part as a rejection of behaviorism. It emphasized the cultural features of human action and the importance of culture and symbols in structuring human behavior. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to re-create a sort of behaviorism within an interpretivist approach if we focus only on behaviors and symbolic forms that are external to the mind, or if we treat the mind as a black box that simply produces and is affected by these symbols and behaviors. The interpretive turn, which we find in thinkers from Geertz to Foucault, has emphasized the role of symbolic forms and culturally meaningful behavior. Yet if these forms are symbolic, they must be symbolic to someone who is able to process and use symbols. If behavior is culturally meaningful, it must be culturally meaningful to a particular person who has some mechanism for making and understanding meaning. To understand the phenomenon of ideology, then, we must marry two separate movements of the second half of the twentieth century. The first is the interpretive turn, which emphasized the importance in human life of culture and the symbolic. The second is the cognitive revolution, which emphasized the internal processes of human under standing. Each of these movements offers something that the other has either downplayed or disregarded. The theory of ideology--which is only a subset of a general theory of cultural understanding--must make use of each of these approaches and bring them together.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/14/feed 0 Chapter 7: Transcendence http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/13 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/13#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 18:20:21 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=13 The theory of ideology that I have been developing in this book is based on the principle of ambivalence. Our tools of understanding are partially ad equate and partially inadequate to understanding the world and what is just and unjust within it. Yet this idea presupposes that there are degrees of greater and lesser adequacy. It assumes that our thought can be "good enough" under some conditions, even if, in other settings, it seriously misleads us. Similarly, I have defined ideological effects as those that tend to promote or sustain injus just.

Nevertheless, our judgments of what is just and unjust themselves depend on our cultural software, which is a result of memetic evolution. As I argued in Chapter 1, human values are articulated and refined through culture. Perhaps the concept of justice, like that of truth, is merely the product of a particular development of cultural software. If so, the theory of cultural software faces three serious problems.

First, the process of critical self-reflection would be not only endless but pointless. For our critical judgments would be the arbitrary product of acci developments. Self-reflection would simply be another ver of different memes to gain ascendancy in our thought processes.

Second, each culture has its own peculiar memetic development. If the idea of justice is merely a product of memetic evolution, perhaps each culture has its own conception of justice or has no conception of justice at all. Ideological analysis requires that we try to see what is just and unjust in the thought of the analysand. But if analysands do not have the same conception of justice as we do, we may not be able to understand their actions properly, for their concept of justice may be entirely different from ours. At best we will simply impose our own standards of justice on others who do not share them. And it will come as no surprise that, from our perspective, the views of others are found wanting.

Third, just as there may be no common idea of justice between cultures, there may be no common idea of justice between persons within the same culture. No two people share the same cultural software. If "justice" is merely an evolutionary product--a concatenation of particular memes that we have assimilated in our heads--perhaps we are simply imposing our personal con and actions. Per individual "justice programs" in conflict with all of the others, trying to spread and take over as many different minds as possible.

In short, if we take the memetic development of culture seriously, perhaps justice is an arbitrary mutation, peculiar to each culture's or even to each in evolutionary history. Asserting that our judgments of justice apply to other cultures or other persons merely reflects the power of our own memes over our own imaginations. Of course, we may insist that others should look at justice and injustice the same way we do. But that is only because our memes are attempting to dominate and replace the memes in other people's minds. This domination can occur in many ways--by persuasion, by indoctri memes for superiority and dominance in the minds of human beings. Even all human beings may share a common sense of justice, but it will be only as the result of an effective conquest by certain particularly ag gressive and effective memes.

Questions like these are serious problems not only for any theory of ide any conception of human morality and politics. Any theory of ideology and any theory of moral discourse must confront them. I have phrased them in the way they arise for the theory of cultural software, but it is clear that much more is at stake in answering them than the fate of this particular theory.

Although it is possible to imagine that justice is peculiar to each culture's or each person's memetic development, it is impossible to be morally en this assumption. I shall argue that ideological anal must presuppose a transcendent value of justice. Tools of understanding produced by cultures to pursue justice are articulations of this value. Because the conception of what is just is necessar ily related to wha tis true --for example, with what has happened and what is happening in society--moral discourse also presupposes a transcendent value of truth.

Defining Transcendent Values

The word transcendent has many meanings. For some people it recalls Plato's theory of Forms in the Republic: a determinate and universal norm of Justice by which human institutions can be judged and found wanting. Something is just to the extent that it follows the formula or resembles the Form of Justice. But I reject this view, for I do not think that our values of truth and justice are determinate.

By a transcendent value, I mean:

1. A value that can never be perfectly realized and against which all con articulations and exemplifications remain imperfect or incomplete. A transcendent value is also a transcendent ideal.

2. A value that appears to us as a demand or longing. A transcendent value seems to call out to us to enact it in our culture and institutions. Our sense of justice seems to demand that we correct injustices when we recognize them; our value of truth seems to demand that we correct falsehood.

3. A value that is inchoate and indeterminate, which human beings must articulate through culture but which is never fulfilled. Precisely because the demand of a transcendent value is inchoate and indeterminate, it can never be completely satisfied. We attempt to realize and understand a transcendent value through its articulations in culture: these include the positive norms of our culture, our technology, and our institutions. But these articulations are always incomplete and imperfect. Our institutions and theories of justice always fall short of what justice demands. Hence there is an ongoing dialectic between transcendent values and their cul tural articulations.

4. A value whose existence is presupposed by some essential aspect of hu some essential human activity. Thus the argument for the existence of a transcendent value is transcendental; the existence of the value must be presupposed given the nature of the activity. Hence we can also speak of transcendent values as "transcendental" values.

Not all human values and ideals are transcendent. Machismo and meekness, for example, do not fall into this category. Many human values and ideals satisfy some of the four conditions listed above but not others. It is by no means clear how many transcendent values there are. But I believe that moral and political discourse requires at least two: truth and justice.1

For some the very notion of truth as a "value" will seem odd. A sentence in a natural language, they will say, can have the logical value of being true or false, but truth itself is not a value in the same way justice is. Many philosophers hold that a sentence in a natural language is true when what it says bears a certain relation to the physical world or to other beliefs we currently hold. These correspondence and coherence accounts miss the phenomenological dimension of truth. Truth appears to us not only as a property of sentences but as a demand for understanding and recognition. Thus when I say that truth is a value, I am not attempting to offer an analytic definition. I mean that human beings have an inexhaustible drive to understand what is the case and what is not in the world around them. It is this value that we experience as a demand.

Transcendental Arguments for Transcendent Values

Transcendent values are similar to what Kant meant by regulative ideals: these values are a necessary precondition to certain forms of thought and certain types of activity. Hence the argument for transcendent values is transcendental. A transcendental argument is a "can't help it" argument; it claims that we cannot avoid presupposing something when we engage in a certain kind of thought or activity that we cannot help thinking or doing.

Transcendent values of truth and justice are necessary preconditions to ideological analysis, but one does not have to engage in ideological analysis. However, ideological analysis is really a special case of the more general activ understanding and moral and political discourse. This is hardly surprising; the skeptical argument about justice that I offered above does not merely undermine the project of ideological analysis; it also undermines the possibility of moral and political judgment about other persons and other cultures.

To be sure, moral and political judgment and moral and political discourse are not logically necessary--people can live like hermits and have no contact with each other. But they are practically necessary. As soon as human beings come in contact with each other, live with each other, or affect each other's lives, questions of justice between them necessarily arise.

People often like to say that certain beliefs are "true for them" or "right for them" but not necessarily for others. This is a simple way to avoid contro versy and appeal to a sense of fair play and tolerance. Particularly if what one believes is likely to be thought unusual or odd, it is easy enough to deflect anticipated criticism by asserting that what one believes is "true for me" or "right for me" but that one wouldn't dream of insisting that the belief has to be true or right for others. This is especially so in a pluralist society like our own, in which respect for differences of opinion (or at least the appearance thereof) is thought to be a virtue.

But the practical difficulty of "true for me" or "right for me" arises pre actions affect other people and come into conflict with other people's values and goals. Then we have to defend what we are doing, either to those we affect or to someone else. At that point we can no longer treat truth and justice like a pie, from which everyone gets to take away his or her own personal and private share. We must regard truth and justice as something that has claims on others besides ourselves. We must abandon the convenient dodge that what we believe is true and right is true only for us and right only for us and for no one else. Of course, we can continue to insist that all indi and their own justice, and that all we are really asking for is tolerance. But then we must claim that our view of tolerance is one that isn't just "true for us" but should be respected and accepted by others as well.

Transcendent ideals of truth and justice are presupposed in our understand encounters between people as encounters between subjects of justice that is, as the sort of entities that can be treated justly or unjustly. Questions about what is true and what is just necessarily arise whenever people affect each other's lives. They arise when people meet together by design or are thrown together by chance. They arise when people live in a single community or when they encounter each other through travel, conquest, or colonization. They arise when people meet face to face in open dialogue or when they affect each other's lives without meeting, as when a bomber places an explosive on an airplane or a factory owner pollutes a river upstream from people he has never met. As soon as we encounter an Other, justice presses its demand on us, whether we respond to that demand or not.

To be sure, people often try to avoid the mutual recognition of others as people who can be treated justly or unjustly. They may refuse to see the people they affect as subjects of justice. So conquering armies and slaveholders have often believed that their victims were less than human; they pretend that the people they subjugate are like inanimate objects to whom no justice is due. Yet even though conquerors and slaveowners refuse to recognize others as subjects of justice, we cannot understand the meaning--and the inhumanity--of their actions until we recognize these actions as an encounter between such subjects. It is ironic but true that we cannot understand the depth of injustice without an idea of justice.

Nevertheless, because the idea of justice is indefinite and indeterminate, the boundaries that demarcate subjects of justice are always contested and unclear. Today, after hard-fought battles over human equality, most people draw that line to encompass all human beings but no other entities. Perhaps in time we will draw it differently, and the nature of the "we" who draws it will change accordingly. But this potential for change simply reflects the fact that our no indefiniteness of the boundaries of the subjects of justice is simply another way of expressing the fact that justice is a transcendent ideal.

We should note, moreover, that animal rights advocates might think it possible to act unjustly toward lions and bears without believing that these animals can act unjustly. They might compare the situation of animals to those of newborn infants and certain mental incompetents, who can be treated un another way, they can claim that an entity can be a subject of justice without being an agent of justice. The boundaries of justice must include both the question of who is a subject and who is an agent of justice. The interesting question of whether subject and agent can be separated in the way the animal rights activist describes is beyond the scope of this book. My point, rather, is that the indeterminacy of the boundaries of justice--the indeterminacy of who is a subject or agent of jus tice--is part of its transcendent character.

Transcendent ideals of truth and justice are transcendental because they frame the structure of our understanding of human action. We need them to understand the meaning of human action in encounters with others, whether this action is directed at us or at third parties, and whether the encounter is friendly or violent, fair or oppressive. Understanding others in dialogic en counters is a special case of understanding human action generally, and ideo logical analysis is a special case of understanding a dialogic encounter.

To take an extreme example, suppose that a conquering army finds a de of women and children huddled and starving in the cold. The army then proceeds to execute them and seize their possessions. In this en reasoned analysis, no self-critical doubt and reconsideration. There is only the brute act of power. How is a transcendent ideal of justice presupposed in this vicious act, which allowed no time for di implicated in our subsequent understanding of what has happened.

We cannot understand the meaning of this massacre as a human action except by reference to an ideal of justice that applies to both the victors and the vanquished. Even if none of the victims is alive to tell their story, we cannot understand what their murderers did--as the brutal actions of responsible in determined actions of objects--without reference to a common and transcendent ideal of justice. We do not accuse stones and rocks of injustice when they fall in an avalanche and kill innocent people. We do not accuse lions and bears of injustice when they attack people. They cannot act unjustly because we do not regard their action as being of the same order as human action.2 What distinguishes the latter kind of action is precisely the fact that it can be just and unjust, and furthermore, that its meaning cannot be adequately understood except against this fact. Because human action is this kind of action, we must presume an idea of justice as part of our frame Finally, we cannot understand the meaning of the massacre unless we recognize that it happened to subjects of justice--to the sort of entities to whom it is possible to act unjustly. The idea of justice frames our understanding of the meaning of this encounter in terms of both the nature of the action and the nature of its results. That is why justice is a transcendental as well as a transcendent ideal.

Yet, one might object, why do we need to presuppose a transcendent ideal of justice to understand the meaning of what happened at the massacre? Why can't we simply apply the standards of justice of our own culture? Often we do simply point to the positive norms of our culture to judge others. Yet these norms of justice themselves presuppose a transcendent ideal. And when our views are challenged by those who do not share our culture's norms, we will inevitably be led to reassert this ideal.

Suppose, then, after we have condemned the massacre, that the conquerors could speak to us. "What right have you," they might say, "to apply your standards of what is just and unjust to us? By our own culture's standards, what we did was regrettable but necessary. We had the right to do what we did and so we did it. Your culture's standards, parochial as they are, apply only to you and not to us. They can have no claim on us. You think you have understood what happened. But we think you have completely misunderstood and mis characterized what we did."

To respond to this argument, we must ascend from the positive norms of our culture to a transcendent norm. We must insist that what the conquerors did was unjust not only by our own standards but by a standard that they, too, should agree to; their failure to agree to it shows that they are mistaken, or wicked, or both.

At the moment we make this claim, we must acknowledge that our own views, and the views of our culture, might actually be limited or parochial in some respects. For we appeal to a transcendent standard that might judge and find both cultures' norms wanting. Nevertheless, our ascent to the transcendent norm allows us to turn the conquerors' argument back on them. For we can say to them: "If standards of justice and truth are internal to each culture, you can have no objection to our characterization of you as war criminals. For just as our standards can have no application to you, your standards can have no application to us. We are as correct in proclaiming your evil in our culture as you are correct in proclaiming your uprightness in yours. But your very asser misunderstood you undermines this claim. It presupposes common values of truth and justice that we are somehow obligated to recog to argue for your wickedness."

I have used an imaginary dialogue to show how our understanding of hu presupposes transcendent values. This use of the dialogic form was no accident. The rhetorical structure of dialogic encounters reveals the regu ideals in a particularly striking way.3 Suppose that we find ourselves in a debate with someone about a question of public policy. Her views are very different from ours. We attempt to persuade her; failing this, we try to persuade a third party that our views are more reasonable than those of our opponent. Our very attempts to convince the audience and justify our own position require that we appeal to common ideals of justice and truth that are binding on both ourselves and the audience. Moreover, we appeal to these common ideals even if we disagree among ourselves about what those ideals require.

We saw previously how our understanding of injustice presupposes an ideal of justice. A similar phenomenon is at work in dialogic encounters. Even when we accuse our interlocutors of great evils, we make reference to a common value of justice that we claim they have failed to live up to. And their defense, even if unconvincing to us, will appeal to reasons that they insist should per opponent to a third party, we invoke an ideal of justice that applies not only to ourselves and the audience, but to the person we criticize.

In short, transcendent ideals are presupposed by the rhetorical situation of having to persuade an audience. They seem to spring forth magically from the rhetorical encounter. Like a beautiful mosaic whose pattern emerges from the juxtaposition of diverse stones, the framework of transcendent ideals that un through the confrontation between different and conflicting perspectives.4

Moreover, these ideals undergird the rhetorical situation regardless of our private intention to tell the truth or to act justly. People often use arguments to deceive each other and convince each other of things that are unjust. They bully and coerce each other with their words. They take advantage of their audience's lack of information, or its emotional, political, or economic weak deceitful and trying to persuade the audience to believe what we know is not true, we phrase our appeal in terms of values of truth and justice that we claim are binding on both us and the audience. The ideal of truth frames even our act of lying, for the ideal is presupposed by our decision to lie. Without a notion of truth, the practice of deceit becomes incoherent, just as, without a notion of justice, the practice of injustice makes no sense.

The analysis of ideology is a special case of the dialogic encounter. In ideological analysis, we interact with a person, a text written by that person, or a culture. We try to understand their ways of thinking; through this process we learn something about ourselves and our own judgments. This process cre ates a virtual dialogue with others, even if they are not physically present. Our ambivalent attitude toward cultural software means that although we criticize the others, we must also allow them to criticize us. Thus ideological analysis is a special case of the more general situation in which we are confronted by people who disagree with us about what is just, and we must deal with their objections through argument and persuasion. Because ideological analysis is a kind of dialogic encounter, it presupposes the same transcendent ideals.

As we saw in Chapter 6, any ideological analysis we apply to the thought of another could, in theory, be applied to our own thought. Because the po analysand is symmetrical, we must assume that neither we nor the analysand has a completely accurate or just view of the situation, and that the cultural software of each is partially adequate and partially inadequate to understanding what is just. We must take an ambivalent attitude not only about the other party's cultural software but also about our own.

Thus our ideological analysis assumes that neither we nor the analysand has a monopoly on what is true or just and that neither of our views offers a perfect, complete account. This already presupposes ideals of truth and justice that apply equally both to ourselves and to the analysand and that are not identical with either of our own views. The ambivalent conception of ideology presupposes common ideals against which both of our views might be found partially inadequate.

We must postulate transcendent norms whenever there is a clash or en between the positive norms of different cultures, different groups, or different persons. This encounter can be the virtual dialogue of ideological analysis, the actual dialogue of debate and argument, or the physical encounters of politics, warfare, and economics. It can be a genteel discussion or a violent confrontation. In each case, our encounter with an Other causes the transcen dent norm magically to spring to life.5

Cultural Relativism and Imperialist Universalism

The idea of a transcendent standard of justice might seem to resemble another, importantly different position: I shall call this position imperialist universalism. This is the view that there are universal concrete standards of justice and human rights that apply to every society, whether pre- or postindustrial, whether sec is the duty of right-minded people to change the positive norms and institutions of all societies so that they conform with these universal norms of justice and universal human rights. This position is worri imposition of a particular set of standards of justice and a particular set of institutions on all of the peoples of the world, whether or not these standards and institutions are appropriate to all, and even if their imposition will result in considerable misery and human suffering. In other words, people are worried by claims of universal standards of justice because they are worried that some form of cultural or political imperialism, particularly from the industrialized West, will be furthered under the name of universal justice and universal human rights. Sim society like the United States. Ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and women may well be concerned that the attitudes, perspectives, and values of majority groups and of men will be imposed on them in the name of universal standards of justice.

All of these concerns are valid ones, but none of them is an argument against the existence of transcendent values. A transcendent value cannot be identical to the values of any particular group because it is an indeterminate standard against which the positive norms of all groups must be seen as incom norms and values of one's own group with transcendent standards of truth and justice is already to misunder stand the nature of such a standard.

In fact, one needs to presuppose transcendent standards to make the case against imperialist universalism. The banner of universal standards of human liberty has often been waved in front of conquering armies, whether military, cultural, or economic. People have often invoked universal standards of reason and justice to promote unjust or inappropriate measures that are unfair to foreigners, women, and minority groups. But one can criticize these usurpa justice. For what can the argument against such actions be other than that they are unjust according to a sense of justice that applies both to oppressor and oppressed? Our very notions of tolerance and respect must be based on values that apply both to ourselves and to other peoples and lands.

To criticize imperialism we must argue that the concrete norms and insti West are not universal standards but only imperfect articulations of justice. Applied thoughtlessly to other cultures, they will produce grave in be simply that the imposition of "universal norms" is unjust because these norms conflict with the norms and institutions of the other culture; it must be because such an imposition offends a sense of justice that transcends both the positive norms of the West and those of the other culture, and against which each might be found wanting. The argument within a multicultural society is similar: We cannot simply argue that it is unjust to impose the values and perspectives of whites and males on women and persons of color because each group has its own values and perspectives. For if the perspectives and values of majorities can have no purchase on minorities, how can it be just to impose the perspectives of minorities on majorities? If the former are improper to apply to the latter, why are the latter proper to apply to the former? Rather, one must acknowledge that the perspectives of each group are partial and incomplete, and that each has the obligation to understand the possible claims of truth and justice in the other's perspective. Like any dialogic encounter, this demand requires an ascent to transcendent values.

We might try to avoid this conclusion in two ways: First, we might argue that it is unjust from the perspective of the majority's own values to apply its values to minorities. But then we have no response if the majority disagrees and insists that from its perspective it is being entirely fair. The majority is surely as good a judge as we are about what its values require of it. Second, we might argue that the majority should try to understand the perspectives and values of minorities because the majority is oppressive and the minority is oppressed. But this argument already appeals to a common idea of justice that applies to both groups. Moreover, we are surely not arguing that in all things the perspectives of minorities are right and the majority's perspective must yield to it. Minorities can also have biased and parochial views of a situation. More be multiple minority perspectives, some of which are in conflict with one another. The argument must be rather that various minority per truth and justice in them that are likely to be overlooked by majority perspectives because of the majority's position, interests, and cognitive framework. In other words, the multicultural situation we have been considering is the familiar one of ideological analysis, and the same arguments apply to it.

If a belief in transcendent values does not require a fixed and determinate standard of justice that applies to all cultures, why does it not collapse into cultural relativism? In fact, there are two forms of cultural relativism, one which I accept and another which I reject. The first claims that different cultures have different norms because they have different histories and have faced different problems, and that if we understood the history and problems of different peoples, many of their norms would not seem so strange to us and would even seem justified. This claim is not inconsistent with a belief in a transcendent value of justice; indeed, it proceeds from such a belief. The transcendent value is indeterminate; it has simply been articulated in different ways in different cultures.

This version of cultural relativism treats the other culture with hermeneutic charity-like a person or a text that has something to teach us. In this sense it takes an attitude not fundamentally different from textual interpretation or ideological analysis. Hermeneutic charity toward the norms of another culture is a necessary admonition against rushing to judgment and may even enlighten our own views. It is not identical, however, to the fantastic claim that if we take enough time to understand another culture, we will agree that whatever that culture considers just will turn out in fact to be just. This conclusion is equally inconsistent with an ambivalent attitude toward cultural software. After all, our own culture's norms are partially inadequate and unjust, and it is likely that the same is true of other cultures. It is entirely possible that when we learn more about another culture, we may conclude that some of its norms and customs are not justified by its peculiar circumstances and history, just as our own culture's history does not excuse all of its present practices.

Nevertheless, even if we find that a culture's norms are partially unjust, there is still the further question of whether it is right for others (including ourselves) to take active steps to abolish that culture's practices. There may be good reasons to avoid doing so. First, intervention might greatly disrupt the society and cause even greater suffering and misery than is created by the current injustices. Second, our notions of tolerance and respect for political self-determination may counsel against intervening in the affairs of another country or another culture. Once again, none of these claims is inconsistent with the postulation of a transcendent value of justice. Indeed, all of them implicitly make reference to such a value.

Moreover, this version of cultural relativism is compatible with the recog some different ways of living may be incommensurable with each other, as long as not all are incommensurable. We may not always be able to say whether one way of life is more just than another. But this does not mean that no ways of living are more just than any other, or that no changes in a culture's norms and mores would make it more just. Even if it is not clear how to compare a constitutional democracy in an industrial age with a close-knit agrarian farming community, it might still be possible to argue that the practice of appropriating lands from the weak and the defenseless in the latter com and should be changed.

A second version of cultural relativism, which I reject, holds that questions of what is just and unjust exist wholly within a given culture. One can judge a culture's justice only by its own norms, because "justice" is by definition some positive cultural norms. Because of our own cul help judging other cultures. But applying our ideas of justice to theirs is a category mistake. We are quite literally talking nonsense when we do this.6

This conception of cultural relativism is inconsistent with the notion of transcendent values. For that reason it is also incoherent. If notions of justice are wholly internal to each culture, then no culture can meaningfully object when another takes it over, seizes its lands, and massacres its inhabitants. It can insist that under its own standards what the other culture is doing is wrong. But this should hardly bother the invaders, since these standards cannot by definition apply to them. If applying the aggressor's standard of justice to the victims is a category mistake, then applying the victim's norms to the aggressors is equally so.

The reason why this position makes no sense is that one can always object, and this objection is meaningful. But the very fact of raising a meaningful objection already places the victim in a dialogic encounter with the aggressor. And as we have seen, the rhetorical structure of this encounter presupposes transcendent ideals.

People may be drawn to this second form of cultural relativism because they feel it is important to respect the values of other cultures and as a perpetual reminder that their own culture does not have all the answers. But ironically, these laudable reasons require the presumption of transcendent ideals. We need a transcendent value of justice to respect another culture's norms as well as to criticize them. To understand why the actions of other cultures make sense, we must already believe in a common and transcendent value of justice that their norms partially and incompletely articulate, as do ours.

We can see a similar difficulty in Jean-Francois Lyotard's vision of justice as constituted by a multiplicity of different and incommensurable language games. According to Lyotard, discussions of justice are like moves in a language game. Each language game has its own standards of justice, and each grows and extends itself by the development of new moves and new rules created through playing the game. The problem, as Lyotard sees it, is the danger of imperialism-one prescriptive system may attempt to dominate and extinguish the others, or fail to recognize their singularity and their claims to exist and to develop on their own through their own internal logics. Thus, in addition to the multiplicity of justices, Lyotard concludes, we must also have a "justice of multiplicity." We must have a justice, Lyotard argues, that "prescribes the singular justice of each game as it has just been situated." The justice of mul "terror"-which to Lyotard means the attempt by one game to take over and dominate most of the others.7

It is a tolerant vision, but as Lyotard's interlocutor, Jean-Loup Thebaud, reminds him, it also undermines the notion of mutually incommensurable lan Lyotard has himself become "the great prescriber," ordering the various games of justice to respect each other's boundaries.8 If justice is purely internal to each particular game, how can any game have the authority to prescribe the boundaries of the others? Such a game must be engaged in its own form of imperialism, like a superpower preventing wars of conquest between smaller countries by the deployment of its own troops.

To avoid this conclusion, we must acknowledge that some forms of over and others unjust, and this judgment must be able to be acknowl distinct language game. Yet this means that the games of justice cannot be completely walled off from each other but must be interpen between games must be recognizable and coherent moves within each game. So all the games must have something in common with each other; they must all be able to communicate with each other, at least on the subject of justice between them. Lyotard and Thebaud end their discussion in laughter, recognizing the incongruity of their situation. But this incongruity also shows us the inescapability of transcendent ideals.

Transcendent Values and Positive Norms

Not all arguments about what is just explicitly refer to a transcendent standard of justice. People often argue about justice by referring to the positive norms of their culture and its institutions. A culture's positive norms of justice, even where they are quite unjust, constitute its attempt to articulate the transcendent value of justice. These positive norms and institutions always presuppose a transcendent value of justice, because it always remains possible for people to criticize their culture's norms and institutions on the grounds that they are not sufficiently just.

In the Jim Crow South, for example, people might have argued that a black man should not sit next to a white woman in a public bus because it is disre against the law. These arguments are appeals to the positive norms of that culture and to its laws. Yet it was also possible for southerners to understand that these norms and institutions were unfair and to criticize them, even while living in the same culture.

This ability to recognize and critique the injustices of our own culture is another reason why it makes sense to speak of transcendent values. It is hardly surprising that people are often critical of other cultures and their traditions. What is surprising is that people are able to apply their critical focus to their own culture's norms and institutions. To be sure, it is always possible that these criticisms are misguided in any particular case. But the mere ability to articulate them already presupposes a sense of justice against which the norms and institutions of one's society might be understood as imperfect and inade quate.

One might object that when we criticize Jim Crow laws, we are only of based on some other aspect of our culture's positive norms. Enforced segregation on public buses is unjust because it offends our culture's commitment to equality, as evidenced in other customs and other laws. So perhaps criticism of our own culture can proceed without the need to postulate any transcendent value of justice. People simply engage in internal or immanent critique of their own culture and institutions by transferring judgments and norms from one aspect of that culture to another.

But this poses an interesting problem: If our judgments of justice come solely from the positive norms of our culture, how do we know that there is a conflict between segregation on public buses and our commitment to equality? Why do we not see the status quo as a perfect accommodation between com differently in different areas of social life? Thus blacks are permitted social equality with whites in some sit considerations is different. The mere recognition of a problem as a problem already takes us beyond a simple application or transfer of cultural norms. Our very sense that there is a conflict between a culture's norms already presupposes a transcendent standard of justice.

Even if we concede that there is a conflict between different positive norms of our culture, both the customs and laws of Jim Crow and our egalitarian commitments are equally part of our culture and institutions. If the culture's norms and institutions are the only standard of justice, what makes one norm or one institution more just than the others? By themselves the culture's norms cannot tell us how to reconcile a conflict between them, for both antagonistic elements are present in the culture. To take another example, suppose current law protects blacks but not homosexuals from job discrimination. If we believe that this treatment is inconsistent, why does it follow that the just solution is to give homosexuals protection from discrimination? Why not remove legal protection for blacks?

One might respond to this difficulty by arguing that our commitment to egalitarianism is a more central feature of our cultural norms than our com However, this claim can be understood in two different ways. If something is central because it is more prevalent, we refer only to a positive norm. (For purposes of argument I assume that there are noncontroversial ways of judging prevalence. If there are not, this simply re of a cultural practice, unless our only goal is to reinforce the most prev alent positive norms simply because they are more prevalent. Racial inequality may be a central and pervasive feature of a regime of Jim Crow or apartheid, for example, but this does not make it a worthy basis for critique of the few egalitarian norms that might remain elsewhere in the culture. By reinforcing the most prevalent practices of a culture we may reinforce its most deeply unfair elements. On the other hand, by "central" we could mean "more valuable" or "more just." In that case our judgment must refer to a transcendent conception of value or justice that informs our notion of centrality.9

We can resolve these puzzles only if we assume that there is a value of justice that our culture imperfectly responds to. Then we can sensibly say that our culture is more just in some regards than in others, and that all conflicts must be resolved in favor of the more just features. Hence even when we engage in a so-called internal or immanent critique of our culture's norms and insti tutions, we must presuppose a transcendent value of justice.

Transcendence of Value Versus Transcendence of Position

The notion of "transcendence" might suggest escaping or getting outside of culture in order to judge it. But this way of talking confuses two very different ideas: the transcendence of position and the transcendence of value. A tran scendent position is a perspective that is not limited in any way; it is a sort of "God's-eye view." A transcendent value is a value that cannot fully be realized; it serves as a regulative ideal to our understanding. The notion of transcendence is quite different in the two cases; the first refers to a perfect perspective for understanding, while the second concerns the necessary framework for nor mative understanding in all perspectives.

Because the word transcendent applies to both, it is tempting to try to con From a transcendent position, perhaps we could fully understand a transcendent value. We could know what was really and completely just if we had perfect information and no impediments to our understanding. But in fact, the idea of a transcendent position is inconsistent with the idea of a transcen determinate, and a transcen dent value cannot be made determinate.

Moreover, the notion of a transcendent position is incoherent. To have a perspective is already to be limited in some way. To have a perspective is to have some apparatus for understanding the world. And to have an apparatus means already to see things in some ways rather than others. To avoid the limitations of each possible apparatus of understanding, one would have to have no apparatus at all. And then one would understand nothing, not everything.

Nevertheless, the idea of a transcendent position has been an attractive one in the history of human thought. The reason is not difficult to understand. Intelligent people understand that disagreements arise from differences in per information, and from the cognitive limitations of po moreover, that the thought of all human beings is limited in one way or another. Thus it seems natural to think that limitation of perspective is the cause of disagreement and uncertainty about justice. If so, then perhaps by removing the causes we could rid ourselves of the effects. We could put our knowledge about what is just on a sure footing by reference to a perfect perspective or a perfect system for judgment.

These considerations explain the appeal of two very common approaches to justice: ideal observer theories and ideal process theories. Ideal observer theories claim that justice is what an observer under ideal conditions would find to be just. Ideal process theories argue that correct judgments about justice are the product of what emerges from some ideal process of decisionmaking. Thus justice is the product of ideal decisionmaking conditions or a consensus reached under ideal conditions of dialogue.

Ideal observer theories attempt to avoid speaking in terms of a transcendent ideal of justice by speaking instead in terms of transcendence of position. Ideal process theories try to avoid reference to a transcendent ideal by manufacturing justice out of an ideal procedure. The attempt to avoid the transcendent nature of justice creates problems for each theory. Conversely, to the extent that they are successful articulations of justice, they presuppose a transcendent ideal.

Ideal observer theories face two problems: First, they postulate an observer with ideal characteristics working under ideal conditions. Yet our notion of what makes these characteristics and conditions ideal already presupposes tran justice. Things are just, not because they are so judged by a person with ideal characteristics; rather, these characteristics are ideal because they help a person understand what is just.

Second, the notion of an ideal observer of justice begins to unravel as soon as we inquire into the characteristics of the observer. All observers have a perspective, but ironically, the ideal observer cannot. To have a perspective is already to be a finite being, with a particular history and a particular set of needs, concerns, and desires. Moreover, having one perspective to some degree precludes having others, because some perspectives are mutually incompatible, or are produced by living different kinds of lives, all of which no single person could lead. Is the ideal observer white or black, pregnant or nonpregnant, untouched by violence or the victim of child abuse? It is clear that she or he can be none of these things, for to be any one of them would already shape and limit her perspective. And this is precisely the problem: to have a per spective is to exist as a finite human being with a particular set of commitments and a particular life history. The ideal observer, on the other hand, can have no gender, no history, and no group identification. The observer can have experienced no defining moments in life, can belong to no political party, can adhere to no ideology or worldview. The observer cannot, in other words, exist as a human being.

The great irony here is that our ability to understand justice stems from our situatedness and our finitude. Our life experiences are the raw materials from which we make sense of the normative demands of life. Without them we cannot understand anything at all. What we most have in common with other human beings is what separates us: our finitude, our inadequacies, and our limitations of perspective. We are able to make normative sense of the world because we exist as individuals with a history, who have experienced things and been changed by them, who have perspectives and cultural software that simultaneously limit and empower our understanding. This finitude, this historicity, this limitation, is what makes the transcendent appear to us as transcendent--beyond our grasp and full comprehension. Ideal observer approaches fail because they rid obser vation of its humanity, which is inextricably linked to conditions of human im­perfection.

Ideal process theories describe justice as the outcome of an ideally fair process or decision procedure.10 Like utilitarian and deontological theories of justice, these theories are useful heuristics for articulating our sense of justice. But they never completely capture our sense of justice. Ideal process theories presuppose transcendent ideals, they do not produce them. Whatever proce themselves; they must appeal to ideals of truth and justice in order to convince us that they are fair and likely to produce correct conclusions about what is true and just. This problem is similar to that faced by ideal observer theories: Things are just, not because they are the result of an ideal procedure; rather, the procedure is ideal to the extent that its con ditions are fair and it leads to just results.

Procedures cannot be determinative of justice because we can always crit terms of the results they produce: the best criticism of the fairness of a procedure is usually the injustice of the results it produces. So a procedure must at best be considered a way of approximating what is just; it is an artic it will necessarily be imperfect, producing results that are always subject to further criticism.

Ideal dialogic theories are interesting and important versions of ideal pro They hold that truth or justice is what people would agree to after a dialogue under ideal conditions.11 Earlier I noted that transcendent ideals of truth and justice seem to emerge naturally out of the structure of dialogic encounters. Hence it is natural to attempt to identify truth and justice with what results from ideal dialogue. One might thus identify truth or justice with the actual consensus of the community in the long run.12 Or, recognizing that many encounters are unfair and coercive, one might identify truth or jus tice with the consensus emerging from a dialogic encounter under ideal con ditions.

Ideal dialogic theories are distinctive because they emphasize that truth and justice are linked to ongoing processes that involve both discovery and creation. The substance of an agreement about truth and justice is true or just not because it conforms to some preexisting test or criterion but because it is the result of a contingent process that results in agreement. The fact of agreement makes true or just what would not be true or just absent the agreement.13

Yet even ideal dialogic theories presuppose a transcendent ideal of truth and justice. Such theories well understand that the brute fact of agreement does not make the substance of the agreement true or just. They must distinguish, in Habermas's terms, between a rationally grounded consensus and a false con dialogic procedure is to make an agreement be perspective impervious to criticism on the grounds that it might be unjust or partial. We can try to solve this difficulty by postulating that the agreement takes place under ideal conditions. Yet as before, transcendent ideals of truth and justice are presupposed in articulating the ideal conditions. What makes these conditions ideal is that they lead the parties to an understanding of what is true or just. Thus the fact that the parties lack important information or suffer from unconscious needs to reduce cog tends to make the results of their deliberation suspect. But the reason why they are suspect is not simply that they deviate from the criteria of ideal dialogue. It is because they are likely to produce a consensus that is not true or just.

Ultimately, however, the problem is not simply that we need better pro problem is that we need better people. The participants in any community are finite beings of finite intelligence whose understandings are shaped and circumscribed by their history. Their perspectives are necessarily limited by the partial inadequacy of their tools of understanding and by their inability completely to take into account situations and consequences beyond their apprehension as well as those which may arise in the future. No dialogue between finite human beings, whose understanding is constituted by the his conditions. For their perspectives are always limited by the fact that each has a perspective. The history of their discussions is always limited by the fact that each has a history. The only truly ideal dialogue would be one between gods. They would already understand everything, and therefore there would be noth ing left to say.14

I believe that there is a deep connection between being the kinds of finite beings we are--who have absorbed tools of understanding produced through evolutionary bricolage--and our experience of moral and factual truth as tran scendent ideals. Although people may have used the fiction of a transcendent position to understand transcendent values, the two notions are actually op position is impossible that we experience justice as a transcendent ideal. To have a per called "the crooked timber of humanity," imbued with tools of under product of history and the object of ambivalence. Yet to have a perspective about human action is already to presuppose the transcen dent. The transcendent exists because we are imperfect, because we have a perspective. The transcendent is the frame through which we understand the normative meaning of human action. The transcendent is the limit that shapes our horizon of moral experience.

The Muse of Justice

As limited and imperfect human beings, we cannot stand outside our cultural practices and our cultural software. And our values must be immanent, in the sense that we can express them only through the tools bequeathed to us by culture. How then can we make sense of the transcendence of human values while recognizing that we always make judgments within culture? How can human values be both transcendent and immanent at one and the same time?

In Chapter 2 I argued that we should think of value as a verb, not a noun, as something we do or feel, not something we have. Human values are inchoate and indeterminate urges or demands that are articulated and refined through culture. A transcendent value is a special kind of human value, a value that can never be fully fulfilled. A transcendent value is an inexhaustible demand.

This way of speaking conflicts with the standard metaphor that we employ to describe evaluation, the metaphor of measurement. We evaluate things by measuring them against our sense of justice, just as we measure the length of a table by laying a ruler against it. Hence we have the familiar metaphors of number (things are more or less just), weight (justice comes from balancing competing considerations), size (the lesser of two evils), and distance (coming closer to or diverging from justice). In the standard conception, values work like scales or rulers, and evaluation is a kind of measurement.

This conception has important metaphorical entailments. The first is a sep between value and the thing valued. Because a value is a standard of measure, it must exist apart from the thing that it measures. One cannot use a ruler to measure itself anymore than one can use a balance to weigh itself.

As a result, the metaphor of measurement also seems to suggest that we must somehow stand outside culture in order to evaluate it. We must use a determinate conception of justice existing outside our existing culture to eval uate it, in the same way that rulers must exist independently of the objects they measure. Thus the twin notions of determinacy of value and separation from the object of evaluation are yoked together under the metaphor of measure ment.

The idea of justice as an indeterminate or inchoate urge does not fit this familiar metaphor. Instead of a standard of determinate measurement, the tran justice is an insatiable urge. Thus we have two contrasting metaphors of the value of justice: justice is like a ruler of determinate length that we use to measure the world, and justice is like an indeterminate demand that can never be fulfilled despite our best efforts. Each of these is a meta but neither can be usefully employed in all contexts and circumstances. To understand the phenomenon of transcendence we must recognize the metaphor of measure metaphor, and exchange it for a different figure.15

The contrasting metaphors of determinate measure and indeterminate de produce different accounts of why our cultural institutions are imperfect, why there is no example of justice in the world that is perfectly just. There are two ways of expressing this inadequacy. One makes use of the notion of a determinate measure, and the second makes use of the notion of an unfulfilled but indeterminate demand.

Under the first metaphor, a determinate conception of justice exists apart from individual examples of justice and is used to measure them. So we explain the fact that no example of justice is perfectly just by saying that each example is an imperfect representation of a determinate conception of justice. The jus institution is a question of the quality of the correspondence between the determinate idea of justice and the concrete example. Thus virtue is a process of good copying, and the virtuous person is a good copyist. One makes an institution just by copying the determinate idea of justice as accurately as possible in all of its details. But because no copy can be perfect, there is no perfect example of justice in the world.

Under the contrasting metaphor, justice is an inchoate yearning that we attempt to articulate through our cultural constructions. To be just we must construct examples of justice using the indeterminate urge for justice as our goad rather than as our guide. This means that the virtuous person is not a good copyist but a good architect. She attempts to satisfy her sense of justice by constructing just institutions. There are many different ways of constructing a just institution, depending upon the situation in which she finds herself and the resources she has available to her. Nevertheless, she responds to an indef indeterminate value that can never be fulfilled. Her constructions cannot exhaust justice's demand. Thus human cultural creations will always fail to be perfectly just, but not because they are defective copies of a determinate standard. Their imperfection arises from the necessary inadequation that must exist between an indeterminate and inexhaustible urge and any concrete and determinate articulation of it. This relationship of inadequacy between culture and value is what we mean by transcendence.16

Note that unlike the metaphor of measurement, the metaphor of the in demand does not suggest that we must go outside our culture to evaluate our institutions. Rather, we feel the demand of justice as we construct and reconstruct our institutions using the cultural tools bequeathed to us. To feel the demand of justice we do not have to travel to a place beyond culture; the demand presents itself as a sense of the inadequacy of our tools that we experience as we work with them.

We might understand this idea better through an analogy to the myth of the Muse. In Greek mythology, the artist created works of beauty because of a Muse, who not only inspired but also demanded the creation of the work. But there are two different conceptions of the artist's relationship to the Muse. In the first, the artist is no more than an amanuensis who copies out what the Muse dictates to her. Artists often talk this way out of a sense of modesty: they tell us that they merely wrote down what a higher intelligence created. This version of the myth, however, disguises important features of human artistic creation. Most artists are not obedient copyists; they create only as a result of practice and hard work, and they suffer greatly for their art.

In the other conception, the Muse is a harsh taskmistress who relentlessly drives the artist to create the beautiful, often to the point of madness. The Muse demands enormous sacrifices of the artist but is never satisfied with the results, and so artists live their lives in a sort of perpetual bondage to their Muse. The copyist has the advantage of knowing what the finished product will look like; the servant of the Muse does not have this luxury. The servant must turn her inchoate sense and drive for beauty into a work of art, always with the risk that it will not please the Muse who goads her. In this story, the Muse is the mythological externalization of the human drive to value and create works of value. Thus we might say metaphorically that transcendent human values are like Muses; and that there is a Muse of justice as well as one of truth.

Do All Cultures Have a Concept of Justice?

So far I have assumed that when we discuss questions of justice with another person, both of us are speaking about the same concept. But what happens if we relax this assumption? Does this undermine the idea of a transcendent ideal of justice?

Suppose that we come across a culture that lacks a word for justice. Instead, they have a concept they call dharmatzedek, a term that I borrow from the Sanskrit word for duty (dharma) and the Hebrew word for righteousness (tze because I do not want the reader to assume that I refer to the concepts of justice in either Hinduism or Judaism.) According to the views of this hypothetical culture, dharmatzedek is a cosmic order of the universe. Social order is a special case of the cosmic order. Things adhere to dharmatzedek when they reflect the proper order of nature, an order that in cludes not only human beings but animals, gods, and even inanimate objects.

Can we still say that a transcendent ideal of justice is presupposed in our conversation with members of this culture? This is really the question of whether it is possible for us to have a conversation with them about what is just and not just. The fact that they have no such word does not mean that such a conversation is impossible. We modify our existing cultural software all the time in order to understand what others are saying. For example, I have just introduced the concept of dharmatzedek into the present discussion.

Let us suppose that our communications with this culture lead us to believe that by dharmatzedek they mean the concept of natural order that I have de we will be able to have a conversation with them, for our notion of justice is a notion of achieving appropriate social order and rectifying inappropriate social order. It overlaps with their concept of dharmatzedek even if it is not identical to it. Their sense of social order will be very different from ours, and they may use very different ways of expressing it and making claims about it. But once we create a theory of what their concept means to them, we can begin the process of understanding how the world makes sense to them. Conversely, from their point of view, we will have a very strange concept called "justice," which concerns the order of society and the entitlements of individ concern their relationship to other things in the universe. They will see our concept of justice as a truncated and mangled conception of dharmatzedek, with an exaggerated focus on the concerns of individu language that makes intelligible what we are talking about, they can begin to see that what we are saying makes sense from our perspective, even if they do not entirely agree with it.

Now suppose further that we discover that this culture is engaging in very inefficient forms of agriculture. Not only that: they refuse to engage in practices that would increase productivity. They believe that these practices would show improper respect for the land and disturb the moral order of the universe. They hold this view even though their forbearance means that many of their people will starve. And when we suggest new methods, they refuse to accept them because our methods are against dharmatzedek.

Note that my very description of their objection shows that we can under makes sense for them to object to agricultural innovation. It is intelligible even if we think it mistaken. Conversely, their conversations with us enable them to recognize that our notion of "justice" is an impoverished version of dharmatzedek this will allow them to understand why we think that one should adopt the new methods, even though they are convinced that we are quite wrong. Once again, the very fact that we can describe our differences from them means that some sort of mutual understanding is possible, even if it is not a perfect understanding.

Nevertheless, we should not assume from our ability to communicate that the other culture really has the same concept of justice as we do and that their concept of dharmatzedek is parasitic on it. We should not assume that our "justice" corresponds to some sort of "natural kind" and their concept of dhar doesn't this undermine the notion of a transcendent conception of justice? Does it mean that we must acknowledge a separate, transcendent ideal of dharmatzedek, and so on, for each different conception in each different culture?

Before answering this question, we might raise the stakes even higher. Most people think that Plato offered a theory of justice in his Republic. But the con (justice) in fourth-century B.C. Greece is hardly the same notion as the concept of justice we have today. Today in Western democracies we tend to think of justice in terms of getting what we are entitled to, fulfilling our duties to others, and avoiding injury to them. Our contemporary notion of justice is largely organized around the language of individual rights and focuses on interpersonal injury and benefit. Plato does not have this conception. His major concern in the Republic is how the individual fits into the social order. Whereas many (though by no means all) political theorists in the contemporary West tend to view the state as an instrument for fulfilling individual needs and protecting individual rights, Plato's conception regards social order as primary and the well-being of individuals as secondary. For Plato, dikaiosune is satisfied when the individual exists in the right relation to his or her society. That is one reason why, in the language of contemporary conceptions of justice, Plato's scheme for an ideal city seems so authoritarian to us.

Nevertheless, Plato is one of the founding voices in the Western discussion about the nature of justice. And he is also identified with the notion of a universal transhistorical conception of justice. Yet if Plato's dikaiosune is not the same as our contemporary conception of justice, perhaps we face the same difficulties in understanding his conception in the Republic as we face in un we claim that there is a single transcendent conception of justice when each culture seems to have a different conception, including those cultures that form the wellsprings of our own?

We can solve this problem by recognizing that our contemporary rights justice is not a transcendent conception. It is itself an articu It has come into being at a certain point in history and will no doubt be replaced by some other normative conception in the future. Plato's society-based notion of dikaiosune is also not a transcendent conception but an articulation that reflects the cultural software of his time. So, too, the natural order-based conception of dharmatzedek represents that culture's articulation of a transcendent value. Each culture (and each person) shares this transcendent value, but each articulates it in a different way.

Throughout this chapter I have called this transcendent value "justice" because that is the word that comes most easily to me, given my cultural sit uation, my cultural software. And it is also the easiest way to explain the idea of transcendence to an audience that shares most of my assumptions. But if justice, dikaiosune, and dharmatzedek are all articulations of some higher tran scendent ideal, what is the nature of that ideal? What is the common ground of all three notions? What is the cognitive framework that each of the three fleshes out partially and imperfectly, and that makes it possible for each of us to understand the other?

In a more abstract sense, we are talking about the transcendent ideal of a normative order. In each culture the members have a conception of a normative order that includes a notion of the subjects and agents to whom this normative order is relevant. Our notion of justice, the concept of dharmatzedek, and Plato's dikaiosune are all ways of expressing the normative order that exists between the relevant subjects and agents. The subjects and agents of each normative order are "individuals," and the normative order concerns their proper relation to each other. By "individuals," however, I mean only the sort of sentient beings who can be subjects or agents, not the full-bodied conception of rights-bearing individuals that we associate with contemporary liberalism. In some cultures, animals and gods can be subjects or agents of the normative order. Moreover, in some cultures, what we call inanimate objects can also participate in the normative order because they are not, strictly speaking, in animate-they are embodiments of or connected to gods and spirits.

Thus each culture recognizes an idea of a normative order, but each artic ulates it in a different way. There are as many ways to articulate the idea of a normative order as there are possible ways of articulating the relationships between individuals, society, and the universe. In Plato's dikaiosune, for ex ample, but not in a modern rights-based conception of justice, the normative order refers to the individual's right relation to the state. Notions of individual entitlement are mediated through the language of this relationship.

It is equally important to recognize that some cultural articulations rec ognize only some of the possible elements of the normative order as salient. The concept of dharmatzedek, for example, includes our normative relationship to the universe. But the modern conception of justice makes a tripartite dis tinction between human beings, other living things, and inanimate matter. Jus tice is a relation between human beings (and possibly some animals). It does not extend to inanimate objects. The contemporary West deemphasizes the possibility of a normative order between ourselves and what our worldview sees as inanimate matter, even though there is currently much interest in protecting the environment. We in the West are more likely to argue for environmental protection because of the ways it will affect future generations of human beings or other living creatures than to claim that we have ethical obligations to rocks, stones, and bodies of water. Even if we recognized a normative relation between ourselves and inanimate matter, I suspect that we would not call it justice. We would give it some other name, like the "sanctity of nature."

Comparing our contemporary notions of justice with other possible con cepts like dharmatzedek or dikaiosune suggests the many different ways that cultures can articulate the transcendent ideal of a normative order between individuals that we understand as justice. Even though justice is an abstract and indeterminate concept, it already articulates and restricts that ideal, reflecting the concerns and attitudes of our cultural moment. Through culture we divide and distribute our sense of the normative order into multiple values and virtues, of which justice is only one among many. Not all cultures will do this in the same way and so we should not expect that their moral language will share the same distinctions as ours. But because all of our moral discourse presupposes the idea of subjects and agents in a normative order, we can be intelligible to each other even if we do not always agree. Indeed, if we could not understand the speech and actions of others as presupposing a normative order with sub jects and agents of some kind, it is likely that we would not even understand them as being rational agents.

Pragmatism and Historicism

My argument that different cultures articulate transcendent values in different ways brings me at last to a final objection-one that should be particularly important in a book whose vision of culture is largely historicist and whose view of knowledge is essentially pragmatist. The objection is that one cannot meaningfully speak of ideals or values that transcend cultures because the idea of transcendence is itself wholly peculiar to a particular cultural tradition of

discourse--the discourse of Western philosophical thought. The concept of transcendent ideals has a specific history and genealogy that stretches backward from the present day to Kant and to Plato. The idea of transcendence is itself merely one set of tools of understanding that have been developed at a certain point in history to solve particular kinds of problems. Thus, the argument goes, the view of human values as a series of articulations of a transcendent frame transcendent conception is itself one of the contingent artifacts of a particular culture. And once we rec ognize the contingency of the idea of "transcendence"-as a historically pro and truth are values that transcend all cultural traditions.

The response to this pragmatic objection is entirely pragmatic in spirit. Surely the idea of a transcendent value is a product of a particular cultural history. We can trace its development from Ancient Greece to the contemporary West, and so the particular shape it has taken is contingent in the sense of having been the product of memetic evolution. But it does not follow that the features of the human predicament expressed through this theoretical con cept are themselves wholly contingent. Rather, I argue, the concept of "tran scendent value" is the best way, given who we are and where we are now, to make sense of these features of human existence--our experience of justice as an inexhaustible demand, and our sense of the inadequacy of all attempts at capturing this value and making it determinate. The concept of transcendence is the most adequate way of describing this inadequacy.

As tools of understanding, all of our ideas are imperfect, and this holds true even for our ideas of perfection. The idea of transcendent values is itself merely an articulation of that which it purports to describe. As an articulation, it is surely subject to revision. And perhaps someday we will exchange the notion of transcendence for another that will be more successful. But this does not mean that the features of human life that our ideas attempt to express are themselves wholly contingent and wholly internal to our discourse. Our con them.

Moreover, there is a curious sense in which even the pragmatist objection to transcendence must make use of transcendent ideals. The pragmatist objec tion is that there cannot really be transcendent ideals because of the historical emergence of the concept of transcendence. Yet such a claim seems to hold itself apart from its own pragmatist scruples. For the objection must surely apply to itself; it is made wholly from within the discourse of a particular culture-and therefore can hardly serve as a judgment about the thought of other cultures. Moreover, the pragmatist objection seems to present itself as an assertion about the way things "really are" that applies with equal force to claims about truth and justice made in other discourses from other cultures with other histories. It offers an impossibility theorem applying to all cultures from within a particular culture. It makes a transcendent claim about the im transcendence.

The pragmatist thus ends up in a curious reversal. What I have dubbed the pragmatist argument turns out not to be so pragmatic at all, for this argument wants to see behind the illusion of adequacy of a particular conception. It believes in the reality of this illusion and thus in the reality of the state of affairs that the illusion conceals. The pragmatist argument wants to insist that, despite the comfort that the notion of transcendent ideals might give us, they are products of a cultural moment. Hence they cannot describe what is really the case; they cannot truly apply to any other culture than our own.

Conversely, as I have suggested, the argument for transcendent ideals is more truly pragmatic in temperament. Given who we are and where we have come from, the language of transcendence is the best way to explain our ability to discuss questions of truth and justice with other cultures and other persons. It is the best way to understand the phenomenological demands of truth and justice. It is the best way to describe the relation between human values and the felt imperfections of this world. Moreover, transcendent concepts are im plicated by many other beliefs about ourselves and our world that we would find it hard to jettison. In other words, the pragmatist argument for transcen dent values is that one should accept these concepts and this way of talking because they work.

For my part, this response to the pragmatist objection is as conclusive as I need it to be. It is, as I like to say, good enough for the purpose at hand. I am happy to acknowledge that talk of transcendent ideals of truth and justice is a part of our cultural software that arose at a certain point in history to under analysis, and moral discourse. Like other cultural software, it may be revised, sharpened, and even discarded in time. But as of now, I argue that this way of talking is the most adequate way of describing the human predicament. More than that a pragmatist surely cannot demand.

As for the historicist, I would go even further: A historicist conception of human culture and human values not only is consistent with the notion of transcendent ideals, it requires them. By "historicism" I do not mean a theory which holds that the content of substantive values is successively revealed to us through the progress of history. Rather, I refer to the view that people's values are shaped by the historical moment in which they find themselves. Hence as the problems people are faced with change, so, too, do their re sponses. Historicism in this sense is the temporal counterpart of cultural rel ativism. The historicist wants us to understand how people in different times and places could have held such radically different views of the world and of human values. She wants us to grasp how it made sense for people to believe in things and hold values that we today find curious or even reprehensible.

Implicit in this project are two assumptions. First, the historicist may wish to present the past as strange and even alien to us, but she cannot present it as utterly unintelligible. Rather, to learn the lessons of historicism, we must seek to understand the past in all of its strangeness and alterity. By definition, an unintelligible past can make no sense to us, and therefore we can learn nothing from it. Indeed, the discovery of an unintelligible past simply leads us to the entirely sensible conclusion that we have not done the work necessary to understand it. For otherwise we cannot know whether the unintelligibility lies in the past or is due to the clumsiness of our efforts to comprehend it. The irony of historicism is that it presupposes the basic intelligibility of the past in order that we may experience its strangeness and difference. Moreover, the strangeness and difference that it presents is only one step in a larger dialectical maneuver. For historicism also wishes to show us how what we find strange and alien made sense to the people who lived through these times.

This leads to the second assumption implicit in historicism. Morally speak historicist does not want to let us off the hook. She wants to upset our smug assurance that the real reason why the views and values of the past seem ugly and ignorant is that they really are ugly and ignorant. Behind this project is usually a further, deeper agenda: the hope that we can take some critical distance from ourselves, that we can understand that people in future genera abhorrent as we find those of the past. And this agenda in turn harbors two equal if opposite hopes: The first is that the present will come to see that it does not hold all of the answers to questions of value. The second is that if we can learn to be charitable to the strangeness of the past, we may merit an equal charity from the future.

The assumptions of historicism open a virtual dialogue between ourselves and the past, a dialogue that has much in common with the critical approach to ideology that I have offered in this book. To make the past intelligible to us, we must understand why the actions of previous generations made sense to them. We must attempt to see the truth and the justice in what they thought and what they said. And this project brings us inevitably back to the postulation of transcendent values of truth and justice.

Our recognition of historical changes in values requires ideals against which to understand this change. We can describe the history of people grappling with successive tools of understanding that reflect the periods of their emer backdrop against which we can describe the limitations of this grappling. We are able to observe the parade of human conceptions passing through history, mutating and reversing themselves, because we have a language for describing their relative adequacy and inadequacy. In this way the concepts of historicism and transcendence are interdependent and inter understand the transcendent as transcendent because we can see its articulations vary in history. The variance of history is coherent because we understand it against the background of the transcendent. The experience of historicism makes the concept of transcendence emergent; the concept of transcendence makes the language of historicism coherent.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/13/feed 1 Chapter 6: Ambivalence and Self-Reference http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/12 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/12#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:19:34 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=12 Theories of ideology take different normative attitudes toward the object of their study. Generally speaking, these theories fall into two categories, pe pejorative conception of ideology sees ideology as nec To have an ideology is necessarily to suffer from some distortion of belief, because ideological belief disguises, mystifies, or conceals what is true or what is just. In addition, pejorative conceptions of ideology are usually epistemological, because they oppose ideology to knowl "critical" con to mean self-referential or self-questioning.1

A neutral conception of ideology, on the other hand, sees ideology as a ubiquitous feature of human thought. Neutral conceptions are historicist or sociological because they connect one's ideology with one's position in a par ticular culture and history. Neutral conceptions contend that all of us have an ideology of some sort, and that our understanding of the social world is nec not mean that ideological thought is distorted or false. As its name implies, a neutral conception of ide ology describes ideology in nonpejorative terms. To say that thought is ideo ideology, rather than being ineluctably opposed to it.

The distinction between pejorative and neutral conceptions of ideology is sometimes associated with different strands of Marxist thought.2 Claims that the proletariat fail to understand their true class interests because they are under the thrall of a dominant ideology employ a pejorative conception of ideology, as do theories that oppose ideology to science (like Althusser's) or make use of the concept of "false consciousness." In contrast, theories like Lukacs's or Lenin's, which identify ideology with the consciousness appropriate to a class given its position in history, might be thought of as neutral concep sense of being nonjudgmental.3 Moreover, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out, the neutral conception associated with Lenin and Lukacs actually combines a historicist conception of ideology with a positive conception of a particular ideology-the proletarian revolutionary consciousness.4 At a particular point in history, the proletariat must have a special revolutionary consciousness. (Whether it in fact possesses it is another matter.) This class consciousness allows the proletariat to understand social conditions as they really are and allows it to fulfill its appropriate role in history. According to Lenin, it is necessary for a revolutionary vanguard to instill this consciousness in the pro Moreover, unlike the class consciousness of other groups, the revo consciousness of the proletariat is regarded positively. Note that in a pejorative conception of ideology, there is no need for a special positive con because ideology is already opposed to truth or science.

Marxist theories of ideology usually define ideology in terms of membership in an economic class and the objective interests of that class. But theories of ideology do not have to be based on economic class membership or economic class interests. John Thompson's and Clifford Geertz's theories of ideology, for example, are pejorative and neutral, respectively, although neither defines ideology in traditional Marxist class terms. Thompson retains the pejorative perspective that he finds in Marxism but applies it to any form of social dom gender. Similarly, Geertz identifies ideology with general features of cultural under standing, which are in no way limited to or organized around Marxist concep of class membership.6

Both the pejorative and the neutral conceptions of ideology have symmet advantages and difficulties: each is better at dealing with the problems created by the other. Neutral conceptions of ideology are attractive precisely because they seem nonjudgmental: By noting the existence of different and conflicting ways of understanding the social world and their relationships to people's historical and social situation, neutral conceptions appear to embrace the detached objectivity of the social scientist or the fairness and openness of liberal inquiry. The great advantage of pejorative conceptions, on the other hand, is that they are more compatible with the reasons why people have tra­ditionally been interested in developing a theory of ideology: a concern with how people are led to believe in false or unjust things, and how people's ways of thinking contribute to or sustain injustice. By their own terms, neutral con analyst from focusing on these issues, or force her to do so either unwittingly or sub rosa.

In fact, conceptions of ideology that claim to be neutral usually cannot retain their neutrality for very long. A scrupulously neutral approach to con make it impossible for the analyst to pronounce one as accurate and another as distorted. The analyst could not even report that each side has grasped part of the truth, for this would mean that the view of the opposite side is to that extent false and distorted. She would simply have to report that the two ways of understanding social reality disagree and to describe the terms of their disagreement. Even then, it may often prove ex difficult to articulate the nature of this disagreement in a neutral fash ascribing truth or falsity to one side or the other--because of the interpretive character of judgments about social conditions.

Furthermore, a perfectly neutral conception would make it impossible for the analyst to explain how particular beliefs lead to oppression or injustice, for oppression and injustice are themselves contested terms between competing ideologies. Judgments about what is unjust and oppressive (and to whom) look very different from the perspective of different conceptions of social reality. Indeed, these are the very sorts of questions about which competing ideologies disagree most heatedly. The question of whether and to what extent blacks in America are treated unjustly, for example, looks very different to members of the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan.

This places the neutral theorist of ideology in a difficult position. Describ of competing ideologies becomes virtually impossible if true neutrality is to be retained. Karl Mannheim, for example, attempted to show that competing ideologies had comparative advantages and disadvantages. Mannheim argued that traditional conservatives could see things about social reality that liberals could not understand as easily, and vice versa.7 But this approach assumes a perspective from which things are understood correctly and one from which they are understood incorrectly, and this leads us back to a distinction between truth and ideology that is characteristic of the pejorative conception. In the same way, a scrupulously neutral conception makes it dif articulate how particular ways of thinking sustain unjust power or are self-serving. These descriptions implicitly rely on conceptions of what is so conceptions that cannot be neutral with regard to competing ways of understanding the social world.

Thus, although Mannheim's broadest conception of ideology, which he calls a total conception, begins as a nonevaluative study of the forms of thought of a given age, it quickly becomes evaluative and normative. Mannheim rec "diagnosis of the thought of an epoch," he argued, "though it may begin non-evaluatively, will not long remain so." The ideological analyst will "be forced eventually to assume an evaluative position" because of the evaluative nature of historical understanding: "History is unin telligible unless certain of its aspects are emphasized in contrast to others."8 A fortiori, if one hopes to understand historical phenomena like oppression or domination, evaluative judgments become unavoidable.

Pejorative theories of ideology do not share these difficulties. They permit (and even require) the analyst to argue that the ideological beliefs of others are false, distorted, or self-serving, or that they lead to injustice or oppression. These theories distinguish between ideological understandings of social con conditions; they happily offer normative judg ments about the thought of others.

While neutral conceptions have difficulty expressing themselves without reference to concepts like truth or justice, pejorative conceptions generally founder on the problem of self-reference. The problem arises as soon as the tools of ideological analysis are applied to the analyst's own thought. If the beliefs of others are affected by their historical and social position, their ap to reduce cog nitive dissonance, the same is likely to be true of the beliefs of the analyst. The social and causal explanations of belief formation that the analyst applies to others are no less relevant to the analyst's own mental processes. The relation between ideological analyst and analysand is symmetrical; every ideological an analysand to someone else.

The phenomenon of self-reference leads to various versions of what has come to be called Mannheim's paradox: if all discourse is ideological, how is it possible to have anything other than an ideological discourse on ideology?9 The problem arises because, unlike the neutral conception, the pejorative con ception defines ideology in terms of falsity or distortion. If ideology is false or distorted belief, the analyst's understanding of the beliefs of others and the nature of social conditions will be warped and limited by her own ideological thinking. She may view social conditions in a self-serving way, for example, and conclude that people who see things differently labor under ideological delusion.

At first glance, Mannheim's paradox seems irrelevant to the pejorative con ideology because this conception denies that all thought about ide ology is ideological. Discourse about ideology can be nonideological if it is scientific or true. Some thought accurately grasps what is going on in society, and hence accurately comprehends the distorting character of the ideological thought of others. When an analyst is not laboring under the influence of ideology, her analysis of the ideology of others is not distorted and hence is reliable.

Unfortunately, the distinction between truth and ideology does not solve the problem of self-reference but merely restates it in another way. Our judg and what is assigned to the realm of the ideological are no less subject to ideological analysis than any other set of judgments. The analyst's judgments about what is a true account of social conditions and what is ideological distortion may also be distorted or self-serving. The boundaries that separate ideology from truth are themselves an object of ideological dis putation.

Pejorative conceptions usually assume a unidirectional model of ideological analysis: the ideology-free analyst locates and criticizes ideology in the ideo analysand. Disagreements between analyst and analysand about social reality are explained as ideological delusion on the part of the analysand. As Terry Eagleton puts it, under this approach, ideology is like halitosis-it is what the other fellow has.10 But this unidirectional model cannot be sustained, for as Mannheim recognized, the relationship between analyst and analysand is fully symmetrical.11 The pejorative conception of ideology thus becomes a two-edged sword, which threatens to undermine the analyst's views as well as those of the analysand.

When we dissolve the study of ideology into the study of cultural software, these questions and these problems still remain. Is our conception of cultural software neutral or pejorative, and how does it hope to resolve the difficulties associated with either approach? In fact, the theory of cultural software is based on a third conception, which endeavors to combine the advantages of the neu without their disadvantages. This is an ambivalent conception. An ambivalent conception of cultural software views cultural software as simultaneously empowering, useful, and adaptive on the one hand, and disempowering, distorting, and maladaptive on the other. We are ambivalent about our cultural software because we see both its good and its bad points, and we see how these arise from the same sources. An ambivalent conception of cultural software differs from a neutral conception because it does not attempt to be neutral or nonjudgmental with regard to competing ways of understanding the social world; it differs from a pejorative conception because it does not see historically generated tools of understanding as uni promoting injustice. Rather, it views our cultural software as both empowering and distorting, as both enabling and hindering justice.

The ambivalent conception of ideology flows from our earlier discussion of how cultural software is produced through cultural evolution. The tools of understanding are produced through recursion and bricolage; they are cumu perfectly designed for the understanding the social world or the many kinds of problems that human beings face, although they may be good enough for the purpose at hand. The same mixture of advantage and disadvantage occurs when we consider the consequences of our understanding for social justice. The adequacy of our tools of understand respect to the promotion of justice depends upon the context in which they are employed; a tool that is more appropriate in one context may be less useful or wildly inadequate in another. Conversely, a way of understanding the social world that is completely misguided as a general strategy (and therefore may tend to promote injustice when so used) may be quite helpful and appro priate in dealing with specific features of the cultural world.

Mannheim's insight about the advantages and disadvantages of contrasting modes of thought anticipates the ambivalent conception. Mannheim argued that even ways of thinking that largely limit our imaginations may be helpful to understand some features of social conditions; what narrows our vision may sometimes also sharpen it.12 At the same time, this narrowing of understanding proves unhelpful and distorting if we apply it indiscriminately to other features of social life; it may lead us to misunderstand or overlook important features of social conditions. When Mannheim spoke of the adequacy or inadequacy of thought, he did not specifically have in mind the question of justice; he seemed to mean some combination of serving the interests of a particular group and being appropriate to the historical development of society viewed as a totality. By contrast, the kind of adequacy I am concerned with is the adequacy of our thoughts and actions specifically in promoting justice and avoiding injustice. This distinction is important, for ways of thinking about the social world that are helpful in assisting a particular group to gain economic or political power may nevertheless foster or sustain injustice.

Ambivalence is the appropriate attitude to take toward cultural software because it is the appropriate attitude to take toward culture and cultural un tools of understanding are the preconditions of understanding the social world. Yet they also are sources of misunderstanding. Hence the study of cultural software is the study of the curious and unexpected linkages between benefit and disadvantage, empowerment and distortion. It is the study of how the tools of understanding simultaneously create conditions of freedom and domination.

How does an ambivalent conception of ideology deal with the problem of self-reference, or Mannheim's paradox? It accepts the inevitability of self reference but argues-consistent with the general conception of ambivalence that this feature of our thought does not necessarily make ideological analysis futile or unhelpful. Quite the contrary: the ability of thought to turn upon itself is a prerequisite for an adequate analysis of ideological thinking.

The problem of self-reference is unavoidable in ideological analysis because this analysis must always be performed by somebody or someone. It must be performed by a subject constituted by certain tools of understanding and not others. Ideological analysis always occurs within the forms of cultural under is necessary for the analyst to understand the social world, the thought of others, and her own thought. Thus the analyst's cultural software is not an impediment to her understanding; it is a precondition of her understanding.13

In this way, Mannheim's paradox is transformed when it is stated in terms of cultural software. The theory of cultural software accepts-indeed insists-- cultural software must involve the use of cultural soft tools of understanding must employ the tools of understanding. Not all such thought is limiting or distorting for the purpose at hand, however, and not all limitations or distortions are relevant in all con not raise an insur understanding are empowering as well as limiting, enabling as well as distorting. They are not simply the enemies of comprehension but also the conditions of its pos sibility. They are not merely hindrances to autonomy and self-understanding but also make autonomy and self-understanding possible. Their dual role forms the essence of the ambivalent conception.

Mannheim's paradox is thus no paradox at all; rather, it explicates the con which ideological analysis must necessarily proceed: the tools of social understanding must be used in order to understand social understanding. Self-reference is not a difficulty that must be neutralized or avoided in order to sustain a study of ideology. It is not an exceptional or subsidiary feature of this study. Rather, it is the central predicament of ideological analysis. Like the story of the tongs mentioned in Pirke Avot, the analysis of cultural software can proceed only through the use of cultural software. The study of cultural software is not unavoidably self-referential, it is fundamentally self-referential.

When we employ the tools of our understanding to think about our own tools of understanding, our thought becomes reflexive and recursive. Human thought is thinking about itself, considering the conditions of its own possi bility, and the forms and limits of its own adequacy. A subject constituted by cultural software is thinking about the cultural software that constitutes her. It is important to recognize that this recursion in and of itself involves no con cultural soft reflexiveness or self-applicability of cultural software is one of its most signif features. Human understanding-hence human understanding about un essentially reflexive and self-referential. It can use its own tools to think about its own tools, and equally important, it does use its own tools to think about its own tools. Our examination of our cultural software is a reflexive study of a phenomenon already reflexive by nature.

Self-Reference and Self-Criticism

This recognition does not make the difficulties of self-reference magically dis may be true that our cultural software is not uniformly distorting or maladaptive. Nevertheless, our conception of cultural software is ambivalent, not uniformly positive. If the tools that we employ to understand social reality are heuristic and have unexpected side effects and limitations, our own under or that of others--may be af may turn out to be unacceptably partial, counterproductive, misleading, or unhelpful. More over, the positions of the ideological analyst and the analysand are still sym applies to the analysand. When we examine the thought of another person, the tools of understanding we employ may, in the relevant context in which we use them, be badly suited for the task and may have ideological effects on our own thought. Thus if we disagree with another person about what is going on in society, we must recognize that this disagreement may not be due wholly to ideological effects on her thought but may also be due to ideological effects on our own.

The symmetry of analyst and analysand means that in an ambivalent con analyst must attempt to examine her own thought along with that of the person she analyzes. Thus, if a pro-choice feminist discovers that a large number of blue-collar women in the United States are opposed to abortion, she must not immediately rush to pronounce the thought of these women as ideologically deluded. Rather, she must, as a part of the process of ideological analysis, consider what she might learn from these women about the social conditions they face. She must consider the insights into social reality that they might have, and reevaluate her own views in light of them. Without such an inquiry, she has no way of knowing whether the disagreement between her and the analysand is due to distortions or limitations in the analysand's thinking or in her own.

This obligation flows directly from an ambivalent conception. This con that the tools of understanding do not uniformly limit and distort the thought of subjects. If so, this must be true for both analyst and analysand. If the analyst is empowered and enabled by her cultural software, she must consider the possibility that the analysand is also enabled and em powered by hers, although in different ways and perhaps to a different degree.14

Successful ideological analysis is possible because and to the extent that the analyst's tools of understanding enable her to understand social conditions well enough to perform the analysis. For precisely the same reason, however, it is possible that the analysand has a grasp of social conditions that conflicts with the analyst's but is nevertheless equally adequate or even more valid. The anal does not see as clearly. By considering how the analysand's thought might have elements of truth or jus using the beliefs and opinions of others as a partial check on the analyst's own, ideological analysis attempts to improve social understanding not only for the analysand but for the analyst as well.

I call this dialectical approach to the study of ideology or cultural software a critical approach. By critical I do not mean the discovery of flaws or defects in the thought of another person but rather a process of self-reflection and self-discovery that is part and parcel of the ideological analysis of the thought of other persons. A critical approach is inevitably a self-critical approach.

Although critical examination must always become critical self-examination, most people find it easier to see ideological effects in others than in themselves. In fact, they may be able to grasp limitations in their own thought only by transferring their observations about the limitations of the thought of others and wondering how analogous effects could occur in their own thinking. Al own thought only after they have been criticized or attacked by others. Once we begin the process of critical self-examination, our views of the other, and her limitations, may change cor examination of the other. Critical self-examination is not, strictly speaking, introspection but rather a process of comparative examination between the self and others. It looks inward by first looking outward.

A critical approach involves critical self-examination, but it is not for this reason a private or individual practice. It is the result of interaction with others in the world, an interaction that may be agonistic as well as cooperative. We may not reexamine our own beliefs until others put them in question. Because of the fallibility of our own cognitive processes, we must, to a large degree, depend upon others for the impetus to critical self-examination, just as we often rely on others for other kinds of knowledge. Thus critical practice is fallible and dependent on contingent circumstance (for example, who we happen to interact with) rather than a source of certainty.

A recurring problem with traditional conceptions of ideology has been that they are unidirectional. They are "critical" only in the sense of taking a pe beliefs of others but not in the sense of being self-critical and self-reflective. As a result, these approaches fail to acknowledge the sym analysand. They project the sources of disagreement between analyst and analysand onto the mental processes of the analysand and locate their cause in distortions in the analysand's thought. A unidirectional approach conceives ideological analysis as a critique of defects in the thought of an Other, who is either despised or pitied for them.

Ironically, by failing to understand the views of another as anything other than a distortion, we fail to understand ourselves. The unidirectional approach is the loss of a double opportunity. In contrast, a critical approach recognizes that ideological analysis is not merely the analysis of defects in an Other, in which the existence of such defects is presumed and preordained; it is an anal nature and justice of social conditions. The disagreement between analyst and analysand is produced by the juxtaposition of contending understandings. These understandings are pro different contexts of judgment. To understand how the disagreement arises, we must try to trace the source of these beliefs in cultural software. Properly performed, the process of ideological analysis must call the analyst's beliefs into question and place them on the table for analysis and scrutiny-a task that can be performed only by using the analyst's own cultural software.

Ideological analysis asks how a particular disagreement about social con between analyst and analysand is produced. The answer to this question is not necessarily that the analysand was completely wrong and the analyst was completely right. Rather, the process of understanding how this disagreement arises may affect the analyst's own beliefs and opinions.15 It may lead her to a deeper and richer understanding of the social world. Yet this process cannot have salutary effects unless the analyst is open to the possibility that her own views are in need of improvement and that the encounter with the analysand has something to teach her. Thus ideological analysis, properly performed, always "risks understanding."16 To risk understanding is always to risk changes in one's own cultural software. Thus ideological analysis, rather than a form of power or mastery over the analysand, is also a potential source of power over the analyst.

The critical process is by no means foolproof. The study of the causes of disagreement between ourselves and the analysand is not a royal road to truth or an algorithm for intellectual improvement. Indeed, the process of ideological analysis can produce its own ideological effects. One is the possibility that we will not put our own ways of thinking in question-this is the danger of uni disagreement wholly onto imagined distortions in the analysand's thought processes, and thus preserves our own thought from ideological scrutiny. Two other types of ideological effects are equally serious. I call these ideological effects hermeneutic confor hermeneutic co-optation.17

Hermeneutic conformation occurs when we interpret the analysand's views in such a way that we believe that she agrees with us. There is no check on our beliefs because we do not think that there is any serious disagreement. Hermeneutic conformation is the production of a false consensus between our selves and the analysand.

Hermeneutic co-optation arises when we are too eager to assume that the analysand's beliefs are true or more justified than our own. If we too readily assume that disagreements between the analysand and ourselves are due to inadequacies in our own belief, we may come to believe things that are unjust or untrue. We may be co-opted into believing things that we should not be this encounter in ways that produce ideological effects in our thought. Hermeneutic co-optation is the achievement of a consensus about the wrong things. It is a special case of the power that understanding can have over a subject."18

Although these ideological effects are real dangers, they are a necessary risk. Unless we are willing to reconsider our own beliefs through ideological analysis, we can never achieve a critical approach. In any case, our refusal to engage in this process hardly avoids the possibility of ideological effects on our own thought. Quite the contrary, for as we have noted, such a refusal simply projects all sources of disagreement onto imagined distortions in the thought of the analysand; this projection is itself an ideological effect of our own thought.

Among theorists of ideology, Karl Mannheim was the first to emphasize the failings of an insufficiently self-critical conception of ideology; his sociology of knowledge may be viewed as a critical response to the unidirectional analysis inherent in Marxist theories of ideology. Mannheim claimed that the sociology of knowledge must inevitably proceed to the questioning of the analyst's own beliefs and ways of thinking. He argued that knowledge of society was rela her experiences and position in society, and the object of her knowledge. It follows that the knowl edge of the ideological analyst is no less relational. Hence, Mannheim argued, the analyst must put all beliefs, including her own, into question, and ask how their content is related to the thinker's experience and position in society.19

Nevertheless, Mannheim's answer to the problem of self-reference was not fully satisfactory. As John Thompson has pointed out, Mannheim's concept of relational knowledge restates the difficulty rather than resolves it.20 Mann argued that the intellectual class would be able to syn of different social groups and hence would be able to offer a relatively undistorted view of social reality.21 This solution was surely unpersuasive when Mannheim first formulated it, and it seems even less persuasive as time passes. As a class, intellectuals seem to be no less prone to ideological effects in their thought than any other group. If they have any special talent in this regard it seems rather to be a special penchant for devel abstract and high-sounding rationalizations for their beliefs and conduct.

The critical approach to ideological analysis is a helpful step toward dealing with problems of self-reference. We can try to use the beliefs of others as a partial check on our own. When we do this, our goal is not necessarily to reach agreement with others; rather, it is to use the project of explaining disagree understanding of the social world. Nev ertheless, this solution is hardly foolproof. It does not make the problem of self-reference go away, because many kinds of ideological effects are still pos self-serving and hindered by our ways of thinking.

Indeed, I would argue that any approach to ideological analysis that prom eliminate the problem of self-reference is probably suspect for that very reason. This problem is inherent in the nature of ideological analysis. The best proof of the ubiquity of the problem is the practice of ideological analysts themselves. Ideological analysis almost always has significant blind spots and ideological effects. The history of Marxism is a classic example. By focusing on questions of social class, Marxist analyses of ideology have often overlooked or deemphasized the importance of race, ethnicity, and gender in explaining social injustices. Even Marxist analyses of class relations have often engaged in wishful thinking about the nature of social conditions, the beliefs and interests of the working class, and the likely course of historical development.

This realization places ideological analysis in the same situation as much of our knowledge about the social world. As with all such knowledge, we learn through interaction with the social world and with others in the world. We learn through a process of trial and error. In the final analysis there is nothing special about ideological analysis--directed either at others or at ourselves-- to understand the social world, the thought of others, or our own thought. It, too, is a process of grappling with the world using the tools that lie to hand. Thus we must accept the fallibility of our knowledge about our mental processes (and those of others) just as we accept the fallibility of other knowledge about the social world. Conversely, we must be willing to accept the possibility that our knowledge can be good enough for the purpose at hand if we are willing to subject it to critical scrutiny.

Perhaps the single greatest mistake that we can make in offering an account of ideological analysis is assuming that this form of inquiry (or the form of knowledge derived from it) rests on a higher plane or uses tools more pure and impartial than other forms of cultural understanding. It does not, it need not, and in any case, it cannot. Ideological critique does not stand above other forms of knowledge creation or acquisition. It is not a master form of knowing. It is not the most important or most sure or most perfect form of thinking. Indeed, there is nothing special about it whatsoever; its most distinctive feature may be its utter ordinariness. It uses the same basic tools of understanding that all other social understanding uses. Ideological analysis, and in particular self- about themselves. It is not pure but reflexive and recursive. Even its recursion is not extraordinary, for the tools of understanding are always developed reflexively and cumulatively.

Here once again we may offer an analogy to computers. When a computer boots up, one of the first programs it runs is a diagnostic--a program that checks the adequacy of its informational capacities. The computer can do this only because the nature of its operations allows such recursion--allows various aspects of the software, firmware, and hardware to act as checks against them diagnostic program is in some sense the most ordinary example of a computer program.

There are perhaps no metaphors more misleading than those we often employ to describe the process of self-reflection and self-criticism. These are metaphors of separation and isolation, removal and ascent: we step back, we distance ourselves, we place ourselves above the fray, we rise above our prej analysis. Given such descriptions, it is no won der that people assume that ideological analysis is a higher, purer form of thinking. But these metaphors are seriously misleading. Although the study of ideology is necessarily a self-critical study, it does not involve a special method of distancing ourselves from the tools of understanding in order to reflect upon them critically. That is because our tools of understanding are a precondition to understanding and therefore to any reflection on their own adequacy or inadequacy. We are always using some tools of understanding to evaluate the usefulness of others in particular contexts. Our judgments of adaptability and adequacy are necessarily jerry-built and provisional in the same way that all bricolage is.

A critical approach uses our understanding to study our understanding. It tests the adequacy of our tools by the use of our tools. All that we do or can do in these cases is use some of our tools to understand others, and to fashion new tools of understanding in the process. Yet there is no point at which we abandon the tools of understanding so that we might critically reflect upon all of them. Such an attempt misunderstands what a critical approach entails, and the effort would be impossible in any case. One does not get outside of one's self to understand oneself. If anything, one gets more inside oneself.

Finally, the practice of self-criticism is not disinterested in the sense of being impartial. It is partial by dint of its very constitution by particular tools of understanding. It seeks to be disinterested not in the sense of neutrality but in the sense of fairness or accuracy; yet its fairness is a fairness judged through the use of the analyst's cultural software, and its accuracy is an accuracy measured through the analyst's tools of understanding. Nor is self-critique uninterested or dispassionate; on the contrary, it is a fully motivated under standing--motivated to improve the subject's tools of understanding.

The upshot of this analysis is not a claim that we are not wrong about our ideological analyses of others or even of ourselves. We are sometimes wrong. The point is that we are also sometimes right, or right enough to effect some improvement in our understanding. And we are right not because we somehow escape our cultural construction but because we put it to good use.

We might contrast this account of ideological self-criticism with Stanley Fish's recent attacks on the concept of critical self-consciousness.22 Fish has argued that the idea of critical self-analysis is both sentimental and conceptually incoherent, because it postulates the existence of critical self-consciousness. Fish argues that critical self-consciousness is impossible because it requires one to get outside the forms of one's own thinking in order to reflect critically on what one thinks. Yet one never gets outside the forms of one's own under that one currently possesses.23

In fact, Fish's argument does not prove that critical self-consciousness is impossible. It simply directs us toward a more careful consideration of what a critical self-consciousness might be. Fish's argument gains rhetorical force pre been attacking-the notion that critical self we must develop specifically for the purpose of ideological analysis. This assumption is linked to the metaphor of stepping outside our accustomed ways of thinking in order to reflect on them, and this metaphor is misleading in turn because it suggests a false notion of a self that exists separate and apart from its forms of understanding.

But when we reflect on our own thought processes or consider the adequacy of our own beliefs, we do not need to stand outside ourselves or abandon our tools of understanding. Fish is quite right that we could not do this even if we wanted to. Rather, using our cultural software, we think about what we are feel our own motives, and compare our views with those of others. We do all these things with the goal of trying to figure out how we think about the social world and how our thought might be improved.

Critical self-consciousness does not employ any special form of cognition outside of the ordinary tools of everyday thought. It is a kind of thought that we are familiar with in everyday life, one that we employ in our most routine dealings with others. We think about the adequacy of our mental processes and our beliefs all the time. We ask ourselves questions like "Was I being polite?" "Did I understand what she said?" or "Am I upset because I am jeal rushing to judgment or forming misleading first impressions. Introspection and self -criticism are ubiquitous features of our mental life. They are so common that they even have pathological forms, like obsessive self-doubt and refusal to make judgments. Yet we do not introspect by standing outside of ourselves and re outside of. Rather, cultural software is reflexive: the tools of understanding are tools of self-understanding. To be sure, we have all sorts of mechanisms that are designed to obfuscate and hinder self- understanding--for example, mechanisms of ego defense. But this does not mean that self-referential inquiry is not possible. It simply means that it must take place using the tools available and encountering the forms of ego defense that currently exist.

The attack on critical self-consciousness might be taken even further than Fish's version. It might be read as the claim that we cannot improve our un social world through any process of critical self-reflection. This claim in turn consists of two different assertions. The first is that we cannot change our ways of thinking through critical self-consciousness because we are trapped inside the ways of thinking we currently have. The second is that the idea of improvement seems to refer to a standard of judgment outside of our own current standards, and this is impossible because we can judge only from our current perspective.

It is not true that we cannot and do not change our ways of thinking by thinking about our own thought. The metaphor of software explains why this is so. Our cultural software is constantly being rewritten. It is rewritten through acts of understanding, which means that (among other things) it is continually rewriting itself. Its reflexive features guarantee that it is always the object of its own manipulation. Moreover, our participation in the economy of cultural soft possibility of changes in our cultural software. We change our minds, and our minds change. We have new experiences, and we experience things anew. Because we exist in history, our selves are part of the flux of change, not merely witnesses to it.

We should not offer too sanguine a view of the process of change in our cultural software. If maturity and growth are possible, so are senescence and corruption. If we can be educated, we can also be manipulated. Moreover, the claim that our cultural software changes over time should not be taken to mean that it changes wholly in accord with our conscious design. Just as people make history, but not as they intend, we also fashion new tools of understanding, but not as we design them. The phrase "critical self-consciousness" may tempt us to assume that the mechanisms of critical self-consciousness are wholly within our conscious control. Yet critical self-consciousness is possible only because a great many of our mental operations remain beyond our deliberate control. We cannot consciously control all aspects of our consciousness because the very elements of control must themselves be preconscious. Paradoxically, then, we might say of critical self-consciousness that it can be critical only if it is not fully self-conscious.

The second critique of the notion of critical self-consciousness questions the possibility of improvement. Notions of improvement or regression must be made by some observer. If the observer is ourselves, we are using the tools of understanding we currently have to think about the difference between our past self and the self we are now. Such a notion of improvement is always internal to the way we currently understand the world; we do not employ a transhistorical perspective to make this judgment. Yet this does not show that change does not happen, that people cannot necessarily understand the exis tence of this change, or that they cannot make acceptable judgments about it. They will simply understand it given the tools of understanding they currently possess. A person who understands Milton better than she did before can also understand that she understands him better. Conversely, a person who has lost the ability to speak Spanish can also understand that she has lost this ability. In other cases, however, the change in our cultural software may blind us to the nature and extent of change. Indeed, this may be so even in the two cases just mentioned.

The critique of critical self-consciousness is valuable not because it shows that ideological analysis is a hopeless endeavor. Rather, it is valuable because it emphasizes the ordinariness and even the banality of the processes by which we understand ourselves and the social world around us. Ideological analysis seems to be special because it is a kind of knowledge about knowledge. Rather than viewing this reflexivity as special, we should recognize it as commonplace. Ideological analysis is not a master discipline that can promise to regulate or direct our understanding of the social world. Rather, it is a form of knowledge acquisition just like the forms it purports to study and critique. It does not regulate the process of discovery without forming part of that process. Its re proof not of its special nature but its ordinariness. This is perhaps the most salutary conclusion of the critique of critical self-consciousness. Once we recognize that ideological analysis is on the same footing as other kinds of knowledge acquisition, uses the same tools, and even makes the same kinds of mistakes, we will have a more appropriate attitude toward its shortcomings and its possibilities.

Reason as Cultural Heuristic Developed Through History

The theory of cultural software that we have been developing presupposes a conception of reason. Its basic outlines should by now be familiar: Human beings have an innate biological capacity both to reason and to incorporate and develop tools of reasoning, or what I call cultural software. Nevertheless, much of what we call human reason is a cultural product. It is the development of skills and capacities that allow us to make judgments about (among other things) values and social life. The kind of reason we develop through culture is not merely a formal or instrumental rationality; it is a substantive rationality that enables us to make judgments about what is reasonable and unreasonable.

The faculty of human reason is a historical artifact, developed through a collective and cumulative writing and rewriting of cultural software through history. We might call this part of human reasoning abilities the historical or cultural component of reason. It is the result of processes that are both co struggle human beings strive to name the good and the bad, the true and the false, and to convince others or otherwise impose their beliefs upon them.

In his historical writings, Kant claimed that humanity develops its rational faculties through struggle, a struggle that ends up being cooperative and cu intentionally being so. Kant's conception anticipates the idea of the cumulative creation of cultural software through conceptual bricolage. One should not confuse this process with Kant's generally optimistic view of history. Many useful and noble ideas may be perverted or completely wiped out in the process of cultural change. As we saw in Chapter 2, the development of human reason is an evolutionary process, which makes use of the ability of human beings to possess, use, develop, and proliferate idea-programs or cul tural software. We do not know, however, whether this historical process is ultimately a tragedy or a comedy. All that we can say is that it happens.

We have also noted that human beings are partly constituted by their cul software. Hence what human beings are doing in the historical process of cultural bricolage is constructing both themselves and reason itself. We con because we are composed of cultural software. We construct reason because reason has a cultural and historical component: part of what we call "reason"--and indeed, part of what we call "human"--consists of certain tools of understanding that human beings have collectively created over time from more primitive reasoning abilities.

Finally, we have noted that the human capacity for reason is reflexive; that is to say, it can be turned upon itself to change and develop itself. Hegel's anthropomorphism of reason in the form of Spirit can be understood in this way. We can say, along with him, that reason is a historical product that is continually interrogating itself.

The theory of cultural software proposes that understanding of the social world occurs through tools of understanding. We might call these tools heu understanding. Such an account, of course, must also be a tool of understanding, and it must also be heuristic. There is nothing self- however. A problem arises only if one assumes that heuristics are always or necessarily false, that they only or pre understanding. The same might be said of symbol or metaphor. Our understanding of the social world occurs through symbol, metaphor, and figural language. Our ac this occurs must also be described in symbolic, metaphoric, and figural terms. Yet this poses a problem only if such accounts are misleading for the purposes for which they are employed.

The conception of reason that emerges from the theory of cultural software is a notion of reflexive and recursive reason, where software is applied to its own operations. Human understanding about understanding is essentially self with respect to concepts that apply to themselves (the concepts of metaphor and heuristic, for example) or to theories about the thought of subjects that apply to the theorist who pronounces them.

Consider, for example, the present discussion of cultural software. In order to articulate the claims I am making, I have to use heuristics, metaphors, and figures, not only to convey what I mean to the reader but also to understand and express my views on the subject. These tools of understanding, however, are just like all other tools. They are helpful in some contexts and less helpful in others. They are simultaneously empowering and limiting. Moreover, even articulating and explaining this feature of cultural software must make use of heuristics and metaphors. Consider, for example, the figural nature of the terms empower and limit. To empower is to endow with power or force; to limit is to impose an endpoint or a boundary. Ironically, the same phenomenon occurs if we wish to critique the notion of tools of understanding. We might argue that this is an inadequate metaphor or heuristic to explain what we mean by un the theory is inadequate, we must make use of figure and heuristic to express our dissatisfaction. We might say that the theory fails to "correspond," "match," "portray," "capture," or "express" what is really going on.

Thus there is no point in the process of human understanding when one abandons the tools of understanding in order to describe or critique under- standing, to articulate or express how these tools operate or malfunction, advantage us or disadvantage us. One does not, in other words, articulate some understanding and then articulate its re relation between something already understood through cultural software and the cultural software that one uses to understand it. This relation is itself expressed, articulated, and under stood through tools of understanding. What one always has is understanding --which is to say that what one always has is the employment of cultural software.

Nevertheless, I wish specifically to distance myself from the simple assertion that all thought or all reasoning is "just metaphor" or "just heuristic." The problem with such statements is that they too easily devolve into what Ernest Gellner has called "reason bashing."24 Such interpretations delight in showing the limitations of reason without considering why such a sorry faculty would be sufficiently capable of recognizing its own limitations. By contrast, the the ory of cultural software tries to understand how the complex is made from the simple, how the adequate is manufactured from the inadequate, while never theless recognizing the side effects and limitations that such a process of de velopment necessarily comprehends.

The terms metaphor and heuristic have traditionally been freighted with pe connotations, perhaps especially so in the case of metaphor and the figural. Before we announce that human thought is just metaphor or just heu how it might be possible for thought to involve just metaphors and just heuristics--that is, metaphors and heuristics that are apt and appropriate, that enable understanding rather than hindering it.

This brings me to a second difficulty with the simplistic claim that thought is only metaphor or only heuristic. Although such a claim seems radical and even dangerous in its pretensions, in fact it is deeply conventional and mired in the same ways of thinking that it purports fearlessly to reject. The use of the words only or just is especially telling. This suggests that there is some other thing that understanding could involve that, unfortunately, poor human reason fails to match. It implies that there are two kinds of understanding, a good, nonmetaphorical or nonheuristic understanding, and a decrepit, figural and heuristic one. It preserves the possibility of a cultural understanding that in unshaped--an understanding that brings no baggage to the act of conception, that does nothing but receives everything, that experiences things as they are, that simply absorbs what is. It preserves the possibility of a reason that uses no tools or devices, that is not a fashioning and weighing, a judging and making sense--and, because it uses no tools, escapes all limitation. In short, such claims dream of an understanding that is not understanding, of a reason that is not reason. And the great irony of this dream is that it is conducted--from start to finish--through understanding and through reasoning, which is to say that it is conducted through the symbolic and the heuristic, through metaphors like "direct," "unalloyed," "unmediated," and "unshaped." The dream of a cultural understanding without cultural software is the dream of escaping the conditions of understanding; it is the dream of escaping what understanding is.

We should not say that reason is just heuristic and just metaphor. Rather we should say that when reason operates well it employs just heuristics and just metaphors. In the latter sentence the terms heuristic and metaphor are them attempt to convey the mechanisms of cul features of the concepts of heuristic and metaphor is that they simultaneously convey the notion of being adequate and inadequate, of being true and false. A heuristic is an aid to un than an accurate one. A heuristic is most helpful when it simplifies, which means that under certain conditions it oversimplifies, fails to take into account all relevant conditions, and therefore misleads. A metaphor is most helpful when it reveals an important quality through an expression of similarity, which means that under certain conditions it will emphasize this similarity to the detriment of important differences and will therefore mislead.

The terms metaphor and heuristic are themselves aids to understanding un derstanding, figures that illuminate the process of understanding. They are thus simultaneously adequate to this task in some ways and inadequate in others; indeed, this characteristic makes them instances of the very kind of things they purport to articulate. The term heuristic is both good and bad at enabling us to understand the kinds of things that are both good and bad at enabling understanding. The term metaphor is both similar and different to what it is compared to-things that express similarity among what is also different. In metaphor, and heuristic-all are examples of themselves, and apply both to themselves and to the ways in which they are used. Hence we might expect that they are both helpful in some situations and harmful in others, enabling understanding in some contexts and unduly limiting understanding in different ones. This realization is part and parcel of an ambivalent conception. The concept of ambivalence in the theory of ideology is not simply a claim about good resting on previous evil, or benefits resting on previous harm, and vice versa. It is also a claim about the simultaneous benefits and problems that arise from the heuristic and adaptive features of understanding. And not surprisingly, the ambivalent conception of cultural software-and indeed, the theory of cul to itself in this way: it has its own benefits and disadvantages, historically created and linked together.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/12/feed 0 Chapter 5: Conceptions of Ideology http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/11 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/11#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:18:47 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=11 There are many different definitions of the concept ideology, and many different ways of approaching its study. In particular, a theory of ideology must consider the following questions:

1. What kinds of things (objects, entities, mechanisms, or structures) are we investigating? This is the problem of the proper object of study.

2. Do we define ideology in terms of its content (for example, distortion or mystification), the functions it serves (for example, furthering the interests of the ruling class), its causes (for example, cognitive bias, re effects (for example, creating or sustaining unjust relations of social power)? This is the problem of the proper mode of explanation.

3. What is our attitude toward ideology-pejorative, positive, or neutral? This is the problem of interpretative stance.

4. How does our theory handle the inevitable difficulty that the analysis of ideology may itself be ideological? This is the problem of self-reference.

The first two questions are the subject of the present chapter; the last two are the subject of Chapter 6.

The Object of Study

Some theories of ideology define their subject matter in terms of beliefs, held either by groups or by individuals. Jon Elster, for example, defines ideology as false or distorted conscious beliefs held by individuals about the social world.1 Other theories of ideology are concerned with linguistic or cultural products or social practices of meaning that do not necessarily exist in the minds of individuals but that individuals use in understanding the social world. Thus John Thompson and Clifford Geertz view the study of ideology as the study of "symbolic forms."2 This expression includes such diverse phenomena as linguistic utterances, symbols, literature, traffic signs, television broadcasts, and advertisements. In Geertz's case this choice is a deliberate attempt to exter object of study--to move from the investigation of internal mental processes to external observable entities like written symbols, linguistic utter ances, artistic objects, and behavioral practices.3

The theory of cultural software takes as its object of study tools of human understanding produced by cultural evolution. Symbolic forms play a key role in cultural evolution because they carry units of cultural transmission; hence the study of symbolic forms is crucial to the study of cultural software. When we study a symbolic form (such as an advertisement), however, we are inter produced it and the effects that it has on the way that others understand the world. Hence we are interested in cul forms are effects of cultural software and therefore are evidence of the mechanisms of thought. Second, symbolic forms have reciprocal effects on individual cultural software. Third, symbolic forms are media through which minds communicate and by which they share meaning. Fourth, symbolic forms are a common ter over shared meanings. These negotiations and struggles, in turn, affect the cultural software of the individuals who engage in them.

Moreover, the object of our study is necessarily broader than conscious beliefs, at least if by this term we mean beliefs that can be expressed in the form of propositions, like "Jews are greedy," "Women don't make good pi To be sure, beliefs can be tools of understanding and can be used to create new tools. But more important objects of study are cognitive mechanisms that produce beliefs. Examples include the tendency to structure experience in terms of narratives, psychological methods of categorization, varieties of metaphoric and metonymic thinking, strategies for reduction of cognitive dissonance, heuristics and biases employed in making judgments under uncertainty, and understanding by means of networks of con form "A is to B as C is to D." Propositional beliefs can be true or false, but cognitive mechanisms are neither true nor false. Rather, they are the ways in which attitudes and judgments are formed: they produce beliefs that can be true or false.

For example, consider the tendency, noted by many feminist writers, for people to think of the male as the standard case or unspoken norm of gender, so that the feminine is treated as an afterthought, an additional feature, or a special case.4 This tendency is produced by various mechanisms of understand more detail in Chapters 10 and 11. Nevertheless, it is important not to confuse these mechanisms with the prop exceptional case," or the directive "Think first in terms of men and then consider women later as an afterthought if it is brought to your attention." Individuals' practices of thought may be aptly summarized by such a propositional belief or such a directive, but this does not mean that the mind consciously employs such beliefs or rules in forming its judgments. Social understanding does not proceed ex the level of such conscious propositional belief or conscious rule following. Understanding also occurs through various mechanisms of framing, narrative construction, characterization, and catego study of conscious beliefs is important because through them we can attempt to understand the mechanisms of social understanding that produce them.

The Focus of Study

Once a theory of ideology has settled upon its objects of investigation, it can study these objects in many different ways. We can study them in terms of their content, their causes, their effects, or the social functions they serve. Often the way that ideology is defined leads to a focus on some of these aspects to the detriment of others. If we define ideology purely in terms of false or dis on the question of the content of beliefs. To study ideology is to study how certain beliefs are false or misleading; hence when the analyst has revealed this falsity or distortion, her task is largely completed.

Marxist theories of ideology often approach ideology in functional terms. They study how ideologies serve the interests of various classes. Michele Barrett summarizes the classical Marxist definition of ideology as "mystification that serves class interest."5 This definition is functional (although it might be re are defined and studied in terms of the social interests they serve. A functional approach, however, is necessarily limited. It tends to explain the development and content of ideologies solely in terms of the class interests that they further, rather than offering evolution produced. Put another way, functional accounts cannot reliably serve as causal explanations: even if a belief serves the interests of a particular class, it does not follow that the belief was the result of something that class did. Sim something serves the interests of one class does not by itself explain how a belief was generated or held by another class.6 In contrast, Jon Elster rejects functional approaches to ideology entirely.7 His theory seeks to offer purely causal explanations of ideology. Thus, although he defines ideologies in terms of their content as false or distorted beliefs, he is specifically interested in how these beliefs are caused by various social psy chological mechanisms.8

Finally, we might define ideology in terms of its effects. For example, John Thompson defines the study of ideology as the study of how symbolic forms create or sustain relations of domination. Thus his approach is centered on what ideology does rather than what causes it or what interests it serves. In Thompson's view, approaches that focus on content are insufficient because the content of a particular symbolic form does not by itself tell us whether it helps sustain relations of domination.9

The theory of cultural software has a twofold focus: First, it is concerned with how tools of understanding are produced through conceptual bricolage. Second, it is concerned with how these tools of understanding help create or sustain injustices in particular social contexts. The goal of this theory is not primarily functional explanation but causal or evolutionary explanation. It stud produce them and the effects that they in turn produce. Although this study is obviously con study of the effects produced. Moreover, because the theory focuses on just and unjust effects, its analysis is overtly normative as opposed to merely descriptive.

Under this approach there is, strictly speaking, no longer a single thing called ideology. The theory of cultural software, while dissolving the study of ideology into the larger study of cultural understanding, also breaks the study of ideology down into the study of ideological mechanisms and ideological effects. Ideological mechanisms are mechanisms of social cognition that pro software that help create or sustain unjust social conditions, unjust social relations, or the unjust use of social power. Ideological thinking, in short, is employment of ideological mechanisms of cultural software that produce ideological effects. Note that symbolic forms produced through the use of cultural software can also have ideological effects through their effects on human understanding. For example, perfume advertisements can have ideological effects if they help to create or sustain unjust relations between men and women.

The phrase "help to create or sustain" in the definition of ideological effects must be understood in a limited way, for otherwise the definition is seriously overinclusive. If a person used statistical formulas to calculate the numbers of individuals who could be transferred to a concentration camp, we would not say that the mere skill involved in applying the algorithm was an example of ideological thinking, even though it would literally be a use of cultural software (a mathematical skill) that helped maintain unjust social conditions. Rather, cultural software has ideological effects when it creates ways of thinking about the social world or about others in the social world. Although the study of ideology is not concerned with the skills involved in statistical computation, it is concerned with the ways of looking at people that lead to the judgments that it is appropriate to apply these statistical methods to facilitate genocide. These judgments include, among others, that people should be shipped to concentra they are inferior or that it is appropriate to think about people as commodities that must be efficiently shipped to the most efficient locations for the most efficient forms of slaughter.

These definitions of ideological effects and ideological mechanisms make what is ideological turn heavily on social context. Cultural software has ideo when and only to the extent that it results in various forms of injustice. This means that in other contexts cultural software may have no significant ideological effects. Moreover, even when cultural software has ide ological effects, these effects do not exhaust its social meaning, its content, or its usefulness. We can make a similar point about symbolic forms: a perfume advertisement is not merely a symbolic form with ideological effects; it is also, among other things, an advertisement for perfume. More generally, the tools of cultural understanding may have many other features and advantages and may serve many other functions apart from their tendency to produce ideo circumstances.

In like fashion, ideological mechanisms are defined contextually. When mechanisms of social cognition produce ideological effects, one can speak of them--for this purpose and to this extent--as ideological mechanisms. But they are ideological not because of their inherent nature but because of the context in which they are employed and the effects that they have.

What distinguishes ideological thinking from mere fantasy or mistake is the social context in which belief occurs and the use that people make of it. An important consequence of this approach is its emphasis on the normative di ideological analysis. To understand what is ideological, we need a notion not only of what is true but also of what is just. False beliefs about other people, no matter how mistaken or unflattering, are not ideological until we can demonstrate that they have ideological effects in the social world. To demonstrate this, we must know something about the relationship between a person's thought and the existing conditions of social power, as these provide the necessary background for considering questions of justice and injustice.

For this reason, the study of ideology necessarily intersects with the study of how social power is created, sustained, and distributed, because one of the objects of this study, the ideological effect, is a highly contextual product of cognitive capability and social situation. To be sure, sometimes we may infer that a particular way of thinking--a white American's belief that all black peo contribute to injustice that we may consider it presumptively ideological. But this is the case only because we already understand the social context in which this way of thinking occurs, the forms of behavior it is likely to lead to, and its place in a larger social system of race relations. Nevertheless, unjust social relations or unjust social power may be created or sustained in many different ways that are not always easily discernible from the content of a particular belief, espe cially when the context is unusual or unfamiliar.

Perhaps the best example of this principle is the bizarre phenomenon of Japanese anti-Semitism. There are very few Jews in Japan today and thus very few opportunities for discrimination against them. Nevertheless, anti-Semitic books and comments have appeared continually in Japan over the years, often repeating the most vicious claims of Nazi ideology and Eastern European anti Semitism.10 Especially popular are beliefs about a secret worldwide Jewish fi power. What is most amazing is that the very same libels that in the European context were part and parcel of a terrible social system of discrimination (and extermination) are combined in Japan with a peculiar form of philo-Semitism in which Jews are admired for their supposed shrewdness and business acumen.11

All of this is not to claim that Japanese anti-Semitism has no ideological effects. Rather, my point is that we must not conflate this phenomenon with European anti-Semitism even though its beliefs and slogans appear to be similar in content and may even have their origins in European anti-Semitic literature. The ideological effects of Japanese attitudes toward Jews seem to have more to do with supporting and sustaining a larger system of beliefs about business and economic competition in Japan. These ways of thinking, in turn, may help sustain relations of unjust power not between the Japanese and a Jewish mi nority but within Japanese society itself, or between the Japanese and the out world. Moreover, Japanese anti-Semitism also serves as a way of expressing anti-American sentiments, which have surfaced as Japan and the United States have increasingly become economic adversaries. Because Jews are portrayed as the hidden masters of American business and government, anti-Semitic rhetoric becomes another way of complaining about American culture and American trade policies.12

Of course, if large numbers of Jews were to emigrate to Japan, existing anti Semitic attitudes might lead to unjust treatment of Jews, just as they did in Europe and America. This is yet another consequence of my basic point about the uses and effects of conceptual tools. When introduced into new social set tings, the tools of understanding display different effects, benefits, and disadvantages. That is why the study of ideology cannot rest on content alone but must take into account the environment in which cultural software operates. Indeed, the view that the power of ideas lies in their content and not in their content in a particular context is itself a way of thinking that causes us to misunderstand social situations.

This approach sheds a somewhat different light on so-called beneficial ide Suppose that the students in a particular elementary school classroom are falsely told that they are very bright and very able, indeed, much more bright and able than other students of their age. As a result, their test scores, as a group, actually begin to improve. The source of their esprit de corps is fraudulent, yet it seems to benefit them. This is an example of what Jon Elster calls the "benefits of bias."13 Such situations are important to explain in the Marxist tradition because ideology is often defined functionally in terms of what serves the interests of a particular class. Hence it follows that some ideologies, while false, may actually benefit the people who hold them--for example, the members of the bourgeoisie. Because I define ideology in terms of what is just rather than what is in a particular group's interests, my analysis of this example is quite different: we cannot yet even say that these students are engaged in ideological thinking until we study how justice might be affected by their views of themselves. First, these students may start to look down on students in other classes and other schools and to discriminate against them although the others have equal or greater abilities. Second, some students in the class may not be able to live up to their teacher's claims of superior ability, and they may engage in strategies of dissonance reduction to avoid this recognition: for example, they may be more likely to assume that people who criticize their work are simply mistaken, or they may come to think that their failures are due less to ability than to luck or sheer coincidence. This may harm them in the long run. Thus, a so-called ideology of superior achievement is not ideological thinking in my sense of the word unless and until it has particular effects, and then only to this extent. Moreover, the flip side of this claim is that even the most seem ingly benign and beneficial forms of thinking can have unexpected and unfor point that they become forms of ideological thought.

Above all, this approach does not view ideology as something separate from cultural understanding. The mechanisms of what we call ideological thinking are no different in kind from the ordinary forms of thought. There is not a separate set of devices that constitute "the ideological" and another set that constitute "the nonideological." There are not mechanisms of social cognition that always produce ideological effects and other mechanisms that never do so. In particular, we must resist the natural tendency to think that ideology con distinguished in terms of its operations from the supposedly normal, nonideological forms and mechanisms of thought that characterize everyday reasoning. The mechanisms of ideology are the mechanisms of everyday thought, which in particular contexts produce effects that are both unfortunate and unjust. Con thought can become ideological mecha contexts and situations.

This conclusion is consistent with our earlier discussion of conceptual bri tools of our understanding can be alternatively advantageous and disadvantageous as they are applied in new situations and new contexts. Among the many possible disadvantages that conceptual tools can have is their ten their many possible advantages is the relative lack of this tendency. Thus tools of understanding that are en too much is demanded of them or if the context in which they are employed changes suf disadvantages of tools may suddenly surface.

The temptation to identify ideology with a sort of pathology may stem from the familiar notion that ideology is false or distorted belief. Given this assumption, it seems natural to think of falsity or distortion as a kind of illness or malady, especially if it has harmful effects. For example, we often speak of racism or anti-Semitism as a sickness or a disease. In fact, the metaphor of disease is not completely unreasonable, as I shall discuss momentarily. But identifying ideology with pathology simply because beliefs are false or distorted improperly focuses on content rather than mechanisms--or, to use the meta standpoint of causal mechanisms, the question is whether the effects that people have traditionally assigned to the ideological are due to (1) a special mechanism different from the ordinary mechanisms of social cognition; (2) the extension or employment of cognitive mechanisms into contexts for which they are not well adapted; (3) a spontaneous malfunction in cognitive processes; or (4) the invasion of some external force into normally and properly functioning cognitive processes that causes them to malfunction. I reject (1) and suggest that many ideological effects are produced by (2).

This leaves cases (3) and (4), both of which explain ideological effects in terms of malfunctions. Obviously, there is some overlap between the notion of overextension and the notion of malfunction. Nevertheless, the concepts are not identical: we would not say of an airplane that it malfunctions because it is a poor vehicle for traveling on land. This is not malfunction but maladap malfunction and maladap should be capable of understanding everything in all contexts. Then to the extent that they failed to do so, we would say that they were malfunctioning. This seems to ask too much of our tools of understanding, though; after all, no tool exists that is equally well adapted to all tasks.

Much of the distortion that we see in ideology involves the side effects of tools of understanding that become prominent and maladaptive in particular contexts. Ideological effects are usually the unexpected and unpleasant side effects of conceptual bricolage. I do not reject out of hand the possibility that some ideological effects are due to a genuine malfunction in cognitive pro individuals at once in order to qualify as an ideological phenomenon. A simultaneous malfunction by members of a culture is unlikely. This leaves the possibility that if some ideological phenomena are due to a malfunction in our cognitive processes, it is a malfunction brought on by some external force that affects many people at once. One possibility is that when individuals are placed in situations with which their cognitive systems cannot cope, they break down or malfunction, just as we say that a car malfunctions when it is forced to drive through water, or a vacuum cleaner malfunctions when it is forced to deal with too great a quantity of dust. If many individuals face the same type of experience, this malfunction would be similar for all of them. But it is hard to imagine that this explains most ideological effects. After all, human intelligence is quite adaptable, and many ideological effects, like racism or anti-Semitism, are long -lasting phenomena that occur over many generations. The idea of a long-term breakdown in cognitive processes seems implausible.

Instead, the theory of cultural software offers a somewhat different account of how relatively robust and long-term ideological effects can be produced by a malfunction due to an "external entity." This external entity is none other than cultural software itself, transmitted from other individuals and spread throughout a culture like a computer virus. A computer virus is just a special kind of computer software that is able to spread and reproduce itself in other computers. By analogy, cultural software may act like an informational virus that infects one node on a network and then, through the exchange of infor mation, gradually infects all the others.

Under this model, long-lasting and widespread ideological effects are pro informational or cognitive "viruses" that are passed from person to person and generation to generation. If so, we might think of racism or anti Semitism as a sort of socially spread informational virus or parasite that, while not totally debilitating subjects, affects their behavior and cognition for the worse.

In fact, this model of ideological effects is the model of memetic evolution through cultural communication. Memes are reproduced in individuals through a social network of communication and transmission. The spread of ideological viruses is merely a special case of the basic mechanism through which cultural software is written, transmitted, and modified. All cultural software can be thought of as a kind of informational virus, transmitted from person to person; or, put another way, what we might call an ideological virus is just another kind of cultural software. Our devices for understanding the social world are constituted in large part by idea-programs that were able successfully to be transmitted to us and absorbed into our cultural software. The complexes of memes that give rise to racism and anti-Semitism, in this sense, are no different from any other idea-programs--like those producing predilections for free speech or free mar-kets--that make use of our cognitive capacities to grow, spread, and develop, just as genes "use" bodies in an evolutionary system.

Hence what differentiates cultural software from a so-called ideological vi harmful effect that the latter produces in a particular social context. As the example of European versus Japanese anti-Semitism demonstrates, an ideological virus can produce very different effects when it is introduced into different environments. If an informational virus produces no such harmful effects--just as there are many viruses in the human body that are relatively benign or harmless--then it does not produce an ideological effect. Fantasies about people in far-off lands may be distorted and false, but they do not become ideological until there are conditions of justice between the two peoples-that is, until there is communication, trade, and the possibility of war, conflict, struggle, economic exploitation, or colonization. Then these fairy tales (which may already have had certain ideological effects within a culture) take on a more serious and harmful tone. Fantasy becomes ideology when justice is at stake.

This line of reasoning brings us back to our original hypothesis--that ide ological effects are produced by ordinary mechanisms of thought that have harmful or maladaptive consequences in particular contexts and situations. Ide software "goes wrong" in some important way. The power of ideology over our imaginations is a special case of the power that all cultural software has over our imaginations.

The power of ideology within this picture is quite different from the picture underlying a more traditional Marxist theory of ideology. In the traditional account, ideas have power because they present a distorted picture of reality to the minds of the persons holding them, causing these persons to act against their objective interests. From the standpoint of the theory of cultural software, the power of ideology is the power of the culturally produced capacities of our minds to shape social reality for us, and thus simultaneously to empower and to limit our imaginations.

This approach makes considerable use of concepts like usefulness, ade quacy, and suitability. But these concepts can hardly be considered inherent properties of the tools of understanding. Adaptability is a judgment made about the operation of a tool in a particular context. It is also a judgment made by an observer who assesses the operations and effects of mechanisms of thought. This means, among other things, that the study of ideology is necessarily an interpretive endeavor, although this fact makes it no less useful. Finally, because all cultural and social understanding makes use of cultural software, all ideo logical analysis-that is, all judgments about the existence and nature of ide effects-involves judgments by an analyst that employ the analyst's cultural software. This raises problems of self-reference, which are discussed more fully in the next chapter.

What Kinds of Effects: Hegemony or Unjust Power?

The study of ideology necessarily has a normative dimension. It cannot be value free but must presuppose a view about what is good and bad, advantageous and disadvantageous, just and unjust. The analyst cannot describe and analyze ide reference to concepts like truth or justice. She must make interpretive judgments about what social conditions are like, and she must also make judgments about whether a way of thinking is adequate or inadequate to serve particular ends and whether social conditions are just or unjust. Ide particular belief or symbolic form is partly or wholly false or distorted. It must ask how this falsity or distortion might create or sustain unjust social conditions or unjust relations of social power. Thus ideological analysis does not merely involve considera tions of truth and justice; it is fundamentally a question of the relationship of truth to justice.

Because I define ideological effects in terms of actual or potential injustices rather than the presence of hegemony or domination, it may be helpful to contrast my approach with that recently offered by John Thompson. Thomp study of how symbolic forms create or sustain conditions of domination. He then defines domination in terms of sys particular agents or groups of agents are endowed with power in a durable way which excludes, and to some significant degree remains inaccessible to, other agents or groups of agents, irrespective of the basis on which such exclusion is carried out."14 Under Thompson's definition, women in the United States would be domi that they are disadvantaged vis a vis men systematically in many different ways, including jobs, income, status, education, economic opportunities, and other resources. Thus while Thompson argues that the essential feature of ideology is the creation or preservation of domination, I have argued that it is the creation or preservation of unjust power or unjust social conditions.

One reason for this difference is that Thompson's definition is underinclu every example of ideological thinking contributes to systematic asym resources or power relations between groups. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of black anti-Semitism in the United States. Anti Semitic propaganda by black nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam does not contribute to or produce systematic asymmetries in resources or power relations between blacks and Jews or even between all Christians and Jews. Indeed, in contrast to blacks, Jews have been relatively successful in gaining access to social resources in the United States. For this and other reasons, Jews provide a convenient scapegoat for some members of the black underclass, just as blacks themselves have provided a convenient scapegoat for lower-class whites in the United States. Black anti-Semitism, like resentment and hostility among some blacks toward Asian Americans, is in part the result of competition between various minority groups; it is not a means by which blacks oppress Jews or Asians and systematically deny them access to social resources. Nev particular injustices-acts of violence, for example-against Jews or Asians, either by blacks or by other groups. Thus a focus on systematic asymmetries in power defines ideology too narrowly; the study of ideology must be concerned with injustices produced by tools of understanding whether or not they stem from domination of a subordinated group by a dominant group.

To be sure, black anti-Semitism or anti-Asian sentiments may also contribute to the perpetuation of systematic asymmetries between blacks and whites, by diverting attention onto scapegoats and away from positive solutions to the challenges the black community faces. Similarly, prejudice against other racial minorities, like Asians or Hispanics, alienates potential allies who might oth erwise fight together with blacks against white supremacy. Nevertheless, the ideological effects of black anti-Semitism or anti-Asian prejudice are not ex further white supremacy. Even if these prejudices did not harm the just interests of blacks, they would still be ideological, because they can and do lead to injustices be members of different minority groups.

Thompson's formulation suffers from these difficulties because it has not yet thrown off the shackles of a traditional Marxist model that envisions a dominant class, a subordinate class, and an ideology that justifies the subordi nation of the latter by the former. Systematic group domination by a dominated class over a subordinate class is the central concern; it follows that forms of social injustice or unjust social power that do not involve hegemony are not properly the concern of the theory of ideology. As Thompson himself stresses, "Ideology, according to this conception, is by nature hegemonic, in the sense that it naturally serves to establish and sustain relations of domination and thereby to reproduce a social order which favors dominant individuals and groups. Hence Thompson limits ideology to the study of "the ways in which meaning is mobilized in the service of dominant individuals and groups."15

Unfortunately, this model is too simplistic to describe a large number of ideological phenomena, particularly in a country like the United States, where there are many different groups with varying degrees of social power and mul social identities. Antiblack prejudice by Korean Americans and anti-Korean prejudice by American blacks cannot easily be subsumed within a hegemonic conception of ideology. Nor does a hegemonic approach contemplate the possibility of simultaneous membership in groups that are dominant and subordinate-working-class white males who are homosexual, for example, or upper-class heterosexual women who are not physically dis course, but the danger is that a large portion of what most people would consider ideological phenomena will be missed. Moreover, this limita tion may have significant ideological effects on the analyst's own thought about ideology and social conditions.

For the theory of cultural software, the equation of ideology and hegemony is problematic for seven additional reasons. The first stems from the basic point that ideological mechanisms are the mechanisms of everyday thought about the social world. There is no reason to think that the kinds of cognitive mechanisms producing ideological effects that benefit dominant groups and harm subor dinate groups are different in kind from those producing benefit and harm to other groups. It is likely that the mechanisms that produce prejudices between groups are fairly similar, although the results may differ because of the relative positions and histories of various groups in society. If we restrict our study of ideology to mechanisms producing beliefs that benefit dominant groups, we cut ourselves off from many examples of ideological thinking that not only shed considerable light on more hegemonic examples but are fully worth study right.16

Second, the concept of a dominant ideology leads us to view ideology in terms that are too monolithic. What people usually think of as ideology is really the confluence of many different types of cognitive mechanisms. The ideology of patriarchy, for example, is not a single thing, or a coherent system, but rather a group of heterogenous and partly reinforcing ideological effects. This het well as a source of its possible deconstruction and subversion.

Indeed, there is a notable tendency among theorists of ideology to confuse the pervasiveness and the wrongfulness of a worldview with its systematicity. Thus, Catharine MacKinnon, in a famous passage, has described patriarchy as a "metaphysically nearly perfect" system.17 This way of thinking may itself betray a certain ideological effect, because it conflates the powerful with the well-ordered. Ideologies in the larger sense that MacKinnon is concerned with are always the product of bricolage and memetic evolution. Hence they lack the characteristics of design: they always have conflicting and variegated ele ments, their seams always show, and loose threads are always dangling. Of course, this makes them no less powerful: an avalanche of motley elements is still an avalanche. But it does suggest that the theorist of ideology may be misled if she attempts to fit the entire phenomenon into a single, systematic analysis rather than looking for the confluence of various ideological effects and for their possible points of interaction and conflict. Indeed, the hetero forms of resistance to received ways of thinking.

Third, the notion that ideology is concerned only with the preservation and maintenance of dominant ideologies neglects the importance of competition between various ways of thinking within a culture. This competition occurs at many different levels and at many different places in society; there are not simply two armies contending on the field, and those armies that do contend already are fragmented and partly divided against themselves. Within American society for example, many different and partially overlapping groups promote their ways of thinking about the social world; and many different currents and eddies of social power result from these encounters. Together these encounters produce heterogeneous matrices of social power, mixing together the just and the unjust in an atrocious and unpalatable stew. To see only some elements of this mixture as worthy of the title of ideology is itself ideological, for it hinders the identification and critique of the many forms of social injustice that do not correspond to the grand narrative of the "hegemonic."

Fourth, when we define ideology in terms of symbolic forms that benefit dominant groups, we risk sentimentalizing the attitudes and interests of other groups, in particular subordinated groups. We risk overlooking the possibility that the beliefs of subordinated groups can also be distorted, self-serving, and unjust to other groups, even including more dominant groups. There is no reason to think that self-serving or distorted views of the social world are con tends to beget hate. Persecution can lead to persecution complexes. Moreover, if a group's opportunities and access to knowledge have been limited by its social condition and its comparative lack of social power, this may seriously affect its members' understanding of the social world, producing ideological effects in their thought.

Even when subordinated groups have a relatively adequate understanding of the social world, it by no means follows that what these groups believe to be in their interest is always just, or even that what is actually in their interests is always just. This is especially so, one might think, in a multicultural society in which many different subordinated groups scramble for social betterment and political power. An obvious example involves tensions between black and Hispanic communities in the United States over the drawing of district bound federal legislatures. Black and Hispanic communities may correctly recognize that drawing boundary lines one way rather than another would guarantee the elec Hispanic representative in Congress, and they may also correctly assess that this would further black or Hispanic interests. Neverthe one group's interests in this way may be unjust to other groups. We are no longer in the Marxist world, where furthering the interests of the oppressed (the proletariat) necessarily furthers justice or the proper direction of history. The belief that something is just simply because it favors a subordinated group may itself, under some condi involve ideological effects.18

Fifth, defining ideology in terms of what benefits members of dominant groups is problematic because subordination is not simply an on-off property of individuals or groups. There are different degrees and kinds of subordination among different groups, and individuals have multiple group identifications. Thus it is possible for an individual to be in a subordinated position with respect to some groups but in a privileged or dominant position with respect to others--consider the example of white middle-class heterosexual women.19 Pursuing the interests of white women may infringe on the just interests of black men, and vice versa. The endless possibilities for self-serving views of the social world between groups all of which can claim to be subordinated in one way or another--along with the concomitant injustices that may be produced by these views--shows how limited and simplistic a bipolar dominator- the need to expand the notion of ideology beyond a hegemonic conception.

The traditional proletariat-bourgeoisie model avoids these problems, first because it tends to reduce the number of groups to two, and second because it assumes that what is in the proletariat's interest is necessarily just or at least follows the course of proper historical development. Within this model the problem, rather, is ensuring that the proletariat understands what is in its own interest-that is, ensuring that it develops an appropriately revolutionary con not derive wholly from economic power, in a society that features many competing and partially over lapping groups, divided on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, language, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, one can no longer employ such simplifying assumptions. The simple model of dominator and dominated itself threatens to become ideological because it obscures the complexity of social conditions.

Not only does a bipolar approach tend to neglect the many different kinds of subordinated groups, it also tends to collapse, homogenize, and demonize the interests, attitudes, and beliefs of whatever group is described as dominant. Such a homogenization may disguise fragmentation within the dominant group as well as the existence of relatively subordinate and distinct subgroups. To speak about hegemony by whites, for example, is to forget that some women are also white; to speak about the hegemony of white males is to neglect the fact that the interests of lower-class white men may be quite different from those of more affluent white males. Moreover, the homogenization of white males into a single group obscures the fact that some of the most vitriolic race hatred appears not among the most powerful members of white society but among the most disaffected and disenfranchised. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations have often found that the poor and uneducated are more promising recruits than the well educated and the well-to-do. One reason why such groups turn to rabid racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism is that, given their economic and class subordination, they cling to their whiteness as a guarantee of social status. Thus even the supposedly simple case of prejudice against blacks is more complicated than a hegemony model of ideology suggests; like the case of black anti-Semitism, it involves competing ideologies among groups that suffer varying degrees and kinds of subordination.

Approaching the study of ideology in terms of hegemony rather than justice creates a sixth problem: the familiar but troublesome concept of "false con sciousness." This concept focuses not on the question of what is just but on the relationship between individuals' thought and the (objective) interest of the class to which they belong. A person whose beliefs and preferences are contrary to that interest is said to suffer from false consciousness. Hegemonic concep consciousness--whether or not they use that precise terminology--because members of subordinate groups often accept their lot and may even oppose political activity designed to undermine the hegemony of superordinate groups.

Inquiries into false consciousness are problematic for four reasons. First, they presuppose that a class can have a unified, objective interest and that the interests of each of the members of that class are not substantially in conflict with it. In other words, the concept of false consciousness assumes without further investigation a particular state of affairs about the benefits of collective action: it assumes that each individual member benefits sufficiently from pro Americans as a group have an objective interest, there is no reason to think that the individual interests of some African Americans might not conflict with that group interest. Indeed, by taking contrary positions they may realize considerably greater ben personally than they would have if they had adhered to the "party line." It is hard to argue that such persons suffer from false consciousness--indeed, they may see what is in their interests more clearly than many other people.

Second, the concept of false consciousness tends to elide distinctions be and short-term interests, in part because it is premised on an underlying historical narrative of eventual liberation. But if one no longer be example, the Marxist narrative of the inevitability of proletarian revolution--the multiple and conflicting interests of persons and groups reassert themselves forcefully. It becomes more difficult to state con Rather, people may disagree simply because they balance long- and short-term interests, or group interests and individual interests, differently.

Third, accusations of false consciousness are normally directed at members of subordinated groups that dissent from the analyst's view of what is in their class's interest. But the same logic applied to superordinate groups leads to a paradoxical result: members of superordinate groups that support the disman from false consciousness because they are working against their class's interests in maintaining hegemony. If women who oppose gender equality suffer from false consciousness, so too do men who support gender equality. This paradox arises from the fact that the notion of false consciousness is concerned not with the justice of a position but its re lation to the interests of a class.

Fourth, the notion of false consciousness is problematic because it is a holdover from the bivalent oppressor-oppressed model of hegemony that I have just criticized. This model makes little sense in a world in which people have multiple and cross-cutting identities. Even assuming that African Americans and women have objective interests as a class, surely these interests can some American woman avoid a charge of false consciousness, regardless of the position she takes?

Indeed, accusations of false consciousness are often attempts by one portion of a social group to assert a unitary and objective interest that disadvantages or ignores the claims of another portion or subgroup. Working-class women may be accused of false consciousness by middle-class women when in fact their interests differ because of their class position. Similarly, the interests of African-American women may diverge in important respects from those of white women. Once internal divisions and cross-cutting identities are recog self-serving.

The approach that I take in this book rejects the notion of grounding an analysis of ideology in the objective and unified interests of social groups. It asks instead whether cultural software tends to produce or sustain unjust effects. This does not eliminate inquiries into the interests of social groups. But it mediates them through the larger question of what is just for all concerned. Because our primary concern is justice, the notion of false consciousness be positions that undermine the achievement of racial justice may be acting in his or her personal interests at the expense of the interests of other African Americans; but the important question is whether taking those positions promotes or hinders justice. More over, a focus on justice as opposed to objective group interest puts the con claims of social groups in proper perspective, for justice does not consist in each group achieving its interests; it involves accommodating the just inter ests of all.

Ideological Analysis and Normative Commitment

The seventh and final reason to prefer a definition of ideology based on the question of justice rather than on the question of domination is that ideological analysis is essentially and ineluctably normative and interpretive. A definition of ideology in terms of "domination" tends to disguise the normative com constitutes domination cannot be artic about what is just and unjust in a society. Moreover, the very concept of domination that one might use to distinguish the ideological from the nonideological is itself an object of ideo logical disputation.

Consider Thompson's definition of domination in terms of "systematic asymmetry" in power and access to social resources. Although this definition seems to rest on facts about society, it must also rest on a conception of justice. The concept of domination must also include a normative judgment about just and unjust treatment if it is to be of any use in a theory of ideology.

In fact, Thompson's definition would be seriously overinclusive if it rested only on the existence of systematic asymmetries in power between groups. Not all examples of systematic asymmetry in power relations involve unjust domi nation, and not all beliefs that justify or sustain systematic asymmetries between groups are ideological in a pejorative sense. Some systematic asymmetries be for example, the case of felons. Surely this group is systematically disadvantaged in the United States. Indeed, in the United States, we incarcerate felons and deny them the right to vote.

We would probably not say that say that felons suffer from social domi law abiding, although we might contend that particular felons suffer from social domination because they also belong to groups that are un do not claim that felons as a class suffer from domination is that we believe that the systematic disadvantages these people suffer on account of being felons are fully justified. We are justified in syste because they have seriously injured other people. That is why our judgments of social dom differentiates a dominated group from a systematically disadvantaged but un one is the question whether the group's lot is due to some present or previous injustice.

Our judgments about social domination are inextricable from our judg justice. People of low intelligence are systematically denied many advantages in the United States, including entrance to elite educational insti tutions and employment in many high-paying occupations like medicine. We might also note the systematic disadvantages suffered by people who are lazy, disagreeable, shy, unambitious, and untalented. Does the mere fact of these systematic disadvantages mean these groups are also dominated? Not neces sarily; it all depends on our theory of justice.

Under some conceptions of distributive justice, one might well conclude that people who are lazy, unintelligent, and untalented are oppressed by the industrious, the clever, and the talented. Suppose, for example, that our theory of distributive justice holds that people do not have rights to the fruit of their talents, and that inequalities produced by the use of these talents unfairly dis think that purportedly negative qualities like laziness are produced by oppressive social structures and that these qualities would be differently produced, differently understood, and differently distributed if these social structures were altered. Finally, suppose that we believe that negative qualities like laziness are matters of social con opportunistically invoked to benefit certain identifiable social groups. Each of these theories of justice may be controversial in some respects. But they aptly demonstrate that our social judgments about domi about facts mediated through underlying values. They are complicated appraisals of social meaning with ineluctably normative underpinnings.

Moreover, a systematically disadvantaged group may be unfairly dominated, but its unjust domination may not be coextensive with the full degree of its systematic disadvantage. Some of the disadvantages its members suffer may be unjust, but others are not. For example, it may be perfectly just to imprison certain types of criminals and to discriminate against them in all sorts of ways, but there is a point at which their punishment becomes oppressive and unjus tortured, or imprisoned under in domination or oppression. In addition, if all felons are lumped together in people's judgments, so that less culpable criminals like petty thieves are treated the same as serial killers, this may also lead to injustice toward and oppression of the former subgroup. Men tally retarded persons suffer systemic disadvantages in social power that can be justified to some degree by their limited mental capacity, but some of their disadvantages cannot be justified on these grounds. These disadvantages are oppressive, and ways of thinking that justify such oppressive treatment are the proper concern of a theory of ideology. Here too, we cannot base our definition of ideology on the bare fact of disparate treatment or systematic disadvantage alone. We need a conception of justice to distinguish those parts of a group's unequal treatment that involve unjust domination and oppression from the parts that do not.

In this chapter I have argued that a theory of ideology needs a conception of justice. By this I mean that to understand and describe ideology the analyst must bring to bear her sense of what is just and unjust. However, ideological analysis does not require that the analyst have a full-fledged philosophical the complete philosophical account of justice. Most people go through their whole lives without developing such theories, and they are nevertheless able to discuss and reason about questions of justice and injustice. Conversely, well-developed philosophical theories of justice are often too abstract to offer specific judgments about whether partic policies or social conditions are just or unjust.

Finally, as we shall see in the next chapter, the very act of engaging in ideological analysis can change our views about what is just and unjust. We must be open to such changes as a condition of our understanding. So the theory of ideology that I offer in this book is designed to be compatible with a wide variety of different philosophical theories of justice. Indeed, in Chapter 7 I will argue that justice is an indeterminate value that must be articulated through human culture. The many different philosophical theories of justice are but one form of this cultural articulation.

Nevertheless, throughout this book I offer examples that assume that cer tain positions and social conditions are relatively just or unjust. I do this to clarify my arguments about ideology through concrete examples. But these specific judgments are independent of the theory of ideology I present. And Iwould hardly be surprised if my own assumptions about what is just and unjust are not themselves possible subjects of analysis and criticism.

My conclusion that the study of ideology must rely on a conception of justice prefigures the answer to the third of the four questions with which I began this chapter-namely, the interpretive stance that we must take toward the object of our study. And it raises even more urgently the fourth question how to deal with the problem of self-reference, given that ideological analysis can also be applied to the analyst's own thought. These questions form the subject of the next chapter.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/11/feed 0 Chapter 4: The Spread of Cultural Software http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/10 http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/10#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 18:14:05 +0000 http://yupnet.org/balkin/?p=10 Because memes can be commensal or even parasitic, we no longer have to explain the development of culture in terms of what is functional for human beings or even for society as a whole. We can shift our focus from what kinds of memes would help human beings or cultures survive to what kinds of memes are most likely to survive and propagate in human beings and their informa successful replicators because they are true beliefs or because they provide skills useful to human beings. But they need not point toward truth or possess great utility in order to survive and propagate in human minds. They may just as easily spread by playing upon our worst instincts, by pandering to our coarsest or basest desires, by permitting us to avoid recognizing our moral responsibilities, or by en other vices. Finally, they may prolif into the world. They may multiply simply because they are entertaining or diverting.

Why Memes Survive and Spread

What makes some memes more successful in their environment than others? We can identify three basic kinds of factors. The first are substantive factors involving content. Second are psychological factors--the cognitive structure of human minds and their comparative susceptibilities. A third set of fac of social institutions, methods of storing information, and technologies of communication. These different fea content that make memes more attractive or more often discussed may depend onstructural features of the human mind and existing religious or educational institutions.

Substantive Factors

Memes tend to spread if they are salient, relevant to existing activities, attractive, or entertaining, or if they generate strong emotions. Sometimes it is not difficult to see why some memes spread more than others. Jokes and skills like juggling or playing a musical instrument are widely distributed be because they are relevant to many different people's lives and interests. Consider as an example the number of songs about the various aspects of love and courtship.

Memes improve their reproductive success if they have behavioral effects that promulgate their own spread. A catchy melody, for example, may cause people to hum or sing it repeatedly, thus increasing the number of times that it is heard by other people. A good joke spreads rapidly because people enjoy telling it to others. Memes may be more successful if they encourage prose lytization, appear to be beneficial (thus encouraging sharing with friends and relations), promote cooperation with others, and hide any maladaptive features for as long as necessary to spread widely.1

Another strategy for survival is to disable or preempt potential competitors in the environment.2 Standard examples are memes for faith, which discourage skeptical beliefs and the sort of critical inquiry that would tend to dislodge faith.3 Ideas of tolerance or free expression tend to assist their own propagation, but they also assist many other competing ideas as well, including ideas of intolerance and censorship. Complexes of memes working together may create joint defense mechanisms. Examples are warnings in chain letters that if recip to them, and rumors of pow erful conspiracies that explain objections on the grounds that all objectors are either part of or have been hoodwinked by the conspiracy.4 To this one might add theories of ideology that make use of concepts of false consciousness to dismiss critics.

Still another method for memes to improve their chances of reproductive success is to attach themselves to other successful memes. Religions, for ex many accretions over time. These accretions benefit from the general acceptance of religious belief and powerful memes for faith. Believers follow the tenets and practices of a general religious tradition together rather than investigating each one separately. Of course, the meme that lives by linkage can also die by linkage. If a meme is too closely linked to others that lose favor, it may be filtered out precisely because of these associations--a memetic baby thrown out with the bathwater.5 One might think that the most important factor in increasing a meme's reproductive success would be its truth or falsity. But many memes cannot be said to be true or false. Examples are bodily skills like dancing, and practical skills like those involved in being polite. Informational and cognitive filters, which shape thought, are among the major concerns of the theory of ideology; they are neither true nor false, though they can produce true and false beliefs. Finally, many philosophers hold (incorrectly, in my view) that statements of political, moral, and aesthetic value cannot be true or false. For these noncog falsity is irrelevant to the success of a large number of memes.

Even with respect to memes which correspond to beliefs that can be true or false, there are several reasons why truth does not necessarily increase re falsity does not necessarily diminish it. First, when a belief is obviously true, no one may pay much attention to it or think about it. As a result, it may be much less likely to be communicated to others. Memes so obvious that they are rarely discussed tend to lie dormant in minds; they are, quite literally, things that go without saying. Regular and prolific replica particular human mind, because a particular carrier might die or forget. Hence memes may be more successful if they are controversial, taking that word in its literal sense as that which produces conversation.

Second, not all of the true things we believe are actually recorded in our minds at any point. For example, most people probably believe that there are no indigenous palm trees in Antarctica, but it is likely that they have never thought about it before the fact was brought to their attention. Many things we "believe" in the ordinary sense of that word are inferable from other beliefs that are stored mentally.6 Because many if not most of our true beliefs are of this form, it may be quite important for true beliefs to be generated, used, and thought about if they are ever to be spread to others. Even true beliefs that many people could generate independently will not be generated and spread unless occasions arise to generate and spread them.

Third, true beliefs are much more likely to be communicated in response to false beliefs or only partially true beliefs (approximations of the truth, for example). This suggests that some false and true beliefs are coadapted: the presence of one spurs the communication and spread of the other. There is an analogous problem for religious beliefs. Religious faith can weaken over time if it is not occasionally faced with challenges. Hence heresies and external op and the propagation of religious memes.7

Fourth, some memes may be employed, generated, or communicated pre cisely because it is difficult to tell whether they are true or false. Many of the most commonly communicated ideas are those whose truth and falsity cannot be determined, which is why they are the subject of endless debate. This debate, in turn, ensures their continual transmission and survival. An analogous point applies to questions of practical reasoning and aesthetic judgment. A course of action is most likely to be debated precisely when its consequences and appro of success by being controversial.

Fifth, beliefs that are clearly true often have unequivocal meanings or un applications; otherwise they would not be clearly true. But such clar their reproductive success. Some memes are more likely to reproduce themselves if they are ambiguous--if they mean different things to different people, or even to the same person. This is especially true in the world of values. Principles like equality and liberty are ambiguous in their reference and hence can be--and are--invoked by different sides of a dispute. They become objects of struggle, and through this struggle they are repeatedly communicated and transmitted, thus ensuring their continued survival. In like fashion, the most heavily litigated and discussed parts of a legal code or con that are least clear, or that become increasingly unclear through successive judicial interpretations.

Finally, truth or falsity may not be relevant to survival because we can remember and transmit beliefs even if they are false, bigoted, or unjust. Some beliefs survive precisely because they are understood to be false or wrong. They are helpful examples of falsehood or wrongfulness that are continually repeated because of their helpfulness.

Psychological Factors

Many of the most important factors in the spread of memes depend less upon their substance than upon features of the human mind. We have already noted one such factor--the capacity of a symbol or belief to raise strong emo tions. Memes better adapted to the architecture of the mind take root more readily than others; hence we can study their comparative success for clues to the nature of this architecture. Experiments have shown, for example, that human beings develop certain basic level categories like "bird," which are easier to remember and employ than more abstract concepts like "flying thing" and more concrete concepts like "yellow-bellied thrush." These basic level cate more "catching"; studying rates of comparative "infection" gives us important clues about the organization of the mind.8

MEMORY AND COMPREHENSION. Human memory storage is an inevitable bottleneck for cultural transmission. Hence one of the most important factors affecting the survival of memes is ease of memorization. Ease of memorization depends on complexity, but complexity is not an inherent feature of information. It is partly a function of mental architecture. Human minds are not general-purpose memorization machines. They have particular strengths and weaknesses that are the result of prior evolutionary pressures and compro mises of design. Different kinds of memes and complexes of memes face dif ferent degrees of success in this architecture.

Compare the memorizing abilities of a computer with those of a human being. What is easy for a human being to remember may be difficult for a computer, and vice versa. Computers can easily memorize long stings of num memory. Narratives and myths are effective methods for human memorization, but not necessarily effective methods of computer memorization. Human beings can easily store hundreds of tales and myths that can be told in multiple variations. It is much easier for human beings to remember and recite a story than to remember and recite a text of a story word for word. On the other hand, it is very difficult to store a myth on a computer, although we can easily provide it with different textual versions of a myth.9 Tales and myths are well-designed vehicles for human memory stor remain useful aids to memory to this day, and why they have survived without being forgotten. It is even possible that there were evolutionary advantages for human beings to storing information in narratives. The memorizability of narratives suggests both the internal structure of human memory and the important ways that it differs from those of currently existing computers.

Ease of memorization is especially important in oral cultures that have not developed writing or widespread literacy. In oral cultures, information that cannot be put in easily remembered forms will likely be forgotten. Hence the importance of bards and storytellers, who serve as walking encyclopedias. In oral cultures, songs and stories do multiple duty as popular entertainment, literature, history, religious doctrine, and canons of social instruction. As a result, branches of art and learning are not strongly differentiated.10 Successful memes must attach themselves to easily remembered forms like stories, songs, and bodily movements, just as medical students to this day learn complex an either will be forgotten or must be transformed into more easily remembered forms before they can be widely spread throughout a culture.11

The invention of writing revolutionizes the cultural environment. Human memory is less of a bottleneck for memetic survival, because it can be supple storage. New forms of literature can develop and may even supplant those found in the oral tradition. Put more generally, every new communication technology leads to new and different susceptibilities for memetic infection; it creates a new ecology for memetic growth and reproduction. Changes in the ecology mean that rates of differential survival and reproduction change; new memes develop that could not have survived or re produced as plentifully in the earlier environment.

This insight allows us to connect the theory of cultural software with the theory of media analysis. Media analysts like Marshall McLuhan and his fol changes in dominant forms of communication (and hence memory storage) lead to changes in human thought and human culture. Put in terms of the theory of cultural software, changes in media are changes in ecology; they create new selection pressures for memes that lead to new and different kinds of cultural software in human minds. In particular, the move significant effects on human memory and hence on human thought and culture.12 Media analysts argue that styles of thought and expression differ markedly in oral and written cultures. Oral cultures feature thought that is figural, repetitive, concrete, and diffuse; in written cultures, thought tends to become more conceptual, linear, abstract, and analytic.13 The latter kind of thought emerges precisely because print media permit it. In like fashion, forms of thought and expression start to change again as television begins to dominate communication.14

The subsequent move to a computer-oriented information society will doubtless further change our ability to store and process information, again revolutionizing our culture and our forms of thought. We are already seeing the signs of this in the information explosion that accompanies computeriza many different kinds of memes; it also creates the need and the opportunity for ever new forms of filtering to control the amount of information being created and broadcast. As a result, in the information age, filters increasingly determine what information we receive and how we receive it. In the age of information, the filter is king.

The details of representation are sometimes as much a candidate for natural selection as the context represented.15 Memes become coadapted to other memes that help in their delivery and memorization, just as information had to be conveyed in narrative or poetic form in oral cultures to ensure memo competition for human memory space, certain methods of communication win out over others: messages coded in rhymes or pithy sayings are memorized better than other messages; com mercials with flashy graphics and news reports that resemble entertainment programs garner more attention than less entertaining forms. Media critics have documented how television has tended to merge news, political coverage, and entertainment, and a similar process appears to be happening in media coverage of the legal system.16

Related to ease of memorization is ease of comprehension. Human beings are less susceptible to memes that they do not understand. Different minds have different degrees of susceptibility to memetic invasion, depending in part on their education and experience. A text that is easy for someone already trained in a discipline may be difficult for a lay person; a sentence easy for a native speaker to comprehend may be more difficult for another person. Peo ple who are immune to written language may nevertheless be susceptible to memes expressed in television shows, movies, or music. Different rates of comprehensibility create selection pressures on memes to be expressed in eas communicated and digested forms. Otherwise, memes must content them smaller ecological niches-for example, in subcultures like academic writing.

Like memorizability, comprehensibility is often greatly affected by the me communication. Print media make much greater demands on com more sustained attention than television. Television has a further advantage: it makes information entertaining by using music, quick image changes, and flashy graphics. The different features of these media have two separate types of effects. First, they bestow a survival advantage to memes conveyed on television, although there are compensating disadvantages as well-for example, televisual information may be viewed as disposable and hence more easily forgotten. Second, because television can be entertaining and absorbing in ways that print media cannot, there is continual selection pressure in television for memes to be more and more entertaining and ab sorbing. More entertaining programming tends to weed out less entertaining programming. Certain types of broadcasts-for example, a stationary camera focusing on an extended lecture by a standing speaker-tend to be weeded out because they are not "good television." More generally, memes involved in public discourse tend to become co-adapted with memes that are optimal for communication on television, producing important alterations to both.

On television, certain styles of communication tend to dominate others: For example, in the current environment, at least, ten-second "sound bites" seem better adapted to the demands of television than four-hour discussions of policy issues.17 Ideas embodied in pictures and accompanied by music tend to dominate ideas conveyed through rolling black text on a white screen. More generally, memes conveyed through a medium's favored forms of communi this fashion tend increasingly to disappear from television broadcasts. This com affects content as well as form. Political discourse has long since begun to borrow heavily from advertising; politicians have learned to stage media events that grab precious television time. Because television favors entertain ment, there are selection pressures on public discourse, advertising, and even coverage of the legal system to conform to these standards and increasingly to resemble other forms of television entertainment.18 All of these tendencies con firm the role of natural selection in the development of culture.

EASE OF COMMUNICATION. Memes that are easy to communicate tend to spread more than those that are more difficult to communicate. Ease of com munication is not necessarily the same as ease of memorization or even ease of comprehension. A list of numbers may be easy to communicate but difficult to remember. A deeply personal experience may be easy to remember but difficult to communicate.19

Every teacher knows that some ideas are more difficult to convey than others. Listeners often take away misunderstandings of complicated ideas be cause the misunderstandings are easier to comprehend and communicate to others than the original, more complicated idea. As a result, the distorted or mutated version may spread more widely than the original. Indeed, repeated communication can affect not only the substance of communication but its form as well. Some words are harder to pronounce than others, leading to mutations of pronunciation.20

Unlike genetic transmission, which engenders relatively faithful copying, cultural transmission normally involves alteration and mutation. Hence in ex plaining the spread of shared cultural software, we must account both for the ability of cultural software to spread and its ability to preserve some measure of identity.21 Because opportunities for alteration are so commonplace, the most widely shared features of our cultural software are those that can best resist alteration after repeated transmission and mutation.22

Stories provide a good example. Each time a story is told, it is likely that the version is slightly different from the last. Some details may be added, others subtracted, and still others compressed or merged. Only the most easily com municated, understood, and remembered features tend to be preserved.23 Most people who remember the biblical story of Joseph, for example, believe that Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. In fact, the story told in the Bible is more complicated and thus less easy to remember. The Hebrew text suggests that Joseph's brothers threw him into a pit. He was rescued by some Midianite merchants, and they sold him into slavery. But the "folk" version of the story has become more widely transmitted than the original.24

In similar fashion, statements and slogans tend to be transformed through repetition until they are relatively easy to remember and transmit to others. This may help to explain the familiar phenomenon of famous "quotations" that were never actually spoken but are variants of what was actually said.25 Not surprisingly, political slogans spread more easily than the complicated po litical theories that they stand for, and they have the further survival advantage that they stand for many different things to many different people. This evolutionary account explains why a wide variety of cultures have sim narratives and myths. Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths in different cultures were transformations of basic narrative structures that in turn reflected basic structures of the human unconscious.26 But we can explain matters more simply. The "universal structures" that we see in human myths and legends may reflect those elements of stories that best survive the continual mutation and alteration that comes with repeated tellings. Moreover, because the spread of myths depends on the ecology of human minds, their content and structure may shift over time.

REFLEXIVE BELIEFS. One of the most important factors in human susceptibility to memes is the reflexive nature of our thought. People not only can have ideas, they also can have ideas about ideas. They can have attitudes or opinions about particular beliefs and ways of thinking. For example, people can understand ideas without being convinced of them; they can believe that certain things are not true; they can recognize that certain opinions are odious. They can engage in mental simulations, plan, exercise foresight, imagine, model, play, or fantasize.27 People often remember memes precisely because they are false, wicked, or don't work. Parents take great pains to teach children what not to think and what not to do, and, if they are lucky, their children internalize these lessons.

People not only can produce and store interpretations of events, they can produce and store interpretations of those interpretations.28 For example, his develop interpretations of the American Revolution, they also remember and discuss the various interpretations of other historians about the Revolution. Moreover, they can pass these interpretations on to their students and other historians even if they don't accept them.

The recursiveness of human thought makes people susceptible to many more types of memes than they actually accept, believe, or act upon. Memes may not die out even if people reject or disbelieve them, because people can still remember and discuss them-with the admonition that "this is wrong" or "this doesn't work."29 False ideas and bad practices can remain in human mem What is stored in memory can be communicated to others. As a result, false ideas and harmful cultural skills can be passed on to new generations despite their being known to be false or harmful. These memes can live to another day, when they can signif affect the behavior of another host. In such ways, superstitions and prejudices can survive even though people decisively reject them. A more be historical interpretations rejected by one gen eration of historians that are retained in historiography and eventually regain favor in a subsequent generation.

Finally, people can store ideas and beliefs even if they do not completely understand them and are not certain whether they are true.30 People may be near a heavy mass, for example, because they read it in a book, although they really don't understand how this could be so. They can retain such beliefs pending further information that might clarify the beliefs or demonstrate the beliefs to be true. And people can hold these beliefs indefi nitely, even if no additional clarification or proof is forthcoming.31

Such half-understood beliefs are not restricted to obscure scientific theo can hold beliefs about UFOs or religious doctrines, for example, whether or not they fully understand or know the truth about such things. In fact, people may be particularly susceptible to what is mysterious precisely because mysteries resist solution or comprehension.32 Exposure to ideas that are difficult to prove or comprehend may even encourage their being discussed or talked about further. Their very inconsistency with other beliefs and their very inability to be fully comprehended make mysteries intriguing and attrac this way, an otherwise beneficial feature of human cognition--the ability to store and reconsider incompletely understood information--creates the op differential reproductive success of a certain kind of meme-- environment of human minds.

Ecological Factors

In most cultures, the reproductive success of memes is largely determined by other memes and by the institutions that use and propagate other memes. Previously internalized memes shape mental susceptibilities to new memes; the cultural skills involved in institutions create the environments in which memes compete. Thus the pool of existing memes creates the basic ecology for other memes. Cultures are like the tropics, where the landscape is overgrown by plant and animal species, and where chances of survival and reproduction are largely determined by the ecology of other organisms rather than by the original phys intricate ecosystems and for the strange and freakish creatures that they produce.

In short, we should think of cultures as ecologies rather than as well organic unities. They are inherently open systems rather than closed ones. Cultures involve an ecological equilibrium between different forms of cultural software, an equilibrium that may be disturbed, reconfigured, or even destroyed by memetic invasion or environmental disturbance.

SEXUAL SELECTION AND BANDWAGON EFFECTS. The crush of animal and plant life in diverse ecologies creates opportunities for exaggerated and bizarre traits. This is due in part to an evolutionary phenomenon called sexual selection. In the natural world, females tend to choose mates based on characteristics that are attractive to other females. They do this to guarantee that their male offspring will be equally attractive to future generations of females, for off spring that attract no mates will produce no offspring of their own.

Females look for characteristics in mates that tend to correlate with the reproductive success of their offspring. Once female preference for a feature is generally established, however, the feature by itself makes the offspring more desirable to future females. Thus females want the feature in their mates simply because all other females also want the feature. The result is a "runaway" effect: the preference for the feature is intensified out of proportion to its otherwise beneficial effects.34 Thus female peacocks prefer peacocks with long bright tail feathers. These features may confer no present additional evolutionary advan tage--they may even be debilitating to the male--but because of sexual selec reproduce their genes in future generations.

In the world of culture, analogies to sexual selection can occur in several different ways. First, to some extent, individuals can choose what beliefs and cultural skills they will internalize. They may choose to adopt beliefs and be people because they believe that this selec tion will make them seem influential and powerful. This process can snowball so that status-seeking individuals attempt to outdo each other in cultural dis the extremist, like the long-tailed peacock, seems to be at the leading edge of a trend.35 The desire to be thought highly successful, powerful, or pious can even lead to competitive construction of elaborate cultural monuments, like pyramids and cathedrals.36

Second, a cultural equivalent of sexual selection produces "bandwagon ef may engage in faddish beliefs or behaviors because they believe that others regard them as desirable, and the belief that others find them de more. John Maynard Keynes's famous description of the stock market as a beauty contest is based on a similar logic --people often buy stocks because they believe that others value them, and this drives up their value out of proportion to a company's expected future earnings. Signals and filters can play important roles in producing bandwagon effects. Best-seller lists are institutional filters that use people's past buying decisions, but they simultaneously act as an advertising gimmick by signaling other peo Once a book sells enough copies to get on the best-seller lists, its sales may increase rapidly.37

Third, sexual selection can occur in the way memes form alliances with other memes. Just as females seek to mate with males whose offspring will be desirable to future females, memes may face evolutionary pressures to join forces with memes that seem particularly successful in gaining entry to human minds. These traits can also snowball. Suppose that flashy graphics, loud vol attract the attention of televi through increasingly flashier graphics, louder volumes, and quicker cross-cutting. This may explain the evolution of some forms of television advertising.

INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY. An important feature of human culture is that human beings can accept beliefs and adopt customs and practices because of institutional authority. We believe many things not because we have direct evidence for them or have gone about proving them to our own satisfaction but because they have been communicated to us by people and institutions we trust. Similarly, there are many practices and customs that we have adopted not because we have independently determined that they are optimal but be doing what others do has independent advantages--for example, cooperation and coordination can some times solve collective--action problems to the benefit of all parties. However, not all examples of following what others do can be explained or justified in this way. Driving the same car that everyone else drives, following the current fashion trends, or hewing to the party line does not necessarily solve collective -action problems.

Following the dictates of institutional authority makes sense for a different reason. Many things cannot be demonstrated for certain, and it is often difficult to know what course of action is best. Hence it may be rational for people to believe things simply because that is what other people believe, and to do things simply because others do them. Believing and doing these things is rational, not by virtue of their content but by virtue of their source.38 If this is indeed rational behavior, we would expect that people in different parts of the world would have different beliefs and customs because they trusted and learned from different sources of belief and action--the people who educated them.

Cultural traditions have a kind of institutional authority, and a similar logic applies to them. Traditions provide people with things to believe and ways to behave. Traditions are not necessarily antithetical to rational action: people rationally strategize within the norms of their tradition and its beliefs; they can even decide to forsake their traditions for other beliefs and practices. That is one way that traditions evolve. But it may be reasonable for people to hew to traditional beliefs and practices when it is difficult and costly to discover what to otherwise believe or do. This is especially true of problems of practical reason. The long-run usefulness of practices may be difficult to determine in advance. Hence following tradition becomes a useful means for solving prob lems of ordinary living.39

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT. Memes are more likely to spread if they are relevant to existing institutions, either because they are associated with the institution or because they give rise to appropriate action in the institution. Handel's Messiah, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Dickens's A Christmas Carol are among the best known and most often repeated of their works because these works are associated with the institution of Christmas. Among the most frequent phrases spoken in many cultures are greetings, comments on the weather, and requests after health.

If an institution requires regular and repeated replication or demonstration of a meme or cultural skill, the chances for survival of that cultural skill are greatly enhanced because the skill is more likely to be remembered and repro particular if there are institutions specifi Examples are schools, churches, libraries, universities, and the family. Some cultures institutionalize the telling of myths and legends, and this helps to ensure their continued survival.

Complicated scientific information depends heavily on institutional struc survival and spread. Scientific truths may be quite compelling once demonstrated to an audience prepared to receive them, but they are often difficult to comprehend without considerable training. Hence even the most indubitable of truths may require elaborate institutions of education (including elaborate structures of intellectual authority) if they are to be preserved and propagated. If these institutions fall apart, the true beliefs that they propagate may become extinct as well. Our romantic notion that the truth will out ne that the truth of a belief does not guarantee its widespread reproductive success; it must find a niche in a suitable environment if it is to survive.

Political beliefs also depend heavily on institutional context, but for some different reasons. Dan Sperber gives the example of the belief that all people are created equal.40 This belief is both salient and controversial in so pervasive social, economic, and political inequalities. That is because the belief has many different implications for such a society. People who like these implications have grounds to accept the belief and in opposition.

This is the memetic version of a familiar theory of ideology-interest-driven explanation. People believe things that jibe with their social, economic, or politi memetic claim is that the institutional environment makes certain people's minds fertile ground for certain types of memes. As a result, these memes tend to propagate once they are introduced. But if opposition to the implications of a belief is too great, the meme may not spread; at best it may be confined to certain subcultures where it can survive and reproduce.

The memetic account adds a new twist to this familiar explanation of ide we can model the prevalence of a belief as the result of a com insights of catastrophe theory apply. A slight change in the institutional ecology may have enormous effects completely out of pro portion to the degree of ecological change. The belief may spread quickly and unexpectedly. At one point, for example, a particular meme--say one associated with radical egalitarianism--may be able to maintain only a marginal existence in a particular subculture. Yet a slight change in the institutional ecology may lead to an explosive spread of belief. In the new environment, the meme takes off and reaches epidemic proportions.

Nevertheless, if memes are to reproduce widely over time they must be able to adapt themselves to political, social, and economic changes. Thus a meme like equality is most likely to thrive if it can be articulated and adopted by people of different political views over time. Thus successful memes often are subject to wide variation in the form of contrary interpretations and subtle shifts in meaning.

Ideas often change their political valence as they are repeated in new con situations. A good example is the idea that democratic governments should be "colorblind." This idea was associated with a very progressive view of race relations in 1896. It was the basis of Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, when he opposed the segregation of railroad facilities.41 In the 1960s Martin Luther King fought segregation by arguing for an America where citizens would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character."42 Yet by 1996 colorblindness was the rallying cry of con servatives opposed to affirmative action. A second example involves the liber freedom of speech was defended by the political left as a means of protecting political dissenters, minority groups, and labor unions. By the close of the twentieth century it was also being used to defend the rights of cigarette man harassing employers, multinational me committees opposed to campaign finance reform.43

I call these changes in political valence ideological drift.44 They are a ubiq phenomenon in social and political life. From a memetic standpoint ideological drift is an example not of political opportunism but of memetic opportunism. As political and social contexts change, slight mutations can make memes newly hospitable to persons who previously would have shunned them. Some members of the American left, for example, have become increasingly attracted to regulation of campaign spending, pornography, racist speech, and commercial advertising, while conservatives have become increasingly libertar interests and other beliefs of liberals and conservatives--change the ecology in which political ideas about freedom of speech can thrive. As a result memes may find new minds increasingly hospitable and older hosts increasingly less so. It is important to recognize that memes do not particularly care who invokes them as long as they are regularly invoked. Memes that were once happily nestled in liberal heads will readily and opportunistically mutate to become acceptable to more conservative minds should this increase their chances of propagation and survival.

Shared Understandings and Lines of Memetic Descent

The theory of cultural software holds that individuals share cultural under because they possess similar memes. One reason people have similar memes is that they communicated them to each other, or that they live in the same culture and therefore have been exposed to the same memes communi explain how individuals in widely divergent cultures might possess similar tools of understanding, because not all cultures are in continuous contact with each other.

Sometimes individuals have similar cultural software not because they or their cultures have had any recent communicative contact with each other but because their cultural software is descended from a common source. Biological evolution offers a useful analogy. Generally speaking, mammals have four legs and a single head. This common morphology is not the result of crossbreeding between different species but rather is due to the common ancestry of all mam in each species even as it evolves and is differentiated among species. That is because biological bricolage is generally conservative, retaining past design choices as the platform for future innovation.

In a similar fashion, the cultural software of present-day human beings builds on the work of previous generations. It is conservative in the same way that biological bricolage is conservative. Earlier forms are retained in later de similarities among diverse individuals and cultures to the extent that their cultural software has a common ancestry. Lan words across different lan guages (father in English, Vater in German, pere in French, padre in Spanish) are evidence of common memetic descent.

One reason for the conservatism of biological development is architectural constraint produced by previous evolution. Previous design choices (like those in the panda's paw) constrain future morphological development. In the pre similar architectural constraint may be at work in meme complexes. Coordinated complexes of memes (like those in a religion) may be able to accommodate only certain kinds of changes if they are to re spreads and develops through such meme complexes, we might also expect that certain features will be deeply embedded in our cultural software and more resistant to change, just as we would not expect an easy transformation from mammals with four legs and one head to mammals with eight legs and multiple heads.

Furthermore, because evolutionary bricolage must innovate on the basis of existing materials, it tends to retain these materials and adapt and alter them for new purposes. Thus certain tropes, metaphors, symbols, heuristics, or other tools of thinking may run very deep in our culture precisely because they appear so early on in the course of historical development, and therefore have been repeatedly used to fashion later tools through which we presently understand the social world. This depth is not the depth of a core versus a periphery but one produced by repetition and recursion. We can see an instance of this in our earlier etymological example of the word articulus, or joint. This word and the concept it represents are used repeatedly to form new words and concepts, which are in turn used to create still other words and concepts, and so on. This process proliferates the original metaphor of joining and dividing into a mul conceptual tools; each of these tools, in turn, is proliferated into new tools, so that the metaphor of joining and dividing appears repeatedly in widely divergent aspects of our cultural software.45

On the other hand, it is also possible that certain memes appear in widely divergent cultures not because of a line of common memetic descent but be faced similar problems and produced similar solutions. For example, Robert Ellickson reports than many different cultures have produced forms of private ownership in land.46 It is possible that this idea began with a single culture and spread to others because it was useful. But it is also possible that it developed independently in many cultures because people in each culture recognized its utility.

A similar point applies to sociobiological explanations of human behavior. Such explanations argue that common human behaviors stem from genetic predispositions. In effect, they argue that we have similar behaviors because we are descendants of the same group of human beings and hence share common genes through a line of genetic descent. But precisely because human beings are able to adapt themselves to the problems they face and pass these solutions on to others in the form of culture, we cannot necessarily infer that any par we have seen, similarity of behavior across cultures may be due to common memetic descent, that is, cultural transmission. Or it may be due to the fact that two different cultures "invented the wheel" independently because they faced similar problems and devised similar solutions. In such cases there is neither common genetic nor common memetic descent.

Although many commonalities in human behavior surely do stem from our common genetic heritage, genetic descent is not the best explanation for large segments of common human behaviors. As Dennett points out, "In every cul hunters throw their spears pointy-end first, but this obviously doesn't establish that there is a pointy-end first gene that approaches fixation in our species."47 People throw their spears in this way not because they are biologically programmed to do so, but because it makes sense to do so, and so everybody ends up doing it in pretty much the same way. A similar analysis applies to less frivolous examples, like the development of com systems of land tenure or accident law that appear in different times and places. The human condition often leads to similar problems across different environments; hence human reason produces similar behaviors to solve these problems; but it does not follow that the behaviors themselves are genetically predetermined.

Cultural Separation and Speciation

I noted earlier that cultural transmission is not simply a means by which memes are copied from one mind to another; it is also an important source of mutua Because perfect copying is the exception rather than the rule in memetic transmission, people's cultural software may vary considerably un practices that homogenize it. Put another way, successful complexes of memes must have ways of accurately reproducing themselves in succeeding generations of minds if they are to survive. In fact, there are many devices for instilling common values and tools of understanding among members of a culture. The most simple is the existence of a common language, but we might also include the family, public schools, intellectual disciplines, and religious institutions.48 These institutions have many different purposes. From an evolutionary perspective, however, they have one additional purpose: to preserve cultural content and cultural identity. They exist in order to reproduce memes (and hence themselves) in new minds.

Constant communication and participation in common social activities are important ways to reproduce and reinforce cultural software in the members of a culture. Conversely, isolation of individuals from a larger group results in cultural isolation and divergent cultural development. There is a useful analogy in evolutionary theory. Ernst Mayr argued that different species form because breeding populations become reproductively isolated, either because of geographic separation or because each inhabits a distinct ecological niche. This causes the genetic pool in the distinct populations gradually to diverge over time.49

In like fashion, communicative isolation separates populations of memes, and over time these populations may develop in distinctly different ways. Com robs institutions of one of their most important means for memetic replication and cultural homogenization. Linguists have long un derstood that languages begin to differ from each other because of geographic isolation. Even cooking styles become distinctive when cultures are isolated.50

Biological speciation results from separation of breeding populations, pre from moving from one group to the other. Cultural speciation results from communicative separation, which prevents memes from traveling from the minds of one group to the minds of the other. This communicative separation may be geographical or spatial. But it may also be produced by culturally created boundaries that discourage communication between people and are themselves the product of previous cultural development. Thus if peo them apart--they may develop completely different ways of un Under the right conditions, cultural differentiation can snowball--racial ideologies may keep blacks and whites from intermingling and communicating with each other, for example, leading to the development of increasingly distinctive subcultures and mutual incomphrension.

Disciplinary boundaries in the modern university exemplify another form of cultural separation. Disciplines are not only distinctive ways of thinking about things; they also serve as ecological niches that separate populations and produce divergent development. But instead of an ecology formed by the nat ecology is formed by other memes and cultural institutions. Other examples are clubs and societies that share com and languages.

Scholars who move across disciplinary boundaries often discover mutual incomprehension among members of different disciplines; each possesses a dif vocabulary and different interests, research paradigms, and conceptions of what is interesting or important. As a result, an economist may find it much easier to understand a fellow economist three thousand miles away than the anthropologist in the building two blocks away.

Just as communicative isolation may tend to produce divergence in devel opment, common experience and common communication may tend to ho mogenize the tools of cultural understanding in a population. Increasing communicative interaction can encourage reciprocal influence and shared ways of thinking. One must use the term reciprocal advisedly, though. The most numerous or dominant groups of individuals may have a disproportionate effect on the cultural software of smaller and subordinate groups-unless, of course, the latter groups have greater communicative power.

This relation between commonality and cultural homogeneity suggests the signal importance of the rise of mass communication. Mass communication makes possible--indeed, increasingly enforces--enormous amounts of inter widely separated individuals and cultures. Much more than individual travel, mass communication is the great arbitrageur of cultural differences. It mixes cultural influences in ways that often annoy cultural pur for transmitting memes, mass communication also tends to accelerate the growth and mutation of forms of cultural understanding. Nevertheless, mass communication does not neces reciprocal influence. Sometimes this mixing does produces homogeneity and uniformity, but sometimes it produces diversity and specialization.

Thus communication performs two contrary functions. On the one hand, it preserves stability and similarity between the various copies of cultural soft individual. On the other hand, it allows innovations in the tools of understanding to be transmitted to others, so that they may become part of the meme pool, the common cultural heritage. Communication is a source of stability as well as change in a meme pool and in the cultural software of individuals within a culture.

The Economy of Cultural Software

This book has offered two different accounts of the spread and development of cultural software. The first is conceptual bricolage: a non-Darwinian process of historical development through which human beings fashion new tools of understanding out of older ones, often with unexpected consequences. The second is memetic evolution: a Darwinian process of variation, reproduction, and differential survival of memes that form the building blocks of human cultural software. The first perspective describes the development and spread of culture from the standpoint of human thought, design, and action. The second describes this process from the standpoint of units of cultural trans mission that compete for survival in the environment of human thought, de and action.

We can view the spread and development of cultural software in a third way. We can see it as an economy of human communication--a process of exchange and development in which the members of a culture continually re software. The idea of an economy joins the first two perspectives together, for it is both the mode of transmission of the products of cultural bricolage and the method of reproduction for the memes that inhabit human minds. Equally important, the economy of cultural software is the means through which ideological power is wielded over mem bers of a culture.

In accord with the computer metaphor, one might compare culture to a giant network of individuals. But culture is not a top-down network, in which a single server transmits identical copies of a software upgrade to the various nodes. It is more like the network of networks called the Internet, which has no center and in which an astonishing array of diverse information flows to and from different points simultaneously. Cultural software is not created in a single place, nor is it distributed from a central location, nor do all individuals share identical copies. The cultural software of individuals in a culture is written and rewritten through acts of communication and understanding among indi individual experience outside of interpersonal interaction. But the memes so created do not become cultural--in the sense of widely shared--unless they are transmitted to others. Hence even individual innovation and trial-by-error learning become part of the economy of cultural software through communication.

The nodes of a cultural network are continually communicating with and attempting to understand each other, and thus continually having reciprocal effects on the structure and content of each other's cultural software. This continuing process of communication is the economy of cultural software. Like other economies, it involves exchange, and it is driven by and operates through similarity and difference. Communication to others produces or reinforces ho minute, are a potential source of change.

Although each individual has different cultural software, we can speak of "our" cultural software or the cultural software of a particular culture in two different ways. First, just as we can speak of a gene pool--the set of available genes that compete in the environment--we can also speak of a "meme pool." The meme pool of a given culture includes the copies of all memes that exist at any one time in the environment of human minds and information storage technology within the culture. Second, we can speak of this meme pool in dynamic terms--as an ongoing economy of transmission and exchange. This economy is the process through which the meme pool grows, develops, and is sustained. It creates the environment in which memes live and die, thrive and become extinct. The economy of cultural software is also the ecology for the memes that constitute individuals' cultural software.

When we speak of cultural software, we can either be speaking of the dis of memes that forms part of a particular individual or of the larger economy of cultural software existing within a culture. But when we peak of the cultural software of an entire culture, we must not think that we are describing a single great "program" that exists over and above each indi isolated individuals. The cultural software of a group is not a separate set of skills in and of itself; it is rather a system of similarities and differences among the skills available to the members of a given culture. Both the similarities (which are sources of shared understandings) and the differences (which are sources of dissensus) are equally important parts of the economy. This economy is a huge system of networks, and networks of networks, of individuals continually com voice and action, continually engaged in a process of collective writing and rewriting of their cultural soft ware.

Each person contributes to this economy through her words and actions, because she sends memes out into the world, where they can be absorbed and assimilated by others. Each individual is a potential source and a potential target of memetic infection. Through a partly cooperative and partly agonistic pro and re-crafted over time. This pro the collective property of the culture and are passed along to succeeding generations.

This set of available tools of understanding is the meme pool. It is sustained and replenished through acts of communication, just as the gene pool is sus tained through reproduction. Through cultural transmission, each generation bequeaths to the next a huge collection of cultural skills, associations, heuristics, metaphors, conceptions, and constructs-a patrimony that will be squandered without perpetual communication between members of the culture.

Yet repeated transmission is also the source of change. Although symbolic and informational exchange is occurring all the time, there is no reason to think that it produces complete uniformity; indeed, it would be surprising if it did so. Communication continually introduces variation. Each person in the culture is equipped with slightly different tools of understanding and therefore carries away different experiences from communication. Each articulation of a meme in new contexts produces differences, however slight. Personal experi memes that join the meme pool once they are communicated. In this way, differences multiply over time, leading not only to the perpetuation of cultural software but also to its perpetual differentiation.

Consider, for example, the effects of rapid technological change on persons of different ages within a culture. Younger generations easily pick up techno that are difficult for older members to master, just as they develop linguistic habits and even accents that differ from their elders'. In the same way, we should expect that although the cultural software of each individual overlaps with others in important ways, it also varies significantly as well. If enough people have cultural software that is sufficiently similar, this produces a cultural inter-subjectivity that is also a cultural objectivity, because all of them see and understand the world in similar ways. This intersubjective agreement is accompanied, however, as it is in real life, by significant differ understanding and belief.

Accounts of shared understandings usually face a problem in accounting for the dynamic nature of cultural traditions: How can a tradition grow and evolve while it remains a tradition shared by all of its members? How can shared meanings and practices remain shared if they are constantly changing? The twin concepts of the meme pool and the economy of cultural software allow us to give an account of this phenomenon. Shared understandings are the result of the partially similar (and partially different) cultural software of individuals within a particular culture. But this software does not remain the same indefinitely. Memes have differential rates of reproduction and survival in the environment of human minds and their technologies of information storage. This causes the cultural software in the minds of individuals to evolve. But as long as the members of the culture are part of the same meme pool and participate in the same economy of communication, their understandings evolve together in roughly the same way. Biological species continue to share a common gene pool and evolve together even though that gene pool is con stantly evolving as members continue to interbreed. In the same way the econ understandings continue to be shared by individuals even though the content of these understandings changes over time as the meme pool constantly changes.

In this way, the theory of cultural software offers a distinct improvement on historicist accounts of cultural understanding like Gadamer's. It translates the idea of a historically evolving tradition into something that truly exists in each individual and constitutes each individual. It shows that the tradition evolves as an economy of communication that regulates a shared meme pool. The theory thus avoids the theoretical puzzles that stem from supraindividual entities-like a tradition, a collective consciousness, or a Zeitgeist-offered to account for the commonality of beliefs and actions. The claim that there is a "spirit of the age" that produces similarities in artistic and intellectual produc tion, for example, merely begs the question of what such an entity is, where it is located, and how it can have causal effects on individual thought and action.

In contrast, the theory of cultural software explains commonalities in in artistic production as the result of the similarities in the cultural software found in different individuals within a culture. These similarities are maintained by an economy of exchange, reproduction, and evolution. Thus, .what people call collective consciousness or the spirit of the age is not a cause of similarities in individuals' cultural production; it is the apparent effect pro similar cul exchange not only produces and reproduces relevant similarities among indi also produces and reproduces differences that lead to divergence and variation. Thus we can say, without the introduction of any mysterious entities, that painters in the Renaissance or composers in the Classical period had sim used the same technologies of painting or music, but because they employed similar tools of understanding. In a given culture at a given time, individuals in different walks of life and different in tellectual pursuits produce artifacts and theories that bear uncanny meta similar for each of them, because each thinker draws from the same meme pool. We need not say that these similarities exist because of the Zeitgeist; rather we should say that the metaphor of the Zeitgeist describes the operation of an economy that produces these similarities.

The Distribution of Cultural Software

An economy of cultural software is a system of similarity and difference in the memes that constitute the members of a culture; the degrees of that similarity and difference may vary in different cultures. Hence an economy of cultural software is distinguished not only by the content but also by the distribution of different types of cultural software among its members. The relative distri bution of similarity and difference affects the degree of intersubjective agree and dissensus.

The distribution of memes in a culture is an important feature of the ecol memes spread and evolve. If the distribution of memes changes in a culture, the character of the culture may change dramatically. Durkheim's notion of collective consciousness, for example, described the thought of rel dissipated as these societies developed increasing specialization of labor and moved away from mechanical solidarity toward the organic solidarity that we associate with modernity.51 The dissolution of collective consciousness corresponds to a change in the distri bution of memes as well as their content.

People often identify modernity with increasing secularization, rationali differentiation of social functions. But we can also think about modernity in distributional terms. What distinguishes modern (and postmod possession of a particular set of tools of understanding-they also possess a more exaggerated and distinctive economy of differences in cultural software that, in turn, produces the kinds of relativism and historicism, disenchantment and lack of solidarity that we as sociate with modernity.

There is a familiar view of modern thought as the result of diverse cultural influences meeting in a single culture. This mixing of influences may stem from changes in communications technology, increased opportunities for travel or trade with other cultures, or increasing rates of literacy and education. In me to flood the existing meme pool with memes from other populations. This memetic invasion tends to change the distribution of the pool. The predictable result is wider disparities in cultural software as well as mixing and crossing of cultural lineages.

Changes in distribution also effect changes in content. First, old memes tend to mix with new ones, spurring cultural innovation. Second, particular memes and memetic filters proliferate in response to the flood of new memes. Some of these are the familiar tropes of modernist anxiety-a sense of loss of an organic connection to past traditions, a desire to regain cultural authenticity, the longing for an imagined golden age of uncomplicated consensus and har and material manifestations.52 Another very different set of memes also flourishes in this new ecology-memes that promote cultural relativism and skepticism. The ecology of modernity is a fertile breeding ground for these ideas because the very presence of so many different and conflicting cultural influences seems to provide evidence for them.

The past two chapters have portrayed cultural understanding as a result of an ongoing economy of communication through which individuals transmit memes to one another and rewrite one another's cultural software. Implicit in this picture are deep connections between cultural communication and ideo source of power over other in Conversely, our ability to understand others is a potential source of vulnerability, because it means that we are susceptible to ever new forms of memetic invasion.

This connection between power and cultural understanding brings us back to the theory of ideology. In the next three chapters, I shall explain how the theory of cultural software approaches the traditional questions that have been asked about ideology and grapples with the recurrent problems that any theory of ideology must face.

]]> http://yupnet.org/balkin/archives/10/feed 0