Rethinking ideology: Greimas’s semiotics, neomarxism, and cultural anthropology

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Ideologija; Neo-Marksismas; Semiotika; Greimas, Algirdas Julius; Luisas Altuseris; Klifordas Gertsas; Ideology; Neo-Marxism; Semiotics; Greimas; Clifford Geertz; Louis Althusser.

ENIdeology is commonly seen today from two points of view, which, although opposed, support each other. For some, ideology no longer has a place in postmodern society; for others it is still an opium, a pathology that must be cured. A different stand-point is defended here, based on the conception of ideology in Greimas’s semiotics. Underlying any human action directed towards values, ideology, over and above its role as a representation of evil (as embodied in totalitarianism), is an inevitable and transversal phenomenon which cannot be confined to the political sphere. This idea is presented first via Geertz’s cultural anthropology. The anthropologist proposes a non-evaluative and non-combative approach to ideology. As if anticipating the neo-Marxist (Althusser’s) conception, discarding the view of ideology as an inverted image of reality, he sees it as a construct of imagination and of figurative discourse. For him, ideology is a symbolic system whose analysis requires a theory of meaning (linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics). Greimasian semiotics offers precisely what Geertz contemplated: a non-evaluative, purely descriptive conception of ideology and of the methodological tools for its analysis. The article stresses the differences between the structural approach and the dominant socio-political theories, and finally compares the principles of ideological analysis of discourse as assumed respectively by (neo)Marxist criticism and by semiotics. [From the publication]