Music Education and Ideology Critique - a New Approach

We must guard against throwing out the baby with the bath-water. In the wake of postmodernist disdain for 'monolithic' theory-building, and rising awareness of the complexity, fluidity and multifariousness of social groups and the relations cutting across them, the concept of ideology became unfashionable at the end of the twentieth century. It was somewhat dismissed as a crude and inflexible way of explaining only a one-dimensional powerrelation between social classes, incapable of accounting for the variety of relationships, perspectives and social groupings that mark the contemporary world. In this article I examine the concept of ideology with specific reference to music, and attempt to show some ways in which the concept continues to be relevant to our understanding of the construction of musical value. I suggest how ideologies of musical value are perpetuated through the education system, and how this perpetuation is also tied up with the reproduction of social groups, not merely despite but partly as a result of the recent incorporation of a variety of musical styles into the curriculum. 1

Orbis Musicae, 13, 107–115., 2003

Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, 2024

A critical political science, if it is to be both critical and a science, must overcome what is often referred to as the "fact-value distinction"; a view that is traceable to David Hume (2007, 302), who argued it is impossible to derive critical conclusions-regarding what ought or ought not to be-from scientific premises, which concern what is, was, or perhaps will be. The approach to "ideology critique" outlined in this chapter bridges that gap by grounding claims about how the world ought to be in an account of how the world is and came to be that way.

Louis Althusser's essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which appeared English in 1971 as a chapter in his book entitled Lenin and Philosophy, reinvigorated Marxist literary criticism in the West. Before Althusser's essay was published, most Western critics held the. Hegelian view that ideas (including those expressed in literature) drive historical change. Traditional Marxist criticism presented the opposing view. Following the Marxist understanding of base and superstructure, it was assumed that the economic conditions and relations of production (base) were simply refl ected in cultural phenomena such as literature (superstructure). Literature, in this view, was inevitably an expression of ideological "false consciousness" supporting oppressive political and economic relations. But Marx himself suggested that the simple "reflection" role was not adequate. If the Greek tragedies of Sophocles were simple reflections of the economic conditions of ancient Greece, he asked, why were they still popular? Building on Marx's materialist account of language and consciousness, Althusser makes two significant advances over the traditional understanding of ideology. First, he rejects as an oversimplification the concept of ideology as merely false consciousness. For Althusser, there is no unmediated access to truth; all consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscnbed within ideology. Second, for Althusser, there is no clear dividing line between base and superstructure. Ideology effectively "produces" social subjectivities and mediates the subject's experience of reality. On the one hand, this theory points to openings for revolutionary change. Since it is a corruptible material phenomenon, the superstructure can never perfectly reflect the base. On the other hand, since language and consciousness are material products, phenomena such as literature have real material effects. Ideology can be a "soft" insidious extension of the power of a repressive state apparatus. Constant, vigilant critique of ideology is required in order to resist reactionary tendencies and promote emancipatory revolution.

Ideology after Poststructuralism, 2002

2018

The concept of ideology appears elusive, in it are combined philosophical, political, sociological, historical, epistemological, pedagogical interpretations. This short essay tries to give an interpretation in light of the contribution offered by the reflections of Marx and hermeneutical philosophy and, especially in light of the international phenomena in the Mediterranean and Middle East and recent economic crises, it overcomes the vision of that particular current of late '900 that wanted the era of ideologies as a land no longer fertile and destined for sunset.

Critical Horizons, 2019

On Jaeggi's reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions under which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it entails a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. 1. Jaeggi on Ideology Rachel Jaeggi has advanced a conception of ideology and ideology critique according to which the normative task of critique must be properly connected with its explanatory task in order for critique to be immanent and promote change. In what follows I discuss Jaeggi's view in the light of a moderately cognitivist conception of ideology. I maintain that the explanatory task places three connected demands on a theory of ideology that relate to the functional, the epistemic, and the genetic dimension of ideology. In this context, I try to outline how these demands impact on the normative and progressive dimensions of ideology critique. In the present section I review Jaeggi's main claims concerning the connection between the analytical and the critical tasks of a theory of ideology, focusing in particular on the interlocking of

The Sociological Review, 2008

Postmodernism is a complex cultural phenomenon which is characterised, among other things, by its distrust of totalising discourses, of reason and of universal truth. It propounds indeterminacy, the primacy of difference and the incommensurability between discourses, which are supposed to have their own regimes of truth. This is why postmodernism is suspicious about the critical concept of ideology, because according to its tenets it is impossible to pass judgement on a discourse from the perspective of another discourse. Hence the critical concept of ideology must be abandoned. However, an examination of Foucault's, Baudrillard's and Lyotard's work shows that they unwittingly end up re-introducing the concept through the back door thus contradicting themselves. While they doubt the validity of total discourses and of their ideological critique, they must assume the validity of their own critique of total discourses.