The genealogy of deritualising the effects of ideology in the public sphere

Abstract

© 2016 EURICOM. This article relies on the presupposition that ideology is a phenomenon which occurs in the same historical, developmental, social and structural field as the public sphere. Burdened by the stigmatised meaning of false consciousness, ideology was often “banished” from the field of the critical, rational public sphere, which was supposed to provide more space for the neutralisation of asymmetrical and hierarchical forms of power. The article is an attempt to additionally “colonise” the thematic field of the civil society with the concept of ideology, which is understood as a form of communicative practice having powerful deritualising effects. We investigate the ideological mechanism and effects of the deritualisation of communication and conclude that the mobilising and socially reconstructive discourse of ideology has not succeeded in building authentic and autonomous fields of validity such as science, art or ethics. Despite the “empirical deficits” which have been valid for ideology since its historical genesis until today, it is manifested as one of the regimes of discourse whose mechanisms reproduce many meanings and representations of social reality as regulated systems of discourse and practice in the public sphere of society.