A New and Superior Theory of Ideology?

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A New and Superior Theory of Ideology?

J. M. Balkin, who teaches law at Yale, does a fair job in Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) of describing the overall intellectual terrain in which most of the important theories of ideology deployed. And the second chapter's elucidation of "bricolage," a concept invented by the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, is a useful reminder that it is best not to view cultural products such as ideology as autogenic entities having no connection with other aspects of culture. Rather, they always seem to be built from the materials that history has delivered, in the way that a handyman (bricoleur, in French) appropriates whatever tools and implements lie at hand, even if his purposes are not the same as the toolmaker's. (Think, for example, of how many conservatives have picked up ideas from Martin Luther King as weapons in their political struggle to abolish affirmative action.) Balkin also manages to trace some interesting connections between theories of ideology and the work of such postmodern thinkers as Michel Foucault, whose writings on the relations between knowledge and power explicitly reject any reliance on the concept of ideology, and Jacques Derrida, who has repeatedly said that the practice of deconstruction that he founded needs and relics on no concept to ground it, let alone the concept of ideology. But Cultural Software is hardly a work of intellectual history. Balkin claims to have identified "a deeper phenomenon" (p. 3) than anyone else has noticed, and he offers an ambitious theory of ideology of his own--one that he repeatedly touts as superior to all of its competitors. Unfortunately, instead of finding deep waters, I cou...

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