意识形态:文化的元语言

Ideology: the Metalanguage of Culture

意识形态是社会科学与人文学科最复杂的概念。在两个多世纪关于意识形态的论争中,有不少论辩已经在讨论文化、符号、元语言等概念。本文试图把这些概念综合起来,给意识形态一个简短而清晰的定义,即"文化的(符号学式)元语言",并用这个定义来解释意识形态研究的几个大难题,即意识形态是整体的还是碎片的?意识形态是真实的还是虚假的?能否超越意识形态来对之进行分析批判?一个符号学式的分析,有可能为这些问题的讨论提供新的理解。

Ideology is the most complicated concept in social sciences and humanities. In the discussions on ideology of more than two centuries,many scholars touched related key concepts such as culture,signs,metalanguage,etc. This paper attempts to synthesize all those concepts into a short and clear definition： ideology is the metalanguage of culture. With this definition,the paper attempts to solve the few difficult problems that have challenged the scholarship on ideology. Is ideology integral or fragmented？ Is ideology authentic or false？ Can we analyze and criticize ideology in the case of surpassing it？ A semiotic analysis could,with greater possibility,provide new understanding for the discussion of these questions.