Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

934 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
of a corresponding “authentic consciousness”—that is, a presocial, fixed self. In this conceptual
context we can refute the reductionistic nature of modernist psychology’s disposition to naturalization.
At this point we can begin to analyze the ways that ideological power complements
disciplinary power’s shaping of subjectivity. Subjectivity and power are inseparable concepts.
In this encyclopedic context this reference to ideological and disciplinary power provides a
good opportunity to delineate just what these concepts denote. Such knowledge, it seems to me,
are key understandings in a critical educational psychology, in postformalism.
Ideological Power: The Basic Characteristics
� Hierarchical power relations are constructed and maintained by diverse ideological expressions that
mobilize meaning.
� Ideology is part of a larger process involving the maintenance of asymmetrical power relations—it is not
a body of political beliefs.
� Ideology is not a misrepresentation of what is real in society.
� Ideology plays a role in constructing reality—it is found in the interplay of meaning and symbols that
make up the lived world of the individual.
� Ideological meaning is always contingent on the process by which a dominant group is able to frame the
interests of a competing worldview.
� Ideology as a semiotic phenomenon is located at the level of the social—it uses signs and signifiers to
serve the interests of dominant power.
� Ideology is an interpretive framework through which the world is understood in a way that operates to
sustain relations of domination.
� Ideology often exists in the realm of the preinterpreted—words, concepts, expressions, symbolic constructions
all gain part of their meaning in this domain.
� Ideological refraction refers to the process by which the relationship between a sign and its referent is transformed.
Such refraction creates a particular relationship that predisposes individuals to an interpretation
of an event that serves the interests of dominant power.
� Ideology does its work in secret—it never says “I am ideology.”
� Ideology struggles to hide social antagonisms and conflicts—an ideological historical account of the U.S.
past, for example, hides particular class and race problems.
� So-called reflexive legitimation (very important in educational psychology and pedagogy) induces the
oppressed to accept their low place in the social hierarchy, their own “inferiority.”
� Ideology is not a monolithic, unidirectional entity imposed on individuals by a secret cohort of power
wielders—it is far more complex and nuanced.
� A hyperreal ideology is found in a variety of social locations, places previously thought to be outside
the domain of ideological struggle—for example, ideology in the contemporary electronic world often
operates at the level of affects and emotion as well as at the rational level.
� The world can only be viewed through ideologically shaped lenses—no objective, pristine view is available.
� A critical complex understanding of ideology understands its operations at the macro, meso, and micro
levels of the social—it also understands both the production and the reception of ideological power.
� The postformal understanding of ideology demands attention to the ways ideology represents the world
and the symbolic processes that are used to shape these representations.
Hegemonic Power: The Basic Characteristics
� Views dominant power formations as shifting terrain of consensus, struggle, and compromise rather than
a one-dimensional ideology imposed from above.