We Have a Firm Foundation 69can therefore be seen as the study of the social world itself. The medium of language
itself is embedded within an historical and political inheritance. Thus, language
cannot stand back from social conflict, it is the medium of expression and experience
of such conflict. In other words, ideology and political theory neither reflect neutrally
on, nor simply represent the world, but rather partly constitute it. Ideology and
political theory are enmeshed in complex relations and struggles of power. To analyse
this process is the self-appointed task of, for example, discourse analysis, forms of
structuralist Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and much postmodern genealogy.
All reject the ‘neutralist’ thesis concerning ideology and theory, stressing conversely,
the constitutive and expressive role of language.
This critique of the language of political theory and ideology has been especially
characteristic of Michel Foucault’s writings (which will be examined in Part Four).
Foucault even suggested abandoning the concepts of ideology and political theory
altogether. They would be replaced by painstaking genealogical explanation, which
examineshowcertain discourses and regimes of truth (epistemes) come about. For
Foucault, all knowledge related to power and domination. As he stated, ‘what one
seeks then is not to know what is true or false, justified or not justified, real or illus-
ory...One seeks to know what are the ties, what are the connections that can be
marked between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what games of
dismissal and support are developed from the one to the others, what it is that enables
some element of knowledge to take up effects of power assigned in a similar system
to a true or probable or uncertain or false element, and what it is that enables some
process of coercion to acquire the form and the justification proper to a rational,
calculated, technically efficient, and so forth, element’ (Foucault in Schmidt (ed.)
1996: 393). Knowledge always conforms to restraints and rules and power also needs
something approximating to knowledge.^56 Thus, for postmodern-inclined writers,
neither political theory nor ideology represent any external objective reality. Ideo-
logy and political philosophy, for Foucault, are both subjects for genealogy. We are
always encultered beings who express, contingently, our diverse communal narratives
through theory or ideology. There is no external reality, which we can represent.
A related dimension to this attack on representation theory concerns the broad
tradition of twentieth century purported nonfoundationalism. Although not directly
focused on this integration thesis, there are a number of the arguments within this
tradition (taken as broad category), which facilitate the conceptual linkage between
political theory and ideology. For example, for nonfoundationalists there are no
givens and no raw data in the world. The idea of an empirical given is a ‘myth’.
Further, there is nothing external to our symbolic systems. We live and think in
several worlds with distinct, often incommensurable systems of symbols. In addition,
there is an abandonment of correspondence accounts and a focus on coherence.
Statements therefore become true, not by referring to an external given world, but
rather in terms of whether they cohere with distinct systems of symbols (see Goodman
and Elgin 1988: 8). In a similar vein, for Richard Rorty, poetic creativity must now
replace representations of reality; irony and gaming are set over against knowledge
claims. Rorty summarizes this drift of argument by completely identifying political