74 suggest,
a set of organizing principles from which to map out an individual’s interpellating experiences and corresponding practices in a way that is more open
to empirical investigation than standard and classical sociological conceptions e.g., false consciousness, interpellation, and habitus, but which can complement
and strengthen them, as I will attempt to briefly demonstrate in the following section, and in the empirical chapters of this thesis.
2.5 Political-Economic Formation: Habitus and Cognitive Dissonance
Rather my point is that the pursuit of interest understood in its most vulgar and unmediated form has become so ingrained in our political
culture and character that it has made other, more authentically political attitudes and practices all but impossible. By universally
taking up an exploitative, instrumental, and fundamentally strategic approach to politics and political action, we have rendered the public
sphere an unfit place for human habituation
Villa, 2008, p. 6. In most sociological and social-psychological accounts, including the ones
discussed in this chapter, and regardless of their specific theoretical background or epistemological emphasis, it is generally agreed that the maintenance and
reproduction of social structures and institutions of a given society is dependent on most of the members within that society consciously andor unconsciously
accepting and reproducing dominant and widely shared and specific discourses and practices Bourdieu, 1990; Gill, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Ridgeway, 2006; van
Dijk 2003. Therefore, in the context of neoliberal reproduction it is important to note, as discussed in Chapter 1, that neoliberal discourses promote a specific form
of political-economic organization and corresponding conception of human nature, which can have a significant influence on the formation of
people’s political- economic schemata and concomitant imagination. For example, in the context of
democratic theory and practice, dominant UK and US social institutions, and mass media in particular, seemingly take for granted that most people of Western
inhabitance know about the many variations of democratic philosophy, and prefer representativeconsumer strands of it, even though these tend to concentrate power
in the hands of representatives of mostly elite backgrounds, or in the hands of those that mostly serve elite interests. As
Babe 2009, p. 37 notes, “commercial
75 media rarely call for picketing or boycotting; rather, voting for pre-selected and
heavily marketed candidates is set forth as the hallmark of democratic expression”.
I suspect, however, that most from neoliberal societies know as much about democratic philosophy and its broad canon and organizational and institutional
application, as they know about neoliberal theory, i.e., very little. I could of course be terribly mistaken about this, but contemporary media-cultural, political science,
and social reproduction research has lagged in exploring this very crucial hegemonic aspect of neoliberal societies. What little work does exist on how UK
and US non-elite people - viz., people of working and middle-class backgrounds - conceive of, interpret, and reproduce democracy of whatever strand is often
relegated to fringe historical or anthropological accounts that are not particularly concerned with the role of socio-cognition e.g., Graeber, 2009:2004; Thompson,
1993; Zinn, 2003. However, tentative and I would argue necessary points of convergence between political-philosophical discourses and practices and socio-
cognitive development can be drawn and laid out for future empirical exploration. For instance, according to cognitive linguist Lakoff 2007, repeated exposure to
the same political messages via mass media can form deep and unconsciously held schemata, which predispose people to think and act in accordance with those
repeated political messages. Therefore, it theoretically follows that repeated exposure to the ‘there is no alternative’ discourse, as disseminated by mass media
and as discussed in section 1.6, can a predispose individuals to solely and automatically conceive of political-economic organization in neoliberal terms that
now frame the leftright political spectrum, which in the current UK and US representative forms usually manifests as voting for the lesser of two or three evils,
andor b generate a sort of cognitive dissonance prompting those who are disadvantaged by neoliberalism to rationalize their misfortunes in ways that
directly correspond to neoliberal discourses Jost et al., 2003.
33
Dias et al. 2009
33
For example, in a study of how Canadian elders are dealing with cuts to social services, Luxton 2010 found that many of her participants, despite having paid taxes and worked hard their entire
lives, nonetheless blamed their personal choices for their impoverished situations rather than expressing a more structural analysis of the complex structural factors that significantly contributed
to their hardships. The strong emotions that their responses evoke, hint to a pronounced inclination on the part of these participants to want to rationalize their existing condition and quell their
internal dissonance, even if that entails entirely blaming themselves, and thereby inadvertently reproducing neoliberal discourses. Luxton 2010 suggests that her participants reflect a form of
false consciousness whereby they have internalized the neoliberal discourse of rugged
76 argue that human beings have both a conscious and unconscious tendency to avoid
internal dissonance. Whether this is a natural or learned human cognitive predispostion, it follows that individuals who have throughout their lives been
overexposed to neoliberal ideas or any other will seek to consciously and unconsciously avoid alternative or conflicting ideas and rationalize their existing
beliefs, which in effect, contributes to social continuity. This thesis starts from the position that research on neoliberal social
reproduction must take into account and investigate where and how non-elite Western inhabitants constitute, practice, rationalize, and reproduce democracy and
democratic institutions of whatever variety, and how dominant social institutions, and mass media in particular, help to shape and inform those specific individual
and shared cognitive frameworks and their underlying ontological presuppositions of human nature. As Jost 1995, pp. 413-414 argues:
Of course, the question of whether some or most people do indeed possess highly sophisticated and integrated systems of political beliefs
is a valid and useful empirical question […] but it is important also to recognize the opposite, namely the degree to which errors in social
cognition serve as an impediment to
accurate and
useful representation of the political world.
2.6 Towards Yet Another Third-Way: A Reformulated BothAnd Framework
