Ideology as a Relational Effect: 1 Ideology in the Field: Why Meaning Alone Cannot Explain It

We are accustomed to thinking of ideology as a set of beliefs, attitudes, or “worldviews” embedded in language. Yet this framing is misleading. It collapses meaning into content, thought, or psychology, obscuring how ideology actually operates in social life.

The cuts framework developed in our previous series gives us a different lens: ideology is not what people “think” or “feel.” It is a relational effect, emergent where meaning cuts intersect with social value surfaces. It exists in the interaction of vulnerability, risk, and persistence.

Meaning is necessary but insufficient

Consider the metafunctional cuts:

• Ideational meaning exposes phenomena to construal. Without it, nothing can be construed or interpreted.

• Interpersonal meaning exposes meaning to social risk and uptake. Without it, no message enters social circulation.

• Textual meaning exposes meaning to decay and ensures persistence. Without it, meanings dissipate across time and interaction.

None of these cuts alone generates ideology. Meaning can exist, be socially taken up, and persist — yet still fail to pattern social expectations, sanctions, or coordination systematically. Ideology emerges at the intersection of meaning and social value, where the semiotic interacts with the non-symbolic.

Value surfaces are key

Values structure consequences — reward, sanction, alignment, or exclusion — but they do not generate meaning themselves. Ideology is what happens when meaning is repeatedly exposed to value surfaces, producing consistent patterns of what is thinkable, sayable, and persistent across a social field.

A relational view

From this perspective, ideology is:

the emergent patterning of possibility, risk, and persistence, enacted where meaning cuts intersect with social value surfaces.

This framing has three important implications:

1. Analytic clarity: We can study ideology without reducing it to attitude, cognition, or representation.

2. Ontological precision: Ideology is not “in language” or “in minds.” It is a relational effect, contingent on the operation of meaning and value.

3. Actionable insight: We can trace ideological patterns empirically — through uptake, sanction, and persistence — without assuming prior knowledge of what people “believe.”

In the next post, we will focus on the ideational cut and show how ideology constrains what can be construed as possible or real in a social field. Here, we begin to see how structured potential is filtered, channelled, and shaped into systematic patterns of social possibility — the very starting point of ideology in practice.