Ideological Social Relations in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses one form of ideological social relations in Northern Ireland. By ideology I mean those representations of material reality that dominate a group or class's consciousness. By ideological social relations I refer to the process in which these representations are derived from and embodied in the specific practices of the State and other social institutions. Ideological social relations exist in a material form and have definite effects on the production of political and economic social relations. The particular effects of a specific set of ideological social relations under discussion here are those that constitute and sustain a sectarian social division. Ideological social relations have as a principal function the task of appropriating distinctions within the division of labour and displacing and refashioning these distinctions within other areas of the social formation. In Northern Ireland sectarianism illustrates a mode of ideological social relations that have formed and have been transformed by social relations of production and political social relations. Sectarianism at this level of analysis is the ideological manifestation of a society characterized by a Protestant working class 'labour aristocracy' and a Unionist cross-class political alliance. These economic and political conditions are the raw materials from which sectarianism has been produced ideologically. This analysis of ideological social relations will take the form of theorizing sectarianism as a practical discourse. Following Foucault' discourse refers here to the regular practices that organize concepts and types of enunciation into themes and theories. These practices are ordered through a body of rules which constitute the subjects and objects that connect statements. Foucault designates the ordering of relationships between statements as a discursive formation. He sees the object of a discourse as a:potential given by groups of relations that emanate from social institutions. These institutions do not, however, constitute the object and neither are they present within it. The institutional relations are primary, the object in the discursive formation is secondary and the regular set of rules that make and re-