Last week, we examined Althusser’s concept of Ideology; in this week’s newsletter, we discuss how Slavoj Žižek builds on Althusser’s concepts of ideology in some important ways.
Žižek takes Althusser’s view on Ideology: “Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence.” 1, and he pushes it even further. For him, Ideology is not just an imaginary view of reality but rather one that sustains reality.
ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. 2
We will look at Žižek’s view of ideology through the lens of the symptom, cynicism, and fantasy:
Symptom
This thing that we depend on is a symptom:
symptom is an element clinging on like a kind of parasite and ‘spoiling the game’, but if we annihilate it things get even worse: we lose all we had – even the rest which was threatened but not yet destroyed by the symptom. Confronted with the symptom we are always in a position of an impossible choice… 3
The symptom is a necessary breakdown that exists in an ideological field. For example, if we take the ideological notion of freedom, this contains
a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour ‘freely’, the worker loses his freedom – the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of ‘bourgeois freedoms’. 4
In an ideology, there is always an exception, which is the symptom of that ideology. It is the thing we cling to that holds it together and without which reality would fall apart. There is a level at which this is known, that we see and hold on to our symptoms, and that view is well represented by cynicism.
Cynicism
The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ – ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naiveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. 5
This is the idea that ideology is something we are not aware of that drives our decisions and actions. We don’t realize that our actions are reinforcing an ideology, but we do it anyway.
As Žižek mentions, the thinkers of the members of the Frankfurt school (Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, etc) took this idea further:
In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology… it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they ‘really are’, of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence. 6
This is the simple view of ideology as a false consciousness in many ways. This view means that if we can’t point out the ideological nature of what people are doing, the ideology will fade; once you see that your action has an ideological outcome, you can stop the action.
You can shift things by recognizing the ideology inherent in the way things are, but things are not that simple.
In modern society, people are cynical. We see the ideology at some level, but it doesn’t change our actions. We know rampant consumerism is destroying the planet; we aren’t false in that view but see it and to it anyway. There is a strong tie here to the notion of Disavowal in Zupančič.
The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. 7
If we know this is the case, then unmasking the ideology won’t work.
It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to ‘symptomatic reading’, confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency – cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance.8
This means that, at some level, ideology is operating less as a false consciousness and more as a fantasy.
Fantasy
They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. 9
If we think of ideology as what we know, then it would seem that the cynical view, “They know what they are doing, and they are doing it,” would be separate from ideology. We would not be in the grip of the illusion.
However, there is more to it.
Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel… The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. 10
Ideology is the illusion we cling to that makes things bearable. It allows us to continue doing what supports it because we need the illusion. It isn’t our escape from reality; it is what sustains our reality.
Looking at this way, it is clear why ideology is so hard to escape. To escape our ideology is to escape our reality to untether it from what keeps it together.
An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality – that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself…An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour. 11
We don’t notice it when we are in the grip of ideology. It allows everything we experience to fit nicely into our reality. Even things that should contradict it are easily assimilated.
It is as if we are lost in the woods and choose to walk in one direction, knowing that we will eventually escape.
what is really at stake in ideology is its form, the fact that we continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction, that we follow even the most dubious opinions once our mind has been made up regarding them; but this ideological attitude can be achieved only as a ‘state that is essentially by-product’: the ideological subjects, ‘travellers lost in a forest’, must conceal from themselves the fact that ‘it was possibly chance alone that first determined them in their choice’; they must believe that their decision is well founded, that it will lead to their Goal. As soon as they perceive that the real goal is the consistency of the ideological attitude itself, the effect is self-defeating.12
We conclude that the way to deal with ideology is to question reality as we see it.
The next bit will get very theoretical, but bear with me. A perspective on its own is not ideological; it becomes ideological when various viewpoints or positions are tied together.
What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its positive content? Hegemony and Socialist Strategy delineates what is probably the definitive answer to this crucial question of the theory of ideology: the multitude of ‘floating signifiers’, of proto-ideological elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning. 13
Let’s look at what this means by way of an example.
Ideological space is made of non-bound, non-tied elements, ‘floating signifiers’, whose very identity is ‘open’, overdetermined by their articulation in a chain with other elements – that is, their ‘literal’ signification depends on their metaphorical surplus-signification. 14
A peace movement could seek an end to the war between Ukraine and Russia, but that position alone is not ideological. It could be based on wanting the US to stop funding it based on anti-globalist ideas; it could be a pro-Russian position, anti-NATO, or a host of other contradictory positions. You can be an ecologist who is deeply conservative (return the land to the way things were before) or a deeply liberal one. The ideology is what ties these various viewpoints together.
The first task of the analysis is therefore to isolate, in a given ideological field, the particular struggle which at the same time determines the horizon of its totality – to put it in Hegelian terms, the species which is its own universal kind. But this is the crucial theoretical problem: how does this determining, totalizing role of a particular struggle differ from the traditionally conceived ‘hegemony’ by which a certain struggle (workers’ struggle in Marxism) appears as the Truth of all the others, so that all other struggles are in the last resort only forms of its expression, and victory in this struggle offers us the key to victory in other domains? 15
And so, where does all of this leave us?
This brings us to the critical idea of how we critique ideology. This is something that I will be going much deeper into as I want to provide some ideological critiques of current leadership trends. But here is how Žižek suggests we go about it:
- Identify the “nodal points” that totalize a “montage of heterogeneous ‘floating signifiers.’” Find how disparate thoughts, ideas, actions, and rituals fit under a theme; what ties it together?
- Identify how “an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.” That is the drive fed from the actions; what desire does it try to meet? What is the fantasy that frames the relations the way it does?
A Way Out
In another text, Žižek posits two ways to undermine the grip of Ideology:
The existing ideological power-edifice can thus be undermined in two complementary ways of overidentification: either we stick to the letter of the law, ignoring its obscene underside of unwritten rules, or we focus on this underside and bring it to the light of day–in both cases, the normal functioning of the power-edifice is suspended, its “organic” unity disintegrates. 16
That is, we can push the ideology to the point of breaking by assuming it is truly real. We can follow each guideline to its extreme breaking point. Or we focus on and highlight how the ideology falls apart.
Take, for example, the ideology of freedom (as discussed above); freedom is often seen as the highest good, and yet it is undermined by how one of our freedoms is to sell our labor and thus sell our freedom. We can either ignore this gap and pursue freedom at all costs, assuming we genuinely are free, even under-wage labor, and loudly proclaim and act on that freedom. Or we point out the contradiction: the freedom to sell out labor results in losing our freedom.
- Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (p. 181) ↩
- Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid (p.16) ↩
- Ibid (p. 24) ↩
- Ibid (p. 25) ↩
- Ibid (p. 25-26) ↩
- Ibid (p. 26) ↩
- Ibid (p. 30) ↩
- Ibid (p. 45) ↩
- Ibid (p. 49-50) ↩
- Ibid (p. 92) ↩
- Ibid (p. 95) ↩
- Ibid (p. 95) ↩
- Ibid (p. 97) ↩
- Slavoj Zizek, “Why does the law need an obscene supplement?” in Law and the Postmodern Mind Essays on Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence Eds. Peter Goodrich and David Gray Carlson (p. 90) ↩