Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek provides his usual piercing analysis of the global agora in Mapping Ideology (Mapping) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? At root in both books is the nature and functioning of ideology. He breaks ideology down into three flavors.
1. Ideology-in-itself. In short, screed. Or for you Plato fans, eidos politicized. This flavor of ideology conjures up a “real” world and a world of “illusions,” a “real” problem and all of its “mere symptoms.” The trouble with this flavor isn’t that it’s inaccurate–it could be very accurate. The problem is that everything becomes a symptom. Zizek imagines himself using the ideological symptom-and-cause cookie cutter to hedge his way out of having to give a speech about something he knows nothing about.* By my junior year of college, I had discovered that this was a reliable method for writing A papers. (It also helped to make either the “symptom” or the “cause” something entirely outside your professor’s field; if she protested, you could always pull out the bogeyman of “interdisciplinary research.”) Liberal arts college aside, screed is the order of the day on all sides of the war on Iraq. Or as Emory professor Mark Jordan notes, “Ideological speech is designed to convert its opponents into ideologues. It does this by wasting language to the point that an opponent despairs of speaking–except by shouting back.”
As Limpy paraphrases the Bush administration, “those brown people over there hate us because they don’t understand that we’re right and they’re not.” If you can shift the public debate into ideological terms, you can start enforcing desired behaviors. If Ann Coulter is calling war protestors “traitors”–a crime that carries a death sentence–then it’s not so bad if I just spit in your hair for protesting the war across the street from your church. The question can shift from “should we go to war?” to “when and how should we go to war?” An air of inevitability is created.
2. Ideology-for-itself. When ideology starts to look out for itself, it begins to create institutions to perpetuate itself: propaganda machines, the vanguard party, government bureaucracies. The war on terrorism is trying to peek into this stage, starting with the Department of Homeland Security and its terrorism alerts. The point is not to convince you of the ideology’s rightness; the point is to graft the ideology’s way of doing things into your daily life. If it’s absurd–like, say, color-coded terror alerts–so much the better. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to become old hat. Then it’s not as big a deal when you, say, apply the terror alert codes to individual citizens. (What color are you?) The ideology doesn’t care if you agree with it as long as it can get you to jump when it says “Boo!”
3. Ideology-in-and-for-itself. If institutionalized ideology is successful enough, the ideology will be able to shed its philosophical and institutional skins. We then have an ideological ghost on our hands. Hard to trace, it appears to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Adorno called industrial capitalism’s ideological ghost “instrumental reason.” In other words, faster-better-cheaper. Why? Just because. By the time an ideology gets to this point, it’s managed to seep into what everyone agrees is just “common sense.” It doesn’t need to convince you, because you always already agree. It doesn’t need institutions to perpetuate itself, because it’s just the way of the world. Doing without the ideology’s colored lenses seems like going without air. Free of targetable rhetoric and organizations, it can shape society without let or hindrance. Mark Jordan advises, “Responding to ideological discourse requires a rule, not just of suspicion, but of inversion: we should attend not to what the discourse says, but to how it operates.” (Enter Foucault.)
* Says Zizek, “The formal matrix can be applied to an infinite multitude of themes–say, distance and proximity: ‘Today, modern media can bring events from the farthest part of our earth, even from nearby planet, close to us in a split second. Does not this very all-pervasive proximity, however, remove us from the authentic dimension of human existence? Is not the essence of man more distant from us than ever today?’ Or the recurrent motif of danger: ‘Today, one hears and reads a lot about how the very survival of the human race is threatened by the prospect of ecological catastrophe (the disappearing ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, etc.). The true danger, however, lies elsewhere: what is ultimately threatened is the very essence of man. As we endeavor to prevent the impending ecological catastrophe with newer and newer technological solutions (‘environment-friendly’ aerosols, unleaded petrol, etc.), we are in fact simply adding fuel to the flames, and thus aggravating the threat to the spiritual essence of man, which cannot be reduced to a technological animal.'”
Chutney,
This looks great. Too tired to comment now–it requires some concentrated reading. I will do so tomorrow.
Very well done. Your thoughts in “ideology degree zero,” where it appears to disappear into commonsense, made me think of Brecht on the function of art, “to make strange.”
I assume that you are not familiar with arguing theory. Perhaps, you prefer the value neutral naivete of the good old days of positivism – or dogmatism. Anyway, I suppose you have never read Zizek. His approach to ideology amounts to this – the symbolic authority of ideology is dead, has been dead, now how do you cope? Symptom (lacan) is not a dirty word for Zizek and if you think you have your finger on the cause – then you are not reading Zizek (Basic Lacan: there is only the absent cause – what can not be symbolized or made conscious of). Zizek is good because he is tricky. Reading him is really like reading Hegel – the first modern master of irony (true dialectic). Of course if you are weak in theory or have only let yourself ponder Adorno or Habermas you will find it difficult to hear the lines of debate or counterpoint (for Zizek as with Hegel that would include the likes of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Judith Butler, Laclau, etc.). Comparing Zizek to Ann Coulter – that’s funny. What do read so as to keep your mind free from idealogical taint – instruction manuals?
Did I compare Zizek to Ann Coulter? Nope. Did you even read my post?
The Lacanian “absent cause” comes into full play during the third phase of Zizek’s dialectic: ideology-in-and-for-itself. Yes, I said Zizek’s dialectic. It’s in Totalitarianism. You should read it sometime.
Who’s trying to keep themselves free from ideological taint? Just because ideology is inevitable doesn’t mean that it can’t be dangerous, that we can’t map out how it operates, or that we can’t choose. Outside of university English departments, anyway.
A dogmatic, positivistic reading of Zizek–thank you, I never would have imagined someone could pull that one off, but you’ve successfully done it.
I’ll repeat the Mark Jordan quote from above: “”Ideological speech is designed to convert its opponents into ideologues. It does this by wasting language to the point that an opponent despairs of speaking–except by shouting back.”
Anonymity–the home of the free and the brave. That is, unless you are the “absent cause.”
The Idols of the Marketplace, and other Ideologies
“HT” My Irony : Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek provides his usual piercing analysis of the global agora in Mapping Ideology (Mapping) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? At root in both books is the nature and functioning of ideology.
The Idols of the Marketplace, and other Ideologies
“HT” My Irony : Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek provides his usual piercing analysis of the global agora in Mapping Ideology (Mapping) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? At root in both books is the nature and functioning of ideology.