#12625 - Zizek Mapping Ideology - Sociological Theory

Slavoj Zizek - Mapping Ideology

Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology

1. Critique of Ideology, today?

• Ideology exists as a generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the imaginable and the non-imaginable, visible and non-visible

  • in the 1970s, we took humanity’s exploitative relationship with nature for granted, and imagined different forms of social organization (communism, fascism)

  • now (1995) we take liberal capitalism for granted, but question our relationship with nature

    • it is as if the end of the world is more plausible than the end of liberal capitalism

  • we can see this matrix in the dialectical relationship between old and new

    • i.e. where an event is heralded as the start of a new epoch, but is ‘entirely inscribed in the logic of the existing order’; or the reverse, where an event that represents a new epoch is seen as a return to the past

      • e.g. late capitalism is seen as a new epoch, when in fact it represents the same dynamics

      • the new states in Eastern Europe are seen as a return to 19th century nation states, but in fact this concept is being withered away by ethnic nationalism, transnational links etc

        • these relationships are dialectical - liberal capitalism and Eurasism are opposite poles, but each is inherent within the other, and to understand Eurasism we must dissect liberal capitalism

• Doesn’t the critique of ideology presuppose some privileged position, above the turmoils of social life, where we can view the mechanism that regulates visibility and non-visibility?

  • isn’t this the most clear case of ideology?

• Ideology can consist in finding necessity in contingent events - seeing patriarchy as ‘natural’ - but it can also consist in seeing necessary events as contingent

  • e.g. in psychoanalysis, claiming your words were a slip of the tongue, without signification, or in economics, where a crisis that represents the inner logic of the system is represented as contingent

  • so in law, the idea of personal guilt serves the ideological function of hiding the (necessary?) mechanisms that define the meaning of actions before they are even committed - this precludes an analysis of concrete conditions

    • similarly the leftist focus on concrete conditions sees necessity where there is contingence

• The ambiguity between the concrete circumstances analysis of economics and the interpretive, desire-focus of psychoanalysis may be ideological

  • viewing resistance to social relations as the acting out of psychic tensions can clearly be seen as ideological

  • similarly attributing all to social conditions, and neglecting ‘the real of his of her desire’ is ‘no less false’

• It is when we try to step out of ideology that we are most enslaved by it

  • actions are ideological where they reflect actual relations of power

    • thus ideology has no connection with illusion - ideology may be true or false: the question is of its relation to power

    • e.g. Neues Forum in Germany weren’t ideological because, though their belief that they weren’t working to reinstate capitalism was illusory, it didn’t reflect any relations of power

2. Ideology: the Spectral Analysis of a Concept

• An ideology may be true or false - what matters is the way its ‘content is related to the subjective position implied by its own process of enunciation’

  • it is ideological when it is functional to some relation of social domination

    • if it is to be successful, it must conceal the way in which it legitimizes the relation of domination

  • it is possible to lie in the guise of truth

    • e.g. the West may actually improve human rights in some country, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a mask for another (e.g. economic) agenda

• One way of analysing ideologies is not to assess their truth or adequacy, but to see them as determined by a multitude of different historical situations

  • but this can lead to relativism, and rob the term of its cognitive value, whence it becomes a mere expression of social circumstances

• Another way is to divide ideology around three axes:

  • ideology as a complex of ideas, theories, beliefs, argumentative procedures

    • there is no neutral descriptive content - every description is part of an argumentative scheme

    • pointing to facts that ‘speak for themselves’ when of course facts only speak through a network of discursive devices

      • that is, every value-judgement requires a symbolic universe

    • meaning does not inhere in the elements of an ideology (e.g. ‘ecology’), but in their articulation (conservative ecology, feminist ecology, liberal ecology etc)

  • ideology in its externality - i.e. the material institutions of ideology (e.g. ISAs)

    • institutional actions (e.g. kneeling down to pray) not only make you believe, but make you believe that you acted because of belief

      • so when we try to step out of ideology, we regress back into it

    • Foucault is wrong to suggest that power constitutes itself from micro practices, because he doesn’t specify the mechanism by which that happens. Althusser is right to claim that micro-practices presuppose an ideological...