Mapping Ideology

336 Pages·1994·1.7 MB·English

by  Slavoj Zizek

MAPPING
This series of readers, published in association with New Left Review,
aims to illuminate key topics in a changing world.
Other titles in the series:
Benedict Anderson and Gopal Balakrishnan, eds
Mapping the Nation
Sheila Rowbotham and Monica ThrelfaU, eds
Mapping the Women's Movements
Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds
Mapping the West European Left
Mapping Ideology
Edited by
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
VERSO
London • New York
P. 75198
First published by Verso 1994
©Verso 1994
All rights reserved
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1V 3HR
USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 2291
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1-85984-955-5
ISBN 1-85984-055-8 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mapping ideology / edited by Slavoj tilek.
p. cm. — (Mapping)
Includes index.
ISBN 1-85984-955-5 (hard). — ISBN 1-85984-055-8 (pbk.)
1. Political science—History. 2. Right and left (Political science)—History. 3. Ideology—
History. I. fciiek, Slavoj. II. Series: Mapping (London, England)
JA83.M265 1994
320—<k20 94-37642
CIP
Typeset by Type Study, Scarborough
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
Contents
INTRODUCTION The Spectre of Ideology
Sla.voj2.iiek 1
1 Messages in a Bottle
Theodor W. Adorno 34
2 Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of
Identity
Peter Dews 46
3 The Critique of Instrumental Reason
Seyla Benhabib 66
4 The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of
the I
Jacques Lacan 93
5 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation)
Louis Althusser 100
6 The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)recognition
Michel Pecheux 141
7 Determinacy and Indeterminacy in the Theory of
Ideology
Nicholas A bercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner 15 2
8 The New Questions of Subjectivity
Goran Therborn 167
9 Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism
Terry Eagleton 179
CONTENTS
10 Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A
Pragmatist View
Richard Rorty 227
11 Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to
Laclau and Mouffe
Michile Barrett 235
12 Doxa and Common Life: An Interview
Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton 265
13 Postmodernism and the Market
Fredric Jameson 278
14 How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?
Slavey Ziiek . 296
List of Sources 332
Index 333
INTRODUCTION
The Spectre of Ideology
v
Slavoj Zizek
I Critique of Ideology, today?
By way of a simple reflection on how the horizon of historical
imagination is subjected to change, we find ourselves in medias res,
compelled to accept the unrelenting pertinence of the notion of
ideology. Up to a decade or two ago, the system production-nature
(man's productive-exploitative relationship with nature and its re-
sources) was perceived as a constant, whereas everybody was busy
imagining different forms of the social organization of production and
commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capital-
ism); today, as Frediic Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody
seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer,
wnereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the
forthcoming 'breakdown of nature', of the stoppage of all life on earth
- it seems easier to imagine the 'end of the world' than a far more
modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the
'real' that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global
ecological catastrophe .... One can thus categorically assert the
existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the relation-
ship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-
imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.
This matrix can be easily discerned inthe dialectics of'old' and 'new',
when an event that announces a wholly new dimension or epoch is
(mis)perceived as the continuation of or return to the past, or — the
opposite case — when an event that is entirely inscribed in the logic of
the existing order is (mis)perceived as a radical rupture. The supreme
example of the latter, of course, is provided by those critics of Marxism
who (mis)perceive our late-capitalist society as a new social formation
1
2 MAPPING IDEOLOGY
no longer dominated by the dynamics of capitalism as it was described
by Marx. I n order to avoid this worn-out example, however, let us turn
to the domain of sexuality. One of today's commonplaces is that
so-called 'virtual' or 'cyber' sex presents a radical break with the past,
since in it, actual sexual contact with a 'real other' is losing ground
against masturbatory enjoyment, whose sole support is a virtual other—
phone-sex, pornography, up to computerized 'virtual sex' .... The
Lacanian answer to this is that first we have to expose the myth of'real
sex' allegedly possible 'before' the arrival of virtual sex: Lacan's thesis
that 'there is no sexual relationship' means precisely that the structure
of the 'real' sexual art (of the act with a flesh-and-blood partner) is
already inherently phantasmic—the 'real' body of the other serves only
as a support for our phantasmic projections. In other words, 'virtual
sex' in which a glove simulates the stimuli of what we see on the sci een,
and so on, is not a monstrous distortion of real sex, it simply renders
manifest its underlying phantasmic structure.
An exemplary case of the opposite misperception is provided by the
reaction of Western liberal intellectuals to the emergence of new states
in tlu* process of the disintegration of real Socialism in Eastern Europe:
they (mis)perceived this emergence as a return to the nineteenth-
cenlui y tradition of the nation-state, whereas what we are actually
dealing with is the exact opposite: the 'withering-away' of the tra-
ditiotiiil nation-state based upon the notion of the abstract citizen
identified with the constitutional legal order. In order to characterize
this :iew state of things, Etienne Balibar recently referred to the old
Marxian phrase Es gibt keinen Stoat in Europa — there no longer exists a
propci state in Europe. The old spectre of Leviathan parasitizing on
the /shmxwelt of society, totalizing it from above, is more and more
eroded from both sides. On the one hand, there are the new emerging
ethnic < ommunities -although some of them are formally constituted
as sovereign states, they are no longer states in the proper modern-age
Euro|H:an sense, since they did not cut the umbilical cord between state
and el link: community. (Paradigmatic here is the case of Russia, in
which local mafias already function as a kind of parallel power
structure.) On the other hand, there are the multiple transnational
links, from multinational capital to mafia cartels and inter-state
political communities (European Union).
There are two reasons for this limitation of state sovereignty, each of
which is in itself compelling enough to justify it: the transnational
character of ecological crisis and of nuclear threat. This eroding of
state authority from both sides is mirrored in the fact that today the
basii political antagonism is that between the universalist 'cosmopoliti-
cal' liberal democracy (standing for the force corroding the state from
INTRODUCTION 3
above) and the new 'organic' populism-communitarianism (standing
for the force corroding the state from below). And — as Balibar pointed
out yet again1 - this antagonism is to be conceived neither as an
external opposition nor as the complementary relationship of the two
poles in which one pole balances the excess of its opposite (in the sense
that, when we have too much universalism, a little bit of ethnic roots
gives people the feeling of belonging, and thus stabilizes the situation),
but in a genuinely Hegelian sense — each pole of the antagonism is
inherent to its opposite, so that we stumble upon it at the very moment
when we endeavour to grasp the opposite pole for itself, to posit it 'as
such'.
Because of this inherent character of the two poles, one should avoid
the liberal-democratic trap of concentrating exclusively on the horri-
fying facts and even more horrifying potentials of what is going on
today in Russia and some other ex-Communist countries: the new
hegemonic ideology of 'Eurasism' preaching the organic link between
community and the state as an antidote to the corrosive influence of the
'Jewish' principle of market and social atomism, orthodox national
imperialism as an antidote to Western individualism, and so on. In
order to combat these new forms of organicist populism effectively one
must, as it were, turn the critical gaze back upon oneself and submit to
critical scrutiny liberal-democratic universalism itself— what opens up
the space for the organicist populism is the weak point, the 'falsity', of
this very universalism.
These same examples of the actuality of the notion of ideology,
however, also render clear the reasons why today one hastens to
renounce the notion of ideology: does not the critique of ideology
involve a privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of
social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very
hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility? Is
not the claim that we can accede to this place the most obvious case of
ideology? Consequently, with reference to today's state of epistemo-
logical reflection, is not the notion of ideology self-defeating? So why
should we cling to a notion with such obviously outdated epistemologi-
cal implications (the relationship of 'representation' between thought
and reality, etc.)? Is not its utterly ambiguous and elusive character in
itself a sufficient reason to abandon it? 'Ideology' can designate
anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its depen-
dence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the
indispensable niedium in which individuals live out their relations to a
social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political
4 MAPPING IDEOLOGY
power. It seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it
fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.
When some procedure is denounced as 'ideological par excellence',
one can be sure that its inversion is no less ideological. For example,
among the procedures generally acknowledged as 'ideological' is
definitely the eternalization of some historically limited condition, the
act of discerning some higher Necessity in a contingent occurrence
(from the grounding of male domination in the 'nature of things' to
interpreting AIDS as a punishment for the sinful life of modern man;
or, at a more intimate level, when we encounter our 'true love', it seems
as if this is what we have been waiting for all our life, as if, in some
mysterious way, all our previous life has led to this encounter . . .): the
senseless contingency of the real is thus 'internalized', symbolized,
provided with Meaning. Is not ideology, however, also the opposite
procedure of failing to notice the necessity, of misperceiving it as an
insignificant contingency (from the psychoanalytic cure, in which one
of the main forms of the analysand's resistance is his insistence that his
symptomatic slip of tongue was a mere lapse without any signification,
up to the domain of economics, in which the ideological procedure par
excellence is to reduce the crisis to an external, ultimately contingent
occurrence, thus failing to take note of the inherent logic of the system
that begets the crisis)? In this precise sense, ideology is the exact
opposite of internalization of the external contingency: it resides in
externalization of the result of an inner necessity, and the task of the
critique of ideology here is precisely to discern the hidden necessity in
what appears as a mere contingency.
The most recent case of a similar inversion was provided by the way
Western media reported on the Bosnian war. The first thing that
strikes the eye is the contrast to the reporting on the 1991 Gulf War,
where we had the standard ideological personification:
Instead of providing information on social, political or religious trends and
antagonisms in Iraq, the media ultimately reduced the conflict to a quarrel
with Saddam Hussein, Evil Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself
from the civilized international community. Even more than the destruction
of Iraq's military forces, the true aim wa^ presented as psychological, as the
humiliation of Saddam who was to 'lose face'. In the case of the Bosnian war,
however, notwithstanding isolated cases of the demonization of the Serbian
president Milosevic, the predominant attitude reflects that of a quasi-
anthropological observer. The media outdo one another in giving us lessons
on the ethnic and religious background of the conflict; traumas hundreds of
years old are being replayed and acted out, so that, in order to understand
the roots of the conflict, one has to know not only the history of Yugoslavia,
but the entire history of the Balkans from medieval times. ... In the
INTRODUCTION 5
Bosnian conflict, it is therefore not possible simply to take sides, one can only
patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, alien to our
civilized system of values.... Yet this opposite procedure involves an
ideological mystification even more cunning than the demonization of
Saddam Hussein.2
In what, precisely, consists this ideological mystification? To put it
somewhat crudely, the evocation of the 'complexity of circumstances'
serves to deliver us from the responsibility to act. The comfortable
attitude of a distant observer, the evocation of the allegedly intricate
context of religious and ethnic struggles in Balkan countries, is here to
enable the West to shed its responsibility towards the Balkans - that is,
to avoid the bitter truth that, far from presenting the case of an
eccentric ethnic conflict, the Bosnian war is a direct result of the West's
failure to grasp the political dynamic of the disintegration of Yugo-
slavia, of the West's silent support of'ethnic cleansing'.
In the domain of theory, we encounter a homologous reversal
apropos of the 'deconstructionist' problematization of the notion of the
subject's guilt and personal responsibility. The notion of a subject
morally and criminally fully 'responsible' for his acts clearly serves the
ideological need to conceal the intricate, always-already operative
texture of historico-discursive presuppositions that not only provide
the context for the subject's act but also define in advance the
co-ordinates of its meaning: the system can function only if the cause of
its malfunction can be located in the responsible subject's 'guilt'. One of
the commonplaces of the leftist criticism of law is that the attribution of
personal responsibility and guilt relieves us of the task of probing into
the concrete circumstances of the act in question. Suffice it to recall the
moral-majority practice of attributing a moral qualification to the
higher crime rate among African Americans ('criminal dispositions',
'moral insensitivity', etc.): this attribution precludes any analysis of the
concrete ideological, political and economic conditions of African
Americans.
Is not this logic of'putting the blame on the circumstances' however,
taken to its extremes, self-defeating in so far as it necessarily leads to
the unforgettable - and no less ideological - cynicism of Brecht's
famous lines from his Threepenny Opera: 'Wir waren gut anstatt so roh,
doch die Verhaltnisse, sie sind nicht so!' ('We would be good instead of
being so rude, if only the circumstances were not of this kind')? In other
words, are we, the speaking subjects, not always-already engaged in
recounting the circumstances that predetermine the space of our
activity?
A more concrete example of the same undecidable ambiguity is