Slavoj Zizek, Introduction to MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

Please excuse that I have not correctly rendered the diacriticals on the Z’s and a few other words here, this is a draft for some work I need to complete. All citations are to the book MAPPING IDEOLOGY edited by Zizek.

“The Spectre of Ideology” - Slavoj Zizek

In this synoptic introduction to Mapping Ideology, Zizek tarries with many of the most common rejections of the concept, interrogating the reasoning involved in these criticisms before suggesting a Hegelian triad (of in-itself, for-itself, in-and-for-itself) as a heuristic for thinking about the various approaches to the idea. He offers, as an introductory framing for the concept, that ideology is the “generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in that relationship” (1). After a few preliminary examples of things proclaimed as new that are in his analysis not new at all, and of things misrecognized as old that are arguably quite unprecedented he turns to the reasons offered for dispensing with the concept of ideology. In summary, these consist in what I will call the “false consciousness problem” and “expansion problem.” The false consciousness problem is well known. While it is easy enough to say from our current historical perspective that medieval aristocracy’s self-understanding (the belief in nobility as passed on through the blood) is ideological in that it supports continuity in the realm of power such that nobles will continue to rule mere commoners, in large part because the commoners also act in accordance with the postulate of nobility - that is, they treat the noble as a noble, sustaining their own political subservience - this sort of analysis is problematic for the very reason of that seeming clarity. For any social actor’s consciousness of the social realm to be deemed “false” by another, this other’s position of enunciation would have to issue from a place of “true consciousness”, one that is not itself mired in ideology. It is this recognition that can lead us to what I call the expansion problem. In this criticism the theoretical consequences of the concept of ideology are found to be somehow too much, to cover too much ground, to have no outside and thus to be negligible. As offered this criticism often has a logical form; if the predicate “ideological” applies to all things, then it has no meaning in and of itself. The problem with this criticism is easy enough to see (though seemingly few notice it) and Zizek does not address it for reasons that will become clear soon enough. Nonetheless, the obvious counter-argument from my perspective is that to say that “everything is ideological”, if one wished to claim this, is not to say that everything embodies the same ideology. If I claim that all human subjects are raced, by which I mean, each is in the social realm racially marked in one way or another, I am not claiming that every subject is caucasian. Having said this, neither I nor Zizek in this article, claim that everything is ideological, which is not to say that we have access to any place of enunciation that is outside of ideology.

Zizek then considers the charge that some statement or action is denounced as “ideological par excellence” (4) and claims that the inversion of any such “ideological” statement will be no less ideological. Unpacking this claim he looks at various modes of reasoning linked to ideology in this instance. The first happens when in “a contingent historical occurrence” is posited a “higher Necessity” which serves to give it meaning (4). A second mode is a seeming reversal of this, to claim that what has happened is nothing but a contingent event and is not expressive of any necessity (here we might think of some of the more outlandish claims made about the economic crisis, for instance, that it was “caused” by real estate speculation). He then turns to the coverage of the Balkan struggles  versus those of the war in Iraq as yet another pair of seeming opposites that are both thoroughly ideological. In the Iraq example we get the very overt demonizing of Hussain and portrayal of the States as fighting evil in order to install freedom and democracy. That this narrative elides the existence of other motives having to do with oil is manifestly obvious. The Balkan example though is much more telling as it’s ideological aspects are harder for many to discern. The Balkan situation was presented as rife with centuries of complex religious and ethnic struggles where good and evil are hard to ascribe clearly, with the outcome being that this “evocation of the ‘complexity of circumstances’ serves to deliver us from the responsibility to act” (5). Yet another seemingly laudable instance he situates in the domain of theory, in the ‘deconstructionist’ problematizing of the subject, and in “leftist criticism of the law” (5). This complaint is that the law, by recognizing only guilt or innocence and thus individual responsibility for the law “relieves us of the task of probing into the concrete circumstances of the act in question” (5). Zizek’s problem with this is that taken to its logical conclusion it is “self-defeating” (5). If the causes are always outside, then the social subject has no agency at all and is not in any way engaged but Zizek argues that all “speaking subjects” are “always-already engaged in recounting the circumstances that predetermine the space of our activity?” (5) What is lost in “putting the blame on the circumstances” is the subject’s desire, something they are responsible for whether they shirk, deny or disavow it. 

Zizek’s answer to the false consciousness problem is that ideology as a concept “must be disengaged from the ‘representationalist’ problematic” which entails that “ideology has nothing to do with ‘illusion’” (7). To ground this further he writes, “a political standpoint can be quite accurate (‘true’) as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological; and, vice versa, the idea that a political standpoint gives of its social content can prove totally wrong, yet there is absolutely nothing ‘ideological’ about it” (7). Zizek’s reasoning here is well supported and to my mind he does answer to the problem of false consciousness, and yet it seems to me that rather than risk a reader assume that he is here suggesting that those social views which are objectively false are nonideological, he might have taken a further step and insisted (as he does elsewhere, see 8) that ideology has no fixed relation to “objective truth” as such. His answer to the false consciousness problem is simply that “true” and “false” are not the determining bases of what is or is not ideological. His answer to the expansionist problem is grounded in an example and bears careful scrutiny. Zizek considers the Neues Forum in East Germany as a “non-ideology which possesses all the standard features of ideology” (6). He reads this as a tragic ethical situation in which “an ideology ‘takes itself literally’ and ceases to function as an ‘objectively cynical’ (Marx) legitimization of existing power relations” (6). The Neues Forum  group longed for a “third way” beyond both the capitalism on offer from West Germany and  the socialism of the GDR. The tragic aspect of this is that they believed that they were not “working for the restoration of Western capitalism” when in fact this belief was an “insubstantial illusion” (6). Because of this the utopian position of the Neues Forum was “stricto sensu non-ideological: it did not ‘reflect’, in an inverted-ideological form, any actual relations of power” (7). Thus I take Zizek’s answer to the naive logic of the expansionist problem to be that not everything is ideological, and even that what had been need not be any longer, unless it reflects a link to actual power relations in the social situation. What makes the Neues Forum tragic for Zizek is that in spite of its stance being illusory, it recognized the inherent antagonism in capitalism which the masses of East Germans seemingly did not (though surely both saw the antagonism in the socialism they’d been living in until then). 

Everything so far discussed appeared under heading “Critique of Ideology, today?” and seems to have been written to convince a reader that ideology remains a pertinent concept. The second heading “Ideology: The Spectral Analysis of a Concept” both introduces the aforementioned Hegelian triad and situates the selections offered in the book as falling under one or another of these modes of thinking ideology. As I’ll be working through those texts, here I will concern myself primarily with Zizek’s application of this triad as a heuristic. But before I turn to that, he offers a few more statements that help to flesh out the concept in his use. Zizek asserts that “the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be the full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth” (8). What he has in mind by this, what “really matters” he writes, “is not the asserted content as such but the way this content is related to the subjective position implied by its own process of enunciation. We are in ideological space proper the moment this content - ‘true’ or ‘false’ (...) is functional with regard to some relation of social domination (...) in an inherently non-transparent way (8). This leads, as I have already indicated, to bracketing truth or falsehood, and as Zizek suggests it also leads to seeing the many competing ideological positions as “the index of different concrete historical situations” (8). Zizek finds this “adequate at its own level” and yet warns that it can “easily ensnare us in historicist relativism that suspends the inherent cognitive value of the term ‘ideology’ and makes it into a mere expression of social circumstances” (9). Because of this Zizek endeavors, via Hegel, to outline a “synchronous approach” to the topic (9). 

Ideology in-itself would then be (firstly) the idea of ideology as a set or system of beliefs or doctrine “destined to convince us of its ‘truth’, yet actually serving some unavowed particular power interest” (10). He connects this conception of ideology in-itself with the idea of “symptomal reading” which seeks to illuminate the unavowed interests by attending closely to the “ruptures, blanks and slips” in the “official text” (10). Yet as a second mode of ideology in-itself is once again an inversion, that derived in his view from discourse analysis for whom “the very notion of access to reality unbiased by any discursive devices or conjunctions with power is ideological” (10). In this way of thinking the ideological the issue is “(mis)perceiving a discursive formation [for] an extra-discursive fact” (10). In connection with one or the other of the these tendencies he speaks of Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Ducrot, Pecheaux and Laclau.

Ideology for-itself is ideology in its “otherness-externalization” which Zizek says is “epitomized by the Althusserian notion of Ideological State Appartuses” - ideology as its “material existence (...) in ideological practices, rituals and institutions” (12). Zizek adds an often overlooked factor to Althusser’s thought in this regard. The bulk of anti-Althusserian criticism harps on the “dependence of inner belief on outward behavior” and thus on the seeming lack of agency that interpellated subjects have in his theory (12). Zizek stresses that this is inadequate and counters that “the ‘external’ ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation” (13). In this conception our belief is generated by the actions that we engage in. Thus the police officer that is taught to use stereotyping as he works in the world will, by virtue of repeatedly using them, will create a belief in their validity, regardless of other inner convictions he or she may have about the justice of stereotyping. 

Foucault, as the most respected counter to an Althusserian view, is also discussed briefly here. Zizek’s critique of Foucault is in line with many I have encountered and centers on the issue of micro-politics and Foucault’s assertion that power does not derive from on high but rather “from below” (13). But, as useful as this analysis is when not trying to think politics above a micro-level, it runs into problems of many kinds as soon as one does try to think politics at the level of the state or society. The issue that Zizek focuses on is Foucault’s inability to account for how power emerges, which prompts him to write that “Althusser’s advantage over Foucault seems evident” (13). Using other terms I might say that Foucault’s is a lovely regional theory of power’s workings (the disciplining of the body in bio-power, etc), but that it is utterly useless as a general theory of power (which would have to cope with states, corporations, religions, technologies, militaries and much else. 

What then is ideology in-and-for-itself? It is problematic and we will see why in a moment, but to begin; the externalization of ideology as for-itself is in this instance “reflected into itself” resulting in “the disintegration, self-limitation and self-dispersal of the notion of ideology” (14). This position denies ideology as a “homogenous mechanism” or “cement” that insures social reproduction and becomes instead a “Wittgensteinian ‘family’ of vaguely connected and heterogeneous procedures whose reach is strictly localized” (14). Those associated with the Dominant Ideology Thesis (DIT) are Zizek’s exemplification of this approach to the concept. In the view of the DIT authors, per Zizek,  “when the expansion of the new mass media in principle (...) enables ideology effectively to penetrate every pore of the social body, the weight of ideology as such is diminished” (14). In such a view “the system (...) bypasses ideology in its reproduction and relies on economic coercion, legal and state regulations, and so on” (14). Zizek does not buy this view at all, claiming that once we scrutinize these purportedly “extra-ideological mechanisms” (14) that we find rather the “For-itself of ideology at work in the very In-itself of extra-ideological reality” (15). He demonstrates this quite easily by highlighting the ideological content of economic coercion and legal regulation before looking at the attitude of the “late-capitalist ‘post-ideological’ society” and pointing to the ideological values which structure its sobriety and cynicism. Ideology in-and-for-itself is then for Zizek “the elusive network of implicit, quasi-‘spontaneous’ presuppositions and attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of ‘non-ideological’ (...) practices” (15). What makes this way of thinking ideology problematic in Zizek’s view is that the exemplary instance of this sort of thought might well be Marx’s thoughts about the fetishism of commodities as it is not a “theory of political economy but a series of presuppositions that determine the structure of the very ‘real’ economic practice of market exchange” (15), and yet, Marx never once considered commodity fetishism as ideology as he thought that “ideology was always of the state” (19). I too prefer to keep a sharper distinction between commodity fetishism and ideology and would prefer to see other concepts or heuristics proposed to account for instances of this type, though I see no reason why they cannot be read with and against the ideologies with which they connect. 

The third heading in this text “The Spectre and the Real of Antagonism” begins with Zizek addressing more directly what I have called above, the expansion problem, saying that it is “one of the main reasons for the progressive abandonment of the notion of ideology” (16). There are a variety of responses to this but the “slick ‘postmodern’” version takes this to an extreme that serves Zizek’s interests here (17). In this view “the conclusion  that the only non-ideological position is to renounce the very notion of extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes, never ‘reality’” (17). Here Zizek makes a move that many will not be satisfied by, he suggests that the view above is unacceptable, “is ideology par excellence” and that we must maintain ourselves in an “impossible position” which, alluding to Kant, he refers to as the “antinomy of critico-ideological reason” (17). This requires of those would would keep ideological critique alive to affirm that “ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which once can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality - the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology” (17).

Zizek’s next imperative here is to elucidate this empty place through discussions of the real, antagonism and the spectral. He has already, in the preceding section, shown at the three levels of his Hegelian mapping of the concept of ideology, that each level has a split, a seeming reversal both sides of which are each ideological. Of these splits he say that the “matrix of all these repetitions, perhaps, is the opposition between ideology as the universe of ‘spontaneous’ experience (...) and ideology as a radically non-spontaneous machine that distorts the authenticity of our life-experience from outside” (19). Following both Marx and Althusser, Zizek asserts that “ideology does not grow out of ‘life itself’, it comes into existence only in so far as society is regulated by the state” (19). Further, he argues that “there is no ideology that does not assert itself by means of delimiting itself from another ‘mere ideology’” (19). Next we turn to the spectral via F.W.J. Schelling who in Clara put forth the notions of a “spiritual element of corporeality” and a “corporeal element of spirituality” (20). He provides a number of examples of this basic split; Marx’s discerning that while “the ‘official’ ideology of our society is Christian spirituality” that its “actual foundation” and “fetishistic supplement” is “idolatry of the Golden Calf, money”, and; commodity fetishism and the ISA, the former “involves the uncanny ‘spiritualization’ of the commodity body, whereas the ISA materialize the spiritual, substanceless big Other of ideology” (20). As convincing as this Schellingian borrowing is in these instances, we might still wonder why there must be a spectre at all? Zizek’s answer first cites Lacan and elaborates upon the notion of the symbolic order and the distinction between “reality” (as a product of the symbolic) and the real (as that remainder which always eludes symbolic capture). The real then, as that which escapes “reality” as such “returns in the guise of spectral apparitions” (21). These spectres cover over  “the hole of the real”, that is, the gaps or fissures in the symbolic - Zizek does not say this, though it is all but explicit here - the spectre here is equivalent to the fantasy in the subject’s psyche, serving to deny to incompleteness of the symbolic. These spectres are in his view the “pre-ideological ‘kernel’ of ideology” which hides the “‘primordially repressed’, the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’ reality itself is founded” (21). Zizek then grounds this discussion with the example of the class struggle, of which he says “there is no class struggle ‘in reality’: ‘class struggle’ designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole” (21). As such, class struggle is “an effect that exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence” (22). Having elaborated this notion of class struggle as spectral and further asserting its inherently antagonistic character (here Zizek follows the lead of Laclau and Mouffe who speak of antagonism as constitutive of society as such) Zizek turns to a few commonly posed polarities, such as masculine versus feminine discourse to show that such polar pairs imply a third place of enunciation which would situate the two sexed discourses on a rhetorical terrain of sorts (this has the effect of denying the inherent antagonism inhering in sexual difference). His answer is quite different, rather than masculine discourse and feminine discourse Zizek argues that “there is one discourse split from within by the sexual antagonism (...) on which the battle for hegemony takes place” (23). Zizek then returns again to what I have called the false consciousness problem, what he phrases as an “epistemologically untenable ‘God’s view’” (25) which turns some away from the concept of ideology. His rejoinder to this criticism is that “the extra-ideological point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as ‘ideological’ - is not ‘reality’ but the ‘repressed’ real of antagonism” (25). It is not hard to imagine a reader having some doubts at this point. That is, if one is not convinced that there is a distinction between “reality” and the “real” as a consequence of the symbolic order being inherently “not all” then this line of thought will not compel belief. Likewise, even if one finds those issues convincing one might still balk at being “authorized” by that which is “repressed” as by definition, we have no conscious access to the “repressed”.  Would this latter instance not verge on an issue of faith? Zizek provides the famous example, from Levi-Strauss, of the mapping of the South American village from Structural Anthropology. Briefly, the villagers are asked to make a map of their village, but there are two subgroups in the village and each draws a substantially different map, one group draws the map as of a unified circle of houses and the other group’s map shows them two groupings “separated by an invisible frontier” (26). The real here is in the difference between the two maps and indexes an antagonism between the two groups. We can easily extend this example to the American context in which a white upper middle class subject may feel that he is free and that his society is a free society, while a poor minority is all too able to discern the bounds of her own “freedom” and those parts of society from which she is effectively barred. Or again to the familiar “All men are created equal” which a man might find unobjectionable, expansive and inclusive of all, while a woman has immediate doubts. That the mappings of different subject, groups, or societies will always have these differences is an index of the real antagonisms present in each. I find these arguments compelling and easily extendable.

To my mind, Zizek rebuts the false consciousness and expansion problems often raised against the concept of ideology, he provides a (perhaps precarious) model for referencing the extra-ideological (his “antinomy of critico-ideological reason”) as well as grounds for understanding certain beliefs and doctrines as non-ideological by virtue of their not being linked to the non-transparent reflection of power-relations. I would like to see greater elaboration on the issue of exactly how it is that that which is or is not ideology is or is not linked to relations of power, but there is always more to be worked out.