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".
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| A younger Slavoj, given that this contributions date to '91 |
This is also the first chapter of Žižek’s book The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Žižek opens by referring to Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom and asks whether this is mere wit or whether it has theoretical merit. His answer is that there is a “fundamental homology” between Marx’s and Freud’s methods, specifically Marx’s analysis of the commodity and Freud’s of the dream. “In both cases the point is avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content‘ supposedly hidden behind the form (...) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself” (296). Žižek then looks at a common reproach made to Freud as it illustrates the mistake at issue here if one treats the latent content as the answer or secret of the manifest content. He cites Freud on this point to insist that “there is nothing ‘unconscious’ in the ‘latent dream-thought’” (297). What is at issue in the dream is not this hidden content, the dreamwork itself “the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, the figuration of the contents of words or syllables” which combine to produce the form of the dream itself (297). This is not to say that the latent content is not important to analyze, between this latent content and “another desire which is already repressed” there has been effected a “short circuit” connecting it to a “desire which has nothing to do” with the the latent content (297-8). The issue here, psychoanalytically speaking, is that that which is primally repressed cannot be “reduced to a ‘normal train of thought’” (298). As such the “structure [of the dream] is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated” by the dream’s form (298). He remarks that the form of unconscious desire in the dream is not in some sense “deeper”, and that it is rather more “‘on the surface’, consisting entirely of the signifier’s mechanisms” (298). Žižek shows how Freud “preceeds here in two stages”, 1st he asserts that dreams are meaningful phenomenon and not just random or meaningless, 2nd cautions analysts not to become ensnared by the latent contents and to focus on the unconscious desire as expressed in the way the dreamwork forms the dream itself (299). He then shows the same two stage approach in Marx. 1st, we must assert that the commodity form has meaning, that its value is not simply a product of chance or “the accidental interplay of supply and demand” (299), and 2nd, we must not simply become fascinated by the latent aspect of the commodity, that it is an expression of congealed labor, and instead we must attend the question of “why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value” (Marx qtd 300). Žižek’s next section title is “Te Unconscious of the Commodity Form” in which he argues that the fascination with Marx’s thoughts about commodity fetishism is that it allows us “to generate all other forms of the ‘fetishistic inversion’” (301). Turning then to the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel he observes that “in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject” (301). The claim here, both Žižek’s and Sohn-Rethel’s, is that the “commodity-form articulates in advance the anatomy (...) of the Kantian transcendental subject (...) the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a priori frame of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge” (301). Per the argument of Sohn-Rethel, “[b]efore thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market” (301). The reasoning here is that “[b]efore thought could arrive at the idea of a purely quantitative determination, a sine qua non of the modern science of nature, pure quantity was already at work in (...) that commodity which renders possible the commensurability of the value of all other commodities” irrespective of their material differences, i.e., money (302). Žižek calls this a “scandal” as it reveals how the Kantian categories and transcendental subject are dependent in their “formal genesis” upon a “‘pathological’ process” and he notes that this scandal “corresponds perfectly” to that of the unconscious for a “transcendental philosophical perspective” (302). Sohn-Rethel is crucial here for Žižek as he formulates the idea of the “real abstraction” - “the act of abstraction at work in the very effective process of the exchange of commodities” (302). Žižek’s thesis from this is that “the ‘real abstraction’ is the unconscious of the transcendental subject, the support of objective-universal scientific knowledge” (302). As this concept is crucial to what follows, I will quote at length;
On the one hand, the ‘real abstraction’ is of course not ‘real’ in the sense of the real, effective properties of commodities as material objects: the object-commodity does not contain ‘value’ in the same way as it possesses a set of particular properties determining its ‘use value’ (its form, colour, taste, and so on). As Sohn-Rethel pointed out, its nature is that of a postulate implied by the effective act of exchange - in other words, that of a certain ‘as if’ [als ob]: during the act of exchange, individuals proceed as if the commodity is not submitted to physical, material exchanges; as if it is excluded from the natural cycle of generation and corruption; although on the level of their ‘consciousness’ they ‘know very well’ that this is not the case. (302)
Žižek gives as an example of this, the case of money itself. Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if the consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material” or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though he insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that it’s very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303). Returning then to the question of the ‘real abstraction’ Žižek argues that it “has nothing to do with the level of ‘reality’, of effective properties” and that, as such “it would be wrong to conceive of it as a ‘thought-abstraction’” (303). Instead the ‘real abstraction’ is “external, decentered” as Sohn-Rethel writes “‘[t]he exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought’” (303). Žižek immediately notices the parallel to the unconscious, “the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought” (303). This leads Žižek, as a good Lacanian, to point out that this “form of thought external to thought itself (..) whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance” is none other than “the symbolic order (...) which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of ‘external’ factual reality and ‘internal’ subjective experience” (304). This realization is situated in the blindspot of philosophy and in Žižek’s words “philosophy as such is defined by its blindness to this place” (304). But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of realty which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “‘Ideological‘ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305).
Žižek argues that what Marx does “consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form” and this, precisely, would be the “Marxian procedure” of ideology critique (306). Žižek gives two examples crucial to market ideology; freedom and equality. Each of these is “‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks it unity” (306). For freedom we have the worker’s freedom to sell himself and thus become unfree, and for equality (or equivalent exchange) it is again the worker, who by virtue of having become a commodity “the use of which - labour itself - produces a certain surplus value” which is “appropriated by the capitalist” (307). In both cases the purported universality of the terms in question produces an excess which negates the the term “in other words, it brings about a symptom” (307).
Returning to Lacan’s claim about Marx’s invention in its specifics, Žižek tells us that for Lacan, it emerges in Marx’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and is bound up with Marx’s thoughts about commodity fetishism. Where in the feudal period there was a fetishizing of the relations between men (Kings, etc) in the capitalist period we reach the fetishization of things (commodities). Thus with regard to a subjects’ relation to their king, “they think they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king” thus failing to grasp that he is the king because of their submission him as such (309). This form of fetishism and that of commodity fetishism are “incompatible” (310). But with once the capitalist model holds sway “the relations of domination and servitude are repressed” so that social subjects can maintain their self-conception as free, autonomous agents, but the “repressed truth - that of the persistence of domination and servitude - emerges in a symptom,” namely the fetishism of commodities (310).
Žižek next tackles the idea that because, in our contemporary society, there appears to be a wide-spread cynicism, whereby, in Sloterdijk’s rephrasing of Marx, “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (312). Sloterdijk’s concept of cynical reason is paraphrased by Žižek as a scenario in which reason is “no longer naive, but (...) 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” (312). “It is clear” Žižek writes, “that confronted with cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works” (313). But rather than consigning our age to the post-ideological, Žižek introduces “the distinction between symptom and fantasy” as a means of demonstrating that, even under the generalized sway of cynical reason, that “the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself” remains “untouched” (313-4).
To elucidate the level of fantasy at work here, Žižek begins with the famous line from Marx “they do not know it, but they are doing it” and asks whether “the place of ideological illusion [is] in the ‘knowing’ or in the ‘doing’” (314). He says that is seems to most that it is in the knowing, and thus “a matter of a discordance between what people are effectively doing and what they think they are doing” (314). This has been the dominant answer to the question, if indeed it had been explicitly posed before Žižek does so. But Žižek argues that it cannot be in the knowing and uses the example of money once again. We know that the currency in our hand is simply paper, but our actions, how we effectively behave with this small stack of paper makes clear that this knowing has little bearing on our doings in the world. So while there may be distortions and falsehoods involved in our knowing, that the full import of Marx’s statement can only be appreciated if we focus on the doing. Because of how we actually behave in our everyday lives with regard to money and other commodities, we act as if money were “the immediate embodiment of wealth as such” (314). As such, we “are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (314-5). We fail to see that what we understand as reality itself, is a misrecognition “guided by (...) fetishistic illusion” (315). To spell this out a bit more fully Žižek raises the notions of universal and particular in relationship to the commodity say that “when we are victims of commodity fetishism it appears as if the concrete content of a commodity (its use value) is an expression of its abstract universality (its exchange value)” leading us to treat the “abstract Universal, the Value as a real Substance” (315). That is to say, in our knowing, we see particular commodities as embodying a particular value (the universal in the particular), but in our doing we act as if commodities are “just so many embodiments of universal Value” (315). Understood in this light “the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what people are doing” (316). The fetishistic inversion proper to the commodity structures what we take as reality itself. This factor, this unconscious illusion, is what Žižek calls “ideological fantasy” (316). The reason that cynicism or ‘enlightened false consciousness’ do not dispel ideology, is that cynicism does not bear upon the level of doing but only on that of knowing. Contrary to Althusser and his followers, who disputed commodity fetishism as being based on an “unfounded opposition between persons (human subjects) and things,” Žižek argues that the “point of Marx’s analysis is that things (commodities) believe in the place of subjects” (317). He understands this as strictly in accord with Lacan’s position, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure[s] of people” (317). Belief here is not an internal, private or intimate mental state or intellectual conviction, rather it “is always materialized in our effective social reality: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality” (317). Social reality then, “is supported by a certain as if” (318). Žižek gives a lengthy list of as if scenarios, of which I will only give one; we all know quite well that bureaucracies are not omnipotent, but facing them “we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy” (318). That examples of this same dynamic come so readily to mind seems to me to be telling. All of this leads quite naturally to Pascal and a discussion of the law and belief. Reading Pascal closely Žižek finds something quite like Lacan’s notion of the unconscious as automaton. Here is Pascal; “[p]roofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (318). This raises the question of obedience to the law and Žižek, building from Pascal and Lacan argues that “real obedience, then, is an ‘external’ one: obedience out of conviction is not real obedience because it is already ‘mediated’ through our subjectivity - that is, we are not obeying the authority but simply following our judgement” (318). From Kierkegaard, Žižek draws the idea that “the crucial religious experience” is to believe in advance of justification, and that if we do that “we find reasons attesting our beliefs because we already believe” (319 my italics). Next, mapping Kierkegaard onto Pascal, Žižek locates the essential character of the law in its “incomprehensible” or “irrational” aspects, those which we believe (through our effective doings in the world) with only the hypothesis that, perhaps, in time, we will have reasons to justify (319). This scenario then looks to Žižek much like the superego with its incessant irrational commands. In his view the law is founded upon the “non-integrated” aspect which “must be repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary experience of the ‘meaning’ of the Law, of its foundation in Justice, Truth” etc (319) when in fact Law is not “true”, only “necessary” (320). Žižek invokes the psychoanalytic notion of transference to explain how social subjects, impute to the law, the notion that somehow, inscrutably, behind the obviously fissured surface of it, that there is meaning and truth (320). He glosses Pascal once again, giving the earlier thinker’s ‘position’ as regards ideology as “leave rational argumentation and submit yourself simply to ideological ritual, stupefy yourself by repeating the meaningless gestures, act as if you already believe, and the belief will come by itself” (320). Here we must read that gloss as containing two sorts of belief, the belief embodied in doing and the resultant belief that takes root in knowing. What distinguishes this from “insipid behaviourist wisdom” in Žižek’s view is that the crucial aspect is the “belief before belief” and the that “the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious” (321).
The next section’s title is “Kafka, Critic of Althusser” and in it Žižek builds upon the discussion thus far to offer a criticism of Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Against Althusser who writes of “the process of ideological interpellation through which the symbolic machine of ideology is ‘internalized’ into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth”, Žižek sticks closer to Pascal from whom we learn that “this ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds” and “there is always a residue (...) of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it” (321-2). What Kafka’s work presents and what Althusser fails to see is that the interpellation of the Other is “without identification/subjectification” because the subject (K) does not know what it is that the Law demands of him or what he is guilty of. Schematizing this through the Lacanian algebra, Žižek argues that “before being caught in the identification (...) the subject ($) is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire in the midst of it (a)” which gives us Lacan’s matheme of fantasy $<>a (322). Noting that Lacan argues that “in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality” (322), Žižek argues that our lived social reality “is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire” and that it is “exactly the same with ideology” (323). “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” (323). Thus, in accordance with the clinical procedure, the “only way to break the power of our ideological [fantasy]” would be to “confront the Real of our desire” which that fantasy serves to mask (325). Ideology then, for Žižek is not what it was for most Marxist thinkers. It is not partial or false knowledge that hides what is really happening in the social totality, rather “ideology (...) designates totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility” (327).
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