Slavoj Žižek, from 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". 

“How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” - Slavoj Žižek

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”, 1^st he asserts that dreams are meaningful phenomenon and not just random or meaningless, 2^nd 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. 1^st, 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 2^nd, 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).    

Frederic Jameson, from 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". 

“Postmodernism and the Market” - Frederic Jameson

This article is quite dense with interesting insights, too dense perhaps to adequately cover all that it does. Jameson by looking at a critique of Proudhon by Marx in the Grundrisse. Proudhon or his followers had advocated abolishing money. Marx found this suggestion misguided because it failed to recognize that the substitute suggested “work-time coupon” would then “simply turn back into money itself” (278). That is, they had failed to grasp that “the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper” would be left untouched, and thus would be expressed and objectified in whatever took the place of money (278). Jameson’s next claim might be somewhat startling for some. Apropos the above, he claims “[s]o also with the attempt to separate ideology and reality” (278). That is, if we think of the ideology of the market, the ideology of, rather than the market per se, we err if we imagine that this ideology is merely “some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment” which could simply set aside in order to focus on the market without distraction (278). This ideology of the market is “generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary after-image” and so, to think clearly about the “market” at all, we must think these two aspects together “in their identity as well as in their difference” (278). Of these two dimensions he remarks that we must think of them as being “semi-autonomous” so long as we understand that term to signify that “they are not really autonomous or independent from each other, but they are not really at one with each other, either” (279). In Jameson’s reading “ideology was always meant to respect and to rehearse and flex the paradox of the mere semi-autonomy of the ideological concept” (279). What we cannot do, if we wish to think ideology is a meaningful fashion is to let the concept slide into putative autonomy and think it as simply epiphenomenal to “reality” (279). Returning to the ideology of the market, Jameson notes that both Marx and Milton Friedman both recognize that the rhetoric of market ideology stresses freedom and equality as values expressed therein, and that these values are “real and objective” and generated by the market system, but that in practice both thinkers (and Jameson) recognize that what results is unfreedom and inequality (279). Jameson likens the Proudhonists to Habermasians in that both assume that “freedom and equality - are properties of real societies” and that we all recognize their lack in the market system requires that we restore to “reality” (the reality of the market system we function within) the ideals that it espouses (280). What such a perspective fails to recognize is that these values, freedom and equality, are “profoundly imaginary in a real and positive sense” by which he means they exist as an image whose “very unreality and unrealizability being what is real about it” (280). The system depends upon these values as images of its promise, but precludes their being actually embodied. As such, Jameson argues that the only way to realize them would be through the dissolution of the market system itself (280).  To think ideology as Jameson suggests, to “restore to ‘ideology’ this complex way of dealing with its roots in its own social reality would mean reinventing the dialectic, something that every generation fails to do in its own way” (280). He notes that the current generation has not even attempted such a thing and that the last attempt was made by Althusser (280-1). 

Jameson also considers “so-called discourse theory” (281) which he sees as having attempted to step into the place of ideology critique, but while it allows its practitioners to “practice ideological analysis without calling it that” it functions to autonomize “the dimension of the /concept/” and call this “discourse” (282). Jameson sees this move as roughly the same error made by the Proudhonists. 

Returning again to market ideology, Jameson offers the following thesis: “the rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and central component of (...) [the] struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse” (281). Noting that many on the left now say that “no society can function efficiently without the market” and who no longer have faith in the nationalization of the means of production, poses the situation of the contemporary postmodern left as espousing a socialism that “really has nothing to do with socialism itself any longer” (281). As such what must be analyzed and overturned is the contention that “[t]he market is in human nature” (281). This struggle he feels to be “the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time” (281). Politics of a certain sort cannot be excluded from ideological critique “not merely because ‘values’ as such have deeper class and unconscious sources than those of the conscious mind but also because theory is itself a kind of form determined by social content” (282). Neither Marxism nor socialism are in Jameson’s view political per se, both “[presuppose] the end of a certain political thinking” (283). He notes a similarity at this level between Marxism and Neoliberalism in that both think that “political philosophy is worthless” and are focused on the economy, as such they have “much in common (...) in fact virtually everything - save the essentials!” (283). Where Marxists would be concerned with people attempting to create a system that achieves certain social ends, the Neoliberal versions of politics “means simply the care and feeding of the economic apparatus” (283). He interrogates the notion of the “free market” observing that, there is no such market actually existing anywhere, and that even in the restricted realm of consumer choice, where we are told again and again that we are free, that we can hardly be said to choose what we consumer, rather we can choose amongst what is offered (283). Freedom of choice here being reduced to the option of Coke or Pepsi. Jameson is interested in how the rhetoric of market ideology has changed “from that of the conceptuality of production to that of distribution and consumption” even if in its material practices it “rarely seems in fact to do” (284). He then brings up the “crucial matter of property” and the many difficulties that conservatives have had with “‘the justification of original property titles’” (284) and whose position on this matter is a mere “synchronic framing” which actively “excludes the dimension of history and systemic historical change” (284). 

Turning again to the question of the market and human nature, Jameson considers the work of Gary Becker in his book An Economic Approach to Human Behavior, where Becker offers a market analysis of marriage and an analysis of the household on the model of the firm. Jameson is willing to accept this analysis and sees it as in accord with Maxr’s view on temporality, which holds that “all value is a matter of time” (285). Jameson argues that this analysis is consonant with a great deal of contemporary theory in that it expands the range of behaviors considered to be “rational” (285). He goes on to argue that in our society that what counts as “irrational” has shrunk nearly to nothing, such that we now understand even those behaviors that we do not condone, such as torture or the destabilizing of other nations, etc (286). Given this shrink of the irrational though he wonders whether with such an “expanded concept of Reason” whether Reason can any longer have a “normative value” (286). Thinking then of Becker and the goal of rationalizing “human behavior” using a market analysis Jameson suggests that we have arrived at the postmodern, “a world peculiarly without transcendence and without perspective” though he notes that Becker’s thinking on these issues falls short of that point, in that it remains focused on production rather than consumption (286). But he claims that the “Becker model is postmodern ion its structure as a transcoding: two separate explanatory systems are combined here by way of the assertion of a fundamental identity (...): human behavior (...) on the one hand, the firm or enterprise, on the other” (287). Jameson faults Becker for assuming that because the metaphor produces results, that we are thereby entitled to revert to the literal level, where, presumably one would then reason about household matters or marriage bonds economically with the metaphorical somehow dropping away (287). In such ways of thinking “we have a welcome reduction of the old-fashioned subject (or individual, or ego), who is now little more than a point of consciousness directed on the stockpile of materials available in the outside world” and making decisions which are deemed to be rational “in the new enlarged  sense of what any other human being could understand” (287-8). 

Again bring this back to the ideology of the market, Jameson argues that “the market was indeed always political” and that “‘market ideology’, has less to do with consumption than it has to do with government intervention” (288). He locates the effectivity of the notion of the market “in its ‘totalizing’ structure (...) its capacity to afford a model of a social totality” (289). “Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies (‘socialism is impossible’) and that we are fortunate in possessing an impersonal mechanism - the market - which can substitute” (290). The market thus becomes like God, something in which we are enjoined to simply trust to do as it will. He then discusses what strikes him as the most unlikely of developments, that what most social agents recognize about the market system - its ruthlessness, dreariness and “Dickensian flavor” (291) should have been successfully given a make-over such that it has “proved to be sexy” (292). He attributes this to the effective merger of the market system with the media such that “two system of codes are identified in such a way as to allow the libidinal energies of one to suffuse the other, without (...) producing a synthesis” (292). This process and what he calls the “the consumption of the very process of consumption itself” (as when audiences are riveted by  shows like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”) “allows a bridge to be made to fantasy-images of the ‘market in general’ or ‘the market as a unified process’” (293). In this situation “the media, [by] which the market was itself fantasized, now return into the market and, by becoming a part of it, seal and certify the formerly metaphorical or analogical identification [of the market ideology] as a ‘literal’ reality” (294). But given what both leftists (Marx) and conservatives (Friedman) recognize that the freedom and equality of the market is unrealizable as such within its domain “the ‘market’ itself turns out finally to be as Utopian as socialism has recently been held to be” (295). 

Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, from 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". 

“Doxa and Common Life: An Interview” - Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton

This interview comes at a time when Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power and Eagleton’s Ideology were both recently published, and the talk unfolds pertaining to themes of these two books. Eagleton glosses the theme of Bourdieu’s book as being concerned with “the social conditions of the production of utterances” holding to a view of language as “an instrument of power and action [more] than of communication” (265). Having said this he raises Bourdieu’s terms “symbolic power,” “symbolic violence” and “linguistic capital” and other to ask “how these processes relate to the concept of ideology” (265). Bourdieu congratulates him on the accuracy of his gloss and then says that he tries not to use the word ideology as such, suggesting that to say, of another’s position, that it is ideological is a form of what he calls symbolic violence (266). He says that his terminology is meant to be more effective and precise and allow him to avoid the imprecision of the term ‘ideology’ (266). He also remarks that for his, the concept “does not work any more” (266). Eagleton then acknowledges all the vagueness and imprecision that the concept have been subject to and lists what he thinks of as the dominant arguments against it; the theory of representation that in some cases it is founded upon; what I have called earlier the ‘false consciousness problem’; the issue of “enlightened false consciousness” - basically that people know quite well what the are doing and are simply cynically accepting of it, and; the argument that the system runs without the need of consciousness to reproduce it (266-7). Eagleton argues that these are not enough to dispel the concept’s pertinence as he thinks there is something meaningfully brought to light by the notion of false consciousness (267). He then asks Bourdieu where that notion might fit, if it does, into his thought. Bourdieu agrees with all the criticisms that Eagleton enumerated and adds that the term was used by many, though he singles out Althusser, in an “aristocratic” fashion - essentially to mark off the “the true knowledge” from everything else which would be “false consciousness” (267). Bourdieu expands upon the notion of doxa, and how it is, in his view, that it functions outside of our conscious awareness (267-8). He then goes on to claim that consciousness has been too privileged and that the “social word doesn’t work in terms of consciousness; it works in terms of practices, mechanisms, and so forth” (268). He then says that we must move further away from Cartesian thinking (which Marxism is an instance of in his view) and “towards a different philosophy in which agents are not aiming consciously towards things, or mistakenly guided by false representation” (268). [This is an edited transcription, so presumably this is what Bourdieu meant to say here. But I cannot but wonder, in what sort of (social, political) philosophy would we find agents that are not aiming consciously toward ends of some sort?] Eagleton responds, asking further questions about doxa. He is concerned that by the claim that doxa are naturalized, and that doxa are legitimated by virtue of people’s practices, but that these claims make no room for variance in people’s responses and thus for “dissent, criticism and opposition” (268). Bourdieu says that our capacity for resistance has be “overestimated” and that people, even those living in appalling conditions “accept much more than we would have believed” (268). That they do seems to provide Bourdieu with evidence in favor of his concept of doxa. He then gives a fascinating example from his researches in France regarding the beliefs of people about success in life. His finding is that the further one goes down the social hierarchy, the more likely people are to believe that success is entailed by “natural talents or gifts” - and thus, the poorest of the poor would be the most likely to assume that this state was, in this sense, their fault for being “stupid” (269). He describes this structure of belief as a “formidable mechanism” which is “much bigger and more powerful than television or propaganda” (269). He does believe that dissent exists, but that it is “not where we look for it” (269). Eagleton, catching the drift of Bourdieu’s thought he, brings up Bourdieu’s term for such dissent, heterodoxy, described as “an oppositional kind of language” (269). Returning to the notion of doxa, Eagleton asks “can people believe and not believe, or believe at different levels?” (269). Bourdieu’s answer is no. He argues that the questions presupposes a “philosophy of man” and thus privileges consciousness but that “ideological effects” are mostly “transmitted through the body” (269). He argues that because of this, change is very difficult. He also refers to “scholastic bias” which for him means the belief that “problems can be solved only through consciousness” as one of our biggest weaknesses (270). Bourdieu says that in a situation of “symbolic domination, resistance is more difficult, since it is something you absorb like air” (270). Eagleton then responds to the issues about the overvaluation of consciousness and points out that there are a variety of Marxists who agree, he then points to Althusser who “was trying to shift the concept of ideology on to a much less conscious, and much more practical, institutional place” which to him [I concur] sounds not unlike Bourdieu’s position (270). Eagleton then raises the question I brought up at the end of my annotation of Eagleton where he mentions Bourdieu, that of be extending the notions of capital and economy into realms which are not in and of themselves economic, that his theory risks being one in which the zero degree of all social action is war (271). Bourdieu agrees that this is a “problem” but say that he “tend[s] to think that the structure of most of the fields, most of the social games, is such that competition - a struggle for domination - is quasi-inevitable” (271). This leads him to discussion communication a bit, and he claims that many linguistic practices “cannot be understood in terms of communication” (271). After a positive reference to J.L. Austin he says that Austin’s account, as good as it is, does not attend to “the social conditions of possibility he describes”, these being precisely what Bourdieu is interested in. Both speak then about coming from blue-collar backgrounds and being in some ways out of step with the academic positions that they have attained, and Bourdieu says that he tries to comprehend both what he has lost and what he has gained by developing an “academic mind” (272). The floor is opened to questions at this point, some of which are interesting but do not produce answers that advance what has already been said greatly until near the end, when one audience member asks about “economic determinants” and Bourdieu answers but never quite satisfies the questioner. Eagleton steps in to try and rephrase the question, which then appears like this “[y]ou are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture” (276). Bourdieu’s answer to this is “[m]aybe you are right” and says that because this area of thought is so prone to economism that he tends to “insist upon the other aspects (...) the less probably, less visible” (276). [Here I am moved to applaud Bourdieu’s honesty, but wonder is this tendency is truly justified simply from his dislike for economism? Also, does his theory do much more than restage economism in other fields of cultural life?]

Michèle Barrett, from 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". 

“Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe” -  Michèle Barrett

Barrett

Perhaps the primary target of Barrett’s in this text is the notion, which she seems to see as univocal and pervasive, that all ideologies are class ideologies. She then narrates the evolution of the idea of hegemony in Gramsci and its later reformulations in the work of Laclau and Mouffe. She acknowledges that Gramsci’s thoughts about ideology and hegemony are crucially important to the left, but that “his brilliant insights often stand alone or in some tension with each other” specifically as regards the question of the relations between ideology and hegemony. Nonetheless, she sees Gramsci, or at least the Gramsci of Laclau and Mouffe as situated “at the crucial breaking point of Marxism as a viable political theory” (235). She praises Gramsci’s attention to “psychological validity” in his consideration of ideology, as well as the fact that he is not an economic determinist (236). She also perseverates on the question of whether many of Gramsci’s reflections on “cultural and intellectual phenomena” doubting whether they ought to be understood as falling under the “rubric of ideology” at all (237-8). She discusses Gramsci notion of “contradictory consciousness” - that our intellectual or philosophical views may not cohere with our actual behaviors (238). She then introduces hegemony, describing it as “the organizing focus of Gramsci’s thought on politics and ideology” and that it should best be understood as “the organization of consent” (238). She tells us that “Gramsci emphasized the ‘lower’ - less systematic - levels of consciousness” and that he attended specifically to  “the ways in which ‘popular’ knowledge and culture developed in such a way as to secure the participation of the masses in the project of the ruling bloc” (238). She mentions the dispute as to whether Gramsci thought hegemony pertained only to consent or if it also covers coercion of consent (238). She then narrates the role of “organic intellectuals” in Gramsci which is at this point well known (239). She deems that Gramsci’s thinking about ideology is as a sort of social cement and calls his theory of ideology “non-deterministic” (239-40). By that she means that “it [the consent of the governed] is not a matter of economic interests alone,” but instead has to be thought in terms of hegemony which would add “political, cultural and social authority” into the mix (240). This brings her to her primary bone of contention, “whether or not ideologies should be described as ‘class belonging’” (240). “It is precisely this that has now been been problematized at a very fundamental level” (240). 

Barrett then turns to Laclau’s 1977 book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, though in general her position on it is as having one foot in the past and one in the future. This book is conserved to criticize reductionist tendencies in Marxism, specifically regarding the question of whether all ideologies must be seen as class-based (241). But she also finds that Laclau covertly reinserts class as the hidden motivator (242). She discusses Stuart Hall’s use of the concept of hegemony to look at Thatcherism,and some of the responses to this criticism, though this accounting does not seem to effect the general direction of her text. 

Laclau (l) and Mouffe (r)

She then turns to the properly post-Marxist work of Laclau and Mouffe, defending them against the criticisms of Marxists (in somewhat blanket fashion) and providing an overview of what she finds valuable in their work. She read Laclau and Mouffe as having effected a “paradigm shift” in in political theory by virtue of having adopted a number of post-structuralist positions such as the end of “universal discourses” (244-5). She writes that Laclau and Mouffe “now believe that theories such as Marxism are not viable on general grounds” (245). Why is that? In her telling (and this seems generally accurate), “Marxism is founded on a political imaginary” which “rests on the assumption that the interests of social classes are pre-given” (246). In a remarkably condensed restatement of Laclau and Mouffe’s position, Barrett writes that hey deny; 1) “the the economy if self-regulated and subject to endogenous laws”; 2) that “social agents are constituted” as class subjects; 3) “that class position is necessarily linked to ‘interests’” (247). Of the positive features of their position she cites only two, that “society is impossible” and their new “theorization of agency in radical democratic politics” (247). [This last bit is somewhat surprising, as it seems to me that what have deviled Laclau and Mouffe and since then Laclau alone is precisely the degree to which is account of agency fails to be theoretically satisfying. In Laclau’s case, I have written about this at some length elsewhere, but to be grossly reductive here, his account relies on a sort of ‘magic moment’ when social subject’s affects are are said to be engaged, yet Laclau’s account of this, using resources from Lacanian psychoanalysis, is psychoanalytically incoherent.] The thesis that society is impossible is derived, in Barrett’s account, from Derrida (though it obviously echoes the Lacanian formula “the big Other does not exist”) and says that “[t]he incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-defined totality” (Laclau and Mouffe qtd 247). This leads then to an explication of their notion of discourse, which Barrett says is a “materialist one that enables them to rethink the analysis of social and historical phenomena in a different framework” (248). Given the preceding, the social real is in a sense radical open and not amenable to closure, but hegemonic discourse attempt to suture these gaps in the social through the partial fixation of certain terms, called “nodal points” which operate along the lines of Lacan’s quilting points (249-50). The pay-off of all of this from Barrett’s perspective is that now “new social movements” organized around issues of identity politics in the main, are not, not so much on equal footing with class, but have replaced class as the relevant theoretical terms of interest (250-1). In the middle of this discussion she makes a remark about Laclau and Mouffe’s thought having been “taken up so extensively in literary critical theory” and how she hasn’t the time to expand upon why that might be the case (251). [This point struck me as inaccurate, or at least I do not know the scale of reference which would incline me to see this as the case. I did a search in the MLA database and restricted it to works published since 1985 (Barrett’s book was published in 1991) and compared the number of articles found referencing her two favorite theorists, either alone or together and contrasted that with those referencing Althusser or the ‘ideological state apparatus’ and my findings do not appear to support her contention.] In Barrett’s account, and certainly in Laclau and Mouffe either together or separately, the notion of democracy has in a sense replaced socialism or communism, both of which are seen in retrospect to have emerged from the “democratic revolution” (253-4). Lest her account be read as uncritical of Laclau and Mouffe, I should mention that she does critique it at a few points. Here she says that she cannot imagine how their account of the “‘anti-natural’ element of the democratic imaginary” can avoid collapsing back into “humanism and essentialism” (254). She is also troubled by the ambiguity of the term “equivalence” in their work, uncertain whether it denotes “equality” or perhaps simply “proportional weight” as in the use of the term in chemistry and how either of these is meant to work given their insistence on “difference” (254). She also faults the pair for retaining an interest in commodity fetishism, seeing this as an avatar of economic determinism (257). She feels that Laclau and Mouffe are in a sense, still a slave to Marxist thought, which in her view they have effectively already transcended, specifically their continued use of the term “capitalism” (257). So what is left, if anything, of ideology in Laclau and Mouffe? As Barrett tells it “both the category of ideology and that of misrecognition can be retained, but by inverting their traditional content,” that is to say, that ideology would not be a misrecognition in the sense of illusion, but instead “it would consist of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity” (259-60). [This seems a bit odd, given that so many of the thinkers in the book, and outside of it, have already jettisoned the notion of ideology as illusion, though Barrett seems unaware of this.] Barrett also faults Laclau for suggesting that it would be productive for “post-Marxism and psychoanalysis” to be brought closer together on the grounds that, in her words “90 percent of psychoanalysis is burdened with a leaden weight of essentialism and it is, in fact, only the Lacanian reworking of the theory that has stripped it of these positivities” and thus she concludes he ought to have said “post-psychoanalysis” instead (262). [I know that Lacan would have refused the term post-psychoanalysis and I strongly suspect that Lacanian analysts would adopt it either. As to her sense of percentages, she seems unaware that roughly half the practicing analysts in the world are Lacanians of one sort of another, but whatever - her point is not a critical one so much as an ungrounded swipe, as the issue of essentialism is by no means absent in the work of contemporary Kleinians, followers of Winnicot, etc].

Richard Rorty, from 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". 

“Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” -  Richard Rorty

Think of me as an establishment philosopher.

This text by Rorty is relatively brief though it makes a fair number of points. Rorty argues that philosophy - specifically deconstruction and pragmatism - are not tools of social change and never will be. He discusses intellectuals and how they wish to make a difference and contribute to positive social changes and that how they have done this is to engage in ideology critique. But he thinks that demystifying critiques of ideology do no good, and are “at best, a mopping-up, rather than path-breaking” (232). He claims that pragmatism, like deconstruction, maintains that “everything is a social construct, and that there is no point in trying to distinguish between the ‘natural’ and the ‘merely cultural’” (229). [Here I have to wonder what has happened to “pragmatism” as I do not see C.S. Peirce as in any way on board with a totally social constructivist viewpoint and in any reasonable account of pragmatism, he remains crucial.] As such, if anyone wishes to help to change the social realm that they ought to forward “an alternate practice, rather than criticizing the current one” (227). He talks about why it was, in his view, easier for Marx and Engels to maintain an immanent critique - the answer being that they had a revolutionary program with which to back it up (228). But those times are gone, he thinks, and write that the “difference between their situation and ours is principally that no one now wants the revolution they had in mind; no longer does anyone want to nationalize the means of production or to abolish private property” (228) [Here we might pause for a moment to ask, is this true?  It seems to me that many have serious problems with intellectual property and the way in which corporations can act as legal “persons” and own virtually anything. Many still offer criticism as of inheritance. Private property may not need to be abolished in all forms, but a significant shift in how it is understood seems to be quite urgently needed and desired by many. As to nationalizing the means of production, again, while few probably want all industry nationalized, there is a significant number of people who would favor nationalized health care and well as many other basic social services - I know as I am one of them and have met others. These claims strike me as too monovalent (bordering on smug), even if he is right that very few (if not, “no one”) want a revolution along the lines of the October revolution, but that is not the whole story.] Rorty sees contemporary intellectuals, having lost a desire for revolution and any connection to a revolutionary movement or party platform as casting about for a cause and finding feminism as the best option. And yet, in his view, feminism is not a good stand in for communism and is essentially reformist and not revolutionary (228). Reformist, even if many feminists suspect that reform will never actually fully achieve its aims. But because of the move toward feminism in the mode of ideology critique, intellectuals focus on “revolutions in consciousness” but these revolutions are simply not enough for Rorty and he thinks that Marx and Engels would have laughed at them as well for they bring about no change in “the material level” of society (229). Returning to the impotence of philosophy as regards politics he claims that even if society and culture should adopt an anti-logocentric view of things that masculinism would survive (232). [This text strikes me as fundamentally conservative - Rorty clearly has embraced capitalism as the horizon under which all must be lived. Additionally, while effecting change is surely more effective effecting change than critique of that which one wishes to change, do not the very terms of the statement require that answer? As such, might there not be other benefits of critique? When do the new ideas come from is not from a dissatisfaction with the current state of things, a dissatisfaction that critique does have an effect upon? It is also notable that, though he cites Eagleton, he seems to have only read the first chapter of his book and thus his thought of what ideology is, goes no further than the Marx of The German Ideology, a position that most of the thinkers collected in this volume have all found insufficient.]

Terry Eagleton, from 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". 

“Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism” - Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton

This chapter of Mapping Ideology is two chapters of Eagleton’s book Ideology in which he is surveying the uses made and criticisms of the notions of ideology as well as certain other ideas which overlap with it in the thought of folks like Gramsci and Bourdieu. As this is already a summative text and I am summarizing further, I will make use a more schematic presentation in hopes of doing as much justice as I can to the wealth of detail presented here. 

György Lukács is given extensive coverage here focusing on History and Class Consciousness (1922). As Eagleton glosses his thought, Lukács’ position on sometimes the split between thought and existence is to argue that “in the act of understanding its real conditions, an oppressed group of class has begun (...) to fashion the forms of consciousness that will contribute to changing them” (180). As such the “identity [of thought and existence] is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process” (180). The other of ideology in his view is not science (not even “Marxist science”) but rather the notion of the social totality itself (181). In Lukács’ view the “self-consciousness of the proletariat” is “the commodity form coming to an awareness of itself, and in that act transcending itself” (181). Given that any knowledge that is not of the totality would be partial and hence ideological, Lukács argues that “certain forms of knowledge - notably, the self-knowledge of an exploited class - which, while thoroughly historical, are nevertheless able to lay bare the limits of other ideologies, and so to figure as an emancipatory force” (181-2). Lukács is aware that a simple contrast between ideology and totality is misleading, but he argues that “oppressed groups and classes , need to need to get some view of the social system as a whole” if they are to effect changes, thus, without “passing over at some point from the particular to the general, those interests are likely to founder” (182). But Eagleton identifies a variety of problems in Lukács’ account as well. There is a logical issue: if the proletariat is somehow the bearer of “‘true’ class consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgment made?” (183). This claim seems unable to avoid being simply a dogmatic assertion. Lukács also develops and relies heavily upon the notion of reification, which he sees as rampant in society and conducive to “a pervasive mechanization, quantification and dehumanization of human experience” (183). Against this the proletarian, in recognizing his class consciousness performs an aufhebung, thereby uniting subject and object (what reification otherwise acts to prevent) (184). “Ideology for Lukács is thus not exactly a discourse untrue to the way things are, but one true to them only in a limited, superficial way, ignorant of their deeper tendencies” (184). Lukács’ economism is problematic for Eagleton (and many others) as well as his all-purpose answer to all problems: reification (185). This insistence betrays a species of idealism in Eagleton’s view (185). Eagleton also points to a conflicting conception of ideology at work in Lukács, on the one hand he hews close to Marx and thinks of commodity fetishism as “an objective material structure” rather than a “state of mind” but in other places he seems to imply that there is an “essence” derivable from the “collective subjectivity” of classes. Lukács then “presumes too organic and internal a relation between a ‘class subject’ and its ‘world-view’” (187). Eagleton also has some issues with Lukács notion that social classes are themselves subjects. He writes that classes “are certainly for Marxism historical agents; but they are structural, material formations as well as ‘intersubjective’ entities, and the problem is how to think these two aspects of them together” (187). “If Lukács is residually idealist in the high priority that he assigns to consciousness, so he is also in his Romantic hostility to science, logic and technology” (189). Seemingly (as with Adorno in some ways) all such discourses are inherently reifying, ergo, to be avoided. Eagleton then uncovers yet another sense of the term ideology in Lukács, that of “structurally constrained thought” (190) suggesting that, in Lukács’ view, “when we keep running up against a limit in our conceptions” that it is our social practices themselves which “pose the obstacle to the very ideas which seek to explain them” meaning that we must change the forms of our lives if we are move beyond this deadlock (190). As a final exemplification of the complexity of Lukács’ thinking about ideology, Eagleton writes that for him “Bourgeois ideology may be false from the standpoint of some putative social totality, but this does not mean that it is false to the situation as it currently is” (191). 

Karl Mannheim is next up for Eagleton’s survey, though he doesn’t fair very well as a thinking of ideology. Mannheim’s basic thesis is that ideology is partial and interested and thus lacking, it will be corrected by being “subsumed into some greater totality” which is “disinterested” according to Mannheim. Eagleton counters “[i]sn’t the interest in totality just another interest?” (194). Mannheim essentially reduces ideology to merely false statements which are produced by individuals’ psychological situation, thereby ignoring ideology as embodied material practice along the lines of commodity fetishism, etc and makes no room at all for thinking of how they are linked to power, involved in struggle, etc (194-5).

Next up is Antonio Gramsci who does use the term ideology but in a casual way as his own ‘load-bearing’ concept is that of hegemony. In Eagleton’s view hegemony is for Gramsci a “broader category than ideology: it includes ideology, but is not reducible to it” (195-6). What then is hegemony for Gramsci? Hegemony is the “whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from those it subjugates” (198). The preceding stresses consent, and this is the dominant meaning that Gramsci seems to rely upon, though at times he does combine consent and coercion (195). But hegemony, unlike ideology in Gramsci’s view, may assert itself through political, economic, and other means whereas for him, ideology “refers specifically to the way power struggles are fought at the level of signification” (196). In a moment of potential confusion (apropos the last quotation) a page later Eagleton remarks that with Gramsci “the crucial transition is effected from ideology as ‘system of ideas’ to ideology as lived, habitual social practice” (197). Raymond Williams discusses Gramsci acknowledging “the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially static connotations of ‘ideology’” (197) arguing that “hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but ‘has to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified’” (197-8). Returning to the notion of ideology in Gramsci, he distinguishes between “‘historically organic’ ideologies - meaning those necessary to a given social structure - and ideology in the sense of the arbitrary speculations of individuals” (198-9). Gramsci argues that “ideologies must be viewed as actively organizing forces that are psychologically ‘valid’, fashioning the terrain on which men and women act, struggle and acquire consciousness of their social positions” (199).

We then reach, in Eagleton’s account, Theodor Adorno (and a few passing comments on Horkheimer and Marcuse). He begins by pointing out that the notion of exchange value in Marx is also useful for thinking about ideology (200). It a pack of cigarettes and a roast beef sandwich cost the same amount, they have the same exchange value (at least at the point of sale). This abstract equivalence subordinates the real material differences between them and elides the human labor that went into them entirely. The same process can be observed, Eagleton writes, in capitalist societies where we all have “theoretical equivalence” before the law, even if “this merely obscures the way in which the law itself is ultimately on the side of the propertied” (200-1). Adorno - pace Eagleton - sees ideological thought as engaged in just such suspect equivalences (201). “Ideology for Adorno is thus a form of ‘identity-thinking’ - a covertly paranoid style of rationality which inexorably transmutes the uniqueness and plurality of things into a mere simulacrum of itself” (201). Hence, negative dialectics (as we have already seen). Adorno poses, against ideology then, heterogeneity. But “Adorno” (unlike some French post-structuralists) “neither uncritically celebrates the notion of difference nor unequivocally denounces the principle of identity” (202). Eagleton points to much the same problem here as we have already encountered, that reason is both being used and being decried as the cause of all the problems. He mentions the book with Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment wherein in his reading “[s]imply to think is to be guiltily complicit with ideological domination” (202). Og Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Eagleton remarks that it “parodies the whole notion of ideology” (202) and in his view it “simply projects the ‘extreme’ ideological universe of Fascism on to the quite different structures of liberal capitalist regimes” (203). He concludes that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse give us a “straw target of ideology” and argues that it is “pure formalism to imagine that otherness, heterogeneity and marginality are unqualified political benefits regardless of their concrete social content” (203).

For Jürgen Habermas ideology “is a form of communication systematically distorted by power - a discourse which has become a medium of domination” (203). And, rather than any assertion that such a situation can be remedied by clearer or better thought, he “draws attention to the possibility of an entire discursive system which is somehow deformed (...) bent out of shape by power interests” (204). And for Habermas, this is not a situation of always external power effecting language because this deformity “inscribes itself on the inside of our speech, so that ideology becomes a set of effects internal to particular discourses themselves” (204). Be this as it may, Habermas believes that as language users we all have “some idea of what an ‘authentic’ communicative act wold be like” (204) and this gives us a chance at discovering and bring to bear “a norm or regulative model for the critical assessment” of ideological discourses (205). “The opposite of ideology for Habermas is not exactly truth or knowledge, but that particular form of ‘interested’ rationality we call emancipatory critique” (207). Eagleton then (surprising me in the process) begins contrasting Freud and Habermas in a number of interesting ways. Eagleton remarks that both thinkers refuse to treat “idealized world-views” (or fantasies) as “just illusions” and says that both think that they encode “genuine human desires” (207-8). Habermas, says Eagleton, sees “psychoanalysis as a discourse which seeks to emancipate us from systematically distorted communication” and regards pathological symptoms as “roughly equivalent to ideology’s ‘performative contradictions’” (208). Habermas also, like Freud, would argue that it is not enough to decipher a text but that we must account for the forces that deformed it, what Freud would the dream work. Thus for both thinkers, the focus is on “the points where meaning and force intersect” (208) and both the speech of the neurotic and the ideological discourse are for both “doubled” texts  (209) which ought not be reduced to either manifest of latent levels as the issue is the force that brought about the doubling. Eagleton then pursues another Freudian notion’s relevance to ideology (though it is not one that Habermas mentions), that of the “compromise formation” (209). The point here is that “a neurotic symptom (...) both reveals and conceals at once” which is also true to ideology in his view (209). And, inline with analytic thinking about this, the “‘truth’ (...) lies in neither the revelation nor the concealment alone, but in the contradictory unity they compose” (209). The compromise formation, and indeed any symptom, must then be seen as “not simply expressive of some underlying problem, but (...) an active, if mystified, form of engagement with it” (210). Many consequences would seem to follow from this analytically speaking, though as Eagleton does not pursue those here, I shall not either.

The resolutely anti-humanist Louis Althusser has no interest in reification or alienation as concepts, as both betray for him their humanist presuppositions and thus both concepts would be situated before the “epistemological break” that precedes the writing of Capital (211). “Althusser holds that all thought is conducted within the terms of an unconscious ‘problematic’ which silently underpins it” (211). A problematic “is a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive” (211). The problematic of an ideology “turns around certain eloquent silences and elisions; and it is so constructed that the questions which are posable within it already presuppose certain kinds of answer” (211-2). Because of this, “ideologies give the appearance of moving forward while marching stubbornly on the spot” (212). As Althusser has already been dealt with at some length, I will focus here on what Eagleton brings to light which I did not and what criticisms he has to offer. Against some critics of Althusser, Eagleton argues that for Althusser while “historical circumstances thoroughly condition our knowledge” that this does not entail that “our truth claims are reducible to our historical interests” (212). Having already noted Althusser’s debt to Lacan, Eagleton highlights the issue of the subject that is crucial for both, saying that “[w]e become conscious agents only by virtue of a certain determinate lack, repression of omission, which no amount of critical self-reflection could repair” (213). He stresses the degree to which for Althusser, all action “is carried on within the sphere of ideology” and that “it is ideology alone which lends the human subject enough illusory, provisional coherence for it to become a practical social agent” (213). Whereas, for Althusser, from the vantage point of theory (on Eagleton’s reading) “the subject has no such autonomy or consistency at all: it is merely the ‘overdetermined’ product of this or that social structure” (213). But Eagleton has problems with Althusser as well, in that he “seems to rule out the possibility of theoretically informed practice” (213) unless that is, it occurs “through the ‘relay’ of ideology” (214). After a brief restatement of the Mirror-Phase essay, Eagleton spells out how it overlaps with Althusser’s position, saying that in “the ideological sphere (...) the human subject transcends its true state of diffuseness or decentrement and finds a consolingly coherent  image of itself reflected back in the ‘mirror’ of a dominant ideological discourse” (214). After a recapitulation of Althusser’s primary definition and some discussion of the subject-centered character of ideology, Eagleton makes the complaint that, apropos interpellation, that “the subject would have to predate its own existence” (215). He then pushes this back to the mirror-phase as well, asking “[h]ow can the subject recognize image in the mirror as itself, if it does not somehow recognize itself already?” (215). I find both these questions somewhat misplaced. In the situation of the hailing on the street, this is not the moment of the subject’s constitution out of nothing, it is a reiteration of interpellative subjectification. The issue with the mirror-phase is different from all subsequent moments of subjectification simply as it is the first one. Recall that the infans, by virtue of that word, is not yet a speaking being. It hasn’t the language to have self-consciousness in any fully-fledged state as yet. It is the moment of the mirror recognition which first gives an image to its thought, an imagine on which to hang all subsequent moments of subjectification and the place of the “I” of language. Eagleton’s problem here strikes me as a non-starter. He asks whether there is not a need for “a third, higher subject” to ground the identification (215)? There are two ways to answer this, first off the imaginary is always encompassed by the symbolic which - as the big Other - is the “third” in every language act. But in a more obvious way, there is the role of the parents, cooing away behind the infans and saying “yes, that’s my good little poopy pants, yes it is.” Which, though the child is not yet speaking, still acts as recognition on the part of the parent that the infans is on to something, i.e., that yes it is them in the mirror. Eagleton points to certain misreadings or misapplications of Lacan that Althusser is enmeshed with, the first of which is his confusion of subject with ego, and in the process losing connection to desire and producing a far more stable subject that Lacan does (216).   Althusser is also faulted for his discussion of the (capital S) Subject which Eagleton equates with the superego, but remarks that Lacan would speak of the Other (216). I left the “Subject” discussion out of my response to the ISA essay as to my mind it is part of a specific example (Christian religious ideology) and not a feature of his general theory. That said, Eagleton has a point, though in my reading Athusser’s “Subject” is not crucial to his theory and thus I saw no need to press the point. Eagleton thinks differently though and I agree with him that the Althusserian (little S) subject, voids much of the instability and the (capital S) Subject is far more determinate and authoritarian than Lacan’s Other is (its determining characteristic being the ambiguity of what it wants). Eagleton concludes (and I think quite rightly) that “Althusser’s model is a good deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways ion which subjects may be ideologically accosted - partially, wholly, or not at all - by discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity” (217). These are some of the issues which I had in mind when writing on the ISA essay I said that there was more to said and thought about interpellation. Ideology in Althusser becomes for Eagleton an exemplar of the expansion problem I have already written of, as it becomes “identical with lived experience” (219). He closes his discussion of Althusser with yet another definitional observation about ideology; that ideology acts as an “imaginary map” (221) for social subjects, and it is necessary because societies and social processes are simply too complex for subjects to grasp “as a whole” in their “everyday consciousness” (220).  

Pierre Bourdieu is the last thinker to be discussed in this text. The first thing to note about him is that he does not make use of the term ideology at all. His own conceptual system rather refers to habitus, doxa and field. By habitus “he means the inculcation in men and women of a set of durable dispositions which generate particular practices” (222-3). By doxa, he refers to the ideas and lived experience of the “stable, tradition-bound social order in which power is fully naturalized and unquestioned” (223). The field(s) of which he writes would be the arenas in which a particular habitus is in effect, thus we have the literary field, the economic field, etc. Habitus is thus not that far from Gramsci and Althusser in certain ways, as Eagleton describes it here, “the very spontaneity of our habitual behavior (...) reproduce(s) certain deeply tacit norms and values; and habitus is thus the relay or transmission mechanism by which mental and social structures becomes incarnate in daily social activity” (223).  What Eagleton does not discuss, but which seems worth noting is the Bourdieu’s adaptation of capital as a concept, thus he gives us symbolic capital and cultural capital and with these innovations, reads a variety of fields as economies of a sort, replete with profits and losses and much else that one associates with the economy. While I find some of what he does in this manner interesting, even fascinating (see his book, Distinction) I have some qualms about using the capitalist economic situation as a model for all social relations as it seems, in effect, to assume that it is utterly dominant in all of them and it does not take a great deal of time to come up with examples where this manner of explanation is revealed as profoundly reductive - Emily Dickinson was a poet and had some contact with the literary field, but given how she lived her life as poet - all one might be left to do is remark on what a bad business woman she was, she ought to have been struggling to obtain more poetic capital rather than wasting so much time making her little books of poems!