Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology

Žižek, Slavoj.  The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008.

Starts with reviving Althusser, whose teaching, as Žižek argues, has been repressed in the intellectual circles, because (at least partly) of “his insistence on the fact that a certain cleft, a certain fissure, misrecognition characterizes the human condition as such.” (xxiv) Human culture is made of “structural mechanism(s) which is (are) producing the effect of subject as ideological misregcognition”; in other words, to become subject means to misrecognize ideology (for oneself). “In this perspective, the subject as such is constituted through a certain misrecognition: the process of ideological interprellation through which the subject ‘recognizes’ itself as the addressee in the calling up of the ideological cause implies necessarily a certain short circuit, an illusion of the type ‘I was already there’.” (xxv) Without these clefts, fissures and misrecognitions no culture is possible: “All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize – to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism...” (xxviii). Attempts to overcome this antagonism would only lead to totalitarianism, hence Žižek follows Laclau and Mouffe’s seemingly paradoxical argument that democracy can be pursued only by exploiting exactly these social antagonisms, on top of multiple cultural fissures and clefts. Argues that Hegel, who in his opinion is totally misinterpreted and his philosophy is not about total knowledge, provides a powerful criticism of totalizing ideas, while Lacan provides language and approaches to reveal ideological disguises of social antagonisms. Hence suggests a mutual reinterpretation of Hegel and Lacan in order to revive Marxist criticism of ideology.

Žižek starts the first chapter by arguing that “there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedures of Marx and Freud – more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and of dreams.” (3) Both shift the focus on the form (of commodities and dreams): why certain processes occupy a specific form of a dream; why labour needs to assume the form of the value of a commodity – or, to reformulate this, why its social character can only be affirmed in the commodity form of its product. So, the form: Žižek returns to Freud to show that dreams as “forms” (the form of a dream) disguises not its “secret content” (there’s nothing interesting in it), but a third element, something which cannot be expressed in normal language—the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. Marx revealed the same mechanism in regard to the commodity as the commodity-form: it is, of course, important that it is labour that is the true source (read: content) of wealth, but it doesn’t explain why labour expresses its value in the commodity-form. There is the unconscious of the commodity-form which emanates from the form itself, not from its “labour-content.” The commodity implies abstraction (from the nature and from specific qualities of the commodity itself, as it enters relations of exchange), so it was the commodity which made abstract thinking (a-la Newtonian science of nature) possible. So, the very transcendental subject—a foundation of modern philosophy—is indebted to the commodity-form, without which it would not emerge. This pure abstraction, abstraction per se, is that unconscious of the commodity which makes Marxist analysis so important to critical theory.

In reality, this abstraction looks like the forms of thought which invade our subjective world from the outside and break the dualism of people’s “actual” thoughts and their objective experience: “the form of thought external to the thought itself – in short, some Other Scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance.” (13) It is the symbolic order that provides these forms of thought. As the result, any activity – starting with trade up to philosophy – is based on blindness to this “third” element which is revealed through the form and offers “ready-to-use” solutions: “a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants.” (15)

As the result, Žižek offers a reinterpretation of ideology, which “is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’.” (15-16) Argues that it’s wrong to speak of our society as post-ideological: although people might recognize that their attitude to reality is structured by ideological illusions, the illusion is actually double: the “overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy.” (30) Therefore, “cynical distance is ust one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” (30)

Marxist analysis of commodity brings a new perspective on the opposition of persons and things: while people become disillusioned in many medieval beliefs, “the things (commodities) themselves believe in their place, instead of subjects: it is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between things’.” (31) As the result, “the lesson... is above all that belief, far from being an ‘intimate’, purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality.” (33)

Here, Žižek returns to Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses to explore its link with forms and mechanisms of ideological interpellation: Ideological State Apparatuses internalize themselves in subject, producing “the effect of ideological belief in a Cause and the interconnecting effect of subjectivation.” (43) The problem is that ISA never fully internalize themselves into subjects: “there is always a residue, a leftover, a strain of traumatic irrationality and senseless 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: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority...” (43) – fits perfectly with late soviet experience of a seeming alienation of ideology from its population, which however brought no attacks on its legitimacy. Cf. also with Eric Santner’s My Own Private Germany where Daniel Paul Schreber’s mental illness is represented exactly as emanating from this “senseless traumatism” which is an unavoidable excess of the authority of the modern Law (or, more broadly, symbolic order).

Žižek develops this idea to argue that “ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernosto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). 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.” (45) Ideological fantasy is, therefore, a necessary support of reality. Here’s the difference between Marxism (not Marx) and Lacan: “in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility.” (50)

The ideological field works and is able to secure the success of its appeals for obedience and sacrifice for their own sake (90) by linking numerous “floating signifiers” (proto-ideological elements) “into a unified field through the intervention of a certain “nodal point’ which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.” (95) Ideological elements are floating (racists can be “elitist” and “outclassed”), but ‘quilting’ makes them part of the structured network of meaning which is ideology.