I’m still a relative newcomer to Žižek, having only read him on and off for about a year now. But I found this dialectical discussion of ideology helpful, even if it is very typically Žižekian, simply because it is so straightforward. It comes from the first of his essays in the Mapping Ideology book I mentioned in the last post:
“‘Ideology’ can designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure in false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power. It seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would expect it to dwell.
When one procedure is denounced as ‘ideological par excellence‘ one can be sure that its inversion is no less ideological. For example, among the procedures generally acknowledged as ‘ideological’, definitely the eternalization of some historically limited condition, the act of discerning some higher Necessity in a contingent occurrence (from the grounding of male domination in the ‘nature of things’ to interpreting AIDS as a punishment for the sinful life of modern man, or, at a more intimate level, when we encounter our ‘true love’, it seems as if this is what we have been waiting for all our life, as if, in some mysterious way, all our previous life has led to this encounter…): the senseless contingency of the real is thus ‘internalized’, symbolized, provided with Meaning. Is not ideology, however, also the opposite procedure of failing to notice the necessity, of misperceiving it as an insignificant contingency (from the psychoanalytic cure, in which one of the main forms of the analysand’s resistance is his insistence that his symptomatic slip of the tongue was a mere lapse without any signification up to the domain of economics, in which the ideological procedure par excellence is to reduce the crisis to an external, ultimately contingent occurrence, thus failing to take note of the inherent logic of the system that begets the crisis)? In this precise sense, ideology is the exact opposite of internalization of the external contingency: it resides in externalization of the result of an inner necessity, and the task of the critique of ideology here is precisely to discern the hidden necessity in what appears as mere contingency”.
He then goes on to give a number of other examples of how this works, the best being a comparison of the media treatments of the (first) Gulf War and the Bosnian war. With the Gulf War, rather than paying attention to the complex social, political or religious trends and antagonisms which informed the situation in Iraq, in the media the conflict was ultimately reduced to a personal quarrel with Saddam Hussein, “…Evil Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself from the civilized international community” (Žižek, quoting Renata Salecl [nope, never heard of her either]). The true aim of the war, as the media portrayed it, was Saddam’s own humiliation. That this functions ideologically is pretty obvious. Conversely, however, the media coverage of the Bosnian war (other than the occasional vilification of Slobodan Milosevic) consisted predominantly of accounts of the complex ethnic, religious and cultural background to the war, and the many unresolved historical antagonisms which gave rise to it. In contrast to the deeply personalized coverage of the Gulf War, media coverage of the Bosnian crisis, in an apparent reversal, invoked a definite distance from the conflict, the implication being that, “it is not possible to take sides, one can only patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, alien to our civilized system of values” (Salecl, again). Though this would initially appear to be more a considered, reasonable and informed account than that of the Gulf War, Žižek’s point is that it too functions ideologically. Indeed, it does so with “more cunning”, the evocation of complex circumstances and a certain distance delivering the West from any responsibility: “The comfortable attitude of a distant observer, the evocation of the allegedly intricate context of religious and ethnic struggles in Balkan countries, is here to enable the West to shed its responsibility towards the Balkans…”. The significance is that this latter, even more poisonous, kind of ideology is also better veiled, less obvious, more insidious than the former, almost caricatured kind. Very clearly, Žižek helps us to see how the most pernicious ideology is not always where it’s most expected… far from it, in fact.
(Indeed, later in the essay Žižek illustrates how the most [apparently] blatant forms of ideology sometimes fail to function ideologically at all, which obviously ties back in to his first paragraph at the top).
First, Rousseau’s Social Contract and Discourses, all together in one 350 page volume for just £2.49!! I’ve been reading up on my history of modern political philosophy over the summer, and so I’m quietly on the look out for cheap primary material from the likes of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, John Stuart Mill etc. and so this was a particularly good find given Rousseau’s importance in the field.
To add to that, just as I was congratulating myself on this particular find, I looked down and noticed a decent-sized book called Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, for sale for a mere £3.49!! On closer inspection I noticed the volume had a bunch of really interesting (and some classic) essays on ideology from figures including Adorno, Althusser, Lacan, Terry Eagleton, Seyla Benhabib, Rorty and Jameson, as well as two pieces by Žižek himself. I also found it funny that there was a picture of a bald eagle on the front. Needless to say I snapped that up too.
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