Slavoj Žižek

A Little Piece of the Real

Matthew Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351899741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Slavoj Zizek has emerged as the pre-eminent European cultural theorist of the last decade and has been described as the ultimate Marxist/Lacanian cultural studies scholar. His large and growing body of work has generated considerable controversy, yet his texts are not structured as standard academic tomes. In Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, Matthew Sharpe undertakes the difficult task of drawing out an evolving argument from all of Zizek's texts from 1989 to 2001, and reads them as the bearers of a single theoretical project, providing an authoritative, reliable, clearly written and well-structured account of Zizek's demanding body of work. From an exposition of Zizek's social and philosophical critical theory the book moves to a critical analysis of Zizek's theoretical project and its political implications. Sharpe concludes by suggesting that Zizek's work, however, raises as many questions as it answers; questions both about Zizek's theoretical system and to the wider new Left in today's world.

PART I

ŽIžEK’S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY

Chapter 1
On Žižek’s Expanded Notion of Ideology

‘What is class struggle’ – ‘The antagonistic process that constitutes classes and determines their relationship’. – ‘But in our society there is no struggle between the classes!’ – ‘You see how it functions!’

Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology, 23.

1 Ideology, Today – Terms and Conditions

On Žižek’s Spectral Analysis of the Notion of ‘Ideology’

As I commented in the Introduction, to invoke Slavoj Žižek as a Marxist theorist may initially seem a misguided pursuit. Žižek’s texts hardly read like orthodox Marxist texts. Especially his two works Enjoy Your Symptom! and Looking Awry offer themselves explicitly as ‘introductions to Lacan through popular culture’. While this may be a laudable project, it is hardly one that bespeaks any fundamental political orientation. When Marx is invoked in these texts, it is less than clear whether his ideas are proffered for their own intrinsic worth, or because their structure neatly illustrates some point of Hegelian or Lacanian learning. One clear example of this is Žižek’s reading of the proletarian as ‘subject’ in the Hegelian sense, in Enjoy Your Symptom! It is because the proletarian is fully objectified, and that there is ‘nothing’ that he has that is not alienated, that his historical destiny gives figure to the substanceless subject of German idealism. This is a useful example for someone who doesn’t know her Hegel. But it is hardly committed writing, in the mode of how Lukacs defended the same position in History and Class Consciousness. [Žižek, 1992: 171–2; Lukacs, 1971]

Yet, following such theorists as Laclau, Daly and Elliot, and as I maintained in the Introduction, I believe that Žižek is a committed theorist, and that his oeuvre cannot be understood except as an attempt to generate a political theory adequate to later modern conditions. [Laclau, 1997; 2000; Elliot, 1992; Daly, 1999] His most recent works, which have become increasingly politically engaged in their tenor, only bear out a position present since he begun publishing in English in 1989. It is salient that the first chapter of his text of that year, The Sublime Object of Ideology, was on Marx, and the notion of commodity fetishism, as we will examine. This chapter also already raised the terms in which his ‘return to Marx’ has always been conducted: centring, I want to contend, on the much-debated and challenged category of ideology. In some way, which he often leaves unfortunately understated, Žižek wants a return to a critique of ideology. Moreover, the terms and tenor of this piece indicate that his is a critical theory, with an emancipatory intent. Through returning to the category of ‘ideology’ that Marx appropriated for radical Left critique in The German Ideology, Žižek believes he can discern or open up the possibility of a radical socio-political transformation.

The most direct, and extended rumination on the category of ideology is ‘The Spectre of Ideology’. This title, as well as indicating Žižek’s cognisance (and criticism) of Derrida’s book on Marx, indicates his recognition that ‘ideology’ today is at once two things. It is an elusive category, whose referent seems increasingly difficult to pin down. Yet it is also a category which has not ceased returning, like the proverbial ghost. ‘By way of a simple reflection on how the horizon of historical imagination is subject to change’, Žižek begins, ‘we find ourselves in medias res, compelled to accept the unrelenting persistence of the notion of ideology’. [Žižek, 1994b: 1]

‘Spectres of Ideology’ is written as the introduction to the collection: Mapping Ideology. In line with its introductory calling, Žižek considers the multitude of different notions of ideology that are around today. He divides them into three groups, in line (loosely) with Hegelian logic. I will follow his division here, for purposes of exposition:

• first, there is ideology ‘in itself’. This is the notion inherited from Engels, and The German Ideology. Ideology here is a discourse or doctrine that aims to produce ‘false consciousness’ in its bearers. Ideological discourses are false, insofar as they distort the subjects’ awareness of the truth of their social order. They may misrepresent salient facts about the current political state of play. Or they may work to close down possibilities for political transformation by misrepresenting the current status quo as inevitable, or ‘the best of all possible worlds’. [Eagleton, 1991: ch. 2] This falsity is not a merely epistemic affair, either. It serves the interests of the ruling classes of society, by legitimating the current status quo within which they are dominant, and/or concealing from consideration the less savoury aspects of their domination. Habermas is the most recent influential exponent of the critique of ideology ‘in itself’, Žižek remarks, when he argues that ideology is ‘distorted communication’, or (to quote ‘The Spectre of Ideology’):
  … a text in which, under the influence of unavowed social interests (of domination, etc.), a gap separates the ‘official’, public meaning from its actual intention – that is to say, in which we are dealing with an unreflected tension between the explicit enunciated content of the text and its pragmatic presuppositions … [Žižek, 1994b: 10]
• next, there is ideology ‘for itself’. This is ideology which is not reproduced solely in discourses, but which directly informs the institutional practices of individuals. Arguably the first Marxian figure to examine this type of ideology was Gramsci. The latter looked at the variegated institutional and cultural mechanisms capitalism used to reproduce consensus to its rule amongst the working class, under the heading of ‘hegemony’. [cf. (e.g.) Eagleton, 1995] The key figure explaining this type of ideology, for Žižek, however, is Althusser. In ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser directs his attention to the question of societal reproduction, which he considers to be under-theorised in the Marxist tradition. Althusser argues that this reproduction is carried out not solely under the aegis of ‘repressive state apparatuses’ (RSAs), such as the army or the police, which wield what Weber called a monopoly of legitimate violence. Also, ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs), such as religious, educational, political and legal institutions, are needed. [Althusser, 1994: 110–11] These institutions inculcate individuals into ideologically assigned roles both through the passing on of explicit discourses, and also through ritualised practices and disciplines. As Žižek writes of Althusser’s position:
  Religious belief, for example, is not merely or even primarily an inner conviction, but the Church as an institution and its rituals (prayer, baptism, confirmation, confession …) which, far from being a mere secondary externalisation of the inner belief, stand for the very mechanisms that generate it … [Žižek, 1994b: 12]
  I will return to Žižek’s reading of Althusser in Part 2 of this chapter.
• Finally, there is ideology ‘in-and-for-itself’. This is ideology ‘from the ground up’. Whereas in ideology ‘in itself’ and even ideology ‘for itself’, a clear distinction between what Marx called the economic ‘base’ and culturally mediated ‘superstructure’ is manifest, here this distinction is blurred, Žižek comments. ‘Commodity fetishism’, to take Žižek’s prime example (and see anon), marks the paradoxical point at which ‘basal’ capitalist economic relations become ‘their own ideology’, as Adorno once said. [Eagleton, 1991: 88] As Žižek puts it, in such pre-reflective illusions as that involved (for example) in the fetishising of dollar bills and coins, ‘… all of a sudden we become aware of a for-itself of ideology at work in the very in-itself of extra-ideological actuality’. [loc. cit.] Here we are dealing with ideology not as an external representation or misrepresentation of the reality of capitalism, but as an illusion that yet belongs intimately to that reality. Ideology ‘in-and-for-itself’, Žižek assesses, is:
  … neither ideology qua explicit doctrine, articulated conviction on the nature of man, society and the universe, nor ideology in its material existence (institutions, rituals and practices that give body to it), but the elusive network of implicit, quasi-’spontaneous’ presuppositions and attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of ‘non-ideological’ (economic, legal, political, sexual …) practices … [loc. cit.]

Žižek frames this typology of ideological forms, however, in a series of wider reflections in ‘The Spectre of Ideology’. As I have said, the fact that the category of ideology as it were ‘refuses to give up the ghost’, does not mean that its referent is any clearer today to us than it was for Marx and Engels. Indeed, Žižek is right to suggest that the very multiplicity of meanings different theorists have given it indicates just how slippery a category it is. There are two central issues or problems for anyone who would defend the use of the category ‘ideology’ that Žižek addresses in ‘The Spectre of Ideology’:

1. – The first concerns how, by the time we begin to use the term to describe what Žižek calls ideology ‘in-and-for-itself’, the category has been expanded to cover or explain even the apparently pre-reflexive reaches of daily life. As Žižek puts it, at this point ‘… we find ourselves knee-deep in the … obscure domain in which reality is indistinguishable from ideology’. [Žižek, 1994b: 15] Yet this very expansion poses its own problem. This is that a category that names everything, in line with Hegel’s Logic concerning being and nothing, actually does no explanatory work at all. [Hegel, 1951: 93–105] If it captures everything, it does no more than rename whatever it captures. If we claim that ‘everything is ideology’, this doesn’t help us much, beyond the fact that our use of this Marxian term will confer upon us a certain (and now ungrounded) sense of being subversive.
   This first problem only increases, too, when we recall, as Žižek does, that the term ‘ideology’ itself has been, since Marx, an implicitly pejorative term. Ideology names a discourse that is saliently false, Marx maintained. It either directly misrepresents what it claims to truly describe, or (at least) ideology distracts people from considering the truth of what is politically important about their society and their condition. To invoke the category of ideology, therefore, the theorist must have claimed an access to a reality that is ‘non-ideological’, from whence this falsity of the ideology has been espied, and against which it can be denigrated. ‘Does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility?’, Žižek asks in this vein. [Žižek, 1994b: 3] Ideology is false for Marx in at least one of his incarnations because it serves and misrepresents class interests grounded in the capitalistic economy, with its production of surplus value that is appropriated by the bourgeois. [cf. Eagleton, 1991: ch. 3] It is false for Althusser, more complexly, because it misrepresents the relations between the subjects and the capitalist order, whose structural truth is evident only to Marxist science. [Althusser, 1994]
   Yet Žižek is aware that arguably the predominant trend of continental thinking since at least Nietzsche has been to problematise the notion that one could ever unproblematically access a pre-existent truth, or that – indeed – such a ‘Truth’ could ever be. If truth there is, it is truth produced by human discourse, and /or relations of power, and it does not pre-exist this production. In the types of theoretical position typically gathered (by Žižek amongst others) under the heading ‘post-structuralist’, the much-vaunted infinity of representation (this fact that we could never access a beyond to representation except through further representations) thus renders ‘ideology’ as a category redundant. Either ideology is unavoidable, insofar as to speak is to misrepresent the vitality of what is; or else there is nothing that is not ideology since there could never have been any unadulterated, pre-existing being.
   We will return to this first problem in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6. Žižek is certainly aware of it, and correctly understands that a sense of it underlies the scepticism of figures such as Bourdiou, Foucault and Rorty about the category of ideology. He also thinks he has an answer to it, which he believes entitles him to a continued use of the term ‘ideology’. My final argument in Chapters 5 and 6, however (as I mentioned in the Introduction) is his answer is a flawed one, or one capable of giving rise only to inconsistencies.
2. – The second problem is that, even if one would want to keep the term ‘ideology’ in one’s vocabulary, at each of the three typological levels Žižek has isolated, theorists have contested its value or use.
   At the level of ideology ‘in itself’, when (for example) Habermas posits some ‘ideal speech situation’ as that regulative truth against which ‘ideology’ can be identified and critiqued, sceptics are inclined to say that this very elevation of a certain type of speech as ‘non-ideological’ itself gives figure to the elementary ideological operation. [Žižek, 1994b: 10] If the term ‘ideology’ has any meaning, an ideological discourse is one that ‘naturalises’ itself, and its worldview. ‘Already in the 1950s, in Mythologies’, Žižek writes, ‘Roland Barthes proposed the notion of ideology as the “naturalisation” of the symbolic order – that is, as the perception that reifies the results of discursive procedures into properties of the “thing itself”‘. [Žižek, 1994b: 11] And Žižek accedes the sense and force of this position, which he throughout his work labels broadly ‘post-structuralism’. He puts this position nicely when he says that ideology is always minimally ‘ideology of ideology’. [Žižek, 1994b: 19] He means to point out, simply, that no one who is ‘in’ ideology believes that they are. As we will see, Žižek rather maintains that the successfully ideologically duped subject is exactly the one who thinks that only the Others have been duped. Ideology works exactly by convincing subjects that its way of seeing things is the unsurpassable and indubitable one, he agrees with Barthes et al.: an ‘ideal’ against which the Other’s ideologies can be uncovered as ‘false’. As Žižek again writes, this time considering the work of Michel Pechoux:
   … one of the fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to some self-evidence – ‘Look, you can see for yourself how things are!’. ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology – the point being, precisely, that facts never speak for themselves...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviated References to Žižek Texts
• Introduction: Locating Žižek as Critical Theorist
• Part I: ŽIŽEk’s Theory of Ideology
• Part II: The Philosophical Grounds of ŽIŽek’s Social Theory
• Part III: Immanent Critique
• Bibliography
• Index