On Dec 5, 2006, at 2:17 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> I have no idea what you mean by "critique" and what you mean by
> "ideology."
I'm not Angelus, but here's some attempt at a definition by Slavoj Zizek, from his intro to his edited collection, Mapping Ideology (Verso, 1994) [I posted this excerpt here 7(!) years ago]:
<quote> For example, we somehow implicitly seem to know what is 'no longer' ideology: as long as the Frankfurt School accepted the critique of political economy as its base, it remained within the co-ordinates of the critique of ideology, whereas the notion of 'instrumental reason' no longer appertains to the horizon of the critique of ideology -'instrumental reason' designates an attitude that is not simply functional with regard to social domination but, rather, serves as the very foundation of the relationship of domination.' An ideology is thus not necessarily 'false': as to its positive content, it can be 'true', quite accurate, since what really matters is not the asserted content as such but the way this content is related to the subjective position implied by its own Process of enunciation. We are within ideological space proper the moment this content -'true' or 'false' (if true, so much the better for the ideological effect) - is functional with regard to some relation of social domination ('power', 'exploitation') in an inherently nontransparent way: the very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be effective. In other words, the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth. When, for example, some Western power intervenes in a Third World country on account of violations of human rights, it may well be 'true' that in this country the most elementary human rights were not respected, and that the Western intervention will effectively improve the human rights record, yet such a legitimization none the less remains 'ideological' in so far as it fails to mention the true motives of the intervention (economic interests, etc.). The outstanding mode of this 'lying in the guise of truth' today is cynicism: with a disarming frankness one 'admits everything', yet this full acknowledgement of our power interests does not in any way prevent us from pursuing these interests - the formula of cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian 'they do not know it, but they are doing it'; it is 'they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it'.
How, then, are we to explicate this implicit pre-comprehension of ours? How are we to pass from doxa to truth? The first approach that offers itself is, of course, the Hegelian historical-dialectical transposition of the problem into its own solution: instead of directly evaluating the adequacy or 'truth' of different notions of ideology, one should read this very multitude of the determinations of ideology as the index of different concrete historical situations - that is, one should consider what Althusser, in his self-critical phase, referred to as the 'topicality of the thought', the way a thought is inscribed into its object; or, as Derrida would have put it, the way the frame itself is part of the framed content.
When, for example, Leninism-Stalinism suddenly adopted the term 'proletarian ideology' in the late 1920s in order to designate not the 'distortion' of proletarian consciousness under the pressure of bourgeois ideology but the very 'subjective' driving force of proletarian revolutionary activity, this shift in the notion of ideology was strictly correlative to the reinterpretation of Marxism itself as an impartial 'objective science', as a science that does not in itself involve the proletarian subjective position: Marxism first, from a neutral distance of metalanguage, ascertains the objective tendency of history towards Communism; then it elaborates the 'proletarian ideology' in order to induce the working class to fulfil its historical mission. A further example of such a shift is the already mentioned passage of Western Marxism from Critique of Political Economy to Critique of Instrumental Reason: from Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness and the early Frankfurt School, where ideological distortion is derived from the 'commodity form', to the notion of Instrumental Reason which is no longer grounded in a concrete social reality but is, rather, conceived as a kind of anthropological, even quasitranscendental, primordial constant that enables us to explain the social reality of domination and exploitation. This passage is embedded in the transition from the post-World War I universe, in which hope in the revolutionary outcome of the crisis of capitalism was still alive, into the double trauma of the late 1930s and 1940s: the 'regression' of capitalist societies into Fascism and the 'totalitarian' turn of the Communist movement.
However, such an approach, although it is adequate at its own level, can easily ensnare us in historicist relativism that suspends the inherent cognitive value of the term 'ideology' and makes it into a mere expression of social circumstances. For that reason, it seems preferable to begin with a different, synchronous approach. Apropos of religion (which, for Marx, was ideology par excellence), Hegel distinguished three moments: doctrine, belief, and ritual; one, is thus tempted to dispose the multitude of notions associated with the term 'ideology' around these three axes: ideology as a complex of ideas (theories, convictions, beliefs, argumentative procedures); ideology in its externality, that is, the materiality of ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses; and finally, the most elusive domain, the 'spontaneous' ideology at work at the heart of social 'reality' itself (it is highly questionable if the term 'ideology' is at all appropriate to designate this domain - here it is exemplary that, apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx never used the term 'ideology"). Let us recall the case of liberalism: liberalism is a doctrine (developed from Locke to Hayek) materialized in rituals and apparatuses (free press, elections, market, etc.) and active in the 'spontaneous' (self-) experience of subjects as 'free individuals'. The order of contributions in this Reader follows this line that, grosso modo, fits the Hegelian triad of In-itself -- For-itself -- In- and-For-itself. This logico-narrative reconstruction of the notion of ideology will be centred on the repeated occurrence of the already mentioned reversal of non-ideology into ideology - that is, of the sudden awareness of how the very gesture of stepping out of ideology pulls us back into it. </quote>