Thank you Doug. I have read this in the past.
I think there is nothing more reified in the discussions of the "theoretical" left, than the notion of ideology.
My point here is that all this throwing brains about over "ideology" does not improve on the common sense view expressed by Chomsky and for that matter Marx and Engels in the German Ideology.
"Plato's problem, then is to explain how we know so much, given that evidence to us is so sparse. Orwell's problem is to explain why we know and understand so little, even though evidence available to us is so rich. Like many other twentieth-century intellectuals, Orwell was impress with the ability of totalitarian systems to instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts about the world around us. The problem is far broader, as the history of religious dogma suffices to show. To solve Orwell's problem we must discover the institutional and other factors that block insight and understanding in crucial areas of our lives and ask why they are effective." Noam Chomsky _Knowledge of Language_ p. xxvii
This is much better said than anything that Zizek tries to say and I think also closer to the problem of reality.
Chomsky continues in his anarchist way:
"In the modern era, the cult of state worship has frequently taken on the character of earlier forms of religious faith."
Now I do think that this is true but I would also refer to class structure, social property, and gender and race divisions through out history.
The problem is that we can only use the word "ideology" in a more or less common sense way to describe aspects of the world where people deceive themselves in others in the midst of social relations and class power. Ideology is not a scientific concept. In his AI lecture Chomsky states:
"It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance."
http://www.counterpunch.org/chomsky01242006.html
This is precisely the point. The ideal of a theoretical concept is an almost tautological definition -- a definition formulated to the preciseness of a Fregean artificial language. Outside of the sciences all that we have is relative clarity and varying amount of certainty, modified by skepticism and whatever bullshit detectors that we can muster individually and collectively. This is not to deny that point of view, world view, or ideology matter. They do, but Chomsky has certainly done more to reveal it than anyone else I have read, including that joker Zizek. Gramsci is good in context but so are Thucydides, Aristole , St. Augustine, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Bertrand Russell, and, of course, Marx.
Ideology as a term "vacillates" (see Balibar below) in a way that every other term of its type does (even such words as "river" or "London") simply because it is not a Fregean concept and is not, and should not be, theoretically rigorous. We simply do not understand the social and psychological details of the process that turn deception and self-deception into social blindness and "second nature." We don't know what turns dogma into doctrine and doctrine into indoctrination and indoctrination into a form of hypocrisy and hypocrisy into self-deception and world view. We can guess at these things in a rational way, using what we do know to illuminate what we don't know. But it is no use pretending we know about processes that we can only guess at. If we try to turn a term such as "ideology" into a theoretically rigorous term we simply turn it into another dogma and probably a term in another ideology. (This basic piece of common sense was observed by ancient philosophers and historians... see the debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic among many examples.)
I have read Althusser -- and actually like him -- but believe he is self-defeating, when not an obscurantist. I have read Zizek's _The Sublime Object of Ideology_ and I don't know how you can accept his view of ideology without accepting the joke on the French intelligentsia which is the psychoanalysis of Lacan. Zizek's books are fun but they don't make very much sense to me. I read them for entertainment value, in the same way I once read Norman Mailer's political-sexual pronouncements. (Have you ever read how Zizek analyzes Hitchcock? I have not read such a divine artist of bullshit in ages. In fact when ever Zizek writes about anything I know anything about he is either wrong or not even wrong.) Or read Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism". Balibar's general conclusion is that "ideology" is a vacillating term because in order to define it Marxists assume a stance somehow outside of ideology -- or counterposed by another class position that reveals the ideology of the ruling ideas of the ruling class. Or read Bourdieu's attempt to revalue ideology in terms of symbolic power in _Language and Symbolic Power_ . One has to accept his bogus view of the social inscription language in social space in order to accept what he writes. There are plenty of things to learn from Bourdieu but his view of language is highly uninformed.
Robert Trivers has written some very interesting essays on "self-deception." The essays are interesting because he does not only deal with examples of self-deception in humans but also in other animals. But in the end he says that we know very little about the actual process of self-deception, though we can speculate and observe how self-deception functions and provides benefits at times. It seems to me that what we are calling "ideology" is a social analog to the psychological notion of "self-deception." It also seems to me that many religious writers in the Axial period used terms such as "hypocrisy" in the same way as we use the term "ideology." I think if we really want to study "ideology" these are good places to start. But certainly we in the tradition of Marx have no monopoly on the term as Angelus seems to imply.
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