At 2:33 PM -0500 5/12/06, Doug Henwood wrote:
>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>
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk