Let's start with the Zizek quote. Zizek starts off by saying that classical Marxism began with a critique of the political economy, but by the mid-20s during the hay day of the Frankfurt School the focus shifted to undertake a critique of the representation of the political economy, that is to say, its ideology as espoused by its ruling elites, i.e. the capitalist class. And of course by the political parties in Germany at that time.
It is important to remember that mass media and political propaganda had become an all pervasive force in western society by the early 20thC and together these were melted into socially constructive processes that reached far more deeply and more comprehensively into people's minds to form people's concepts of what a modern society was supposed to be. Thus the Frankfurt school felt it was an important task of progressives to both mount a critique of this ideology, and to understand how it (the representation itself) managed the social and economic forces at work in the world around them. Since many of Frankfurters were at least Socialists, and many were Communists, it should be remembered too, that their cherished goals for society had just been brutally defeated with the sell-out of a provisional socialist party (SDP) in the Weimar government who sent the police to crush the Communists led by intellectuals, disaffected military, and local workers in Munich (and elsewhere) in the aftermath of WWI. There is nothing like betrayal and defeat to make people examine their assumptions.
In any event some of what Zizek said dovetails with Chomsky's conviction that we need to understand how social and political institutions form, manage, and indeed manufacture our consent. Zizek is just carrying this idea further along its theoretical road and saying that we need to understand how ideology, that is the representation of the political economy and its institutions is in fact, also part of the political economy.
(I am in a race against time, to keep this coherent, before the first Martinis hits my blood stream, on an empty stomach...)
The quoted section on truth, which seems highly confusing, is simply a complicated way of saying that the truth of a statement is not as important as how the statement functions in an ideology, or rather in any given representation. In a world composed mostly of representations and images, generalized concepts or mere hand waving, obviously none of these are stickly true in the classical sense of an Aristotelian truth value. For one thing there is no single valued logical structure to representations, rather their own internal coherence depends on their consistency. Internal consistency is not the same thing as an Aristotelian truth.
What I am saying is that I don't think that Zizek is a bullshit artist. He is serious and he must have undertaken a serious review of the changing contours of theoretical Marxism, and found the Frankfurters a pivotal moment in that history. But they were also not the last word. We in the post-modern period, need to continue this critique of representations, more or less for the same reasons the Frankfurters under took the project in the first place, that is to say in order to understand how our society manages and maintains its social, political, and economic structures. Because in the end, we need to know how these systems work, in order to change them.
Carrol mentioned that the only critique of ideology was through the practical or material means of an alternate practice that illuminates the structures and structural weaknesses of the dominant ideology. That is both true and excellent, but there is more than just practice involved here. We are a highly sophisticated people (masses and intellectuals) and our ruling elites are not stupid. All together we know there is a war of oppression going on and there are numerous tactics to fight with. Certainly a practical demonstration of the human costs of this oppression is both dramatic and convincing to many people who do not think with their heads, but their eyes and their hearts. But there is also great value to simply calling the representations and their endless spin to account by de-constructing their bullshit. This is primarily what Chomsky does simply through common sense based language. I would call this popular language, and not common sense, but never mind that for now. Also, note that Brad Delong believed in the neoliberal ideological manque, but it was the simple empirical figures on charts that convinced him that that ideological take on the economy had to be wrong. It simply didn't work.
However compelling these war of words, war of classes, war of the ruled against the rulers are, they are not the final or even the primary context of a philosophical and scientific understanding of modern societies or the physical world, and therefore, I want to take this understanding a few steps further.
I want to bring up the problem of cultural relativism at this point. So far neither Zizek, nor the latter day Frankfurters, nor most of the current crop of post-modernist Marxist critiques have really plumbed the deeper implications to what it means to live in a world of representations. This problem goes far beyond the nastiness of our political economy or its utterly despicable rightwing mercenaries. It evokes a basic problem of the nature of human knowledge. While we are left almost speechless at the patent absurdities of our current condition, that is, its severe disjunction between the media and government representation of the world, broadcast at us 24/7/365, and our own rational and experience based understanding of the world, we somehow fail to see that this is not a unique condition. As Carrol says, this is a practical demonstration that the world is not as it appears on tv, but the practical demonstration of this reality dysfunction is not a new condition. It is rather a very fundamental problem that all societies ultimate face if they last long enough. It is precisely these kinds of experienced moments that bring societies to examine their most basic ideals, values, and assumptions about the world.
What is involved in this reality dysfunction isn't just a quest for creating more perfect representations, better ideals, more sharply defined values, etc. Plato's cave where we watch the shadows of reality passing by the entrance is not the operative metaphor. The problem is that while we can manipulate physical reality directly (and thereby ignore the shadows and get to the thing in itself, the physical sciences have discovered that these manipulations produce almost the same epistemological problem, as Carrol's example that a practical demonstration is the most basic kind of critique of ideology. More simply, the most advanced empirical examinations of the physical world reveal a profound disjunction with our theoretical representations of that physical world, mostly given in mathematical forms.
In other words there is something wrong with the way we form our physical concepts about the world that has a haunting similarity to our struggles to comprehend the movements, moments, and forces of our own human world.
Just about the only object that both the physical world of the natural sciences and the human world share is both are absolutely dependent on our basic ability to creat concepts. In mathematics, concept formation is formalized in what is called the axiom of comprehension, which lays the foundation for the definition of a set. It has been known for at least a century that the axiom of comprehension leads to unresolvable contradictions. One contradiction is known as the problem of infinite subsets. The paradox is that the sum of infinite subsets is greater in extension (or in its comprehension as a set) than their putative infinite superset. In other words, the sum of the parts is not equal to the whole.
While the problems of set theory interest no one but the specialist, these are important examples that illustrate that our concepts, that is our symbolic representations of the world are not, and maybe can not be wholly accurate, that is truthful in the classical sense of the word. Or to put it in a different way. Our representations maybe endowed with a complete inter-consistency, but they will evidently also be self contradictory. Or our representation may be incomplete, lack self-sufficiency, but at least they will not be contradictory (Goedal).
Wojetk writes: `` All perceptions and knowledge systems are selective in that they emphasize certain facts and deemphasize or altogether ignore other facts. This is known as framing in cognitive science, and there is nothing unusual or deplorable about it.
The ubiquitous existence of framing implies that the notion of "truth" is not the matter of simple "concordance" between thought and reality, but it is rather an interpretative process involving *sets* of ideas in which the truth value of individual proposition is established not just by its in relation to reality, but also to other propositions within that set. As a result, there is always a certain level of inconsistency between ideas and facts, or among ideas within the same set that is tolerated or explained away...''
While this problem with cognition sounds similar to what I outlined above, in fact it is not the same problem. In effect Wojetk is saying that our ability to creat representations of the world is less rich than the variety of potential forms the world presents us. While I completely agree, our rather limited abilities is not the same kind of epistemological problem. Wojek is saying that our imaginations lack the steer quantity and diversity of form in its most creative mode, that the world of phenomenon present us with, and therefore we selectively edit these phenomenon down to what we can represent--or to what we wish to represent.
What I am saying is that in principle, no matter how rich our own imaginative resources are, no matter how generous our wish, even if our concepts can be matched one to one to all physical phenomenon, we still can not represent the world according to our own ideal of truth, which is both self-consistent, and self-sufficient (Goedel again).
Zizek and other post-modernist writers are quite eager to point out this latter epistemological problem when it concerns our representations of popular culture, society or the political economy. But most of the post-modernists are unaware of the very early and highly technical critiques that were mounted in the early 20thC, specifically in mathematics and the mathematically based physical sciences. The first hints that there was something profoundly wrong about the way we construct reality appeared in mathematics, oddly enough, and took the form of the now well know contradictions of set theory. But later, deeply related problems came to permeate the physical sciences as they evolved their ideas about relativity in macro-physics, and slightly later in micro-physics and quanta.
Absolutely none of these problems have been resolved. Rather they have been glossed over and more or less ignored for a variety of practical theoretical reasons. However, the deeper stains, the haunting and creepy nature of doubt still shadows almost all of these endeavors to understand ourselves, our world and the physical universe from which we arose. I think we are in a severe and sustained intellectual crisis.
While it is far more important to feed, cloth, and house the vast multitude of humanity who want for all of that, there is also this other realm. Other rooms and other voices. And yet I can not bring myself to believe these two completely diverse problems of practice and theory are not related.
In the most simplistic terms possible, we can not feed the earth's people for the same reason we can not resolve the contradictions between empirical physical science and its attending theories. The reason is because our representations of both worlds are profoundly flawed and we refuse to acknowledge it, holding to our ideals, despite every hard smack on the shins that material reality provides as a matter of course, and as a reminder of how things are.
(My third Martinis has finally kicked in. So, good night, and good luck. I need both, and have neither.)
CG