Two Views of Ideology

1
Two Views of Ideology

• Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek

2
Outline

• Starting Questions
• Hall
• Ideology rediscovered
• a process of signification
• Site of struggle
• classification
• Historicized

• Zizek
• The book
• Outline of the article
• Fantasy

3
Starting Questions

• How are Halls views of ideology different from,
  and similar to, those of Althussers, Jameson, or
  Eagletons? And how is he similar to Hebdiges
  approach? What have them learned from Gramsci?
  
• Can you give some examples of media events to
  explain how ideology is a site of struggle?
• How does Zizek move beyond Althusser in his use
  of Lacan to explain ideology? Is his view of
  form and abstraction different from Halls
  signification?
• Can you find examples of the dream work of
  ideology?

4
Hall The rediscovery of Ideology

• the post-war history of social scientific
  thought
• the pluralist paradigm developing out of the
  clash of ideologies during World War II.
• the pluralist paradigm collapsing in the face of
  the social upheavals of the '60s. ?
• power gt the power to define reality
• 3. a period of extraordinary science
• -- Media as the "signifying agents
• -- brought "the ideological" to the fore in media
  studies (65)

5
Hall The rediscovery of Ideology

• full title "The rediscovery of Ideology
  Return of the repressed in media studies." In
  Culture, Society and the Media, 56-90. New York
  Routledge, 1982.
• -- an attack of the traditional American approach
  to the study of mass communication, also known as
  the effects tradition (1051)

6
Ideology as a process of signification

• Combination (narrativization) and selection
  (exclusion) process of encoding (also decoding
  the common sense of the audience) 1051
• ? constructing privileged meanings

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"struggle over meaning."

• the mass media do tend to reproduce
  interpretations which serve the interests of the
  ruling class,
• but they are also 'a field of ideological
  struggle'.
• E.g. industrial debate p. 1052

8
classification and framework

• Classification different systems produce
  different terms and meanings
• Framework ? positionality p. 1053
• Unconscious

9
Ideological signification historicized

• Gramscis view of common sense? folklore 1055
• P. 1056 historical grammars
• deep structure of presuppositions
• their logic of arrangement

10
Class struggle of language multiple meanings in
signification

• Multiple referentiality
• Althusser too uni-accentual p. 1060
• closure equivalence of discourse and reality
• The class struggle in language struggle between
  two different terms 1061
• Changing the terms

11
The Sublime Object of Ideology

• Critique the fundamental antagonism in Marxist
  views
• Joins Marxism and Lacan (p. 4)
• Post-Marxist -- affirms the irreducible
  plurality of particular struggles , demonstrating
  how they articulation into a series of
  equivalences depends always on the radical
  contingency of the social-historical process
• Lacanian psychoanalysis enable us to grasp this
  plurality itself as a multitude of responses to
  the same impossible-real kernel

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The Sublime Object of Ideology (2)

• Sees antagonism of death drive vs. pleasure
  principle in many fields (e.g. democracy,
  ecology, etc.)
• Thesis Hegelian dialectics as the most
  consistent model of such an acknowledgement of
  antagonism.

13
The Sublime Object of Ideology (3)

• Three purposes (7)
• -- re-introduces Lacan as non-poststructuralist,
  the most radical contemporary version of the
  Enlightenment.
• return to Hegel by giving it a new reading on
  the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
• Re-define ideology through a new reading of
  classic motifs such as commodity fetishism.

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How Did Marx Invent the Symptom? Outline

1. Form of Dream//Commodity-form ? the unconscious
   the real abstraction ? money as the sublime
   object
2. Social symptom
3. Commodity fetishism necessary condition in
   capitalist society
4. Ideology defined
5. modern society is post ideological ? cynical
   reasoning fantasy in the doing

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How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?

• Fundamental homology between the interpretive
  procedure of Marx and Freud--. . . between their
  analysis of commodity fetishism and of dreams
  (11/t 312)

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Form

• Dream manifest content ? latent thought ? the
  unconscious desire
• Dream needs analysis 2. Attention should be
  centered on form (dream work).
• Commodity chancy determination of commoditys
  value ? determination by labor-time (a secret)
• even after we have explained their hidden
  meaningwhat is not yet explained is simply
  their form, the process by which the hidden
  meaning disguised itself in such a form.
  (15/t313)

17
real abstraction

• Exchange of commodity implies a double
  abstraction
• The abstraction from the changeable character of
  the commodity
• Abstraction from its sensual properties (17/t
  314)

18
real abstraction (2)

• Real abstraction the act of abstraction at work
  in the very effective process of the exchange of
  commodities (17/t 315)
• e.g.
• positive content ? a priori categories
• Physical content ? commodity value
• Latent thought ? manifest content.
• money (changeable, perishable) ? universal
  value, indestructible This immaterial
  corporality of the body within the body gives us
  a precise definition of the sublime object. (18)

19
real abstraction (3)

• (critique of Althussers rejecting this category)
  
• The real abstraction introduces the third
  element--the symbolic orderto the binary of
  real object and form of thought
• The unconscious the form of thought external to
  the thought itself

20
The Social Symptom

• Symptom a particular element which subverts
  its own universal foundation. (21/t 316) e.g.
  the idea of freedom negation of equivalent
  exchange.

21
Commodity Fetishism

• 1. a definite social relation between men, that
  assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
  relation between things (Marx 1974, 77)
• 2. A misrecognition of what is really a
  structural effect of the network of relations
  between elements (price) as an immediate
  property of one of the elements (commodity), as
  if this property belongs to it outside its
  relations with other elements. (23-24)

22
Commodity Fetishism

• Necessary when the relations between men are not
  fetishized (as they were in feudal society).

23
Ideology

• a social reality whose very existence implies the
  non-knowledge of its participants as to its
  essence (21/t 316)
• Contemporary form cynicism (knows the falsehood,
  but does not denounce it). (29/t 319)
• Cynical reason . . .leaves untouched the
  fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the
  level on which ideology structures the social
  reality itself. (30/t 320) ? not knowing in the
  doing a fetishist in practice but not in theory
  (31/t320)

24
Ideology

• "ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we
  build to escape insupportable reality in its
  basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction
  which serves as a support for our "reality"
  itself" (45/t 323)
• e.g. a fathers dream of seeing his dead son
  burned.

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Ideology (2)-- Critique of Althusser

• a gap between ISA and ideological
  interpellation, or how does ISA internalizes
  itself?
• this external machine of ideology exercises
  its force only in so far as it is experienced, in
  the unconscious economy of the subject, as a
  traumatic, senseless injunction.
• The is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of
  traumatic irrationality and senselessness ?
  ensures the authority of law.

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Fantasy as a Support of Reality

• (against ideology as illusion to be unmasked or
  reality as illusionor fiction)
• Lacan a hard kernel of the Real
• The only way to break the power of our
  ideological dream is to confront the Real of our
  desire which announces itself in this dream.
• E.g. to critique anti-Semitism
• not by saying Jews are really not like that
• but by pointing out that the ideological figure
  of a Jew a way to stitch up the inconsistency of
  our own ideological system.

27
Beyond Interpellation

• the theory of ideology descending from the
  Althusserian theory of interpellation focus too
  much on the efficiency of an ideology
  exclusively through the mechanisms of imaginary
  and symbolic identification.
• The dimension 'beyond interpellation' which was
  thus left out has nothing to do with some kind of
  irreducible dispersion and plurality of the
  signifying process ... 'Beyond interpellation' is
  the square of desire, fantasy, lack in the Other
  and drive pulsating around some unbearable
  surplus enjoyment. (124)

28
Beyond Interpellation

• -- two readings of ideology
• Discursive, symptomal reading
• Extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at
  articulating the way in which beyond the field
  of meaning but at the same time internal to it
  an ideolgoy implies, manipulate, produced a
  pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.

29
Slavoj Zizek

• a professor at the Institute for Sociology,
  Ljubljana, Slovenia
• politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a
  candidate for the presidency of the Republic of
  Slovenia in 1990, and  most of his works are
  moral and political rather than purely
  theoretical.
• (source)