Zizek's Big Ideas: Where is Ideology Today?

1. Zizek's Big Ideas: Where is Ideology today?Bill BowringSchool of Law BA Philosophy (University of Kent, 1970) Barrister Professor of Law

3. OED Definition OED definition of Ideology 1 A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy: the ideology of republicanism 1.1 The set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual: a critique of bourgeois ideology Origin late 18th century (in sense 2): from French idéologie, from Greek idea 'form, pattern' + -logos (denoting discourse or compilation).

5. Slavoj Žižek discusses the famous platitude (incorrectly) attributed to Dostoyevsky's character in "The Brothers Karamazov" that "If god does not exist, everything is permitted.“ Žižek rejects this and suggests, in fact, the opposite — that if there were a god, everything would be permissible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUtW6KIdtxE

6. Susan Marks, LSE Ideology is ‘not an inherent property of particular ideas or a characteristic of particular ideational systems, but it is rather a function of the way meaning is generated, conveyed, apprehended and appropriated in different contexts.’

7. Five roles ideology plays 1) universalisation: Through processes of universalisation, social and political institutions are made to seem impartial, inclusory and rooted in considerations of mutual interest. In this way, an illusory unity may be conferred on societies, and differential levels of social power may be masked.

8. Five roles ideology plays 2) reification: This concept is familiar from Marx’s use of it – the process by which human products come to appear as if they were material things, and then to dominate those who produced them. Thanks to strategies of reification, men and women may cease to recognise the social world as the outcome of human endeavour, and begin to see it as fixed and unchange-able, an object of contemplation rather than a domain of action.

9. Five roles ideology plays 3) naturalisation: contested arrangements appear obvious and self-evident, as if they were natural phenomena belonging to the world “out there”

10. Five roles ideology plays 4) rationalisation: through the construction of a chain of reasoning of which the status quo is the logical conclusion, it may be made to seem as if there are good reasons why things are as they are. Change may thus come to seem irrational.

11. Five roles ideology plays 5) narrativisation: the telling of stories which set particular developments in the context of a history . . . practices and institutions may be made to seem worthy of respect and perpetuation, whether because they are venerable or because they represent progress.

12. Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek argues: ‘This is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice within the co-ordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very co-ordinates.’

13. Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek argues: And: ‘What this means is that the “actual freedom” as the act of consciously changing this set occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as if the choice is not forced and “chooses the impossible”.’

14. Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso 1989, 2009) I read it in 1993, recommended by Costas Douzinas, the founder of Birkbeck Law School in 1992

15. Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book p.11 - According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom… how was it possible for Marx, in his analysis of the world of commodities, to produce a notion which applies also to the analysis of dreams, hysterical phenomena, and so on? The Marxian notion of commodity fetishism – is “a definite social relation between men, that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

16. Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book p.28 - The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" ("they do not know it, but they are doing it"). The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.

17. Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book That is why such a 'naive consciousness' can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naïve ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that it is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself.

18. George I. García and Carlos Gmo. Aguilar Sánchez “Psychoanalysis and politics: the theory of ideology in Slavoj Žižek” (International Journal of Žižek Studies v.2, n.3) Žižek is particularly interested in the third moment of ideology in and for itself, the moment when ideology seems to disappear. This is the moment, for instance, when commodity fetishism takes place. Here capitalist fantasy takes shape in social practice, and therefore it takes the form of the symptom of that very same inter-subjective fantasy… According to Žižek, therefore, ideology does not depend on the fact that in their praxis human beings do not know it (that they act in benefit of certain power groups) but they do it; it depends rather in the fact that they can know it perfectly well, but they act as if they did not know. Ideology in and for itself does not reside in knowing but in doing. Hence, in main contemporary societies, the ideology par excellence is cynicism.