Ideology After
Poststructuralism
Edited by
Sinisa Maleseviç and Iain MacKenzie
Pluto
P
Press
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in association with SSRC
First published 2002 by Pluto Press
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Copyright © Sinisa Maleseviç and Iain MacKenzie 2002
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ISBN 0 7453 1807 X hardback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ideology after poststructuralism / edited by Sinisa Maleseviç and Iain
MacKenzie.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1807–X
1. Ideology. 2. Poststructuralism. I. Maleseviç, Sinisa. II. MacKenzie,
Iain M.
HM 641 .I32 2002
140––dc21
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Contents
Acknowledgement
Introduction: de Tracy’s Legacy
Iain MacKenzie and Sinisa Maleseviç
vii
1
Part I – Poststructuralism vs. Ideology
1. Idea, Event, Ideology
Iain MacKenzie
2. Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
Caroline Williams
3. A World Beyond Ideology? Strains in Slavoj Zizek’s
Ideology Critique
Robert Porter
4. City Life and the Conditions of Possibility of an
Ideology-Proof Subject: Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce
on Berlin, Paris and Dublin
Kieran Keohane
11
28
43
64
Part II – Ideology vs. Poststructuralism
5. Rehabilitating Ideology after Poststructuralism
Sinisa Maleseviç
6. The Dialectics of the Real
Diana Coole
7. Ideology, Language and Discursive Psychology
Michael Billig
8. The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth:
Foucault and Social Critique
Mark Haugaard
Notes on Contributors
Index
87
111
134
157
171
173
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the British Academy, the School of Politics
at Queen’s University Belfast and the Social Science Research Centre,
National University of Ireland, Galway for their generous support of
the conference ‘Ideology After Poststructuralism’ which gave rise to
the papers included in this volume.
vii
For Luka, Kathryn and Sam
Introduction
de Tracy’s Legacy
Iain MacKenzie and Sinisa Maleseviç
Unlike many other concepts in social and political theory, ideology
is not an illegitimate child. We know that its father was Count
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy and that the date of its birth
was 1796. We also know that de Tracy had grand designs for his
firstborn – to become a universal and integral science of all ideas.
More than anything else the father of ideology wanted his offspring
to transcend and surpass the ideas that had motivated the French
Revolution and gained dominance in its immediate aftermath. For
de Tracy the aim of ideology was ‘to give a complete knowledge of
our intellectual faculties, and to deduce from that knowledge the
first principles of all other branches of our knowledge’ (de Tracy,
1826–27). In other words, the father of ideology shared the ultimate
goal of the Enlightenment movement – to establish a solid and
unquestionable method by which correct ideas could be scientifically identified so as to foster the use of reason in the governance of
human affairs for the betterment of society as a whole. This grand
science of ideas was thus conceived as the final, ultimate and only
measure of human intellectual capacity.
We also know that de Tracy was an overambitious father. With the
benefit of hindsight it is all too clear that de Tracy’s brainchild failed
to live up to his expectations and the science of ideology was not to
be. On the contrary, in a parodic and tragicomic historical twist, the
concept invented by de Tracy has acquired rather different meanings,
most of which are associated in one way or another with systematically or intentionally distorted truths. Ever since Napoleon’s
denunciation of ‘the ideologues’, the term ideology has been
deployed with derogatory connotations, typically to discredit an
opponent’s views, actions or intentions as no more than a set of
sophisticated lies. In this most stark example of the dialectical turn
of Enlightenment aspirations, the dream of a science of ideas has
become the nightmare of blinkered obscurantism. It would seem that
de Tracy, if only he could know, would have to admit that whatever
1
2
Ideology After Poststructuralism
hopes one has for one’s children the fact remains that they carve out
their own lives in directions wholly unforeseen by their parents.
This admission often leaves parents with a sense of failure. Such
feelings are best overcome, though, by realising that one’s legacy is
often expressed at deeper, more fundamental levels than one first
assumes. This is certainly the case with de Tracy. Firstly, it is often
overlooked that de Tracy bequeathed much more to intellectual life
than the naming of a single term. His concept marks a significant
contribution to two hundred years (and counting) of discussion on
the possibility of using analytic, systematically gathered and
organised knowledge of human values and ideas to advance society.
Although his aim of building the all-embracing genealogy of human
knowledge that would provide us with a master key to the human
spirit was a failure, the overall tenor of his project remains central to
social and political investigation. De Tracy’s primary goal was to
overcome the hegemony of religious and metaphysical explanations
of ideas in order to identify a method for critical investigation of the
sources and development of knowledge. By asking the right
questions he should undoubtedly be considered as a key figure in
the development of modern sociology and philosophy of
knowledge. Secondly, de Tracy’s ambition to find the simple,
practical and reliable tools for theoretically grounded and informed
political action has led generations of others to recognise the
necessity of developing coherent, systematic and realistic social and
political world-views, today known as ideologies – liberalism,
socialism, conservatism, feminism, etc. – thus attempting to
integrate social and political theory with the practical politics of
everyday life. Here too, the outcome of actions that de Tracy has
triggered matter much more than his own modest results. Thirdly, de
Tracy was among the first who anticipated the necessary link
between knowledge, modernity and domination. Long before it was
applauded by Comte, reluctantly accepted by Weber and denounced
by Foucault, de Tracy had come to understand the central role that
the new breed of intellectuals, the new priests of modernity, had in
the construction of truth. While de Tracy, in keeping with his
Enlightenment surroundings, saw these new intellectuals as the
vanguard of social and political progress, we should not let his
elitism and intellectual authoritarianism cloud our view of the legacy
he left behind. What is important is his implicit acknowledgement
of the deep link between power and knowledge in modernity.
Introduction
3
Despite the fact that de Tracy’s vision of a unified science of ideas
is itself an idea generally consigned to history, his conception of
ideology – with all that it implies about the relationship between
theory and practice, the role of intellectuals and the status of
knowledge in the modern world – has become a site of deep contestation and the springboard for many of what we take to be the most
innovative and challenging ideas of contemporary social and
political theory. The surest evidence of this is the fact that there are
very few major social and political theorists who did not develop in
one form or another even a rudimentary theory of ideology. Of
course, one must be careful of assigning too great a role to de Tracy
because our contemporary concerns with ideology typically stem
from a lineage that takes as its starting point the work of Marx and
Engels. In Marx and Engels, we have both an account of the
generation of ideas and an account of the conditions that would
have to be met for those ideas to merit the claim that they are fully
adequate to the world around us. In short, ideology was historicised
by Marx and Engels. Their account of the different ideas that
dominate different economic systems in different historical epochs
gave renewed impetus to the idea that the study of ideology was a
core component of any serious social and political philosophy.
Perhaps more importantly, Marx and Engels bequeathed to the study
of ideology the idea that under conditions of post-capitalist
economic production, when production is no longer riven with class
division, there will be no dominant ideologies to bolster false claims
as to the nature of social and political reality. This claim has
generated a vast array of speculation on the possibility of nonideological social and political interaction, and it would not be an
exaggeration to say that much of the most innovative work on
ideology has been that which has faced head-on the twin demands
of an historicised and, in some respects, all-embracing sense of
ideology and an account of the disappearance, now or in the future,
of ideologically tainted forms of social and political life.
We can see this if we look at the range of discussions on ideology
after Marx and Engels. To name a few, this concern is central to the
work of Lenin, Bernstein, Gramsci, Althusser, Geertz, Mannheim,
Marcuse, Habermas, Gouldner, Parsons, Boudon, Freeden and Zizek.
Of course, these theoretical approaches to ideology differ in many
ways. Some have focused on the origins of ideology, locating it in
the capitalist mode of production (such as the structural Marxists),
others were concerned with its psychological powers, seeing ideology
4
Ideology After Poststructuralism
as a fantasy of enjoyment (the cultural psychoanalysts, for example),
some have concentrated on ideologies as cultural systems (as with
the symbolic anthropologists), others have emphasised its societal
function, perceiving it as a cement that binds society together (the
functionalist sociologists, for example), and so on. These were all
markedly different interpretations and understandings of ideology,
often with very little mutual agreement. However, what united them
all was a recognition of the relevance and the necessity of the
concept of ideology. Whether these theorists have subscribed to a
positive, negative or neutral evaluation of ideology, or opted for
restrictive or all-inclusive concepts of ideology, or developed materialist or idealist interpretations of ideology, very few major social
theorists of the twentieth century have dismissed the entire concept
as being analytically or heuristically irrelevant or flawed.
With the development of poststructuralism this has dramatically
changed. Poststructuralism represents the first truly sustained
critique of de Tracy’s legacy. To varying degrees, and for different
reasons, poststructuralists have opted out of the ongoing discussion
initiated by de Tracy and they typically reject the idea that a
discussion of ideology is relevant to our attempts to understand the
contemporary world. The general outline of the poststructuralist
critique, for all the different versions of it that have been articulated,
can nonetheless be summed up quite simply. Poststructuralists have
argued that from its inception the concept of ideology has remained
chained to the problematic humanist assumptions that motivated
the Enlightenment. Given the poststructuralist critique of
humanism, the idea that one can ‘rise above all particular social perspectives and reach a non-ideological definition of the nature of
man’ (O’Sullivan, 1989, p. x) is thought to be theoretically barren
and politically dangerous. Where the classic texts of poststructuralism often tread carefully in rethinking and problematising other
stalwarts of the theoretical lexicon, ideology has come in for straightforward attack and blunt rejection. Deleuze and Guattari’s remark in
the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus is indicative of this blatant
poststructuralist rejection of ideology: ‘There is no ideology and
there never has been’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 4).
The aim of this book is to explore the significance and consequences of the poststructuralist critique of ideology while avoiding
such strategies of blunt rejection. The chapters that follow aim to
explore the possibilities for a nuanced and subtle poststructuralist
problematisation of ideology and also to explore the resources
Introduction
5
available within contemporary ideology theory for accommodating
and/or responding to poststructuralist suspicions about the
humanist assumptions that drive ideology theory. As such, the book
is divided into two parts. The first part of the book consists of four
chapters which share one common theme – the rejection of a naïve
poststructuralist critique of ideology. In their different ways, all four
authors explore the possibility of developing a viable concept of
ideology or its substitute, which would go beyond traditional
ideology critique and would at the same time preserve central
postulates of poststructuralism.
Iain Mackenzie’s chapter, ‘Idea, Event, Ideology’, presents the
broad outline of an encounter between competing accounts of the
nature of ideas and events and the theory of ideology. It is argued
that we cannot fully understand what we mean by ideology if we do
not first have a sure grasp of what we mean by ‘ideas’ and the things
that ideas are said to represent, ‘events’. Once the conceptual ground
has been cleared in this way, one can see why poststructuralists
would want to be suspicious of traditional forms of ideology critique,
given that poststructuralists have a distinctive account of both ideas
and events; but one can also see why it is possible to reconceptualise
a poststructuralist account of ideology, using these distinctive conceptions of idea and event. Mackenzie argues that this transforms
the common view that poststructuralist theorists simply reject
ideology into the view that they reject ideology only when it is based
on majoritarian conceptions of the idea and the event. The chapter
concludes with the claim that this should dispel the common but
false notion that poststructuralism lacks the conceptual apparatus
required to engage in effective social criticism.
In the second chapter, entitled ‘Ideology and Imaginary:
Returning to Althusser’, Caroline Williams argues that in the light
of the poststructuralist attack, the concept of ideology can be rescued
by returning to its structuralist roots and in particular to Althusser’s
later work. The chapter is divided into three sections. Sections one
and two explore the indicators of ideology in Althusser’s work – the
first, epistemological, and linked to his project to develop a science
shorn of all subjective reference; the second, political, and linked to
the constitution of the social subject and the materiality of ideology’s
practices. The third section considers Althusser’s later reflections on
what he calls ‘aleatory materialism’ or a materialism of the
encounter. It is argued that the theory of ‘aleatory materialism’ offers
6
Ideology After Poststructuralism
a way out of some of the problems encountered in sections one and
two.
Robert Porter’s chapter, ‘A World Beyond Ideology? Strains in
Slavoj Zizek’s Ideology Critique’, critically analyses the theory of
ideology put forward by Slavoj Zizek. The author argues that there
are two strains or tendencies at play in Zizek’s theorisations: an affirmative strain that takes ideology critique to be ethically motivated
and a negative strain that constantly challenges any affirmative
gesture aimed at justifying ideology critique. The chapter analyses
the tensions between these two strains of Zizek’s thought, and in the
process provides insights into the idea of a world without ideology.
In the fourth chapter, ‘City Life and the Conditions of Possibility of
an Ideology-Proof Subject: Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce on Berlin,
Paris and Dublin’, Kieran Keohane discusses and formulates the revitalised urban spaces of Berlin, Paris and Dublin as ideological fetishes
sustaining the consumptive desires of urban tourism and shopping as
lifestyle. Benjamin’s argument for the emancipatory potential in the
outmoded commodity is disputed in the context of the reconstruction of the dead object as antique and thereby repository of the
authentic, in the environment of postmodern nostalgic libidinal
economy. The reconstruction of Dublin’s Temple Bar as a ‘cultural
quarter’ is similarly interrogated. Temple Bar is formulated as a
simulacrum of modern urban street space, in which the conditions of
possibility of the emergence of a prototypical utopian cosmopolitan
subjectivity, exemplified in Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, are being systematically eliminated. The persistence of social antagonism and the
subversion of prevailing ideological interpellations in the postmodern
urban environment are explored in all three cities.
The second part of the book is devoted to theoretical responses to
poststructuralist attacks on ideology. The four authors represented
all explore possible ways out of traditional ideology critique and its
heavy-handed emphasis on the Enlightenment-shaped belief in the
existence of sharp distinctions between science and ideology, truth
and falsity or reason and prejudice.
In his chapter ‘Rehabilitating Ideology after Poststructuralism’,
Sinisa Maleseviç looks at the analytical relevance of the concept of
ideology in the wake of poststructuralist criticism. He argues that
although poststructuralism rightly challenges the totalising
ambitions of ideology critique, being focused exclusively on the
Marxist understanding of ideology, it fails to account properly for
the contributions of other theoretical traditions. Poststructuralist
Introduction
7
preference for the concepts of ‘discourse’ or ‘meta-narrative’ over
that of ideology has been criticised as being too relativist and analytically insufficient for empirical purposes. The author argues that
the concept of ideology can be rehabilitated by moving it from
structure-centred approaches towards more agency-centred theories
of ideology and by shifting the emphasis from the function to the
form and content of ideology. It is claimed that the subtlety of micro
approaches not only can better respond to the challenges of poststructuralist criticism but also can rescue and give a new life to the
concept of ideology.
In ‘The Dialectics of the Real’, Diana Coole offers a provisional
defence of ideology inasmuch as it is one element within a dialectical understanding of social life. Ideology is understood in this
context as referring to ideas and practices which block communication, exploration and interrogation in order to sustain established
limits, boundaries, interests and privileges. From this perspective it
is claimed that dialectical and genealogical, deconstructive or vitalist
positions have more in common than postructuralists generally
acknowledge. Coole argues that some of the poststructuralist
criticisms made of ideology elide the case against Descartes and Kant
with that against Hegel and Marx, leading to an unnecessarily hostile
response to dialectics as a critical engagement with the real.
Michael Billig defends the concept of ideology from a psychological perspective. In his chapter ‘Ideology, Language and Discursive
Psychology’, he argues that any theory of ideology needs a psychological dimension to show how people think, feel and act
ideologically. Given the recent interest in linking ideology to
discourse, ideology needs a discursive psychology, which shows how
psychological states can be constituted through discourse. It is
suggested in this chapter that such a discursive psychology needs to
take into account three psychological levels: conscious, preconscious
and unconscious. Ideology provides the means for conscious deliberation through the rhetoric of argumentation and ideological
dilemmas. Preconscious ideology functions through the familiar but
often unnoticed elements of social life. In discourse, dietic aspects
of discourse frequently function at this level. With regard to the
unconscious, it is suggested that repression is essentially a dialogic
process. Through acquiring language we acquire the ability to
repress, and this ability can be socially practised. In this way ideology
is revealed both by what is habitually said, and just as important, by
what is habitually left unsaid.
8
Ideology After Poststructuralism
In the last chapter, ‘The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth:
Foucault and Social Critique’, Mark Haugaard examines Foucault’s
concept of ‘truth’ and his declared death of the subject. While it is
claimed that Foucault perceived himself as a radical philosophical
relativist and that he was strongly committed to the idea of the death
of the subject, it is argued in this chapter that neither are actually
intrinsic to the logic of the theoretical position which Foucault
develops in his genealogical histories. If one recognises, as Foucault
did, that relations of domination are recreated through the reproduction of systems of meaning and reinforced through the language
of truth production, one needs to know if this recognition is necessarily self-defeating. It is argued that Foucault presented his analysis
in terms that have implications that are not inherent to such a
perception of relations of domination and, furthermore, that the
actual content of Foucault’s genealogy offers evidence to support
such a thesis.
All of these essays testify to the possibilities of a vibrant debate
between poststructuralists and ideology theorists that does not
necessarily end in unproductive claims and counter-claims.
Although the mutual suspicion that exists between poststructuralists and ideology theorists will not evaporate overnight, this
collection should serve to remind protagonists from both camps that
the possibility of further discussion and debate exists in areas where
even the most hardened battle lines have been drawn up. It is not
clear where the debates between poststructuralists and ideology
theorists will end up but there is reason to believe that ideology after
poststructuralism will be marked by a new maturity that will enable
de Tracy’s brainchild to emerge from under the wing of an unsophisticated humanism.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 (London: The Athlone Press).
de Tracy, A.L.C.D. (1826–27) Éléments d’idéologie – l’Idéologie (Brussels: A.
Wahlen).
O’Sullivan, N. (ed.) (1989) The Structure of Modern Ideology (Aldershot: Edward
Elgar).
PART I
Poststructuralism vs. Ideology
1
Idea, Event, Ideology
Iain MacKenzie
As the Paris uprisings of May 1968 summoned the dormant forces
of backlash and reaction, from both Left and Right, Henri Lefebvre
sought to understand the multifaceted nature of this event, and of
events in general. He begins with the claim that events challenge
the complacencies of those who concern themselves with, and find
solace in, the world of ideas. Events, he says, ‘pull thinkers out of
their comfortable seats and plunge them headlong into a world of
contradictions. Those who are obsessed with stability lose their
smiling confidence and good humour’ (Lefebvre, 1969, p. 8). This is
a particular example of a general dogma – one that has currency both
within the academy and in the world at large – namely, that the particularity of events disrupts the universality of ideas. Of course, in
privileging the disruptive powers of ‘the event’ this dogma itself
depends upon a system of ideas that posits the event as privileged.
Generally speaking, one can call this ‘background’ reservoir of ideas
the ‘ideology’ that motivates the analysis.
But if we define ideologies solely as sets of ‘second-order’ or
‘background’ ideas then this manoeuvre itself could be taken to task
on the grounds that it idealises the concept of ideology. It could be
argued, in fact, that such an idealist reading of ideology amounts to
an ideological account of what is meant by the term ideology: ideological in that it surreptitiously and problematically privileges the
realm of ideas over other realms. Although it seems intuitive to
assume that ideologies are ‘collections of ideas’ that inform the way
we look at the world (where ‘the world’ includes both ideas and
events) there is an equally plausible counter-intuition that ideologies
are at least as much ‘collections of events’ (where events should
signify actions, practices, habits, etc.) that shape the world (again,
where ‘the world’ includes both ideas and events). Given this,
ideologies are not just collections of ‘background ideas’, they are also
collections of ‘background events’.
The same point can be made in a slightly different way. More than
30 years after the ‘events of 1968’, the turn to ideology is no longer
a straightforward one. In the intervening years, an overly confident
11
12
Ideology After Poststructuralism
neo-liberalism (Fukuyama, 1992) and an extravagantly destructive
postmodernism (Baudrillard, 1975) draped the intellectual skyline
in a flurry of banners proclaiming ‘the end-of-ideology’ (while it was
not the first time such banners had seen the light of day, the decay
and eventual collapse of the Soviet bloc gave their message a new
persuasive power). However, as the ‘end-of-ideology’ thesis is left in
tatters – to the extent that it has been exposed as the ideological
manoeuvre par excellence (for example, Derrida, 1994; Zizek, 1994) –
the opportunity has now arisen for a new look at this seemingly
withered concept (for example, Laclau 1996). As a result there has
been a resurgence, albeit a cautious one, in the idea of ideology. A
key theme in this new attitude of constructive interrogation, I would
suggest, is a fresh look at what the theory of ideas has to offer ideological analyses. One of the odd developments of previous,
traditional, work on ideology had been its peculiar disregard for
ideas. Indeed, this disregard became such a rallying cry that the
theory of ideas, it seemed, had been overtaken by theories of
ideology (a theme that will be taken up in the last section of this
chapter). If this is to be remedied then the nature of the idea must
be placed firmly at the heart of the nature of ideology.
But, as already stated, it would be foolish to subsume the theory
of ideology within the scholastic world of the theory of ideas. This
would inevitably result in a denigration of the ‘active’ dimension of
ideologies; that ideologies have a role in shaping the world, not just
a role in how we view the world, is poorly expressed solely as a
function of ‘ideas’ (at least as we traditionally understand them).
Freeden (1996), in one of the most significant contributions to the
study of ideology in recent years, argues that it is misleading to view
ideologies as pure systems of ideas. He argues, in contrast, that the
most distinctive feature of ideological analyses is that they take ideas
and behaviour into account (in contrast with the abstract approach of
much contemporary political philosophy). As such, Freeden talks of
ideologies as ‘thought–behaviour’ conjunctions (1996, p. 43). While
this goes a long way towards capturing the complex nature of
ideologies – that they are more than simply thoughts or ideas –
throughout the discussion below I shall keep my distance from the
concept of behaviour (which I understand to have a troubling ring
of methodological individualism to it) in preference for the term
‘event’ (on the grounds that ideologies may shape the world in ways
which cannot be accounted for by the idea of human behaviour). I
take it, therefore, that ideologies are manifest not only as ideas in
Idea, Event, Ideology
13
the world but also as events in the world. An ideology, one could say,
is an idea–event conjunction. One cannot address the nature of
ideology, in short, without implicating oneself in a discussion about
the relationship between ideas and events.
Ideologies, then, are both ideas and events that shape the way we
think about how ideas and events relate to each other. I shall outline
below the various ways this knotty definition could be unravelled.
In conclusion I shall propose what I take to be the only consistent
way of understanding ideologies as both sets of ideas about ideas and
events and as events which give shape to ideas and events. To do this
I shall turn first to the nature of ideas, then to the nature of events
before finally turning to a reconsideration of the nature of ideology.
IDEA
When one inquires about the nature of ideas one immediately faces
a problem: how can one have an idea of ideas? But the problematic
nature of such an inquiry gives the clue to how it can be overcome.
Ideas have a mutually constitutive relation to problems, precisely
because of the problem of finding an idea of ideas. We can
understand the nature of ideas, therefore, by understanding how
they relate to problems (whatever the problem, although ultimately
the essential problem is always one of relating ideas to themselves).
An investigation of ideas, then, requires an investigation of how
ideas are generated in response to problems and how problems are
generated in response to ideas. Of course, this is no straightforward
matter. The history of philosophy is littered with attempts to cast
this relationship between ideas and problems in the toughest metal,
so as to avoid the corrosive powers of trying to generate an idea of
ideas. I shall briefly outline five such attempts – those that I take to
be the most dominant and the most revealing as regards the task in
hand. In each case I shall associate the relationship between ideas
and problems with a persona that represents the nature of philosophical activity implicit within the account. In addition, the
problem of the political will be used as a way of indicating the nature
of the idea at work in each account, an approach which also makes
the transition towards the concept of ideology later in the chapter
less of a jolt.
The five conceptions of the idea:
1. The problem is a poorly comprehended idea. On this account
of the relationship between problems and ideas, we might say that
the problem of the political is a result of a failure to comprehend
14
Ideology After Poststructuralism
fully the nature of the political. The task of the philosopher in this
instance is to reveal the true nature of politics such that, for example,
politics is thought to be essentially the pursuit of justice. The
philosopher, in other words, has a certain artistic role in that she
helps us to comprehend the object, in this case ‘politics’, for what it
really is. The persona associated with this conception of the relationship between ideas and problems is the artist.
2. The problem circumscribes the idea. On this account, there is
not a failure of comprehension but a failure to state the problem
correctly. One should not assume, therefore, that there is a nature
of the political to be revealed. Instead, it is assumed that one can
state the problem of the political in such a way that the boundaries
of what might count as the political are properly demarcated. This
leaves the nature of the political in a state of suspension and shifts
the interrogative focus on to an analysis of the problem itself. The
philosopher’s role in this case is less that of the artist and more that
of the artisan that helps to craft whatever idea we have of the
political into a form appropriate to the problem of the political. The
artisan, we might say, is less concerned with the nature of justice
than with the right way to deal with competing conceptions of the
nature of justice (or in a more contemporary vein, much recent
political philosophy has come to define justice as that which
mediates between competing conceptions of the good).
Both of these approaches assume that there is a certain timelessness about the relationship between problems and ideas. This is
problematic to the extent that one takes as given the changing
nature of problems, such that, for example, the political is thought
to be a different problem at different historical moments (and, we
must add, in different contexts). This gives rise to a strategy of
making the problem of the political itself problematic. This strategy
typically takes two forms, one which salvages the idea’s relation to
the problem and one which sets the idea adrift from the logic of the
problem.
3. The problem is made problematic so as to pursue the logic of
changing ideas. On this account the problem of the political can
only be stated correctly if it is seen to be a problem that changes over
time. In other words, there is no one way to circumscribe the
political as a problem but a series of different ways which are then
placed in relation to each other. The relationship between the idea
and the problem is salvaged to the extent that one has an idea of the
ways in which problems change. The philosopher in this case is not
Idea, Event, Ideology
15
the artisan who crafts our idea of the political into an appropriate
form but an architect who builds the different conceptions of the
political problem into a larger theoretical system, that is, one that
harmonises the competing problems of the political into an idea of
how the political may reveal itself by virtue of being placed in
relation to other problems.
4. Problems and ideas are incommensurate. On this account, the
historicity, and contextuality, of problems are seen to rupture any
connection they might be said to have with ideas. The problem of
the political, for instance, has no architectural resolution and this
lack of resolution functions as the condition of the political itself.
The political is defined by its very problematic quality and the world
of ideas about the political is thought to be the very definition of
the apolitical. Typically this account of the relationship is used to
undermine all the previous accounts by dissolving them into
variants of the first conception (that problems are poorly comprehended ideas). It nonetheless resonates with this very strategy to the
extent that it depends upon an idea of the political as essentially
problematic. One might say, therefore, that the philosopher in this
instance, in trying so hard to distance herself from her role as artist,
ends up playing the role of artiste; where the artiste is the mock artist,
the one that assumes the garb of the artist in an attempt to lay bare
the pretensions of the artist.
In summary, on the side of the idea we have the Platonic drive (1)
to comprehend the essence of problems and the dialectical drive (3)
to unravel the idea in time through problems. On the side of the
problem we have the modern, typically Kantian, drive (2) to circumscribe the idea and the postmodern drive (4) to unhook the
world of ideas from the world of problems. At this point one might
be tempted to say that the logic of the relationship between
problems and ideas has been exhausted. However, before giving way
to this temptation it is worth inquiring further into the nature of
this exhaustion. The solutions given to the relationship between
problems and ideas are only ever partial solutions because they are
predetermined by the way in which one constructs the relationship
in the first place. Indeed, because of this, it is often thought that
philosophy hits rock bottom and the analytical spade is forced to
turn back on itself. The theoretical exhaustion arises, therefore, as a
result of pursuing the impossible resolution of the essentially problematic. It is tempting to think, therefore, that one should make
one’s metaphysical choice and get on with the business of
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
philosophy from whatever ground one has chosen. But, to the extent
that this strategy is itself a resolution, one which is conditioned by
a certain view of philosophy’s relationship to the metaphysical (of
the problem to the idea), the exhaustion that accompanies the initial
conundrums will never be overcome. Perhaps this is why so much of
contemporary philosophy lacks vitality; every intake of air serves to
remind it of the exhausted state of its lungs.
Translating this into the realm of the political, it is sometimes said
that one must plant one’s feet in ideological soil in order even to
enter the political arena. In other words, it is the very pursuit of an
idea of the political in response to that which is perceived as the
problem that generates the need for the concept of ideology or,
putting it more strongly, the impossibility of escaping the ideological. This is problematic, however, to the extent that it treats the
problem of the political as already given in the idea of the ideological: a relationship that can be played out in any of the four ways
already outlined. At this point the metaphysical circles in which we
are caught seem to take a distinctively vicious turn. And, for all that
an increasing number of social and political theorists are trying to
construct a ‘politics’ out of these disabling conundrums – witness
the growing interest in ‘the decision’ as the formative moment of
politics (Critchley, 1999; Laclau, 1996) – I want to argue that a more
promising route can be taken by following through another way of
conceiving of the relationship between problems and ideas. This
leads on to the fifth option.
5. Problems and ideas are coextensive. We can say that on this
account the problem of the political is that which expresses the idea
of politics but that the idea of politics can only ever be expressed as
a problem. The role of the philosopher on this account is twofold.
On the one hand, the philosopher must reveal the partiality that will
always haunt any attempt to resolve the relationship between
problems and ideas. One can make the same point by saying that
the task of the philosopher is to unmask the artist, artisan, architect
and artiste in order to expose the prejudicial gaze that the mask is
there to hide. On the other hand, the philosopher must turn this
negative critique into a positive affirmation by conceiving of the
problem as an idea. Here, one might say that the philosopher
idealises the problem to the extent that she recognises the need to
adopt a philosophical persona or mask. This seemingly contradictory gesture will flounder on the very same rocks as the other
approaches if one particular persona is idealised in competition with
Idea, Event, Ideology
17
the others; that is, it will not escape the charge of predetermination
– that one conceptualises the relationship between ideas and
problems only by determining that relationship prior to one’s
‘solution’ of it – if it is seen to give priority to a partial determination
of philosophical activity (if under the masks of the other conceptualisations one is said to find the true face of philosophy). Therefore,
we should think of the philosopher on this account as the one who
constantly restages the relationship between problems and ideas
without privileging any particular version of that relationship. The
persona appropriate to this account is that of the person who adopts
personas, the actor. In other words, the philosopher must ‘act out’
the resolution between problem and idea each time the relationship
is ‘staged’ anew. Or, turning this passive construction into a more
active one, it is through the various ‘actings-out’ that the very nature
of the relationship is staged each time.
There is reason to believe that this is the least promising of all the
options discussed so far. First, it may be said to dissolve the very distinction under scrutiny, the distinction between problems and ideas.
Second, it appears to have compounded this by ignoring the
conceptual benefits of historicising the relationship between
problems and ideas. Both of these criticisms, however, miss the
point. First, the claim that ideas and problems are coextensive does
not dissolve the distinction between the terms; rather it makes the
nature of that distinction relative to the event through which the
distinction is ‘acted out’ or ‘staged’. Political events, one might say,
create a certain relationship between the problem and the idea of
the political, such that they cannot be made subject to a predetermined sense of what constitutes the political in the first place.
Second, the historicity of the relationship is to be found in the
changing nature of events, rather than in a predetermined sense of
what makes events change. The theatre of political events, one might
say, is governed by the time of the ‘eternal present’, so long as one
thinks of the present as that which lacks ‘plenitude’ and the eternal
as that which lacks ‘unity’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 175). So the claim that
ideas and problems coexist does not imply that the relationship does
not change; on the contrary, it raises the possibility of real change,
that is, change freed from a predetermined logic of change.
Both these responses, however, appeal to a logic of events that has
yet to be fleshed out. Of course, the nature of the event, just like the
nature of the idea, is one that is highly contested. It is important to
consider, then, some of the different ways in which the event has
18
Ideology After Poststructuralism
been conceptualised in order to develop this discussion of the nature
of ideas. In the process, the groundwork will be laid for the final
section where I will show how this discussion of the idea and the
event can be used to shed some light on the nature of ideology.
EVENT
It may seem odd to look to the nature of the event to bolster an
abstract metaphysical claim about the nature of the idea. However,
as I said at the outset, one cannot invoke the particularity of events
without constructing an idea that governs that particularity. In other
words, the world of events and the world of ideas are not mutually
exclusive and antagonistic. Rather we should see events and ideas as
constituting different dimensions of the same world. From this perspective, therefore, it is important to consider the various ways in
which these two dimensions may be said to intersect. This point of
intersection we can call, in general, the sense of the event – the
meaning the event has for us in constructing the problem and idea
that we extrapolate from it. In politics this is clear: an event is made
sense of in terms that establish a relationship between the problem
of the political and its idealisation. For example, if the events of 1968
(which I’ll be treating as a paradigmatic event throughout this part
of the chapter) are made sense of vis-à-vis the failure (or not) of Left
politics, then this in turn reinforces the idea that the problem of the
political is one of class antagonism. So, to understand the different
ways in which the event can be conceptualised we must think in
terms of the relationship between the nature of the event and the
sense of the event. With this in mind I shall now briefly outline a
number of different conceptions of events and how we make sense
of them. Each conception will be associated with a contemporary,
broadly twentieth-century, school of thought, though this should
not be taken to imply that the relationship between events and sense
is a solely contemporary phenomenon (far from it!). I also recognise
that the thumbnail sketches that follow cannot be said to capture
the conceptual riches of each position. My aim is simply to map out
a terrain of thinking about the event that enables me to make some
general remarks about the relationship between ideas and ideologies.
I will examine seven approaches to the event.
1. Positivism. For the positivist the event is to be thought of as a
transformation in a state of affairs such that the meaning of events,
the sense we make of them, is to be treated as an attribute of that
transformation. The events of 1968 are to be explained by reference
Idea, Event, Ideology
19
to the dynamics of French society and whatever sense is attributed
to those events is contained within the explanation of that
dynamism.
Now, the problems associated with a positivist logic of the event
and its sense are well documented. Broadly speaking, positivism does
not allow for the contingency of meaning that has become the bread
and butter of contemporary philosophy. It lacks sensitivity vis-à-vis
the mutable and contestable grounds of sense. This has led to a
number of different approaches to events and their sense that reveal,
to varying degrees, the shifting sands upon which we construct
meaning.
2. Phenomenology. For the phenomenologist the nature of the
event is located in material transformations but the sense of the
event is to be found in the operations of consciousness. Much as for
positivism, the events of 1968 are said to have a brute facticity about
them but, in contrast to positivism, the meaning of those events is
not contained within that facticity, rather it is found in the way the
conscious subject signifies that facticity to itself.
3. Structuralism. For the structuralist the nature of the event and its
sense combine in a logic of discursive transformation. The notion
that events involve transformations is retained but the site of transformation is not to be found in the materiality of the event nor in
consciousness but in the ways in which its sense is structured in
relation to a field of signification. Typically, therefore, the event is a
transformation in that field of signification, the discourse, rather
than in the state of affairs that it may be said to represent. The events
of 1968, for example, are to be understood in terms of the transformations and reverberations of this very phrase within and between
discursive systems.
4. Deconstruction. The deconstructionist begins with the separation
of facticity and meaning inaugurated by phenomenology and then
doubts that the conscious subject can be said, in any foundational
sense, to be the locus of meaning. Similarly, though, the deconstructionist doubts that one can straightforwardly invoke the
discursive field as the locus of meaning. The consequence of this is
a radical separation between facticity and meaning (where even the
‘facticity’ of the discursive field is rendered problematic). As regards
the events of 1968, both the nature of the material transformation
and the sense we can make of that transformation are held in
suspension, such that all that remains is, in principle, an open-ended
chain of signification.
20
Ideology After Poststructuralism
5. Hermeneutics. From the hermeneutic perspective this radical
separation of facticity and meaning goes too far. A relationship
between the event and its sense, it is argued, can be established when
one considers both aspects from an historical point of view. For the
hermeneuticist, historicising facticity and sense usually takes the
form of accounting for their split in terms of a narrative of cultural
and self transformation such that we are in a position to assume their
possible reconciliation. The nature of the events of 1968, in other
words, will emerge in the process of trying to find the narrative that
makes the most sense of those events.
6. Critical theory. Accepting the need to historicise the relationship
between the nature of the event and its sense, the critical theorist
nonetheless remains suspicious of the hermeneutic desire for a
narrative of retrieval and reconciliation, arguing instead for a means
through which the substance of such narratives can be assessed as
reasonable accounts of the nature of the event (so as to avoid
hermeneutics slipping into deconstruction). Putting it another way,
reasonableness is formulated with particular regard to avoiding both
the logic of the object so dear to positivism and the subjectivist
baggage of phenomenology, the result being a stress on the intersubjective, communicative, construction of reason. The nature of
the events of 1968 is held in suspension until agreement is reached
about the meaning of those events to all concerned (an agreement
that is rationally grounded but sensitive to historical and cultural
development).
In all of these cases, the desire to move beyond positivism has led
to the creation of a certain distance between the event and its sense.
This distance is problematic because it ultimately dislocates the
grounds of sense from the world of events; one is understanding the
event in terms not given by the event (consciousness, discourse,
history, reason, and so on). Of course, for many that is the only
option if one wants to escape the paralysing logic of positivism.
There is one other option, however, that looks to salvage the
positivist intuition that the event and its sense are bound together
while retaining the post-positivist intuition that sense is changeable
and contestable.
7. Constructivism. In contrast with positivism, the event is not
simply a transformation within a state of affairs. Rather, the event
expresses the transformation between states of affairs in terms not given
by those states of affairs. Deleuze has given us a paradigm case of this
when he contrasts the state of affairs denoted by ‘green’ with the
Idea, Event, Ideology
21
event expressed by the phrase ‘to green’. As he puts it, the event
should not be confused with ‘the state of affairs denoted by the
proposition’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 182). As he puts it in another text,
‘pure events escape from states of affairs’ (Deleuze, 1997, p. 21).
While post-positivists assume, however, that this means that the
sense of the event is given by reference to something beyond the
event, the constructivist argues that ‘sense does not exist outside of
the proposition’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 21). For the constructivist, if sense
resides anywhere other than in the proposition, anywhere other
than in language, then one will never understand sense and
language immanently.
But how can we think of the event as the moment of transformation between states of affairs and, at the same time, maintain that
the sense of the event must be given immanently in language? On
the face of it, this seems to cleave the event from its sense in the
most radical way yet. However, putting it rather abruptly, exactly the
opposite is true. If there were not transformations between states of
affairs there would be nothing to sense to make sense. If things did
not change, then we’d have nothing to say. Events are not separated
from sense, therefore, rather events are the glue that stick things to
words such that sense is possible. This avoids the pitfalls of
positivism because it treats ‘the glue’ as made up of transformations,
not given states of affairs, and hence it retains the post-positivist
insight into the contingent nature of meaning. However, it also
avoids the pitfalls of post-positivism by resisting the temptation to
view this contingency in terms of external interference in the relationship between things and words. So, the constructivist maintains
that sense resides ‘on the surface’ between things and words, where
the surface is the event constituted as the moment of transformation between states of affairs.
Before turning to the nature of ideology, I will briefly comment
on the relationship between ideas and events. As is well known, if
the event is thought to contain and constrain its sense in the manner
of positivism then the problematic nature of events is always already
circumscribed by an idealisation of the event which renders it
ultimately unproblematic – typically, in the name of ‘common
sense’. This is not the place to rehash the arguments against such a
reductive move; suffice to say that, from a political perspective, the
idea that philosophy is the mobilisation of a ‘common sense’ is
incredibly dangerous as well as intellectually barren. But, if the event
is separated from its sense, as a signification of something external
22
Ideology After Poststructuralism
to the event in the manner of post-positivism, then the problem of
how to relate facticity and meaning will always be met by a solution
that must be treated as ideal (the self, discursive structures, historical
narratives, communicative reason or whatever). So, whereas
positivism typically idealises the problem, post-positivism typically
assumes an already idealised idea. In both cases, the issue of predetermination, addressed earlier on, will always rear its head.
In contrast, if the event is that which makes sense possible in the
first place then the problem of how to relate facticity and meaning
is one that must be staged anew each time, with each event. As such,
the meaning of events will never be given by reference to a predetermined ideal of how sense relates to events. But, unless this passive
account of the relationship between facticity and meaning is turned
into an active one, it too will quickly become metaphysically
exhausted. This active transformation requires divesting oneself of
the tendency to think that events are things that happen which
philosophers must make sense of ‘after the event’ and, instead, one
must embrace the idea that philosophy is the construction of events.
When we think of philosophy in these terms we can sharpen up the
claim made at the end of the last section. Rather than say that ideas
and problems are staged through events we should say that ideas
and problems coexist in events.
IDEOLOGY
This chapter began with the claim that one cannot formulate an idea
about the nature of an event without invoking an ideological frame
of reference. I now want to examine how this general definition of
ideology is affected by the previous discussions of the idea and the
event.
One might be tempted to begin with a distinction between
ideologies and the ideological, where ideologies are particular configurations of idea and event and the ideological expresses the
inescapable fact that idea and event mutually presuppose each other.
On this account, the task of the ideology theorist is to construct a
graph of possible ideologies, with the points on one axis representing the different conceptions of the relationship between problems
and ideas and the points on the other axis representing the different
conceptions of the event and its sense. One could then plot the
various points and look for the regularities or irregularities that exist
between these points. However, this image is deeply problematic,
given what has already been said about the idea and the event,
Idea, Event, Ideology
23
because it amounts to the claim that the idea of the ideological
conditions the problem of how ideas and events relate, such that
events and the sense we make of them are also conditioned by a predetermined grasp of what counts as ideological. Given that this claim
depends upon a certain constitution of the relationship between
problems, ideas, events and their sense, it fails to grasp the essential
contestability within and between all these terms. In short, this
approach falls into the trap of predetermining that which it is trying
to prove. If we blithely accept that the ideological conditions
ideologies, the ways in which the idea and the event are combined,
then we will plunge ever deeper into the metaphysical quagmire.
Traditionally this conundrum was simply ignored by jettisoning
the problematic quality of ideas into a wilderness beyond the ideological. It was this I alluded to above when I suggested that ideology
theorists tended to be wary of, even hostile to, the world of ideas.
For many who study ideology it is precisely these disabling philosophical manoeuvres that lend weight to the fact that the study of
ideology is first and foremost a sociological activity, where this is
deemed to be the investigation of events with a more or less dispassionate and objective eye for the ideas that inform them and how
they fit together (or not) – I say this aware of the fact that few sociologists interested in ideology are looking for ‘objectivity’ in their
work. The problem is that no amount of trying to avoid the implications of these philosophical dilemmas – say, by framing the idea in
given social conditions, or by trying to avoid any reference to one’s
social conditions by celebrating the inevitable contingency of it all
– will ever truly sidestep the partial and problematic nature of an
idea of ideology. Attempts to account for the nature of politics in
terms of competing ideologies typically fall into the same trap – that
is, predetermining the political field as already ideologically constituted so as to prove by way of an analysis of competing ideologies
(idea–event conjunctions) that this is the case.
The issue at stake is this: even though particular conceptions of
idea and event bring forth a concept of ideology, the ideological does
not function independently of a particular conception of ideology.
It is a mark of recent work on ideology, I would suggest, that it has
tried to grapple with the fact that each configuration of idea and
event posits its own conception of the ideological. Once this is
accepted, the thrust of the discussion is led away from a configuration of the ideological as that which explains ideologies and towards
a far less certain, but far more exciting set of possibilities.
24
Ideology After Poststructuralism
One can take this notion further by clarifying that the distinction
between those who espouse the ideological as the condition of
ideologies and those who see the ideological as that which is posited
by ideologies is not a distinction between a general account of the
ideological field and a particularist rejection of that generality. The
claim that each ideology posits its own conception of the ideological
is just as general as that which takes the ideological as the condition
of ideologies. However, there are different and competing generalities at stake. If the ideological is treated as the condition of ideologies
then it functions as a given generality, whereas the claim that
ideologies posit a conception of the ideological functions as an
assembled generality that must be explained each time it is constituted. This is not mere sophistry; a given generality requires that the
particular cases are subsumed within a logic external to the particulars, whereas an assembled generality views that logic as internal to
each particular case. Of course, this distinction shifts the problem of
the ideological on to a new level, which is not to say that one is
trapped by this same problem but, hopefully, that one is moving
closer to asking the right question. Indeed, the question we are now
faced with is this: how can we explain the construction of internal,
assembled, generalities about the ideological without reference to an
external, given, generality that orders this construction? Broadly
speaking, two answers have been given to this in contemporary
social and political theory: (1) one that treats the assembled,
internal, generality as given by a logic of negativity and (2) one that
treats the assembled, internal, generality as given by a logic of
positivity.
1. On this account the ideological posited by each ideology is that
which the ideology itself can never explain. Because the metaphysical ground beneath one’s ideological feet is essentially contestable,
every attempt to construct an idea through its relationship to a
problem and every attempt to make sense of events, carries with it
the need to posit the ideological as that which lacks any fixity. This
amounts to saying that the ideological is the moment of negativity
within each ideology: every attempt to account for the relationship
between ideas and events generates the possibility of saying ‘no’ to
that relationship, even though this ‘no’ is solely, internally, conditioned by the idea–event conjunction in question (i.e. there is no
way of constructing a total rejection of ideologies). The pay-off, it is
argued, is that this negative construction of the ideological functions
as a way of retaining the idea that one can, and must, in some sense,
Idea, Event, Ideology
25
critique all ideologies by showing how they inescapably imply that
which they cannot explain. The generality of this claim is internal
to the particular construction of each ideology because it shows that
each ideological moment includes the rejection of the ideology
which posited it in the first place. In the post-Lacanian work on
ideology this is often described as the Real that is posited by
particular ideologies but which forever escapes the attempt to
account for it in the construction of the ideological.
The problem with this account is that it is hard to conceive of a
moment of negativity that can be truly internal to the ideological
field without it becoming a sham negativity, one that ultimately
becomes an external general positivity, one that ultimately bolsters
a certain idea of the ideological from an external point of view.
Certainly, there is an avoidance of the straightforward ‘givenness’
of the ideological, but this only seems to hide a rather more surreptitious version which posits the ‘givenness’ of the negative as
ultimately external to the ideological. In other words, it generalises
the impossibility of a metaphysical ground as the very ground on
which its analysis of the ideological is, paradoxically, made possible.
Building on this idea, the critique of ideology that this approach is
said to make possible will always be partial to the extent that it predetermines the limits of available critical positions by fencing them
into this account of the metaphysical. But if this is the case, and I
grant that I have hardly shown it to be the case, then the second
option needs to tackle head-on the pay-off presumed to reside
within this logic of negativity; that is, the fact that it seems to make
the critique of ideology possible. Does the second option address
the internal nature of the general claim about the construction of
the ideological while maintaining a sense that the ideological can
itself be criticised (which after all would seem to be a prerequisite
for avoiding the charge of predetermination, addressed throughout
this chapter)?
2. On this account the ideological is that which engenders the
need to constantly re-establish the link between ideas and events,
on the grounds that an idea about an event only makes sense if one
sees it as a problem. The difference between this account and the
previous one is not always appreciated. The metaphysical ground is
shifting, certainly, but this does not block the ideological completion
of an ideology, rather, it requires that each time one links ideas and
events, and thereby constructs an ideology of how they relate, one
constitutes the ideological as that which makes it possible in the first
26
Ideology After Poststructuralism
place. So although these two options share similar theoretical
gestures the difference could not be greater – the one sees the ideological as that which constitutes a lack within a given ideology,
whereas the other sees the ideological as that which fulfils the relationship between ideas and events. To reiterate: this can only avoid
the pitfalls of the other approach if the idea is treated as essentially
problematic (and the problem as essentially ideal) and if the event
has its own logic of sense (not one given by another source). For
example: the problem of the political is idealised by becoming that
which is essentially problematic by the philosopher acting out the
relationship afresh each time, a mode of philosophical inquiry that
is given life by staging political events in such a way that the sense
we make of it cannot be explained by reference to anything beyond
the event.
What about the critique of ideology? The problem from a constructivist point of view is that criticism often invokes a ground that
is posited as larger than the grounded such that criticism ‘serves only
to justify traditional ways of thinking’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 153). The
task of criticism, therefore, is to find a ground for criticism within
that which one is aiming to criticise. This ground is exactly that
which has been excavated through the discussion in terms of the
principle that ideas and problems are coextensive in the event. The
task of criticism, on this basis, is to create ideas, create problems,
create events and to create sense where all of these terms are different
dimensions of the same creative process. In this way one exercises
the most devastating criticism that any ideology (and its correlative
conception of the ideological) can face; one steps to the side of it
and thinks differently, completely differently, about how ideas and
events relate. One criticises a position as ideological, in other words,
by refusing to occupy the terrain it has posited, though this itself
can only be achieved by creating a new terrain of one’s own.
However, as this critique turns upon itself, the result is not the idea
that all criticism must be ideological. Instead, we must conclude that
all criticism is first and foremost creative and that the ideological
emerges, precisely, at the moment when criticism stops.
This is sometimes taken to imply that one meets the claim that
everything is ideological with the claim that ‘there is no ideology
and never has been’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 4). However, the
thrust of this discussion points to a different conclusion: forget all
those slogans about the all-encompassing nature of ideology and
forget all those slogans that urge us to forget ideology! Instead,
Idea, Event, Ideology
27
construct the ideological every time one formulates an idea about an
event in such a way that the ideological itself changes relative to the
idea–event conjunction in question. If one can imbue this construction with a real vitality then one can become a real critic of
ideology.
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, J. (1975) The Mirror of Production (New York: Telos).
Critchley, S. (1999) Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso).
Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press).
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University
Press).
Deleuze, G. (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press).
Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International (London: Routledge).
Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in D.F. Bouchard (ed.)
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel
Foucault (New York: Cornell University Press).
Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish
Hamilton).
Laclau, E. (1996) ‘The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology’,
Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 201–220.
Lefebvre, H. (1969) The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (London
and New York: Monthly Review Press).
Zizek, S. (ed.) (1994) Mapping Ideology (London: Verso).
2
Ideology and Imaginary:
Returning to Althusser
Caroline Williams
In his recent introduction to the collection of essays Mapping
Ideology, Slavoj Zizek argues that the epistemological opposition
between ideology and reality, on which the term traditionally relied,
has collapsed. The tendency is for our theories of ideology to
embrace and swallow even that ‘extra-ideological ground supposed
to provide the standard by means of which one can measure ideological distortion’ (Zizek, 1994, p. 16). A crisis appears to pervade the
concept of ideology, at least from poststructuralist quarters, but this
crisis is not a new one. Since its inception, ideology has suffered from
a lack of knowledge regarding its own limits. Finally to have
absorbed the real is perhaps ideology’s ultimate fate. Does this mean
that the concept should be abandoned? Surely not – the title of this
collection indicates that much. Indeed, Zizek also warns against the
abandonment of the concept of ideology and proposes that we try
to transcend this theoretical difficulty and maintain at least a
political critique of the concept, form, and function of ideology. It
appears then, that the concept must be salvaged from the reconfigurations in contemporary thought which sometimes seem to echo
the 1950s chorus of ‘the end of ideology’.
Why, nevertheless, return to an old structuralist, indeed one often
accused of political dogmatism, a rigid theoreticism, an antihumanism and a form of structuralism, all of which allow little space
for the analysis of history and of the political, however we may wish
to understand their inner dynamic? My reasons for returning to
Althusser are many, and I wish to begin by setting out three of them.
First, there can be no dispute that Althusser’s work alone has had
theoretical effects and consequences which he could never have
anticipated. Althusser’s symptomatic reading of Marx, his account
of philosophy as a practice always linked to its political conditions
of existence, and his radical and subtle account of ideology as an
imaginary relation, travelled long distances towards sociology and
political and social theory, along a route that also passed by gender
28
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
29
and film studies, cultural and literary studies, as well as more
obviously Marxist economics and radical philosophy. Michael
Sprinkler (1995) points out that even amongst those who would now
repudiate nearly every aspect of their Althusserian past, the occult
force of Althusser’s various indications concerning ideology persists.
Every theory of ideology which takes its genealogy through Marx
has also to pass by way of Althusser. Why is this the case? What is
so distinct about Althusser’s structuralist approach to Marxism and,
more specifically, his reflections on ideology? Perhaps it is worth
stopping with Althusser merely to recapture his theoretical and
political predicament and to place it within our present theoretical
and political landscape, a landscape marked by the challenges posed
by poststructuralism in particular.
My second reason for returning to Althusser is that his thought
opens up many of the antinomies that have haunted, and continue
to haunt, the concept of ideology. Some oppositions take us straight
to the field of politics. In particular, oppositions between knowledge
and mystification, power and subjection, theory and praxis. Others
more clearly expose ideology’s epistemological relation, namely, the
dualisms between science (theory) and ideology, essence and
appearance, objectivity and subjectivity, real and imaginary.
Althusser spent his life pursuing this space of ideology suspended
between politics and epistemology, indeed his writings show us that
the two terms are inextricably bound. For Althusser, there is no
political conception of ideology that is not linked to epistemological
concerns. Perhaps it is the aporetic form of ideology, its tendency to
wish for its opposite, truth, and yet always to be captured and
distorted in political and social forms, that leads some poststructuralists, notably Michel Foucault (1980), to abandon the concept
altogether. However, Althusser, and to some extent Foucault, stayed
close to the problems pervading the concept of ideology wrought by
its dual identity (at once political and epistemological), and
continued to think through the dilemmas posed by the concept.
One commentator has even gone as far as to say that the whole of
Foucault’s concept of discourse, most rigorously presented in The
Archaeology of Knowledge is a dialogue with his former teacher Louis
Althusser. At certain points below we will have the opportunity to
consider the theoretical relation between the two thinkers (very
often in the form of a dialogue without proper names).
The third reason for my return to Althusser’s problematic of
ideology (and its wider epistemological resonance) is generated by
30
Ideology After Poststructuralism
the more recent and provocative readings of his work. These readings
are, in part, a response to the newly available posthumous notes and
publications written by Althusser during his long stay in prison
where his life ended. If we could agree that the author is a product
of the interpretations which we (as readers) bestow on him/her then
the Althusser of the 1990s is very different from the one created in
the 1970s and 1980s. In fact I would go so far as to say that the
former is a caricature of the thought of Althusser as it is presented
today. This is not only because the readings are more nuanced and
finely drawn than those previous discussions around structure and
history, voluntarism and determinism, and associated centrally with
the arguments of Anderson and Thompson. It is also because the
later writings of Althusser expose the concern (already begun in his
reading of Marx) with a theorisation of contingency and not a
structural determinism (Elliot, 1998). Certainly these later reflections
and insights were flashes of a new form of thought rather than
anything systematically developed, but I am inclined to think that
they may assist us in our discussions of ideology and indeed may
give new form to Althusser’s own 1972 definition of ideology as an
imaginary, albeit wholly necessary, relation to reality. At the very
least these later reflections may offer a response to some of the
possible critiques of Althusser’s somewhat antinomic rendering of
science and ideology.
My chapter is divided into three sections. Sections one and two
of the chapter will explore the two indicators of ideology in
Althusser’s work. The first indicator is epistemological, and linked
to his project to develop a science shorn of all subjective referent;
the second is political, and linked to the constitution of the social
subject and to the materiality of ideology’s practices. Section three
will consider Althusser’s later reflections on what he calls ‘aleatory
materialism’ or a ‘materialism of the encounter’. Here it will be
argued that this form of materialism may offer a way out of some of
the problems encountered in sections one and two. It may also, I
will speculate, enrich Althusser’s earlier, influential reflections on
the concept of ideology (Williams, 2001).
IDEOLOGY AND SCIENCE
Althusser’s quest to develop a science for Marxism may seem
redundant today in light of poststructuralist critiques of the
totalising tendencies of science. However this interest in a
conception of knowledge which may escape all ideological form is
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
31
central to many accounts of ideology, be they Marxist or other. For
Althusser, the primary culprit, and the foundation of much ideological thinking, is the concept of the subject. In a statement which
may appear to echo the position of the structuralist anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Althusser writes that ‘it is impossible to know
anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the
philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes’
(Althusser, 1990, p. 229). His project, he writes in For Marx is ‘to draw
a line of demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of
philosophical (and political) subjectivism which have compromised
or threatened it’ (Althusser, 1990, p. 12). Thus begins Althusser’s
diatribe against all forms of Hegelian Marxism, notably that of
Lukacs with its attendant historicism and humanism as well as its
residual idealism, but also against many other forms of humanism,
particularly the existential variety that remains tied to a conception
of the subject as cogito.
Althusser’s anti-humanist credentials are well-known. Less wellknown is their source which must certainly be attributed to Spinoza
rather than to Lévi-Strauss (Althusser, 1976, p. 132). In Spinoza,
Althusser notes in a reflection omitted from his autobiography The
Future Lasts a Long Time, ‘[I saw] ... the matrix of every possible
theory of ideology’ (Althusser, 1998, p. 7). ‘Spinoza’s theory’, he
writes elsewhere, ‘rejected every illusion about ideology, and
especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by
identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat
ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based
the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to
the world “expressed” by the state of their bodies’ (Althusser, 1976,
p. 136). There is much in this reading of Spinoza that Althusser takes
up in his political theory of ideology, but I want to focus, for the
moment, on the problem of science in order to point to the significance of Spinoza’s philosophy for Althusser’s scientific epistemology
and for his structuralism more generally.
There are three aspects to Spinoza’s thought that are important to
Althusser’s epistemology. First, for Spinoza, the subject is not the
primary object of knowledge; it is not even the creative agency of
knowledge or a faculty of autonomous experience which, opposed to
the object, creates the conditions of possibility for knowledge.
Spinoza’s anti-anthropomorphism precludes these forms of philosophical subjectivism. In fact, it is this denial of subjectivity and
historical becoming or agency which was a source of criticism by
32
Ideology After Poststructuralism
Hegel and others. ‘The essence of man’, Spinoza writes in The Ethics,
‘is constituted by definite modifications of the attributes of God’
(1992, p. 70). According to Spinoza, the subject is not the cause of
itself, rather body and mind are different modes of existence of
substance. Furthermore, and contra Descartes, body and mind are
not perceived in a dualistic fashion where the first, through inwardturning (and, of course, a religious guarantee) can free itself from the
passions of the body. For Spinoza, the kind of knowledge built upon
such dualisms is one which gives full power to the imagination. It is
unable to understand the mode through which an idea and its corresponding object is constituted. There is always an interconnectedness of
mind and body, that which commentators have variously called a
‘parallelism’ or a ‘symphony’ rather than a dualism (Deleuze, 1988,
p. 126). Crucially, the mind is an individual subject only because it
is also a particular idea of the body (that is, the body is the material
site of ideas). This does not however mean that the order of ideas in
the mind and the body are adequate and clear; they may be
imaginary, confused and fragmented, based solely on abstractions
of the mind (idealism) or of the senses (a stark empiricism).
Secondly, Spinoza recognises three gradations in the form of
knowledge that are replicated in Althusser’s own conception of
knowledge (see below). The first is derived from casual, subjective
experience. Both Spinoza and Althusser would view empiricism as
producing an imaginary – for Althusser, an ideological – form of
knowledge because it takes the subject’s experience and perception
of objects as the basis for knowledge. The second form of knowledge
is that based on common notions, or symbols that we come to
associate with certain ideas and affects. Here the imagination is not
a site of creativity and reflection as it will be in some later philosophies; the imagination distorts and confuses relations between
things. For Spinoza, our moral distinctions and the imperatives
which follow from law have their source in the imagination: order,
goodness and beauty are deducible from nothing other than the
affects generated by the imagination. This second kind of knowledge
can nonetheless provide a bridge between the first and the third kind
of knowledge. Common notions are evidence that thought is able
to present generalities that are not founded upon the immediate
experience of the body. Common notions illustrate the interconnectedness, the necessary integrations and classifications, that derive
from the mind’s ability to reason and understand the unity of affects
of different bodies. It is only by thinking through the body that
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
33
common notions can be derived. Spinoza calls this capacity of
thought to think intuitively ‘intellect’, and it is the basis for the third
form of knowledge. Significantly, it does not bypass the body
because both mind and body are attributes of Substance and thus
contain (modally) the conditions for reflexive, immanent knowledge
(Lloyd, 1996).
The third and final aspect of Spinoza’s thought which is important
for the argument here is his concept of idea. Althusser drew upon
this in his own epistemology and it represented, for him, a way of
escaping ideological or imaginary forms of knowledge in order to
develop a scientific knowledge of the third kind. For Spinoza, the construction of knowledge does not seem to require the existence of
objects. The idea comes before the object for Spinoza. In what Althusser
views as a fundamental attack upon empiricist conceptions of
knowledge, and one which parallels his own critique conducted in
Reading Capital, Spinoza makes an important distinction between
the idea of an object generated through bodily affects and the idea
of an object in thought. Thus, in Reading Capital Althusser writes:
...Spinoza warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was
in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object, for,
to repeat his famous aphorism, the two objects must not be
confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge
must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object.
(1979, p. 40)
Knowledge is produced, then, according to conditions internal to its
own production.
It is important to emphasise (although I don’t think that Althusser
took this wholly on board in his early adoption of Spinoza) that
Spinoza does not develop an a priori conception of substance. This
conception of knowledge is based on immanence, and not the transcendence of the world. There is no simple causal relationship
between knowledge and world. Certainly, the order and connection
of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. Both are
modes of being of Substance but the contingent, finite nature of
mind and body, thought and experience, allows for the development
of a kind of knowledge that always remains embedded in concrete
life. In this way, Spinoza’s Substance (‘God sive Nature’) functions as
an absent cause with no absolute power of determination.
34
Ideology After Poststructuralism
Althusser claims to find in Spinoza the resources for an
autonomous conception of science that can distinguish itself from
imaginary, ideological forms of knowledge. All empiricist conceptions of knowledge are to be rejected, even the more sophisticated,
dialectical ones that posit a duality between the distorted world of
appearances and its hidden essence, a duality that can ultimately be
overcome. For Althusser, the division between fiction and truth,
between ideology and the real, are wholly internal to ideology.
Empiricist forms of knowledge impart a distinction within the real
itself: ‘it [the real] is structured as a dross of earth containing inside
it a grain of pure gold, i.e. it is made of two real essences, the pure
essence and the impure essence, the gold and the dross’ (1979, p. 36).
All that is required for knowledge to be unearthed, according to
empiricist method, is for the real essence of the object to be
dislodged from the impure dimension of the object. The grain of
knowledge unearthed, however, is already present within the object.
The formation or structure of knowledge here requires no separation
or dislocation from the ideological impurities of the object, because
the object of knowledge is intrinsic to the real, empirical object.
There must be a reframing of the problem concerning the
question of knowledge, or as Althusser put it in an interview with
Fernando Navarro, ‘in order to change our world we must first
change our way of thinking’ (Althusser, 1994 and Navarro, 1998). It
was a new apparatus of thought that Althusser intended to bring to
Marxism by generating an epistemological break between the ideological and the latent scientism present in Marx, who did not have
the conceptual resources to organise his work as a science. The aim
here is not to open up old debates about the notion of a break (which
one of Althusser’s co-authors, Etienne Balibar (1996), has recently
noted was more akin to an inner-theoretical tension than a clear
demarcation). What is important to emphasise at this point is the
way in which Althusser attempts to inaugurate a new mode of
knowledge via a new way of understanding thought.
Nevertheless, this new scientific epistemology is not without its
problems. Not only does the antinomy between ideology and science
still appear in Althusser’s formulation of knowledge, but it also
makes it somewhat difficult to think their differentiation. Althusser
does however recognise this problem: ‘there is not one side of theory,
a pure intellectual vision without body or materiality – and another
of completely material practice which “gets its hands dirty”’
(Althusser and Balibar, 1979, p. 58). Althusser draws upon Spinoza’s
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
35
account of three gradations of knowledge, where Generalities 1 corresponds to brute facts/objects; Generalities 2 to the field of concept
production, the marking-out of a ‘problematic’ where, we may
anticipate, ideology and science may intermingle; Generalities 3
denotes the space wherein a theoretical field of science asserts itself.
Can these three regions remain distinct? If science is the other of
ideology, then insofar as it tries to extricate itself from the clutches
of ideology, it will be continually reinhabited and contaminated by
it. This problem continues to haunt Foucault’s Archaeology of
Knowledge in the form of the opposition between the discursive and
non-discursive realms, which only transcends the concept of
ideology on the surface of things. Spinoza did not encounter such a
philosophical antinomy between the imaginary and the true because
he sought the transformation rather than the transcendence of the
world of subjectivity. He thus established a parallelism between the
order of ideas and the order of things and posited an interconnectedness between the imaginary and the true (or between ideology and
science, to put the problem in Althusser’s parlance). If this
embodiment (without subjectivism) of science and ideology was
established, it may save Althusser’s epistemology from his critics who
question the alleged containment of science from the world of
ideology, and hence its divorce from any extra-theoretical referent.
Before considering the moves Althusser made toward a rearticulation of this difficulty, let us turn to consider the more familiar terrain
of Althusser’s theory of ideology.
IDEOLOGY AND IMAGINARY
The later text of 1972, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’,
rests, in my view, upon the prior epistemological work on ideology,
even though the presentation of the problem is quite different. It
should be clear from Althusser’s critique of empiricism that a
definition of ideology as an inversion, or mystification of the real, as
presented (on Althusser’s reading) by the metaphor of the camera
obscura in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, is rejected.
Similarly, Althusser’s rejection of the subject as the foundation, origin
or essence of a theoretical concept precludes him from establishing
an overly simplistic account of ideology as false consciousness, where
the subject’s experience of the world must become the source of
knowledge necessary to transcend ideology. In his essay ‘Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser is concerned not with
an investigation of what particular subjects may think, or even how,
36
Ideology After Poststructuralism
by what means, they carry out the act of thinking, rather he is
concerned with the ideological mechanism according to which
thought, perception and subjectivity are produced. Althusser’s central
focus is upon the representation of ideology within consciousness, that
is, the process by which the individual is constituted as a subject by
ideology. Hence, ideology ‘represents the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser, 1984, p.
36). Ideology then, is not to be associated solely with the realm of
ideas; it is material and relational precisely because of its structural
existence. Ideology is an element of the social totality and functions
in a complex relation to the other elements or levels of the structure
(for example, the legal, political, economic, cultural and philosophical and scientific levels). These levels are not hierarchical; there is
no direct causality between infrastructure and superstructure. They
are viewed by Althusser according to a model of structural causality
which allows each structural mode a degree of autonomy from the
rest, although it may in practice, under certain political and social
conditions, become dominant.
Crucially, ideology has a material existence. Through its materialisation in state apparatuses, ideology can operate according to a
number of different modalities. In his example of religion, Althusser
notes the modalities of kneeling, the discourse of prayer, the sign of
the cross, the gaze of the Absolute, all of which insert the subject
into the materiality of religious ideology. Ideology appears to be at
once a priori and timeless, in that it is a necessary structure which is
always already regulated by ideological state apparatuses; it also has
a specificity which allows it historical variance and a necessary
responsiveness to particular political and social formations.
The concept of the imaginary is of central importance to
Althusser’s theory of ideology (as it was, above, in his theory of
knowledge). It is, we might say, a foundational fantasy as the genesis
of an experience of subjectivity which is at once primary, continuous
and phantasmatic; it produces a structure of experience which is akin
to what Ernesto Laclau (1996) has called, with a broader reference
to the productive mechanism of ideology, a constitutive distortion,
and it generates an account of the subject wherein ideology and subjectivity are inseparable. Althusser’s concept of the imaginary is
invested with allusions to Spinoza and to the psychoanalyst and
philosopher, Jacques Lacan. From Spinoza, Althusser takes the view
of the imagination as a source of deception and illusion; from Lacan,
the view that the imaginary is a necessary form of misrecognition.
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
37
It deceives subjects as to their relation to the symbolic social order,
the place of the Law and the only possible place for speaking and
acting subjects. According to Lacan, however, the imaginary only
partially constitutes the subject with a fantasy of wholeness and containment. It leaves a dimension of experience, the real, which is
forever foreclosed and cannot be represented in the symbolic social
order except through its effects. Althusser’s theoretical explanation
for this process of constitution is the much more inclusive notion
of interpellation. This is the structure of recognition by which the
‘concrete individual’ finds its place and in doing so becomes a
subject. The theory of interpellation performs a vital function of
identification for Althusser, enabling subjects to recognise
themselves in the dominant ideology. That such a structure of recognition remains forever on the level of misrecognition is a necessary
and essential counterpart to the receipt of consciousness, belief,
action and speech by the subject. In this way, méconnaissance, or the
imaginary structure of ideology, is constitutive of the subject without
remainder or residue.
I would like to spend the remainder of this section drawing out
some of the criticisms of Althusser’s conception of ideology; I will
focus upon two criticisms in particular, (1) the form of interpellation and (2) the constitution of the real. In doing so I also hope to
illustrate how Foucault’s position is opened up within the Althusserian problematic.
The most repetitive criticism levelled at this conception of
ideology is that the constitution of the subject as subjected being is
absolute. A single spectacle, a single event of constitution, and
subjects seem to work, in Althusser’s words, ‘all by themselves’.
Whilst it is clear why Althusser wants to protect his analysis from
the risks of subjectivism, this anti-humanist theoretical manoeuvre
stops short of an analysis of exactly how material practices constitute
particular forms of subjectivity, that is, the degree to which they
succeed in their task of normalising and disciplining individuals.
Some may recognise the seeds of Foucault’s project in Discipline and
Punish, which was influenced not only by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of
Morals but also, surely, by Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses’. What then of the problem of resistance, so central (if
underdeveloped) to Foucault’s analysis of power?
Althusser seems to assume rather than interrogate the sense in
which the process of interpellation must be continuous if it is to
produce and maintain self-disciplined subjects. There is no focus
38
Ideology After Poststructuralism
upon the perpetual process of interpellation; no account of the link
between ideological state apparatuses and the constitution of the
subject, no reference to the role of linguistic articulation in the
theory of interpellation which can bring about the subject (i.e. ‘It is
I, the subject of recognition’), and no consideration of the possible
relation between ideology and the unconscious. For Althusser, the
process of interpellation rests upon the singularity of the subject; it
submits to a logic of ‘wholeness’ and simplistic identity and, for some
critics, may even subscribe to a form of behaviourism. In other words,
the concept of the subject is not considered as a complex production
which is never fully constituted, thus always unstable and disruptive
of theories which retrospectively view it as such. This is precisely
where Discipline and Punish may exceed Althusser’s formulations.
Whereas Althusser pushed the problem of the internalisation of
ideology to one side, preferring to consider the mechanism of interpellation as an imaginary recognition or a méconnaisance, Foucault
explores the physical processes of subjection, the way in which the
subject inscribes within itself the principle of subjection, and the
body as a transmogrifying site of disciplinary power.
I want now to turn to the second, thorny problem of the apparent
dualism maintained in Althusser’s work between science and
ideology. In the essay on ideology, this problem is hidden, because
Althusser is at pains to show that ideology constitutes itself and its
opposite on the plane of the real. Notions of truth and illusion,
distortion and disjuncture of experience, as well as contradiction,
are all sustainable by ideology. Certainly, a powerful, determining
structure of ideology will mask and contain these divisions, but it is
significant that for Althusser there is no reality for subjects except an
ideological reality. This perspective is most difficult to marry with
the discussions raised in section one where there seems to be – at
least – a potential fluidity between ideology and science, imaginary
and true (real). For many commentators, however, Althusser presents
us with a rigidly structuralist conception of ideology which reduces
the subject to a mere function of ideological state apparatuses,
together with an idealist conception of science that somehow breaks
with the ideological realm. Thus Derrida (1992) questions whether
both ideology and science may be ‘cut off from their history, from
semantics sedimented within [them], as if one could obtain a nonideological, uncontaminated, scientific concept of ideology’. Can
Althusser move beyond this antinomy between science and
ideology?
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
39
IDEOLOGY AND (ALEATORY) MATERIALISM
I do not think that such interpretations of Althusser tell the whole
story. Of course, discussions have now moved beyond this Althusserian problematic and we should perhaps be looking to those who
have substantially developed his position, for example, Etienne
Balibar, Antonio Negri, Pierre Macherey, as well as Foucault, and
perhaps Deleuze (Stolze, 1998), for new theoretical directions.
However, it does seem that in his later writings Althusser continued
to think through the antinomies discussed here, and these must be
sketched out. In The Future Lasts a Long Time, Althusser writes;
In this fantastic philosophy of the necessity of the factual stripped
of every transcendent guarantee (God) or transcendental
guarantee (The ‘I think’), I rediscovered one of my old formulas.
I thought, then, using a metaphor – for what it’s worth – that an
idealist philosopher is like a man who knows in advance both
where the train he is climbing onto is coming from and where it
is going: what is its station of departure and its station of destination (or again, as for a letter, its final destination [an allusion
here to Lacan and Derrida?]). The materialist, on the contrary, is
a man who takes the train in motion (the course of the world, the
course of history, the course of life) but without knowing where
the train is coming from or where it is going. He climbs onto a
train of chance, of encounter, and discovers in it the factual installations of the coach and of whatever companions he is factually
surrounded with, of whatever the conversations and ideas of those
companions and of whatever language marked by their social
milieu they speak. (1998, p. 13)
It is through this metaphor of a train in motion that Althusser draws
attention to a form of materialism that he calls aleatory: the materialism of the encounter. With this formulation all reductionist
interpretations of Althusser as a structuralist who analyses formal
rules of social formations in a trans-historical manner can be
contested. What exactly is aleatory materialism? In this concept
Althusser traces a path beginning with Epicurus, that is with the
image of a disorderly fall of atoms through a vacuum causing their
free encounter in order to give birth to a world. This materialism
extends in a subterranean philosophical tradition from Lucretius to
Hobbes and Spinoza, to Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger and some of
40
Ideology After Poststructuralism
Althusser’s French contemporaries. Althusser referred, for example,
to the materiality of the trace and invoked Derrida’s analysis of
writing and the trace as différance (Navarro, 1998). This material
encounter is an ontological becoming but one without origin; it is
ateleological but must not be viewed simply as a random, chaotic
sense of historical temporality. It is also nominalist; it is always tied
to particular cases because there exist, for Althusser, only particular
cases, situations and events. Aleatory materialism is always, as Negri
(1996) puts it, aleatory ‘after the fact’. Thus every historical event
must be understood as an exception; there can be no norms because
every historical situation is underdetermined and therefore not
wholly explicable in terms of a model. In other words, what
Althusser sought to invoke was the thought of the new in the
absence of determining conditions.
I will leave to one side the question of whether the structural/
scientific framework of Althusser’s previous theoretical analysis is
completely reversed; where some see a break or a turn, in the
Heideggerain sense, others prefer to see continuity. What is
important, as Negri also reminds us in his reading of the later work,
is that Althusser now begins to consider the question of bodies and
their powers of thought and freedom in place of the individual
subject. Now we seem to find Althusser thinking about reality in the
manner of Spinoza. In other words, to think about the true, to
acquire a knowledge of the true, requires that thought passes
through the body, and through relations between bodies. This is the
basis of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, and the parallelism
between ideas and things (and bodies). It is the fuller philosophical
schema rather than an isolated part (i.e. the three levels of
knowledge) that Althusser now embraces. Hence:
That one can liberate and recompose one’s own body, formerly
fragmented and dead in the servitude of an imaginary and,
therefore, slavelike subjectivity, and take from this the means to
think liberation freely and strongly, therefore, to think properly
with one’s own body, in one’s own body, by one’s own body,
better: that to live within the thought of the conatus of one’s own body
was quite simply to think within the freedom and the power of thought.
(Althusser, 1998, pp. 12–13)
It is an encounter with the power of thought without conditions.
Ideology and a knowledge of the true become gradations or regions
of the real rather than sliding into metaphysical dualisms.
Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser
41
What does this notion of aleatory materialism bring more specifically to the conception of ideology discussed in section two? On
one level nothing seems to change. Ideology and power have
achieved a certain dominance over, and unification of, social life and
communication. The material forms of ideology, varied and singular
as their modalities may be, have permeated the social body and
rendering it a passive and inert subjectivity. With Spinoza, and to
some extent after Foucault, thought must begin with the body, with
the immediately lived relation to ideology, imaginary as it may be.
Only then can its fissures and incompleteness be understood. It is
surely to the dynamic, open, multiple and aleatory nature of the
subject that Althusser’s materialism points. Perhaps now, in the later
Althusser, we find a means of understanding, and gaining a
knowledge of ideology in terms of its effects ceaselessly to encounter
and colonise a radically open form of subjectivity.
REFERENCES
Althusser, L. (1976) Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books).
Althusser, L. (1984) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation)’ in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso).
Althusser, L. (1990) For Marx (London: Verso).
Althusser, L. (1994) Sur La Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard).
Althusser, L. (1998) ‘The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza’ in
Montag and Stolze (eds) The New Spinoza (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press).
Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1979) Reading Capital (London: Verso).
Balibar, E. (1996) ‘Structural Causality, Overdetermination, and Antagonism’
in Callari and Ruccio (eds) Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist
Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press).
Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights
Books).
Derrida, J. (1992) ‘Politics and Friendship’ in Kaplan and Sprinkler (eds) The
Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso).
Elliott, G. (1998) ‘The Unknown Althusser’ Radical Philosophy, no. 90.
Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’ in Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77 (Brighton: Harvester Press).
Laclau, E. (1996) ‘The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology’,
Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 201–220.
Lloyd, G. (1996) Spinoza and the Ethics (London: Routledge).
Navarro, F. (1998) ‘An Encounter with Althusser’ Rethinking Marxism, vol. 10,
no. 3.
Negri, A. (1991) The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press).
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Negri, A. (1996) ‘Notes on the Evolution of the Later Althusser’ in Callari and
Ruccio (eds) Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays
in the Althusserian Tradition (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press).
Spinoza, B. (1992) Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.).
Sprinkler, M. (1995) ‘The Legacies of Althusser’ in Lezra (ed.) Depositions:
Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labour of Reading (New Haven: Yale
University Press).
Stolze, T. (1998) ‘Deleuze and Althusser: Flirting with Structuralism’ Rethinking
Marxism, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 51–63.
Williams, C. (2001) Modern French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of
the Subject (London: Athlone Press).
Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1994) ‘The Spectre of Ideology’ Introduction to Zizek (ed.) Mapping
Ideology (London: Verso).
3
A World Beyond Ideology?
Strains in Slavoj Zizek’s
Ideology Critique
Robert Porter
The intention in this chapter is to explore Slavoj Zizek’s concept of
ideology critique. But before doing this we will need to find a way
of animating and framing the terms on which our discussion will
proceed. We can begin by briefly calling upon a fragment of a story
from Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy. Daniel Quinn, a writer
of detective novels, finds himself in the strange and somewhat ironic
situation of acting as a real detective tracking Peter Stillman.
Stillman is a man consumed by the desire to seek communi(cati)on
with God; that is to say, he is convinced that he can reverse the ‘fall
of man’ by positively appropriating or ‘speaking God’s language’
(Auster, 1992, p. 49).
For Stillman, humanity needs to move beyond the ‘brokenness’
of a world distorted by falsifying symbols to an ordered universe
restored to wholeness: a world in which ‘words’ and ‘things’ come
together in true reciprocity. His task, he tells Quinn, is to invent a
‘new language’:
that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer
correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt
confident that our words could express them. But little by little
these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos.
(Auster, 1992, p. 77)
Stillman’s desire to restore the ‘world’ and ‘words’ to one ordered
‘whole’ assumes a concrete horror for his son who is subjected to a
most ghastly experiment. He imprisons his two-year-old boy for
nine years, locking him up in a darkened room devoid of any
human or communicative contact. Why? Stillman believed that his
son would be open to the possibility of speaking the language of
God if he remained untainted by the distortions and falsifications
supposedly inherent in the symbols of modern everyday speech.
43
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Peter junior tells Quinn the story retrospectively in his own peculiar
form of words:
So I am telling you about the father. It is a good story, even if I do
not understand it. I can tell it to you because I know the words ...
The father talked about God. He wanted to know if God had a
language. Don’t ask me what this means. I am telling you because
I know the words. The father thought a baby might speak if it saw
no people. But what baby was there? Ah. Now you begin to see ...
Of course, Peter knew some people words. That could not be
helped. But the father thought that maybe Peter would forget
them. After a while. That is why there was so much boom, boom,
boom. Every time Peter said a word, his father would boom him.
At last Peter learned to say nothing. Ya ya ya. Thank you. (Auster,
1992, p. 20)
In what way, then, does this fragment of Auster’s writing help us in
framing our exploration of Zizek’s notion of ideology critique? The
first point to be made is that Stillman is actually engaged in a critique
of ideology. That is to say, he is concerned with developing and
maintaining a critical distance from the ideology he encounters in
the social field (a world of distorting and falsifying symbols, a world
in which words and things have become detached from one
another). One of the most significant aspects of this critical gesture
is that it is ethically motivated. Stillman is disgusted and dismayed
by the moral fragmentation and anomie he finds in the world
(‘things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos’, etc.) and
he seeks ethical transcendence in God’s word (the ‘new language that
will at last say what we have to say’).
The problem, of course, is that Stillman’s ethic institutionalises a
new, and rather violent, ideology of its own. This, clearly, can be
seen in his treatment of Peter junior, for the boy is treated as a mere
instrument to be employed in the pursuit of God’s word. This brings
into focus a point that will prove to be important from a Zizekian
perspective: namely, that the notion of experiencing an ethic beyond
ideology (God’s language beyond falsifying everyday speech, etc.) is
always precarious because the subject (Stillman) who posits this ethic
may remain pathologically or, as Zizek would say, psychotically
distanced from the negative and repressive consequences that follow
from its realisation (Zizek, 1989, pp. 165–166).
A World Beyond Ideology?
45
Perhaps now we are in a position to begin framing the terms on
which we will explore Zizek’s concept of ideology critique. The
following points, implied by what we have already said, also
anticipate and rely on Zizekian arguments that will be encountered
as our discussion unfolds. Firstly, and most obviously, critique
involves maintaining a distance between ideology and non-ideology.
Secondly, this critical gesture is ethically motivated. Thirdly, the
subject’s experience of an ethic beyond ideology is always precarious,
defined, as it can be, in negative terms: that is, by what it lacks, by
the way in which it is limited and repressive. Put more broadly, then,
we could suggest that there are two strains or tendencies at play in
Zizek’s theorisation of ideology critique. Firstly, there is an affirmative strain in the sense that ideology critique is ethically motivated,
concerned with positively justifying itself in moral terms. Secondly,
there is a negative strain in the sense that ideology critique bears
witness to the negative possibility that the terms of its justification
can be antagonistically challenged, revealed as limited, lacking, etc.
In the first part of the chapter we will focus on the negative strain
in Zizek’s ideology critique. That is to say, we shall witness the way
Zizek, in a quasi-Lacanian fashion, relates the idea of negativity to
the notion that we can take a critical stand against ideology. In the
second part of the chapter we will focus on the affirmative strain in
his critical thinking. That is to say, we will see that the ethical
motivation to engage in ideology critique involves, Zizek says in a
quasi-Kantian fashion, the affirmation of universality and moral
responsibility. It will be the aim of our conclusion to think through
the way in which Zizek theoretically relates these (negative and affirmative) tendencies and briefly to make some critical remarks about
the consistency he lends to them. Also, we shall consider how these
strains of Zizekian thought may help us evaluate the notion that we
can experience a world beyond ideology.
IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE AND NEGATIVITY
We implied above that Zizekian critique involves maintaining a
distance between ideology and non-ideology. But how is this to be
done? We can look to the Introduction of Mapping Ideology for a
sense of how this issue is played out in Zizek’s thought (Zizek, 1994,
pp. 1–33). Zizek begins his remarks by posing a question. He asks:
‘Critique of Ideology, today?’ What does Zizek mean by posing this
question? Perhaps he is saying that dismissive criticism of the
concept of ideology is rendered problematic by our seemingly
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
irreducible experience of it in the contemporary political arena. So
the accent on the question would be one of surprise, perhaps even
disdain. ‘You mean to critically dismiss the concept of ideology’, we
could imagine Zizek saying, ‘when ideologues all around us continue
to work their magic?’ This stress on the continuing importance of
the play of ideology in the contemporary political arena is made
explicit when Zizek writes:
it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more
modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism
is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a
global ecological catastrophe ... One can thus categorically assert
the existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the
relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable
and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.
(Zizek, 1994, p. 1)
We can begin to give further sense to Zizek’s categorical assertion
concerning the ‘existence of ideology qua generative matrix’
regulating the ‘visible and non-visible’, ‘imaginable and nonimaginable’, by referring briefly to certain scenes from D. H.
Lawrence’s Women In Love. Consider, in the first instance, the
following conversation between Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin:
‘And we’ve got to live for something, we’re not just cattle that can
graze and have done with it’, said Gerald.
‘Tell me,’ said Birkin, ‘What do you live for’?
Gerald’s face went baffled.
‘What do I live for?’ he repeated. ‘I suppose I live to work, to
produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from
that, I live because I am living.’
‘And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of
tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all
the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and
the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we’re all warm and our
bellies are filled and we’re listening to the young lady performing
on the pianoforte – what then?’ (Lawrence, 1996, p. 72)
Gerald’s ideology is assembled according to an ethos of capitalist productivity. His position or social standing – as an industrialist or coal
magnate – is mocked by Birkin who clearly is seeking to push beyond
A World Beyond Ideology?
47
the limits of the bourgeois order – the world of desiring ‘plush
furniture’ and ‘pianofortes’ etc. – in which his friend is implicated.
The critical and caustic question – ‘what then?’ – strains at the
teleology of a capitalistic desire – to produce and consume – by
rendering visible or imaginable certain alienating consequences that
flow from its realisation. To put it another way, the generative ideological matrix at play in Gerald’s ethos of capitalist productivity, for
Birkin, cannot render ‘invisible’ or ‘non-imaginable’ the consumptive and ideological limits it imposes on subjects who must, in order
to accumulate goods, labour in the most mechanical, horrible and
alienating conditions. Birkin confronts Gerald:
‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We
have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient.
So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like
insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte
in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your
up-to-date house .... (Lawrence, 1996, p. 71)
This, of course, is not to say Birkin is beyond reproach from an ideological point of view. There is a tendency for Birkin to lapse into
what we could, in Deleuze’s Nietzschean terms, call a negative
nihilism that judges social life in accordance with ‘superior’ values
which, in actuality, are themselves abstracted from life (Deleuze,
1986, p. 147). We can detect this in Birkin’s desire to replace the life
or social fabric of the bourgeois world with, what he dramatically
terms, ‘the finality of love’. Birkin says:
‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me
there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of
ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’
‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said
Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (Lawrence, 1996,
p. 75)
Thus Birkin could be seen to be judging the world – the social
relations and values that constitute the bourgeois order of industry,
labour, production, consumption, etc. – while dramatically positing
the superior value of a ‘perfect union with a woman’. This ideology
of love (as a ‘sort of ultimate marriage’) regulates, in Zizek’s terms, its
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
own zone of visibility/non-visibility, imaginability/non-imaginability in that it acts as a limit horizon with regard to the object of
unification: namely, woman. It is no surprise that Birkin reacts badly
to an actual – living, breathing – woman who critically questions his
mystical ideology of sexual harmony and union. Consider the
following exchange between Birkin and Ursula Brangwen:
‘I do think’, he said, ‘that the world is only held together by the
mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people – a bond.
And the immediate bond is between man and woman.’
‘But it’s such old hat’, said Ursula. ‘Why should love be a bond?
No, I’m not having any.’
‘If you are walking westward,’ he said, ‘you forfeit the northern
and eastward and southern direction. If you admit a unison, you
forfeit all the possibilities of chaos.’
‘But love is freedom’, she declared.
‘Don’t cant to me’, he replied. ‘Love is a direction which
excludes all other directions. It’s a freedom together, if you like.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘love includes everything.’
‘Sentimental cant’, he replied. ‘You want the state of chaos,
that’s all. It is ultimate nihilism, this freedom-in-love business,
this freedom which is love and love which is freedom. As a matter
of fact, if you enter into a pure unison, it is irrevocable, and it is
never pure till it is irrevocable. And when it is it is one way, like
the path of a star.’
‘Ha!’ she cried bitterly. ‘It is the dead old morality.’ (Lawrence,
1996, p. 179)
Birkin is never more the reactive nihilist than when he accuses
Ursula of ‘ultimate nihilism’. His suggestion that her ideology of love
– ‘this freedom which is love’ – is abstract and life denying clearly
applies to his own discourse concerning the ‘mystic conjunction’
between ‘man and woman’. Ideologically speaking, such a discourse
desires to make ‘woman’ ‘invisible’, ‘non-imaginable’ – that is, as a
critic, someone who questions, who talks back, etc. – by abstracting
her from the world and supposedly joining with her in the ‘stars’.
There is, in Birkin’s discourse, a kind of Schopenhauerian will to
nothingness, a nirvana of what he calls ‘mystic balance and integrity
– like a star balanced with another star’ (Lawrence, 1996, p. 179). Of
course, Ursula, in critically suggesting that he is labouring under a
‘dead old morality’, is Nietzschean enough to recognise that all this
A World Beyond Ideology?
49
talk still masks a will to order and judge her as a – critical, questioning – woman living in the world.
Now, nothing that has been said so far concerning Zizek’s ‘categorical’ assertion of the ‘existence’ of the ideological – as that which
limits the social field by regulating and institutionalising zones of
visibility/non-visibility, imaginability/non-imaginability – would
seem to support the view that he wants to maintain a critical
distance between ideology and non-ideology. To put it in the form
of a question: can Zizek be thought to be holding out for a world
beyond ideology while simultaneously positing, what he calls, ‘the
unrelenting pertinence of ... ideology’ (Zizek, 1994, p. 1)? The idea
that we can move beyond or transcend ideology becomes problematic with Zizek in that it is caught up in the following paradox. As
Zizek puts it: ‘The paradox ... is that the stepping out of (what we
experience as) ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it’ (Zizek,
1994, p. 6).
Stillman senior desired to step out of an experience of ‘chaos’ in
a fallen world through ascension and the assumption of the
language of God. He becomes entranced by this ideology of
ascension and consequently institutionalises a zone of the nonvisible; a non-visibility which takes on a horrifyingly literal meaning
for his son who is banished to a darkened world without human
contact. Birkin, to take another example, wants to move beyond or
step out of a capitalistic ethos of production and consumption. In its
stead, though, he labours under an ideology of love (love as mystical
conjunction and balance, etc.) that desires to render invisible or
domesticate the living, and critically questioning, woman (Ursula).
To reiterate the Zizekian point: both these cases presuppose a critical
attempt to move beyond ideology that immediately and paradoxically ends
in ideological enslavement.
Yet, if we agree with Zizek that any attempt to move beyond
ideology immediately and paradoxically involves our enslavement to
it, are we not undercutting any possibility of justifiable critique? To
put the question another way: how can a critic of ideology remain
so if the very act of criticising itself is ideologically implicated? In
these terms, the position of the critic, if (s)he is to remain free from
ideology, would only seem to exist in the abstract; that is, removed
from social life. Zizek is not unaware of this problem. He writes:
does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place,
somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that
regulates social visibility and non-visibility? Is not the claim that
we can accede to this place the most obvious case of ideology?
(Zizek, 1994, pp. 3–4)
Yet, for all this, Zizek is absolutely insistent on retaining a criticaltheoretical use for the notion of a non-ideological world or, what he
actually calls, ‘extra-ideological reality’. That is to say, he wants to
insist that we can still maintain a critical distance from ideology. It
is worth quoting him at length here:
one should be careful to avoid the last trap that makes us slide
into ideology under the guise of stepping out of it. That is to say,
when we denounce as ideological the very attempt to draw a clear
line of demarcation between ideology and actual reality, this
inevitably seems to impose the conclusion that the only nonideological position is to renounce the very notion of
extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are
symbolic fictions – such a quick, slick ‘postmodern’ solution, however,
is ideology par excellence. It all hinges on our persisting in this
impossible position: although no clear line of demarcation
separates ideology from reality, although ideology is at work in
everything we experience as ‘reality’, we must none the less
maintain the tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive ...
ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us
to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can
denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any
positively determined reality – the moment we yield to this
temptation, we are back in ideology. (Zizek, 1994, p. 17)
It is clear from the above that Zizek expresses the intention to negate
the ideological: that is, to use the negative in a critical stand against
ideology. To put it differently, Zizek theorises the spatial position of
the critic of ideology – the ‘place from which one can denounce
ideology’ – negatively: as ‘empty’ or, more accurately, as an emptying
of all and ‘any positively determined reality’. Further, he is content,
paradoxically, to recognise that such a theoretical understanding of
ideology critique makes him persist in maintaining a ‘position’ that
is impossible. In these speculative and rather abstract terms:
negativity is characterised by its impossibility, by its failure to sustain
itself in any positive determination. Or to make the point in the
A World Beyond Ideology?
51
opposite way, any ‘positively determined reality’ has its being
reflected in a failure to occupy the impossible place of the negative.
Zizek, of course, uses the Lacanian idea of the ‘Real’ to approach this
negative idea of an impossibility that gives rise to failure. He writes:
The Real is ... that which cannot be inscribed ... the rock upon
which every formalisation stumbles. But it is precisely through
this failure that we can in a way encircle, locate the empty place
of the Real. In other words, the Real cannot be inscribed, but we
can inscribe this impossibility itself, we can locate its place: a
traumatic place which causes a series of failures. And Lacan’s
whole point is that the Real is nothing but this impossibility of its
inscription: the Real is not a transcendent positive entity,
persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like ... some kind
of Kantian ‘Thing-in-itself’ – in itself it is nothing at all, just a void,
an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility. (Zizek, 1989, pp. 172–173)
We can now begin to see the precise Zizekian terms in which
Stillman’s transcendentally motivated critique of ideology becomes
problematic. In a sense, Stillman senior’s belief in a pure language
of God beyond the distorting and broken symbols of our fallen world
expresses a desire for what Zizek above calls ‘a transcendent positive
entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order’. The
problem with such a transcendental desire is that it is marked by a
‘central impossibility’. This impossibility, we should say, is purely or
radically insistent in that it is always immanently caught up in the
experience of the critic (we could also think of Birkin here) who symbolically posits (for example, in the discourse of a mystical union
between man and woman) a world beyond (bourgeois) ideology.
That is to say, what Zizek calls the ‘pure’ or ‘radical negativity’ of the
‘Real’ acts as an ‘immanent’ ‘limit’ rendering ‘impossible’ the transcendental desire to purge the world of ideological configurations
(Zizek, 1989, pp. 205–206).
Further, it should be stressed that the ‘immanent’ and radically
negative ‘experience’ of the ‘Real’ is characterised by its necessity. Just
as it is ‘impossible’ to ‘occupy’ the place or ‘position’ of the ‘Real’, it,
according to Zizek’s view, ‘is even more difficult to avoid it’ (Zizek,
1989, p. 155). That is to say, if we can never fully immerse ourselves
in the ‘Real’, we simultaneously can never escape from it; that is,
from the necessary failure caused by our attempts to symbolise it.
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Such ontological necessity or cause expresses itself in a peculiar way:
it is, in Zizek’s words, ‘a cause which in itself does not exist – which
is present only in a series of effects ...’ (Zizek, 1989, p. 163). Now, the
political significance of thinking about the radical ‘non-existence’
or ‘negativity’ that defines the ontological necessity of the ‘Real’ is
that it gives rise to a logic of antagonism which, as Zizek puts it,
‘prevents the final totalisation of the social-ideological field’ (Zizek,
1989, p. 164).
We can again use the exchange between Gerald Crich and Birkin
discussed above to help us animate this Zizekian logic of
antagonism. When Birkin questions Gerald’s ideology or ethos of
capitalistic productivity, he is, in Zizek’s terms, pointing up the
negative fact that the social reality implied by this ideology – a reality
of purposive work, of production, consumption, etc. – does not exist
in a self-enclosed harmonious way. That is to say, in critically
suggesting that the bourgeois pursuit of material goods – ‘cars’,
‘pianofortes’, etc. – condemns many to a life of alienating work,
Birkin, on Zizek’s view, is rendering ‘visible’ or ‘imaginable’ certain
impediments that could be used to challenge antagonistically the
efficacy of ordering the social along capitalist lines.
Now, Zizek’s point is that such antagonistic critique is contingent
on the fact that a purely positive and self-enclosed social totality
can never be institutionalised. It is always the case that posited ideological positions such as Gerald’s are haunted by the ‘Reality’ of
‘radical negativity’: that is, by the spectre of disharmony and incompleteness (this, of course, is also implied in Ursula’s antagonistic
critique of Birkin mapped out above). Put speculatively: it is the constitutive incompleteness or lack inherent in the positivity of the
social-ideological field that allows for the continuing antagonistic
struggle that would challenge its foreclosure. Interestingly, these are
the terms in which Zizek reconstructs the Marxian notion of ‘class
struggle’. He writes:
[T]he ultimate paradox of the notion of class struggle is that
society is ‘held together’ by the very antagonism ... that forever
prevents its closure in a harmonious, transparent, rational Whole
– by the very impediment that undermines every rational totalisation. Although ‘class struggle’ is nowhere directly given as a
positive entity, it nonetheless functions, in its very absence, as the
point of reference enabling us to locate every ... meaning (‘transcendental signified’) ... as (an)other attempt to conceal and ‘patch
A World Beyond Ideology?
53
up’ the rift of class antagonism, to efface its traces. (Zizek, 1994,
pp. 21–22)
So we witness Zizek returning to Marx, but returning via a Lacanian
detour. This ‘return to Marx’, he says, ‘entails a radical displacement
of the Marxian theoretical edifice’ (Zizek, 1994, p. 28). The displacement, of course, is inevitable given Zizek’s – Lacanian inspired
– assertion of the constitutive incompleteness or lack inherent in
any attempted foreclosure of the social-ideological field. Oddly
enough, the theoretical-conceptual resources needed for a consistent
recognition of this lack or failure are, according to Zizek, to be found
in a thinker who Marx famously dismissed as ideologically conservative. This thinker, of course, is Hegel. Zizek writes:
[T]he most consistent model ... of antagonism is offered by
Hegelian dialectics: far from being a story of its progressive
overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the
failure of all such attempts ... In other words, Hegelian ‘reconciliation’ is not a ‘panlogicist’ sublation of all reality in the Concept
but a final consent to the fact that the Concept itself is ‘not all’ (to
use a Lacanian term). In this sense ... Hegel ... [is] ... the first postMarxist: he opened up the field of a certain fissure subsequently
‘sutured’ by Marxism. (Zizek, 1989, p. 6)
Let us sum up the main thrust of this first part of the chapter. We
began with the suggestion that Zizek insists on maintaining a critical
distinction between ideology and non-ideology. Of course, the
manner in which he does this is rather paradoxical. Zizek asks us to
consider the possibility of holding a position that will enable the
maintenance of a critical stance against and beyond the ideologies
we encounter in the social field (to repeat: ‘we must ... maintain the
tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive’). Yet, the idea that
we could occupy such a position (a ‘place from which one can
denounce ideology’) is immediately thought to be ‘impossible’: that
is, the position of the critic is rendered purely empty, radically
negative and irreducible to any ‘positively determined reality’.
This, for Zizek, does not mean that the idea of actually engaging
in ideology critique is lost to a negative abstraction. For we must, on
this view, understand how ‘radical negativity’ also necessarily gives
rise to a form of antagonism that structures our concrete experience
of ideology. That is to say, the ideological and critical struggle over
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
meaning in the symbolic realm (recall, for example, Birkin and
Ursula’s antagonistic exchange) is concretely structured in
accordance with the ‘Reality’ that there is always something fundamentally lacking in any attempt to foreclose the social-ideological
field. Every time a situated critic says ‘No!’ and challenges the
harmony (say Birkin’s notion of sexual harmony) or wholeness (say
Stillman’s idea of a world restored to the wholeness of God’s word)
projected in ideological symbolisations (s)he, for Zizek, unavoidably
bears witness to the potentially disruptive power of the negative (see
Zizek, 1989, pp. 230–231).
IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE AND THE AFFIRMATION OF ETHICS
Why, though, should any critic want to negate or challenge the
harmony or wholeness projected in ideological symbolisations? This
question is crucial in so far as it plunges us – we could say after a
certain Habermasian fashion – into the murky waters of ethical
motivation (see Habermas, 1987, p. 284). Zizek, as we shall see,
provides a degree of clarity on this issue by consistently entrusting
himself to the thought of Immanuel Kant. Put simply, Zizek’s
ideology critique is ethically motivated by concerns that are
explicitly Kantian. Now, we can begin to detect this by considering
a passage from his ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’ (Zizek, 1990, pp.
249–260). Here Zizek explicitly raises the possibility of what he calls
the ‘ethics of the real’. We should say at this juncture that the essay
in question is constituted as a formulated response and appraisal
(an overwhelmingly positive one at that) of work undertaken by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy. Zizek writes:
The main achievement of Hegemony ... is that, perhaps for the first
time, it articulates the contours of a political project based on an
ethics of the real, ... an ethics of confrontation with an
impossible, traumatic kernel not covered by any ideal (of
unbroken communication ...). That’s why we can effectively say
that Hegemony is the only real answer to Habermas, to his project
based on the ethics of ... communication without constraint. The
way Habermas formulates the ‘ideal speech situation’ already
betrays its status as fetish: ‘ideal speech situation’ is something
which, as soon as we engage in communication, is ‘simultaneously denied and laid claim to’, i.e. we must presuppose the ideal
of an unbroken communication to be already realised, even
A World Beyond Ideology?
55
though we know simultaneously that this cannot be the case.
(Zizek, 1990, p. 259)
We see that the ‘ethics of the real’, for Zizek, confronts us with the
impossibility of regulating the communicative universe with
reference to the ‘ideal’. The implication, of course, is that ethics itself
acquires the impossible status of what we have been calling the ‘Real’.
That is to say, it is the pure emptiness or ‘radical negativity’ (the
‘traumatic kernel’) pervading any supposedly transcendental
regulative ideal – notice that Zizek explicitly targets Habermas’s ‘ideal
speech situation’ – that necessarily gives ethics a confrontational or,
what we earlier called, antagonistic character. Now, although Zizek
seems intent on criticising the notion of an ‘ideal speech situation’,
he nonetheless formulates his ‘ethics of the real’ as ‘the only real
answer to Habermas’. This infers, of course, that Zizek thinks
Habermas is at least asking pertinent and important ethical questions.
Zizek is drawn to the Kantianism in Habermas: that is to say, he is
attracted to Habermas’s Kantian-inspired affirmation of universality
(see Habermas, 1990, p. 197). We can look to Zizek’s critique of what
he calls the ‘ideology of late capitalism’ for clear evidence of a similar
universalist conviction. He asks the following ethical question:
Where ... are we to look for the way out of [the] vicious circle of
late-capitalis[m]? ... The way to break out of this vicious circle is
... to invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension
of universality beyond Capital ... (Zizek, 1993, pp. 219–220)
So, according to Zizek, an ethically motivated critique of the ‘vicious’
ideology of late capitalism points to a ‘dimension of universality
beyond’. Again it is important to stress how this concept of the
‘universal beyond’ is ‘Real’ in Zizek’s strict Lacanian use of the term.
In other words, the universal – as ‘Real’ – has the paradoxical status
of being both necessary and impossible. As ethically motivated critics
of ideology we are, Zizek says after the Kantian fashion, necessarily
and unavoidably involved in the symbolic activity of positing
universals. Yet, the notion of positing a ‘universal beyond’ ideology
is, on this view, something we perpetually encounter as an impossibility: that is, we inevitably experience the lack or incompleteness
which pervades our specific ideological symbolisation of it. Zizek is
again drawing inspiration from the work of Laclau. Consider the
following passage from Zizek’s The Abyss of Freedom:
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
As Ernesto Laclau would ... put it, the Universal is simultaneously
necessary (unavoidable) and impossible; necessary since ... the
symbolic medium as such is universal, and impossible, since the
positive content of the Universal is never purely neutral but is
always (mis)appropriated, elevated from some particular content
that ‘hegemonises’ the Universal ... (Zizek, 1997a, p. 53)
The ‘ontological scandal’, as Zizek would call it, of the universal –
that is, the fact universality is impossible, always (mis)appropriated,
etc. – acquires its sense in the performative enunciations of the
‘subject’ of ethical experience. What defines this ethical subject is its
excessiveness (Zizek, 1999, pp. 291–292). The subject is excessive
inasmuch as it has the performative power to construct or, we should
say, reconstruct the ontological frameworks that positively sustain
current forms of ethical life. Or, to put it another way: the subject,
through its performative assumption of ‘universal norms’, constitutes a ‘crack in the ontological edifice of the universe’ (Zizek, 1997b,
p. 214). Now, what makes this performative gesture understandable
from an ethical point of view is, Zizek says, the fact that it implicates
the subject in a field of moral responsibility. That is to say, the performative assumption of universal norms – the symbolic gesture of
saying ‘universal morality is X!’ – simultaneously precipitates an
assumption of moral responsibility on the part of the subject positing
these norms. Again it is important to recognise that Zizek theorises
this process in terms that he considers strictly Kantian. He writes:
[T]he unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in ... [its] formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely
tells me that I should accomplish my duty. That is to say, it is not
possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my
specific situation from the moral Law itself – which means that the
subject himself has to assume the responsibility of translating the
abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. In this precise sense, ... the ethical subject bears full
responsibility for the concrete universal norms he follows – that
is to say, the only guarantor of the universality of positive moral
norms is the subject’s own contingent act of performatively
assuming these norms. (Zizek, 1997b, p. 214)
So we see that Kantian ‘moral Law’, for Zizek, amounts to an ethical
injunction – to do one’s duty – that must always be responsibly
A World Beyond Ideology?
57
translated into a ‘series of concrete obligations’. Let us, once again,
return to Stillman in order to animate this idea. Stillman, on Zizek’s
Kantian terms, fails in his duty to act morally in so far as he exhibits
no responsibility for the normative standpoint he adopts. That is to
say, Stillman, in his normative pursuit of God’s language, labours
under a promise of ethical transcendence that is taken to instrumentally override or displace any responsible consideration of the
pain he is causing the other (namely, his son). Or, consider the
situation of an alleged ‘sex addict’ who is caught by a spouse in the
throes of sexual – and extra-marital – congress. The ‘sex addict’ could
try to displace, or instrumentally override, any responsible obligation
to the other (in this case, the spouse) by suggesting that he is
suffering at the hands of a biological affliction over which no control
can be exercised. In this case, of course, the notion of a ‘biological
affliction’ is ideologically posited to assume the responsibilities and
obligations the subject (‘sex addict’) displaces.
Zizekian critique is of ethical importance in so far as it rejects such
an ideological displacement of moral responsibility (see Zizek, 1993,
pp. 99–100). But what, we may ask, if the subject can be said to act
responsibly, dutifully and yet unethically? This question brings into
focus what is perhaps the fundamental difficulty facing any affirmation of Kantian ‘moral Law’: that is to say, it forces us to confront
the potentially monstrous or evil consequences that may flow from
consistently following it through. The terroristic ethic of the ‘suicide
bomber’ would seem to present an exemplary case of a subject consistently following a course of action dictated in accordance with
‘moral Law’. To put it in the form of a question: are not the actions
of the terrorist formally dutiful and responsible in Zizek’s strict
Kantian sense (performing a duty for the sake of an ethno-religious
cause, responsibly exhibiting a will to do God’s work or good no
matter the cost to the self, etc.)? Is this not an example of what Zizek,
again following Kant, calls ‘diabolical Evil’; the ‘act of elevating Evil
into an ethical principle’? (Zizek, 1993, p. 101).
In order to rescue his Kantian-inspired ethic of responsibility,
Zizek must critically expose the concrete expression or symbolisation of ‘diabolical Evil’ as ideological self-deception (see Zizek, 1997b,
p. 231). The ‘suicide bomber’, in this regard, must be viewed as
someone so instrumentally swept up in a form of the ‘Good’ that
(s)he fails to recognise or displaces the horrifyingly monstrous consequences of her/his actions. Zizek, we can see, adopts this strategy
in a discussion of the ‘Nazi executioners’ of the Holocaust. He is keen
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
to defend the Kantian ethic of responsibility against the criticism –
detectable, he says, in the work of Hannah Arendt amongst others –
that the ethos of Nazism was systematically over-coded with the
formalist Kantian attitude to do one’s duty for the sake of duty.
Zizek’s point is that Nazism (and by implication the activities of the
‘suicide bomber’ mentioned above), far from exhibiting a formalist
attitude, actually:
violated the basic Kantian precept of the primacy of Duty over any
notion of Good, since it relied on a precise notion of Good (the
establishment of a true community of German people) ... to which
all ‘formal’ ethical injunctions were instrumentalised and relativised (it is proper to kill, torture ... if it serves the higher goal of
the German community). The element which suspended the
‘formalist’ character of Nazi normativity was the very reference to
the Führer: ... the Führer is the one who knows what is for the Good
of the People and, consequently, [his] word overrides all ‘formalist’
ethical considerations. (Zizek, 1997b, p. 231)
In this regard, Zizekian ethics asserts the ‘formalist’ primacy of Duty
over and above any substantive form of the ‘Good’ (fundamentalism, Nazism, etc.) that may want to step into the breach of the
social-ideological field. This, of course, is where responsibility ought
to be brought into the equation. To repeat: it is in the subject’s translation of the abstract injunction – to do one’s duty – that (s)he
assumes responsibility for the goods that structure ethical life. In a
sense, then, Zizek’s ethically motivated critique of ideology is defined
by the way in which it can formally problematise the goods that are
taken to legitimise morally irresponsible action.
It is important to stress that the position from which this critique
originates is – in Zizek’s Lacanian and Realist terms – impossible to
occupy and yet necessarily unavoidable. In other words, the ‘moral
act’ of assuming responsibility for the ‘Good’ is impossible, according
to Zizekian logic, in that we can never be absolutely certain as to
whether or not our duty to this ‘Good’ is instrumentally or pathologically driven. Consequently, the rather precarious circumstances
in which we exercise our duty act as a necessary limit that cannot
simply be avoided or, as Zizek says, ‘transgressed’ in a ‘pure act of
reason’. In sum: Zizek’s affirmation of moral responsibility and
‘Duty’ must give way to the powerful negativity or, in this context,
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59
‘formalism’ of the ‘Real’ qua impossible/unavoidable ethical
injunction (Zizek, 1997b, p. 231).
We began this second part by raising the question of what
ethically motivates ideology critique. Zizek, we saw, gives Kantianinspired responses to this question. Most immediately, we saw the
extent to which Zizek affirms the Kantian conviction that ethical
criticism must be motivated by ‘universal’ concerns. That is to say,
the notion of critique points to a ‘universality beyond’ the ideologies
currently structuring ethical life. Characteristically, Zizek gives this
notion of ‘universality’ a Lacanian twist; thus the universal – qua
‘Real’ – acquires the paradoxical status of being both necessary and
impossible. To repeat: as ethically motivated critics of ideology, we
are necessarily involved in the symbolic activity of positing
universals. Yet, the notion of positing a ‘universal beyond’ ideology
is something we perpetually encounter as impossible: that is, we
inevitably experience the lack or incompleteness that pervades our
ideological symbolisation of it. In this sense, of course, the ethically
motivated critic is, for Zizek, always left in the precarious position of
contemplating the possibility of her/his own specific failure to move
beyond ideology.
Now, it would be clearly wrong to say that this conclusion forces
Zizek into a nihilistic dismissal of ethical matters. For there is a sense
in which our specific failure – to constitute a universal norm beyond
ideology – gives rise to the possibility of affirming a form of Kantian
moral responsibility. To repeat: the performative affirmation of
universal norms – the particular and failed symbolic gesture of saying
‘the moral Law is X!’ – simultaneously, for Zizek, precipitates the
assumption of moral responsibility on the part of the subject
positing these norms. This brings into focus the suggestion that Zizek
wants, as we earlier put it, to implicate the subject (Stillman, the ‘sex
addict’, etc.) in a field of moral responsibility. Also, it brings into
focus the extent to which Zizek’s ethically motivated critique is
defined by the way it seeks to question the ideological displacement
of obligations and responsibilities.
CONCLUSION
Nothing we have said so far has explicitly focused on the consistency
of Zizek’s views. Yet, everything we have said points to inevitable
questions concerning the way in which the two strains of his
thought mapped out above (negative and affirmative) are related to
one another. It will be the aim of our conclusion to think through
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
the way in which Zizek theoretically relates these tendencies and
briefly to make some critical remarks about the consistency he lends
to them. Also, we shall briefly consider how these strains of Zizekian
thought may help us evaluate the notion that we can experience a
world beyond ideology.
Let us begin, then, by briefly clarifying the negative and affirmative strains in Zizek’s thought as articulated. Firstly, let us think about
how Zizek relates the idea of negativity to ideology critique. We have
seen (in the first part of the chapter) the way in which Zizek uses the
negative as a conceptual tool in his critical stand against ideology.
That is to say, we have seen the way in which he insists on theorising
the position of the critic (the ‘place from which one can denounce
ideology’) negatively, and how this negativity is thought to fuel
challenges against the foreclosure of social-ideological field (think
again of the exchanges between Gerald and Birkin, Birkin and
Ursula, etc.). To repeat: ideological struggle or antagonistic critique
always and concretely bears witness to the disruptive power of the
negative. Put all too simply, saying ‘No!’ to the harmony or
wholeness projected in ideological symbolisations is, according to
Zizekian logic, what critics of ideology do.
Yet, conversely, the Zizekian critic of ideology is also (as we saw
in the second part of the chapter) engaged in an ethical ‘Yes’ saying.
That is to say, Zizek responds affirmatively to the question of why be
ethically motivated to engage in ideology critique by positively
championing Kantian notions of universality and moral responsibility. To repeat: the critic of ideology, from a Zizekian perspective,
must accept responsibility for the ‘universal norms’ (s)he posits in
the social field. (S)he must retain an awareness of how ideology can
function to excuse or justify morally irresponsible actions (our ‘sex
addict’ again comes to mind). Also, and perhaps most importantly,
(s)he must be critically sensitive to the fact that her/his own ethical
position in the symbolic realm is morally precarious: that is,
surrounded by uncertainty.
Such are the negative and affirmative strains of Zizek’s thinking.
Let us now briefly venture some critical remarks concerning the consistency that is lent to them. Or, consider the following question:
does the affirmative and ethical strain in Zizek’s thinking always
already render his stress on negativity rather redundant? The implication of this question is that Zizek’s notion of ideology critique only
makes sense if it is normatively grounded in a Kantian ethic that has
nothing really do with the so-called ‘pure’ or ‘radical’ ‘negativity’ of
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61
the ‘Real’. On this view, the position of the critic is never ‘empty’ or
‘impossible’, but is always affirmatively concerned with ‘moral
responsibility’, actively justifying ‘universal norms’, etc. To put it in
the form of another question: how can an ethically motivated
critique such as Zizek’s be anything other than a positive transgression of an impossible or radically negative ‘Real’?
Zizek is well aware of this potential criticism and aims to challenge
it head on. Indeed, this is already implied in his spirited defence of
the ‘moral Law’ above. Rather than concede that the ethical
motivation to critique and transform the social-ideological field be
thought of as a transgression of negativity (a Nazi transgression, a
fundamentalist transgression, etc.), Zizek, to repeat, insists on its
‘formal indeterminacy’. Zizek’s point, here, is that the ‘radical
negativity’ of the ‘Real’ – understood in this context as the ‘formal
indeterminacy’ of ‘Duty’ – unavoidably and immediately persists in the
subject’s motivation to assume moral responsibility. That is to say, the
subject cannot simply avoid the ethical injunction to act in
accordance with ‘Duty’. So, for Zizek, it is not that we positively
transgress the ‘radical negativity’, ‘impossibility’, ‘Reality’ or
‘formalism’ of ‘Duty’: rather, we immediately experience it as the
constitutive uncertainty surrounding the assumption of ‘moral
responsibility’ in the symbolic realm. Negativity, in this sense, is not
a redundant abstraction existing beyond our experiences in the
symbolic, but is absolutely immanent to the limited and precarious
task of affirming an ethical standpoint in the social field (see, Zizek,
1997b, p. 217).
We are perhaps now in a better position to evaluate the precise
terms in which Zizek theoretically relates the affirmative and
negative strains of his thought. Negativity assumes sovereignty and
is given conceptual priority over affirmation. To repeat: it is the
‘radical negativity’ of the ‘Real’ – the ‘formal indeterminacy’ of
‘Duty’ – that provides the condition of possibility for affirming an
ethical standpoint in the symbolic realm. To repeat an even earlier
point: it is the ‘radical negativity’ of the ‘Real’ – its ‘impossibility’,
pure emptiness, etc. – that allows us to positively and antagonistically struggle over the ideological meanings of subject-positions
adopted in the social field. To the critical suggestion that all this
emphasis on negativity inevitably leads to abstraction, Zizek, we
have seen, insists that it is a ‘necessary’ feature of social life: that is
to say, the conceptual priority given to negativity is never, on this
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
view, a purely theoretical matter, but is always taken to be constitutive of the subject’s concrete experience of ideology.
Let us now close our discussion by considering how these strains
in Zizek’s thinking may help us evaluate the notion that we can
experience a world beyond ideology. Well, if a critical stand against
ideology is, as Zizek says, motivated by a positive commitment to a
form of Kantian universalism and moral responsibility, and if these
ethical characteristics are formally and immanently haunted by the
spectre of ‘radical negativity’, then the problem of experiencing a
world beyond ideology is a paradoxical one. In other words, the
‘stepping out’ of ideology – positively inhabiting a moral universe
in which we are certain in our exercise of ‘Duty’, ‘moral responsibility’ etc. – always already involves our potential ‘enslavement’ to
a form of the ‘Good’ that may ideologically repress certain subjects
in the social field. So, to the prospect of concretely experiencing a world
beyond ideology Zizek gives a categorical ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ Yes, we can take
a stand against ideology. No, we can never be certain of the terms of
our own ideological enslavement. Yes, we can maintain a critical
position enabling us to point up and negate the limits of ideologies
we encounter in the social field. No, we can never inhabit a social
field totally purged of ideology.
Of course, it would be easy to critically dismiss Zizek’s logic as
paradoxical and contradictory, to suggest that his philosophical
shilly-shallying is of little practical meaning or significance. But this
would miss the crucial point of the Zizekian enterprise: for we have
seen how Zizek embraces this paradoxical logic and how he theoretically puts it to work in his analysis of our concrete experience of
ideology. Further, he would say that the making of such criticisms
serves as an immediate reminder of the real and practical struggle
over meaning that exists in the symbolic realm. The experience of
such ‘antagonism’, on Zizek’s view, signifies not only the continual
work of ideology, but also our continuing ethical desire to move
beyond it.
REFERENCES
Auster, P. (1992) The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber).
Deleuze, G. (1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone).
Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge:
Polity Press).
Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action
(Cambridge: Polity Press).
Lawrence, D. H. (1996) Women In Love (London: Penguin).
A World Beyond Ideology?
63
Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1990) ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’, in E. Laclau, New Reflections on
the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of
Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press).
Zizek, S. (ed.) (1994) Mapping Ideology (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1997a) The Abyss of Freedom (Michigan: University of Michigan
Press).
Zizek, S. (1997b) The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1999) The Zizek Reader eds E. & E. Wright (Oxford: Blackwell).
4
City Life and the Conditions
of Possibility of an IdeologyProof Subject: Simmel,
Benjamin and Joyce on
Berlin, Paris and Dublin
Kieran Keohane
Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce are the three figures of classical
modernism with the strongest affinity to postmodernism. Indeed in
their respective fields of sociology, cultural criticism and literature,
they are frequently discussed as though they were ‘postmodernists
before their time’, presaging and exemplifying the theoretical,
methodological, and aesthetic sensibilities that have lately come
together under the umbrella of postmodernism. Underappreciated
at the time, it is as if they have now come into their own as, if not
‘founding fathers’ then certainly ‘forefathers’ of the present
generation. If we are to understand the status of ideology in the
context of the conditions of postmodernity, and develop tactics of
ideology critique appropriate to these conditions, then it will be
instructive for us to look at how these three writers have dealt with
the problem.
Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce, writing of Berlin, Paris and Dublin
respectively, cities that they simultaneously loved and hated, feared
and celebrated, are acutely aware of the problems of modern urban
life, but are also attuned to its joys and alive to its utopian possibilities. They have in common the conviction that while the modern
city has many ominous dimensions – predatory commercialism,
social conflict grounded in inequalities of class and ethnicity,
deprivation and marginalisation, the reduction of value to cash and
the debasement of the human spirit – the city also constitutes the
conditions of possibility of realising the good life in modern society.
For Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce, the city is the locus of modernity,
and its symbolic order and imaginative structure are characterised
by ambiguity and ambivalence. On the one hand the city threatens
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City Life
65
the erasure of individuality by the mass, and simultaneously the city
provides the anonymity and freedom for subjective self-expression
and the celebration of individuality. The city constitutes a theatre of
power and ideology, of collective action and difference of opinion –
a polis – and cultivates its subjective correspondent(s); the person
who is subject to ideology, and simultaneously the open-minded,
liberal democratic, individual citizen.
As Simmel expresses it:
The deepest problems of modern life spring from the attempt of
the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of
his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the
weight of historical heritage and the external culture and
technique of life. (Simmel, 1971, p. 325)
This dialectic between objective and subjective culture, between the
homogenising effects of mass society and the fragmentation of
collective life into privatised individualism, the problem of finding
the good relation between our individual and our social being – a
problem of the care of the self – animates the writings of Simmel,
Benjamin and Joyce, and is still at the core of discourse on the city
at the turn of the twenty-first century.
For Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce, as we are both subjects and
objects of modernity, the subject of ideology is also, equally, the
subject who is resilient to ideology. The metropolis constitutes a
form of life in which the individual is subject to the sovereign
powers of society, but simultaneously a form which generates the
conditions of possibility for the emergence of a modern ‘ideal type’
of subject resilient to power. For Simmel this is the ‘blasé cosmopolitan’, a subject who is intellectualistic, liberal, tolerant of
difference, and who thrives on the agonal pluralism of urban life
(Simmel, 1971). For Walter Benjamin the equivalent is the flâneur, a
participant observer in urban phantasmagoria, but one who
cultivates distance from the prevailing ideologies, enabling a critical
perspective and preserving the possibility of an alternative form of
life;1 and the qualities of the blasé cosmopolitan and the flâneur are
personified in Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses
(Joyce, 1990).
Dublin, Berlin and Paris, cities with very different modern
histories: Paris the capital city of an empire, a global power, capital
of the nineteenth century; Berlin, capital of Prussia, a regional power
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
underpinned by a Spartan militaristic and bureaucratic culture with
national and imperial aspirations; Dublin, in the same time-frame, a
subjected city, the subaltern capital of Britain’s oldest and most troublesome colony. Monet and Renoir depicted Paris as the city of light
and life; Joyce represented Dublin in paralysis, darkness and death.
And today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Paris has become
like Rome, which, as Joyce remarked, is like someone who makes his
living by charging money to see his grandmother’s corpse (Ellmann,
1982, p. 225). Paris is the world’s largest single tourist destination,
where people pay to see the remains of classical nineteenth-century
modernity. Berlin, the forgotten city, walled and divided, the
forbidden city, twice thwarted in its designs to be capital of Europe,
capital of the twentieth century, is poised at last to become capital of
Germany and the European Union. And ‘dear old dirty Dublin’,
Europe’s worst slum in 1900, the squalid, backward capital of
Europe’s third-world country throughout the twentieth century, is a
brash, bustling, trendy city that boasts itself ‘the new Paris’!
But despite the evident differences between Paris, Berlin and
Dublin, what collects them, what allows us to move freely from
discussing one to the other? Georg Simmel argues that what modern
cities share in common are the conditions that cultivate a unique
form of modern subjectivity (Simmel, 1971).2 The collective and
subjective existential conditions that characterise the modern metropolitan form of life, Simmel argues, are that in the metropolis there
arises ‘an intensification of emotional life due to the swift and
continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ (1971, p. 325). In
the metropolis there is an exponential growth and expansion of possibilities for encounters with alterity, arising from the dense
overlapping and interpenetration of elements. Thus, ‘the relationships and concerns of the typical metropolitan resident are so
manifold and complex ... as a result of the agglomeration of so many
persons with such differentiated interests, their relationships and
activities intertwine with one another into a many membered
organism’ (1971, p. 328). These conditions become ramified into
thousands of individual variations, bearing the characteristic stamp
of each particular city. But while the content of life in every modern
environment will be irreducibly particular, giving every place its
unique and peculiar character, there is a generalised, ubiquitous form
in modern urban life the world over. Berliners, Parisians and
Dubliners (and New Yorkers, for that matter) as urbanites share a
common form of life.
City Life
67
Simmel lived in downtown Berlin, at the intersection of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, the subway stop on his doorstep was
Stadmitte (mid-town), in an area that was the heart of Berlin before
it was obliterated in the Second World War, left a wasteland for 50
years, and is presently the world’s largest building site. Potsdamer
Platz and Checkpoint Charlie are a minute’s walk north and south
of his house. In the liveliness of this downtown environment
Simmel formulates the archetypal modern subject that corresponds
with the metropolis as the city dweller whose ‘essentially intellectualistic character’ distinguishes him from the mental life of the small
town, which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships. The
metropolitan person has become accustomed to jarring contrasts and
rapid changes, movement and discontinuity, and in order to live in
this vibrant modern environment: ‘The Metropolitan type – which
naturally takes on a thousand individual modifications – creates a
protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with
which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu
threaten it’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 326). Simmel says that ‘with every
crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 325), the metropolis
creates the sensory foundations on which a new subjectivity is constructed. Echoing Simmel, in a typical passage of Ulysses, as Bloom
walks along Talbot street at the edge of Dublin’s red-light district, he
crosses the street to avoid a lurching drunk, he is narrowly missed by
two cyclists, he is nearly run over by a street-car, he has two kids
bump into him (causing him to check his pockets, as he suspects it
is a pickpocket’s ruse), he skirts a rowdy gang outside a pub, he is
hailed by three prostitutes and an old bawd pimping a teenager, and
he bumps into (or imagines what he would say if he were to bump
into) a respectable acquaintance and has to account for his being in
the red-light district to her; all in a 50-yard walk (Joyce, 1990,
pp. 410–418). The new subjectivity of the metropolitan is acutely
aware and self-aware, calculating and self-reflexive. He is selfpossessed, and at the same time immersed in the crowd, subject to
the sovereign powers of mass society and at the same time resilient
and skilled in evading interpellation.
The second formative influence on modern mental life, Simmel
says, is the universalisation of the money economy, which becomes
‘a common denominator of all values ... the frightful leveller that
hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values
and their uniqueness and incomparability ... all float with the same
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specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money’ (Simmel,
1971, pp. 329–330). These two influences combine, Simmel argues,
to cultivate a psychic phenomenon that uniquely characterises the
modern metropolitan subject, that is ‘the blasé outlook’.
The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference to the distinctions between things. Not in the sense that they are not perceived,
... but rather that the meaning and the value of the distinctions
between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are
experienced as meaningless. They appear to the blasé person in a
homogenous, flat and grey colour with no one of them worthy of
being preferred to another. (Simmel, 1971, p. 330)
Other aspects of the blasé outlook which Simmel discerns are
‘reserve’, the ‘privilege of suspicion’, ‘a slight aversion, a mutual
strangeness and repulsion’, ‘antipathy ... which brings about the sort
of distanciation and deflection without which this kind of life could
not be carried on at all’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 331).
But the crucial point for Simmel is that he sees how these qualities,
which at first sight might be seen to be solely negative attributes of
modern subjectivity, are also, paradoxically, the very grounds of
modern tolerance, liberalism and cosmopolitanism. The blasé
attitude is a new ‘protective organ’, developed to protect the personality (Simmel, 1971, p. 326). For Simmel the cosmopolitan is not
inhumane, but on the contrary, is more fully human. The citizen
with the blasé attitude is used to difference and discontinuity, he is
accustomed to the antagonism of modern life. Ordinarily he is able
to deal with it. At worst he is indifferent to it, or at least he can
tolerate it. At best he is friendly towards it, he feels at home in the
middle of it, and actively seeks it out. Prevailing ideological currents
do not easily sway the blasé cosmopolitan. When he is hailed (interpellated) he may not respond: he has heard it all before. He is not
naively subject to sentimental and emotional appeals: he ‘enjoys the
privilege of suspicion’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 331). Rational and calculating, he is inclined to size up the situation objectively and (he likes
to imagine) make up his own mind – as much as possible, under the
circumstances! He is self-reflexive and ironic even on the subject of
his own autonomy.
For Simmel this is the deeply ambiguous effect of the combination of increasing rationalisation and the complete penetration of
the money economy: on the one hand it frees Berliners from
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localism and chauvinism, but on the other hand it leaves them open
to instrumental and strategic rationality. The ambiguous effect of
the rationalised consciousness of urban life that is the subjective
correlate of the intensification of nervous stimulation and the
abstraction of the money economy is that it frees urbanites from
servitude to ideology, chauvinism, and prejudice; but, simultaneously, as the universal solvent, money is ‘the frightful leveller – it
hollows out the core of things’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 330), making social
relations inhumane. The rationalisation of consciousness which
accompanies the universalisation of the money economy might free
Berliners from anti-Semitism, but it might also provide the foundations for a new barbarism of reason, which, alloyed with the mutual
antipathy characteristic of life amongst strangers, and the vestiges
of traditional prejudice and military authoritarianism, was to
become the basis for the Holocaust.
Walter Benjamin similarly sees an ambiguous quality in the city’s
ideological currents. The city is a phantasmagoria of the ideology of
progress, and the fundamental component of the phantasmagoria
is the commodity fetish (Benjamin, 1995, p. 50). Progress is
worshipped by the consumption of commodities and fashion
‘prescribes the ritual by which Progress wishes to be worshipped’
(Benjamin, 1995). But this phantasmagoria generates a material and
symbolic leftover, an excess of ‘dialectical images’ – ‘small particular
moments’ in which the ‘total historical event’ could be discovered
(Buck-Morss, 1995, p. 71). These moments, like Joycean ‘epiphanies’,
can illuminate the social totality for the subject who encounters
them and brush against the grain of the phantasmagoria of progress.
Modern cities are littered with the ruins of progress: once-fashionable shops and districts, presently dilapidated; outmoded
commodities discarded as detritus; a negative excess piling up in a
repressed collective unconscious of consumer society, returning and
protruding into the dream world of the present. To Benjamin, the
Paris Arcades, the prototypical shopping malls and supermarkets,
now defunct, and lying like petrified forests of consumer enjoyment3
were such ruins, a stone’s throw from Galeries Lafayette and Le
Printemps. Formerly ‘grottoes of the commodity fetish’ (Benjamin,
1995), they persisted in Benjamin’s time as nightmarish passages to
the underworld, peopled with the mouldering cadavers of
mannequins; awkwardly poised, grotesquely dismembered and
contorted, draped in ludicrous costumes and festooned in cobwebs
and grime, they represented the ur-phenomena of the Real, stark
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reminders of the constitutive lack in the commodity fetish (BuckMorss, 1995, pp. 56–75). What had once been the ‘sublime objects
of ideology’ (Zizek, 1989) now appear as profane and ridiculous.
Benjamin argues that the dialectical image of the outmoded
commodity, in which the lack that had once been the focus of desire
where consumer fantasies were projected and elaborated, and thus
the source of the sex-appeal of the commodity fetish, now appears
as gaping void, may strike at the heart of the belief in progress and
the entire mythology. To the day-dream believer in progress,
believing in the eternity of the forever-renewed present-as-future life
everlasting, encounter with such dialectical images would be the
modern/secular equivalent of encounter with the mark of the AntiChrist.
But the grottoes of the commodity fetish, petrified and obsolete in
Benjamin’s time, are revivified, and are being revivified now, and
new (olde) passages are being built. ‘Les Passages couverts’ are featured
in the centre pages of Paris: Môde d’emploi 1999, the official guide to
Paris produced by the Office de Tourisme et des Congrès Paris, and distributed free to hotels, airports, and travel agents around the world.
In Dublin the equivalent of the decayed Paris Arcades used to be
Temple Bar;4 once a thriving network of streets, but more recently a
ruin, a run-down district of derelict shops and seedy bars at the heart
of Dublin. In the 1990s Temple Bar was targeted for redevelopment,
and over five years some £300 million has been spent to turn the
area into the capital’s cultural district,5 ‘Dublin’s Left Bank’, and
Dublin is hyped by the tourism industry as ‘the new Paris’. And in
Berlin what had been the city centre for the first half of the twentieth
century was waste land and no man’s land for the next 50 years, a
monument to the frozen ideological polarities of modernity, but in
the last decade it has become a building site of epic proportions, a
tourist spectacle in its own right. The Paris Passages, Berlin’s
Potsdamer Platz and Dublin’s Temple Bar now trade in signs of the
renaissance of modernity. In the postmodern, nostalgic imaginary
they become vistas and passageways not to the hellish underworld
of dead and decaying modernity, but to classical modernity as a
wholesome past, or more precisely, to simulacra of classical modern
urbanism as a form of life in such a past.
The Puces de St Ouen, the Paris Flea Market, used to sell off the
detritus of the nobility to the peasantry at the edge of the city. Now
a new passage, resembling Benjamin’s Passages downtown, has been
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cut through the flea market, and accommodates a different class of
customer:
In the heart of St Ouen Flea Market, the Marché Dauphine: Come
and discover 150 antique shops on two floors in the Marché
Dauphine. You will find paintings, furniture, ornaments and
curiosities of all periods. The Marché Dauphine offers a unique
service: issuing certificates of authenticity to buyers established by
independent experts ... (Marché Dauphine publicity leaflet, 1999)
The Marché Dauphine sells the detritus of the modern bourgeoisie
to their inheritors, postmodern homemakers in search of the
authentic. As well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century furniture,
paintings and ornaments, and new-wave primitivism and orientalism (shops are dedicated to Africa, Indian exotic artefacts, Judaica,
Moroccan tribal rugs, etc.), Marché Dauphine has boutiques that
specialise in ‘vintage’ advertising posters and ‘classic’ publicity
objects from theatre and cinema, ‘antique’ cameras, toys, household
appliances, comics, records, luggage, clothes and costumes. In the
Marché Dauphine a schoolroom map of the Empire circa 1910, with
the caption ‘les Francais: C’est ici, votre Empire’ costs 2,000 Fr. Tintin
en Congo, a comic book from the 1940s, recently sold for 100,000 Fr
at a Paris auction (‘Six Minutes News Bulletin’, Paris TV Channel 6,
28 November 1998). As Benjamin says, on the totemic tree of objects
within the primal thicket, the very last face on the totem is that of
kitsch.
But Benjamin didn’t fully anticipate the speed at which ‘antique’
can constitute a second life of the mass-market commodity, after it
has been shorn of its value. And in the accelerated culture of late
modernity and the exhaustion of cultural innovation of postmodernity, the time/space between the devalued category of ‘refuse’,
on the one hand, and the revalued categories of ‘old-fashioned’,
‘retro’, ‘classic’, ‘vintage’ and ‘antique’ on the other, become
windows of opportunity where outmoded commodities can be represented with new representational values. The subversive potential
of the outmoded commodity as dialectical image is erased when the
outmoded commodity is resurrected from the dead and re-presented
for consumption as ‘vintage’ or ‘antique’, revivified and reinvigorated with renewed fetish qualities. Perhaps even more than
previously, for in its new life as an antique its representational value
is history, time. It is placed outside/above the risk of temporal flux,
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it transcends the diachronic forces that give fashion its anxiety;
antique is a quality that never goes out of style. By its miraculous
survival from the flux of history it serves as a quilting point that
reassures and reconfirms the value of the commodity. In becoming
antique the outmoded commodity partakes of a cunning of logic by
which the destructive forces of Time in fact are not destructive to
the Utopian, dreamy investment in futurity, but actually have
redemptive power.
In the time-frame of Joyce’s Ulysses, Dublin city centre, around
Temple Bar, was alive with social antagonism, arising from all classes
and manner of people living cheek by jowl and on top of one
another. Tenements and town houses stood back to back and facing
onto one another. Trinity College’s young gentlemen, Guinness’
brewery working men, squaddies from the garrison and shopkeepers,
all rubbing shoulders and fighting for elbow room along the less
than a mile of city streets between Trinity College and Guinness’
brewery, Dublin Castle and the street markets. By the late nineteenth
century Dublin was widely acknowledged to be the most overcrowded city and to have the worst slums in Europe. This teeming
cauldron was dangerously charged with crime and sedition, and as
the garrison expanded so the brothels and prostitutes did a roaring
trade. Dublin’s ‘Monto’ (Nighttown in Joyce’s Ulysses) had more
prostitutes per head than any other European city, and Dublin was
to the British army in the 1890s what Saigon was to American troops
in the 1960s. This was the context of friction, of random encounter,
of vibrant social antagonism, on the streets, in the markets, in the
brothels and especially in the pubs, in which the sensibility and the
idiom of the modern Irish urban character was forged, and it is the
forging of this character that Joyce reveals for us in the young
Stephen and the mature Bloom (both aspects of himself and
Everyman) in the epic of the modern Ulysses.
And this immediate juxtapositioning of social difference is still
evident in the present, reconstructed simulacrum of Temple Bar –
though it is in imminent danger of erasure. The Dublin
Workingman’s Club adjoins the £1,000 a-night Clarence Hotel,
restored to its art deco glory by owners U2 (the club has recently
been bought, and closed for redevelopment) and the James
Connolly bookstore, named after labour leader and founder of the
Citizens’ Army as the vanguard of the working class, nestles amongst
the cappuccino bars, terraces, and ‘art spaces’. The ‘re-enchantment
of Temple Bar’ (Corcoran, 1998) has been good for business at James
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Connolly’s: tourists and Dubliners snaffle up Heaney and Joyce,
histories of the Famine and 1798, while Marx has been shifted to
the back of the store, and lapel pins of Lenin sell as novelty items
at the cash desk. Consumers want interpretations of history – with
the representational value of authenticity: ‘I got it in Dublin
actually, in Connolly’s.’ ‘Really! Looks interesting. Must read it
sometime’ – but they have little interest in changing it! What still
makes Temple Bar an interesting and vestigially modern city space
is that the visitor might enjoy a latte while reading the New York
Times or La Monde, and immediately outside the door have to give
a junkie a wide berth – Dublin’s heroin addicts have found easy
pickings amongst the yuppies and tourists, particularly young
people on English language and literary summer schools. In the
middle of Temple Bar’s £250k apartment zone is Focuspoint drop-in
centre for the homeless, where a coffee is one-tenth what it costs
next door, and where Dublin’s destitute and Romanian Gypsy
refugee claimants come to hang out. And at night, neo-urbanites
who have bought a pad in Temple Bar on the promise/expectation
of a ‘sophisticated downtown lifestyle’ have to pick their way
through ‘stag-ers’ and ‘hen-ers’ on weekend package pub crawls from
Liverpool and London, throwing up and falling down outside the
‘olde’ (or rather, ‘auld’) and ‘unique’ pubs and clubs. But even this
form of life, which offered at least some possibilities for encounters
with alterity, has recently been expunged from the urban scene, as
the development corporation, Temple Bar Properties Ltd, has
required that publicans no longer cater for such parties.
What once made the Paris Passages, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and
Dublin’s Temple Bar modern urban spaces was the opportunity they
provided for dialectical encounters between subjective and objective
culture, between the citizen and the prevailing ideological powers:
the magnificence of Empire, the heroic solidarity of Nation, the holy
faith of our fathers, the truth of science, the phantasmagoria of
progress; and simultaneously for encounters that provided opportunities for alternative perspectives: for Simmel, immersion in the
multitude and the abstraction of money enabled detachment and
intellectualism; for Benjamin, encounters with dialectical images –
fragments, ruins, the ideological detritus of former hegemonies –
that as profane (ridiculous) objects of ideology give the lie to the
present regime’s claim to permanence. Along the boulevards of Paris
and Berlin, and in the passages and shops particularly, the flâneur
and the blasé cosmopolitan were formed by reflexive encounters
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with power and ideology: the infinity of the Empire’s magnificence,
the enormity of the monuments like the Arc de Triomphe, the grands
places and the impressive aspect of the public architecture, deliberately intended to dwarf and disempower the subject. By the
mid-nineteenth century this was already an archaic and vestigial
form of power. The emergent form assailed the modern subject in
the Passages, in the Galeries Lafayette, and in the Opera, and it took
the form of a relentless interpellation to consume. More particularly
the growth of objective culture, the desiring machines of the
emerging consumer society, confronted and exposed the flâneur to
the infinity of his own desire: aggressively and systematically
assailed by the new machines of advertising, marketing and
publicity, he was interpellated that his every desire be met: all
fantasies, whims, curiosities, needs and wants – real, imagined, and
not yet even dreamt of – ‘... gastronomical perfections, intoxicating
drinks, wealth without labour at the roulette wheel, gaiety in the
vaudeville theatres, and in the first floor galleries, transports of
sexual pleasure sold by a heavenly host of fashionably dressed ladies
of the night’ (Buck-Morrs, 1995, p. 83).
It is in this context wherein the individual subject becomes the
focus of systematic and relentless interpellation that the question of
the care of the self assumes its contemporary relevance and urgency.
Foucault shows that for the Greeks ‘not to be a slave (of another city,
of those who surround you, of those who govern you, of one’s own
passions)’ was vitally important (Foucault, 1990). Not to become a
slave required a ‘care of the self’, that is, ‘the deliberate practice of
liberty’. Care of the self entails sustained self-reflection, a systematic
effort ‘to know oneself, and to improve oneself, to master the
appetites that risk engulfing you’. The importance of the practice of
the care of the self for the Greeks, and more importantly for the
modern city dweller is that
the one who cared for himself correctly found himself, by that
very fact, in a measure to behave correctly in relationship to others
and for others. A city in which everyone would be correctly
concerned for self would be a city that would be doing well, and
it would find therein the ethical principle of its stability. (Foucault,
1998, pp. 4–7)
It is their identification of conditions of possibility of such a practice
of the care of the self, and their illumination of the forms of life, that
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exemplify the practice in the modern metropolis that collects the
work of Simmel, Benjamin and Joyce.
To survive in the modern city the subject had to learn to resist, to
detach himself, to defer and to select gratifications, to respond, as
Simmel argues, intellectually rather than emotionally. ‘Curiosities
aroused, fantasies indulged’ promises an old sign still hanging in the
Passage des Panoramas. And in addition to this aggressive, systematic
deployment of power in the Passages, and on Haussmann’s new
streets, hacked through old, poorer quarters, the flâneur ran into,
brushed past, skirted around and was confronted and harangued by
hucksters, dealers, destitutes, salesmen, muggers, shoppers, pimps,
prostitutes, policemen; his betters and his inferiors, strangers all. This
is the texture of modern urban life in Simmel’s Berlin, Benjamin’s
Paris and Joyce’s Dublin. The blasé cosmopolitan, the flâneur, made
his life amongst these strangers, made an art of reading and interpreting them, found his jouissance in the social antagonism, the
frisson of being with them, and made an emancipatory ethical
principle of his being exemplary to them as a form of life practising
a care of the self; offering heroic resistance to interpellation by the
prevailing ideologies to which they, and he too, were interminably
subject.
Joyce set out ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race’ (Joyce, 1987), a model, prototype modern
subject with the highly tuned intellect and blasé cosmopolitan
outlook and the involved detachment of the flâneur. These are
qualities that would enable him to defend himself against the
onslaught of ideological interpellation – imperial propaganda, reactionary chauvinistic nationalism, smothering religious dogmatism,
pervasive commercialism, and the relentless interpellation to
consume by the advertising and publicity industry. Baudelaire had
begun to formulate this hero in Paris 25 years before Joyce.
Haussmann’s new boulevards were hacked and rammed through old
city neighbourhoods, the city was drawn and quartered, and in the
torturous process the rising bourgeoisie and the immiserated proletariat came face to face with one another. Plate glass windows were
all that separated the starving poor from the bright goods and fine
dining.6 In Baudelaire’s time, Paris streets and passages were vibrant
and alive with possibility and danger. To negotiate one’s way
through the chaos of modern life called for the emergence of the
flâneur: a man of the crowd, but who had cultivated qualities of
detachment and discernment, immersed in the currents of modern
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life, swept along despite his swimming against the tide, the object of
prevailing powers and ideologies even though aware and conscious
of those powers. The flâneur has an ambivalent and ironic sensibility; attuned to, and able to negotiate, ambiguity and paradox. The
flâneur can read and understand the city. He has become a highly
skilled hunter for meaning in the forest of signs – skills forged by
sustained self-reflection from encounters with difference.
Similarly, Joyce’s Bloom is formed by his heroic resistance to being
levelled and swallowed by the huge impersonal forces of modern
history. In Ulysses the objective culture against which Bloom is
reflexively formed consists of the infinite might of the British
Empire, as in Paris represented in Dublin by the Castle, the
occupying garrison, and spectacular monuments of power like the
statue of Nelson towering over the main thoroughfare. A walk across
the city, which Stephen and Bloom do in Ulysses, involves a
sustained encounter with objective culture and ideological interpellation. The British Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, the law,
science, the mass media, the subaltern but mighty weight and moral
authority of Irish Republicanism, the sentimental popular music and
pulp fiction of the day that are woven seamlessly into the tapestry
of commerce and consumption, comprising the ambience and the
substance of a day’s shopping, eating, and drinking in the city; these
are the powers with which Joyce’s Bloom must come to terms. In
addition, Joyce’s ideal type is self-reflexively formed by the
encounter with the infinity of his own desires and anxieties; his own
carnal appetites and erotic predilections welling up into his consciousness, his renegotiation of his intimate relations in the context
of his wife’s affair; and by the external power of the contingency of
the social; people whom he runs into, some of whom he owes
obligation to, some who are friends, some acquaintances, some
strangers, some enemies. Bloom has to take care of himself, to
maintain his integrity while negotiating his way through city life,
and it is in this way that he is the heroic modern Ulysses: he
navigates through the city even as he is menaced by its giants and
seduced by its Sirens’ songs.7
The risky, character-building dialectical encounter with the
prevailing ideological powers is exemplified in Cyclops (Joyce, 1990,
pp. 279–330), where Bloom comes face to face with nationalism and
anti-Semitism directly and tangibly in an argument in a pub with
the Citizen. The Citizen is a bar-stool patriot who spouts antiimperialist revolutionary rhetoric, but whose nationalism is
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chauvinistic and xenophobic. The Citizen makes thinly veiled
threats to Bloom, and when Bloom trumps his anti-Semitism by
pointing out that Christ was a Jew, the incensed Citizen becomes
violent. But Joyce’s relationship to the ideology of militant Irish
Republicanism is not as straightforward as it seems: Joyce has a
deeply ambivalent and ambiguous relation to Irish nationalism.
Parnell, the champion of Home Rule for Ireland by parliamentary
means, was one of Joyce’s heroes; many of his friends and associates
were activists, amongst whom was Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn
Fein, to whom Bloom is represented as being a friend and adviser.
Joyce was a supporter of the Sinn Fein movement and an admirer of
Fenianism, but he saw Ireland ruled by Rome at least as much as by
London, and he saw nationalism as a subaltern and neo-colonial
reaction to power, and thus as a deformed extension of imperialism
as much as a release from it (Deane, 1990, p. 44).
The Citizen is a critical portrayal of the one-eyed view of the world
proffered by nationalism, but Joyce’s critique is by no means specific
to the peculiarities of nationalism: it extends to a wide range of other
ideologies. Joyce’s method for dealing with the hegemonic discourses
of objective culture is comedic. While criticism is content merely to
refute ideology, comedy has a more noble goal. Comedy seeks not
only to challenge power but to reconcile it with its subjects, to cancel
the opposition between them and collect the parties in a better
humour. Joyce’s comedy is that he identifies the lack underpinning
all discourse, so that what had seemed to be sublimely powerful is
shown to occupy the same profane world as everyone else. Power is
revealed to be subject to discourse, and it becomes possible to
negotiate and come to new terms with it rather than be simply
subject to it. Joyce’s method is that he identifies the characteristic
ideological idiom of a wide variety of powers and accentuates them,
showing each ideology to be in its own way formulaic, and thus to
be an effect (and affect) of artifice and convention – an historically
contingent discursive formation of articulated elements masquerading as a regime of truth, rather than the Truth itself.
In his caricature Joyce gives free rein to the Citizen’s loquatiousness, so that he reveals himself eventually to be a bag of wind, much
less threatening than he initially appears, and along the way, far
from refuting the charges against the Empire made by the Citizen
and his cronies, Joyce has Bloom endorse them. Joyce exposes the
lack in the ideology of imperialism by playing up the pomposity of
Empire, and then deflating it by profaning the sublime body of
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Queen Victoria and other imperial heroes (she is depicted drunkenly
pulling her gamekeeper into bed). Using a black parody of the Credo
as a prayer to the barbarism of the Royal Navy, he alloys sedition
with blasphemy, showing a profane equivalence between the sacred
traditions of British militarism and Irish Catholicism.8 He exposes
the empty formalism of bourgeois parliamentary democracy by
parodying verbose, rule-bound debate in the House of Commons,
and by so doing he simultaneously reveals the lack in his own hero,
Parnell, who was an acknowledged master of Parliamentary protocol,
rhetoric and sophistry. He undermines the authority of Enlightenment rational discourse of science and law and their spurious claims
to neutrality and objectivity by mimicking their ponderous jargons
and putting their weighty pronouncements and judgements into the
mouths of barflies. By having pub talk sound as authoritative as the
voice of Science, Joyce shows, as Wittgenstein would hold, that
science and law, like pub talk, are language games. They do not stand
apart form the world, their truth claims are value-laden and
contingent. By exaggerating to epic absurdity the pomp and circumstance and the theatricals of public culture – parades, theatre
openings, a public execution, sporting events – Joyce ironises the
sanctimonious, solemn rituals of church and state, the bombast and
hyperbole of sports and popular journalism, the authoritative voice
of the news, the vapidities and pretensions of the chattering classes
in the society columns, and the self-aggrandising, conceited conventionalism of the cultural writers of the time. In this comedic
context the Citizen’s bigoted nationalism is pathetic and impotent
– he ‘waddle[s] to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy’
(Joyce, 1990, p. 326) and throws an empty biscuit tin after Bloom.
The Citizen is a pale shade of the gigantic Cyclopean powers
looming in the background: militarism, imperialism, one-eyed
Nelson towering over the subaltern colonised city; the sharp, but
narrow, relentless and inhuman gaze of science; the judgmental
eagle eye of the law, the normalising panoptic gazes of Roman
Catholicism and polite bourgeois society; and the vacuous, noisy,
relentless culture industry. In Simmel’s terms they constitute the
burgeoning weight of objective culture, the hegemonic ideological
discourses that crush Bloom’s subjectivity. The Citizen is a representative of only one, albeit a significant aspect, of the problematic.
If the Citizen ruled the city, Bloom would be killed. That is to say, if
the city were ruled by any one of these powers – for they are each
shown, one after the other in Joyce’s comedic exposé, to be
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grotesque and totalitarian – then it would be impossible for any kind
of freedom to exist in the city. But the Citizen doesn’t rule. There are
several competing powers, to which the Citizen and Bloom are
equally subject,9 and each of these powers is inherently flawed; they
share a constitutive lack. The gaps and slippages between these
competing powers, the shifting tectonic plates between empire and
nation, science and religion, and the multiple overlapping webs of
meaning and interrelations within which the encounter between
Bloom and the Citizen are enmeshed – commerce and camaraderie,
friendship and passing acquaintance, business and leisure, drunkenness and sobriety – form what Geertz calls ‘piled-up structures of
inference and implication’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 7), the mise en scène, the
webs of signification in which both Bloom and the Citizen are
suspended: together, these constitute an unfathomable multiplicity
of the sources of social action, and are the conditions of possibility
of a practice of individual freedom and care of the self in modern
Dublin, as they are also in Paris and Berlin.
In Bloom’s encounter with the Citizen, Joyce shows us what is
involved in the self-reflexive formation of principled relations to
power. Joyce doesn’t seek to ‘refute’ ideology by opposing it to
science, nor does he seek to ‘unmask’ the truth that it occludes by
criticism. Following Hegel, Joyce shows how self-consciousness is the
‘return from otherness’: the development of conscience – the
integrity of identity in the face of the multiplicity of the social and
its sovereign powers – grows from subjecting oneself ‘to the infinity
of the difference’ (Hegel, 1977, pp. 107–108). Joyce doesn’t ignore
the Citizen, he has Bloom engage him in conversation. Contrary to
revisionists who would erase the Citizen, by having Bloom engage
with him – subject himself to the difference that he represents –
Joyce collaborates with him, he lets him speak. The Citizen’s opinion
– and the kernel of truth in his opinion and in every doxa, every
opinion, every discursive and ideological position – is given room
in the conversation with Bloom. Thus Joyce preserves the otherness
of the Other, providing Bloom and we readers with the opportunity
of coming to terms with the Citizen and the ideological position he
represents; we must listen to what he has to say, and in so doing we
have the opportunity of self-reflexively coming to terms with the
limits of our own subject positions.
Furthermore, in the encounter with Cyclops Joyce explores the
flaws and the limits of his own modern hero, the uncreated consciousness that he is forging. Bloom appears in his exchange with the
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Citizen as problematically equivocal. His reflexivity, his hermeneutic sensibility, leave him open to the charges of the nameless narrator
(who is modelled on another of Joyce’s heroes, his father)10 that in
wanting to cover all positions – Bloom interjects into his conversation with the Citizen the points of view of pacifism, humanism,
Marxism, and feminism – he is left wanting a position for himself,
that he has no position, that he is a half-and-half, and a good-fornothing. Here Joyce is showing that there is no non-ideological
position, no position outside of ideology, and to speak as though
there were is to delude oneself and also to risk being groundless and
antisocial. Bloom shares the same problem as Socrates: the city may
decide that it has no use for the man who is sceptical of all prevailing
ideologies, who prioritises thought over action and doubt over
certainty, who wants to work out truth – that is, to reveal the lack
underpinning all truth claims – through discussing all points of view.
The aporia that this questioning and seeking understanding produces
interferes with action and practical life. And later in Ulysses, in a hallucinogenic sequence in Circe, Bloom imagines himself sharing
Socrates’ fate (Joyce, 1990, pp. 449–451).
This condition of coexistence with multiple Others, of mutually
and self-reflexively negotiating the manifold encounters with
alterity, forms the collective and individual existential conditions of
the modern city. Joyce’s Bloom is the ideal type (and, Joyce intends,
the prototype) of a subject who occupies the paradoxical modern
subject position of permanent liminality (Szakolczai, 1999), of
existing in a condition of perpetual transition, always travelling, but
never arriving. In Bloom, Joyce makes a value and a principle of
being the place-holder of the condition of permanent liminality, and
thus transforms the terrible fate of modern subjectivity into its most
beautiful and enduring form. This is the ontological and ethical significance of Joyce’s flâneur: Bloom’s jouissance is to endure the
existential condition of permanent liminality: he makes himself at
home with the condition of transcendental homelessness. Bloom is
the subjective correspondent of what Lefort identifies as the radical
symbolic mutation of power instituted by the democratic revolution,
where power becomes an empty place (Lefort, 1988). As the indeterminate, the wanderer, the Jew, the protean stranger, Bloom is the
decentred subject who corresponds with the decentring of power;
he is place-holder of the constitutive antagonism of the social,11 the
persistence of the Real that assures the radical unfixity and indeterminacy of social relations, and thus the Utopian moment of
City Life
81
openness and the promise of futurity in the uncontrollable
adventure of democratic life.12
By systematically placing himself in the position of permanent
liminality Bloom’s practice of care of the self represents a spirited
way of being in the city, as Hegel understands a spirited form of life:
... the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it
and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the
magical power that converts it into being. (Hegel, 1977, quoted
in Zizek, 1993)
Bloom is an advertising canvasser, and as such he is acutely aware
and tuned in to his interpellation in the commercial life of the city.
Because it is his livelihood, he is thoroughly familiar with the idiom
and the imaginative structure of commercial interpellation, and –
because he depends on it to make his living – it is simultaneously a
source of security and insecurity to him. So much does he
understand the world of advertising that he interprets and critiques
it, and can enjoy it and evade it, all the time with a sharp eye for his
own professional opportunity. Like Ulysses, a musician himself, he
wants to listen to the Sirens’ songs, so in spite of the dangers that
he is fully aware of, far from avoiding the Sirens he ties himself to the
mast, and sails through them with ears wide open. It is Bloom’s
sustained tarrying with the negative that forms him as exemplary
subject. Lacan calls Joyce ‘le sinthome Joyce’: ‘St Thom.’ (St Thomas
Aquinas), from whom Joyce borrows the formula of the epiphany –
that the truth that gives unity to the world flares out in the mundane
(and for Lacan that the truth of the subject – the lack, the subject’s
decentredness – is written in the symptom, for those who have eyes
to see), and ‘saint homme’, the saintly man who, though existentially
vulnerable, heroically commits himself to tarrying with the negative,
and risks spiritual devastation and dismemberment to come close
enough to bear witness to the Real: for it is also the task of the saint
faithfully to record the epiphanies and thereby to reveal the (real)
truth of the world: that is the lack, the constitutive antagonism of
the social, and the radical contingency of prevailing ideologies,
discourses, regimes of truth, that makes power always subject to
discourse. And while this is an onerous responsibility, a spirited
relation to the city is joyous and playful, for Joyce is also jouis, play,
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joy, and the good form Joyce shows us in his phenomenology of the
metropolis is by his playful attuning to its jouissance.
The Utopian ideal represented by Bloom as prototypical new man
that contemporary people might try to live up to is the ideal of
understanding. And in this, Joyce agrees with Simmel, when he says
that the forms and contents of life in the metropolis are such that ‘a
judge-like attitude on our part is inappropriate ... it is our task neither
to complain nor to condone, but only to understand’ (Simmel, 1971,
p. 339). Bloom represents a further refinement to the care of the self
of the blasé cosmopolitan and the flâneur, a capacity for verstehen
(Weber, 1968), understanding. Bloom exemplifies a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness, a cultivated capacity, and a commitment to
see the world from other people’s point(s) of view. Like Socrates, on
whom he is to a great extent modelled, Joyce’s Bloom knows that
the world opens itself up differently to everyone according to their
position in it; and that the ‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness
... or ‘objectivity’ (as we would say from the subjective viewpoint of
modern philosophy) resides in the fact that the same world opens up
to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their
positions in the world – and consequently their doxai (opinions) –
‘both you and I are human’ (Arendt, 1990, pp. 80, 73–103). Like
Socrates, Joyce’s Bloom represents the good of trying to understand
the diverse ways in which the same reality appears to different
people, and trying to reconcile opposing views and diverse realities
with one another. He systematically and deliberately tries to
understand others, that is to put himself in their shoes, to see the
world from their point of view. This is what makes Bloom’s flâneur
an heroic Übermensch, a better human being. Bloom tries to combine
many lives of others in his own, but at the same time he does not
lose himself in their otherness, and neither does he claim to fully
understand and represent the others’ views; he allows others their
otherness. Bloom is the subjective embodiment of the Greek
principle of phronesis (political insight). Bloom is the phronomous,
the understanding man whose insight into the world of human
affairs qualifies him for leadership in the city, though not of course
to rule it (Arendt, 1990, pp. 75–76). The problem that Bloom faces,
that of negotiating a principled path through the various ideological
powers that beset us in modern life, is everyone’s problem. Hence
H.C.E. (here comes everybody) of Finnegans Wake; and the perennial
and intractable nature of the problem of dealing with ideology is
what gives Ulysses its universal import. Bloom is an ideal-type
City Life
83
hermeneutic actor, who tries to see the world from many, changing
points of view. He is divided and Protean himself: a stranger, a
flâneur, an insider and an outsider to discourses of empire, nation,
church and commerce; an ad-man, a civic-minded private man, a
womanly man, a man who even tries to see things from a blind
man’s point of view. The multitudes of views represented in Ulysses
are always partial and imperfect. Joyce himself is partially sighted.
Aren’t we all similarly handicapped? Such are the limits that the
human condition places on knowledge/power, tempering it towards
irony and wisdom.
NOTES
1. The flâneur appears throughout Benjamin’s writings, in the Passagenwerk,
on Baudelaire, and is a simulacrum of Benjamin himself in works like
One Way Street (1979), Moscow Dairies (1986), and Berlin Chronicle (1970).
For a succinct formulation see Benjamin (1995).
2. For a fuller exposition of the themes of this essay see Simmel (1990).
3. On a related theme see Zizek’s discussion of the wreck of the Titanic, in
Zizek (1989).
4. For an introductory history of Temple Bar see Liddy (1992).
5. For a good account of urban renewal in Dublin and the revitalisation of
Temple Bar, see Corcoran (1998).
6. For an excellent discussion of this process in Baudelaire’s Paris, see
Berman (1998, pp. 131–171).
7. I owe this insight to Professor Arpad Szakolczai, National University of
Ireland, Cork.
8.
They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was
scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he
arose again from the bed, steered into haven and sittethed on his beam
end til further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and
be paid (Joyce, 1990, p. 314).
9. For this point, and for other insights on this paper, I am indebted to
Professor Kieran Bonner, University of Waterloo, Canada.
10. On this, see Richard Ellmann’s definitive biography of Joyce (Ellmann,
1982, p. 22).
11. The phrase ‘constitutive antagonism of the social’ is coined by Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985).
12. For an elaboration and exposition of this theme, see Mouffe (1989).
REFERENCES
Arendt, H. (1990) ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research, vol. 57, no. 1,
pp. 73–103.
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Benjamin, W. (1995) ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ in Kasanitz,
P. (ed.) Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of our Time (New York: Macmillan).
Berman, M. (1998) All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin).
Buck-Morss, S. (1995) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Corcoran, M. (1998) ‘The Re-enchantment of Temple Bar’, in Peillon M. and
Slater, E. (eds) Encounters with Modern Ireland (Dublin: Institute of Public
Administration).
Deane, S. (1990) Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press).
Ellmann, R. (1982) James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. III, The Care of the Self (New
York: Vintage).
Foucault, M. (1998) ‘The Ethic of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’
in Bernauer J. and Rasmussen D. (eds) The Final Foucault (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press).
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books).
Hegel G.W.F. (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Joyce, J. (1987) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin).
Joyce, J. (1990) Ulysses (New York: Vintage).
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Social Strategy (London: Verso).
Lefort, C. (1988) Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity).
Liddy, P. (1992) Temple Bar Dublin: An Illustrated History (Dublin: Temple Bar
Properties Ltd).
Mouffe, C. (1989) ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’, in Ross, A.
(ed.) Universal Abandon? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Simmel, G. (1971) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Levine, D. (ed.) Georg
Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Simmel, G. (1990) The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge).
Szakolczai, A. (1999) Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge).
Weber, M. (1968) Economy and Society, I-II (New York: Bedminster Press).
Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso).
Zizek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of
Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press).
PART II
Ideology vs. Poststructuralism
5
Rehabilitating Ideology after
Poststructuralism
Sinisa Maleseviç
Until quite recently, the concept of ideology was considered to be
indispensable in the study of social and political life. Sociologists,
political scientists, social and political theorists, anthropologists,
social psychologists, as well as those researching cultural studies,
have extensively applied this concept in their work and the only
point of divergence and disagreement was, as always, different
conceptual understandings of what ideology is. For some, mostly
political scientists, ideologies were always discussed in the plural,
meaning different sets of ideas and principles about the possible or
desirable organisation of particular societies (as in liberalism, conservatism, socialism or environmentalism), while others, notably
sociologists, have tended to speak of ideology in the singular,
viewing it as a set of ideas or practices related to a specific structural
organisation of society (as in Marx’s ‘fetishism of commodities’,
Engels’s ‘false consciousness’ or Zizek’s ‘fantasy of enjoyment’).
Although significantly different, neither of these traditions and
approaches has questioned the relevance of the concept of ideology.
Poststructuralism was the first theoretical movement to reject the
entire notion of ideology, viewing it as totalistic, essentialist and
methodologically and theoretically obsolete. Poststructuralism has
been particularly critical of the way ideology was used in the writings
of its ancestors – that is, structuralists.
This chapter aims to critically review and analyse the way the
concept of ideology was and is used in structuralism and poststructuralism, as well as to defend and rehabilitate the concept of ideology
from poststructuralist attacks. It is argued that the theory and
concept of ideology can be rescued as a valuable research tool by
recognising and accommodating some of the pitfalls identified by
poststructuralist approaches without accepting the radical relativism
of some poststructuralist positions. The chapter is divided into three
sections. In the first section, structuralist approaches to ideology are
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briefly discussed and critically elaborated. In the second section,
various poststructuralist criticisms of ideology are presented and
criticised. The last section maps an outline for the new concept and
theory of ideology.
STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO IDEOLOGY
In order to deal properly with the poststructuralist approaches to
ideology it is necessary to examine their ancestors, that is the structuralist views on ideology. There are basically three different and
mutually opposing structuralist traditions – Marxist, functionalist
and anthropological structuralism.
Marxist structuralism is usually associated with the work of
Althusser, but different variants of Marxist structuralism are also
evident in the early works of Hirst (critical structuralism), Goldmann
(genetic structuralism) and Godelier (economic structuralism)
(Maleseviç, 2002). The common characteristic of Marxist structuralism is its emphasis on the state and economy. The state is seen as
the principal agent of action and the concept of ideology is
employed exclusively in reference to the state power. Structuralist
Marxists follow classical Marxism in their perception of the state as
an instrument of repression, but they differ from agency-centred
Marxism in downplaying the role of class struggle at the expense of
structural determinants (e.g. capitalism) which are found to be
central for the analysis of ideology.
For Althusser class hegemony is achieved not only through
Repressive State Apparatuses such as military, police, courts but
primarily through Ideological State Apparatuses – education system,
mass media, family or church. He argues that ‘no class can hold State
power over a long period of time without at the same time exercising
its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses’
(Althusser, 1994, p. 112).
Furthermore, ideology is built into the material apparatuses that
are determined by the relations of production – i.e. capitalist
economy. For structural Marxists ideology has a tangible, material
form which is not only completely independent of individual subjectivity but is also able to create and mould subjects. As Althusser
claims (1994, p. 125), ideology is ‘not the system of the real relations
which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary
relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live’.
For structuralist Marxists, human beings are constituted by ideology,
while ideology itself originates from the particular type of
Rehabilitation Ideology after Poststructuralism
89
production in society – capitalism. In other words, the capitalist state
hegemony is maintained through ideological state apparatuses,
which are themselves tied to the dominant modes of production in
a particular (capitalist) society. Structuralist Marxists also strongly
oppose ideology and science. For Althusser, for example, ideology is
abstract while science is concrete; ideology is historically contingent
while science is ahistoric; ideology is only raw material while science
is exact and accurate. Althusser sees his structuralist Marxism as a
form of science par excellence and claims that the role of science is to
creatively use and criticise the products of ideology.
Functionalist structuralism shares with its Marxist counterpart the
emphasis on the collective roots of ideology as well as the perception
of ideology as something that stands in opposition to science.
Malinowski, Shils, Parsons and Sartori all define ideology with
reference to dominant social institutions – the school, the family,
the state. They all also make a strong distinction between closed,
dogmatic and stable concepts associated with ideology, and open,
flexible and prone-to-change values seen as non-ideological.
However, unlike Marxism, structuralist functionalism ignores the
economy and materialist explanations of ideology. In this tradition
ideology is seen as a normative value system necessary for social
cohesion and the proper functioning of societies. For Malinowski
(1926), ideology/myth is a sacred tale that functions as a practical
justification of relationships and practices existing in the particular
society. For Shils (1968), ideologies are no more than normative
belief systems that are founded on ‘systematic intellectual constructs’
that demand total commitment of their followers. For Parsons (1991,
p. 39), ideology is ‘an evaluative, i.e. value-loaded existential
statement about the actual or prospective state of a given social
system or type or category of social system’. In Sartori’s theory (1969)
ideology is more precisely identified with the ‘political part of a belief
system’ and is tied to strong affects and closed cognitive structure.
Although functionalist structuralism relates ideology strongly to
society, looking at its collectivist origins, unlike Marxism it does not
perceive this relationship as being conflictual. Ideology is not viewed
as something being imposed upon human beings, but rather as a
functional necessity without which society cannot exist. Ideologies
do not shape, structure or interpellate and thus manipulate individuals as in Althusser, but are rather seen as ‘building blocks’ for the
integration of societies.
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Anthropological structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes shares
with Marxists and functionalists their understanding of ideology as
a macrostructural phenomenon. Just like Marxism, anthropological
structuralists aim at discovering ‘hidden’ structures behind more
manifest actions and similarly to functionalists their goal is to
demonstrate the necessity of ideology in every society. However,
unlike Marxists they are only sporadically (Barthes) or not at all
(Lévi-Strauss) interested in the modes of production and the role that
capitalism plays in the formation of ideologies, and unlike functionalists they are not concerned with the integrative role of
ideology in society. Their main aim is to apply the methods of linguistics (e.g. structural analysis) to social relations. For
anthropological structuralists, myths and ideologies are no more
than logical models that aim at overcoming a contradiction between
nature and culture and as such they function independently from
individual consciousness. In the words of Lévi-Strauss (1975, p. 12)
the aim of structural analysis is not ‘to show how men think in
myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without them being
aware of the fact’.
For Barthes (1972) and Lévi-Strauss there is no significant
difference between ideological/mythical contents and other
contents; they all operate in a similar way, have similar pattern
structure and apply identical logical principles. Anthropological
structuralists use structural analysis with the simple aim of identifying the elementary logical structure on which message, myth, ritual
or any other meaningful content is based. Lévi-Strauss aims to
discover the common structural forms and common logical patterns
behind arbitrary symbols and randomness that are present in myths
and ideologies. He looks for what he calls mythemes, that is the
elementary units of myth, with the aim of identifying the logical
order behind myth’s formal structure. Lévi-Strauss has little interest
in the actual contents of the particular myths and ideologies. What
is important to demonstrate and explain is the similarity between
the structure of different myths and ideologies.
Although different, these three structuralist approaches to
ideology share several important common features. All three assign
the overwhelming primacy to structure over agency in the explanation of ideology. All three perceive human will and individual
consciousness as largely irrelevant in the explanation of ideology.
All three argue for an ahistorical theory of ideology. All three share
the view that with the right methodology one can successfully and
Rehabilitation Ideology after Poststructuralism
91
precisely differentiate between ideological and non-ideological forms
of knowledge.
The classical criticisms of structuralism have successfully
challenged all of these claims. It has often been convincingly argued
that human beings are much more than just bearers of social roles
and that regardless of how powerful ideologies are there is always
room for autonomous individual action. As Pareto (1966) was
already aware, ideologies cannot run against already existing human
sentiments. To use his language, derivations can intensify residues
but they cannot manufacture them. The residues have to be there
in the first place in order to be instrumentalised. Ideologies cannot
work ex nihilo. In addition, as Gouldner (1970) and more recently
Giddens (1991) and Beck (1991) have convincingly argued, human
beings are also self-reflexive creatures. Very often, they are aware of
the entire process of ideological interpellation and are still taking
part in it, or are simply adjusting in accordance with their own
interests, values and emotions.
Critics have also pointed out that ideologies always originate
within a particular geographical and historical environment.
Although all communist states derived their official ideologies from
Lenin’s interpretations of Marx and Engels, each society had a
particular and unique brand of its own state-sponsored communist
ideology, which took into consideration particularities of the
national history, history of its own communist movement, differences in the economic, cultural and political development of the
particular society, and so on. It was also very often the case that these
differences (perceived by outsiders as insignificant) were central for
the legitimisation of the particular regime, as was the case with
Yugoslav self-management socialism, Polish nationalist communism
and Chinese Maoism. Structuralist preference of ‘synchronic’ over
‘diachronic’ analysis leaves these substantial and often crucial differences out of its explanation.
However, most criticism was placed against the structuralist claim
of having developed scientific, meaning non-ideological, tools for
the study of ideology. Although structuralism opposes the positivist
ambition to explain phenomena only in terms of immediately
observable entities, and abandons the search for the laws of causality,
it too is a victim of overoptimistic scientism. Its aim, to uncover the
latent structures of manifest phenomena with the help of structural
analysis, is even more arbitrary than the methods of positivist social
science. If one cannot rely on the strict procedures of laboratory
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
experimentation, sampling, surveying, factor or regression analysis,
why would one trust the extreme arbitrariness of the ‘synchronic
analysis’? In addition, as many critics have emphasised, the linguistic
methods are hardly applicable for the study of the complexity of
social life. As Giddens (1987, p. 200) rightly argues, ‘linguistics
cannot provide a model for analysing the nature of either agency or
social institutions, because it is in a basic sense only explicable
through an understanding of these’.
Other types of criticism, such as those coming from the Frankfurt
school sociologists, show that even when knowledge is completely
reduced to its technical forms, it is still far from being nonideological or value-free. As Marcuse (1971, p. 130) points out,
‘domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through
technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimisation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres
of culture’.
However, the most severe criticism of structuralist approaches to
ideology is to be found in the writings of poststructuralist authors,
some of whom grew up intellectually within the tradition of Marxist
or anthropological structuralism. Let us take a brief look at how poststructuralism views the concept of ideology.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND IDEOLOGY
Although leading poststructuralist approaches differ on many points
they agree on one thing – they all firmly reject the concept of
ideology. For Foucault (1980, p. 118) the concept of ideology cannot
have any analytical relevance because (a) it is based on true/false
criteria; (b) it overemphasises the role of conscious subjects; and (c)
it is viewed as secondary reality (superstructure) that is regularly
determined by the economic base. According to Foucault, knowledge
and power are deeply related, since the use of power always produces
new information and novel types of knowledge. He argues that since
‘no power can be exercised without extraction, appropriation, distribution or retention of knowledge’ therefore ‘power and knowledge
imply one another’ (Foucault 1977, p. 27). Because of this peculiar
power–knowledge relationship, ideology cannot be, as in the Marxist
tradition, opposed to science. Ideology and science cannot be
analysed and assessed in the light of a true/false criterion. As ‘truth’
in itself is situational and historically and geographically contingent
and at the same time always tied to power, there are no universally
accepted rationalist parameters to distinguish ‘truth’ from ‘nontruth’. These parameters lie at all times in the realm of a particular
Rehabilitation Ideology after Poststructuralism
93
concrete community. Instead of ideology Foucault operates with the
concept of discourse. In his view discourses are much less totalistic
and universalistic than the concept of ideology as used in structuralism. Discourses operate on a much lower level of generality and
are not evaluated using true/false dichotomy. Unlike ideology, this
concept is used in order to understand and explain how particular
ideas and practices relate to the context, which has ‘its own history
and conditions of existence’. What is crucial for Foucault is not
whether the ideas and practices expressed within a particular
normative discourse are provable, but rather how they operate in
relation to power.
Baudrillard (1988) and Lyotard (1984) follow similar lines of
thinking. They both oppose the analytical relevance of the concept
of ideology. For Baudrillard we live in a postmodern world of isolated
individual actions devolved of any intrinsic meaning, incoherent
and incomprehensible social events and fragmented and fractured
realities. This postmodern world does not depend on modes of
production, industrial growth and economics, but predominantly
on the production, use and exchange of images, signs, and information. However, these images, signs and information are not
produced, exchanged and consumed in the same way as material
goods once were, to secure a new and better reality. They are rather
seen by Baudrillard as simulations that have lost their original
meanings and now do not reveal anything beyond the ‘real’. In his
view there is no reality any more; everything has become an
extensive simulation. Instead of reality we live in hyperreality which
can easily be and is falsified by different and often opposing representations.
Just like Foucault, Baudrillard does not believe in the autonomy of
conscious subjects and prefers the idea of discourse over that of
ideology. However, discourses in Baudrillard have little analytical
strength; they are only empty images – simulacra. The problem of
ideology critique for Baudrillard is that its aim is always the same –
‘to restore the objective process’ – and he argues that ‘it is always a
false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological
discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of
truth – always good’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 182).
Lyotard also thinks that in the postmodern world there is no place
for individual subjects. Following Wittgenstein he views society as a
sequence of language games where one can see only dissolved social
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subjects. According to Lyotard, in the postmodern world there is no
place for the single universalist Enlightenment-generated concept of
Reason, but only for many different, mutually incommensurable
unprivileged reasons. He opposes any attempt towards totality and
ridicules universalist rationalist conceptions that promise comprehensive positive explanation and hence emancipation and salvation.
These theories and explanations which focus on and give privilege
to singular ‘essential’ identities such as nation, gender, race or class
are described as ‘totalitarian meta-narratives’ and are resolutely
rejected. Consequently, there is no place for ideology critique in his
position: all language games are equal and legitimate.
The post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) also shares many
similarities with Foucault’s, Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s criticisms of
ideology. Laclau and Mouffe also identify the concept of ideology
with its Marxist derivative and intend to show the weaknesses of this
position. They agree with poststructuralists that classical Marxist
analyses reduce plurality and difference by attributing a privileged
role to the proletariat and treat social identities as stable and fixed.
They argue that social identities are fundamentally relational and
situational. Like other post-essentialists, they believe that there are
no privileged historical subjects, whether these be classes, nations
or something else. Accordingly, no social relations between individuals or between groups are necessarily of a permanent, universal or
continuous nature. As a result, Laclau and Mouffe also opt for the
concept of discourse over that of ideology.
Nevertheless, their concept of discourse differs significantly from
those of Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard. They define discourse as
a ‘structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice’, where
an articulatory practice is ‘any practice establishing a relation among
elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 105). As is evident,
their understanding of discourse is much broader and more
totalising than in poststructuralism.
For Laclau and Mouffe all social actions are discursively constructed. Discourses just like identities are also relational. They argue
that individuals are dispersed by and within different discursive
formations. Since individual subjects change their social positions
and their relations to the discourse, formations are never eternally
fixed. For Laclau and Mouffe they are only ‘partial fixations’. In their
view ‘any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field
of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’
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(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 112). Furthermore, they argue that
owing to the fact that objects are always constituted as objects of –
and in – a particular discourse, one cannot distinguish between
discursive and non-discursive practices. Following Gramsci and
Foucault, they also ascribe to discourses a value of materiality. In
other words the practices of articulation have their material
dimension: institutions, organisations, ritualistic practices,
techniques, and so on. However, this materiality of discourses is not
in any significant way connected to the consciousness of the
subjects. Positions of the subjects are, rather, dispersed within a
discursive formation. In the eyes of Laclau and Mouffe, society, as a
stable articulated entity, does not exist. What one can observe are
only perpetual attempts of discursive articulation.
The common features of poststructuralist approaches can be
summarised in the following three points: (a) they all renounce the
entire concept of ideology and operate with alternative concepts
such as ‘discourses’, ‘simulacras’, ‘language games’ or ‘metanarratives’; (b) they all rebuff true/false or science/non-science
criteria in distinguishing between different social actions, viewing
all knowledge claims as discursive, relative, situational and therefore
equal; and (c) they all stand firmly against essentialism, positivism
and universalism.
However, although poststructuralism appears to be extremely
critical of the structuralist concepts of ideology, it is still unable to
overcome many of its shortcomings. Firstly, even though poststructuralism launches fierce criticism of the concept of ideology, as some
have already observed (e.g. Larrain, 1994, p. 292), it reintroduces this
concept through the back door, thus contradicting itself. As Larrain
(1994, p. 292) states ‘while they [poststructuralists] doubt the validity
of total discourses and of their ideological critique they must assume
the validity of their own critique of total discourses’. This criticism
is of course derived from the much wider problem that concerns
poststructuralist understanding of knowledge and truth. As
Habermas (1987, p. 247), Taylor (1984, pp. 175–177), Bevir (1999, p.
70) and others have pointed out, in rejecting the possibility of
individual freedom and reason, poststructuralists cut the ground
from under their own feet. In other words, the ethical criticisms of
meta-narratives, language games and discourses are undermined
when there is no epistemological or normative ‘axis’ to build upon.
This radical epistemological relativism is not only ethically problematic, because it does not (want to) differentiate between different
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types of power, thus (unintentionally) equating for example sexual
inequality and genocide, but more importantly for this study, it is
analytically insufficient. Its methodology applies no appropriate
criteria in distinguishing between different ‘regimes of truth’. How
can one distinguish between meta-narrative and non-metanarrative? In order to move from the metaphoric level of analysis
towards useful empirical analysis of the ‘regimes of truth’, one has
to offer better criteria on how one is to decide that particular
discourses are incommensurable. Poststructuralism does not offer us
an adequate conceptual apparatus that could be used in the
empirical research. As a result, most poststructuralist analyses remain
on the level of statement, metaphor or extensive description. The
main question here is certainly how to overcome the arbitrariness
of poststructuralist methodology.
This arbitrariness is perhaps most visible in the way concepts such
as ‘power’ are used in Foucault’s writings. The statement that power
is everywhere is analytically flawed. In social sciences when
attempting to explain a particular social phenomenon we introduce
concepts in order to organise our information in a meaningful way,
with an aim to differentiate those events and actions that we find
somehow more relevant, from the rest. When we say that power is
everywhere, we automatically say that power is nowhere. By relativising our concepts we are unable to provide explanations. One
can agree with Foucault that micro or local dimensions of power are
exceptionally important for understanding of social life, but this
should not prevent us from differentiating, studying or finding that
the macro state power can have wider and deeper impact on human
condition. Furthermore, as argued and documented by Fox (1998,
p. 424), while poststructuralism may be able to provide research tools
for the analysis of ‘relatively unresisting subjectivities’ (such as in
Foucault’s analysis of prisoners and patients in mental hospitals),
this approach lacks conceptual tools for analysis of ‘the conditions
under which resistance to power becomes possible, why some people
resist and others do not, and how resistance may be successful’.
There is another problem with the poststructuralist position that
has both ethical and analytical implications. By stating that every
society or group has its own regime of truth, we deny the possibility of individual choice within a group. The problem of cultural
relativism is its insensitivity towards particularities within the
particular. In other words, by assuming that a certain group of people
or society share the same ‘regime of truth’, one remains totalist on
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the level of the particular. Is a macro meta-narrative any less ‘totalitarian’ than a micro meta-narrative?
Secondly, the preference for the concepts of ‘discourse’, ‘language
games’, ‘simulacra’ or ‘meta-narratives’ over that of ideology does
not solve the problem that exists in structuralist writings. On the
one hand, it makes little difference whether we use concepts such as
‘ideology’, ‘myth’ or ‘discourses’ if our aims remains the same – to
show that somebody else’s views are less (or at least no more) true
than ours. Although poststructuralists distance themselves from such
an aim they too are engaged in the activity of delegitimising other
perspectives describing them as a ‘meta-narratives’ or ‘discourses’.
On the other hand, the concept of ‘discourse’ is very often used in
an extremely imprecise and vague sense, meaning everything and
nothing. For example, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) recognise that it is
impossible to make a distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices. Some writers use the concept of discourse only
to refer to a particular set of ideas, views or values (e.g. Baudrillard
and Lyotard) while others, such as the later Foucault, or Laclau and
Mouffe, include in it much more (such as practices and actions).
Hence, when the concept refers only to ideas, values and meanings,
we end up with a classical idealism that argues that human action is
governed and shaped primarily by discourses and only secondarily
by interests. When it include practices, actions, rituals, etc. (i.e. the
body instead of consciousness) we end up with a more materialist
theory of ‘discourses’ that in the long run does not differ much from
the Althusserian project. In other words, although poststructuralists
prefer discourse over ideology, when they are forced to specify the
meaning of the discourse in a concrete analysis, the concept of the
discourse differs little from that of ideology.
As in structuralism, we can read in Foucault, or Laclau and Mouffe,
that ‘discourses constitute the subject’, that ‘subjects are not the
producers of discourse but rather “positions” in discourse which can
be occupied by any individual’ (Foucault 1977, p. 115), and so on.
If we replace the word ‘discourse’ with ‘ideology’ or ‘myth’ these
sentences sound just as if they were taken from Althusser’s or LéviStrauss’s works.
To conclude, poststructuralist attempts to overcome the deficiencies of the structuralist concept of ideology are far from successful.
Even though postructuralism rightly challenges the totalist
ambitions, hard essentialism and scientism of structuralist
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approaches, it fails to provide a better theoretical and methodological apparatus for the study of ideology.
IDEOLOGY AFTER POSTSTRUCTURALISM
In an article published in 1987, Giddens launched a sharp criticism
of both structuralism and poststructuralism; the first line reads:
‘Structuralism, and post-structuralism also, are dead traditions of
thought’ (Giddens, 1987, p. 195). In the last two decades we have
witnessed largely the opposite – the late 1980s and 1990s as well as
the beginning of this century have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of books, studies and journal articles written from the
poststructuralist or postmodernist perspective. Even structuralism
had its significant revival. The end of the cold war and the total
collapse of the communist world further rejuvenated poststructuralist thought, demonstrating the death of another great
meta-narrative of the Enlightenment project – Marxism-Leninism.
If poststructuralism was a still largely marginal movement in the
early and mid-1980s, it has certainly become mainstream now.
Today no serious academic will so easily dismiss poststructuralist or
postmodernist ideas. In fact, even Giddens’s more recent work on
reflexive modernisation (1991, 1992) incorporates many poststructuralist ideas, perhaps without being aware of the fact.
Hence, poststructuralist criticisms of scientism, universalism and
hard essentialism, as developed in various ‘modernist’ approaches
(including their criticism of the concept of ideology), cannot be so
easily dismissed. Poststructuralism rightly challenges the totalising
ambitions of ideology critique. It is really as difficult in today’s world
to attribute a special and privileged role to one single social actor
(e.g. class, nation, gender, race or community) as it is to one metanarrative. For example, a Marxist concept of ideology, with its focus
on economy, capitalism and the modes of production can hardly
operate in societies where the economy does not exist as an independent realm, as is the case with communist and other centrally
planned regimes. Furthermore, by locating the origins of ideology
in the development of modes of production and class struggle only,
Marxist explanations ignore the evidence of historical and political
research that relates the birth of ideology to the emergence of
modernity and the development of modern bureaucratic nation
states. Similarly, the rigid opposition of science and ideology as
maintained in anthropological and functionalist structuralism
cannot stand the scrutiny of empirical research, and it looks obsolete
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in this day and age when the status of the natural sciences
themselves has become highly questionable. Poststructuralism is
very convincing indeed in demonstrating that the basis for having
narratives with privileged agents of social change is quite weak and
that reality in itself is both multiple and discursive.
However, recognising the notion that there are no universally
privileged social actors does not mean accepting the view that all
‘language games’ are equal and that social actions of all actors have
equivalent impact on social relations. On the contrary, by acknowledging the idea that there are no general and omnipresent social
actors one can better focus on particularly shaped asymmetrical
relations of power. One can now concentrate on the questions of
when, why and how interpretations and articulations of social reality
by these particularly privileged social agents become hegemonic,
shared or trusted by many. In other words, although ‘metanaratives’, ‘discourses’, ‘simulacras’ and ‘language games’ might be
epistemologically of equal worth, their structural position (i.e.
whether any particular discourse or meta-narrative is dominant and
institutionalised or not) makes them structurally and ontologically
very different and unequal.
Because of this structural inequality and the existing asymmetrical
relations of power in everyday life, one should not so easily reject
the concept of ideology in the social sciences. The concept of
ideology still has many advantages over the concepts of ‘discourse’
or ‘meta-narrative’. Nevertheless, in order to accommodate criticism
put forward by poststructuralists, it is important to specify what the
concept of ideology should stand for.
First of all, it is necessary to point out that poststructuralist
criticism operates with the concept of ideology inherited from the
Marxist structuralism. In the poststructuralist view, ideology, as
Barrett (1991) puts it, focuses on the ‘economics of un-truth’ whereas
‘discourse analysis’ deals with the ‘politics of truth’. Foucault (1980,
p. 118) and Baudrillard (1988, p. 182) have both explicitly stated
that they are against ‘ideological analysis’ because ‘it always stands
in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count
as truth’ or ‘it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth
beneath the simulacrum’. However by reducing the concept of
ideology to its Marxist variant, they have failed to account properly
for the contributions of other theoretical traditions.
The concept of ideology cannot be equated with its structuralist
and Marxist versions because there are many other traditions of
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inquiry that have developed the concept of ideology, such as the
psychoanalytic tradition (Freud’s ‘illusion’, ‘delusion’ and ‘justification’, Reich’s ‘political rationalisation of sadism’, Zizek’s ‘enjoyment
and lack’), the classical elite theory of Pareto (‘derivations’) and
Mosca (‘political formulae’), Sorel’s political myth, the cultural
approach of Geertz (‘ideology as a cultural system’) and Mannheim
(‘ideology and utopia’), the Weberianism of Boudon (‘rationality of
ideology’), Critical Theory (‘science and technology as ideology’) and
so on. Drawing on some of these approaches, particularly Weberianism and classical elite theory, one is able to develop a theory of
ideology that can incorporate positive features of poststructuralist
criticism such as rejection of the application of the crude true/false
and science/non-science dichotomies to the study of ideology, as
well as poststructuralist criticism of meta-narratives, without reinstating extreme relativism, analytical and intellectual paralysis
(Maleseviç, 2002).
The new theory of ideology should be capable of reconciling the
explanatory merits of ideology theories with the ideas and critique
of poststructuralism. However, this attempt raises a number of
problems, of which the most important is the question: is it possible
to renounce positivism, universalism and attempts to build a grand
metatheory and at the same time maintain an explanatorily oriented
concept of ideology?
This can be achieved only if the concept of ideology is reformulated and removed from its Marxist obsession with the ‘economics
of untruth’, its structuralist obsession with the latent and manifest
patterns, its poststructuralist radical relativism, obsessed with the
‘celebration of differences’, and the obsession of all three with the
structure and the macro level of analysis. In order to rehabilitate the
theory and concept of ideology one needs to do three things: (1) to
move the theory of ideology from structure-centred approaches
towards more agency-centred approaches; (2) to shift the emphasis
from the function to the form and content of ideology and in this
way to develop better research tools for the analysis of ideology; and
(3) to apply these research tools to the study of the different articulations of ideology, among which the most important is the
distinction between normative (official) and operative ideology (that
is, ideology as an institutionalised narrative).
As we can see, both structuralism and poststructuralism operate
with a similar concept of the social, giving an extremely strong, in
the case of structuralism even a deterministic tone, in favour of
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structure over agency. Individual consciousness, autonomous will
and an actor’s rationality are not just completely negated, they are
consciously expelled from the analysis. Structuralism and poststructuralism differ little in their rejection of the subject. Although this
strategy of removing the subject from the analysis can produce neat
and smooth historical and cultural essays, as in Baudrillard or
Foucault, the analyses that exclude the role of agency certainly
cannot properly explain the role ideologies play in social life. In their
rejection of the subject and of ideology, poststructuralists treat this
relationship as if it is circular and one-dimensional. The concept of
ideology is rejected because it is perceived as a consciously employed
device of manipulation of one class by another. On the other hand,
individual autonomy is rejected because it is perceived as being
completely historically determined and socially constructed. In other
words, if there are no individual free wills, there can be no ideology,
whereas if there is no ideology there can be no subject.
This line of thinking is problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly,
as structuralists, and especially Althusser, show, there is no necessary
relationship between the two; a theory of ideology is possible
without a subject. Secondly, and more importantly for us, the agency
and ideology can and do have many different forms of relationship.
Ideologies certainly can and do include a level of manipulation,
though this is not necessarily tied to class relations or to one social,
economic or political order, and they can include any form of group
membership (gender, nation, race, age, and so on) as well as being
oriented to society as a whole. In fact every modern society, consciously or not, manipulates its young members through the
education system, by forcing them to use textbooks with particular
nationalistic interpretations of history and the social sciences. As
Billig (1995) has nicely shown, ‘banal nationalism’ is a constant and
often unnoticeable feature of everyday life – in the newspapers we
read, in the television news we watch, through routine symbols and
habits of language such as saluting the flag, expressing national
pride, and so on.
Next, as we have learned from Weber (1968) individuals are
attracted to a particular set of ideas, values and practices in at least
four ways.1 Firstly, this could be achieved through the form of instrumental rationality, meaning that individuals can be motivated in
maximising their advantages that are in line with the teaching of
the particular ideology.2 The familiar and more extreme examples
include support for the ideology that promotes ethnic cleansing or
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genocide that will result in acquiring houses, banks, land and other
material goods from the expelled group, as was the case with the
ideology of Nazism and the attitude of ordinary Germans to Jews in
Nazi Germany (Goldhagen, 1996) or with the ideology of Serbian
ethno-nationalism and Serbian popular perceptions of the Bosnian
Muslims or Albanians in the recent wars on the territory of former
Yugoslavia (Maleseviç, 2002).
Secondly, individual actors as well as groups can act on the basis
of individual and group value-rationality, or what Boudon (1989)
calls axiological rationality, meaning that individuals hold up to
particular set of beliefs because they consider these values as
promoting certain symbolic benefits for them. In Weber’s words
(1968, p. 25) actors believe ‘in the value for its own sake of some
ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behaviour, independently of its prospects of success’. Hence, most citizens of the United
States will support the values of liberal democracy without having
broad knowledge, or even any knowledge at all, of the political
theory of liberalism, predominantly because they associate these
values with symbolic (and, of course, material) rewards generated
within the framework of the American nation state. Similarly,
Hezbollah suicide bombers and jihad warriors are motivated by the
same belief in symbolic reward – all sins forgiven and a secure place
in heaven.
Thirdly, ideologies can work through an emotional appeal where,
in contrast with the first two ways, there is no clearly defined ideal
of action. Individuals can act out of fear, hatred, love, the need for
security, serenity or any other affect. This type of social action is
more likely to take place in relatively short periods of time during
or immediately after some dramatic social change (such as revolutions, wars, break-up of the state structure, natural disasters, and so
on). Typical examples of this are the images associated with the close
family and kinship ties (‘our sons die for our motherland’, ‘our proletarian brothers’, ‘daughters of our nation’, and so on).
Finally, actors can also maintain the traditional course of action,
meaning that an individual will behave in accordance with habit
and custom. As Weber (1968), Elias (1983) and Billig (1995) have
convincingly argued, values, principles and ideas, that is ideologies,
are very often reproduced and maintained almost exclusively
through the habits of everyday life. By taking for granted symbols
and practices around us, we maintain and reproduce many
constructs of ideologies.
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The answer to the question, ‘why do individuals and groups
accept and follow certain ideologies?’ is not only to be found at the
top of the social pyramid in structural manipulation (such as the
‘fetishism of commodities’ or logical structural patterns) or agency
manipulation (the ruling class, the power-elite, the charismatic
leader) but also at the bottom of the pyramid. The particular
ideologies are well received by the majority of the population
because they are successful in presenting themselves as being able
to offer concrete material benefits, they appeal to particular interests
and affects, they provide symbolic rewards, or they are simply part
of traditional habitual action. The agency-centred theory of ideology
needs to analyse in particular this relationship between the reception
and receptors of ideology. The main questions here should be: what
do ideologies offer to individuals? Why and how can individuals be
motivated or persuaded to believe in particular ideologies? Why do
individuals subscribe to one and not to another ideology? When,
why and under which conditions is one articulation of an ideology
preferred over another? Why are some interpreters (‘articulators’)
more trusted than others?
It is important to emphasise here that this agency-centred theory
of ideology does not neglect the role institutions of the state (which
are often very important, if not crucial) play in the formation and
dissemination of ideology, but unlike structuralism and poststructuralism it does not give primacy to institutions and structure. The
institutions are no more than the means of and for individual and
group action.
The next element is the need to shift the emphasis from the
function to the form and content of ideology. As Lewins (1989,
p. 680) and others have recognised, most approaches to ideology are
focused on the functionality of ideology (examining what ideologies
do), while there are very few approaches that are focused on the
content of particular ideologies (examining what ideologies are, how
they are composed, what their dominant themes are, and so on).
Among the few theories that nominally concentrate on the content
of ideology such as those of Pareto (1966) or Geertz (1964), there is
very little serious analysis of ideology structure and content. Most
of these approaches remain rather at the level of description or
metaphor. In order to spot the similarities and differences between
ideologies it is necessary to move our attention to the form and
content of ideological narratives. The various action-oriented
systems of beliefs, ideas and practices would hence be analysed and
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categorised by breaking them down into their constitutive elements
in order to show similarities and differences between them. In this
way we can secure a relatively simple but effective mechanism for
the analysis of ideology. Thus, we need to identify and specify in
detail conceptual segments of ideology. As a starting point I
recommend seven such elements, analysis of which can help us to
distinguish between the different ways any particular ideology may
be structured. These include economy, politics, culture, the nation,
dominant actors, type of language used and the depiction of
principal counterideologies.3
First, ideology is related to the conceptual organisation of society.
Therefore, the analysis would concentrate on statements and
practices related to the four central categories that are vital for the
functioning of any society:
(a) economy (production, distribution, consumption and exchange
of goods and services);
(b) politics (political systems, dominant socio-political beliefs, power
distribution and party structure);
(c) culture (articulation and dissemination of culture products,
shared cultural values, stated directions of cultural policies and
popular perceptions of culture); and
(d) the nation (what and who counts as a nation, the intensity and
direction of nationalist feelings, the question of ethno-national
homogeneity and the relationship between the nation and the
state).
Second, every ideological narrative operates with a set of
individual and group actors. The narratives depend on formulating
and depicting the relationships between individuals and groups.
They also portray social actors in different lights, attributing them
different human or non-human characteristics. Hence, the analysis
would look at how these individual and group actors have been
described, what kinds of names, descriptions and images are
associated with them, and so on.
Third, the research would also concentrate on the detailed analysis
of the language used and other images present in the statements and
practices. One should be able to assess the emotional, rational and
other types of appeal in the particular ideological texts. This would
also include the analysis of particular symbols, metaphors, the
dynamics of their ambiguity and the intensity of their appeal.
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Fourth, one needs also to study the way counterideologies are
depicted and presented. This analysis would especially focus on the
categorisation and descriptions of various counterideologies, from
those that are perceived as directly threatening to those that are seen
as potentially ‘friendly’. One would in particular look here at the
delegitimising strategies and tactics used.
This research strategy can be applied to a number of ideological
texts regardless of their historical or geographical origins and
location. The aim of such an analysis would be to single out similarities and differences between different ideological narratives,
without treating any particular set of ideas and practices as being
intrinsically privileged and hence accepting the criticism put forward
by poststructuralists. In parallel with this activity, by identifying
common features of ideologies, one would be in a position to make
some theoretically interesting generalisations. In this way, if the
model employed gives sufficient interpretation for the phenomena
under study then it would achieve its main aim. It would provide
the interpretation for the case studies under question and at the
same time would demonstrate that the concept of ideology is still
theoretically and methodologically viable. It would give an interpretation of ideology structure for particular societies or groups and
would tell us at the same time something sociologically interesting
about the concept of ideology.
However, in order not to reduce ideologies to party politics, worldviews, discourses or language games that have equal structural or
ontological standings and thus lose the analytical strength of this
concept, it is also necessary to distinguish between the two levels at
which ideologies operate – that is normative (or official) and
operative levels.4
Normative ideology refers to what Seliger would call ‘fundamental principles which determine the final goals and the grand vistas
in which they will be realised’ (Seliger, 1976, p. 109). This form of
ideology contains all the central pillars of any particular value system
including views and ideas on the complete organisation and
structure of past, present and future for the particular society. It spells
out in a relatively clear and coherent way what relationships
between individuals and groups are taking place and what ought to
be, in order to change or preserve them. It gives a relatively
consistent set of moral prescriptions, often based on a particular set
of knowledge claims, and presents these prescriptions and claims as
if addressing the entire humankind. This form of ideology is to be
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encountered in the works of influential philosophers, mystics, social
scientists and prophets, in ‘holy books’ such as the Bible, Quran,
Talmud or Vedas, in the constitutions of various nation states, in
party programmes and manifestos, and so on.
Operative ideology is the form of ideology that one can encounter
by analysing the features and patterns of everyday life in any given
society. This type of ideology can consist of different conceptual
elements and principles, some of which can serve to justify actual
or potential social action. This is the form of ideology that penetrates
and fills social life through institutional and non-institutional
channels. It consists of commonly (but not universally) shared
patterns of belief among the particular group of people in any given
society. It is the way ideology functions and operates in the circumstances of daily routine. To identify and specify the form and content
of this ideology, one has to analyse in detail such sources as the mass
media, school textbooks, political rallies, political jokes, political and
commercial advertisements, various pamphlets and leaflets, as well
as political and commercial posters.
The relationship between the normative and the operative
ideologies tends to be fairly complex and very much a matter of
empirical evidence relating to individual case studies. The two can
be composed of the same elements but they can also integrate
entirely different ideas, values and practices. The cases of the Soviet
Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran provide very good examples.
As is evident from the analysis of their constitutions and numerous
party resolutions (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the
Islamic Republican Party) their normative ideologies were MarxismLeninism and Shia Islam respectively. However, by analysing the
patterns of their operative ideologies as they have been developed
and have operated in the ritual practices, educational system, mass
media and other social events and institutions, one could conclude
that their operative ideologies were rather different – that is nationalist in the case of Iran (Ram, 2000) and imperialist and traditionalist
(Lane, 1984) in the case of the Soviet Union.
In the study of dominant normative and operative ideologies of
post-Second World War Yugoslavia and post-Cold War Serbia and
Croatia I have tried to show how in each of the three cases normative
and operative ideologies, while significantly different in terms of
individual contents, were very similar, occasionally even identical,
when analysing their form. While on the normative level dominant
ideologies sharply differ, on the operative level they exhibit more
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107
similarities than differences. In all three cases it was differently articulated nationalism that was identified as a dominant operative
ideology: in the case of post-Second World War Yugoslavia the
normative ideology was self-management socialism, whereas the
dominant operative ideology was integral nationalist selfmanagement socialism; in the case of post-Cold War Serbia the
dominant normative ideology was reformed democratic socialism,
while the dominant operative ideology was ethno-nationalist
socialism; and in the case of post-Cold War Croatia the dominant
normative ideology was ethno-nationalist Christian democracy,
whereas the dominant operative ideology was Catholic ethnonationalism (Maleseviç, 2002). A similar strategy, albeit in a more
rudimentary form, was used also in comparing the central principles
of ideologies of globalism and nationalism (Maleseviç, 1999).
These studies also demonstrated that the central research tool in
the analysis of ideologies tends to be a comparative method, because
by using this technique one is able to produce more generalised
findings on the nature of ideology. The comparative analysis also
allows examination of differently articulated ideologies without the
need to make reference to the crude true–false criterion. The
emphasis here is not any more on whether particular ideas, beliefs,
values and practices are true or not, but rather on what they consist
of, what kind of feelings and emotions they provoke, what kind of
language they use, what they offer to their followers, what kind of
action they provoke, and how they operate on normative and
operative levels. In this way we will not focus rigidly and exclusively
on the modes of production, on logical patterning or on discursive
framing, as in structuralism and poststructuralism, in order to
demonstrate that somebody else’s views or actions are wrong and
manipulative, but will rather focus on the form and contents of differently structured and articulated ideologies, in order to pinpoint
their similarities and differences. The possible findings that this type
of research could yield, such as that despite their contrasting and
mutually exclusive normative ideologies Iran’s and the United States’
operative ideologies have much in common, would be at the same
time politically provocative, theoretically interesting and sociologically important.
By applying this analytic approach and comparative method we
are in a position to overcome both unreflective and ‘totalitarian’
hard essentialism as well as the radical relativism and nihilism of
poststructuralist critique. In other words, the theory and concept of
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
ideology can be preserved by accepting and integrating some of the
poststructuralist ideas, without the automatic incorporation of its
relativist epistemology and its feeble research strategy.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have critically reviewed and analysed the main
structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to the concept of
ideology. I have tried to show that despite some positive criticism of
poststructuralist approaches, such as their critique of the totalistic
ambitions and hard essentialist methodology of structuralism, their
complete rejection of the concept of the ideology is unfounded.
Concepts such as ‘discourse’, ‘language games’, ‘simulacras’ or ‘metanarratives’, recommended by poststructuralists in place of ideology,
have been criticised as adding very little to the structuralist notion
of ideology. It is thus argued that with the exception of clear and
radical anti-scientism, poststructuralist approaches differ little from
structuralism in their understanding of ideology. It is claimed that
the concept and theory of ideology can be rehabilitated by removing
it from its structuralist and Marxist emphasis on the truth, science
and macrostructure. Instead, a new, more agency- and contentoriented theory of ideology has been proposed.
NOTES
1. Boudon (1989) recommends one more type of social action – situated
rationality, which includes a different set of ‘good reasons’ that every
individual can have in pursuing certain behaviour. Typical forms of
situated rationality are rationality of position, where one’s social, political,
economic, cultural or any other position can determine the way one sees
a particular situation, and dispositional rationality, where the knowledge
that one has about a particular phenomenon can directly influence one’s
interpretation of it.
2. Other explanations that focus on instrumental rationality, such as rational
choice theory (e.g. Downs, 1957, Heckathorn, 1998), explain ideologies
with reference to individual actors’ information costs. Hence actors
subscribe to particular ideologies because of their lack of information and
the costs of obtaining that information. In other words, if one intends to
maximise one’s net advantage, it is more rational and cheaper to follow
the particular ideology than not to.
3. These seven categories by no means exhaust the possibilities. I have
selected these particular categories simply because the great majority of
all ideological narratives operate with them.
4. Similar distinction is also made in the works of Billig et al. (1988) and
Freeden (1996). Billig distinguishes between intellectual and lived
ideology, while Freeden talks about elitist and popular ideologies.
Rehabilitation Ideology after Poststructuralism
109
REFERENCES
Althusser, L. (1994) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation)’, in Zizek, S. (ed.) Mapping Ideology (London:
Verso).
Barrett, M. (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge:
Polity).
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies (London: Cape).
Baudrillard, J. (1988) Simulacra and Simulations (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Beck, U. (1991) Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Bevir, M. (1999) ‘Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against
Autonomy’, Political Theory, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 65–84.
Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism (London: Sage).
Billig, M. et al. (1988) Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday
Thinking (London: Sage).
Boudon, R. (1989) The Analysis of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and
Row).
Elias, N. (1983) The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell).
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Allen
Lane).
Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) Michael Foucault,
Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester Press).
Fox, N. (1998) ‘Foucault, Foucauldians and Sociology’, British Journal of
Sociology, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 415–433.
Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
(Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Geertz, C. (1964) ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in Apter, D. (ed.) Ideology
and Discontent (New York: Free Press).
Giddens, A. (1987) ‘Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and the Production of
Culture’, in Giddens, A. and Turner, J. (eds) Social Theory Today
(Cambridge: Polity).
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity).
Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism
in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity).
Goldhagen, D. (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (New York: Knopf).
Gouldner, A. (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic
Books).
Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT
Press).
Heckathorn, D. (1998) ‘Collective Action, Social Dilemmas, and Ideology’,
Rationality and Society, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 451–480.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London:
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Lane, C. (1984) ‘Legitimacy and Power in the Soviet Union Through Socialist
Ritual’, British Journal of Political Science, vol.14, no. 1, pp. 207–217.
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Larrain, J. (1994) ‘The Postmodern Critique of Ideology’, The Sociological
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Lévi-Strauss, C. (1975) The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row).
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Lyotard, F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Maleseviç, S. (1999) ‘Globalism and Nationalism: Which One is Bad?’, Development in Practice, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 579–583.
Maleseviç, S. (2002) Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State: Yugoslavia, Serbia
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Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press).
Pareto, V. (1966) Sociological Writings (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
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6
The Dialectics of the Real
Diana Coole
Is there ideology after poststructuralism? The question is certainly a
provocative one, but what does it mean? It implies that there is
something wrong with ideology, a problem for which poststructuralism is at least in part responsible. Yet its wounds are perhaps
not terminal: it still commands our affections sufficiently to
summon reappraisal. What can this reappraisal entail, coming after
poststructuralism? Are we to return to a concept which once
appeared obsolete but whose loss we now mourn, rediscovering
riches to which poststructuralism perhaps did an injustice? Are we
to rehearse, maybe now with greater clarity, the reasons we
abandoned such a troubled term in the first place? Or is this an
invitation to explore some possible synthesis or rapprochement,
whereby ideology might now be reborn but inflected through poststructuralist perspectives? It seems to me that the question could
plausibly be interpreted in any of these ways: as a nostalgic revisiting
of the past; as a more precise engagement in current debates, or as a
call for experiments towards the future. Accordingly I will try to
address all three.
If poststructuralist sympathies have challenged the very idea of
ideology, why should we wish to rescue or reinvigorate it? Does this
desire not imply some discomfort with the poststructuralist project
too; a lacuna we hope some reconstituted understanding of ideology
might overcome? To put it rather schematically: it seems to me that
this desire and discomfort arise from political concerns and from a
now widespread sense that the relativisms and multiplicities vaunted
by poststructuralism cannot deliver the sort of critical or reconstructive politics once anticipated. It is true that they invoke a sort
of creative, experimental and aleatory whirlwind that summons a
break with the continuum of history in the name of a new people
and a deterritorialised politics (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). The
insistence on openness does suggest an enduringly critical attitude
inasmuch as democracy, justice, communism are always to come (àvenir) – not in the future but as the spectres that haunt every present
by preventing its closure. Held at a distance via an ethic of
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responsibility to the other, they defy the thermidor which has historically followed every revolt and the authoritarianism inherent in
every rational (and irrational) plan for a free society.1 What seems
to be missing nevertheless is a process of critical engagement in what
might once have been called the real world. For there is little
concrete analysis of socio-economic or state structures in the contemporary social formation and therefore little sense of how to
change them.2 If poststructuralism has ethical and utopian credentials,3 it thus lacks the determinate negations which might endow
them with efficacy. As such, poststructuralism might itself be
designated ideological by those who follow the early Marx in
equating ideology with idealist philosophies that alter consciousness
without changing the material world.4
It is in this context that many who still associate themselves with
a radical (leftist) political agenda have been reluctant to abandon the
idea, difficult as it now is to state with the requisite philosophical and
deconstructive rigour, that powerful groups or institutions in society
rely upon a variety of mechanisms which reproduce the conditions
of their privilege, where these include something that is usefully
labelled ideological. Whether ideology is understood here in the
narrower sense of ideas that sustain particular privileges, or in a
broader sense as the taken-for-granted horizons of a culture, a search
for some more robust way of distinguishing between conservative
and critical discourses than poststructuralism apparently offers
probably explains the enduring attractiveness of some concept of
ideology. The relating of these discourses to the force field of the
present similarly explains the appeal of ideology critique. Certain
questions then follow. First, can ideology’s political utility be rescued
without ignoring the epistemological challenges poststructuralists
pose? And second, is there an alternative to widespread suggestions
that ideology has either ended or is (now) sufficiently ubiquitous to
be unrecognisable, unavoidable and therefore essentially meaningless? I think it is important to keep these two questions at least
analytically distinct since the first involves the very idea of ideology,
which interests philosophers, while the second is more concerned
with its sociological relevance (in this latter case ideology might be a
coherent concept but one whose historical relevance has atrophied).
I will not have space in this chapter to explore the second
question, except to note that it cannot be resolved other than by a
critical analysis of recent global developments. I will focus rather on
some of the criticisms poststructuralists have made of the very idea
The Dialectics of the Real
113
of ideology. But I will then argue that it was precisely the (dialectical)
connection between philosophy and sociological analysis, which
discourses concerned with ideology once insisted upon, that is
missing from poststructuralism and the reason for a continuing
enchantment with ideology.
THE CASE AGAINST IDEOLOGY
Much of the poststructuralist case against ideology hinges on its
implication in the sort of binary oppositions its exponents famously
deconstruct. As a result, ideology is thrown under suspicion of
being metaphysical and more specifically, of relying upon the
Enlightenment’s rationalist and subjectivist foundations. In this
context anxieties about ideology have fused with more general epistemological and ontological concerns related to the philosophical
foundations Descartes and Kant developed at the beginning of
modernity. For both these thinkers, knowledge entailed the
imposition of methodological or categorial classifications on the
natural world. As such, rationality was the provenance of a knowing
subject who brought order to the objective domain. Hegelian
dialectics was developed as a way of thinking a more reciprocal,
mediated relation between subject and object, humanity and
nature, whereby all these terms as well as their relationships are
produced historically. It is therefore ironic that more explicit attacks
on ideology have tended to be inflected through poststructuralists’
antipathy towards Marxism. For this antipathy draws in turn on
the rejection of Hegelian dialectics which is characteristic of most
poststructuralists.
As a result of these philosophical antagonisms, it then appears that
hostility towards ideology is but one aspect of a more general
incredulity towards each of modernity’s two major meta-narratives
– the liberal-emancipatory one associated with Kant and the speculative one derived from Hegel5 – both of which are accused of a
philosophically misguided and politically dangerous rationalism. It
is on this fundamental level that its critique has then to be
addressed. Here the debate broadly translates into support for
Nietzsche against both Descartes/Kant and Hegel/Marx. I suggest that
the rather different cases against these two targets have tended in
fact to become elided, leading to an unwarranted dismissal of the
dialectical approach, which was itself developed as a way of
overcoming many of the oppositions and difficulties poststructuralists now cite and which dialecticians themselves identified with
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Descartes and Kant. It is then by returning to a more sympathetic
understanding of dialectics as a critical methodology – albeit one
which looks less different from genealogy than poststructuralists
would have us believe – that a politically useful and epistemologically tenable sense of ideology might be regained. In other words,
I am arguing that the fate of ideology hangs on a reappraisal of
dialectics, since the two are inseparable. Outside of this connection
ideology looks vulnerable to accusations of a rather crude form of
rationalism, such as poststructuralists often level.
In order to consider more carefully the broad oppositions and
antagonisms so far alluded to, it will be useful to start with the confrontation between post-Nietzscheans and Hegel/Marx: one that can
in turn be usefully transcribed, I suggest, into affirmation versus
negation. It is in these terms that the significant difference between
poststructuralist (and vitalist) and dialectical politics comes into
relief, although one can also discern here more critical continuity
than is generally acknowledged. Here is a brief philosophical
excursus in support of such transpositions and claims.
In what Habermas has categorised as critical discourses of
modernity, the figure of the negative is indicative of a radical, emancipatory politics. Yet poststructuralists often voice considerable
hostility towards the negative. A good place to begin in understanding why, is Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche. Deleuze’s 1962
Nietzsche and Philosophy was immensely influential among poststructuralists and their own reception of Nietzsche as an alternative
to Marx. Deleuze makes much of the fact that in his Genealogy of
Morality, Nietzsche had attacked the ressentiment of the slave
mentality as a simply reactive, life-denying and thus nihilistic orientation. It was portrayed as merely negative. For unlike the nobles
who affirm life in its joyous excess, the plebs identify themselves
solely through opposition. They say no to everything that is other
and establish their identity only as not being masters. Against the
masters’ celebrations, which are beyond good and evil, the slaves
oppose ascetic morality and enervating bad conscience. Whereas for
Hegel and Marx the master–slave dialectic had been politically
explosive and historically fecund, with the slave-proletarians
negating master-capitalist domination in order to set humanity free,
Nietzsche identified no progressive political interaction between
them. Instead he appeared to look beyond the oppositional form
itself and towards a new economy of life. Here a ferment of creativedestruction occurs and differential intensities are celebrated without
The Dialectics of the Real
115
desire for synthesis or negation. The young Deleuze interpreted all
this in Manichean terms. ‘Nietzsche’s “yes” is opposed to the dialectical “no”; affirmation to dialectical negation; difference to
dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment, to dialectical labour;
lightness, dance, to dialectical responsibilities’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 9).
More ontologically, Deleuze derived from the play of differential
intensities that describe the dynamics of Nietzsche’s will to power, a
process of becoming through differenciation that is more positive
and multiplicitous than the contradictions and negations described
by dialectics. In other words, he appeals to a different rhythm of generativity than the labour of the negative described by dialectics: one
where there is a productive difference without opposition or
negation. Dialectic, he would go on to write in Difference and
Repetition, ‘thrives on oppositions because it is unaware of far more
subtle and subterranean differential mechanisms: topographical displacements, typographical mechanisms’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 158).
Beneath the platitude of the negative, he insists, there lies the world
of ‘disparateness’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 266). Change is not then
engendered by contradiction and negation but through a repetition
of singularities whose small divergencies produce unexpected
novelty and facilitate unpredictable experimentation. From this perspective dialectics, with its choreography of determinate negations,
binary-looking contradictions and syntheses, remains too close to
logical and grammatical forms with their emphasis on identity. It
seems to reduce non-identity and difference to reason. It is too
lawful. ‘There is no synthesis, mediation or reconciliation in
difference’, Deleuze contends, ‘but rather a stubborn differenciation’
(Deleuze, 1994, p. 202f.). It was this wild, positive generativity that
Nietzsche had termed will to power. He had anticipated its exemplification in a Dionysian revaluation of all values whose
participants would say yes to life, where life is itself described as will
to power. As far as politics is concerned, Deleuze concludes that
history progresses not via negation, but ‘by deciding problems and
affirming differences’. ‘Only the shadows of history live by negation:
the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or
a difference affirmed’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 268). Although Deleuze
explicitly opposes positivity and affirmation to dialectical negativity
in his work, it is nevertheless evident that Nietzschean generativity
does fulfil a critical, negativist role inasmuch as it challenges positive,
reified forms (like asceticism, religious or egalitarian ideologies,
stultified herd-consciousness, the Oedipalised unconscious) which
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are uniformly nihilistic in denying life. It is this Nietzschean-inspired
antipathy towards the negative in its dialectical sense, coupled with
the generalised hostility to reified structures it shares with dialectics,
that can subsequently be discerned among most poststructuralist
and postmodern thinkers.
The rejection of the negative here is more or less synonymous
with an attack on Hegelian dialectics, where difference seems merely
to enhance identity; determinate negation is implicated in what it
opposes and the negation of the negation looks like an overcoming
of alterity in a positive lifting up (relève). It is the latter which yields
what looks like a rationalistic meta-narrative: a process that will
finally transcend difference, non-identity, particularity. It has no
responsibility to the Other (to Life, to the nonrational fulminations
of the heterogeneous, the multiple, the material) apart from its
assimilation into rational knowledge and reduction, thereby, to the
Same. The itinerary trodden by the negative is totalising (read totalitarian) as well as teleological. According to this reading of dialectics,
negativity succumbs to positivism, difference to identity, diversity
to the gulag. It is little different, after all, from the Cartesian rationalism that results in the domination of nature or the Kantian
categorical imperative whose outcome is Terror.6 Marxism generally,
and its conception of ideology in particular, are then implicated in
this critique, where ideology looks like a temporary failure of reason
to reach its goals of identity and truth and where the overcoming of
ideology means using reason to put Reason back on course.
It is this kind of attack on dialectics that also drives Derrida’s sense
of différance, whose play is explicitly opposed to Hegelianism.
Because opposition and rational argument would merely verify the
rationalising progress of the dialectic, it is necessary instead to
operate the ‘radical displacement’ that is attributed to différance
(Derrida, 1982, p. 14). If différance could be defined, Derrida explains,
it ‘would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of
the Hegelian relève [aufhebung] wherever it operates’ (Derrida, 1981,
p. 40). Deconstructive practices are then summoned precisely to
dislocate the synthetic process; to disrupt temporal succession and
a phenomenology of meaning by deferral and the incision of
intervals that rupture any possible unity. Although Derrida’s appeal
to Saussurean linguistics, where there are only differences without
positive terms, looks more negative than does Deleuzean difference
(and Deleuze himself criticises Saussure for presenting differences as
negative rather than affirmative and productive (Deleuze, 1994,
The Dialectics of the Real
117
p. 204f.)), the aim is still nevertheless to invoke a generativity that
is heterogeneous and nonlogical, affirmative in the sense of being
playful, creative, productive. Synthetic becoming is always deferred,
scattered by undecidables. Instead of antithesis and synthesis there
is inversion and subversion. The spacing that produces effects and
interrupts all identity, Derrida writes, ‘carries the meaning of a
productive, positive, generative force’ (Derrida, 1981, p. 106f.).
Différance does not work through mediation or contradiction but is
the differentiating process itself.
Derrida gives the description a normative gloss by calling on us
to affirm such différance by dance and laughter without nostalgia (for
identity or totality): an affirmation which he designates ‘foreign to
all dialectics’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 27). Against dialectical totalising, he
insists, dissemination marks an irreducible and generative multiplicity where closure or totality are always rendered impossible.
Subsequently this procedure is used to deconstruct both Hegel’s
system (in Glas) and Marx’s allegedly totalising thought (in Specters).
In the latter case, Derrida’s reading is designed precisely to subvert
what he sees as a faulty ontology in Marx, whereby communism is
seen as an absence to be brought into presence, made real. His aim
is to rescue Marx from a series of oppositions, centred on
presence/absence, reality/appearance, that for Derrida spook his
radicalism.
This sense of an affirmative, non-totalising productivity is then
indicative of most poststructuralisms (think of Lyotard’s experimental war on totality or Foucault’s assault on negative accounts of
power as opposed to its heterogeneous, constitutive flows). Broadly
it signifies the possibility of a surprise, an event, a rupture with the
past which is antithetical to the unfolding logic of dialectics; an
aleatory process rather than the immanent logic and determinations
of the dialectic.
This affirmation must nevertheless be understood in a far more
complex way than simply as one side of a positive–negative
opposition. First there is the affirmative celebration of (quasi-)ontological flux, contingency, heterogeneity, which resist the
oppositional figure itself as too rationalistic, logical, lawful. Poststructuralist writing is designed to exemplify these qualities to a
greater or lesser extent, as opposed to the demystification which
ideology critique practises. A politics modelled on this process would
necessarily remain unpredictable, with ‘progress’ having nothing to
do with the discovery of truth. If congealed institutions and
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structures of privilege provoke censure, then the particular resistances they incite, like the experiments which might transfigure
them, remain immune to theoretical prophecy. They thereby elude
the rationalist projects of the past (associated with the Enlightenment and implicating its progressive as well as its conservative
ideological movements in authoritarianism), but do they also lose
transformative efficacy?
A second and more specific argument concerns the way poststructuralists oppose discourse to ideology in a way that summons
their respective positive and negative affinities rather differently. In
their typical Foucaultian version, discourses are presented as positive
qua productive; that is, as constitutive of truth, as opposed to
ideology’s negative function of obscuring it. (In the half-way house
of the Althusserian version, ideology itself becomes productive, in
particular of subjectivity.) It will be necessary to return to this
argument shortly but in this context it serves to highlight the way
ideology is seen as negative. Like the political and juridical understanding of power which Foucault contests, it focuses only on forces
of denial and suppression. Ideology thus looks merely negative
inasmuch as it is something that denies and mystifies, hides and
obscures; it is associated with lack, false consciousness and error. It
is social theories predicated on this negativist approach that have
fallen victim to the more affirmative rendition, where affirmation
now means producing rather than blocking. Accordingly ideology
is no longer opposed to science (as false consciousness versus truth)
but on the one hand to philosophy (as creative and productive, in a
good sense)7 and on the other, to discourse (as constitutive and
productive but in a power-suffused sense). Unlike ideology, discourse
carries no hope of overcoming the power-relations it involves; at best
one discursive regime would be replaced by another (in this sense
such regimes are more like descriptive senses of ideological
horizons). Ideology’s negative aspects of appearance, error and
distortion are perceived as meaningful only in the binary context of
their antitheses: reality, rationality, Truth. It is its dependence on the
latter that is seen as the rationalist flaw in Marxist theories of
ideology: a flaw derived from an uncritical acceptance of certain
Enlightenment presuppositions concerning subjectivity, objectivity
and humanism. Ironically, Marx’s problem here was that he was not
critical enough. It looks as if he committed the grave error of
assuming a pre-discursive reality against which knowledge is judged.
The Dialectics of the Real
119
Inasmuch as Marx would look like a positivist here, such positivism
must, finally, be distinguished from the affirmation discussed above.
For dialectical thinkers, negative thinking involves criticism of the
given in terms of what it is not but has the potential to become. This
is opposed by them to positivism, which covers a raft of approaches
from logical positivism to empiricism and is accused of a onedimensional and uncritical presentation of the given.8 Such thinking
is of course at odds with the affirmation which, if it eschews the
critical negativity of determinate negation, also presents the given as
highly dynamic and immune to representation. But it is also quite
at odds with anything except the crudest Marxism.
In this section I have tried to unpack some of the poststructuralist arguments against the concept of ideology, showing how it is
implicated in broader targets whose common flaw is their rationalism. I have suggested that a helpful way of understanding these
polemics is to cast them in a complex field of positive versus negative
permutations. In the next section I will explain how, in so far as
ideology is understood in this negative way, it must however be
grasped in terms of Marx’s more extensive philosophy of negativity
and that from this perspective, poststructuralism and Marxism have
more in common than the former acknowledges. The crucial issue
here seems to be the senses and relationships attributed to the real
and the true and these must also be addressed more explicitly, via a
return to Foucault.
PHILOSOPHIES IN THE NEGATIVE
If ideology is negative for Marx inasmuch as it implies a deficit of
reason, this understanding has nevertheless to be understood in the
context of his more general philosophy of negativity, derived from
Hegel and centring on defining aspects of historical materialism as a
dialectical methodology. According to this approach, no social or
symbolic form is natural or absolute because every identity results
from a process of negation. There is a continuous mediation of identity
and difference, subject and object, which also engenders them.
Everything is in the process of becoming. Although there is a certain
inertia and interest in history that works to sustain the status quo and
thus prevent change (specifically, for Marx, class interests) the present,
according to dialectical thinking, inevitably finds itself succumbing to
oppositional forces it cannot finally control or suppress. Historical
materialism tries then to discern this interplay between positive and
negative – between stabilising, reactionary forces and progressive,
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transformative ones – at any historical moment. Typically, the tension
they generate takes place between (dynamic) forces of production and
(reifying) social relations of production.
Ideology is one component of this drama because, as Marx makes
clear where he renders it synonymous with German Idealism, it refers
to those ideas that make the present look unassailable or unsurpassable. In this sense it is one of the forces that support the positive –
that is, what has presence, privilege and power under existing
arrangements. Ideology critique, on the other hand, involves a
practising of negativity: a critical assault on the illusion that things
can resist change and are not in-process or that they benefit all universally rather than privileging particular groups. The aim of such
ideological demystification is to set history in motion once more, by
galvanising those who suffer the injustices of the present as their fate.
Of course, for Marx (and Hegel) it is not just the resumption of
process per se that is important, but the fact that process means
progress: towards more universal forms that will transcend the
partiality and errors, the scarcity and exploitation, of the past.
History’s blockages are to be negated by a variety of critical interventions that must, to be effective, culminate in a material praxis
which instantiates a culturally richer, more rational and synthetic,
collective life. Here the rational involves a constellation of senses:
not only a clearer knowledge of history’s trajectories which guides
action (praxis) and production organised on a rational basis
(planning) but also, an integration of the particular and the universal.
To the extent that all this looks like a recipe for a closed totality, teleologically anticipated as history’s true culmination, poststructuralist
anxiety seems entirely warranted. But inasmuch as dialectical wholes
resonate with diverse perspectives, history’s contingency is acknowledged and reason involves critically defensible social arrangements;
a dialectical methodology avoids these concerns.
In fact, the sort of Nietzschean-inspired affirmation or genealogy
embraced by many poststructuralists is quite consonant with Marx’s
negativity here, as a political project. For its aim is also to resist and
transgress reified and immobile forms and to release the forces that
would subvert them (an ambition helped in the West, as a variety of
thinkers from Kristeva to Foucault concede, by the demise of two
millennia of Christianity). Of course the ontology and rhythms
underpinning the poststructuralist version are quite at odds with
dialectical negativity. But the basic political opposition between what
is instituted and static (boundaries and limits as well as structures
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121
and stratifications) and irruptions which will destabilise it, is a shared
one. In both cases, negative forces are immanent and theory both
clears spaces for and helps constitute the agencies which will set
them in motion. Hegelianism/Marxism as well as poststructuralism
can all then be classified as philosophies of negativity inasmuch as
they pursue a politics that opposes the positivity of the given (for
example the misrepresentations and illusions of subjectivity as well
as of capital). In all cases, some disruptive and irrepressible generativity is invoked in order to destabilise congealed institutions and
immobile powers. If ideology designates those performative or
discursive acts that sustain closure by immunising the positive
against change, then something like it is operative in all these
approaches.
It is nonetheless necessary to distinguish here between a
pejorative, critical sense of ideology and a more neutral definition
of discursive regimes which merely, monotonously, follow one
another. It is the former that lends political bite, yet it is precisely
this point, concerning the criterion of the pejorative (against what
is it being measured to yield this negative judgement?), that is most
contentious. Marxian senses of ideology look problematic inasmuch
as they seem to rely on a meta-narrative whereby overcoming
illusions and obfuscations would return History to its correct path,
rather than simply opening it to the agonistic play of power and
resistance. This is where ideology looks as if it relies upon a metaphysical conception of truth. At the same time, appeals to a truth
against which ideological falsity is measured invoke more general
concerns about epistemology and representation, where evocations
of the real as true ring poststructuralist alarm bells. This then brings
me to the next part of my argument, concerning dialectical senses of
the true and the real.
THE TRUE AND THE REAL
I will start here with Foucault, because he is so explicit on this issue.
Foucault gives three reasons for finding the notion of ideology
‘difficult’ (though not impossible, note: he only warns us against
using it ‘without circumspection’). His first is the following: ‘like it
or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which
is supposed to count as truth’. In place of this impossible ideological
distinction he proffers genealogy: ‘seeing historically how effects of
truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither
true nor false’. Foucault then goes on to offer two additional
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concerns about the notion of ideology: it refers – ‘I think necessarily’ – to the subject and it is epiphenomenal, that is, relative to a
material determinant (‘etc.’) (Foucault, 1972, p. 118). In sum,
Foucault condemns ideology owing to its alleged dependence on
three oppositions: truth/error; subject/object; base/superstructure.
Its difficulties are thus coexistent with Marxism in its entirety. But is
Foucault’s rendition of ideology fair and does he offer us compelling
grounds for rejecting it? This hinges on the question of whether it
necessarily relies on the trio of oppositions he elicits.
I will begin with a rather general point here. It would be easy in
light of poststructuralist attacks to forget that dialectical thinkers
never do posit binary oppositions as such and certainly not in any
metaphysical or ontological way. If oppositions are recognised, these
are always in a dialectical process of reciprocity that is highly
dynamic, unstable and productive of the opposing terms themselves.
If they harden into contradictions, then this is a sign that their
internal relationship has been foreclosed and a more explosive
negation is going to be needed before that relationship can resume.
It is with this in mind that the first opposition, between truth and
error, is approached. This is the one most explicitly associated with
ideology and the one about which I will therefore have most to say
here, especially since it tends to subsume the other two. In elaborating on his antipathy towards the category of truth, Foucault rejects
any sense in which it lies undefiled behind power, waiting as a
reward for liberation. Truth is engendered within ‘régimes of truth’
which are not, he insists, ‘merely ideological or superstructural’, but
conditions of possibility for economic forms like capitalism. The
essential political task, he concludes, does not lie in criticising ideological contents or acquiring a correct ideology. Much less – as in
fact Marx had explicitly noted – can it be a case of changing consciousness in isolation from its political and economic supports. For
Foucault politics is rather about engaging with the discursive régimes
that produce truth. (‘The political question ... is not error, illusion,
alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself’ (Foucault, 1972,
p. 133)). Such discursive regimes, it might be inferred, operate more
like will to power than ideology in that they are internally generative
of a range of symbolic, material and institutional effects. This is
perhaps what Foucault has in mind in his last caveat, where ideology
is rejected as epiphenomenal, superstructural. For here it sometimes
looks like an effect of prior, non-discursive, economic causes. His
concern echoes Nietzsche’s condemnation of cause/effect relations as
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123
entailing a doer behind the deed, as opposed to will to power’s
internal generativity. From this perspective it makes no sense to
condemn discourse as such, as a Marxist might describe all ideology
in pejorative (negative) terms. One can only attempt to shift
particular discursive configurations, where there is sufficient room
for manoeuvre, and replace them with others.
As far as truth and error are concerned, for dialectical thinkers
their relationship is neither causal nor simply oppositional. Truth
evolves out of error: not via acts of discovery, but through an
ongoing process whereby partial truths are confronted by their
limits. It is a product of intersubjective and existential interactions
over time. Ideology in this context is erroneous because it blocks
further explorations and interrogations, thus freezing truths which
become erroneous as they move out of kilter with a world in process.
Where I think the true/false opposition becomes most resonant
for poststructuralists is, however, where it is treated as more or less
synonymous with the distinction between reality and appearance.
This distinction is important to them inasmuch as they are
captivated by Nietzsche’s claim that metaphysics presents the real as
the true in order to dismiss or condemn appearances as false, because
they are shifting and contingent. Dialectical thinkers seem to echo
this division and its hierarchy when they contend that the real
becomes true when it is sufficiently mediated (as opposed to the
illusion of immediacy borne by mere appearances). It is nevertheless
important, I want to insist, that these dialectical and Nietzschean
arguments are kept distinct because they are in fact quite different.
Poststructuralist attacks on ideology’s opposition between true
(reality) and false (appearances) tend to get inflected, however,
through Nietzsche’s attack on Kant and this then distorts their
readings of Marx. In other words, this is where the arguments
relative to modernity’s two meta-narratives become misleadingly
conflated.
Nietzsche had implicated Kant, among others, in the metaphysical
distinction between reality and appearance. Kantian epistemology is
also, of course, one of the main targets of poststructuralist critiques
of the Enlightenment. So what has happened, I am suggesting, is that
dialectics gets caught up in the general attack on Enlightenment
rationalism. Although Marx is certainly vulnerable to aspects of this,
the Nietzschean-inspired reading both distorts the notion of reality
which dialectics intends and, paradoxically if implicitly, attributes to
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Marx the very Kantian dualism which Hegelian dialectics was
intended to overcome. How does this reversal work?
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had famously tried to overcome
scepticism via his Copernican Revolution. The aim here was to
sidestep the dilemma which seems to occur whenever knowledge
claims rely upon accessing the thing in itself. The result, he shows,
is either dogmatism or scepticism, since there is no possibility of the
sort of verification that could satisfy criteria of critical reason. Kant
accordingly argues that we must forget about knowing the thing in
itself since any knowledge we could conceivably have is already
structured by the forms which the senses and the categories of the
understanding impose upon the world. This is indeed the precondition of our knowing it at all. He thus made a famous distinction
between noumena, which are irremediably off limits, and
phenomena, which are the representations we do know since they
result from subjective faculties. Although Kant’s efforts to sustain the
distinction got him into difficulties,9 the impossibility of knowing
the in itself has been widely accepted ever since. (This has not
however caused any practical difficulty since Kant offered a realist,
correspondence theory of truth when it came to phenomena: since
we structure their appearances, we know them indubitably.)
Hegel accepted these epistemological limits when he acknowledged that the immediacy with which his books often begin is only
an origin under erasure, since anything we can say, know or even
perceive is already mediated. Identifying anything relies on a process
of differentiation and determinate negation. But the aim of dialectics
was precisely to overcome the dualism of an inert, unknowable
noumenal other (or for that matter an equally inert, fully known
phenomenal immediacy), and an ahistorical subjectivity. Dialectical
becoming is a production of, as well as a reciprocity between, subject
and object. In this sense Hegelian reality is never some noumenal
immediacy underlying phenomena but is closer to what the young
Marx’s existentialist followers called existence: that place where
practical and cognitive interventions, material and ideal forces, meet
in a highly dynamic way. It is in the phenomenal realm that meaning
appears, and references to ‘mere’ appearances are never intended to
imply that they are opposed to the thing in itself. If this phenomenal
reality becomes rational – actual – this is only through a process of
mediations whereby the web of relations that support every provisional identity as complex and in process is articulated over time.
The Dialectics of the Real
125
Nietzsche’s attack on Kantian metaphysics also challenged the
idea of the thing in itself underlying appearances, but on quite
different grounds. Kantianism was for Nietzsche only part of a
nihilistic and ascetic metaphysics that opposes a true, unchanging
higher world to the shifting phenomena of Life in order to denigrate
the latter. Unlike Hegel he does not offer a phenomenology of
meaning whereby appearances yield up their partial truths until the
real becomes rational; rather, appearances remain unmediated, a
shifting configuration of perspectives that coagulate and disintegrate
through a combination of random and colonising moves (hence the
will to power, or capillary power, that the genealogist describes).
Nietzsche is no more an empiricist of the phenomenal than are
Hegel and Marx, because for him appearances are always veils,
masks, but there is no sense of an underlying truth that might
disclose or expose them.
Now, when poststructuralists read the Nietzschean/Foucaultian
appeal to genealogy, this rejection of the in itself becomes generalised, it seems to me, to a broad proscription on any claims that
look as if they appeal to the real, since this is now understood as a
metaphysical gesture towards the noumenal (and following Lacan,
this is seductively labelled the impossible Real). It now looks, then,
as if the Marxist sense of ideology relies on an illegitimate Kantian
distinction between Truth and appearances. Worse, it is even precritical in claiming access to Reality, to Truth, in itself (an
hallucinatory metaphysics of transcendental realism as Kant would
have put it). I am not quite claiming that these unwarranted elisions
are explicitly made, but I am suggesting that they tend to operate
implicitly because of the route by which many of poststructuralism’s
admirers have taken up its critiques of Marxism and its sense of
ideology.
As far as dialectics is concerned, it would be entirely illegitimate
to claim that it seeks either unmediated access to immediacy or a
correspondence theory of truth. But inflected through neoNietzscheanisms, ideology does begin to look like a naïve claim to
knowledge of the social formation purged of false consciousness and
distortion. As such, it looks suspiciously like a version of the will to
truth and vulnerable to postmodern concerns about representation.
Furthermore, it seems to be part of the modern, rationalist fantasy
of an end to chaos and conflict, power and politics, where the
overcoming of ideology that motivates ideology critique would
mean redemption, harmony, transparency, consensus. This
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suspicion could be expressed in quite other terms politically – for
example as Rousseau versus Machiavelli – and it is also fed by poststructuralist disquiet towards Habermas’s ideal speech situation. But
it implicates ideology in the whole Nietzschean distrust of Western
metaphysics as life-denying and therefore nihilistic.
Poststructuralist concerns about appeals to the real as the true are
further reinforced by more traditional liberal anxieties. One has only
to think here of Isaiah Berlin’s identification of positive liberty with
a dangerous authoritarianism he identifies with Rousseau and
Stalinism, whereby an elite would claim knowledge of an authentic
freedom unavailable to the mystified masses as a way of legitimising its own rule (Berlin, 1969). Or one might recall the concerns that
Lukes’ (1974) third dimension of power provoked in its appeal to
the proletariat’s ‘real’ but veiled interests, which was again accused
of dangerously elitist or paternalist implications.10 Liberal fears of
authoritarianism and poststructuralist anxieties about totalitarianism converge here. Where they differ, of course, is in liberals’ belief
that there are objective criteria of truth that debunk ideology; that
appeals to valid interests can be made where individuals are credited
with being the best judges on their own behalf, and that ideology
has anyway succumbed to a common-sense, reasonable pragmatism.
Poststructuralists remain sceptical regarding the possibility of
making any such distinctions or claims without getting entangled
in the discursive regime that constituted them in the first place.
Returning, finally, to the subject–object dualism that Foucault
cites as his second concern about ideology, I suggest that a similar
and related series of conflations occurs. The object tends here to be
elided with the Real that is off limits, or to a naïve and unmediated
experience, while the knowing subject who is mystified but might
attain true (class) consciousness is vulnerable to all the antihumanist and anti-rationalist attacks that poststructuralists rehearse.
From this perspective, ideology critique looks dangerously like
Cartesian or Kantian idealism, with a disengaged (scientific) subject
surveying its objects in order to impose order upon, or elicit order
from, reality.
Again, this is a travesty of any dialectical method since for it,
subject and object are as much in process as any other phenomena:
the way we conceptualise or experience them is historical, not ontological or natural. If the rational subject does triumph over its objects
in modernity, then this epistemological relation is itself an
indication of the material relationship which capitalism actually
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127
instantiates; in other words, it is the ideological equivalent of an
actual dualism and hierarchy between subject and object. The critical
methodology that follows must therefore recognise the historicity
both of this relationship and of its own intervention, as well as
acknowledging the way both concepts and material conditions are
highly dynamic and mutually dependent. I will return to this latter
claim shortly, because I think it is crucial in assessing the contemporary relevance and meaning of ideology. But meanwhile it is
necessary, having cast some doubt on the reliability of poststructuralist interpretations of dialectics, to see how a more sympathetic
account of dialectical methodology and its pursuit of the ‘real’ might
be elicited. For my criticism of the sort of reality/appearance
opposition poststructuralists attribute to dialectics is not intended
to do away with the distinction altogether. Any retrieval of ideology
in its critical sense depends upon it.
DIALECTICS: THE REAL, THE TOTALITY AND THE CRITICAL
METHOD
In dialectical references to a reality underlying appearances, a certain
reading of Hegel defines the real as the cunning of Reason, as essence,
and it is this that Marx allegedly inherits when he alludes to the Truth
of History and reveals the reality that ideology occludes. Here is the
real as rational versus its deceptive or partial appearances. If however
we extricate dialectics as a critical method from this narrative, then
the real entails that which is also defined as concrete (as opposed to
appearances, which remain abstract). The real is concrete not because
it is solidly material but because it is mediated. This is indeed what
renders it rational, but not in any metaphysical sense.
The reason appearances remain abstract is that while they seem
to have common-sense, empirical veracity – as facts, the given – it is
actually impossible to say anything about isolated data without
recognising their connections with, as well as their differences from,
other data. In other words, what looks immediate always turns out
to be mediated and the critical method involves tracing this web of
connections in order to build an increasingly rich sense of things’
significance. This involves their process of genesis, their internal
dynamism and trajectory, their inner tensions and vulnerabilities,
their potential to transmute into something richer or to disintegrate,
their place within an evolving whole. This inquiry is not after all so
very different from genealogy and the lessons drawn from
Saussurean linguistics, except that the emphasis tends to be on
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tracing a phenomenology of meaning as opposed to its deconstruction (although even within Marxism, this would be much truer of
Merleau-Ponty, for example, than of Adorno).
If one abandons the grand narrative aspect of Hegelianism and
accepts history’s contingency, then dialectics still permits a
hermeneutical project of interpreting the real as this evolving web of
material and ideal imbrications – as a field of forces, or what MerleauPonty has called the visible and the invisible. Here, for example, is
Lukács’ account of totality:
If change is to be understood at all it is necessary to abandon the
view that objects are rigidly opposed to each other, it is necessary
to elevate their relatedness and the interrelation between these
‘relations’ and the ‘objects’ to the same plane of reality. The greater
the distance from pure immediacy the larger the net encompassing the ‘relations’, and the more complete the integration of the
‘objects’ within the system of relations, the sooner change will
cease to be impenetrable and catastrophic, the sooner it will
become comprehensible. (Lukács, 1971, p. 154)
Lukács notwithstanding, if such an approach aims towards establishing the totality of connections, their proliferation nevertheless
renders this an ongoing critical project, in principle incomplete. I
do not think there need be any more sinister definition of totality
than this. It is the dialectical, mediated reality, not the impossible
Real or the empirical real, full presence, that is at issue. In poststructuralist eyes totality equals the triumph of reason, a universality
that suppresses otherness, particularity and nonidentity, in short,
totalitarianism. But for dialectical thinkers, it signifies the critical
project of interpreting the real from within as it unfolds: both in
order to demonstrate its instability and structural significance (versus
positivism, empiricism, ideological versions of common sense) and
to guide praxis strategically through a reading of the present (like
Machiavellian virtù). While we can never in principle represent the
real completely, faithfully (the positivist goal) since we are situated
within it, neither is in an alien domain immune to understanding
since it is the outcome of interpersonal acts, where nature itself has
been worked over by symbolic and material practices.
To be authentic, any interpretive process must be self-critical, not
dogmatic (Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-dialectics, Adorno’s negative
dialectics, Kristeva’s semiology); an amalgam of discovery and
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129
invention. As Marx put it: ‘The concrete is concrete only because it
is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the
diverse’ (Marx, 1973, p. 100). As Balibar adds, what interests Marx is
‘the relation of forces in play at any particular moment, determining the direction of its advance’ (Balibar, 1995, pp. 100f.). The trick
is to sustain a methodology that accommodates both the diversity of
particular parts and the shifting identity of the whole; one that does
justice both to sociological facts and their significance; to the
objective and its interpretation. This was, in fact, the methodology
explicitly practised by the early Frankfurt School.
In so far as dialectics speaks of the real here, it is not then making
metaphysical claims about the in itself or claiming some privileged
knowledge of History’s laws; it is not claiming to mirror the Truth
of an objective reality through an act of accurate representation.
Rather it is interpreting the field of existence from within, making
sense of its provisional forms, potentials and vectors, from the perspective of those whom the given configurations of power suppress.
While this need not privilege any particular group, it cannot
however entail an empowering of just any voice: only those that
challenge closures and open up a field of inquiry or coexistence are
historically progressive. This is what allows dialectics to avoid
dogmatism or relativism. As Merleau-Ponty claims, truth is a
blending of perspectives into provisional unities, a bringing of
reason into being where it was not predestined; the true is what
opens a field for further questioning and exploration, as opposed to
the false which closes it down.
This allows falsity to be aligned with ideology in its pejorative
sense – it blocks change – without claiming that its antithesis is Truth
in some ahistorical, definitive sense where it is devoid of power or
perspective. Whether one speaks of ideology or discourse, however,
I have claimed that all the approaches involved operate with this
basic political distinction between openness and closure, where the
ideological involves the processes that block openness, mobility and
change in order to protect the interests of currently privileged
groups. The aim in all cases is to open a space for new or countermeanings, where false consciousness would be a closed
consciousness, not a failure to recognise true interests or the
occlusion of an autonomous subjectivity. This is not a philosophy
of subjectivity but of intersubjectivity.
To summarise and recapitulate, then, I have suggested that the
major obstacle to retrieving a concept of ideology after poststruc-
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turalism lies in the latter’s attributing to ideology a true/false
opposition which apparently involves it in a series of epistemological errors and metaphysical illusions whose exposure renders
ideology untenable. I have however offered something like a
genealogy of this poststructuralist argument, suggesting that it draws
on a whole series of claims directed against a much bigger target than
ideology per se. In the process the dialectical understanding of the
real, one which is not necessarily vulnerable to the sort of criticisms
poststructuralism raises, gets distorted.
The critical method dialectics supports here is more similar to
genealogy than the latter’s exponents acknowledge, but it resolves
better the basis for a non-dogmatic political and normative
judgement which avoids the relativism into which discourse theory
is drawn. At the same time, it is less hesitant about interpreting
socio-economic reality in order to guide political interventions,
while it resists temptations to emphasise singularity and difference
at the expense of recognising more pervasive structures and relationships there. External reality in this materialist approach is
recognised as exerting a non-discursive pressure which needs to be
understood, and the important questions here concern the right sort
of sociological methodology (it is no coincidence, for example, that
both Adorno and Merleau-Ponty were interested in Weber’s
approach). These kinds of concern seem to get eclipsed inasmuch as
the shift from ideology to discourse and différance tends to favour
methods of literary criticism.
It is in terms of a dialectical methodology, one which recognises
the intimate relationship between changing historical conditions
and the necessity of new concepts for analysing them, that I want to
make my final remarks.12 It must be important from this perspective to guard against any reification of the concept of ideology itself.
Might it not be the case, as intimated in my introduction, that the
term’s difficulties are less conceptual than historical? By this I mean
that the apparent confusions attributed to the term might arise less
from its internal contradictions than from shifts in the conditions to
which it is applied.
Now for Marx, ideology related primarily to the realm of ideas:
ideas that were not simply a cynical means of propaganda but entire
belief systems supporting the status quo. German idealist philosophy
and liberal political theory do indeed seem especially appropriate for
the maintenance of bourgeois capitalism, which relies on voluntary
submission to apparently rational authority or class relations. In
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131
other words, it is not just the content of the ideas but their rationalism as such which is particularly fitting. For both capitalism and
the liberal state rely upon voluntary compliance rather than
coercion, and this is won by appeals to rational self-interest which
in turn relies upon (even constitutes) a certain rational subjectivity.
So the priority accorded to ideas in sustaining the system, as well as
their correspondence with the socio-economic domain, seems historically appropriate.
As structural differentiation proceeds with modernity, so the institutions that disseminate ideas conducive to the system proliferate
(schools, mass media, etc.). Additionally, as capitalism develops it is
able to reproduce itself more effectively because the sort of performances it requires are integrated into the everyday habits and
practices of society, where they become increasingly pervasive. Thus
ideology no longer needs to be confined to the ideal and essentially
negative realm: it becomes instantiated in material practices that
have more constitutive power. This is what Althusser recognised. At
the same time, as critical theorists and postmodernists have seen,
new technologies allow cultural production to take off in such a way
that older spaces for free time or unintegrated ideas are closed off. If
critics of ideology or discourse theory complain that it leaves no
space for criticism from outside, then this in a sense expresses the
new reality.
Accordingly, a dialectical method might suggest that ideology as
Marx conceived it has become historically anachronistic: not however
because he was confused about its nature or function but because the
mechanisms for reproducing the system have changed. It is interesting in this context to recall Baudrillard’s account of postmodernity,
where the true/false and reality/appearance distinction is occluded
not because it was philosophically confused, but because conditions
in an image-drenched culture have changed. Now it is simulation that
threatens the difference between true and false, real and imaginary.
Now reality is produced and reproduced by the imaginary. This,
Baudrillard tells us, is the ultimate ideology. ‘One can live with the
idea of a distorted truth’, he assures us, but not with the realisation
that images conceal nothing: that images are merely simulacra, that
is, copies for which no original ever existed. As such, ideology in
postmodern cultures permits the production of an illusion of reality
in order to uphold an obsolete and illusionary true/false distinction
which can no longer be made. Paradoxically, the very idea of ideology
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comes to play an ideological role at the same time as the distinctions
on which it relied disappear (Baudrillard, 1983).
I do not have time now to start unravelling the conundra into
which this argument throws us. I have invoked Baudrillard only to
support my final suggestion that questions about ideology’s meaning
and continuing relevance can only be approached in historical
context and that the dialectical approach which is associated,
through Marx, with ideology is the best way to proceed. No amount
of analysis of terminology can substitute for this difficult
engagement with the real. What remains is thus a methodology
which is broadly a historical materialism infused with elements of
genealogy. Whether ideology as a concept remains the most appropriate way of grasping and challenging the maintenance and
reproduction of relations of privilege or exclusion here remains a
historical and sociological question which awaits the judgement of
an ongoing dialectical inquiry.
NOTES
1. The sociological and psychological imperatives that result in a strengthened authoritarianism even where revolt in on the agenda have often
been explored. See for example Horkheimer (1982) and Foucault (1983).
2. I pursue this theme in Coole (2000), especially in Chapter 3 and the
conclusion. The considerations in this chapter are to some extent a
development informed by arguments presented there.
3. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) insist that it is philosophy’s utopianism that
makes it political. The ethical dimension is explicit throughout most of
Derrida’s work and also within Foucault’s later writing.
4. This is the gist of Habermas’s designation of poststructuralists as young
conservatives, in his ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’. The essay has
been reprinted many times in English but see the complete translation
in Habermas (1996).
5. It is Lyotard who explicitly and famously proffers these two metanarratives, in Lyotard (1984).
6. Although they implicitly oppose dialectical, critical reasoning to the
rationalist logic of enlightenment, the equation between reason and
totalitarianism had been made by members of the Frankfurt School well
before poststructuralism. See in particular Horkheimer and Adorno
(1972). See also the section on ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in Hegel
(1967) and Merleau-Ponty (1969).
7. See Deleuze and Guattari (1994). Philosophy creates a plane of
immanence which might come to seem like truth although it has
nothing to do with the representation of actual states of affairs.
8. Such arguments were perhaps most explicitly developed by the first
generation of critical theorists.
9. For more about this see Coole (2000), in particular Chapter 1.
The Dialectics of the Real
133
10. For a summary of criticisms of Lukes, see S. Clegg (1989), Chapter 5.
11. R. Gasché (1986, p. 57) writes: ‘A totality ... amounts to a medium of
mediation, a middle of intersecting lines.’
12. This relationship seems to be ruled out by Deleuze and Guattari in What
is Philosophy? for example, when they distinguish between science’s
interests in states of affairs and philosophy’s conceptual creativity.
REFERENCES
Balibar, E. (1995) Marx and Philosophy (London: Verso).
Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e)).
Berlin, I. (1969) ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Clegg, S. (1989) Frameworks of Power (London: Sage).
Coole, D. (2000) Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialects from Kant to Poststructuralism (London: Routledge).
Deleuze, G. (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone Press).
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy? (London: Verso).
Derrida, J. (1981) Positions (London: Athlone Press).
Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester).
Foucault, M. (1972) Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books).
Foucault, M. (1983) ‘Preface’, in Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Gasché, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press).
Habermas, J. (1996) ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, in Passerin
D’Entrèves, M. and Benhabib, S. (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project
of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Hegel, G.W.F. (1967) Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper Colophon).
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:
Seabury Press).
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Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum).
Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969) Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press).
7
Ideology, Language and
Discursive Psychology
Michael Billig
In a famous passage of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels claimed
that the study of ideology should begin with the activity of ‘real
men’ (1970, p. 42). They were suggesting that theory on its own was
insufficient for understanding how ideology operated. One needed
to observe how men (and women) actually live and think. According
to Marx and Engels, the social processes of inequality distort the way
that the oppressed classes experience the world, so that mentally the
world is turned upside down in a way that hides the workings of
power. In effect, Marx and Engels were proposing that an understanding of ideology should have an important psychological
dimension, for ideology is reflected in the feelings, views and life
patterns of ‘real’ people. Today, it is no longer possible to hold a
convincing theory of ideology which simply states that the powerful
classes conceal the operations of their power by implanting
falsehoods in the minds of the oppressed. Rightly, there has been a
reaction against the tendency to reduce the subject of ideology to a
‘dupe’ who unwittingly accepts the distortions of ideology. A more
active view of the ideological subject is required. Even if the theory
of ideology outlined in The German Ideology is no longer satisfactory
in itself, nevertheless the dictum of Marx and Engels should still be
taken seriously. Any reconstituted theory of ideology needs to be
based on understanding people and, as such, it requires a psychological dimension at its core.
Today, as theorists attempt to reconstitute a theory of ideology
that is appropriate for contemporary conditions, two factors tend to
be stressed. First, the power of language is often recognised.
Following Foucault, it is generally accepted that discourses constrain
what people say and think; moreover, discourses are closely related
to patterns of social power. Second, theorists today often accept that
a theory of ideology should incorporate a psychology of the unconscious, in order to understand how the subjects of ideology have
internalised forces of distortion that will curtail, channel or recreate
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desires, wishes, etc. Many theorists, especially in the field of cultural
studies, have found both elements in the work of Lacan, whose
motto is that the unconscious is structured like language. Unfortunately, the more that theorists tend to turn to Lacan, the more they
find themselves being pulled away from studying ‘real’ people in the
way that Marx and Engels recommended. Lacan’s writing is highly
abstract and abstruse. Surprisingly for a psychoanalyst, he does not
base his theories on accounts of the lives of people. As Stuart Hall
(1988, p. 35) has complained, there is today an ‘overtheoreticism’,
which tends to ‘pile up one sophisticated theoretical construction
on top of another ... without ever once touching ground and
without reference to a single concrete case or historical example’.
In contrast, the present chapter will introduce a different form of
psychology that is suitable for incorporating into a reconstituted
view of ideology. This form of psychology – discursive psychology –
acknowledges the importance of language in constituting human
thinking (for statements of this position, see for example, Antaki,
1994; Billig, 1991 and 1996; Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter,
1993; Harré and Gillett, 1994; Potter, 1996; Potter and Wetherell,
1987). In this respect, discursive psychology fulfils the primary
requirement for any theory of ideology: it recognises the extent to
which thinking is socially constructed. As such, the discursive
approach differs from most orthodox psychological theories that
tend to explain thinking in terms of universal properties of the
individual (Billig, 1991; Parker, 1992; van Dijk, 1998). In addition,
discursive psychology can be extended to show how Freud’s theory
of the unconscious can be reinterpreted in terms of speech and
discourse. Most importantly, discursive psychology is not content to
formulate abstract theories, but is based on the detailed study of
social actors. Consequently, it seeks to ground any reconstituted
theory of ideology in the actions, thoughts and lives of ‘real men’,
as Marx and Engels advocated.
THREE PSYCHOLOGICAL LEVELS
Three levels of psychological functioning can be distinguished: the
conscious, the routine and the unconscious. A psychology which is
satisfactory for a theory of ideology must be able to deal with these
three levels and, moreover, show their interrelations even within a
single activity. It will be suggested that all three levels can be
manifested simultaneously within the business of talk.
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(a) The conscious level. Much conscious thinking is directly
shaped within language, for we use language to think. Every day we
make new utterances; our use of language is creative. It will be
suggested that the argumentative aspects of language are fundamental for this creativity.
(b) The routine level. Language use is not, and cannot just be, a
matter of individual creativity. We inherit languages and have to use
accepted social codes in order to engage in the social activity of talk.
As Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks (1971), languages contain
their own philosophies, often expressed as a shared common sense,
which is taken for granted. In this sense, language can mould its
speaker’s thoughts in particular directions, with the result that some
matters are routinely spoken about and other topics are left
unspoken – indeed, they cannot be spoken about. This latter aspect
of language has been well studied by Foucault and his followers.
They show how a society’s discursive concepts are integrated into
that society’s patterns of life. Some matters are routinely accepted as
common sense, while other topics, for which the requisite concepts
have not been formulated, are literally unspeakable. Thus, in the
Middle Ages, speakers lacked the discursive resources to talk about
psychiatric matters. Today, so prevalent are these discourses, that
contemporary speakers at times find it hard to avoid speaking psychiatrically.
(c) The unconscious level. There is an aspect of the ‘unsaid’ which
Foucauldians tend not to examine. They examine that which cannot
be spoken because the speakers lack the necessary discursive
resources. However, there is another form of ‘unsaid’. These are
matters that could be spoken about – the discursive resources are in
place. Nevertheless, there are silences, because social taboos demand
that some topics be repressed from outward conversation and inner
thought. In order to understand this sort of unsaid there is a need to
turn to Freud and to reinterpret his notion of repression dialogically.
THE NATURE OF THINKING
To begin with, it is necessary to outline briefly the discursive
approach to the topic of ‘conscious thinking’ (for more details, see
Antaki, 1994; Billig, 1991, 1996 and 1999a; Edwards, 1997; Edwards
and Potter, 1993). Orthodox psychologists, particularly contemporary cognitive psychologists, typically take a Cartesian approach to
the study of thinking. They assume that thinking is a silent, solitary
(even lonely) activity, which takes place mysteriously within the
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brain of the isolated individual. Thus, the psychologist cannot
directly observe the processes of thinking, but must infer their
existence from outward behaviour. This Cartesian view of thinking,
as an internal and individual activity, is exemplified by Rodin’s
famous sculpture The Thinker. Rodin depicts a man (of course, a man
– not a woman), sitting alone, with forehead resting on his hand.
He is not talking, nor paying attention to anyone. All his attention
is directed inwards, as if he is removed from active social life. The
image suggests that thinking is not a social, discursive activity, but
is something solitary and silent.
There are psychological problems with this image of thinking. Any
psychology, based on this image, will lack an observable object of
study. Its topics, whether they be ‘attitudes’, ‘memory stores’ or
‘heuristic processes’, will be ghostly entities, which, however
powerful the methodological microscope, can never be directly
observed. Cognitive psychology, like much of psychology, is a
strange scientific discipline: its objects of study, which are the
presumed ‘cognitive processes’ underlying thought, are inherently
unobservable, for these hypothetical processes are not assumed to
be neurological structures (Harré and Gillett, 1994).
There is another factor, which should concern those involved in
education. The traditional view of thinking, as a wordless, soundless
process, seems to imply that the thinking of other people is always
out of reach. We may know our own thinking, but we can never
know the thinking of other people. If thinking is this solitary, private
activity, then we can ask how is it possible to teach thinking?
According to the Cartesian view, it is hard to see how children can
be taught to think, for thinking cannot be demonstrated. It must be
something that mysteriously develops within the individual psyche,
untouched by conversation or social contact.
As Wittgenstein repeatedly argued in his later philosophical
writings, another position is possible (for discussions of the relations
between Wittgenstein’s ideas and discursive psychology, see, in
particular, Shotter, 1993a and 1993b). Thinking can be seen as a
social, and above all, discursive, activity. Of course, this idea well
pre-dates Wittgenstein. It was well expressed by the Eleatic Stranger,
in Plato’s dialogue The Sophist: ‘Thought and speech are the same;
only the former, which is the silent inner conversation of the soul
with itself, has been given the special name of thought’ (263 e).
This could be applied to Rodin’s solitary thinker. Far from being
removed from dialogue, he might be imagined to be conducting an
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internal dialogue, debating with himself in an example of what the
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky termed ‘inner speech’ (Vygotsky,
1987; see also Wertsch, 1991; Sampson, 1993). Such an internal conversation, given the thinker’s outward signs of preoccupation, will
probably have an argumentative character. He is unlikely to have
divided his mind into two speakers, only to find them in happy
agreement – as if his desire says, ‘I want to get off this rock and go
for an ice cream’ and his voice of conscience replies ‘what a lovely
idea’. Were this the case, he would not still be sitting on the rock,
head on hand.
Instead, we can imagine a fierce debate inside his head, turning
over the pros and cons of a course of action. Perhaps the voices of
desire and conscience are vigorously debating a course of action or
the ethics of another’s personality. Maybe, seated on his seaside rock,
he is debating whether, despite doctor’s advice, to go for that ice
cream. Whatever the content of the internal debate, one might say
that Rodin’s thinker-as-debater has not been abstracted totally from
social life. Instead, his internal processes would be derived from
publicly observable debate, as he uses, silently and internally, a
public language. He must have observed and participated in debates,
and, thus, have acquired the skills of debate, or argument. Only if
he has done so can he sit there alone, arguing with himself.
This would imply that the skills of debate, or argument, are vital
for much of our thinking. To think about ethics, politics or human
character – in short, the questions which preoccupy social life – we
need the skills of language. Central to language are the skills of
argument, for language is not merely a device for naming objects or
representing external reality. Language provides the means of justification and criticism, and most notably the faculty for negation.
Indeed, a means of communication without negation, and without
the resources for justification and criticism, would scarcely qualify
to be a language (Billig, 1996).
Of all species which can communicate to fellow members, only
humans have the faculty for negation and, thereby, for argumentation. Other species can process visual information, recognise sounds
and remember to orientate to particular shapes. Chimpanzees can
even be taught to use sign language. But however much effort is
spent developing the linguistic skills of chimpanzees with sign
language, there is a ceiling. No psychologist has been able to teach
a chimpanzee to justify and criticise argumentatively. Only humans,
equipped with the syntax of negation, can do these things. As such,
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dialogic thinking, or the conduct of internal debate, is something
that is pre-eminently human.
THE STUDY OF THINKING
The linking of human thought to the use of language has a number
of implications for the sort of psychology that is being proposed by
discursive psychologists. In the first place, discursive psychology
recommends that the traditional topics of psychology should be
studied discursively. If psychological states are constituted within
and by discursive practices, then psychologists, instead of looking
within the head of the isolated individual, should be directing their
attention to the activities of discourse. This does not mean
examining the linguistic structure of language conceived as a total
structure, but looking at the actual, messy business of speech and
conversation. For this reason, many discursive psychologists have
adopted the methods of micro-sociology, in particular conversation
analysis.
This can be illustrated with respect to the topic of memory. Traditionally psychologists have searched inside the mind for
hypothetical memory stores. Discursive psychologists, on the
contrary, claim that this is to look in the wrong place. Human
memory is not merely, or even principally, about retaining stimuli.
It is about performing social actions, such as remembering a
birthday, remembering one’s manners or remembering the sacrifices
of past generations. There is a whole range of activities which we call
‘remembering’, or ‘forgetting’. Discursive psychologists claim that
we should investigate what activities are called ‘remembering’ and
how these activities are accomplished in social life. Above all,
discursive psychology examines the claims people make to
remember or forget things, and to see what they are doing in making
such claims. One of the findings of discursive psychology is that
people making memory claims are typically not reporting on inner
states, but doing other things (Edwards, 1997; Potter and Edwards,
1990; Middleton and Edwards, 1990). For example, if someone, on
returning from a trip, says to their partner ‘I did remember you all
the time I was away’, they are unlikely to be making a simple report
of an internal state. Instead, the memory claim itself will be an
action which is accomplishing important interactional business.
The same move of looking at the outward behaviour, rather than
the hypothesised internal structure, can be seen in relation to a topic
which has traditionally been central to social psychology – the study
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of attitudes. The discursive/rhetorical approach directs the psychologist’s attention to the dynamics of debate. One can see ‘the holding
of attitudes’ in terms of taking stances in matters of public controversy. Moreover, in participating in debate, people typically are
engaging in thinking, rather than outwardly expressing a preformed,
unchanging inner cognitive structure. In debates, and more
generally in conversations, people say novel things, making
utterances which in their detail have never been made before. Even
when talk returns to familiar themes, which the participants may
have discussed previously, it seldom, if ever, returns in exactly the
same ways (Billig, 1991). Every day, people formulate sentences
which they have never said before, and, indeed, which no one else
has ever precisely uttered before. In this respect, dialogic creativity
is a mundane, even banal, factor of the human condition.
It is hard to account for this mundane creativity, if analysts are
too cognitive or, indeed, too Foucauldian. Discourses, conceived as
total ideological structures, cannot constrain thinking absolutely, if
speakers are routinely formulating new utterances for new situations.
There must be some slippage between the hypothetical structure of
la langue and the actual business of talk. By the same token, it is too
simple to assume that our utterances are expressions of internal
cognitive processes, which must precede the utterances. Dialogue
takes place too quickly to assume that the outer pattern is merely a
reflection of something more important taking place internally.
Given that people are readily formulating new utterances as they
debate issues, then in debate the processes of thinking are directly
hearable. By studying the micro-processes of talk, psychologists can
directly observe, or hear, the social activity of thinking itself. In this
way, the psychologist can see how human thinking is rhetorically
accomplished and contested. What was formally assumed to be
hidden, indeed mysterious, can be directly studied in its complexity.
There is a further implication in taking this discursive position. It
is possible to see how thinking is learnt. If thinking is modelled on
conversation, then the child’s entry into dialogue is an entry into
thinking. Language is not learnt in order that the child can possess
a system of naming, or even to represent the outside world.
Language is learnt in order that children can participate in the conversations, and thus the social activity, that surround their lives.
From the earliest age, adults are speaking to them, telling them
things, commenting on their infantile reactions. As children learn
to respond, so they learn how to enter this rhetorical world of justi-
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fication and criticism. Moreover, they do not merely acquire the
formal syntax of argument, but they learn what counts as persuasive
justification and criticism, as adults and older children offer
‘convincing’ arguments why certain things should, or should not be,
performed. From a comparatively early age, children acquire the
skills to challenge arguments and contest the rhetoric they hear
(Dunn, 1988).
In all this learning, the child is not merely acquiring the
rudiments of language, but of human thinking; the lessons can be
transferred or internalised from outer dialogue into inner dialogue,
so that children learn to conduct their own internal dialogues or
thoughts, like Rodin’s thinker. The movement, thus, is from the
outer, social world of conversation into the inner world of thought,
not vice versa.
RHETORIC AND COMMONPLACES
Argumentation can be conceived as a dialectic of justification and
criticism. As a speaker justifies their own position, they criticise the
other’s position and vice versa (Billig, 1996). However, as Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca argued in the pathfinding The New Rhetoric
(1971), the discourse of argumentation is not simple. Speakers
typically do not use a rhetoric that simply addresses the anti-logoi of
the opponent. In seeking to persuade and to substantiate their
criticisms and justifications, they appeal to a ‘universal audience’.
They speak as if their reasoning is reasonable in an absolute sense,
as if any reasonable person, not just the particular addressee, would
be persuaded. As such, they use rhetoric which appears to be
addressed to the mythical universal audience – or, to use the phrase
of Bakhtin, speakers address themselves to a ‘super-addressee’
(Bakhtin, 1986). This general rhetorical point is substantiated by
detailed study of actual conversation, in which speakers argue for
their attitudinal positions (Schiffrin, 1984; Billig, 1991). Such
speakers not only use a discourse of ‘multisubjectivity’, which
suggests that opinions are subjective and, thus, equally valid, but
simultaneously they argue as if there is ‘intersubjectivity’, such that
their own position is ‘rationally’ superior to those of others.
In arguing, speakers typically employ rhetorical devices which
classical rhetoricians identified as ‘commonplaces’. These are values,
maxims and clichés that speakers assume that they share in common
with their fellow speakers. In discourse, these maxims are used to
justify particular stances. Because their sense is commonly shared,
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the maxims themselves do not need to be justified. Speakers can use
them as if they are self-evidently ‘common sense’ or good sense. The
communal sense of the particular speakers – their common, shared,
sense – appears as le bon sens, even as they dispute this commonality. In this way, the two meanings of ‘common sense’ become
conflated in dialogic practice. This rhetorical move makes what is
contingent appear as ‘natural’. According to theorists such as
Eagleton (1991), the transforming of the contingent into the natural
is one of the characteristic functions of ideology.
In contemporary political discourse, words such as ‘freedom’,
‘democracy’, ‘community’ act as commonplaces. Not only are they
commonly used, but their desirability is assumed to be commonly
shared. Speakers will not need to justify ‘freedom’, but will assume
its commonsensical positive value. They will, therefore, try to
promote their particular position as enhancing ‘freedom’, or
‘democracy’, and that of their opponents as restricting these selfevident desiderata. As such, rhetorical commonplaces – or the
unjustified maxims of justification – can convey the ideological
assumptions of a speaking community.
The existence of rhetorical commonplaces illustrates something
more general about the nature of common sense and ideology. In
argumentation, commonplaces are typically brought into
opposition, one against another. The ancient textbooks of rhetoric,
such as Rhetorica Ad Herennium, provided novice orators with lists of
suitable commonplaces to be used in particular sorts of debates. For
instance, prosecutors were provided with handy maxims about
‘justice’, whereas defenders were equipped with useful phrases about
the need for ‘mercy’; or political debaters were given the rhetorical
wherewithal to argue for boldness or for prudence.
These rhetorical guidebooks illustrate that common sense is not a
unitary structure, whose values are arranged in a consensually agreed
hierarchy of importance. Instead, in legal, political and daily life,
common sense’s common values are continually coming into
opposition with each other. The defending counsel might appeal to
mercy and the prosecution to justice. Both will be presuming that
the jury, or judge, value both mercy and justice. Similarly, political
audiences will acknowledge both prudence and boldness as desirable.
In fact, most proverbs come in opposite pairs. In English, ‘look before
you leap’ is matched by ‘a stitch in time’; ‘many hands make light
work’ can be counterposed by ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’.
Ideology, Language and Discursive Psychology
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Such contrary values of common sense are held by the same
persons. Juries do not split into those who only love ‘mercy’ and
hate ‘justice’ and vice versa. In short, common sense provides the
rhetorical resources for dilemmas. Speakers argue whether this
particular case should be treated as one suitable for mercy or justice,
not whether mercy or justice are desirable in the abstract. If the
rhetorical commonplaces are seen as ideological constructions, then
one might talk of ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988). Ideologies
do not dictate exactly what should be thought, thereby excluding
the necessity for thoughtful debate. Their very contrary themes
ensure the necessity for argumentation, continual debate and the
daily formulation of novel utterances. In this respect, ideologies are
not coherent systems of belief, but they constantly create dilemmas.
Thus, they enable, as well as demand, thinking. Simultaneously the
thinking is restricted. Speakers will use the rhetorical resources to
hand – they will be constrained by what passes for common sense
in their particular community. But in using these resources, they will
have to formulate new utterances, adapting the old maxims to new
situations, and, thereby, adding to, and perhaps altering, the shared
rhetoric.
RHETORICAL ROUTINES
In debating, speakers are consciously aware that they are talking,
arguing, responding, etc. In this sense, the thinking that is revealed
in argumentative debate is conscious thought. Similarly, the internal
debates of inner speech are presumed to be conscious. In consequence, the psychology of argumentation is, at least in the first
instance, a psychology of conscious thought. On the other hand,
the results of conversation analysis reveal that even the most simple
snatches of conversation are extraordinarily rich in their detail:
routine greetings or bidding farewell are complexly managed and
executed pieces of turn-taking (Nofsinger, 1991; Psathas, 1995). So
rich are these exchanges that it makes sense to say that speakers are
not consciously aware of all they are doing in conversation. We may
not be aware of the exact nature of our hand gestures, pitch or facial
expression – nevertheless all these will convey information to the
addressee. If speakers are asked to repeat themselves, it is rare, if not
impossible, for them to repeat exactly the original utterance: not
only may the small words be changed, but so may speed of delivery,
intonation, stress, etc.
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In short, much of what is accomplished in conversation is done
routinely. The codes of turn-taking, for example, are executed as
‘second nature’. Discursively, they are part of what Bourdieu (1990)
has called the ‘habitus’ (see Billig, 1999a, for details of this
argument). One might presume that ideology is present in the
routine, habitual aspects of dialogue. For instance, forms of address
and patterns of turn-taking may routinely ascribe speakers with
differing statuses and discursive positions (Billig, 1999b). This might
be accomplished unthinkingly through routine deictic utterances,
which ascribe identities by means of words such as ‘we’, ‘you’ and
‘them’. In this regard, ideology might be reproduced through the
routine, unnoticed small words of conversation.
The small, banal words of nationalism might provide an example.
Nationalism is more than a matter of waving flags, imagining
historic myths and consciously declaring loyalty. It has its banal
aspects (see Billig, 1995, for more details). For established nations
such as the United States, Britain and France to be reproduced as
nation states and for their inhabitants to remember their national
identity, there must be daily reminders of nationhood, often
operating below the level of outward conscious awareness. For
example, the majority of national flags are not consciously waved
or saluted. In the United States, for example, they are hanging
outside public buildings or are stitched onto the uniforms of public
servants. They are not to be consciously noticed, but, out of the
corner of the eye, they constantly flag nationhood, maintaining the
physical environment as a national space.
Little words function in the same way. Democratic politicians
routinely address the imagined national audience. As they consciously talk on a particular issue – such as taxation, law or the
failings of rivals – they will use the little word ‘we’, often conflating
‘we’, the party, ‘we’, the nation, and ‘we’, all right-thinking people
(Billig, 1995; Wilson, 1990). Even more banally, nationhood is
indicated in ‘neutral’ discourses such as weather forecasting. ‘The’
weather is typically assumed to be the national weather, illustrated
in newspapers and on television by maps of the nation. ‘We’, who
are presumed to suffer snow or enjoy sunshine, will be assumed to
be a national ‘we’ (see Billig, 1995 for details).
Thus, nationhood is often flagged in daily discourse, as the
attention is directed elsewhere. Readers of weather forecasts may not
be consciously aware of nationhood as they consciously absorb the
meteorological messages. Yet, at a level below conscious awareness,
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nationhood is being reproduced. If this psychological level is called
‘unconscious’, then this is not a Freudian unconscious, for nothing
is being repressed. Attention could be directed to the small words
and their deictic meaning spelled out. There are no psychological
forces preventing this.
UNCONSCIOUS REPRESSION
Freudian repression refers to thoughts that have been repressed from
conscious awareness and which are maintained outside of conscious
awareness by some sort of resistance. Although Freud considered the
notion of repression to be the key concept of psychoanalytic
thought, he actually had little to say about how we go about the
business of repressing thoughts and, in particular, how we acquire
the skills of repression. In order to rectify this gap in Freud, it has
been proposed that the notions of discursive psychology be extended
in order to see how the unconscious can be created dialogically (see
Billig, 1997a and 1999a, for more details). Of course, unconscious
repression is a major issue for any theory of ideology, for it draws
attention to issues that are collectively avoided in dialogue. If it
makes sense to talk of a dialogic unconscious, then it is necessary to
show how language is inherently both expressive and repressive –
and how we must learn to repress routinely in order to talk routinely.
The possibility of a dialogic, or rhetorically accomplished, unconscious implies that discourse analysts must observe both what is
talked about in conversation and what is not talked about. It can be
assumed that, on occasion, speakers are involved in a joint activity
of avoidance, so that particular ways of talking are repressed dialogically. An example of such avoidance can be given, taken from a study
investigating how English families talked about the British royal
family (for details of the study, see Billig, 1992). The study involved
listening to families talk about royal issues in their own homes. The
speakers rarely raised the issue of race, particularly in respect to the
question whether the heir to the throne might marry a non-white
person. The very issue raised difficult issues for white supporters of
the royal family, who saw the monarchy as symbol of nation and
identified with the monarch as the representation of their own
national identity. Such supporters could not say that the monarch
must always be white, for that would risk the accusation of racism.
Nor, for the same reasons, could they say that they could not identify
with non-white as the epitome of ‘Britishness’. Moreover, they could
not say that the Queen would disapprove of a non-white daughter-
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in-law (or son-in-law), for that would suggest that the Queen was
racist, and also that the speakers themselves, in identifying with a
racist figurehead, were themselves racist.
Instead, the speakers tended to adopt ambiguous ways of talking
when the issue was raised. They would talk about an amorphous
‘them’, saying ‘they would not allow it’, leaving unsaid who ‘they’
were. Or they might say that ‘the public’ would not stand for it, as
if they themselves were not part of that public. It was as if they were
projecting their own unacceptable wishes onto unspecified others.
Above all, awkward questions were not asked by the other members
of the family. It is as if all speakers conspired dialogically to protect
each other and to protect the projections. In this sense, the
avoidance was dialogically constructed and protected.
CONVERSATION AND PRACTICAL MORALITY
A sense of morality typically accompanies dialogic interaction.
Harold Garfinkel (1967), founder of ethnomethodology, claimed
that, in studying the micro-processes of social life, he was investigating ‘practical morality’. This can be seen in ‘turn-taking’, to which
conversation analysts have given much attention. In order for conversation to take place, there have to be complex codes about how
speakers alternate their ‘turns’, by yielding turns, taking up implied
invitations to speak, interrupting without disruption and so on. If
these unwritten, but daily practised, rules are transgressed, the risk
is not merely the breakdown of the immediate interaction, but also
a moral evaluation: speakers will accuse the transgressor of transgressing the morality of interaction.
This can be illustrated hypothetically by the codes for asking
questions. There is a lot of evidence that questions which are
requests will normally be phrased with ‘indirection’ in American and
European conversations, where direct questions will appear rude or
aggressive (Brown and Levinson, 1987). This can be seen in academic
seminars. At question time, critical questioners are expected to
preface their remarks with phrases such as, ‘I was fascinated to hear
what you said about X, I wonder if you have fully taken into account
...’ or ‘I was interested in your remarks about Y but was a bit
concerned that you didn’t mention the work of ...’. If critical
questions are raised too directly or intellectual dissatisfaction
expressed without any credit being expressed, then others are likely
to suggest that the moral codes of politeness have been breached and
that rudeness has been performed.
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Practically every utterance, if delivered inappropriately, carries the
possibility of moral censure. If we pitch our voice too high or too
loudly, if we intervene too quickly or too slowly, then we run the
risk of being seen to infringe the codes of politeness. As such, every
day we habitually practice this conversational morality. As we make
habitual utterances which have never been said before, we run the
risk of transgressing the morality which permits such utterance.
This view of morality, as being something which is routinely
accomplished in dialogue, could be allied to the Freudian view. For
Freud, the presence of moral restrictions is a sign of the presence of
temptation and desire. If there were no temptation, suggested Freud,
then there would be no reason for moral codes. Moreover, according
to Freud, temptations not only have to be resisted but often they
must be repressed: we cannot admit to ourselves that we have the
desires which we regularly resist, and so the temptations, which
morality forbids, must be pushed from consciousness.
A Freudian, viewing the complex codes of conversation and turntaking, should ask what conversational temptations all these codes
are being directed against. If complex codes are inbuilt into every
utterance, then the Freudian would see temptations as being everpresent. The stronger the codes, the more they suggest the
pervasiveness of resisted temptation. Thus, the daily accomplishment of conversation is being stalked by shameful hidden desire and
temptation. One might say that ordinary talk, conventionally
considered as ‘polite’, is somehow keeping at bay, or even repressing,
the temptation of rudeness.
There are reasons for supposing that the possibility of speaking
politely depends on being able to speak rudely (see Billig, 1997a and
1999a for more details). Politeness is not a biological imperative, but
children have to learn its codes and intonations. The paradox is that
as children learn the codes of politeness so they learn how to be
rude. Parents, or other adults, are frequently correcting children for
inappropriate talking. They often utter words to the effect of ‘don’t
say that, it’s rude’. In speaking thus the adult is doing two things:
they are indicating what is polite (how to speak) and also what is
rude (what should not be spoken). Moreover, they are doing it in a
conventionally rude way. Parents tend to talk to children in direct
ways which are unacceptable in adult conversation (for details see
Billig 1999a). ‘Don’t say that, it’s rude’ is not typically the sort of
utterance to be made in adult polite conversation. Thus, an adult,
in so speaking to a child, is not just indicating what rude talk is, but
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the adult is exemplifying rudeness. Therefore, as the child learns
politeness, it also learns to acquire the dangerous weapons of
rudeness. Indeed, it is not possible to have one without the other.
Studies of mother–child interaction show that the teaching of
language, morality and polite behaviour is not smooth (Dunn,
1988). Between the ages of two and three especially, young children
deliberately challenge and resist the authority of the mother. Above
all, the breaking of rules is a matter of enjoyment, especially those
rules forbidding talk about bodily functions or the making of rude
remarks. This suggests something of which Freud was well aware –
there is pleasure in rudeness. As the child becomes older and is
expected to enter the world of mature conversation, such pleasure
must be curtailed. Adult speakers cannot talk as a two-year-old, but
must become responsible and polite. Thus, politeness demands the
repression of rudeness and of childish jokes. In Freudian terms, what
is repressed is desired; it is an object of temptation. In this respect,
the learning of dialogue creates pleasures and desires, which the
child must learn to repress or ‘grow out of’.
It might be objected that ‘repressing’ and ‘growing out’ of
pleasures are two very different things. If we grow out of the
pleasures, then we stop desiring those pleasures: they no longer
attract us. But if we repress those childish pleasures, we secretly still
desire them, but we deny these desires even to ourselves. The
question to ask is what evidence is there that the pleasures of
rudeness are repressed, rather than grown out of.
From a Freudian perspective, the most direct evidence comes from
jokes. As Freud realised in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
many jokes derive their humour from the fact that they express
repressed desires, especially those relating to sex and aggression.
Many of the great comic heroes, from Diogenes of Sinope to
Groucho Marx and John Cleese, are unspeakably rude. Instead of
being outraged by their displays of breaking the restricting codes of
politeness, onlookers greet their antics with loud signs of pleasure.
It is as if we would like to do what the comic does. John Cleese, as
Basil Fawlty, not only insults the guests in his hotel, but he mocks
the rules of politeness by insulting through overpoliteness. Because
the joke is merely a joke, the release is safe – the rules are in fact
strengthened by their breach being defined as just a joke.
There are several implications which can be drawn from this
linkage of conversation and the idea of repression:
Ideology, Language and Discursive Psychology
149
(a) Adult conversation is restricting: it makes demands on talkers.
Codes of turn-taking, which are necessary for the activity of
dialogue, must be routinely followed and enacted in conversation.
(b) These dialogic codes of politeness create the possible pleasures of
rudeness, which if continually put into practice would make
language as a social activity impossible.
(c) Desires to break the routine codes of conversation must be
repressed or driven from the mind. If speakers are conscious of
the desire to be rude (for example to shout ‘Mr Piggyface’ to
one’s fellow conversationalist) then they will be unable carry on
routine, habitual conversations.
(d) In consequence, the child who learns to be a moral, ordinary
speaker, must learn to repress.
(e) This involves not merely repressing the desire to be rude, but
also learning to avoid disturbing subjects, by changing topics,
etc., for the mature speaker must learn the routine rhetoric of
dialogic avoidance.
(f) In consequence, the repression of desire is basic to language. As
such language is not merely expressive, but it is repressive.
(g) If, in learning to participate in dialogue, the child must learn to
repress, then the child acquires skills of repression that later in
life can be applied inwardly to drive out uncomfortable
thoughts. Thus the skills of repression can parallel the skills of
thinking: what the child first learns in outward debate can later
be used in the dialogues of inner thinking.
FREUD’S CASES
Freud’s classic case histories can be reinterpreted in the light of
discursive psychology’s insistence on paying attention to the ‘small’
words of dialogue (for details of these reinterpretations, see Billig,
1997c, 1998, 1999a, 1999c). Not only do these cases bear rereading
for the light they continue to throw upon enduring issues in psychoanalytic theory (Spence, 1994), they also illustrate a further point
in relation to the idea that the unconscious is dialogically produced.
If language is repressive, then even Freud’s own texts may have their
hidden or repressive aspects. More particularly, in drawing attention
to repression, and in revealing its hidden aspects, Freud may have
also been engaging in repressive activity himself. And this repression
may also be in line with wider ideological factors.
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One aspect of the case histories that has particular interest for a
discursive psychologist is Freud’s accounts of his own dialogues with
his patients. Freud was especially interested in the ‘big’ symbolism
contained in his patient’s words. A discursive psychologist, by
contrast, might look towards the details of dialogue which Freud
seems to ignore. This is notable in the case of Little Hans, the young
child whose development provided Freud with direct evidence for
the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1990a). Freud’s account concentrates
on Hans’s desires, most notably his sexual desires for his mother and
aggressive impulses towards his father. According to Freud, Hans
represses both sets of desires. However, if Freud’s account is read
carefully, especially in relation to the notes which Hans’s father takes
of conversations with his young son, it is possible to see more than
the young child’s desires. It is possible to hear his parents talking to
him, often changing the subject, when Hans asks awkward
questions. The parents are instructing him into the conventions of
morality, telling him to be ashamed of certain wishes, to behave and
to speak appropriately; they can even be heard to project their own
desires onto Hans, as jealous parents, denying their own jealousy
and teaching the young boy to believe that he is being unfairly
jealous (Billig, 1998). In this way, Hans learns that some things are
to be talked about and others are shameful. He learns discursive
devices for changing the topics of conversation, and these discursive
devices can be used to change the topics of his own internal
thoughts (for details, see Billig, 1999a).
SEXUALITY, POLITENESS AND DORA
Freud’s case histories suggest that it is the sexual which is, above all,
forbidden and is not to be discussed openly. But there is a paradox:
Freud in his texts discusses sex openly; Hans’s parents are Freudians
– they are constantly bringing up sexual themes; and in psychoanalytic interviews, sex is talked about. Freud saw this as a liberation
from repression, with the texts of psychoanalysis providing a nonrepressive form of discourse in which nothing is hidden. Yet, if
language is repressive, then these texts, which are so open about
sexuality, might be drawing attention away from other matters, of
which it was even more difficult to speak. In other words, Freud’s
own texts might be creating their own silences.
This can be illustrated by a slightly earlier case than that of Little
Hans – the celebrated case of Dora, which Freud published as
‘Fragment of analysis of case of hysteria’ in 1905 (for full details of
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the analysis, see Billig, 1997c and 1999a). Dora, a young woman of
18, was showing symptoms of hysteria. Her family situation was
complex, as her family’s life was intertwined with that of another
family, the Ks. Dora’s father, a domineering man, who insisted that
his daughter consult Dr Freud, was having an affair with Frau K. Dora
regularly looked after Frau K’s children. Her father was regularly
conspiring that the two families spend time together and share
holidays. Herr K had been pursuing Dora since she was 14. On
occasion, he had even grabbed her, tried to kiss her, and entered her
bedroom on holiday. At last Dora told her father about Herr K’s
advances. Her father refused to believe her. Dora had been greatly
distressed and had threatened suicide. Her father had wanted Dr
Freud to cure her of this nonsense.
Freud sought to fulfil his remit by locating the cause of Dora’s
‘pathology’ in her unconscious wishes, rather than in her family circumstance. He claimed that she really loved Herr K (which she
denies and which Freud takes as sign of resistance). Also, he later
suggested that she had lesbian desires for Frau K, which likewise had
been repressed.
Feminist critics have recently criticised Freud for taking an
apolitical stance towards Dora, and ignoring the politics of the
family (see Billig, 1997c and 1999a for details). However, they, in
common with Freud, can be said also to be apolitical, in that their
analyses avoid the outward politics of the time. Freud’s original case
report did not mention that both the doctor and the patient were
Jewish (many of today’s critics overlook the political significance of
this). This might not seem a relevant detail for a psychoanalytic
report today but at the time Vienna was a deeply anti-Semitic society.
Its elected mayor, Karl Lueger, was an anti-Semitic demagogue,
whose party had promised to sack all Jewish doctors.
At the time when Freud treated Dora, he was at the most isolated
point of his life. He believed he had failed to gain promotion at the
University of Vienna because of anti-Semitism. There were regular
boycotts of lectures by Jewish academics. Freud himself had
withdrawn from lecturing, even to fellow doctors. His only regular
audience was the B’nai B’rith, the Jewish defence organisation.
Dora’s family, like that of Freud, were assimilating Jews, who
looked forward to joining mainstream society (see Decker, 1991, for
details). As with many bourgeois Jews in the Vienna of that time,
these hopes included an identification with German culture. It was
a painful identification, for the culture was deeply anti-Semitic.
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Sometimes, bourgeois Jews ignored the anti-Semitism of the culture
with which they were identifying. Sometimes they took on such
assumptions, directing them against Ostjuden, or eastern, nonGerman-speaking Jews, as if they themselves were not really Jewish,
but the eastern Jews were the real Jews, and the ones to criticise. One
might say that an avoidance was built into the routines of life and
conversation.
This avoidance, which was part of the ideological climate of those
times, even reached into the dialogic routines of Freud’s consulting
room. It is not merely that Freud and Dora do not seem to have talked
about the political situation of the time (Decker, 1991). Perhaps that
is unsurprising. After all, it is in the nature of psychoanalytic conversations that the topics are personal rather than political. Dora
seems to have understood the conversational game. She appears to
have talked readily without undue inhibition. However, there is one
point at which the conversation appears to have come unstuck, as
Freud asks a question and Dora avoids replying.
The moment comes when Freud is interpreting the dream, which
in the published report is presented as ‘the second dream’. Dora says
that she dreamt of going to a strange town. She meets a strange man
and asks him the way to the railway station. She is trying to return
home, because she has heard that her father has died and that all
the family are at the cemetery. Freud interprets the dream in terms
of shameful desires. He claims that the underlying meaning is based
on Dora’s wish to kill her father, in order to be free to engage in
sexual activity. In constructing this interpretation, Freud brilliantly
makes connections between the German words for cemetery, station
and female sexual organs.
Given that Freud claimed that dreams were ‘over-determined’, or
have multiple meanings, it is rather surprising that he misses obvious
religious interpretations. He does not offer an interpretation which
suggests that Dora wishes to be freed from her father’s traditions, in
order to marry a stranger, or non-Jew. Jewish themes are indicated by
the phrase ‘the cemetery’, to which the rest of the family have gone.
‘The’ cemetery, in this context, would be assumed to be a Jewish
cemetery (in fact, a year after Freud’s report was published, Dora, by
now married, converted to Protestantism, along with her husband
and infant child).
The most remarkable incident of all occurs when Freud asks about
the strange town in which Dora dreams she is wandering. He links
the town to Dresden, which she had previously visited. She describes
Ideology, Language and Discursive Psychology
153
that visit, mentioning that she visited the art gallery. Freud inquires
about the visit. Dora replies that she stood in front of Raphael’s
pictures of the Madonna for two hours. Freud then asks the
seemingly obvious and innocuous question: what had she liked
about the picture?
It is at this point that the conversation breaks down. Freud reports
that she could give no clear answer to his question. Finally, she
answers, ‘The Madonna’. Most surprisingly Freud does not ask why
she was stuck for an answer. Nor in his report does he present it as a
problem. Quite the contrary, he seems to dismiss the incident,
mentioning in a footnote that Dora seems to be showing an identification with the Madonna, and that this represents a culturally
approved desire for motherhood and thus, a guilt-free desire for
sexual intercourse. Freud does not apparently see the contradiction
in this analysis: if the identification is culturally acceptable, then
why should there be such hesitation?
Of course, the identification in this case was not culturally
acceptable. Freud does not discuss the symbolic meaning of a Jewish
girl staring at the Madonna, as if identifying with the mother of
Jesus. If her staring indicates a wish to be a mother, it is a Christian
mother (as, in fact, she became). A whole complex of issues,
touching on guilt, betrayal and self-hatred, is involved. But Freud in
his report avoids all this, just as he and Dora in their conversation
had apparently done. It was easier to talk (and write) of sexual
matters than it was to speak of other things.
This does not reflect the personal psychology of Freud and Dora.
It is a message of their times and conditions of life. The repressed
themes were part of habits of avoidance, which were maintained by
routine conversations leading in other directions. If the embarrassing topic should intrude (as it does following Freud’s question about
the Madonna), then after a momentary embarrassment conversation is directed along other paths, and all is forgotten. But, as with
Freudian repression, what is forgotten is not obliterated, never to
return, but leaves its trace.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the greatest psychological theory
of self-deception was developed at a time and place when an element
of collective self-deception was built into conditions of life. In such
conditions, avoidance can seem natural and rational. By contrast,
too unbending a gaze, or too voiced a sentiment, might be taken as
a sign of irrationality. This is illustrated by a story from Freud’s own
family circle.
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The youngest of Freud’s five sisters, Adolphine, was considered
sweet, oversensitive and slightly dotty by the rest of the family.
Sigmund, in one of his letters to his wife, had said she had ‘such a
great capacity for deep feeling and alas an all-too-fine sensitiveness’.
Sigmund’s son Martin, years later, was to write how she used to
imagine insults as she walked along the streets. Other members of
the family put this down to her silliness, verging on paranoia. She
would say ‘Did you hear what that man said? He called me a dirty
stinking Jewess and said it was time we were all killed’ (see M. Freud,
1957, p. 16). It was rather a joke with the other Freuds.
Today, it is not possible to dismiss Adolphine. In the most awful
way, she was proved correct. Years later, when the Nazis invaded
Vienna, Freud was able to escape in time. So too was Dora, whom
Freud had not seen for years. But Adolphine and three other sisters
had no escape, being taken to the camps from which they were never
to return. Even Sigmund Freud, justifiably praised for hearing things
which few previously had dared to hear, had not been able to bring
himself to hear what his youngest sister not only heard, but had
understood.
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8
The Birth of the Subject and
the Use of Truth: Foucault
and Social Critique
Mark Haugaard
As was argued in the Introduction, from Marx onwards the concept
of ideology has become linked to the existence of a social subject
with meaningful autonomy (the humanist problematic) and
knowledge which is undistorted by power and domination. The
social subject is considered to have internalised knowledge which
distorts its perception of reality in a way which is beneficial to a
dominant elite – the bourgeoisie in Marxism. It is because the
dominated internalise ideology that they willingly participate in the
reproduction of structural forms which are contrary to their actual
interests. The unmasking of ideology presupposes an active subject
who has the capacity to reflect upon the system of knowledge into
which they have been socialised and, furthermore, who can replace
it with knowledge which does not mirror the distorting effects of
domination. Within this perspective, social critique is practised by
using truth to unmask the distorting effects of domination. Philosophically speaking, truth is a view from ‘nowhere’. If something is
true, it is true irrespective of particular ‘local’ culturally constituted
knowledges and, as a consequence, cannot mirror deformation
brought about by power and domination.
Social critique also presupposes a subject who has the capacity to
transcend local context. If, as postmodernists argue, the social
subject is the mere effect of the systems of thought into which they
are socialised, they cannot distance themselves from previously
internalised knowledge. They become like flotsam and jetsam upon
a sea of meaning which tosses them from one horizon to the next.
In contrast to this, the more autonomous subject of ideology is an
agent who has the capacity to transcend local contextuality and
critically evaluate it. As I have argued elsewhere (Haugaard, 1997),
this subject need not transcend local meaning entirely but, rather,
should be considered more as a person on a raft who has the
capacity to rebuild, and consequently transform, their craft without
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ever getting off it. It is a question of mirroring meanings and
contexts against each other in a manner which makes agents selfconscious of the way in which specific meanings are implicated in
relations of domination. ‘Local’ truths become revealed as covert
‘wills to power’ in a process which entails mirroring ‘truths’ and
systems of thought against each other. This consciousness raising is
not some obscure process but, rather, reflects aspects of everyday
life. As has been argued by Giddens (1984), social consciousness
comprises both a tacit aspect (practical consciousness) and
knowledge which we can put into words (discursive consciousness).
These are not hermetically sealed aspects of social knowledge but,
rather, are characterised by a continual flow of information from
one to the other. When we learn a foreign language, or visit an
unfamiliar culture, we use discursive consciousness knowledge for
practical consciousness tasks. Similarly, but in reverse, when we read
Goffman’s descriptions of everyday life or Foucault’s description of
the Panopticon, our tacit knowledge of social life is rendered
discursive – it is a process of recognition of what ‘we already know’.
This consciousness raising, or move from practical consciousness to
discursive consciousness, has a radical aspect and undermines
relations of domination because the routine reproduction of
meaning and structure suddenly becomes subject to critical scrutiny.
The things which individuals have always done because ‘that’s the
way we do things around here’ are suddenly problematised.
However, this process presupposes an agent who has the capacity
to evaluate relative truth claims. If Foucault’s description of the
Panopticon is to have radical implications, the reader must believe
that this is not some ‘arbitrary’ new description. However, this need
not necessitate absolute truth but, rather, the ability to balance interpretative horizons against each other. As was argued by Weber, actors
switch rationalities all the time. They are not made up of one
continuous interpretative horizon – they may be driven by instrumental rationality during the day and affective action in the
evening. Following Bauman (1989) and Habermas (1984, 1987),
systematic failure to switch interpretative horizon is what makes it
possible for actors to collaborate in the reproduction of systems of
domination which they never evaluate – the ‘ordinary German’
during the Holocaust and the disenchanted being who allows
‘system rationality’ to colonise the ‘life world’. In contrast, social
critics can stand on one part of their interpretative raft while they
‘saw up’ another part for the sake of a better (more truthful and egal-
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
159
itarian) vision of how their raft should be constructed (Haugaard,
1997, pp. 163–187).
When we read Foucault’s histories they have the effect on the
reader of social critique. However, Foucault’s theoretical insistence,
that there is no truth without power and the ‘death of the subject’,
would appear to preclude such a possibility. It has frequently been
argued that Foucault’s relativisation of truth undermines the epistemological foundations of his critique of modern knowledge. As has
been observed by Taylor, the ‘... regime-relativity of truth means that
we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime’ (Taylor,
1984, p. 176). It is also a criticism frequently levelled at Foucault’s
work that the death of the subject undermines the possibility of the
type of radical political action which, on another level, Foucault
advocates – this lies at the core of the conservative implications of
Foucault’s work noted by Habermas and Nancy Fraser (Kelly, 1994).
In this chapter we shall examine Foucault’s concept of ‘truth’ and
his declared death of the subject from a different perspective than
characterises this form of critique. We shall take it as given that the
total relativisation of truth entails an undermining of the epistemological foundations of radical critique and accept that there is an
inevitable conservatism inherent in the hypothesis of the death of
the subject. We shall look at the broader issue of whether the type
of social critique to which Foucault was committed actually entails
either the death of the subject or deep philosophical relativism. In a
certain sense, this can be regarded as a defence of Foucault against
postmodern trends in his work which undermine its utility for the
project of critical theory and critique of ideology. While it is beyond
dispute that Foucault perceived himself as a radical philosophical
relativist and that he was strongly committed to the idea of the death
of the subject, we shall argue that neither are actually intrinsic to
the logic of the theoretical position which Foucault develops in his
genealogical histories. The point of this argument is not primarily
to defend or criticise Foucault: the issue is much wider than the work
of a particular author. If we recognise, as Foucault did, that relations
of domination are recreated through the reproduction of systems of
meaning and reinforced through the language of truth production,
we need to know if this recognition is necessarily self-defeating.
While Foucault presented his analysis in terms that have selfdefeating implications, we shall argue that these self-defeating
implications are not inherent to such a perception of relations of
domination and, furthermore, that the actual content of Foucault’s
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genealogy offers evidence to support such a thesis. We shall argue
that the genealogical method represents a birth of the subject in the
sense that the subject has autonomy not only to act creatively as a
reproducer of meaning but, more significantly, also as a creator of
new meaning. With regard to truth, Foucault’s work tells us nothing
concerning the philosophical issues which lead to relativism. This is
theoretically important because, once this is realised, Foucault’s work
can be used as a source of critique by those who hold neither with
the death of the subject nor with deep philosophical relativism.1
Foucault’s archaeological work is a form of radical critique where
our taken-for-granted reality – the systems of knowledge which
shape tacit perceptions of the world – are thrown open to question.
This is done by showing us ‘... how that-which-is has not always
been i.e., that the things which seem most evident to us are always
formed in the confluence of encounters ...’ and that these perceptions have been made and, as a consequence, they can also be
unmade (Foucault, 1988, pp. 36–37). It is a form of critique which he
describes as the ‘flushing out’ of thought whereby he shows us that
what we take for granted as self-evident is in fact not so (Foucault,
1988, p.155).
If we consider the social agent’s interpretative horizon as constituted through frameworks of meaning, a Foucauldian social critique
is a form of interrogation of that horizon. What Foucault called the
historical a priori (Foucault, 1970, pp. xv–xxiv) are the tacit meanings
which make us see the world the way we do. The historical a priori
is our taken-for-granted reality which constitutes us as we are.
One of Foucault’s techniques for making us question our historical
a priori is to give his readers a jolt by thrusting them into an alternative reality. For instance, The Order of Things begins with a bizarre
and puzzling quotation from Borges about
... a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that
‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b)
embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g)
stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et
cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a
long way off look like flies.’ (Foucault, 1970, p. xv)
For us the passage is impossible to comprehend because the ordering
device which could link, for instance, ‘stray dogs’ with ‘having just
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
161
broken the water pitcher’, is entirely absent. We do not know what
it means to see the world in this way. We cannot comprehend
because, to use Heideggerian language, the being-in-the-world of the
Chinese encyclopaedist is entirely different from our being-in-theworld. Because the former’s being-in-the-world is so entirely different
from our own, we are confronted with the stark fact that it is possible
to see reality, and to be, in an entirely different way from the way we
see and are. The consequence of such a confrontation with radical
difference of being is to make ‘that-which-is appear as something
which might not be or that might not be as it is’ (Foucault, 1988,
p. 37) and, in so doing, we realise that our taken-for-granted reality
is a historical construct which has been made and, as a consequence
can be unmade. Our way of perceiving the world and our method of
reason ‘... reside on a base of human practice and history; and that
since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as
we know how it is that they were made’ (p. 37).
Foucault’s method of social critique is radical in the sense that he
performs a critique of the interpretative framework which constitutes our horizon of meaning and being. It is not only what we say
which is interrogated, but the system of meaning which we use to
say what we do which is subject to critique. However, this form of
social critique is theoretically deeply problematic because it raises
the problem of meaning and social stability: if Foucauldian critique
is to have a political purpose then we must presuppose that it is
possible to change these meanings.
Meaning, of course, is not intrinsic to the world. The constitution
of meaning is contingent across space (in different geographically
situated cultures) and time (the historical evolution of thought which
Foucault documents). However, if meaning is arbitrary and
contingent, as is evidenced by differences of meaning, we are
confronted with the problem of the stability of meaning. This is the
problem of social theory – the problem of social order – whereby we
have to account for the fact that meaning does not disintegrate even
though it is both conventional and historically contingent. This is
made particularly problematic if we take seriously the Foucauldian
point that meanings entail relations of domination and subjectification. It seems almost logical to suppose that dominated social actors
might simply choose to opt out of social order. When confronted
with meanings which disadvantage them, one could almost imagine
disadvantaged social actors saying words to the effect, ‘Sorry, that’s
all arbitrary and contingent social convention, I don’t accept it!’ The
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aggregate consequence would be praxiological chaos, which clearly
does not happen – social order is reproduced with remarkable
(though, significantly, not total) regularity. Obviously coercion can,
to an extent, explain why actors do not ‘opt out’ of social order but
it does not do so in its entirety – social order is not simply recreated
through the coercion of the losers by the winners.
In Foucault’s archaeology the answer to the problem of social
order is a holistic systemic solution: social order is reproduced as a
consequence of its systemic properties. Because meanings are constituted relationally it is not possible for individual actors to contest
specific meanings. Social change only happens systemically as one
system replaces another – what Foucault termed discontinuity. Alternatively, we have stability.
If we follow Wittgenstein’s private language argument to its logical
conclusion, it is impossible to give meaning to a word by confronting it with an external nonlinguistic context. Hence, new
meanings are never introduced externally, with the consequence
that languages are self-reproducing local ways of life.2 Similarly, in
Sausurre the meaning of a word is created by its membership of a
linguistic system in which the meaning of each word is constituted
through relational difference from other words within the system:
... in language there are only differences. Even more important: a
difference generally implies positive terms between which the
difference is set up; but in language there are only differences
without positive terms. Whether we take the signifier or the
signified, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed
before the linguistic system, but only conceptual or phonic differences that have issued from the system. (Saussure, 1964, p. 120)
Consequently, truly new meaning is an impossibility: we are simply
recyclers of already preconstituted meanings. Meaning is not created
by the intention of the speaker and, while it has to be accepted that
the social subject is the reproducer of meaning, she is never the
creator of meaning.3
This systemic view is prominent in Foucault’s archaeology. Here
the greater system, which confers meaning through relational
difference, is the episteme, and the base subunits (the theoretical
equivalent of words in Saussure) are statements. In a manner theoretically similar to words in language, statements confer meaning
upon each other:
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
163
There is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent
statement; but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole,
always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from
them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a
network of statements, in which it has a role, however minimal it
may be, to play. (Foucault, 1989, p. 99)
In a manner which is analogous to Sausurre’s’ analysis of language,
in the archaeological episteme all statements refer to each other and
preclude the truly creative act of making a statement which is nonepistemic. The social subject is trapped inside her particular
epistemic context and is, in this sense, dead. This explains how,
despite their conventional and contingent nature, systems of
meaning remain stable. However, it does so much too effectively in
the sense that it is a theoretisation of systemic stability which entails
that individuals are epistemically trapped and, hence, the enterprise
of radical critique is an impossibility. However, I would now suggest
that the genealogy contains an implicit way out of this problem.
In the genealogy, social change is linked to power and truth.
Power is not viewed as a teleological source of social change. Power
has no essence and is not situated anywhere and, hence, there is no
teleology of power (Foucault, 1981, p. 92). Power has to do with
struggle (Foucault, 1979, pp. 26–27) and is always exercised (Foucault,
1980, p. 89). According to this perception, power is ‘... the reign of
peace in civil society ...’ whereby power is the reinscription of the
rules of war. In other words, power is war by other means (Foucault,
1980, p. 90).
In the genealogy there are two levels of conflict. There are the
conflicts which take place within a regime of truth production and
there is the deeper conflict at the level of meaning. At the latter level
‘... power produces: it produces reality: it produces domains of
objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 194). This distinction
between deep conflict and more superficial conflict can be illustrated
by analogy with chess. In chess, actors prevail over one another
within certain rules and local frameworks of meaning. There is no
deeper conflict in the sense that meaning and rules are not thrown
open to question but, rather, they facilitate conflict between the
players. In the game of chess we can become better and better players
and, in this way, increase our local power. However, unlike in social
life, it is not possible to engage in conflict over meaning. The latter
is a conflict which is frequently motivated by the desire to create
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new relations of domination by making it possible to win in new
ways. It is with reference to distinction between these levels of
conflict that we should interpret Foucault’s observation that the
conflict between Marx and the bourgeois economists was a storm in
a children’s paddling pool (Foucault, 1970, p. 262). That particular
conflict presupposed the reproduction of a shared framework of
meaning. It was like a game of chess where there was great skill but
no questioning of the system of meaning which defined the
parameters of the conflict.
Integral to power as the production of reality, or interpretative
frameworks, is the role of truth – politics and power are a struggle
for truth. ‘“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered
procedures for the production, regulation, distribution and operation
of statements’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). The struggle for domination,
which constitutes the essence of power, is a struggle for truth. ‘Truth’
is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce
and sustain it, and to the effects of power which induce and which
extend it: a ‘régime’ of truth (p. 133).
This perceived link between power and truth provides a potential
way out of total systemic determinism. Conceptual space is created
for social action of the type which entails a change of meaning. The
battle for truth can be used to encode the constitution of meaning
because of the nonrelative status which historically has always been
accorded to truth. If the creation of new meaning is linked to truth,
it is not systemically derived but, in its place, an illusion is created
that meaning is somehow intrinsic to the newly created object of
knowledge. If the case can be made that a new meaning is not
merely a proposed new convention, then there is compelling reason
for others to accept it. As a consequence of its status as a ‘view from
nowhere’ (as an extra-systemic source of meaning) truth becomes
the foundation for the introduction of new meaning into conventional systems of meaning.
Truth is not, of course, some external teleological source as, for
instance, reason is for Hegel. Rather, it exists at the level of local
strategies. Actors struggle to create new objects of meaning because
the existence of particular objects as carriers of meaning in some way
benefits them. In this context we can make use of Bourdieu’s
extended use of the word ‘capital’.4 If we take capital as referring to
a local resource which a select number of actors have exclusive use
of, the struggle over production of meaning is part of a system-wide
struggle over capital. Individual actors create new objects in order to
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
165
tap into new sources of capital. To see how this takes place let us take
the instance of Pierre Rivière, who was accused and convicted of
murdering his mother and two sisters (Foucault, 1975). What
interested Foucault concerning the Rivière case was the way in which
experts insisted on producing a large body of documents concerning
the life of Rivière. It is significant that these documents were not
necessary for the conviction – the guilt of Rivière was beyond dispute
and it was quite evident that the judge in the case did not know
what to do with these documents. The importance of this body of
knowledge constructed around the person of Rivière lay in its contribution to the creation of a new system of meaning (criminology)
which contained a new field of objects from which truth could be
obtained – the delinquent, the perpetual offender and the dangerous
individual. In other words, Pierre Rivière was a new object or carrier
of meaning which a certain group of individuals (would-be criminologists, psychologists and sociologists) fought to create for the
purpose of producing a new source of capital. The disciplines of criminology, psychology and sociology became resources which gave
specific actors (criminologists, psychologists and sociologists) capital
in the form of a monopoly on expertise.
In the modern period, objects of meaning include living beings
who configure the interpretative horizon of the newly created
‘sciences of man’. For the specialists in the ‘science of man’ the fight
for creation of these objects is motivated by a desire for capital, while
the unintended effect of this fight for capital is the subjectification
of the living beings as they become objects of truth.
Meaning and methods of truth production circumscribe possibilities of conflict. They tame conflict by preventing it from
degenerating into war. In this case, war is the equivalent of praxiological chaos or the total degeneration of social order. Truth creates
new objects around which a new order can be created without
praxiological degeneration by providing a definite threshold for
systemic change. Actors cannot simply create new objects of
meaning as alternative conventional ways of life – this would lead
to praxiological chaos. Truth provides a brake upon systemic
change. We either have systemic stability whereby meanings are
simply reproduced or, in exceptional circumstances, new meaning
is created through the discovery of new objects of truth. These
additions to, or changes of, the social system happen as the consequence of local conflicts which are carried out by individual actors
fighting to manufacture capital through the creation of a new social
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order which is presented as something other than an arbitrary set of
conventions through a link to truth.
It is because Foucault is interested in deep conflicts – conflicts over
meaning – that his histories are populated with names which are
unfamiliar to us. Conventional histories of ideas document local
victories of great players, but what they leave out are the names of
those whose local conflicts contribute to the creation of new
meanings and which, in turn, constitute the context of the victories
and defeats within shared systems of meaning and truth production.
The big names of conventional history are like chess champions who
play brilliantly within the rules of the game but are not responsible
for the creation of the system of meaning which they reproduce.
Pierre Rivière is an instance of what Foucault termed the
‘dangerous individual’.5 As an object, the dangerous individual lives
among us as a threat which we need experts to identify and manage.
For the would-be experts this object of knowledge entails the
creation of a body of expertise which constitutes capital. It is not
possible to set oneself up as an expert upon any object. It has to be
proved that this object represents something other than a personal
whim, and this is achieved by the link to truth.6 As a ‘view from
nowhere’ or, more specifically, as a view from outside the system of
convention, the ‘dangerous individual’ does not represent the mere
subjectivity of those for whom it constitutes a source of capital.
The struggle for new meaning through truth production provides
a method whereby social change can take place without presupposing the disintegration of social order. The individual does not simply
introduce new arbitrary objects as carriers of meaning within social
order but does so by linking these new objects to a stable point
outside existing social order. This is done without any presupposed
grand teleological project of historical change: actors engage in this
struggle over the processes of truth production because they have
vested interests in creating new objects of knowledge which they
can use as sources of capital. Interpreted in this way, the social
subject is not decentred from, or irrelevant to, the creation of
meaning but the creator of new meaning through participation in
local struggles for new sources of capital.
The names which Foucault writes into history are active social
subjects, not the decentred subjects presupposed by the death of the
subject. However, it may be thought that this birth of the subject
appears to offer little hope for the creation of a better society. While
we have shown that the proposition of an active social subject does
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
167
not entail the conservatism deriving from determinism (Habermas’
and Fraser’s point), this may appear to be a struggle which is going
nowhere because the link between power and truth entails a
nihilistic relativisation of truth (Taylor’s objection). However,
contrary to appearances (and to Foucault’s own perceptions), this is
not theoretically the case.
In the genealogy, the use of truth is analysed. Genealogical
histories are an account of how truth is deployed in the struggle over
meaning. As Foucault observes: following Nietzsche, he does not
concern himself with ‘What is the surest path to truth?’ but rather,
‘What is the hazardous career that Truth has followed?’ (Foucault,
1980, p. 66; 1988, p. 107). However, I would argue that answering
the question ‘What is the surest path to truth?’ involves a very
different discourse (to use Foucault’s term) or language game (to use
Wittgensteinian terminology) than is entailed by the question ‘What
is the hazardous career that Truth has followed?’ In order to make
this distinction clearer, let us term the former a ‘philosophical’
discourse or language game and the latter a ‘sociological’ one: the
philosopher is interested in the surest path to truth, whereas the sociologist is preoccupied with the use which people make of truth or, in
the case of historical sociology, the use which actors have made of truth.
In the philosophical-discourse formation the question of truth is
one concerning epistemology, whereas in the sociological-discourse
formation the investigation is ultimately an empirical one concerning
behaviour, even if the latter is theoretically grounded. Foucault
documents conflicts, strategies of domination and power relations
which are inextricably bound up with regimes of truth production
– he analyses the process of truth production within the discourse
formation of historical sociology. However, the local truths of
historical sociology do not tell us anything concerning the philosophical status of truth. As Foucault was at great pains to observe, a
statement made in one discursive formation has an entirely different
meaning from the same statement made in a different discursive
formation. The statement that ‘truth is a disguised will to power’ or
that ‘truth is inextricably bound up with relations of domination’
has an entirely different meaning within the discourse of historical
sociology than it does in philosophy. It is only in the latter that such
statements entail relativism. By following the hazardous career of
truth, Foucault does not give us any information on the surest way
to truth nor does he commit us to the conclusion that there is no
such path.
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
While it is a valid observation that the philosophical analysis of
truth has the potential to impact upon the sociological discourse
concerning truth, the reverse is not the case. Answering sociological
questions concerning truth tells us nothing about its epistemological
status. To take some parallels: Durkheim held that a shared concept
of truth reinforced social integration, without being a philosophical
relativist; Weber argued that certain forms of rationality reinforce
relations of domination, without embracing philosophical irrationalism (of the romantic, or any other, variety) and, similarly,
anthropologists may hold that a belief in God reinforces social
solidarity, without committing themselves to atheism.
This distinction between sociology and philosophy entails that it
is possible both to observe sociologically that truth is used to initiate
social change and, simultaneously, to maintain that there is such a
thing as philosophical truth. Once this distinction is realised it is not
contradictory to argue that a social critique which documents the
link between truth and power is in itself true. Obviously the sociological analysis should make us suspicious of truth (which is the only
proper mindset of a critical theorist) but will not lead us to reject the
possibility of it. Furthermore, the knowledge that power and truth
are invariably linked has the positive aspect that the successful fight
for truth by a radical critical theory will, if it can establish its objects
of truth, change relations of domination.
In conclusion, the struggle which Foucault describes in his
genealogy entails active social actors, the existence of whom is
inconsistent with the death of the subject; and his analysis of truth
is entirely neutral on the philosophical questions which have the
potential to lead to relativism. This implies that the type of social
critique which Foucault’s genealogical histories represent is not
necessarily self-defeating. It is theoretically possible to engage in Foucauldian historical social critique and, simultaneously, to maintain
that what is said is true. Furthermore, the concept of social agency
implicit in this form of critique does not foreclose the possibility of
radical political action. In short, Foucault’s histories can be used as
important sources of critique by those who are neither theoretically
committed to postmodern philosophical relativism nor to the death
of the subject. Foucault’s genealogical observations are commensurable with the broad tradition of modern critical theory which
presupposes ideology and, as a consequence, has among its premises
an active social subject and a commitment to philosophical truth,
even if this was not evident to Foucault. The death of the subject
The Birth of the Subject and the Use of Truth
169
and the philosophical relativisation of truth are shadows of the dead
living on in the incompatible theoretical logic of Foucault’s
genealogical histories.
NOTES
1. Some of the ideas used in this chapter are developed at greater length, but
in a different context, in Haugaard (1997).
2. In his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989, p. 41) Rorty argues that
Wittgenstein’s private language argument precludes the possibility of the
type of ‘true’ originality which entails changes of meaning.
3. Not only did Saussure argue that new meaning is entirely beyond the
scope of individual speakers but he even argued that it is outside the scope
of a community of speakers: ‘No individual, even if he willed it, could
modify in any way at all the choice [of words] that has been made: and
what is more, the community itself cannot so much as change a single
word; it is bound to existing language’ (Saussure, 1964, p. 71).
4. Bourdieu (1986) argues that there are three forms of capital. We will not
follow in this, as I see no intrinsic reason for the hypothesis that there are
three, as opposed to any other number, of types of capital.
5. For other instances of the discovery of the dangerous individual in the
early part of the nineteenth century, see Foucault (1988, pp. 128–129).
6. It is not only the dangerous individual who is created at the time of the
birth of the ‘sciences of man’. For instance, in the field of sexuality, the
Lapcourt case performs a theoretically parallel function to the Rivière case.
See Foucault (1981, pp. 31–32).
REFERENCES
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity).
Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The Forms of Capital’ in Richardson, J.G. (ed.) Handbook
of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood).
Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things (London: Routledge).
Foucault, M. (ed.) (1975) I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my
Sister and my Brother ... A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Brighton: Harvester Press).
Foucault, M. (1981) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Foucault, M. (1988) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (ed. L.D.
Kritzman) (London: Routledge).
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity).
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. I, Reason and the
Rationalization of Society (Cambridge: Polity).
Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. II, The Critique
of Functionalist Reason (Cambridge: Polity).
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Haugaard, M. (1997) The Constitution of Power (Manchester: Manchester
University Press).
Kelly, M. (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate
(Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press).
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Saussure, F. de (1964) Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen
Limited).
Taylor, C. (1984) ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory, vol. 12,
no. 2, pp. 152–183.
Notes on Contributors
Michael Billig is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences,
Loughborough University. He is author and editor of numerous
books including Ideology and Opinions (Sage, 1991), Arguing and
Thinking (CUP, 1996), Banal Nationalism (Sage, 1997), Freudian
Repression (CUP, 1999) and Rock’n’Roll Jews (Five Leaves, 2000).
Diana Coole is Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary and
Westfield College, University of London. Her most recent work is
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2000). She is currently writing a book on
Merleau-Ponty and the Political.
Mark Haugaard is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science
and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway. He is author
of The Constitution of Power (Manchester University Press, 1997) and
Structures, Restructuration and Social Power (Aldershot, 1992), and coeditor of Power in Contemporary Politics (Sage, 2000).
Kieran Keohane is a Statutory Lecturer in the Department of
Sociology, National University of Ireland, Cork. He is author of
Symptoms of Canada (Toronto University Press, 1997) and of many
articles on social and political theory.
Iain MacKenzie is a Lecturer in Politics at Queen’s University,
Belfast. He is author of articles on Deleuze and Guattari and coauthor of Contemporary Social and Political Theory: An Introduction
(Open University Press, 1999).
Sinisa Malešević is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science
and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway. He is author
of Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State (Frank Cass, 2002) and of
articles on ethnicity, nationalism and sociological theory. He is also
editor of Culture in Central and Eastern Europe: Institutional and Value
Changes (IMO, 1997).
Robert Porter is a Lecturer in Communications at University of
Ulster. His work is on the social and political consequences of
Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivist philosophy.
171
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Ideology After Poststructuralism
Caroline Williams is a Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen Mary
and Westfield College, University of London. She is author of Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject
(Athlone Press, 2001) and has published essays on Lacanian
psychoanalysis, selfhood and subjectivity.
Index
Compiled by Auriol Griffith-Jones
Adorno, Theodor, 128, 130
affirmation, 117–18
of ethics, 54–9, 60–2
agency, 7, 168
excluded, 101
in ideology theory, 100, 103, 108
and structure, 90, 100–1
aleatory materialism, 5–6, 30
and ideology, 39–41
Althusser, Louis, 3, 5, 30
For Marx, 31
formulation of knowledge, 34–5
‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses’, 35–6, 37, 88
ideology as productive, 118
and the imaginary, 35–8
Reading Capital, 33
and Spinoza’s concept of
knowledge, 31–4
structuralist approach to
Marxism, 28–9, 30, 88–9
The Future Lasts a Long Time, 39
antagonism, logic of, 52, 60, 62
anthropological structuralism, 90
anthropology, 87
antique, fetishism of, 71–2
Arendt, Hannah, 58, 82
argument, 138, 141
use of rhetoric, 141–3
attitudes, 140
Auster, Paul, The New York Trilogy,
43–4, 51
authoritarianism, 126
avoidance, in conversation, 145–6
Balibar, Etienne, 34, 39, 129
Barrett, M., 99
Barthès, Roland, 90
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 75
Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 93, 97, 99
exclusion of agency, 101
and postmodernity, 131
Bauman, Z., 158
Beck, U., 91
behaviour, and ideas, 12
belief systems, 89, 102
Benjamin, Walter, 64
flâneur, 65
on Paris, 69–70, 71
Berlin, 64, 65–6, 67
Berlin, Isaiah, on positive liberty,
126
Bernstein, Eduard, 3
Bevir, M., 95
Billig, Michael, 108n
‘banal nationalism’, 101
Birkin, Rupert see Lawrence, D.H.,
Women in Love
‘blasé cosmopolitan’ (Simmel’s), 65,
68–9, 72–3, 75
Bloom, Leopold see Joyce, James,
Ulysses
body and mind dualism, 32, 33
Boudon, R., 3, 100, 108n
Bourdieu, Pierre, 144, 169n
Buck-Morss, S., 69
capital(ism), 3, 88, 130–1, 164–5,
169n
role in formation of ideologies,
90
children
learning language, 137, 140–1
use of language, 147–8, 149
choice, individual, 96
city
ideological power in, 73, 76
ideology of progress in, 69–70
as locus of modernity, 64–5
modern subjectivity of, 66
see also Berlin; Dublin; Paris
class struggle, Marxian, 52–3, 88
comedy
in Joyce, 77–9
and the unconscious, 148
common notions, 32–3
173
174
Ideology After Poststructuralism
‘common sense’, 21, 142, 143
commonplaces, 141–2, 143
communist states, 91
comparative analysis, use of, 107–8
Comte, Auguste, 2
conflict, in Foucault’s genealogy,
163–4, 165–6
consciousness
and ideology, 35–6
individual, 90, 101
and phenomenology, 19
psychological, 136, 145
rationalisation of, 68–9
types of, 158
constructivism, 20–1
contingency
meaning of, 19
theorisation of, 30
conversation
avoidance in, 145–6
and practical morality, 146–9
repression in, 148–9
conversation analysis, 139, 143–4
turn-taking, 146, 149
counterideologies, 105
Crich, Gerald see Lawrence, D.H.,
Women in Love
Critchley, S., 16
critical structuralism, 88
critical theory, 20, 100
criticism, 26
Croatia, 106, 107
culture, 4, 104, 106
custom, and appeal of ideologies,
102
de Tracy, Count Antoine Louis
Claude Destutt, 1–2
debate, 138–9, 140, 143
and conversation analysis, 139,
143–4
deconstruction, 19
Deleuze, G., 39, 47
constructivism, 20–1
Difference and Repetition, 115
Nietzsche and Philosophy, 114
reading of Nietzsche, 114–16
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.
A Thousand Plateaus, 4, 26
What is Philosophy?, 132n, 133n
Derrida, Jacques, 12, 38, 39, 132n
différance, 40, 116–17
Descartes, René, 32, 113, 114, 136–7
detachment, 75–6
dialectical encounters, 65, 73–4,
76
dialectics, 7, 113–14
as critical methodology, 114, 127,
130
and différance, 116
and ideology critique, 125–7,
131–2
and real as true, 123
see also oppositions (binary)
différance, 40, 116–17
discourse, 7, 95, 108
concept of, 93, 94, 97
opposed to ideology, 118
and power of language, 134, 167
as productive, 118
discourse analysis, 99
discursive psychology, 7, 135
and memory, 139
domination, relations of, 8, 157,
158, 159–60
dualism
of body and mind, 32
see also oppositions (binary)
Dublin, 64, 66, 67
Temple Bar, 70, 72–3
see also Joyce, James, Ulysses
Durkheim, Émile, 168
duty, primacy of, 58–9, 61
Eagleton, T., 142
economic structuralism, 88
economy, 67–8, 104
education, 106, 137
emotions, and appeal of ideologies,
102
empiricism, 32, 34
‘end-of-ideology’, 12, 28
Engels, Friedrich, 3, 91
see also Marx, Karl
Enlightenment, the, 1
Epicurus, 39
epistemology, 29, 30–5, 167
essentialism, 87, 95, 97, 98, 107–8
Index
ethics
affirmation of, 54–9, 60–2
beyond ideology, 44
and moral responsibility, 56–9,
61
of the real, 54–5
and relativism, 95–6
ethnic cleansing, 101–2
ethnomethodology, 146
events, 5, 18–22
conceptions of, 18–21
nature of, 17–18
Paris uprisings (1968), 11, 18, 19
relationship to ideas, 11
sense of, 18, 19, 22
evil, diabolical, 57
existentialism, 124
facticity, and meaning, 19, 22
flâneur (Benjamin’s participant
observer), 65, 73–4, 75–6,
82–3, 84n
Foucault, Michel, 2, 39, 41, 95,
132n
and agency, 101, 168
The Archaeology of Knowledge, 29,
35
care of the self, 74–5
concept of power, 96, 159,
163–4
concept of truth, 8, 164–7, 168
‘death of the subject’, 159
Discipline and Punish, 37, 38
on discourse, 97, 99, 118, 134
historical a priori, 160–1
on language, 136
on oppositions, 121–3, 126
The Order of Things, 160
Panopticon, 158
rejection of ideology, 92–3, 117
Rivière case, 165, 166
systemic view, 162, 164–5
Fox, N., 96
Frankfurt School of sociology, 92,
129, 132n
Fraser, Nancy, 159, 167
Freeden, M., 3, 12
freedom, individual, 95
Freud, Adolphine, 154
175
Freud, Sigmund, 100, 136
Dora (case history), 150–3
Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious, 148
Little Hans (case history), 150
repressive activity of, 149–50,
154
on temptations, 147
Fukuyama, Francis, 12
functionalist sociology, 4
functionalist structuralism, 89
Garfinkel, Harold, 146
Geertz, Clifford, 3, 79, 100, 103
genealogy, 120, 127–8
in Foucault, 121–2, 125, 160,
163–4, 168–9
and use of truth, 167
generalities, logic of, 24
generativity, positive (Nietzsche),
115–16
genetic structuralism, 88
genocide, 102
Giddens, A., 91, 92, 98, 158
Godelier, Maurice, 88
Goldhagen, D., 102
Goldmann, Lucien, 88
Gouldner, A., 3, 91
Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 95
Prison Notebooks, 136
Great Britain, Royal Family, 145–6
Greece, classical, 74
Griffith, Arthur, 77
Guattari, F. see Deleuze, G.
Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 54, 55, 95, 114
interpretative horizons, 158
on poststructuralists, 132n, 167
Hall, Stuart, 135
Hegel, G.W.F., 31, 53, 79, 81, 164
dialectics, 113, 116, 124
Heidegger, Martin, 39, 40
hermeneutics, 20
Hirst, Paul, 88
historical materialism, 119–21
historicism, 31
history
laws of, 129
truth of (Marx), 127
176
Ideology After Poststructuralism
Hobbes, Thomas, 39
Holocaust, 57–8, 154, 158
humanism, 31
poststructuralist critique of, 4, 5
idealism, in Marxism, 31, 120, 130
idea(s), 5, 12
nature of, 13–18
and problems, 13–18
relationship to events, 11
Spinoza’s concept of, 33
theories of, 12
see also events
identity, mediation of, 119–20
ideological, 24, 50
contrasted with ideologies, 22–6
negative construction of, 24–5
positive construction of, 25–6
ideology, 1–2, 22–6, 122, 143
agency-centred, 100, 103, 108
and aleatory materialism, 39–41
Althusser’s problematic of, 28–30
application of, 130–2
better research tools for, 100,
107–8
compared with discourse, 97, 99
concrete experience of, 44, 62
critique of, 26–7
form and content of, 100, 103–4,
108
and ideas, 11–12, 13, 23
and the imaginary, 35–8
individual acceptance of, 101–3
interpretations of, 3–4, 99–100
material existence of, 36
normative, 100, 105–6
operative, 100, 105, 106–7
and philosophy, 118
and poststructuralism, 87, 92–8,
111, 113–19
and reality, 28, 30
and science, 30–5, 38, 89, 92, 118
and social institutions, 89, 112
and social subject, 157
structuralist approaches to,
88–92, 99
theories of, 12–13, 22–3, 134
see also ideological; ideology
critique
ideology critique
and affirmation of ethics, 54–9
and dialectical method, 126–7
dialectics and, 125–6
and negativity, 45–54, 60–2,
120–1
Zizek’s notion of, 43–5
images, 93, 131
imaginary, the, 32, 34, 36, 46
and ideology, 35–8
imagination, 32
immanence, 33, 40, 51, 61, 132n
of negativity, 121
individual, ‘dangerous’, 166, 169n
individualism, 65
see also subject
interpellation, notion of, 37–8, 89
interpretative horizons, 158
interpretive process, 128–9
intersubjectivity, 141
Iran, Islamic Republic of, 106, 107
Ireland, nationalism, 77
Jews, in Vienna, 151–2, 154
jokes, 148
Joyce, James, 64
Finnegan’s Wake, 82
Ulysses, 65, 72–3, 75–83
see also Dublin
Kant, Immanuel, 15, 54, 55, 113,
114
Critique of Pure Reason, 124
epistemology of, 123
metaphysics of, 123, 125
moral Law, 56–7
knowledge
Althusser’s formulation of,
33–5
de Tracy’s view of, 2
and discursive consciousness,
158
internalised, 157
and power, 92
production of, 33
and scepticism, 124
of social life, 158
see also epistemology; science
Kristeva, Julia, 128
Index
Lacan, Jacques, 36–7, 135
‘impossible Real’, 125
influences in Zizek, 45, 51, 53,
55, 58
on Joyce, 81
Laclau, Ernesto, 16, 36, 55–6
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe,
Chantal, 94–5, 97
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 54
language, 7, 104, 140
as conscious thinking, 136
conversation analysis, 139, 143–4
learning of, 140
and meaning, 162–3
power of, 134
skills of, 138
see also linguistics; thinking
language games, 10, 93–4, 95, 97,
99
Larrain, J., 95
Lawrence, D.H., Women in Love,
46–8, 52
Lefort, C., 80
Lenin, V.I., 3, 91
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 31, 90
Lewins, F., 103
liberalism, 126, 130–1
liminality, permanent, 80–1
linguistic method, 90, 92
linguistics, 127, 139
Lucretius, 39
Lukács, Georg, 31, 128
Lukes, S., 126
Lyotard, François, 93–4, 97, 117,
132n
Macherey, Pierre, 39
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 89
Mannheim, Karl, 3, 100
Marcuse, Herbert, 3, 92
Marx, Karl, 39, 129
Althusser’s reading of, 28–9, 30
notion of class struggle, 52–3, 88
Truth of History, 127
see also Engels, Friedrich
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich,
The German Ideology, 35, 134–5
Marxism, 31, 100, 157
and dialectics, 123, 124
177
and ideology, 3, 6, 98, 116,
118–19, 120, 130–1
poststructuralist rejection of, 113,
125
Marxism–Leninism, 91
death of, 98
Marxist structuralism, 88–9, 99
see also Althusser
master–slave dialectic, 114–15
materialism, aleatory, 5–6, 30, 39–41
meaning, 161–2
contingency of, 19
and facticity, 19, 22
and language, 162–3
and production of truth, 164–5,
166
memory, 139
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 128, 129,
130
meta-narrative, 7, 95, 97, 99, 108
metaphysics, 2, 125
reality and truth, 123–4
modernity, 2
city as locus of, 64–5
renaissance of, 70–1
money economy, universality of,
67–8
moral codes, of politeness, 146–8,
149
moral prescriptions, 105–6
moral responsibility, 56–9, 61
Mosca, Gaetano, 100
myth, 89, 90
mythemes, 90
nation, concept of, 104
nationalism, 73, 76
‘banal’, 101
Iran, 106
Irish, 77
unconscious rhetoric of, 144–5
Navarro, Fernando, 34
Nazism, 102
and the Holocaust, 57–8, 154,
158
negation, human faculty for, 137
negative
disruptive power of, 54, 60
rejection of, 116
178
Ideology After Poststructuralism
negative nihilism, 47
negativity
dialectical, 115–16
in ideology critique, 45–54, 60–2
logic of, 24–5
Marxist philosophy of, 119–21
Negri, Antonio, 39, 40
neo-liberalism, 12
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39, 113, 167
attack on Kantian metaphysics,
123, 125
Genealogy of Morals, 37, 114
reality and appearance, 123–4
will to power, 115, 122–3
nihilism, 47, 48, 107
non-ideology, 89
Zizek’s distinction, 45, 53
notions, common, 32–3
noumena, 124
objective culture, 65, 73
hegemonic discourses of, 77,
78–9
objectivity, 118
objects, and ideas, 33
oppositions (binary), 32, 100, 113,
117
affirmation and negation, 114,
117–18
ideology and reality, 28, 131
reality and appearance, 123–5
science and ideology, 38, 98–9
subject and object, 126
true/false, 95, 121–3
visible and non-visible, 47, 48, 49
see also dialectics
O’Sullivan, N., 4
Pareto, Vilfredo, 91, 100, 103
Paris, 64, 65–6, 75
Arcades, 69–70
Flea Market, 70–1
Marché Dauphine, 71
uprisings (1968), 11, 18, 19
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 77
Parsons, T., 3, 89
partiality, 16–17
participant observer see flâneur
Perelman, C. and Olbrechts-Tyteca,
L., The New Rhetoric, 141
phenomenology, 19, 124, 125
philosophy, 132n, 168
and ideology, 118
phronesis (political insight), 82
Plato, 15
The Sophist, 137
politeness
moral code of, 146–8, 149
and sexuality (Freud’s case
history of Dora), 150–3
political science, use of ‘ideologies’,
87
politics, 104, 106
and epistemology, 29
nature of, 14, 16, 23
and relativism, 111–12
positivism, 18–19, 21–2, 95, 119
positivity
and affirmation of ethics, 54–9,
60–2
logic of, 24, 25–6
post-positivism, 20, 21–2
postmodernism, 12, 64, 131
poststructuralism
critique of ideology, 4–5, 6, 92–8,
113–19
limitations of, 97–8, 107–8,
111–12
methodology, 96
and negativity, 121
rejection of ideology, 87, 95, 99,
129–30
see also discourse; relativism
power
in Foucault, 96, 159, 163–4
and knowledge, 2, 92
negotiated, 77–8
problems, relationship to ideas,
13–18
progress, ideology of, 69–70
proverbs, 142
psychology, 3–4
congnitive, 136–7
in theory of ideology, 134,
135–6
see also discursive psychology;
thinking
Index
rational choice theory, 108n
rationalisation, of consciousness,
68–9
rationality, 113, 130–1, 132n
axiological, 102
and group value-rationality, 102
instrumental, 101, 108n
situated, 108n
system, 158
Real, 123–5
Hegel’s definition of, 127
‘impossible’, 125
as meditated, 127
radical negativity of, 51–2, 60–1
and universality, 59
reality
illusion of, 131
power as production of, 163–4
questioning of, 160–1
Reason
and reality, 127
and totalitarianism, 132n
recognition, structure of, 37
reflexive modernisation, 98
reflexivity, self-, 68, 73–4, 76,
79–80, 91
Reich, Wilhelm, 100
relativism, 7, 94, 100, 107–8
cultural, 96–7
epistemological, 95–6
in Foucault, 159, 160, 168
and politics, 111–12
religion, 2, 31, 106
repression, 7
Freudian, 136, 145
of rudeness, 148–9
unconscious, 145–6
resistance, 96
revivalism, in cities, 70–3
rhetoric, 141–3
and commonplaces, 141–2, 143
routines of, 143–5
Rhetorica Ad Herennium, 142
Rodin, Auguste, The Thinker, 137
Rorty, Richard, 169n
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 126
rudeness
and code of politeness, 146–8
repression of, 148–9
179
Sartori, G., 89
Saussure, F. de, 116, 127
language and meaning, 162–3,
169n
science, and ideology, 30–5, 38, 89,
92
scientism, 91
self, care of the, 74–5
self-reflexivity, 68, 73–4, 76, 79–80,
91
Seliger, M., 105
Serbia, 102, 106–7
sexuality, and politeness (Freud’s
case history of Dora), 150–3
Shils, E., 89
signs, 93
see also symbols
Simmel, Georg, 64, 66, 75, 82
in Berlin, 67
‘blasé cosmopolitan’, 65, 68–9
simulacra, 93, 95, 108, 131
social actors, 104, 168
social critique, 157–8
Foucault, 161, 168
social difference, in cities, 72–3
social identities, in Marxist analysis,
94
social subject, 5, 166–7
autonomy of, 157
social theory, and problem of
meaning, 161–2
society
conceptual organisation of, 104
depiction of counterideologies,
105
integrative role of ideology, 89,
90, 131
and use of language, 136
sociology, 23, 87, 112, 168
Sorel, Georges, 100
Soviet Union, 106, 107
Spinoza, Baruch, 39, 41
concept of idea, 33
concept of knowledge, 31–3
gradations of knowledge, 32–3,
35
The Ethics, 32
Sprinkler, Michael, 29
Stalinism, 126
180
Ideology After Poststructuralism
Stillman, Peter see Auster, Paul, The
New York Trilogy
structural analysis, 90, 91
structural causality, Althusser’s
model of, 36
structural determinism, 30
structuralism, 19, 97
Althusser’s, 28–9, 36, 88–9
anthropological, 90
critical, 88
functionalist, 89
and ideology, 88–92
Marxist, 88–9
revival of, 98
structure, 7
and agency, 90, 100–1
subject
concept of, 31
‘death of’, 159
rejection of, 35, 101
relationship to modern urban
society, 65, 73, 74–8
see also agency; social subject
subject/object dualism, 126–7
subjection, principle of, 38
subjectivity, 118, 121
modern, 67, 68
substance, concept of, 33
symbols, 32, 102
of ideology, 104
synchronic analysis, 92
systemic determinism, 164
Szakolczai, Arpad, 80
Taylor, C., 95, 159, 167
thinking
and language, 140
levels of, 136
nature of, 136–9
socially constructed, 135, 137
as solitary, 137–8
study of, 139–41
time, 72
totalitarianism, 126, 132n
transformations, 19
in constructivism, 20–1
truth
construction of, 2
in discourse analysis, 99, 118
and error, 121–3
Foucault’s concept of, 8, 164–7,
168
interpretation of, 129
objective criteria of, 126
and power, 159, 164
use of, 167
unconscious
dialogic, 145
Freudian (repression), 145–6
and use of language, 144–5
United States, nationalism, 144
universality, 55–6, 59, 94, 95
of money economy, 67–8
see also relativism
urban life
ubiquitous form of, 66
see also city
Vienna, anti-Semitism in, 151–2,
154
visibility and non-visibility, 47, 48,
49
Weber, Max, 2, 82, 100, 101, 130
on rationality, 168
will, human, 90
autonomous, 101
will to power (Nietzsche), 115, 122
will to truth, 125
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 93–4, 137
private language, 162, 169n
Yugoslavia, 106, 107
former, 102, 106–7
Zizek, Slavoj, 3, 6, 100
The Abyss of Freedom, 55–6
affirmation of ethics, 54–9, 60–2
‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’, 54
ideology critique, 43–5
and Lacan, 45, 51, 53, 55, 58
Mapping Ideology, 28, 45
and Marxian class struggle, 52–3
negativity in ideology critique,
45–54, 60–2