I don’t like ideology critique. I generally find it underwhelming, and suspect there’s a lingering idealism at work there, of the sort that implicitly holds to one or more of the following: “X idea in the mind of Y means Z act will follow”,”Changing Z circumstance requires instilling W idea in the mind of Y”, and “Instilling W idea in the mind requires U discursive act (defined as the exchange of the propositional contents of sentences)”. None of that strikes me as very compelling, and it also can easily imply a sort of “one road to revolution only” kind of attitude (and, more importantly, that road is not mine!) and a “people are dupes” kind of attitude. The combination of these two is part of why there seems to be an overlap (though by no means an identity) between the populations of self-important asshole intellectual bullies and Marxists. I generally believe that reason capital continues to exist is largely due to force (by which I don’t mean ideological force) and that this balance of forces continues to exist largely due to lack of organizing knowledge and simple historical/power inertia (if I wake up with someone standing on my throat, the odds are good that this situation will continue for a while).
That said, there’s clearly a place for ideology critique writ small, like when bosses simply lie or say things that are not about their propositional contents but perform something (like a threat or act of intimidation). K-punk has a post recently that’s pretty illustrative of this (though I disagree w/ him in the arguments about Zizek/with Chabert). I don’t know what to make of K-punk’s theoretical descriptions of the situation (I don’t share a lot of the idiom he uses) nor am I sure what it adds to attempts to do this kind of (really important) lowercase ideology critique. Those attempts, I think, fall less under the realm of theory than of something else. (Craig’s post on racism posed a distinction I found really helpful, this is how I mean the ‘not theory’ comment here, it’s not meant to be any ‘anti-theory’ performance on my part, just wish I had a term for that other thing….) This reminds me that I want to do a post on the steps of a housevisit/one-on-one, to get my head clearer on it again - the stuff I’m talking about here as lower case or writ small ideology critique is basically what I call innoculation in housevisits. More on this later. Now it’s bedtime.
I’m not sure, but I think I’m saying a bit more and a bit less in the passage you cite than you give me credit for. This follows a bit from my reply to your comment at my place. When I say that it isn’t a theoretical problem, I think I’m making an appeal to the obvious or to common sense: Guatanamo Bay isn’t a theoretical problem different from the theoretical problem posed by totalitarianism because they are the same. The theoretical question isn’t particularly relevant — or interesting — here. What is interesting, however, are the differences and similarities between a Nazi death camp and Guantanamo Bay. This is, as I indicate, a technological and pratical question. Just want to make sure that I was clear in an otherwise rather unclear post!
Comment by Craig — March 22, 2006 @ 1:29 am
I agree completely with your rejection of the “people are dupes” school of ideology critique. But I think there is something useful in studying ideology as a reflection of material relations, in particular to figure out how these relations operate subjectively. The relationship between you and your boss is a relationship of force, but it’s also an ideological relationship (indeed, I think I’d want to say that it’s the particular sort of ideological relationship it is because it’s a relationship of force).
Comment by Tim — March 22, 2006 @ 5:46 am
hi Tim,
Thanks for your commnets. Given our conversations while you were in Minneapolis and what else I know, I suspect we really disagree on very little, especially on what matters more. I think I often react to a certain charge in certain formulations, such that my impulse is to say “you don’t mean X-dodgy-thing, do you?” but it often comes out phrased more like “you’re wrong!” Sorry for when that’s the case.
Anyway, I do think that there’s a most important site and that it’s the workplace, but that’s a matter of political orientation rather than a theory of cultural/superstructural production. So, I’m not sure about the phrasing of “ideology as a reflection of material relations.” I hear this as positing a distinction between the ideological and the material, which would mean ideology is not material. I don’t know what to make of that. Aside from the distinction between the two, ‘reflects’ sounds very much to me like a directional metaphor, a la the old ‘base-superstructure’ model: I stand in front of a mirror and the causal power is in me, not the reflection in the mirror - the reflection moves because I move, not vice versa. Like I said, I think the workplace, the ‘base’, is most important, but I’m not convinced the rest is causally derived from this most important area, it might just be a non sequitur (which is not to say the ’superstructure’ never has an effect for good or for ill). I suspect none of this is what you mean, but I don’t know how else to take these terms. I am, of course, willing to have my mind changed.
One other thing, I am more sympathetic to something like ideology critique in terms of readings of things, like Marx’s readings of classical political economy (or good readings of Marx). There are texts or idioms or methods or whatever one wants to call them that systematically don’t admit of a certain thing explicitly (the superfluosness of the boss and the degrading nature of the workplace, say, in some hypothetical management literature) but must still deal with that thing in order to function well. So they develop ways - I’m tempted to say ‘coded’ but that’s not right - to talk about these things, which we can learn to read (like, when they say “productivity gains” we know it means layoffs and/or speedups, etc) in order to understand certain moves in the class struggle at least at a grand scale. It’s like… a vocabulary that let’s one simulate how the enemy might think or react in some situation, though not in any terms the enemy would ever admit to as an approximation of their self-understanding (they do this to us too, hence their successes in busting unions, rounding up dissidents, etc).
Comment by Nate — March 22, 2006 @ 6:06 am
I said “reflects” to get away from a causal base/superstructure relation, but you’re right that that still implies a direction, which was not what I wanted to say. Indeed, what I want to do is precisely not to say that the ideological is not material. Maybe we should say the ideological is the material considered from the point-of-view of subjectivity, or something like that (and we could probably say that the material is the ideological considered from the point-of-view of objectivity, too).
I was going to mention Marx’s reading of political economy as an example of the sort of ideology critique I like, too. But I’m not sure that the only thing we can get from that is an idea of the self-understanding of the enemy. I want to say something like, because these ideological texts are an aspect of particular material conditions, we can find out something about the material conditions by reading the texts in a certain way. Something like Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism - the autonomous character of the commodity, which shows up ideologically in political economy, is something that capitalism actually achieves materially by separating workers from the product of their labor.
Comment by Tim — March 22, 2006 @ 7:45 am
Zizek’s view is that ideology consists in what people do in the face of what they know. So, I know that when I scan my card at the grocery store they are tracking me and my purchases, but I do it nevertheless (it might save me a dime!). So, the truth of ideology is always open and apparent, clearly visible in our actions.
Comment by Jodi — March 24, 2006 @ 3:19 am
hi Jodi,
Thanks for that. That’s a pretty different sense of ideology than I’ve heard before. I’m amenable to that, I think. Does Zizek have/do something like ideology critique then? Also, it strikes me there’s at least two kinds of thing one knows. One is in a case like, say, I buy the sweatshop-made shoes or cross a picket line knowing it will hurt certain workers but wanting to save a dime (or, I take a promotion out of the bargaining unit and into management, know what this entails). Another is, say, my co-workers and I march on our boss (or my comrades and I smuggle photos of the inside of the detention center out through our networks and into the hands of some outside media), knowing there’s a chance I may lose my job (or be killed). The former is a knowledge of a certainty, the latter of a probability. Are they both ideology?
Best,
Nate
Comment by Nate — March 24, 2006 @ 4:19 am
Nate–the question of ideology isn’t a question of knowledge. It’s a question of doing, of acting, of what one does. So, in both your instances, you are acting ideologically. From Zizek’s perspective, this is not a critique at this point–it’s simply a description. The critique becomes an element of the description when one sees a conflict between what one claims to know (self-consciously know to be the case) and how one acts. In addition to being materialized in practices, ideology is also materialized in physical objects–architectures, city designs, etc. So, the city government says–we aren’t racist! but authorizes roads that divide the city in half according to race. All of Zizek’s early work in structured as a theory of ideology. So, his first major work in English is The Sublime Object of Ideology. A fun read that does a lot with ideology in the way I’m describing is The Plague of Fantasies (the book that really got me interested in Zizek).
Comment by Jodi — March 24, 2006 @ 1:59 pm
hi Jodi,
Thanks very much for this. I hope this doesn’t sound like a backhanded compliment, but, this is the most compelling description of Zizek I’ve seen. That’s a different definition of ideology than I’ve encountered (I’d taken the term to mean something along the lines described here: http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm#ideology). Is it fair to say that the ideology-action pair you describe (like in the city gov’t example you cite) is something like bad faith? I’ve got the Sublime Object of Ideology, but haven’t read it yet. I’ll check out the Plague of Fantasies too, these can go on my summer list.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — March 24, 2006 @ 4:15 pm