Transcript BB where is ideology today zizek 1702 15

Zizek's Big Ideas:
Where is Ideology today?
Bill Bowring
School of Law
BA Philosophy (University of Kent,
1970)
Barrister
Professor of Law
OED Definition
OED definition of Ideology
1 A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the
basis of economic or political theory and policy: the ideology of
republicanism
1.1 The set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or
individual: a critique of bourgeois ideology
Origin
late 18th century (in sense 2): from French idéologie, from Greek
idea 'form, pattern' + -logos (denoting discourse or compilation).
Slavoj Žižek discusses the famous platitude (incorrectly)
attributed to Dostoyevsky's character in "The Brothers
Karamazov" that "If god does not exist, everything is
permitted.“
Žižek rejects this and suggests, in fact, the opposite — that
if there were a god, everything would be permissible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUtW6KIdtxE
Susan Marks, LSE
Ideology is ‘not an inherent property of
particular ideas or a characteristic of particular
ideational systems, but it is rather a function
of the way meaning is generated, conveyed,
apprehended and appropriated in different
contexts.’
Five roles ideology plays
1) universalisation:
Through processes of universalisation, social and
political institutions are made to seem impartial,
inclusory and rooted in considerations of mutual
interest. In this way, an illusory unity may be
conferred on societies, and differential levels of social
power may be masked.
Five roles ideology plays
2) reification:
This concept is familiar from Marx’s use of it – the
process by which human products come to appear as
if they were material things, and then to dominate
those who produced them. Thanks to strategies of
reification, men and women may cease to recognise
the social world as the outcome of human endeavour,
and begin to see it as fixed and unchange-able, an
object of contemplation rather than a domain of
action.
Five roles ideology plays
3) naturalisation:
contested arrangements appear obvious and selfevident, as if they were natural phenomena belonging
to the world “out there”
Five roles ideology plays
4) rationalisation:
through the construction of a chain of reasoning of
which the status quo is the logical conclusion, it may
be made to seem as if there are good reasons why
things are as they are. Change may thus come to
seem irrational.
Five roles ideology plays
5) narrativisation:
the telling of stories which set particular
developments in the context of a history . . . practices
and institutions may be made to seem worthy of
respect and perpetuation, whether because they are
venerable or because they represent progress.
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek argues:
‘This is what the distinction between “formal” and
“actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal”
freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while
“actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention
which undermines these very co-ordinates.’
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek argues:
And: ‘What this means is that the “actual freedom” as
the act of consciously changing this set occurs only
when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as
if the choice is not forced and “chooses the
impossible”.’
Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book
The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso 1989, 2009)
I read it in 1993, recommended by Costas Douzinas,
the founder of Birkbeck Law School in 1992
Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book
p.11 - According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl
Marx who invented the notion of symptom… how was
it possible for Marx, in his analysis of the world of
commodities, to produce a notion which applies also
to the analysis of dreams, hysterical phenomena, and
so on?
The Marxian notion of commodity fetishism – is “a
definite social relation between men, that assumes in
their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between
things.”
Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book
p.28 - The most elementary definition of ideology is
probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital:
"Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" ("they do not
know it, but they are doing it"). The very concept of
ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté:
the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its
own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence
between so-called social reality and our distorted
representation, our false consciousness of it.
Slavoj Žižek’s first and best book
That is why such a 'naive consciousness' can be
submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim
of this procedure is to lead the naïve ideological
consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its
own effective conditions, the social reality that it is
distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself.
George I. García and Carlos Gmo. Aguilar Sánchez
“Psychoanalysis and politics: the theory of ideology in Slavoj Žižek”
(International Journal of Žižek Studies v.2, n.3)
Žižek is particularly interested in the third moment of ideology in
and for itself, the moment when ideology seems to disappear.
This is the moment, for instance, when commodity fetishism
takes place. Here capitalist fantasy takes shape in social
practice, and therefore it takes the form of the symptom of that
very same inter-subjective fantasy…
According to Žižek, therefore, ideology does not depend on the
fact that in their praxis human beings do not know it (that they
act in benefit of certain power groups) but they do it; it depends
rather in the fact that they can know it perfectly well, but they act
as if they did not know. Ideology in and for itself does not reside
in knowing but in doing. Hence, in main contemporary societies,
the ideology par excellence is cynicism.