IDEOLOGY IN ITS VOID: A CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUE
Dr. Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu
Gaziantep Universitesi, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü
[email protected]
There is an ongoing and somewhat deliberate evaporation of the term
"ideology" from the writings of postmodernism. This evaporation might be
detected not only in academia but also in the streets. Ideology does not
seem to hold a place in the ordinary people's daily agendas. To mottos like
"Workers of the world unite!", "Long live the fatherland!" or "Martys never
die!" the reply of the postmodern is: "Yeah, whatever!". The present paper
will humbly focus on the probable reasons of this contemporary nihilism
which results in the redundancy of ideology today.
We can describe ideology from different perspectives: one might be
idealist; the other, materialist. Classical idealist concept treats
ideology as a sort of knowledge, specific kind of consciousness which
assumes a "concrete universality" by which Hegel means the potential to be
reinvented in every new epoch. Ideology, in this perspective, covers all
noble struggles for freedom and justice, and its reference is generally to
religion or metaphysics. This view of ideology has always been allusive to
totalizing, unifying and universal worldviews and always uses a narrative
of progress. It presupposes the idea of individual who is responsible of
his actions, who commits himself to a cause or ideal, and it tends to
believe that truth is located in knowledge. But the materialist
perspective, by virtue of locating it in material conditions of existence,
transforms ideology into "false consciousness" and puts aside the need of
metaphysical or religious dimensions in the formation of it.
Ideology in materialist perspective is not a kind of knowledge. Nor is it
the opposite of knowledge. By virtue of being an imposed system of thought
or way of living which is legitimized and promoted by the state, it must by
definition be non-cognitive. "It is the realm of lived relations rather
than theoretical cognition. It adapts individuals to their social functions
by providing them with an imaginary model of the whole, suitably
schematized and fictionalized for their purposes" (Eagleton, 1991: 151) For
Terry Eagleton, "what persuades man and woman to mistake each other from
time to time for gods or vermin is ideology."(xxii) And, "To claim that
someone is speaking ideologically is surely to hold that they are judging a
particular issue through some rigid framework of preconcieved ideas which
distorts their understanding."(Eagleton, 3) By being the body of ideas
characteristic of a particular society or class, it is assumed to have a
homogenizing function like culture itself. Ideology, in this sense, is akin
to Foucauldian "episteme" in that it renders the particular organization of
categories possible at any given historical moment constituting the limits
of what we are able to utter and conceive, enabling us to have dominant or
widespread discourses. These discourses are formed according to the modes
of structure; for example, in feudalism it is the religious ideology which
predominates, whereas in capitalism it is the juridico-political instances.
Nevertheless, for both idealist and materialist perspectives, ideology is a
matter of meaning (either true or false) and requires a certain depth of
subjectivity and consciousness (either true or false) on which to go to
work. Both views require a grand narrative for ideology to illustrate
itself, and seek to substitute one truth for another in the dialectical,
progressive understanding of life. In each case a naivé consciousness is at
work to make the chaotic look harmonious.
For Louis Althusser "ideology is a representation of the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence"
(2008:39). In this definition, the highlighted terms are "representation",
"imaginary", "individual" and "real". The term "imaginary" implies "false
consciousness" or "hope giving, desire fulfilling illusion". To illustrate
this we can give the example of a leftist talking to a rightist: whatever
the leftist advocates as right will sound false to the other, or vice
versa, and the reason of this is ideology. Since each party will always
seem to have a false consciousness mutually, ideology remains a state of
illusion, and opinions will remain relative.
After defining ideology as such, Althusser focuses on how it happens, and,
in his famous essay on Ideological State Apparatuses, claims that this
imaginary, fictional relationship is a deliberate product of the state:
these apparatuses contribute to the reproduction of the relations of
production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation. (2008: 28)
Althusser, then takes a step further and points that the state and its
ideological apparatuses have fundamental effect on individuals because
ideology uses the mechanism of interpellation or hailing of the human
subjects. Terry Eagleton considers Althusser's view of this mechanism of
interpellation as subject-centered or anthropomorphic, and notes that:
"Interpellation causes us to view the world as somehow naturally oriented
to ourselves, spontaneously 'given' to the subject and the subject
conversely feels itself a natural part of that reality, claimed and
required by it. Through ideology, society interpellates or hails us,
appears to single us out as a uniquely valuable and address us by name."
(142) In other words the individual needs ideology to form a proper
identity, he has to be hailed by the system to feel as individual.
The above descriptions of ideology imply the need of individual,
consciousness, and a distinction between real and imaginary, ideal and
material. But, is it still possible today to talk about "individual",
"human subject" or about a distinction between real and imaginary? For
Terry Eagleton, there are three reasons, three key doctrines of
postmodernist thought to discredit the classical concept of ideology:
1- A rejection of the notion of representation –an empiricist notion of
representation, [so, if we claim that representation is possible we
should also admit that there is a reality to be represented. But since
reality is replaced by simulacrum which unifies real and non-real, it
cannot be represented.]
2- An epistemological scepticism which would hold that the very act of
identifying a form of consciousness as ideological entails some
untenable notion of absolute truth, [and today we have already lost
touch with truth],
3- A reformation of the relations between rationality, interests and
power, along roughly neo-Nietzschean lines, which renders the whole
concept of ideology redundant [From Nietzsche we learnt that reason
is simply a modality of desire and there is no such thing as
consciousness, since all consciousness is false. Thus, we have to talk
about "will" instead of consciousness, reason, intellect etc.] (1991:
xxi)
To sum up, postmodernist thought by being cynical of representation, truth
and consciousness tends to see all ideology as teleological, totalizing and
metaphysically grounded, in other words, groundless. (1991: xxi)
Furthermore, by virtue of treating it as a false consciousness or distorted
understanding, it also questions the very identity of the individual that
it is supposed to form.
Yet, when we look around today don't we see that religions are still very
effective in the lives of masses? Aren't there wars in the name of justice
and freedom? Aren't there people around who look to have a correct view of
the world? If capitalism is an ideology, isn't it still valid? How can we
claim that ideology is oblolete when there are many fundamentalists around?
If this is the case, the claim "ideology is redundant" seems to be
rootless. But if it is not the case, then, the postmodern critique sounds
perfectly sensible and what we experience today, in the form of ideological
actions or events, becomes totally fake, which turns the ongoing religious
fundamentalisms, 9/11s, "noble struggles" for freedom and justice in the
Asian and African continents (the so-called Arabian Spring etc.) into mere
lies or pseudo-events. Another perspective might as well be that what we
witness today in the form of wars, terrorist attacks or fundamentalist
activities are no longer justified by ideology but by other things like
religion or ethnicity which are today some of the masks of the capital. Is
for example the fundamentalization of Afghanistan simply a matter of
ideological shift or just a product of the capital?
Althusser's definition of ideology presupposes the existence of the human
subject/individual who will evaluate his real conditions of existence and
establish an imaginary relationship with them. As a result of this relation
he will come up with an ideology or meaning of life. Ideology, to survive,
then, needs a subject, a warrior for noble causes, but capitalism and
consumerism create from the good old individual a mere clown and reduces it
to its object. This new man who lacks thymos (i.e. spiritedness) or an
honorable passion to live for an ideal, is the post-human, or in
Nietzsche's terms "the last man". The question is should we celebrate the
birth of the last man and enjoy the idea that he won't have an anti-thesis
as Francis Fukuyama did, or try to revive the real human being from its
ashes and summon an anti-thesis to the last man by a provocative discourse
as Zizek, Jameson or Eagleton did?
In order to understand the impossibility of ideology without the human
agent we should know how late capitalism turns the man into "the last man"
or "the post-human". The obvious instruments of the system are commodity
fetishism, market economy, liberalism, consumerism, and the consciousness
industry, which turn the individual into a TV watching, internet surfing,
and constantly shopping monkey. Moreover, while seemingly providing a state
of welfare and material abundance, the system uses democracy, or
egalitarian discourses as its mask. For we know that today democracy is
nothing but an empty performance. Zizek calls this the "human face of
capitalism". The system seems to be the morally approved guarantor of the
welfare state, and operates as if it is struggling for anti-capitalist,
socialist causes such as justice and freedom, but when it comes to
effectively and equally sharing the wealth it is mute and dumb. (2010: viii-
x) This is how capitalism has beaten the socialist left, by way of making
the capital serve the social-democratic welfare state. (2010: 240) For
Eagleton, its dominant ideology (if there is one) is internally fissured
and contradictory, offering no kind of seamless unity for the masses to
internalize (1991: 35). Late capitalistic logic, contrary to ideology as
defined by Althusser, needs no individual to interpellate or infiltrate his
or her consciousness; as Eagleton points out, it does not need mythic,
religious or metaphysical rationales to justify itself, it no longer has to
pass through consciousness since it manipulates the logic of all human
subjects transforming them into obedient effects. Therefore, it is less
meaning that keeps us in place than the lack of it. (1991:37)
Postmodernism rejects morality because it involves a distinction between
better and worse, good and bad, and replaces it with the democratic
principle of tolerance. The problems of inequality, exploitation,
discrimination and injustice have to be perceived not as moral problems but
as problems of intolerence. Thus, tolerence, for Zizek, has become the post-
political ersatz (substitute of morality). As a result, people with totally
different ideas can find themselves agreeing with each other, ending up
with mutual understanding, and tolerating each other's different world-
views. (2010: 6) Moreover, while the system produces meanings like
equality, tolerence, justice etc., on one hand, on the other, it leads us
into such a cynicism that we end up thinking all meanings are futile and
temporary. "This very discrepancy between meaning and non-meaning", for
Eagleton, "is the very reason why ideology is felt to be redundant in
modern capitalist society. For postmodernism created such a strong waning
of affects and cynical subjects that no ideology can ever deceive them
anymore."(1991:39) He plausibly believes that "advanced capitalism flattens
man to a viewing eye and a devouring stomach and there is not enough
subjectivity around for ideology to take hold." (1991: 38)
As a result, instead of the leftist youth of 1960s and 1970s, we have the
planking, owling, teapotting youth pausing in unusual and incongruous
locations. These young people have nothing to do, nothing to say but just
these weird and empty performances which show how paralysed our
consciousness is. They merely act out the widespread imbecility of our
times.
Zizek agrees with Eagleton in that, the ruling ideology by creating such a
cynical distance accomodated the fact that we will be sceptical of it.
Zizek gives the example of the government spokesman announcing that there
is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the cabinet;
nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him; we know that he
knows it; and, he knows this too. (2008: 20-25) We can add to this example
a Turkish politician -a man who was once convicted of his anti-secularist
and anti-democratic discourses in favour of Sheria- is now preaching in
Egypt and Tunisia about the importance of secularism and democracy. We know
that he is lying, he knows that we know, and he knows it too. Very funny!
Lie has been the most effective form of truth. Today words are all hollow
and signifiers have no signifieds. It was Bertolt Brecht who said "what is
the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new one?" Don't we know
that banks are somewhat robbers? Yes, we do, but we all pretend that they
are not. Zizek calls this "the negation of negation" and believes that we
live in a disenchanted post-religious and post-ideological era which
condems us to be pretentious, ostentatious, indifferent and insincere.
Well, what was Althusser's definition? Ideology is the representation of
individual's imaginary relationship with his real conditions of existence.
Ok, can we really tell what is imaginary and what is real today? To live in
the post-ideological world means to live as if we all hold certain
ideologies in order to create the illusion that our lives have meaning, and
we all stick fast to this lie in order to sleep more in our consumerist
dream-like world of abundance. If there is no heaven, no problem, we have
our all-inclusive holiday villages, if there is no happiness, no problem we
have our avatars on internet to escape from our miserable identities etc.
"The citizens of the advanced capitalist societies are thus reduced to mere
functions of this or that act of consumption or media-experience."
(Eagleton, 1991: 38)
We all live as if we are humanitarian, as if we are democratic, as if we
really care for the starving people in Somali, as if we feel anxious about
global warming, as if God exists. This very sense of AS IF does not only
underlie our major psychological state, it also determines our daily
conducts. It is not like Nietzsche who declared the death of God or that we
killed him. It was not a matter of "as if" for him. Eagleton
perspicaciously describes this in his book After Theory:
As Nietzsche admonished us, we have killed God, but, then, hidden
the body, insisting as we do on behaving as though he is still
alive. Postmodernism exhorts us to recognise that we will lose
nothing by the crumbling of the foundations except our chains. We
can do now what we want, without carting around a lot of cumbersome
metaphysical baggage in order to justify it. Having checked in our
baggage, we have freed our hands. (2003: 58)
For Eagleton, however, the system imprisons us by this very deceptive
metaphor of freedom. (2003: 58)
Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, observes the death of subject as one of the main aspects of
postmodernism. He states that: "The end of bourgeois ego, or monad, no
doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego –what [he
has] been calling the waning of affect. This brings the liberation not
merely from any anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling
as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling." (1991:
15) The result of this "waining of affect" is anti-foundationalism, non-
essentialism and the return of the narrative of the end of narratives. The
new man is a detached, disinterested, decentered object who cannot think,
ask or politicize. The system wants him to forget, or in Zizek's terms, it
"determines that which we know but about which we have to talk and act as
if we do not know, and that which we do not know but about which we have to
talk and act as if we do know. It determines, in short, what we have to
know but have to pretend that we do not know". (2010: 4) As a result, we
all act as if we have very humanitarian feelings for the people in Somali
and the system makes it easy when it teachs us that by way of buying a cup
of cappuccino we can automatically donate for the people in Somali. "For
the price of a couple of cappuccinos one can continue in his ignorant and
pleasurable life, not only feeling any guilt but even feeling good for
having participated in the struggles against suffering." (Zizek, 2010: 117)
Zizek, somewhere else, called this "a cup of decaf reality". Like light
coke, light coffee, light cigarettes, we have light reality.
Zizek's new man, who is marked by the symptoms of alzheimer's disease and
autism due to the loss of affective engagement, experiences its own death
of symbolic identity with lack of emotions, profound indifference and
detachment –[...and becomes] a subject living death as a form of life which
is deprived of what is used to be called "human". A new subject which no
longer experiences the Freudean death drive, but which lives the death of
the drive." (2010: 294-296)
Moreover, for ideology to exist, we also need class struggle, or the good
old master/slave dialectic. But the late capitalist system is a classless
and weightless one. It does not operate on the Hegelian doctrine of
"recognition", and, hence by dissolving "the other", it also dissolves the
whole process of becoming a self. It has already transformed everyone into
proleteriat and the conflict between laborer and employer has been
abolished. As Eagleton observes "a distinguishing feature of capitalism is
the absence from its discourse of all trace of class domination" (1991:154)
It encourages the subject to live provisionally, glide contentedly from
sign to sign, revel in the rich plurality of its apetites and savour itself
as no more than a decentered function of them (1991: 198).
To sum up, the individual, self conscious being of modern times has been
replaced by selfless masses, the members of which are no longer
individually hailed by the system. The capitalist system has its own
formula for its existence and this form of existence does not need ideology
to justify itself. As a result we have become light individuals with light
ideas, light concerns and even light art. This paradigmatic shift projects
on us a capitalist mode which accommodates every tendency, ideology, and
theory so long as it is hollow inside. The result has been a mixture or
coexistence of all kinds of ideologies, yet in a desubstantialized manner,
hence we are unable to form a dominant ideology.
When Louis Althusser defined ideology as the birthplace of art by saying
"what art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of seeing,
perceiving and feeling is the ideology from which it is born, in which it
bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it
alludes"(2001: 1480), he considered ideology as identical with the lived
experience of man, and his interaction with the real. For him, all art was,
essentially, ideological since art has been the imitation of reality
experienced by man. But in postmodern times, it has transformed itself into
a kind of realism in which "anything goes". Commodity is enough in
supplying its own ideology, and consumerism by-passes meaning by the
pervasive non-meaning which gives no place to truth or falsehood.
(Eagleton, 1991: 37) Since "capitalism speaks from a multiplicity of sites,
and in this subtle diffuseness presents no single target to its
antagonists" (Eagleton, 1991: 45), to say ideology is obsolete sounds
firmly logical. Instead of ideology we have democracy. Democracy has become
the most effective disguises of the capital in hiding its non-essentialism.
As Zizek describes it in his The Sublime Object of Ideology, democracy
always entails the possibility of corruption, of the rule of dull
mediocrity. (xxviii)
Consumerism or the unbridled capitalism is the malaise of our times.
Zizek, in his latest book Living in the End Times, reminds that consumerism
is reaching to its apocalyptic zero-point as a result of the encroaching
end of natural resources. Population growth, consumption of resources,
carbon gas emissions, global warming, and the mass extinction of species
are the alarming facts for us. Capital will abolish itself when the means
of production will be over. Yet, instead of sincerely focusing on the
alarming global ecology or, say, the melting of the icebergs in the
Antarctic, the rule of dull mediocrity, that is, the capital dreams on
investing the promising resources and hidden treasures that will be
disclosed in the new continent of Antarctic. It is now politics and
economics, not ethics or ideology which reign supreme. Ideology is supposed
to belong to the cultural space of a society, and the cultural space which
used to be semi-autonomous has now been destroyed by the logic of late
capitalism. As Jameson amply states, "culture has been transformed into a
capitalist product and therefore the critical distance it used to have has
been abolished in the form of new space in the postmodern." (1991: 48) By
becoming its own ideology (if not properly an ideology as understood by
Althusser) market exterminated any viable alternative, and for Fukuyama, it
therefore constituted the end point of mankind's ideological evolution. The
dialectical process has been over. Fukuyama observes that:
The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his
life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of
pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be
Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French. The
loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice
were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices. Men with
modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating
themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism. As
Nietzsche's Zarathustra says of them, "For thus you speak: 'Real
are we entirely, and without belief or superstition.' Thus you
stick out your chests –but alas, they are hollow!" (Fukuyama, 1992:
307).
This extract from Fukuyama is in fact talking about the loss of ideology
from the postmodern sphere. This loss is the very reason why Fredric
Jameson called his book not "Postmodernism or the Ideology of Late
Capitalism", but "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism".
He knew that to put postmodernism and ideology side by side was logically
the same thing as saying "cold fire", or "hot ice". "Postmodern ideology"
is just an oxymoron.
To conclude, if we rewrote Althusser's definition (considering the void of
the individual, real, imginary and representation which were the
constitutive concepts of it), ideology today would be "the media-oriented
speculations about the object's relationship to its simulated conditions of
existence".
References
Althusser, Louis. "A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre." Norton
Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. Eds. Vincent Leitch et al. WW Norton & Company: London
& New
York, 2001.
--------- On Ideology. Verso: London & New York, 2008.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. Verso: London & New York, 1991.
--------- After Theory. Penguin Books: London, 2003.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin Books:
London, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Verso: London &
New York, 1991.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso: London & New York,
2008.
--------- Living in the End Times. Verso: London & New York, 2010.
--------- "A Cup of Decaf Reality."
http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm accessed on
20.09.2011
Dr. Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu received her PhD from Ankara University,
Department of English Language and Literature in 2004. Her dissertation
title is A Study of Stoppardian Drama from the Standpoint of Postmodernist
and Counter-postmodernist Attitudes. Currently she is a faculty member at
Gaziantep University, Department of Language and Literature as an assistant
professor. She has various published articles on Stoppardian Drama and the
fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Peter Ackroyd.
