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dream' -- that is to say, where the distance from reality seems redoubled. In a somewhat homologous way, we encounter the inherent limit of social reality, what has to be foreclosed if the consistent field of reality is to emerge, precisely in the guise of the problematic of ideology, of a 'superstructure', of something that appears to be a mere epiphenomenon, a mirror-reflection, of 'true' social life. We are dealing here with the paradoxical topology in which the surface ('mere ideology') is directly linked to -- occupies the place of, stands in for -what is 'deeper than depth itself, more real than reality itself.
Notes
| 1. |
See Étienne Balibar, 'Racism as Universalism', in Masses, Classes, Ideas, New York: Routledge1994, pp. 198-9. |
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| 2. |
Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, London: Routledge 1994, p. 13. |
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| 3. |
See Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1984. |
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| 4. |
Jacqueline Rose, 'Where Does the Misery Come From?', in Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof, eds, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1989, pp. 25-39. |
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| 5. |
The very title of Rose's article -- "'Where Does the Misery Come From?'" -- is indicative here: one of the functions of ideology is precisely to explain the 'origins of Evil', to 'objectivize'-externalize its cause, and thus to discharge us of responsibility for it. |
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| 6. |
For that reason, the 'epochal horizons of pre-understanding' (the big theme of hermeneutics) cannot be designated as ideology. |
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| 7. |
For a concise account of the theoretical consequences of this double trauma, see Theodor W. Adorno, 'Messages in a Bottle', in this volume (Chapter 1). As for the way Adorno's critique of identitarian thought announces post-structuralist 'deconstructionism', see Peter Dews, 'Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity', in this volume (Chapter 2). |
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| 8. |
In his La philosophie de Marx ( Paris: La Découverte 1993), Etienne Balibar drew attention to the enigma of the complete disappearance of the notion of ideology in Marx's texts after 1850. In The German Ideology, the (omnipresent) notion of ideology is conceived as the chimera that supplements social production and reproduction -- the conceptual opposition that serves as its background is the one between the 'actual life-process' and its distorted reflection in the heads of ideologues. Things get complicated, however, the moment Marx engages in the 'critique of political economy': what he encounters here in the guise of 'commodity fetishism' is no longer an 'illusion' that 'reflects' reality but an uncanny chimera at work in the very heart of the actual process of social production.
The same enigmatic eclipse may be detected in many a post-Marxist author: Ernesto Laclau, for example, after the almost inflationary use of the concept of ideology in his Politics and Ideology ( London: Verso 1977), totally renounces it in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, London: Verso 1985). |
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| 9. |
To avoid a fatal misunderstanding, one must insist that this line of succession is not to be read as a hierarchical progress, as a 'sublation' or 'suppression' of the preceding mode. When, for example, we approach ideology in the guise of Ideological State Apparatuses, this in no way entails the obsolescence or irrelevance of the level of argumentation. Today, when official ideology is increasingly indifferent towards its own consistency, an analysis of its inherent and constitutive inconsistencies is crucial if we are to pierce the actual mode of its functioning. |
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