Transcript Two Views of Ideology Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek

Two Views of
Ideology
Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek
Outline
Starting Questions
•
Hall
• Ideology
“rediscovered”
• a process of
signification
• Site of struggle
• classification
• Historicized
•
•
•
•
Zizek
The book
Outline of the article
Fantasy
Starting Questions
• How are Hall’s views of ideology different from,
and similar to, those of Althusser’s, Jameson, or
Eagletons’? And how is he similar to Hebdige’s
approach? What have them learned from
Gramsci?
• Can you give some examples of media events to
explain how ideology is a site of struggle?
• How does Zizek move beyond Althusser in his use
of Lacan to explain ideology? Is his view of
“form” and abstraction different from Hall’s
signification?
• Can you find examples of the “dream work” of
ideology?
Hall:
The rediscovery of Ideology
the post-war history of social scientific thought:
1. the pluralist paradigm developing out of the
clash of ideologies during World War II.
2. the pluralist paradigm collapsing in the face of
the social upheavals of the '60s. 
power => the power to define reality
3. a period of “extraordinary science”
-- Media as the "signifying agents“;
-- brought "the ideological" to the fore in media
studies (65)
Hall:
The rediscovery of Ideology
full title: "The rediscovery of Ideology:
Return of the repressed in media
studies." In Culture, Society and the
Media, 56-90. New York: Routledge,
1982.
-- an attack of the traditional American
approach to the study of mass
communication, also known as the effects
tradition (1051)
Ideology as a process of
signification
• Combination (narrativization) and selection
(exclusion) = process of encoding (also
decoding the common sense of the
audience) 1051
•  constructing privileged meanings
"struggle over meaning."
• the mass media do tend to reproduce
interpretations which serve the interests of
the ruling class,
• but they are also 'a field of ideological
struggle'.
• E.g. industrial debate; p. 1052
classification and framework
• Classification: different systems produce
different terms and meanings;
• Framework  “positionality” p. 1053
• Unconscious
Ideological signification
historicized
• Gramsci’s view of “common sense”
folklore 1055
• P. 1056 “historical grammars”
– deep structure of presuppositions
– their logic of arrangement
Class struggle of language; multiple
meanings in signification
• Multiple referentiality;
• Althusser too uni-accentual p. 1060
– closure: equivalence of discourse and reality
• The class struggle in language= struggle
between two different terms 1061
– Changing the terms
The Sublime Object of Ideology
• Critique “the fundamental antagonism” in
Marxist views;
• Joins Marxism and Lacan; (p. 4)
– Post-Marxist -- “[affirms] the irreducible
plurality of particular struggles , demonstrating
how they articulation into a series of
equivalences depends always on the radical
contingency of the social-historical process”
– Lacanian psychoanalysis– enable us to grasp
this plurality itself as a multitude of responses
to the same impossible-real kernel”
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(2)
• Sees antagonism of death drive vs.
pleasure principle in many fields (e.g.
democracy, ecology, etc.)
• Thesis: Hegelian dialectics as “the most
consistent model of such an
acknowledgement of antagonism.”
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(3)
• Three purposes: (7)
• -- re-introduces Lacan as non-poststructuralist,
“the most radical contemporary version of the
Enlightenment.”
• “return to Hegel” –by giving it a new reading on
the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
• Re-define ideology through a new reading of
classic motifs such as commodity fetishism.
“How Did Marx Invent the
Symptom?”: Outline
1. Form of Dream//Commodity-form  the
unconscious: the “real abstraction” 
money as “the sublime object”
2. Social symptom
3. Commodity fetishism: necessary condition
in capitalist society
4. Ideology defined:
5. modern society is “post ideological” 
cynical reasoning; fantasy in the doing
“How Did Marx Invent the
Symptom?”
1. Fundamental homology between the
interpretive procedure of Marx and Freud-. . . between their analysis of commodity
fetishism and of dreams (11/t: 312)
Form
Dream: manifest content  latent thought 
the unconscious desire
1. Dream needs analysis; 2. Attention should be
centered on form (dream work).
• Commodity: chancy determination of
commodity’s value  determination by labortime (a secret)
• “even after we have explained [their] hidden
meaning…what is not yet explained is simply
[their] form, the process by which the hidden
meaning disguised itself in such a form.”
(15/t:313)
•
real abstraction
•
Exchange of commodity implies a
double abstraction:
1. The abstraction from the changeable character
of the commodity;
2. Abstraction from its ‘sensual properties’ (17/t:
314)
real abstraction (2)
•
•
Real abstraction: “the act of abstraction at
work in the very effective process of the
exchange of commodities” (17/t: 315)
e.g.
–
–
–
–
positive content  a priori categories;
Physical content  commodity value
Latent thought  manifest content.
money (changeable, perishable)  universal
value, indestructible; “This immaterial
corporality of ‘the body within the body gives
us a precise definition of the sublime
object.” (18)
real abstraction (3)
•
•
•
(critique of Althusser’s rejecting this
category)
The real abstraction introduces the third
element--the symbolic order—to the
binary of “real object” and “form of
thought”
The unconscious: the form of thought
external to the thought itself
The Social Symptom
• “Symptom”: “a particular element which
subverts its own universal foundation.”
(21/t: 316) e.g. the idea of freedom;
negation of equivalent exchange.
Commodity Fetishism
• 1. ‘a definite social relation between men, that
assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
relation between things’ (Marx 1974, 77)
• 2. A misrecognition [of] what is really a structural
effect of the network of relations between
elements (price) [as] “an immediate property of
one of the elements” (commodity), as if this
property belongs to it outside its relations with
other elements. (23-24)
Commodity Fetishism
• Necessary when the relations between men
are not fetishized (as they were in feudal
society).
Ideology
• a social reality whose very existence implies the
non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence
(21/t: 316)
• Contemporary form: cynicism (knows the
falsehood, but does not denounce it). (29/t: 319)
• Cynical reason . . .”leaves untouched the
fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level
on which ideology structures the social reality
itself.” (30/t: 320)  not knowing in the doing; a
fetishist in practice but not in theory (31/t:320)
Ideology
• "ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we
build to escape insupportable reality; in its
basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction
which serves as a support for our "reality"
itself" (45/t: 323)
• e.g. a father’s dream of seeing his dead son
burned.
Ideology (2)-- Critique of
Althusser
1. a gap between ISA and “ideological
interpellation”, or how does ISA internalizes
itself?
• “this external ‘machine’ of ideology exercises its
force only in so far as it is experienced, in the
unconscious economy of the subject, as a
traumatic, senseless injunction.”
• “The is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of
traumatic irrationality and senselessness” 
ensures the authority of law.
Fantasy as a Support of Reality
• (against ideology as illusion to be unmasked; or
reality as illusion—or fiction)
• Lacan – a hard kernel of “the Real”
• The only way to break the power of our
ideological dream is to confront the Real of our
desire which announces itself in this dream.
• E.g. to critique anti-Semitism:
– not by saying “Jews are really not like that”
– but by pointing out that “the ideological figure of a Jew
a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own
ideological system.”
Beyond Interpellation
• the theory of ideology descending from the
Althusserian theory of interpellation – focus too
much on “the efficiency of an ideology
exclusively through the mechanisms of
imaginary and symbolic identification.”
• “The dimension 'beyond interpellation' which was
thus left out has nothing to do with some kind of
irreducible dispersion and plurality of the
signifying process ... 'Beyond interpellation' is
the square of desire, fantasy, lack in the Other and
drive pulsating around some unbearable surplus
enjoyment. (124)
Beyond Interpellation
• -- two readings of ideology
• Discursive, ‘symptomal reading’
• Extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at
articulating the way in which –beyond the
field of meaning but at the same time
internal to it – an ideolgoy implies,
manipulate, produced a pre-ideological
enjoyment structured in fantasy.
Slavoj Zizek
• a professor at the Institute for Sociology,
Ljubljana, Slovenia
• politically active in Slovenia during the
80s, a candidate for the presidency of
the Republic of Slovenia in 1990,
and most of his works are moral and
political rather than purely theoretical.
• (source)