POST #6
When most people hear the word “ideology,” they think of a large set of socio-political beliefs that typically end in “ism;” communism, liberalism, conservatism, etc.
When Žižek uses the term “ideology,” he is using it in a Marxist sense. For Karl Marx, ideology is a series of discourses that push false ideas on people. When people buy into these false ideas, they develop a “false consciousness” about the world, how it works, and their place in it. According to Marx, without ideology, no society could function for very long.
According to Marx, other ideologies like capitalism or liberalism work the same way. They are created, work to help sustain a particular social structure, and ultimately fall out of favor when a new idea comes to force. When this happens, the whole structure of society can change in a hurry as a new ideology fills the void.
Žižek, himself essentially a Marxist, starts with this idea and goes further.
Taking off on the development of the idea of ideology done by Louis Althusser, Žižek incorporates psychology into ideology. While for Marx, ideology is a conscious exercise, Žižek suggests that ideology is also a subconscious phenomenon that helps to shape the world we live in.
Crucial for Žižek is his argument that we are all influenced by the prevailing ideology even if we think we aren’t. In the same way that we may think we are looking at the world as it really is when we think of all black coffee as “coffee without milk,” ideology can cause us to look at things in a very subjective way while also telling us we are entirely objective about it.
While some thinkers, like Richard Rorty or Tony Blair, have suggested we’re are in a post-ideological age, Žižek argues that the appearance of such a thing is evidence that the dominant ideologies have finally “come into their own.” That is, they are so entrenched that people are no longer able to see them.
Žižek states the following: “When we think we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology” and “Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive its meaning…” He means by this is the idea that we make certain assumptions about the world around us or about what is “natural” or “obvious” and that the prevailing ideology around us often influences these assumptions isn’t too bold a claim. After all, most intelligent people would admit to thinking about things the way they do, at least in part, because of where they’re from and how they were raised.
Žižek wants you to question everything about society, especially when something seems to be so obvious it shouldn’t be questioned. To put it as simply as possible, ideology is a set of reasons meant to justify an action after the action has been decided upon. For instance, let’s say I really want to go to war in Iraq because I love oil and I don’t like brown people. After I decide to go to war I come up with all sorts of very good reasons for it, like the protecting the safety of my people. This is ideology.
Žižek’s critique of ideology reminds us that it operates in a cunning, treacherous, elusive way. There is for Zizek a direct link between the liberal pretence of neutrality or a value-free analysis of society and ideology in its purest form. In short, the claim to neutrality is ideology at its purest. Why? Because it consists in pretending to be something that it constitutively cannot be. Society cannot be studied as if it is a phenomenon of the natural sciences, simply because society is not nature. It also cannot be studied as if there is only one way to understand or explain it.
Žižek warns us that there is a danger in merely laughing at ideology, because, ironically so, it is at this very point of laughter that we are exposed to the pure hold that ideology exerts over us. It seems to me that if there is a crucial and critical task for legal academia, it is precisely to expose lamentations for what they are: clever ideological ruses that tragically reveal to us that as legal subjects we do not, in any sense, live in a post-ideological age.
References:
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/slavoj-zizek-ideology
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304541876_NO_PLACE_LIKE_IDEOLOGY_ON_SLAVOJ_ZIZEK
South America 