heimlich, the nest

what do our preferences signal? let us trace it in signs: preference, pre – fer, to set before, give some thing more than others. so stand before me, and play here-> preference

some questions, why attempt to cultivate the uneven glades, are there not already differences in shade, why shy from naming them thusly, do we condition a worldview of warring estimations,

is our will misconstrued? who am i to use? to peruse? to prefer? to place before me one and not an other?

preference might be impelled by our connection to our uncanny. the unprobed places of and in us that lead us to worry. and these places are both particular and shared, as interpretation is both personal and part of a community of sound.

evaluation changes the objet/other observed and the subject observing. for example, evaluation presumes a staticity to otherness–as there is an objet under inspection–and to subjectivity–as there is a watch-position occupied. but neither these lives nor their characters are static. the evaluation ensues an illusion. that we control the frame leads us to imagine we control the life depicted in our picture. watching is never seeing every thing; it is viewing some thing through a relatively small window. what we glimpse–and fail to glimpse–is not simply related to my level of vigilance: what we see we see accidentally. hemmed by will and hawed by accident, these already tricky/tricked observations feed our judgments, which grow into formidable traditions. as we often tend to forget the radical void of otherness in face (literally) of our objet of inspection, we also forget the accident in favor of our will. this will, the story of mistake, becomes our divide.

but it can also be our harmonizing drive.

–
if i am so resolutely sad is it that i prefer to be so? are emotions different from logos, such that my reason it bends, it is the most willing slave, but the passion depression love disdain these are sages with no yoke to enplace. passion makes agental mastery impossible. for example, the realization that your seduction by an image is reliant/related to some hidden source–some how out side of your logical mind–questions the ability of logo-mind to control our preferences. if our preferences as taste reflect our selves then we must also note how our preferences are out of control, as part of our selves is a quagmire impossible to be fully uncovered. when i say uncovered, i mean traced. that is, put back precisely in one place. we instead can succinctly only mis-place. what i prefer from one moment to the next is an accident. and you can convince me other wise…

there seems a process to the preferences of one. over time, the process attunes itself to each particular life. it is forming and formed out of the moments and mire of event, myth, mirth and madness wrought on and of one’s thought. the community of timing and happenstance on one is grown of shared seeds, and they fruit only within the limits of controllable thought. for the unconscious bears no fruit; it be the hydroponic chemical concoction that reacts to feed the stalk of man. we fruit in the language we can use to tell an other so. be with me and farm my possibilities.

of preference we establish our grounds of judgment. this is not the same as establishing our selves, even if preference in an other way reflects our selves. remember, the preference is a mirror not a mason. one judges–that is, decides by determining one as not an other, namely, you as not the world. in judgment we step out of time and claim vainly to be ahistorically set free from the continual unwoven weaving. one judges from a position–a position suspended in time and in space–that is nonetheless on some ground. it is a ground not terra firma, but a ground very particularly located, some times only in one’s own temples.

mind the madness in the temples

preference is accidental, preference is one’s process of telling the self, preference is a rocky island. but an island is only a mountain. we swim to cross.
–

taste is notional beauty. but is beauty more universal? what is the nature of beauty, let us explore our aesthetics. with in mind the preference that signals an opening that is always present in all every thing.

the fleshing out of preference brings to mind an analogous example of determining how to drive a vehicle on a highway. in order to determine how to drive, one might look at the sign of the law to learn what is demanded from her; also, one might look at the ground–that is, the flow of traffic, the conditions of the road, the constraints on visibility and so on.

these consultations are not necessarily totally distinct (the law is part of the terrain). the judgment of beauty corralled by taste is a testimony to ones interaction with this objet out side and in side . the terrain. we are persuaded by the signs designating the beautiful in kind. but we can tell our relationship with the beautiful without such guidance. the interpretation of your heart and whims are yours not an outliers’. but this window lets in much light which conditions our vision of the spaces in side.

the uncanniness, the hiddenness of the hidden, is where the secret to the beautiful (our notion of the beautiful, our taste) is revealed. and this bespeaks the relation of beauty to a universalizable concept, as what is truly hidden is neither yours nor mine.

–
the love i know is always limited. the love is my sense and so limited. by this form, love it is both limit and exceeding of limit. it is both, in between either/or.

and this is not the love that i know, but the love i believe.

but it is beautiful to know. this is a space of stirrings of the heart. passion. the muse, the spark.
the limit is beautiful. we must relish the limit. this knowing is part of love as it is BOTH LIMIT AND EXCEEDING ITS LIMIT. know me, knowing there is no me but the me that inhabits my body

why do we love the limit? because we must? because it hurts me when you do not wish to love mine? it is more…

who and how are these limits? i do not know who. i know never whom. the target is missed, misappropriated before i begin to strike at it. this is not in-itself, the target is mis-itself. how is the flesh and the form. the enplace-ment of space. how is the time that i see tick until i see it stop. (it can stop)

so then love is not based on the target. the strike will never reach it precisely. love forgives the hidden spaces where its objet hides.

we overflow the me-and-you we know

-the process of penetration-

in //critique of judgment// kant describes the sublime as “found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness” (§ 23). ironically, the body is sublime. the body–configured as figure and thus limited–is in reality unending and beyond; and love–eternal and without bound–is bounded en frame (love is always political).

is ideology necessarily hidden? i don’t think so. but this is why i am skeptical that analysis helps. it indulges. it is a strip tease with your ideology. but the awareness that it conditions does not subvert it simply in its revelation.

is the body a fetish-objet? can one love the body, can the body be a part of love–is it necessarily an illusion, a fantasy. and what when we find fantasy as an indelible part of love.

if our social practice effects as, that is, we treat the body as holy, how do we know we are not tricking ourselves? in //the sublime object of ideology//, the nefarious thing for zizek, it seems, is the mistake that is willfully re-committed nonetheless. but zizek does not know love–he is worried about being tricked. and though fantasy is a part of love, the suspicion of the fantasy’s trick is not.

it is not that we are only concerned with the way that things are hidden, but more so wherefore this occurs in the first place. the beautiful is hiddenness becoming revealed. but revelation is a construction remade at each moment; it takes constant vigilance to realize its opening.

and this position, the hidden, is sacred. love protects our hidden spaces.

zizek reads an almost omnipresent ideological illusion, “which is structuring our real  effective relationship to reality” (322). and so we are always dreaming–in language, in dance, and in flesh. we are getting it wrong.

zizek writes “”reality” is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire.” (323…cfLacan’s //sem xi//). are we always to wear masks? if so we better start to like the masks. he continues, “an ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favor” ( 325). in this case, then, in faith and belief we are always relaxing in some cozy ideological blanket.

can we resist ideology? can we step outside of it? zizek notes an escheresque knot: two hands drawing each other. so if fundamentalism is ideology, and cynicism is ideology–these various comportments toward interpretation and analysis, and further zizek reminds us “there are no facts only ideology”…    does our search for the beautiful and the good then return humbly–and may be a bit too eagerly–simply to the play of preference? are we isolates in our accidental singularity, an immanence that renders judgments of any kind including beauty impossibly futile and naive toward universal application and, therefore in a sense, understanding. is this not selling out (like zizek does) our concept of the community of the beautiful to the caustic wasteland of the sublime? we find our selves then again with sartre, who, in //nausea// begins picking over his face to ask how it is that such a clod of clay is beautiful and not. does true immanence make all judgments of beauty untenable? may be instead of untenable, the designation of beauty describes a process of openness in unfolding. when we might see an other as always excess of its map, we are ready to behold the beautiful. further, we are best confronted by this excess en flesh a flesh.

how do get get out side of ideology? we do not side-step it, we en-body.” why do i do this” instead becomes, “i do this.”
but if it be all a praxis of illusion may it be a beautiful illusion that is me…

the de-horrorification, when taste is mass produced

-in the flesh we find the uncanny-

freud writes on //the uncanny// as being related to aesthetic judgment. he calls this uncanniness, heimlich, that is, what is hidden. he traces our resonance with art–the beautiful–with that which reminds us of our hidden spaces, e.g. oedipal drives and guilt, castration and our fear of it, the id–which is interestingly homologous to I. D. and etymologically linked to idea.

an example, even guy de maupassant’s, and later, magritte’s, is of a hu-man who sees the back of her body in a mirror. an eyeful of the back of the head! this vision is strange until it is contextualized as her own. it is uncanny; like the halloween sentiment. jarring.

now, in mass production culture–the logic of making the unseen, seen–we witness the widespread penetration and thus de-sacrilization of our hidden experiences. the louvre exhibition is a google images search. the bedroom fantasy is digitized and labeled via common search terms…the back of our heads are now visible by all manner of constant surveillance and imaging software. the vision loses its uncanniness as we are (empowered)–it is a power–by an omnipresent identification as…___

thus we lose sight of the beautiful.

magritte paints “not to be reproduced” and it is a warning. do not loose/lose our hidden frights and surprises that have us reevaluate what and how we know.

what if beauty is always a question of epistemology?

-a virtual conclusion-
we virtualize when we trick our self into thinking self as mediating preferences when it is just all phantasy. do we virtualize all?

since we construct the world (zizek’s kantianism) then the kernal of the world–the world that we can only know as illusion–is found inside the deconstruction of this phantasmic illusion. i make the world and the process of making it reveals my desire. but, does this not simply mistake the making of art–that is, genius at play? art creates a beauty not simply to aid the narcissistic goal of my desire. it is an expression of being with otherness. zizek instead thinks us to be scientists on behalf of our construction, of our desire…and not poets. but we are poets. the poet welcomes the accident without reducing it to the fold. in the scape of our poetry, the accident of articulation and audition remains a rim, a hole.

but, when we share a space, the ministrations of time and order melt away and at least join together in a rhythm that protext against their oft-debilitating noise. by noise i mean distraction. it is in sharing this space where we can confront the holes of our experiences. together.

happiness is not suspension, remaining hidden, detente. lacanian psychoanalysis misconstrues happiness as detente. upon revelation, i am elated. even as i know there will always be hiding. and the illusion of not hiding.

ready or not, here i come

the body is part of the love-process. being-with breaks the illusion. no, it toys with it

there is a catch 22 to enbodying. objetification is initially a mastery. let this move to its own dissolve.

is uncanniness related to ideology? if uncanniness is the hiddenness of hiding, and so too is the ideological fantasy at work (that in seeing the hiding, we out-step the hiddenness of the hidden)… what is left hiding is beautiful. and the most hidden thing is the me at the very point i am the me who inhabits this body.
–

Slavoj Zizek London 1998 [photo Mykel Nicolaou]

I first met Slavoj Zizek in Bloomsbury in 1998 to conduct a relaxedly spontaneous, short but full-blooded interview in what I was to discover is the authentic Zizekian mode. I knew his work, had seen him speak, admired his reworking of various Idealists more than the brilliant-but-familiar bug-eyed film theorist and, armed only with a dodgy autobiographical preface, wondered about who he was. I’ve just found the 22,000 word transcript  of that first meeting. Afterwards we wandered through Georgian Squares in the University quarter and he graciously accompanied me as far as possible whilst exchanging gossip eagerly, before cutting back to a meeting.

That initial meeting was something of a rehearsal for a plan for me to go to Ljubljana -before easyjet!- to spend a week doing a series of focused interviews. Whilst in that memorably lively city, Zizek would introduce me to key figures from Slovenia’s recent underground; activists, politicos, Laibach, Mladen Dolar and the Lacanian gang, etc. Those sessions produced 14 hours of tape containing dense and agile theorising, but the generous backers of my trip bottled out of publishing the resulting coup [quoting Bertrand Russell approvingly; oh dear] -as was always an open possibility. A possibility that had liberated me to do it fully and properly.

Thereafter, there were some telephone conversations and emails  and Zizek sent me his “Kosovo 4.99″ piece on the double bind of supporting exceptionally belated foreign intervention to stop Serbian fascism’s campaign of ethnic cleansing; Against the Double Blackmail. A phrase from a clarifying phone call I made to him went in to the first substantial piece published on him in a UK journal [below] around publication of The Ticklish Subject and The Zizek Reader in 1999.

The so-called “Kosovo 4.99″ text Zizek sent me was then staged as an exhibition of wall-texts [with a pirate radio installation by Gregory Green] at Cubitt Gallery and as an insert in the pages of Third Text magazine. I came across the original email to me with that ‘lost’ interview transcript. At the time I asked Cubitt to remove the note from SZ with thanks to me from their website because I was embarrassed! Somehow, they took the whole text down instead. After all this time, I’m linking to a pdf of it below with no shame at all.

I’m posting the interview-based piece I wrote for The Independent because though Zizek has since made it all the way to the comfortable pages of the New Yorker magazine, the piece was a first and still has bite I think. Since then there have been excellent documentaries, mountains ranges of books on and by SZ, a finely tuned ongoing pour of theoretical analysis and yet even watching him bat away the inherent absurdities of the format of HARDtalk recently still gave me pleasure.

I’m a few books behind right now; no more a completist but not from want of appetite for his work or him either. Unless you count innocent smoothies like Malcolm Gladwell or various other part-time safe bets, Zizek reigns as a theorist proper and philosophical commentator supreme still now.  Oh and on his robust approach towards the Milosevic regime, there were and are those who preferred to watch European muslims in particular being routinely massacred instead. One of them was Harold Pinter, admirable playwright and man in many ways but wrong on this and wrong to vote in Margaret Thatcher in 1979 too.

As Tony Judt’s in many ways admirable recent polemic reminded me, Zizek is still rightly insisting on more as he works away at the outer edges of what is possible and the perceived horizons of where we’re at. As ubiquitous as he often seems, Zizek remains a contingently intrusive figure, irresistible and yet disapproved of or guardedly championed even by friends and admirers for his ‘populism’ and/or popularity.

Meanwhile, some 200,000 words of carefully and fiercely articulated thinking from the pleasant confines of Zizek’s apartment in Ljubljana remain unarchived and, from what I recall, unmatched by what is out there.

[A longer essay -'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's Slavoj Zizek'- is archived on my old site www.g-m-a.net under 'critical things' and online elsewhere. Thanks to DO, BT, CR and most of all SZ.]

[KOSOVO 4.99 a.k.a. 'Against the Double Blackmail'  by Slavoj Zizek, the original email! is KOSOVO 4.99 or Against the Double Blackmail by Slavoj Zizek [Dear Guy...]]

The Books Interview: The giant of Ljubljana

Slavoj Zizek, Slovenia’s superstar philosopher, backs the war against his ex-bosses. Guy Mannes-Abbott met him

Guy Mannes-Abbott

Saturday, 24 April 1999

I had read Slavoj Zizek’s distinctive work before I saw him speak about – or rather, perform – it in public. To witness a lecture by Zizek is rather like watching matter exploding in space. He has enormous energy and reach, stages a dazzling display of ideas, and makes the phrase “miracles do happen!” ring with a new truth. Zizek’s appearances generate adulatory laughter and cheers. They embody what Terry Eagleton describes as his “enviable knack of making Kant” (among other thinkers) “sound riotously exciting.”

Zizek is a bundle of unlikely elements. He’s arguably the brightest and most significant star in Europe’s philosophical cosmos, throwing out light by way of an infectious plundering of popular culture and an interest in the tabloid domain of Viagra and virtual pets. Crucially, he is a theorist of the whole when the perceived wisdom is that grand philosophical theory is now neither credible nor possible. Worse, that theory is rooted in Freud and Marx, and fuses the notoriously opaque thinking of Jacques Lacan with the founding figures of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel.

However, Zizek – like any original – is re-writing the rules. His cultish popularity since the collapse of Eastern European socialism a decade ago has made him a lot hipper than the legions of philosophical cynics. More than that, his thinking restores life to the possibility of a radical political project and so rejects the notion that the state we’re in is a paradise-like “end of history”. It does so with the piquancy of his direct involvement in real change in his native Slovenia, when the republic was forced to opt out of Serb-controlled former Yugoslavia and declare independence in 1990.

The Slovenians were the first to be attacked by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, in the three-day war of 1990. That conflict revealed the extent of international apathy towards Milosevic’s aggressive nationalism, which has culminated in the Kosovan war. Today, Zizek lambasts “the interminable procrastination” of Western governments and says that “I definitely support the bombing” of Milosevic’s regime by Nato. But he argues that Milosevic is also symptomatic of the New World Order, and that our real focus should be on creating “transnational political movements” to counter it.

An American critic famously described Zizek as “the giant of Ljubljana”. That charmed city, untouched by the wars of former Yugoslavia, remains his home. It is dominated by a hill topped by a castle and looped by bridges – the central feature in a redesign by the proto-postmodernist architect Josef Plecnik. His grandly eccentric parliament was never built on the hill, but his incongruous monument to Napoleon is visible among the medley of styles down below. The perspective reminds me of the bird’s-eye view of the town in Hitchcock’s The Birds – one of Zizek’s favourite references. The philosopher’s home is just east of the centre as it reaches towards a kind of Slovenian Shoreditch of warehouses.

Zizek lives in a modern apartment building which has an expensively elegant air. Inside, it feels the opposite of lived-in: cool and tidy. Zizek tells me he is “obsessed with it; how everything must be in its proper place”. He works nearby in another tidy apartment: the obverse of his writing, with its speculative freedom, its promiscuous appetites and astonishing urgency.

Zizek is a blur of animation, huge frowns and life-saving gestures at perpetual odds with a subversive smile in his beard. He is a symposium of philosophers. But this insistent vitality is a faithful embodiment of the substance of his ideas, which are uncompromising in their desire to breach the limits of what we think.

Zizek has two books out in Britain this spring. The Zizek Reader (edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright; Blackwell, pounds 15.99) is an excellent introduction to his thinking and contains the first systematic criticism of his work, in editorial introductions to each essay. In his own preface, Zizek makes his gambit explicit by his categorical rejection of the “hegemonic trends of today’s academia”.

In The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (Verso, pounds 20), he lays out the substance to this philosophical gambit. We live in an age defined by digitalisation and biogenetics, which has produced the first map of the universe. And in Slavoj Zizek we have a philosopher to match. The Ticklish Subject is a massive work of critical intelligence and philosophical rigour. It attempts to “reassert the dimension of universality as the true opposite of capitalist globalism”. Zizek is positioning himself against the notion that all we can do now is deepen our democratic foundations, or that the once-liberating proliferation of cultural, sexual, regional identities is subversive any more. He argues that these are merely postmodern supplements to global capitalism. The task is to break out of it.

Zizek tells me that he agrees with Lacan’s dictum that “you must not compromise your desire”. He adds, however, that “my focus is not Lacan”, but Descartes and German Idealism, especially Hegel. Ultimately, Zizek wants “to defend philosophically the dimension of modern Cartesian subjectivity”, and this is the very complex subject of his new book.

In a sentence, Zizek’s subjectivity is not the old notion of the self but something contingent, created in a void, in place of the Nothingness which is in turn the “traumatic core of the modern subject”. Relatedly, epoch-making change in history occurs only when “a negative gesture” shatters a symbolic social order and in this new “night of the world”, a “higher order” is founded.

This is the focus of The Ticklish Subject, which devours all serious thought from the Bible through to Heidegger and the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, Marx, Freud and Lacan. It goes through Parisian theory from Louis Althusser to the current star Alain Badiou, across several disciplines, and up to sociologists such as the Reith Lecturer, Anthony Giddens. This scrupulous breadth is “not some inherent honesty”, he says, but a neurotic obsession motored by the fear: “What if the guy is right?”

Zizek was a precocious youth who published a book on Heidegger when he was 22. His first PhD and earliest writings made the connections which develop through his many books to cohere definitively in The Ticklish Subject. However, his passage has not been smooth or conventional. Although his significant role in the Slovenian protest movement has left him close to the country’s social democratic government, his philosophical dissidence is profound. He says “I must have been about 17 when it became clear to me that I would become a philosopher. But then it took some time.”

He leapt at the ideas emerging from Paris in the late Sixties, but his forceful advocacy of them in Tito’s Yugoslavia nearly ruined him. When the moment came to take up a promised job at his university to complete his PhD, he was ostracised. This was the period in the mid Seventies of “the last counter-attack by hard liners in the Communist Party,” Zizek says, in which a clampdown was cemented in a new constitution.

In Yugoslavia, awkward figures were not imprisoned but removed from influence. The unnaturally promising Zizek – already married with a child – was suddenly unemployed. “Throughout all of the mid-Seventies I was jobless. It was very humiliating.” Eventually, although he was considered “too dissident to teach”, he was “employed by the Central Committee of the Party”. He describes this as “a nice paradox”, one which led to a job as researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in 1979. At the time, this was a further humiliation, but now he says “How shall I put it in Michael Fox terms? You saw that movie? It’s The Secret of My Success.”

The “secret” is that he has been able to do pure research ever since without constraint. “I’m even tempted to say that it was in those four years of unemployment that all the elements of what is now identified as the Slovenian School were established,” he says, referring to a group of like-minded critics in Ljubljana. Implicitly, his total estrangement, combined with workaholism, have also shaped his thinking. Zizek is equally scathing about the old left’s attachment to outmoded formulae and the Blairite embrace of “economic realities”. Both are signs of failure, he argues.

Crucially for Zizek, “real politics” is not the art of the possible but of the impossible. “A political act proper” is one that has no utilitarian supports but which dissolves its context. He instances the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the 36-year-old schoolteacher imprisoned in Seattle last year for a passionate love affair with her 14-year-old pupil. Her case proves that it is still possible to commit an act of liberating decisiveness, which involves acting on compulsion against all rational odds. Zizek argues that “we need more people with Mary Kay’s stance in today’s politics”.

The surprising accessibility of his work – which typically contains as much Star Wars as subjectivity – is reflected in his cult following, but these two new titles deserve recognition for their substance. While the ruthless logic of globalisation elsewhere draws a chorus of resigned sighs, Slavoj Zizek remains determined to ask fundamental questions of it. The cliché that “everybody knows there’s nothing to believe in anymore” gets a tough and exhilarating ride, as Zizek’s ideas burn through the limits of the present consensus.

Slavoj Zizek, a biography

Slavoj Zizek was born in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia in the former Yugoslavia, in 1949. He obtained doctorates in philosophy and psychoanalysis from Ljubljana and Paris respectively, and retains the humble post of Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana that he has held since the 1970s, when the Yugoslavian authorities prevented him from teaching students. His many books include The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Looking Awry (1991), Tarrying with the Negative (1993), The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Plague of Fantasies (1997), as well as several edited volumes including Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (but were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) in 1992. He has taught in various American universities and given lectures all over the world, but pointedly remains in Ljubljana with his second wife, the critic Renata Salecl.

Istanbul/2009

Note: This article is a part of my PhD proposal submitted to Professor Frieder Otto Wolf last August.

Althusser’s ideology theory is a doctrine which has a huge impact upon the aftertime. On the basis of Marx, he explicitly points out and confirms the existential mode of ideology in social existence, i.e., the imaginative system of social unconsciousness. Althusser thinks that ideology itself has no history but it is eternal as an important dependent phenomenon of social relationship. In modern capitalist society, ideology becomes an important instrument of justifying the domination.

In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1969), Althusser defines ideology as “a ‘Representation ‘ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence.”[1] He sets forth two fundamental theses concerning the structure and functioning of ideology. First thesis is relevant to the object that is ‘represented’ in the imaginary form of ideology: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”[2]

With the second thesis, Althusser puts forward the question of materialization of ideology. He says “Ideology has a material existence.”[3] That is, “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.”[4] The novel idea does not indicate that ideology is an object but it means its existence is always supported by the individual or the social objective practices that highly repeat themselves. For example, one goes to the church; worshiping, praying, confessing; he uses the incessant sensuous activities to support his imaginary relations with the divine world.

Althusser especially notes, the Christian discourse not only speeches through the bible and the priest but also utilizes the religious practice, like service and sacrament, to interpellate the subject. The “I-am-that-I-am” God (Big Subject) speaks via the bible[5] and the mouth of priest, “Hello, Your name is Peter. You are born. It is your origin. You are created by God. You are born in 2009 and it is your position in the world. You shall live and die. If you believe in me, you will be saved and become a part of Christ’s body.” Here, every individual in the structure of the Christian ideology is interpellated as the subject of “oneness of body and name.” In every pray, every worship, every confession, it is told and proved that “I (the Christ) drop the blood for you.” However, Althusser exposes, what really happens is that “God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the innumerable subjects of God’s people -the Subject’s interlocutors-interpellates: his mirrors, his reflections.” This is an example of the process of ideological structuring, in which the Big Subject reproduces many subjects and becomes a subject.

In his famous book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Žižek remains hesitant to show his agreement with this Althusserian point of view in terms of the material existence of ideology and of the nature of ideological interpellation process. Instead, he lists Althusser’s “weak” points as follows:

“He [Althusser] or his school never succeeded in thinking out the link between Ideological State Apparatuses and ideological interpellation: how does the Ideological State Apparatus (the Pascalian ‘machine’, the signifying automatism) ‘internalize’ itself; how does it produce the effect of ideological belief in a Cause and the interconnecting effect of subjectivation, of recognition of one’s ideological position?”[6]

These are sharp and profound questions. In Žižek’s view, Althusser’s answer is rash and simplistic. According to him, Althusser has the misconception that the ideological machine of representation is internalized as the self-identification of the subject through interpellation. But Žižek believes the reality is much more complex.

“This ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority; in other words, which – in so far as it escapes ideological sense – sustains what might call the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant), proper to ideology.”[7]

While criticizing Althusser, Žižek’s next critical weapon is Franz Kafka. In his eyes, Kafka’s novels provide a possible critique of Althusser’s inquiry into the ideological totality. The characters of Kafka reveal a new rupture, a “gap” between the enormous ideological state apparatuses and their internalization within the individual body. Žižek says, “Kafka’s ‘irrational’ bureaucracy, this blind, gigantic, nonsensical apparatus, precisely the Ideological State Apparatus with which a subject is confronted before any identification, any recognition – any subjectivation – takes place?”[8] Furthermore, Žižek asks: is the subject really assimilated by the machine? According to Žižek, Kafka’s novels can be traced to Althusser’s interpellation.

“The Kafkaesque subject is interpellated by a mysterious bureaucratic (Law, Castle). But this interpellation has a somewhat strange look: it is, so to say, an interpellation without identification/subjectivation; it does not offer us a Cause with which to identify – the Kafkaesque subject is the subject desperately seeking a trait with which to identify, he does not understand the meaning of the call of the Other.”[9]

This is because the characters in Kafka’s novels[10] usually seem to remain outside the system, like the metamorphosed insect-man (Gregor Samsa), which is an artistic representation. In the place where the normal people enter identification and subjectivation, the deformed insect-man is denied; in the place where a normal subject receives interpellation, the insect-man is simply confused.

“This is the dimension overlooked Althusserian account of interpellation: before being caught in the identification, in the symbolic recognition/misrecognition, the subject is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause desire in the midst of it, through secret, supposed to be hidden in the Other: the Lacanian formula of fantasy.”[11]

Žižek’s theses appears very formidable with those concepts rather strange to the traditional critique, like “traumatic,” “non-integrated surplus,” “jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant).” He is re-writing ideology with the Lacanian philosophy. As we know, Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses is under Lacan’s influence. However, Žižek accuses Althusser of his misunderstanding of Lacan. It seems that he [Žižek] wants to prove himself an orthodox Lacanian successor. However, what Žižek seems to overlook (or to ignore) is the aim and target of Althusser’s use of the ideological interpellation process and its context in Althusser’s Marxism.

Althusser had always been familiar with the Lacanian terminology and with the realm of psychoanalysis in general. Moreover, he explains the ground of his postulate of “ideology has no history” through Freudian proposition about unconsciousness: “Ideology has no history, can and must (and in a way which has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the reverse, is theoretically necessary, for there is an organic link between the two propositions) be related directly to Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history.”[12]

But within the context of structure and functioning of ideology, Althusser’s main concern is basically the conditions of the process of reproduction. For Althusser, the ultimate condition of reproduction is the reproduction of the conditions of production. Referring to Marx, he underlines one of the fundamental Marxist theses: a social formation, which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced, would not last a year.[13]

II. The Main Context of Althusserian Discourse of Ideology:

Althusser asks: “What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions of production?”[14] For him, reaching the point of view of reproduction has a crucial importance, but at the same time it is extremely hard due to the fact that the obviousness of the point of view of the production is so integrated into our everyday consciousness.

“Nevertheless, everything outside this point of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) — even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice.”[15]

Considering the condition of survival of a social formation, a social formation must reproduce two elements: the productive forces and the existing production relations. The reproduction of the material condition of production is obviously a substantial factor and this is ensured in the firm by the extensions of the ruling class.

“The average economist, who is no different in this than the average capitalist, knows that each year it is essential to foresee what is needed to replace what has been used up or worn out in production: raw material, fixed installations, instruments of production, etc. I say the average economist = the average capitalist, for they both express the point of view of the firm, regarding it as sufficient simply to give a commentary on the terms of the firm’s financial accounting practice.”[16]

Althusser reminds that Marx had successfully elaborated and proved the principles and process of the reproduction of the material conditions of production in Capital, basically volumes two and three of it. When it comes to the reproduction of labor power, the process starts to become much more complex. While wage[17] meets the minimum requirements of reproduction of the material labor power, still remains a question: “How is the reproduction of the (diversified) skills of labor power provided for in a capitalist regime?”[18] This question is one of the key questions that pave the way for the discussion of ideology in the contemporary Marxist literature, particularly in Althusser’s theory.[19] Here Althusser distinguishes the capitalist society from other types of class societies (i.e. slavery and serfdom societies).

In a capitalist society the educational system plays an indispensable role in the process of reproduction of the labor power. Beside being technically[20] shaped according to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production, children also learn the ethical codes and rules, to become a “good citizen,” -to speak with Marxist language- which means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labor and consequently the rules of the system/order that is established by the ruling bourgeois class.

“To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.”[21]

Here the core question emerges: how is the “reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers” ensured in a capitalist society? Althusser indicates that we face the dual characteristic of the capitalist State by this question: the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses.

Before advancing, it is remarkable to note that what creates “the gap” between Althusser and Žižek seems to lie behind the difference of focuses. Because Žižek’s criticism is relying on “the other,” who or which is not and cannot be integrated in the “system,” in the production and reproduction process (including the reproduction of the labor power) but is a result or reflection of this process (Such as the insect-man that is characterized in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’). So the Althusserian point of view does not seem to exclude the “Kafkaesque subject” or the “Pascalian machine,” but such figures are immanent to the ideology and reproduction process in the broader scale in Althusser’s theory.

In order to develop this context and to constitute an answer from Althusserian discourse to the criticism of Žižek, I am planning to have a systematic reading of Žižek’s works on ideology through centralizing his book titled ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology.’

The Category of Subject and Its Functioning:

The subject category and its functioning have a crucial importance in Althusser’s ideology theory. Considering his famous formulation, “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,”[22] the subject category emerges as the constitutive structure of all ideologies. For Althusser, the existence of the ideology depends on subjects and it also processes for subjects.

“There is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning, by the category of the subject and its functioning.”[23]

Depending on one of the central thesis of Althusser on the question of ideology, “Ideology has no history,” the subject category is the constitutive category for all ideologies, independently of their regional or class-base determinations. So the question is: how does the subject category constitute the ideological process? For this constitution, the ultimate condition is the fact that the constitutive function of ideology: the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects. This dual structure of constitution leads to “quadruple system”[24] of ideological interpellation:

1.     The interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects;

2.     Their subjection to the Subject;

3.     The mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself;

4.     The absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly.

“Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses).”[25]

While Althusser summarizes the ideological interpellation process as such, with the unity and unique style of working of the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), he also gives the hints of the nature of ideological interpellation process among subjects:

“They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’, etc. Their concrete, material behavior is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen — So be it’.”[26]

So Althusser says, the reproduction of the existing relations of production is depending on this scheme: “The reality in question in this mechanism, the reality which is necessarily ignored (méconnue ) in the very forms of recognition (ideology = misrecognition/ignorance) is indeed, in the last resort, the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them.”[27]

[2] Althusser, Ideology, p. 162.

[3] Althusser, Ideology, p. 165.

[4] Althusser, Ideology, p. 166.

[5] Despite the current expample is taken from Christianity, it applies for all abrahamic religion types. Here the aim is to remain loyal to Althusser’s way of speaking.

[6] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso Books, New York and London, 1989), p. 43.

[7] Žižek, p. 43.

[8] Žižek, p. 44.

[9] Žižek, p. 44.

[10] See Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and “The Trial.”

[11] Žižek, p. 44.

[12] Althusser, İdeology, p.161.

[13] Marx’s letter to Kugelmann, dated 11 July 1868 (Althusser’s footnote).

[14] Althusser, Ideology, p. 127.

[15] Althusser, Ideology, p. 128.

[16] Althusser, Ideology, p. 129.

[17] Althusser notes that the quantity of value (wages), which is necessary for the reproduction of labor power, is not only determined by the needs of a ‘biological’ Guaranteed Minimum Wage alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum. He gives the example of Marx that English workers need beer while French proletarians need wine. So the term minimum signifies a historically variable minimum rather than a biological minimum.

[18] Althusser, Ideology, p. 131.

[19] It is well known that the ideology debate has not been launched by Althusser in the Marxist literature. As he points out in various parts of his works, the debate dates back to Marx and Engels’ German Ideology (1845) or even  to Marx’s On the Jewish Question (1843). The 20th century Marxism, including Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukacs and Karl Korch, were high involved in the discussion in certain extents. Therefore, the framework of this thesis is planned to be established on the general ideology debate within the 20th century Marxism to comprehend Althusser’s theory, its position in Marxist literature and Marxist state theory in a more concrete way.

[20] Althusser exemplifies as such: “They learn to read, to write and to add — i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’, which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn know-how” (Althusser, Ideology, p. 132.)

[21] Althusser, Ideology, p. 132.

[22] Althusser, Ideology, p. 169.

[23] Althusser, Ideology, p. 170.

[24] Althusser, Ideology, p. 182.

[25] Althusser, Ideology, p. 182.

[26] Althusser, Ideology, p. 183.

[27] Althusser, Ideology, p. 183.

There were yellow taxis (which are supposed to be less abusive than the ordinary white ones) in the airport already. My little sister has grown from a baby into a little girl who recited to me the poems she learned in preschool. I finally met my high school sister’s suitor, the same guy who ran away from the gate last Valentines’ Day when I went out to see who sent my sister a pink teddy bear.

And after more than half a decade of renting the house, the street that leads to our home was finally asphalted by the local government. The next local and national elections are just around the corner. An asphalt road’s supposed to be six inches thick but the one there was only two inches thin. Well, not much has changed. I’m expecting potholes and cracks the next time I visit home.

I also donated some books to Their Books, an event wherein the organizers collect books from writers, poets, editors and media practitioners, musicians, artists, book lovers, art lovers, and other prominent personalities in Cebu and put them on sale with the proceeds going to school children. There’s a list of the books they’re putting on sale at facebook. I’d like to get The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño for myself. Unfortunately, I’m not in Cebu for the event. So I guess I’d have to ask somebody to buy them for me.

Anyhow, I got myself a copy of Resil Mojares’s Origins and Rise of the Novel: A Generic Study of the Filipino Novel until 1940, a synchronic and diachronic investigation that seeks to chart the contours of the structures that underlie the Filipino novel while at the same time tracing the development of its various elements through history.

I have never been that much of an admirer of local literature, in part because my petty bourgeois habitus (the set of tastes characteristic of my class) is more inclined to consuming cultural artifacts coming from the west. Last year, this middle class colonial mentality was epitomized in a society columnist’s complaint over her daughter’s required high school class reading of Amado Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit. Why not just let them read Hemingway, she asked?

But along with Soledad Reyes’s essays on the fictions of Filipino women writers, female characters in Filipino literary texts, and popular culture in Tellers of Tales, Singers of Songs: Selected Critical Essays, Mojares’s study has instilled in me a greater appreciation of the Philippine literary heritage. I’ve begun to see them in a new light.

I’m halfway through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a thick tome inhabited by a hilariously unreliable narrator. It is written in a most garish style, perhaps much too colorful for my taste but still very much worth the effort to read.

After discontinuing my previous attempt at Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject (which I was gravely unprepared for when I began reading it last December), I decided to start over and began reading the Slovenian cultural theorist’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English) to gain an understanding his Lacanian-informed critique of ideology.

There are too many texts to read and too little time, especially when one has other things to do too – like attending classes, talking with and organizing people, daydreaming about running after a girl, losing sleep, and writing all sorts of silly stuff like this. ■

Hegel with Austen

Austen, not Austin: it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart to Hegel in literature: Pride and Prejudice is the literary Phenomenology of Spirit; Mansfield Park the Science of Logic and Emma the Encyclopaedia… No wonder, then, that we find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition. Although they belong to different social classes – he is from an extremely rich aristocratic family, she from the impoverished middle classes – Elizabeth and Darcy feel a strong mutual attraction. Because of his pride, his love appears to Darcy as something unworthy; when he asks for Elizabeth’s hand he confesses openly his contempt for the world to which she belongs and expects her to accept his proposition as an unheard-of honour. But because of her prejudice, Elizabeth sees him as ostentatious, arrogant, and vain: his condescending proposal humiliates her, and she refuses him.

Darcy is about to give his letter to Lizzy.

This double failure, this mutual misrecognition, possesses a structure of a double movement of communication where each subject receives from the other its own message in the inverse form: Elizabeth wants to present herself to Darcy as a young cultivated woman, full of wit, and she gets from him the message ‘you are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature, full of false finesse’; Darcy wants to present himself to her as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message ‘your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance’. After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other – she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit – and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage.

The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot go directly for the truth, we cannot say ‘If, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.’ Let us take as a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success – that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy’s first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant,  rich man and a pretentious, empty-minded young girl. If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself: only the ‘working-through’ of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency – for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.

These two movements are interconnected because Elizabeth encounters, in Darcy’s pride, the inverse image of her own prejudices; and Darcy, in Elizabeth’s vanity, the inverse image of his own false pride. In other words, Darcy’s pride is not a simple, positive state of things existing independently of his relationship with Elizabeth, and immediate property of his nature; it takes place, it appears, only from the perspective of her prejudices; vice versa, Elizabeth is a pretentious empty-minded girl only in Darcy’s arrogant view. To articulate things in Hegelian terms: in the perceived deficiency of the other, each perceives – without knowing it – the falsity of his/her own subjective position; the deficiency of the other is simply an objectification of the distortion of our own point of view.

~~~~~~

I’ll add that the book as such approaches the theme of illusion and ideology that is mistakenly supposed to be a consciously prepared image of the world. According to Zizek we are all wrong thinking that we are free from misconceptions and live in the post-ideological times (times of truth), and assuming that we are not vulnerable to manipulation, while, in fact, everything that we see as truth, all our knowledge about the world, ourselves, and our system of arranging the world, is an ideology par excellence. People are led by their unconscious desire to set the world in order, to look for truth. This desire makes them create an illusion of humans being dividable into good or bad, of their being definitive personalities. In fact no one can be so easily described, and those images of ourselves and others created by us (or to some extent imposed on us by our families and others) are the very ideology we think we are free from.

The idea of the Misrecognition of the Truth assumes that the truth that becomes recognised already exists in us. I.e. people who believe in God can give many reasons for His existence, but no number of proofs will change the mind of an atheist. A naturally tallented person can suddenly become a great artist, but no number of lessons will make for a genius. And the truth can be recognized only by accident, since only an accident can make us look at ourselves from the outside.

So neither Darcy nor Lizzy learn from each other something new, but rather thanks to the clash they recognise the truth that was already in them. But it also means that neither of them would ever be happy with themselves if they never met the other, because they’d struggle living according to their mistaken, false images of themselves that they used to believe to be true.

Relevant posts at Austenette:

Easter in Pride and Prejudice
Woman in Love