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Mapping Ideology Edited by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK VERSO London New York
Contents INTRODUCTION The Spectre of Ideology Slavoj Žižek 1 Messages in a Bottle Theodor W. Adorno 2 Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity Peter Dews 3 The Critique of Instrumental Reason Seyla Benhabib 4 The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I Jacques Lacan 5 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) Louis Althusser 6 The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)recognition Michel Pêcheux 7 Determinacy and Indeterminacy in the Theory of Ideology Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner 8 The New Questions of Subjectivity Göran Therborn 9 Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism Terry Eagleton 10 Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View Richard Rorty 11 Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe Michèle Barrett 12 Doxa and Common Life: An Interview Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton 13 Postmodernism and the Market Fredric Jameson 14 How Did Marx Invent the Symptom? Slavoj Žižek List of Sources Index
1 34 46 66 93 100 141 152 167 179 227 235 265 278 296 332 333
INTRODUCTION Ideology
The
Spectre
of
Slavoj Žižek
I Critique of Ideology, today? By way of a simple reflection on how the horizon of historical imagination is subjected to change, we find ourselves in medias res, compelled to accept the unrelenting pertinence of the notion of ideology. Up to a decade or two ago, the system production-nature (man's productive-exploitative relationship with nature and its resources) was perceived as a constant, whereas everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today, as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming 'breakdown of nature', of the stoppage of all life on earth -- it seems easier to imagine the 'end of the world' than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the 'real' that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe . . . . One can thus categorically assert the existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and nonimaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship. This matrix can be easily discerned in the dialectics of 'old' and 'new', when an event that announces a wholly new dimension or epoch is (mis)perceived as the continuation of or return to the past, or -- the opposite case -- when an event that is entirely inscribed in the logic of the existing order is (mis)perceived as a radical rupture. The supreme example of the latter, of course, is provided by those critics of Marxism who (mis)perceive our latecapitalist society as a new social formation no longer dominated by the dynamics of capitalism as it was described by Marx. In order to avoid this worn-out example, however, let us turn to the domain of sexuality. One of today's commonplaces is that so-called 'virtual' or 'cyber' sex presents a radical break with the past, since in it, actual sexual contact with a 'real other' is losing ground against masturbatory enjoyment, whose sole support is a virtual other -phone-sex, pornography, up to computerized 'virtual sex' . . . . The Lacanian answer to this is that first we have to expose the myth of 'real sex' allegedly possible 'before' the arrival of virtual sex: Lacan's thesis that 'there is no sexual relationship' means precisely that the structure of the 'real' sexual act (of the act with a flesh-and-blood partner) is already inherently phantasmic -- the 'real' body of the other se