[PEN-L:9393] Re: Re: Let's slow down here

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brad De Long wrote:

>Maybe I'm hopelessly old-fashioned, but I had always thought of
>"ideology" as something different from "knowledge"

Which just proves you're in the grip of ideology!

Quoting, as I did a few weeks ago, from Slavoj Zizek's intro to his
edited collection, Mapping Ideology:

"However, such an approach, although it is adequate at its own level,
can easily ensnare us in historicist relativism that suspends the
inherent cognitive value of the term 'ideology' and makes it into a
mere expression of social circumstances. For that reason, it seems
preferable to begin with a different, synchronous approach. Apropos
of religion (which, for Marx, was ideology par excellence), Hegel
distinguished three moments: doctrine, belief, and ritual; one, is
thus tempted to dispose the multitude of notions associated with the
term 'ideology' around these three axes: ideology as a complex of
ideas (theories, convictions, beliefs, argumentative procedures);
ideology in its externality, that is, the materiality of ideology,
Ideological State Apparatuses; and finally, the most elusive domain,
the 'spontaneous' ideology at work at the heart of social 'reality'
itself (it is highly questionable if the term 'ideology' is at all
appropriate to designate this domain - here it is exemplary that,
apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx never used the term 'ideology").
Let us recall the case of liberalism: liberalism is a doctrine
(developed from Locke to Hayek) materialized in rituals and
apparatuses (free press, elections, market, etc.) and active in the
'spontaneous' (self-) experience of subjects as 'free individuals'.
The order of contributions in this Reader follows this line that,
grosso modo, fits the Hegelian triad of In-itself -- For-itself --
In-and-For-itself. This logico-narrative reconstruction of the notion
of ideology will be centred on the repeated occurrence of the already
mentioned reversal of non-ideology into ideology - that is, of the
sudden awareness of how the very gesture of stepping out of ideology
pulls us back into it."

Doug