[PEN-L:9601] Re: Re: Re: Let's slow down here

[Ken Hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If I follow Zizek at all, it seems to follow that his own pompous
quasi-Hegelian vagary is itself
a piece of fashionable ideological puffery.
    Cheers, Ken Hanly

Doug Henwood wrote:

> 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