Summary of The sublime object of ideology By Abida younas

Summary of The sublime object of ideology

By Abida younas

Žižek starts his book by arguing that there is an essential homology between the interpretive procedure of Marx and Freud and more precisely between their analysis of commodity and dream. Both Marx and Freud shift the focus on the form of commodities and dream that is why certain process occupies such form as Žižek says in his book: “the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form but on the contrary ‘the secret of this form itself”. Žižek proceeds to Freud to show that dream is a form not only disguises the latent content, but also an another element, an unconscious desire, which cannot be express in normal language rather it can pronounce in a dream. Marx expose the same mechanism in regards to the commodity form as he says in The sublime object of ideology: “the real problem is not to penetrate to the hidden kernel of the commodity – the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production- but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity- form of its product”. Therefore commodity implies the abstraction which made the abstract things possible. This pure abstraction, which is actually the unconscious of commodity, is the core of Marxist analysis today.

However, in reality this abstraction conquers our subjective world from the outside and disrupt the dualism of people’s actual thought  and their objective experience: “the form of though external to the thought itself- in short some other scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance”. (13) It is the symbolic order that provides these forms of thought: “the symbolic order is precisely such a formal order which supplements or disrupt the dual relationship of external factual reality and internal subjective experience”. (13) Thus it means that every activity of a subject is based on the blindness of this third element which is revealed through form and it offers a ready-made solutions: “a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies certain non-knowledge of its participants”. (15)

Consequently, Žižek offers the reinterpretations of ideology which for him is not simply a “False consciousness”, an illusionary representation of reality rather reality itself conceived as an ideological: “ideological is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participant as to its essence- that is the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals do not know what they are doing.” (16) He further argues that people might recognize that their reality is not an actual reality rather it structures on ideological illusion which he calls as an “ideological fantasy” yet the people follows it. Therefore he says that cynical reason is one of the ways which keep us blind to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: “even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” (30) Sloterdijk also puts down the same accounts of ideology: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it”.

From this standpoint, Marxist analysis of the commodity exposes a new relationship between things and persons: “the crucial relationships between people take on the form of relations between things, between commodities- instead immediate relations between people; we have social relations between things.” (31) As a result our social field and our mental state are always materialized in our effective social effective.

Here Žižek yields in to the Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatus to explore its link with form and with mechanism of ideological interpellation. ISA internalize themselves in subject by producing “the effect of ideological belief in a cause and the interconnecting effect of subjectivation.” (43) Moreover he also claims that ISA never fully internalize themselves into the subjects: “there is always a residue leftover and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submissions of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this nonintegrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority...” (43)

Žižek advances his concept of ideology by saying that “ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernosto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.” (45)

Here, the difference between Lacan and Marxism is prevalent: “in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility.” (50)

Further he discusses the Lacan formula for the relation of subject with object. The Subject, split and 'barred' by language, is directing his desire onto the object a, to retrieve the 'lost', imaginary unity with the mother, situated 'before' the entry into the symbolic order. He says that the object of fantasy is not the fantasy scene itself rather an impossible gaze witnessing it.

Finally, Žižek outlines Lacan's different approach to the problem of the Real. He puts down the question whether real is 'really real', or is it something resisting symbolization, or is it the subject supposed to know, a cause, that doesn't exist. Žižek then argues that the Real 'is nothing at all, just a void, emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility'. This is where, according to Zizek, is the difference between 'post-structuralist' position and Lacan's position: The former describes the subject as being the result of a subjectivating processes ('assujetissement'), while the latter conceives of the subject as an 'answer of the Real' -- because the signified can never find a signifier that would fully represent it, this void we call a subject is created.

He says that reality is produced by means of some particular act: “purely formal act converting reality as something which is objectively given into reality as 'effectivity', as something produced, 'posited' by the subject”. (247) Thus in common language the subject does not perform any action as Žižek says: the subject 'doesn't really do anything', he only assumes the guilt-responsibility for the given state of things - that is, he accepts it as 'his own work' by a purely formal act: what was a moment ago perceived as substantial positivity ('reality that merely if) is suddenly perceived as resulting from his own activity (' reality as something produced by consciousness').” (248).

Hence, Žižek’s book The Sublime Object of Ideology is a book of Hegel and Lacan in which he offers a reinterpretation of the ideology and he also revives the concept of Lacan’s real.

Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.