on the sublime object of ideology
the material force of ideology is what keeps the subject from really seeing what they are eating from the trashcan of ideology. what is this material force? how does it function? what sustains it?
to make sense of this question, Žižek conjugates Kant, Lacan, and Marx via the sublime object of ideology. this perspective is a bridge between psychoanalysis and Marxism, that is, a merging of the psyche with the socio-politico-economic structures that surround us and are within us.
this connection between internal system and external system is actually found already in historical materialism with Marx’s notion of the symptom. in the words of Freud, “a symptom is a sign of and a substitute for an institutional satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process to repress.”
that is, a symptom is the result of a systemic failure or a systemic repression. thus the sneeze is a symptom.
this dynamic between what is external and what is internal results in two “naturalized” states (not natural but made natural), which are systemically isomorphic to each other. one is the Real state/order and the Symbolic state/order.
the Symbolic order has captured the unconscious and the superego, and now there contains what Žižek calls, latent thought. this is the motor of the dream, but because of its ‘structure’, isolating it for analysis does not offer any clarity. in fact, the attempt to isolate latent thought has been the failure of psychoanalysis as it has been developed historically.
instead of identifying it, one should study how it becomes, that is, one should seek to understand the form in which these thoughts occur and the form in which the subject exists.
instead of asking “what is latent thought,” we should ask why abstract structures become the motor of dreams. and further, why is the structure of abstractions driving our socio-politico-economic systems?
this is because of the nature of our communication system: it is language (the Word) that splits the subject into the moments of the Real and the Symbolic.
thus, because communication is not just the verbal, the symbolic is a system in a mode of communication e.g. language, discourse, rule within governing systems, methods of monetary exchange within markets, in one word, desires. and it is within this symbolic system that the superego resides in and communicates from.
the superego as characterized by Freud communicates with the forms of acceptability, ideals, morality, and ethics. in this way, the symbolic order sets up the parameters within which we act, reason, and communicate.
at this point, it is natural to ask: if there is a structure of hierarchy, what is at the top? what influence these superstructures? Žižek answers, pure ideology i.e. the sublime objects of ideology.
what is this sublime object of ideology? it is an object co/created by ideology, assuming forms of money, legal treaties, governments—in general, it isn’t a concrete thing but can be represented by a concrete thing, where thing may even be a system.
the point, remember, isn’t to identify these so as to submit them to analysis, but rather to “meet” them on their own plateau, in their own movement. to this end, we concern ourselves with the arrows/functors flowing away from these sublime objects. we ask: how do these sublime objects operate?
strictly speaking, we could say that everything positive that happens in this country is a direct result of the constitution; so too is everything negative also a direct result of the constitution—because the constitution offers the very framework from which political institutions act and are swayed.
so these sublime objects of ideology function precisely like language: just as language cause the subject to be diffracted into moments and the subsequent symptoms only to be understood with language; so too do these sublime objects of ideology condition what is thought, idealized, dreamed, reasoned, communicated. in short, these sublime objects condition the quanta of possibles.
we can characterize these sublime objects as Overton windows: they shift acceptable realms of ideas and acceptable modes of communication. with this lens, that the commodity-form is diffracted into four moments (use-value, desire, exchange-value, labor) is already a symptom, a systemic glitch.
in practice, the result is that workers, commodities, and so on become abstractions; and what sustains these abstractions are people/resources, which can in turn become abstractions.
this is why most people realize that money is just paper and more than just paper. and because money is simultaneously nothing and all-powerful, money/capital/commodity holds the power of a sublime object of ideology.
as an example of a mode of behavior induced by this sublime object of ideology, look at how certain people act in a business context. business people with their version of religion/astrology, where the Entrepreneur is substituted for the Son/the Cosmos, posture themselves in a way that shows they are a serious person, so that their businesses may be regarded as serious.
and this tendency, this set of behaviors—this ideology—comes back in another ideology: a cynical person might look at this repugnantly, reject it, and in reaction, construct another identity that denies all of these elements, à la Big Lebowski.
hence even the rejection of ideology is ideological, because ideological modes of viewing the world are completely enmeshed with the superego structure of the mind; because, in turn, ideological modes of understanding the world are completely enmeshed in the unconscious mind.
so while most people recognize this dual characteristic of money, that it both is meaningless and all-powerful, the point is that this continues: they continue to pretend that it isn’t just paper, they continue to ritualize themselves within that ideological framework they live in. in other words, the subject can understand that ultimately money is just paper but they can never pretend like it is just paper.
it should be clear by now that these systems are without us and within us. this formulation isn’t too dissimilar to the Lacanian structure of psychoanalysis, where political systems and psychoanalysis are on the same pole.
to make this point clearer: political systems exist homogeneously, so that when we become socialized on a personal level, our behavior and day-to-day functions become more integrated into social rituals, thus strengthening our understanding of (internal) concepts such as purchasing, consuming, etc i.e. concepts derived from the (external) system (which is itself reflected/projected in the person, where it is replicated and maintained).
consequently, we become more socialized when we interact with the market, as the market becomes more humanized.
if we were constantly aware of these processes, abstractions, exchanges—if we were to become aware of ideology, it simply wouldn’t be ideology anymore: “this non-knowledge of the reality is a part of its very essence.”
this is when Žižek borrows from Marx about ideology: “this non-knowledge is not simply false consciousness of the prior world labeled ideology; it is a social reality, how we interact. in a dialectical way, ideology is the very consciousness of itself.
these ideological fissures within ideology itself does produce the symptoms. these symptoms are everything we see on a symbolic level, which gives rise to some interesting paradoxes and inversions. Žižek writes,
every ideology has a central component of exception
every ideological universal concept has a contradiction built within it: freedom is a universal notion with many species (freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, etc), but also a structural necessity, a specific freedom, that of the worker to freely sell their labor on the market, which subverts this universal notion. that is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling their labor freely, the laborer loses their freedom—the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. the point of course is that it is this precise paradoxical freedom that closes the circle of bourgeoisie freedoms.
in other words, you are only ever ultimately free to sell yourself to slavery.
another paradox: when we become servants of capital via labor, if we refuse this we become destitute, poor within this system—yet ideology sets the very parameters for this to exist!!
these types of paradoxes bring these symptoms into fruition.
we might think of ideology as glasses which distort our vision and to see reality, we have to remove the glasses. in the movie They Live, the correct thesis of this symptom is portrayed: ideology is our “naturalized state” and to see the truth we have to put on the glasses.
another significant symptom is ideological cynicism as totalitarian laughter. since life situations are elastic, this symptom is such that people become dogmatic to the structural good and practically maintain that ultimately there will not be any compromise in the name of good. thus we could run into a situation where the end justifies the means, which can be paradoxically evil.
Žižek posits: maybe we should not take the status quo ideology as seriously, as ultimately we jeopardize our ability to adapt.
but interestingly, in robust systems of authority (e.g. Yugoslavia), there arises a general mockery about its authority, itself adopted by the governing system of authority to gain the popular trust by systematizing the mockery of itself. consequently, the population not taking its authority seriously results in totalitarian actions by the status quo. again, all is subsisted in ideology.
for example, consider the U.S. 3%ers, an anti-government right-wing militia group. in paper they claim to protect people from a tyrannical government and claim to be anti-government, whatever, but still licks the boot—precisely because they don’t take it seriously.
these doings and not knowings is what paves way for ideological fantasy. traditionally, a fantasy is situated within the internal. but, the materialist inversion of our particular historical moment has emptied the subject of a fantasy and instead, placed it in the external. that is, now the fantasy is practiced externally with money, exchange, and commodification.
the movement of the fantasy from the internal to the external generates the objectivity of belief. this is a fetishistic illusion where one acts as if money were the embodiment of wealth. these beliefs, these grand narratives people tell themselves in their heads ultimately transfers (transference) to larger exterior socio/politico/economic structures.
Lacan claims that belief is something interior whereas knowledge is something exterior (because one can verify knowledge from an exterior position).
but what is observed instead is that today belief is something exterior as it makes up the very foundation of our inner structures of life and our thinking about what is possible, how we interact with the world via commodities, how we design political systems.
thus in a paradoxical sense, belief frames the objective in an exterior manner; and further, what we are symbolically told to believe also comes from the exterior.
a great example of paradox is the canned laughter of TV shows: with canned laughter, the Lacanian ‘Other’ is embodied in that television set, and the person is relieved from the tangible duty to laugh—this is a form of surplus-enjoyment. the result is that we may not laugh once throughout the show but may still claim we “enjoyed” watching the show.
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summarily: in the Imaginary, the Real is codified, reflected with elements that form coherent significations (meaning) i.e. organized by discourses, sciences, languages i.e. elements of design i.e. symbols, which form the general language that symptomizes our desires via acts of creation/destruction, be they political, philosophical, or artistic (i posit they are all artistic acts).
as such, reality is a fiction meant to protect us from the yawning chasm of the Real, that singularity which haunts our day/to/day subjectivity. yet only from the Real can we build up our symbols, our objects of desires, that is, the desires perceived.
there are splitting laws/functions that stem from Ideology which continues the building up and maintaining of the Real in the Imaginary and hence the Real via this Imaginary, and more importantly, constrains desire (objet petit a) via the castration.
ultimately, the subject is built up from the very ideology they were born into, the one with the very posited desires in the symbolic order, and with the very posited social normals that they follow, which is reinforced by the psyche itself, and the very sublime objects which are placed in front of them.
the ultimate position of the sublime object of ideology is thus articulated through Hegel:
“it is manifest that beyond so-called curtain of phenomena which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves as much in order that we may see, as there may be something behind there which can be seen.”