Ideology and Philosophy

Taking a brief pause from discussions of pretension, I'd like to address the issue of ideology and philosophy. Althusser defines ideology in an extremely interesting way, in his seminal article "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses": "Ideology is a 'representation' of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

I've always found this definition interesting because of the multiple degrees of separation it suggests between the individual and that individual's conditions of existence. Ideology becomes, then, a double-layer of mediation between what is presumably some form of conscious subjectivity, and a material reality that is capable of producing some form of phenomenal appearance.

At one level, individuals have an imaginary relationship to this material plane of existence. I'm not entirely sure what this means, except that it must have something to do with psychoanalysis and Lacan's notion of the imaginary. Let's, uhm, avoid for the moment bringing in Lacan, and focus instead on a brute, somewhat naive interpretation of this sentence. Let's suppose that the imaginary is basically just that, a version of the real world located in the mind of the observer that is somehow less real than the world it refers to.

Okay, so we've got our little eidolon stored comfortably in our minds. This means we can more or less proceed about our daily business, referring from time to time to this imaginary picture of the world to prevent us from bumping into pointy objects like those infuriating crotch-level poles that litter the sidewalks of Paris. No doubt Althusser was quite familiar with these; unless you've got a very good image of the world, you're bound to run into them eventually.

Now, I've hesitated to call this image a representation, but that is precisely what my limited knowledge of phenomenology would incline me to label it. An imaginary representation of the world. The world, at least some phenomenologists have argued, is such that we cannot access it in its pure and complete form. We're always losing information, owing to the limitations of our senses. A Cartesian would likely say at this point, "To hell with the senses! There is only thought!", while an Empiricist would say, "I hate the French!", or perhaps, "This baguette needs more brie." In any event, I have nothing but love for the French, but I definitely think all baguettes always need more brie, and that makes me an Empiricist (for the duration of this sentence, at least). This is all to say, of course, that Rationalists (like Descartes) like to talk about ideas and thought, while Empiricists and Materialists (e.g., Marxists) like to talk about the 'real conditions of existence'. But this is a pretty old, and frankly somewhat limiting binary, so let's do away with it for now!

So if we can't know the so-called 'real' world perfectly, because our glasses are always getting foggy in the winter or something, all we have then is a little internal model of it: a re-presentation. Our brains take what is presented to us, or more precisely whatever their grubby little brain tendrils can get a hold of, and re-project it into the dark theatre of our minds for our personal amusement (inverted to accommodate for the way an image appears on our retina, that is to say upside down). This new image becomes a representation of the world, and is all we ocular-dependent folk have to go on. Of course, I'm emphasizing sight here, but this kind of representation applies equally to worlds constructed entirely in the absence of any one sense (the blind or the deaf, for example, must contend just as much with the limitations of their imaginary representations, but I don't for a moment think MORE so).

But if you go back and re-read Althusser's definition, you'll see that he is very specific in his use of language. At this point you'll probably say, "Wait, Andrew, Althusser doesn't say 'a representation of an imaginary representation'! You're lying to us!" And, well, you'd be perfectly right. About the first part. Because I never lie. Or at least not right now.

No, it is in fact true. Althusser says that ideology is a representation of an imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence. But the fact remains that in order to have a relationship, we must have something to relate to. Since phenomenologically we can't relate perfectly to the 'real conditions' as they exist in themselves -- sooner or later we'll crash into one of those damn poles -- all we can do is relate to an imaginary representation of those conditions. Our experience of the world is this relationship to an imaginary model. The daily quotidian existence of our lives, before the occurrence of any higher-level values (like truth, or baguettes, or even perhaps notions of what a 'self' is) can be called a relation to the real. This has a very Lacanian feel, but I promised not to go into Lacan, especially since I don't feel qualified to crack that nut right now.

So we're people, presumably conscious and self-aware, relating to this abstract image of a thing we can never really know called the 'real', and for all that we still can't manage to navigate our way through the streets of Paris. All we want to do is find that amazing baguette shop where they bake the brie right into the bread (to be honest, I don't even know if such a thing is possible, but it sounds delicious, and if it were in fact possible I am sure that such a place exists somewhere in Paris, though it is probably damn near impossible to find, and certainly impossible to find twice). Alas, however, we have become hopelessly lost, and for some strange reason our map keeps turning into a white sheet with the cryptic message, "Error 404: Page not found", and just as we're about to start questioning the fundamental nature of perception itself another, more compelling thought strikes us: Let's complain!

Yes, let's chalk this damnable un-navigability up to poor city planning and bureaucratic mismanagement. In fact, let's blame a particular political party for this problem, join an opposing one, and start picketing for straighter, more pedestrian friendly streets (and let's get rid of those damn poles while we're at it). Althusser would call this 'ideology'. In fact, he'd lean out of his window, point at you, and laugh. And then he'd call it ideology, under his breath. And then he'd probably go make coffee.

It's ideology because this whole story about bureaucracy, while compelling perhaps, has very little to do with the 'real conditions of existence', whatever those are. No one knows, and that's precisely the problem. Whenever we start to comment ABOUT our imaginary relationship to those conditions, we're in ideology. Any attempt to assign any kind of order and system to that flickering movie in our minds is ideological. It never gets at the real, but only a representation of the real. Even more than that, it is a representation of a representation of the real. What we've done is taken the image playing in our minds and filtered it through a silk-screen, so that we still get something of the original image (which was nevertheless still a representation), but only now it is distorted. However, the silk-screen makes sense to us. It gives everything in the original image a kind of significance that it didn't have before; a coherence, a narrative perhaps, is created where before there was only a succession of discrete moments in time, lacking any relationship between them.

So, our imaginary relationship to the real, devoid of any meta-narrative, consists of these disparate, unconnected moments. Along comes ideology and re-presents this relationship as something cogent and, dare I say it, 'true'. It's true to those who adhere to a given ideology. Ideology always bespeaks truth. So our silk-screen tells us a story, gives us a satisfying or compelling filter through which to pass all that phenomenological data we were getting before, unfiltered. It's like a Brita filter for the mind: we're getting less stuff, or at least somehow altered, but we're convinced it tastes better.

Of course, there are many ideologies of guilt and resentment, hatred and enmity. These are silk-screens that tell a story of repression and oppression, and they tend to be very compelling indeed. We can't really say, as such, that ideology makes us feel better. It certainly has that potential, but that is not its purpose. Ideology exists in order to superimpose meaning onto something that would otherwise strike us as inherently meaningless, and it is everywhere and in everything.

So in reality, or perhaps I should say in the imaginary, we are always already in ideology. What I said before about us wandering around blithely content with our imaginary representation of the real, before the advent of any higher determining concepts, was by and large a fiction. Even in those moments before we are self-aware of ideology, there is already an ideology implicit in how we see the world. The silk-screen, if you will, is installed at birth, and can never be removed -- only changed, replaced for another.

The question of ideology, after Althusser, becomes "What is outside ideology?" The image I've created, of a projector in the mind, whose lens has a silk-screen transforming the image, was deliberately selected to parallel the Platonic cave metaphor. In that version, the hapless masses sit chained to the floor of a cave (an 'allegorical' cave, in case you weren't paying attention, since sadly even in ancient times caves weren't big enough to fit everyone), and are made to watch an endless procession of shadows dancing across a wall (read: imaginary relationship to/representation of the real). The shadows are puppets, themselves cheap reproductions of things (like men and women, trees and animals; read: silk-screen), dancing in front of a fire (read: primitive projector). The whole story does start to take on a distinctly Platonic feel, and of course no one wants to be a poor sap chained to a cave floor watching the shadows of cheap hand puppets dancing around. We'd want to turn around, grab the hand puppets, and throttle their owners to death with them (or, as Plato puts it, escape into the light of the Sun, but I like my version better).

So how DO we get out of ideology? And, for that matter, cheesy metaphors about caves and movie theatres? For this, I think we need to turn to Deleuze... but more on that later.

To be continued...