The following is a series of notes on
Wendy Brown’s 1999 article ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’.[1]
Page
19
“For the last two decades, cultural
theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that the ‘crisis of the Left’ is due neither
to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever
rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he has charged, this
ascendancy is consequent to the Left's own failure to apprehend the character
of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision
appropriate to this character. For Hall, the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan Right
was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure.”
This is Wendy Brown’s interpretation of Stuart
Hall's chief argument concerning the crisis of the left.[2] Is a pitfall of Hall’s
thought the conflation of political critique and moralism? Is this too much a
humanist concern or has Althusserian anti-humanism been consigned to the
dustbin of ideas as too teleological, Hegelian, or ‘deterministic’? The
assumption here is that there is a firm ethico-political bind at play in the very
eidos of leftism. The emergence of Neoliberalism can be thought of a symptom of
the left's failure, which can be agreed with even if one disagrees with Hall’s
overall position.
Page
19-20
“The Left's dismissive or suspicious
attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall a sign not of its unwavering
principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and
anxieties about revising those habits.”
Now perhaps we see the reverse of this,
the Left has a preoccupation with cultural politics by its intersection to
identity. Oddly, perhaps, its lack of ethico-political vision, a requirement
for the left according to Hall, was replaced with a heightened sense of
Moralistic politics alone, which is fundamentally a different phenomenon to a
fully considered ethico-political vision, whereby human emancipation sits at
its forefront of aspiration and hankering. A certain turn onto a cultural axis,
promoted by Hall and the cultural theorists at the end of the last century, ultimately
came at the expense of any materialist political or economic consideration (be
it dialectical or otherwise), throwing us into era of idealist and ideational
politics whereby emancipatory concern is of a paralleled sort – of our
ideational as opposed to material existence. ‘Those habits’ I believe is a signification
to the economic, materialist approach of most classical leftists. The issue we
now face is that the left cannot re-return to such a classical mode of leftist
economic and materialist theorising without repeating the same failures, or of
even escaping such failures within the leftist psyche and imaginary.
Page 20
“Indeed, he [Benjamin] had a
well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and
mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of Charles
Baudelaire, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative
wellspring. But left melancholy is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the
revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political
analysis or ideal-even to the failure of that ideal-than to seizing possibilities
for radical change in the present.”
Here, Brown emphasises that Benjamin’s
grasp of melancholia is as a critical theoretical and political force or
emotional phenomenon. Once again, in Benjamin's analysis we see the inter-relation
with time itself. In this case, it is the attachment to a particular mode of
analysis, ideal or past potentiality (of slipping into idealism perhaps, even
if it is a Marxian one), as opposed to seizing the present for the sake of
future. I wonder the extent to which the notion of superabundance within the
work of some postcapitalist, Left Automation and Accelerationist theorists,
such as in the case of Bastani’s ‘Fully
Automated Luxury Communism’, is part and parcel, or rather just
symptomatic, of such a melancholia?[3] Does Philip Cunliffe's ‘Lenin
Lives!’ - discussing a counter-factual parallel world of 2017 whereby the
Bolshevik dream came to fruition - signify a certain sense of left melancholy?[4] If this is so, does any
pining reflection of the past constitute ‘left melancholy’? This for instance
is something we only see superficially in the work Zizek (when he speaks about
Stalin and The Soviet Union etc.), whereas, actually, in his discussion of 'the
commons' in relation to contemporary technology, or even in relation to his
grasp and skepticism of horizontalism, Zizek is firmly in the present, riding
the tensions between a wholly vanguard-centric Leninism and the decentred,
network character of horizontalism.
“It signifies, as well, a certain
narcissism with regard to one's past political attachments and identity that
exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or
transformation.”
Brown discusses this in relation to
Benjamin’s noted for The Arcades Project, published by Gary Smith in his
edited volume on Benjamin.[5] Brown highlights several
passages that are significant; I list them here in relation to their page
number in the edited volume. Equally, for the sake of clarity, Benjamin’s words
are placed in italics for emphasis alongside distinction from my own thoughts.
p. 49
“It isn't that the past casts its light
on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is
that in which the Then (das Gewesene) and the Now (das Jetzt) come into a
constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: image is dialectics at
a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical -
not development but image [,] leaping forth (sprunghaft). -Only dialectical
images are genuine (i.e., not archaic) images; and the place one happens upon
them is language. *Waking*” [N 2a, 3]
pp. 51-52
“Can it be that awakening is the
synthesis whose thesis is dream conscious ness and whose antithesis is
consciousness? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘Now of
recognizability,’ in which things put on their true - surrealistic - face.
Thus, in Proust, the importance of staking the whole of life on its ultimate
dialectical breaking point - the moment of awakening. Proust starts out with
the presentation of the space of someone waking up.” [N 3a, 3]
p. 52
“In the dialectical image, the pastness
of a particular epoch is always also ‘things as they always have been.’ As
such, though, at times it comes into view only at a very specific epoch: that
is, the epoch in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, suddenly recognizes the
dream image as such. It is at that point that the historian takes on the task
of dream interpretation.” [N 4, 1]
Freud comes to the fore here as significant, engaging in the 'dream-work' -
this is how it connects back to Mark Fisher’s work on both Capitalist Realism
and Postcapitalist Desire.
“The irony of melancholia, of course, is
that attachment to the object of one's sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to
recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by
it.”
Perhaps this is the task of the left,
i.e., to learn how to overcome its past failings, as opposed to being defined
by them in a melancholic sense, and this will allow for its unburdening, at
least to some degree? This perhaps my only come to be through an ontological or
epistemological rupture of sorts?
“In Freud's 1917 meditation on melancholia,
he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholia: It entails ‘a loss
of a more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died,
but has been lost as an object of love.’”
Therefore, there is a distinction in
Freud between 'death' and 'loss' as far as melancholia is concerned. Indeed,
perhaps in this case, loss as an object of love is less traversable as an
obstacle of melancholy than death is, because of its lack of finality and
reality that death entails. ‘Loss’ entails within it the notion of the
potential return, of 'the found', that outcomes can be adapted.
Page 21
“Now why would Benjamin use this term [left
melancholy], and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a
particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a precise
formulation of left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium
for those more beholden to certain longheld sentiments and objects than to the
possibilities of political transformation in the present.”
I think that Brown here presents an
excellent explanative summary of Benjamin's 'Left Melancholy' in a single
sentence, eschewing out the manner in which Benjamin sought its use.
“In his critique of Erich Klistner, a
left-wing poet from the Weimar Republic, in which he first coins the phrase ‘left
melancholy,’ Benjamin suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the
left melancholic who ‘takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual
goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods’.”[6]
Here we see the left melancholic
fetishism of 'the former' in a mirrored way that the Bourgeoisie fetishize
commodities. Perhaps, in this way, this is part of the road to grasping the
'internal conservatism' quietly at rest in leftism broadly. This we see from
Marx's concern that the Bourgeoisie enforce an exchange of wage for labour that
does not conform to the Bourgeoisie's own capitalist laws of exchange and the
lament that comes with this,[7] to the conservatism of
Leninists who sought to 'protect the revolution',[8] to the Critical Theorists[9] and their bemoaning of
what is lost to the capitalist Culture Industry in its attempt to recreate, what
in strict Althusserian terms is known as, the Ideological and Repressive State
Apparatus,[10]
to even Fisher and the Postcapitalist thinkers, perhaps, who seek not
necessarily a return but certainly a re-ignition of our capacity to imagine and
dream an alternative; that another world is possible, a capacity that once
existed and can be seen in the rhetoric that Fisher himself uses in the
instance that he claims the throws of Neoliberalism brought this capability or
capacity to an end, and so our task is to re-ignite the potential to imagine
once again – if possible.[11] This is of course not
the case if I have read Fisher correctly, and his claim is more descriptive
than prescriptive, i.e. that such melancholy is to be avoided, that capitalist
realism = the inability to dream beyond itself (descriptive alone) and that we
must act/think/theorise in some manner so to regain our imaginative capabilities
for the sake of another possible world coming onto the horizon (prescriptive).
Pp. 21-22
“Left melancholy, in short, is
Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a
feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen
in the heart of the putative leftist.”
Maybe, in relation to my comment above,
this is not a trait of certain modes of leftism, but a central character of its
very phenomenon?
P. 22
“And on the backs of these losses are
still others: We are without a sense of an international, and often even a
local, left community; we are without conviction about the truth of the social
order; we are without a rich moral-political vision to guide and sustain
political work. Thus, we suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but
a lost historical moment; not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence
but a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits.”
Perhaps it is not the project that
divides us, but the project of overcoming out melancholia? How we act in the
future in relation to our past, this may be the dividing feature? This site is
that of 'the dialectical image' according to Benjamin, and so this could be the
root of left division in the world as it stands. Is a loss of movement always a
loss of moment? Like a clock losing its motion, it loses its ability to 'keep
time'. When a clock comes to an abrupt motionlessness, 'the moment' in time is
unaccounted for, literally lost to potential record – both Kairos and Kronos
dissolve.[12]
“But in the hollow core of all these
losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an
unavowed loss - the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply
its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the
true?”
This is perhaps the biggest loss of all:
that the promise of emancipation either (a) dissipated in its failure on the
levels of ethics, moral action, aesthetics and epistemology; and/or (b) slipped
into the inverse of emancipation, forging further suffering to human development
on both individual and systemic levels, being hijacked by a certain 'will to
power'.
“And if this love cannot be given up
without demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love,
in our very capacity for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to
left melancholy, a melancholy that is certain to have effects that are not only
sorrowful but self-destructive?”
This is an interesting observation. Political
love and humanistic attachment perhaps doom the left to melancholy in the face
of failure.
P. 23
“The first is a set of social and
political formations variously known as cultural politics or identity politics.
Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political
movements rooted in cultural identity- racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered -
not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its
fundamental formation, class, but fragment left political energies and
interests such that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also
has various names-poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy
literary theory got up as political analysis. The murder charges here are also
familiar: Postfoundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes
undermine the possibility of a theoretically coherent and factually true
account of the world, and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of
left norms. Together or separately, these two phenomena are held responsible
for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented character of the contemporary Left.”
These two phenomena, for the sake of
commentary, are (a) Identity Politics - think the critique of this made by such
left-wing critics as the Aufhebunga Bunga presenters and Paul Embrey[13] - and (b)
Postmodernism/Poststructuralism and Postfoundationalism - for which there are a
host of Leftist critiques of.[14]
“If Hall understands our failure as a
Left in the last quarter century as a failure within the Left to apprehend this
time, this is a failure that is only reiterated and not redressed by our
complaints against those who are succeeding (liberal centrists,
neoconservatives, the Right) or by our complaints against one another
(antiracists, feminists, queer activists, postmodernists, unreconstructed
Marxists).”
This is what we see coming to the fore
slightly more so with the whole 'culture wars' phenomenon. Could one not
critique Gramsci for the same, however? Or does the Gramscian project (via the
thinking of Laclau and Mouffe, or even the Gramscians of the conservative
variety) entail a seizure of the 'now' in cultural action based upon a certain
mode of subject-centered agency, be either (a) the proletarian – in the case of
the left Gramscian - or (b) the god and nation fearing citizen - in the case of
the right Gramscian variety.[15]
Pp. 23-24
“In Hall's understanding, this failure
is not simply the consequence of adherence to a particular analytic orthodoxy-the
determinism of capital, the primacy of class-although it is certainly that. Rather,
this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket - an
insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the
subjective, the question of style, and the problematic of language.”
How does this square with Mouffe and
Laclau, who in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy seek to jettison a
certain element of 'class essentialism' in favour of their 'chain of
equivalency'? Would we have to shoe-horn them, wholly, into either the identity
politics or 'poststructural/ postfoundational' threads as substitutive objects
to engage with left melancholy affirmatively?
Equally, the claim that classical Marxism
entailed: “an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the
subject and the subjective” is a flawed over-generalisation. By extension, one
would have to assume that Materialism is, without question, teleologically deterministic.
Now, it would be a stretch to claim that Historical Materialism is detached
from teleological thought; this would put too much distance between Marx and Hegel.
However, to claim that Materialism entails a jettisoning of the subject and thus
agency, tout court, would be no less than assumption. This is even
questionable within Marx’s own work, which, on a basic level, placed such a value
on the agency of the proletarian subject through the mechanism of class
consciousness. Sheer teleological determinism requires little action or agency
from the revolutionary class, a stance not taken by classical leftists. By
extension of this, for instance, we can see in Terry Eagleton's work ‘Why
Marx Was Right’ a perfectly good retort to such a claim that Materialism
jettisons the subjective agent in favour of determinism.[16]
P. 24
“Certainly, the course of capital shapes
the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself ‘is either
conducted ideologically, or not at all’.”
The interesting feature of this claim is
the post-ideological one, that it is indeed possible to escape ideology and
still engage with political action maintaining distance from ideology, i.e.,
"not at all". I am reminded of Zizek's point about ideology being
inescapable, that the moment we consider it as such, we are within its eye,
right at its centre.[17]
P. 25
“If the contemporary Left often clings
to the formations and formulations of another epoch, one in which the notion of
unified movements, social totalities, and class-based politics appeared to be
viable categories of political and theoretical analysis, this means that it
literally renders itself a conservative force in history-one that not only
misreads the present but installs traditionalism in the very heart of its
praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs.”
Absolutely, but this brings us back to Kairos
and Kairopolitics. This works only if 'the loop' is present, i.e., that now
is indeed the moment x leftist group was waiting for and we can achieve
what they wanted at this juncture, 150 years later. If 'the loop' is not
present, i.e., the achievement of aims that can be grasped as aligned to those
from 150 years ago but are updated or clearly tempo-normatively distinct, they
may not be as conservative as thought - but still holding elements of
conservatism none the less.
“The truth is that traditionalist ideas,
the ideas of social and moral respectability, have penetrated so deep inside
socialist consciousness that it is quite common to find people committed to a
radical political programme underpinned by wholly traditional feelings and
sentiments.”
I have to say that I agree with this quote
of Hall’s that Brown recites, but only to a certain extent. This phenomenon is
caused, perhaps somewhat simply, by the passage of time and the ossification of
'the radical' or 'radical-potential' to the usual or commonly encountered. Is
Embrey not the best illustration of precisely this? This is then wrapped in the
aesthetics of a 'true' working class, connecting back to the thought of Paul
Embrey or to a section of Mark Fisher’s ‘Postcapitalist Desire’ wherein Nixon's
hard hat working class becomes a central focus.
P. 26
“And when this traditionalism is
conjoined with a loss of faith in the egalitarian vision so fundamental to the
socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of distribution, and a loss of faith
in the emancipatory vision fundamental to the socialist challenge to the
capitalist mode of production, the problem of left traditionalism becomes very
serious indeed. What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical
critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of
things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more
attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that
is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and
failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to
a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure
of desire is backward looking and punishing.”
(1) This is what must be avoided at all
costs by parts of the paleo-left, perhaps. That the left does not slip into an
aesthetics of critique without critique of the status-quo itself. (2) Is Brown
not here taking part in what she surveys others of doing in relation to (a)
identity politics and (b) poststructuralism? i.e., engaging in and thus adding
to the disunity of the left broadly? On the claim that the left has become more
attached to its impossibility than its potential, I think that this is the
saddest thing of all, as I agree. A left that seeks to campaign and advance a
project that it claims itself is impossible, that it is drawn and attached to
precisely due to its impossibility. This is the sheer sublimation into the
purest of idealism and negative utopianism, centered always with a fixation on
'failure' as its most central or essential quality or feature. ‘Demanding the
impossible’ should not be ‘demanding the defective’.
I do like how Brown here recalls that the
etymological basis of a 'radical' politics sits with its Latin root Radix.
It is the 'unsettling' as opposed to the transformative character of this that
distinguishes it from other political modes. ‘Radical’ is not style of
politics, but, in this case, it is a modality of approach or framework of thought
to the edifice of socio-political organisation as it stands. Gluing oneself to tarmac
is not radical, but merely bombastically defiant. The simple, polite, claim and
consequent agency of Bartleby the Scrivener, that ‘I would prefer not to’, is
radical. Radicality is not a style of politics, but a modality of casting and
recasting the order of things by praxis.
P. 27
“My emphasis on the melancholic logic of
certain contemporary left tendencies is not meant to recommend therapy as the
route to answering these questions. It does, however, suggest that the feelings
and sentiments - including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken
promises and lost compasses - that sustain our attachments to left analyses and
left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of
potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively
progressive political aims.”
In the final lines of the piece, we see Brown's
central thesis, alongside her theoretical point, purpose and prescription in
relation to this short article. I could not agree more.
[1] Wendy Brown (1999) ‘Resisting Left
Melancholy’. boundary 2, 26(3): 19-27.
[2] In this case, the chief work that Brown
is responding to is: Stuart Hall (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal:
Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
[3] Aaron Bastani (2019) Fully Automated
Luxury Communism. London: Verso. For other postcapitalist and accelerationist
works, see: Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Eds.)(2014) #Accelerate: The
Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media; Nick Srnicek and Alex
Williams (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without
Work. London: Verso; Peter Frase (2016) Four Futures: Life After
Capitalism. London: Verso.
[4] Philip Cunliffe (2017) Lenin Lives!
Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017. Winchester: Zero Books.
[5] Walter Benjamin (1989) "N [Re the
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]" in Gary Smith (Ed.), Benjamin:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp.
43-83.
[6] Walter Benjamin (1994) "Left-Wing
Melancholy", in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Eds.), The
Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press. pp. 304-307, p. 305.
[7] For reference, see Marx’s discourse in
the first volume of Capital concerning ‘The Working Day’, in the first
section of Chapter Ten, entitled ‘The Limits of the Working Day’. Karl Marx (1976)
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume One. London: Penguin
Books. pp. 340-344.
[8] Although a somewhat reductive generalisation
whilst tackling this notion from an increasingly Americanised and Liberal
Republican standpoint, I do feel that Hannah Arendt rhetorically summarises such
an internalised will to concretize a newly forged status-quo in her claim that:
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the
revolution”. Hannah Arendt (September 12th 1970) ‘Reflections Civil
Disobedience’, New Yorker, Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/1970/09/12/reflections-civil-disobedience (Accessed 4th October
2022).
[9] Although figures such as Adorno and
Horkheimer analyse the Culture Industry and what mankind loses by such an
industrial advance through a plethora of modalities, both in tandem and alone,
I do not think we see this more so than in their critique of popular music,
manifesting then as Jazz, and in those productive material industries that
recast and recreate the popularity of popular music. Adorno discusses this in
his essay ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’: “Thus the technological changes
which have been brought about with the advent of radio have inflicted a loss of
history upon music. Even the performance ideal of serious music in the sense of
a perfect account of the work that takes no risks, as this has developed under
monopoly conditions, has fallen under an iron grip of rigidity despite the
ostentatious appearance of dynamism: the performance of a symphony in which
nothing can go wrong is also one in which nothing happens any more either.”
Theodor W. Adorno (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture. London and New York: Routledge. p. 77.
[10] It must be said that there is a great
distinction between the manner in which Althusser and the Critical Theorists grasped
Capitalist Ideology, with the latter naturally emphasising a greater all-encompassing
cultural role than the stricter and more formal socio-economics and political crystallisation
of ideology that we see in the work of the former. Saying this however,
Althusser does content in his work that capitalist ideology, through the
ideological state apparatus, can manifest culturally in sports, whereby the so-called
‘competitive and entrepreneurial spirit’ of capitalism find mirror in the talent,
skill and competition of sports. Perhaps, there is something to be said of this
under-explored connection, given that even the philosophical defendants of
Capitalist epistemologies explore such a bind, as in the case of Nozick and his
famed ‘Wilt Chamberlain Argument’. For Althusser’s grasp of ideology, see:
Louis Althusser (2020) On Ideology. Second Edition. London: Verso;
(2014) On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses. London: Verso.
[11] Mark Fisher (2009) Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books; (2020) Postcapitalist
Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater Books.
[12] For a discussion of Kairopolitics and leftism,
see: Jason M. Adams (2013) Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and
Resistance After Occupy Wall Street. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
[13] Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Phillip
Cunliffe (2021) The End of The End of History: Politics in The Twenty-First
Century. London: Zero Books. Paul Embrey (2020) Despised: Why the Modern
Left Loathes the Working Class. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[14] For instance, see: Frederic Jameson
(1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press; Alex Callinicos (1991) Against Postmodernism: A
Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[15] In reference to Mouffe and Laclau, I am
implying a reference to: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London:
Verso. By reference to a ‘right Gramscian’ there are two directions such a category
may fall. In the first case, I am thinking of those ‘Gramscians of the Alt-Lite’;
see: Angela Nagle (2017) Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and
Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. London: Zero Books. In the second, I am drawn
to the significant interrelation between Neoconservatism and Trotskyism; see:
Seymour M. Lipset (1988) ‘Neoconservatism: Myth and Reality’. Society,
25(5): 29-37; William King (2004) ‘Neoconservatives and “Trotskyism”’. American
Communist History, 3(2): 247-266.
[16] Terry Eagleton (2011) Why Marx Was
Right. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[17] “This is probably the fundamental
dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an
illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is
already to be conceived as 'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality
whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants 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'. 'Ideological is
not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far
as it is supported by "false consciousness"'. Thus, we have finally
reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions
would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain
non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom'
only in so far as its logic escapes him - the measure of the success of its
interpretation is precisely its dissolution.”, and, “In the more sophisticated
versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School,
for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social
reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles
of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce
itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply
hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its
very essence. We find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself
only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it 'as
it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely,
it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple
metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide
the naked reality.” Slavoj Zizek (2008) The Sublime Object of Ideology.
London: Verso. pp. 15-16, 24-25.