Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher with a bit of a pop culture following given his penchant for framing philosophical concepts in pop culture tropes. And although The Sublime Object of Ideology does contain some pop culture references, it is not really a book written for the masses. Many, many times during my read I felt like the philosophy student who had failed to read the textbook or start attending classes until the second half of the semester.
But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book. It stretched my mind in new and interesting ways. In the end, however, I really struggled to understand the essential points Zizek was making.
Here’s the best I can do.
Ideology
Let’s start with ideology itself. Like a lot of terms in the book, I was left with the sense that Zizek’s use of it was predicated on a precise, philosophical (and perhaps communistic) definition of the term, which both differed from the vernacular one we may use in our everyday speech and was never explicitly stated. I mean, why define it for the student, right? He was supposed to read the textbook before even attending this class.
In Zizek’s formulation, ideology is not just a way of understanding reality, it is a way of ordering and structuring the social reality around you.
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 Ernesto 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.
Okay. Let’s stop there. Yes, two sentences into Zizek’s actual words, and I feel like I need to provide some explanatory context (for my benefit, at least, if not for yours).
First, I haven’t read any Ernesto Laclau or Chantal Mouffe (I don’t even know who they are), but Zizek clearly has. Laclau and Mouffe and a dozen other historical and contemporary figures. I can only assume that Zizek is doing more than name dropping. He is grounding his thoughts and opinions in the philosophical ideas of his comrades and critics. It’s a sign that Zizek is at least attempting a serious philosophical work -- regardless of how much is lost on simple neophytes like me.
Second, I don’t exactly know what a “kernel” is. It’s another term that Zizek has introduced somewhere along the way, again with little fanfare or definition. To the best of my lay understanding, it refers to something that concretely exists in the real world, independent of the social realities created by various ideologies.
And that, by extension, is a crucially important concept in Zizek’s larger work. Because ideology will do all that it can to absorb everything in the world into its defining symbology -- even facts that might otherwise seem to contradict it. To help explain this, Zizek uses the example of an anti-Semitic ideology.
Let us again take a typical individual in Germany in the late 1930s. He is bombarded by anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jew as a monstrous incarnation of Evil, the great wire-puller, and so on. But when he returns home he encounters Mr Stern, his neighbour, a good man to chat with in the evenings, whose children play with his. Does not this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?
The answer is, of course, no. If everyday experience offers such a resistance, then the anti-Semitic ideology has not yet really grasped us. An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality -- that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. How then would our poor German, if he were a good anti-Semite, react to his gap between the ideological figure of the Jew (schemer, wire-puller, exploiting our brave men and so on) and the common everyday experience of his good neighbour, Mr Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: ‘You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance -- and it is exactly this hiding of one’s real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature.’ An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.
But despite this tendency and this power, even the most successful ideologies encounter objects that resist their incorporation. These objects, however, are not the sublime objects of Zizek’s title.
Sublime Objects
Near as I can tell, there are two different kinds of objects described in Zizek’s work.
The first kind are the objects of the title, those of ideology itself. And these objects are sublime in the sense that they are both material and immaterial. They have physical presence, but have also been given symbolic meaning that survives the destruction of their physical aspects. A good example of this is money.
The easiest way to detect the effectivity of this postulate is to think of the way we behave towards the materiality of money: we know very well that money, like all other material objects, suffers the effects of use, that its material body changes through time, but in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist ‘of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature’.
In other words, that dollar bill may be worn and tattered, but it is worth just as much in the market as one fresh out of the Federal Reserve.
Ideologies are rich with this kind of Sublime Object. Another great example is a king or, to be more precise, the knowledge of ‘being-a-king.’
‘Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but -- and here is the fetishistic misrecognition -- to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of ‘being-a-king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king. How can one not remind oneself here of the famous Lacanian affirmation that a madman who believes himself to be a king is no more mad that a king who believes himself to be a king -- who, that is, identifies immediately with the mandate ‘king’?
Zizek will say that most believe ideology relies on just this kind of illusion about its Sublime Objects -- that it needs the illusion of value in the case of money or the illusion of ‘being-a-king’ in the case of a monarchy -- in order to survive. But he will also argue that this is not necessarily true. To his way of thinking, knowledge that the illusion is an illusion does not always strip the ideology of its reality-ordering power.
If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way -- one of many ways -- to blind ourselves 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.
It is from this standpoint that we can account for the formula of cynical reason proposed by Sloterdijk: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.’ If the illusion were on the side of knowledge, then the cynical position would really be a post-ideological position, simply a position without illusions: ‘they know what they are doing, and they are doing it.’ But if the place of the illusion is in the reality of doing itself, then this formula can be read in quite another way: ‘they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it.’ For example, they know that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation, but they still continue to follow this idea of Freedom.
Real Objects
Powerful stuff, these Sublime Objects and the ideologies that are fueled by them. But there is a second kind of object that can successfully stand in opposition to ideology. They are pieces of the real world than cannot be absorbed into the symbology of an ideology’s Sublime Object.
To my way of thinking, the best pop culture example that Zizek offers of this second kind of object -- this Real Object -- is the alien in Ridley Scott’s film of the same name.
To take, as a final example, Ridley Scott’s film Alien: is not the disgusting parasite which jumps out of the body of poor John Hurt precisely such a symptom?
Here I should interject to say that by this point in the text Zizek has more or less defined ‘symptom’ in a psychoanalytical sense -- it is the cognitive dissonance that occurs when our ideologies cannot assimilate something that is real into its symbolic framework.
The cave on the desert planet into which the space travellers enter when the computer registers signs of life in it, and where the polyp-like parasite sticks on to Hurt’s face, has the status of the pre-symbolic Thing -- that is, of the maternal body, of the living substance of enjoyment. The utero-vaginal associations aroused by this cave are almost too intrusive. The parasite adhering to Hurt’s face is thus a kind of a ‘sprout of enjoyment,’ a leftover of the maternal Thing which then functions as a symptom -- the Real of enjoyment -- of the group marooned in the wandering spaceship: it threatens them and at the same time constitutes them as a closed group. The fact that this parasitical object incessantly changes its form merely confirms its anamorphic status: it is a pure being of semblance. The ‘alien’, the eighth, supplementary passenger, is an object which, being nothing at all in itself, must none the less be added, annexed as an anamorphic surplus. It is the Real at its purest: a semblance, something which on a strictly symbolic level does not exist at all but at the same time the only thing in the whole film which actually exists, the thing against which the whole reality is utterly defenceless. One has only to remember the spine-chilling scene when the liquid pouring from the polyp-like parasite after the doctor makes an incision with a scalpel dissolves the metal floor of the space ship.
The use of film as an example to explain the distinctions between the Sublime Objects of ideology and the Real Objects that confront them lends itself to a handy term, first popularized (I think) by Alfred Hitchcock. A Google search will define a “MacGuffin” as “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot,” and the most famous MacGuffins in and out of Hitchcock’s work are certainly that. The Maltese Falcon. Rosebud in Citizen Kane. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But when taking Zizek’s point of view, it may be better to focus on the MacGuffins that exist more in their symbology than in their physicality. Like Ridley Scott’s anamorphic Alien, or perhaps the glowing contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction or, if you really want a deep cut, the radioactive bodies of the aliens in J. Frank Parnell’s trunk in Repo Man. These MacGuffins are Real Objects, in the sense that solidly extrude as uncompromising rocks in the waves of ideology that are the characters in these films, but they are also Sublime Objects, in the sense that they come to be the central symbols that obsess them and drive them through the plot.
The best term of all might be the one that Zizek borrows from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan -- das Ding, or the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire.
We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object -- according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire. The sublime object is ‘an object elevated to the level of das Ding’. It is its structural place -- the fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance -- and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity.
That’s about all the sense I felt I could make out of this challenging and intriguing work. Ideologies are how we order our social realities, they are based on Sublime Objects that we imbue with symbolic meaning, and we experience cognitive dissonance only when Real Objects that resist our symbology intrude on our perceptions.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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