Zizek's Critique of Ideology and Socratic Examination
Not the same, but not that different, either
I'm notorious among my students for my use of a clip from the opening of Zizek's The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Zizek uses John Carpenter's They Live to compare "critique of ideology" to the glasses used in the film to see the aliens and their messages. As Zizek notes, the film is a kind of "invasion of the body snatchers" type of SF story in which the earth has already been conquered, but by manipulation rather than by force. This manipulation, in Carpenter's allegory, is most closely associated with the power of advertising to create and channel desire into specific sets of social institutions, most notably consumption and marriage/reproduction, while simultaneously shutting down independent thought and action -- in other words, media, and marketing in particular, robs us of our freedom by convincing us that we are choosing for ourselves the things they tell us to choose. A resistance group has formed and has developed a technology (with an uncanny resemblance to knock-off Ray-Bans) that lets them see -- in black and white -- the otherwise-invisible aliens and the subliminal messages in all the media around us, hidden beneath the appealingly colorful pictures and beautiful people.
The clip opens with the main character, Nada, trying to get his friend, Armitage, to put the glasses on. Armitage doesn't want to, and Nada tells him, "Put on these glasses, or start eating that trash can." At this point, Zizek cuts in to say, "I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating." In a fairly straightforward Marxist move (although with an Althusser twist), he describes the "material force" of our mental frameworks, our ideology, to shape the world into recognizable, meaningful things. The part that veers away from Carpenter, however, is where Zizek insists that, while the trash can makes the trash look more appealing than it really is, he is himself always eating from the trash can; we all are, all the time, because there is no not eating from the trash can. Ideology is, as Zizek says, "our spontaneous reaction to our social world;" ideology is in fact what makes the world a world, separating it into this, that, and the other things with which we can interact, things we can want, not want, do, sit in, talk to, fall in love with, and so on and so on. So ideology is a way of manipulating us, but we also couldn't have a world without it. Moreover, "spontaneity" is just the most invisible of ideologies because we confuse it so easily with our "true" selves. We have the idea that our desires must come from inside us, that they are somehow uniquely, individually, individuating-ly "ours," choices we make for ourselves. But his point is that "this, precisely, is the ultimate illusion." Zizek, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, does not engage with cognitive science, but it is entirely appropriate here: our brains organize our worlds for us, without asking permission or submitting proposals for approval. So ideology isn't just what comes from outside; it isn't just the advertising serving up objects of desire on platters. The calls, as the guy in the movie says, are coming from inside the house. The most horrifying, terrifying, existentially threatening aspect of ideology is that we are always already in it; we are born into it, and to escape it is impossible because our very idea of a self or escape is itself already ideological. There are, of course, important Lacanian elements of Zizek's reading -- the Real (sort of a Kantian noumenon), the symbolic order (language and, in that sense, ideology), and so on. But I've come to approach it recently more in terms of the cognitive frameworks that, for example, make it possible for us to distinguish faces from, say, toys or chairs, as well as to recognize individual faces, so to be able to tell a person who will help us from a person who will hurt us, although it doesn't seem to help us tell that the person in the mirror will do both.
The point Zizek makes with the glasses is crucial and clever and confusingly counter-intuitive.1 While we would like to think that "naturally," we would see everything as it is, but we have these ideology glasses that "distort our straight view," and so "critique of ideology should be, you take off the glasses." But just like the prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave are born in the cave and need the intervention of a philosopher to show them what's really real, ideology is already with us, inside us, and we need an external intervention -- the glasses, critique -- to show us that we are within ideology.
Zizek's "critique of ideology" is precisely parallel to Socrates's "philosophic life" understood as, the way he puts it in Plato's Apology, "examination of myself and others." Socrates doesn't just examine others; he doesn't just try to free himself from the influence of others. Socrates also endeavors to free himself from his own misconceptions, from the temptation to think himself wise when he is not. Critique and examination are the points from which I have come to see philosophy primarily as an effort we make to minimize the effect of what today we call confirmation bias: the temptation to preferentially notice and to regard as most persuasive information and evidence that confirms what we already think.
But also, Zizek's reading of They Live maps in another important way to Socrates's reading of his own story of the cave. Famously, Plato writes Socrates in the Republic describing what happens when the philosopher descends back into the cave to free the other people in his community: they regard him as stupid, as a troublemaker, as a threat, and so they respond with violence and even kill him (as Athens did with Socrates). The fight scene with which Zizek opens his discussion of ideology also concludes it. Nada tries to free his friend Armitage, tries to put the glasses on him, but Armitage resists violently. As Socrates mentions to Euthyphro, people don't mind so much if you have your own ideas as long as you just keep them to yourself. It's when you try to make these points with other people that bad things happen to you.
But there is one crucial difference to be aware of between philosophy as Plato understands it and critique as Zizek understands it. As we have noted, Zizek regards ideology as inescapable. If ideology works the way he says it does, that is just obvious: you'd even need an ideology to call ideology an ideology; what would "escape" even mean? The best you can do is to remain cognizant, to not forget that there is a difference between what's outside your mind and what's inside it. That doesn't make reality a free-for-all (why I think that's true is probably a subject of another post), but freedom for Zizek means acknowledging that, while you can’t choose to be ideology-free, you can choose which ideology/ideologies with which to engage the world. This is the measure of freedom available to us as human beings, and if you don’t choose your ideology, if you regard your perception of the world as transparent, then ideology has simply chosen you.
My sense of Plato on this point is not settled. Arcesilaus, in the Academy after Plato, chose the skeptical Socrates, the one who examines himself and others, and considers his "human wisdom" at best limited. If, however, we stay with the allegory of the cave, Plato-Socrates is telling us that you can, with effort, look on Truth itself in the (allegorical!) form of the sun. Armed with true knowledge (rather than doxa: "opinion" or "belief"), one can then determine what to do. Freedom is actual knowledge of actual truth, outside of the shadows, outside of ideology or other human frameworks. It's amazingly optimistic. Whether this is what either Socrates or Plato actually believed, or at which point in their lives, I leave to scholars of Plato to debate.
As it is, the comparison gives us two ways of looking at the philosophic life, the examined life that is, as Socrates says, the only one "worth living for a human being," and whether you regard critique/examination as getting you "out" of ideology/the cave or as simply giving you what I like to call "room to maneuver" among ideologies, the methodological and moral commitments are strikingly, if unsurprisingly, aligned.
Zizek’s reading is not obviously supported by the film, strictly speaking, since there is a radio transmitter that is making it impossible for humans to see aliens without the glasses. So, that is coming from outside, and without the interference, we’d see them. So it’s not “right,” necessarily, as a reading, and yet it is still a great reading.