No Place Like Ideology (On Slavoj Žižek): Is There a Difference Between the Theory of Ideology and the Theory of Interpretation?

For Emil Hrvatin, a.k.a. Janez Janša

Across literary studies, the accepted view is that ideology is not only a specific belief system but also, to borrow from an old favorite, “the very condition of our experience of the world” (Belsey, 4). Since the 1950s, we have moved from regarding ideology as a form of false consciousness to the idea that there is no way out of ideology. Today, we believe that, as another favorite has it, “stepping out of it” is “the very form of our enslavement to” ideology (Žižek 1994, 6). This development follows the predictable paradigm switch from content to form, from interpellation to enunciation, from structuralism to poststructuralism. Still, despite the obvious progression, and despite the fact that there are works that seem to explain ideology in a manner that is all but definitive, I want to return to some basic issues.

The questions I want to revisit concern not ideology as such (as we will see, when we move beyond a certain position with Louis Althusser, there is no ideology as such) but the discourse on ideology. For instance, what exactly is the position from which a claim like the one above (that ideology has no limit or outside) can be made?

Or what happens when we apply the theory of ideology to itself? (If we cannot step outside ideology, can this theory be applied to itself and take itself as what Lacan would call the position of enunciation?)

Or, to ask the same question yet another way, can there be a discursive formation that replicates itself without change ad infinitum?

I am, as you can see, interested in the limit that is constitutive of ideology. My real motivation, however, comes from a rather stubborn personal failure to accept what the theory of ideology has been telling us for the past twenty years, namely, that, in Robert Pfaller’s words, “[i]deology does not have an outside: the void is still an identity, and a ‘zero-interpellation,’ an ‘interpellation beyond interpellation,’ is still an interpellation” (241). I am not so sure that this is the case. If, with deconstruction, we assume that systems of meaning are open (and not only incomplete), it cannot be the case in a literal sense, since open systems do away with the inside/outside dichotomy. And why not go a step further? It appears equally plausible that after we open the theory of ideology and realize that there is no outside, ideology vanishes into thin air. Given my deconstructive beliefs, I am also skeptical about recent interpretations of Slavoj Žižek’s work—Žižek being, according to widely accepted opinion, the preeminent philosopher of ideology and, along with Judith Butler, the most prominent philosopher of his generation. Even when the interpretations are “pleasingly accurate,” to use Mathew Sharpe’s term (1), they are defined, as is Žižek’s theory, in reference to a specific, Lacanian understanding of signification that relies on the assumption of a closed system with a hole as its model. The same can be said about poststructuralist critiques of Žižek, which affirm the same notion that meaning is structured around an absence.¹ (Therefore, when we think about the beyond, outside, or otherwise than ideology, we are looking also for the beyond of a certain understanding of meaning, for a specific relation between theory of ideology and theory of interpretation—a challenge not just for Žižek but also, as it turns out, for one entire theoretical paradigm that holds that interpretation and ideology coincide.)²

I would like to ask, for instance, whether at a certain point emptying out the meaning of the master-signifier (the absence at the heart of this theory of meaning, the void that is identity, and so on) becomes, perhaps, even a form of presence. Must the process through which meaning is created repeat itself on and on, or could our theory of ideology, too, be subject to, well, process, historical changes, and the passing of time...