the ideograph
Music: Marconi Union: [Distance] (2005)
This week I've returned to writing, and I think that's partly because I have a cold. Something about my head is off, a dull buzz in my right ear, bouts of coughing, and the rumbling umbles of cold medicine. It's somehow easier than normal to sit here and just tinker. A footnote here. A sentence there. Check the email. Another sentence. Slowly it slumbers. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow (which I sort of dread only because of the weight scale routine), I predict a Z-Pac and a "call me in a week if" kind of conversation.
I've decided some of my chicken noodle goodness is in order, so I'll be heading out to pick up the ingredients here in a few. Until then, I’m coding this blog entry and pasting in what I/we wrote today and yesterday.
Some of you may recall Shaun and I have been writing (for years) a follow-up to our "Zombie Trouble" essay published a few years ago. In the follow-up we want to take up race, because we know we skirted the issue in the last essay. We're basically calling for more ideology critiques that can wrestle with the way (a) critique does a sort of ideological misdirection itself; and (b) critique has succumbed to cynical reason. Insofar as zombie films are themselves cultural critiques, they serve as an excellent illustration. What we've got already is about thirty-pages of notes and drafted passages that just need to be pulled together and coherent-ized, so I've started that process this week.
Of key concern to me: doing a literature review I discovered an overwhelming number of ideology critiques fly under the banner of ideographic criticism. For some reason I've never really been impressed with the idea of the ideograph. It's too text-bound and it really doesn't have any explanatory power. It seems to me the method keeps getting trotted out because its accepted, and then you can just say whatever the hell you want to say and attach it to some empty signifier like "equality" or "freedom." To be blunt, I've only ever been impressed with Condit and Lucaites Crafting Equality and Dana Cloud's work with the ideograph. Everything else just seems to oversimplify and turn ideology into this static and unmoving thing.
For me, true ideological critique requires book-length projects. I mean, that's what Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, and I think he's right (I have a doomed essay about this which kept getting rejected, so I stopped trying to work with Jameson). So the bind with this second zombie essay is how to say that---how to argue for procedure and not do ideological criticism ourselves, or at least, only do a mini-version. Anyhoo, I'll forgo the introduction and jump into the discussion:
I. Resurrecting Ideological Criticism (Again)
Owing to a number of theoretical developments, such as the eclipse of the concept of ideology by that of "hegemony" or "power/knowledge," ideological criticism seems to be in decline---at least in name. Elsewhere we have argued that the decline in ideological criticism is also connected to an unwillingness to confront the determinist connotations of ideology, as well as a profound misunderstanding of the category of the unconscious. We think there is a third reason as well: methodological stagnation. Although for decades ideological criticism has been an accepted approach to understanding and critiquing cultural artifacts in Communication Studies for decades, such criticism has been limited to a fairly restrictive analytical procedure termed "ideographic criticism." The reduction of ideology to its ideographic footprint, we suggest, has slowed communication scholars from developing a more robust, poststructural understanding of ideology as such.
Developed originally by Michael Calvin McGee, ideographic criticism reduces ideology to its fundamental "building blocks," which he terms "ideographs." As Sonja Foss explains in her popular textbook on rhetorical criticism, "the primary goal of the ideological critic is to discover and make visible dominant ideology or ideologies embedded in an artifact and the ideologies that are being muted in it." For McGee, ideographs were simply words or concepts that punctuated the movement or development of a given ideology overtime: an ideograph is "a higher-order abstraction representing to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal." McGee lists "such terms as 'property,' 'religion,' 'right of privacy,' 'freedom of speech,'" and so on as examples of ideographs. Since McGee advanced the ideograph in 1980s, there have been many ideographic studies, including a widely read, book-length study of the As useful as McGee's concept has been for textual and cultural criticism, we question its exclusive deployment for more recent understandings of ideology that critique any easy correspondence between words and extra-linguistic reality. Ideographic criticism, in light of contemporary understandings of ideology, is not suspicious enough. For example, unlike previous Marxian understandings that hold ideology is always determined by the "base," Althusserian conceptions of "interpellation" hold that ideology, culture, and other social formations are relatively autonomous from basic arrangements. Consequently, there is often a mismatch or distortion between superstructural or cultural objects and basic, material arrangements. This notion of a mis-match between symbols and extra-symbolic reality is inspired, in part, by Freud's assertion that dreams are distorted representations of unconscious wishes that have been condensed and displaced in the conscious mind. The consequence of the displacement and condensation of ideology in an autonomous cultural domain is that there is no necessary or direct homologous relation between any two cultural strata, and insofar one notices a parallel, it is likely obscuring or displacing a deeper ideological element. Such autonomy troubles a stable presumption behind ideographic criticism, detailed by Mary E. Stuckey and Joshua A. Ritter: If we understand ideology as unconscious and autonomous, the consequence for ideographic criticism is that symbols may not correspond to the ideological logics they appear to signify: "equality" may, in fact, be about torture practices, "freedom" may be about totalitarianism, and so forth. Ideographs may tell one where to look, but like the images of dreams, they are helpless to specify what one might find. Consequently, the ideographic approach runs the risk of turning criticism into little more than a shell game without an abiding conceptual apparatus of constancy other than the empty signifier: myth, narrative, and so forth. As we have argued elsewhere, one conceptual innovation that better attends to the dynamism of ideology is interpellation. Althusser's theorization of ideology as interpellation explains ideology as a subject-making process: ideology is not an indoctrinated set of beliefs, attitudes, and values of a given "mass," but rather, a kind of map or script for who a given individual is; to use and reverse the zombie allegory, without ideology we are all zombies. The concept of interpellation is not completely satisfying as an alternative to ideographic criticism, however, for Althusser also makes an exemption for the critic. According to Zizek and others (e.g. Judith Butler), it is Althusser's inability to contend with this problematic, with his own interpellation in the act of critique, that leaves his theory of ideology incomplete. In fact, Zizek suggests that the difficulties of one's position as a critic is one of the reasons scholars have hastened Indeed, Althusser maintained an "outside" category-that of pure and objective "knowledge"-that most commentators found untenable, precisely because the pure category served to obscure his own ideological investments. Insofar as there is no outside, insofar as every self-conscious subject is "always-already" interpellated, then it is always that case that every critique of ideology is a misdirection of one sort or another. One should always be suspicious of any claim to "radical breaks" as much as to objectivity. And rather than let such a predicament lead to the idea that the category of ideology is self-defeating, Zizek argues that it should lead to further theorization; we should not rest. To better contend with ideology as a necessarily tautological structure, one must first completely divorce the concept from the 'representationalist' problematic at the center of ideographic criticism: in a qualified sense, "ideology has nothing to do with 'illusion,'" says Zizek, for "a political standpoint can be quite accurate ('true') as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological." In other words, insofar as the primary function of ideology-as-interpellation is to create subjects, interpellation does not produce a barrier between human reality (an interior) and some "true," objective world (an exterior). Interpellation is the process by which the exterior is enfolded to create a subject; in this sense, self-conscious individuals are products of the "outside," ultimately becoming what Burke referred to as the symbol-using---and symbol-used!---animal. Consequently, any one subject's self-consciousness is determined by ideology in general, and ideologies in particular, but only in the sense of establishing the limits of choice. Dispensing with the problem of representation marks a break with Althusser, who held ideology was an "illusion," however, it also introduces a technical turn (and term) that is frequently misread: fantasy. Zizek explains:
Understanding fantasies as reality-scripts that tell us what we desire, Zizek contends ideology is a kind of fantasy-field, and culture itself an autonomous reservoir of largely unconscious desire-scripts that yield self-conscious identities. Zizek frequently uses the fictional film as an exemplar of fantasies---and therefore the work of ideology. Insofar as the term fantasy is used in a technical, psychoanalytic sense, however, Zizek frequently refers to cinema as a nonfictional ideology zone in a manner that challenges commonplace understandings of "reality":
In this respect, films and other forms of media simultaneously shield us from the very things they bring into existence; they allow us to confront and indulge in our own ugliness without having to admit it or go "all the way." For example, the NBC network's program, "To Catch a Predator" (a break-out segment of the show Dateline NBC) is a hidden camera reality show in which presumed pedophiles are lured over the Internet into a supposedly under-age girl or boy's home. Before the men are arrested and taken to jail, the intrepidly righteous "journalist" Chris Hansen interrogates them, insinuating they are "sick," eliciting tearful confessions, and so on. Certainly the ideological fantasy in play concerns that of normalcy and deviance, however, the show's success depends on a perverse appeal: by watching those bad men get busted, one can safely confront the fact that young people are sexual beings. Insofar as ideographic criticism---or rather, all criticism---exempts the critic from the ideological field and reduces ideology to a single fantasy structure, it is essentially a fantasmic enterprise: whatever we critique likely displaces some other kind of ideological labor-perhaps even reinforces the very ideology critiqued. In response to this predicament, following Peter Sloterdijk, Zizek argues critics have succumbed to cynical reason, either abandoning the category of ideology or reducing critique to facile, superficial readings. In what follows, we turn to an analysis of the film 28 Days Later to further elaborate two neglected but nevertheless important conceptual considerations for any form of ideology critique today: (1) the arrival of cynical reason; and (2) the ideological misdirection of critique itself. Only by reckoning with the cynicism and misdirection inherent to ideology critique can we hope to reinstate the enterprise as a viable one in Communication Studies.
Ideographs . . . are terms that are ordinarily found in common language but tend to resist change---
"liberty" or "equality" are two examples, although ideographs can be visually driven as well. Ideographs possess a certain fluidity, revealing a protean nature, but their use within a cultural vocabulary produces an ossification into the public imaginary as an empty signifier that may be attached to various meanings in rhetorical situations. This is how they function discursively and why they are so powerful-they possess a certain "givenness" that is also highly variable.
to renounce the notion of ideology: does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility? Is not the claim that we can accede to this place the most obvious case of ideology?
The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not 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... What we call 'social reality' is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if (we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interests of the working class...). As soon as the belief (which, let us remind ourselves again, is definitely not to be conceived at a psychological level: it is embodied, materialized, in the effective functioning of the social field) is lost, the very texture of the social field disintegrates....
the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy cannot be reduced to that of a fantasy-scenario that obfuscates the true horror of a situation. The first, rather obvious thing to add is that the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem. Fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its 'repressed' point of reference.