wither ideology?

Music: Kitchens of Distinction: Love is Hell (1989) Over on Crackbook I've discovered in recent weeks that if I update my status with the word "ideology," the ensuing discussion tends to court a crowd. I'm not sure what to make of the reaction other than the specter of ideology (critique) can get one---so I've moved the status discussion here.

What's going on? Well, Dana Cloud and I are working on our second collaborative project together. We've tackled "agency," now we're going back to that ol' saw horse of "ideology" (Dana teaches a regular seminar on ideology, and yours truly, the sister seminar on subjectivity). The last sustained discussion of ideology in rhetorical studies was over a decade ago in a special issue of the Western Journal of Communication guest edited by Phil Wander. Dana and I are going to survey the work on the "ideological turn" and come up with a provocation of some sort with which both of us can be happy. That a Marxist and Freudian can collaborate together is, frankly, a testament to Slavoj Zizek; his work has given both of us a way to see the world collaboratively, although we might disagree about some of the particulars.

Now, the problem of ideology critique is the tendency of the critic to occupy a privileged status, a problem Wander first addresses by claiming the concept of the totality. Adorno's solution (negative dialectics) is not elegant, but certainly rigorous. And Zizek's recent revival of ideology critique as a program figures ideology as the field of fantasy such that there is no access to an "outside," however much the Real still looms as a gaping of the edges. Where Althusser stops short ("last instance," y'all) Zizek goes all the way, incorporating desire and drive into the ideological matrix.

It remains to be seen (or, er, written) how Zizek's version of ideology critique can help us to revision it in rhetorical studies, except to say, perhaps, that it confronts a version of ideology critique that would locate "a cause imminent to its effects" a la mid-period Foucault (Shepardson's reading of Foucault with Lacan vis-à-vis the Real is pretty damn compelling). I've often argued an appeal to "the outside" in whatever guise (as truth, etc.) is politically necessary yet perhaps an ontological mistake. Zizek helps me to rethink the latter. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the question "wither ideology?" has yet to be answered. At one level, I think the lessons of Wander's ideological twisting and shouting have been learned and fully assumed. These days, one is hard-pressed to say rhetorical criticism is not a de-facto ideology critique at some level or remove. Even so, the terms "ideology critique" and "ideology criticism" are not mentioned much anymore, and at dinner a couple of years ago with Phil and Dana, we collectively wondered about that.

In general terms, I think "in-name" ideology critique has been eclipsed by what we might simply call the "immanentist turn"---an abandonment of various logics of transcendence in favor of the "down-in-it" school of emergence. Ideological critique, traditionally, has been associated with the movements of demystification and disenchantments (e.g., the Frankfurters). The trend in the theoretical humanities, however, has been toward more immanentist-materialist approaches that return to what Ricouer once termed a "hermeneutics of faith."

This was, in fact, the topic of my very first graduate seminar in 2003, couched in terms of transcendence and immanence. What seems to be at issue is a certain unfashionability, the dowdy stylings of the suspicious.