Isak Ebbelind<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During a recent three-day seminar which was held together with students and teachers from the University of Konstanz we discussed questions of decolonisation in detail. At the beginning of the seminar, we were asked to share our expectations for the workshops. Many students, me included, wished for concrete actions one could take to decolonise ourselves and our educational systems. After now having had time to digest the thoughts raised during the seminar, I realize that this is more difficult than one could first have imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have been writing many iterations of this text and started over many times. Not because of lack of thoughts, but due to difficulties in figuring how best to frame these thoughts. The perspectives through which one can view the issues of decolonisation are many and I find it somewhat difficult to make myself understood in such a limited number of words. I have therefore decided to limit myself to the discussion of ideology through the perspective of Slavoj Zizek. More specifically, I am going to argue for the necessity of expanding Marxist and leftist ideology for decolonisation to be made possible. I believe that a blog post would be the appropriate arena for such a tentative text, and I hope to invite into discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Traditional Marxist conceptualisations of ideology tend to view it as false consciousness that the subject will revolt against once they learn of its falsity. Zizek does a convincing job of arguing against this, stating that people are generally aware of the arbitrariness of ideology, but pretend as though it was real. He gives the example of money, that people intuitively know are paper or numbers on a screen, but that they live as though it has inherent objective value[1]<\/a>. Money in Zizekian terms is a sublime object<\/em>. It does not possess inherent value but derives its value from intersubjective relationships. If you the reader are familiar with Baudrillard, it could be likened to the term sign value<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Marxists we ought to ask ourselves why capitalism endures despite the injustice of it and despite the material conditions for socialism being more than present. I argue that it would be beneficial to look at this question in the chronology of Gramsci\u00e0Althusser\u00e0Zizek. Gramsci opens for us the questioning of the supremacy of the base over the superstructure. Althusser helps us understand how the superstructural constructs of ideology become cemented in collective consciousness through practice, ideological state apparatuses and interpellation, thus takin on agency stretching beyond that power initially granted to it by its material circumstances. Zizek helps us understand how ideology as a practice is tied to the organizing of desire, and how the central organizing principle as to why ideology survives is precisely this desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zizek comes to this conclusion and argues from Lacan that the human subject through the mirror stage experiences chronic sense of lack due to the learned identification with an external object (the mirror image)[2]<\/a>. The person tries to fill this lack with objects that are ascribed the role of being able to fulfil it[3]<\/a>. But this lack cannot be fulfilled by an external object. Upon acquisition of this object, desire therefore shifts to another object. This idea of the object of desire being able to fulfil lack is a fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zizek adds to Lacan, saying that it is through ideology that an object becomes assigned the role of being able to fulfil lack. It is thus through ideology that the organization of desire and fantasy takes place. But external objects cannot fulfil internal sense of lack, and desire therefore moves to another object designated as fulfilling through ideological frameworks. Ideology is thus self-propagating in the sense that it introduces people into a closed circuit of desire fulfilment within the framework of itself[4]<\/a>. For example, a person believes that money will fulfil her, but upon gaining money she realizes that she still desires. The object of desire is transferred to a dream car. And the story repeats itself again. Ideology is the framework that designates the money and the car as being able to fulfil desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to understand the implications that this has on the issue of decolonisation and the need for expansion of class politics, I believe that we would benefit from looking at this Zizekian argument of ideology as self-promulgating through organizing desire and reading it alongside theories on the making of humans into objects. This would show that there are struggles other than that of the proletariat that results from capitalism and the ideological constructs around it, which are qualitatively different from the suffering of the proletariat. I argue that the ideological constructs around the productive mode of capitalism have for long directly enabled capitalism through the making of humans into objects. Through the production of the other, through fetish, through cultural productions cementing articulations between certain groups of humans and arbitrary signifiers, the systematic exploitation of these people has been justified, or even made necessary according to some \u201ccultural logic\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This incorporation of the fetishized human being into the role of the object of desire means not simply that the human is objectified. It means that because the human is made object she becomes assigned the role as fulfilling desire. She is transformed into an object that is hunted. She is not exploited for her capacity for labour, but for psychological satisfaction on the part of the ones allowed to remain subjects by ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, these productions effectively set up relations that go beyond the class distinction, and these do not automatically disappear with the fall of capitalism. To believe that just because a thing originates in a phenomenon, it will fall with that phenomenon, is a logical error (hopefully I\u00b4m not debating with anyone here). Despite disagreements with Laclau and Mouffe and other post-Marxists, I do believe that an effective left must articulate different struggles against the mechanisms of capitalism together. It cannot all be about acquiring the means of production, but also about the transformation from object to subject of women, LGBTQ+ groups, and people experiencing different forms of prejudices based on ethnicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To someone who says that all of this will be accomplished simply through acquiring the means of production, I note that racism and sexism did not disappear under socialist projects. On the contrary, prejudice was justified through socialist rhetoric, where for example homosexuality was constructed as a bourgeoisie excess, and extraction of indigenous land was framed as inclusion into the socialist project. And if the answer to that is that \u201cthis was not real socialism\u201d, I would note the risk of straying from material analysis into metaphysical claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The struggle against capitalism therefore does not belong solely to the proletariat, but also to other marginal and subaltern groups. The struggles of these groups are furthermore phenomenologically different. One struggles for the acquisition of the means of production. The other struggles to regain subjectivity. This does not mean that both are not made into objects, or that these two forms of struggle doesn\u00b4t overlap at times, but it means that the objects which they are made into are of fundamentally different natures. One becomes a resource and the other becomes an object of consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a> Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008). P.12<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> Ibid. P.116<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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