Sinthomi Tardo-Capitalisti

Abstract

Everybody must have heard the Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s new clothes. It tells about a vain Emperor who would get new and more elegant clothes made all the time. One day, two adept impostors visited the Emperor, declared themselves accomplished weavers and offered to craft a new suit for His Majesty with a textiles with the magical property of being invisible to those not at the height of their own charge or else unforgivably stupid. The weavers received the assignment and wove throughout the days before the parade that was organized to display the new garment. They pretended to weave on an empty loom and worked with such an ability that none of the Emperor’s civil employees, who were asked to supervise the job of the weavers, had the courage to admit that they could not see anything at all. Meanwhile, the news about the special properties of the burlap spread throughout the Empire. On the parade day, the Emperor wore his new invisible dress and exited the parade. There was not a soul who did not praise the beauty of the new dress. Everyone but a child who, unaware of the deceit, said: “the King is naked!” The trick was revealed but, despite that, the Emperor stood up forthrightly dissimulating the shame. Is this not a perfect example of how ideology works, that is, of how the socio-symbolic web is not at all based on facts but rather on predetermined symbolic fictions? The purpose of this essay is to analyse ideological mechanisms in relation to subjective fantasy. Andersen’s tale, presents in parodist form both the fact that, through the working of symbolic adjustments, we always have a pre-understanding of reality, and the fact that such reality has an intrinsically perverse and cynical core. In fact, even when the deceit is revealed, we keep acting as if this order were already effective.