The Ideological Fantasy of Otherness Postmodernism

Abstract

In his foundational work The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek argues that ideology is not simply the fantasy that people believe about themselves and their society. The classical notion of ideology assumes it to be “false consciousness,” so if people were simply informed about how the world works, they would change it. Against this notion, drawing on Lacan, Althusser contended that ideology constitutes the subject’s “imaginary relations” to the real conditions of existence (109-112). In turn, Žižek argues that “ideology” is not only this Imaginary relationship to reality; rather, ideology itself is the notion that social reality relies on a fantasy: “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” (Sublime 33). The ideological fantasy is that ideology can be separated from reality, whereas ideology is not only what people “think” or “know” but also—even primarily—what they do. Belief, Žižek continues, is not merely an individual or purely mental state; rather, it is “always materialized in our effective social reality: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality” (36). Therefore, ideological critique is not only a matter of figuring out how an ideological illusion relates to some reality constituted by its social relations (commodity exchange, value, labor), but also of identifying “the ideological fantasy efficient in social reality itself” (Žižek, Sublime 36).