Bibliography

Abrams, Philip 2006. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. Pp. 112-130 in The
Anthropology of the State: A Reader, edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation). London: New Left Books.
Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Blackwell.
Eagleton, Terry. 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawerence and
Wishart.
Lukcs, Gyrgy. 1963. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.
London: Merlin Press.
iek, Slavoj 2012. The Spectre of Ideology. Pp. 1-33 in Mapping Ideology, edited by
Slavoj iek. London: Verso.

My Point: I want to make the connection between ideology and a tourist festival
explicit. I want to stress that culture is one of the ISAs (Eagleton 1990; 2000) and that
it was backed up by an RSA. But in this case it is not. Thus we are somewhere
between (Althusser 1971) and (Lukcs 1963), which is where we should be, but
always remembering that ideology is the state (Marx/Engels), the state is a veil that
masks capitalist ideology (Abrams 2006)and that, in this instance, a proto-state must
appropriate (Gramsci 1971)the means of generating a new ISA.
1. Production-nature was perceived as a constant
2. Imagining different form of the social organisation of production (communism,
fascism, etc.,)
3. Nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer
4. And as Balibar pointed out yet again1 - this antagonism is to be conceived neither
as an external opposition nor as the complementary relationship of the two poles in
which one pole balances the excess of its opposite (in the sense that, when we have
too much universalism, a little bit of ethnic roots gives people the feeling of
belonging, and thus stabilizes the situation), but in a genuinely Hegelian sense
each pole of the antagonism is inherent to its opposite, so that we stumble upon it at
the very moment when we endeavour to grasp the opposite pole for itself, to posit it
'as such'
5. 'Ideology' can designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its
dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the
indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure
to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power (iek 2012:3-4)
Ideology
a. a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality
b. an action-orientated set of beliefs
c. the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social
structure
d. false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power (iek 2012:3-4)
6. They do not know that, but they are doing it The outstanding mode of this 'lying in the
guise of truth 'today is cynicism: with a disarming frankness one 'admits everything',
yet this full acknowledgement of our power interests does not in any way prevent us
from pursuing these intereststhe formula of cynicism is no longer the classic
Marxian 'they do not know it, but they are doing it'; it is 'they know very well what
they are doing, yet they are doing it (iek 2012:8) We are not aware of it, but we do
it (Pg 74 Capital)
People do not therefore bring the products of
their labor in relation to each other as values
because they regard these objects as the mere
material shells of homogeneous human labor.
They proceed in the order: by equating, in the
exchange, the different products to each other
as they equate their own different labours as
human labor. They do this without knowing
it.

Die Menschen beziehen also
ihreArbeitsprodukte nicht aufeinander als
Werte, weil diese Sachen ihnen als blo
sachliche H ullen gleichartig menschlicher
Arbeit gelten. Umgekehrt. Indem sie ihre
verschiereverse denartigen Produkte einander
im Austausch val- als Werte gleichsetzen,
setzen sie ihre verues, schiedenen Arbeiten
als menschliche Arbeit gleich. Sie wissen
das nicht, aber sie tun es.

7. Ideology is a systematically distorted communication: a text in which, under the
influence of unavowed social interests (of domination, etc.), a gap separates its'
official', public meaning from its actual intention that is to say, in which we are
dealing with an unreflected tension between the explicit enunciated content of the text
and its pragmatic presuppositions (iek 2012:10)
8. The concrete intersubjective space of symbolic communication is always
structured by various (unconscious) textual devices that cannot be reduced to
secondary rhetoric (iek 2012:10)
9. That is to say, the implicit logic of his [Althusser] argument is: kneel down and you
shall believe that you knelt down because of your beliefthat is, your following the
ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the 'external' ritual
performatively generates its own ideological foundation. (iek 2012:12-13)

The Image of Ideology
10. What thereby comes into sight is a third continent of ideological phenomena neither
ideology qua explicit doctrine, articulated convictions on the nature of man, society
and the universe, nor ideology in its material existence (institutions, rituals and
practices that give body to it), but the elusive network of implicit, quasi-'spontaneous'
presuppositions and attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of
'non-ideological' (economic, legal, political, sexual ... ) practices. (iek 2012:15)
11. The Marxian notion of 'commodity fetishism' is exemplary here: it designates not a
(bourgeois) theory of political economy but a series of presuppositions that determine
the structure of the very 'real' economic practice of market exchange-in theory, a
capitalist clings to utilitarian nominalism, yet in his own practice (of exchange, etc.)
he follows 'theological whimsies' and acts as a speculative idealist. (iek 2012:15)
12. For that reason, a direct reference to extra-ideological coercion (of the market, for
example) is an ideological gesture par excellence: the market and (mass) media are
dialectically interconnected; we live in a 'society of the spectacle' (Guy Debord) in
which the media structure our perception of reality in advance and render reality
indistinguishable from the 'aestheticized' image of it. (iek 2012:15)
13. Perhaps, following Kant, we could designate this impasse the 'antinomy of critic-
ideological reason': ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us
to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology
must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality the
moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology. (iek 2012:17)

The Symbolic Order
14. Next, this very externality splits into an 'inner externality' (the symbolic order, i.e. the
decentred discursive mechanisms that generate Meaning) and an 'external externality'
(the ISA and social rituals and practices that materialize ideology)the externality
misrecognized by ideology is the externality of the 'text' itself as well as the externality
of 'extra-textual' social reality. (iek 2012:17-18)
15.