When he spoke of seeking justice for the vanquished of History, Benjamin was invoking the Final Judgment – which underscores the messianic dimension of his thought. Pieces of evidence are produced before a tribunal because they serve as a clue or proof. ‘The first will be the last’ is another way of saying that even the least cultural maverick may find a central place in a narrative to come. Moreover, the pieces of evidence brought forth by contemporary artists attest to the ‘materiality of ideology’ that Althusser theorized; this occurs by way of an aesthetic that introduces fiction to archaeology, but which qualifies as realist inasmuch as it evinces the will to set the real of historical production in opposition to the prevailing ideology.
As acts of historical justice, quotations of the past appear in objective, factual and apparently documentary compositions – in order to insist on the potential of the fiction that elements reunited in this manner generate. Works of art tell us that every narrative of History belongs to the genre of the novel, just as Jorge Luis Borges declared philosophy a branch of fantastic literature. As such, artists identify symptoms of our present condition in the traces History has left behind. The new generation discerns the light, flashing with greater or lesser intensity, of the ‘dialectical image’ that signalled for Benjamin the transition between yesterday and today. ‘It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past,’ he observed, ‘rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’40
The Unconscious, Culture, Ideology and Phantasmagoria
Phantasmagoria, ideology, culture and the unconscious represent four distinct formations corresponding to four levels of human existence. At the same time, they admit comparison in terms of a shared structural function: expulsion. Individual unconscious, community culture, societal ideology and civilizational phantasmagoria represent the unthought; one is subject to them, respectively, as a person, a member of a community, a citizen, and a subject of History. The individual assumes the destiny of being a subject via these four processes; as Althusser reminds us, subjectivity is a matter of ‘membership’ (appartenance). ‘It is not by chance’, he writes,
that the subject designates one who is subjected, while according to its classical function in psychology, it designates one who is active. It is this reversal, for example, that constitutes the paradox of a psychology whose origin is manifestly political: the subject is one who submits to an order or to a master and who is at the same time thought in psychology to stand at the origin of his own actions.41
This amounts to saying goodbye to psychology, which Althusser defines as the mere ‘by-product’ of political, moral or philosophical ideology. Psychoanalysis, in contrast, stands on the side of philosophy, because both psychoanalysis and philosophy lay siege to what Althusser calls ‘the ideological subject’ – that is, the subject as ‘the effect of structures anterior to its existence’, the individual ‘subjected to, or dominated by, ideological social relations’.42 Everything takes place on the level of ideology, which provides ‘the condition of individual existence’.43
As such, every subject stands exposed to four unmasterable swarms (nuées) producing dominant norms and values, whose hold on behaviour and thought cannot be fully compassed. Indeed, our unconscious is constituted in earliest infancy; our sensibility (culture) depends, to greater and lesser extents, on the identitarian context in which we mature; the ideology that suffuses us is transmitted by multiple ‘ideological apparatuses’; finally, the ‘phantasmagoria’ in which we participate derives from the collective imaginary of our times. But for all that, it seems that the unconscious lies at the heart of this four-headed hydra, as its nucleus and prototype. Its tie to ideology is the central problem Althusser addressed – the concept at the core of his philosophy, no doubt. Ideology, he maintained, is where subjectivity is fabricated – once the ‘savage’ combat through which a child becomes a human being has ended. As individuals, we are transformed into social subjects because of what Althusser calls ideological ‘interpellation’, a process he compares to a police action:
‘Hey, you there!’ If … we suppose that the theoretical scene we are imagining happens in the street, the hailed individual turns around. With this simple 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail ‘really’ was addressed to him and that ‘it really was he who was hailed’ (not someone else).44
For Althusser, then, the subject emerges inasmuch as it is interpellated by ideology. On this score, one cannot fail to notice how analytic experience and, moreover, Lacan’s influence prompted him to inject a good dose of Freudianism into Marxist studies. Althusser embraces the analogy between ideology and the unconscious (both of which operate ‘behind our backs’): an individual is ‘always already (a) subject’, interpellated by ideology even before birth – as holds for the ‘symbolic order’ postulated by Lacan. Such ‘ideological constraint and pre-appointment, and all the rituals of rearing and then education in the family, have some relationship with what Freud studie[d] in the forms of the pre-genital and genital “stages” of sexuality’, Althusser observes in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.45 More specifically: ‘the human subject is decentered, constituted by a structure that, too, has a “center” solely in the imaginary misprision of the “ego,” that is, in the ideological formations in which it “recognizes” itself’.46
In other words, the relationship between the individual and society duplicates, point for point, the relationship s/he entertains with his/her ego: ideology and the unconscious fatefully decentre the individual. One only seems to be one’s own master – in fact, one is constructed through blows of interpellation from outside. Thus, if analysis aims to recentre the subject by rewriting the personal scenario in which it is caught, a comparable effort should be made with respect to the social scenario, i.e., work enabling us not to respond mechanically to ideological interpellation. The definition Althusser provides corresponds to this double exigency. On the one hand, ‘ideology is a “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.47 On the other hand, he describes it as inherently repressive: ‘ideology has the function of assuring the bond among people in the totality of the forms of their existence, the relation of individuals to their tasks assigned by the social structure’.48 In this way, he demonstrates that the subject is produced by intersubjectivity; and because it results from exterior ‘interpellation’ fashioned by interhuman relations, it is political in essence.
These reflections will no doubt surprise those who think that our epoch has settled such matters. But in this instance, the cliché about the ‘end of ideologies’ turns out to be purely ideological itself. Such an illusion is readily explained by confusion about ideology’s true nature: ideology is not a matter of any ‘content’ in particular; rather, it is a relationship between human beings, more specifically, a relation of subjugation that seems to be freely accepted, a sentiment of membership or belonging.
Althusser invokes Blaise Pascal to bolster his theory of ideological state apparatuses. ‘Pascal says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”.’49 In other words, practice produces belief, and ideology rests on actions and structures. Why does this insistence on the material character of ideology seem so singular today? Because we have slowly come to accept a massive devaluation of thinking; more specifically, thought has become completely disconnected from action. The reigning ideology proceeds by stealth, radically separating what can be thought from what can be done. This ‘cut’ insinuates that no serious connection holds between ethics and practice, between ideas and the real. Positing a relationship between abstract speculation and concrete action amounts to a scandalous pretension branded as naïve – unless it finds support in the ultimate ideological state apparatus recognized as the official alternative: religion. Reducing the array of positions to
a binary opposition between the religious and the secular, ‘fanatics’ and pragmatists, perfectly suits the programme of capitalist ideology. Indeed, it works so well that the average politician has become a man of action priding himself in having ‘his feet on the ground’ and eschewing ‘dogmatism’ of any kind. It now counts as self-evident that the economic sphere cannot harbour the slightest trace of ideology; because it is efficient by nature, we are told it has no other purpose.
Thus, the ‘everything is political’ of Althusser’s times has given way, in just a few decades, to the following syllogism: ‘everything is economic’ – that is, pragmatic, or natural. Yet as strange as it may now seem, pragmatism is nothing but ideology. As Žižek stresses, ‘To say that good ideas are “ideas that work” means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation which determines what works.’50 From this point on, the act of thinking implies keeping distant from politics and economics – renouncing efforts to achieve a concrete effect on the world as it stands. Specific spaces are set aside for this kind of speculation; their connection to the sphere of action is stretched further every day; alternatively, they are reorganized at the behest of power: the expert is the figure embodying collaboration of this sort. In a word, in order to preserve the capitalist system of production, ideas must be relegated to a field where they have only display value – without any relation to economic or political reality. It is striking that contemporary art has been contaminated by this call for efficiency. Haunted by its inability to think about the way things are, it evinces boundless nostalgia for modernism: a discourse calling for ideas and action, criticism and engagement. Indeed, we would be at great pains to quantify the effects of art on society. According to the prevailing ideology of ‘pragmatism’, which recognizes only numbers and tangible effects, this is enough to disqualify art’s political pretensions. Art, the very site where ideology is laid bare, has become the space where politics is deployed, where it becomes a matter of display value, pure and simple. The positions artists take are all the more extreme because no one believes that they can have the slightest effect on the real, which is cemented by ideology.
Whether on the street or in our homes, advertising and economic information interpellate us directly as subjects of capitalist ideology – that is, as consumers. This discourse defines us, day after day, as the subjects of an imaginary realm based on acquisition, the salariat; here, money is the motor of all action. It would be mistaken to think the art world has escaped this effect of interpellation. To be sure, the work of art is not addressed to consumers – at least not a priori … Indeed, if the term refers to individuals who actually buy works of art, there are few consumers. That said, consumption (as an ideology) does not stop at the concrete act of purchasing: observers, even if they do not possess the financial means to acquire a work of art, play the part of passive spectators of others’ sumptuary consumption. In turn, if public art interpellates empty individuals – that is, parties free to understand themselves as subjects of the polis (citizens), members of a given community, or art lovers – it winds up being determined by its position within a society ruled by an ideology of consumption applied to the urban environment. Alain Badiou reminds us that such contempt for thinking was not always a matter of course: ‘In Althusser’s view, the origin of the great historical failures of the proletariat lay not in the crude balance of power, but in theoretical deviations … That weakness is always, in the last analysis, an intellectual weakness.’51
Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin both used the term phantasmagoria to describe the essence of the capitalist economy. The former did so in speaking of the ‘fetish character of the commodity’. The commodity, he explained, has transformed into an idol that, even though it is the product of human hands, dictates its own rules to people. This fetishization of commodities stems from the capitalist system of labour: a social relation takes on, in the eyes of those who inhabit it, the fantastic form of a relation between things. As such, phantasmagoria, like ideology, comprises ‘imaginary representations’ that exercise a powerful effect on human behaviour. They possess the same characteristics as the unconscious, and they act in the same way. For all that, the unconscious does not have the same nature as what is called an imaginary: it is composed of linguistic debris, buried memories, traces. As such, it stands related to a universe of ruins, and the social edifice – like our personalities – is founded on these ruins. In the analytic cure, an individual’s relation to his or her unconscious prompts a quest similar to the philosopher’s effort to disclose ideology under the surface of things or facts, the artist’s incorporation of documents or debris from the past into compositions, and, finally, the method employed by Benjamin’s ‘materialist historian’. Ideology, Althusser explains, is not ‘an idea that is the fruit of individual fancy’; rather, it comes ‘from a system of notions that can be socially projected’.52 In other words, ideology is a kind of film, analogous to phantasmagoria.
What fascinated Benjamin about Marx above all was this notion of phantasmagoria: the fact that reified inter-human relations emerge from the fetishizing idealization of commodities – that is, from a kind of collective dream. Because monetary relations between commodities dictate relations between human beings, phantasmagoria transforms subjects into objects; conversely, it turns commodities into self-sufficient subjects. In this context, Marx speaks of a ‘spectral dance’: things come alive, and human beings stop being anything more than ghosts of themselves. We shouldn’t forget that, etymologically, phantasmagoria means ‘to make ghosts speak in public’. Accordingly, it is no accident that Benjamin uses the same word – which simultaneously designates the fetishism of value and a magic show (spectacle féérique). For him, the ‘phantoscope’ – the projection device used in the first phantasmagoric séances at the end of the eighteenth century – is Capital itself. Capital distances us, through the fictions it offers, from what underlies our objective existence in concrete terms, and it drags us towards an existence as ghostly as that of the products surrounding us. Inasmuch as it inverts the terms of subject and object, concrete and abstract, phantasmagoria represents the essential pivot linking what Marxist theory calls ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ – the everyday life the individual lives and the collective dream that carries him or her along. Ideology, which Althusser defines as a system that must be socially ‘projected’, constitutes a phantasmagoria through and through – and ideological state apparatuses are so many phantascopes for its diffusion.
Benjamin sought to reconstruct the phantasmagoria specific to the nineteenth century by studying the streets and boulevards of Paris in detail. Commercial arcades, the system of public lighting, the decor of bourgeois interiors, and objects displayed at universal expositions represent enigmatic features of a building in ruins – strips of film on the cutting room floor. For Benjamin, dreams do not stand in opposition to the spirit of historical materialism; instead, they constitute its raw material. At the same time, however, the true sense of a given historical moment – that is, the significance of a collective dream - is apparent only at the moment of waking. The historian seeks to wrest scraps of meaning from what sleep has left behind; he is a ragpicker rummaging in piles of ruins, attempting to reconstitute the past mentally by accumulating details gleaned here and there. Initially, the crumbled edifice offers a mass of incomprehensible fragments; they reveal their meaning only after the fact, following patient decipherment, once the phantasmagoria to which they belong has vanished.
Between 1968 and 1972, Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers devoted himself to an elaborate project: Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. In this series of works, fiction became a medium in its own right. Starting with his first exhibition in 1964, Broodthaers crafted magisterial works centred on the notion of reification – notably, a series of paintings consisting of a mass of mussels (moules) evoking industrial production by moulding (moulage). His attention then shifted to the Museum as a totalizing form, the central site of cult
ural commodification. Here, the signs that artists bring into circulation transform into economic and cultic quantities, as well as historical documents. Broodthaers decided to use this found format as a readymade and developed, in twelve sequences, the fiction of a Museum without a fixed location. In his work, the figure of the ‘Eagle’ functions as a substitute for art. The majestic flying creature becomes the emblem of a complex fiction exploring the formal and ideological universe of cultural reification comprising various ‘sections’: Section cinéma, section des figures, section documentaire, services financiers, réserves … ‘My system of inscription’, Broodthaers declared, invites observers to ‘separate, in an object, what is art and what is ideological. I want to show ideology as it is, and precisely to prevent art from making this ideology inapparent, that is, effective.’53
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