The Sublime Object of Ideology
By Slavoj Žižek
If I have to be honest about this book, it wasn’t exactly a psychoanalysis for dummies kind of introduction. Readers beware. It will greatly help to have a basic understanding of a) Freudian Psychoanalysis b) Lacanian theory. It certainly helped that I read Looking Awry by Zizek before but it wasn’t enough I think. Understanding Lacan’s Graph of Desire and Theory of Mirror Stage in a practical fashion would’ve helped much better. There was a lot of parts in the book that was left vague or incomprehensible to my untrained mind.
Despite all this, I'd like to note down a few very strong ideas that captured me fully within this book. Zizek argues that individuals understand the reality through a symbolic order. Essentially all the physical and metaphysical objects we interact with and/or try to manipulate — thus, have to comprehend — live as abstractions in our minds. These are referred as symbols. Our understanding of reality, again physical or conceptual, is nothing more than the interaction of these symbols. Hence, our symbolic order.
When you think about it, this idea of a network of symbols is quite strong. For instance, a concept, such as culture, which is undefinable in strict terms with traditional language, becomes strictly definable all of a sudden. This definition would be something along the lines of:
culture. A subset of symbolic order that’s shared among
a given group of individuals.
It is on top of this idea of symbolic order Zizek builds his main argumentation. He claims that anything that we experience, but fail to place correctly in our symbolic order (i.e., anything that resists our symbolic order) manifests itself as ideology.
He goes on to explain the exact mechanism behind this process using Lacanian tools such as the Graph of Desire, which, perhaps even more so now that it’s been a few weeks since finishing this book, is still unclear to me. But he will later go on to claim everything is ideology, or in other words there’s little to no escape from ideology. This little notion, as predictable, has grand implications for our post-modern minds that falsely believe to live in an age of post-ideology.
One day, when I’m a bit better grounded in Lacanian theory, I’d like to revisit this book. Despite failing to understand half of it, it has remarkable parallels with some seemingly irrelevant disciplines such as computer science or the age old question “Can machines think?”.