I'm starting to see the intersection of the unconscious (psychoanalytic) and ideology (Marxist). The unconscious is, logically, where deep ideology lives, where we accept/refute/ignore the hails of ideology and 'texts' (a term I'm not altogether comfortable with).
So, Jameson, Althusser, etc. are trying to show, to some degree or another, either the fluidity of ideology (the ISA rather than state-controlled entertainment), its self-reflexivity or even homeostasis (base -> superstructure and superstructure -> base), or both. Should this remind me of medieval astronomers building orbits inside orbits inside orbits in order to reconcile the terracentric universe with observable phenomenon, because it kinda does? The broad strokes of the system are appealing, but the specifics get all tangled up in, well, specifics, situational problems, and the like. There's a methodological problem, here.
On the one hand, I'm loath to use any one over-arching ideology as the end-all, be-all key to the universe. Nothing sees the totality. Nothing is capable of answering every question because it has its own answers built it. That way is the path of zealotry. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
On the other hand, if I do as my gut tells me and use an ideology (Marxism in this case) only at those times that it feels appropriate--using it as a counter-narrative to capitalism, for example, or talking about alienation from labour/goods through money--then I'm still using something to decide when Marxism 'feels appropriate,' I'm trading an explicit, if flawed, ideological system for an implicit one that resides only in my unconscious (according to the logic above). This is the same problem. I've just tricked myself into not seeing it.
On yet another hand, if we work with the most basic notion of most ideologies, "I am ignorant of more things than I know, and therefore should think with humility," then I'm very much in danger of keeping myself from ever acting at all because I can always come up with a scenario in which I could be dead wrong; if ideology rules action, even in a material world, then when can I ever act with confidence?
These are not new questions, of course, and the only answer would seem to be "make yourself as informed as you can given your material constraints and then do your best." There is no certainty. There is not perfect determination. We must rely on cogency because it's all we have.
But very few people like the "oh well, I guess we just have to muddle through" answer to life's big questions (except for old people; they get it right away). My question is, why not? Why the search for absolute surety (i.e., determinism), and then the flight from it (i.e., quest for freedom of choice)? What's at stake in this ping-pong match of totalization versus anarchy? Who benefits from one answer, the other, or, more importantly, the debate itself? Why do we keep asking this same old question?
I don't know the answer yet, and I may be repeating myself, but I can't help thinking that the determinist question is meaningless at this point, but asking about the question could be more fruitful.
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:39 PM