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Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

(Zizek, 1991). The clearest account of his own conception of
ideology, however, is in the introduction to a collection of essays
he would edit entitled Mapping Ideology. Here he distinguished
three senses of the term ‘ideology’: as a doctrine or set of beliefs;
as materialised in institutions and practices; and as ‘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’
(Zizek, 1994, p. 15). The latter is clearly what interests him the
most. It acquired a distinctly psychoanalytic twist, moreover,
through Zizek’s resort to a Lacanian model of psycho-social
reality as comprising three dimensions, respectively the Imagi-
nary, the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary refers to the
Freudian pre-Oedipal stage of infant development; the Symbolic
to the world of language, social communication and culture; the
Real to all that is inaccessible both to the Imaginary and to the
Symbolic, but that nevertheless impinges on subjectivity and its
functioning.
The Real is more or less synonymous with the unconscious
and with the individual’s real desires: ‘the irreducible kernel of
jouissance that resists all symbolization’ (Zizek, 1999, p. 14). Zizek
was especially fascinated by Lacan’s move away from an earlier
structuralist sense of the unconscious as ‘structured like a
language’, preoccupied with the boundary between the Imag-
inary and the Symbolic, and towards a later exploration of the
radical implications both of the Real itself and of the boundary
between it and the Symbolic. Following Lacan, Zizek claimed that
symbolisation, or representation, will always fall short of reality,
which can never be wholly revealed ‘in itself’. The aspects of
reality that resist symbolisation take the form of a spectre, he
argued, an unsettling (ideological) closure. For Zizek, this is
the ‘pre-ideological kernel’ of ideology: ‘What the spectre conceals
is not reality but its “primordially repressed”, the irrepresentable X
on whose “repression” reality itself is founded’ (Zizek, 1994, p. 21).
Zizek cites as an example Lévi-Strauss’ explanation for the
fundamentally different spatial conceptions of the ground plan
of a village held by its two main subgroups. These conflict-
ing conceptions were evidence not simply of a difference of

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