Page 93 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 84

Contemporary Cultural Theory

perspective, Lévi-Strauss had concluded, but of an irresolvable
social antagonism, with which neither group had been able to
come to terms. This ‘splitting’ of perception, Zizek observed,
‘implies the hidden reference to a constant—not the objective,
“actual” arrangement of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a funda-
mental antagonism the inhabitants were not able to symbolize .
. . [or] come to terms with: an imbalance in social relations that
prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmo-
nious whole’. This traumatic kernel is the Lacanian Real masked
by the social structure: ‘the structure of social reality materializes
an attempt to cope with the real of antagonism’ (p. 26).
Marx’s critique of political economy yielded a similar insight,
according to Zizek, when it referred to the ‘fetishistic’, or idola-
trous, quality of commodities, which shadows the ‘official
spirituality’ of western capitalist industrialisation. If ‘the “official”
ideology of our society is Christian spirituality’, wrote Zizek, ‘its
actual foundation [its Real] is none the less the idolatry of the
Golden Calf, money’ (p. 20). The most basic function of ideology,
then, is to conceal these deeper social antagonisms, which are not
so much aberrations of the social world as the key to its consti-
tution. Zizek is thus a Marxist without the messianism. He agrees
with Marx that class conflict and other similar social antagonisms
provide the motor force of social reality. But for Zizek these are
unamenable to any final resolution, whether through an ideal
communist state, a triumphant liberal-capitalist ‘end of history’
or a New Age return to pastoral harmony. His notion of ideology,
as that which papers over the ‘senseless contingency of reality’,
defines real life itself as necessarily always ideological. For Zizek,
then, the ultimate source of social antagonism lies within the
subject itself as a ‘constitutive lack’ rather than in the symbolic
field of power relations into which the subject is inserted.

Ideology as fantasy
The aim of ideology critique is thus to expose or deconstruct the
field of social or ideological fantasy. Zizek argues that the factual
impossibility of social harmony tends to be be ‘displaced’ onto
the Other, who is imagined as preventing entry into plenitude,

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