The Ideological Aesthetic: the ‘Political’ as inevitable and Epiphenomenal PART 3: The Ideological Construction of the Subject, by Udith Dematagoda & Christos Asomatos

Why is everything an 'aesthetic'? Two writers explain... Part 3 of 3

Much of the theoretical underpinnings of The Exform hinge on Bourriaud’s extrapolation of Althusser’s theory ideology in its most well-known iteration from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970):

Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence (IISA:)

This formulation is given to be framed in terms of the Lacanian psychoanalysis which seemingly supports it, where each element corresponds to the tripartite model of the unconscious. Ideology is thus a (Symbolic) representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their Real conditions of existence. Implicitly for Bourriaud, such a definition must also include Althusser’s speculative insight on art as a mediating force that makes us see, perceive and feel (without knowing) the ideology from which it derives and to which it alludes. It is now clear that this particular definition of ideology, which has become without question Althusser’s most famous contribution to theoretical discourse, is in no way definitive. Indeed, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is a fragmentary and elliptical work sutured together from various sources by the author, and intended to be part of a much larger work intended for a non-academic readership. Another earlier intervention by Althusser in the realm of ideology is contained within the 1964 essay Marxism and Humanism, which precipitated the acrimonious ‘humanist controversy’ that gripped French intellectual life in that period. Both texts were separated by a period of 6 years, some of the most tumultuous in recent European history, yet are often unthinkingly considered to mark two stages in the evolution of Althusser’s theory of Ideology. 

However, Warren Montag’s brilliant and authoritative Althusser and his Contemporaries (2013) has demonstrated through a robust command of archival material that although these two texts differ significantly from each other in many crucial ways, they also share some fundamental similarities. It is Montag’s contention that a third text, Three Notes on a Theory of Discourse (1966), unpublished in Althusser’s lifetime, is a necessary waypoint between the first and second text, and moreover, one which reveals ‘a period of rapid breaks and reversals in his thought, and a period in which the continuity of certain terms concealed underlying theoretical discontinuities’ (Montag 104). 

Montag focuses on Althusser’s initial notion of ideology as a system of “representations” which the philosopher clarified later as “usually images and occasionally concepts” (Montag 108). For Montag, the foregrounding of images is here highly significant, since it is the root of the “imaginary” relationship on which Althusser’s theory of ideology in its most well-known iteration rests, and which has heretofore been considered “an unfailing reference to Lacan" (Montag, 108). However, Montag instead traces this notion of the image in Althusser to a contemporary debate within French phenomenology. On one side of this debate were Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and their attempt to restore the image to a form of knowledge; on the other was Gaston Bachelard’s previous contention that the image is, instead, the primary form of illusion and the main impediment to scientific knowledge. Although closer to the position of Bachelard, in Marxism and Humanism Althusser resisted association with either proposition and attempted instead to advance a sophisticated conception of ideology that seemingly de-centers consciousness and displaces the perceiving subject - thereby removing the significance of the image, whilst simultaneously attempting to conceive of ideology in material terms: 

“men live their actions commonly related by the classical tradition to freedom and to ‘consciousness’ in ideology, through and by ideology; in short . . . the ‘lived’ relation of men to the world, including History (in political action or inaction), passes through ideology, or better, is ideology itself.” (Quoted in Montag 112)

Montag notes that both the novelty and contradiction in the above formulation derives primarily from Althusser’s use in the French of le vécu, i.e., the lived relations of men to the world. Its use is the best indication of Althusser’s implication within what Montag describes as the “unfinished” field of the Lebenswelt as developed by Edmund Husserl in his 1936 work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. The Lebenswelt represents a distinct turn within the field of phenomenology, and signalled for some philosophers in the Husserlian tradition such as Tran Duc Thao and Merleau-Ponty a turn into a more materialist direction. Previously, the discipline had been concerned with exploring the functioning of consciousness in isolation – but now conceived of it as inescapably embedded within an already extant and inter-subjective world of collective perception and accumulated experience. Yet as Montag perceptively highlights, Althusser did not merely reproduce the unresolved contradictions of the Lebenswelt. In the last instance, he reverted to Spinoza in his absolute refusal to see mind and body as neither distinct or reciprocal, but as the same thing - thereby denying the existence of the subjectivity so central to phenomenology. This occurs primarily in the form of expression in the French original of ‘men’s consciousness’ and their ‘attitude’ and ‘conduct’:

“…attitude and conduct, to translate Althusser’s word literally, represent a substitution of body for mind, of external for internal, of acts for thoughts. To follow this set of associations is to see consciousness disappear into acts and mind into body; to replace “become conscious of” or “experience” with “live” as in men “live” their relations to their conditions of existence, is not only to make ideology an affair of bodies rather than minds, but to materialize it altogether.” (Montag 117) 

For Montag this is evidence enough that Althusser remained in part tethered to the idealist preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition, and that Marxism and Humanism, and by extension the entire genealogy of his theory of ideology, is “haunted by the humanism it sought to analyze, insofar as it desubstantialized ideology and vacillated between a notion of individual subjects as given (although no longer the center of their world) and a notion of the subject as illusion” (Montag 117). Nevertheless, this ambivalence, rather than being a mere reflection of Althusser’s uncertain philosophical commitments, might in fact point to a certain liminality in the very constitution of the subject of liberal democracy: of the emptiness of the subject outside the reproduction of hollowed out predetermined practices. Seen in this light, the vacillation described by Montag essentially underlines Althusser’s own implication on the lived relation of individuals to the world as not simply being filtered through ideology, but as ideology itself. 

To consider the perceptual lived relation as ideology in itself is to emphasize the spirit of Althusser’s simultaneous use of, and quarrel with, what he believed to be the inescapable idealism of the phenomenological tradition, whilst acknowledging the possibility that this very theory remains “desubstantialized” due to an unwillingness to attach to ideology the totalizing force which certain parts of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses demand. Indeed, the substitution of perception as a facet of consciousness for a bodily act does not necessarily negate ideology’s relation to the aesthetic in its original etymological rendering (αἰσθητικός), as itself a form of perception or aesthesis. Conceived in this way, art is plausibly not always only a means of making us see, perceive and feel the ideology from which it derives and to which it alludes - it can also sometimes be ideology itself. 

In order to arrive at such a designation, we need to briefly engage with what was for Althusser the central conceptual link between psychoanalysis and the theory of ideology, a link which Bourriaud notably leaves unexplored: the theory of interpellation. It is our contention that there exists a conceptual gap within this theory that allows for a degree of speculation. Since, despite Althusser’s insistence, the issue of whether ideology has a material or an ideal existence is never fully resolved even in the final instance, it is difficult to accept entirely the totalizing materialist force by which ideology consistently interpellates all individuals as subjects. We maintain that there remains the possibility of an aberrant functioning which sometimes disrupts this process, and one which ultimately creates the conditions for what we will designate as the ideological aesthetic.

The central thesis posited by Althusser in his noted text on ideology is that “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects.” The memorable example which Althusser furnishes is the scenario of the policeman stopping an individual on the street and forcing them to give an account of themselves. Such an interpellation inevitably occurs under duress and the threat of physical violence from the policeman, who is the embodiment of the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The process of interpellation, where the body of the RSA acts upon the body of the individual is thus given to be an entirely material process and one detached from any notion of the imaginary as perception or indeed as merely consciousness. According to Althusser, this dramatic process, this calling to account by which the individual appears to become a subject of ideology, already takes place within ideology – or outside of it, since ideology is nothing but “outside” – thus proving that ‘individuals are always already subjects’ and that ideology has no origin or telos. Thus, to his initial thesis, Althusser appends another:

I”deology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation” (IISA 48)

As we can see, Althusser conceives of ideological interpellation as a totalizing process, composed of an act of ‘recognition’ (reconnaissance), a term which, along with its inversion méconnaissance (or misrecognition), Althusser has borrowed from the Lacanian psychoanalytic account of Ego formation. Yet this notion of recognition, as Montag notes, already presupposes a constituted subject who acts consciously and therefore possesses some degree of subjectivity. Indeed, to conceive of interpellation in this way is to return ideology to the realm of inter-subjectivity and thus to return it to the realm of the Lebenswelt from which Althusser, through the Spinozist materialization of ideology, had attempted to extract it in Marxism and Humanism. Nonetheless, there remains a conflict between idealism and materialism within Althusser’s theory of ideology; it rejects interiority and consciousness, yet in their place merely proposes a functionalist account of the processes of exploitation and domination. However, this conflict remains intractable only if we accept the inter-subjective realm of the Lebenswelt as an entirely phenomenal (and idealist) one and not, as some have previously attempted to frame it, something approaching a material one. It is well to note that this is a question that remains unresolved even within contemporary discussions around phenomenology and aesthetics. Within this discussion, the aesthetic is argued to be both an (idealist) perceptual phenomenon, but one which also has a material existence – or as ‘an affair of bodies rather than minds’ in Montag’s description (Montag 117). This assertion is by no means as implausible as it appears, and on the contrary has been recently and convincingly argued by Günter Figal, who posits that

”art is no arbitrary theme of phenomenological description[…] Rather, an artwork is essentially phenomenal; it is an appearance that is not to be taken as the appearance of something, but instead purely as appearance. Accordingly, aesthetics essentially is phenomenology.” (Figal 3)

The aesthetic, thus conceived by Figal, is itself an inherently phenomenological category. Yet Figal makes a further distinction: the aesthetic ‘does not merely possess a phenomenological character to the extent that it is one possible form of phenomenology’:

“Aesthetics also at the same time alters phenomenology, insofar as phenomena capable of being experienced aesthetically are not pure correlates of consciousness, but rather things. Artworks are thing-like; it is only for this reason that perception is essentially connected to the experience of them.” (Figal 3-4)

It is our contention in this essay that Ideology as conceived by Althusser, in certain circumstances, becomes a phenomenon capable of being perceived purely aesthetically but simultaneously retains a materiality that in certain circumstances remains attached to its (aesthetic) perception. As Althusser writes, in ideology it is therefore not the real conditions of their own existence that men represent to themselves, but their own subjective relation to them. What we have then is, a form of subjective perception as relation, that Althusser maintains lies 

“at the centre of every ideological, i.e., imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the ‘cause’ which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world.” (IISA 38)

The ‘cause’ of this ‘imaginary distortion’ is to be found not within a process of interpellation which seemingly recruits all subjects equally, but within the fact that its functioning is inconsistent within certain contexts. In contrast to the standard interpretation of Althusser’s theory, interpellation is not uniformly tied to a positive subjection to an external authority through which the subject recognizes themselves. In a posthumously published typescript written in 1965 titled Theory, Theoretical Struggle, Theoretical Formation: Ideological Struggle, Althusser attempts to examine ideology not only in relation to recognition, but also to misrecognition:

We understand that … ideological representation imparts a certain ‘representation’ of reality, that it makes allusion to the real in a certain way, but that at the same time it bestows only an illusion on reality. We also understand that ideology gives men a certain ‘knowledge’ [connaissance] of their world, or rather allows them to ‘recognize’ themselves in their world, gives them a certain ‘recognition’ [reconnaissance]; but at the same time, ideology only introduces them to its misrecognition [méconnaissance]. Allusion-illusion or recognition-misrecognition – such is ideology from the perspective of its relation to the real. (Althusser/Elliot 29) 

“The above proposition once more brings into question the notion of interpellation as a totalizing drama of recognition (which recruits all individuals as subjects) by introducing to it – and associating it with - the simultaneous problematic of misrecognition. The latter, an afterthought in the above formulation, should be understood as related to the former in terms of an occurrence that disrupts the normative functioning of interpellation. At this juncture, we can now posit the Ideological Aesthetic (in contradistinction to the recognition proper to interpellation) as a form of misrecognition (méconnaisance) which Lacan associated in his 1946 paper Presentation on Psychical Causality with the inability of the paranoiac subject to identify with an imposed subjective identity — a condition that inevitably hastens a crisis in their psychic life.”

In his seminar of 1953-54 Beyond Psychology, Lacan writes of misrecognition as “a certain organisation of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached” that, furthermore, cannot be constituted without what he describes as “correlative knowledge”, i.e., if the subject is capable of misrecognition, then he must be equally capable of recognition, and thus privy to the knowledge of that which he has failed to recognize. This would seem to accord with Althusser’s view of ideology as it relates to the real, as a form of allusion/illusion or recognition and misrecognition. This is, however, a normative view - and one which does not itself preclude the existence of an aberrant form. Indeed, in the 1946 paper, Lacan elaborates in a subsection of the Essential Causality of Madness on the centrality of misrecognition to madness, which is apparent.

”in the revolt through which the madman seeks to impose the law of his heart onto what seems to him to be the havoc [désordre] of the world [...] It is an insane enterprise [...] in that the subject does not recognize in this havoc the very manifestation of his actual being, or that what he experiences as the law of his heart is but the inverted and virtual image of that same being. He thus doubly misrecognizes it, precisely so as to split its actuality from its virtuality. Now, he can escape this actuality only via this virtuality. His being is thus caught in a circle, unless he breaks it through some form of violence by which, in lashing out at what he takes to be the havoc, he ends up harming himself because of the social repercussions of his actions.” (Lacan 140)

As Lacan implies, the formation of the ego is a perilous and deceptive enterprise, and one necessarily based on misrecognition. However, through the intervention of technologies that demand constant self-observation, or rather self-surveillance, we are now forced into a quotidian confrontation with this misrecognition, and the results are unsurprisingly pathological. 

The near-universal forms of derangement inculcated in contemporary subjects by this loop of misrecognition, where the differences between virtuality and actuality are ever more indistinct, are palpable. The contemporary subject is only capable of misrecognition through practices that possess no specific relation to themselves, but through which they are compelled to give a false account to the bourgeois Big Other. Through the ubiquitous modes of social media as means of communication, self-promotion, self-abjection, political mobilisation, and consumption (increasingly in ways that coalesce), the subject inhabits a public sphere overfilled with political gestures which furnish them with a seemingly endless flow of perceptions of genuine engagement. These perceptions may well devolve into misperceptions as soon as their efficacy is judged against their professed political intentions and content, but should by no means be dismissed as meaningless. In fact, they are particularly meaningful as their primary function is to entrench the representation of the self always in opposition to a perceived, illusory or not, hegemonic centre. Within this drama of misrecognition (or mis-interpellation in contradistinction to interpellation) the individual has become impervious to the Policeman’s demand to give account of themselves, not least because they have been conditioned into the habit of policing themselves. The liberal ‘total state’ has come about not through the disintegration of previous states, but through the creeping supremacy of vast, borderless semio-corporations.

The Ideological Aesthetic can therefore be framed as an aberrant form of interpellation; a mutation which occurs as a backsliding or regression, a residual trace of the purportedly ideal (immaterial) form, and a degeneration (or deformation) of ideology into its aesthetic representation. The conditions for this mutation are provided by emergent states of hyperpoliticisation wherein categories – conventionally political or not – are constantly remobilized, reoriented and repurposed into the service of superstructural political divisions.

Within its present partial functioning, the hyperpoliticisation created by the Ideological Aesthetic appears overwhelmingly negative. Historically, however, phenomena of aberrant interpellation could be explicated with recourse to what Althusser, in his brief comment on Christian ideology, referred to as the “bad subject.” According to Althusser, there are four stages to the interpellation of the Christian ideological subject. In the first instance there is the interpellation of the individual as subject, in the second their subjection to the Subject (in this case the God of the Christian Church). Thirdly, there is the “mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and, finally, the subject’s recognition of himself” (IISA 55). This chain of interpellation ends with the “absolute guarantee” of these conditions, which takes the form of the invocation ‘Amen’, that is, ‘so be it.’ In contradistinction to this ‘good’ (normative) subject, the ‘bad’ subject is an exception to the functioning of this ideological interpellation who “provokes the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State Apparatus” (IISA 55). The implication is that this ‘bad’ subject had heretofore been defined by their rebellion against the authority of the Church by deviating from its law (as a heretic, as a sinner, or an apostate). The ‘good’ subjects, one the other hand, functioned ‘all by themselves’- through positioning themselves within an extant status quo:

”They must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So Be it’.” (IISA 55)

In the contemporary moment this process is beginning to be reversed. The process of neutralization now also functions through the creation of “bad subjects”, those who express their putative rebellion against (sometimes illusory or already obsolescent) Ideological State Apparatuses. As Montag has perceptively suggested, much of Michel Foucault’s philosophical oeuvre, which has exerted a sometimes unwieldy and palpable influence on contemporary culture, was an (unacknowledged) practical exploration of Althusser’s theory of ideology in relation to the historical “bad subject” in a variety of contexts. What we are now witnessing is the emergent universalisation of a new type of subject who (mis)recognizes themselves as in opposition to oppressive ideological structures whilst blind to the impossibility of rebellion encoded within the very means through which it is communicated. This universal “bad subject” has become, in actual fact, an exemplary good subject whose purported antagonism is continually neutralized, recuperated, and thus rendered impotent. This phenomenon - the institutionalization of oppositionality in the formation of the subject - speaks less of an individual or collective failure, or even political short-sightedness, and more of a reflexive assumption of a differential identity as the only means to guarantee a sense of self. Its endgame, as Jacques Rancière has observed, is the impossibility of the critical universalization historically necessary for the enunciation of political identity. (Nash 177-178)

As the undulations of the preceding analysis no doubt reveal – a theory of the Ideological Aesthetic has the potential to retroactively account for some of the more perplexing events and phenomena in 20^th century history, thereby providing a fuller account of our chaotic and destabilized present. The utility of a theory of the ideological aesthetic becomes apparent when we consider it as a lacuna within previous discourses on ideology and as recurrence of the antagonisms birthed in the early twentieth century; a comparable era of bewildering and alienating technological progress which witnessed the birth of Fascism: the Ur-Ideological Aesthetic. Fascism, as Jeffrey Schnapp noted, necessitated “an aesthetic over-production, a surfeit of fascist signs, images, slogans, books, and buildings in order to compensate for, fill in, and cover up its forever unstable ideological core” and that it “ushered in a new dispensation in which all oppositions between aesthetics and politics are swept up into a new image politics” (Schnapp 3). To take this valuable insight further, Fascism did not simply use aesthetic production as a means of compensation for an absent political content, rather, it was precisely those aesthetic elements (its “image politics”) which constituted its ideology in its entirety. Nowhere is this more evident than within works of Fascist modernism, a little recognized but nonetheless distinct tradition within European literature. From the early Futurist novels and poetry of F. T Marinetti, the work of Wyndham Lewis’s middle period, and the writings of Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Henry de Montherlant, Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn - there is a marked confluence of literary aesthetics and ideology mired in often pathological modes of thinking that reproduce an array of comparable responses to the crises of that turbulent period in time.

Walter Benjamin wrote in a 1930 review that Ernst Jünger’s work reflected the “depraved mysticism” at the heart of German Fascism (Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism 121). In 1935, he would write some of his most memorable lines in the epilogue to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.” (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 234)

We propose that the Ideological Aesthetic in its present form, as an instrument of the contemporary technological reality, aestheticizes aspects of everyday life in the service of similar forms of mystification. Through offering ample opportunity for the universal “bad subject” to give expression to their discontent, they too have become engaged in the production of “ritual values” insufficient to mount any form of serious opposition to a contemporary total state, which inculcates in atomized, cyclical and self-limiting forms - something which approaches the mass hysteria once prompted by the Fascist Führer cult. Whether Benjamin himself may later have become aware of these connections we can merely speculate. Five years before penning the above, he sent a copy of his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama to one ‘Esteemed Professor Schmitt’, accompanied by a mildly obsequious (though nonetheless enigmatic) letter. Benjamin ends by acknowledging the debt he owes to Schmitt’s 1922 Die Diktatur, from which he derived a “confirmation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the state.” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe 558). A decade later Benjamin was to die by his own hand, fleeing the Fascist state which Schmitt’s philosophy had helped to legitimize.

READ PART ONE HERE
READ PART TWO HERE

NOTE: This article is the ‘Author Original’ (AO) - the final ‘Version of Record’ (VoR) was published in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 28, Issue

CITATIONS
[11] Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in On Ideology, trans. by Ben Brewster, (Verso: 2008), p.34. Further references given in brackets as ‘IISA.’
[12]  There are perhaps few contemporary examples that illustrate this phenomenon more lucidly than the recent resignification of racial and ethnic categories in the arena of party politics. Notably among them, the reframing of the concept of ‘political blacknessness’ away from its 1970s use as a description of the socio-political experience of minorities in the UK into a rhetorical a distinction between voters for the two main American parties – a distinction which attempts to separate voters into categories of ‘politically black’ or ‘multi-racially white.’ 
[13]  In this passage, Althusser used Christian ideology as a demonstration of ideology’s rhetorical functioning. Althusser, in fact, asserted that Christianity could be replaced by any other form of ideology, since their formal structure is “always the same” (IISA 51).

ILLUSTRATION BY TONY OURSLER