An Augur’s ‘Taking of the Auspices’

 An Augur’s ‘Taking of the Auspices’

I notice a common theme in both Foucault and Lacan where ideology is not about beliefs or concepts, or even signifiable, but about silence or the Real in contrast to discourse and reality.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do think that our social institutions and political institutions are not ideal, are incomplete and harbor problematic ideological practices. They are not always discursive: the Syrian Civil War, the Libyan Civil War, the wars over conflict minerals, the Iran and Afghanistan Wars reveal deep ideological problems with US and many other nation’s foreign and military policy. In the 60’s there were anti war protests and a movement, today nothing, a few books and a few NGO’s covering the carnage.

Foucault claimed that ideology operated by silences, that silence warped our understanding and epistemological descriptions.

Lacan claimed that the Real was unsignifiable and related to an obscure command to “enjoy” the sadistic terror from the “law” and the superego. This is doubly problematic from a Heideggerian view where the subject is always already eclipsed by social institutions and tribal or communitarian “obligations.”

Schopenhauer posited ideology as the Will, Freud as desire, Lacan as the Real (in contrast to reality as the place of fantasy, a set of fictions to shelter from the terror), Levi-Strauss as the structural unconscious. The ‘command’ essence of the real or superego distorts any ideal of reason as operable by a subject who wants to navigate like a pilot through life. Lacan discusses the masochism of ideology, the way we follow the injunction to enjoy the sadistic other, but it is also the obedience to the order to reproduce and work, purposelessly. Similar to the way a planet or star refracts and diffracts space around it, bending and skewing symbolic systems, and discourse itself. The hard core of the person is a repressed traumatic kernel - a hole filled with ‘necessary!’ fantasies!

Ideology is not beliefs but injunctions; not concepts but libidinal impulses!

Zizek’s first 10 books were all about ideology!