Symbolic Ordure ii

More thoughts on Lenin’s letter to Gorky (see below).

Ideology operates on a level prior to Belief, it is embodied in behaviour. Wired into the way we are forced to live there are silent imperatives, unspoken propositions about the world. Working in a factory, surfing the internet, window shopping on a Saturday are already animated by the implicit nerves of the ideological. Zizek makes the point with reference to ‘commodity fetishism’. It is not a matter of incorrect conscious beliefs about commodiities, but consists in the fact that

in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, [people] are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.

The ideological illusion inheres in the practice. In some sense, therefore, the system ‘justifies itself’, immanently in its material praxis and without recourse to intellectual content.

 And so to the intellectuals. If we accept the preceding argument, then the explicit ‘ideas’ produced by the intellectuals are a kind of surplus. The system, already self-justifying – receives a kind of gratuitous (secondary) rationalization though the intellectuals. But it is utterly surplus to requirements, ie, it is excrement.  When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.