On Overidentification

First, I suggest you read this (and comments) and these comments. Most of what I would want to say are contained therein, and what follows are just some addenda.

'Overidentification' is a kind of 'utra-orthodoxy', taking a regime more seriously that it takes itself, relentlessly implementing the letter of its Law, unconditionally following its avowed beliefs, in a way that is radically embarrassing to the regime. This of course entails the idea that the ruling ideology doesn't take itself seriously. But if the ruling ideology doesn't 'take itself seriously', then how exactly does it operate?



Here are a few thoughts:

Firstly, Zizek is arguing against the commonplace that ironic distance toward an ideology is subversive. In fact, Ideological apparatuses rely on this 'ironic distance' to function, it is the very guarantee of their success.


[1] 'Ironic distance' functions to unify the group around the object of their irony. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or company will recognize this: all, equally, make jokes - of cynical commentary, stoic acquiescence - about the company, it's rules and personnel. It's as though a 'collective subject' is thereby produced; and for all its cynical detachment, this 'collective subject' is parasitic upon the company and an effect (and support) of its organization. Needless to say, the bosses frequently 'buy into' this collective irony to get what they want.

One could take any organization, political, religious or whatever. The participants do not take the official ideology seriously, are ironically detached etc, and in this common ironic distantiation, are unified into a collectivity. Of course, on one reading, it is this very unification which is the function of the ideology. Ideology works at a level 'beneath' - and more subtle than - that of adherence to belief. The 'letter' of the ideological text is beside the point, it is the dummy sold to the adherents, who, in refusing the letter (through irony) collectively enter the Spirit of the regime. The 'fanatics', on the other hand, represent the subversion of the spirit by the letter: poker-faced attention to and enactment of the ideological letter runs counter to the geist of the ideological regime, and embarrasses it by demonstrating that it is Other than it claims to be.

[2] The second point is that the Orders will be implemented more effectively if one does not fully identify with them: 'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine. And the name for this trick of delegation is irony.

(These thoughts were in part inspired by an example I wrote about previously, and one which, while not exactly identical to what I've just been talking about, nevertheless can be used to illustrate a point. Some time ago, while casually refuting a middle-brow polemicist, I commented on the recently publicised Nixon-Kissinger exchanges. It's noted that Kissinger adopts a 'sardonic tone' when talking to his underlings about the President. I speculated as to this 'tone':

'[1] A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he's really with them- an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. [2] Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in 'Look, I'm just obeying these crazy orders, they're not mine.' I'm just an instrument.'