What's Ideology? (Video Exclusive)
Added 2024-12-10 15:26:20 +0000 UTCThis reading comes from Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", and I am trying to explicate what counts as specifically "capitalist ideology," as opposed to everyday "social ideology."
Comments
"Time" We return Heidegger again! The omnipotence of the mind (one of the deepest ideologies resulting from class culture) combined with a consumer society means you will have subject trying to be immortal through consumption. This is the source of Western Boomer hysteria.
Khemith
2024-12-17 05:28:50 +0000 UTCHave you ever read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang? It's the short story the film "Arrival" is based on. He talks about the aliens (Heptapods) as having a different conception of language and time more or less as a function of their biology where they don't have eyes on the front of their bodies so the primacy of the concept of "forward" doesn't really matter, any direction is as good as any other. Their language and experience of time is basically non-linear but more of a gestalt thing and the author ties it to their material existence.
Joey McAuley
2024-12-15 20:56:34 +0000 UTCI don't think modes of production can explain ideology in every society. Modes of production are a political economy construction, and frankly doesn't work very well for prehistoric times where the first calendars and concepts of time were envisaged. Maybe it wasn't the agricultural cycle, it could have been the menstrual cycle and its synchronization with the lunar phases which were first as some have said. Or maybe the movement of migratory animals or sheer boredom. But this is just speculation, and you may dismiss it as such.
Mario Mario
2024-12-13 13:19:57 +0000 UTCI liked the time as capitalist ideology example, the monologue format is much clearer in this pod. There are also some other examples that come to mind: how people think to buy commodities as a way to get what they need, instead of relying on oneself or the community as in the past. Also the belief in the capacity of the market to redistribute automation job losses, where the invisible hand will make miners learn how to code, pure ideology. The recent idea where entering contracts without full knowledge of the weaker party is somehow justified, even when the weaker party has no way to negociate or understand what they have signed, as the ubiquitous EULAs on the internet attest. Another recent ideological belief is the transmutation of environmental damage into a debt, via offsets, that claim to revive another area killed by capital using money, obtained by the sale of environmental papal bules. That the notion of destroying nature guilt free is common sense, given the amount of evidence of the contrary, could be explained by ideology. But as you say, ideology isn't everything and we should be careful not to mud the waters too much, otherwise you will get the derailed discussions of the three previous installments. Advertising ain't ideology, it's more akin to power and the mute compulsion that Søren Mau talks about in his book. This concept shouldn't be downplayed however, as in the current Amazonian period of data capitalism you can toss away the grocery list, they already know what you want (Sadowski, 2020, ch. 2).
Mario Mario
2024-12-13 11:45:57 +0000 UTCIf 'point zero' is the consistent availability of necessary resources with little waste, excess resources are positive and lack is negative, where is there either side of zero for desire to go? Post scarcity desire is for overpower: excessive physiques, vehicles, etc. just to sit down and drive slowly to shops, so becoming stripped of meaning. In scarcity desire has excess meaning but mostly hits a void of immateriality, which becomes an overpowering presence in opposition to excess death and hard integration. Atheists pray in desperation. Perhaps neolithics weaponising intersubjective complex representation to hunt species to extinction were proto-capitalists experiencing the first crisis of meaning, while impotent dreams of hungry observers spawned magic and wrathful gods?
Alex B
2024-12-13 10:20:49 +0000 UTCThere's a book by Brill press (in the historical materialism series) where they make an adjacent point to your hypothesis pills: https://brill.com/display/title/23826
Mario Mario
2024-12-12 21:34:10 +0000 UTCAlso, here's one of my favourite essays ever arguing for the abolition of work, a truly radical stance, considering how the entire political spectrum (including Pills, it seems) fetishises it: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
anacidcommie
2024-12-12 12:04:11 +0000 UTCIf you guys want to have a discussion on time-as-ideology and its development, George Woodcock wrote a great essay on this in the 40s: https://files.libcom.org/files/TheTyrannyoftheClock.pdf "The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine. The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here symbolising the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the chief raw material of industry. ‘Time is money’ became on of the key slogans of capitalist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of official introduced by the capitalist dispensation."
anacidcommie
2024-12-12 12:00:20 +0000 UTCGreat! Note around 45min in: my understanding of Zizek’s conception of “ideology” is that it’s primary function is to smooth over contradictions. Perhaps , take his example of ethical consumption with that in mind. What unconsciously are people smoothing over with “ethical consumption”?
Qoheleth
2024-12-11 00:23:16 +0000 UTCThe material conditions for their ancient time conception would have been seasonal agricultural cycles right? It's warm and your stuff grows, and then it gets cold and it all dies (depending on where you live). If you were a super nerd you were an astronomer that could figure out the time in that cycle using the stars. For most people sunrise, noon, and sunset would be their markers. If they knew the astronomer guy they could ask to know how close it is to harvest or whatever. "Everyone believes it without realizing they're doing it." Like that spending time with family is better than buying shit? Sometimes it seems like people would much rather doomscroll on their phones. How much of these family dynamics are capitalist ideology? Can you answer that? The truly subversive position is to say that family sucks, I don't know them, and I'd rather watch reality tv. That's a joke, kinda. But you know what I'm gonna come down on the "this is useless" side because it seems like we can come up with more and more and more new things that are really ideology. This feels like evo psych, and that's bad. https://youtu.be/ApF23AP5HO8?feature=shared&t=352
Ashley H
2024-12-10 21:59:29 +0000 UTCThanks! Really helpful video.
Glenn Wallace
2024-12-10 19:37:38 +0000 UTC😍
Das Boy
2024-12-10 15:27:20 +0000 UTC
