Truth and the Empty Form of Ideology

In the critique of ideology, it is a mistake to assume that ideology expresses itself only as an empty form—an empty vessel in which any ideological content may be placed. This cynical view of ideology expresses itself in the popular frustration with politics’ inability to effect change in the status quo. In this naive political view, the problem with politics is its lack of commitment to an Idea or cause beyond politics; for example, the failure of politicians to address the ‘real problems’ facing today’s ‘global community’, the protection of ‘human rights’ and sanctity of ‘international law’ etc. However, this criticism of the self-reifying interest of power misses the point: what is remarkable about ideology is not its contingent message but the way in which the empty form itself gives rise to truth.

Hegel identifies this empty form of truth as the void. The void is posited as logical necessity. Consciousness, limited to the world of sense-certainty and perception, is not satisfied with the mere appearance of the Thing. Thus, consciousness posits an ‘inner world’ or true inner being of the Thing, “a pure beyond… [that] consciousness does not as yet find itself in” (Hegel 1977, §146). The appearance is thus an illusion—a curtain that serves to hide the ‘true’ being of the Thing. Yet this void is unacceptable for consciousness—the void, empty of content, poses a metaphysical problem that consciousness has to solve. The solution is the stuff of imagination. Or, more precisely, the solution lies in the illusion of appearance itself. In filling the unknowable void, consciousness takes what is known (appearance) and images it as present in the void. Despite this imaginary leap into truth, consciousness finds this solution acceptable as “even reveries are better than [the void’s] own emptiness” (§146)

However, the point here is not simply that the illusory world of appearance has become the imaginary stuff of the supersensible. As Hegel writes, we “completely misunderstand… if we think that the supersensible world is therefore the sensuous (§147). Rather, the “world of appearance” is not a world that “positively is” but “this world posited as superseded” (§147). In this way, the supersensible is not appearance but “appearance qua appearance”—appearance taken literally as appearance (§147). Thus, what is hidden behind the veil of appearance is not some truth regarding being but the realization that “there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind [the curtain] ourselves” (§165). Slavoj Zizek writes:

“The illusion that there is something hidden behind the curtain is thus a reflexive one: what is hidden behind the appearance is the possibility of this very illusion—behind the curtain is the fact that the subject thinks something must be behind it” (Zizek 2008, 220).

Rather than being an a priori presumption regarding Thing-in-itself, the void is generated only by our insistence that the sensuous world is illusory. The supersensible is an effect of human thought that is “effective only as redoubled, self-reflected, self-related appearance” (Zizek 1999, 196).

Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the feint and the lie can provide an entry point into understanding this redoubling of appearance. For Lacan, the feint lies on the level of the animal. Animals deceive only by caprice, throwing “off their pursuers… by briefly going in one direction as a lure and then changing directions” (Lacan 2006, 683). Human deception, however, has the ability to present the true as false, to throw off the pursuer by making the real tracks appear false. More precisely, the “animal does not feign feigning”—it cannot lie (683). In order for a lie to misrepresent reality, there must first be presumed some other self-consciousness capable of (mis)interpreting the sign—in other words, a human subject of the signifier, a subject of language. As Zizek writes, we “can deceive animals by an appearance imitating reality for which it can be a substitute, but the properly human way to deceive a man is to imitate the dissimulation of reality” (Zizek 2008, 223).

More simply, the ‘realistic’ illusion can deceive only the animal. As Hegel notes, the human is not satisfied merely taking the illusion as truth: “If no further significance attached to the inner world and to our close link with it through the world of appearance, then nothing would be left to us but to stop at the world of appearance, i.e. to perceive something as true which we know is not truth” (Hegel 1977, §147). The trick, for the human, is to pressent appearance qua appearance—the illusion not taken as mere illusion but as superseded in truth. In this sense, truth emerges as the redoubling of illusion. It is no longer the particular illusion (the particular dissimulation of the animal) that relates to truth as illusion but the redoubling of illusion itself, a purely formal or imaginary movement, that reflects the very dissimulation of reality.

Truth, once again then, is not on the level of appearance. Rather, “Truth draws its guarantee from somewhere other than the Reality it concerns: it draws it from Speech” (Lacan 2006, 684). To lie, the signifier cannot exist in a vacuum; it must exist for “the Other as witness” (684). Language is not given. Just as Hegel’s consciousness presumes the existence of a void beyond the appearance, the subject split by language must presuppose the existence of the Other. As Lacan writes, “one cannot even speak of a code without it already being the Other’s code”—a code the Other and I both understand (684).

The focus here is thus not the content of the code but the way in which the structure of the code itself opens the possibility for meaning. In this sense, any signifier can function as a code. In the Other’s recognition of my voice (the name I call out to him), the specific content of the signified is irrelevant to the production of self-consciousness (so long as he responds). The code or password is speech “as pure gesture or recognition of admission into a certain symbolic space” (Zizek 1993, 94). It is the formal redoubling of the signifier as it exists “prior to it being a means of communication, of transmitting the signified content” (Zizek 1993, 94).

In the process of quilting, admission to a symbolic space is only the first stitch. The possibility of meaning exists at this point only as a sheer potential that will become actualized only retroactively. In other words, “for Meaning to emerge it must be presupposed as given” (Zizek 2007, 142). The subjects constitution thus “refers back only to its own anticipation in the composition of the signifier, which is in itself meaningless” (Lacan 2006, 683). In this way, Lacan is able to write that the “subject of the unconscious manifests itself, that it thinks before it attains certainty” (Lacan 1998, 37). The existence of the Other is a matter of logical necessity. For any meaning or certainty to emerge in the subject, there must first be the imaginary recognition of the Other. As a subject of the signifier, we enter a symbolic community for which the big Other is only “a hypothesis which never directly ‘is’, it merely ‘will have been’” (Zizek 2007, 142).

Thus, reading Descartes, Lacan is able to identify the way in which any content taken as truth can be expressed as always having been true:

“I can do no more than suggest the extraordinary consequences that have stemmed from this handing back of truth into the hands of the Other, in this instance the perfect God, whose truth is nub of the matter, since, whatever he might have meant, would always be the truth—even if he has said that two and two make five, it would have been true. What does this imply, if not that… we can permit ourselves everything as a hypothesis of truth?” (Lacan 1998, 36).

The realization that that the Other is only a formal condition of thought should not be taken as an indication that meaning is merely illusory. The function of the void is to invite consciousness. As Lacan writes, the creation of the void “introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier… that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world” (Lacan 2008, 120).

The empty speech fill out the void of the pure signifier by virtue of its “wholly potential power” as the “birth of possibility” (Lacan 2006, 684). Zizek makes this explicit:

“It is precisely the password qua empty speech which reduces the subject to… a pure symbolic point freed of all enunciated content…. [I]t is only empty speech by way of its very emptiness (of its distance toward the enunciated content which is posited in it as totally indifferent) which creates the space for “full speech”… in which the subject can articulate his or her position of enunciation” (Zizek 1993, 94).

While in the space of empty speech the subject could only hover somewhere in between meaning and nothingness, the removal of all substantive content from speech allows the subject to articulate (i.e. identify with) any subject position.

Consequently, it would be a mistake to take the void merely as an emptiness. The void is both an effect of the subject and a logical precondition of the subject’s constitution. In this way, speech is the a priori condition of the identification process in language. No longer merely a relationship with an imaginary Other, by entering the register of the symbolic the subject constitutes itself from the position of the Other itself as object:

“What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question… I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is… the future anterior as what I will have been , given what I am in the process of becoming” (Lacan 2006, 247).

In this way the question “when did you become a subject of ideology” can be answered, “I always-already was.” It is in this sense that Lacan speaks of the unary trait, or fabricated signifier of the Other that marks the first symbolic identification, as “an insignia of… omnipotence” (684). This trait is arbitrary or contingent yet nonetheless “is experienced as something which was already there from the beginning”—the very stuff of the subject itself (Zizek 2008, 115). In the discourse of science, “by allowing free rein to the play of signifiers, [the pure signifier] has given rise to a science whose laws develop in the direction of an increasingly coherent whole, but without anything being less motivated than what exists at any given point” (Lacan 2008, 122). This idea of a mutable scientific law is at the very core of ideology. Although any given ideology is fundamentally contingent, it presents itself at any given moment as something that always will have been.

It is now possible to understand the structure of ideology as regards the category of truth. Identification is by its nature a somewhat arbitrary process. The code or password that permits entrance into the symbolic can by virtue of the redoubling of the signifier be any given signifier—’democracy’, ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ etc. The point is not that these ideological terms have no content. While this may be the case in some respect, the presupposition of the Other by the subject allows the subject to be interpolated within ideology in such a complete manner that these empty terms come to mean everything—the constitution of the subject. Thus, although many on the left may assume that their discourse concerns greater problems than ‘mere politics,’ the cause one adopts is irrelevant insofar as its empty signifier serves as the constitution of the subject. The empty or meaningless terms of ideology thus serve an integral purpose in the genesis of subjectivity—by filling the void, the Master-Signifier marks both the possibility and impossibility of becoming a subject of ideology. Indeed, as Nietzsche notes in the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, “man would rather will nothingness than not will at all”—man would rather fill the void with the stuff of imagination than face its emptiness