The scenario recounted via the chain of emails here is all too familiar: an ideologically-loaded text (often art, though not always) gets displayed within an institutional context, and then someone complains that it doesn't behoove the institution to support and/or lend credence to the text's ideological position. Structurally, the fear is that an object that is purely rhetorical can gain substantial force through the context of its display, and more easily cause people to believe stuff that they shouldn't believe.
This claim is easily and sensibly shrugged off, as the Institute for Cinema and Culture has done. There are certain absolute debates underlying this sad scene, and those cannot be easily resolved: Is there a real historical truth, for example, which representations must either get right or wrong? Does art really get people to do anything anyway? But beyond these issues, which must remain undecisive as long as they are undecided, more immediate — dare I say "pragmatic"? — concerns make the concerned citizen's position incoherent.
What would it mean, according to his own logic, to regulate "particular description of [a] film"? Who would be in charge? Would that not involve controlling, institutionally, the rhetorical weight of the movie? Is the goal to produce a rationalized balance to make sure no one is ever threatened with being convinced of something? Would this balance assure that texts would never threaten the truth value of absolute historical fact (which would be known methodically via...)? — and would that be a good thing? Really, the attorney's stance is not a stance at all, just a sense of aggrievedness that makes a convenience of the very instability of rhetoric — of the uncertainty of art and propoganda and all other forms of contingent communication — while purporting to object to excessive stability. All messages are spinnable; spin this another way, because the way it's spun now I don't like it and what's worse it doesn't appear to be spinning. That's not really an argument, now , is it?
And yet, as I am fond of saying. The attorney's intuition is not finally one that I would dispute. Signification doesn't happen in parallel; as a given object, the poster in question forms a complex of signs which achieves meaning — which is rhetorical, that is to say, like a film or an email — through the relations between the parts (as well as in relation to surrounding matter). The director's squib description of the film is indeed part of a meaning that includes what institutions' names appear alongside. That Hayek has interpreted this meaning-complex in a banal, univocal manner is merely the sign of a weak reader, not of a failed understanding of how social meaning appears in the first place.
Hayek's intuition, alas, goes thoroughly unexplored, because of a very particular slippage: the slippage in the contemporary usage of the word "ideology." It's not a word Hayek employs, but it's what he means when he says "politics": the commitment to a prescriptive line about how social relations should be organized, before which historical truth — objective reality — is cast down. This is the meaning mechanism by which, most famously during the last century, communists are ideological but capitalist humanists are not — and, in a hysterical farce of recapitulation, the New York Times is ideological while Fox News is not.
The Times is ideological, of course, as is communism and Fox and capitalism and the poster at the University of Iowa announcing the film Blood of the Condor. The use of ideology described in the previous paragraph is more or less the second definition in the American Heritage dictionary: "A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system." But as it's come to be used, this use of "ideology" is purely ideological, per the main sense of the word: "The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture." That is, "ideology" as used by the current President (and former Prezzes), Bill O'Reilly and, implicitly, by Matt Hayek, is itself little more than a bludgeon used to discipline anyone who would threaten the body of ideas reflecting their own social needs etc.
The main function of "ideology" is to conceal the workings of ideology.
Another way to put this would be that Hayek (as a representative for a familiar strategy) doesn't wish to protect the truth from rhetoric, but rather to protect his preferred rhetoric from the truth of its own rhetoricity. To do so, he must produce a privileged category (what usually gets called "art") that is at once separate from the basic truths of daily life and capable of threatening them. Having done so, he must demand that all the meanings in this sphere replicate Moretti's Lukacsian account of the modern novel, that does the endless work neither of casting doubt on, nor lending credence to life, but of modeling conciliation, of showing us how to modulate the demands of the radical and of the daily life on offer so their distance is made tolerable. The Iowa poster's failure of modulation is in fact its only failure; the content is scarcely relevant. It's ideological — "political" — to Hayek not because of its expressed politics so much as because of its distance from the activity of conciliation that must define the supposedly non-ideological. That distance must be closed. (There is no radical activity, one notes in passing, that does not promise irreconcilability; a fact that goes equally for "art" and "politics").
What Hayek's intuition, structured by such interests, thusly must turn away from is the application of his own initial logic beyond the space of the University's arthouse. I note for example that various seals of the United States are generally present when the President speaks on television; does that mean that the US endorses the President's claims? Am I in fact being forced to play a part, as a citizen of this nation, in endorsing the President's expressly rhetorical and ideological claims? This is quite disturbing. But moreover, when I watch such speeches on, say, NBC, and the little NBC floater-logo appears in the corner of the screen, does this mean that NBC is endorsing the truth-value of said claims?
I could poke fun at Matt's initial ire, because the answer to all of these is, Of course not!
Except that the answer is, Of course! That's exactly how truth-value is produced (and we are enlisted to endorse it "against our will" every day), replete with its internal fractures, its disavowals, its proleptic recuperations of dissent and its cosmetic self-doubts. When Fox News announces itself as "fair and balanced" night after night, and then the FoxSearchlight logo appears on a poster for the film The Dreamers, this is an aggressively ideological labor, and I resent the ensuing effort to persuade me that the spirit of 1968 concerns free love with a little hullaballoo downstairs as a backdrop, a meaning I necessarily understand Fox to support and propose as "fair and balanced" — that's pure ideology! It's a lot more pernicious than Blood of the Condor, and it's got to be stopped! And this is true, in various ways, of every movie and its poster ever!
If you believe in the dangers of complex ideological signs, you can do a little better, sir. And there is indeed work to be done. One more try if you want to be a social critic...
Posted by jane at January 28, 2006 08:58 AM | TrackBack