Ideology is Dead, Long Live Ideology
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I’ve personally never seen Powell’s close down the Pearl room for a reading before. Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.
I came half an hour early and was lucky to get a spot on which to lean on the front of a bookshelf.
He was here to promote his new book Violence, but as he said he would early on, he talked about far more than the book, bringing in chicken jokes, dinner party conversations, late-Platonic notions of discourse and the inadequacies of hard-core porn to further his cultural critique of our particular historical moment.
What jumped out to me was this persistence of ideology. Zizek proposed that we are engrained with certain attitudes that seem ostensibly moral and high-minded, like all good doctrines should, but actually interfere with practical political solutions to the problem in question. The inability to discuss racism was one example he gave, how PC attitudes make it very difficult to address the latent racism which remains dysconsciously in our society.
I can only say that in my life as a schoolteacher, I have seen that to be true. No teacher would ever say they are prejudiced, right? Yet a lot of the more progressive critique of the education system, such as Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, point up subtle inequities which I have seen in real life, like a principal saying out loud that he had lower expectations for ESL students going to college, or an English teacher calling a counselor in front of an entire Honors English class to question a student’s placement because she had a strong accent.
And then there’s the larger systematic problems, such as why students of color are disproportionately represented in special education programs and underrepresented in honors programs, which has not only to do with the school system but with larger social problems that many communities struggle with and which affect a student’s level of literacy background and focus they bring with them to school every day.
These are all problems which could be solved, imo. The thing is, it would take a brutally honest societal conversation around the legacies of slavery and colonialism and what to do about them going forward.
The last time we saw a conversation like that was in the late 60’s.