Based on what we discussed last week and this week’s readings, I am very interested in the role of consciousness in the way the individual or the subject interacts with and through language and ideology, and if living in the truth of ideology is a conscious decision.

Bakhtin, for example, highlights the importance of the awakening moment when an individual (an illiterate peasant in his extreme example) realizes there are variegated languages that juxtapose, encounter, interact and contradict each other just like in a novel, and he faces the moment of choosing one (678).

Before that, the individual just use various (not variegated) languages automatically. What triggers that moment of consciousness? If we say during the mirror stage when the child determines his identity as a separate entity and recognize the Other, then I don’t think children will have the capacity of realization and Bakhtin is not proposing that either as the peasant might have gone through that stage and not necessarily choose a specific orientation at such an early age.

It seems to me that we have the faculty to choose at some point, according to Bakhtin, between the Authoritative discourse and the Internally persuasive discourse, this latter enabling multiplicity of the semantic structure, an open window where languages can have a dialogue.

In contrast, Althusser’s perspective is more deterministic and blunt: ideology is false consciousness and consciousness is seen as the means by which ideology will preserve the order or, in his words “the imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence” (693). If man is by nature a subject (“individuals are always-already subjects” p. 700). Then one cannot even talk about an “awakening moment” or the mirror recognition (although he suggests that this is what is really in question) since ideology will interpellate us since always and our ‘free’ subjection will always be mediated by an illusion.

As a side note, the way Althusser wrote the text with self-reflecting quotes such as “To speak in a Marxist language…” (694) or “And I shall be expected to use a more directly Marxist vocabulary” (697) or the justification of quoting Aristotle by saying Marx had a very high regard for him (695) were very comical, and make me wonder about his intention. As he insisted that one might be able to observe the distortion ideology displays in front of us if we don’t live in its truth, should these quotes be interpreted as a claim of distance from Marx while still using a Marxist framework for his analysis?

Back to the topic of consciousness and ideology, Zizek replies to Althusser arguing that ideology is not simply a false consciousness but it’s this reality which is “already to be conceived as ideological” (716). This implies blindness or a cynical attitude in which subjects are conscious of the ideological discourse and the distorted reality offered to them but still live in its truth because they find reasons to retain the mask (718). The solution to break the cycle would be rather than unmasking, to confront the Real of our desire (723), but how? He doesn’t say and perhaps there is no way to do it as reality is always mediated by the language and other structures as Lacan said.