Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

 [....] If neurosis contains this more 'positive' element, then so for Freud does an ideological illusion like religion. He distinguishes in The Future of an Illusion between 'delusions', by which he means psychotic states of mind in outright contradiction with reality, and 'illusions', which for all their unreality express a genuine wish. An illusion, for example, may be false now, but might be realized in the future; a middle-class woman may fantasize that a prince will arrive to marry her, and in the odd case may prove prophetic. What characterizes such illusions in Freud's view is their 'forward-looking' perspective, which is to say that they are essentially modes of wish-fulfilment. Thus we call a belief an illusion', he writes, 'when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification' (213). We need only substitute the term 'ideology' for 'illusion' here to read the statement as impeccably Althusserian: it is not a matter of verifying or falsifying the representation in question, but of grasping it as encoding some underlying desire. Such illusions are indissolubly bound up with reality: 'Ideology', comments Slavoj Žižek, 'is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape an insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself: an 'illusion' which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel‖'14 As Althusser might put the point: in ideology, social reality is invested in the imaginary, interwoven with fantasy throughout its entire fabric; and this is very different from conceiving of it as a chimerical 'superstructure' erected over a solidly real 'base'. It is also, we may note, different from conceiving of it merely as a 'screen', which interposes itself between reality and ourselves. The reality and its appearances or fantasmal forms are much more closely intermeshed than any such imagery would imply. Real and imaginary are given in ideology together – which is why Žižek can argue that 'the only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself there.' If 'disinvesting' ourselves of an ideological viewpoint is as difficult as it usually is, it is because it involves a painful 'decathecting' or disinvestment of fantasy-objects, and thus a reorganization of the psychical economy of the self. Ideology clings to its various objects with all the purblind tenacity of the unconscious; and one important hold that it has over us is its capacity to yield enjoyment. Beyond the field of ideological signification, as Žižek points out, there is always a kind of non-signifying 'surplus' which is enjoyment or jouissance; and this enjoyment is the last 'support' of ideological meaning.15

  Illusion, then, is by no means in Freud's view a purely negative category. Indeed it is a good deal less negative than Marx's early conception of ideology. If ideology is a condition of reality suffused and supported by our unconscious desires, as well as by our anxiety and aggression, then it conceals a utopian kernel. Illusion adumbrates within the present some more desirable state of affairs in which men and women would feel less helpless, fearful and bereft of meaning. It is thus radically double-edged, anodyne and aspiration together; and Frederic Jameson has argued that this is true of all artefacts in class society. Ideologies, cultural formations and works of art may well operate as strategic 'containments' of real contradictions; but they also gesture, if only by virtue of their collective form, to possibilities beyond this oppressive condition.16 On this argument, even such 'degraded' modes of gratification as pulp fiction encode some frail impulse to a more durable fulfilment, and thus dimly prefigure the shape of the good society. Surprisingly, then, Freud's concept of illusion turns out to be at one with the notion of ideology developed by the later Frankfurt school. For Herbert Marcuse, the culture of class society is at once a false sublimation of social conflict and – if only in the very structural integrity of the work of art – a utopian critique of the present. Walter Benjamin's study of nineteenth-century Parisian society reminds us of Michelet's slogan that 'every epoch dreams its successor', and finds a buried promise of happiness and abundance in the very consumerist fantasies of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Ernst Bloch, in his Principle of Hope (1954–5), unearths glimmerings of utopia from that most apparently unpromising of all materials, advertising slogans.

  To examine the unconscious dimensions of ideology is at once hopeful and cautionary. If ideology is interwoven with fantasy, then this is one reason for its formidable power, but such fantasies are never easily containable within the present, and point in principle beyond it. Utopia would be a condition in which Freud's 'pleasure principle' and 'reality principle' would have merged into one, so that social reality itself be wholly fulfilling. The eternal war between these principles rules out for Freud any such reconciliation; but the unreality of utopia is therefore also the impossibility of any total identification between our libidinal drives and a given system of political power. What thwarts utopia is the ruin of dystopia too: no ruling class can be wholly victorious. Freud has little to say directly of ideology; but it is very probable that what he points to as the fundamental mechanisms of the psychical life are the structural devices of ideology as well. Projection, displacement, sublimation, condensation, repression, idealization, substitution, rationalization, disavowal: all of these are at work in the text of ideology, as much as in dream and fantasy; and this is one of the richest legacies Freud has bequeathed to the critique of ideological consciousness….