Pill Pod 193 - Does Ideology Even Go? (Exclusive)
Added 2024-12-07 03:14:30 +0000 UTCSo we did a reading but never got to it because we stepped back in an attempt to decide how and why this even matters. It turns out we did not agree on the basics...
Please enjoy the discussion!
Comments
I thought these two episodes on ideology sort of demonstrate the trouble with the term “ideology” to begin with, and I’m glad someone mentioned Eagleton’s book, as he does provide a ton of definitions/understandings of the term. For any future episodes on ideology, I think there’s some great perspectives in Zizek’s Mapping Ideology. Honestly, his felt like the most disappointing essay in that collection, but I think that the idea of the subject of ideology and how well or not ideology (via interpellation) works on that subject really comes through in that collection. To that point, I feel like considering the “subject” could help center the discussion here. How individuals become constituted as subjects within an ideological schema is one of the primary debates y’all have, and I think that people have taken that in a number of ways. Is it language (the hail?) or is it the material practice(s) I engage in everyday? Or are they both doing it? Yeah, I don’t fucking know, but I do think like the consideration of subjecthood/identity are at play here. I probably haven’t internalized Althusser’s anti-humanist argument like I should have, though, and I may be missing something here.
Foster M
2025-04-23 03:17:50 +0000 UTCWhat is the structural coupling between tradition, culture, and relgion/spiruality?
ChatGPT
2025-04-20 21:41:41 +0000 UTCI love that Pils won’t touch a stranger unless they ‘really need CPR’ - I had to laugh at the thought of someone ‘kinda maybe needs CPR’ - truly one of the few absolutes in our world.
James Aydelotte
2025-01-02 16:28:10 +0000 UTCFound a great example of this phenomenon the other day in the wild i was at this store called the REI store and they had a brand of socks which purported "buy this pair and save the owls, buy this pair and give a meal to someone, buy this pair and save the sloths" i mean just immediately I went to heavy cynicism mode I feel like the next step is to start marketing this way ironically or like cynically very obviously fake allusion to saving the world or something
Brandon Hamilton
2024-12-09 19:53:12 +0000 UTCThere is an argument to be made for not working hard. You should take a look at "The Right to Be Lazy" by Paul Lafargue (Karl Marx son-in-law) Also, as I have 1 year old (she is growing up with this podcast in the background), I think there are good reasons to spend time with her rather than working hard.
Guttorm Glomsås
2024-12-09 17:40:48 +0000 UTCOoh I clocked Erik dropping some secret CSP references lol
Jack
2024-12-09 15:05:50 +0000 UTCA vegan couch? Game over, capitalism wins.
Tom Hancock
2024-12-09 13:39:13 +0000 UTCYe briefly mentioned Fishers's capitalist realism - surely when you're looking at the ideology of Capitalism it's precisely those concepts in whose absence we can't imagine society as capable of functioning? Ie the example of hard work; Bobby mentioned meritocracy below; private property; borders (as preventing the movement of people but not capital); wage labour (as legitimate and not a form of wage slavery or exploitation), etc.
Seb
2024-12-09 04:29:03 +0000 UTCLooking forward for this one: Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of Reality
Francesco
2024-12-08 18:32:06 +0000 UTCYeah, there are many examples, but I get Erik finding it difficult to come up with examples when put on the spot. I would further counter Pills’ claim that the message of materialism not being the most important thing as the ideology of Xmas movies with the fact that these films themselves are commodities. Anticapitalist-themed commodities are incredibly ideological in the more action-orientated way that Zizek claims in that they make you think your bring subversive because you’re consuming these products, when in actuality there’s no difference between a T shirt with Marx’s face on it and one with the Nike logo: both were made using exploited labour and both reproduce the effect of alienation via commodity fetishism. If anything, the former T shirt is more ideological than the Nike one for this reason.
anacidcommie
2024-12-08 18:21:37 +0000 UTCI liked Pills' question which structured the entire episode. He kept asking the same question which generated ongoing discussion about the concept of ideology without ever arriving at a satisfying answer. I understood Pills' question to be: How does the concept of ideology serve those of us who would like to dismantle capitalism? Does the concept of ideology afford us a tool for revolution? Or is the concept of ideology simply a descriptive statement about the world as it is without offering any prescriptions for how we ought to act? Perhaps the answer to this question is a negative one, i.e. ideology critique won't change anything because only a change in material conditions will alter the fundamental economic dynamics of our world. This is what I understood Diego Ruzzarin to be arguing for in previous episodes on this topic. In other words, the non-answer to Pills' question proves Diego's argument that we won't get anywhere until something (mother nature or revolutionary actors) reorder the material conditions of life. From this perspective, ideology critique is an armchair enjoyment for intellectuals, like literary criticism--an ideologically determined bourgeoisie leisure time activity--a humanistic enlivening to entertain us while the titanic is sinking.
Philip Lance
2024-12-08 18:19:01 +0000 UTCHow was Eric’s trip to NYC?
Andy Madeley
2024-12-08 16:24:02 +0000 UTCAny chance you can cover the 2004 book Money and the early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy … a book by University of Exeter professor Richard Seaford (he past last December in his 70s.) the theory claim of Prof Seaford is that the introduction of coin-money caused the rise of Philosophy, Theater, certain types of claims in Religion, etc, etc due to how coins change social relations in local tribes, but also larger groups. One must create a system of metaphysics, analysis, to judge whether this silver is worth its value, especially when silver stamped with the local temples / later cities imageo is worth more than its base metals, and also the reverse is a coin that looks like an official one but with an inferior ratio of metals, is it “real” with its value. Pretty much this is a similar claim as existential philosopher Karl Jaspers Axial Age. ===== I ask for it dovetails so much with “ideology” discourse, especially since many of the words for form / eidos are literally words for coin. • Like buddhism word for form, the rupa it comes from sanskrit rūpa (रूप) "shape, likeness, image", and that later gives us rūpya (रूप्य), which means "wrought silver, a coin of silver", which became rupayā (रुपया) and rupee. • Likewise we can see this all over Plato even though coins are almost 200 years old when Plato was doing The Republic, and several of the stories are invoking Lidyan myths like King Midas, Gyges of Lydia using a magic ring to kill King Candaules of Lydia, etc, etc.
Matthew Theisen
2024-12-08 02:08:33 +0000 UTCI'm new to this ideology stuff, but I think it is confusing to say ideology is causal of individual behavior. It seems like ideology should be an emergent property of society at large scales due to macro constraints/limits. But emergent phenomena don't determine individual behavior (at least not in a straight forward way), they appear in the statistical aggregate. The shape of an object determines it's resonant frequency (macro property), but it doesn't dictate the motion of every atom. If a vibration passes through the object, the atoms must participate in a collective motion to produce the wave, but this is superimposed on a "random" thermal motion.
Alex Shook
2024-12-07 20:15:44 +0000 UTCNew follower, go easy. Hazard a guess, but I think y'all are dancing around schemata. When we get on a full elevator, we automatically turn around without thinking about it. And we do it even when it's empty. An example where it might be a force is consumer behaviors? Think restaurants, department stores, or even online retail. We know how to engage with those spaces in specific ways without thinking about it, and incidentally, we're prone to impulse buys, advertising, etc that are also shortcutting active reasoning.
tomatogoblins
2024-12-07 18:42:37 +0000 UTCIMO if you’re looking for real world examples of ideology I highly recommend Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. He frames ideologies as different types of “inequality regimes” which are defined as a “set of discourses and institutional arrangements intended to justify and structure the economic, social and political inequalities of a given society”. For most of European history the dominant inequality regimes were trifunctional societies (clergy, nobility and workers) but that overtime we have moved towards ownership societies which is “a social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability.”
Will Wedin
2024-12-07 18:34:08 +0000 UTCI’m thinking I could make a distinction between general ideology like hard work or standing in line and particular ideology like corporatism. Then I could maybe keep ideology as everything and complain that particular ideologies get in the way of the real good everything ideology we need.
Jack
2024-12-07 18:11:13 +0000 UTCThus giggled Althusser
Mrityunjay Awasthy
2024-12-07 17:15:22 +0000 UTC7:00 per "miracle of science" not being permissible or effective in today's commercials, I would say that it's still alive and well in supplement commercials 😅, like "prevegen has an active ingredient found only in jelly fish because, science!" Which would make sense because their target consumer is probably the same person who saw those ads from the 50s and 60s lol. Seems like ideology is just something an owner class uses as a giant white noise machine to keep the working class peacefully asleep, no? Sure, both are equally under the same umbrella, but the coin flip is rigged and which side lands facing up for which side is determined only by one side. One side by nature knows and exploits the ease of working when others do it for you, the other remain immune from this reflection by believing it is their solumn duty to work hard and go that extra distance lol. *Hard work pays off.* You credit out your hard work and yet you do not earn interest, curious... 😆 Just like a big theatre, where different people are in different positions, and the problem is most people think we're all in the stands together... All this shit seems to just take the *dystopian edge off.* What's the causal linkage of ideology and norms?
ageOfBumFires
2024-12-07 14:07:41 +0000 UTCHey question, would it be possible to publish the private RSS feed for the podcasts to Spotify as well? So I can listen to the Patreon exclusive episodes on Spotify, will still keep them private for Patreon members only. Some other channels on here are doing the same and it is really handy. It seems, according to my interpretation of the documentation, that Patreon has an integration with Spotify to do this automatically, so hopefully it might be just changing some settings on your end. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enable-audio-RSS-feeds-for-my-members https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/17118627183501-Deliver-Podcasts-with-Spotify
Michiel Saey
2024-12-07 09:35:15 +0000 UTCCheck out the most recent episode of Secret Base's "Pretty Good" series for more analysis of useless emails.
GolfBaller
2024-12-07 08:39:04 +0000 UTCCreatura
Obstentia
2024-12-07 07:15:20 +0000 UTCOh come on guys we can come up with examples! Like Bobby said, meritocracy, which goes along with hard work. The people that earn the most money and own capital deserve it because they work the hardest. Ignore how much of it is luck. If you make minimum wage you should work hard cause maybe you could be the manager of Taco Bell®! Capitalist ideology would justify the bourgeoisie position in society with this and then if someone knows how much of it is luck they might say that it shouldn't be them at the top but someone else that actually worked harder, but that is still within a meritocratic ideology. Getting out of it would be thinking "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" or something like that. Ya know although in Christmas movies the message is, "Family and friendship is what really matters :)" in real life if you didn't get someone a present and said, "Well you don't need a present because you have me! Our love is what matters." Then you'd be seen as an asshole, unless you couldn't afford to get presents or something. People do care about brands. When I was a kid the shoes you wore would make kids think you're cool or get you bullied. Now if you have an iPhone and see green bubble texts you get nauseous. If you see someone with a flip phone that's like inconceivable, maybe they're a drug dealer. Remember the brand Supreme like six years ago? Literally just a red rectangle on a shirt with simple text makes it sell for hundreds of dollars. I was at a grocery store and saw a package of chicken, there was some words on it saying that it has no GMO's or something, and there was an asterisk at the end. The asterisk led to smaller text that said this was mandated by the FDA. I dunno if this counts I just thought it was funny to advertise something they are legally required to do. Here's one, non-violence is good. If you protest it should be non-violent, and if it isn't then what ever is being protested doesn't matter actually you can ignore it. I think this one is more directly ideological, I remember in school we went over MLK jr. and how great he was and then we saw something about Malcom X and they said yeah his heart was in the right place but he used violence :/ Violence being used in protests is exalted in some instances and lambasted in others. During the American revolution they were violent but that's not really discussed in a moral sense, at all. No one says "But can we really justify this bloody conflict?" It's just YEAAAAHHH WOOOO AMERICA. It's not even a possibility that destroying property, tea, was bad. Or if tarring and feathering British soldiers was bad. Then we debate if setting a Wendy's on fire in a BLM protest now is bad. God forbid you kill a cop, or a CEO :P
Ashley H
2024-12-07 06:43:44 +0000 UTCExample of ideology under capitalism: meritocracy conceived as an ethical virtue
Bobby Bancroft
2024-12-07 05:07:12 +0000 UTCIt's so hot when y'all "fight". Maybe it's time for a change of pace and topic. Love you!
David Yip
2024-12-07 04:56:12 +0000 UTC"Absolutely loved this episode! The discussion on Althusser and whether ideology still 'sticks' today was so on point. The breakdown of interpellation and how it functions in a hyper-fragmented digital landscape got me thinking—are we really escaping ideology, or just adapting it to fit the memes and vibes of late capitalism? Also, the nods to Žižek were chef's kiss. Would love a follow-up digging deeper into how ideology functions in the attention economy—like, is scrolling TikTok just a new form of being 'hailed'? Amazing stuff as always!" ChatGPT 4o
Isaac Dekker
2024-12-07 03:22:00 +0000 UTC
