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Section 8. Political culture and ideology
Section 8. Political culture and ideology
Qori Arlind,
University of Tirana, Lecturer of Political Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ph.D Candidate in Political Sciences
E-mail: arlind_qori11@yahoo.com
The idea of Europe as a nodal point of the Albanian ideology
Abstract: The Albanian ideology in the last two decades of post-socialism has played a crucial role in the legitimation and reproduction of the current social formation. Its nodal point, which has integrated different political discourses, has been the idea of Europe constructed imaginarily as a counterpoint of Islamism and communism. Keywords: Ideology, hegemony, nodal point, field of discursivity, Europe.
This essay aims at critically analyzing the Albanian ideology of the last twenty years, understanding it as a discourse, used in the public sphere from intellectuals, political elite and reflected to common people discussions, which aims at he-gemonizing the field of discursivity by constituting a centre (nodal point), which in our case is embodied in the idea of Europe, as an idea that embraces both the cultural-civilisational and the political-institutional aspects. This idea is not the sole element of the ideologically transformed Albanian political discourse, but nonetheless its importance can be spotted in its potential to explain and legitimate other ideological elements like the West, Free Market, Democracy etc.
If we refer to Laclau-Mouffe’s critical approach to discursive hegemony, the concept of ideology can be defined as the constitution of the nodal points of a discourse, which hegemonizes the field of discursivity through marginalizing and silencing alternative discourses. “Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points” [1]. Any discourse tries to hegemonize the field of discursivity, but what distinguishes an ideology is the definitive outcome, which does not mean that one discourse is the most important temporarily, but is one when one discourse almost totalizes and permeates the whole field of discursivity, leaving other discourses in the margins. So even if any discourse tries to hegemonize, only the ideological one achieves, or at least creates the impression of permanent success. But which is the mechanism of the ideological reduction of the field of discursivity? A discourse does not hegemonize by placing itself in the terrain of some kind of metaphysical objectivity, but by transforming the ontological relativity of the nodal point to meet the metaphysical criteria of self-foundation, self-sufficiency and auto-reference. More concretely, Slavoj Zizek, referring to the nodal point (although in his Lacanese he prefers the French point de capiton), claims that it is an empty signifier, or to put it in other words,
a signifier without a signified, whose importance is structural “In itself it is nothing but a ‘pure difference’: its role is purely structural, its nature is purely performative — its signification coincides with its own act of enunciation; in short, it is a ‘signifier without the signified’ ” [2, 109]. It exists in a discourse as a kind of fantasy, whose absence would mean the other elements of ideology will lack coherence and co-identification.
In this perspective, the idea of Europe expresses the nodal point of the Albanian ideology, which in-itself means nothing (in the sense of a direct relation to a fixed content), but exactly the nothingness enables it to function as a node where the other elements are intertwined, and whose relation to each-other otherwise would be either contradictory, or inexistent. So, ideology can transform what is contradictory or paradoxical into coherence. In the Albanian political discourse the characteristics of Europe are expressed so that they could harmonize ideas which would otherwise be nonrelational or contradictory. For example, Europe is viewed as the embodiment of superior values which should be categorically imitated by others, and in the same time as the political space where every system of value is acceptable, or at least tolerable; it is what is massively trendy, and at the same time what urges towards authenticity; it is the terrain where the collective emancipation is understood in terms of the cult of the individual; it is the understanding of democracy and popular engagement through the paternalism of the elites; it is the intermingling of welfare for all and the economic triumph of the few; it means the tolerance towards the Other and the hygienisation of its presence; it is the acceptance of equality for all and the cultural, and sometimes even racial, superiority of the Europeans. The Albanian political discourse shows its ideological traits in the process of the public harmonization in an organic whole of the above-mentioned elements through building the common roof of the signifier without the signified named Europe. And when an open conflict explodes inside this common roof, as in the case of serious conflicts between the major political actors of Europe
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The idea of Europe as a nodal point of the Albanian ideology
that even threaten the continuity of Europe politically, the response of the representatives of the Albanian ideology takes the form of melodramatic plea for unity so that the phantas-mic coherence of the signifier Europe could persist.
In the perspective of the “sense-autonomy” of the ideology’s nodal point, it must be said that the latter should not be understood as an illusion or a “priestly lie” for the purpose of subjugating the people. Its complexity, which on its part influences the longevity of ideology, is grounded in the fact that ideology does not say a lie that conspiratorially masks the reality, but in an constructive way, it structures reality through a fantasy (nodal point), and in doing so, it gives a real response to an unreal problem “The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” [2, 30]. Ideology constructs reality by reducing the concept of truth to instrumentality, and in so doing it can hegemonize the field of discursivity by marginalizing any non-instrumental, critical or even revolutionary conception of truth. This is why ideology does not mean the wrong answer to the right question, but the right answer to the wrong question. Inside the ideological strait jacket, every subject of discussion is built by presupposing uncritically what we are aiming at or what is the society’s point of arrival, and in so doing it reduces thinking to a mere function of finding the right answer about the shortest way to reach the predetermined goal. So, the Albanian ideology takes it for granted that the goal of each Albanian is to be like the imaginary or phantasmic Europe not only culturally, but even politically in being integrated into the EU institutions. In doing so, the question it asks does not concern the critical inquiry about how and why the goals are important, but only the velocity of the arrival date. This leads to the answers being correct or describing “the reality”, as long as according to the way questions are asked or problems are posed the social and political reality of a society is built. The ideological reduction not only suffocates the critical power of thinking which does not take anything for granted, but also channels the society’s energies in finding the pharmakon to a phantasmic disease, which in the case of the Albanian political discourse means accepting unconditionally and uncritically whatever the ideology means as the idea of Europe.
The instrumentality of thinking is completed when the field of discursivity is reduced due to the rigidity of the categories of understanding. In this way, ideology seeks to naturalise and eternalise what would otherwise be considered a process of historical development. So, the Albanian ideology interprets the entire Albanian history as a natural flow which emerges from the authentic European roots of the Albanian people. According to it, those roots can be spotted in the ancient Pelasgian-Illyrian identity of the Albanians, which means that the Albanians are autochthonously Europeans, and that every political and historical movement is understood in terms of affirming this natural European essence, or otherwise as a temporary and correctable historical deviance
from this telos. The goal can be found in the origins, so that the point of arrival merely designates the completion and the enrichment of born characteristics. This enables the Albanian ideology to present the history of Albania as a popular belonging and trend towards Europe, a long walk that starts from the dark beginnings of time, and which is thwarted continuously by unnatural subversive deviances. In this context, historical agents like Skanderbeg, the patriots and romantic poets of the XIX century, and other contemporary pro-Europeans are viewed as confronting subversive trends and agents, often of doubtful national origins, like the pro-Ottomans, “Haxhiqamilists, Zogists, Hoxhaists”. Haxhi Qamili is a political figure of the first years of the Albanian independence who led a local uprising against the newly formed Albanian state, asking for rejoining the Ottoman Empire. Ahmet Zogu was the Albanian head of state and then king for fifteen years before the Italian invasion in the brink of the WWII. From his critics he was often accused ofbeing Oriental-minded [3], Orientalists etc. Ideologically, these subversive and pathological elements could delay, even for centuries, the Albanian political telos. But the naturalness of the way and the providence of the European “magicians”, which have the magical power of attaining the goal despite the hurdles mentioned above, can definitively guarantee the success in the last instance, so that the people should humbly bow to them for enabling what the Albanian Prime Minister, referring to the Albania’s entrance in NATO, once called “the miracle of freedom” “Miracles are the asses’ bridge leading from the kingdom of the idea to practice” - Marx K. Engels F. “The German ideology: including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to The critique of political economy”.
The concept of naturalness leads to understanding history as an unchangeable flow, where the future is magically written in the immutable essence of the past. That is why the Albanian ideology presents the Albanian road map towards the Europeanization as the sole and well-deserved alternative, despite the pathological hurdles. So, the integration into the EU is not considered as an alternative among others, but as a historical necessity. Nonetheless one could say that what distinguishes ideology in general, and specifically the Albanian ideology, is the fact that it receives legitimacy not in the sense of utopian or messianic promise of some bright future, but as the unavoidable determinism of what is happening and what is going to happen. In doing so, even the perception of the problematic actuality is not based only on some absolute ground of the gap between the Albanian actual conditions and the quasi-perfect Europe, but on a comparative scale which aims at avoiding the radical evil of the Other of Europe. Although from time to time ideology uses the utopian hope of some future paradise, its inherent characteristic is the creation of the politically fatalist perception that there is no highest good, or whatever the latter might be theoretically, it always leads through some kind of dialectical reversal to the evilest regime like the totalitarian utopias it criticizes. But whatever one can put on the negative records of utopias,
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Section 8. Political culture and ideology
it should be admitted that utopias have the characteristic of seeding the collective political resistances of tomorrow, which are unavoidable as long as the gap between the promise and actuality is unbridgeable. So, if we refer to the Hoxhaist ideology, the latter fails at shaping definitively the collective consciousness of the people because of its insistence to ask loyalty in the name of the future utopia. This promise can play a successful ideological function in the days of political resistance or in the first years of the newly-formed political regime, but when the utopia seems unreachable, some kind of political schizo emerges which feeds itself from the gap between what is promised and what is delivered. That is what led to the political overthrow of the Hoxhaist regime in Albania in the early nineties. In this way, utopia, even when it is used ideologically, bears the seeds of the future reversal of the ideological status-quo. In this sense, the less and less utopian character of the Albanian ideology does not point to a kind of a way out of ideology, but on the contrary, by silencing any messianic hope and confronting everybody with the lesser evil/radical evil dichotomy, it neutralizes any serious political and theoretical engagement, which is stigmatized as a step towards utopian terrorism.
Meanwhile, ideology tries to give a self-referential, closed and non-relational sense to the categories of political judgement. For the Albanian ideology, Europe as a nodal point is understood as being a unitary, unbreakable, unchangeable and self-referential entity. Being European does not admit any internal or essential plurality of contradiction, or at least every conflict is considered as marginal or such that it cannot alter the above-mentioned essentialism. On the other hand, the concept of being European is not constructed through a critical and dialectical relation with its Other, but is viewed as self-constituted and in terms of identity a closed one. So, for the Albanian ideology, being European means having a set of self-made values, created in isolation from the world, which has the characteristic of being a political lighthouse to every other culture or people, but nonetheless accepts inside itself only the chosen ones — those whose natural and ahistorical essence belongs to the same category. And it goes without saying that in the perspective of the Albanian ideological discourse, the Albanians are among those who deserve to be part of this large family of chosen people.
Nevertheless, the most politically alienating aspect of ideology, other than the marginalizing of the critical consciousness, is its trend to “integrate” socially almost everything, which leaves aside, disregards or properly speaking silences the ontologically political and economical contradictions of the society. If we refer again to the Zizekian and Laclau-Mouffeian perspectives, we will find that contradictions or conflictuality designates the traumatic Real of a society, the latter being able to affirm itself as a unitary entity only on the condition of eliminating or sublimating ideologically the conflict. In this sense Zizek says that: “Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape 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 (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” [2, 45]. In this sense, the Albania ideology can build the social coherence of the sole European goal only by silencing the unavoidable socio-economical (Zizek) or political (Laclau-Mouffe) antagonisms. By not confronting the traumatic Real of antagonism it tries to build a phantasmic unity of the common path towards Europe, where, once there, every contingent actual conflict will be resolved magically. In this sense, every political and discursive tentative to awake or put forward antagonisms or touch the traumatic kernel of the Real faces the quasi-insurmountable difficulty of confronting an ideologically structured reality, whose coordinates urge people to think and act accordingly. On the other hand, in the perspective of the ideologically hegemonic discourse, any dissident voice is put between the Scylla of being disregarded as a harmless utopia and the Charybdis of some diabolical totalitarian plot, because in the ideological cognitive map any alternative is either unrealistic, or heretical.
Another aspect of ideology is its claim of universality, which analysed critically, reveals its exclusionary founding act. The ideology’s universality is none other than the confinement of the field of discursivity and the self-proclamation as an all-inclusive entity, which tries to forget its particular place in the political ontology. To refer again to Zizek, ideology consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form... every ideological Universal — for example freedom, equality — is ‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity” [2, 16]. So, the universality of ideology is false because it affirms its truth being uncontradictable and in the same time it defines its adversaries. In the case of the Albanian ideology, the universality of Europe can be found in the fact that, according to it, every Albanian deserves to be European, except. everybody that does not like to be European, which leads not to their being different kinds of Albanians, but simply essentially non-Albanians. So, the universal categories ofAlbanians and Europeans found themselves on the exclusion of everyone which cannot be included in neither of these categories, leaving them only the political space of unnatural monsters.
The above-analysed elements make it possible to determine the socio-political functions of ideology. Whatever its exclusionary strategy, ideology tries to draw a constantly changing line that separates what should be permanently excluded, which empirically is constructed as an empty place to be filled in a situation of serious threat, from what should be dominated through integration. If we refer to the interpretation Ricoeur makes ofWeber, “... while ideology serves.
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The idea of Europe as a nodal point of the Albanian ideology
as the code of interpretation that secures integration, it does so by justifying the present system of authority” [4]. In this sense, the idea of Europe serves the Albanian ideology for the delaying of the socio-political contradictions until the bright common European future will conquer all antagonisms, at least all which escapes some devilish undefined Other, in the eternal peace of integration. In this retroactive perspective of the future every current socio-political conflict would seem like childish skirmishes, taking away in this manner any trace of tragedy.
The above-analysed functions of ideology are performed through tactics that try to hide its particular content and dominating actuality, and on the other hand through trying to weaken the otherness by some kind of soft integration, without excluding it permanently. As Zizek again puts it, “ideology appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the core of our human identity underneath al the ideological labels” [5]. It can present itself in this way as long as it has the capacity to hegemonize the field of discursivity by transforming its elements in unfalsifiable truths. As long as the conceptual lexicon tends towards conforming to the ideological necessities, the truthfulness of the ideological judgements seems unfalsifiable. In the Albanian context, the idea of Europe as a civilisational superiority and an unavoidable destiny looks towards claiming its non-ideological status as long as its premises present themselves as self-evident truths. Also, ideology yields domination not just by eliminating otherness, because its total absence would threaten it like the Communist Manifesto’s ghost, but by integrating it within its soft and changing borders. As Zizek puts it, “... ideology is not simply an operation of closure, drawing the line between what is included and what is excluded/prohibited, but the ongoing regulation of nonclosure” [6]. This characteristic provides it theoretically and socially with the necessary flexibility to engulf the possible resistances. Ideology hegemonizes not by excluding totally and definitively, but by integrating the contradiction so that the latter can play the well-prepared function of legitimating the longevity of the ideological domination. This is what happens in the case of the idea of Europe, whose performance does not include the legal or public lynching of the opposing
perspectives, but necessarily entails the reduction of those perspectives to mere entities that serve as a dichotomic pole that legitimates through its moral and political evilness the superiority of this nodal point. That is why every critical perspective is either laughed at as infantile anarchism, or is accepted only on condition that it deactivates its revolutionary potential that aims at repluralising the field of discursivity. E. g. only on a European society one can have the right to behave or think unEuropeanly; of course on condition that these acts of theoretical and practical resistance do not threaten the predetermined road map.
In conclusion, one might assert that ideology aims at transforming the people in a passive recipient of systematic truths, so that it always already disables their subversive potential. Social and political passivity of the written destiny is supplemented by the fetishist misrecognition, according to which the European identity is not only self-referential and self-sufficient, but also by not considering the relational character of the theoretical concepts and social actors, it reduces the latter in an outcome and not in the cause of collective action. Ideology fetishises because it can stabilize a sociopolitical situation in which the people are not considered as agents of their own self-transformation, but through its camera obscura, their potentiality is viewed upside-down. As Marx put it in a footnote of the Capital considering the social meaning of power and its representatives: “For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king” [7]. This means that what the Albanian ideology misrecognizes is the relation between the Albanians and Europe. The latter has no importance in itself, but only as far as the Albanians as a people are politically destitute, and being so, they are in the need of a point of reference, whose function is played by the nodal point of the ideological discourse. If we refer to Lacan, according to whom the king who takes himself as a king is no less crazy than the crazy man who pretends to be a king, one could reach the conclusion: If Europe, in the context of its ideological self-reference and self-sufficiency, takes itself seriously as Europe is no less crazy that the crazy man who pretends to be a king.
References:
1. Laclau E., Mouffe Ch. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. - London: Verso, 2001, - Р. 112.
2. Zizek S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. - London: Verso, 2009.
3. Enver Hoxha was the communist leader of Albania from 1944 to 1985. - New York: Prometheus Books, 1998, - Р. 562.
4. Ricoeur P. Lectures on ideology and utopia. - New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, - Р. 13.
5. Zizek S. First as Tragedy than as Farce. - London: Verso, 2009, - Р. 39.
6. Zizek S. In Defense of Lost Causes. - London: Verso, 2009, - Р. 29.
7. Marx K. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One./ Translated by Ben Fowkes, - New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, - 1976, - Р. 149.
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