post 6

Zizek has a very interesting and different view of ideology. To him, his definition of ideology isn't what most conventional academics would consider as ideology. To most people, an ideology is basically an idea manifested in a sort of organized, comprehensive theory, usually in a political context. Some examples of ideology include Marxist ideology, or capitalist ideology. They can be broad, or single issue. Zizek, however is not talking about any of these. To Zizek, ideology is a much more personal thing. According to Zizek, an ideology is essentially what you personally think about your surroundings and how you react to them. Your internal monologue is the truest version of your personal beliefs.

To delve into one's inner thoughts and dreams is to analyze their ideology as well. The subconscious without a doubt is a great source of someone's personal creed. When saying that “Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive its meaning…”, Zizek trying to describe our initial reaction to our surroundings, how we perceive the world around us. While there isn't necessarily a political narrative to everything we come across in our day to day lives, there is without a doubt a way to analyze how we feel about the world around us and turn it into an ideology for a specific person.

I was actually shown the movie that Zizek describes in a digital media class last semester, when I studied abroad in Seville, Spain. It is a great representation of how advertising and news works to subconsciously nudge us in the "right" direction, that being the direction of being a consumer who reproduces and creates more consumers. I also feel this way when I see political ads. Although most political ads make you want to vote for a candidate, I often feel they are fake and overproduced, and work to make the candidate feel less "real".