Read the full Manifesto
By Martín López and Gabriel Tupinambá
Ideology resounds like an echo in fictional stories, quietly seeping through the narrative cracks of films, novels and popular TV shows. It is embodied as an unconscious knowledge, a knowledge that doesn't know itself, and that constantly needs to be declared dead in order to be functional. The ideological tics are what in psychoanalysis is called a return of the repressed: a symptom that is manifested in the unsaid, in the sleepwalking of involuntary acts.
As Alain Badiou pointed out, we should distinguish two forms of ideology. Constituted ideology is an empirical form of ideology; obvious examples of false reasoning, paranoia, etc. Constitutive ideology, on the contrary, is an invisible form of reasoning, at a much more fundamental level. The very texture that determines our thought. The problem is that, by denouncing the first, we cannot escape the logic of the latter.
We're not pretending to stand in a neutral space; ours is a committed position, which nevertheless accounts for our own imaginary identificatons. These are not opinions; but affirmations. We're not reviewing movies according to the artistic value. We rate movies in terms of how much they help us identify the hidden coordinates of ruling ideology. The more we rate a movie, the more symptomatic we believe it is. We claim that cultural production is the clearest reflection of the ideological symptom; a more accurate picture than the original.
It is just like in Blade Runner (1982): you can investigate and discover where the malfunctioning androids are, but you cannot escape the recurrent dream, the repetition, the machine-like atmosphere that points towards a dark truth of your own. Cinema, after all, is not so much a screen that bounces an external projection into us, but a screen into which we project our own distortions. There, like in a slip of tongue floating through the air in front of you, something detached from you, but at the same time strangely familiar takes place. Ideology at its purest
Ideology resounds like an echo in fictional stories, quietly seeping through the narrative cracks of films, novels and popular TV shows. It is embodied as an unconscious knowledge, a knowledge that doesn't know itself, and that constantly needs to be declared dead in order to be functional. The ideological tics are what in psychoanalysis is called a return of the repressed: a symptom that is manifested in the unsaid, in the sleepwalking of involuntary acts.
As Alain Badiou pointed out, we should distinguish two forms of ideology. Constituted ideology is an empirical form of ideology; obvious examples of false reasoning, paranoia, etc. Constitutive ideology, on the contrary, is an invisible form of reasoning, at a much more fundamental level. The very texture that determines our thought. The problem is that, by denouncing the first, we cannot escape the logic of the latter.
We're not pretending to stand in a neutral space; ours is a committed position, which nevertheless accounts for our own imaginary identificatons. These are not opinions; but affirmations. We're not reviewing movies according to the artistic value. We rate movies in terms of how much they help us identify the hidden coordinates of ruling ideology. The more we rate a movie, the more symptomatic we believe it is. We claim that cultural production is the clearest reflection of the ideological symptom; a more accurate picture than the original.
It is just like in Blade Runner (1982): you can investigate and discover where the malfunctioning androids are, but you cannot escape the recurrent dream, the repetition, the machine-like atmosphere that points towards a dark truth of your own. Cinema, after all, is not so much a screen that bounces an external projection into us, but a screen into which we project our own distortions. There, like in a slip of tongue floating through the air in front of you, something detached from you, but at the same time strangely familiar takes place. Ideology at its purest