The Pervert's Guide to Ideology Page #5

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in our suburbs?

Of course, because single

unemployed mothers

cannot take care

of their children -

don't properly educate

them and so on.

We have a lack in our budget,

not enough money -

of course, because we have

to support unwed

single mothers

and so on and so on.

In an ideological edifice

you need some pseudo

concrete image like this

to fixate your imagination,

and then this image

can mobilise us.

Imagine ideology

as a kind of a filter.

A frame, so that if

you look at the same

ordinary reality through

that frame -

everything changes.

In what sense?

It's not that the frame

actually adds anything;

it's just that the frame opens

the abyss of suspicion.

If we look at the anti-Semitic

image of the Jew

it's crucial to notice how

contradictory this figure

of the Jew is.

Jews are at the same time

extra intellectual -

like mathematicians,

whatever -

and vulgar.

Not washing regularly.

Seducing innocent girls all the

time and so on and so on.

This is typical for racism.

You try to imagine how

the other enjoys

all the secret orgies or

whatever, because in racism

the other is not

simply an enemy;

usually it is also

invested with

some specific

perverse enjoyment or

in an inverted way,

the other can be someone

who tries to steal from us

our enjoyment, our...

to disturb, as we usually

put it:
our way of life.

We should be here

very precise

not to fall into the usual

trap of disqualifying

all elements out of which

the Nazi ideological edifice

is composed, to disqualify all

them as proto-fascist.

We should never forget that

the large majority

of these elements which we

today associate with fascism

were taken from

the workers' movement.

This idea of large numbers of

people marching together -

this idea of strict bodily

discipline as our duty -

the Nazis directly took this over

from social democracy,

from the left.

Let me just take some other

central concepts

of the Nazi world-view:

the solidarity of the people.

My God, there is nothing bad

in this notion as such.

The problem is solidarity

to what kind of people?

If by people you mean

'Volksgemeinschaft' -

the organic community

of people -

where then the enemy

is automatically

the foreign intruder,

in this case

we are in Nazism.

The crucial thing is to locate

ideology where it belongs.

Let's take a clear example.

The well known song

'Tomorrow Belongs To Me'

from the film Cabaret.

The sun on the meadow

is summery warm

The stag in the forest

runs free...

Some of my friends after

seeing the film -

Bob Fosse's Cabaret -

thought that after

they heard this song

they finally understood

what at it's deepest,

as to its emotional impact,

what fascism is.

But I think this precisely

is the mistake to be avoided.

This song is rather ordinary

popular song.

Incidentally it was composed

while they were

shooting the movie

by a Jewish couple.

Nice irony.

If you look not only at the

music, at the way it is sung,

but even at the words

"awakening of a nation,

tomorrow belongs to me... "

one can well imagine with

a slight change of words

radically leftist,

communist song.

But soon says the whisper:

arise, arise...

The German hard rock

band Rammstein

are often accused of flirting,

playing with

the Nazi militaristic

iconography.

But if one observes

closely their show -

one can see very nicely

what they are doing.

Exemplarily in one of their best

known songs 'Reise Reise'.

Reise, reise,

Seemann reise

Jeder tut's auf seine Weise

Der eine stt den

Speer zum Mann

Der andere zum Fische dann.

Reise, reise,

Seemann reise...

The minimal elements

of the Nazi ideology

enacted by Rammstein

are something like

pure elements of

libidinal investment.

Enjoyment has to be,

as it were,

condensed in some

minimal tics:
gestures,

which do not have any

precise ideological meaning.

What Rammstein does is -

it liberates these elements

from their Nazi articulations.

It allows us to enjoy them in

their pre-ideological state.

The way to fight Nazism

is to enjoy these elements,

ridiculous as they

may appear,

by suspending the

Nazi horizon of meaning.

This way you undermine

Nazism from within.

So how does none the less

ideology do this?

How does it articulate

pre-ideological elements?

These elements can also be

seen as a kind of a bribe.

The way ideology pays us to

seduce us into it's edifice.

These bribes can be

purely libidinal bribes,

all those tics which are

condensed enjoyment.

Or they can be explicit

discursive elements like

notions of solidarity

of collective discipline,

struggle for one's destiny

and so on and so on.

All these in itself are

free floating elements

which open themselves to

different ideological fields.

Let's turn to the high point

of our consumerism.

Let me take a drink...

Some of it -

'Starbucks' coffee.

I am regularly drinking it,

I must admit it.

But are we aware that

when we buy a cappuccino

from 'Starbucks', we also buy

quite a lot of ideology.

Which ideology?

You know when you enter

a 'Starbucks' store

it's usually always displayed

in some posters there,

their message which is:

Yes, our cappuccino is more

expensive than others,

but - and then

comes the story -

we give one percent of

all our income to some

Guatemala children

to keep them healthy.

For the water supply

for some Sahara farmers,

or to save the forests, to enable

organic growing coffee...

whatever, whatever.

Now I admire the ingeniosity

of this solution.

In the old days of

pure simple consumerism

you bought a product

and then you felt bad.

My God, I'm just

a consumerist

while people are

starving in Africa.

So the idea was you had to

do something to counteract

your pure distractive

consumerism.

For example, I don't know,

you contribute

to charity and so on.

What 'Starbucks' enables you

is to be a consumerist and-

be a consumerist without

any bad conscience

because the price

for the counter measure -

for fighting consumerism -

is already included into

the price of a commodity.

Like you pay a little bit more

and you are not just

a consumerist but you do also

your duty towards environment -

the poor, starving people in

Africa and so on and so on.

It's, I think, the ultimate

form of consumerism.

We should not simply

oppose a principal life

dedicated to duty and enjoying

our small pleasures.

Let's take today's capitalism.

We have, on the one hand,

the demands of the circulation

of the capital which push us

towards profit making,

expansion, exploitation and

destruction of nature and,

on the other hand,

ecological demands:

let's think about our posterity

and about our own survival,

let's take care of

nature and so on.

In this opposition between

ruthless pursuit of

capitalist expansion and

ecological awareness -

duty, a strange perverted

duty of course -

duty is on the side

of capitalism,

as many perspicuous

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