Slideshow for the eighteenth lecture in my summer course, English 10, "Introduction to Literary Studies: Deception, Dishonesty, Bullshit." http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m15/

1. Lecture 18: Who Speaks,
and Who Answers?
PATRICK MOONEY, M.A.
ENGLISH 10, SUMMER SESSION A
21 JULY 2105

2. How identity is stabilized
My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at
last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept
seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We
moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain
departments, not only entire departments but whole stores,
mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one
reason or another. There was always another store, three floors,
eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I
shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs
and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking
and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of
buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and
pattern books to search for elusive designs. […]

3. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself
out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d
forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We
crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through
cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored
columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in
security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more
money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was
bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my
skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back
to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive,
inclined to be sweepingly generous, and told the kids
to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I
gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I
could tell they were impressed. They fanned out
across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be
private, shadowy, even secretive. (83– 84, ch. 17)

4. The old people shopped in a panic. When TV
didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to
death. They whispered to each other in the
checkout lines. Traveler’s advisory, zero
visibility. When does it hit? How many inches?
How many days? They became secretive,
shifty, appeared to withhold the latest news
from others, appeared to blend a cunning with
their haste, tried to hurry out before someone
questioned the extent of their purchases.
Hoarders in a war. Greedy, guilty. (160; ch. 22)

5. “This is the point of Babette.” (184; ch. 26)
“You cherish the wife who tells you everything. I am
doing my best to be that person.” (185, ch. 26)
“She is the woman in the ski mask.” (286; ch. 38)
“Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack
not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is
forever.” (225; ch. 31)
“I could hardly bear to sit there. Murray’s remark fixed
him forever to a plausible identity. What had been
elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down.”
(227; ch. 32)

6. “Here’s what I think. I’m nothing without the
snakes. That’s the only negative. The negative is
if it doesn’t come off, if the humane society
doesn’t let me in the cage. How can I be the
best at what I do if they don’t let me do it?” (253;
ch. 35)
“How would you feel if you were a jerk?”
“Glad to be alive,” I said.
“Not Orest. He dropped out of sight. He went
into complete seclusion. Nobody’s seen him
since it happened. He doesn’t answer the door,
he doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t show
up at school. The total package.” (284; ch. 38)

7. What
you
believe
is what
you do
THESIS I: Ideology
represents the
imaginary relationship
of individuals to their
real conditions of
existence. (Althusser
1264)
THESIS II: Ideology
has a material
existence. (1265)

8. Thesis I
Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these
ideologies as the truth (e.g., “believe” in God, Duty, Justice,
etc. . . .), we admit that the ideology we are discussing from
a critical point of view, examining it as the ethnologist
examines the myths of a “primitive society,” that these
“world outlooks” are largely imaginary, i.e. do not
“correspond to truth.” (1264)
this interpretation leaves one small problem unsettled: why
do men “need” this imaginary transposition of their real
conditions of existence in order to “represent to themselves”
their real conditions of existence? (1264)

9. What is represented in ideology is therefore
not the system of the real relations which
govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of those individuals to the
real relations in which they live. (1265)
Why is the representation given to individuals
of their (individual) relation to the social
relations which govern their conditions of
existence and their collective and individual
life necessarily an imaginary relations? And
what is the nature of this imaginariness? (1265)

10. Thesis II
An ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its
practice, or practices. This existence is material. (1266)
Throughout this schema we observe that the ideological
representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize
that every “subject” endowed with a “consciousness” and
believing in the “ideas” that his consciousness” inspires in
him and freely accepts, must “act according to his ideas,”
must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in
the actions of his material practice. If he does not do so,
“that is wicked.” (1266)

11. Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a
function of what he believes, it is because he does
something else, which, still as a function of the same
idealist scheme, implies that he as other ideas in his head
as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts according
to these other ideas, as a man who is either “inconsistent”
(“no one is willingly evil”) or cynical, or perverse. (1266-67)
This ideology talks of actions; I shall talk of actions
inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these
practices are governed by the rituals in which these
practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an
ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that
apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a
minor match at a sports club, a school day, a political
party meeting, etc. (1267)

12. Interpellation
There is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for
concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only
made possible by the subject: meaning, by the category
of the subject and its functioning. (1268)
But at the same time and immediately I add that the
category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology
insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it)
of “constituting” concrete subjects. (1268)

13. As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in the Logos, meaning in
ideology, that we “live, move, and have our being.” It
follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject
is a primary “obviousness” (obviousnesses are always
primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical,
etc. . . .). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a
word “name a thing” or “have a meaning” (therefore
including the obviousness of the “transparency” of
language), the “obviousness” that you and I are subjects—
and that that does not cause any problems—is an
ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is
indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without
appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”)
obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to
recognize and before we we have the inevitable and
natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small
voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s
true!” (1268)

14. you and I are always already subjects, and as
such constantly practice the rituals of
ideological recognition, which guarantee for us
that we are indeed concrete, individual,
distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable
subjects. (1269)
As a first formulation I shall say: all ideology
hails or interpellates concrete individuals as
concrete subjects, by the functioning of the
category of the subject. (1269)

15. Everyone knows how much and in what way an
unborn child is expected. Which amounts to
saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the
“sentiments,” i.e. the forms of family ideology
(paternal/maternal/conjugal/fraternal) in
which the unborn child is expected: it is certain
in advance that it will beat its Father’s Name,
and will therefore have an identity and be
irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is
therefore always-already a subject, appointed
as a subject in and by the specific familial
ideological configuration in which it is
“expected” once it has been conceived. (1270)

16. The real re-emerges
We watched the portico begin to go, a far column
leaning. A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across
the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was
white haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we
could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies
that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental.
No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of
detonating wood, she brought a silence to her. How
powerful and real. (DeLillo 228; ch. 32)

17. Soon there was a smell of acrid matter. It could have
been insulation burning—polystyrene sheathing for
pipes and wires—or one or more of a dozen other
substances. A sharp and bitter stink filled the air,
overpowering the odor of smoke and charred stone. It
changed the mood of the people on the sidewalk.
Some put hankies to their faces, others left abruptly in
disgust. Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it
made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious and
terrible drama was being compromised by something
unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. Our eyes
began to burn. The crowd broke up. It was as though
we’d been forced to recognize the existence of a
second kind of death. One was real, the other
synthetic. (229; ch. 32)

18. I continued to advance in consciousness. Things
glowed, a secret life rising out of them. Water struck
the roof in elongated orbs, splashing drams. I knew for
the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet was.
I understood the neurochemistry of my brain, the
meaning of dreams (the waste material of
premonitions). Great stuff everywhere, racing through
the room, racing slowly. A richness, a density. I
believed everything. I was a Buddhist, a Jain, a Duck
River Baptist. (296; ch. 39)
The intensity of the noise in the room was the same at
all frequencies. Sound all around. I took out the
Zumwalt. Great and nameless emotions thudded on
my chest. I knew who I was in the network of
meanings. Water fell to the earth in drops, causing
surfaces to gleam. I saw things new. (297; ch. 39)

19. … but disappears again
“It’s called a nebulous mass because it has no
definite shape, form or limits.”
“What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario
contingencies?”
“Cause a person to die.”
“Speak English, for God’s sake. I despise this modern
jargon.” (266-67; ch. 36)
I recalled Babette’s remarks about the side effects of
the medication. I said, as a test, “Falling plane.” (395; ch.
39)

20. “Plunging aircraft,” I said, pronouncing the
words crisply, authoritatively.
He kicked off his sandals, folded himself
over into the commended crash position, head
well forward, hands clasped behind his knees.
He performed the maneuver automatically,
with a double-jointed collapsible dexterity,
throwing himself into it, like a child or a mime.
Interesting. The drug not only caused the user
to confuse words with the things they referred
to; it made him act in a somewhat stylized way.
I watched him slumped there, trembling. (295;
ch. 39)

21. He raised his hand and pulled the trigger,
shooting me in the wrist.
The world collapsed inward, all those vivid
textures and connections buried in mounds of
ordinary stuff. I was disappointed. Hurt, stunned
and disappointed. What had happened to the
higher plane of energy in which I’d carried out my
scheme? The pain was searing. Blood covered my
forearm, wrist and hand. I staggered back,
moaning, watching blood drip from the tips of my
fingers. I was troubled and confused. Colored dots
appeared at the edge of my field of vision. Familiar
little dancing specks. The extra dimensions, the
super perceptions, were reduced to visual clutter,
a whirling miscellany, meaningless. (298; ch. 39)