At the campus where I teach, a recent visiting scholar was rhapsodizing about her work on "affect," and how she was fascinated with the deep meaning that rural people invested in local craft fairs and neighborhood associations. I asked her if one might also need to be critical of this attachment to the local — if, say, it might harden into a fetish for "country living" that could turn into a brickbat against the big bad cities. "Mmm, I don't really like 'ideology,' " she replied. As she went on, I jotted in my notes: "too bad, because ideology likes you!"

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek would certainly seem to agree. In this, his second documentary-performance collaboration with British director Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph), Žižek picks up where their previous film The Pervert's Guide to Cinema left off. The nutty professor continues to pop up in restaged scenes from key films as a kind of interloper, a gesticulating commentary track come to life. But whereas before, Žižek was more intent on using cinema as a springboard for explicating his unique Marxist-Lacanian view of the world, the new Pervert's Guide is specifically about how various aspects of popular life (including cinema) demonstrate dominant ideologies in action, and how small doses of the Žižekian system can offer insights about those ideologies.

For all its compelling intellectual swerves and parries, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology never actually provides a solid definition of its titular term. To be fair, ideology is one of the slipperiest concepts in the philosophical toolbox, and this is to say nothing of its often nefarious political applications. An ideology, simply put, is an interconnected set of explanatory beliefs that, taken together, provide an all-encompassing worldview. Some, like communism or religious fundamentalism, tend to be more clearly recognizable as ideologies.

But often, systems of belief that seem to be anti-ideological (or "natural," or just "practical") are just better at concealing their ideological basis. Neoliberal capitalism, for example, has so many global apologists that it has come to seem inevitable. It is only at moments of crisis (e.g., the financial collapse of various European nations) or unexpected challenge (Pope Francis' recent salvo) that "the natural order" (ideology) becomes open for discussion once again.

The lack of a working definition of ideology tends to hobble The Pervert's Guide. Of course it's possible that Žižek assumes an audience with some working understanding of the idea, since by this point he may be playing to a fanbase. A public intellectual cum performance artist, Žižek lectures with a structured associative style somewhat reminiscent of the late Spalding Gray (with an exaggerated lisp). Žižek's approach to his stand-up philosophy, however, comes directly from his master: the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose seminars were infamously theatrical events. But where Lacan articulated concepts like the "big Other" and the compulsion toward masochistic enjoyment with examples drawn from high culture (Hamlet, Hans Holbein, de Sade), Žižek's frame of reference includes everything from Taxi Driver and Titanic to ad campaigns for Starbucks and Coke.

Žižek is undeniably engaging, if overexposed. (One wishes we could have in-depth film profiles of major thinkers like Judith Butler and Cornel West, but they probably have better things to do.) If there is a significant flaw in Fiennes' film, it's that Ideology is almost structured as if it were a series of blackout sketches or freestanding webisodes, so no broader argument ever builds. Perhaps this was intentional, a way to philosophize in shards so as to break up any potential totality and avoid the pitfalls of ideology. At this same time, this leads to internal contradictions. And as Žižek himself would warn us, the will to self-contradict — the postmodern assertion that one need not maintain a consistent attitude in the face of a ruptured late-capitalist universe — is itself an ideology. It's simply the ideology of the self-consciously undisciplined Unconscious, trying to stake out a position that is simultaneously subversive and self-serving. As we know, the market always has that covered.

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