Slavoj Zizek: The Enchainments of Meaning

(Trying to get my students to [re]cognize that words and images have multiple meanings and that, as creators of culture, as communicators of meaning/s, we need, we must, clarify what we mean when we seek to communicate a message. Thanks to Lazzarone on Cross-X forums for reminding me about this quote.)

Ecology, for example, is never ‘ecology as such’; it is always enchained in a specific series of equivalences: it can be conservative (advocating the return to balanced rural communities and traditional ways of life), statist (only a strong state regulation can save us from the impending catastrophe), socialist (the ultimate cause of ecological problems resides in the capitalist profit-orientated exploitation of natural resources), liberal-capitalist (one should include the damage to the environment in the price of the product, and thus leave the market to regulate the ecological balance), feminist (the exploitation of nature follows from the male attitude of domination), anarchic self-managerial (humanity can survive only if it reorganizes itself into small self-reliant communities that live in balance with nature), and so on. The point, of course, is that none of these enchainments is in itself ‘true’, inscribed in the very nature of the ecological problematic: which discourse will succeed in ‘appropriating’ ecology depends on the fight for discursive hegemony, whose outcome is not guaranteed by any underlying necessity of ‘natural alliance’. The other inevitable consequence of such a notion of hegemonic articulation is that statist, conservative, socialist, and so on, inscription of ecology does not designate a secondary connotation that supplements its primary ‘literal’ meaning: as Derrida would have put it, this supplement retroactively (re)defines the very nature of ‘literal’ identity—a conservative enchainment, for example, throws a specific light on the ecological problematic itself (‘owing to his false arrogance, man forsook his roots in the natural order’, etc.).

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” The Žižek Reader. ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999: 65.