I wanted to further explore two interrelated strands of discussion from last class: on the one hand, the consequences of Atwood's rendering her dystopia with fidelity to certain internal currents of various socio-political developments in the 1980's (e.g., Reaganism, porn-burning feminism, the "breakdown" of the East-West Cold War-era binary, etc.); and on the other, the political implications of distinguishing between "reasonable" and "dogmatic" forms of an ideological system (a distinction which was invoked at least once in an attempt to explain the basis of 1980's "anti-feminist" backlash [of which Atwood's text may or may not be an example]).

At stake in both cases is the question of what to make of the structural gap between the theoretical mandates of a given social order's foundational and the practical mandates of its "actually existing" manifestation. Can this gap ever be closed, which is to say, can ideology-on-paper and implementation-in-the-world ever overlap fully? Slavoj Zizek contends that it cannot, and his reasoning is as follows: because the call of ideology is never "pure"—its coercive, positive claims (e.g., Be a good person! Share with others!) are necessarily supplemented by its internally transgressive "seedy underside," which disrupts its positive claims from within (e.g. Be a good person! Share with others! [unless you decide that transnational business is your passion, in which case, by all means follow your heart...])—the actualization of a given ideological system is predicated on the disavowal of certain internal mandates of said system. In other words, the "imperfection" of ideology-in-practice is already present in ideology-in-form. Zizek's account suggests that internal disavowals are not the mark of ideology's mis-actualization (as though the "real thing" is lurking there somewhere behind its butchered form), but rather its proper actualization. Thus, throwing out the inconvenient and/or (ostensibly) non-sensical dimensions of ideology—a political manuever that we tend to laud as "reasonable" and "prudent"—becomes the gesture of ideology par excellence.

In this sense, "reasonable" positions—as well as their formal basis, the overarching injunction to "Be reasonable!"—are critically bankrupt. In fact, whereas we generally conceive of "ideological" (in the connotative sense of moronically inexorable) positions as easy to maintain—essentially a *pre-critical* position that relies on utter blindness to the empirical reality that "extremism never works"—Zizek's analysis of ideology as internally split leads us to precisely the opposite conclusion: "ideological" positions that stubbornly refuse to break from the formal mandates a given ideology, even when such mandates seem "silly" or "unreasonable," are, in fact, the hardest positions to live by. Indeed, does not the "non-ideological" position—the "reasonable" position that willfully amends its principles on cue, and thereby facilitates the continual reinscription of hegemony—exemplify the very notion of an easy position? What could be easier than amending one's viewpoint according to the shifting winds of whatever seems "reasonable" (or more to the point, what "expert" techno-crats tell us is reasonable) at the time?

So, what's at stake when Atwood takes the dominant ideologies (of her contemporaneous moment) to their extreme, utilizing their internal logic as the basis of socio-political critique? I'd suggest that we should read The Handmaid's Tale as a work of "critical heresy," understanding "heresy" as the refusal to perform the disavowals necessary to found an ideological system in practice, and simply maintaining the ideology in its pure form. The heretic is, for all intents and purposes, the figure who refuses the constitutive of auto-transgressions of systems of power, and thereby takes the logical underpinning of systemic domination to its internal (and often absurd) limit-point. The heretic thus steps outside of ideology precisely by staying within it. (This is precisely the basis of the resistive capacity that Zizek locates in hyper-conformity—stepping outside the confines of Law precisely by staying fully and uncompromisingly within them.) Atwood's heretical inclinations stem from socio-political malaise. She's not arguing that The Handmaid's Tale depicts a Utopian landscape whose conditions should be brought to their "actually existing" form in the real-world; rather, she's attempting to undermine the ideological fabric of her historical moment by taking it to its "natural" extreme. In fact, seems as though this mode of heresy—understood as the impulse to take an ideology "more seriously than it takes itself"—operates in many science-fictional narratives (toward equally progressive and reactionary ends, we should note). We tend to think that critique is most potent when it underscores how social arrangements are failing, but it can be far more subversive to highlight when such arrangements are working perfectly—though to horrific ends.