There is an affinity between what some of us have been calling “opinionism” and what Badiou calls ”democratic materialism”. The latter can be summarized by the formula “there are only bodies and languages”. It is broadly tolerant (by its own lights) of anything a body can do, and any language that can come to fix the meaning of a body’s actions; but presupposes that the range of affordable bodies and languages is given in the situation as it is. Rendered as an imperative, this formula would be: “be realistic: there are only bodies and languages”; in other words, there are only those bodies and languages that are counted within the reality of the situation.

Let us call “reality” the material that a situation provides for the composition of appearances: its primitives or non-decomposable elements, those elements that are “on the edge of the void” in Badiou’s terminology. For democratic materialism, for example, there is no getting beyond the figure of “the individual”: even the unconscious is represented as a kind of private property, a walled garden within the perimeter of the public self. It follows that to attribute an unintended significance to the speech of an individual is to indulge in speculation about the contents of this hidden zone, which acts as a kind of reserve of intentionality ensuring that even the “slips” and perversities over which I have no seeming conscious control can be referred to an inner meaning which derives from myself alone.

It is clearly improper to attempt to discern any ideological component in the speech of this individual: everything he says is what he means to say, either consciously or unconsciously. If I am not a racist, then nothing I say can be racist either (irrespective of how racist it actually sounds); any attempt to diagnose a racist component in my speech is a de facto accusation of personal racism. Of course it is allowed that the speech of conscious-or-unconscious racists is racist - it can hardly be anything else - but the properly ideological character of racism disappears in precisely this identification.

Ideology is not what one believes in: it is not present where one believes, and absent where one does not. Rather, it is most effective where one believes that one does not believe anything except what one personally happens to believe (on the basis of one’s life-experience, say, or some inexplicable yet incontrovertible inner conviction), where it is neither consciously avowed nor localized in a private unconscious. Ideology is non-local, im-personal: that is what makes it ideological.

Democratic materialism is maximally tolerant of the proliferation of ideologemes in the speech of individuals, and maximally intolerant of “ideological” struggles against that proliferation, which it stigmatizes as hygiene-obsessed and persecutory. Opinionism is the doctrine of the efficient dissemination of ideologemes; its maxim would be, “let nothing stand in the way of opinion”. The ideologeme is in the domain of “languages” what the individual is in the domain of “bodies”: the non-decomposable semantic atom that the the situation makes available for the composition of appearances. For democratic materialism, under the sway of the reality principle, such bodies and languages as may appear are inexorably composed of individual persons and idées reçus.

It is for this reason that what Badiou calls the “passion of the real” directs its ire with such vehemence not only at appearances, but at “reality itself”, the basic fabric from which the world of appearances is woven; for it is just in the register of primitive elements that the real is both occluded and held captive. To “be realistic” is to refer every appearance back to this primitive register of presentation; accordingly, the strategy of Badiou’s militant of the real is not to affirm the freedom of the imagination to compose ever-more fanciful appearances out of this material, but to seek to dismantle the “reality studio” itself.