What might be termed our ethical critique of social practices thus focuses on the closure of subjective identification, which for us is just another name for the ideological. Ideology it will be recalled is related to those practices and forms of identity which conceal or deny the inherent radical contingency of practices … ideology’s very function is to fantasmatically conceal such relations and structures of domination by keeping radical contingency at bay. From this point of view, ethical critique demands detailed analyses of the kinds of fantasies underpinning social and political practices, as well as the exploration of ways such fantasies can be destabilized or modulated. (198)
Author: logocentric
no typology of practices as such
It is clear regimes remain both entities which structure practices, and entities which are produced by practices. Equally, we have noted the discursive and constructed character of regimes … every regime is marked by an outside that partially constitutes its identity, and which carries the threat of subverting it. And this ontological assumption is linked to our claim that every order and practice arises as a political construction that involves the exclusion of certain possibilities.
There is no typology of practices as such, only practices for which one or more ontological dimensions are foregrounded, bckgrounded, or articulated. For this reason, the boundary between social and political practices is blurred, as is the boundary between regimes and practices. 123
dislocation normative ethical aspects
…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices. The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new. Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation. Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be. The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)
dimensions of social reality
Our fundamental ontological premise is then used to redescribe social relations by stipulating different dimensions of social reality. The social dimension captures those situations in which the radical contingency of social relations has not been registered in the mode of public contestation whereas the political dimension refers to those situations in which subjects responding to dislocatory events re-activate the contingent foundations of a practice by publicly contesting and defending the norms of that practice. On the other hand, the ideological and ethical dimensions of social reality capture the way subjects are either complicit in concealing the radical contingency of social relations (the ideological), or are attentive to its constitutive character (the ethical). (14)
In articulating this basic ontological standpoint, we take our principal objects of investigation to be practices or regimes of practices, where our aim is to critically explain their transformation, stabilization, and maintenance. Drawing on Heidegger, we claim that such an inquire will always have an ontical and ontological impulse. (15)
Discourse Theory Methodology
Howarth, David. “Applying Discourse Theory: the Method of Articulation” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave: Great Britain. 2005., pp. 316-349.
The application of post-Marxist discourse theory (PMDT) to empirical objects of investigation
Discourse Theory and the Question of Method
PMDT is best understood as a research programme or paradigm, and not just an empirical theory in the narrow sense of the term. It thus consists of a system of ontological assumptions, theoretical concepts and methdological precepts, and not just a set of falsifiable propositions designed to explain and predict phenomena such as the behaviour of the capitalist state, or different forms and logics of collective action (317).
– discourse theory is to be differentiated from discourse analysis
– discourse theory does not overlap with the different varieties of discourse analysis
– discourse theory is not just a toolkit to analyse ‘language in use’
as the conduct of discourse analysis is only meaningful within a particular social and political theory, alongside its core ontological assumptions and overall political purposes. At most, therefore, the various tools of discourse analysis constitute one particular set of techniques that can help us to understand and explain empirical phenomena which have already been constituted as meaningful objects of analysis. They do not exhaust the concept of discourse theory itself (318).
– discourse theory is “problem-driven”: akin to Foucault’s technique of problematization in that it begins with a set of pressing political and ethical problems in the present, before seeking to analyse the historical and structural conditions which gave rise to them, while furnishing the means for their critique and transgression.
this method is not simply a matter of analysing ‘behaviour or ideas, nor societies and their “ideologies”, but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought — and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed.
In so doing Foucault synthesizes his archeological and genealogical moments of analysis:
Archaeological: makes possible the examination of ‘forms themselves’, describing the rules that condition the elements of a particular discourse —its objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies — in a given period say, the discourse of ‘madness’ or ‘illness’ in the nineteenth century, archaeology provides the means to delimit research objects (318).
Genealogical: accounts for their contingent emergence and production, analyses their constitution by recounting the historical practices from which they were constructed, enabling research to show the contingency of identities and practices and foreground possibilities foreclosed by the dominant logics.
Finally while the focus of research is the interrogation of a specific problematized phenomenon, it is important to stress the these problems are not specified in a completely independent and atheoretical fashion. On the contrary, as against empiricism or rationalism, the emergence and constitution of research problems always presupposes the ontological assumptions and categories of discourse theory for their initial discernment and description (319).
Derrida on signifying
Clohesy, Anthony M. “The Human Rights Act: Politics, Power, and the Law” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave: Great Britain. 2005. pp. 170-189.
Derrida’s argument is that signifiers can be repeated because their meaning is, and can never be exhausted. They are, therefore, always subject to rearticulation into other contexts. However, when this rearticulation happens, the meaning of the signifier is modified. This is because meaning is only intelligible in the context of a particular system of differences. Thus, when the context in which the sign appears changes, its meaning also changes. This has important implications for how we understand politics as it allows us to see that political identities and settlements, while appearing natural and necessary, are always the product of this wider system of differences. How is this related to power? The important point here is that the integration of a signifier into a new system of differences is always the result of a specific act of power that excludes other possible interpretations. This is the case whether the attempt to recast the terms of a debate is successful in hegemonic terms or not. … it is because the context in which meaning is derived is always the result of power that it is always then subject to the future exercise of power (180).
2 key dimensions of ontological framework
2 key dimensions which centre on the notion of subjectivity
hermeneutic-structural: highlights the presumptive centrality of the self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But it is also important to recognize in this regard that discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to social habits. While the social logics structuring them are literally buoyed up by subjects — they do not exist except through the activity of subjects— they are not necessarily cognitively accessible to subjects, at least not immediately and without some form of intervention. This means that logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents. Certainly, social logics are products of past understanding, interpretations and decisions, but they tend to secure a degree of autonomy and not insignificant force when sedimented into practices and regimes. This is one reason why the assent of agents is not conclusive or exhaustive of an explanation’s validity. (162)
poststructural dimension: highlights the way in which social structures are never complete in themselves by foregrounding the dislocatory nature of the symbolic order (the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms) and thus the possible emergence of political subjectivity as such. This means that the hermeneutical-structural dimension fails to exhaust our particular ontological framework. It is at this point that political and fantasmatic logics come into play, thus enabling us to generate critical accounts of the constitution and dissolution of social structures themselves. This is because they assist in the process of revealing and explaining the non-necessary character of social logics and the practices they sustain and animate. This enables us to generate critical explanations that are both sensitive to context and explicit about their ontological, ethical, normative, and sociological presuppositions. (162)
Retroductive explanation
Our main critical argument is that it is problematic to model social processes on natural processes in this way — whether as universal laws, causal generalizations, or robust empirical correlations — because it leads to rather narrow conceptions of testing and explanation, in which the element of prediction is elevated at the expense of contextual and ontological factors. In short, our target is the law-like conception of explanation and testing that the causal law paradigm elevates to the status of an ideal. (19)
As against inductive and deductive modes of reasoning, we argue more positively that retroductive reasoning provides us with a general form or logic of explanation in the social sciences.
More specifically, we challenge the compartmentalizing tendencies of positivist social science investigation — a logic of scientific discovery followed by exhaustive empirical testing and explanation — and propose instead one overarching logic of investigation comprising three interlocking moments: the problematization of empirical phenomena; the retroductive explanation of these phenomena; and the persuasion of — and intervention into — the relevant community and practices of scholars and lay-actors. (19)
Jouissance
Jason Glynos, Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter. Political Studies 56 (3), 2008
– jouissance pleasure as pain, jouissance is fantasy of one-ness with mother
– loss of jouissance = loss of one-ness with mother (lost object)
– lost object is primordial = something we never had (impossible) thus its this that structures our desire
– Jouissance linked to an impossibility and fantasied overcoming
– impossibility is translated into a prohibition
– once jouissance is turned into a prohibition, this gives man the illusion that it can be transgressed
– we now have a prohibition of jouissance, a Law qua prohibition
– plus-de-jouir happens through a transgression of the Law qua prohibition
– the subject derives its being and identity via this transgressive enjoyment
– representative of the Law — the Other — is the one who steals enjoyment, as thief of subject’s enjoyment
– the subject’s enjoyment is constitutively ‘stolen’, always already taken, by the Other
– thus the most intimate part of the subject, the subject’s own mode of enjoyment is structured by the Other
How, then, is the subject’s own enjoyment structured? Precisely by acting in such a way as to ‘steal back’ the enjoyment that the Other has supposedly stolen from him or her. His or her enjoyment is supported by the thought that he or she is transgressing the Other’s laws and ideals, enjoying behind the Other’s back’. The neurotic subject sustains itself as a subject of desire through transgressive thoughts and activities (i.e. by doing things it is not supposed to do: by stealing a covetous glance, by secretly wishing the downfall of a successful colleague, etc.)
The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive.
What the law prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) which brings it into being. Thus, desire can never free itself completely from the Other, as the Other is responsible for desire’s very being (cited in Fink, 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 207)
We enjoy our symptoms
We resist cure, because we unconsciously take jouissance from our symptoms. “subjects enjoy their symptoms as a means of escaping deeper psychical tensions … However painful the symptom may be, its aim is to free the subject form sometimes even more painful conflicts.”
Why do we procrastinate? We set ourselves stringent ideals (perfectionism) and then get a kick out of transgressing them.
Jouissance and the GRIP of ideology, or Jouissance and transgression of an ideal
Ideological critque is meant to weaken the grip of ideology and enhance freedom of subject. What holds the community together is a specific form of transgression of an ideal, of the Law.
– KKK lynchings, Nazi pogroms (these remain hidden from public view), these transgressions provoke a form of collective enjoyment and a kind of solidarity in guilt thus reaffirming the cohesion of the group.
Self-Transgressive Enjoyment
What is responsible for ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing other than the very ‘ordinary’, neurotic contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles. Zizek implies that the modality of our contemporary neurotic subjectivity can and ought to be made unavailable under an alternative regime.
The subject procures a modicum of (unconscious) enjoyment in transgressing his or her own self-affirmed ideal.
– Health ideal I affirm, while secretly smoking in the back room with my friends.
Taylor treats self-understanding as a function of rational understanding … While self-understanding certainly plays an important role here, overcoming unfreedom qua self-transgressive enjoyment is not reducible to the abandonment of a particular mis-understanding and simultaneous adoption of a particular (rational) self-understanding, even though the practice of interpretation may of course function as an essential first step in this process. Rather, overcoming unfreedom from a psychoanalytic point of view resides essentially in the act of abandoning ones self-transgressively enjoyed attachment to a concrete ideal, not simply in abandoning or substituting a particular understanding of the subject’s relation to it. In other words, while a passage through, and reinterpretation of, the subject’s self-interpretation might be necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient to overcome self-transgressive enjoyment qua freedom fetter.
A psychoanalytic perspective thus explains an otherwise counter-intuitive phenomenon in which the ‘pull’ or ‘desirability’ of a concrete ideal resides in the self-transgressive enjoyment it makes possible rather than simply in a mis-understanding (i.e. a false, misguided or irrational understanding).
It is thus able to explain the resilience of an ideal’s attractiveness for a subject in the face of ‘corrective’ measures deployed at the level of rational understanding. It suggests that detachment from self-transgressive enjoyment may diminish a concrete ideal’s desirability, thereby allowing other reasons to defeat (or better support) its apparent worth.
What is a Logic
GH talk about the “logic of a practice” which
comprises the rules or grammar of the practice, as well as the conditions which make the practice both possible and vulnerable.
This definition of ‘logic’ and the way GH use it is hard to pin down. They give example of of they use the term logic, speaking about the logic of:
– logic of chess playing: 1) the dominant pattern of moves, strategies, counter-strategies, tactics and counter-tactics 2) Basic entities and types of relationships between pieces 3) rules of the game
– logic of the market: 1) compirses a particular set of subject positions, objects (commodities and means of exchange) 2) systems of relations and meanings connecting subjects and objects, insitutional parameters (legal system) 3) Also the conditions that make possible the continued operation of a partiuclar market practice, as well as its potential vulnerabilities. What political struggles preceded its institution? What processes ensure its maintenance or question its hegemonic status? Logics must also provide the means with which to answer these sorts of questions.
A social logic can characterize a practice or regime. Take the Thatcherite regime which can be characterized as a network of social logics: 1) a social logic of marketization and centralization, both of which were rooted in the philosophy of the New RIght … Once sedimented, the Thatcherite discourse signified the practices and aspiration of liberating the capitalist economy, with its attendant entrepreneurial practices, from the stranglehold of an overloaded and bureaucratic state, as well as from over-powerful trade unions which were smothering enterprise and innovation. On the other hand, Thatcherism came to represent a demand for a more restrictive, though more powerful, state that would regulate less, but more intensively. (137)
objet (a)
Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder. Verso: 1996.
The symbolic order (the big Other) is organized around a hole in its very heart, around the traumatic Thing which makes it ‘non-all’; it is defined by the impossibility of attaining the Thing; however, it is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space for symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately ‘collapse’ into the designated reality — that is to say, the distance that separates ‘words’ from ‘things’ would disappear.
The void of the Thing is therefore both things at the same time: the inaccessible ‘hard kernel’ around which the symbolization turns, which eludes it, the cause of its failure, and the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility. That is the ‘loop’ of symbolization: the very failure of symbolization opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place. 145
Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan. Routledge, New York 2005.
The objet a is not an object we have lost, because then we would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for possessions, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is always something more we desire, we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there. This is one sense in which we can understand the Lacanian real as the void or abyss at the core of our being that we constantly try to fill out. The objet a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not the object itself but the function of masking the lack. 88
The objet a is the left-over of the real; it is that which escapes symbolization and is beyond representation.
Bruce Fink. The Lacanian Subject Princeton UP. 1995
Desire has no “object” as such. It has a cause, a cause that brings it into being, that Lacan dubs object (a), cause of desire.
Object (a) as the cause of desire is that which elicits desire: it is responsible for the advent of desire, for the particular form the desire in question takes, and for its intensity.
… a certain way a man has of looking at a woman may sum up for that woman everything she really wants in a man. (Not what she says she wants in a man, appealing to typical American discourse about needs: “I need affection, support, and encouragement.” For that is all conscious ego discourse: verily and truly the discourse of the Other, the social American Other.) That particular way of looking, that — to use an example — impertinent, unblinking way of looking, may be what really causes her to desire, stimulating in her a desire which cannot be extinguished by all the fine qualities revindicated by the ego: a man who is caring, a good father, a good provider, and so on and so forth. It is the desire-causing look that determines for her what Freud called “object choice” and what I will call the choice of companions. 91
The breast is not, during the first experience of satisfaction, constituted as an object at all, much less as an object that is not part of the infant’s body and that is largely beyond the infant’s control. It is only constituted after the fact, after numerous vain attempts by the infant to repeat that first experience of satisfaction when the mother is not present or refuses to nurse the child.
It is the absence of the breast, and thus the failure to achieve satisfaction, that leads to its constitution as an object as such, an object separate from and not controlled by the child. Once constituted … the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue, and mouth, or from his or her self.
Once the object is constituted, the “primal state” wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object (for the subject only comes into being when the lacking breast is constituted as object, and qua relation to that object), can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it.
object (a) is the leftover of that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization. It is a reminder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps yet to be found … It is the rem(a)inder of the lost hypothetical mother-child unity. 94
Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex
INTELLECTUAL STRATEGIES
There are two misconceptions that have to be carefully avoided when writing a PhD thesis in the IDA programme. These I will call: (a) the myth of the case study; (b) the myth of “methodology”.
The myth of the case study
This consists of the assumption that there is something such as a “theoretical framework” that one applies to some particular empirical material. In actual fact, such an application is not an entirely invalid exercise: it is what one expects from a good MA dissertation, in which the student has to show that he/she has understood a theoretical approach and knows how to relate it, in a preliminary fashion, to the analysis of a concrete situation. But this is totally insufficient in a PhD thesis, which is only successful if it manages to overcome the relation of exteriority between “theoretical approach” and “case study”.
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