Author: logocentric

subordination domination oppression

Jason Glynos, David Howarth. “Interpretations, Mechanisms, and Logics” paper presented at 1st IDA World Conference Roskilde University, Denmark. Sept 8-10, 2008. pp.37.

Relations of Subordination

Those practices which appear not to invite or need public contestation of social norms, either by the subjects engaged in the practice, or by the theorist who is interpreting the practice.  In the absence of dislocations, existing social relations are reproduced in this mode without public contestation.  Here we might include everyday activities such as working, going on holiday, playing sport … All these activities may in fact involve and rely upon relations o subordination, but they are not experienced as oppressive, nor are they regarded as unjust by the analyst.

Relations of Oppression

Point to the features of a practice, or a regime of practices, that are challenged by subjects in the name of a principle or ideal allegedly denied or violated by the social practice itself.  Here the experiences of dislocation are symbolized in terms of a questioning of norms, which may be accompanied by political challenges to the practices or regime of practices examined.  But equally they may be met with renewed efforts to offset challenges and maintain the existing social relations.  Here the political dimension comes to the fore.

Relations of Domination

Point to the way subjects are judged by the theorist to be dominated or unjustly treated, whether or not the norms so judged are explicitly challenged by those engaged in the practice.  Here interpretation may focus on those practices which appear to actively prevent the public contestation of social norms from arising in the first place. In this case, social relations are understood to be reproduced without public contestation, either because dislocatory experiences are processed privately or informally, or because they do not arise at all.  They may take the form of ‘off the record’ complaints … made by employees amongst themselves, or even toward their managers, who then elicit, deflect, or satisfy requests … On the other hand, the concealing of dislocation will be accomplished most completely and effectively if subjects are rendered ideologically complicit in the practices they partake.  More generally, then, in the context of a set of dislocatory experiences, these ‘pre-emptive’ aspects of a practice seek to maintain existing social structures by muffling or guiding the process by which grievances are articulated, so that the existing social structure remains unthreatened.  An important part of contemporary labour process theory, organization theory, and critical management studies literature deals with precisely these aspects of social practices.  Moreover, since such activities are geared toward keeping public contestation at bay, they tend to be unofficial in character, in the sense that they operate in the interstices of official institutional practices.

Characterizing practices as fostering or reinforcing relations of domination immediately highlights the sociological and normative character of the approach we advocate.

After all, the very identification of a social norm as worthy of public contestation, as well as the claim that a norm is actively prevented from being contested, presupposes some view of social domination.  It implies that we already have some grasp of the practice, both sociologically and normatively.  And this is where social logics are particularly relevant, as they are crucial in making explicit the sociological and normative aspects of this process of characterization.   In this context, to highlight the political dimension of a practice entails pointing to those aspects of a practice which seek to generate, maintain, contain, or resolve the public contestation of social norms.  Put differently, the political aspects of a practice involve attempts to challenge and replace existing social structures, as well as attempts to neutralize such challenges in a transformist way (citing Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1971: 58-9)

Deconstructive Genealogy/Onto-ethical critique

What then does the task of incorporating a self-reflexive and self-critical ethos into the concrete problematization and explanation of social phenomena entail?  On the one hand, the ontological postulates of our approach concerning radical contingency have to inform the construction, investigation and explanation of social phenomenon (155).

We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself.

A Deconstructive Genealogy of a social practice or regime

The task here is to reactivate and make evident options that were foreclosed during the emergence of a practice – the clashes and forces which are repressed or defeated – in order to show how the present configuration of practices relies on exclusions that reveal the non-necessary character of the present social formation, and to explore the consequences and potential effects of such ‘repressions’.  On the other hand,

Onto-ethical critique

In the mode of what we could call an onto-ethical critique the task is to critically interrogate the conditions under which a particular social practice or regime grips its subjects despite its non-necessary character.  This mode of critique furnishes us with a means of critically interrogating the will to (fantasmatic) closure. 

However, both modes of critique are informed by an ethos of exercising a fidelity to contingency itself, by displaying other possibilities for political decision and identification as well as other modalities of identification.  Together they contribute to a practice of ethico-political interpretation. (155)

UK Audit Regime Fantasmatic Logic

… given the broader social context in which they operate. .. give a wider discursive context in which a culture of instrumentalist consumption and exchange dominates, it is not fanciful to suppose that key signifiers which exhibit a clearly positive valence for subjects, whether they are ‘quality’, ‘professionalism’, ‘knoledge’, ‘excellence’ or ‘freedom’, should be suitably rearticulated to better resonate with the market ethos (177).

Given a dislocation, and the drawing of a political frontier via logics of equivalence, key terms acquire the status of ‘floating signifiers’ — signifiers that for relevant subjects are no longer fixed to a particular meaning.  Once detached, they begin to ‘float’, and their identity is only (partially) stabilized when they are successfully hegemonized by groups that endeavour to naturalize meaning in one way rather than another.

By criticizing universities for failing the economy throughout the 1980s, accusing academics of being snobbishly out of touch with the real world, and by painting a general picture of higher education as overly bureaucratic and inefficient in the face of an imminent and threateningly aggressive global market, ‘modernizers’ facilitate the processes by which certain key signifiers are detached from their signifieds and rearticulated to reinforce market-friendly equivalences.

Laclau’s article: Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?

Problematization

Problematization

Changing face of higher education in the UK: Problematize the different way it has been problematized by key social actors.

In this general context, an apparent puzzle has emerged concerning the lack of meaningful resistance by academics to the new regime of audit practices … Why are higher education audit reforms frequently not abandoned or activetly resisted by academics?  … Why are these reforms often allowed to intensify further, becoming even more deeply institutionalized and sedimented. 170

An object of study is constructed.  This means that a range of disparate empirical phenomena have to constituted as a problem, and the problem has to be located at an appropriate level of abstraction and complexity.  Thus our approach shares a family resemblance with Foucault’s practice of problematization, which in his view synthesized the archaeological and genealogical methods of analysis.

… problematization constitutes the first of three moments in the overall logic of critical explanation.  The second moment entails the furnishing of a retroductive explanation that addresses key features which emerge out of our initial problematization.

1. Identifying relevant social (What), political (Why)  and fantasmatic (How) logics.  We must thus start by characterizing the practices under investigation … this involves the task of retroductively identifying the assemblage of social logics that are currently being installed in UK universitites.  There are 4 such social logics:

4 social logics informing the practices of the new regime:1. competition, 2. atomisation, 3. hierarchy, 4. instrumentalization.  Which when articulated together enable us to characterize the emergent regime of audit practices (171).

2. The important point to keep in mind here is how, for us, the identification and operation of social logics requires some reference to — or passage through — the self-interpretation of subjects.

3.  Having established what the logics structuring the various audit practices in higher education are, we can also ask why and how they came about and continue to be sustained.  This turns our attention to the operation of political and fantasmatic logics

Normative assumptions

our account of regimes and our account of practices as a function of four ontological dimensions relies on a set of sociological and normative assumptions.  These assumption are linked to our capacity to identify social norms underpinning practices, our ability to attibute to them relative weight in terms of their foundational status, our suggestion that particular norms are more or less worthy candidates for public contestation and/or transformation, and so on … the very claim that a particular dimension is foregrounded, or that a particular dimension is being actively backgrounded, presupposes a sociological and normative view about the practice or regime (127).

Ethics by Laclau

First, if the ethical has from the beginning a content necessarily attached to it, all other conceptions have to be rejected offhand as unethical.  It is not difficult to realize the authoritarian and ethnocentric consequences … from such an approach … But, second, … as the Habermasians do, not a dogmatism of the contents but of the procedures.  Have we advanced a single step with this new solution?  No, we are in the same place as before, because only somebody who has already accepted some substantial values will accept also the validity of those procedures.  It is only if a set of empty terms —’justice’, ‘truth’, ‘people’, etc. — become the names of the ethical, only if they are not necessarily attached to any content but are always given reversible contents through collectively elaborated radical investments, that something like a democratic society becomes possible.  This means an endless movement between the ethical and normative dimensions. 

… what kind of other link could exist between ethics and normativity?  My answer is: radical investment, a notion that requires clarification.

I have said the primary ethical experience is experience of a lack:  It is constituted by the distance between what is and what ought to be.  … the object bridging the distance does not have a content of its own.

… any positive moral evaluation consists in attributing to a particular content the role of bearer of one of the names of fullness.  If I say “socialism is just’ … I am identifying ‘justice’ as one of the  names of fullness with a content which cannot be locally derived from that name (because there is no inherent conceptual content associated to that name). … Here we have investment in an almost literal financial sense: the relevance of the terms is greatly increased by making it the embodiment of a fullness totally transcending it.  And this investment is radical because, justice being an empty term, nothing in it preannounced that socialism had to become the body incarnating it.  (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 291)

Radical investment, conceived in this sense, describes the way I see the basic structure of ethical action. 

Doesn’t that involve that anything goes, that there is no possibility of objective criteria to choose one rather than the other course of action?  … a sovereign chooser who, precisely because he is sovereign, does not have the ground for any choice. But ethical life is entirely different from that picture.  People are installed on both sides of the equation: they are, on the one hand, constructed as positions within a certain symbolic order; on the other hand, however, such an order is always a dislocated structure: it is destabilized by what … we could call the real of the structure.  These dislocations show themselves as the distance between the achievable fullness and what actually exists, and this distance is the source of the ethical experience conceived as the attempt to name the unnameable (which requires, as we have seen, a radical investment).  (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 287)

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Harper’s Archive of DFW

Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok
By Michiko Kakutani
September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer – his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness – to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life. Continue reading “no”

deductive-nomological, hypothetico-deductive

Our more concrete object of critique was the subsumptive character of the dominant mode of social and political theorizing.  Subsumption in the field of method is evident when mainstream social scientists either deduce explanation from higher order laws or generalizations — the so-called deductive-nomological form of explanation — or deduce predictions which are subjected to exhaustive tests — the so-called hypothetico-deductive form of validation.  Empirical objects are thus subsumed under the theoretical concepts, and do not modify or transform the latter, thus giving rise to what Althusser calls ‘a relation of exteriority’ between theoretical categories and empirical phenomena ( citing Althusser Reading Capital: 49) (210)

Causal mechanisms

Can we come up with an approach to social science explanation that incorporates the non-intentional dimension, but avoids an overly descriptive or particularistic solution (à la hermeneutics)

[Elster’s] residual positivism comes in two forms.  In the first place, the notion of causal law continues to play a determining role in Elster’s worldview, in which case mechanisms do not succeed in offering us a distinctive enough alternative to the causal law model.  Secondly, the causal chain language deployed by Elster belies how the grammar of causal mechanisms is only one of several possible, and indeed contestable, grammars of intelligibility.  The question then becomes one of articulating an appropriate grammar of intelligibility in the social sciences. (84-5)  

We develop one such grammar of intelligibility in terms of social, political, and fantasmatic logics, which we believe avoids the twin fallacies of psychologism and idealism that bedevil Elster’s account.