While political logics can be resolved into two main components — the logics of equivalence and difference — the logic of fantasy is defined solely by the function of closure. Moreover, in concealing — suturing or closing off — the contingency of social relations, fantasy structures the subject’s mode of enjoyment in a particular way: let us call it an ‘enjoyment of closure’. Thus, ethics is directly linked to the logic of fantasy because, whatever its ontical instantiation, the latter (fantasy) has closure as its principle of intelligibility, whereas ethics is related to the ‘traversal’ of fantasy in the name of an openness to contingency corresponding to an ‘enjoyment of openness’. For us, then, fantasy and ethics pick out the subject as a subject of enjoyment. though social practices are capacious enough from our point of view to enable us to capture those aspects in which subjects are attentive to the radical contingency of social relations, it should be clear that fantasmatic logics are operative in social practices where the ideological dimension is foregrounded. however, we have also seen that fantasmatic logics are equally operative in political practices. But whereas political logics are used to explain the discursive shifts in the wake of a dislocatory moment, fantasmatic logics describe and account for the vector and modality of those discursive shifts, capturing the way in which the subject deals with the radical contingency of social relations as a subject of enjoyment (151-2).
Author: logocentric
Hegemony
Given a dislocation, and 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 (177).
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 process by which certain key signifiers are detached from their signifieds and rearticulated to reinforce market-friendly equivalences (177).
Causal Mechanisms
After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causallity is its subject independence. The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it. Take the law of gravitation … we as subjects can act in light of such causal lasws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise. The functioning of comparable processes … in the social sciences, however, is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects. … the functioning of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations. This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’.
The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest. At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which prompted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subject: logics are thus meant to capture the subject-dependent aspect of social processes, as well as aspects which are not reducible to the empirical context. (97)
Logic of equivalence, Logic of difference
In thinking about the link between political and fantasmatic logics we could say that the articulation of fantasy and the political dimension varies, depending on whether or not the equivalential or differential aspects of a discursive construction predominate (150).
The predominance of the LOE, in which the articulation of political discourse is dominated by a logic of substitution that links different demands together, harbours the possibility of a more populist or revolutionary politics. In this context, fantasmatic logics may take the form of a narrative in which an internal obstacle (or ‘enemy within’) is deemed responsible for the blockage of identity, while promising a fullness or harmony to come. This logic is clearly evident in Leninst forms of Marxist discourse, in which a particular class enemy has to be forcibly overthrown (usually by revolutionary means) in the name of a universal class (the proletariat), so as to bring about complete human emancipation. 150
But it can equally apply to projects such as Thatcherism in which a failing social democratic consensus (condensed in the figure of the trade unionist qua ‘enemy within’) was opposed in the name of a ‘strong state and a free economy’ …
The predominance of the LOD in political practices in which the articulation of political discourse is dominated by a logic of combination that decouples demands, and addresses them in a punctual fashion by channelling them into the existing system of rule, harbours the possibility of a more institutionalist or reformist politics. Here the fantasmatic logics may be articulated by means of a narrative in which an external obstacle or enemy is deemed to be a threat to an already existing fullness and harmony. For example a ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist threat’ … was presented … as a direct threat to South Africa’s ‘free enterprise’, ‘Christian values’ and ‘Western freedoms’. … In short, we witness the efforts to disarticulate the growing political opposition to the apartheid state in the naming of an external enemy which threatens the internal stability and prosperity of the country … coupled with the defence of a fully constituted and harmonious order in the here and now.
War on terror’ discourse, in which values and stability of liberal democracies are confronted by a foreign ‘axis of evil’, ‘international terrorism’ and an ‘arc of extremism’.
Fantasmatic logic
Consider first the relationship between fantasmatic logics and social practices. Though social practices are punctuated by the mishaps, tragedies and contingencies of everyday life, social relations are experienced and understood in this mode of activity as an accepted way of life. The role of fantasy in this context is not to set up an illusion that provides a subject with a false picture of the world, but to ensure that the radical contingency of social reality — and the political dimension of a practice more specifically — remains in the background. In other words, the logic of fantasy takes its bearings from the various ontical manifestation of radical contingency. …
In this context, we can say that the role of fantasy is to actively contain or suppress the political dimension of a practice. Thus, aspects of a social practice may seek to maintain existing social structures by pre-emptively absorbing dislocations, preventing them from becoming the source of a political practice. 146
The operation of fantasmatic logics can thus reinforce the social dimension of practices by covering over the fundamental lack in reality and keeping at bay what we have labelled ‘their real’. In this respect, logics of fantasy have a key role to play in ‘filling up’ or ‘completing’ the void in the subject and the structure of social relations by bringing about closure. In Zizek’s words, they ‘structure reality itself’ … fantasies are ‘the support that gives consistency to what we call “reality”‘ (citing Zizek in Sublime Object: 44) (147)
But how do fantasmatic logics relate to political practices? For is it not the case that political practices represent a rupture with the logic of fantasy, which we have described in terms of concealment? After all, political logics are linked to moments of contestation and institution, all of which presuppose contingency and all of which involve the attempt to defend or challenge existing social relations through the construction of social antagonisms. Nevertheless, though social antagonisms indicate the limits of social reality by disclosing the points at which ‘the impossibility of society’ is manifest, social antagonisms are still forms of social construction, as they furnish the subject with a way of positivizing the lack in the structure.
… while the construction of frontiers presupposes contingency and public contestation, this process does not necessarily entail attentiveness to radical contingency. In other words, radical contingency can be concealed in political practices just as much as it is in social practices. If the function of fantasy in social practices is implicitly to reinforce the natural character of their elements or to actively prevent the emergence of the political dimension, then we could say that the function of fantasy in political practices is to give them direction and energy, what we earlier referred to as their vector.
“it is the imaginary promise of recapturing our lost/impossible enjoyment which provides the fantasy support for many of our political projects and choices (citing Stavrakakis Passions 2005: 73). In addition, during the institution of a new social practice or regime, there are invariably political practices that actively seek to naturalize a newly emerging social structure or regime by backgrounding its political dimension through decision, institutionalization, and other means. This entails marginalizing whatever contestatory aspects remain from the sturggle to institute the new social structure. 147
In other words, radical contingency can be concealed in political practices just as much as it is in social practices (147).
In sum, whether in the context of social practices or political practices, fantasy operates so as to conceal or close off the radical contingency of social relations. 147
Social structures are best conceptualized as systems of meaningful practices marked by an inherent lack and undecidability (citing Laclau, New Reflections) … It is now the case that every social process of putting together elements is to some degree articulatory, and this is because they (and the agents of articulation) are not governed by an underlying metaphysical principle or ground
[T]he crucial ingredient of an articulatory practice involves conceptualizing the relation between articulated elements as non-necessary or contingent. Articulation, therefore, ‘is the primary ontological level of the constitution of the real’, and will thus always involve ‘the creation of something new out of a dispersion of elements’ (citing Laclau Interview 1988:16). … the gathering of heterogeneous elements under a name is necessarily a singularity: ‘[t]he less a society is kept together by immanent differential mechanisms, the more it depends, for its coherence, on this transcendent, singular moment’ (citing Laclau, On Populist Reason, 2005: 100). … the identity of each element that is articulated is always ‘modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (LM HSS, 1985: 105). More formally, then, we can isolate the contingency, singularity, and modification of elements, as three key aspects of an articulatory practice (180).
be-ing
Hallward, Peter. Badiou a subject to truth. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. pp.467.
The pen is blue, it is smooth, it is made of plastic, and it is also IS purely and simply.
Ontology is the science that concerns itself with this last and seemingly elusive quality, which is not properly a quality at all: the be-ing (in the verbal sense) of beings (in the substantial sense).
Over the centuries, philosophers have suggested a whole host of answers to the question of what is, simply insofar as it is: ideas for Plato, substances for Aristotle, God for Spinoza, synthetic intuition for Kant, the will to power for Nietzsche, pure Being for Heidegger, vital energy for Deleuze.
Badiou’s own answer is perhaps the most surprising: Mathematics is the science of all that is, insofar as it is
It is not that things or being are themselves mathematical forms. NO. Badiou’s concern is with what can be thought or presented as pure be-ing, rather than with the (variable and empirical) substance of beings or presented things.
To the question of be-ing: the brute facts of existence can’t answer the question, the answer must properly be a DECISION, rather than an investigation or perception. In the end, whatever is to be thought of as PURE being as be-ing proves to be indistinguishable from the very be-ing of thought itself … and there is no deriving this determination from the analysis of a faculty, or a nature, or an evolution.
The discourse of ontology is a truth procedure, and like any truth procedure, it involves a fundamental choice that cannot be referred back to a more primitive objectivity
In short, mathematics provides Badiou with a language for describing the general situation of all conceivable situations, regardless of their particular contexts or contents.
What can be said of be-ing as such is not the business of philosophy per se. So Heidegger’s own version of the question of Being — Being as precisely that which cannot be incorporated through mathematization, Being as that which cannot be grasped, or can be grasped only by letting be, by passive exposure to the “clearing” in which things can be glimpsed in their “unconcealment” — cannot even be posed with the contours of Badiou’s philosophy (60).
Retroductive explanation
Identifying the relevant social, political, fantasmatic logics
identify a domain of objects and practices in need of analysis and critique, before then providing a genealogical accounting that explains their political and ideological emergence.
This involves the task of retroductively identifying the assemblage of social logics that are currently being installed at UK universitites
- logic of competition (actors as rivals)
- logic of atomisation (independent entities, isolated)
- logic of hierarchy (top down mode of governance)
- logic of instrumentalization (exchange over use value)
Reification
Subsumption relies on the idea that the very process of explanation is exterior to the explanation itself, an assumption which we have sought to undermine. From a postructuralist point of view, therefore, we can reconceptualize laws, mechanisms, and empirical generalizations, as a function of reification, or what we called in Chapter 3, abstract essences. The term reification simply signals the effect of bypasssing the contextualized self-interpretations of actors. By contrast, reactivation involves a process of de-reification, in which abstract essences are linked to the contexts and self-interpretations relevant to the problem at hand. Understanding such theoretical concepts and empirical generalizations as a function of degrees of reification or sedimentation, of course, differs substantially from the way mechanisms and laws are usually understood in the literature, namely, as representing differences in subsumptive scope (188).
3 moments in overall logic of critical explanation
Three interlocking moments:
- Problematization of empirical phenomena
- Retroductive explanation of these phenomena
- Persuasion of — and Intervention into — the relevant community and practices of scholars and lay-actors. (19)
Problematization
An object of study is constructed. This means that a range of disparate empirical phenomena have to be constituted as a problem, and the problem has to be located at the approaprate level of abstraction and complexity.
Often this begins by problematizing another’s problematization, that is, one problematizes the way in which the Harper Government in Canada has problematized the issue of copyright reform, in particular the notion of intellectual rights in the era of digitalized information.
ideology social identity
- Because of the ultimate undecidability of the social world, discourse is a result of political decisions. We are not talking here about conscious decisions taken by some central decision makers on the basis of rational calculation, but rather about an endless series of de facto decisions, which result from a myriad of decentred strategic actions undertaken by political agents aiming to forge a hegemonic discourse.
- A discourse is forged and expanded by means of articulation, which is defined as a practice that establishes a relation among discursive elements that invokes a mutual modification of their identity. Articulations that manage to provide a credible principle upon which to read, past, present, and future events, and capture people’s hearts and minds, become hegemonic.
- Ideology can no longer be defined as a distorted representation of an objectively given social reality, since reality is always-already a discursive construction. However ideology can still be defined in terms of distortion, not of how things really are, but of the undecidability of all social identity.
- As such, ideology constructs reality as part of a totalizing horizon of meaning that denies the contingent, precarious, and paradoxical character of social identity. The construction of naturalizing and universalizing myths and imaginaries is a central part of the hegemonic drive towards ideological totalization. 15
Torfing, Jacob. “Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges” in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing, (eds) Discourse Theory in European Politics. Palgrave. 2005.