logocentric – Page 119

Critique of causal mechanisms

Now it is clear that those who stress the role of causal mechanisms also go beyond the field of self-interpretations. For example, though Elster stresses the indeterminacy of their triggering and interaction, he uses mechanisms to provide a causal connection between phenomena and events. But he brackets the ontological conditions of possibility of these mechanisms, and underplays their organic and dynamic relation to self-interpretations and their contexts … Elster short-circuits the passage through the subject by conceiving mechanisms as a set of ‘abstract essences’ or free standing ‘tools’ that are not tied to any ontology, and which can be applied to different contexts without modification (159).

For us by contrast, logics are always linked to a particular field of self-interpretations. Social logics, in particular, provide access to the practices under investigation, enabling us to grasp the point of a practice or institution, as well as the rules and structures that organize them … Social logics require therefore a ‘passage through the self-interpretations of subjects’, and they provide a bridge between description/characterization and explanation/critique.

In any fully-fledged critical explanation of a phenomenon, political and fantasmatic logics have to be articulated with a range of social logics together with the empirical contexts they inform and within which they function. The entire logic of explanation thus requires the passage through self-interpretations (160).

Critique of hermeneutics

[A] hermeneutical inquiry not only pushes the study of society beyond the given facts and behaviour to the meaning an interpretation of facts, but it also moves beyond self-interpretations to the study of rules and interpretations of self-interpretations. Hermeneuticists thus seek to render the implicit explicit and to interpret self-interpretations, yielding contextualized self-interpretations. ..

Notwithstanding the advantages of the hermeneutical perspective, our use of logics goes further than this, for the latter not only focus our attention on the rules or gramnmar that enable us to characterize and even criticize a phenomenon, but they also allow us to disclose the structures and conditions that make those rules possible. They (the logics) ‘go beyond’ contextualized self-interpretations because they speak to the latter’s contingent constitution and sedimentation, focusing attention on the way their ‘ignoble origins’ are generally forgotten or covered over as the practices and their self-understanding are then lived out. (citing Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil :177) (158-9)

Public contestation

Public contestation enables GH to develop 2 further dimensions along the social/political axis

By public contestation we mean simply the contestation of the norms which are constitutive of an existing social practice (or regime) in the name of an ideal or principle. … Public contestation can, of course, be seen as just another response to dislocation, which we can add to the repertoire of ethical and ideological responses. This is true, but for us public contestation (qua response) operates at a different analytical level. It is possible in our approach, for exampe, to characterize public contestation as itself ethical or ideological. More importantly, however, the notion of public contestation is relevant to the present discussion because of its privileged status in relation to the radical contingency of social relations, and because of its association with the concept of the political.

[T]he political becomes one of the forms in which one ‘encounters the real‘ so that ‘political reality is the field in which the symbolization of this real is attempted’

(citing Stavrakakis,1999: 73)

Authentic versus Inauthentic

Here is the only slightly bewildering part of the whole book:

However it does not follow that the subject will engage with contingency in a more authentic way because of this confrontation (with contingency of social relations). In using the term authenticity we simply aim to capture a subject’s generalized sensitivity or attentiveness to the always-already dislocated character of existing social relations, wherein creativity and surprise are accorded prominent roles. But this implies that an inauthentic response to a dislocation is also possible. We call the authentic response ethical, and the inauthentic response ideological… the radical contingency of social reality and identity can be acknowledged and tarried with, or it can be denied and concealed. To what extent do subjects engage authentically with the radical contingency of social relations (where the ethical dimension is foregrounded)? 111

Dislocation serves as a device for articulating their fundamental ontological postulate — the radical contingency of social relations. And Dislocation allows GH to develop 2 dimensions ethical/ideological in which to characterize aspects of a practice or regime. 111

Modalities of subjectivity

Althusser’s model of ‘interpellation’, in which individuals are constituted or ‘hailed’ as subjects by recognizing certain signifiers and discourses as addressed to them, seems to presuppose an already constituted subject, which is able to ‘recognize’, ‘desire’, ‘know’, and so forth (cite Paul Hirst 1979) … After all, for Althusser, ‘individuals are always-already subjects’, whose ‘places’ in the existing social structures have been determined and fixed beforehand (cite Althusser 1971)

By contrast, … the category of the subject … is marked by a fundamental misrecognition that can never be transcended. The subject is thus no more than a void in the symbolic order whose identity and character is determined only by its identifications and mode of enjoyment (cite Zizek 1989).

questions of ethics (and ideology) centre on the subject’s particular mode of enjoyment. They address issues that arise from the different modalities of subjectivity in relation to the ultimate contingency of social existence.

How does a subject relate to the contingency of social life that is disclosed in dislocatory events? How does it identify anew? How does it translate its ‘radical investments’ into social and political practices? How does a subject relate to its identifications and consequently to its own contingency?

It is perhaps worth emphasizing here that these modes of subjectivity should not be understood in cognitivist or intellectualist terms. In other words, what we are trying to capture here with the categories of ideology and ethics has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that someone can apprehend and even consciously affirm a particular ontological schema rooted in the racial contingency of social relations. This is because modes of subjectivity are also modes of enjoyment. and modes of enjoyment are always embodied in material practices, and thus not completely reducible to conscious apprehension. It is with this in mind that one should approach the question of subjectivity and identification. For example, does the mode of identification privilege the moment of closure and concealment (ideological dimension), or does it keep open the contingency of social relations (ethical dimension)? (119-120).

Political and Social dimensions

Both the political and social dimensions of social reality presuppose an intimate connection to the radical contingency of social relations, for both are understood in relation to a particular ontical manifestation of this radical contingency, namely, the public contestation of a social norm. Insofar as public contestation does not arise or is eschewed, we say that the social dimension is foregrounded. Insofar as this public contestation is initiated or affirmed through action, we may say that the political dimension comes to the fore. … the boundary between the social and political is not fixed, but in a state of constant flux (117).

Symbolization of the Real

quoting Stavrakakis,

the political becomes one of the forms in which one encounters the real, so that political reality is the field in which the symbolization of the real is attempted. (111)

Reactivation does not therefore consist of returning to the original situation, but merely of rediscovering, through the emergence of new antagonisms, the contingent nature of so-called “objectivity”

Middle range theorizing

We can now revisit our model of practices and regimes by relating them to the ontological dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage, therefore, in what might be termed a more middle-range style of theorizing, which involves the use of our ontological categories to redescribe ontical entities like practices and regimes. For instance, practices can be understood in terms of the way different dimensions of social relations —comprising the social, political, ideological, and ethical dimensions — are foregrounded or backgrounded, how they are articulated, and so on. We claim that this provides us with significant analytical purchase to describe and explain the socio-political world in a non-topographical fashion (120).

It is important to stress that in this to and fro movement between the ontological and ontical levels, which after all is constitutive of the logic of middle range theorizing, such typolgies are empirical and contingent. … 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. (127).

This suggests that we need to develop a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of concrete practices and regimes that is sensitive to our four ontological dimensions, and which makes explicit the normative aspects of our critical explanations.

practices, regimes, and logics

Structure of Chapter 4 Ontology

Social and Political practices, Regime
Ontical/Ontological distinction
Radical contingency opposed to empirical contingency
4 dimensions of socio-political reality
Dislocation: ideological-ethical axis
Public contestation: political-social axis
Political and Social
Radical political demand, Hegemonic political demand
Reactivation
Ideology and ethics
Practices and regimes revisited
Subjectivity

Three-fold typology of logics
Social, Political, Fantasmatic logics which when articulated together constitute the basic explanatory schema of our poststructuralist approach to critical explanation. This complex of logics provides us with the theoretical resources to characterize practices and regimes, to account for their dialectical relationship, and to explan how and why they change or resist change. 106

Social logics comprise the substantive grammar or rules of a practice or regime, which enable us to distil their purpose, form and content. Moreover in characterizing a regime, we also describe the context of the practices under study, since a regime is always a regime of practices 106

A regime is just another term denoting the particular context of a practice or set of practices. It denotes the broader context that structures social practices, as well as the new social structure that emerges out of hegemonic political practices. However, the term regime has for us the advantage of denoting something that is more individual than context, and this is because it already flags the fact that some work has already taken place in characterizing that context in a particular way. In other words, this characterization process implies that the analyst adopts an active role in constructing the context as a particular regime. (125-6)

In short, the regime/practice complex is primarily a heuristic device that enables us to conduct concrete analysis (126).

libidinal/affective dimension of identification

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Passions of Identification: Discourse, Enjoyment, and European Identity” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howard, Jacob Torfing (eds). 2005 pp. 68-92.

the key term for understanding this process is the psychoanalytic category of identification, with its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with something [a political ideology or ethnic group for example] because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity (Laclau, 1994, p.3. cited in Stavrakakis 2005)

Central insight of discourse theory: the ultimate impossibility of identity renders identification central for contemporary political analysis … political subjectivity (both at the individual and the collective levels) depends on identification but identification never results in the production of full identity … it is because it proves unable to cover over lack and dissimulate social antagonism that identification remains the horizon of political subjectivity. 71

What I have in mind is the crucial Freudian insight that what is at stake in assuming a collective identity is something of the order of affective libidinal bonds. … Freud’s account points to a crucial dimension which is constitutive of identification: the dimension of passion, of affective attachment, and libidinal investment … Lacan will redirect this Freudian focus on the affective side of identification processes onto the obscene paths of enjoyment (jouissance).

What is at stake is to find a way to relate ethically to antagonism and jouissance, as opposed to the unethical unproductive, and even dangerous standpoints of eliminating or mythologizing them: to sublimate instead of repressing or disavowing, to inject passion into the radicalization of democracy and the reinvigoration of political discourse instead of reducing politics to the unattractive spectacle of the neutral administration of unavoidable necessities. 89-90

Repressing the dimension of enjoyment does not only affect the future prospects of European unification, it also produces a series of indirect results of major political importance … the repression of signifiers cathected with libidinal and affective value never leads to the disappearance, but merely to the displacement, of psychical energy and to the ‘return of the repressed’ through the emergence of symptomatic formations. … the rise of right-wind populism in Europe (Le Pen in France)

The neglect of the affective side of identification leads to a displacement of cathectic energy which is now invested in anti-European political and ideological discourses. In fact, a whole separate level of charged debate is erected, in which dry European identity, its institutional arrangements and big words are seen as agents of castration, not only indifferent but also hostile to the structures of enjoyment operating in the various nationalisms and engaged in a process of standardization which has to be resisted. These discourses of resistance differ from the standard euro-jargon not only in terms of their content but also in terms of their style: they are aggressive, visceral, and funny, ranging from the obscene to the violent, often via the grotesque. This is, however, the secret of their success. 87

What are the basic parameters of resistance to Europe which is articulated in the British popular press? … the depiction of the European Union as an alien regulating agency which somehow intervenes in the particular way we have organized our lives, in the particular way we have structured our enjoyment. In other words the EU is primarily represented as an agent of castration. 88

multiple subject positions

What organizes multiplicity? What determines the movement between different subject positions? Are all the components of multiple identity equally important? The answer psychoanalytic theory proves is that there is always a fantasy scenario which organizes and supports the apparent multiplicity of identity and determines the ‘rules of engagement’ between its different levels, a mapping which prioritizes particular modes of enjoyment, particular libidinally invested components and nodal points (points de capiton) and not others, which remain structurally emotionally peripheral. 84

1. Without the intervention of these nodal points, subjective structure can easily disintegrate into a psychotic state. This has to be taken very seriously into account by some ‘chaotic’ conceptions of ‘multiple identity’, primarily because the ‘the total disintegration of personal identity into identity atoms [components of the multiple identity] might not be psychologically manageable’ and thus ‘multiple identity’ might not be the most promising solution for the Europeanization of national identities … when a conflict of loyalties arises, certain components or levels are always assigned higher priority than others … ‘people always were many things, but in the epoch of nationalism, one identity was the trump card … the national identity was the primary one in cases of conflict between loyalty to the different identities.

2. Second, ‘multiple identity’ arguments often presuppose a fluid conception of identity, which is ultimately premised on a certain voluntarism. It seems in other words, to imply that the particular profile of an identity is a matter of conscious, instrumental or even rational choice on the part of the subject, a matter of shopping around for interesting components for inclusion. It is clear that discursive structuration and affective investment, set precise ”although contingent” limits to such movements.

Negativity in the ontological sense

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism.” Parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 56-71.

Negativity in the ontological sense as that which, by dislocating our sedimented positivities, ‘shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity’ … negativity refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of linguistic creatures, this does not mean, however, that it should be understood as a mere destructive force. By inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities it fuels the desire for new social and political constructions. Negativity … indicates the dimension of ‘becoming, a productivity that engenders and ruins every distinct form as a creative destructive restlessness’. It is neither an object nor its negation: it is the condition of possibility/impossibility of the constitution of objects. 56

post-fantasmatic radical democratic ethos

[T]he following question posed by Badiou strikes me as extremely important:

There is always one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known?

Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 50.

From the point of a radical democratic ethics it is not enough to encourage fidelity to an event (in practice, any event), but to cultivate an openness towards event-ness. Such an openness, premised on a Lacanian negative ontology and alert to the ever-present play of negativity and disaster, will be more adequately equipped to allow and encourage the pursuit of a better future within a political framework founded on the awareness of the dangers of absolutization. In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutization only within the framework of another fidelity, fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social; within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other. This fidelity is not a one-off, a rare occurrence, it is not tied to a great politics of nostalgia, but implies a permanent democratic revolution in our political ethos, a skeptical passion that will have to be re-inscribed in every political act: it cannot be reduced to a fidelity to particular acts, not even those associated with the democratic revolution, but extends its scope to an acknowledgment of the post-fantasmatic political potential opened by them in the direction of a continuous radicalization of democracy. Badiou is right that today ‘democracy’ is one of the central organizers of consensus. And this is clearly the consensus of post-democracy. It is obviously necessary to question and interrogate this anti-political normalization of democracy. The only consistent way of doing that, the only way of making democracy relevant again, without reoccupying the dangerous ground of utopian absolutizations, is by re-activating the radical potential of the democratic revolution, by acknowledging event-ness and negativity as the conditions of possibility/impossibility of all transformative political action: “It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned — that something else is possible, but not that everyting is possible.” * (68-69)

Identity and Identification

As Laclau puts it, ‘the incorporation of the individual into the symbolic order occurs through identifications. The individual is not simply an identity within the structure but is transformed by it into a subject, and this requires acts of identification’ (Laclau 1990, 211).

… the subject of identity is linked to the social dimension, while the subject of identification is linked to the political dimension.

It is because the master signifier simultaneously promises a meaning, and yet withholds it, that subjects can be politically engaged. They are engaged in a search for identity and a struggle over meaning

Identification is linked to the enigmatic dimension of the signifier, the dimension of the signifier that functions as a raw question mark that troubles the subject, and defies his or her attempts to discern its meaning.

In the case of an ecological identification in the wake of a dislocation, the signifier ‘ecology’ may be conceived by a subject … as an enigma that promises meaning, as the site of a hegemonic struggle over meaning.

Here ecology’ holds the place of the gap separating ‘ecology’ from its many possible meanings and associated identities, thus making political struggle possible. When this dimension of the signifier emerges (master signifier for Lacan and empty signifier for Laclau), it signals the introjection of this signifier as ‘enigma-plus-promise’ that accounts for a common identification without (yet) a common identity. It literally marks the incompleteness of the symbolic order, that is, the structural lack that inhabits the order of discourse, and yet it also engages subjects in a concerted effort to decipher it, thereby uniting them (130).

Identity is therefore conceived as the meaning attributed to ecology, while identification is conceived in terms of the enigmatic pure signifier of ‘ecology’.