Author: logocentric

Thrown subjects

Thrown Subject: a subject that is nothing but the identities conferred by its culture or ‘world’.  However, as this structure is marked by a fundamental lack” an impossibility which becomes evident in moments of dislocation” it is able under certain conditions to engage and act.  This moment of identification is the moment of the radical subject which discloses the subject as an agent in its world.  Nevertheless as lack is constitutive both of the structure and of the subject, the construction of any identity ”or the linking together of identities into a common project” is always contingent and precarious.  In this sense, identities are always ‘failed identities’, which never fulfil the telos of subjective identification, thus rendering them vulnerable to further dislocation.  In sum, ‘far from being a moment of the structure, the subject is the result of the impossibility of constituting the structure as such’ (Laclau 1990, 41).  Situated within this poststructuralist horizon, our aim is thus to plot a path away from thinking about the subject as simply a discursive position, to thinking about it as constitutively incomplete and split.  This conception of subject is predicated on four notions: lack, identity, identification, enjoyment.

The subject is marked by a constitutive lack or, to put it differently, by an identity which is impossible to fully suture.  It is an ontological feature of subjectivity which is empirically disclosed in moments of dislocation when it is no longer clear how the subject is to ‘go on’, that is, when it is undecided as to how it is to follow the rules, for instance, or engage in its routinized practices.  In short, lack is revealed when identities fail, that is, in situations where the contingency or the undecidability of social structures is made visible.  It is in these situations of structural failure that we see the emergence of subjectivity in its radical form: subjects are literally compelled to engage in acts of identification, whose aim is to fill the void made visible by a dislocatory event with new signifiers and discourses. Here the subject is ‘merely the distance between the undecidable structure and the decision (Laclau 1990, 39).  A person becomes a subject in this sense …  (129)

Lack

a core ontological assumption [is that] each system of meaning or each symbolic order is essentially incomplete or lacking.  While meaning is holistic, in the sense that the identity of an element depends on its relationship to other elements within a wider social structure, each structure is never closed.  Each structure is marked by an impossibility — what Lacan captures with the register of ‘the real’ — which prevents the full constitution of meaning.

… in keeping with our ontological presuppositions every subject is a discursive construct or entity, whose identity depends on its relationship to other subjects and objects.  However, because each discursive construct is never fully constituted, but essentially incomplete or lacking, the subject is also lacking and incomplete (127).

Subjectivity

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 there 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 radical contingency of social relations.  This is because modes of subjectivity are also modes of enjoyment, and modes of enjoyment are always embedded 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 conealment (ideological dimension), or does it keep open the contingency of social relations (ethical dimension)?

(119-120)

Hermeneutical critique of positivist science

… interpretation both on the part of the researchers, as well as the groups they study, is involved in determining what is to count as political facts in any particular situation.  For Taylor this is emphatically not the case in the natural sciences, in which the latter’s objects are not — and in principle cannot be — self-interpreting (GH cite Dreyfuss 55.)

In sum, then, the hermeneutical criticque of positivist approaches to social and political analysis proceeds from the affirmation that our interpretation of reality is constitutive of reality, not merely a view on reality which can be ‘bracketed’.  In other words, hermeneuticiists accord language and meaning a privileged role, insofar as they necessarily mediate all experience.  The move from the study of nature to the study of society thus requires that we take into account this insight by noting how in the latter case both the subject and the object of research consist in meaningful behaviour. The central point is that interpretation ‘goes all the way down’: interpretaton cannot somehow be by-passed in the establishment of facts and correlations, because the interpretations of both researcher and researched are essential in determining what is to count as a fact.

Post-positivism

For GH the context of discovery and context of justification is blurred

GH focus on the centrality of self-interpretations in the social world, context, and the relevance of the ontological presuppostions that are brought to bear when the self-interpretations of the actors and the data itself needs to be interpreted.

Of course, how far we go in deferring to the self-interpretations of the actors in generating or accepting a proto-explanation will be a function of the specific ontology (e.g. hermeneutical, critical realist, poststructuralist) underpinning one’s approach. What is essential here is that the minimal hermeneutical insight be taken seriously, in the sense that our explanations ought to be properly contextualized in relation to the self-interpretations of the subjects themselves. (37).

Critical Realists

The critical realist intervention is helpful because it goes some way towards suggesting why retroductive reasoning is central to how we should think about social science explanation. Nevertheless, there are two qualifications we need to make. First … the critical realist position … restricts the scope of contingency to the multiple interactive possibilities among the plurality of generative mechanisms, which in turn points to a residual positivism. In our account, however, contingency ‘goes all the way down‘ so to speak. It is not just the complexity of the interactions between various mechanisms that concerns us, but the intrinsic contingency of the mechanistic structures themselves. Second … (Bhaskar’s argument moving from positivism to post-positivism is basically confused) 33.

Bhaskar

Bhaskar’s ontology GH argue focuses on the kinds of things in the world, the ‘furniture’ if you will, which means Bhaskar focuses on the “contingent interaction of fully constituted causal mechanisms” whereas GH emphasize, after Heidegger, the being of these beings

In Bhaskar’s account of structure and agency, he clearly privileges the role of structures as a set of constraints on human action, which define for them the potential range of outcomes and strategies. But there is a danger of paying short shrift to the necessary and complex connection between the empirical and ontological levels of analysis, that is, the realm of lived experience and action, on the one hand, and the underlying structures and modes of being, on the other hand, that make the former possible (30).

An alternative social ontology

For our approach is predicated on the articulation of an alternative social ontology that stresses the radical contingency and structural incompleteness of all systems of social relations … [drawing on the Lacanian concept] the disruptive presence of THE REAL which marks the impossibility of any putative fullness of being, whether at the level of structures, subjects or discourses (11).

Following Bhaskar and others, we begin by assuming that any legitimate approach to social and political analysis requires at least some ontological assumptions and commitments … However, in our view the importance of ontology is not just about what sorts of things exist, but that they exist and how they exist.  Indeed, of capital importance in this regard is the fact that objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’ that problematizes a simple listing of their necessary intrinsic properties and causal capacities.  Therefore, of greater import for us is their contingency, historicity and precariousness … this perspective enables us to highlight the constructed and political character of social objectivity, and then to articulate a connected series of concepts and logics that can help us to analyse social relations and processes, while remaining faithful to our ontological commitments (11).

The point of the book

… the whole point of the book is to develop an ontological stance and a grammar of concepts, together with a particular research ethos, which makes it possible to construct and furnish answers to empirical problems that can withstand charges of methodological arbitrariness, historical particularism, and idealism (7).

Working within the field of postructuralism, our central aim in this regard is to construct an explanatory logic, together with the grammar of concepts and assumptions that serve as its conditions of possibility, and to articulate a typology of basic logics – social, political and fantasmatic – which can serve to characterize, explain and criticize social phenomena (8).

Method of critical logics

Several consequences follow from our account of logics:

1) Methodologically we argue that the development of an explanation must start with intentions and self-interpretations.  It is absolutely crucial to pass through subjects’ self-interpretations, not only as part of the process of problematizaton, but also to arrive at an understanding of the character of social  logics, as well as political and fantasmatic logics. In conceptual terms, logics are aligned with self-interpretations against causal mechanisms, because it is through self-interpretations and thick descriptions that the ontic is connected to the ontological, and social logics connected with the political and fantasmatic logics … Contextualized self-interpretations are necessary but not sufficient components of a social science explanation.  Showing why and how this is possible allows us to carve out a space beyond the domains of causal laws and mechanisms on the one hand, and self-interpretations and thick descriptions on the other. (161)

… [T]he process of social science explanation ought to be understood in terms of articulation rather than subsumption. It is evident from our account that any fully-fledged explanans contains a plurality of different kinds of logics and concepts, which have to be linked together to critically explain.  This raises a question about the conditions under which it is possible to bring together these heterogeneous elements into an explanation without subsuming them under higher-order laws or abstractions and without falling into a pure descriptivism … [W]e should understand critical explanation as part of an articulatory practice, by which we mean ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (cited in LM 1985: 105) (162).

2) This is not voluntarism:

Siding with hermeneutics against naturalism we argue that contextuallized self-interpretations are an essential and ineluctable aspect of any critical explanation. But now siding with naturalism, we argue that critical explanations cannot be reduced to contextualized self-interpretations, because we bring to each particular object of study a set of concepts and logics that necessarily transcends the particularity of context.

[D]iscursive 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 … (162).

While in our view logics are subject-dependent, in the sense that our explanations require a passage through a subject’s contextualized self-interpretation (the hermeneutical constraint), they also require something that transcends them (15).

bhaskar’s ontology

For GH, Bhaskar’s ontology focuses on the stuff, the furniture of the world’ in a manner of speaking, which doesn’t adequately investigate the ‘being of beings’, or how this stuff emerges within a relational, contingent historical context.

We follow Heidegger here by focusing on the historicity and contingency of beings — and not just on the contingent interaction of fully constituted causal mechanisms … against Bhaskar we … cannot sever beings from the relational contexts in which they appear (160).

(I)n Bhaskar’s account there is a short-circuiting of the necessary and complex relationship between the ontical and ontological levels of analysis.  Social structures (or ‘society’) … are ultimately privileged … what Bhaskar calls ‘intransitive objects’: “things [that] exist independently of our descriptions’.  In his account of structure and agency, he thus privileges the role of structures … what this does not fully take on board, as Laclau has pointed out, is the transitive nature of the transitive-intransitive distinction (161).