Category: badiou

pluth on signifiers and subject of lacan the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007.  Print.

🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.

A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language.  This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).

The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).

[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).

It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).

[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification.  … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).

One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.

Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).

Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).

rhizomes deleuze

rhizomes are plants that tend to grow horizontally rather than vertically.  Rather than sending their roots dep into the ground, and rather than being clearly unified and distinct entities, rhizomes spread out, climbing up and all over things that are in their way, getting tangled up with other rhizomes.  Think of grass, or of ivy climbing up and over what ever it comes acrss. If philosophers approach things as rhizomes (instead of trees), they will come up with a very different picture of how things are.

Chiesa

In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?

And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?

The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.

It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).

In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’

For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.

There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines.  Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.

JB sexual d irigaray

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible. … Sexual difference — is it to be thought of as a framework by which we are defeated in advance?  Anything that might be said against it is oblique proof that it structures what we say.  Is it there in a primary sense, haunting the primary differentiations or structural fate by which all signification proceeds? (177)

Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact, not a bedrock of any sorts, and not the recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance. On the contrary, it is a question, a question for our times. As a question, it remains unsettled and unresolved, that which is not yet or not ever formulated   in terms of an assertion.  Its presence does not assume the form of facts and structures but persists as that which makes us wonder, which remains not fully explained and not fully explicable. If it is the question for our time, as she insists in The Ethics of Sexual Difference, then it is not one question among others, but, rather a particularly dense moment of irresolution within language, one that marks the contemporary horizon of language as our own.  Like Drucilla Cornell, Irigaray has in mind an ethics which is not one that follows from sexual difference but is a question that is posed by the very terms of sexual difference itself: how to cross this otherness?  How to cross it without crossing it, without domesticating its terms? How to remain attuned to what remains permanently unsettled about the question?

Irigaray then would not argue for or against sexual difference but, rather offer a way to think about the question that sexual difference poses, or the question that sexual difference is, a question whose irresolution forms a certain historical trajectory for us, those who find ourselves asking this question, those of whom this question is posed.  The arguments in favor and against would be so many indications of the persistence of this question, a persistence whose status is not eternal, but one, she claims, that belongs to these times. It is a question that Irigaray poses of modernity, a question that marks modernity for her.  Thus, it is a question that inaugurates a certain problematic of time, a question whose answer is not forthcoming, a question that opens up a time of irresolution and marks that time of irresolution as our own (177-178).

I begin with Irigaray because I think her invocation of sexual difference is something other than foundational. Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis onwhich to build a feminism, it is not that which we have already encountered and come to know; rather, as a question that prompts a feminist inquiry, it is something that cannot quite be stated, that troubles the grammar of the statement, and that remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate (178).

My view is that no simple definition of gender will suffice, and that more important than coming up with a strict and applicable definition is the ability to track the travels of the term through public culture.  The term “gender” has become a site of contest for various interests. Consider the domestic U.S. example in which gender is often perceived as a way to defuse the political dimension of feminism, in which gender becomes a merely discursive marking of masculine and feminine, understood as constructions that might be studied outside a feminist framework or as simple self-productions, manufactured cultural effects of some kind.  Consider also the introduction of gender studies programs as ways to legitimate an academic domain by refusing to engage polemics against feminism, as well as the introduction of gender studies programs and centers in Eastern Europe where the overcoming of “feminism” is tied to the overcoming of Marxist state ideology in which feminist aims were understood to be achievable only on the condition of the realization of Communist aims (184).

As if that struggle internal to the gender arena were not enough, the challenge of an Anglo-European theoretical perspective within the academy casts doubt on the value of the overly sociological construal of the term. Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference precisely because gender endorses a socially constructivist view of masculinity and femininity, displacing or devaluing the symbolic status of sexual difference and the political specificity of the feminine. Here I am thinking of criticisms that have been leveled against the term by Naomi Schor, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and others. (185).

Perhaps it is precisely that sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine (186).

The human, it seems, must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane. This human will not be “one,” indeed, will have no ultimate form, but it will be one that is constantly negotiating sexual difference in a way that has no natural or necessary consequences for the social organization of sexuality.  By insisting that this will be a persistent and open question, I mean to suggest that we make no decision on what sexual difference is but leave that question open, troubling, unresolved, propitious (191-192).

Butler disses Žižek’s sexual d Žižek responds

Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)

This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).

Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?

Žižek replies:

I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).

… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.

Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).


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)

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).

Badiou interview 1994

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).

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).

Causal Mechanisms (Elster)

This is an excerpt

What distinguishes causal mechanisms from causal laws is the indeterminacy of the former, and the death knell this sounds for any attempt to make prediction a constitutive feature of social science explanation.  More precisely, the lack of determinacy is understood as a serious epistemological obstacle to the elevation of mechanisms to the status of laws, whether this indeterminancy is linked to not knowing the identity of relevant triggering conditions, or to not knowing with sufficient precision the relative force of individual mechanisms acting simultaneously.  Elster’s intervention thus decisively discredits one of the central pillars of the positivist paradigm by decoupling prediction, and thus a strict deductive-nomological form of reasoning, from social science explanation.  While it may still be possible to offer predictions in social science, these predictions are understood to be constitutively precarious and, in any case, non-essential for purposes of explanation.  It if for this reason that we feel justified in regarding his approach as conforming to a retroductive form of explanation in the social sciences (Glynos, Howarth, 2007 89).

… from the fact that X qua process is not reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations or intentions of subjects, it does not necessarily — or only — follow that X is independent of those contextualized self-interpretations or intentions.  But this is precisely what is implied by Elster’s conception of causal mechanism. .. causal mechansims can be discussed entirely on their own, with no necessary internal connection to intentional mechanisms.

Of course, the subject-independent feature of causal mechanisms is very attractive from the perspective of a positivist programme seeking to import the causal law ideal and its correlative promise of (a certain conception of) objectivity into the social sciences.  After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causality 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 for instance.  At the very most, we as subjects can act in light of such causal laws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise.  The functioning of comparable processes (X) 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. If we insist on calling such a process a mechanism, then we must accept that, unlike laws, it has the property of fungibility, that is, it can suffer dissolution.  At any point, the mechanism may find that it has lost its necessary support — intentional or otherwise — in the relevant subjects.  Thus, mechanisms are not ‘proto’ laws that may one day be transofrmed into ‘proper’ causal laws.  This is because 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 promoted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subjects: 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 (Glynos, Howarth, 2007: 97).

While Elster’s theory of causal mechanisms responds to certain limitations of the causal law paradigm, he nevertheless accepts the search for laws as an ideal.  And on of the reasons for this is the atomistic ontological grounding of his account, in which the world consists of discrete events, facts, and mechanisms.  103