dislocation – objet (a)

Žižek cartestian subject cogito

Žižek, Slavoj. SIC Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham: Duke University Press 1998

Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth

There are two standard ways to approach the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Philosophers usually search for so-called philosophical foundations of psychoanalysis”: their premise is that, no matter how dismissive psychoanalysis is of philosophy, it nonetheless has to rely on a series of conceptual presuppositions (about the nature of drives, of reality, etc.) that psychoanalysis itself does not render thematic and that bear witness to the way in which psychoanalysis is only possible within a certain philosophical horizon.

On the other hand, psychoanalysts at their worst, indulge in so-called “psychoanalyzing of philosophers,” trying to discern pathological psychic motivations beneath fundamental philosophical attitudes (philosophical idealism as the last vestige of the childish belief in the omnipotency of thoughts; paranoiac systematizing as the foundation of the need to form all-embracing philosophical systems, etc.). Both these approaches are to be rejected. While the psychoanalytic reduction of philosophy to an expression of psychic pathology is today, deservedly, no longer taken seriously, it is much more difficult to counter the seemingly self-evident claim that psychoanalysis cannot relate anything truly relevant to philosophy, since psychoanalysis must itself rely on a set of philosophical presuppositions that it is unable to reflect upon.

What if, however, references to the Freudian subject are not external to philosophy, but can, in fact, tell us something about the modern, Cartesian subject?

What if psychoanalysis renders visible something that the modern philosophy of subjectivity accomplishes without knowing it, its own grounding gesture, which philosophy has to disavow if it is to assume its place within academic knowledge?

To use Lacan’s pun, what if psychoanalysis renders visible the ex-timate kernel of modern subjectivity, its innermost core that philosophy is not ready to assume, which it tries to keep at a distanceor, to put it in a more fashionable way, what if psychoanalysis renders visible the constitutive madness of modern philosophy?

We are thus playing a double strategic game: this ex-timate kernel of philosophy is not directly accessible to the psychoanalysis conceived of as a branch of psychology or psychiatry — what we encounter at this level are, of course, the “naive” pre-philosophical theses. What one has to do, is to bring to light the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis, that is, to retranslate, to transpose psychoanalytic propositions back into philosophy, to “elevate them to the dignity of philosophical propositions”: in this way, one is able to discern the ex-timate philosophical kernel of psychoanalysis, since this transposition back into philosophy explodes the standard philosophical frame. This is what Lacan was doing all the time: reading hysteria or obsessional neurosis as a philosophical “attitude of thought towards reality” (the obsessional compulsion to think” if I stop thinking, I will cease to exist” — as the truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum), etc., etc. Are we thus not again engaged in “psychoanalyzing philosophy”? No, since this reference to madness is strictly internal to philosophy — the whole of modern philosophy, from Descartes onward, involves an inherent reference to the threat of madness, and is thus a desperate attempt to draw a clear line that separates the transcendental philosopher from the madman ( Descartes: how do I know I’m not hallucinating reality? Kant: how to delimit metaphysical speculation from Swedenborgian hallucinatory rambling? ).

This excess of madness against which modern philosophy fights is the very founding gesture of Cartesian subjectivity.

…At this point, anyone versed in postmodern deconstructionism will utter a sigh of bored recognition: of course, the Cartesian ego, the selftransparent subject of Reason, is an illusion; its truth is the decentered, split, finite subject thrown into a contingent, nontransparent context, and this is what psychoanalysis renders visible…. Things, however, are more complicated.

[…]

It is against this background that one should appreciate the paradoxical achievement of Lacan, which usually passes unnoticed even by his advocates: on the very behalf of psychoanalysis, he returns to the modern rationalist notion of subject. Philosophers and psychoanalysts, of course, promptly exclaim “We are here on our home terrain!” and proceed to reduce the Freudian subject to a psychological subject of introspection, to philosophical self-consciousness, to Nietzschean will to power…. Lacan’s underlying thesis here is even more radical than with the unconscious:

not only has the Freudian subject nothing to do with the self-transparent, unified self-consciousness, it is the Cartesian subject itself (and its radicalization in German Idealism, from Kant’s transcendental apperception to self-consciousness from Fichte onward) … the standard philosophy of subjectivity, … misrecognize the gap that separates the Cartesian subject (when it is “brought to its notion” with Kant) from the self-transparent ego, or from man, from the “human person.”

What they fail to see is that the Cartesian subject emerges precisely out of the “death of man” “transcendental subjectivity” is philosophical antihumanism at its purest.

One can see, now, why, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan asserts that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian cogito: the Freudian unconscious emerges through the very reduction of the “person’s” substantial content to the evanescent punctuality of the cogito.

In this precise sense, one could say that Martin Luther was the first great antihumanist: modern subjectivity is not announced in the Renaissance humanist celebration of man as the “crown of creation”, that is, in the tradition of Erasmus and others (to which Luther cannot but appear as a “barbarian”), but rather in Luther’s famous statement that

man is the excrement who fell out of God’s anus.

Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the “great chain of being,” as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as “out of joint,” as excluded from the “order of the things,” from the positive order of entities. For that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern subject is inherently excremental: there is no subjectivity proper without the notion that, at a different level, from another perspective, I am a mere piece of shit.

For Marx, the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly codependent to the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being (his creative power) as a commodity on the market, that is, to reduce the agalma, the treasure, the precious kernel of his being, to an object that can be bought for a piece of money — there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subject positive-substantial being to a disposable “piece of shit.”

In this case of the correlation between the Cartesian subjectivity and its excremental objectal counterpart, we are not dealing merely with an example of what Foucault called the empirico- transcendental couple that characterizes modern anthropology, but, rather, with the split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated:

If the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level of the enunciation, he is to be reduced to the “almost-nothing” of a disposable excrement at the level of the enunciated content.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way, the intervention of the subject undermines the standard premodern opposition between the universal order and the hubris of a particular force whose egotistic excess perturbs the balance of the universal order: “subject” is the name for the hubris, the excessive gesture, whose very excess grounds the universal order; it is the name for the pathological abject, clinamen, deviation from the universal order, that sustains this very universal order. The transcendental subject is the “ontological scandal,” neither phenomenal nor noumenal, but an excess that sticks out from the “great chain of being,” a hole, a gap in the order of reality, and, simultaneously, the agent whose “spontaneous” activity constitutes the order of (phenomenal) reality. If, for the traditional ontology, the problem was how to deduce chaotic phenomenal reality background image from the eternal order of the true reality (how to account for the gradual “degeneration” of the eternal order), the problem of the subject is that of the imbalanced excess, hubris, deviation, that sustains the order itself. The central paradox of the Kantian transcendental constitution is that the subject is not the absolute, the eternal grounding principle of reality, but a finite, temporal entity — precisely as such, it provides the ultimate horizon of reality.

The very idea of the universe, of the all of reality, as a totality that exists in itself, is thus rejected as a paralogism: what appears as an epistemological limitation of our capacity to grasp reality (the fact that we are forever perceiving reality from our finite, temporal standpoint), is the positive ontological condition of reality itself. Our philosophical and everyday common sense identifies the subject with a series of features: the autonomous source of spontaneous, self-originating activity (what German Idealists called “self-positing”); the capacity of free choice; the presence of some kind of “inner life” (fantasizing); etc.

Lacan endorses these features, but with a twist: the autonomous source of activity — yes, but only insofar as the subject displaces onto an Other the fundamental passivity of his being (when I am active, I am simultaneously interpassive, i.e., there is an Other who is passive for me, in my place, like the weepers, the hired women who cry for me at funerals in so-called “primitive” societies); the free choice — yes, but, at its most radical, the choice is a forced one (i.e., ultimately, I have a freedom of choice only insofar as I make the right choice); the presence of fantasizing — yes, but, far from coinciding with the subject in a direct experience of “inner life,” the fundamental fantasy is that which cannot ever be “subjectivized,” that which is forever cut off from the subject….

What Lacan focuses on is this specific twist, this additional turn of the screw that confronts us with the most radical dimension of subjectivity. How, then, does this endeavor of ours relate to Heidegger’s well known attempt to “think through” the horizon of subjectivity? From our perspective, the problem with Heidegger is, in ultima analisi, the following one:

the Lacanian reading enables us to unearth in the Cartesian subjectivity its inherent tension between the moment of excess (the “diabolical Evil” in Kant, the “night of the world” in Hegel) and the subsequent attempts to gentrify-domesticate-normalize this excess.

Again and again, post-Cartesian philosophers are compelled, by the inherent logic of their philosophical project, to articulate a certain excessive moment of “madness” inherent to cogito, which they then immediately endeavor to “renormalize.” And the problem with Heidegger is that his notion of modern subjectivity does not seem to account for this inherent excess — in short, this notion simply does not “cover” that aspect of cogito on account of which Lacan claims that cogito is the subject of the unconscious.

One of the basic presumptions of contemporary doxa is that the Cartesian cogito paved the way for the unheard-of progress of modern science that profoundly affected the everyday life of mankind. Today, however, it seems as if the Cartesian cogito itself has acquired the status of a prescientific myth, superseded by the very progress of knowledge it unleashed. For that reason, the title Cogito and the Unconscious is bound to give rise to two immediate associations: that it is to be understood as designating the antagonism between cogito (the transparent subject of self-consciousness) and the unconscious, its opaque Other that subverts the certitudes of consciousness; and, consequently, that cogito is to be repudiated as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. The specter of the “Cartesian paradigm” roams around, simultaneously proclaimed dead and feared as the ultimate threat to our survival.

In clear contrast to this predominant doxa, Lacan pleads for a psychoanalytic return to cogito.

Today’s predominant position involves the assertion of multiple subjectivities against the specter of (transcendental) Subject: the unified Subject, the topic of transcendental philosophy, the constitutive source of all reality, is dead (or so we are told), and the void of its absence is filled in by the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity– feminine, gay, ethnic….

One should thus abandon the impossible search for the Subject that is constitutive of reality, and, instead, focus attention on the diverse forms of asserting one’s subjectivity in our complex and dispersed postmodern universe….

What, however, if we perform the exact opposite of this standard operation, and endeavor to think a subject bereft of subjectivity (of the self-experience of a historical agent embedded in a finite horizon of meaning)?

What kind of monster remains when we subtract from the background image subject the wealth of self experience that constitutes subjectivity? The present volume provides an answer to this question: its underlying premise is that

the Cartesian subject is this monster, that it emerges precisely when we deprive the subject of all the wealth of the “human person.”

Notes […]

2. See Jacques Lacan, Érits: A Selection ( New York: Norton, 1977), 300.

3. For a more detailed account of this excess, see, in the present volume, Slavoj Žižek, The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater.

Laclau subject formation

if the subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all … [Radical contingency is possible only] if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. There acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself.

Laclau, Emancipation(s) 1996: 92.

Taken from: Jason Glynos and David Howarth,
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory.

Routledge, 2007 pp. 128-129.

chantal mouffe

New Statesman Published 19 November 2009

You argue that politicians should seek to create a “vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere”. What do you mean by that?

What I have in mind is not simply a space for the expression of any kind of disagreement, but a confrontation between conflicting notions about how to organise society. This does not exist in Britain at the moment, because no political party clearly challenges the hegemony of neoliberalism. There are, of course, disagreements about a variety of issues, but what is lacking is a debate about possible alternatives to the current neoliberal model of globalisation. We have been told by advocates of New Labour that politics now takes place at the centre and that the categories of right and left have become obsolete.

Did the BBC contribute towards the creation of such a public sphere by putting the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Question Time?

In such a situation, which I designate as “post-political”, an agonistic debate cannot exist, and it is not by inviting Nick Griffin on Question Time that things are going to change. That does not mean that he should not have been invited. Indeed, if the BNP is allowed to present candidates at elections, there is no reason to ban its representatives from taking part in public debates. To criticise the BBC for inviting him is typical of themoralistic attitude that has replaced the political confrontation between left and right. Instead of trumpeting their moral condemnation, Labour politicians should be inspired to examine why some of their supporters are being attracted by the BNP. But moral indignation is easier and more self-gratifying than auto-critique.

What concrete changes in British politics would get us closer to your ideal of agonistic democracy?

My agonistic model of democracy acknowledges the existence in social life of antagonistic conflicts, conflicts that concern the configuration of power relations and the way society should be organised. Those conflicts cannot be solved by deliberation, and they will never be eliminated. The aim of a pluralist democracy is to provide the institutions that will allow them to take an agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their position while recognising the right of their opponents to fight for theirs. An agonistic democracy requires the availability of a choice between real alternatives and that is precisely what is missing in Britain today. What would be needed to foster an agonistic democracy is a significant break from Third Way politics by Labour or the development of a new party with a clear left identity, like Die Linke in Germany.

You talk about a “post-political” era. What do you mean by this?

When I speak of the post-political, I am not agreeing with Third Way theorists on the need to think “beyond left and right” and the demise of the adversarial model of politics. We have no doubt been witnessing a blurring of the frontiers between left and right in recent decades, but this is not something that I celebrate. In my view, such a post-political situation represents a danger for democracy. I have tried in my recent work to show that our inability to envisage the problems with which we are confronted in a properly political way is the origin of a widespread disaffection with democratic institutions. This is a disaffection that, in several European countries, has led to the growing success of right-wing populist parties.

How has the global economic crisis influenced your thinking?

There was a moment at the beginning of the financial crisis when it seemed that the hegemony of neoliberalism had received a serious blow. After decades of being demonised, the state was suddenly called to the rescue. However, instead of implementing redistributive policies, the intervention of the state has been limited to rescuing the banks. There is, though, a positive aspect. I think there is an increasing awareness that the current model of development is unsustainable.

Interview by Nina Power

dislocation and identity

Discourse Theory in European Politics., Howarth, David and Jacob Torfing, 2005 Palgrave.

The dislocation of the discursive structure means that the subject always emerges as a split subject that might attempt to reconstruct a full identity through acts of identification. … When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure … The idea that the subject simultaneoulsy occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves. Here, the notion of dislocation provides a fruitful starting point.

The recurrent dislocations of the discursive system mean that the subject cannot be conceived in terms of a collection of structurally given positions. The discursive structure is disrupted and this prevents it from fully determining the identity of the subject. The does not mean we have to reintroduce an ahistorical subjectivity that is given outside the structure. The subject is internal to the structure, but it has neither a complete structural identity nor a complete lack of structural identity. Rather it is a failed structural identity. Because of dislocation, the subject emerges as a split subject, which is traumatized by its lack of fullness. The split subject might either disintegrate or try to recapture the illusion of a full identiy by means of identifying itself with the promise of fullness offered by different political projects. Hence a dislocated Russion party functionary might aim to reconstitute a full identity by identifying with the promise of Russion nationalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, or some religious movement. The split subject might identify with many different things a the same time. In this situation the hegemonic struggles will have to offer ways of articulating the different points of identification into a relatively coherent discourse. Social antagonism will play a crucial role for the attempt to unify dissimilar points of identification. The construction of a constitutive outside facilitates the displacement of responsibility for the split subject’s lack onto an enemy, which is held responsible for all evil. The externalization of the subject’s lack to an enemy is likely to fuel political action that will be driven by an illusionary promise: that the elimination of the other will remove the subject’s original lack 17.

ontologically incomplete structures

So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ’thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. an immersion that both shapes their identity and structures their practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ’space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Moreover, as these identifications are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses – some of which are excluded or repressed – and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise

In sum, social structures and forms of life are not only composed of relations of hierarchy and domination; even more pertinently, they are marked by gaps and fissures, and forged by political exclusions. And the making visible of these gaps in the structures through dislocatory experiences makes it possible for subjects to identify anew, and thus to act differently (79).

free decisions and actions are likened to miracles, which are characterized as an ability ‘to begin something new’, that is, to set in motion events and practices that cannot be controlled and whose consequences cannot be foretold. Indeed, echoing her once-mentor Heidegger, freedom involves the ‘abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed than cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality’ (Arendt cited in Zizek 2001:113) (79).

In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.

dislocation normative ethical aspects

…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices. The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new. Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation. Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be. The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)

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).

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

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

Practices and Regimes

A very simple paradigm for our objects of investigation in general, namely, the transformation and/or stabilization of regimes and practices.

Conditions of possibility and impossibility of regimes and practices demands setting out 4 ontological dimensions of social reality: SOCIAL, POLITICAL, IDEOLOGICAL and ETHICAL dimensions. 104

103 The simple paradigm: the transformation and/or stabilization of regimes and practices

A dislocatory experience, major economic depression, closing factories, spiralling inflation, rise in crime and social disorder etc. Social actors can interpret and respond in a variety of ways: passive resignation, despair and alienation, mounting anger leading to new grievances which can be articulated as claims and demands with latter may even lead to construction of new identities and subjectivities “Indeed there may emerge a radical political subjectivity and ideology that seeks to transform social relations along fundamentally different lines. Equally, of course, these developments may provoke renewed efforts by power holders and political elites to meet or deflect claims and demands, thus channelling and reshaping the grievances into the existing institutions and structures of power” (104).

A dislocatory experience such as a an economic depression may thus reveal the contingency of taken-for-granted social practices, highlighting the fact that the existing system represents only one way of organizing social relations amongst others.

[T]he way the dislocation is constructed and enacted does not follow from the simple fact of dislocation. It may be gentrified (or absorbed) by an existing social practice or regime, or it may provoke a political practice (112).

[D]islocation can be understood as a moment when the subject’s mode of being is experienced as disrupted. In this sense, then, we could say that dislocations are those occasions when a subject is called upon to confront the contingency of social relations more directly than at other times (110).

Social Practices:

ongoing, routinized forms of human and societal reproduction, repetitive activities that do not typically entail a strong notion of self-conscious reflexivity — what we might term a series of sedimented practices — which have been inscribed on our bodies and ingrained in our human dispositions – making breakfast, taking children to school, drving to work

Every social practice is also articulatory, that is all social practices comprise temporal and iterative activities, each iteration is slightly different each time requiring minor modifications and adjustments …

Dislocation can provoke political practices

Political Practices:

struggles that seek to challenge and transform the existing norms, institutions and practices — perhaps even the regime itself in the name of an ideal or principle. Political practices bring about a transformative effect on existing social practices, or entire regime of practices, “resulting in the institution and sedimentation of a new regime and the social practices that comprise it” (105).

Regimes: have a structuring function in the sense that they order a system of social practices, thus helping us to characterize the latter. A regime is always a regime of practices. The Thatcher regime, for example, comprises a heterogeneous set of practices linked to welfare, business, the passage of legislation

Regime
(Order, system, discursive formation)

structuration hegemony

Social practices <—————————-> Political practices