fantasy – Page 5 – objet (a)

objet (a)

Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder. Verso: 1996.

The symbolic order (the big Other) is organized around a hole in its very heart, around the traumatic Thing which makes it ‘non-all’; it is defined by the impossibility of attaining the Thing; however, it is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space for symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately ‘collapse’ into the designated reality — that is to say, the distance that separates ‘words’ from ‘things’ would disappear.

The void of the Thing is therefore both things at the same time: the inaccessible ‘hard kernel’ around which the symbolization turns, which eludes it, the cause of its failure, and the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility. That is the ‘loop’ of symbolization: the very failure of symbolization opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place. 145

Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan. Routledge, New York 2005.

The objet a is not an object we have lost, because then we would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for possessions, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is always something more we desire, we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there. This is one sense in which we can understand the Lacanian real as the void or abyss at the core of our being that we constantly try to fill out. The objet a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not the object itself but the function of masking the lack. 88

The objet a is the left-over of the real; it is that which escapes symbolization and is beyond representation.

Bruce Fink. The Lacanian Subject Princeton UP. 1995

Desire has no “object” as such. It has a cause, a cause that brings it into being, that Lacan dubs object (a), cause of desire.

Object (a) as the cause of desire is that which elicits desire: it is responsible for the advent of desire, for the particular form the desire in question takes, and for its intensity.

… a certain way a man has of looking at a woman may sum up for that woman everything she really wants in a man. (Not what she says she wants in a man, appealing to typical American discourse about needs: “I need affection, support, and encouragement.” For that is all conscious ego discourse: verily and truly the discourse of the Other, the social American Other.) That particular way of looking, that — to use an example — impertinent, unblinking way of looking, may be what really causes her to desire, stimulating in her a desire which cannot be extinguished by all the fine qualities revindicated by the ego: a man who is caring, a good father, a good provider, and so on and so forth. It is the desire-causing look that determines for her what Freud called “object choice” and what I will call the choice of companions. 91

The breast is not, during the first experience of satisfaction, constituted as an object at all, much less as an object that is not part of the infant’s body and that is largely beyond the infant’s control. It is only constituted after the fact, after numerous vain attempts by the infant to repeat that first experience of satisfaction when the mother is not present or refuses to nurse the child.

It is the absence of the breast, and thus the failure to achieve satisfaction, that leads to its constitution as an object as such, an object separate from and not controlled by the child. Once constituted … the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue, and mouth, or from his or her self.

Once the object is constituted, the “primal state” wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object (for the subject only comes into being when the lacking breast is constituted as object, and qua relation to that object), can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it.

object (a) is the leftover of that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization. It is a reminder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps yet to be found … It is the rem(a)inder of the lost hypothetical mother-child unity. 94

Deconstructive Genealogy/Onto-ethical critique

What then does the task of incorporating a self-reflexive and self-critical ethos into the concrete problematization and explanation of social phenomena entail? On the one hand, the ontological postulates of our approach concerning radical contingency have to inform the construction, investigation and explanation of social phenomenon (155).

We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself.

A Deconstructive Genealogy of a social practice or regime

The task here is to reactivate and make evident options that were foreclosed during the emergence of a practice – the clashes and forces which are repressed or defeated – in order to show how the present configuration of practices relies on exclusions that reveal the non-necessary character of the present social formation, and to explore the consequences and potential effects of such ‘repressions’. On the other hand,

Onto-ethical critique

In the mode of what we could call an onto-ethical critique the task is to critically interrogate the conditions under which a particular social practice or regime grips its subjects despite its non-necessary character. This mode of critique furnishes us with a means of critically interrogating the will to (fantasmatic) closure.

However, both modes of critique are informed by an ethos of exercising a fidelity to contingency itself, by displaying other possibilities for political decision and identification as well as other modalities of identification. Together they contribute to a practice of ethico-political interpretation. (155)

UK Audit Regime Fantasmatic Logic

… given the broader social context in which they operate. .. give a wider discursive context in which a culture of instrumentalist consumption and exchange dominates, it is not fanciful to suppose that key signifiers which exhibit a clearly positive valence for subjects, whether they are ‘quality’, ‘professionalism’, ‘knoledge’, ‘excellence’ or ‘freedom’, should be suitably rearticulated to better resonate with the market ethos (177).

Given a dislocation, and the drawing of a political frontier via logics of equivalence, key terms acquire 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.

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 processes by which certain key signifiers are detached from their signifieds and rearticulated to reinforce market-friendly equivalences.

Laclau’s article: Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?

Enjoyment of closure

While political logics can be resolved into two main components — the logics of equivalence and difference — the logic of fantasy is defined solely by the function of closure. Moreover, in concealing — suturing or closing off — the contingency of social relations, fantasy structures the subject’s mode of enjoyment in a particular way: let us call it an ‘enjoyment of closure’. Thus, ethics is directly linked to the logic of fantasy because, whatever its ontical instantiation, the latter (fantasy) has closure as its principle of intelligibility, whereas ethics is related to the ‘traversal’ of fantasy in the name of an openness to contingency corresponding to an ‘enjoyment of openness’. For us, then, fantasy and ethics pick out the subject as a subject of enjoyment. though social practices are capacious enough from our point of view to enable us to capture those aspects in which subjects are attentive to the radical contingency of social relations, it should be clear that fantasmatic logics are operative in social practices where the ideological dimension is foregrounded. however, we have also seen that fantasmatic logics are equally operative in political practices. But whereas political logics are used to explain the discursive shifts in the wake of a dislocatory moment, fantasmatic logics describe and account for the vector and modality of those discursive shifts, capturing the way in which the subject deals with the radical contingency of social relations as a subject of enjoyment (151-2).

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

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).

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”

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.

4 dimensions of socio-political reality

The irreducible presence of negativity means that any social edifice suffers from an inherent flaw or crack which may become visible in moments of dislocation. In such situations, new possibilities become available, enabling a subject to identify differently. Indeed there are a number of ways in which human beings can fill in the gap between experiencing dislocation and responding to it.

How dislocation of social relations 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. This entails the construction of political frontiers which divide the social space into opposed camps.105

But political practices also involve efforts on the part of the power bloc to disrupt the construction of antagonistic frontiers by breaking down the connections that are being forged between different demands.

… insofar as political movements are successful in challenging norms and institutions in the name of something new, political practices bring about a transformative effect on existing social practices. 105

dislocation is a concept we need in order to understand better the dimensions of the ideological and ethical.

dislocation: a moment when the subject’s mode of being is experienced as disrupted. Dislocations are those occasions when a subject is called upon to confront the contingency of social relations more directly than at other times 110.

There are 2 ways the subject can respond to a dislocation, either authentically or inauthentically. An authentic response is ethical, and an inauthentic response is ideological.

Political dimension

Ideological dimension Ethical dimension

Social dimension

The Social: forgetting the acts or decisions of ‘originary institution’ (which involved the rejection of those options which were actually attempted), … Reactivation (consists) of rediscovering, through the emergence of new antagonisms, the contingent nature of the so-called “objectivity” …

The Political:is about taking decisions in a contingent and ‘undecidable’ terrain, which involves radical acts of power and institution. The political is an ontological category distinct from the social, rather than an ontical or regional category.

The political starts with a demand that cannot be satisfied, if the demand publicly challenges the norm(s) of an institution

That is to say, a demand is political to the extent that it publicly contests the norms of a particular practice or system of practices in the name of a principle or ideal 115

… any political construction takes place against the background of a range of sedimented practices’, in which ‘the boundary of what is social and what is political in society is constantly displaced’ 116.

The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes the field of the “political”‘ Laclau cited 117.

The character of the political consists is one of contesting sedimented social relations in the name of new ones in situations where undecidability and power have been brought to the fore 117.

Both the political and the social presuppose a connection with 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 say that the political dimension comes to the fore. The two dimensions are always present in social reality … the boundary between the social and political is not fixed, but ina state of constant flux 117.

The Ideological

A dislocatory experience in the field of social relations can provoke a political response. However it can also provoke an ideological response which:

aims to repair and cover over the dislocatory event before it becomes the source of a new political construction … the ideological dimension signals the way in which the subject becomes complicit in covering over the radical contingency of social relations by identifying with a particular discourse. In this sense, ideology involves the way a subject misrecognizesits real conditions of existence. Indeed the hold of this misrecognition inures or insulates the subject from vagaries of the structural dislocation that always threatens to disrupt it (117).

What we term the ‘grip’ of ideology’thus comprises a myriad of practices through which individuals are sustaind and reproduced. The ideological can thereby induce the ‘forgetting of political origins’ and it can enable subjects to live as if their practices were natural.

The Ethical

In our view, the space of the ethical — like the political, social, and ideological — is understood in relation to the radical contingency of social relations and the way in which the subject ‘responds’ to this ‘ontological lack’. But we reserve the concepts of the ethical and the ideological to speak about the different ‘ways‘ in which a subject engages in practices, be they social or political … This means that the concept of ethics in our approach is not reducible or equivalent to questions about normativity … with questions of right conduct … or dispositions (on how) to live the good life …

Instead, in our view, 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? … modes of enjoyment are always embodied in material practices, and thus not completely reducible to conscious apprehension. (119)

The Logics pt2

… if naturalists offer the prospect of a causal explanation by subsuming the phenomena under universal laws or general mechanisms, and if hermeneuticists explain via the use of particular contextualized interpretations, our approach conceives of explanation in terms of a critical and articulated assemblage of logics. Our parsimonious theoretical grammar consisting of logics and dimensions thus contributes to a kind of ‘middle-range theorizing‘, which moves between empirical phenomena, consisting of self-interpretations and practices, and our underlying ontological premises. Our task is thus ‘to re-describe the ontical level in terms of distinctions brought about by [our] ontology’ (Laclau 2004 cited in Glynos et al: 164.)

Fantasmatic logic: the way the subject enjoys that covers over, conceals the radical contingency of social reality

… 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 159.

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.

Ontological Framework: 2 key dimensions

The ontological framework that makes possible our approach has two key dimensions, which centre on the notion of subjectivity. These are what might be called the hermeneutic-structural and the poststructural dimensions. 162.

Hermeneutic-structural: centrality of self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to everyday social habits

While the social logics structuring them (discursive practices) 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 … logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents 162.

poststructural: highlights that social structures are never complete in themselves “by foregrounding the dislocatory nature of the symbolic order (the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms) and thus the possible emergence of subjectivity as such 162.

The hermenuetic-structural dimensions fails to exhaust our particular ontological framework. It is at this point that political and fantasmatic logics come into play, thus enabling us to generate critical accounts of the constitution and dissolution of social structures themselves. This is because they assist in the process of revealing and explaining the non-necessary character of social logics and the practices they sustain and animate. 162

Social Political Fantasmatic Logics

(T)he discernement of social logics enables us to characterize practices or regimes by setting out the rules informing the practice and the kinds of entities populating it; political logics allow us to account for their historical emergence and formation by focusing on the conflicts and contestations surrounding their constitution; and fantasmatic logics furnish us with the means to explain the way subjects are gripped or held by a practice or regime of practices. Taken together, logics are by no means reducible to the empirical phenomena for which they are designed to account though neither are they accorded a fully transcendental role and function. … 213

(with regards to our social ontology) our commitment (is) to the radical contingency of social objectivity whether in the form of structures, agents or institutions, which in our view has important ramifications for our understanding of social change, political subjectivity, and the overall structuring of social relations (215).

Social science explanation involves the mobilization of three types of logics

Social Logics: not synonymous with causal mechanisms, capture the ‘patterning’ of social practices.

Regularity in dispersion: captures both the idea of social logics as a pattern and an open-endedness [139].

… rules are not reified entities that subsume practices and discourses; instead they enable us to describe and characterize the latter,

… logic is not ‘superhard’ whose identity can survive independently of the contexts within which it is instantiated or operative [140].

But social logics are not reducible to empirical contexts either. … in sum, we could say that with social logics, we aim to capture the ‘patterning’ of social practices, where such practices are understood in this regard as a function of the contextualized self-interpretations of key subjects. Social logics of competition … describe the way that actors interact with, and understand, each other as competitors. Or social logics of ‘individualization’ might capture those patterns of discursive articulations which, in the self-understanding of actors … isolating them from each other 140.

Political Logics: provide means to explore how social practices are instituted, contested, and defended — logic of equivalence, logic of difference— to investigate the way in which the traces of radical contingency associated with the original institution of practices and regimes can in certain circumstances be reactivated by subjects, thus enabling them to construct new meanings, practices and identities. “Since the very identity and significance of a social practice depends upon its institution, as well as the subsequent forgetting of its ignoble origins, political logics assist in the characterization of a practice or regime by showing how they emerge and are sedimented (106).

Political logics are most closely associated with the political dimension of social relations

Political logics are related to the institution of the social they are also related to it possible de-institution or contestation (142).

Fantasmatic Logics: account for the grip of an existing or anticipated social practice or regime. Fantasy is understood as the frame which structures the subject’s enjoyment.

looking at how subjects are gripped in different ways by the discourses with which they identify.

With the logic of fantasy we aim to capture a particularly powerful way in which subjects are rendered complicit in concealing or covering over the radical contingency of social relations.

In sum, by invoking fantasmatic logics we suggest that one condition for subscribing to an existing or promised social practice concerns the extent to which it can tap into the subject’s existing mode of enjoyment and thus fantasmatic frame. When working in tandem with political logics, fantasmatic logics may be invoked to help explain why certain demands — or responses to demands — succeed in gripping or interpellating a particular constituency. Equally, they can be mobilized to account for the way explicit challenges to existing social structures or institutions are blocked (107).

The 3 logics are articulated together to account for a problematized phenomenon 133

.... our idea of a logic is not only set against the universalizing and necessitarian tendencies of the causal law paradigm, but it is also opposed to the particularised tendencies of the interpretivist paradigm (135)

… the logic of a practice comprises the rules or grammar of the practice, as well as the conditions which make the practice both possible and vulnerable 136.

Logic of the market

Clearly the way we conceptualize the market depends on whether it is a supermarket, a market in energy supply, a market in educational goods, and so on … the meaning of expressions such as ‘efficient allocation of resources’, ‘fair price’ or ‘supply and demand’ depends on the way we understand the key actors and terms associated with the specific market paradigm we have adopted. There is a clear relational network at stake here which the concept of a logic must try to capture and name. Crucial in this respect is the way actors themselves interpret their roles and activities 136.

In abstract terms .. a particular market comprises a particular set of rules or grammar that govern the arrangements and meanings that bring together buyers and sellers of goods and services.

Hence the logic of the market comprises:

– subject positions (buyers and sellers), objects (commodities and means of exchange), and a system of relations and meanings connecting subjects and objects, as well as certain sorts of institutional parameters (such as a well functioning legal system).

However, our concept of a logic also aims to capture the conditions that make possible the continued operation of a particular market practice, as well as its potential vulnerabilities. And this involves answering a set of connected questions: What were the conditions under which the institution of this market was made possible? What political struggles preceded its institution? What processes ensure its maintenance or question its hegemonic status? Logics must also provide the means with which to answer these sorts of questions 136-7.