hegemony

Next 4 years under Biden

The Election Is Over. Here’s a Vision From the Left for the Next Four Years.
Organizers and thinkers on where we are in the major fights of our moment—from prison abolition to climate justice and the housing crisis—and where we go next. Melissa Gira Grant, Nick Martin, Katie McDonough, J.C. Pan

We have a new president, but little else has changed in terms of the work ahead. A Biden administration may be more vulnerable to pressure from the left, but its positions on climate disaster, police and private right-wing violence, mass precarity and poverty, and other compounding crises of our moment will do little to pull us out of the fire. Our elite institutions are largely incapable of responding to the urgency of the moment or the left movements rising to meet it.

Benanav

Verso Live October 29, 2020 Figure out whether automation story: why is there few jobs, look at manufacturing sector. We can look at stats to see how many robots. Claim of industry is that its already happened.

DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION: many countries, Mexico has been de-industrializing, even China has been de-industrializing. If were the case that automation is taking off, you would expect labour productivity to be rising, this is counter-intuitive, but stats, the remaining workers appearing to produce more output per hour, but this isn’t happening. Labour productivity is not increasing.

More and more is being produced with fewer workers. Technology is always transforming, certain jobs are disappearing due to automation i.e. travel agents, but it’s due to OVERCAPACITY and Overproduction, so many suppliers have come online, its hard for producer to expand its output without taking some from others, heightened competition, lots of pressure to hold worker wages down. Hyper competition at the global level is expression of this OVER-capacity.

logics of critical explanation

Course: Applying Discourse Theory

Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory
Published October 1, 2007 by Routledge, New York
Authors: Jason Glynos and David Howarth

Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s (hereafter: GH) have written a comprehensive theoretical tract outlining how one would go about investigating concrete empirical phenomena using a poststructuralist discourse analytical framework. Heavily influenced by a Lacanian inspired discourse analysis that emerged out of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist intervention Hegemony and Socialist Strategy back in 1985, GH’s intention is to illustrate how a robust, empirically grounded political analysis can be conducted using a combination of three different ‘logics’ of investigation. These three logics are, in order of application: a social logic which characterizes relevant social practices and clusters of practices or regimes. The social logic sets out to answer the query, what is the object of investigation? Next is a political logic which is a genealogical investigation that reveals why a social practice or regime became institutionalized (sedimented) in the social fabric and, alternatively, the possibility it can become ‘dislocated’ through counter-hegemonic struggles. Thirdly and to this reviewer most interestingly, there are fantasmatic logics that locate how subjects are ‘gripped’ by ideology and thus seemingly are attached to social practices that seem to work against their own interests.

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. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ‘space’ or ‘gap’ of social strucures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Morevover, as these identification 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 (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.

Glynos, Howarth 2007: 79

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

Glynos, Howarth 2007: 155

genealogy of discourse theory

Jacob Torfing, “Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth, Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave, 2005. pp. 1-32.

As against Hume, it was Kant who argued that “perception and experience of empirical phenomena are made possible by some pregiven categories in the human mind.” Discourse theory agrees that we should focus on the conditions of possibility of our perceptions, utterances, and actions, rather than on the factual immediacy or hidden meaning of the social world.” (10)

There have been many attempts in the history of Western thought to explain the course of history, the structure of society, and the identities of subjects and objects by reference to an underlying essence which is given in a full presence and plenitude and not implicated in any historical processes of structuration. God, Reason, Humanity, Nature, and the Iron Laws of Capitalism are some of the celebrated candidates for this transcendental determining centre … Discourse theory aims to draw out the consequences of giving up the idea of a transcendental centre. The result is not total chaos and flux, but playful determination of social meaning and identities within a relational system which is provisionally anchored in nodal points that are capable of partially fixing a series of floating signifiers. (13).

Two differences between the classical transcendentalism of Kant and poststructuralist discourse theory:

1. The conditions of possibility are not invariable and ahistorical as Kant suggest, but subject to political struggles and historical transformation. As such, discourse theory adopts a quasi-transcendental view of the conditions of possibility.

2. Discourse theory does not see the conditions of possibility as an inherent feature of the human mind, but takes them to be a structural feature of contingently constructed discourses. Discourse theory focuses neither on observable facts nor on deep meanings, but on the historical formation of the discursive conditions of social being.

on the subject

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, or, as Louis Althusser phrased it: to a ‘mere bearer of the structure’. The idea that the subject simultaneously 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.

daly on Žižek

Daly, Glyn. “The Materialism of Spirit – Žižek and the Logics of the Political” International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol1.4

Class has little/no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian picture of identity that does not reflect the true nature of contingent undecidable identities and their basic materialism.

But it is precisely this distinction that is under question. To affirm the authenticityof contingent-plural identities against the falsity of class necessity is perhaps already to adopt a certain infra-political gaze and to stand inside the reflexive economy of modern spirit (Žižek in Butler et al, 2000: 319-320; Žižek, 2004: 99-102; Žižek, 2006: 55-56).

Viewed from the negative, class does not appear as a positive position (endowed with a historic destiny etc.) but rather as a non-position: the impoverished, the destitute, the ‘wretched of the earth’ and all those who do not ‘count’ — a vanishing-point of value in order for the system of socio-economic valuation to function. Along the lines of Badiou, class stands for the void that is constitutive of multiplicity. It is the alchemical caput mortuum (death’s head) of Lacan: i.e. something which is itself empty of value but which, like a catalyst, is essential for the substance of value to be produced.

So while postmarxism is right to critique the positivistic status of class, what it overlooks is a view of class as an inherent and fundamental symptom of a systemic process in which capitalism tries to realize itself as a necessity – a kind of underlying dark matter that supports and stabilizes the positive forms of the capitalist universe. And it is precisely in its condition of symptom, of necessary anomaly, that the contingent nature of capitalist necessity is shown.

This also indicates a central problem with the idea of radical democracy: that is, it does not provide any real or systematic account of today’s symptoms or of those who are in a position to hold up the mirror to, to show the truth of, today’s cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be established between all disaffected groups within the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in endless cycles of infra-political networking. Political subjectivity would consequently become hyper-active – endlessly fascinated by its own positions, continually refining itself and so forth – but incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character of all political engagement, repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal, always reinforcing its own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another and so on. It is on this basis that Norval (2004) draws direct, and rather uncomfortable, parallels between radical democracy and a Habermasian deliberative democracy (7-8).

Tariq Ali

immanence antagonism

Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics. 31:4. 2001. pp. 3-10.

What is important, however, in reference to these theological debates are the alternatives that remain in case the immanent route is not followed. For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying and explaining it but a brute and irreducible fact. As the chasm separating good and evil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanent development the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity which cannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzschean assertiveness (5).

In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theological concept and became fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, with the modern turn, the kernel of what we can call “social antagonism.” What the latter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture — radical in the sense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity which would reduce the terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement — for example, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence. Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonism — and its corollary, which is radical social division — that we are confronted with forms of social action that can truly be called political (5).

In the words of Marx: “By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” To put it in terms close to Hardt and Negri’s: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within an objective social order which is entirely the product of capitalism—which is, in turn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces. But, precisely for that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subject entails the end of politics—that is, the beginning of the withering away of the State and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted by Marxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.

As for the second revolution—the political one—its distinctive feature is, for Marx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and the particularism of the agent carrying it out. Marx describes this asymmetry in nonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and that allows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to present itself as a universal liberator — universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.

Here we find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either we assert the possibility of a universality which is not politically constructed and mediated, or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on a historical construction out of heterogeneous elements. Hardt and Negri accept the first alternative without hesitation. If, conversely, we accept the second, we are on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony. (Gramsci is another thinker for whom—understandably, given their premises—Hardt and Negri show little sympathy.) (5)

Laclau, Ernesto.”The Future of Radical Democracy.” Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005. pp. 256-262).

… antagonism is irreducible, in which case social objectivity cannot be fully constituted. This explains why antagonisms cannot be conceived as dialectical contradictions. For the latter, negativity is only present to be superseded by a higher form of objectivity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and Marx’s classless society are the names of a fullness which makes it possible to detect the ultimate meaning of all previous stages and thus, to transform negativity in the apparential form of a deeper objectivity. What happens if, instead, we avoid this reductionist operation and take antagonisms at face value. In that case … what cannot be fully constituted is objectivity as such (257).

Every identity is a threatened identity … If an identity was not threatened by an antagonistic relation, it would be what it is as a pure objective datum. Between what it ontically is and the ontological fact that it is, there would be no distance. It would be mere positivity, closed in itself. Antagonism is what creates a gap between these two dimensions.

This distance between fullness of being and actual being is what we call lack. Representation of that distance, however, requires not only the discursive presence of actual being but also of the fullness of being.

But this creates an immediate problem, for fullness of being is that which is constitutively absent. The difficulty can be summarised in the following terms: the distance between full and actual being needs to be represented — which involves the two poles being somehow present in such representation — but one of the two cannot have a DIRECT representation because it operates through its very absence. Actual beings are the only means of representation. In such conditions, representation of the fullness of being can only take place if there is an essential unevenness among actual beings — that is, if an ontic particularity becomes the body through which an incommensurable fullness ‘positivises’ itself. This means that one element assumes an ontolgical function, which far exceeds, its ontic content. This is the moment of EXCESS. As we see, we are not dealing with an excess which is opposed to lack, but with one which directly results from the latter.

zizek reply to butler criticism of symbolic

So when when Butler asks the rhetorical question

Why should we conceive of universality as an empty ‘place’ which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event? Is it empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges, and where is the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges? (JB, 34)

I fully endorse her implicit stance. My answer … is: Lacan’s ‘primoridal repression’ of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place … This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. … And here I am even tempted to read Butler against herself — say, against her sympathetic recapitulation of Laclau

Inevitable as it is that a political organization will posit the possible filling of that [empty place of the universal] as an ideal, it is equally inevitable that it will fail to do so (JB 32).

It is in endorsing this logic of the ideal to be endlessly approximated that I see the underlying Kantianism of both Butler and Laclau (257).

Here I think it is crucial to defend the key Hegelian insight directed against the Kantian position of the universal a priori frame distorted by empirical ‘pathological’ conditions … it is not enough to posit a universal formal criterion and then to agree that, owing to contingent empirical distortions, reality will never fully rise to its level. The question is rather

how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame itself emerge? With regard to the notion of hegemony, this means that it is not enough to assert the gap between the empty universal signifier and the particular signifiers that endeavour to fill its void — the question to be raised is, again, how, through what operation of exclusion, does this void itself emerge?

For Lacan, this preceding loss (the loss of das Ding, what Freud called ‘primary repression’), is not the loss of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing (Lacan’s definition of sublimation) in a way gives body to this loss. What this means is that the Lacanian Real, the bar of impossibility it stands for, does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic ‘substance’ that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded.

In other words, far from signalling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance, the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack.

So — to conclude with Kierkegaard, to whom Laclau refers: ‘the moment of decision is the moment of madness’ precisely in so far as there is no big Other to provide the ultimate guarantee, the ontological cover for the subject’s decision (258).

Zizek is capitalism the only game in town

… while this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from ‘essentialist’ Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, an so on, to the postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resignation at its heart — the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime (95).

postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’; the fact remains, however, that it does NOT in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.

Regarding JB:

[Butler] is well aware that universality is unavoidable, and her point is that — while, of course, each determinate historical figure of universality involves a set of inclusions/exclusions — universality simultaneously opens up and sustains the space for questioning these inclusions/exclusions, for ‘renegotiating’ the limits of inclusion/exclusion as part of the ongoing ideologico-political struggle for hegemony. The predominant notion of ‘universal human rights’, for instance, precludes — or, at least reduces to a secondary status — a set of sexual practices and orientations; and it would be too simplistic to accept the standard liberal game of simply insisting that one should redefine and broaden our notion of human rights to include also all these ‘aberrant’ practices — what standard liberal humanism underestimates is the extent to which such exclusions are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusion in ‘human rights’ would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what ‘humanity’ in ‘human rights’ means (101-102).

This passage from ‘essentialist’ marxism to postmodern contingent politics (in Laclau), or the passage from sexual essentialism to contingent gender-formation (in Bulter), or — a further example — the passage from metaphysician to ironist in Richard Rorty, is not a simple epistemological progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not that before, people were ‘stupid essentialists’ and believed in naturalized sexuality, while now they know that genders are performatively enacted; one needs a kind of metanarrative that explains this very passage from essentialism to the awareness of contingency: the Heideggerian notion of the epochs of Being, or the Foucauldian notion of the shift in the predominant épistème, or the standard sociological notion of modernization, or a more Marxist account in which this passage follows the dynamic of capitalism

So, again, crucial in Laclau’s theoretical edifice is the paradigmatically Kantian co-dependency between the ‘timeless’ existential a priori of the logic of hegemony and the historical narrative of the gradual passage from the ‘essentialist’ traditional Marxist class politics to the full assertion of the contingency of the struggle for hegemony … The role of this evolutionary narrative is precisely to resolve the above-mentioned ambiguity of the formal universal frame (of the logic of hegemony) — implicitly to answer the question: is this frame really a non-historical universal, or simply the formal structure of the specific ideologico-political constellation of western late capitalism? The evolutionary narrative mediates between these two options, telling the story of how the universal frame was ‘posited as such’, become the explicit structuring principle of ideologico-political life. The question none the less persists: is this evolutionary passage a simple passage from error to true insight? Is it that each stance fits its own epoch, so that in Marx’s time ‘class essentialism’ was adequate, while today we need the assertion of contingency? Or should we combine the two in a proto-Hegelian way, so that the very passage from the essentialist ‘error’ to the ‘true’ insight into radical contingency is historically conditioned (in Marx’s time, the ‘essentialist illusion’ was ‘objectively necessary’, while our epoch enables the insight into contingency)? This proto-Hegelian solution would allow us to combine the ‘universal’ scope of ‘validity’ of the concept of hegemony with the obvious fact that its recent emergence is clearly linked to today’s specific social constellation: although socio-political life and its structure were always-already the outcome of hegemonic struggles, it is none the less only today, on our specific historical constellation — that is to say, in the ‘postmodern’ universe of globalized contingency — that the radically contingent-hegemonic nature of the political processes is finally allowed to ‘come/return to itself’, to free itself of the ‘essentialist’ baggage … (106-107).

This solution, however, is problematic for at least two reasons. [1. it’s Hegelian, Laclau hates Hegel]

2. … from my perspective, today’s postmodern politics of multiple subjectivities is precisely not political enough, in so far as it silently presupposes a non-thematized, ‘naturalized’ framework of economic relations. … One should assert the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles and the totality of Capital are not opposed … today’s capitalism, rather, provides the very background and terrain for the emergence of shifting-dispersed-contingent-ironic-and so on, political subjectivities. Was it not Deleuze who in a way made this point when he emphasized how capitalism is a force of ‘deterritorialization’? And was he not following Marx’s old thesis on how, with capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’?

… MY KEY POINT … the need to distinguish more explicitly between contingency/substitutibility within a certain historical horizon and the more fundamental exclusion/foreclosure that grounds this very horizon. When Laclau claims that ‘if the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems’, does he not — potentially at least — conflate two levels,

the struggle for hegemony within a certain horizon
and the more fundamental exclusion that sustains this very horizon?

And when Butler claims, against the Lacanian notion of constitutive bar or lack, that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted thorugh exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, does she not – potentially at least – conflate two levels,

the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions within a given field (say, of today’s late capitalist society)
and a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field.

(107-108)

laclau on sexual d and hegemony

Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 44-89.

It is precisely because I fully appreciate the potentialities of the notion of ‘parodic performances’ for a theory of hegemony, that I find some of Butler’s questions rather perplexing. She asks: “If sexual difference is “real” in the Lacanian sense, does that mean that it has no place in hegemonic struggles?’ I would argue that exactly BECAUSE sexual difference is real and not symbolic, because it is not necessarily linked to any aprioristic pattern of symbolic positions, that the way is open to the kind of historicist variation that Butler asserts — and that a hegemonic game becomes possible. The same goes for some of Butler’s other questions: ‘Does a logic that invariably results in aporias produce a kind of stasis that is inimical to the project of hegemony?’ If there were no aporia, there would be no possibility of hegemony, for a necessary logic inimical to hegemonic variations would impose itself, entirely unchallenged. We have here the same mutually subverting relationship between necessity and impossibility to which we have been referring from the beginning (note 39, 88).

If the representation was total — if the representative moment was entirely transparent to what it represents — the ‘concept’ would have an unchallenged primacy over the ‘name’ (in Saussurean terms: the signified would entirely subordinate to itself the order of the signifier). But in that case there would be no hegemony, for its very requisite, which is the production of tendentially empty signifiers, would not obtain. In order to have hegemony we need the sectorial aims of a group to operate as the name for a universality transcending them — this is the synecdoche constitutive of the hegemonic link. But if the name (the signifier) is so attached to the concept (signified) that no displacement in the relation between the two is possible, we cannot have any hegemonic rearticulation. The idea of a totally emancipated and transparent society, from which all tropological movement between its constitutive parts would have been elmininated, involves the end of all hegemonic relation (and also, as we will see later, of all democratic politics).

what is critique

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader 2003. Sara Salih editor.
online version

For the question, “what are we to do?” presupposes that the “we” has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited. But if those very formations and delimitations have normative consequences, then it will be necessary to ask after the values that set the stage for action, and this will be an important dimension of any critical inquiry into normative matters.

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.

To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.

In Foucault’s view, following Kant in an attenuated sense, the act of consent is a reflexive movement by which validity is attributed to or withdrawn from authority. But this reflexivity does not take place internal to a subject. For Foucault, this is an act which poses some risk, for the point will not only be to object to this or that governmental demand, but to ask about the order in which such a demand becomes legible and possible. And if what one objects to are the epistemological orderings that have established the rules of governmental validity, then saying “no” to the demand will require departing from the established grounds of its validity, marking the limit of that validity, which is something different and far more risky than finding a given demand invalid. In this difference, we might say, one begins to enter a critical relation to such orderings and the ethical precepts to which they give rise. The problem with those grounds that Foucault calls “illegitimate” is not that they are partial or self-contradictory or that they lead to hypocritical moral stands. The problem is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself. How does one call into question the exhaustive hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism. The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?

“Critique,” he writes, “will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability [l’indocilité réfléchie].” If it is an “art” in his sense, then critique will not be a single act, nor will it belong exclusively to a subjective domain, for it will be the stylized relation to the demand upon it. And the style will be critical to the extent that, as style, it is not fully determined in advance, it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question. So the stylization of this “will” will produce a subject who is not readily knowable under the established rubric of truth. More radically, Foucault pronounces:

“Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation [désassujetiisement] of the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (32, 39)

The politics of truth pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? Is this not precisely what is meant by “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of…the politics of truth”(my translation)?

At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing. Deriving a sense of critique from Kant, Foucault poses the question that is the question of critique itself: “Do you know up to what point you can know?” “Our liberty is at stake.” Thus, liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes place, the moment where a certain questioning practice begins that takes the following form: “‘What, therefore, am I’, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?”(46) Another way of putting this is the following: “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” If, in posing this question, liberty is at stake, it may be that staking liberty has something to do with what Foucault calls virtue, with a certain risk that is put into play through thought and, indeed, through language where the contemporary ordering of being is brought to its limit.

The critic thus has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” but also “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.” So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands. What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.” (58)

Indeed, another way to talk about this dynamic within critique is to say that rationalization meets its limits in desubjugation. If the desubjugation of the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks precisely the fragility and transformability of the epistemics of power.

How would this particular use of fiction relate to Foucault’s notion of critique? Consider that Foucault is trying to understand the possibility of desubjugation within rationalization without assuming that there is a source for resistance that is housed in the subject or maintained in some foundational mode. Where does resistance come from? Can it be said to be the upsurge of some human freedom shackled by the powers of rationalization? If he speaks, as he does, of a will not to be governed, how are we to understand the status of that will?

[…] he has shown us that there can be no ethics, and no politics, without recourse to this singular sense of poiesis. The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavors to form itself. Engaged in “arts of existence,” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.

We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of “self,” and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former. The self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.

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).