Category: lacan

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

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)

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”

Identity and Identification

As Laclau puts it, ‘the incorporation of the individual into the symbolic order occurs through identifications.  The individual is not simply an identity within the structure but is transformed by it into a subject, and this requires acts of identification’ (Laclau 1990, 211).

… the subject of identity is linked to the social dimension, while the subject of identification is linked to the political dimension.

It is because the master signifier simultaneously promises a meaning, and yet withholds it, that subjects can be politically engaged.  They are engaged in a search for identity and a struggle over meaning

Identification is linked to the enigmatic dimension of the signifier, the dimension of the signifier that functions as a raw question mark that troubles the subject, and defies his or her attempts to discern its meaning.

In the case of an ecological identification in the wake of a dislocation, the signifier ‘ecology’ may be conceived by a subject … as an enigma that promises meaning, as the site of a hegemonic struggle over meaning.

Here ecology’ holds the place of the gap separating ‘ecology’ from its many possible meanings and associated identities, thus making political struggle possible.  When this dimension of the signifier emerges (master signifier for Lacan and empty signifier for Laclau), it signals the introjection of this signifier as ‘enigma-plus-promise’ that accounts for a common identification without (yet) a common identity.  It literally marks the incompleteness of the symbolic order, that is, the structural lack that inhabits the order of discourse, and yet it also engages subjects in a concerted effort to decipher it, thereby uniting them  (130).

Identity is therefore conceived as the meaning attributed to ecology, while identification is conceived in terms of the enigmatic pure signifier of ‘ecology’.

Thrown subjects

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

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

Lack

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

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

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)