Influenced principally by Heidegger, Lacan, and Laclau and Mouffe, but also drawing on Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, we put forward an ‘ontology of lack’, which is a negative ontology premised on the radical contingency of social relations. Stated simply, we take this axiom to imply that any system or structure of social relations is constitutively incomplete or lacking for a subject. … every social identity is always-already dislocated. On the one hand we take this to be a strictly ontological understanding of dislocation, in which each and every symbolic order is penetrated by an impossibility that has to be filled or covered-over for it to constitute itself. The category of dislocation can also be understood, however, in more ontical terms: moments in which the subject’s mode of being is disrupted by an experience that cannot be symbolized within and by the pre-existing means of discursive representation. From this perspective, practices are governed by a dialectic defined by incomplete structures on the one hand, and the collective acts of subjective identification that sustain or change those incomplete structures on the other. (14)
Category: lack
Thrown Subjects pt.2 Subject of Enjoyment
Practices of identity reproduction and new acts of identification also presuppose a subject of enjoyment that is structured around certain fantasies. Fantasy is a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other. When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject ”via the enjoyment it procures” to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus confering identity … the categories of enjoyment and fantasy are relevant for thinking about issues of ideology and ethics. (130)
Cause
In short, ’cause’ emerges as relevant at those moments when our conceptual field is revealed as deficient, indicating the irreducibility of the real to the concept (101).
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”
Negativity in the ontological sense
Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism.” Parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 56-71.
Negativity in the ontological sense as that which, by dislocating our sedimented positivities, ‘shows the limits of the constitution of objectivity’ … negativity refers to the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of linguistic creatures, this does not mean, however, that it should be understood as a mere destructive force. By inscribing a lack in our dislocated positivities it fuels the desire for new social and political constructions. Negativity … indicates the dimension of ‘becoming, a productivity that engenders and ruins every distinct form as a creative destructive restlessness’. It is neither an object nor its negation: it is the condition of possibility/impossibility of the constitution of objects. 56
post-fantasmatic radical democratic ethos
[T]he following question posed by Badiou strikes me as extremely important:
There is always one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known?
Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 50.
From the point of a radical democratic ethics it is not enough to encourage fidelity to an event (in practice, any event), but to cultivate an openness towards event-ness. Such an openness, premised on a Lacanian negative ontology and alert to the ever-present play of negativity and disaster, will be more adequately equipped to allow and encourage the pursuit of a better future within a political framework founded on the awareness of the dangers of absolutization. In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutization only within the framework of another fidelity, fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social; within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other. This fidelity is not a one-off, a rare occurrence, it is not tied to a great politics of nostalgia, but implies a permanent democratic revolution in our political ethos, a skeptical passion that will have to be re-inscribed in every political act: it cannot be reduced to a fidelity to particular acts, not even those associated with the democratic revolution, but extends its scope to an acknowledgment of the post-fantasmatic political potential opened by them in the direction of a continuous radicalization of democracy. Badiou is right that today ‘democracy’ is one of the central organizers of consensus. And this is clearly the consensus of post-democracy. It is obviously necessary to question and interrogate this anti-political normalization of democracy. The only consistent way of doing that, the only way of making democracy relevant again, without reoccupying the dangerous ground of utopian absolutizations, is by re-activating the radical potential of the democratic revolution, by acknowledging event-ness and negativity as the conditions of possibility/impossibility of all transformative political action: “It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned — that something else is possible, but not that everyting is possible.” * (68-69)
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).
Practices and Regimes
A very simple paradigm for our objects of investigation in general, namely, the transformation and/or stabilization of regimes and practices.
Conditions of possibility and impossibility of regimes and practices demands setting out 4 ontological dimensions of social reality: SOCIAL, POLITICAL, IDEOLOGICAL and ETHICAL dimensions. 104
103 The simple paradigm: the transformation and/or stabilization of regimes and practices
A dislocatory experience, major economic depression, closing factories, spiralling inflation, rise in crime and social disorder etc. Social actors can interpret and respond in a variety of ways: passive resignation, despair and alienation, mounting anger leading to new grievances which can be articulated as claims and demands with latter may even lead to construction of new identities and subjectivities “Indeed there may emerge a radical political subjectivity and ideology that seeks to transform social relations along fundamentally different lines. Equally, of course, these developments may provoke renewed efforts by power holders and political elites to meet or deflect claims and demands, thus channelling and reshaping the grievances into the existing institutions and structures of power” (104).
A dislocatory experience such as a an economic depression may thus reveal the contingency of taken-for-granted social practices, highlighting the fact that the existing system represents only one way of organizing social relations amongst others.
[T]he way the dislocation is constructed and enacted does not follow from the simple fact of dislocation. It may be gentrified (or absorbed) by an existing social practice or regime, or it may provoke a political practice (112).
[D]islocation can be understood as a moment when the subject’s mode of being is experienced as disrupted. In this sense, then, we could say that dislocations are those occasions when a subject is called upon to confront the contingency of social relations more directly than at other times (110).
Social Practices:
ongoing, routinized forms of human and societal reproduction, repetitive activities that do not typically entail a strong notion of self-conscious reflexivity — what we might term a series of sedimented practices — which have been inscribed on our bodies and ingrained in our human dispositions – making breakfast, taking children to school, drving to work
Every social practice is also articulatory, that is all social practices comprise temporal and iterative activities, each iteration is slightly different each time requiring minor modifications and adjustments …
Dislocation can provoke political practices
Political Practices:
struggles that seek to challenge and transform the existing norms, institutions and practices — perhaps even the regime itself in the name of an ideal or principle. Political practices bring about a transformative effect on existing social practices, or entire regime of practices, “resulting in the institution and sedimentation of a new regime and the social practices that comprise it” (105).
Regimes: have a structuring function in the sense that they order a system of social practices, thus helping us to characterize the latter. A regime is always a regime of practices. The Thatcher regime, for example, comprises a heterogeneous set of practices linked to welfare, business, the passage of legislation
Regime
(Order, system, discursive formation)
structuration hegemony
Social practices <—————————-> Political practices
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)