logics – objet (a)

bosteels logic of capital

Traversing the Heresies: Interview with Bruno Bosteels

On October 14, 2012, Alec Niedenthal and Ross Wolfe interviewed Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University

The events of 1968 were definitely pivotal globally for the Left. The reason why 1968 in France was a key moment was because the so-called theories, what people now call “French theory” and the philosophical elaborations and politics stemming from it, all share this interest in “the event.”

Whereas Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and Deleuze were once read as philosophers of “difference,” now it is common to read them as philosophers of the event—that is, 1968. So, we might ask, “Why is it an important moment or event in the history of France or Mexico or other places where, in the same year, there were riots, uprisings, popular movements, rebellions, and so on?” But also, “What does it mean to think about ‘the event’ philosophically?”

The theoretical traditions that led to this pivotal moment have a longer history in France than in other places where one must search obscure sources to get to the same theoretical problem.

Within the French context, for institutional, historical, and genealogical reasons we have a well-defined debate that can be summed up, as what Badiou himself called “The last great philosophical battle”: the battle between Althusser and Sartre, between structuralism and humanism, or between structure and subject.

Ross Wolfe: Much of this French theory centers on a struggle between structure and subject and the idea that events do not necessarily happen autonomously. The question you seem to be asking is,

How do we understand the given circumstances that are not of our own making, but in which historical action takes place? Is it possible for a political subject to intervene in history?

In a recent, highly philosophical book on Marx, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval propose that there are two major logics in Marx that are at loggerheads: There is the logic of capital, which is a logic of systematic constraints and turnover, and there is the logic of struggle. [Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom Karl 2012]

They apply Hegelian logic to the way that capitalism posits its own presuppositions, claiming that something that enables capitalism is in fact already the product of capitalism, logically if not historically. There is this kind of spiraling movement in which it seems the logic of capital is unbreakable and that human subjects are only bearers of these functions coming out of the immanent logic of capital’s own self-positing.

On the other hand, there is what Dardot and Laval call the historical logic or a logic of class struggle that is contingent, working upon the gaps or moments of breakdown within the economic logic of capital itself. They claim that it all comes down to the question of whether Marx himself (they deal far less with Marxism) was able to reconcile the logic of struggle and the logic of capitalism.

They believe that “communism” is almost like an imaginary kind of glue that (even though it is impossible) pretends that these two things can be held together.

One of the interesting things about Dardot and Laval’s philosophical reconstruction of the French debate over the competing logics in Marx is their return to the legacy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. They see two major paths: there is either a more idealist, Fichtean approach or a more materialist, Feuerbachian approach.

One path, which is the path of someone like Bruno Bauer or Max Stirner, is to insist upon the subject’s capacity for self-positing. The subject can, in a sense, almost posit itself into existence; it can posit its own presuppositions almost boundlessly. On the other hand there is the more materialist school, which insists on the givenness of external factors that are not the result of the subject’s own positing, but instead precede the subject. Marx, in their account, tries to hold these things together. It is in that particular moment, when Marx seeks to articulate and overcome the idealist and materialist readings of the Hegelian notion of positing the presuppositions, that a certain logic and a certain history is productively combined.

RW: Marx captures the differences between the more Fichtean Hegelians and the Feuerbachian Hegelians inThe Eighteenth Brumaire, where he writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past

These two logics, which are still at play in trying to think about the event, go back to this legacy of German Idealism. I am interested in seeing what happens when this encounter occurs (or again, in a sense, when this encounter fails to occur) between the logic of capital and the logic of political struggle. They clash precisely at the point where the logic of capital is inconsistent, in the sense that it cannot, strictly speaking, claim to have posited all its own presuppositions. Nor is the logic of the subject here one of spontaneous freedom or autonomy.

But, it is precisely just as the structure shows inherent moments of breakdown, where the subject reveals itself to be structurally dependent on what Sartre called “the practico-inert.”

What came out of 1968 was, especially in the Althusserian and Lacanian schools, an attempt to formalize the inconsistencies of the structure. That is what we call post-structuralism. This is then tied to a new theory of subjectivity. So all these ex-Althusserians—Rancière, Žižek, and also Laclau—are, in fact, trying to hold these two logics together.

trieb death drive post-Hegel radical evil condition of goodness jean dupuy

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey

And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.

But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality

Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]

Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead. He is alive.

Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive). He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges. This is the domain of drive.

The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.

The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel. It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity. Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition. Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.

On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.

But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing. It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself. Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.” It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.

Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”. Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.

Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity. Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself. Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.

There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency. The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.

A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.

First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy. Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse. The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3. First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation. You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.

Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing. The space of desire is curved. You don’t go directly at it. Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe” What is human sexuality formally? It is not simple pleasure. But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.

Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery. Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk. Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint. Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing. I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it. Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.

Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it. Death drive is the ethics at its zero level. It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil. A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion. Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil. He steps back though. First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil. If for Kant you can be good out of principle. Then why cannot you be evil out of principle? Not just good, but evil as well. But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart. You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent. Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life. From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no. He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil. It’s not pathological, no personal gain. This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.

Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.

Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty. But Lacan reads Kant with Sade. The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian. The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle. It’s non-pathological.

Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself. Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.

Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch. Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war. Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.

Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.

Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.

Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.

Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.

Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.

******

Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.

[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.

But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.

But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

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

zizek rejects logic of equivalence

On should not forget that in spite of some occasional ‘objectivist’ formulations, the reduction of individuals to embodied economic categories (terms of the relation of production) is for Marx not a simple fact, but the result of the process of ‘reification’, that is, an aspect of the ideological ‘mystification’ inherent to capitalism. As for Laclau’s second point about class struggle being ‘just one species of identity politics, one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live’, one should counter it by the already-mentioned paradox of ‘oppositional determination’, of the part of the chain that sustains its horizon itself; class antagonism certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the specific antagonism which ‘predominates over the rest whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity‘.

[M]y point of contention with Laclau here is that I do not accept that all elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always ONE which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon (320).

laclau on laclau articulating logics

I have dealt extensively with the rhetorical and discursive devices through which contingently articulated social relations become ‘naturalilzed’ in order to legitimize relations of power (288).

If I have called the general equivalent unifying an undisturbed equivalential chain the empty signifier, I will call the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interupting each other the floating signifier. In practice, both processes overdetermine each other, but it is important to keep the analytical distinction between them.
(305).

Butler’s question

Is the incompleteness of subject-formation that hegemony requires one in which the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? … Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formation and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition? (JB. BuLaZi. 12-13)

Laclau’s response

I have just said that the sleight of hand on which Butler’s argument is based consists in a hypostasis by which a purely negative condition is turned into a positive one — only at that price can one assert the non-historicity of the structural limit (184).

First, Butler introduces her usual war machines — the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’— without the slightest attempt at defining their meanings, so it is impossible to understand what she is talking about except through some conjecture. My own guess is that if she is opposing the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ to something which is on the one hand ‘universal’ and on the other ‘structural’, one has to conclude that structural determinations are universal, and that they are incommensurable with social and culture specificity. From this it is not difficult to conclude that Butler is advocating, form the point of view of theoretical analysis, some sort of sociological nihilism. Taken at face value, her assertions would mean that the use of ANY social category describing forms of structural effectivity would be a betrayal of cultural and social specificity. If that were so, the only game in town would be journalistic descriptivism. Of course, she can say that this was not her intention, and that she wanted only to speak out against essentialist, aprioristic notions of structural determination. In that case case however, she would have to answer two questions:

1. where is her own approach to a more differentiated analysis of levels of structural limitation and determination to be found.

2. where does she find that I have EVER advocated in my work a theory of ahistorical aprioristic structural determination?

On the second point there can be NO ANSWER.

Tada: my comment: I like this, Laclau’s point is that Butler has no theory of structural determination. She hates anything structural. Because remember Derrida, what constitutes the structurality of the sturucture, where does the structure get its beating heart? From an essentialst centre no doubt? But no. Laclau does not believe structural determination means essentialism. Nor does JB. She just doesn’t like how LaZi bring in this notion of the Real, and the Symbolic. The Symbolic is overwritten by the law of the Father. Uh uh, like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

On the first point the answer is more nuanced — in fact, there COULD be an answer if Butler managed to go beyond her rigid opposition structural determination /cultural specificity. Any social theory worth the name tries to isolate forms of structural determination which are context-specific in their variations and relative weight, but tries also, however, to build its concepts in such a way that they make social, and historical comparisons possible. Butler’s own approach to society at it best moments — her innovative and insightful approach to performativity, where (and I agree with her) there are several points of coincidence with the theory of hegemony — proceeds in that way. I only have to add, in this respect, that one finds it difficult not to turn Butler’s weapons against herself, and ask the insidious question: is performativity an empty place to be variously filled in different contexts, or is it context-dependent, so that there were societies where there were not performative actions? (188-189).

political logics of equivalance and difference

In sum, the political logics of equivalence and difference comprise a descriptive framing devise which is derived from a particular understanding of discourse and the importance accorded to processes of signification. They enhance our approach to social science explanation by furnishing us with a conceptual grammar with which to account for the dynamics of social change. They help us show how social practices and regime are contested, transformed, and instituted, thereby extending our grammar beyond social logics (145).

self-interpretations

The reason social science explanation cannot be entirely reduced to the contextualized self-interpretations of the subjects under study is not simply because these are structured by broader social processes that are too complicated and complex in their interactions to grasp, but more fundamentally because social structures are themselves constitutively lacking. But, again, the social structures making possible the subjects’ self-interpretations, and the limits of social structures themselves, are locatable and understandable only by identifying correlative limit experiences by passing through, and relating them explicitly to, the self-interpretations of subjects. Lapses, bungled actions, and slips of tongue comprise examples of just such limits within the psychoanalytic domain (102).

Enjoyment

Enjoyment is not to be understood as a synonym for pleasure, if only because such enjoyment is often though by no means always consciously expereinced as suffering.

– accounts for a ‘symptom’s inertia’

The notion of enjoyment captures a subject’s mode of being, whether individual or collective

The guilt which may accompany the transgression of an officially affirmed ideal is a possible, indeed farily common, mode of experiencing enjoyment (107).

… the notion of enjoyment has been used to characterize and account for the resilience of a host of practices and rituals … 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 exisitng mode of enjoyment and thus fantasmatic frame.

Discourse Theory Methodology

Howarth, David. “Applying Discourse Theory: the Method of Articulation” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave: Great Britain. 2005., pp. 316-349.

The application of post-Marxist discourse theory (PMDT) to empirical objects of investigation

Discourse Theory and the Question of Method

PMDT is best understood as a research programme or paradigm, and not just an empirical theory in the narrow sense of the term. It thus consists of a system of ontological assumptions, theoretical concepts and methdological precepts, and not just a set of falsifiable propositions designed to explain and predict phenomena such as the behaviour of the capitalist state, or different forms and logics of collective action (317).

– discourse theory is to be differentiated from discourse analysis
– discourse theory does not overlap with the different varieties of discourse analysis
– discourse theory is not just a toolkit to analyse ‘language in use’

as the conduct of discourse analysis is only meaningful within a particular social and political theory, alongside its core ontological assumptions and overall political purposes. At most, therefore, the various tools of discourse analysis constitute one particular set of techniques that can help us to understand and explain empirical phenomena which have already been constituted as meaningful objects of analysis. They do not exhaust the concept of discourse theory itself (318).

– discourse theory is “problem-driven”: akin to Foucault’s technique of problematization in that it begins with a set of pressing political and ethical problems in the present, before seeking to analyse the historical and structural conditions which gave rise to them, while furnishing the means for their critique and transgression.

this method is not simply a matter of analysing ‘behaviour or ideas, nor societies and their “ideologies”, but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought — and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed.

In so doing Foucault synthesizes his archeological and genealogical moments of analysis:

Archaeological: makes possible the examination of ‘forms themselves’, describing the rules that condition the elements of a particular discourse —its objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies — in a given period say, the discourse of ‘madness’ or ‘illness’ in the nineteenth century, archaeology provides the means to delimit research objects (318).

Genealogical: accounts for their contingent emergence and production, analyses their constitution by recounting the historical practices from which they were constructed, enabling research to show the contingency of identities and practices and foreground possibilities foreclosed by the dominant logics.

Finally while the focus of research is the interrogation of a specific problematized phenomenon, it is important to stress the these problems are not specified in a completely independent and atheoretical fashion. On the contrary, as against empiricism or rationalism, the emergence and constitution of research problems always presupposes the ontological assumptions and categories of discourse theory for their initial discernment and description (319).

2 key dimensions of ontological framework

2 key dimensions which centre on the notion of subjectivity

hermeneutic-structural: highlights the presumptive centrality of the self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But it is also important to recognize in this regard that discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to social habits. While the social logics structuring them 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. This means that logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents. Certainly, social logics are products of past understanding, interpretations and decisions, but they tend to secure a degree of autonomy and not insignificant force when sedimented into practices and regimes. This is one reason why the assent of agents is not conclusive or exhaustive of an explanation’s validity. (162)

poststructural dimension: highlights the way in which 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 political subjectivity as such. This means that the hermeneutical-structural dimension 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. This enables us to generate critical explanations that are both sensitive to context and explicit about their ontological, ethical, normative, and sociological presuppositions. (162)

What is a Logic

GH talk about the “logic of a practice” which

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

This definition of ‘logic’ and the way GH use it is hard to pin down. They give example of of they use the term logic, speaking about the logic of:

– logic of chess playing: 1) the dominant pattern of moves, strategies, counter-strategies, tactics and counter-tactics 2) Basic entities and types of relationships between pieces 3) rules of the game

– logic of the market: 1) compirses a particular set of subject positions, objects (commodities and means of exchange) 2) systems of relations and meanings connecting subjects and objects, insitutional parameters (legal system) 3) Also the conditions that make possible the continued operation of a partiuclar market practice, as well as its potential vulnerabilities. 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.

A social logic can characterize a practice or regime. Take the Thatcherite regime which can be characterized as a network of social logics: 1) a social logic of marketization and centralization, both of which were rooted in the philosophy of the New RIght … Once sedimented, the Thatcherite discourse signified the practices and aspiration of liberating the capitalist economy, with its attendant entrepreneurial practices, from the stranglehold of an overloaded and bureaucratic state, as well as from over-powerful trade unions which were smothering enterprise and innovation. On the other hand, Thatcherism came to represent a demand for a more restrictive, though more powerful, state that would regulate less, but more intensively. (137)