[W]e draw heavily on … the disruptive presence of “the real” in any symbolic order, that is, the presence that marks the impossibility of any putative fullness of being, whether at the level of structures, subjects or discourses. Moreover, the effect of our ontological framework is not only to destabilize the conditions upon which the standard models of social science are grounded, but also to provide the conditions for developing an alternative approach to social and political analysis that inter alia concedes a central role to subjectivity (as distinct from subjectivism) in characterizing, explaining and criticizing practices and regimes (11).
Category: ontology
ontology of Lack
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)
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).
dislocation normative ethical aspects
…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices. The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new. Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation. Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be. The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)
dimensions of social reality
Our fundamental ontological premise is then used to redescribe social relations by stipulating different dimensions of social reality. The social dimension captures those situations in which the radical contingency of social relations has not been registered in the mode of public contestation whereas the political dimension refers to those situations in which subjects responding to dislocatory events re-activate the contingent foundations of a practice by publicly contesting and defending the norms of that practice. On the other hand, the ideological and ethical dimensions of social reality capture the way subjects are either complicit in concealing the radical contingency of social relations (the ideological), or are attentive to its constitutive character (the ethical). (14)
In articulating this basic ontological standpoint, we take our principal objects of investigation to be practices or regimes of practices, where our aim is to critically explain their transformation, stabilization, and maintenance. Drawing on Heidegger, we claim that such an inquire will always have an ontical and ontological impulse. (15)
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)
Deconstructive Genealogy/Onto-ethical critique
What then does the task of incorporating a self-reflexive and self-critical ethos into the concrete problematization and explanation of social phenomena entail? On the one hand, the ontological postulates of our approach concerning radical contingency have to inform the construction, investigation and explanation of social phenomenon (155).
We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself.
A Deconstructive Genealogy of a social practice or regime
The task here is to reactivate and make evident options that were foreclosed during the emergence of a practice – the clashes and forces which are repressed or defeated – in order to show how the present configuration of practices relies on exclusions that reveal the non-necessary character of the present social formation, and to explore the consequences and potential effects of such ‘repressions’. On the other hand,
Onto-ethical critique
In the mode of what we could call an onto-ethical critique the task is to critically interrogate the conditions under which a particular social practice or regime grips its subjects despite its non-necessary character. This mode of critique furnishes us with a means of critically interrogating the will to (fantasmatic) closure.
However, both modes of critique are informed by an ethos of exercising a fidelity to contingency itself, by displaying other possibilities for political decision and identification as well as other modalities of identification. Together they contribute to a practice of ethico-political interpretation. (155)
deductive-nomological, hypothetico-deductive
Our more concrete object of critique was the subsumptive character of the dominant mode of social and political theorizing. Subsumption in the field of method is evident when mainstream social scientists either deduce explanation from higher order laws or generalizations — the so-called deductive-nomological form of explanation — or deduce predictions which are subjected to exhaustive tests — the so-called hypothetico-deductive form of validation. Empirical objects are thus subsumed under the theoretical concepts, and do not modify or transform the latter, thus giving rise to what Althusser calls ‘a relation of exteriority’ between theoretical categories and empirical phenomena ( citing Althusser Reading Capital: 49) (210)
Foucault’s doublet
In Foucault’s formulation, the social sciences are strongly marked by the modern episteme’s empirical-transcendental doublet, which for him stems from the epistemologically ambiguous figure of ‘Man’, who is both the subject and object of knowledge.
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).
Critique of causal mechanisms
Now it is clear that those who stress the role of causal mechanisms also go beyond the field of self-interpretations. For example, though Elster stresses the indeterminacy of their triggering and interaction, he uses mechanisms to provide a causal connection between phenomena and events. But he brackets the ontological conditions of possibility of these mechanisms, and underplays their organic and dynamic relation to self-interpretations and their contexts … Elster short-circuits the passage through the subject by conceiving mechanisms as a set of ‘abstract essences’ or free standing ‘tools’ that are not tied to any ontology, and which can be applied to different contexts without modification (159).
For us by contrast, logics are always linked to a particular field of self-interpretations. Social logics, in particular, provide access to the practices under investigation, enabling us to grasp the point of a practice or institution, as well as the rules and structures that organize them … Social logics require therefore a ‘passage through the self-interpretations of subjects’, and they provide a bridge between description/characterization and explanation/critique.
In any fully-fledged critical explanation of a phenomenon, political and fantasmatic logics have to be articulated with a range of social logics together with the empirical contexts they inform and within which they function. The entire logic of explanation thus requires the passage through self-interpretations (160).
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)