ontology – Page 6

Authentic versus Inauthentic

Here is the only slightly bewildering part of the whole book:

However it does not follow that the subject will engage with contingency in a more authentic way because of this confrontation (with contingency of social relations). In using the term authenticity we simply aim to capture a subject’s generalized sensitivity or attentiveness to the always-already dislocated character of existing social relations, wherein creativity and surprise are accorded prominent roles. But this implies that an inauthentic response to a dislocation is also possible. We call the authentic response ethical, and the inauthentic response ideological… the radical contingency of social reality and identity can be acknowledged and tarried with, or it can be denied and concealed. To what extent do subjects engage authentically with the radical contingency of social relations (where the ethical dimension is foregrounded)? 111

Dislocation serves as a device for articulating their fundamental ontological postulate — the radical contingency of social relations. And Dislocation allows GH to develop 2 dimensions ethical/ideological in which to characterize aspects of a practice or regime. 111

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).

Political and Social dimensions

Both the political and social dimensions of social reality presuppose an intimate connection to 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 may say that the political dimension comes to the fore. … the boundary between the social and political is not fixed, but in a state of constant flux (117).

Middle range theorizing

We can now revisit our model of practices and regimes by relating them to the ontological dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage, therefore, in what might be termed a more middle-range style of theorizing, which involves the use of our ontological categories to redescribe ontical entities like practices and regimes. For instance, practices can be understood in terms of the way different dimensions of social relations —comprising the social, political, ideological, and ethical dimensions — are foregrounded or backgrounded, how they are articulated, and so on. We claim that this provides us with significant analytical purchase to describe and explain the socio-political world in a non-topographical fashion (120).

It is important to stress that in this to and fro movement between the ontological and ontical levels, which after all is constitutive of the logic of middle range theorizing, such typolgies are empirical and contingent. … our account of regimes and our account of practices as a function of four ontological dimensions relies on a set of sociological and normative assumptions. (127).

This suggests that we need to develop a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of concrete practices and regimes that is sensitive to our four ontological dimensions, and which makes explicit the normative aspects of our critical explanations.

practices, regimes, and logics

Structure of Chapter 4 Ontology

Social and Political practices, Regime
Ontical/Ontological distinction
Radical contingency opposed to empirical contingency
4 dimensions of socio-political reality
Dislocation: ideological-ethical axis
Public contestation: political-social axis
Political and Social
Radical political demand, Hegemonic political demand
Reactivation
Ideology and ethics
Practices and regimes revisited
Subjectivity

Three-fold typology of logics
Social, Political, Fantasmatic logics which when articulated together constitute the basic explanatory schema of our poststructuralist approach to critical explanation. This complex of logics provides us with the theoretical resources to characterize practices and regimes, to account for their dialectical relationship, and to explan how and why they change or resist change. 106

Social logics comprise the substantive grammar or rules of a practice or regime, which enable us to distil their purpose, form and content. Moreover in characterizing a regime, we also describe the context of the practices under study, since a regime is always a regime of practices 106

A regime is just another term denoting the particular context of a practice or set of practices. It denotes the broader context that structures social practices, as well as the new social structure that emerges out of hegemonic political practices. However, the term regime has for us the advantage of denoting something that is more individual than context, and this is because it already flags the fact that some work has already taken place in characterizing that context in a particular way. In other words, this characterization process implies that the analyst adopts an active role in constructing the context as a particular regime. (125-6)

In short, the regime/practice complex is primarily a heuristic device that enables us to conduct concrete analysis (126).

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’.

Critical Realists

The critical realist intervention is helpful because it goes some way towards suggesting why retroductive reasoning is central to how we should think about social science explanation. Nevertheless, there are two qualifications we need to make. First … the critical realist position … restricts the scope of contingency to the multiple interactive possibilities among the plurality of generative mechanisms, which in turn points to a residual positivism. In our account, however, contingency ‘goes all the way down‘ so to speak. It is not just the complexity of the interactions between various mechanisms that concerns us, but the intrinsic contingency of the mechanistic structures themselves. Second … (Bhaskar’s argument moving from positivism to post-positivism is basically confused) 33.

Bhaskar

Bhaskar’s ontology GH argue focuses on the kinds of things in the world, the ‘furniture’ if you will, which means Bhaskar focuses on the “contingent interaction of fully constituted causal mechanisms” whereas GH emphasize, after Heidegger, the being of these beings

In Bhaskar’s account of structure and agency, he clearly privileges the role of structures as a set of constraints on human action, which define for them the potential range of outcomes and strategies. But there is a danger of paying short shrift to the necessary and complex connection between the empirical and ontological levels of analysis, that is, the realm of lived experience and action, on the one hand, and the underlying structures and modes of being, on the other hand, that make the former possible (30).

An alternative social ontology

For our approach is predicated on the articulation of an alternative social ontology that stresses the radical contingency and structural incompleteness of all systems of social relations … [drawing on the Lacanian concept] the disruptive presence of THE REAL which marks the impossibility of any putative fullness of being, whether at the level of structures, subjects or discourses (11).

Following Bhaskar and others, we begin by assuming that any legitimate approach to social and political analysis requires at least some ontological assumptions and commitments … However, in our view the importance of ontology is not just about what sorts of things exist, but that they exist and how they exist. Indeed, of capital importance in this regard is the fact that objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’ that problematizes a simple listing of their necessary intrinsic properties and causal capacities. Therefore, of greater import for us is their contingency, historicity and precariousness … this perspective enables us to highlight the constructed and political character of social objectivity, and then to articulate a connected series of concepts and logics that can help us to analyse social relations and processes, while remaining faithful to our ontological commitments (11).

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)