subjectivity

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).

libidinal/affective dimension of identification

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Passions of Identification: Discourse, Enjoyment, and European Identity” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howard, Jacob Torfing (eds). 2005 pp. 68-92.

the key term for understanding this process is the psychoanalytic category of identification, with its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with something [a political ideology or ethnic group for example] because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity (Laclau, 1994, p.3. cited in Stavrakakis 2005)

Central insight of discourse theory: the ultimate impossibility of identity renders identification central for contemporary political analysis … political subjectivity (both at the individual and the collective levels) depends on identification but identification never results in the production of full identity … it is because it proves unable to cover over lack and dissimulate social antagonism that identification remains the horizon of political subjectivity. 71

What I have in mind is the crucial Freudian insight that what is at stake in assuming a collective identity is something of the order of affective libidinal bonds. … Freud’s account points to a crucial dimension which is constitutive of identification: the dimension of passion, of affective attachment, and libidinal investment … Lacan will redirect this Freudian focus on the affective side of identification processes onto the obscene paths of enjoyment (jouissance).

What is at stake is to find a way to relate ethically to antagonism and jouissance, as opposed to the unethical unproductive, and even dangerous standpoints of eliminating or mythologizing them: to sublimate instead of repressing or disavowing, to inject passion into the radicalization of democracy and the reinvigoration of political discourse instead of reducing politics to the unattractive spectacle of the neutral administration of unavoidable necessities. 89-90

Repressing the dimension of enjoyment does not only affect the future prospects of European unification, it also produces a series of indirect results of major political importance … the repression of signifiers cathected with libidinal and affective value never leads to the disappearance, but merely to the displacement, of psychical energy and to the ‘return of the repressed’ through the emergence of symptomatic formations. … the rise of right-wind populism in Europe (Le Pen in France)

The neglect of the affective side of identification leads to a displacement of cathectic energy which is now invested in anti-European political and ideological discourses. In fact, a whole separate level of charged debate is erected, in which dry European identity, its institutional arrangements and big words are seen as agents of castration, not only indifferent but also hostile to the structures of enjoyment operating in the various nationalisms and engaged in a process of standardization which has to be resisted. These discourses of resistance differ from the standard euro-jargon not only in terms of their content but also in terms of their style: they are aggressive, visceral, and funny, ranging from the obscene to the violent, often via the grotesque. This is, however, the secret of their success. 87

What are the basic parameters of resistance to Europe which is articulated in the British popular press? … the depiction of the European Union as an alien regulating agency which somehow intervenes in the particular way we have organized our lives, in the particular way we have structured our enjoyment. In other words the EU is primarily represented as an agent of castration. 88

multiple subject positions

What organizes multiplicity? What determines the movement between different subject positions? Are all the components of multiple identity equally important? The answer psychoanalytic theory proves is that there is always a fantasy scenario which organizes and supports the apparent multiplicity of identity and determines the ‘rules of engagement’ between its different levels, a mapping which prioritizes particular modes of enjoyment, particular libidinally invested components and nodal points (points de capiton) and not others, which remain structurally emotionally peripheral. 84

1. Without the intervention of these nodal points, subjective structure can easily disintegrate into a psychotic state. This has to be taken very seriously into account by some ‘chaotic’ conceptions of ‘multiple identity’, primarily because the ‘the total disintegration of personal identity into identity atoms [components of the multiple identity] might not be psychologically manageable’ and thus ‘multiple identity’ might not be the most promising solution for the Europeanization of national identities … when a conflict of loyalties arises, certain components or levels are always assigned higher priority than others … ‘people always were many things, but in the epoch of nationalism, one identity was the trump card … the national identity was the primary one in cases of conflict between loyalty to the different identities.

2. Second, ‘multiple identity’ arguments often presuppose a fluid conception of identity, which is ultimately premised on a certain voluntarism. It seems in other words, to imply that the particular profile of an identity is a matter of conscious, instrumental or even rational choice on the part of the subject, a matter of shopping around for interesting components for inclusion. It is clear that discursive structuration and affective investment, set precise ”although contingent” limits to such movements.

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).

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 there 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 radical contingency of social relations. This is because modes of subjectivity are also modes of enjoyment, and modes of enjoyment are always embedded 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 conealment (ideological dimension), or does it keep open the contingency of social relations (ethical dimension)?

(119-120)

The Logics pt2

… if naturalists offer the prospect of a causal explanation by subsuming the phenomena under universal laws or general mechanisms, and if hermeneuticists explain via the use of particular contextualized interpretations, our approach conceives of explanation in terms of a critical and articulated assemblage of logics. Our parsimonious theoretical grammar consisting of logics and dimensions thus contributes to a kind of ‘middle-range theorizing‘, which moves between empirical phenomena, consisting of self-interpretations and practices, and our underlying ontological premises. Our task is thus ‘to re-describe the ontical level in terms of distinctions brought about by [our] ontology’ (Laclau 2004 cited in Glynos et al: 164.)

Fantasmatic logic: the way the subject enjoys that covers over, conceals the radical contingency of social reality

… 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 159.

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.

Ontological Framework: 2 key dimensions

The ontological framework that makes possible our approach has two key dimensions, which centre on the notion of subjectivity. These are what might be called the hermeneutic-structural and the poststructural dimensions. 162.

Hermeneutic-structural: centrality of self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to everyday social habits

While the social logics structuring them (discursive practices) 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 … logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents 162.

poststructural: highlights that 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 subjectivity as such 162.

The hermenuetic-structural dimensions 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. 162

Subjectivity, Fantasy

– structure is never closed

– structure is marked by an impossibility (the real) which prevents the full constitution of meaning

– every subject is a discursive construct whose identity depends on its relationship to other subjects and objects

– each discursive construct is never fully constituted, but essetially incomplete or lacking, the subject is also lacking and incomplete

Radical Contingency (from Laclau)

– if a subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all

– Radical contingency is possible only if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. These acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exists as a will transcending the structure.

– Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed ony through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself (Laclau 1996: 92 cited in Glynos 2007: 129).

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 (129).

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 cited in Glynos 2007:130).

Fantasy

– a narrative that covers-over or coneals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and objstacles 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 conferring identity (130).

– insofar as the mode of enjoyment … (involves) the subject’s complicitous concealment of the radical contingency of things, we are dealing with a case in which the ideological dimension is foregrounded.

– insofar as the mode of enjoyment … (involves) the subject’s attentiveness to the radical contingency of socio-political relations, we are dealing with a cases in which the ethical dimension is foregrounded (131-2)