Criticism of Laclau

Slovoj Zizek, The Plague Of Fantasies, Verso, 1997.

The necessary failure here is structural:  it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular progressive fights will never be united, that ‘wrong’ chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal domination and homophobic attitudes), but rather, that occurrences of ‘wrong’ enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s progressive politics of establishing ‘chains of equivalences’: the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the ‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle.  The Leftist politics of the ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system — that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life (128)

Fantasmatic Logics

Consider first the relationship between fantasmatic logics and social practices.  Though social practices are punctuated by the mishaps, tragedies and contingencies of everyday life, social relations are expereinced and understood in this mode of activity as an accepted way of life.  The role of fantasy in this context is not to set up an illusion that provides a subject with a false picture of the world, but to ensure that the radical contingency of social reality — and the political dimension of a practice more specifically — remains in the background … (T)he role of fantasy is to actively contain or suppress the political dimension of a practice (145).

The operation of fantasmatic logics can thus reinforce the social dimension of practices by covering over the fundamental lack in reality and keeping at bay what we have labelled ‘the real’ (146).

In sum, whether in the context of social practices or political practices, fantasy operates so as to conceal or close off the radical contingency of social relations.  It does this through a fantasmatic narrative or logic that promises a fullness-to-come once a named or implied obstacle is overcome — the beatific dimension of fantasy – or which foretells disaster if the obstacle proves insurmountable, which might be termed the horrific dimension of fantasy (147).

Images of omnipotence or of total control –> beatific dimension of fantasy
Images of impotence or victimhood –> horrific dimension of fantasy

Logic of Equivalence, Logic of Difference

The logic of equivalence involves the simplification of signifying space, the logic of difference involves its expansion and complexification (citing LM 144).

The political logics of equivalence and difference (furnish) us with a conceptual grammar with which to account for the dynamicsof social change.  They help show how social practices and regimes are contested, transformed, and instituted, thereby extending our grammar beyond social logics (145).

Logic of Equivalence (LOE) and Logic of Difference (LOD)

–  LOE (associative), captures the substitutive aspect of the relation by making reference to an ‘us-them’ axis: two or more elements can be substituted for each other with reference to a common negation or threat.  They are equivalent not insofar as they share a positive property (though empirically they may share something in common), but, crucially, insofar as they have a common enemy … Entails the construction and privileging of antagonistic relations, which means that the dimension of difference on each side of the frontier is weakened, whether differences are understood as a function of demands or identities.  For instance, a national liberation struggle against an occupying colonial power will typically attempt to cancel out the particular differences of class, ethnicity, region, or religion in the name of a more universal nationalism that can serve as a common reference point for all the oppressed; indeed, its identity may be virtually exhausted in its opposition to the oppressive regime.  By contrast the LOD draws on other discourses in an attempt to break down these chains of equivalence.  The age-old practice of ‘divide-and-rule’, for instance in which an occupying power seeks to separate ethnic or national groups into particular communities or indirect systems of rule, is invariably designed to prevent the articulation of demands and identities into a generalized challenge to the dominant regime (145).

– LOD (syntagmatic), captures the combinatory or contiguous aspect of the relation, which accounts not simply for differences in identity among elements, but also for keeping elements distinct, separate, and autonomous.  Both dimensions are always present in the sense that each presupposes the other.

LOE and LOD thus emphasize the dynamic process by which political frontiers are constructed, stabilized, strengthened , or weakened.  They elucidate the way one or another dimension acquires greater or lesser significance, even while each presupposes the other. (citing Laclau 2005, 79) (144).

In sum, the political logics of equivalence and difference comprise a descriptive framing device 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 show how social practices and regimes are contested, transformed, and instituted, thereby extending our grammar beyond social logics (145).

Thatcher Regime

LOE was mobilized to shift terrain away from the post-war consensus

range of diverse demands were linked together into a project that publicly contested the failing Keynesian welfare state project.

linked together demands for

  • free economy
  • strong state
  • traditional morality

This involved a form of populist politics successfully dividing existing ‘one nation’ welfare state consensus into two camps, those in favour of the newly proposed project versus those associated with the Keynesian post-war consensus (173).

Following groups made equivalent and then targeted by this new project:

  • public sector workers, trade unions, teachers, doctors, lawyers, immigrants and gays

Installing the Audit Regime in UK universities

‘Modernizers’ have constructed a series of antagonistic equivalences in order to establish political frontiers that make possible the installation of the new practices.  Thus we have seen the ideological construction of ‘surplus’ versus ‘deficit’ departments, ‘research active’ versus ‘research inactive’ members of staff, ‘good recruiters’ versus ‘bad recruiters’ traditional’ versus ‘innovative’ modes of service provision, and so forth (176).

On the other hand, and at the same time, university managers and administrators have — by means of various logics of difference — sought to manage change by addressing demands and by changing the structures of governance, so as to prevent or displace public contestation.

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)

Retroduction

Retroduction is:

– distinct form of reasoning pertaining to the context of discovery in the natural sciences

Given certain facts or anomalies (conclusions) retroductive reasoning describes the way plausible hypothesis are produced (our search for premises).

Why do G&H like this? IT DESIGNATES A BACKWARD-LOOKING MODAL FORM OF INFERENCE WITH WHICH MANY SOCIAL SCIENTISTS ARE FAMILIAR. For example, take the resounding hegemonic success of Thatcherism as the given anomaly, and then to proceed backwards to furnish an account of how and why this was so 24.

– opposed to predominance of induction and deduction

– posits hypotheses designed “to render recalcitrant phenomena more intelligible.”

– used by G&H can undermine postivism’s absolute separation between contexts of discovery and justification 12

– about studying facts and devising a theory to explain them 24

Social sciences are inherently open systems, one cannot do closed experimental set-ups as in natural sciences. This means that the socical sciences are not oriented towards explanations qualified by a battery of predictive tests successfully completed 29.

3 usages of the term retroduction, a positivist, post-positivist, and poststructuralist

positivist: keeps separate the contexts of discovery and justification, situating retroduction firmly within the former

post-positivist: regard the boundary between the contexts of discovery and justification as porous.  While a positivist understanding of retroduction is compatible with a deductive form of explanation which entails universal subsumption, a post-positivist understanding of retroduction is compatible with a range of explanatory modes (description, general subsumption, articulation) and contents (contextualized self-interpretations, causal mechanisms, and logics) 41.

… retroductive reasoning provides us with a general form or logic of explanation in the social sciences 19

G&H rework the distinction drawn in the positivist images of social science between context of discovery and context of justification.

the ontological shift from the natural to the social world results in our abandoning the positivist understanding of the distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification

context of discovery: original intuitions and practices that produce theories and laws, all those activities that result in the positing of a hypothesis H (either in the form of inductively inferred laws, or in the form of laws that have been derived from axioms), and which therefore contribute to the development of theoretical tools with thich to explan a phenomenon X.

context of justificiation: the demonstration and acceptance of those theories and laws, it draws a boundary around those activities that result in the acceptance of a hypothesis H: theorems, empirical predictions that are deductively inferred, tested and then used to explain X.

A positivist understanding of the context of justification includes a narrow conception of testing and explanation.  In this view, a posited hypothesis is deemed valid if and only if it enables one to deduce falsifiable predictions.  Moreover, a hypothesis is accepted as a valid explanation only if its predictions are confirmed, or at least not falsified.  Thus from the point of view of positivism, it makes sense to distinguish between a hypothesis on the one hand, and a valid explanation on the other hand. It adopts a hard conception of testing, whose aim is to demonstrate the validity of a hypothesis, thus relegating the process of hypothesis production to a secondary role 38.

From a positivist point of view, the relevant audience or tribunal is called upon to adjudicate on test findings, not to dispute historical, ontological, political, and ethical presuppositions that are linked to the formulation of the problem and hypothesis in the first place … positivist social scientists will disagree about whether findings verify or falsify predictions, thus restricting the scope of the retroductive circle to the self-contained context of discovery (and not that of the context of justification), 40.

[Positivists claim that how one comes about coming up with the hypothesis is not important, its the testing, the predictive capability or the justification is what matters most.  RT]

link between: explanation and prediction ??  Let’s be skeptical:

centrality of self-interpretations in the social world, the relevance of context in attributing sense and significance to data against which hypotheses are tested;

contestability of the ontological presuppositions necessarily brought to bear when self-interpretations and data are subjected to interpretation

hypotheses concerning the social world are ‘logically tied’ to the reasons and self-interpretations of agents (the hermeneutical insight).

And the reflexive nature of the objects that are studied in the social sciences implies that our interpretation of the contextual factors become constitutive of the posited hypothesis.

Our interpretations as analysts of the contextualized reasons and self-interpretations carry a large share of the explanatory burden, thereby diminishing the prospect and significance of the deductive form of testing and explanation 36.

Retroductive form of explanation: positing a proto-explanation which insofar as it renders a problematized phenomenon intelligible can be said to account for it. The bulk of our book explored three possible ways of fleshing out the content of a retroductive form of explanation: contextualized self-interpretations, causal mechanisms, and logics (211).

Ontology Ontical

However, we do not think ontology can or should be bracketed in the name of simply developing pragmatic concepts with which to investigate and intervene in politics and society.  Instead, an ontological inquiry for us, focuses attention on the underlying presuppositions for any analysis of politics; it focuses on the ‘basic concepts’ mobilized by a discipline in any empirical and normative investigation.

An ontical inquiry focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or ‘region’ of phenomena, whereas an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation …

… a political scientist might investigate the construction of national identiy in a variety of contexts, or she might examine the changing role of teachers and university lecturures in societies that are increasingly marked by new audit regimes and markets. If the researcher takes for granted the notions of ‘national identity’, ‘audit regime’ or the ‘market’, which are given in the practices themselves … then her research operates at the ontical level.  If … the research inquires into the underlying presuppositions that determine what is to count as an identity or role, how these phenomena are to be studied, and that they exist at all, then the research incorporates an ontological dimension … the more the inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential preconditions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded (108-9).

… for Heidegger, the ontological is the a priori or transcendentally constitutive features — what Heidegger calls ‘existential’ — that can be discerned from socially instituted, ontic or a posteriori life … But … Heidegger does speak … of Dasein as a unity of the ontological and ontic … I therefore worry about the seeming ease with which Laclau distinguishes the ethic-ontological level from the normative ontic level, as if one could somehow expunge or slough off the ontic from the ontological in ethical.  Once cannot and, in my view, one should not.  (Critchley in Laclau A Critical Reader, 2004: 120)

For G&H the importance of ontology cannont be underestimated.

Elster’s atomistic ontology leads him to falling back on a causal law necessity, and it is the lack of a robust ontological framework that hampers the self-interpretive hermeneutic analysis of Taylor, Winch and Bevir and Rhodes.

GH’s critical practice involves 3 intertwining logics, social, political and fantasmatic. Their ontological conditions:

1) All practices and regimes are discursive entities: an object’s identity is conferred by the particular discourses or systems of meaning within which it is constituted.  In short social practices can coalesce into constellations or systems of practices which we call regimes, and both practices and regimes are located within a field of discursive social relations 109.

2) radical contingency: objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’,
contingency, historicity and precariousness and the constructed and political character of all social objectivity 11.

the constitutive failure of any objectivity to attain a full identity … (makes impossible the) fully consituted essence of a practice, regime or object, in the name of an irreducible negativity that cannot be reabsorbed 110.

… the more an inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential precondtions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded 109.

All practices and regimes are discursive entities

… As this investigation requires an analysis of the entities and relationships that constitute the phenomena investigated, our ontical inquiry necessarily involves an ontological dimension: an ontical inquiry will therefore always involve the redescription of phenomena in terms of our presupposed ontology.  And for us this task requires the employment of social, political, and fantasmatic logics 230.

Poststructuralism

Isn’t it the case that poststrucuralism makes everything into discourse suffocating any chance of human agency in the process?  Language refers to something out there doesn’t it?  People are active subjects too eh?

Actually language is what makes reality possible for us.  Social agents always find themselves ‘thrown into’ a system of meaningful practices, and these structures they’re thrown into however are ontologically incomplete.

Indeed it is in the ‘space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’.  Moreover as these identifications 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 (Glynos, Howarth 2007: 79).

Interpreting the self-interpretations of subjects

In order to construct a valid social explanation of human activity, hermeneuticists claim that

our interpretation of ourselves and our experience is constitutive of what we are, and therefore cannot be considered as merely a view on reality, separable from reality, nor as an epiphenomenon, which can be bypassed in our understanding of reality (Taylor in Glynos, Howarth 2007: 53.)

They stress the incoherence of the causal law paradigm in social science, Charles Taylor for instance says that the reason for the failure of the prediction and causal laws paradigm is the ontological world-view it presupposes.  At the root of empiricist and rationalist epistemologies including behaviourism is a positivism that “treats everything, including human beings, as an ‘object amongst others'” (Taylor in Glynos, Howarth 2007, 52).

Glynos et al. some it up nicely by saying that the hermeneutical critique of positivist approaches to social and political analysis is based on the affirmation that our “interpretation of reality is constitutive of reality, not merely a view on reality which can be ‘bracketed’ (55).

Both the subject and the object of research consist in meaningful behaviour … interpretation ‘goes all the way down’: interpretation cannot somehow be by-passed in the establishment of facts and correlations, because the interpretations of both researcher and researched are essential in determining what is to count as a fact.

Causal Mechanisms (Elster)

This is an excerpt

What distinguishes causal mechanisms from causal laws is the indeterminacy of the former, and the death knell this sounds for any attempt to make prediction a constitutive feature of social science explanation.  More precisely, the lack of determinacy is understood as a serious epistemological obstacle to the elevation of mechanisms to the status of laws, whether this indeterminancy is linked to not knowing the identity of relevant triggering conditions, or to not knowing with sufficient precision the relative force of individual mechanisms acting simultaneously.  Elster’s intervention thus decisively discredits one of the central pillars of the positivist paradigm by decoupling prediction, and thus a strict deductive-nomological form of reasoning, from social science explanation.  While it may still be possible to offer predictions in social science, these predictions are understood to be constitutively precarious and, in any case, non-essential for purposes of explanation.  It if for this reason that we feel justified in regarding his approach as conforming to a retroductive form of explanation in the social sciences (Glynos, Howarth, 2007 89).

… from the fact that X qua process is not reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations or intentions of subjects, it does not necessarily — or only — follow that X is independent of those contextualized self-interpretations or intentions.  But this is precisely what is implied by Elster’s conception of causal mechanism. .. causal mechansims can be discussed entirely on their own, with no necessary internal connection to intentional mechanisms.

Of course, the subject-independent feature of causal mechanisms is very attractive from the perspective of a positivist programme seeking to import the causal law ideal and its correlative promise of (a certain conception of) objectivity into the social sciences.  After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causality is its subject-independence.  The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it.  Take the law of gravitation for instance.  At the very most, we as subjects can act in light of such causal laws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise.  The functioning of comparable processes (X) in the social sciences, however is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects. If we insist on calling such a process a mechanism, then we must accept that, unlike laws, it has the property of fungibility, that is, it can suffer dissolution.  At any point, the mechanism may find that it has lost its necessary support — intentional or otherwise — in the relevant subjects.  Thus, mechanisms are not ‘proto’ laws that may one day be transofrmed into ‘proper’ causal laws.  This is because the functioning of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations.  This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’.  The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject-independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest.  At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which promoted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subjects: logics are thus meant to capture the subject-dependent aspect of social processes, as well as aspects which are not reducible to the empirical context (Glynos, Howarth, 2007: 97).

While Elster’s theory of causal mechanisms responds to certain limitations of the causal law paradigm, he nevertheless accepts the search for laws as an ideal.  And on of the reasons for this is the atomistic ontological grounding of his account, in which the world consists of discrete events, facts, and mechanisms.  103

Poststructuralist Discourse Theory

… once we take seriously the need to pass through the subjects’ self-interpretations on the way to an adequate explanation of social phenomena, the issue of language and discourse is put centre stage

(Glynos, Howarth, 2007: 98)

Anti-essentialist ontology, anti-foundationalist epistemology

  1. There is no pre-given, self-determining essence that is capable of determining and ultimately fixing all other identities within a stable and totalizing structure.

There have been many attempts in the history of Western thought to explain the course of history, the structure of society, and the identities of subjects and objects by reference to an underlying essence which is given in a full presence and plenitude and not implicated in any historical processes of structuration.  God, Reason, Humanity, Nature, and the Iron Laws of Capitalism are some of the celebrated candidates for this transcendental determining centre 13.

The longing for such a centre reflects our desire to master the anxiety that accompanies a certain mode of being implicated in contingent processes of structuration 13.