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

Social Political Fantasmatic Logics

(T)he discernement of social logics enables us to characterize practices or regimes by setting out the rules informing the practice and the kinds of entities populating it; political logics allow us to account for their historical emergence and formation by focusing on the conflicts and contestations surrounding their constitution; and fantasmatic logics furnish us with the means to explain the way subjects are gripped or held by a practice or regime of practices.  Taken together, logics are by no means reducible to the empirical phenomena for which they are designed to account though neither are they accorded a fully transcendental role and function.   … 213

(with regards to our social ontology) our commitment (is) to the radical contingency of social objectivity whether in the form of structures, agents or institutions, which in our view has important ramifications for our understanding of social change, political subjectivity, and the overall structuring of social relations (215).

Social science explanation involves the mobilization of three types of logics

Social Logics: not synonymous with causal mechanisms, capture the ‘patterning’ of social practices.

Regularity in dispersion: captures both the idea of social logics as a pattern and an open-endedness [139].

… rules are not reified entities that subsume practices and discourses; instead they enable us to describe and characterize the latter,

… logic is not ‘superhard’ whose identity can survive independently of the contexts within which it is instantiated or operative [140].

But social logics are not reducible to empirical contexts either. … in sum, we could say that with social logics, we aim to capture the ‘patterning’ of social practices, where such practices are understood in this regard as a function of the contextualized self-interpretations of key subjects.  Social logics of competition … describe the way that actors interact with, and understand, each other as competitors.  Or social logics of ‘individualization’ might capture those patterns of discursive articulations which, in the self-understanding of actors … isolating them from each other 140.

Political Logics: provide means to explore how social practices are instituted, contested, and defended — logic of equivalence, logic of difference— to investigate the way in which the traces of radical contingency associated with the original institution of practices and regimes can in certain circumstances be reactivated by subjects, thus enabling them to construct new meanings, practices and identities.  “Since the very identity and significance of a social practice depends upon its institution, as well as the subsequent forgetting of its ignoble origins, political logics assist in the characterization of a practice or regime by showing how they emerge and are sedimented (106).

Political logics are most closely associated with the political dimension of social relations

Political logics are related to the institution of the social they are also related to it possible de-institution or contestation (142).

Fantasmatic Logics: account for the grip of an existing or anticipated social practice or regime.  Fantasy is understood as the frame which structures the subject’s enjoyment.

looking at how subjects are gripped in different ways by the discourses with which they identify.

With the logic of fantasy we aim to capture a particularly powerful way in which subjects are rendered complicit in concealing or covering over the radical contingency of social relations.

In sum, by invoking fantasmatic logics we suggest that one condition for subscribing to an existing or promised social practice concerns the extent to which it can tap into the subject’s existing mode of enjoyment and thus fantasmatic frame.  When working in tandem with political logics, fantasmatic logics may be invoked to help explain why certain demands — or responses to demands — succeed in gripping or interpellating a particular constituency.  Equally, they can be mobilized to account for the way explicit challenges to existing social structures or institutions are blocked (107).

The 3 logics are articulated together to account for a problematized phenomenon 133

.... our idea of a logic is not only set against the universalizing and necessitarian tendencies of the causal law paradigm, but it is also opposed to the particularised tendencies of the interpretivist paradigm (135)

… the logic of a practice comprises the rules or grammar of the practice, as well as the conditions which make the practice both possible and vulnerable 136.

Logic of the market

Clearly the way we conceptualize the market depends on whether it is a supermarket, a market in energy supply, a market in educational goods, and so on … the meaning of expressions such as ‘efficient allocation of resources’, ‘fair price’ or ‘supply and demand’ depends on the way we understand the key actors and terms associated with the specific market paradigm we have adopted.  There is a clear relational network at stake here which the concept of a logic must try to capture and name.  Crucial in this respect is the way actors themselves interpret their roles and activities 136.

In abstract terms .. a particular market comprises a particular set of rules or grammar that govern the arrangements and meanings that bring together buyers and sellers of goods and services.

Hence the logic of the market comprises:

– subject positions (buyers and sellers), objects (commodities and means of exchange), and a system of relations and meanings connecting subjects and objects, as well as certain sorts of institutional parameters (such as a well functioning legal system).

However, our concept of a logic also aims to capture the conditions that make possible the continued operation of a particular market practice, as well as its potential vulnerabilities.  And this involves answering a set of connected questions: What were the conditions under which the institution of this market was made possible?  What political struggles preceded its institution?  What processes ensure its maintenance or question its hegemonic status?  Logics must also provide the means with which to answer these sorts of questions 136-7.

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)