Naturally, what we said about reality in general is also
applicable to political reality. But what is this political reality for which
Lacan is relevant? In fact what exactly is political reality in general? We
know that in mainstream political science, politics and political reality are
associated with citizenship, elections, the particular forms of political
representation and the various ideological families.
Politics is conceived as
constituting a separate system, the political system, and is expected to stay
within the boundaries of this system: people, that is to say, politicians,
social scientists and citizens, expect to find politics in the arenas
prescribed for it in the hegemonic discourse of liberal democracies (these
arenas being parliament, parties, trade unions, etc.), and also expect it to be
performed by the accordingly sanctioned agents (Beck, 1997:98). Although this
well-ordered picture is lately starting to show signs of disintegration, with
the politicisation of areas previously located outside the political system (as
Beck has put it 'if the clocks of politics stop there [within the official
arenas of the political system], then it seems that politics as a whole has
stopped ticking' - Beck, 1997: 98), politics can only be represented in spatial
terms, as a set of practices and institutions, as a system, albeit an expanding
one. Politics is identical to political reality and political reality, as all
reality, is, first, constituted at the symbolic level, and, second, supported
by fantasy.
But if reality in general can only make sense in its
relation to a real which is always exceeding it, what can that real associated
with political reality be? If reality cannot exhaust the real it must be also
the case that politics cannot exhaust the political. Not surprisingly then, it
is one of the most exciting developments in contemporary political theory, and
one promoted by theorists such as Laclau, Mouffe, Beck and Lefort, that the
political is not reducible to political reality as we have been describing it:
The political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.
(Mouffe, 1993: 3)
In order to illustrate this 'emancipation' of the moment of
the political let us examine very briefly the relevant argument put forward by
Claude Lefort. Lefort's project entails the reinterpretation of the political.
He considers both the Marxist and the strictly scientific definitions of the
political inadequate. Marxism regards the political as a mere superstructure
determined by a base consisting of the supposedly real level of relations of
production, and thus is unable to recognise any substantial specificity to the
political. Political sociology and political science, on the other hand,
attempt to delineate political facts in their particularity, as distinct from
other social facts which are considered as belonging to other separate levels
of social reality: the economic, the aesthetic, the juridical, the scientific,
the social itself. Such an approach claims to provide an objective
reconstruction of reality as consisting of all these strict differentiations
and thus does not realise that its own constructs derive from social life and
are, consequently, historically and politically conditioned - our discussion on
constructionism becomes relevant again. In the definition of politics (as the
space of political institutions, such as parties, etc.) what is lost is the
political itself, meaning the moment in which the definition of politics, the
organisation of social reality, takes place:
The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed.
(Lefort, 1988:11)
The point here is that the institution of political reality
presupposes a certain repression of the constitutivity of the political. It
entails an impossible attempt to erase the political ontology of the social. In
Lefort's view, for example, and here he draws from traditional political
philosophy in which what distinguishes one society from another is its regime,
its shaping of human existence, the political is related to what generates
society, the different forms of society. It is precisely because the very idea
of society contains a reference to its political definition that it becomes
impossible to localise the political within society. The political is thus
revealed as the ontological level of the institution of every particular
shaping of the social (this expression denoting both giving meaning to social
relations and staging them) (Lefort, 1988: 217-19). When we limit our scope
within political reality we are attempting a certain
domestication/spatialisation of the political, we move our attention from the
political per se (as the moment of the disruption and undecidability governing
the reconstruction of social objectivity including political reality) to the
social (as the result of this construction and reconstruction, as the
sedimented forms of objectivity) (Laclau, 1990: 35). This sedimentation of
political reality (as a part or a subsystem of the social) requires a
forgetting of origins, a forgetting of the contingent force of dislocation
which stands at its foundation; it requires the symbolic and fantas-matic
reduction of the political. Yet, 'to negate the political does not make it disappear,
it only leads to bewilderment in the face of its manifestations and to
impotence in dealing with them' (Mouffe, 1993: 140). What constantly emerges in
these currents of contemporary political theory is that the political seems to
acquire a position parallel to that of the Lacanian real; one cannot but be
struck by the fact that the political is revealed as a particular modality of
the real. The political becomes one of the forms in which one encounters the
real.
The field of social construction and political reality is
the field in which the symbolisation of this real is attempted. Chaitin is
correct when asserting that symbolisation 'has the creative power to produce
cultural identities, but at a price, the cost of covering over the fundamental
nothingness that forms its foundation ... it is culture, not nature, that
abhors a vacuum, above all that of its own contingency' (Chaitin, 1996: 4-5),
of its ultimate inability to master and symbolise the impossible real: 'there
is a structural lack in the symbolic, which means that certain points of the
real can't be symbolised in a definite manner.... The unmitigated real provokes
anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary
constructs' (Verhaeghe, 1994: 60). Following from this, 'all human productions
[Society itself, culture, religion, science]... can be understood in the light
of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real' (ibid.:
61). It is the moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the
real, that is revealed as the moment of the political par excellence in our
reading of Lacan. It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian
psychoanalysis that proves our
fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of
society as a harmonious totality to be no more than a mirage. It is this
traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that initiates
again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present
hegemonic play between different symbolisations of this real. This play leads
to the emergence of politics, to the political institution of a new social
fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for hegemony)
in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth. In this light,
Lacan's insistence on the centrality of the real, especially in the latter part
of his teaching, acquires major political importance. Lacan himself, in his
seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis uses noise and
accident as metaphors or examples of our encounter with the real. It might be
possible to add the political to this chain of equivalences. Lacan's schema of
socio-political life is that of a play, an unending circular play between
possibility and impossibility, between construction and destruction,
representation and failure, articulation and dislocation, reality and the real,
politics and the political.
It is this constitutive play which can help illuminate a
series of political questions and lead to a novel approach to political
analysis. As an illustration let us examine a concrete problem of political
analysis. How are we, for example, to account for the emergence and the
hegemonic force of apartheid discourse in South Africa? Is this emergence due
to a positively defined cause (class struggle, etc.)? What becomes apparent
now, in light of the structural causality of the political, is that the reasons
for the resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s are not to
be found in some sort of 'objective' conditions (Norval, 1996: 51). Apartheid
can be traced back to the dislocations that conditioned the emergence of this
Afrikaner nationalist discourse (associated, among others, with the increasing
capitalisation of agriculture, the rate of urbanisation and events such as the
Great War). The articulation of a new political discourse can only make sense
against the background of the dislocation of the preceding socio-political
order or ideological space. It is the lack created by dislocation that causes
the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a
dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an
encounter with the Lacanian real. Every dislocatory event leads to the
antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its
traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political
stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of
a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real moment of the political
at the root of our symbolisation of political reality.
Underlying Lacan's importance for political theory and
political analysis is his insistence on the split, lacking nature of the
symbolic, of the sociopolitical world per se. Our societies are never
harmonious ensembles. This is only the fantasy through which they attempt to
constitute and reconstitute
themselves. Experience shows that this fantasy can never be
fully realised. No social fantasy can fill the lack around which society is
always structured. This lack is re-emerging with every resurfacing of the
political, with every encounter with the real. We can speak about the political
exactly because there is subversion and dislocation of the social. The level of
social construction, of human creativity, of the emergence and development of
sociopolitical institutions, is the level in which the possibility of mastering
the real makes itself visible but only to be revealed as a chimera unable to
foreclose a moment of impossibility that always returns to its place. Given
this context, the moment of the political should be understood as emerging at
the intersection of our symbolic reality with this real, the real being the
ontological horizon of every play between political articulation and
dislocation, order and disorder, politics and the political.
Let us summarise our Lacanian commentary on the concept of
the political. The political is not the real per se but one of the modalities
in which we experience an encounter with the real; it is the dominant shape
this encounter takes within the socio-objective level of experience. The moment
of the political is the moment made possible by the structural causality of
this real, a moment linked to the surfacmg of a constitutive lack within our
fantasmatic representations of society. It amounts to the cut of dislocation
threatening all symbolisations of the social, to the ultimate subversion of any
sedimentation of political reality. It is the moment in which the ontological
impossibility of the real affects socio-political reality. It is also a moment
located prior to all attempts and promises to cover over this lack, to
reconstitute the fantasmatic coherence of the dislocated reality. Although it is
internal to the development of such a desire, although it constitutes its
condition of possibility, it evaporates as soon as the play of construction
begins: it is what makes possible the articulation of new political projects
and new social fantasies but is not compatible with them; their constitution
demands the repression of the political. The political is associated thus with
the moment of contingency and undecidability marking the gap between the
dislocation of one socio-political identification and the creation of the
desire for a new one.
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