The faith in rhetoric

Laclau tackle the theoretical verisimilitudine of the investiture —which allows a significant to identify the originary lack, the radical loss— employing a Lacanian argument, previously proposed by Joan Copjec. It consists in using the “object a” theory. As we know, Lacan understands the Real as something that cannot be symbolized. It thus constitutes a different dimension from the order of the symbolic. This order is the one which can circulate by means of metaphors, identities, and displacements. The subject that embarks on these symbolical displacements is like the shipwrecked mariner that tries to mysteriously arrive on his raft to the coast of the Real, but he knows that the Real it is neither in a coast, nor in the sea, but in a star. This relation with the absence of the Real is the permanent Gnostic trace in Western culture. Contemporary political science —as wrote Eric Vogelin— appeals to it. As such, the anxiety of the Real continues to encourage the displacement, the metonymies, the analogies, the metaphors. The subject, so as not to completely retire the affection to that activity, to maintain and to repeat it, has to indirectly connect the symbolic with the Real. With these connections, displacements and symbolical works, the shipwrecked mariner has to construct a raft as he goes along —quoting Blumenberg’s metaphor— not with logs, but with the foam, so as not to completely shipwreck and accelerate the [instinct] of death. Those elements in the discursive work on the symbol —which, for a moment, produce juissance and permit to connect with the real— are called “object a” by Lacan. Blumenberg could call them the work on the myth. Laclau reproduces this theory and identifies the “object a” with the radical investiture of the hegemonic program. «the partial objects transforms itself into a totality». Now we can quote the basic text in his theoretical approximation:

the aspiration to that plenitude or totality [...] is transferred to partial objects [...]. In political terms, this is exactly what we called a hegemonic relation: a certain particularity that assumes the role of an impossible universality. This happens because the partial character of this objects is not a result of a particular narrative, but it is inhered in the proper structure of significance, that Lacan’s object a constitutes the key element of a social ontology.

We have, then, that populist politics are based on the nature of things, on deep anthropology, on social ontology. The consequence can be easily observed: by radical investiture both individual and collective —omnes et singulatim— jouissance will be achieved, a symbolic rhetoric will be offered, and inside it there would be an object a apt to establish the affect of a community and to maintain the appearance of an enjoyment of the originary possession. In this case, the symbol rhetorically created would be «the embodiment of the mythical plenitude» and its effect the collective enjoyment. If we remember the name that Lacan uses for that originary lack, the primordial mother, the enjoyed mythical plenitude would be exactly the socially joyful equivalence of the primordial mother. Here we could retrieve Carlo Ginzburg’s reflections on Dumezil and the myth of matriarchate during the Nazism, and Furio Jesi’s parallel reflections on the work of the nazi technified myth to check the structural similitudes for the rhetorical construction of the collective identity.

The strangest aspect in Laclau’s statement can be found in the fact that a category explicitly characterized to explain the untransferable enjoyment that permits us to live —the object a, Blumenberg’s personal work on the myth, Warburg’s Pathosformeln—, that maintains us as subjects, that individualizes us in our shared and transmitted cultural horizon, and that we will never be able to produce ex nihilo; [a category as such, I repeat,] can be built and fixed by means of a rhetorical structure, to the extent of being able to constitute a collective identity. The object a is what suddenly, indomitably, unexpectedly, emerges beyond of its particularity, the concrete trace that, for an instant, allows us to escape from the shipwreck of the symbol and anchor in the enjoyment of the real. The fact that symbols maintain, reproduce, and produce performances of object a is something that is not incumbent on human beings, neither its emergence depends on any kind of rhetorical procedure, it can’t be produced or created. Laclau, whose anthropology is very limited, believes on the contrary that building a radical investiture can offer a symbol that docilely works as object a for a collective, a symbol that produces such an affection and enjoyment as if the Real was submitted to that community that he calls people. Once he assures that the Freudian concept of overdetermination points out in the same direction. Other times he calls it sublimation. All this suggests that Laclau, beyond Foucault, thinks on a governmental technique that shares its premises with liberalism, as long as it starts from a loss, from a lack, from affection, from the unmaintainable solitude of human beings, from the demands. This technique can explain the basic problem of classical liberalism: how the individuals configure people. To be constituted by rhetorical procedures, to produce controlled effects, suggests a ‘technification’ in the production of people. In conclusion, all depends on keeping blind faith in the technified rhetoric. Since Carlo Michelstaeder, nobody can second it without sharing a nihilistic premise.

Laclau has identified this radical investiture, this productivity of the symbol that satisfies [instincts], this capacity to represent an empty universal in a particular, with a passage à l’act, and has set in its origin the Aktus der Freiheit. He has forgotten that in Lacan it is a genuine act, prepared as the basis for the relation between the human being and the Real, and the key for the ordering of its [instinct of death]. When this kind of acts —originally planned in order to constitute a space for individual identity—, are projected towards a sociology of the masses and, introduced rhetorically, they produce, for Laclau, a political use and configure a collective identity. Undoubtedly. this is possible and cannot be denied. Propaganda and coaction can manage it in a nihilistic universe. But with that, the unavoidably hallucinatory elements are introduced in political life, and consequently it specializes in the ordering of the instinct of death as well. With his premises, Laclau cannot escape from these consequences. All the arsenal of the sacrificial logic is implemented here. When, in the last pages of his book, Laclau talks about the relation with contemporary political thinking he recognizes —after thanking Ranciére’s influence— that in front of Negri and Hardt the moment of articulation should not be forgotten. Laclau has talked about the relevance and centrality of this moment. He identifies a partisan mediation in it. Actually, he talks about people, but he hides the political party or the future avant-garde that is supposed to surpass it. Then, it arises very clearly what Foucault already knew: the specific form of affective, totalitarian, sublime, sacrifical governability was the partisan government. This, with its rhetorical power, its power for investiture, its power of over-determination, its power to articulate demands, is what is revealed at the end of Laclau’s book.

But Laclau forgets in his analysis the verisimilitudine of neoliberalism as a more coherent direction for his own Lacanian premises, and as a social organization that is governed by an anthropological base quite similar to the one he wants to offer for the political construction of the people. Therefore, if we concede that the present work arises from a discursive and symbolic elaboration where we place affections, desires, processes, and images able to increase the possibilities to make circulate objects a directed to resolve instincts in conjunction with them. If we accept this indissoluble synthesis of work and cultural industry, in which elements of the work of the myth are embedded, proposing offers increasingly diverse and apt to beforehand identify demands. Then we must admit that there is a closer institution of the truth of the subject in that market-enterprise than in the ‘technification’ of a rhetoric directed to offer a disciplined and sublimed object a, governable in its social performance. The psychic demands of enjoyment can be easier found in the basis of the work and of the ‘capitalitation’ of oneself, than in the conformation of a hegemonic rhetoric. To articulate these demands there already is a market, that relies on the assumption of liberty as the only way to give a proper signification to the ‘instinctive work’.

With the assumption of the basis of liberalism only in the adequate measure to make verisimilar his populist reason, Laclau cannot see that neoliberalism is more coherent with this basis. That is the reason why the inclusion in a market-enterprise where symbols circulate is more verisimilar than the incorporation to a friend/enemy dynamic, where only one symbol concenters all the ‘instinctive’ elements. In a way, the contradiction can only be solved by means of something that Laclau already knows: he is speaking to non-liberalist societies, closer to the 19th Century oligarchical constructs. In these, leftist and rightist populist rhetorics can even constitute a regime of psychical instincts, of affections, and dualist identifications. But this technology of populist government should not be an object of hope to provide a solution to oligarchical societies, in front of a true alternative to the neoliberal forms of government.

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