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9.6) situates this mechanism within the field of social and linguistic structure. Structure can be minimally defined as that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes (CpA 9.6/95). Insofar as a structure lays out places to be occupied, it may be said to analytically contain a virtual dimension, alongside the actual plane in which it is incarnated. This permits a distinction between a structuring structure and a structured structure. The subject that emerges out of this primary process of structuration is first of all nothing but a support, a subjected subject. The relation of the subject to the structure is mediated through an imaginary function of misrecognition, involving representations that respond to the fundamental absence in the structuring process, and compensate for the production of lack (96). These representations exist only in order to dissimulate the reason for their existence. This distortion of the structure by the subjectivity it has produced in turn leads to an overdetermination of experience by the structuring process. The production of the lack of the cause in the space of its effects coincides with the operation of suture. Miller suggests that every structure includes a lure which tak es the place of the lack, but which is at the same time the weakest link of the given sequence, a vacillating point which belongs only in appearance to the plane of actuality. Although the subject is caught in a constitutive misrecognition of its own position, it is possible to produce a theoretical conversion of perspective that reveals these vacillating points for what they are: points at which experiential, structured space intersects with the transcendental space of structuration. Miller contends that this conception affords possibilities for political transformation, insofar as these vacillating, utopic points indicate the weak links of social and political structures. The misrecognitions of subjects can be examined according to the logic of their displacements. Structural causes may be metaphorised in discourse, but their underlying metonymic causality can still be penetrated. The necessary condition for the functioning of structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the cause (CpA 9.6); but nevertheless, it is possible to ascend by means of theory to the level of structural determinations, and to target from there possible sites of practical intervention at the level of actual discourse. Thomas Herberts Remarques pour une thorie gnrale des idologies (CpA 9.5) can be read as a more concrete, directly politicized version of the view of structural causality presented by Miller. Herbert makes a fundamental distinction between two types of ideology, the second of which operates according to a logic of structural causality. Type A ideologies have an empiricist form in that their goal is to match significations to a putative reality, whereas type B ideologies follow an immanent law of organization adhering to a speculative-phraseological form that establishes coherence in advance. Whereas an empirically grounded ideology can be discarded by reference to a putative real which reveals its inadequacy, a type B speculative ideology determines what is admissible, or what can even make sense, in advance (CpA 9.5:78-79). Herbert claims that ideologies of the speculative form are situated at the level of syntax, that is, in the relation of signifier to signifier, rather than in the semantic adjustment of signifier to signified. Speculative ideologies organize a syntactical allocation of places for subjects that is constitutively forgotten by those subjects. Let us say briefly that the putting into place of subjects refers to the economic instance of the relations of production, and the forgetting of this putting into place to the political instance (CpA 9.5:83). Taking up the relationship between (semantic) metaphor and (syntactical) metonymy in Lacanian thought, Herbert shows how metonymic relations in one domain, e.g., the economic, become metaphorically displaced into, and as a consequence establish relations with, other domains, such as the political or the ideological. For example, in capitalism, economic relations are effectively metonymical, its constitutive terms - salary, worker, contract, boss, etc. - only making sense in their differential relationship to one another. Through the very organization of the economic field of production, however, these metonymic sequences become condensed into semantmes , units of meaning, displacing these meanings into the adjacent field of the political, wherein they constitute a politico-juridical axiomatic whose own internal coherence blinds it to its economic origins. The reciprocal functioning of these two levels is grounded in the primacy or the position in dominance of the metonymic sequence: As the horizontal articulation of ideological elements according to a syntactic structure, the metonymic effect produces a rationalization-automisation at all structural levels, each of which will now appear endowed with internal coherence. In this way the subjects identification to the political and ideological structures that constitute subjectivity as the origin of what the subject says and does (the norms he states and practices) is produced: this subjective illusion through which, to use a phenomenological expression, the consciousness of being in a situation is constituted hides from the agent his own position in the structure (CpA 9.5:88). Alain Badious La Subversion infinitsimale (CpA 9.8) and Marque et manque: propos du zro (CpA 10.8) attempt to prise the Althusserian problematic of the representation of structural causality away from Millers Lacanian interpretation. In Le (Re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique Badiou implicitly concurred with Miller that the identification of the determining instance in a structure can only be achieved by getting out of the structured.9 On this problem, J.A. Miller has given an exposition to which reference will be essential. We will try to show elsewhere that 1) the usage - extraordinarily ingenious - of the construction of number by Frege to illustrate the problem of structural causality is epistemologically inadequate; and 2) that one cannot think the logic of the signifier as such (as signifier in general) except by redoubling the structure of metaphysics .10 Badiou carries out these two tasks in Marque et manque. He identifies an alternating chain in which what is known as the progress of science consists (CpA 10.8:173). However, the action or motor of this progress is science alone. It is not because it is open that science has cause to deploy itself (although openness governs the possibility of this deployment); it is because ideology is incapable of being satisfied with this openness. Forging the impracticable image of a closed discourse and exhorting science to submit to it, ideology sees its own order returned to it in the unrecognizable form of the new concept; the reconfiguration through which science, treating its ideological interpellation as material, ceaselessly displaces the breach that it opens in the former. Millers account of the reciprocal interpenetration of structure and ideological misrecognition must therefore be replaced by a more fundamental opposition between scientific progress and ideology.
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969. Althusser, Louis, and tienne Balibar. Reading Capital [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Badiou, Alain. Le (Re)commencement de la matrialisme dialectique, Critique 23/240, May 1967. Feltham, Oliver. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss [1950], trans. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge, 1987. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973. Wahl, Franois. Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?, in Quest-ce que le structuralisme? 5. Philosophie. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1973.
Notes
1. Althusser, Marxism and Humanism, in For Marx , 223-27. 2. Ibid, 226.
3. The conclusion w e reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions w ithin a unity. Production predominates not only over itself [], but over the other moments as w ell []. A definite production determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as w ell as definite relations between these different moments . Marx, Grundrisse, 99. Althusser w rites that the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction can rightly be regarded as the Discourse on Method of the new philosophy founded by Marx. In fact, it is the only systematic text by Marx w hich contains, in the form of an analysis of the categories and method of political economy, the means w ith w hich to establish a theory of scientific practice, i.e. a theory of the conditions of the process of know ledge, w hich is the object of Marxist philosophy. Althusser, Reading Capital , 86. 4. Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination, in For Marx , 101. 5. Althusser, The Object of Capital, in Reading Capital , 188. 6. Ibid, 188-89. 7. Badiou, Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matrialisme, 457. The reference to Lvi-Strauss is to Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss , 63-64. 8. For an account of Millers and Badious theories of structural causality in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, see Franois Wahl, Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?, 115-126. 9. Badiou, Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matrialisme, 459. 10. Ibid, 457.