Articulating discursive and materialist conceptions of practice in the logics approach to critical policy analysis

Abstract

In this article it is argued that while Glynos and Howarth's logics of critical explanation (LCE) offers an important and promising contribution to critical policy analysis, it, along with other approaches that focus on the meaning of social action, faces a growing challenge in the form of a so-called new materialist turn in social and political theory. The article argues that there is much to be gained for the logics approach in paying closer attention to the materiality of practices in terms not only of lending greater clarity to the conception and role of social practices in the logics approach but also in enabling it fully to deliver on its critical ambition. The article explores an alternative materialist approach to the study of social practices, which hails from the post-actor–network-theory tradition and which has ontological affinities with post-structuralism. The article begins with a brief analysis of the new materialist turn in its various guises. It then critically examines the logics approach, and, in particular its conception of practice. It then explores an alternative materialist and ethnographic reading of practice, focusing on medical and care practices. It concludes with an examination of the implications for a more materialist conception of practices for the LCE's broad deconstructive, psychoanalytic and onto-political ambitions.

Keywords:

• logics of critical explanation
• new materialist turn
• post structuralism
• material semiotic relationality

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to Sarah Amsler, Crispian Fuller and Pierre Larrivée for comments on earlier drafts of this article and for fruitful discussions in the ‘Discourse, Materiality, Performativity’ reading group at Aston. Thanks also to Paul Davis for comments on an earlier draft and for many hours of discussion. Thanks also to Ewen Speed, Steve Griggs, Jason Glynos and David Howarth for conversations on the issues pertinent to the article. All mistakes and omissions are my own.

Notes

1. See the edited volume by Pinch and Swedburg (2008).

2. See the edited volume by Bryant et al. (2011) and Harman (2009).

3. See Bennett (2010) and the edited volume by Coole and Frost (2011).

4. See Whatmore (2006) and Bingham and Hinchliffe (2008).

5. The protagonists here are: Quentin Meillasoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman.

6. See, for example, Laclau and Mouffe's (1987) riposte to Geras’ critique of hegemony and socialist strategy in ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’.

7. See, for example, Critchley and Marchart (2004), Howarth (2004), Norval (2005) for discussion of the iterative development of the theory of hegemony and radical democracy in Laclau's work.

8. The term theory is deployed loosely here. Howarth (2008), for example, has argued that Laclau's logic of hegemony and populism is more appropriately designated as ‘a grammar of concepts and logics’ (p. 185) than as a theory.

9. In addition to Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Laclau (1990, 1996 and Laclau's contributions in Butler et al. 2000), see also the edited volume by Critchley and Marchart (2004) and Tønder and Thomassen (2005) for a discussion of its key aporias.

10. The concept of fantasy starts with the lacking subject. When the subject enters the world of language it is castrated. When a subject enters the socio-symbolic system it experiences a loss of ‘pre-symbolic real enjoyment or satisfaction which … always presents itself as lost’ (Stavrakakis 2007, p. 74). This lack is not just a lack, but a lack of something, and that something needs to be ‘imaginarised’ (Stavrakakis 2007). Here then, what becomes of interest is the subject's attachment to, or enjoyment of specific objects, or object causes of desire (the ‘objet petit a’). These serve to direct desire in that they simultaneously imaginarize both the lack and that which can come (potentially, but never actually) to fulfill that imaginarized lack.

11. I am grateful to Ewen Speed for this point.

12. See Glynos and Howarth (2007, pp. 110–117).

13. In an extension of this insight, Law and Mol (2008) trace out the global ramifications of the apparently innocuous practice of boiling pigswill on English farms and the many practices that this articulates with devastating consequences for South American peasants. This they term ‘material politics’.

14. It is tempting to call this the sub-political level, but the distinction between political and sub-political is, of course, merely an artifact of the methods used to access practices.

15. We are aware of the difficulty that the qualifier themselves raises and we certainly do not want to suggest that there is some essential unit of practice that is readily identifiable. However, we do use this to register the distinction between regimes and social logics and social practices.

16. Word length does not permit full exploration of this point, but how to deal with heterogeneity and its import for hegemony has been identified as a pressing issue from within Laclauian post-structuralism. See, for example, the chapter by Thomassen (2005) in the edited volume by Tonder and Thomassen (2005).

17. It is precisely for this reason that Strathern, for example, argues for an investment in ethnographic research.

18. In fact, for Law there is a great deal more to heterogeneity than what we are describing here and he argues that we need to examine in greater depth the ‘architectures of heterogenity’ which play out around the tensions and ambivalences of ‘simplicity, materiality, Otherness, noncoherence, and deferral’ (Law 2006, p. 136).

19. These have been collected together in a single volume – Mol et al. (2010).

20. For further and more detailed reflection on this point, see also Law (2004).

21. The idea is, in fact, most clearly expressed in subsequent work by Glynos (2008).

22. See also Gibson-Graham (1996), Connolly (2011), Glynos (2008) and Fleming and Spicer (2003).

23. However, as an anonymous referee of an earlier draft of this article pointed out, the question of how this fantasmatic mode of subjectivity is overcome is hugely controversial. See for example, Stavrakakis (2007) and Žižek's (n.d.) response to it.

24. I take this point from an intervention by David Howarth at the 5^th Interpretive Policy Analysis conference, Grenoble, 2010.

25. More recent work by Glynos (2008) points in this direction.