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Abstract
I have argued that the substance of social reality is figural or constructed, an effect of an arrangement of instituted tropes — the narrative of progress or ‘growth’ that transforms economic power structures into temporal figures of movement, the structuring of democracy as a displacement from popular participation to representational elitism, the metaphor of individual freedom that effaces interrelational social realities, the metonymic shaping of happiness on the mass level into fragmentary fetishes or part objects like drugs or sports, the patterning of sexuality as a doubly negated dynamic of repression and violent effusion, and so on. The substance of the social is constituted as these shaping procedures, these arrangements that create an effect or appearance of a pre-rhetorical reality that is ‘represented’ by existing institutions. What is interesting about such social-rhetorical structures is the tension they contain between the stabilization of the existing format and the forces that push against that stabilization, pushing it beyond its boundaries. In this chapter, I will consider how such tensions are played out in the social theory of liberalism.1
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