Master Signifiers Research Articles

Mysticism and the Postanarchist Symbolic

Abstract This article engages with Meister Eckhart's mystical theology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore the role that mysticism can play in the production of an alternative symbolic order that can form the basis for a reenchantment of the world as part of the postanarchist insurrection of the self and project of structural renewal. More specifically, it draws from Meister Eckhart's conceptualization of the Godhead to argue that the positioning of the Godhead as the primary master signifier for the political community can contribute toward the production of an alternative, mystical postanarchist Symbolic founded on a sovereignty of the Godhead oriented toward the deconstruction of the symbolic systems out of which contemporary forms of domination and control emerge. In doing so, it argues that this mystical approach to postanarchism can contribute toward the undoing of the symbolic law through which neoliberal sovereignty is exercised on a subjective level by orienting the political community toward the temporary annihilation of both the subject and the Symbolic in divine love. The article concludes by contending that the positioning of the Godhead as master signifier for the prefigurative postanarchist political community can contribute to the reenchantment of the world by forming part of a broader, nascent Symbolic, constituted through the production of a range of master signifiers reflective of a variety of largely heterogenous political communities configured around broadly nonhierarchical, spiritual values and connected via a logic of affinity.

Gozo e passagem para a vida civil: o caso de um ex-combatente das FARC-EP

Abstract: We present some research findings on the subjective responses around the jouissance, before the semblances offered by the Other, in the case of a former FARC-EP combatant. The purpose was to locate the significant coordinates that determine their position of jouissance with respect to their choice to sign the Peace Agreement with the Colombian State. As a finding, this step was possible when re-encountering the master signifiers that give consistency to his illusion of being something for the Other, maintaining a certain share of drive satisfaction, structural, beyond the phenomenology of the war scenario.

Dysfunctionality of Master Signifiers in the Georgian (Political) Discourse

The aim of this paper is to identify, compare and analyze the basic master signifiers within the Georgian political discourse. We will try to construct some kind of a typology of master signifiers in relation with the concept of ideology/discourse, fitting them in the main political parties’ ideological grounds. We will also try to show that the concept of the Master Signifier can be employed while analyzing any type of political realm for practical purposes. Our main task will be the general typology of Master Signifiers, with a particular focus on the Georgian political-ideological realm. Together with the master signifier, the concept of empty signifier is also given in the literature. Accordingly, there are dysfunctional master signifiers, as well. Our goal is to focus on the dysfunctional signifiers and their importance in terms of meaning creation/cancelation. At the same time, the notion should be examined in the context of ideology/power relations. Moreover, it must be considered in relation with concepts like discursive strategy, narrative, metaphor. We start with definition of the concept of Master signifier. In a very broad term, it can be defined as the main idea, the ideological basis for justifying a political behavior. The “master signifiers” define and limit the meanings of concepts and at the same time, they contain ideological views on how society should function. Master signifiers are unprovable, though guiding and justifying ideas of behavior. It is a collection of sublimated ideas. The function of the master signifier is to unify meanings and to derive a common, comprehensive and determinative final idea.

ENSINO HÍBRIDO NA UNIVERSIDADE E O LUGAR DE ENUNCIAÇÃO DO PROFESSOR NA FORMAÇÃO ACADÊMICO-PROFISSIONAL

ABSTRACT: The growth of the university formation market, in private higher education, has become a big profitable business, to the point of ignoring the criterion of quality of training. In this article, we reflect on the contradictions regarding the implementation of hybrid education, in which virtual and partially face-to-face activities are reconciled, but strategically adopted following the market's appetite for jouissance. Based on the Moara case, under the coordinates of psychoanalysis, education and teacher training studies, we examine how the use of teaching mediated by technologies precarizes and can do without the teacher, while, when objectify the professors, expropriates them from their enunciation place. The incidence of technological discourse in academic-professional training, as an unfolded from capitalist discourse, creates statements that become discursive support and master signifiers through which the teacher can not only alienate himself, but also be satisfied. We'll see at what price.

Dysfunctionality of Master Signifiers in the Georgian (Political) Discourse

The aim of this paper is to identify, compare and analyze the basic master signifiers within the Georgian political discourse. We will try to constructsome kind of a typology of master signifiers in relation with the concept of ideology/discourse, fitting them in the main political parties’ ideologicalgrounds. We will also try to show that the concept of the Master Signifier can be employed while analyzing any type of political realm for practicalpurposes. Our main task will be the general typology of Master Signifiers, with a particular focus on the Georgian political-ideological realm. Togetherwith the master signifier, the concept of empty signifier is also given in the literature. Accordingly, there are dysfunctional master signifiers, as well.Our goal is to focus on the dysfunctional signifiers and their importance in terms of meaning creation/cancelation. At the same time, the notion shouldbe examined in the context of ideology/power relations. Moreover, it must be considered in relation with concepts like discursive strategy, narrative,metaphor.Keywords: Discourse, ideology, Master signifier

The Mythologisation of the Migrant Issue in the Federal Republic of Germany as a Result of the 2015 European Migrant Crisis and Its Effect on Changes in German Migration Policy

This article deals with the process of mythologisation of the migrant issue in the Federal Republic of Germany during the period 2014–2018. The research started with the fundamental question of how selected German media represented the immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries who came to Germany during and immediately after the 2015 migrant crisis. The media content on migration and extremism was selected from the available online archives of the following German newspapers: Berliner Morgenpost, Deutsche Welle, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Freie Presse. Using the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as the research model, three master signifiers were selected from the analysed articles: immigrants, German jihadists, and German far-right extremists. Further analysis suggested that myths were the most influential type of signification and a dominant way of dealing with the critical situation caused by the 2015 migrant crisis. As a result of that situation, the following myths were produced: the open-door myth, the myth of Islamisation and the new myth of the East. In the analysed material, references to historical German myths, like the border myth and the stab in the back myth, were also recorded. This research aimed to determine the relation between of the process of mythologisation during and immediately after the emergence of the 2015 migrant crisis and the changes in German migration policy. Furthermore, the role of hegemonic discourse was explored, especially in situations where it was used to alleviate cultural conflict and social polarisation in times of crisis.

Contesting Welfare Discourses in Post-New Order Indonesia

This article analyses the contestation of 'welfare' discourses in Indonesia since the fall of the New Order, employing the discourse theory offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001 [1985]). Its main argument is that welfare is an “empty signifier”, the meaning of which may shift or change as a consequence of the unfinished discursive contestations of various subject positions. This article identifies four central discourses, or master signifiers, between 1998 and 2015 that serve as “nodal points” in the hegemonisation of welfare: "Social Safety Net", "Creative Innovation" versus "Electoral Strategy", "Sustainable Development", and "Right of the People and Constitutional Obligation of the State". The dominant and hegemonic meaning of welfare, understood here as a “nodal point”, is only temporary; it is partially fixed, while at the same time experiencing ongoing discursive contestation. It is, is being, and will be subjected to unending dislocation.

Quilting Muslims: A diachronic study of ideological representations around the master signifiers for Muslims in the TIME Magazine Corpus (1923–1992)

This paper reports on the findings of a diachronic investigation into ideological patterns of representation around the master signifier Muslim (and its lexical variants) during 70 years of TIME Magazine journalism. Manual analysis, of 1,573 concordance lines, showed that across the twentieth century the dominant master signifier transmuted, in both content and form. Three signifiers were used across the twentieth century to refer to Muslims. The signifier Mohammedan/Muhammadan was used in neutral constructions to reference religious and cultural themes. The signifier Moslem was predominantly used in neutral constructions but displayed a greater propensity to reference negatively constructed political. The signifier Muslim was largely used to negatively reference the narrow issue of conflict. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research.

“Decolonise, Don’t Diversify”: Discounting Diversity in the South African Academe as a Tool for Ideological Pacification

The problem of the South African university, and society in the same breath, is not so much that of governance or politics but ideology. The deepening realisation of the farcicality and impossibility of strategies, attendant ideologies and “master signifiers” of transformation (such as diversity, multiculturalism and rainbow nation) of the South African society and (whatever remains of) its institutions has never been more acute than now, when the insistence at meaningful change and the unanimous rejection, mostly by blacks, of the university (at least in its current form) have gained traction. This paper draws on Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology to provide a counter-narrative and reading of official transformation consensus and ideologies like diversity, by highlighting their ethical liminalities. The underside of diversity’s official claims to equality and justice are unmasked, and the terror and ironies of this liberal ideology are exposed, especially its refusal to recognise that whiteness (as a system) and justice can never coexist or inhabit the same space. Transformation discourse, of our kind, fashioned under diversity’s register can never escape being appropriated by liberal ideology and practice, as yet another means to reaffirm its priorities.

The Eclipse of Sacramental Realism in the Age of Reform: Re‐thinking Luther's Gutenberg Galaxy in a Post‐Digital Age

AbstractIn the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.

Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression.

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (or “empty”) signifier in political discourse analysis has thus proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand it demonstrates how crucial psychical processes are performed via the operations of the signifier, extending thus the Lacanian thesis that identification is the outcome of linguistic and symbolic as opposed to merely psychological processes. On the other, the use of the master signifier concept within the political realm to track discursive formations tends to distance the term from the dynamics of the unconscious and operation of repression. Accordingly, this paper revisits the master signifier concept, and does so within the socio-political domain, yet while paying particular attention to the functioning of unconscious processes of fantasy and repression. More specifically, it investigates how Nelson Mandela operates as a master signifier in contemporary South Africa, as a vital means of knitting together diverse elements of post-apartheid society, enabling the fantasy of the post-apartheid nation, and holding at bay a whole series of repressed and negated undercurrents.

Regulation and Recognition in Education Discourses

In December of 2010, blogger Michael Fischer created Common CoreZilla as a referent to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as a forum to talk about teachers' fears regarding curricular change and new regulatory requirements. As of this writing, the CCSS have been adopted by 45 states in the United States and are the result of a statedriven, business-backed initiative to develop a set of internationally benchmarked Math and English Language Arts achievement standards. Assessments of student achievement on CCSS are being developed by two consortia for national use. Further, teacher evaluations in many states, for both art and non-art teachers, are tied to CCSS through value-added models using CCSS test results to define the educational value a teacher has added to a child's education1 (Jennings, 2012). The CCSS and related assessments are intended to align diverse state curricula, improve educational outcomes, prepare students for college and careers, foster development and implementation of rigorous academic content, and ensure high-quality teaching practices grounded in content and pedagogical knowledge and skill (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012; Youngs, 2013).Fischer's Common CoreZilla (2012) has served as both an icon of terror and a promise of manageability. It is a tongue-in-cheek metaphor intended to reassure teachers that although CCSS seems terrifying, it is manageable; although time consuming, its management will not consume them. Despite this, the Godzilla metaphor aptly signals the unease that CCSS-and the network of regulations they are part of-is creating. This commentary further considers CCSS and the network of related assessments within which it is embedded, using Jacques Lacan's theory of discourse to develop insight into the regulatory education discourse provoking this unease and teachers' positions within it.Recognizing Ourselves Through Master SignifiersPreK-12 and higher education art educators with whom I have spoken acknowledge that attending to standards and assessments can lead to deeper understandings of what is being taught and how student learning happens. However, the current configuration of standards and assessments houses curricular decisions and evaluation systems in large, centralized organizations-such as the CCSS Initiative, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) (www.ascd. org), and Pearson Education (www.pearsonschool.com)-that act from assumed positions of definitive knowledge about what constitutes good content and good teaching. Concerns about what is important for students, teachers, and society are voiced but occur at the periphery of regulated actions which are already codified through states'requirements and supported by the U.S. federal government's Race to the Top funding structure (www2.ed.gov/programs/ racetothetop).Lacan used the term master signifier to describe signs that position individuals within discourse by providing anchors for identities in which we can recognize ourselves and be recognized by others (Bracher, 1993). Master signifiers operating within the CCSS discourse can be found in the CCSS mission statement:The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. (CCSS Initiative, 2012, para. 1)The words consistent, clear, help, robust, relevant, college and career, knowledge and skills for success, fully prepared, future, best positioned, compete, and global economy appear here and throughout the CCSS website, and are echoed in countless blogs and articles discussing CCSS. …

‘I Could’ve Been Raskolnikov’: Punk reads Dostoevsky

If humankind truly is 'born a rebel', as his Grand Inquisitor declares, perhaps no author's body of literature is more appropriate to read in the context of punk and postpunk than Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose Notes from Underground alone has been appropriated countless times by those who consider themselves members of this specific popular music subculture, Pussy Riot aside. Beyond Notes, however, much of Dostoevsky's thought seems to have found a home in punk culture, the intellectual predilections of which are well-documented. With assistance from M. M. Bakhtin and psychoanalysis, then, this article explores a trio of scenarios in detail to show how and to what effect Dostoevsky has emerged in punk historically: first, as an attempt to grapple with punks' shame in Being; second, as a touchstone for the often crippling 'intensified consciousness' this shame produces; finally, and following The Brothers Karamazov, as a way of approaching the killing of all manner of master signifiers or 'fathers' who generate, even in absence, this shame and paralysis.

The bounced cheques of neoliberal fantasy: Anxiety in times of economic crisis

Since the onset of the ongoing economic crisis, there has been a significant increase in anxiety-related problems. This article ascribes economic anxiety to the backfire of an enjoyment that neoliberal fantasy affixed to the unfettered maximization of profit. The widespread economic crisis interposed a discontinuity into the regular circulation of desire bringing out the limit of the fantasy of neoliberal economy and the emptiness of its master signifiers. As a result, the subject moves from the fantasmatic prospect of fulfilling desire through the acquisition of the object of enjoyment located in the market toward an encounter with the real emptiness that fantasy tries to disguise. The object falls from fantasy, giving its place to the real that burdens the subject with anxiety as a signal for the abrasion of her desiring status. Rather than trying to abolish anxiety by clinging to fantasy, the article suggests that maintaining anxiety in inter-subjectivity can open new possibilities for socio-economic relations.

O PIERRÔ IRÔNICO DE JULES LAFORGUE

Este estudo examina o personagem do pierrô na obra do poeta francês Jules Laforgue, ao analisar um poema alegórico traduzido para o português O conceito de personagem é retirado da teoria de Jacques Lacan. Primeiro definimos o nó borromeano; depois, o significante-fálico e o significante-mestre; após, o ritmo e a voz e, por fim, o personagem. Identificamos, no pierrô laforguiano, um mal na alma e o caracterizamos como irônico. Nossa tese central é que o sentido do personagem é uma origem da narrativa. Definimos origem e narrativa em nossa discussão e concluímos com ideias para estudos futuros.

Beethoven Overcome: Romantic and Existentialist Utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky'sStalker

Abstract The very last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky9s film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who moves glasses around on a table just by fixing her eyes on them. As she performs this magical act the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven9s Ninth Symphony, alongside the sound of a passing train, briefly appears on the soundtrack. This brief but poignant appearance of Beethoven9s music is both arresting and perplexing, but although the scene has received a number of critical readings, it is often noticed without further considerations. The present article concentrates on this overlooked aspect in order to reread the scene and examine the role played by Beethoven9s music in it. I argue that Beethoven9s music has a symbolic function within the scene and, furthermore, that it can most plausibly be understood as representing the scientific revolutions, the political projects, and the ideological struggles of modern history. I also argue that this symbolic meaning is effectively recoded within the filmic context of the last scene, turning what can be understood as two of the master signifiers of modern civilization9s technological, political, and ideological triumphs into powerful representations of the transitory and ultimately meaningless dimension of those triumphs. In the last part of the article I examine a particular phenomenon in the film: the regular return of the compound sound-image consisting of classical music and the sound of running trains. Departing from an interpretive strategy developed by musicologist Lawrence Kramer, I attempt to show that the iteration of this sonic figure amounts to a particular structural trope in the film, namely what Kramer would call an expressive doubling. This eventually leads me to the conclusion that one very rewarding way of looking at Stalker is to see it as expressing or enacting a central tenet of the utopian aesthetics of early Romanticism: the idea of transcendence.

Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship

This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits.The article then examines a recent example of contemporary,“deconstructive” scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential “Orwellian doublespeak.” The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with “discourse analysis” and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers.

Response to Haim Gordon’s Review of Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education

Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education is less than modest: it attempts to become a critical attempt to rearticulate critical theory and reformulate the possibilities of current critical education. By the time of the publication of this book I already felt it was less of a summary and more of a departure to a new beginning. A gate to a new path which, while remaining true to the initial inspiration that gave birth to critical theory and its educational fruits, would be brave enough to face unavoidable questions that currently demand our courage: what has gone wrong with critical education? Does greater alethea await us in what the post-structuralist educational alternatives hide from us? And what does this closure tell us about human existence and its (counter-) educational telos in the omnipotent dullness of the present historical moment? In this book I tried to articulate the origin of the fantastic optimism which in modernity was adjunct to the project of the human-killing-God-each-moment-anew and the deification of humanity as a manifestation of the overcoming of the quest to return ‘‘home’’ to nothingness. My goal was to address the impetus of critical education, from within the current process of deconstruction of its preconditions, master signifiers, and, more importantly, its Eros. This birth-giving fire was actualized historically and individually in the framework of the Enlightenment’s project in two very different prisms and strivings: (1) Overcoming the imperatives of determinism by devoting its spirit to a commitment to a new kind of transcending holiness. (2) Striving to surrender to meaninglessness, sometime ecstatic surrender to the invitation to return ‘‘home’’—to the ‘‘harmony’’ of nothingness or to the glorious return of the Gnostic God from its exile. Its most common modern manifestation is the Utopia of consensus, synthesis, or the ideal of a just, free and solidarian society. These are the two strongest suggestive wings of the hospitality of modern education as the loyal servant of the ‘‘home-returning’’ striving. Historically, humanist critical education was explicitly committed to a grand refusal to the ‘‘home-returning’’ hospitality, which enabled, justified and did its best to ornament and reproduce hierarchical social relations, dogmas and enslaving/meaning-birth-giving mysterium. As a substitute it offered a critique of the traditional ‘‘home-returning’’ prisms

The ghosts of the past, the dreamlands of the future … or why fantasies are bound to fail in socialism and the market: The case of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia

The transition ‘from planned to market economy’ in the former Soviet Union and in several countries in post-communist Europe is one of the most sweeping social transformations of the second half of the 20th century. It is widely accepted that this transformation was driven by a shared belief in the market's superior ability to deliver economic growth, to create wealth and contribute to the well-being of the populations after the demise of the defunct socialist ideology. However, the element of utopian fantasy undergirding the grand projects of socialism and the market is usually ignored, often with detrimental results. The study draws on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to propose an alternative reading of the process of transition, as an exchange of one powerful fantasy for another. My key contention is that as long as the common utopian dream of social harmony underlying both projects will not be recognised for what it is, which is in itself an unattainable desire of the human psyche, the illusory dreamlands will continue to exist and so will their violent political consequences. The study uses the example of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia to illustrate how unacknowledged fantasy leads to violent utilitarianism as it was manifested in socialism, and is now repeated differently but no less tyrannically in the market. In conclusion, I argue for integrating fantasy as a constitutive element of political projects and explore the possibility of the autonomous (self-determined) mode of governance that Cornelius Castoriadis (1987/2005) theorised on and juxtaposed to the heteronomous ways of organising ruled by master signifiers present in various ideologies.

Ironic Narrative, Ironic Reading

This article discusses irony both as a narrative archetype in tonal music and as an interpretative strategy on the part of the listener. Beginning with a discussion of Northrop Frye's four narrative archetypes (romance, comedy, tragedy, irony), the article turns to a semiotic interpretation of the archetypes by James Liszka and an application of that work for music analysis by Byron Almén. Arguing that ironic narratives in tonal music often take as their premise a topical field associated with romance or comedy that leads to an unexpected failure, the article also claims that our interpretation of musical narratives must be invested in the semantic level (topics, codes, conventions, genres) as well as the syntactic one (harmony, voice leading). The four archetypes function as structures of the musical text and as master signifiers that the listener uses to organize an interpretation. As such, the archetypes function as ideologies of the musical text and as ideologies of the reader. The article illustrates these ideas with analyses of Chopin's Nocturne in B, op. 32/1, Chopin's Second Ballade, and Brahms's Rhapsody in E♭, op. 119/4.