The Failure of Discourse

The Failure of Discourse

In poststructuralism and in psychoanalysis;

there is only impossibility

outside of concrete discourses;

from which to interpret

or critique truth-effects.

Concepts have no existence

independent of their articulation;

they reverb in their pragmatic moment

and only within a regime of signification.

There is no stable truth

that is transcendental

to discursive and historical context;

from which it was produced

and deployed.

There is no neutral enunciative

position to comment on utterances;

fixing meaning once and for all.

No methodology to provide mastery

over the surplus of meaning

that is produced by every

signifying practice.

There is no neutral language

through which truth claims

of discourses may be evaluated.

If there is no mode of analysis

that can claim unmediated access

to truth or objectivity;

how do we identify false

discourses or consciousness?

If we can't describe

reality or truth

then discourse structures

produce only categorical distortions.

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Therefore, any description of society

as a structural totality is questionable.

Contrary to the axioms

of Western metaphysics;

structures do not possess anything

like fixed centers or essences

that establish secure limits

for the combination and/or

substitution of structural elements.

If in the absence of a stable center;

no ordered set of relations;

is it possible to achieve the status

of a coherent and unified totality?

This suggests that

every process of ordering

produces a surplus that limits

and subverts totalization.

Residual surplus ensures the persistence

of a contested terrain of unfixity

that escapes articulation and signification.

The failure of totalization comes

through the symbolic order,

network of differential relations

between signifying elements

that provide categories and identities

from where subjectivity

and social reality are produced.

The symbolic order is a failed

structural totality,

a discursive complex that

maintains the illusion

of consistency via a set

of constitutive exclusions.

We will merely leave a

breadcrumb here

so at some future time

we expand how these

"constitutive exclusions"

become the "logic of identity",

eventually racism and

most forms of discrimination.

What are we saying?

The symbolic order has holes!

These gaps in symbolization

retroactively produce sets

of distortions in social

and subjective reality.

This warping of the discursive weave

within the human experience is called

"The Real".

You may be familiar

with "alternative facts",

the rendering of oppositional

discourse as patently fake!

The so called, "Post-factual

political discourse".

The erosion of epistemic dimension;

when reality stops exerting deontic;

(here we mean a duty and obligation

to ethical behaviour),

power on our political discourse;

when we stop caring about truth.

As such, post-factual political

discourse is a discursive attitude

that consists of three components:

motivated cognition, conspiratorial

epistemology, and bullshit.

The conspiratorial epistemology

attempts to correct the socio-symbolic

distortion anxiety by mainly

discrediting those who utter claims,

"The Real", incompatible with ones

explanatory completeness.

Bullshit is an important

philosophical concept.

Bullshit is a class of claims

about objective reality.

When the speaker utters

a claim of the bullshit class

the speaker is being dishonest,

The bullshitter doesn't care

of the claims of truth.

The bullshitter is uttering

bullshit in order to reinforce

their pre-existing beliefs,

and / or in order to persuade

others of their beliefs.

"The real" represents an ineradicable

negativity that every symbolic

structuration fails to master.

"The real" occupies the site of lack

in a symbolic structure,

but more often than not,

in the pre-symbolic non-meaning

that founds the process of symbolization.

We stand at the last breath

of a large mass of settlers

and their descendants, who

who bullshit themselves;

continue to inhabit

the living collective body

and who cannot fully

integrate into the symbolic.

By Tezozomoc