Lefort Losocial y Lo Politico. Articulo

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2006 87: 83Thesis ElevenBrian C. J. Singer

Thinking the 'Social' with Claude Lefort

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THINKING THE ‘SOCIAL’WITH CLAUDE LEFORT

Brian C. J. Singer

ABSTRACT This article examines Claude Lefort’s writings in order to thinkabout the ‘social’, understood as separate from the political, and in its separ-ation, as a strictly modern ‘phenomenon’. Prior to the modern democratic revol-ution, the collective order was presented through the representation of power,itself identified with both law and knowledge, and referred to a transcendentsource. At a first moment, the modern democratic revolution, under the signof the general will, renders power immanent. At a second moment, it separ-ates power from law and, above all, knowledge, such that three domainsemerge, each with its own logic, its own notion of representation, its owndivisions. The ‘social’, in a sense, arises between these two moments. At onelevel, it appears as an event in, and in consequence an object of, knowledge,once knowledge need no longer be, primarily, a knowledge of power or law,that is the enunciation of the principles by which the latter establish the order,coherence and sense of the world. At another level the ‘social’ emerges as aresponse to the difficulties presented by a strictly political representation ofsocietal order – difficulties in no small part due to the revolutionaries’ inabilityto countenance the separation between the three domains. In this regard the‘social’ appears as a presupposition that serves to stabilize an inherentlyconflictual political order. It is, however, an ‘empty’ presupposition, withoutdeterminate content, and therefore also a source of uncertainty. While thisemptiness proves a stimulus for the construction of new savoirs, it also accountsfor the fragility of all discourses that would speak in its name (social science,social theory, sociology). The article concludes with a few words about the‘death of the social’.

KEYWORDS Claude Lefort • political • power • representation • social

Claude Lefort is known primarily as a thinker of the ‘political’, particu-larly as it emerges with modern democracy. This article asks if his thought

Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 83–95SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513606068777

07 068777 Singer (bc-t) 25/9/06 2:38 pm Page 83



can also serve to think about the ‘social’. The claim of this article is that thesocial was only ‘discovered’ during the 18th and 19th centuries, and that thisdiscovery must be related to the modern democratic revolution. Warrant forthis claim can be found in one of Lefort’s more difficult essays, ‘Outline ofthe Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’ (Lefort, 1982). As this essay’scentral thematic concerns ideology, his comments on the social remain quitebrief. They are, nonetheless, highly suggestive, and need to be unpackedand expanded.

Near the beginning of the essay, Lefort draws a distinction betweenthe ‘institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’, which corre-sponds roughly to that between ‘an order of practice and an order of repre-sentation’ (1982: 183). The social here applies to all societies. Still, he makesit clear that the social appears explicitly as such, in discourse, only in modernsocieties. Earlier societies spoke of the social in non-social terms, as theyhad not disentangled ‘the social order’ from ‘the order of the world’(1982: 187). The suggestion is that the social order was confused with thenatural or, as more likely, the super-natural world, such that the institutionof that order was represented as proceeding from an extra-social, transcen-dental source. In modern societies the social order is deemed immanent tosociety and, therefore, intelligible in its own terms – this ultimately beingwhat is meant by the ‘discovery’ of the social. Of course, many have notedthat, as long as religion remained dominant, the nature of social being wasmisrecognized. The promise of Lefort’s discussion lies in its association ofsecularization with the idea of a change in the ‘symbolic order’. The latteris defined not just as ‘a system of oppositions by which social forms can beidentified and articulated with one another’ (1982: 194). He adds that thecharacter of these oppositions depends on ‘the configuration of the signi-fiers of law, power and knowledge’ (1982: 186). With a change in thesymbolic order, there is a change in the relations between law, power andknowledge, and consequently, in each of these terms’ signification. Considerthe character of this change, if only schematically.

CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER, LAW AND KNOWLEDGE

In the religious symbolic order, at least in its pre-modern Christianvariant, the three terms are all referred to a divinity that is all-powerful andall-knowing, the source of all law, and guarantor of the world’s coherence,integrity and intelligibility. Human power, knowledge and law must partici-pate in, and be modelled on, divine power, knowledge and law in order torender the latter visibly present to the human world. As power, law andknowledge converge within the figure of the divinity, they will also converge,if less perfectly, when re-presented in human institutions. Thus there isneither law nor knowledge outside the position of power: the law is definedthrough the power that gives it substance, while power is defined through

84 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)




the law that gives it form. A power that separates from its law is no longerpower, but its corruption. Similarly, knowledge is only genuine knowledgeif it is validated by power, and serves to sustain power and its law. Ulti-mately, power speaks truth in order to sustain a lawful world. Truths thatlie outside the orbit of power appear senseless because they would refer toa disorderly and incoherent world.

This has implications for the distinction between ‘the institution of thesocial’ and the ‘discourse on the social’ (here a politico-theological discourseon a social ‘under erasure’). Institution appears present only to the extentthat it is represented in the theological-political discourse, for the latterrenders present the power, law and knowledge without which there wouldbe no institution. Institution thus appears via discourse, the latter appearingless a discourse about the ‘social’ than a discourse constitutive of the ‘social’,as it relays the divine word constitutive of the order of the world from whichthe ‘social’ is not yet disentangled. Words are often not just words; theymould the institutional world. And acts are often ritual acts because theycommunicate between worlds. Power here bears, comparatively speaking,an explicitly symbolic dimension.

Modern democratic power is less explicitly symbolic: as the place ofpower is ‘empty’, its occupants no longer incarnate the constitution of anorder. Nonetheless, modern democratic regimes still entail a symbolic order,the emptying of the place of power itself implying a new ‘configuration ofthe signifiers of power, law and knowledge’. In effect, as the three terms nolonger refer to a single extra-social source, they separate and pursue theirown particular ‘logics’. This article looks at this separation from, above all,the perspective of knowledge and its transformation. The latter is, indirectly,the focus of Lefort’s essay, ideology being a form of knowledge, an un-satisfactory form to be sure, but one still subject to the changes beingexamined.

In modern democratic regimes, knowledge (like power and law,moreover) is general, and in several senses. Everyone can, in principle,become knowledgeable, and should receive an education. Everyone is apotential source of knowledge, and deserves to be heard regardless ofposition. And everyone can become his own object of knowledge, with hisown personal archive. All this supposes that knowledge, if it is not to becomean instrument of oppression by the few, must be dissociated from theposition of power, or at least the position of the power-holders. This laststatement suggests a qualification, for power is divided between the immedi-ately visible positions occupied by the power-holders and the sovereignposition they claim to represent. One wonders if this separation from knowl-edge also applies to the sovereign, particularly in matters of political judge-ment. After all, if constitutions never declare the all-powerful sovereignpeople to be all-knowing, knowledge and power are still conjoined, if onlytentatively, in the figures of the general will, common sense and public

Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 85




opinion (Singer, 2004b). These are figures with considerable symbolicpotency, for much of their truth value depends on their place of enunciation.

A similar argument can be made regarding the relation of knowledgeto law. Knowledge is no longer restricted to a concern with (the power of)law. Paradoxically, the separation of knowledge from law is perhaps firstevidenced by the development of a division in law, between scientific andjuridical law – a division crucial to ‘the disentangling of the social order fromthe order of the world’. This division implies not just a distinction betweentwo forms of causality, but between laws that must be stated in order to beeffective, and laws that do not. Stones fall according to the law of gravityindependent of whether anyone, the stones included, recognizes these laws;by contrast, juridical laws will not be obeyed if not known. This is to saythat the statement of juridical law, when enunciated from a position ofpower, bears considerable symbolic efficacy (an efficacy greater than thefigures of the previous paragraph). Scientific laws, of course, are even moreeffective for being ‘real’ rather than symbolic.

And yet, if the division between the two laws rigorously correspondedto that between ‘the social order and the order of the world’, knowledgeand law would not be separated relative to the social order. For knowledgeof the social order would still be restricted to knowledge of juridical law,even as knowledge of the latter would be considered directly constitutiveof that order. The discovery of the social thus requires the development ofan extra-juridical knowledge of the social order which, if not necessarilymodelled on scientific law, still has to gesture to an underlying ‘reality’. Suchknowledge, however, is not, at first, demanded by the modern democraticrevolution. When democracy is defined in terms of a general accord thatestablishes the nation, the existence of the national society depends ongeneral knowledge of the accord and agreement as to its wisdom. To posethe existence of a ‘hidden’, non-consensual social order, that demands adifferent kind of knowledge, cannot but appear to interfere with the accord’stransparency and, potentially, its purchase.

THE SOCIAL DISTINGUISHED FROM THE POLITICAL

When one speaks of a ‘social contract’ in, say, the manner of Rousseau,one has yet to discover the social, at least as distinct from the political.1

Lefort speaks of two disentanglings: first, ‘the disentangling of the politicaland the mythical-religious’, and second, ‘the disentangling of the politicaland the non-political within the social order’ (1982: 187). This second disen-tangling, the discovery of the social proper, should be understood asproceeding from the political, as its discovery of a terrain that marks thelimits of its empire. This accords with what we know about those generallyconsidered the pre-revolutionary precursors of social theory: Montesquieucriticized contractualism, and legislative hubris more generally, while the





Scottish Enlightenment sought to oppose civic republicanism (Pocock, 1985;Singer, 2004a). It also accords with the common argument that the post-revolutionary development of social thought in the 19th century was aresponse to the shortcomings of the French Revolution.2 The discovery of anon-political social was not, however, simply a matter of intellectual history;it also served to stabilize the separation of knowledge, law and power whichthe democratic revolution momentarily threatened to erase.

Consider for a moment this revolutionary democratic imaginary thatrefuses to separate the political from the non-political. Power, law andknowledge here all appear general: the sovereign encompasses all citizens;the law brooks no privileges; and the political truth is born of a generalaccord. Moreover, the generality of one term blends into the generality ofthe others: if the voluntas of power is not general, then the laws passed willnot be in the general interest, and the nation will not live up to its concept.In a sense, the three terms again converge, though from within a positionof immanence. This renders what Lefort terms the ‘play of divisions’ diffi-cult and, in the context of the French Revolution, murderous, any sign ofdivision threatening the republic one and indivisible with symbolic collapse(Singer, 1986). Thus the continuous purges, as well as the festivals that re-iterate the original act of political constitution with a display of generalassent. A non-political social, by contrast, points to a half-buried stratum ofcollective existence not directly encompassed by rights, laws or powers – astratum that bears signs of a minimal consistency and intelligibility, thoughit is not the immediate object of a knowing gaze or consenting will.

Much of our problematic can be resituated in terms of the question ofrepresentation. With the political disentangled from the mythical-religious,representation no longer refers to the rendering present to this world of anorder that originates in another through a power that bridges both. But whatthen does representation refer to? What does it mean to represent a collec-tivity? The answer is less simple than it appears. One cannot simply say thatrepresentation no longer participates in the formation of the represented,that the representation merely reflects, at a distance, a pre-existing, sovereignprinciple. Much depends on what sort of representation one is talking about– a representation of power, law or knowledge? The problem with the revol-utionary democratic imaginary is that it confuses the three forms, which thenmakes it difficult to separate the representation from the represented.

What is the nation? Within social contract theory it is given through itsconstitution. As a written document, the latter is by definition a representa-tion, but a representation of what? Let us say that it reiterates truths that, byvirtue of their self-evidence (and by the self-evidence of their virtue), arepresent to each and every citizen – as if the constitution were merely a pieceof paper representing a contract already present in hearts and minds. Buteven what is based on purportedly self-evident truths does not really existuntil it has been declared to exist. Moreover, here we are speaking of a





declaration of law that constitutes the sovereign nation that declares the law.If, then, a constitution genuinely takes hold, it will be no mere piece ofpaper; it will appear sacrosanct, not because inspired by God, but becauseconfounded with the sovereign act that founds the nation. One cannot under-estimate the enormous symbolic efficacy of the representation of the lawhere.

The real problem emerges with the translation from the representationof law to that of power. One might think such a translation unnecessary,even impossible. After all, if in the register of the law the referent (the repre-sented) cannot be easily separated from its enunciation (the representation),in the register of power the representatives and represented refer to twodifferent groups of people. However, as the sovereign people is constitutedthrough the (fundamental) law, the representational logics of law and poweroverlap, opening the way for a logic of substitution that operates in thefollowing manner. The sovereign power constituted by the (fundamental)law refers to the general will of the people that exists to maintain and extendthe law. But this will cannot manifest itself directly, at least not continuously,as the nation is too large to assemble in person. Instead it must manifestitself indirectly through its political representation, with the proviso that thelatter reflect the national will as closely as possible (a proviso that appearsall the more necessary as, prior to the Revolution, political representationwas considered inherently aristocratic, a filtering mechanism for the promotionof superior individuals to positions of authority). The tendency, then, is toread not just the ‘general will’, but the nation’s very existence, off the repre-sentative will. Thus the propensity to postpone elections which, while peri-odically permitting the direct manifestation of the sovereign will, threaten toreveal that will as internally divided and different from its representation.Indeed, all political divisions, whether within or between representatives andrepresented, appear as a direct menace to the nation one and indivisible,the Terror being the attempt to ensure the survival of the sovereign by forcingnation and representation to coincide.

The dramatic, ultimately unsustainable, character of such a logic under-lines the need to separate polity and society. If events at the level of politi-cal representation are not to directly threaten the ‘order of society’, the lattermust appear as existing relatively independent of political representation,which is to say, it must be represented in terms other than those of law orpower. The second disentangling, in short, supposes the existence of differ-ent forms of representation corresponding to the different spheres.

Once polity and society can be distinguished, democratic politicalrepresentation no longer represents the collectivity, identified with the sover-eign power and its act of foundation. When the order, coherence and identityof the collectivity are no longer suspended on its political representation,politics can be ‘desacralized’. Political representation need no longer embodythe wholeness and wholesomeness of the social bond. It refers instead to a





political competition only loosely connected to a society that exists on itsown terms. If modern democracies have instituted a distinct political sphereopen to the play of division, it is not just because of the establishment of adivision within power (between the sovereign people and its representa-tives), but also because of a division from power that allows the nationalsociety to appear as more and other than the sovereign.

Everything that has been said so far suggests that the discovery of thesocial is not exclusively a matter of knowledge. Nonetheless it remainsprimarily such as the presence of the social depends on a change in therepresentation of knowledge consequent to its separation from power andlaw. In the religious symbolic regime, where the ‘order of the social’ isrendered present through the representation of an extra-social power, knowl-edge appears as a necessary moment of, and inseparable from, power andits representation. In the revolutionary democratic imaginary, as knowledgeof the social order is still equated with knowledge of power at its source(even if the latter is no longer extra-social), the enunciation of knowledgeremains joined to the expressions of law and power, with all the correspond-ing symbolic effects. By contrast, the emergence of the social from the politi-cal supposes a form of knowledge that separates political representationfrom national existence, discourse from institution, enunciation from itsreferent, and words from things. This last phrase refers to Foucault’s Les motset les choses and, more precisely, his discussion of the shift from the classicto the modern episteme that separates words from things. ‘The space of order,which served as a common place for representation and for things, forempirical visibility and for the essential rules . . . is from now on shattered.’This order resides ‘henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediatevisibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more densethan representation itself’ (Foucault, 2002: 259). It seems odd to pair Foucaultwith Lefort3 – still, Foucault’s history illuminates a change, relative to knowl-edge, in the very sense of representation, a change that, I am arguing,consummates the differentiation of knowledge from law and power. Hence-forth, the social appears as the moment of collective existence that lies‘outside representation’, the signifier of a reality that slips beneath the surfaceof law’s empire, and resists power’s diktat. As such, the social appears asthat which is not immediately apparent, a tangled skein at once synchronicand diachronic, an index of the depths below that replaces the light fromabove. In its gesture to an underlying reality, the social solicits new savoirs– social sciences, social theories, sociology – themselves the occasion forthe creation of new empiricities.

Returning to Lefort’s original terms, the emergence of the socialrequires a separation between ‘the institution of the social’ and the ‘discourseon the social’. Once the latter admits its distance from institution, it becomesa discourse about the social, i.e. a discourse that makes truth claims aboutsocial institution. Here the sense of the term institution must be specified. I





assume that Claude Lefort draws it from Merleau-Ponty, and notably fromhis 1954–5 course at the Collège de France, which Lefort recently edited. Inthe preface he writes:

Merleau-Ponty explicitly distinguishes between the problematic of institutionand that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, with the idea of aconstituting consciousness, the idea of a world within which nothing can bediscovered that has not been constituted by that consciousness’ activities.Understood in its double sense, institution supposes that the instituting andthe instituted do not coincide. (Lefort, 2003: 7)

The discovery of the social, then, implies a discovery of the institutionaldimension of collective life beyond the constituting consciousness of thepolitical. This discovery points beyond the sense of the social as an associ-ation formed by the enunciation of an action in common. In its refusal tobe reduced to the terms of power, law and contract – terms that are inevi-tably the expression of a (conjunction of) will(s) – the social now demandsthe ‘admission’ of a difference between discourse and institution, enuncia-tion and referent, representation and ‘reality’. Such is the supposition of theemergence of genuine social knowledge: ‘the attempt . . . on the basis ofinstituted knowledge, to bring thought into contact with the institutingmoment’ (1982: 202). One must add, if the non-coincidence of the institut-ing and instituted is to be acknowledged, it is not just the difference betweendiscourse and institution, but the irreducibility of this difference, that mustbe admitted.

According to Lefort, ideology is the attempt, once the differencebetween representation and reality has been posed, to dissimulate the ‘real’,or what in reality is unwanted and unexpected. In this attempt, ideologytries to narrow this difference in order to neutralize the effects of divisionand historicity that bespeak the uncertainties of ‘the instituting moment’. Butwhere once institution could only be presented through discourse, andreality only through representation, the temptation now is to seek to narrowthe distance from the side of reality, i.e. by enjoining a discourse that wouldhide behind the facts. Such a discourse would represent reality as devoid ofdiscourse (including an instituting discourse) and represent itself as the self-decipherment of that non-discursive reality. It would, in effect, conceal itsown coherence behind the erasure of the signs of its difference, as thoughthe coherence of its speech were immanent to ‘reality’ alone. Here we touchon a matter that goes beyond ideology: the illusion that shadows the emer-gence of the social, ‘namely that the institution of the social can account foritself’ (1982: 201) – as if social reality could be represented as independentof representation, and simultaneously as the latter’s source or cause. In whatLefort disparagingly refers to as ‘sociologisms’, the discourse on the socialspeaks in the name of reality by presenting itself as simultaneously externalto and engendered by the reality it ‘reflects’. However, the difference cannot





be indefinitely disguised; eventually the facts escape even the most ‘realist’discourse, which can then only play catch-up. Representation inevitably fallsshort of social reality, and not just because the distance between the placeof enunciation and its referent cannot, in the end, be disguised. Nor becausethere is no single place of enunciation and, therefore, no single perspectiveon the referent (politicians, lawyers and sociologists all represent socialreality differently, as do economists, artists, shopkeepers, workers, industri-alists, etc.). Ultimately, the failure is inscribed in the very nature of the object,the social, wherein the instituting continuously breaks through the instituted.

The social, once distinguished from the political, is a source of stability.Being rooted in the bedrock of an evolving history, and dispersed througha variety of spheres, it proves relatively impervious to shifts in power. Thesocial is also a source of uncertainty – the topos of an ‘institution’ ultimatelyexperienced as ‘ïnsaisissable ’ and ‘immaîtrisable ’ (Lefort, 1981: 173). Thediscovery of the social signals a new ontology of collective life, suggestiveof a new openness to institutional creativity, and a new sensitivity to reality’sindeterminacy. In its dual aspect this discovery must be considered a politi-cal event (if one that points beyond the political4), as well as an event inknowledge. Indeed, as a source both of stability and uncertainty, the socialappears as the necessary presupposition of modern democracy, serving toground its regime of representations. However, as a presupposition, thesocial is without determinate content, and all attempts to specify its contentprove rather fragile.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE SOCIAL

When the social was still indistinguishable from the political, andconceived as an association, its meaning was clear. It was the result of anexplicit conjunction of wills based on a shared interest. In its dependenceon the will, it appeared an abstraction, at once descriptive and normative,from all the particulars of position, communal belonging or regime type. Itsinstrument, the contract, appeared as both the most natural (as it accordswith the nature of the free will) and most artificial of devices (as that will,freed of all natural constraints, produces a purely conventional agreement).Modern liberalism still draws on the individualism, egalitarianism and ‘spir-itualism’ that such an understanding implies.5 However, once the social isdistinguished from the political, it is no longer an object of volition, andappears neither natural nor artificial, but seems to occupy an intermediaryzone of its own, wherein conventions appear ‘natural’ while nature appearsmutable. Society is now presented as a given, a strictly empirical entity,devoid of any normative imperative to conform to its definition as a general,conscious accord. The result is that the idea of the social becomes even moreabstract, to the point where it loses even its descriptive value, encompass-ing all of collective life in all its aspects. Thus the tendency of sociologists





to define their discipline tautologically, as the study of society, or of socialrelations, social interactions, etc.

In truth, the new, institutional sense of the social does not simplyreplace an earlier, contractual sense, the idea of a contractual associationbeing too deeply rooted in the democratic imaginary to simply disappear.Not only is the idea of social relations as constituted of a common accordstill very much present in normative political theory, but the idea that suchrelations are constituted of individual wills comes to define the basis ofeconomic theory. One is tempted to speak of a shift in the apprehension of‘the order of the social’ from the one big contract of the general political willto the many little contracts of the market economy. The latter economic repre-sentation points to an invisible principle of order that limits and, thereby,stabilizes the political, while maintaining much of the contractual imagination.In other words, it does what the properly social does, but in a way that is,at once, more certain (given its law-like determinations), more providential(given its promise of a utilitarian utopia), more flexible (with its mix of natureand artifice, it appears to reconcile the instituting and the instituted), yet stillupholds the free will as the source of all action. Thus there are those – mostfamously, Margaret Thatcher – who claim that society does not exist; as wellas those for whom society exists, but as the sum of the interaction of indi-vidual wills, sometimes associating, sometimes competing.

Most often the inaugural gesture of the disciplines that speak in thename of the social is to deny, if not necessarily the hegemony of the polityor economy, then the hegemony of their associated paradigms. One callson the social in order to criticize the ‘spiritualism’ of political theorists andthe ‘instrumentalism’ of economists, and to invoke some broader, denser andultimately more realistic perspective. Yet the prestige of the two more estab-lished disciplines remains largely unscathed. Anyone who has taught soci-ology knows that the pull of the discipline, however large its claims, istowards ‘residual’ areas like deviance, gender, race and ethnicity, etc. Thesocial, however, need not seek to encompass the political or the economicin the name of the whole. It can claim an intermediary status, sometimespitched diacritically towards the political, as with Hegel’s concept of civilsociety squeezed between family and state, or Hannah Arendt’s concept ofthe social distended between oikos and polis. And sometimes towards theeconomic, as in the neo-Habermassian version of civil society (Arato andCohen, 1992) or more indirectly, in the attempts to supplement economiccapital with social capital or trust (Putnam, 1994; Seligman, 1997). Often thesocial is invoked to speak less of the theoretical limits than the very realfailings of economy and polity. One thinks of the designation, beginning inthe 1830s, of ‘the social problem’ at that point where democratic republi-canism appeared incapable of responding to market dysfunctions (Castel,1995; Donzelot, 1984); or of the responses to that problem, ranging fromSocial Catholicism to socialism, social democracy and the World SocialForum. Or one thinks, in related terms, of the social as a set of policies,





social policies, and their corresponding forms of ‘governance’, e.g. socialwelfare, social insurance or social work.

Once the question of the social’s emergence is posed, the possibilityof its disappearance has to be countenanced. Indeed, ‘the end of the social’has already been announced; though as the term has several meanings, thesocial has been subjected, rhetorically at least, to several deaths. Sometimesits death or decline is attributed to the increased hegemony of (the repre-sentation of) the economic. If identified with a form of governance, the endof the social refers simply to the waning of the welfare state (Rose, 1999).If identified with a bounded society, understood as the container of thenation-state, the reference is to economic globalization (Giddens, 1990:63–78). Sometimes what is understood is the end of the ‘idea’ of society –society as a normative order underwritten by an idea of justice embeddedin the public sphere – an idea crushed by the sheer positivity of systemfunctioning (Freitag, 2002). At other times, one seems to be speaking of thedeath of the ‘instituted’, with the social turning liquid, dissolving the dura-bility and externality that sociologists equate with social structure (Bauman,2000; Dubet, 2002). Lastly, there is the death associated with a loss of refer-entiality, the claim that the social no longer seems real, but appears a simu-lation, the product of the increasingly tactile immediacy of mediarepresentations (Baudrillard, 1983). All these different deaths, though notentirely coherent with each other,6 appear to touch, in almost systematicfashion, on the different elements of the emergence of the social as describedhere. The more interesting of these deaths speak to the difficulty of engagingthe distance established by the division between institution and representa-tion, practice and discourse, fact and value, which afford the social its prin-ciple of visibility. Something of this is anticipated by Claude Lefort when, atthe end of the essay under discussion, he speaks of an ‘invisible ideology’– though the very fact that he still calls this an ideology suggests a note ofcaution.7 The implication is that the division between the institution of thesocial and the discourse on the social still holds, although it may now beharder to represent. After all, if ‘the configuration of the signifiers of law,knowledge and power’ are no longer quite the same as they were, no-onewould suggest that they have fused into the representation of a constitutingconsciousness at the source of collective life. Rather the implication is thatthe disarticulation of these signifiers has proceeded apace, such that thediacritical markers that demarcated the social no longer hold with the samefirmness, leaving the social both more pervasive and more difficult to pindown. The elaboration of this claim, however, would require another article.

Brian Singer teaches at Glendon College in sociology, and in the graduateprogrammes in Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto.He has written one book, some dozen articles in different journals, and translatedseveral works from the French. [email: [email protected]]





Notes1. Though there can be no doubt that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book of the same

name did much to spread the use of the term ‘social’ (Williams, 1976: 243–7).2. Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, Marx, Comte and Durkheim can and have all been

read in this manner. There is no need to turn to a Bonald or de Maistre, withtheir attempt to ground a community – as opposed to a society – in a revivedpolitical theology.

3. Foucault hardly speaks about the appearance of the social (not least becauseof his difficulties in speaking about the political); he does, however, speak ofthe emergence of the ‘human sciences’.

4. Much of what is called nation-building should be understood as the attemptto establish the presence of a ‘pre-political’ society. In an earlier article I triedto examine the emergence, within the French Revolution, of elements of a‘cultural’ understanding of the nation in response to the aporias of a strictlyvoluntary, contractual understanding (Singer, 1996).

5. The representative principle, at its root, consists in wanting to producethe political and, more generally, the social bond, by the will alone, thatis, from the human soul alone. Our period is perhaps not very religious,but, in the political and social order, it is quite “spiritualist.” We want allour ties, even corporal ties, to have their origin, cause and duration in apurely and sovereignly spiritual decision. (Manent, 2004: 230; my trans-lation).

Note the author, a political theorist, tends to fold the social into the political.6. One death suggests the end of social work; another that the social has been

reduced to social work. One sees representation (the representation of thenorm) absorbed into the facts, while another sees the facts absorbed into repre-sentation (by the media).

7. He describes the ‘invisible ideology’ in terms of a double movement: ‘elimi-nating the distance between the discourse on the social and social discourse,inserting the first into the second’; and ‘dissociating [this latter enterprise] fromthe affirmation of totality’ (1982: 225).

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