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Cultural Studies
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BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE

PEOPLE
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Published online: 02 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2012) BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE,
Cultural Studies, 26:2-3, 370-390, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2011.636206

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 Elizabeth A. Povinelli

BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE

Disinterring the body politic

This essay scrutinizes the theoretical foundations of Laclau’s notion of rhetoric and
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the rhetorical. It juxtaposes to Laclau’s reliance on Saussurean linguistics,

especially its elementary vocabulary of the signifier and signified, a model of
rhetoric based on non-linguistic and linguistic modes of rhetoric and
interpretation.

Keywords liberalism; liberal politics; Laclau; structuralism;

pragmatism; rhetoric

1.
To judge from recent publications, the spirit of the times is returning to ‘the
political’, to the question of the concept of ‘the political’ and to the question of
how a particular type of political formation
democracy
constitutes and is
constituted by rhetoric and rhetorical figures. Several fundamental questions
about the specific nature of democratic politics have re-emerged. Do
democratic political formations allow the people to speak? Or do democracies,
in grounding their legitimacy in the people, demand that all claims made on it
be in the figure (name) of ‘the people’
‘the people’ being the proper subject
of democratic processes. In other words, is rhetoric the foundation rather than
merely the tool of democratic politics? If so how does understanding this
rhetorical foundation
to be democratic all claims must be made in the name
of ‘the people’
help us better understand the nature of the political in
democracies? What conceptual advantage do we gain by considering ‘the
people’ to be a rhetorical figure rather than a pre-rhetorical social referent?
Who would have predicted such a decisive return to the issues of rhetoric in
political theory at the very moment that many scholars have declared the
insufficiencies of the linguistic turn for apprehending the forces of neo-liberal
capitalism and the material inequalities they are producing?
The return to the rhetorical foundations of democratic politics is in part
motivated by a new set of material forces and material inequalities plaguing a
post-cold war world and by a new set of governmental techniques emerging
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, Nos. 2
3 March
May 2012, pp. 370
390
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 371

from the so-called war on terror. This historical conjuncture is producing a

new raft of interred, interned and rotting bodies at the periphery and in the
centre of the democratic heartland. One does not have to adhere to the ever-
expanding concept of the ‘state of exception’ to be outraged by how various
democratically grounded political parties use the rhetoric of the people to
expunge certain bodies not merely from democratic borders but from the
border of the human itself. Surely the democratic order is in a crisis when civil
and physical death is increasingly the governing techniques of democratic
rather than totalitarian states, when democratic governments justify, and
attempt to legitimate, the production of this new level of violence and
maiming vis-à-vis the protection of democratic people and the democratic way
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of life, and when freedom is increasingly the rhetorical figure within which
governments make torture sensible and practical.
Many people have pointed out that the majority of the people within and
without contemporary democracies do not support the specific policies of the
Bush and Blair governments. The problem is not with democracy as a political
formation so much as with the distortion of the democratic process. The
problem is that the people are not being heard. Or they are not able to
organize their voices in such a way that they can hegemonize the political field.
Their voices are too unruly, and this unruliness is exploited to maintain foreign
and domestic politics that have only an awkward relation to democratic
principle. The problem is a problem of voicing, how the people as a rhetorical
source, figure and effect is voiced. The solution is to better understand the
relationship among these rhetorical elements so that the people can speak. As a
result, if the literal decay and sacrifice of certain bodies within the increasingly
cramped space of the new democratic order has placed increasing pressure on
how we conceive the relationship among the political, the democratic and the
rhetorical, the material nature and sources of political rhetoric
and in
particular the materiality of the political subjects of democracies
rapidly
collapses into linguistic fact or analogy.
If my opening gambit is a poetic homage to the first line of Paul De Man’s
Allegories of Reading, it is also a not so subtle observation that current
discussions about the political and about the proper subject of the political rely
on specific concepts of the material nature and sources of rhetoric and the
rhetorical. Whether they mean to or not these recent discussions reduce all
forms of rhetoric to linguistically based models of rhetoric. Ernesto Laclau’s
recent On Populist Reason is certainly an exemplary case of how the rhetorical,
its epistemological and ontological character and its material braces and
slippages, rapidly collapses into linguistic fact or analogy, despite his theoretical
sophistical, intentions and desires. Striving to defend the name of the people as
the political subject par excellence and popularism as the exemplary logic of
the political, Laclau turns to a post-Saussurean psychoanalytically informed
account of the empty signifier as the basis for a reinvigorated radical
democracy. Laclau’s aim is the sedimented realm of social process. But, as I
 372 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

will argue here, his end lands far from a vigorous account of ‘social sediment’;
if we are to understand this phrase to function as more than mere metaphor. It
is as much for its frustrated goals as its successful ends that On Populist Reason
serves as necessary text for any attempt to understand the limits of a specific
concept of the rhetorical for understanding the capacitation and incapacitation
of democratic politics and its proper subject.
This essay scrutinizes the theoretical foundations of Laclau’s notion of
rhetoric and the rhetorical. It juxtaposes to Laclau’s reliance on Saussurean
linguistics, especially its elementary vocabulary of the signifier and signified, a
model of rhetoric based on non-linguistic and linguistic modes of rhetoric and
interpretation. Here again it proves helpful to refer to De Man’s Allegories but
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this time not merely as a poetic homage. In his discussion of the interpretive
divide between grammatical meaning and rhetorical meaning, De Man evokes
the understanding of rhetoric offered by Kenneth Burke and the American
pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce. De Man is primarily interested in a certain
‘semiological enigma’ of critical reading: The undecidability between literal
and figural meanings through ‘grammatical or other linguistic devices’ (p. 10).
Thus, like Laclau, he tracks how metaphors connote the ‘formal potential of
the signifier’ (p. 31). But Peirce understood grammatical devices as merely one
of three different grounds of rhetoric. For Peirce (1998), to read is to engage
in a process of interpretation that has three different grounds
affective
(emotional), energetic or logical
symbolic
linguistic. All ‘readings’, critical
and otherwise, are some combination of these three elemental units of
semiosis. And all of them figure a relationship between two other signs (or a
sign and its object), i.e. they are rhetorical. The feeling of rage in the vicinity
of neoconservative politics would, for Peirce, be an example of an affective
interpretant. Rage is an affective sign that interprets (critically interprets) and
thus connects the subject to her political context. She might then reflect on
this rage and establish through reflexive thought some language specific sense
of it. She might symbolically interpret this affective interpretant through the
various political registers and genres available, such as evidence of her political
allegiance or she might affective interpret it becoming proud or scared of her
rage. Or she might be paralyzed, discovering that her self-understanding as a
committed pacifist is out of joint with the direction of her feelings. In any case
this spiralling matrix of signs is political semiosis.
To demonstrate how this alternative model of rhetoric and the rhetorical
would alter our understanding of the political conditions of actually existing
democratic orders, the essay begins by examining the stakes of Laclau’s
decision to ground the rhetorical structure of the people in the rhetorical
potentials of the empty signifier. What advantage does Laclau’s concept of the
empty signifier gain over other theories of democratic political rhetoric such as
Ranciere’s discussion of democratic politics as defined by the difference
between logos and phonos? How might we reread theorists like Schmitt through
this concept of the empty signifier? The purpose of this section is to tease out
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 373

how, in spite of his intentions and the potential power of his approach, Laclau
collapses political processes into a specific linguistic theory that continually
deflects analysis away from the body politic and its institutional sedimentation.
The essay then turns to two doorframes
a men’s bathroom in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the front door
of an indigenous Australian family’s house in the Northern Territory of
Australia
to explicate an alternative model of social rhetoric that includes
linguistic models of interpretation but does not reduce interpretation (or
critical reading) to a linguistic model or analogy. I use the first doorframe to
build up the vocabulary of the alternative model of rhetoric I am proposing.
This vocabulary includes the elements and dynamics of what are always
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internally diverse and unstable matrixes of interpretation. I use the second

doorframe to demonstrate how the coherence and incoherence of these
elements of interpretation within the political subject are the effect of larger
social processes and institutions that give force to and enforce one matrix of
interpretation rather than another.
I make three broad claims in this essay. First, I agree with Laclau’s sense
that rhetoric is as much the foundation as the tool of democratic politics. But,
not only do I disagree with how Laclau theoretically anchors his model of
rhetoric, I want to suggest a kind of social analysis that might be possible

assuming that the aim and end of a political theory is social sediment
if we
were to make a decisive break with the logic of the Saussurean sign (not merely
structuralism, but the language of the signifier and the signified) and its
continuing hold on the humanistic social sciences. Second, I want to begin to
sketch out an alternative conceptual vocabulary for this non-Saussurean model
of political rhetoric in late liberal democratic orders. What are the various
modes of rhetoric that compose the ‘people’ of liberal democratic orders?
How are they related to each other in theory and in social practice? How does
understanding these various modes of rhetoric help explain how and why
political movement emerges, or not, in specific contexts? The alternative
conceptual vocabulary presented in this essay takes from as it confronts the
limits of various non-linguistic models of critical reading, including the earlier
work of Heidegger, Peirce’s pragmatism, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and
Foucault’s critique. Finally, I want to begin to reintegrate something we might
call a post-essentialist materiality into our political analysis. Thus my interest in
foregrounding non-linguistic embodied forms of critical reading as essential to
understanding the emergence of the people. Let me say a bit more about this.
Talking about rhetoric as grounded in bodies and materialities can produce
feelings of ambivalence for some critical theorists in part because mentioning
bodies and their materialities is to forget that bodies and materialities are
always stretching, reacting and forming their physiologies and intensities in the
domain of discourse. And mentioning bodies and materialities would seem to
forget that even if there were flesh on one side and discourse on the other,
neither of these sides is singular, homogeneous or reducible to a unitary axis.
 374 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

What flesh, affect, disposition, where and when? And which discourse, where
and when? And, finally, mentioning bodies and materialities would seem to
forget that bodies and materialities are always within and spilling out of
demanding environments and institutions. So let me try to be clear (see also
Povinelli 2006). When I question the mode of rhetoric currently on offer in
political theory, I am not thereby hoping to smuggle back into critical political
analysis a pre-discursive, inert body or an essential materiality. Instead I am
interested in how political rhetoric might depend on the socially built space
between the various historically embodied grounds of rhetoric. In this account,
flesh is no less a set of political manoeuvres and tactics, neither uniform nor
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unified, than is language (see also Massumi 1992, Gil 1998). To make political
sense
to constitute ‘a people’
democratic politics must be shaped, etched
and registered through physicalities, fabricated habitudes, habituated visions.
These habituated materialities leave behind new material habitats that will be
called on to replicate, justify, defy and interfere with given sense-making and
with the distribution of life and death, wealth and poverty that this sense-
making makes possible. In this account rhetoric is always already within the
body
although not uniformly or univocally. Thus we need to understand the
demanding environments that capacitate and incapacitate the circuits that
connect affective, energetic and symbolic dimensions of rhetoric in such a way
that the body politic is produced and disturbed. The aim of this essay is,
therefore, not to demonstrate how the body determines the rhetorical nature
of the political. Instead, I want to discuss how the various embodied grounds of
interpretation would change how we approached the relationship between the
rhetoric of the people and the nature of the political.

2.
On Populist Reason makes two powerful claims about the nature of the political
and the rhetorical that bear serious engagement for any student of
contemporary democratic politics. The first is that the political is a discrete
social domain whose nature needs to be defined if political philosophy is to
secure its proper object (and subject). Thus, Marchant’s (forthcoming) reading
of On Populist Reason as primarily interested in establishing the proper name of
the political subject to describe the actual grounds of political practice and its
social sedimentations seems correct to me. The second point is that ‘the
people’ is a rhetorical effect figure of the empty signifier. Laclau is very clear
about what he means by an empty signifier. For Laclau the empty signifier is
not without content in the way that a vacuum is empty of air pressure. Quite
the contrary: The signifier is empty in the sense that it is maximally full (‘an
empty fullness’, 2005, p. 106), so full that it stands for things that are not only
unnamed but also unnamable. So full in fact that even as the irreducible
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 375

heterogeneity passing through the empty signifier creates centring effects, it

also creates a space of political antagonism outside the totalizing enclosures of
structuralism and dialectics. Political antagonisms cannot be predetermined
from the point of view of the structure because the centring effects they
produce do not presuppose a determination in the last instance; and
antagonisms will never be dialectical because the elements of antagonism do
not meet on a common level of discourse (see for instance, Laclau 2005, p. 69,
83
85, 148
149). As a result, the empty signifier is not merely maximally
available to the irreducible heterogeneity of demands, identities, aspirations
and outcomes but also knots this heterogeneity together in such a way that it
provides the external frontier so fundamental to populist politics
the
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designation of the one who claims to be inside but is, in this hegemonic act,
thrown outside the people. The empty signifier is radically promiscuous in
democratic politics. All sorts of figures can stand in for the name of the people
and its external frontier: Humanist and Terrorist; Feminist and Misogynist; the
People, the Multitude, Friend/Enemy. These phonic waves are catachrestic
figures through which an infinite possibility of desires, meanings and identities
are knotted together in such a way that they constitute and unsettle the given
time of political hegemony.
Laclau is hardly the first political theorist to reflect on the relationship
between the political and the sedimented realm of social processes. Some time
ago, Claude Lefort (1989) discussed the division of semantic and social space of
out which the political and non-political emerged. Nor is he alone in trying to
understand the relationship between forms of discourse and the emergence of
democratic politics. Jacques Ranciere (1998, p. 2) rests the distinction
between democratic politics and the police on the difference between ‘speech,
which expresses’ (logos) and the alien voice, which ‘simply indicates’ (phonos).
At stake for him are the different political capacities of logos and phonos rather
than rhetoric or the nature of the empty signifier. Whereas voice can only
indicate pain and pleasure
is mere noise
speech can express the just and
the unjust, the useful and harmful. ‘Discursive articulation of a grievance’ is
altogether different from ‘the phonic articulation of a groan’ (1998, p. 2).
Grievance constitutes the subject as part of a community, while the groan
merely indicates that the utterer is a part of sentient life. Logos allows the non-
monstrous to emerge from the monstrous, the man from the sludge of
existential otherness.
If Laclau is not alone in his attempt to understand the political in relation
to processes of social sedimentation, nor alone in his attempt to reflect on the
role that phonos (signifier) and logos (signified) play in this process, he does,
nevertheless, have a singular commitment to a reading of the political subject
and the hegemonic process through a Lacanian influenced Saussurian account of
rhetoric. The potential of his approach to the rhetorical structure of a politics
grounded in ‘the people’ is suggested by how Laclau might read the anti-
rhetorical political philosophy of Carl Schmitt (1996, 2006). As is well known,
 376 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Schmitt did not consider the state’s power to decide the friend/enemy
distinction to be based on metaphorical or rhetorical powers. For Schmitt,
state power potentiated
it created concrete existential beings and determined
their manner of being in the world of states and citizens (see also Lefort 1989,
p. 216). This is what the political state does; and when it can no longer do so it
is no longer a political state. This right to kill
‘the authority to decide, in the
form of a verdict on life and death, the jus vitae ac necris’ (Schmitt 1996, p. 47)

was not, as Foucault (1991) would claim, a prehistory of modern power. It was an
essential pre-requisite to modern political sovereignty.
But it is exactly here that Laclau’s argument that ‘the people’ is an effect
and figure of rhetoric shows some of its potential power. Remember,
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Schmitt’s state is not defined by the essential concepts of the political (friend/
enemy) so much as by its ability to designate them (as well, of course, as to
declare its own legal suspension). It becomes clear then that although Schmitt
explicitly rejects the metaphorical and rhetorical nature of state power, his
account of proper state function and his account of the actual liberal
parliamentary system in which he lived relied on the rhetorical nature of
the political in two distinct but important ways. First, the nature of the
Schmittian state is designatory
baptismal in the Kripkean sense
and thus
already within a linguistic horizon. Laclau would no doubt agree with this
Kipkean counter-decriptivism, although he would translate the meaning of the
rigid-designator into the ‘emancipation of the signifier from any enthrallment
to the signified’ (p. 102). For Laclau, the guarantee of the object’s integrity

in Schmitt’s case, the designation of friend/enemy distinction
is the
retroactive effect of baptismal naming. Quoting Zizek, ‘What is overlooked, at
least in the standard version of antidescriptivism, is that this guaranteeing of an
object in all counterfactual situations
through all its descriptive features
is the
retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which
supports the identity of the object’ (pp. 102
103). As a result, categories such
as friend
enemy do not reveal the true logic of the political. Rather they are
the empty signifiers that allow a politics to emerge at a specific catachrestic
juncture of popular movements.
There is second sense in which, against his own account, Schmitt’s political
theology is rhetorical in nature. Here we remember that Schmitt was not
writing within what he considered to be a true political state. He was fully
aware, in other words, that if his true political state was to be, it had to be
birthed from within the existing liberal parliamentary system. In other words,
Schmitt had to persuade, win over, convince and motivate into being a world
that did not as yet exist. Social space had to be rhetorically prepared if the
baptismal power of the friend/enemy were to be sensible and compelling
in
Ranciere’s terms, if it were to enter the order of the visible and sayable. What
is invisible must become visible, what is intangible tangible. And so the social
categories and coordinates of friend/enemy must become apparent to anyone
with eyes
the perceptual field had to be shaped to produce these eyes. The
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 377

Concept of the Political is a beautiful example of how rhetoric is deployed to

shape this political subject. Through complex tropes of war, Schmitt creates a
set of social coordinates (friend
enemy) which themselves pre-suppose all
sorts of discontinuities with other social relations and social destinies (kin,
caste, religion, intimate stranger) and which are based not on the actual state
but a potential state. In other words, The Concept of the Political is not a
descriptive political science any more than the Bush Administration’s 2002 and
2006 National Security Strategies (see Wagner-Pacifici, 2008). Friend, enemy,
freedom is sedimented in the social imaginary through his writings, lectures
and jurisprudence so that they can be seen, heard, anticipated, feared and
followed. It is a manifesto, the prolegomenon, to a state that might be. It is
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also an obituary, much as Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was obituary
and manifesto, suffused with melancholy for a form of the state that never
existed and may well never exist.
We can see how Laclau’s interest in the rhetorical foundations of the
political provides a provocative interpretation of Schmitt
and the conditions
of the current Bush Administration’s state of terror for that matter. But if
political meanings are based on a set of unique, as of yet not realized, figural
conditions and on making these conditions persuasive in the world of policy
that is, in fact, dominated by other logics, then why would anyone listen? And
how do they ‘listen’? If the friend
enemy distinction is not a descriptive
category of actual life but a figural baptism necessary to produce political life
then what person in their right mind will agree to give birth to the thing that
might potentially murder her? What motivates her to take up these positions,
to experience herself and others in these terms
these names? What animates,
motivates and disseminates these names of identity and identification? The
state
or more precisely, Schmitt
can say all it wants, call people by whatever
names it chooses, by why do people obey, turn to these names (see also Butler
1997)? As Bourdieu (1998) asked, why are certain people invested in certain
social games in such a way that they are ready to die for these games even as others
are distinctly indifferent to the game, its terms, and its outcomes? And, most
importantly, for the purposes of this essay, what are the broad rhetorical
conditions in which such persuasive, motivation and identification occur?
Laclau answers that these identifications are the effect of the empty
signifier and the processes of affective identification that emerges from it. To
see what is at stake in reducing rhetoric to the play of the signifier, we need to
push against his own account of what he is up to theoretically, including his
account of his commitment to a language-based approach to the political. What
Laclau says he is doing and not doing is very clear. He says he does not
understand political rhetoric to be restricted to language and speech; thus,
from his perspective, the motivations to assume the friend/enemy distinction
are not merely linguistic. ‘Discourse is the primary terrain of the constitution
of objectivity as such. By discourse, as I have attempted to make clear several
times, I do not mean something that is essentially restricted to the areas of
 378 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

speech and writing, but any complex of elements in which relations play the
constitutive role’ (p. 68). He also says, very clearly, that ‘the construction of a
‘‘people’’ is not something which takes place just at the level of words and
images: it is also sedimented in practices and institutions’ (p. 106). Citing
Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Laclau argues that the quilting
function consists of ‘material practices that can acquire institutional fixity’
(p. 106). And yet, though Laclau clearly seeks something more robustly
material than a linguistic-based model provides, the tools of analysis he uses are
by-products of the Saussurean sign and the relationships he posits between such
things as affect, materiality and institutions on the one hand and language on
the other hand are figured through the Saussurean sign. The logic of
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combination and substitution, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, the signifier

and signified, negative differential relationality: these are the tools that
Saussure used to found his semiology and the terms that others would disperse
into critical social theory as if they were the only foundations to rhetorical
analysis. More strikingly, all non-linguistic, discursive phenomena are derived
from and mimetic to the ‘signifying chain’. For instance, Laclau argues that
signification and affect are not merely embedded phenomena but that affect is
inseparable from signification to such a degree that there seems little
meaningful difference between them. Indeed, affect barely disturbs, if it
disturbs it at all, the internal logic of the signifying chain. Finally, although
Laclau insists his model of rhetoric is attentive to the institutional life of the
empty signifier, institutions, like affects, mimic rather than dynamically
encounter the hegemonic process of particularization and universalization
carried out by the empty signifier (p. 107).
As a result it is not clear whether it matters that Laclau repudiates the
linguistically defined grounds of the Saussurean semiology. Granted, it is not
completely clear how far afield from Saussure’s semiology Laclau means to go.
Soon after arguing that he is not conflating discourse and language he resituates
his discursive approach in the linguistic formalism of the Copenhagen and
Prague Linguistic Schools. So perhaps it is no surprise that the dynamism and
source of political articulation remain subordinate to what we might as well
call language since all other material grounds of rhetoric are absent from the
account in any determinate sense. It is not that I doubt Laclau’s desire to make
affects and institutions matter to his analysis of the political subject. Rather I
think that the model of rhetoric he relies on continually reduces these social
materialities to a specific concept of the sign that was designed to break with
the very social processes and life-worlds he seeks to apprehend. What surprise
that all of his examples continually wend back to social practices that are
primarily language based; e.g. people requesting then demanding housing,
water, schooling. Popular movements constitute their universality by a
linguistically expressed set of equivalences that stitch together a field even
as it creates a border
a part that has no part among the People. Marchant
(forthcoming) is right to view Laclau’s project as the search for the (proper)
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 379

name of the political subject as ontological ground of the social and society.
‘The name’ will become ‘the ground of the thing’ (p. 101). The question is
whether the genealogy of the rhetorical on which Laclau depends forces him to
discount all aspects of the rhetorical not amenable to the determinative logic of
the name, leaving all other material aspects of the body politic on the cutting
floor. What is evacuated when grounding political rhetoric in the name of the
post-Saussurian sign? What happens if we pull this foundation from under the
theory of political rhetoric? What will be the conceptual vocabulary of an
alternative model of rhetoric? How will this alternative model of rhetoric help
elucidate the elements and dynamics of the interpretative matrixes that
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constitute political life within liberal democracies?

3.
To answer these questions lets proceed to a woman standing in front of a
doorframe. Our protagonist will initially seem to be standing in isolation,
experiencing the centring effects of the empty signifier. But her social isolation
and these centring effects will be slowly unpacked to demonstrate the multiple
social grounds of interpretation, the multiple and always potentially competing
modes of interpretation, and the material nature and sources of interpretation.
In Haskell Hall, where the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Chicago is located, the women’s bathroom is located on the second floor, the
men’s on the third a stone’s throw from what was then my office. Late at night,
not a soul be heard, but in desperate need of physical relief I faced what Laclau
would understand to be the empty signifier of my body. At that moment a
cluster of irreducible differences disrupted the usually programmatic and
unreflective movements of social interpretation that allow me to move fairly
seamlessly and unthoughtfully through space. Things are ready-to-hand usually,
to use Heidegger’s neologism. But on this night, standing at the doorframe, I
find myself disturbed by the play of various kinds of interpretants and their
multiple material anchors. I know that this sign, ‘Men’, is just a conventional
sign that has no real existential relation to my urinary tract because I have been
habituated to this mode of critical reasoning. Already I am the effect of a social
world and its historical sedimentation within me. Even so I react simultaneously
as if there were such an existential connection. As I stand there I notice that I am
having a feeling and engaged in a hesitation. I notice a slight heating of
my cheeks. I notice my muscular system dragging me somewhere other than
where my critical reason wishes to take me
my critical reason and my bladder;
even my body is not one. A torsion in my guts
a torque, a force
twists and
turns me inside out and outside in. This torsion is also the effect of a social world
and its historical sedimentation in me. But the ground of sedimentation is not
language or its semiotic components. It is semiotic
we might say it is an
 380 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

energetic interpretation
but not semiological. In other words these

sedimentations are neither unified in their semiotic composition, nor in their
social direction. What am I to make of these colliding readings of this sign
‘Men’? How do I read these divergent readings? Are the ‘readings’? Even if I do
pause to engage in a meta-reading, will this necessarily help me cross this
threshold, make alliances with other genders, join my particular, if not peculiar,
struggle to some universal horizon?
How would Laclau answer these questions? Perhaps he would say that my
attachment to and disturbance by the figure I confronted on the toilet door was
not the result of a ‘wealth of signifieds’ but from its nature as a pure signifier
through which a quilting function occurs (p. 103). I am like the ‘little boy and
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a little girl, brother an sister . . . seated in a compartment face to face next to

the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen
passing as the train pulls to a stop. ‘‘Look’’, says the brother, ‘‘we’re at the
Ladies!’’; ‘‘Idiot!’’ replies his sister, ‘‘Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen’’’
(Lacan 1982, p. 152). I refer to an empty signifier on the doorframe to
constitute my unity and thus to ‘recognize’ who I am as such. The emptier this
signifier is
the purer its nature as a signifier whether as an icon (ç) or
linguistic symbol (‘femme’)
the broader its potential reach, the more of ‘me’
there will be. As America is Coke, so Woman/ç is that pure signifier around
which the maximal reach of female identity can crystallize. In this model,
rhetoric is the figural means by which pure signifiers are knotted together such
that metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis ‘become instruments of
an expanded social rationality’ that is essential to ‘ideological interpellation’
(p. 12). In other words, the internal dynamic I experienced when I hesitate at
the doorframe is the result of the heterogeneity of the empty signifier within a
specific rhetorical operation. In Lacan’s hands, this constitutive meconnaissance
indicates and is animated by the passion of the signifier, the bar and the
slippage between the signifier and the signified on which the truce of
subjectivity will rest. Equally certain, with his tongue firmly lodged in his
cheek, Lacan sees this passion of the signifier as material.
And so we see that neither Laclau nor Lacan would ever make the mistake
of seeing me as standing alone before this doorframe. For them a multiplicity
of social discourses course through me at that doorframe knotting together my
subjectivity in such a way that I am always also on the verge of unknotting. And
while relying on Lacan, Laclau diversifies the structural logic of his symbolic.
Laclau knows that every material habitat (context) can be interpreted through
multiple names, subject positions and genres. ‘I am that’ is always ‘when am I
an instance of that and according to what condition of that and me?’ These
(pro)nominal struggles are themselves always within the equally disseminated
domain of genre. In what social genre am I engaged
social rebel, ordinary
citizen, critique at large, actor on stage
such that I am that? How do I align
these social genres to practices in such a way that the names of certain
subjective positions that I hold dear are preserved? Even if I were wedded to
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 381

normative femininity, for instance, I could situate myself within a context and
genre that would allow me to cross the threshold of the men’s bathroom. For
instance, if unexpectedly confronted in the dead of night by one of my
colleagues, I can count on the fact that we live in similar enough life-worlds
such that my making reference to my body under severe urinary stress trumps
the sign of gendered space; i.e. the truth of sex can be sublated to the truth of
viscera in certain contexts. ‘Look, if you really need to go, then go to the
men’s bathroom’. And as Laclau would point out, in sublating my sex to my
viscera, I find that I can leave my particularity and become part of the general
human condition: ‘We all got to go’ becomes a potential node for the
constitution of a people in democratic formations.
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For the most part, when political and critical theorists have looked at the
readings that allow us to create the matrixes through which we manoeuvres
social space, they have emphasized, as does Laclau, name oriented approaches to
social life. One problem with these approaches is that they radically reduce the
actual dynamics of language-in-use to the single dyad of the signifier and the
signified. As countless contemporary language theories have shown these two
concepts cannot
and there is no reason they should be expected to
refer and
describe the grammatical categories and devices, meta-pragmatic phenomena
and processes (including explicit and implicit meta-discursive framing; genre
emergence, entextualization and circulation), and institutional canalization that
help establish and regiment a relationship between an object (or sign) and sign

in this case between ‘me’ and ‘men’ (see for instance, Silverstein and Urban
1996, Povinelli 2001a, 2001b, Agah 2007).
But I want to bracket these pressing concerns to examine a different kind
of problem with language-based theories of rhetoric whether or the
(post)structuralist or (post)pragmatist variety. I want to bracket these issues
to focus on the other modes of rhetoric occurring in and through me as I stand
on the threshold of this doorframe. It is my contention that these rhetorical
modes are not best understood through the play of the signifier, its purity or
pollution, or its enslavement or emancipation from the signified. To isolate
analytically these distinct modes of rhetoric we must remember that all acts of
interpretation figure a relationship between two other signs (or a sign and an
object). The very act of interpretation is an act of rhetorical figuration. My
body and the sign attached to the bathroom do not compose a rhetorical figure
until an interpretation, or reading, establishes some relationship between them.
In other words, the rhetorical relationship between the ‘Men’ guarding the
doorframe and me must be established by an additional specific kind of sign, an
interpretant. One kind is glossed by ‘identity’ by which people include all sorts
of nominal and nominalizable phenomena, running the gamut between
phraseable content such as ‘We all have to go’ to the ‘People’.
The right ‘name’ is not, however, necessarily a sufficient rhetorical
structure to get my body through the door. For one thing, the name itself
 382 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

has a material embodiment. Perhaps the best example of the material

embodiment of the linguistic sign can be drawn from music where the scores
and words of any composition are perceptually within the perceptual field

the instrumental-technological apparatuses
of their times. For another thing,
if the name I read my environment through and the dispositions that resist this
name collide, I must change my dispositions by working on them, and not
necessarily through a name. My interpretation of my physical interpretation
might not be mental at all, it could be another physical interpretation such as
vomiting
experiencing myself bodily interpreting my environment in this
way sickens me. And so on and so on. Moreover, what is and is not an instance
of ‘the body and mind’ or of ‘affect’, ‘muscularity’ or ‘logic’ is itself a history
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of the assemblage of interpretations rather than hard ontological categories as

Peirce suggested. From the point of view of the bodily habitat, one way of
reading my ‘reading’ of the bathroom doorframe is as a physical reaction rather
than a reading. In social life, most people are constantly producing unconscious
embodied readings as they navigate their everyday material and social
environments. Bourdieu (1977, 1998) focused exactly on these pre-perceptive
corporeal anticipations in his concepts of habitus, investment and field. The
good player
the doxic player
does not think, she works her body
energetically until she anticipates
her body anticipates
the immanent
tendencies of the game. The bad player
the player that resists the game or is
not presupposed by the game
does not move so smoothly. You can see her in
the crowd. She stands out. She looks confused at various thresholds.
Various modes of interpretation are always already a part of political
process. In western democracies the distinction made between deliberative
reason and moral sense is a second-order thematization of the broad
difference between language-based forms of interpretation and non-language
(embodied) forms of interpretation. And on this distinction is built a politics
of public reason and its limits in deontological sense. In other political
contexts this distinction is used to change political formations. Saba Mahmood
(2001, p. 216) can be seen as making this point in her discussion of the
practices of piety among Islamic women in Egypt. For Saba what was at stake
for these women was ‘the sedimented and cumulative character of reiterated
performances, where each performance builds on prior ones, and a carefully
calibrated system exists by which differences between reiterations are judged
in terms of how successfully (or not) the performance has taken root in the
body and mind’.
To move through this doorframe, then, I need to find an interpretant that
hinges together the various tokens of types proliferating in front of it even as I
am experiencing consciously and unconsciously, bodily as bodily and bodily as
mentally, as a sudden overloading, social world as a dense incommensurate set
of rhetorical diagrams. The rhetorical consists of multiple modes of materiality
and these modes of materiality are always potentially out of alignment. When I
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 383

stood before the door, I was not merely the effect of the kind of articulation
that interests Laclau
the formal feature of catachresis, synecdoche,
metonymy or metaphor
but I was also the effect of the way that these
tropes worked through me muscularly, viscerally and affectively. The
alternative diagrams of viscera, genitalia, epidermal and class must be aligned
rhetorically to allow bodies to traverse doorframes. The rhetorical is in this
sense far more complex than a name oriented political theory would allow for.
And it is not more complex because more of the same kind of thing is in the
picture than name-oriented political theory accounts for. It is more complex
because a variety of different kinds of rhetorical materials are always in play;
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and, although all of these kinds of rhetorical materials are in play in the same
material, psychic and social space and time, none of the temporal or spatial
dynamics of these rhetorical materials can be ultimately reduced to the same
logic or the same social direction. One ‘reading’ pulls me through the door,
another away from it, and yet another in neither direction. At this exact
moment we experience the slight or not so slight tears that compose everyday
life and its hegemonic unity. And these tears are not merely between the
habitus and the field, but within habitus itself. In other words, although
Bourdieu describes similar tears as a ‘contradiction’ between the habitus and
the field, they might also be more of a sliding or slippage.
These tears are not rare, nor are they only available to a select portion of
the body politic. Tears exist in the rhetorical fabric of everyday life. We are
continually confronted by low-level decisions about what trait ‘allows one to
decide if something is a member or not’ (Derrida 1991, p. 228, see also
Silverstein and Urban 1996) of a normative interpretation of social space and
me. And as my tribute to Derrida suggests, these possible interpretations and
their affective and energetic dynamics are always within the play of a multiple
deformations and disruptions (demanding environments). If that irritating
‘Men’ is negatively hinged into me, it itself is animated multiply and without
security. The non-alignment of the entirety of possible discourses about my
body and this sign meets the multiplicity of these possible interpretants as
energetic grounds for heaving myself over the threshold. It is not the content
of the action that is critical here so much as the dissonance that this content
creates across the orders of materiality habituated interpretation and the stance
that one takes to this dissonance.
What interests me here is how we conceptualize the rhetorical foundations
of the ‘people’ differently when we understand all social movements to be
composed of these kinds of rhetorical tears in our normative epistemologies
and dispositifs. Why for instance do some people move towards these
decompositional tears while others run to re-suture them? How do we increase
the likelihood of facing such tears politically in our ordinary lives? Why do
we experience ‘gut’ reactions as some form of truth
the truth of our moral
sense or of our discipline? Here the later writings of Foucault find their place.
 384 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

In his ‘What is Enlightenment’, Foucault (1984) transforms Kant’s limit-

philosophy into a positive sociology.

If the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has
to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today
has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as
universal, necessary, obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is
singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints. . . . This
critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the
form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but
it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are,
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the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do,

or think.

As Foucault well knew, these possibilities come not merely from linguistic-
epistemological knowledge but disciplines of the body and their tactics. For
Foucault, s/m sexual practices were exemplary of the possibilities that could
emerge from pursuing rather than avoiding these tears. But so can the practice
of peeing.
To understand why we move towards or away from tears we need to
remember three things: First, all acts of interpretation, whether affective,
energetic or symbolic, can be experienced as adding something to the scene
that wasn’t there before or discovering something in the scene that had been
hidden. This is simply because the interpretant does indeed add something: an
additional sign connecting two other signs. This addition can be thematized
in all sorts of ways
telos, truth, destiny or God. Second, a tear can be
existentially, but the attitude, policy or posture adopted in relation to a tear is
not in the nature of the tear. In other words, at once and the same time,
people experience the non-correspondence of these diagrams and environ-
ments, evaluate them on the basis of competing modes of evidence and
authority, express and ascribe emotional states to them, evaluate how
normative institutions will treat them, and align themselves or not with
others to form more or less cohesive social groups. Tears can be incitements to
act differently. They can be invitations to freedom in Foucault’s sense of
freedom. But they can also be something to be avoided or disciplined. Because
of this issue of stance is extraordinarily important to politics and its normative
and counter-normative projects. One stance to the tear that opens between
habituated and disturbed mental and physical interpretants may be to pursue an
identity or to bracket identity and instead twist my guts into a new body
without organs. Another stance might move me away from such articulations.
Finally, which stance we take on the meaning and destiny of these moments of
interpretive disturbance cannot be separated out of the institutionally
organized environments in which we live.
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 385

Let me turn to a second doorframe To develop these points and suggest

how they might refashion our approach to the rhetoric of the people in actually
existing liberal democracies.

4.
In a day in the not so recent past, a group of white nurses and some members
of an indigenous family clustered on the concrete porch of a house in which a
sixty-six year old woman was dying of oral cancer. Inside the cider brick house
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were a series of rooms, unfurnished except for mattresses on the floor, a single
steel-framed bed in the front room (what most Australians would call the den),
and a wobbly table on which stood a broken television set. In the kitchen were
carcasses of various animals and fish, opened jams, loaves of bread, sugar, tea,
bowls and pans with days old remainders of cooked food and running through
them all various sizes of cockroaches. The inside toilet had been backed up for
weeks. There was no hot water. Sewn through all of this were the syringes,
empty pill bottles, new and used bandages used to care for this woman, and
beer cans, wine coolers and other addictive substances her relatives were using
as they stayed there. The nurses on the porch had come to change the bandages
of the dying woman. Many people on the porch were drunk, stoned or hung
over. Not far distant, a fight had broken out between the two sides of the
community, part of a longstanding ‘war’.
On this particular day, one of the nurses entered the house to administer
medications and change the bandage of the dying woman. As the nurse did so a
middle aged slightly inebriated indigenous woman also entered the house to
cry for her mother
the dying woman had been married to her father’s
brother. Both of these men had died of strokes long ago. As the daughter began
to cry and beat her head, the nurse insisted she leave, saying that only family
members were allowed to be present when the bandages were being changed.
A fight broke out between them. The daughter confronted the nurse’s
assumptions about bodies and their substantial connections saying that her body
felt her mother’s pain, not sympathetically, but actually. In this physical
mutuality she and her mother were ‘one body’. Her pain was the interpretant
that made this body one not the patrilineal name of the fathers. She then
threatened the nurse with physical harm if she tried to kick her out. Others
rushed to intervene, including myself. The confrontation was defused. But it
resurfaced throughout the woman’s illness as nurses, operating under the best
of intentions to shield this woman’s privacy, given the horrible physical
condition of her illness, would or could not make way for this form of
embodied relationship. Eventually, after making a complaint about the high
level of violence and physical threat on the community, the nurse walked off
 386 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

her job. Soon after the local nurses union voted to boycott the community
unless it could guarantee the safety of its health workers.
On other days, non-indigenous bodies stay firmly on one side of the door,
or if they pass through it, quickly exit. Some sit outside for reasons of
politeness. Others are physically or emotionally uncomfortable in the physical
scene they encounter inside. They describe their experience within the genre
of panic. ‘I can’t go in there. It makes me panic’. For them the issue is not
whether under the right conditions they could act
repeated exposure or a
better understanding. There are no possible conditions in which they can be
there and still be. The material nature of the scene would have to change
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dramatically before they could ‘stand it’. Some critically reflect on these
physical and emotional reactions. They see this doorframe as a material
metaphor that provides a critical reading of trickle down economics and neo-
liberal attacks on the welfare state. They interpret their physical and emotion
reactions as demonstrating self-evidently the intolerable nature of neo-
liberalism
they experience the scene as physically and emotionally
intolerable and interpret these interpretants not as interpretants but as a
moral truth about the limits of life at the end of the market liberalization.
Some don’t express any reaction verbally. Or, not having a critique of market
liberalization, they blame local people for not accepting the minimal
responsibility of caring for their sick relatives. These people also experience
the scene as physically and emotionally intolerable but interpret these
interpretants within a different moral genre. Some indigenous friends of
mine notice these reactions, comment on them critically or sympathetically;
others don’t notice or don’t care. In any case these everyday modal
philosophies of the embodied interpretation can turn deontological. They
can become about obligation, responsibility and blame. Who or what is
responsible for this place and my reaction to it? To whom is something owed
and under what conditions? In other words, the embodied interpretants of
embodied space can themselves be interpreted as moral sense
moral senses.
I think it is safe to claim at this point that everyone who stood before this
doorframe found themselves interpreting their social environment through the
full range of rhetoric material discussed in the previous section. They did not
understand these rhetorical figurations in the same way. The daughter of the
dying woman understood an energetic-affective interpretant of her mother’s
condition as a sign of the truthfulness of her kinship to her. The nurses read
this reaction as a sign of her lack of care. A full range of secondary
interpretations emerged among health and social workers about how to
interpret the disjunction between one’s commitment to indigenous lifeworlds
and the discovery that their actual lifeworlds can make them sick. What stance
on this disjunction was appropriate and productive? And everyone, indigenous
and non-indigenous, read these interpretants as indicating some truth. The
problem was with competing truths both within any social subject and their
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 387

social world and between social subjects and their social worlds. How are these
resolved into political worlds, actions and subjects within liberal democracies?
It is here that we must remember that the meaning and destiny of these
moments of interpretive disturbance cannot be separated out of the
institutionally organized environments in which we live. All of these material
grounds of interpreting social life and of interpreting ones various grounds of
interpretation
for instance, ‘I am ashamed that I feel sick when I enter to
homes of others’
occur within social institutions that amplify, impede or
deflect one possible reading or another. These momentary tears, these singular
events of everyday interpretation, meet social machines of interpretive
augmentation and deflection. The ability of nurses to strike
to give their
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reading of their environment social and political force
and to have the strike
recognized by their union
no matter whether the nurses were right or wrong

intensified the interpretive hold and reach of their mode-of-life. These social
institutions made it harder for local people to make sense or to make other
people’s senses interpret the world otherwise. If want to understand body politic
beyond the outrages of the community and the outrageousness of poverty and it
management, then the question is how these variously grounded interpretations
that are constantly judging various phenomenological orders are socially
amplified or not.
The stakes of understanding this is high in indigenous Australia. Some
indigenous and non-indigenous policy pundits argue
in the wake of liberal
forms of multiculturalism’s failure to equalize structures of racial inequality

that the singular largest problem with addressing the fetid nature of these
communities is that indigenous Australians are so destroyed and so used to their
destitution that it is unclear how to fix their life-worlds other than removing
them from them. Given the high rate of substance abuse and other behavioural
problems that suggest indigenous people are themselves not invested in
maintaining their lives, these people and their worlds are not worth the
investment. In other words, even as I, and many others, have been critically
analyzing state forms of cultural recognition, state actors and many people
within the national public seem to have shifted dramatically away from the
politics of recognition. Noel Pearson (1999), an Aboriginal activist, has
famously and forcefully argued that state welfare, when applied to indigenous
peoples, is a technique of numbing indigenous and non-indigenous people to the
radical ‘state of dysfunction’ in Aboriginal communities. After over a decade of
the Liberal-National coalition government under John Howard, it is not clear
whether the Australian state has any real commitment to the politics of cultural
recognition or the broad imaginary of social justice that underpinned it. The
conservative government under John Howard is committed to withdrawing
federal economic support from rural indigenous communities as part of the
‘mainstreaming’ of indigenous people and policy. The certainty with which the
nurses could act and expect to be supported in their action
again whether
from one position or another they were correct
was itself an interpretant of
 388 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

this changed socio-political field. The effort to materially ground an alternative

reading of corporeal kinship, make alliances with others, and join this particular
struggle to a universal horizon is that much more difficult.

5.
What we see in scenes such as this one are at least threefold. First, in social life
there are often two or more competing rhetorical formations of any social
movement, sometimes within the same social subject and her social world
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sometimes between social subjects and their social worlds. Where the body is,
what constitutes a real or a legitimate affect, and whether legible affects and
reactions are legible for some and not others are always part of the rhetorically
sedimented social world out of which the body politic emerges. In the second
case, suffering has a certain distribution and meaning in so far as it is
differentially experienced by differentially situated people. The daughter of the
dying woman was furious that the nursing staff could not see the clear bodily
evidence of her bodily relation to her mother. For many nurses
and other
visitors
the seeming inability of local indigenous people to feel the horror in
which they are living let alone act to ameliorate this horror demands an
accounting, usually a moral accounting, usually by indigenous people
themselves. Second, these rhetorical assemblages are not reducible to a
name-oriented political or social theory. Many progressive activists have
described with great pathos their shame, and their political undoing, when
discovering that they cannot ‘get their body under control’ in scenes of poverty
where poverty manifests as intense filth. It doesn’t matter how they
characterize this bodily liquefication; they still liquefy. Finally, the institutional
backing of one form of embodied sense
its names, its moral senses and
classificatory trajectory
provide a intensified rhetorical force, a sedimenta-
tion, within which alternative backing must struggle.
In short, to understand how a body politic is conjured, mobilized, and
presupposed in political struggles to hegemonize the social field, we need an
account of the nature of the rhetorical that does not start with the play of the
signifier, its purity or pollution, its enslavement or emancipation from the
signified. The model we need begins with a different series of questions: How
are two or more signs hinged together through the practices and processes of
interpretation (what De Man referred to as doing a reading)? What are the
various material grounds of practices and processes of interpretation? And how
are these interpretative grounds the material conditions that animate, exceed or
oppose the legitimacy of social norms and institutions? Rather than merely logos
and phonos, and rather than merely the rhetorical architecture of the empty
signifier, the political subject is the effect of multiply grounded interpretants
hinging together the various already existing energetic diagrams, physicalities
 B E YO N D T H E NAM E S O F T H E P E O P L E 389

and meanings that compose social space as such. As we stand before various
doorframes the entire materially diverse panoply of interpretation is at play
including social institutions and forces that compose these scenes. Interpretants
address meet, order, and deform a multitude of material anchors even as they
enflesh worlds, depend on previous enfleshments of the world, and apprehend
these enfleshments both in the sense of the ability of these discourses to grasp
the importance, significance or meaning of this flesh and in the sense of the
ability of these discourses to create a feeling of anxiety or excitement that
something dangerous or unpleasant might happen in the vicinity of this flesh.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Department of Communications at Northwestern

University, the Department of Musicology at New York University, and the
Department of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to
present versions of this essay. Their engagement was critical to the
development of its thought. I would also like to thank my colleagues Nadia
Abu El Haj, Saba Mahmood, and Michael Silverstein for reading and providing
invaluable comments on the content and shape of my argument.

Notes on contributor
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, where she is also co-
director of the Center for Law and Culture. She was the editor of Public
Culture from 2000 to 2004 and is currently senior editor. She is the author of
Labor’s Lot (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Cunning of Recognition (Duke
University Press, 2002), and The Empire of Love (Duke University Press, 2006).

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 390 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

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