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A proper agent 2) can haven effect on a structure and 2) is itself not determined by that structure.

An activist social theory must be able to provide, in a non-contradictory way, not only a credible

analysis of the link between power and subjectification but also a plausible locus of resistance.

What constitutes as subject? Can this subject influence the social structure?

Kant.Natural world superstructure. Material relations -> consciousness.

Consciousness cannot have an effect on the social world. It is determined by the material relations.

1 world. No outside. Consciousness is caused by the structure, it is reducible to the structure.

Consciousness seems outside the material world, but it is a false outside.

Consciousness cannot instigate a cause. Consciousness cannot change the economic base. It is

determined by that base. Social problems are not caused, and cannot be solved by mere

consciousness. Social problems have determinable cause, capital. Paradox: how to distinguish cause

from effect? Who decides/ who can see this distinction, from where (transcendental vantage point)?

How can we Act? No dualism, but no agency and paradox.

Althusser and Lukacs: relations of production Ideology

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Foucault: Power - > subject.

1 world. Social world cannot be effected externally. There is no outside. The cause of the social world

is the social world itself: relations of power. Immanent causation. There is no outside. Subject is not

outside the structure, but an effect and function of the structure. It is not autonomous in relation to

the structure. Subject cannot change the power relations, the subject is reducible to the power

relations. Social problems have no determinable cause. No paradox and no Dualism. But no agency.

At the same time, subjects produced within that mode of power have no effective autonomous

agency, subsisting as nothing other than the intersection of various discursive determinants. 27

Butler (derrida)

1 world. Social world cannot be effected externally. There is no outside. Subject is caused by power

relations. Subject is the effect of the structure. It is not autonomous in relation to the structure.

Subject can change the power relations, the subject is not entirely reducible to the structure. A space

for agency. Not consistent. Sometimes agency, sometime not. Sometimes dualism, sometimes not.

Immanent causation: reciprocally: the social is an effect of differentiated causes. The cause of a social

problem is not determinable.

On one hand, external causation presents the space of causes (e.g., economic forces) as being

outside and exceptional to the space of its effects (superstructural elements, e.g., law, education, art,

mass media). In this model, the field being analyzed is divided into two, such that the arena of causes

is separated from the arena of effects by a boundary that, in theory, is impermeable. Yet, this

boundary must be crossed in order for a causal force to generate its effect, that is, in order for a

cause to "touch" what it brings about. Theories of external causation typically have a difficult time

addressing he nature of this boundary with its contradictory properties of impermeability andporosity. On the other hand, immanent causation renders causes too close to their effects. Causes

and their effects mutually condition one another, making it impossible ultimately to distinguish one

from the other. The focus of critical attention is the unified field of reciprocal causes and effects, but

the boundary that forms the space around this unified field is ignored. That is, whatever generates

this infinite field of dynamic forces - whatever serves as the cause, so to speak, of social causes and

effects -goes untheorized.

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In contrast to both of these, the extimate causal model presents the social space as a special

unbounded yet finite spatial object - what is known in topology as a "non-orientable" object.

In non-orientable objects, an apparently distinct surface, such as the inside, imperceptibly transforms

into its opposite without crossing a discontinuity (an edge or a hole).

Unlike the spatial relations between cause and effect in external causation, the Mobius strip is

"unbounded" (which is to say that there is no boundary between inside and outside). But unlike the

infinite space of immanent causation, it is finite.

1 space; two sides. No boundary.

Kant: (Natural world) does not determine (Autonomous Subject)

Early Marx: (Relation of production determines consciousness)

Foucault: (Discourse determines notion of subject)

Lacan: (Symbolic Order| determines and is determined by |Split Subject)

nondeterminate sidedness means that causes are not quarantined from their effects because the

excess brings them into contiguity. At the same time, these points and their relations have a certain

specifiability; they do not merge into one another as they do in the infinite flux of immanentism.

That is, before being-things can become objects of experience for us, before they can exist qua

objects for us, their status as sheer being first has to be cancelled.

The empty set's lack of properties qualifies it to remedy the defects in Foucault's one-tier model of

social cause. That is, the addition of the negation does not simply add another positive (particular)

element to the causal field, to be swallowed up in the flux of cause and effect among particularized

determinants.

At the same time, its effect of establishing relations among the things in the field in which it operatesqualifies it to remedy the flaw in the Marxian two-tier model of social cause. In other words, it

provides a "link" between the cause and its effects that the external Marxian cause cannot.

The extimate cause functions like the empty set: it provides the cut necessary to bring an object into

our world from sheer being, and so acts as external cause.At the same time, the minimal difference

that makes an object non-self-coincident (and therefore not a sheer "being-thing") adheres to the

object as aninternal cause. Taken together (as they must be, because they are the same function),

they form the extimate cause. The extimate cause, functioning by way of the specific mechanism of

the formal negation, engenders a structured field or system (with its concomitant objects, properties,

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and relationships) out of what would otherwise be a state of undifferentiation or monadic

unrelatedness.

At the same time, it inevitably gives rise to an element of nondeterminacy, surplus, or excess.

Speaking in terms of the social arena, we could put it this way: the operation that bestows identities,

properties, and relationships also leaves a residue, so that every subject bears some excess. At every

point in the social field, then, an irreducible excess attends social relations. In fact, although it seems

paradoxical, this excess is what makes the social field itself possible and makes its structure

potentially analyzable.

Psychoanalytic discourse has a name for what we've been discussing -Symbolic inscription. What

appears in the Symbolic is the result of an operation of the formal cause the addition of a negation

- to the state of being. In a well-known example, Lacan describes the subject as just such an effect,

emerging where Being and Meaning come together; at the point, that is, where the subject is

produced through its entry into the field of signification (Meaning) by way af a formal negation of

Being (what we will discuss later as the Norr/Nom'du'Pere),

Split subject | objet petit a; not 0-0 but 8 (subject of lack / jouissance) (individualsociety)

For Lacanians, the excessive dimension (*) is the little bit of the Real that intervenes in the Imaginary

regime of self-coincidence (and vice versa) to create the minimal self-difference, the excess, ecessary

for Symbolic registration.

Imaginary (Being / self coincidence / being qua being) Symbolic (formal negation / cut / split subject)

Real (lack and excess)

Extimate cause; signifier (empty place / socials structure) signified (materiel element/ imaginary

subject)

This figure of a double negation or reciprocal exclusion results in the Mobius condition, where inside

and outside become "in-determinate": "This space would coincide neither with any of the

homogeneous national territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by

articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Mobius strip, where

exterior and interior in-determine each other" (MWE 25