Collective identities,empty signifiers and solvable secrets

Identity as a vague and ambiguous certainty

In the following, we will answer the question of collective identity within the framework of a new paradigm. This paradigm does not focus on consensus, coercion or egoistic means, but refers first and foremost to the social boundaries that straddle the inside and outside of a community, a paradigm that focuses on belonging, collectivity and collective identity. Collective identity is usually defined as a certain culturally rooted similarity among the fellows of a community, in distinction to outsiders. This raises, of course, questions about what these boundaries are based on, and the conditions under which they can be crossed.

However, all claims about collective identity are contentious (Brubaker, 2006). Even though as individual persons we might possess an identity that is rooted in our body, one that traverses our entire life, the case of collective identity is more complicated: one can simultaneously identify with diverse communities, one can cross social boundaries, and one can adhere to the public representations of a collective identity as ideology. This ambiguity has led some authors (e.g. Brubaker) to question the scientific use of this concept. However, despite significant differences, both the individual identity of a person and the collective identity of a community exhibit a similar structure: they connect absolute self-assurance with the greatest possible non-transparency. We are absolutely certain that we exist, but we are unable to give an exhaustive account of our identity as a person, nation, family or ethnic group. Every attempt at such a description will invariably be incomplete and distorted. This fundamental incompleteness of every image of identity is due to the pragmatic situation in which those notions are formulated and to which they are adapted. The expression of identity changes depending on the particular person to whom this expression is addressed, it depends on the common memory invoked and on the particular aim of its representation.

Secretive signifiers

These pragmatically generated variances alone make collective identity an irresolvable ambiguous and vague matter. By this we do not simply mean that how precisely the identity of a particular collective should be defined is always unclear. Rather, we argue that cultures are opaque to themselves (Koschorke, 2012), that the center of a society and of collective identity is an empty or ‘floating signifier’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1987: 63) – something that does not refer to something concrete, and to which almost every possible meaning can be ascribed precisely because of its indeterminacy. Examples of such empty signifiers are ‘God’, ‘Nature’ or ‘Reason’. Typically such ‘empty signifiers’ are constructed as placeless and timeless. They can always be signified in deficient representations, but each concrete manifestation misses its essential transcendence. In some cases this otherworldliness is strengthened by bans and taboos: the name of ‘God’ must not be mentioned, He must not be represented, and all talking about Him is restricted. By virtue of these bans, the divine and the sacred will remain an unsolvable mystery; they elude every attempt to solve their secrets. ¹ By contrast, modernity is marked by its treatment of divine mystery as a secret that can be revealed: ‘From the outset, Enlightenment and secret appeared as historical twins’ (Koselleck, 1973: 49 [our translation]). ² However, even after the passing of personified ideas of God, mysteries cannot be entirely dispensed with. Contemporary discourses of negativity have, instead, replaced these former religious traditions of meaning and sense (negative theology, etc.). They turn the uncertainty and inexpressibility of the social center into their theoretical program. We may take, for example, Derrida’s deconstructivism (Rentsch, 2000: 24), theories of cultural trauma (Caruth, 1996; Alexander et al., 2004; Giesen, 2004), and the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who, along with Claude Lefort, are the most prominent theorists of the empty signifier in Political Theory.

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe discuss the restructuring of individual identity out of difference, ‘the precarious character of every identity and the impossibility of fixing the sense of the “elements” in any ultimate literality’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 96). Above all, they criticize every kind of totalizing representation of society that suppresses all disintegrative and deconstructive mechanisms. They use Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘over-determination’ (1969: 101) to refer to the fact that cultural phenomena always have intersecting and overlapping significances. At the same time, this explains why cultures never manage conclusively to generate an identity for themselves: something different from what was anticipated can happen – yet, from another point of view, this happens also because it has always also become something else altogether. Laclau and Mouffe emphasize not only the fact that the totality of society is impossible to imagine, but also the fact that the heterogeneous and conflicting elements of a culture can be held together only through an empty signifier. Only an empty signifier allows the attachment of diverse elements, including the conflicting and apparently irreconcilable ones. The more complex a culture or society, the more pressing the need or demand for empty signifiers.

However, approaches such as the theory of hegemony by Laclau and Mouffe and the Actor Network Theory by Bruno Latour exhibit a curious bias towards individual parts, and against a societal whole (Latour, 2002). The individual level is considered to be more real, whereas the societal whole is deemed a fictitious object of delusion, an invention that has to be deconstructed. Society, according to Latour, is a false totality. One has to ‘follow the actor’, and all ‘macro observations can and should be replaced by micro interactions’. Thus, Latour claims that ‘there is no macro society in a human group, there is none anywhere’ and that society is simply a ‘vague notion’ (2002: 122, 127). Yet, the individual or actor itself is a totality, albeit on a smaller scale, and neither individual nor society is more or less imaginary or vague then the other. Even if we accept that this emphasis on the imaginary character of society and collective identity is plausible in contemporary everyday life, the main objection remains: the partial determinability of what we call society, culture, and nation also applies to individual identities and their interactions, i.e. individual identities, which appear partial and particular from a societal perspective, are no less real and imaginary than the whole and the totality. The individual identity of a person is an invention that depends on specific circumstances; it integrates the incompatible and creates a consistent picture out of completely different phenomena. It remains unclear why the societal totality should be much less real and much less significant than the individual particular. Once we abandon this bias, and understand the difference between part and whole as an analytical differentiation, then we will see that indeterminacy holds for all levels of social reality (be it subject, family, or society and state, etc.); conversely, even an individual person can understand herself as a totality. ³ The difference between totality and particularity does not denote ontologically different spheres (here is the individual, and there is society), but traverses them. Even at the level of the personal and subjective partiality, characteristics of the Total or totality can be found: on the one hand, we can identify ourselves as autonomous subjects with judgmental reason, or we can perform ourselves as manifold split multiplicities with various, contradictory aspects. The question of the reality of the Total does not refer to the level of society alone; nor is there any reason to deem this level any less real than the role of the particular.

However, if the concept of the collective as well as the concept of an individual are imaginary and precarious, and if those concepts can only be held together by means of an empty signifier, then we are facing not simply Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘deconstructive effects’ (2001: 193), but rather the question of how cultures institute themselves as something that goes beyond a mere unity or a deconstructive moment (Seyfert, 2011).

In this context, we assume a significant emptiness on the part of the individual and on the part of the collective, but we take this significant emptiness as the main reason and necessity for the continuous inventions, imaginations and fables that can fill this emptiness (Bogue, 2006).

The drive for collective fabulations

The non-transparency of the imaginary precisely attracts and motivates representation and imagination. The ban on imagination and expression that we described in the context of concepts of God does not apply to all empty signifiers. In the case of collective identity, it does not refer to something placeless and timeless. Collective identity has a beginning, which is represented in foundational myths and narratives. Distinct from concepts that refer to the unity of the world (God, Nature, etc.), collective identity is not without any connection to locations and landscapes. Collectives normally claim a homeland, and this claim is spatially and temporally represented. Allegories, ritual remembrance, icons, emblems, anthems, parades and memorial visits represent that which is not representable in itself (Giesen, 1999).

Bans on names and images imply doubts over the existence of that to which the empty signifiers refer. Collective identity thereby proves to be a particular articulation of the sacred of a society (Durkheim, 2001). Like the invocation of the sacred, it serves to construct latency and lack of doubt. We believe, even though we are not eyewitnesses and though we have no independent proof (Castoriadis, 1987); nor have we ever encountered the majority of the collective (the people, the nation, the community of faith) (Anderson, 1991). Thus, significant emptiness does not prevent the construction of a collective identity – as if the latter were merely misbelief or the opium of the masses. Cultural myths are not simply phantasms that can be confronted with the images of how things really are. Every social description is based on imaginary inventions. Nonetheless, this does not mean that they are a fantasy and therefore not real. Collective identity has become our perennial task and challenge, precisely because it is barred to us. Emptiness compels incessant retelling, and the individual interpretation of cultural myths makes all of us fabulating subjects.

Thus, myths underlying collective identity are not only based on the history of living people, but are also represented and consolidated in imaginary figures. Particular attention has to be paid to the figure of the hero, who sets out into the unknown, living through many adventures, eventually returning in triumph and taking up a position of authority (Campbell, 1949). The figure of the hero works particularly well for the imagination of identity: incomparable and very often of divine origin, not knowing fear, despising the rules of reason, and the demand for caution, doing what is dangerous and risky, the hero is the exception to the ordinary. The hero breaks traditional customs, sets new rules, s/he is the creative founder of collectives.

The hero’s counterpart is the traumatized victim who has no name, no face and no space within the group and who – even though innocent – can be killed, solely due to the fact that it bears a certain characteristic (Agamben, 1998). The victim is no longer a sovereign person; it can no longer make decisions about itself, it is merely a case of … (Giesen, 2004). In remembrance of the victims of the past, the community tries to return their names and faces to them and relates this gesture to the historical motive of Never again!

Both the narratives of the hero and that of the victims can be found at the core of many ethnic and national myths. They are exemplified either in the histories of slavery, colonialism, expulsion and genocide (as in the case of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide), or in various myths of foundation and capture; they are also exemplified in the histories of revolutions and uprisings, in which a people breaks the chains of its oppressors, lapsing into a pre-contractual state of nature from whence it violently seizes power (Giesen, 2004). In the idea of revolutions and national uprisings, the myth of the hero, originally and individually, is turned into a collective mode. The myth transmutes the suffering of Job in the Old Testament (who was still able to talk to God) into the modern genocides, in which the victim loses its individual identity, becoming a victim only because it accidentally bears a certain characteristic.

In the past few decades, a new mythical figure has appeared in western constructions of identity: the perpetrator. In contrast to the triumphant hero whose acts of violence attract the admiration of the community, perpetrators inspire contempt and hatred. The most important forms of coping with the past include the punishment of perpetrators who are still alive, memorials, commemoration days for the victims, a peace education, and representational confessions of guilt for the collective to which the perpetrators belong. The genuflection of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt at the memorial honoring the Ghetto Uprising (Schneider, 2006) in Warsaw became a model for the latter. In this gesture there appears a split or schism between the individual and collective identity. Brandt representationally acts for the German nation, even though he himself was persecuted by the Nazis. He performed a Christian gesture, even though he was not a Christian.

The fact that collective as well as personal identity needs to be continuously readjusted to changing communicational circumstances also affects the mythical figures upon which these representations are based: work on collective identity is always also work on myth (Blumenberg, 1979). On the one hand, there are references to formative events in the past – civil wars, revolutions, defeats, constitutional acts, etc. – and, on the other hand, there are attempts to adjust these narratives to the events of the present. For example, in the past, German national identity was based on events that ranged from heroic triumphs (the Battle of the Teutoburg Wood), to high cultural accomplishments (German Classicism and Romanticism), to a collective sororicide and fratricide (the Holocaust). Even though collective myths cannot explain all future eventualities, they are abstract enough to serve as the basis for the explanation and narration of the present.

Contestations over collective signifiers

Thus, abstraction solves the problem of ambivalence and non-transparency of collective identity that is often related to myths. The actual content of the myth, on which collective identity is based, is situated in a position of in-betweenness: it is abstract enough in order to serve as a reference for all participants, but at the same time it is so vague that it does not permit consensus on particular claims, thus consistently leading to completely contradictory conclusions, misunderstandings and debates. In contrast to the common assumption that every society is based on a minimum of shared values and norms, we claim that at the center of every culture are found the ambiguous (Giesen, 2010) and the vague (Giesen et al., 2013).

However, these attempts to arrive at a conclusive definition of a collective identity lead to endless controversies that criticize and throw in doubt particular interpretations and narrations, and therefore continuously empty the signifiers of a culture. Thus, collective identity is not entirely homogenizing, and not all members of a society share the same sense of the sacred. On the contrary, not only are there necessarily divergent opinions within a group, but almost everybody has a different opinion. Such various voices are necessary in order to keep the debate going – without those critical voices, collective identity would cease to be a secret that is yet to be revealed.

Indeed, the attempts to define collective identity, the arguments over its defining power and the critiques on all sides, are precisely at the center of collective identity. It is a field rather than an object. Since it is precisely such contention that powers collective identity, even someone who rejects a certain iteration of a particular collective identity can still be considered a part of the group. Conversely, somebody who might seem to be an outsider can become constitutive of a collective identity if s/he voices an opinion that drives the debate forward.

At the same time, the narratives and representations of collective identity are in no way undermined by these public debates. Instead, the debates reinforce the notion that one day it will indeed be possible to conclusively narrate collective identity, to finally attain the right notion of it. This public discourse is so far-reaching that we are almost unable to escape the subject, and are ceaselessly lured and forced into committing ourselves to a stance. Thus, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: we can neither conclusively define identity, nor can we deem this topic irrelevant. We know that identity belongs in quotation marks, that it is an empty signifier; we also know that both our own identity and the identity of our culture are mostly a matter of imagination. Yet that does not free us from the obligation and motivation to repeatedly refill this emptiness with myths and fables. It is precisely the non-transparency of identity – the identity of the individual and the collective – that forces us to continuously invent it. Just as magic continuously creates new gods, spirits and impersonal forces, to which it assigns agency and responsibility, we create the notion of collective identity and represent it through images and emblems (flags, coats of arms), rituals and memorials, mythical narrations and songs.

Thus, public communication through empty signifiers runs counter to the structure of traumatic memory. If traumas are (at first) barred from public communication but are over-represented in individual consciousness, then the opposite is true for empty signifiers: there is a ceaseless public communication about the empty space, but individuals are simply incapable of enacting the imagining of this empty identity on their own.

In fact, public communication does not operate according to Habermas’ model of deliberation. It is distorted through the permanent public imagining of the non-representable, through the projection into emptiness, through the laborious attempt to make the whole visible. But it is also distorted by a past that is known to everybody, but that is enshrouded in silence, a past that must not be mentioned. (We have covered traumatic communication in detail elsewhere; see Giesen, 2004.) Traumatic memories are related to events in which mortality or finiteness of one’s own consciousness becomes the center of attention. Unable to integrate the perception of one’s own finiteness into a familiar narrative pattern, this experience will be deferred to the sphere of that which is known but cannot be mentioned. This process applies not only to the sphere of individual, but also to collective traumas. In collective traumas public communication assumes the function or role that the consciousness plays in the individual. Here we also find the typical omissions, insinuations and gaps to which all participants adhere, and which can be traced back to collectively committed crimes or experiences of victimization rooted in the community. Only later, from the distance of a new generation, can the trauma be articulated and institutionally worked through. Here we also find surprising similarities in the traumatic sequences of individual and collective memory.

The transition from the collectively silenced signifier to one that can be publicly debated is often performed through scandalization by outsiders and later generations. Such a process usually involves clear and unambiguous distinctions between victims and perpetrators, a process that does not admit of zones of in-betweenness. Such strict distinctions necessarily lead to unintended side effects, for example, when those who were responsible escape punishment, when innocents are scapegoated, and when people initially claim a victim status that they are later no longer able to disavow.

Scandalization is not confined to the transition from traumatic silence to public attention. Rather, it constitutes a decisive mechanism that keeps the empty space of society latent.

The example of the democratic sovereign provides a particularly apt illustration of the relation between empty space, on the one hand, and public projection and imagination, on the other. In a democracy, it is said that all power comes from the people. In contrast to the princely ruler who can be identified by his face, name, and body, the democratic sovereign, who replaces him after the great revolutions on the threshold to modernity, remains an empty signifier. The latter is mainly imaginary: nobody has ever seen the people, the nation and the demos in their entirety, and their boundaries cannot easily be identified. The boundaries of citizenry are notorious causes of conflicts and debates.

The political theorist, Claude Lefort claims that democracy’s space of power is intentionally left empty, and that this is democracy’s defining characteristic (Lefort, 1988). In this sense, the constitutional articulation that all power comes from the people, in fact, means, strictly speaking, its exact opposite – the people are always missing and the space of power is empty. Precisely because power no longer comes from a monarchical sovereign but from the people, power becomes impersonal, and those who exercise it are always immediately replaceable.

Secrets, not mysteries

What this Enlightenment theory misses, however, is the fact that the public consciousness addresses this emptiness of power in a very particular manner. The empty space of power and the provisional assumption of power in the name of the people in fact do not lead to a common belief (in individuals) that nobody at all possesses the power. On the contrary, it turns the space of power into a secretive space of fascination and attraction. If in monarchical societies the king is a transcendent figure who has to be kept separate from the people, for instance, by lineage and rituals of distance and separation, then the space of power is mysterious, but, in a bodily sense, beyond reach. In turn, the democratic emptying of this space, and the replacement of the king by everybody, give the empty signifier a dramatic twist: from now on, everybody in principle has access to power, but nobody knows exactly where it is, who exactly wields it, and, most importantly, how to gain it.

The mythical and competing narratives that claim to fill the empty signifiers in the center of collective identity simultaneously bestow upon it an aura of the secretive. In this context, we do not – unlike Georg Simmel – primarily distinguish the secret from that which is commonly known (Simmel, 1908), but argue that both our own identity as well as the identity of the other are always concealed from us. In the center of collective identity is not only an empty but also a secret signifier whose content we deem – and this is crucial – solvable in principle; its solution seems merely a question of effort, time, and access to those who presumably possess inside knowledge. It is precisely this assumption and suspicion that bestow the character of the secretive upon modern cultures of identity. If we considered social facts as opaque but at the same time unsolvable, ‘unfathomable, inscrutable, eluding every comprehension’, then they would no longer be secrets but ‘mysteries’ (Hahn, 1997: 25). For instance, Koselleck has shown that, in order to shield themselves from control in an absolutistic state, the Freemasons surrounded themselves with an aura of mystery (1973: 56). Modernity, however, abolishes all mysteries: ‘everything is sucked into the maelstrom of the public gaze. There is nothing that would escape this public sphere.’ But at the same time, ‘this public sphere is dialectical, i.e. as everything becomes public, everything also becomes ideological’ (1973: 97). Thus, the shift to modernity has two consequences. First, collective identities become the subject of perpetual critique (of ideology) and endless debates. Second, collective identities and their empty significations are transformed from mysteries into secrets that are deemed in principle solvable.

This is the reason why the space of power is at the same time the space of narrative and imagination. It is deemed to be the backstage of society from where invisible hands organize society. The assumption that it is possible to get there, to name the instigators and to find out how power works, bestows upon politics the character of the secretive and the scandalous. Thus, democratic politics very often turns into continuous efforts to uncover scandals and to speculate about private interests behind the public façade. Scandalization constitutes the decisive mechanism for the construction of the empty signifiers as the place of secrets. Not only does the scandal construct the hidden content, it also presupposes the notion that this hidden content can one day be unveiled, that it is solvable in principle. At the same time, it mobilizes the affective energies that bring a particular issue into the realm of public communication, energies that ensure the issue’s continued salience (Seyfert, 2012).

Latency and the role of experts

It is not only the imagination of the observers that plays an important role, but also the experts who – from the perspective of the common audience – supposedly know all about the game being played, and the players involved. Thus experts help sustain the conviction that things not only are mysterious, but also that the contents of the secrets of power are accessible in principle, even though the experts are themselves mostly entangled in seemingly interminable processes of the impersonal legitimation of power (Luhmann, 1983).

The secret at the center of cultural identity is a form of non-knowledge. Examples of social secrets are not just the afore-mentioned questions of political power, but also questions of economic wealth, personal happiness and health – all highly contingent states that are mostly beyond individual planning and execution. Even though the ways of achieving power, health and wealth are vague and opaque, we nonetheless are always able to point to a concrete individual case in which a person appears to have found the solution to the riddles of power, wealth and happiness: Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, the Dalai Lama. Here we have another reason for the secretive character of these topics: if there were no exemplary carriers of this secret knowledge, those who might be able to guide our search, then there would be no secrets.

In this process, both the secret and its transmission need to be staged; this staging presents its own problems. For instance, in order for former top-ranking athletes to become plausibly credible as carriers of knowledge in social spheres other than sports, not only must they successfully manage a believable costume change (for management seminars or presentations, for instance), they must, above all, also demonstrate how individual success in sport is bound to success in economics and power in politics (e.g. ‘Success starts in the head’). And if the mathematical models of financial investors are not much more profitable than the amateur decisions of monkeys (Malkiel, 2012), then the existence of the specialized access to the secrets of the stock market has to be made plausible with the help of an appropriately complex sophistry. The fact that behind every success story is an unequal greater number of failed (but invisible) carriers of knowledge is something that has to be hidden when it comes to questions of happiness and financial success as well as for questions regarding power. As we mentioned earlier, this problem is not limited to the ways of power, but concerns every element of society that wants to define something worth attaining or worth striving for, e.g. individual wealth, health and happiness. To the extent that certain issues and desired objects become accessible to all, they become increasingly significant as the subject matter of cultural identity.

In the very center of society and in the center of cultural identity lies the work on secrets. In pre-modern societies these secrets were protected from trespass by privileges and bans on curiosity (Montaigne, 1993: 91).

These secrets emerge in modern societies in various, mostly individualized, forms, for example, as the quest for personal happiness, health and individual wealth. A secret presupposes – as we have also pointed out – the notion of the principle of solvability; it is based on the fundamental distinction between those who supposedly know it and those who don’t; it is based on the unquestioned summons to erase this difference.

Those who know or pretend to have access to this knowledge are not just the figures who inhabit the imagined backrooms of power, but also the experts of an extensive array of guidebooks for a happy life, as well as the stock market gurus who dispense advice on investments in the financial markets. In particular, the function of the experts and intellectuals is to interpret the secret and to assure that the secret will be solved in the future; but it is not their function to resolve the secret or to provide its eventual resolution. This is especially true in the realm of culture and identity (Giesen, 1993: 69). Even though their primary claim is the (re)solution of the secret(s), the real function of experts is rather the preservation of the latency (and thereby the potency) of the key issues of cultural identity. This indicates the individual and partial character of mythical interpretation, and simultaneously points to the fact that an individual’s distinct interpretation might always be perceived as a distortion or a misinterpretation by other members of the group. For the students, pupils, amateurs and consumers – i.e. the advisees – the actual accessibility of the gist of the secret does not play the decisive role; they can relate to the secret in various ways, e.g. by huddling and nestling with those who supposedly have access to power, wealth and happiness; by independently debunking relations of power in science and academia; through political activism; through various guidebooks.

Beyond that, these matters are continuously debated at kitchen tables and in bars, and experiences of exclusion (from power, wealth, happiness, etc.) are compensated for in conspiracy theories or through resentments (Nietzsche, 1999). Nevertheless, the gaze that exposes, enlightens, conspires or resents always in fact constructs the center of the secret, and thereby keeps it latent: thus, what is criticized is always only a particular interpretation of cultural identity, but never the notion of its existence itself.

Conclusion

To conclude, we will systematically arrange the public modes of dealing with empty signifiers. To this end we use the classification of two axes, Silence–Debates and Public–Private respectively. The overlap of those axes creates an ideal-typical differentiation in four fields that represent the various logics of dealing with empty signifiers (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Ideal-typical differentiation representing the various logics of dealing with empty signifiers.

As we have seen, the secretive signifier in the center of collective identity can be dealt with by a traumatic ban on speaking, e.g. if it is related to a collective violent crime or an experience of victimization. In the beginning, traumatic memories result in a ban on public speech (with regard to that experience). However, this experience remains enclosed in the individual. It is of a private nature and receives its certainty from the past alone.

In contrast, public debates about empty signifiers are difficult for the individual participant to imagine. Here, too, the public plane can be sharply differentiated from the private. While traumatic experience is banned in public debates but over-emphasized in private memory, empty signifiers are expressed in continuous public communication about something that appears completely ambiguous and blurred to each individual participant (in this public communication). Everybody refers to these empty signifiers (God, the people, Nature, freedom, justice, etc.) and nobody questions their existence but nobody can precisely or conclusively define them. Empty signifiers are created only through and in public communication – by insinuations, by reference to something else and by repetition, all of which hold together the various and contradictory articulations. Precisely because they are empty signifiers, there is ample room for individual fabulations, shifting contextualizations and colorful inventions. Everybody imagines something different when speaking of justice, but no one ever questions the fictionality of, and individual variations in, the references to justice. We pretend that our counterpart (pre)supposes the same thing as we do, even though we know that this is most likely not the case. The opposite of utmost certainty about the existence of the referent (God, the people, justice) and the complete non-transparency of its qualities, however, emerges only when the perspective of an outside observer is adopted. For the members of the community, this paradox is as unproblematic as the indexical reference of here and we.

With the third ideal-typically differentiated field, we are moving into the territory of what Habermas and many others have identified as the actual logic of public communication. Here, what matters is no longer the overcoming of the past, or the communicative filling of a void, but only an enlightened and enlightening communication that is strictly committed to reasonable arguments and discursive rules. Neither the past nor the inequality of the participants, neither the scarcity of resources nor the shortness of time, neither private concerns nor historical preferences, are allowed to play a role in this discourse. The approved motives for discourse are solely the enlightenment of truth and the uncovering of private secrets. In opposition to the logic of trauma, here communication moves completely into public discourse; individual motives and interests are suppressed – everybody is of equal rank, likewise without individual interests and memories. This enlightenment ethics assumes that, if the rules of discourse are properly applied, it is only a matter of time until seemingly endless debates will unveil the secret. As noble as the contours of this enlightenment discourse appear, its assumptions are unrealistic: the exclusion of the past and of inequality is impossible in all actual discourse. As an ideal, this enlightenment discourse might be useful in detecting social distortions and imbalances; however, as a description of the reality of public communication, it is of no use.

Finally, we will touch on the last field of the logic of empty signifiers. Here, a distance from the public realm of communication intersects with skepticism about grand narratives, a skepticism that is expressed only in private communication. The grand narratives are considered to be implausible if not downright ludicrous. The suspicion surrounding the meaninglessness of empty signifiers – the suspicion that must remain unspoken in public communication – is spoken in private. By using contemptuous expressions such as empty words, one tries to distance oneself from empty signifiers. Empty signifiers can always be turned into a subject of discussion or criticism, but this is entirely different from the private, retrograde movement into the modes of resentment, sarcasm and irony. If resentment enters public communication, the former would be perceived as cynicism and ultimately be attacked. Resentment can persist only in modes of private expression concealed from public discourse.

Our outline of the public handling of empty signifiers is meant to resolve certain problems in the concepts of contemporary cultural and social theory. On the one hand, we introduce collective phenomena such as society, nation and the people as constructs (pace deconstructivism) not based on grand closures and narratives: identity is a vague thing, non-transparent to all participants. However, we seriously doubt the claim that after the end of all grand narratives, all collective terms such as society and the people will consistently be replaced by deconstructive plural terms such as networks and the particular, and furthermore that this fragmented reality without a center is in fact present in the beliefs and imaginaries of the various actors. By contrast, we continue to assume that not only are participants in public debates absolutely certain about the empty signifiers in the center of culture, but also that these empty signifiers are constructed precisely and primarily in public speech and open debate. At the same time, the doubts surrounding their precise nature and reality are kept latent in public debates. The decisive question is not whether a certain society, nation or people possesses a definable or determinable substrate, or whether a consensus on their nature is possible. Instead, the more pressing question concerns the mechanisms of constitution on which they are based, and the ways and means through which empty signifiers are filled out – and again emptied. In this context, we have pointed to the secretive character of empty signifiers in modern societies. From the perspective of modernity, empty signifiers are presented as an opportunity for illumination, as a task of elucidation and enlightenment that is always solvable in principle. Thus, modernity is dominated by the pathos of enlightenment of Habermas’ notion of the public sphere: everything is suspected of bearing a secret that demands urgent elucidation (1991: 4). The fact that this secret consists only in a self-supporting empty space, created precisely within discourse, is what completely escapes these proponents of enlightenment. They tend to treat everything as a secret to be elucidated, and miss the point that the apparent secret remains an unsolvable mystery, and that no society can exist without this mysterious center – without the sacred.