giesen, bernhard, seyfert robert collective identities, empty signifiers, solvable secrets

The persistent debate over the nature of the social and society has led some theorists

to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Thus, for instance, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal

Mouffe, and Bruno Latour in various places have declared the end of the social and the

end of society (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Latour, 2002). Those who argue most force-

fully against the idea of social whole have thus far failed to explain, not just the sub-

stance or content of these debates, but the forces that drive such debates in the first

place. Why do people compulsively, actively and intensively engage in debates about

collective identity in the first place? Instead of simply denouncing the idea of a collective

whole and treating every debate about it as an analytical error, we try to explain the

mechanisms through which collective identity is created and perpetuated.

First, we have to make it clear that ours is not a representational theory of collective

identity where the existence of collectives depends on representation through a leading

associate; such theories have been rightly criticized (Latour, 2002). Instead of represen-

tatives, we discuss illustrative figures such as imaginary heroes, so-called achievers, and

other exemplary persons. Collective identity is kept latent through the imaginaries gen-

erated by such non-representational figures. Second, ours is not the discourse ethics of

collective identity that can be found in Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thinkers

such as Jurgen Habermas (1990). Even as we are interested in how collective identity is

stabilized in conditions of fuzziness and vagueness, factual observation shows that this is

certainly not accomplished through the balancing of agonistic opinions in discourse

ethics. Such debates are neither ideally nor practically geared towards a public consensus

(about the definition of collective identity). Not only do controversies and contestations

remain factually unresolved, these disagreements are the de facto motors of collective

identity. Instead of being a problem for collective identity formation, controversies and

contestations are in fact the main mechanisms of its maintenance; one might even say

collective identity, for its preservation and generation, logically requires these agonistic

practices. These quarrels and clashes of opinion may go so far as to conclude with the

rejection of a particular collective identity. Yet – mostly unbeknown to its proponents –

this rejection may be most effective in stabilizing the collective identity. Thus we are

advocating a different idea of integration in contrast to the commonly accepted paradigm

of modernity that relates social integration to discursive enlightenment. The following

remarks are more in the vein of Reinhart Koselleck, and less along the lines of Jurgen

Habermas’ idea of the public sphere.

Finally, we would like to note – contra the antagonistic approaches adopted by

authors such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – that even the most wildly contested

of these debates do not lead to temporal hegemonic interpretations. As we will show,

they are in fact all driven by the need to solve the mystery of collective identity. This

mystery is by its very logic unsolvable, precisely because it is only created amid the

debates about what it is, what stuff it is made of, where it was born. But it is treated

as if it were solvable, it is treated as a solvable secret. And this is decisive.

As we said in the beginning, collective identity is not a theoretical assumption but an

empirical dimension. Why are we willing to extend the right to vote to citizens, but not to

foreigners? Why are we ready to help other people in our country with taxpayers’ money

and private donations when catastrophe befalls them, but hesitate to help strangers in dis-

tant lands? Why do we trust our neighbor and mistrust strangers?

2 European Journal of Social Theory

These questions cannot be resolved by pointing to personal experiences or in the

hopes of a quid pro quo between beneficiaries, rendered by all in the event that any

single one of them should need to be rescued from distress. Nor can the questions be

answered by pointing to coercion and the anticipation of punishment if help is with-

held. This is not a question of relations of security, nor of systems of sanctions, which

motivate us as to act rationally as egoistic individuals to attain the benefits of

solidarity.

The attempt to explain collectivity and identity through actions guided by individ-

ual interests (Hechter, 1987) fails to recognize that identity cannot serve as a means to

a superior end but is itself the highest-ranking end of all actions (Pizzorno, 1986).

Identity defines interests, not the other way around. Furthermore, the reference to the

interests of rulers, to those who delude the people into a particular notion of collec-

tivity (the so-called ‘theory of deception by priests’) simply alters the problem; the

question then becomes why the ‘deceived’ audience accepts certain interpretative sug-

gestions but not others. Finally, referring to an explicit consensus of shared values

does not get us any further. Every attempt to formulate an explicit consensus of values

and norms inevitably creates controversies. The ambivalence and ambiguity involved

in formulating a consensus of values indicate the vague and precarious character of

collective identity. Something similar can be found in the controversies surrounding

the Iraq War in the United States, where the American identity was strongly tied to

supporting the troops, which could be taken to mean both support for the invasion and

the suppression of all critique, as well as advocating keeping the troops home, and

thereby safe.

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 collec-

tive identity. Collective identity is usually defined as a certain culturally rooted similar-

ity 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 con-

cept. However, despite significant differences, both the individual identity of a person

and the collective identity of a community exhibit a similar structure: they connect abso-

lute self-assurance with the greatest possible non-transparency. We are absolutely cer-

tain 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

Giesen and Seyfert 3

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’ (Levi-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. Exam-

ples 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 transcen-

dence. 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 personi-

fied ideas of God, mysteries cannot be entirely dispensed with. Contemporary dis-

courses of negativity have, instead, replaced these former religious traditions of

meaning and sense (negative theology, etc.). They turn the uncertainty and inexpres-

sibility 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 individ-

ual parts, and against a societal whole (Latour, 2002). The individual level is con-

sidered 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 imagin-

ary 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 iden-

tity of a person is an invention that depends on specific circumstances; it integrates

the incompatible and creates a consistent picture out of completely different phe-

nomena. 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 sub-

ject, 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 par-

tiality, 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 per-

form 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 empti-

ness (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 iden-

tity, it does not refer to something placeless and timeless. Collective identity has a begin-

ning, 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 con-

struct 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 iden-

tity – 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 atten-

tion 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, colo-

nialism, 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 oppres-

sors, 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 ges-

ture 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 read-

justed 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 con-

tradictory 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 collec-

tive identity, even someone who rejects a certain iteration of a particular collective iden-

tity 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 our-

selves to a stance. Thus, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: we can neither con-

clusively 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 signif-

iers: 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 trau-

matic 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 indi-

vidual, 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 victimiza-

tion 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 dis-

tinctions necessarily lead to unintended side effects, for example, when those who were

responsible escape punishment, when innocents are scapegoated, and when people ini-

tially 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 atten-

tion. 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 inten-

tionally 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 sover-

eign 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 conscious-

ness 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 impor-

tantly, 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 collec-

tive 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 cul-

tures 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 mys-

teries: ‘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 facade. Scan-

dalization 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 solva-

ble in principle. At the same time, it mobilizes the affective energies that bring a partic-

ular 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 pre-

sents 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 exis-

tence 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 pre-

supposes – 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 intel-

lectuals 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 cul-

tural identity. This indicates the individual and partial character of mythical interpreta-

tion, 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 sig-

nifiers. 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).

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 pub-

lic 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 par-

ticipant to imagine. Here, too, the public plane can be sharply differentiated from the pri-

vate. 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 par-

ticipant (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.

Silence/Concealment Debates

Public � Trauma� Repression

� Enlightenment� Critique� Universal discourse ethic

Private � Resentment� Cynicism� Irony

� Individual interpretation� Inventions/fables� Speaking about the unknown

Figure 1. Ideal typical differentiation representing the various logics of dealing with emptysignifiers.


Precisely because they are empty signifiers, there is ample room for individual fabula-

tions, shifting contextualizations and colorful inventions. Everybody imagines some-

thing 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 communi-

cation. 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 com-

munication 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 prop-

erly 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 commu-

nication, 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 narra-

tives, 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 prob-

lems 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 signif-

iers 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 surround-

ing their precise nature and reality are kept latent in public debates. The decisive ques-

tion 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 eluci-

dated, 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.

Notes

1. On secrets in religion, see Assmann and Assman (1999, 1997).

2. The English translation (Koselleck, 1988) uses ‘mystery’ for the German word Geheimnis,

which is particularly misleading for our analysis. Koselleck’s entire book can be read as an

analysis of the socially constitutive role of secrets.

3. On the problem of order beyond the micro and macro level, see Seyfert (2014).

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Author biographies

Bernhard Giesen is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Universitat Konstanz, Germany. His pub

lications include: Zwischenlagen: Das Außerordentliche als Grund der sozialen Wirklichkeit

(2011), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (ed. with J.

Alexander and J. Mast, 2006) and Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (with J. Alexander,

R. Eyerman, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztompka).

Robert Seyfert is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Cultural Foundations of Social

Integration’, Universitat Konstanz, Germany. His research interests are social theory, cultural

sociology and the sociology of the financial markets. His dissertation was published in 2011 as

Das Leben der Institutionen (Velbruck). Other publications include: ‘Beyond personal feelings and

collective emotions: a theory of social affect’, Theory, Culture & Society 29/6 (2012): 27 46.


giesen, bernhard, seyfert robert collective identities, empty signifiers, solvable secrets

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