zero institution

is the hidden thing that underlies and quietly reconciles two different cultural models within a single group.

However, Levi-Strauss make here a further crucial point: since the two subgroups nonetheless form one and the same tribe, living in the same village, this identity somehow has to be symbolically inscribed, but how, if the entire symbolic articulation, all social institutions, of the tribe are not neutral, but are overdetermined by the fundamental and constitutive antagonistic split' Levi-Strauss's answer is what he ingeniously calls the 'zero-institution,' a kind of institutional counterpart to the famous mana, the empty signifier with no determinate meaning, since it signifies only the presence of meaning as such in opposition to its absence: a specific institution that has no positive, determinate function. Its only function is the purely negative one of signaling the presence and actuality of social institution as such, in opposition to its absence, to presocial chaos. It is the reference to such a zero-institution that enables all members of the tribe to experience themselves as such, as members of the same tribe. Is, then, this zero-institution not ideology at its purest, that is the direct embodiment of the ideological function of providing a neutral all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is obliterated, in which all members of society can recognize themselves' And is the struggle for hegemony not precisely the struggle for how this zero-institution will be overdetermined, colored by some particular signification' To provide a concrete example: Is not the modern notion of nation such a zero-institution that emerged with the dissolution of social links grounded in direct family or traditional symbolic matrixes, that is, when with the onslaught of modernization, social institutions were less and less grounded in naturalized tradition and more and more experienced as a matter of ''contract''22 Of special importance is here the fact that national identity is experienced as at least minimally ''natural,' as a belonging grounded in 'blood and soil,' and as such opposed to the ''artificial'' belonging to social institutions proper (state, profession, etc.) premodern institutions functioned as 'naturalized'' symbolic entities (as institutions grounded in unquestionable traditions), and the moment institutions were conceived as social artifacts the need arose for a 'naturalized'' zero-institution that would serve as their neutral common ground. And, back to sexual difference, I am tempted to risk the hypothesis that, perhaps, the same logic of zero-institution should be applied not only to the unity of a society, but also to its antagonistic split: what if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split of humankind, the naturalized minimal zero-difference-- a split that, prior to signaling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such'

zero institution, n.Definitions

zero institution