Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
The constitution of the subject through ideological struggle
Download 0.72 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
The-Radical-Democratic-Imaginary-oleh-Laclau-and-Mouffe
The constitution of the subject through ideological struggle
Gramsci’s displacement of Lenin’s scientific rationality with his conception of historical specificity allows his theory to attend to many political dimensions that have been neglected in Marxist theory. He firmly rejected the reductionist conception that the superstructural sphere—the sphere of social relations, cultural practices, state structures, ideologies and so on—was thoroughly determined by the economic base. Kautsky, by contrast, viewed political relations and ideological discourses as “epiphenomena,” or mere reflections of the underlying economic structure (Mouffe 1979b:174). With his rejection of Kautsky’s epiphenomenalism, Gramsci concluded that we cannot dogmatically determine the meaning of democratic struggles with reference to their relations to the class struggle. The F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 54 workers’ movement should instead enter into ideological struggle to redefine the democratic movements and to win them over to its side (Mouffe 1979a:17). Gramsci did maintain that ultimately the political terrain would take the form of two great historical blocs standing in opposition to one another, and that these two blocs would be defined in terms of their class-based leadership, namely the leadership of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He nevertheless regarded the two blocs as complex unities or collective wills; he even saw class struggle itself as “complex relations of forces” (Mouffe 1979b:180). Above all, Gramsci maintained that the socialist struggle would not succeed in its counter-hegemonic strategy merely by relying on the dictates of scientific theory. It would have to engage in the complex game of redefining democratic struggles and the most promising popular elements, and then integrating them into a hegemonic socialist bloc. Gramsci’s strategic approach remains relevant today. Radical democratic activists in the United States, for example, are constantly attempting to counteract the right’s appropriation of the American democratic tradition with alternative constructions. When the neo-conservatives suggest that affirmative action contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment, or the religious right invokes the mythical constitutional right of American employers to discriminate against lesbian and gay workers, democratic activists do not remain silent; they enter the fray and offer oppositional constructions of these American political values. When the anti-immigrant forces depict America as a white-English-only space, radical activists respond with a vision of a multicultural and hybrid America. This is not to endorse a full-scale “alternative patriotism”; the historical sedimentations of American nationalism are such that a radical democratic pluralist American patriotism has become almost an oxymoron. This is only to note that wherever authoritarianism advances its agenda by appropriating traditions and symbols, radical democratic activists respond by attempting to rescue the progressive elements that can be found in those institutions and to transform that potential into concrete political tools. In the development of his theory of hegemony, Gramsci drew inspiration from the same text that reductionist Marxists cite in defense of their epiphenomenalism, namely Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Gramsci 1971:365; Texier 1979:56–7). Marx argues that the economic structure of society constitutes the “real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness,” and that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1969a:503). This passage has, with some justification, been widely interpreted as an endorsement of the view that the political is merely a reflection of the economic base. In a later passage, however, Marx offers an epistemological comment. A distinction should be made between the material transformation of the natural economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 55 aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. (Marx 1969a:504) The “conflict” to which Marx refers is the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, the contradiction that in this text operates as the “motor of history” (Marx 1969a:504). The text is profoundly ambiguous. It could be read as an affirmation of the negative meaning of “ideology” as that which is not scientific and as that which conceals social contradictions. Further, the passage could be made compatible with the argument that although some philosophical, legal and political discourses are ideological insofar as they are opposed to science, not all of these discourses are necessarily ideological. Finally, it is asserted here that individuals become conscious of the “conflict” through the work of “ideological forms”; it is not stated that only ideological forms can play this role. It remains possible, then, that non-ideological discourses could also contribute to this process (Larrain 1981:9–10). Marx’s main argument, namely that ideology should be understood negatively as that which is unscientific and conceals social contradictions, is therefore barely interrupted by this methodological aside. In any event, this fragment inspired Gramsci as he asserted that humans can only have a mediated relation to the movement of great historical forces. Although Gramsci had to reconstruct Marx’s text by memory during his imprisonment, he seized on this passage and concluded that “‘man acquires consciousness of social relations in the field of ideology’” (Gramsci 1971:138; Texier 1979:57). For Gramsci, then, “ideology” is not a simple tactical tool that can be used by the bourgeoisie to delude the workers. “Ideology” plays a constitutive and epistemological role: it is through ideological struggle that the terms that define the political terrain are constructed (Gramsci 1971:365). “Ideology” also has ontological effects, for where an ideology resonates with the masses, it takes on a “psychological” validity: it organizes humans into groups, constructs group members’ concrete sense of shared interests, and stages the groups’ struggles (Gramsci 1971:377). “Ideology” not only provides the mediating element through which basic conflicts are grasped; it also sets up the defining framework for political battles (Przeworski 1985:69). Although Laclau and Mouffe abandon the concept of “ideology” because of its residual connections to the reductionist base/superstructure model (Laclau 1990a: 89–92), they nevertheless appropriate Gramsci’s argument about the positive role of ideology in their constructivist conception of identity formation. Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling