Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Structural positions, subject positions, identity and
antagonism
From Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, a fully constructivist theory of identity
formation must go much further than those Marxist theories that merely recognize
that political discourse can affect the formation of interests or that it can play a

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secondary role in the reproduction of social structures. For the authors, discourse
is prior to identity formation in the sense that identity is wholly constructed
through discourse. Their embrace of constructivist theory has been widely
criticized. Hall argues, for example, that his position differs from that of Laclau
and Mouffe insofar as he does not believe that “just anything can be articulated
with anything else.” He asserts that every discourse has specific “‘conditions of
existence’ which, although they cannot fix or guarantee particular outcomes,
set limits or constraints on the process of articulation itself.” Hall insists that
although historical formations are contingent, they can be “deeply resistant to
change” (Hall 1988a:10).
Laclau and Mouffe would, however, agree that in the context of a particularly
entrenched hegemonic project, the possibilities for subversive interventions and
re-articulations in a given social formation would in fact be limited. They do not
hold that politics has become a game in which everything is equally possible and
every position has equal value. They speak extensively about the ways in which
political strategies must always be deployed in specific contexts and recognize
that relations of domination may prevail in those contexts (Laclau and Mouffe
1985:149–94). Laclau also situates his more recent arguments about subjectivity
within broader considerations about the processes of sedimentation, normalization
and institutionalization (Laclau 1990a). By way of a response to Hall’s criticisms,
and in the interest of clarifying Laclau and Mouffe’s theory, a distinction that is
already implicit in their work will be brought to the fore, namely the distinction
between structural positions and subject positions.
Like all radical theories, radical democratic pluralist theory rejects the neo-
conservative assumption that individuals freely choose their identity and freely
utilize socio-economic networks and institutions to shape their material
conditions according to their preferences. In the case of class, for example, radical
democratic pluralist theory recognizes that in capitalist formations, those
individuals who do not own the means of production must become workers;
they must sell their labor according to conditions that are not of their choosing
in order to survive. We could say, then, that an individual is structurally
positioned within hierarchical social, cultural, political and economic systems
by forces and institutions that are prior to her will.
2
Further, these structural
positions shape the individual’s life chances, for they situate her within the
relatively stable networks of power relations that shape the distribution of
material resources. The masses of the poor and the homeless in the United States
are not impoverished because of their low motivation, faulty self-esteem or
inferior intelligence; their condition should be explained instead in terms of
historical patterns of exploitation and oppression. The same holds true with
respect to race and sex. In a racist and sexist society, no one chooses to be
positioned as white, black, Latino/a, Asian, mixed race, male, female and so on;
one finds oneself “always already” positioned by forces and institutions within a
discursive field that is never wholly of our choosing. (I will critique the biological
determinist conception of race and sex in Chapter 5.)

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Following Gramsci, we could argue further that no one experiences her structural
positions within the social in a direct and unmediated way. It is only through
political discourses that we experience the ways in which we are positioned within
social structures. In the metaphorical terms provided by psychoanalysis, we could
say that discourse provides the imaginary framework through which we interpret
the symbolic order into which we are thrown (Bellamy 1993:28). This process is
contingent: there is no guarantee that one specific discourse will defeat all its
rivals and become a predominant interpretative framework. The struggles between
discourses to become predominant interpretative frameworks do tend to reflect
the configuration of power relations in a given historical moment, but they are so
complex that we cannot predict their exact outcomes. Some discourses may, given
the strategic terrain, be more likely to become compelling frameworks, but none
of them—not even the ones that seem to “reflect” predominant social structures—
are utterly guaranteed to succeed. In any event, no individual can choose to stand
outside the totality of interpretative frameworks; our fundamental dependence
upon the interpretative function of discourse is written into our very human
condition.
Laclau argues, for example, that an individual’s class structural position becomes
coherent for her through some specific and compelling political discourse (Laclau
1990a:9, 16). We could imagine the way that this might work for different workers
on the same assembly line in an American factory. One worker might be influenced
by neo-conservatism. She might believe that her position as a worker results from
the fact that she made a greater effort in life than her neighbors on welfare. She
might think that the corporate executives and the corporate shareholders owe
their positions to luck, hard work, corruption, nepotism or maybe a combination
of these and other factors. The second worker might be influenced by right-wing
religious fundamentalism. She might claim that her neighbors on welfare are living
lives of sinful sloth and sexual immorality, and that her own industriousness is a
reflection of her Christian way of life. She might even believe that the executives’
and shareholders’ relatively better fortune is in part the result of God’s will. The
third worker might be influenced by leftist leaders and the progressive wing of her
trade union. She might believe that her position as a propertyless worker results
from systematic exploitation, that she has in this sense much in common with her
neighbor on welfare, and that the executives and shareholders won their positions
thanks to the better opportunities that were systematically provided for them
from birth onwards in a basically inegalitarian social order.
These imaginary examples are already too abstract, for the interpretative
frameworks described here do not have racial, gender, national and other elements
blended fully into them whereas actual interpretative frameworks are always
irreducibly multiple, complex and even contradictory. Political subjects may think
one thing, state another, and act in yet another manner altogether. Perhaps their
basic principles are reinterpreted in unpredictable ways whenever they are applied
in specific circumstances; or perhaps their conscious affiliations are haunted by
unconscious fixations and aversions. With these reservations in mind, we can

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nevertheless assert that an individual’s sense of her structural positions—the way
that she lives in her structural positions and responds to them—is shaped not by
the mere fact of the structural positions themselves, but by the subject positions
through which she lives her structural positions.
3
Furthermore, the meaning of
each subject position is constituted with respect to its differential relations with
the entire system of subject positions. I will return to the relational character of
subject position formation below and in Chapter 3.
This argument sets Laclau and Mouffe’s constructivism entirely apart from
essentialist identity theory. An essentialist approach ignores the constitutive role
of mediating political discourse, and assigns to the individual an “authentic” interest
that is supposed to flow directly from her structural position. Hence propertyless
workers are supposed to have an “authentic” interest in the socialist struggle to
overthrow capitalism, just as women in sexist societies are supposed to have an
“authentic” interest in the feminist struggle, and so on. Where individuals do not
actually act in accordance with their putative “authentic” interest—where workers
vote for conservatives, women reject feminism, racial minorities oppose affirmative
action, and so on—the essentialist diagnosis is that they are caught in the grips of
false consciousness and require firm leadership to guide them towards their
“authentic” interests.
The essentialist approach does not pay sufficient attention to the specificity of
these individuals’ interpretative frameworks. There may be some very good reasons
why a woman finds a particular anti-feminist interpretation more compelling than
a feminist one in a given moment, and these reasons should be taken into account
during the reconstruction of a more effective feminism. Laclau and Mouffe do not
pursue the question of identity formation with the aim of piercing ideological
distortions to arrive at the authentic subject. False consciousness theory assumes
that we can stand in an objective position outside political discourse in order to
establish the distinction between objective interests and ideological illusion. For
Laclau, not only is it impossible for us to occupy such a position, this promise is
itself an ideological illusion (1996i).
Laclau and Mouffe define “subject positions” as “points of antagonism” and
“forms of struggle” (1985:11). We will see in Chapter 3 that each subject position
is constituted through its differential relations with other subject positions, in
the form of equivalential and antagonistic relations at a given moment in time,
and in the form of the “iterated” traces of genealogical precedents. At this point,
however, we need to explore what a subject position does. Adding another
element to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory, we could say that a “subject position” is
like an “identity” in the following sense. A “subject position” refers to the
ensemble of beliefs through which an individual interprets and responds to her
structural positions within a social formation. In this sense, an individual only
becomes a social agent insofar as she lives her structural positions through an
ensemble of subject positions that makes sense to at least one other person in
one other time and place.
4

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The relationship between subject positions and structural positions is often
quite complex. Consider, for example, a white heterosexual bourgeois woman,
living in a social formation characterized by highly stabilized structural hierarchies
and yet a relative openness with respect to the availability of different interpretative
frameworks. Her racialized, gendered, sexual and class structural positions are in
this case largely determined by the social formations into which she is “thrown,”
and it is largely her structural positions, rather than her free will, that shape her
life chances. At the same time, her subject positions, the ways in which she lives
her structural positions, will tend to be somewhat more vulnerable to political
intervention and even the accidents of personal circumstance. That same individual
could live her structural positions through subject positions such as liberal anti-
racist Catholicism; socialist environmentalism or neo-conservative anti-feminism.
In a social formation with stabilized structural hierarchies and a relatively closed
set of normalized interpretative frameworks, however, a singular and rigidly defined
set of subject positions will tend to operate as the only coherent interpretative
frameworks through which structural positions are lived. This is often the case,
for example, in religious fundamentalist communities or in strong nationalist
movements.
Strictly speaking, we cannot speak of a “false” subject position in the same way
that some Marxists refer to “false” consciousness. Laclau asserts, for example, that
workers take on radicalized identities solely because of the intervening effects of
political discourses that come from outside the relations of production as such
(Laclau 1990a:9, 16). Their identities do not emerge as a direct result of what I
am calling their structural positions. We can refer to our working definitions of
political values and suggest that in a given set of circumstances some subject
positions will tend to have more democratic effects than others; radical democratic
pluralist activists make these sorts of practical assessments all the time. The identity
of the leftist worker in our imaginary factory, for example, expresses principles
that are clearly quite close to radical democratic pluralism, while the principles
expressed in the identities of the neo-conservative and the religious fundamentalist
clearly oppose this project.
The term “class” becomes problematic wherever it is used indiscriminately to
refer to both of these facets of subjectivity, structural positions and subject positions.
One is more or less assigned a class structural position within stable capitalist
structures; as we saw in Chapter 1, there is very little class mobility in capitalist
societies. All of our three workers—the neo-conservative, the religious
fundamentalist and the leftist trade union supporter—are being exploited through
their wage labor contracts, and, because their life chances are profoundly shaped
by their working-class structural position, it is very unlikely that they will ever
escape this condition. But we must recall that when we group individuals together
by virtue of their shared structural position alone, we are actually referring to
theoretical categories, and not to actual social agents who perform concrete social
practices. In Marxist theory, for example, we use economic categories to depict
the capitalist relations of production—the bourgeoisie/proletariat relation—and

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actual social actors only appear in this model insofar as they are the “bearers”