Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

(Träger) of this structure (Laclau 1977:163; 1990:9). Commenting on Althusser’s
conception of interpellation, and using the term “ideology” where he would later
substitute “political discourse,” Laclau states,
Individuals, who are simple bearers of structures, are transformed by
ideology into subjects, that is to say, that they live the relation with their
real conditions of existence as if they themselves were the autonomous
principle of determination of that relation.
(1977:100)
In the abstract Marxist model, we reduce the members of a workers’ movement,
in all their historical specificity and contradictory desires, to nothing but a group
that sells its labor power to capitalists. Some degree of abstract theoretical
reduction is of course necessary; it is only through some type of conceptualization
that we can describe, for our practical purposes, the ways in which different
individuals are affected by the systematic and hierarchical distribution of life
chances. The pragmatic and anti-positivistic aspects of theory should be
underlined at this juncture. Theoretical models never correspond perfectly to
the concrete world; there will always be some element of materiality that exceeds
our theoretical grasp, for the real ultimately cannot be reduced to the concept
(Laclau and Mouffe 1990:107–9). Against positivist social scientists, Laclau and
Mouffe would therefore argue that the search for falsifiable claims about social
structures is futile.
This does not mean that all theoretical formulations are therefore utterly
useless. Wittgenstein says, for example, that a sign-post may be read different
ways, or that we may have different ideas about what being “on time” means,
but that these imperfect forms of communication may nevertheless work well
enough in most circumstances, in the sense that they usually fulfill their specific
purposes. The inevitable absence of exactitude in a concept does mean that it is
“unusable” (1958:39–42). As Quine insists, vague terms sometimes rescue
communication from failure (1960:127). The question for theory, then, is not
whether it perfectly corresponds to the real, for the real cannot be reduced to
the concept. We should consider instead whether or not our necessarily imperfect
theoretical concepts work well enough for our particular practical purposes. As
for a definition of our practical purposes, we can turn to Marx’s famous
declaration, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point, however, is to change it” (1969b:15). From this perspective, then, we
can say that one theory such as radical democratic pluralism offers a better
description than another—say neo-conservatism—on the grounds that it tends
to be more useful in describing and inciting concrete struggles towards progressive
social change. For all their inevitable failure to reduce the real to concepts, our
theoretical arguments can sometimes serve our pragmatic purposes well enough
in specific circumstances.

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We might also note in passing that this approach sets Laclau and Mouffe apart
from critical theory as well. For the authors, we can only evaluate a particular
social and political theory with reference to a political horizon. With this
perspectival approach, Laclau and Mouffe reject the immanence principle in critical
theory, namely the claim that we must be able to find an element of critique
within social reality itself (Honneth 1994:256). The authors also distance
themselves from the scientific Marxist argument that theory ought to be unified
with practice in the sense that theory should allow us to grasp the objective truth
about the world that is unfolding before us. Insofar as Marx believed that he had
captured the logic of history, he depicted the commitment to the socialist struggle
as an objectively necessary position (Aronson 1995:42, 44). For radical democratic
pluralist theory, we inhabit a world in which contingency always threatens to
interrupt even the most institutionalized social order. Every time that we attempt
to apprehend the logic of social structures, there will always be some irreducible
remainder that exceeds our grasp. This implies that the commitments that are
possible for us can only be moral and normative, rather than objectively necessary;
we can no longer comfort ourselves with illusions about the objective necessity of
any political position.
It should nevertheless be emphasized that the claim that we interpret power
relations discursively does not contradict in any way other claims regarding the
material effects of power relations, namely that the humans who are caught up in
what we call exploitative and oppressive relations actually do experience pain
and suffering. The point is altogether a different one, namely that our attempts to
grasp those experiences through theoretical concepts will always be more or less
inadequate, and that we can only assess our theories on the basis of pragmatic
tests—the tests of their practical effects vis-à-vis the incitement of subversive
resistance. I will return to the theme of the discursive constitution of the social in
Chapter 3 in the context of my discussion of Saussurean linguistics.
In concrete historical settings, actual subjects get caught up in solidarities that
never neatly correspond to theoretical categories. They come together through
their practices and build up some sort of collective social agent—such as a social
movement—that is meaningful to them only insofar as they share a common
subject position or identity, that is, a common interpretation of their structural
positionings. It is their identity—and never their common structural positions
alone—that operates as the principle of their political solidarity.
This implies, for example, that we cannot assume solely on the basis of empirical
data about income levels, wealth and job classifications that class is a meaningful
axis of identification. We have to look instead for the ways in which individuals
respond in a concrete way to class-oriented discourses that conceptually organize
their experience (Scott 1988:56–7). Workers’ movements do not, therefore, merely
describe an existing state of affairs.
5
Nor do workers’ movements merely appeal to
a fully formed, albeit dormant, subject. Like all movements, workers’ movements
are performative: they have to bring the resisting subject into being. Movements
may work with fragments and traces of previous solidarities, but they never simply

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deliver into existence an embryonic subject that matures according to its own
unfolding logic. Social movements’ political discourses are constitutive rather than
epiphenomenal. Social movements offer critical frameworks that allow the
exploited to interpret their experience, and thereby provide them with “forms of
social consciousness based on common terms of identification and…the means
for collective action” (Scott 1988:94). To the extent that their incitements to
identification are successful, exploited individuals collectively take up the “anti-
exploitation/anti-capitalist” subject position.
Given the fact that every iteration introduces deviation, there will always be
variations in the identities that the workers’ movement incites. Every social
movement’s discourse is overdetermined; the discourse of every specific workers’
movement is a “mélange of interpretations and programs” that is tactically built
up in a contextually-specific manner (Scott 1988:61). In this sense, every workers’
movement will always incite hybrid worker identifications that are articulated in
complex ways with other identifications. In some cases, a worker identity might
be constructed in terms of the citizen/foreigner difference, while, in other cases,
symbols such as “family values,” “technology,” or the “environment” might play a
crucial role.
The idea that class structural positioning does not immediately give rise to a
class-defined subject position is of course highly problematic for traditional
Marxists. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels contend
that capitalist society will inevitably polarize into “two great hostile camps,” the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They further argued that these two great classes,
by virtue of their different relation to the means of production, will ultimately
pursue the interests that are proper to each of them as a class and thus will engage
in a total class war. Rephrased in the terms introduced here, Marx and Engels’
argument is that there is no difference between structural positions and subject
positions, and that it is the economic structural position that determines the being
of every social agent. In one of his richest texts, The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx
still constructs the French peasants as an embryonic class that would progress
towards maturity as soon as the proper material conditions emerged (1978:608).
And yet, even in the Manifesto, we can detect the presence of a supplementary
element that is introduced into the account of the revolutionary proletariat’s
maturation, namely the intellectuals’ intervention. While material conditions,
such as the massive concentration of workers in huge factories, their de-skilling
and their pauperization, create favorable conditions for the emergence of a
revolutionary proletariat, the Communist Party’s leadership is necessary in the
last instance. It is the Communists, as opposed to other workers’ leaders, who are
capable of formulating the most advanced expressions of the interests of the
workers’ movement as a whole (Marx and Engels 1969:120). Paradoxically enough,
the Communists include among their number certain “bourgeois ideologists.” The
latter is a “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift [from the
bourgeoisie] and joins the revolutionary class.” No mere opportunists, these