Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

country’, and so forth, as something that antagonistic political forces claim to
ensure through totally different political means, have to be necessarily empty in
order to constitute the aims of a political competition” (1994:37). Like Žižek,
Laclau and Zac contend that the content of a political discourse is almost irrelevant,
for it is really the formal framework of a political discourse that makes it compelling

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for “the people.” Various political signifiers may appear to operate differently, but
they are all “empty signifiers,” blank spaces whose organizational form—and not
its content—compels phantasmatic investments. From a Lacanian perspective,
those investments are made not because the signifiers have specific meanings that
resonate organically within a given context, but because the “empty signifiers”
promise to deliver jouissance, the primal unity and completion that was foreclosed
at the entry into language. The (impossible) lure of a return to jouissance, which
restimulates profound longings in the interpellated subject, is therefore the key to
the power of a given political signifier (Butler 1993:191, 199, 209). Laclau’s
Lacanian shift is in this respect a departure not only from post-structuralist theory,
but also from the Gramscian tradition, for Gramsci insists that a political discourse
will only resonate with “the people” insofar as it organically resonates in some
way with popular traditions.
One of the hallmarks of Laclau’s early work is precisely his Gramscian attention
to historical specificity. In his influential article, “Towards a Theory of Populism,”
for example, Laclau notes that opposed forces often appeal to the same political
symbols: Tupac Amaru has been evoked by both guerrilla movements and the
Peruvian military government; the symbols of Chinese nationalism were deployed
by Chiang-Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-tung; and German nationalist symbols were
used by Hitler and Thälmann. Laclau cautions, however, that
popular traditions are far from being arbitrary and they cannot be modified
at will. They are the residue of a unique and irreducible historical
experience and, as such, constitute a more solid and durable structure of
meanings than the social structure itself.
(1977:167)
Laclau does not, however, completely reject the post-structuralist and Gramscian
approaches in his more recent work. He maintains, for example, that political
signifiers can only offer themselves as empty surfaces of inscription for new
articulations to a certain extent: “imaginary signifiers forming a community’s
horizon are tendentiously empty and essentially ambiguous” (1990a:65). If the
contents of a political discourse are of “secondary consideration” in contrast to
their formal characteristics (Laclau 1994:3), this implies that they still retain some
significance. A hegemonic discourse must be more than the formal embodiment
of order itself; it must offer some compelling concrete alternative vision of the
social.
This does not mean, of course, that any discourse putting itself forward
as the embodiment of fullness will be accepted. The acceptance of a
discourse depends on its credibility, and this will not be granted if its
proposals clash with the basic principles informing the organization of a
group.
(Laclau 1990a:66)

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Many interesting questions could be addressed in future research within this
theoretical horizon. Exactly how are the boundaries of “credibility” established in
a specific historic formation? If both the form and the content of rival political
discourses matter, what can we say about the limits of hegemonic practice?
Perhaps the best way to approach these problems would be via a recuperation
of the Gramscian emphasis on historicity and concrete empirical research. With
respect to her own study on apartheid discourse, for example, Norval contends
that the Afrikaner community’s world was thrown into crisis through the 1930s
and 1940s by a drought, the Depression, rapid urbanization and the Second World
War. Various Afrikaner discourses that expressed different nationalist, religious
and racial elements competed with one another to become the new hegemonic
discourse. One of the key factors in this rivalry consisted precisely in the ways in
which each of these discourses resonated with residual Afrikaner traditions
(1996:65–6).
Norval’s argument can be usefully illustrated with reference to McClintock’s
account of the mobilization of Afrikaner nationalism in the years leading up to
the apartheid era. McClintock examines, for example, the conservative
Afrikaners’staging of the “Second Trek,” the 1938 re-enactment of the 1838
migration, in which Afrikaners fled from British rule, rejected slave emancipation
and massacred the Zulus at Blood River. Citing Benjamin, McClintock contends
that archaic images can become potent elements within popular commodity
spectacles insofar as they are redefined, paradoxically enough, to identify precisely
what is new in the contemporary moment, while simultaneously granting free
rein to reactionary nostalgia. For McClintock, it was precisely the trek’s double-
faced historical logic that gave it a tremendous organic force.
Unlike socialism, then, the Tweede Trek could evoke a resonant archive
of popular memory and a spectacular iconography of historical travail
and fortitude, providing not only the historical dimension necessary for
national invention but also a theatrical stage for the collective acting
out of the traumas and privations of industrial decline.
(1995:376)
Although Lacanian theory usefully draws attention towards the formal aspects of
identification, it must be supplemented by a Gramscian approach to historicity.
Competing articulations never work on a signifier as if it were a blank space; every
floating signifier has some meaning—albeit one that is always open to subversive
recitation—insofar as it bears the fading traces of past articulations. The
effectiveness of a political discourse, in other words, is not merely a question of its
formal characteristics. It is entirely possible that a highly ordered, consistent and
organized discourse that was supported by devastating demonizations would
absolutely fail to incite popular identifications if it assigned meanings to key terms
such as “freedom” and “democracy” that did not resonate in any way with organic
traditions.

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The Lacanian and Gramscian approaches are not totally opposed to one another.
Gramsci argues that the formal character of the intellectuals’ intervention—the
way that the intellectuals bring greater coherence and universality to fragmented
popular discourse—is central to hegemonic strategy. Both Lacanians and
Gramscians would agree that there is no single discourse that is predestined to act
as the single hegemonic solution to an organic crisis. Gramscians insist that there
has to be some degree of continuity between a hegemonic discourse and the partially
normalized traditions that make up the discursive formation in question, but that
continuity is not analogous to an essentialist repetition with a predictable trajectory.
Again, the type of repetition that is proper to a series of articulatory moments in
time is similar to the imperfect and unpredictable continuity that is found in
Derridean iterations (1988), Wittgenstein’s family resemblances (1958), and
Foucauldian genealogy (1977, 1979, 1980b). Present articulations must resonate
with normalized traditions to become effective, but they also introduce novel
redefinitions of those traditions at the same time.
In this sense, both the Lacanian and Gramscian approaches share the assertion
that we cannot predict with exact certainty which discourse will emerge out of a
given crisis as hegemonic. Unlike the Lacanians, however, the Gramscians attend
to both the form and the content of competing discourses. By searching for organic
traces, Gramscians can reconstruct the genealogical, non-essentialist logic that is
displayed by a series of articulations. Like the Derrideans, Gramscians insist on
the historically structured character of structure failure. Finally, Gramscians can
construct historically specific maps of institutionalized power relations and the
residual effects of the crumbling traditions that make up the background for any
organic crisis. On that basis, Gramscians can suggest, in a limited manner, various
probable outcomes. Because Lacanians remain exclusively concerned with the
formal characteristics of identification, they cannot do so.

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3
S U B J E C T P O S I T I O N S ,
A RT I C U L AT I O N A N D T H E
S U B V E R S I O N O F E S S E N T I A L I S M
As we have seen in Chapter 2, Marx and Engels treat class as the essence of every
socio-political identity in their Communist Manifesto. Where there are variations
between different subjects who are supposed to belong to the same class, these
differences—nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on—are not supposed to
affect their class “core.” Class is supposed to be constituted solely with reference
to that subject’s relationship to the means of production. According to traditional
Marxist theory, one working-class group’s objective interest should ultimately be
the same as that of another working-class group, regardless of the other differences
between them. These non-class differences, then, are supposed to be secondary
and external. In technical terms, they are non-constitutive accidents, for they are
nothing but superficial differences that can be added or subtracted from the subject
without transforming the subject’s true being and its objective interests in any
way. A boundary is therefore supposed to exist between class and non-class
differences such that class is protected from the latter’s effects. Other essentialisms
take the same form. Gender, race or nationality, for example, can be considered as
the subject’s essential “core” in other theories.