Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Semiology, genealogy, sexuality and race
This point can be clarified further with reference to the use of genealogical
methodology in contemporary lesbian, gay and bisexual studies. Genealogy is an
“effective” history, a radical contextualization that seeks to clarify the conditions
of possibility for identity formations that are specific to a given time and place
(Foucault 1977:154; Connolly 1991:181–4). Sexuality historians who have taken
up this paradigm—Rubin (1984), Weeks (1977, 1981, 1990), Foucault (1977,
1980B), Halperin (1990), Chauncey (1990), Vicinus (1993), Almaguer (1993)
and others—have demonstrated that “sexuality” has not remained an essentially
unchanged field of subjects, practices and norms throughout history. Indeed,
“sexuality” carves out a specific area of concerns and anxieties which, strictly
speaking, only makes sense in modern Western contexts. The historicization of
apparently universal categories such as “heterosexual,” “homosexual” and “lesbian”
allows us to problematize contemporary value systems by demonstrating the fragility
of the norms that are taken for granted as transcendental rules.
An imaginary critic of Laclau and Mouffe, however, might grant the historicity
and contingency of sexual subject positions without abandoning essentialist theory
with respect to other types of subject positions. Indeed, homophobic discourse is
often centered on the idea that otherwise “normal” people can be “made”
homosexual through the illegitimate promotion of homosexuality. Homophobic
bigots and leftists alike often maintain that sexuality is unusual in that, unlike
other identities, it is socially constructed. Laclau and Mouffe would respond by
insisting that all subject positions are arbitrary in a Saussurean sense. This does
not mean that all oppressive and exploitative forces work in exactly the same way,
but that we can use the same ontological and epistemological presuppositions in
our explorations of these different discourses. Support for this argument can be
found in the theories of Hall and Gilroy on racial formations.
Hall contends that a racialized social field is not the direct expression of an
underlying economic structure. From his perspective, capitalism and racism inter-
twine with one another in complex, contradictory and mutually constitutive
ways, and the subject positions through which we live our class and race structural
positionings mutually constitute one another through specific articulations. Hall
suggests that in contemporary Britain, “race is…the modality in which class is
‘lived’, the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in
which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’” (Hall 1980:341). Similarly,
economic crises in America are widely interpreted through racialized discursive
frameworks, such that an assault on “unmarried teenage mothers”—again, a code
for blacks and Latinas—is accepted as a legitimate solution to the national debt.
Racialized subject positions can “cross over” in that they can serve as frameworks
for the interpretation of both racial and class structural positioning. In an abstract

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sense, virtually any subject position could play this role, but Hall is referring to
the specific conditions in post-colonial Britain, in which racialized ways of
thinking have become deeply woven into official and popular discourse. Hall
concludes that instead of using universal categories and trans-historical theories
to analyze race and racism, we should investigate the “specific conditions which
make [racial or ethnic] distinction[s] socially pertinent, historically active” (Hall
1980:338).
The dimensions of Hall’s articulation approach can be clarified with reference
to the work of Sedgwick, Crenshaw and Alarcón. Sedgwick contends that although
gender and sexuality are inextricable in concrete instances, they can be imagined
as “two distinct axes” (1990:30). She recognizes that different identities “mutually
constitute one another,” but argues that “there is always at least the potential for
an analytic distance between gender and sexuality” (1990:30). From Hall’s
perspective, gender, like race, is always so thoroughly constituted in and through
its relations with other positions that treating it as an isolated entity—even in
theoretical discourse—becomes an abstract exercise with little pragmatic value.
This does not mean that comparative research on different racialized and gendered
formations is utterly impossible, but that we can only expect to discover family
resemblances and genealogical tendencies from these studies, rather than
transcendental rules.
In her intervention in American legal discourse on sexual and racial harassment,
Crenshaw argues that sexism “intersects” with racism such that the wrongs suffered
by women of color are often different in form from the exclusions and injuries that
affect men of color and white women. Since existing jurisprudential traditions
tend to think in terms of black male and white female complainants, the courts’
inability to accommodate the intersectional perspective virtually guarantees the
erasure of the experience of women of color (1992). Given her limited aim,
Crenshaw does not take issue with the fact that litigation in these areas is structured
by other problematic assumptions, such as the primacy of an individualistic
approach to injury and the idealization of the white masculine middle-class
condition (Brown 1995:61). For our purposes, however, it should be noted that
Crenshaw’s intersectionality metaphor implies that these two “roads,” racism and
sexism, form an “intersection”—racialized sexism or gendered racism—at only
one position in the social “map,” namely in the condition of women of color.
Hall’s articulation metaphor, by contrast, suggests instead that racism and sexism
are more akin to three-dimensional force-fields than to intersections. Their
mutually constitutive combination has implications for every position within the
discursive formation in question. The identity of white males, for example, could
be affected by the combination of racism and sexism. In lynching, white males
position themselves not only as superior to women and superior to blacks, but as
chivalrous “protectors” of “their (white) women” against the black male “sexual
predators.” White males’ assaults against women of color, and the economic and
political motivations for their attacks on black men, are thereby erased. In a factory
with white and black women workers, to take another example, all the workers

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may be paid the same wage, but the white women may be paid a “symbolic wage”
by being placed in the cleaner, safer and less physically-demanding jobs. In this
case, the factory management would be attempting to incite a “lady worker” identity
among the white women that would set them apart from their black women co-
workers. In these and many other cases, the articulation of racism and sexism
have implications for the identities of both women of color and virtually every
other subject who is caught up in the same formation.
Alarcón would also take issue with the ways in which Crenshaw’s
intersectionality theory leaves the whole question of constitutive intra-gender
conflicts unaddressed. In her critique of feminist standpoint epistemology (Hartsock
1983), Alarcón notes that Women’s Studies research often merely appropriates
material about women of color without considering the ways in which a radical
integration of their discourse would require feminist theory’s transformation. In
this case, the failure to extend the articulation approach facilitates the erasure of
white women’s accountability, as white femininity is represented as if it emerged
solely out of a simple binaristic gender relation.
The inclusion of other analytical categories such as race and class becomes
impossible for a subject whose consciousness refuses to acknowledge that
“one becomes a woman” in ways that are much more complex than in a
simple opposition to men. In cultures in which “asymmetric race and
class relations are a central organizing principle of society,” one may also
“become a woman” in opposition to other women.
(1990:360)
Following Hall, Gilroy also rejects the view that racial discourse can be understood
from a universalist perspective. Against traditional Marxist theories of race, in
which race is always reduced to epiphenomena determined by economic relations,
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Gilroy argues that the relation between race and class should be understood as a
“complex syncretism.” Gilroy’s conception of syncretism is quite similar to Laclau
and Mouffe’s definition of articulation: race and class combine together in a
mutually constitutive relation that produces a contextually specific hybrid
formation that nevertheless retains genealogical traces and non-essentialist
resemblances to contiguous formations. Like Hall, Gilroy advocates a historicizing
approach to the study of racial solidarities (Gilroy 1987:17, 27–38). He concludes
that race is a “political category that can accommodate various meanings which
are in turn determined by struggle” (Gilroy 1987:38). With their meaning
established only within particular syncretisms, racial signifiers are in themselves
“elastic” and “empty”; they become signifiers only through “ideological work”
(Gilroy 1987:39). Unity across the complex differences that mark the trans-
Atlantic African diaspora remains possible, but that unity must be constructed
within specific strategic conditions: resistance against the racisms of slavery,
colonialism and post-colonialism.

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Shohat and Stam would concur; they point out that the very form of syncretistic
hybridity is politically available for radically different articulations.
As a descriptive catch-all term, “hybridity” fails to discriminate between
the diverse modalities of hybridity: colonial imposition, obligatory
assimilation, political cooptation, cultural mimicry and so forth. Elites
have always made cooptive top-down raids on subaltern cultures, while
the dominated have always “signified” and parodied as well as emulated
elite practice. Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymmetrical.
(1994:43)
For his part, Gilroy locates his discourse in opposition to both the ethnic absolutists
and the post-modern relativists (1993:31–2, 80–1, 99–103). White ethnic
absolutists construct fantasies of a homogeneous and timeless Western identity
that ignores both the hybridity that has always been a central characteristic of
whiteness (Smith 1994b: 132) and the fictitious character of the attempts to Aryan-
ize the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece (Bernal 1987). Black
ethnic absolutists question the “authenticity” of the black popular cultural projects
that combine traditional African elements with Western influences or construct
alternatives to the black heterosexist patriarchal family. For Gilroy, hybrid diasporic
cultural formations are continually undergoing transformations as blacks in the
present moment reinterpret the past to serve their current strategic needs and
desires. Against the ethnic absolutists, he argues that hybrid cultural projects should
not be dismissed out of hand. He demonstrates, for example, the ways in which
complex appropriations from African, black Caribbean and African-American
sources take place in black British popular culture (1993, 1987). Indeed, the very
structure of the racisms to which Africans have been subjected has incited this
continual syncretistic activity. Slave traders uprooted different African peoples
and forced them to endure the horrors of the “middle passage” across the Atlantic.
Their subsequent owners then separated the slaves that belonged to the same
linguistic groups in order to frustrate the slaves’ rebellion. Preservation of a black
culture and a tradition of resistance in these conditions, then, was already a
syncretistic operation. This sometimes involved not only the articulation of
different African traditions, but also the integration of indigenous native American
traditions as well.
While Gilroy recognizes the possibility of legitimate syncretisms, he opposes
cultural theories that uncritically celebrate each and every form of appropriation.
He argues that the latter approach has not always achieved an adequately critical
stance, for it has been “insufficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically
racialized forms of power and subordination” (1993:32). Gilroy explicitly reserves,
for example, the right to assess the work of contemporary black hip-hop artists on
the basis of their gender politics and their positions vis-à-vis racial representations
and commercialism (1993:84–5). Instead of grounding his assessments on a fixed
conception of racial authenticity, however, he consistently returns to contextual

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analyses that consider new racial syncretisms against the background of their
structural conditions. A black cultural project, then, should not be regarded as a
spontaneous construction that can be invented and reinvented according to a
subject’s every whim; it should be understood instead as the product of social
practices and the “outcome of practical activity” (1993:102). As we will see in the
following chapters, Gilroy’s critical stance is remarkably similar to the position of
Laclau and Mouffe. Where Gilroy distances himself from both ethnic absolutism
and post-modern voluntarism, Laclau and Mouffe deploy a non-essentialist and
yet critical approach to difference.
The analogy between Saussurean signs and identities is therefore relevant for
both sexual differences and racial differences, even though the latter are often
regarded as ahistorical, natural and fixed. As long as identity formation is seen as
the mere addition of already constituted individuals or as the addition of “natural”
groups together in simple coalitions, the complexity of contemporary political
practices will never be grasped. Political discourse does not merely reflect the
interests that are already constituted at the structural level; the subject positions
through which we live our structural positionings are wholly constructed through
the differential relations within political discourses.
The hybridizing effect of articulation occurs throughout the social, between
and among subject positions and social structures alike (Laclau 1977:42). As we
have seen in Chapter 1, for example, capitalist exploitative relations are always
intertwined with other oppressive relations such as racism or sexism. A given
economic structure might entail complex relationships between different sectors,
such as a so-called “backward” peasant sector and a “modern” industrial sector.
According to traditional Marxist theory, these sectors are organized in terms of
distinct modes of production; qualitatively different property relations and class
relations are supposed to obtain in each one. In some cases, however, the
constitutive relations between these sectors play a prominent role. The industrial
sector may depend on the peasant sector for the reproduction of the labor force at
low costs. Perhaps the workers in the industrial factories can afford to work for the
low wage offered by the capitalist because their families live on peasant plots and
engage in subsistence farming. The peasant sector may depend on the industrial
sector for the cash needed for input investment. The money for the seeds, fertilizer
and insecticide used on the family plot may come from the wages that are earned
by the family member working in the factory. In these cases, we have a formal
distinction between the two sectors at the level of traditional Marxism’s abstract
theory, but at the level of the concrete formation, we have a complex relationship
of interdependence between them. Where essentialist theory cannot grasp this
sort of interdependence, the articulation metaphor brings the irreducible
complexity of overdetermination to the fore.