Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
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University of California 1978; Richmond v. Croson, 1989; Metro Broadcasting v.
FCC 1990; Adarand Constructors v. Peña 1995; and Hopwood v. Texas 1996) cite the same passages in the American Constitution, but offer radically different interpretations of such basic concepts as “equality,” “racial classification” and “compelling governmental interest.” The problem of conceptualizing the relation between the individual and her community positionings is centered on the definition of the principle of self- determination. For Kymlicka, Kantian liberal theory does not actually construct the individual as an atomistic entity. It does, however, reserve for the individual the right to question the beliefs, values and traditions that have become normalized within one’s community. Individuals may find themselves thrown into specific S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P 122 social roles, but they are not fully defined by those roles. The liberals contend that they should be allowed to challenge any of the moral obligations that follow from their communal memberships. It is only with this fundamental freedom of choice that the individual can pursue a meaningful life. The liberals’ insistence on the construction of a state that is neutral with respect to the common good arises precisely from this concern. For the communitarians, by contrast, the common good is supposed to operate not as a reflection of individual preferences but as a standard by which individual preferences are evaluated. Where the liberals believe that the moral individual should ask herself, “Who should I become?” the communitarians would like her to attempt to discover who she already is by virtue of her social positionings. From the communitarians’ perspective, the individual can interpret the meaning of her roles, but she cannot reject them altogether as worthless, for in the end, there is no self that is prior to the totality of one’s positions in the community (Kymlicka 1990:204–15). The communitarians therefore tend to remain silent on the following question: if we did grant that the community’s tradition should operate as a moral horizon, what would we establish as the moral obligations of those peoples who have been systematically exploited and oppressed within that tradition? Hegel, for example, allowed that in a corrupt regime, the outlaw who opposed her community’s traditions could become a moral hero. It should be noted, however, that his heroic outlaw figures, such as Socrates and Jesus, belonged to ancient communities. Hegel maintained that ultimately, morality can only be achieved within a communal setting, for it is only the community’s traditions that can give definitive content to the individual’s decisions. A subject who finds herself in a transitional period in which historical rationality has become corrupted must resort to her own individualistic deliberation. Hegel assumed, however, that modern nation-states were generally progressing towards the realization of an increasingly rational morality. His faith in that progress was such that he believed that the modern individual ought to determine her moral views with respect to her community’s way of life in all but the most extraordinary conditions (Hegel 1953:39–43; Taylor 1975:376–8). Hegel badly mis-judged the predominant moral traditions in contemporary Western societies. If we follow the critiques by contemporary revolutionaries such as Malcolm X (1965), the later Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991, 1968), and Angela Davis (1981), then the concern of the Kantian liberals about the individual’s right to self-determination remains well founded. The communitarians’ solution to the traditions of exclusion, namely the simple inclusion of the previously excluded, misses the point. Systematic forms of oppression such as racism are not necessarily accidental to a communal tradition; they are often constitutive of their basic principles. Further, the communitarians ignore the morality of radical rebellion: militant workers; revolutionary blacks, Latinos, indigenous peoples and other oppressed racial/ethnic minorities; feminist women; radical queers and many others find their moral paths precisely by denouncing their assigned social roles within traditional communities as worthless and by entering oppositional moral S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P 123 universes. Kymlicka concludes that what is needed in our diverse and historically exclusionary societies is not heightened conformity with communal traditions but the empowerment of the oppressed to define their own aims (1990:226, 229). Kymlicka’s emphasis on the enduring presence of social structures of domination is crucial. From Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, both the liberals and the communitarians ignore the impact of power relations and overdetermination when considering communal obligations and the right to rebellion. The communitarian call for respect for the authority of tradition is obviously problematic. The liberals’ suggestion that the individual should stand back from all of her positionings and deliberate about their legitimacy is also impractical. Such a totally asocial self would have no reason to make any choices. If we examine actual practices of contemporary rebellion, however, we can observe the ways in which every individual and group is always situated with respect to multiple traditions and their corresponding moral obligations. A subject gains the ability to loosen the grip that a corrupt tradition exerts over her identity only to the extent that an oppositional tradition provides her with the solid ground from which rebellion becomes possible. In Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralist terms, it is through the discursive interruption of a “constitutive outside” that the democratic revolution is extended and politicized resistance becomes possible. Every social formation is destabilized by its “constitutive outside”: the antagonistic otherness that simultaneously operates as its defining principle and lethal enemy (Mouffe 1994:107–10). In some cases, destabilization effects can become transformed into useful tools for resistance discourse. When the black power movement, for example, identified the myth of an inclusionary liberal democratic America as a lie, and sought to radicalize the masses of African-Americans vis-à-vis the moral bankruptcy of the existing political and economic system, they drew upon numerous oppositional traditions, such as African-American anti-racist resistance, global anti-colonial struggles, the socialist tradition, and the most radical moments in the liberal democratic tradition itself. Progressive black nationalists did not reject dominant American values in order to enter an amoral world, and they did not step back from all moral traditions into a blank space in order to deliberate. On the contrary, they struggled to situate their revolutionary program as the embodiment of oppositional traditions (Malcolm X 1965; Marable 1991; Brown 1992). In this, and many other similar cases, the democratic revolution can be advanced by radical disobedience to hegemonic values and by articulating new moral principles. Those alternative principles are not conjured up out of thin air according to an individual’s voluntaristic whim. They are drawn from a “constitutive outside”—the marginal and even “foreign” traditions of resistance that have survived in the shadows cast by the hegemonic value system. Radical democratic pluralist theory therefore both borrows and departs from the liberal and communitarian traditions. Communitarian theorists rightly reject the claims of universal rationality; they favor instead a conception of morality and rationality that is specific to particular historical traditions and communities. S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P 124 Like communitarianism, radical democratic pluralist theory is based on a commitment to egalitarianism; the overcoming of domination, exploitation and oppression; and to the supersession of the atomism, instrumentalism and alienation that is specific to capitalism. Radical democratic pluralism, however, is also fundamentally committed to a liberal pluralist vision of the social in which multiple individual goods would be valued and the right to self-determination would be upheld. Communitarianism recognizes the specificity of morality and rationality for each particular community, but insufficiently values diversity within a single community or tradition, and fails to address adequately the ways in which systematic patterns of oppression can become central to a community’s “way of life.” Finally, both the liberals and the communitarians do not pay sufficient attention to the role of overdetermination: the fact that every individual is positioned vis-à-vis an irreducible plurality of communities and traditions, and that every resistance is fashioned out of the traces of oppositional traditions. Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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