Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
participate in the annihilation of culture. Power not only manufactures meaning
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participate in the annihilation of culture. Power not only manufactures meaning; it incites the demand for meaning. From this perspective, the alienation of the “masses” is not the effect of their ideological mystification. On the contrary, their indifference and withdrawal into the molecular worlds of the private is their only true form of resistance (Baudrillard 1983). Values, however, are never completely drained out of even the most popular spectacles. We need only consider the American public’s fascination with events such as the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles uprising, the O.J.Simpson trial and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma to find evidence of the enduring popular search for values within spectacles. The distance between Laclau and Mouffe and Lyotard is not as great. Lyotard affirms the complexity of the social: he conceptualizes the social as an ensemble of irreducibly plural language games (1984:19). Each language game has its own distinct rules of formation, just as every social sphere in Walzer’s theory has a specific conception of the good. The individual self is, for Lyotard, not an isolated atom; she is positioned vis-à-vis a whole complex web of language games (1984:15, 22, 25). Like Laclau and Mouffe, Lyotard asserts that there is no metanarrative that can resolve the plurality of discourses into a single, all-comprehending totality (1984:26–7, 36, 40–1). Lyotard shares with Laclau and Mouffe a suspicion regarding the coercive potential in those moments of Habermas’ discourse in which the latter constructs universal consensus as the political ideal. For all of Habermas’ claims that such a consensus could, in ideal conditions, be reached through coercion-free dialogue, Lyotard insists that power relations would always be present, 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 145 and that progress towards such a consensus would always depend on the suppression of the heterogeneity of language games (1984:xxv, 10, 30, 65–6, 81–2). Lyotard’s rejection of the totalistic aspects of metanarratives, however, leads him to dismiss the possibility of a political practice that would seek to articulate different positions, forces and movements together. He is not altogether agnostic with respect to political values; he speaks out clearly and forcefully against “terror”: the condition in which obedience to the rules in a language game is secured solely through brute domination (1984:63–4). From his perspective, however, the only possible form of governance is temporary and precarious “local determinism[s]” (1984:xxiv, 66). Dallmayr would argue, by contrast, that when it does appear to us that we are caught up in utterly isolated struggles, we may actually be dealing with elements that are situated within a regime that has learned how to conceal its systematic character, rather than atomistic fragments (1993:102). Lyotard’s principle of “local determinisms” cannot adequately address these conditions. Lyotard is also woefully mistaken when he claims that “most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative” (1984:41). For all their failures to deliver on their promises of a seamless world, fundamentalist religious, nationalist and totalistic ethnic discourses continue to flourish. Consider, for example, the tremendous success of Patrick Buchanan’s religious fundamentalist Republican Presidential bid in 1996 or the vicious nationalism that characterizes not only Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party but also significant portions of the Serbian opposition forces as well. We cannot be so enamored with postmodern fashion that we ignore the popular effects of discourses that operate as metanarrative- pretenders; an effective response to the nostalgia for totalistic closure must be offered. Although Lyotard shares with Laclau and Mouffe the view that every institutionalized language game always remains open to contestation, he only advocates practices of interruption, displacement and subversion (1984:16–17). For Lyotard, the political practices favored by Laclau and Mouffe, such as the construction of alternative identities, progressive institutions and counter- hegemonic blocs, would be so vulnerable to reactionary decline and the coercive suppression of difference that they could never be legitimately deployed in the name of radical democracy. Laclau and Mouffe’s position is closer to that of Derrida in this respect. Deconstruction is often mis-interpreted as an approach that can only affirm the endless play of difference. Derrida contends that post-structuralist theory can account not only for the failure of closure, but also for the necessity of constructing some sort of partial and imperfect closure. Once it is granted that violence is in fact irreducible, it becomes necessary—and this is the movement of politics—to have rules, conventions and stabilizations of power. All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show is that since conventions, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes 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 146 micro-stabilizations), this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus, it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that there is a need for stability. (Derrida 1996:83–4) Both Laclau and Derrida would contend that the demonstration of both the failure of closure and the paradoxically necessary attempt to achieve this impossible end is on its own insufficient as a political practice. Interruption effects must be thoroughly articulated together with democratic normative commitments and practices that aim to create the institutions necessary to defend and to promote radical democratic difference (Laclau 1996f:77–8, 87–9; 1996b:119). Against Lyotard, Mouffe asserts that radical democratic pluralism must always strive to maintain both the autonomy of social elements and their interconnectedness and mutual transformation. Again, it is specifically the radical democratic pluralist form of citizenship that can play this complex linking role (Mouffe 1993b:77–8). For Mouffe, any “extreme pluralism” that fails to value the construction of a “‘we,’ a collective identity that would articulate the demands found in the different struggles against subordination,” dangerously negates the political just as liberalism does with its illusions of neutral procedures and universal rationality (1996b:247). Citizenship can only become the site of democratic articulations to the extent that it is centered on a firm commitment to equality and human rights. A radical democratic pluralist society would, for example, tolerate the formation of fundamentalist religious communities, but only insofar as the latter did not attempt to impose anti-liberal principles onto the polity as a whole. Religious communities cannot be allowed to construct a form of citizenship that undermines redistributive welfare programs in the name of the work ethic, bans civil rights for gays, violates women’s rights to choose abortion and censors the work of radical artists. All differences cannot be accepted and…a radical-democratic project has also to be distinguished from other forms of “post-modern” politics which emphasize heterogeneity, dissemination and incommensurability and for which pluralism, understood as the valorization of all differences, should be total. (Mouffe 1992a:13) Radical democratic pluralism does not, therefore, amount to an infinite tolerance for any difference. Radical democratic pluralism would protect the principle of tolerance for democratic difference precisely by vigorously attacking each and every anti-democratic position. There is nothing contradictory in radical democratic pluralism’s lack of tolerance for anti-democratic positions, because radical democratic pluralism must aim to “protect as much as possible the autonomy 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 147 of people to pursue a variety of goals” (Cunningham 1987:194). It would promote progressive forms of affirmative action and multiculturalism, for example, while conducting a full-scale assault on racism. Where neo-conservatives take a purely individualist and ahistorical approach and claim that it is impossible to differentiate between democratic and racist recognitions of racial difference, radical democratic pluralism would refer explicitly to historical and group-based data on inequality to support its distinctions. Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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