Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
participation,” but as a means for securing compromises between ruling elites
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participation,” but as a means for securing compromises between ruling elites (Habermas 1975:123). To the extent that the liberal pluralist vision of the political is successfully popularized, the fundamentally anti-egalitarian, anti-participatory, and anti-liberatory aspects of the contemporary Western democratic systems are insulated against radical democratic critique (Habermas 1975:123–4; Phelan 1990:438). 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 149 Liberal pluralist theory therefore does not construct the critical tools that are needed to detect the formation of identities, the rigidification of interests and the monopolization of power (Cunningham 1987:165). Even Rawls, with his commitment to an egalitarian form of liberal pluralism, cannot overcome the limitations of this tradition. Liberal pluralist theory presupposes a power-free social space in which new differences are merely added to the existing totality. Referring to Rawls’ pluralism, for example, Mouffe writes, “Conflicts, antagonisms, relations of power disappear and the field of politics is reduced to a rational process of negotiation among private interests under the constraints of morality” (1993b:113). Confronted with recalcitrant anti-liberals, Rawls simply asserts that their exclusion from political conversations is a “moral requirement” that is produced by the “free exercise of democratic public reason” (Mouffe 1996a:10). Consensus, according to the liberal pluralists, is supposed to be achieved through rational discussion— and rational criteria for limiting participation in that discussion—alone. Mouffe points out that the rules that determine what counts as a “reasonable” argument are themselves highly political (1993b:142–3). Power relations are constitutive of discursive rules and identities; they cannot be ignored. Laclau and Mouffe take subject positions, historic blocs social formations, and hegemonic power relations as their units of analysis, rather than isolated individuals or naturalized interest groups. Laclau and Mouffe contend that power does not come later to the subject; the subject’s formation is a response to and an effect of antagonism and hegemony. Liberal pluralism also fails to uphold radical democratic pluralism’s diversity and autonomy principles. Rawls aims to protect plural differences only because he takes the differentiated character of modern society as a “fact” and estimates that the type of state coercion that would be needed to eliminate that difference would be illegitimate. This approach amounts to the mere tolerance of social differences. Radical democracy, by contrast, builds on Mill’s conception of self-determination: it takes radical pluralism as “something to be celebrated and valued because it is a condition for personal autonomy” (Mouffe 1993b:137). Once again, this principle has a material dimension. The commitment to the promotion of democratic pluralism must entail the social obligation to construct the conditions in which self-determination for everyone—and especially for the traditionally disempowered—becomes possible. In the United States, for example, progress towards this goal could only be made after radical changes to the political system and massive redistributions in income, employment, access to education and access to health care took place. Because power relations are integral to Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic pluralist theory, their arguments imply that every privileged group has a profound ethical responsibility with respect to rights. Rights are only won through antagonistic conflict; “some existing rights have been constituted on the very exclusion or subordination of the rights of other categories” (Mouffe 1992b:236). Radical democratic pluralism therefore requires the dismantling of the systems of rights that by their very nature block the democratic and egalitarian claims to justice by those who have been disempowered by those systems. The dismantling 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 150 of the rights of whites in post-apartheid South Africa to make way for equal rights for blacks and a new democratic constitution is a case in point. Another example would be the debate on “color-blindness” in the United States. Charging that goods ought to be distributed in a “color-blind” manner, some white Americans have described themselves as the victims of affirmative action programs. They argue that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 gave full citizenship rights to African-Americans and that henceforth every racial group should receive exactly the same treatment. Neo-conservative jurists have gone as far as to equate affirmative action with racism (Smith et al.1996; O’Connor et al.1995). Again, a radical democratic pluralist approach to this issue would consider the historical power relations that have obtained between the different racial groups in the United States. Emphasis would be placed not just on isolated hiring and admissions decisions, but on the structural patterns that have led to the dramatic over-representation of blacks among America’s poor. Anti- racism would not be simply thought in terms of “color-blindness” but in terms of the structural reforms that are needed to redistribute power to those who have been traditionally disempowered. Under the current conditions that prevail in the United States, recognition of racial difference in the form of well-crafted affirmative action programs would be one important aspect of these reforms (Eisenstein 1994:39–69). We have seen in this chapter that Laclau and Mouffe consistently differ with liberal, communitarian and liberal pluralist theorists in the treatment of power relations. Where some communitarians envision an ideal condition in which citizens deliberate on the common good in a coercion-free environment, and progress towards justice is made in each new era as laws and norms become increasingly rational, Laclau and Mouffe insist on the centrality of political struggle. Where liberals contend that the individual has the right to challenge her community’s norms, they imagine her doing so from a power-free position outside the social. Laclau and Mouffe argue that each political subject is always situated in overdetermined force-fields that have been produced by multiple normative systems, and that one gains the ability to loosen the grip of one of those normative horizons only insofar as one identifies with a constellation of subject positions within another horizon. Resistance against a dominant tradition cannot come from a blank space; it can only be generated from oppositional traditions. Finally, we have seen that the liberal pluralists, like the neo-conservatives, tend to ignore the ways in which enduring power relations structure contemporary societies. I will consider Laclau and Mouffe’s treatment of power relations in more detail in the following chapter. 151 5 POWER AND HEGEMONY Laclau and Mouffe’s work on power relations constitutes one of their most important contributions to social and political theory. Many of the approaches to power that are central to the political theory tradition are incompatible with the authors’ project. As we have seen, radical democratic pluralist theory contends that all identities remain in some way open to contestation. As Bowles and Gintis suggest, the models of social practice that we find in liberal and Marxist theory are generally inadequate in this respect because they specify the contours of social agency in advance, when in fact “individuals enter into practices with others not only to achieve common goals but also to determine who they are and who they shall become as social beings” (Bowles and Gintis 1986:150). Political struggles do not merely realign already fully-constituted subjects. Every struggle entails the far more profound process of working with partially formed popular identities and reconstructing them according to the values of the warring forces. Laclau and Mouffe have been at the forefront of the effort to develop a theory of power—or, to follow their Gramscian terminology, hegemony—that is appropriate to this specifically post-structuralist conception of identity. In this chapter, I will examine Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to power and consider its implications for political practice. Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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