Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

The Bell Curve, we need to pierce the strategic devices of naturalization to reveal
the highly political discursive forces that produce this essentialist effect.
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In this
sense, we could say that not only is the constructivist approach entirely compatible
with the study of racial power configurations, we cannot even begin to study racial
power unless we adopt the constructivist viewpoint.
Constructivism does not, therefore, amount to an “anything goes,” “you-can-
be-whoever-you-want-to-be” voluntarism. There is no sense whatsoever in the
work of Gates, Appiah and Higginbotham that those individuals who find
themselves positioned as racially “other” could opt into whiteness simply because
the boundary between those two categories has no pre-discursive basis. Racial
meanings are “arbitrary” in Saussurean terms because they are not established
prior to discourse. However, dominant political forces are interested in the
normalization of some racial meanings and the exclusion of others. Because every
individual is structurally positioned within discursive fields that are shaped by
forces that are to some extent prior to her will, no one can fully escape these
structures’ limiting effects. Further, because hegemonic social structures condition
identity formation—by normalizing some subject positions and excluding others—
no one is perfectly free to construct the frameworks through which she lives her
structural positionings. Alternative frameworks are never impossible, but their
promotion never takes place in a vacuum. The meaning of alternative identities is
always to some extent influenced by the meaning of hegemonic identities.
Subversive political practices must always wage a complex and sophisticated game
of appropriation and redefinition.

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Here again we must insist on the lack of total closure in each formation of
power relations and the lack of a perfectly functional fit between different
formations. Laclau and Mouffe develop this argument in philosophical terms with
reference to the Derridean (non-)concept of supplementarity. Because every social
formation constitutes itself through its supplementary relation with a constitutive
outside, and because it always fails in the end to master its relation with that
outside, it remains vulnerable to subversion, for it is constitutionally dependent
upon a potentially unruly otherness. This argument can also be phrased in
Foucauldian terms. Contemporary forms of power are fundamentally productive:
objectification, the regulation of social agency, is achieved through subjectivation,
the construction of a mobile subject who is incited to perform self-disciplinary
practices. Incitement processes are, however, notoriously complicated. Strategic
limitations that originally had regulatory effects may actually have unpredictable
enabling effects.
Again, we could point here to the paradoxical domestic effects of foreign policy
as an example. When American statesmen proclaimed that the United States was
the leader of the “free world” during the Cold War, Martin Luther King, Jr. and
other civil rights leaders took advantage of America’s official investment in its
democratic reputation. At a time when economic, ideological and military wars
were being fought to ensure the global hegemony of American capital, images of
officially-sanctioned racist violence in American towns and cities were televised
across the world, causing profound public relations problems for the American
government. Although the Cold War certainly did have a chilling effect on the
leftist elements of the domestic civil rights movement, as many anti-racist
organizations were banned as “communist” (Marable 1991:18), America’s geo-
politically inspired interest in constructing the United States as an exemplary
egalitarian space had unforeseen and productive consequences for the cause of
civil rights. Racism operated in Cold War America as a hegemonic social structure
that exercised an almost omnipotent authority in terms of the naturalization of
racial structural positionings and the regulation of the interpretative frameworks
through which those racial positionings were lived; indeed, this remains the case
today. There are nevertheless moments of “backfiring” and dysfunctional
inconsistencies in this and every other apparatus. By their very nature, disciplinary
incitements and regulatory apparatuses may produce radically dysfunctional effects;
techniques of social control may unintentionally create favorable conditions for
the construction of oppositional subject positions; legitimation discourses may
inadvertently enable criticism; and overdetermination may keep an apparently
closed discursive space open to the subversive influences of “outside” discourses.
As such, there is always the possibility that resistance can flourish in the most
unlikely situations.
Where Butler’s theory has been interpreted as an endorsement of a voluntarist
approach to politics, this has only been achieved through the suppression of crucial
parts of her discourse. With Butler’s claim that gender is “performative,” she is not
only appropriating Derrida’s reinterpretation of speech act theory (Derrida 1988),

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she is also adding something to his text, namely a political analysis of power
relations. For Butler, gender is performative in the sense that the social structures
in which we are gendered are nothing but the effect of practices. Further, although
Butler affirms that alternative interpretations of given gender structures may give
rise to subversive practices, Butler never speaks about resistance as if it took place
in a vacuum. Commenting on de Beauvoir, she states, “Gender is the repeated
stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame
that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being” (1990a:33). Like Martin, Higginbotham, Fausto-Sterling, Bem, Davis,
Adams and many other feminist theorists, Butler recognizes the structured character
of identity formation. We are all positioned within social structures;
notwithstanding their incomplete character, these structures delimit, to a greater
or lesser extent, the boundaries of effective resistance in a given historical context.
The powerful reactionary forces that are constitutive of oppressive and exploitative
structures seek to promote the interpretative subject positions that legitimate those
structures, and to exclude the rival interpretative frameworks that threaten to
incite subversive practices.
Butler’s argument is therefore analogous to that of the critical race theorists
and Laclau and Mouffe. Gender, race and class are all strategic fictions in the
sense that they are not given pre-discursively, but this does not mean that sexism,
racism and capitalism do not exercise actual material effects. The advance of
sexism, racism and capitalism depends precisely on the deployment of these
normalizing fictions, while resistance depends on the deployment of alternative
constructions.