Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
participation may, depending upon its precise structure, be compatible with the
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participation may, depending upon its precise structure, be compatible with the democratic principle. It may, for example, promote civic values while enhancing the minority members’ understanding of their rich traditions, thereby providing them with the tools that they need to make valuable contributions to robust public debates. A program that serves only to enshrine the anti-democratic symbols and values that have been passed down in exclusionary traditions, such as those of racist white Afrikaners and racist white Americans from the South, would not have the same beneficial effect. Multicultural projects that celebrate the identity of a disempowered group can also be problematic in those cases in which they perpetuate capitalist exploitation, sexism, homophobia and the denigration of other racial/ethnic differences. Some traditions are more homogeneous while others consist of complex hybrid articulations of democratic and anti-democratic elements. As such, no abstract rules can be drawn up in advance with respect to the evaluation of diversity claims; each claim must be carefully assessed within a specific historical context. Laclau’s innovative theory of universalism provides a useful framework for understanding these problems. Instead of constructing the universal and the particular as separate elements, or positing the universal as a moment in which differences are canceled out, Laclau contends that we should consider the universal as “the symbol of a missing fullness.” Like Spivak (1988a, 1988b; Spivak and Grosz 1990:11–12; Spivak et al. 1990:117–18) Laclau argues that particular social groups inevitably invoke universalist discourse—that is, the principles of the M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L 187 broader community as a whole—whenever they advance their demands for access to education, employment, consumer goods and so on. Every demand is framed in some minimal way with reference to the larger community’s shared horizon. A particularistic discourse in this sense employs universal principles to fill in the gaps in its own identity: that element of legitimacy which extends beyond the limits of its own self-referentiality. Laclau’s argument paradoxically situates the universal as a necessary moment of compensation for incompletion within every particularism. Further, whenever a particular social group affirms its difference as it advances its demands for rights, it also tends to cancel out its difference—precisely because it tends to frame its demands in terms of the broader community’s values (1996g:28). The “universal” never becomes a dialectical category, for Laclau’s “universal” space remains a contested terrain, and the moment in which the difference between particularism and universalism would be finally overcome through dialectical negation is infinitely postponed. With Mouffe, Laclau affirms that the community’s shared norms remain incomplete and vulnerable to political reactivation and subversive recitation (1996g:28, 33). Laclau’s provocative formulation deserves careful analysis. He contends that a specific group attempts to fill out its incomplete identity by invoking the common principles of the broader community. We should note, first, that this is a very complex operation that takes place in the context of multiple and antagonistically opposed political discourses that compete with one another to perform this compensatory function. Laclau contends, for example, that an ethnic minority might advance its own particularistic demands by invoking “some universal principles” that are shared in a broader social space (1996g:28). While Laclau does recognize that those universal principles are always open to contestation, we should also consider the multiplicity of “universal” spaces. In the debates on Quebec separatism, for example, different groups invoke different “universalities”: separatist francophones may refer to the Québecois nation, to their position within the Quebec-United States economic community, and to the ties between their Québecois nation and France; the anglophones, federalist francophones and the allophones (immigrants for whom both English and French are second languages) may refer to their rights as Canadian citizens; while the indigenous peoples may refer to their federal rights and their rights under the United Nations Charter as sovereign First Nations. The development of Laclau’s theory requires a detailed investigation of the multiple and sometimes contradictory character of broader community affiliations. Laclau’s privileging of formalism in his more recent work has profound implications for his argument on universalism and particularism. A “universal” discourse is necessarily invoked within a particularistic discourse as an ultimately vain attempt to fill in the constitutive lack that penetrates every identity. However, as we have already seen in Chapters 2 and 5, Laclau’s argument tends to emphasize the formal characteristics of hegemonic discourse. He asserts, for example, that in an organic crisis, M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L 188 people need an order, and the actual content of it becomes a secondary consideration. “Order” as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder “order” is present as that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this filling function. (We have spoken about “order,” but obviously “unity,” “liberation,” “revolution,” etcetera belong to the same order of things. Any term which, in a certain political context becomes the signifier of the lack, plays the same role. Politics is possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty signifiers.) (1996h:44) In the case of a specific group’s particularistic demand for rights, the universal performs this “filling function”; it is the universal that sutures the group’s dislocated identity. If we combine Laclau’s remarks on particularism and universalism with his formalistic analysis of hegemonic discourse’s ordering effect, then we have the following argument: in an organic crisis, the actual content of the “universal” discourse that performs this compensatory suturing work in particularistic discourse is much less important than its form, that is, its promise to provide some sort of order. Laclau does admit that the content of the hegemonic discourse has some importance; while its content becomes a “secondary consideration,” it is never totally irrelevant. It should also be noted that Laclau is dealing with an almost impossible case, for indifference to the content of a hegemonic discourse increases to the extent that the social formation is disrupted by an organic crisis. On this account, complete indifference to historical traces and residual traditions would only make sense in the context of a total breakdown of the social. The occasions in which actual historical circumstances even begin to approach these conditions are indeed very rare. Perhaps the problem with these formulations, then, is simply that they focus exclusively on an extreme case. In more normal conditions, there are multiple factors that make it more or less likely that one discourse will prevail over others in a hegemonic manner. In most cases, a discourse becomes effectively hegemonic not only because of its abstract form, but also because of its non- essentialist continuities with residual, enduring and emerging institutions. Laclau explicitly criticizes Eurocentrism for representing its exclusionary Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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