Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

5 Power and hegemony
1 Chodorow has also been criticized for suggesting that gender difference and feminist
social change are primarily concerned with the family and household experience, thereby
making it impossible to link the familial institution with economic, political and broad-
based socio-cultural relations (Scott 1988:37–8). See also Brown (1995:83), who argues
that MacKinnon exaggerates the totalizing and ontologically reductionist dimension
of Marx’s theory while failing to adopt its historical and dialectical elements. Hartsock’s
theory is similarly limited insofar as it is structured by an analogy with the most
reductionist moments in Marx’s theory of ideology (Hartsock 1983:283–5; Marx 1976:42,
67; Barrett 1991:3–17). Hartsock revises her standpoint theory in a later text; she
acknowledges, for example, that women are indeed differentiated in terms of class,
racial and colonial status (1990:161). Hartsock nevertheless continues to theorize power
as a purely negative and external force, and does not address Alarc6n’s challenge
concerning intragender antagonisms (1990). Hartsock does refer to the existence of
multiple marginalized groups, but she constructs the social as a simple antagonism
between two unified blocs—the marginalized and the dominant—without recognizing
the persistence of antagonisms among the marginalized and across the marginalized/
dominant divide (1990:171). Finally, she reiterates her basic argument that the social
is divided into the rulers and the ruled and that the rulers only have access to a “partial”
and “reversed” view of material reality; feminism is again positioned as a superior rational,
objective and universal discourse that can unmask false consciousness and recover
women’s authentic identities (1990:172). With respect to the general issue of feminist
essentialism, it should be noted that many women activists have in fact organized their
projects according to a complex understanding of gender that is highly sensitive to
class, race and sexual differences throughout the current post-1960s period of feminist
mobilization. Part of the problem consists in the fact that insofar as feminists have won
mass media attention, the “sound-bite” and “niche-oriented” logic of that coverage is
such that only the more binaristic feminist struggles have been featured, while the
intersectional and transnational aspects of women’s activism have been ignored (Flanders
1997:4–5).

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2 Zerilli makes a similar point with respect to feminist interpretative strategies. She
contends that feminist readings of canonical political theory are inadequate where
they merely trace the ways in which the texts in question assign political significance
to gendered signifiers, as if the meaning of gendered signifiers were already established
elsewhere. Political theorists do not, of course, invent the category of “woman” out of
nothing, but they do intervene in gendered discourse in a performative manner. Zerilli
aims to bring this constitutive dimension to light:
Rather than treat woman either as an embodied social referent or as a
term whose meaning preexists its figuration, narrative invocation, and
circulation in the political text, I examine woman as she is produced
symbolically and deployed rhetorically in theoretical interventions in
historical debates about the crisis in political meaning.
(1994:4)
On the racialized performativity of gender and sexuality discourse in the imperial context,
see McClintock (1995) and Stoler (1995).
3 Appiah’s Kantian rationalism, however, yields very little in the way of anti-racist
strategies. Where racists resist anti-racist rational dialogue and scientific evidence,
Appiah bleakly concludes that they suffer from a “deformation of rationality in
judgement,” that may in turn “threaten an agent’s autonomy, making it appropriate to
treat or train rather than to reason with them” (1990:9).
4 See, for example, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) and the texts on The Bell Curve,
including Devlin et al. (1997), Fischer et al. (1996), Fraser (1995) and Kinchloe et al.
(1996).
5 For a critique of The Bell Curve and race-based conclusions from “intelligence testing,”
see S.Could (1981), Johnson (1994), Gardner (1994), Holmes (1994), Holt (1994),
Lewin (1994), Herbert (1994), Passell (1994), Hirsch (1994), Ryan (1994) and Lane
(1994).
6 This critique of Althusser does not, however, amount to an endorsement of Scott’s
rejection of hegemony theory. From a Gramscian-Foucauldian perspective, Scott’s
argument becomes problematic insofar as he constructs significant formal continuities
between radically different formations, such as slavery and late capitalism, and treats
the identities of the disempowered as if they were prior to power relations (Scott
1990).
7 Butler notes that although the American judiciary has allowed for an expansion of
the category of obscenity, it has consistently rejected the claim that a person of color
who has been subjected to racist speech—including cross-burnings—has suffered an
injury that would legitimate the abrogation of the First Amendment. Under the First
Amendment, speech can be regulated only if it violates the obscenity “community
standards,” or if it fails the “clear and present danger” test. By ruling in R.A.V. v. St.
Paul (1992) that a burning cross on a black family’s lawn remained protected speech,
even though there is a well-documented historical relationship between burning
crosses and racist acts of arson and murder in the United States, the Supreme Court
effectively drained that deadly historicity out of the burning cross signifier. Butler
also demonstrates that some officials regard blacks as the primary source of racially
incendiary speech (1997a:62–5). Her critique can be compared in this respect to that
of the British leftists who took aim against the British Race Relations Act (1965).
Citing the fact that black activists have been charged under this law with the
incitement of racial hatred against whites, they have argued that it was designed
solely to promote the state’s social control agenda in the name of safeguarding the
“public order” (Sivanandan 1982:17–18).

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8 There are, of course, several risks involved in the use of this compassionate discourse.
To the extent that Clinton transforms himself into an empathetic figure and uses phrases
that are usually found in the context of a discourse between equal members of a
therapeutic support group, he decreases the symbolic distance between his office and
his constituents, thereby endangering his Presidential stature. In contemporary
American society, a successful populist would probably have to move back and forth
between the compassionate position and the dignified elder statesman position, thereby
symbolically inciting both egalitarian sibling/sibling-style identifications and hierarchical
parent/child-style identifications. His critics would point out, in any event, that Clinton
has also lost Presidential stature because of his own wrongdoings with respect to campaign
finance scandals and Jones’ sexual harassment charge, and that his “downsizing” of the
dignity in his office synecdochically represents the general “downsizing” of public
institutions and the decline in popular trust in the government.