Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
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(Träger) of this structure (Laclau 1977:163; 1990:9). Commenting on Althusser’s
conception of interpellation, and using the term “ideology” where he would later substitute “political discourse,” Laclau states, Individuals, who are simple bearers of structures, are transformed by ideology into subjects, that is to say, that they live the relation with their real conditions of existence as if they themselves were the autonomous principle of determination of that relation. (1977:100) In the abstract Marxist model, we reduce the members of a workers’ movement, in all their historical specificity and contradictory desires, to nothing but a group that sells its labor power to capitalists. Some degree of abstract theoretical reduction is of course necessary; it is only through some type of conceptualization that we can describe, for our practical purposes, the ways in which different individuals are affected by the systematic and hierarchical distribution of life chances. The pragmatic and anti-positivistic aspects of theory should be underlined at this juncture. Theoretical models never correspond perfectly to the concrete world; there will always be some element of materiality that exceeds our theoretical grasp, for the real ultimately cannot be reduced to the concept (Laclau and Mouffe 1990:107–9). Against positivist social scientists, Laclau and Mouffe would therefore argue that the search for falsifiable claims about social structures is futile. This does not mean that all theoretical formulations are therefore utterly useless. Wittgenstein says, for example, that a sign-post may be read different ways, or that we may have different ideas about what being “on time” means, but that these imperfect forms of communication may nevertheless work well enough in most circumstances, in the sense that they usually fulfill their specific purposes. The inevitable absence of exactitude in a concept does mean that it is “unusable” (1958:39–42). As Quine insists, vague terms sometimes rescue communication from failure (1960:127). The question for theory, then, is not whether it perfectly corresponds to the real, for the real cannot be reduced to the concept. We should consider instead whether or not our necessarily imperfect theoretical concepts work well enough for our particular practical purposes. As for a definition of our practical purposes, we can turn to Marx’s famous declaration, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (1969b:15). From this perspective, then, we can say that one theory such as radical democratic pluralism offers a better description than another—say neo-conservatism—on the grounds that it tends to be more useful in describing and inciting concrete struggles towards progressive social change. For all their inevitable failure to reduce the real to concepts, our theoretical arguments can sometimes serve our pragmatic purposes well enough in specific circumstances. F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 61 We might also note in passing that this approach sets Laclau and Mouffe apart from critical theory as well. For the authors, we can only evaluate a particular social and political theory with reference to a political horizon. With this perspectival approach, Laclau and Mouffe reject the immanence principle in critical theory, namely the claim that we must be able to find an element of critique within social reality itself (Honneth 1994:256). The authors also distance themselves from the scientific Marxist argument that theory ought to be unified with practice in the sense that theory should allow us to grasp the objective truth about the world that is unfolding before us. Insofar as Marx believed that he had captured the logic of history, he depicted the commitment to the socialist struggle as an objectively necessary position (Aronson 1995:42, 44). For radical democratic pluralist theory, we inhabit a world in which contingency always threatens to interrupt even the most institutionalized social order. Every time that we attempt to apprehend the logic of social structures, there will always be some irreducible remainder that exceeds our grasp. This implies that the commitments that are possible for us can only be moral and normative, rather than objectively necessary; we can no longer comfort ourselves with illusions about the objective necessity of any political position. It should nevertheless be emphasized that the claim that we interpret power relations discursively does not contradict in any way other claims regarding the material effects of power relations, namely that the humans who are caught up in what we call exploitative and oppressive relations actually do experience pain and suffering. The point is altogether a different one, namely that our attempts to grasp those experiences through theoretical concepts will always be more or less inadequate, and that we can only assess our theories on the basis of pragmatic tests—the tests of their practical effects vis-à-vis the incitement of subversive resistance. I will return to the theme of the discursive constitution of the social in Chapter 3 in the context of my discussion of Saussurean linguistics. In concrete historical settings, actual subjects get caught up in solidarities that never neatly correspond to theoretical categories. They come together through their practices and build up some sort of collective social agent—such as a social movement—that is meaningful to them only insofar as they share a common subject position or identity, that is, a common interpretation of their structural positionings. It is their identity—and never their common structural positions alone—that operates as the principle of their political solidarity. This implies, for example, that we cannot assume solely on the basis of empirical data about income levels, wealth and job classifications that class is a meaningful axis of identification. We have to look instead for the ways in which individuals respond in a concrete way to class-oriented discourses that conceptually organize their experience (Scott 1988:56–7). Workers’ movements do not, therefore, merely describe an existing state of affairs. 5 Nor do workers’ movements merely appeal to a fully formed, albeit dormant, subject. Like all movements, workers’ movements are performative: they have to bring the resisting subject into being. Movements may work with fragments and traces of previous solidarities, but they never simply F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 62 deliver into existence an embryonic subject that matures according to its own unfolding logic. Social movements’ political discourses are constitutive rather than epiphenomenal. Social movements offer critical frameworks that allow the exploited to interpret their experience, and thereby provide them with “forms of social consciousness based on common terms of identification and…the means for collective action” (Scott 1988:94). To the extent that their incitements to identification are successful, exploited individuals collectively take up the “anti- exploitation/anti-capitalist” subject position. Given the fact that every iteration introduces deviation, there will always be variations in the identities that the workers’ movement incites. Every social movement’s discourse is overdetermined; the discourse of every specific workers’ movement is a “mélange of interpretations and programs” that is tactically built up in a contextually-specific manner (Scott 1988:61). In this sense, every workers’ movement will always incite hybrid worker identifications that are articulated in complex ways with other identifications. In some cases, a worker identity might be constructed in terms of the citizen/foreigner difference, while, in other cases, symbols such as “family values,” “technology,” or the “environment” might play a crucial role. The idea that class structural positioning does not immediately give rise to a class-defined subject position is of course highly problematic for traditional Marxists. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels contend that capitalist society will inevitably polarize into “two great hostile camps,” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They further argued that these two great classes, by virtue of their different relation to the means of production, will ultimately pursue the interests that are proper to each of them as a class and thus will engage in a total class war. Rephrased in the terms introduced here, Marx and Engels’ argument is that there is no difference between structural positions and subject positions, and that it is the economic structural position that determines the being of every social agent. In one of his richest texts, The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx still constructs the French peasants as an embryonic class that would progress towards maturity as soon as the proper material conditions emerged (1978:608). And yet, even in the Manifesto, we can detect the presence of a supplementary element that is introduced into the account of the revolutionary proletariat’s maturation, namely the intellectuals’ intervention. While material conditions, such as the massive concentration of workers in huge factories, their de-skilling and their pauperization, create favorable conditions for the emergence of a revolutionary proletariat, the Communist Party’s leadership is necessary in the last instance. It is the Communists, as opposed to other workers’ leaders, who are capable of formulating the most advanced expressions of the interests of the workers’ movement as a whole (Marx and Engels 1969:120). Paradoxically enough, the Communists include among their number certain “bourgeois ideologists.” The latter is a “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift [from the bourgeoisie] and joins the revolutionary class.” No mere opportunists, these Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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