Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

vis-à-vis the successful emergence of a particular form of political solidarity can be
given in advance.

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Laclau and Mouffe’s Gramscian attention to the organic character of effective
ideological interventions also should not be understood as an endorsement of
historicist “expressive totality” theory. Like Lukács, Laclau and Mouffe argue that
we cannot draw up an abstract model that will help us to determine which political
interventions will be more effective than others; we can only make estimations
about effectiveness with respect to analyses of historically specific conditions. The
resemblance between their approaches, however, ends here. Lukács holds that for
every historical epoch, a single worldview will tend to define the social, and the
social will take the form of a “totality.” For Lukács, virtually every aspect of the
social is integrally connected in a closed system that embraces not only the forces
of production, the relations of production, the state and the legal system, but
cultural expression and class consciousness as well (Barrett 1991:22–6). Laclau
and Mouffe contend, by contrast, that every social formation remains an incomplete
totality (Laclau 1990a:89–92).
7
Where Lukács’ expressive totality approach holds
that there can be only one effective form of discursive intervention at a given
moment in time—namely the general worldview that corresponds to the specific
formation in question—Laclau and Mouffe argue that we will always find a plurality
of discourses competing with one another to provide an effective framework for
the construction of popular identities. Further, even where Laclau and Mouffe
adopt the Gramscian conception that effective discourses must appropriate some
elements from already normalized traditions, they do not imply that political
struggles are in this respect always already trapped within the fixed limits of
traditions. We should not take Marx too literally when he writes that “the tradition
of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”
(1978:595). In logical terms, there are an infinite number of possible variations
on traditional discourses; ideally, the potential for novel iterations is limitless. In
strategic terms, some of these variations will be accepted as plausible or legitimate
more readily than others, according to the ways in which political struggles define
the limits of the “normal” political terrain, but no single variation ever enjoys the
guarantee of success in advance.
A radical democratic pluralist struggle in our imaginary factory would have to
include a strategy to undermine the credibility of the neo-conservative and religious
fundamentalist interpretative frameworks so that the first two workers could be
won over to the radical democratic pluralist side. But—and here is the crucial
difference with the Leninist approach—that strategy would begin first with the
concrete study of the neo-conservative, religious fundamentalist and leftist
discourses as they are actually received by our three workers. Radical democratic
pluralist activism would attempt to grasp the ways in which democratic and anti-
democratic discourses actually resonate—or fail to resonate—with “the people”
in specific historical circumstances. Further, it can be useful to map out the
relational systems of difference and equivalence that obtain between discursive
elements, for these systems are constitutive for each individual subject position.
Perhaps the religious fundamentalist discourse responds to anxieties about sexuality
and gender when leftist discourse has been too silent on these issues. Perhaps a

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Perot-style nee-conservatism speaks to the American workers’ xenophobic fear of
foreign workers when leftist discourse has not engaged ener-getically enough with
the issues of immigration and racism. Perhaps all of these points are salient, but
they are exacerbated by the fact that the corporate media has stifled leftist
alternative messages and the American electoral system is overwhelmingly
dominated by corporate interests. Perhaps our third worker, the progressive trade
unionist, was won over to the radical democratic pluralist side by workers’
campaigns that opposed free trade and supported the Canadian-style single-payer
health care plan.
Clearly we could not arrive at any of these findings without careful and sensitive
concrete research. The radical democratic pluralist activist would proceed not by
imposing an abstract image of the workers’ “authentic” interest, but by waging a
war on the level of the “politics of meaning”: by borrowing already popular elements,
redefining them in a radical democratic pluralist manner, and fusing them together
in a leftist interpretation of the workers’ condition. When Laclau affirms that
there is no necessary connection between an individual’s location in class structures
and her formation as a subject, he does not dismiss the possibility of a radicalized
workers’ struggle. On the contrary, Laclau’s Gramscian theory places an enormous
emphasis on the political interventions that are needed to radicalize the exploited
and the oppressed.
It is only when an exploited individual begins to live her relation with capital
as an antagonistic relation—that is, as a relation that is denying her identity, as
something that is blocking herself from realizing what she regards as her true
potential and stopping her society from becoming an ideal social order—that she
is transformed into a worker who is ready to engage in subversive collective
resistance (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:125; Laclau 1990a:18, 126). An antagonistic
construction of identity is in itself politically ambiguous. Connolly asserts, for
example, that given the fact that the drive to achieve a fixed identity always fails
to achieve its goal, we remain vulnerable to the lure of demonization. This is
especially the case when we attempt to ground identity in religious, biological or
rationalist arguments. In these conditions,
A powerful identity will strive to constitute a range of differences as
intrinsically evil, irrational, abnormal, mad, sick, primitive, monstrous,
dangerous, or anarchical—as other. It does so in order to secure itself as
intrinsically good, coherent, complete or rational and in order to protect
itself from the other that would unravel its self-certainty and capacity for
collective mobilization if it established its legitimacy. This constellation
of constructed others now becomes both essential to the truth of powerful
identity and a threat to it. The threat is posed not merely by actions the
other might take to injure or defeat the true identity but by the very
visibility of its mode of being as other.
(Connolly 1991:66)

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An antagonistic perspective may, nevertheless, become an extremely important
resource for resistance. As we saw in Chapter 1, a relation of subordination will
only be transformed into a relation of oppression insofar as the social agent’s
worldview is radicalized by democratic discourse. It is only when subordinated
individuals are inspired by radical democratic pluralist demands for freedom and
equality that they can begin, first, to imagine what they could become in an
alternative democratic world; second, to see the ways in which power relations
are antagonistically blocking them from pursuing that path of self-development;
and third, to construct possible avenues for collective resistance that would radically
transform the entire capitalist system to make way for the realization of their
alternative vision. As they become radicalized, their alternative world ceases to
be compatible with the current world; instead of thinking merely in terms of
piecemeal reform within the current formation, they construct their alternative
as a distinct imaginary.
Borrowing from psychoanalytic theory, we could say that subjects are constituted
through the process of identification with subject positions. This psychoanalytic
analogy allows us to insist on a principle which is fundamental to Laclau and
Mouffe’s conception of agency: identities are centered on lack. Social agents
constantly come up against the limits that are posed by the material effects of
their structural positionings, and they are constantly searching for political
discourses that provide explanations or legitimations for their experiences of these
limit-effects. We will never arrive at a final identity, an ensemble of subject positions
that would offer an interpretative framework that would operate as a perfect
explanatory discourse. The limiting material effects of our structural positionings
will always exceed the explanatory frame provided by our identities. As such,
every subject remains somewhat alienated and restless, for she can never be “at
home” in her largely determined structural positionings. This universal condition
is of course differentiated with respect to authority and historical conditions: the
more empowered the social agent, the more they will have access to resources
that allow them to make their alienation more bearable; and the more a social
formation disintegrates into an organic crisis, the more every social agent will be
driven to seek out new identities. We can nevertheless maintain that the whole
process of identity formation always remains incomplete, for it always fails to resolve
the subject’s fundamental drive to be “at home” in her given structural positionings.
As such, every process of identity formation—even for the most empowered, and
even in the moments of greatest social stability—remains somewhat open to
interruption and contestation.
With this approach, politics is not a power game between already fully
constituted subjects; political struggles are primarily struggles to produce subjects
(Mouffe 1979b:171, 186; Przeworski 1985:47, 66, 70; Althusser 1971; Bellamy
1993:28).
8
Many of the individuals who are thrown into the structural position
of the exploited do not see themselves as “workers” at all. They may be
interpreting their structural positionings through patriotic, racial or gendered
subject positions first and foremost; usually, they participate in solidarities that

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displace radicalized identities. Our neo-conservative factory worker might live
her class structural position through her American patriotism first and foremost,
such that she tends to identify primarily with cross-class xenophobic and
imperialist solidarities. Our religious fundamentalist might see the world in terms
of the division between the saved and the damned rather than the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat.
Even where we have a popular workers’ movement that seems to have sprung
directly from the simple fact of the members’ common structural positioning, we
have to recognize the invisible work that has been done by political discourses to
create their solidarity. A worker whose political orientation is defined chiefly by
neo-conservative views may become radicalized by her participation in a strike, as
her trade union deploys radical democratic pluralist arguments for a broad-based
anti-capitalist solidarity. But it is also possible that she will become radicalized in
other ways as well. She might be compelled to reinterpret her structural positioning
as a worker in an antagonistic manner by the black community’s response to racist
police violence. She might become inspired by feminism while struggling to obtain
childcare and then begin to live her class structural position through a feminist
perspective. Again, radical democratic pluralist discourse is like a “fermenting”
agent: the more it circulates throughout the social, the more it can inspire
radicalized resistance, and it does so by providing a radicalized interpretative
framework for the structural positions into which we are “thrown.”
Clearly, workers in capitalist formations need much more than a shift in their
identity; they also need access to institutional resources. The views of many of
the workers who decided to go on a hunger strike after being locked out for over
two years at the Staley corn-processing plant in Decateur, Illinois, were already
quite radical. Citing the civil rights movement and Gandhi, Dan Lane, one of
the hunger strikers, declared, “A person has certain rights, which are undeniably
connected with his being as a person. One of those rights is to his body, to
determine what his body does, and what is done to his body” (Frank and Mulcahey
1995). The radicalization of a group of workers can only bear fruit for the labor
movement and for radical democracy as a whole if their rights to unionize, to
engage in collective bargaining, to strike without being replaced by strike-
breakers, and to respect other workers’ picket lines in a single industry—regardless
of the ways in which corporations break up work sites and internationally relocate
production—are recognized in law and upheld in practice. The union-busting
activities of Staley and Caterpillar in Decateur, or the Gannett and Knight-
Ridder newspaper publishers in Detroit, or the corporations operating the
maquiladoras
9
on the Mexican side of the US-Mexican border, can only be
stopped through profound reforms in labor laws and their implementation
(Glaberson 1995; Bacon 1995).
The identity of the exploited and the oppressed is nevertheless one of the
crucial factors in the fight to democratize our societies, for every identity acts as a
horizon within which a set of political practices becomes thinkable, and different
identities tend to incite different acts of resistance. The reactionary forces in

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America are already well aware of the importance of identity formation; hence
the bitterly fought “culture wars” and the censorship of socialist discourse. Wherever
reactionary forces gain authority, they always do so in part because they have
made strategic gains in cultural struggles. Reactionary forces always aim to promote
those subject positions that make it possible to live one’s assigned structural
positions within relations of domination as if they were legitimate, natural and
necessary. Reactionary forces also always aim to silence, to exclude, or to colonize
those political discourses that make it possible to experience one’s assigned
structural position within relations of domination as unjust, unnecessary and alien.
With respect to identity formation and the corresponding incitement of resistance,
everything depends on the availability of political discourses that can operate as
credible and organic frameworks for the interpretation of everyday experience.
Because political horizons play this crucial role, every effective struggle has to
have a cultural dimension; it has to engage in the battles for power within key
cultural institutions such as governmental agencies, the education system, global
multi-media corporations, and so on.
The social is “open” in the following sense: even the most powerful reactionary
forces cannot fully anticipate the ways in which their strategies will backfire and
produce unintended and unpredictable consequences. During the Cold War, for
example, the civil rights leaders were able to use the prevailing anti-Soviet
American patriotic discourse to promote the anti-racist struggle. Homophobic
medical panics can actually promote homosexuality by bringing homosexual
discourse into official and popular sites. A sexist attack on a figure such as Hillary
Clinton might mobilize popular sympathy for her. The vicious misogynist,
homophobic and anti-Semitic strategies of the religious right do not always succeed,
in spite of this movement’s enormous authority; sometimes the religious right’s
extremism actually backfires quite badly.
In some cases, a discourse of social control may, in its attempt to define the
boundaries of the social imaginary, unintentionally incite the formation of subject
positions that in turn open up the possibility for interruption and subversion. The
neo-conservative repeal of welfare rights, for example, includes measures that force
able-bodied welfare recipients to work in return for their benefits. This policy
shift institutionalizes the extremely reactionary idea that the majority of welfare
recipients have become a permanent “underclass,” and that they only have
themselves to blame for their impoverished condition. The term “underclass”
signifies the black and Latino inner-city populations in the United States; it is
widely alleged that the “underclass” is locked in a culture of dependency thanks to
its own inferior work ethic and the overly generous character of the welfare state
(Reed 1990; Fraser and Nicholson 1994). This construction conceals the structural
shifts in the American economy, such as automation, globalization, deregulation,
tax cuts and social spending cuts, that have made it increasingly difficult for people
with a high school education or less to earn a livable wage while the wealthy
benefit from record profits. The “workfare” programs are therefore supposed to
symbolize the extremely reactionary concept that America’s massive poverty is

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actually caused by a lack of individual initiative on the part of the poor, and that
the only obligation for the larger community is to promote the work ethic and to
restore the strict discipline of the market.
It is highly unlikely that any of the neo-conservatives who designed the workfare
programs anticipated their politicizing effect for the participants. Since most welfare
recipients actually move back and forth between low-wage non-unionized
employment and welfare, the mere experience of holding a regular job will have
little impact on their lives. They are not receiving the kinds of training in these
programs that could actually assist them in finding a job that pays a livable wage;
nor are governmental agencies deploying job creation programs on a meaningful
scale. The “workfare” participants will therefore probably return to the low-wage
employment/welfare cycle at the completion of their program. The punitive
discourse surrounding the program constructs the participants as publicly shamed
demon-figures on a welfare chain gang. It is nevertheless the case that the workfare
programs bring otherwise isolated welfare recipients together in public spaces,
and locate them, as the cleaners of streets and parks, in positions that are analogous
to that of unionized workers. Some workfare participants have borrowed union
discourse to redefine themselves as legitimate workers, and have begun to demand
their rights through collective action. Given their situation, they will continue to
lack access to the resources necessary to achieve significant social change. This is,
nevertheless, an instance in which the deployment of a technique of social control
inadvertently creates favorable conditions for the construction of oppositional
subject positions.
Laclau and Mouffe argue, in sum, that although the discursive fields in
contemporary Western societies are largely structured by capitalist, sexist, racist
and homophobic forces, there always remains some limited and context-specific
possibility for subversive resistance. Against Althusser, then, they would say that
in those societies that remain defined in some minimal way by the democratic
revolution, we never arrive at a situation in which a ruling force can become so
authoritative that it can totally impose its worldview onto the rest of the population.
Althusser’s totalistic “teeth gritting harmony” between what he calls the “repressive
official apparatuses” and the “ideological state apparatuses” (1971:150) is never
fully established.
Subject positions, then, are constructed by more or less institutionalized political
discourses, and their formation is arbitrary in the sense that no individual’s structural
positioning guarantees identification with a particular political discourse. A
relatively stabilized subject position provides a collectively shared framework for
the interpretation of a given set of structural positions. The struggle to construct
subject positions—the struggle to provide compelling frameworks through which
structural positions are lived—never takes place in a vacuum. That struggle is
profoundly shaped, although never fully determined, by the prevailing configuration
of authority in key official and popular institutions.
Subject position formation influences political practices, and political practices
constitute, through regimented iterations over time, social structures. Every specific

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subject position tends to incite a more or less corresponding set of beliefs and
practices. Once a struggle to radicalize and to democratize the ways in which a
group lives its structural position as workers gains ground, we would, in ideal
conditions, expect those workers to engage in broader and broader forms of
solidarity with the exploited and the oppressed. We would also expect them to
pursue increasingly democratic goals through increasingly democratic means.
Further, because there is never a simple predetermined correspondence
between structural positioning and subject position formation, and subject
positions become effective through interpellation and identification, rather than
the awakening of a preconstituted dormant essence, subject position formation
always opens up the possibility of complex, unintentional and unpredictable
processes of transitivistic (mis-)identifications. Consider, for example, the number
of daughters who became successful because they thought that the encouraging
words expressed by their parents but intended for their brothers were meant for
them. Or consider the ways in which analogical forms of identification structure
the popular response to films, such that a black man suffering from racist insults
could take comfort by cheering for the Indians in a Western (Shohat and Stam
1994:351). Democratizing social forces possess the same sort of unpredictable
potential. In an ideal case, democratization would touch the lives of more and
more people, leading in turn to the expansion of democratic forces at many sites
in the social. To the extent that the democratic forces gained strategic ground,
key institutions, such as the system of elected representatives, government
administrations, the media, private corporations, the education system, familial
structures and so on, would become more and more democratized as well. These
structural changes would not only provide more hospitable conditions for the
development and circulation of radical democratic discourses. They would also
affect the forces and institutions that locate individuals in structural positions
in the first place: fewer and fewer people would be locked in exploited and
oppressed structural positions. In short, shifts in subject positions may contribute
to the political practices needed to bring about shifts in the formations that
produce structural positions, just as innovative speech acts might bring about a
change in the rule structure of a language. This analysis raises many questions
about resistance; I will address the themes of power, hegemony and resistance in
greater detail in Chapter 5 and the Conclusion.
The distinction that I have made between class as a structural position and
class as a subject position—the collectively shared interpretation through which
a structural position is actually lived—should be extended to non-class identities
as well. Like class structural positioning, racial structural positioning is largely
determined for both whites and people of color. This is clearly the case for those
individuals who are read as racially “other.” Consider, for example, the
predicament of Plessy, the complainant in the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy
v. Ferguson, that established the separate-but-equal doctrine. A mixed-race man,
Plessy, did not regard himself as black, but his own opinion had no bearing on
the matter; as far as the Louisiana laws of segregation were concerned, he was

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black. Fanon’s narrator, to take another example, also has no choice; pinned
down by the white child’s categorizing observation, he becomes the object of
the racialized gaze:
“Look, a Negro!”… In the train it was no longer a question of being
aware of my body in the third person. In the train, I was given not one
but two, three places…. I am being dissected under white eyes, the only
real eyes. I am fixed.
(1986:12–16)
Individuals who are read as white also cannot opt out of racializing structures in a
voluntaristic manner; we are thrown into a powerful network of structural relations
that more or less secures our enhanced access to resources. Every white person in
a racist society is structurally positioned as racially privileged; she may be able to
abandon some of that privilege through principled anti-racist practices, but she
will never be able to stop the process by which white privilege is conferred onto
her through her individual actions alone. Shohat and Stam comment,
No one should be ashamed of belonging to the identity categories into
which they happen to have been born, but one is also accountable for
one’s active role or passive complicity in oppressive systems and
discourses…. No one need perpetually apologize for the crimes of remote
ancestors, but it would also be a crime to ignore benefits accrued over
centuries, especially when those benefits “bleed into” contemporary
situations of structured privilege.
(1994:344)
However, the ways in which a white person interprets her experience of her
whiteness—the ways in which she lives with and responds to her white privilege—
do not flow directly from her whiteness itself. A white person may, for example,
live her whiteness through a racist religious fundamentalism, an anti-racist liberal
feminism or an anti-racist progressive worker’s solidarity. Gilroy, quoting rap artist
Rakim, puts it this way: “It Ain’t Where You’re From; It’s Where You’re At” (Shohat
and Stam 1994:344).
Racism has become so hegemonic that many whites live their whiteness through
some type of racist subject position without being aware that they are doing so. In
a similar manner, many men live their gender, many heterosexuals live their
sexuality, and many capitalists live their class unconsciously through reactionary
political frameworks. In this way, they never experience the fact that goods flow
to them by virtue of their structural positions as an abnormal or problematic
phenomenon. All that is required for subject position formation is the development
of a shared interpretation of a common structural position; self-conscious awareness
of this process may or may not occur. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory would insist
that the moment in which a subject achieves total mastery over the entire complex

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ensemble of subject positions through which she organizes her experience remains
infinitely postponed. The reactionary apparatuses of racism, sexism, heterosexism
and capitalism often work precisely to foreclose awareness of the mediating effects
of political discourse for both the exploiter and the exploited, the oppressor and
the oppressed. We often assume that there is nothing but “nature” at work in the
most concentrated sites of power in the social.
The implications of the anti-essentialist post-Marxist approach to subjectivity
and political leadership are enormously important. If, following Lenin, we assume
that social agents possess identities or “interests” that are already automatically
constituted through their structural positionings, and that a privileged leadership
can fully grasp those positionings through scientific concepts, then it becomes
necessary to think in terms of an elitist vanguard Party-type leadership. Again,
such a leadership enjoys a privileged access to knowledge of the subject’s true
interests, thanks to its objective theory of history, and can intervene—even in the
name of democracy itself—to correct the led wherever they deviate from their
putative predestined course of action by any means necessary. If, on the contrary,
the anti-essentialist approach is taken, then the formation of identity is viewed as
a contingent and context-specific process. Where a contradiction emerges between
the leaders’ theory of what the led should be doing and what the led are actually
doing, the leaders must consider the possibility that it is the led who are correct
and that it is their own theory that is mistaken. Even where an identity emerges
that is clearly anti-democratic, such as a specific form of a populist racist whiteness,
radical democratic leaders should try to find out why that particular identity became
compelling at a given time and space and not some other identity. All popular
identities and practices—even the ones that are the most repugnant to a radical
democratic pluralist—are the effects of political discourses that must be providing
some sort of convincing answer to the problem of interpreting the experience of
structural positioning.
Popular identities are not, in short, the effects of total irrationality, a complete
absence of knowledge, a failure of cognition, or the devious machinations of the
corporate media. In this sense, they must never be dismissed out of hand as
irrelevant chimeras. Popular discourses must be valued as weathervanes or signposts
that allow the organic intellectual leaders to map out the configuration of power
relations and cultural struggles that obtain in a given formation. Once these maps
are drawn, the leaders will be much better equipped to offer effective counter-
interpretations of experience than they would be if they relied upon abstract
theories of history alone. More important, they will be democratically situated