Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
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vis-à-vis the masses: they will begin their interventions in popular discourse by
looking for the rationality—however unfamiliar, obscure, or even anti- democratic—that is embodied in popular identities. Post-Marxism and Lacanian theory There are many important continuities between Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 75 subject position formation and Žižek’s (1989) and Salecl’s (1994) Lacanian theory of ideology. Žižek and Salecl would agree that individuals cannot immediately apprehend the ways in which they are located within the symbolic order, and that they live their structural positions through phantasmatic frameworks. From a Lacanian perspective, every explicit political discourse is supported by a hidden fantasy structure. A political discourse can become compelling not just because of what it explicitly says, but also because of its concealed responses to our unspeakable desires, or more precisely, because of its ability to teach us how to desire in the first place. Our openness to the constitutive effects of phantasmatic frameworks is, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, inscribed in the human condition itself. Because we continually encounter the traumatic experience of the interruption by the real in the symbolic order, we are constantly driven to seek compensation for that trauma in the phantasmatic realm, for only the latter offers us a fully sutured conception of the social. An apparently neutral technocratic discourse about governmental budgetary restraint, for example, might be supported by racial and sexual fantasies that are either concealed or referred to in heavily coded ways. A subject might speak as if her support for the massive cuts in welfare programs were motivated purely by her neo-conservative principles. Žižek and Salecl, however, would encourage us to look behind her affirmation of individualistic values for the implicit phantasmatic operation of this discourse. Perhaps she has accepted the racist and groundless assumption that there is an “epidemic of teenage pregnancy”— which, in the United States, is a code for the threat of uncontrolled fecundity of poor black and Latina women—and believes that the welfare system rewards “irresponsible promiscuity.” Perhaps her support for the restriction of welfare benefits is motivated in this manner by her fears about the expansion of a multicultural America in which the white “middle class” would have less power. In short, a given subject position may become compelling not solely because of the relative attractiveness of an explicitly affirmed set of beliefs, but also because of the ways in which underlying fantasies about threats to the social order have become attached—in a contingent manner—to those beliefs. When the linkages between apparently “legitimate” beliefs and unspeakable fantasies are solidified, an extremely influential political force is set into motion. Counter-discourses have to attend to this underlying phantasmatic structure. The attack on the rights of the poor in the United States, for example, cannot be countered through the recitation of statistics and direct appeals to rationality alone. Democratic activists have rightly taken on the whole issue of racist and sexist imagery in the fight against the right-wing anti-welfare campaign. While these aspects of Lacanian theory are highly suggestive, it should be noted that there is a tension between Žižek’s conception of ideology and the Gramscian approach to historicity. Scott argues that Lacanian theory “does not permit the introduction of a notion of historical specificity and variability” (1988:39). LaCapra similarly contends that although Žižek rightly criticizes reductive F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 76 contextualization, “he runs the risk of an equally reductive hypostatization and leveling of problems” (1994:206). 10 Žižek does not resolve this crucial problem; he offers a purely formal model of the relationship between trauma, fantasy and desire. For Žižek, any fantasy could provide the crucial suturing effect at a given moment. From his perspective, the predominance of one fantasy over others, the emergence of new fantasies and the decline of older ones are purely random phenomena. When Žižek argues that a dominant discourse relies on anti-Semitism and the figure of the corrupt Jew to patch over its inconsistencies and gaps, he cannot explain why a particular type of anti-Semitism is prevalent in a given moment, or why it is anti-Semitism and not racism, sexism or homophobia that does this work. 11 From a Gramscian perspective, the practical effect of a political discourse will always depend to some extent on its historical traces, the ways in which it resonates with already normalized traditions. Further, patterns of normalization and problematization of popular discourses are never random events but reflect the complex fields of power relations that obtain in a given formation. In his more recent theoretical writing, Laclau has moved closer to Žižek’s Lacanian formulations (Laclau 1990a; 1994; 1996d; Laclau and Zac 1994). Laclau contends that because the subject is a subject of lack, she is caught in an endless and impossible search for completion and is thereby driven to perform an infinite series of identifications. Although each identification seductively promises to deliver completion, it necessarily fails to constitute a complete identity, for in the process of becoming a human subject, one necessarily abandons the originary condition of completion as one enters into language. Laclau contends that it is the impossible return to unity and completion in a formal sense that the subject seeks through her identification with a subject position. Identification presupposes the constitutive split of all social identity, between the content which provides the surface of inscription and the Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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