Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
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country’, and so forth, as something that antagonistic political forces claim to
ensure through totally different political means, have to be necessarily empty in order to constitute the aims of a political competition” (1994:37). Like Žižek, Laclau and Zac contend that the content of a political discourse is almost irrelevant, for it is really the formal framework of a political discourse that makes it compelling F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 81 for “the people.” Various political signifiers may appear to operate differently, but they are all “empty signifiers,” blank spaces whose organizational form—and not its content—compels phantasmatic investments. From a Lacanian perspective, those investments are made not because the signifiers have specific meanings that resonate organically within a given context, but because the “empty signifiers” promise to deliver jouissance, the primal unity and completion that was foreclosed at the entry into language. The (impossible) lure of a return to jouissance, which restimulates profound longings in the interpellated subject, is therefore the key to the power of a given political signifier (Butler 1993:191, 199, 209). Laclau’s Lacanian shift is in this respect a departure not only from post-structuralist theory, but also from the Gramscian tradition, for Gramsci insists that a political discourse will only resonate with “the people” insofar as it organically resonates in some way with popular traditions. One of the hallmarks of Laclau’s early work is precisely his Gramscian attention to historical specificity. In his influential article, “Towards a Theory of Populism,” for example, Laclau notes that opposed forces often appeal to the same political symbols: Tupac Amaru has been evoked by both guerrilla movements and the Peruvian military government; the symbols of Chinese nationalism were deployed by Chiang-Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-tung; and German nationalist symbols were used by Hitler and Thälmann. Laclau cautions, however, that popular traditions are far from being arbitrary and they cannot be modified at will. They are the residue of a unique and irreducible historical experience and, as such, constitute a more solid and durable structure of meanings than the social structure itself. (1977:167) Laclau does not, however, completely reject the post-structuralist and Gramscian approaches in his more recent work. He maintains, for example, that political signifiers can only offer themselves as empty surfaces of inscription for new articulations to a certain extent: “imaginary signifiers forming a community’s horizon are tendentiously empty and essentially ambiguous” (1990a:65). If the contents of a political discourse are of “secondary consideration” in contrast to their formal characteristics (Laclau 1994:3), this implies that they still retain some significance. A hegemonic discourse must be more than the formal embodiment of order itself; it must offer some compelling concrete alternative vision of the social. This does not mean, of course, that any discourse putting itself forward as the embodiment of fullness will be accepted. The acceptance of a discourse depends on its credibility, and this will not be granted if its proposals clash with the basic principles informing the organization of a group. (Laclau 1990a:66) F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 82 Many interesting questions could be addressed in future research within this theoretical horizon. Exactly how are the boundaries of “credibility” established in a specific historic formation? If both the form and the content of rival political discourses matter, what can we say about the limits of hegemonic practice? Perhaps the best way to approach these problems would be via a recuperation of the Gramscian emphasis on historicity and concrete empirical research. With respect to her own study on apartheid discourse, for example, Norval contends that the Afrikaner community’s world was thrown into crisis through the 1930s and 1940s by a drought, the Depression, rapid urbanization and the Second World War. Various Afrikaner discourses that expressed different nationalist, religious and racial elements competed with one another to become the new hegemonic discourse. One of the key factors in this rivalry consisted precisely in the ways in which each of these discourses resonated with residual Afrikaner traditions (1996:65–6). Norval’s argument can be usefully illustrated with reference to McClintock’s account of the mobilization of Afrikaner nationalism in the years leading up to the apartheid era. McClintock examines, for example, the conservative Afrikaners’staging of the “Second Trek,” the 1938 re-enactment of the 1838 migration, in which Afrikaners fled from British rule, rejected slave emancipation and massacred the Zulus at Blood River. Citing Benjamin, McClintock contends that archaic images can become potent elements within popular commodity spectacles insofar as they are redefined, paradoxically enough, to identify precisely what is new in the contemporary moment, while simultaneously granting free rein to reactionary nostalgia. For McClintock, it was precisely the trek’s double- faced historical logic that gave it a tremendous organic force. Unlike socialism, then, the Tweede Trek could evoke a resonant archive of popular memory and a spectacular iconography of historical travail and fortitude, providing not only the historical dimension necessary for national invention but also a theatrical stage for the collective acting out of the traumas and privations of industrial decline. (1995:376) Although Lacanian theory usefully draws attention towards the formal aspects of identification, it must be supplemented by a Gramscian approach to historicity. Competing articulations never work on a signifier as if it were a blank space; every floating signifier has some meaning—albeit one that is always open to subversive recitation—insofar as it bears the fading traces of past articulations. The effectiveness of a political discourse, in other words, is not merely a question of its formal characteristics. It is entirely possible that a highly ordered, consistent and organized discourse that was supported by devastating demonizations would absolutely fail to incite popular identifications if it assigned meanings to key terms such as “freedom” and “democracy” that did not resonate in any way with organic traditions. F R O M L E N I N T O G R A M S C I 83 The Lacanian and Gramscian approaches are not totally opposed to one another. Gramsci argues that the formal character of the intellectuals’ intervention—the way that the intellectuals bring greater coherence and universality to fragmented popular discourse—is central to hegemonic strategy. Both Lacanians and Gramscians would agree that there is no single discourse that is predestined to act as the single hegemonic solution to an organic crisis. Gramscians insist that there has to be some degree of continuity between a hegemonic discourse and the partially normalized traditions that make up the discursive formation in question, but that continuity is not analogous to an essentialist repetition with a predictable trajectory. Again, the type of repetition that is proper to a series of articulatory moments in time is similar to the imperfect and unpredictable continuity that is found in Derridean iterations (1988), Wittgenstein’s family resemblances (1958), and Foucauldian genealogy (1977, 1979, 1980b). Present articulations must resonate with normalized traditions to become effective, but they also introduce novel redefinitions of those traditions at the same time. In this sense, both the Lacanian and Gramscian approaches share the assertion that we cannot predict with exact certainty which discourse will emerge out of a given crisis as hegemonic. Unlike the Lacanians, however, the Gramscians attend to both the form and the content of competing discourses. By searching for organic traces, Gramscians can reconstruct the genealogical, non-essentialist logic that is displayed by a series of articulations. Like the Derrideans, Gramscians insist on the historically structured character of structure failure. Finally, Gramscians can construct historically specific maps of institutionalized power relations and the residual effects of the crumbling traditions that make up the background for any organic crisis. On that basis, Gramscians can suggest, in a limited manner, various probable outcomes. Because Lacanians remain exclusively concerned with the formal characteristics of identification, they cannot do so. 84 3 S U B J E C T P O S I T I O N S , A RT I C U L AT I O N A N D T H E S U B V E R S I O N O F E S S E N T I A L I S M As we have seen in Chapter 2, Marx and Engels treat class as the essence of every socio-political identity in their Communist Manifesto. Where there are variations between different subjects who are supposed to belong to the same class, these differences—nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on—are not supposed to affect their class “core.” Class is supposed to be constituted solely with reference to that subject’s relationship to the means of production. According to traditional Marxist theory, one working-class group’s objective interest should ultimately be the same as that of another working-class group, regardless of the other differences between them. These non-class differences, then, are supposed to be secondary and external. In technical terms, they are non-constitutive accidents, for they are nothing but superficial differences that can be added or subtracted from the subject without transforming the subject’s true being and its objective interests in any way. A boundary is therefore supposed to exist between class and non-class differences such that class is protected from the latter’s effects. Other essentialisms take the same form. Gender, race or nationality, for example, can be considered as the subject’s essential “core” in other theories. Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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