Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Articulation, equivalence and difference
From Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, political identities are analogous to
Saussure’s linguistic signs. Like Saussure, they reject a referential theory of
identity in favor of an exclusively relational theory. Political discourses and
identities are wholly constituted through articulation, which they define as “any
practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is
modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:105).
An articulation consists of the transformative combination of two or more
discursive elements. As we saw in Chapter 1, for example, socialism is not
necessarily democratic, but a socialist project can indeed become democratic
insofar as it is articulated with—that is, transformed through its combination
with—democratic discourse.
In Chapter 2, we considered an imaginary example in which three different
individuals live their structural positions as workers through the neo-conservative,
religious fundamentalist and democratic leftist subject positions. Having looked
at what subject positions do, we should now consider the ways in which subject
positions are constituted. Each of the subject positions are like “floating signifiers”:
their meaning is never entirely fixed but always remains open to change. The
meaning of a subject position is constructed through its differential relations with
the other subject positions that are found in a given discursive formation (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985:113).
Following Barker (1981), for example, we could distinguish between two basic
types of racism: traditional racism on the one hand, and cultural racism or the
“new racism” on the other. While traditional racism explicitly affirms the superiority
of the white Anglo Saxon race, the new racism gives its support to the same
segregationist politics, but defends the latter as the only public policy that
adequately expresses recognition of cultural differences. The traditional racist
subject position became meaningful through its differential relations with similar
and opposed subject positions, such as social Darwinism, eugenics, and anti-
Semitism on the one hand, and universalist humanism on the other. Although
traditional racism became a widely accepted discourse in the West through the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it did not fix the meaning of racism for
all time. A new discourse that opposed racism gained authority, namely cultural
relativism. As the latter became normalized, the value of traditional racism
changed, for it became largely discredited. Post-colonial racists, however, soon
appropriated key elements out of cultural relativism and constructed a new cultural
racism. Because their racism mimics the normalized features of cultural relativism,
the post-colonial racists were able to pose as anti-racists.

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In short, what we have in this example is a complex field of different
interpretative frameworks, or subject positions, in which the meaning of each
subject position is shaped by its differential relations with the others. The study of
the differential construction of a subject position becomes all the more complicated
when the constitutive role of absent subject positions is taken into account. A
taboo, for example, might preclude the explicit articulation of a signifier—this
may be the case, for example, where abject feminine, homosexual or racially “other”
signifiers are concerned—but that may not prevent it from shaping the meaning
of other signifiers in an invisible manner. Discourse analysis cannot stop short at
the interpretation of the subject positions that a discursive formation openly avows;
it must always perform genealogies of erasure and archaeologies of silence as well
(Sedgwick 1990; Hammonds 1994:138–9).
Saussure contends that the extra-discursive does not determine the constitutive
relations between signs. Laclau and Mouffe similarly insist that there is nothing
that is meaningful or has being for us outside the discursive. Extra-discursive matter
has brute existence but remains fundamentally unknowable for us. We can say
nothing positive about pure matter; it is so utterly formless that it even defies
description. Again, our discursive attempts to distinguish between the discursive
and the extra-discursive become impossible, for we inevitably resort to discursively-
constituted concepts to refer to the extra-discursive (Butler 1993:31).
In the examples presented in Chapter 2, we considered different subject
positions in isolation. In actual political situations, identity is always
overdetermined in the psychoanalytic sense. Overdetermination entails not only
a plurality of causal factors, but also a certain degree of irreducibility. A dream,
for example, is the product of condensation whereby various different unconscious
elements are merged together such that they give rise to a single manifest
sequence. However, even if we could isolate each of those constitutive elements,
we could not say that their combination necessarily produced this specific dream,
for their mutually constitutive convergence could have produced several other
meaningful sequences as well (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973:292–3). The identity
of an individual, group or movement is also in this sense a product of
condensation: it is always the product of an irreducible plurality of subject
positions. Insofar as the coherence of that plurality is always context dependent,
every identity is at least potentially precarious. Each ensemble of subject positions
is like an incomplete linguistic system: the value of each subject position is
shaped by its relations with the others, but always remains open to the
constitutive effects of new differential relations.
Consider, for example, the two sides in the affirmative action debate in
California during the mid-1990s. The pro-affirmative action side includes civil
rights organizations, people of color community organizations, feminist groups,
progressive trade unions and the AFL-CIO, student groups and small leftist
organizations. On the anti-side, we have the Republican Party, neo-conservatives
who oppose what they call “special rights” and “preferential treatment,” anti-
feminists, racists who oppose the advance of people of color in any shape or

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form and xenophobes who see affirmative action as an incentive for non-white
immigrants to settle in California. Insofar as these groups form two opposed
blocs, the following analysis can be suggested. On each side of the debate, the
different subject positions are articulated together to form a chain of equivalence
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985:127–9). To the extent that we are dealing with
articulation—and not just a superficial coalition—the value of each subject
position in the chain is shaped by its relations with the others. Perhaps trade
union militancy or radical feminism, for example, would become more
multicultural as these subject positions were brought into closer negotiations
with progressive anti-racist subject positions during the pro-affirmative action
campaign. Ultimately, hegemonic articulation would occur on both a conscious
and unconscious level, as anti-racism began to operate as a compelling
overarching framework for identification for anti-racists, trade union militants
and radical feminists alike. Wherever different subject positions are symbolically
located together in opposition to another camp, such that their meanings are
subsequently transformed by their overlapping identifications with partially
shared sets of beliefs, then we are dealing with an articulated chain of equivalence.
We should note, however, that a chain of equivalence never dissolves into a
singular homogeneous mass; the differences between the subject positions in
question are always to some extent preserved.
Taking the chain as a whole, we could say that its identity is constituted by its
differential relation with other chains. The meaning of the “pro-affirmative action”
movement is defined by the antagonism between itself and its opponent, the “anti-
affirmative action” camp. Actual struggles are, of course, extremely complex. Every
subject position bears the residual traces of past articulations, and is always being
articulated into many different chains of equivalence at the same time. As
progressive feminism is active in the pro-affirmative action campaign, its meaning
is also being shaped in its campaigns on abortion, sexual harassment and rape,
breast cancer, the war against poor women and so on. Further, the negotiations
between the different subject positions within one chain of equivalence can be
extremely complicated. As I will discuss below, one position, the “nodal point,”
can emerge as the position that is predominant in the sense that it has the greatest
effect in reshaping the meaning of the other positions in the chain.
This is one logic of the social, namely the logic of equivalence (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985:129–30). Wherever social forces tend to become organized in terms
of an antagonistic relation between two great chains of equivalence, we can describe
that form as the logic of equivalence. In some contexts, political forces that have
become stabilized in terms of a logic of equivalence representation will be displaced
by other forces attempting to impose a logic of difference counter-representation.
A struggle to manage difference will ensue, and its dimensions will always remain
beyond the conscious grasp of the social agents in question. At some moments,
political forces attempt to construct the social as an antagonism-free system of
subject positions, and subjects find themselves caught up in a corresponding set of
identifications.

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When the Republican Presidential 1996 campaign, for example, learned during
the summer of 1996 that many voters had been offended by the extremism of the
religious right, they attempted to adopt a complex strategy to manage the
differences at hand. Within the Party, every effort was made to accommodate the
extremist demands of the Christian Coalition into the official Party platform. In
this moment, the Republican Party constructs America according to the logic of
equivalence, as an all-out war between “good” and “evil.” When addressing
audiences outside the Party, however, Dole attempted to take the moral high ground
and to construct the Republican Party as a site in which Americans from all “walks
of life” were welcome and respected. Explicit extremist language about abortion
and gay rights was almost completely dropped from Dole’s public discourse, and
he waited until his defeat was certain before emphasizing his anti-affirmative action
and anti-immigration positions. Women, people of color and the handicapped
were prominently featured in the Party’s convention and campaign materials. In
this second moment, “America” is no longer represented as two great warring
camps; it is depicted instead as a peaceful system of different subject positions. For
Laclau and Mouffe, this second representational form is the logic of difference
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985:130).
These two logics limit one another (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:129–34). No
political force can sustain a “total war” construction indefinitely; at some point,
the antagonism will either dissolve or be suppressed, and at least some of the
subject positions that were formerly at war with one another will be effectively
reconstructed as elements within an antagonism-free system of differences. This
might occur through some degree of genuine resolution of the antagonism,
cooptation, assimilation or the splitting of a subject position into new fragments.
On the other hand, it is impossible to suppress antagonisms indefinitely in order
to maintain a construction of a social field as a peaceful system of differences. The
Christian Coalition, for example, is heavily invested not only in the defeat of the
Democratic Party, but in an antagonistic construction of “America.” At some
point, the Republican Party’s “big tent” approach and back-room deal-making
will alienate key players on the religious right, and they will leave the Party to
join movements in which they will be able to wage blatantly right-wing extremist
political campaigns. Dole’s campaign ultimately failed, and it did so in part because
its linkage between neo-conservatism and religious fundamentalism remained
exposed as a fragile and opportunistic coalition. The campaign therefore could
not construct Dole’s agenda as a coherent worldview that would operate as a
compelling site for popular identifications.