Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Anti-essentialism and political assessment
As we have seen in Chapter 2, the reductionist tendency in the Marxist tradition
maintains that democratic demands of all types and in all cases are fundamentally
bourgeois in nature. This thesis is one of Laclau and Mouffe’s primary targets, and
their critique is entirely sound. The reductionist approach would decide, in

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abstraction, whether environmentalist demands would further either the interests
of the revolutionary proletariat, or those of the capitalist bourgeoisie. Based on
this abstract decision, it would construct a fixed political strategy with respect to
environmentalist demands well in advance of actual engagements with concrete
environmentalist politics. This sort of reductionism is equally flawed where racial
or gender principles are substituted for class principles. When lesbian and gay
rights are dismissed in advance by heterosexual people of color as an inherently
“white thing,” or anti-censorship demands are rejected in advance by feminists as
capitulations to the patriarchy, they are reproducing the same sorts of illegitimate
reductionism that we can find in the Marxist tradition.
What Laclau and Mouffe insist is that when we are dealing with democratic
demands, we will not know in advance exactly how they might be articulated
with other political discourses, and how they might be open to alternative
definitions. Environmentalism could be articulated with either reactionary concepts
such as the protection of private property rights and the eugenicist management
of population growth, or progressive elements such as the defense of indigenous
people’s rights and an attack on corporate greed. Its political meaning cannot,
therefore, be decided in advance. Similarly, the demand for lesbian and gay rights
could be phrased such that they would bring progress for only wealthy white male
conservatives, or it could be shaped to contribute to the liberation of all individuals,
including heterosexuals, from coercive familial situations. And an anti-censorship
demand might be constructed either as an assault against progressive sexual
harassment procedures, or as a defense of feminist free speech. We cannot make
these distinctions without looking at the concrete situation; theories that decide
the political value of a democratic demand in advance cannot be reconciled with
radical democratic pluralist principles.
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As to the descriptive features of a democratic group’s membership and
leadership, the situation is more complicated. Laclau and Mouffe rightly reject
the argument that the “authentic” interests of a social agent can be determined
with reference to their structural location. There is nothing “inauthentic” about
blacks, women, gays or workers who embrace conservative and even anti-
democratic values. Instead of charging them with false consciousness, we would
prefer to say that radical democratic pluralists have the better moral positions and
arguments.
Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that there is no necessary connection between
an individual’s structural position and their subject position should not be extended
beyond this point. It is in fact often appropriate to include in an assessment of a
group’s politics an analysis based on the descriptive features of its membership
and leadership. An organization that claims to pursue democratic goals but actually
maintains an exclusionary leadership structure, such that members of dominant
social groups—whites, males, heterosexuals, the bourgeoisie and so on—always
prevail in that organization, and minority members are either excluded altogether
or included in merely tokenistic roles, is acting in a manner that contradicts its
stated goals. We do not need to retreat to reductionist logics or essentialist categories

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of authentic consciousness to make this point, for leadership and membership
structures are material expressions of an organization’s common-sense ideology.
At the same time, it remains entirely possible that a group with a leadership
composed predominantly of women, people of color, queers or workers could indeed
promote reactionary politics; reactionary fragments can always be found within
any disempowered group. In this sense, the assessment of the representation of
the disempowered in leadership positions is but one part of a contextually-specific
analysis for a given movement. What we need is a both/and approach: an analysis
of both the movement’s leadership and membership structures, and an analysis of
the political concepts that are fused together in the construction of the movement’s
democratic demands.
The political assessment of a democratic movement’s politics must also include
an analysis of the movement’s response when the material effects of its practices
deviate from its stated intentions. Because every movement makes history in
conditions not of its choosing, it cannot always control the ways in which its
practices are reappropriated by other forces. The anti-choice Pope appropriates
feminist language; a conservative political group co-opts civil rights arguments; a
powerful corporation persuades trade union members to contribute to its corporate
strategy. A feminist organization may try to close a red-light district down, only to
find that its efforts are assimilated into the reactionary social control agendas of a
racist police force and profit-driven urban developers. To the extent that a
movement is democratic, it will abandon dogmatic predictions about the success
of its strategies, remain vigilant about unintended effects and co-optation, and
act quickly to redefine its strategies where necessary. A movement can only
maintain this sort of mobile approach to political strategizing insofar as it promotes
vigorous debate and critique within its own ranks.
For Laclau and Mouffe, the meaning of every subject position remains arbitrary
in the Saussurean sense. Even the most naturalized subject position that is defined
through a relatively stable field of differential relations with other positions is
open to subversive redefinition. Subject positions, like signs, may appear to be
natural—they may appear to have, by necessity, only one possible meaning—but
this is merely the effects of hegemonic normalization. As Culler puts it, “the more
powerful a culture, the more it succeeds in having its signs taken as natural”
(1986:108). Laclau and Mouffe’s semiological approach to the constitution of
subject positions, in which Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness is extended to
identity formation, prompts the analyst to look for concealed power, namely the
forces of institutionalization, behind every apparent “nature.”
Laclau and Mouffe’s semiological approach can be somewhat difficult to grasp
because it contradicts much of our common-sense understanding about identity.
In our everyday discussions, we usually presume that the individual is the basic
unit of analysis, and that the individual has already been assigned definite
characteristics at birth, such as race, gender and sexuality, and that there are
“natural” and “unnatural” ways to express these assigned characteristics. If, however,
it can be shown that these apparently “natural” identities have a history, and have

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different meanings across different contexts, then their “natural” status becomes
suspect.