Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

The return of essentialism in “anti-essentialist” socialist
theories
Many apparently non-foundationalist theories actually become incoherent as they
attempt to combine incompatible arguments together. Fuss argues that much of
social constructionist theory commits this error. Constructionist discourses
sometimes appear to escape essentialism through their insistence on the historically
specific character of identity: “constructionists take the refusal of essence as the
inaugural moment of their own projects and proceed to demonstrate the way
previously assumed self-evident kinds (like ‘man’ or ‘woman’) are in fact the effects
of complicated discursive practices” (1989:2). Where essentialists interpret
differences as the effects of a pre-discursive “nature,” constructionists perform
genealogical analyses that reveal the political relations that are concealed within
that “nature.”
Fuss contends, however, that constructionists “often work with uncomplicated
or essentializing notions of history” (1989:3). She points out that constructionists
can often appear to accommodate plurality without really departing from the
essentialist tradition. Constructionist feminist theorists, for example, may recognize
that they should speak of plural groups of “women” rather than a singular universal
category, “woman.” They may nevertheless take for granted the primary relevance
of sexist structures and gendered subject positions for all of these different women.
All women, however, would only share the exactly same structural positioning if
they were located in a social formation in which gender social structures were
absolutely isolated from other social structures. This is never the case in actual
history, for the sexisms that define our life chances are always overdetermined
with other structures, such as capitalism, racism, homophobia and so on. White
women and women of color, for example, are positioned differently insofar as
sexisms are hybridized through their articulation with racism. Further, even if we
were referring to some women who shared similar structural positionings within
overdetermined formations, we would find that they interpreted their structural
positionings through different subject positions. Given these conditions, it is never
legitimate to presume that a solidarity among all women already exists in embryonic
form and only needs to be brought to maturity through the invocation of universal
women’s interests.
Again, we can say that some subject positions are more progressive in a radical
democratic pluralist sense than others, but we cannot say that one is more or less
“authentic” than another. Workers should not be viewed as “embryonic
revolutionaries” who possess an “authentic” interest in socialism; their solidarity
with a socialist struggle has to be produced through organic and democratic political
interventions. The same is true for the relation between women who occupy an

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oppressed structural position in sexist formations. In Gramscian terms, feminist
movements have to “organize their consent”; they must offer feminist subject
positions as compelling frameworks through which women’s oppression can be
lived. As many feminist leaders have already recognized, the successful pursuit of
this goal requires close attention to the overdetermined character of sexism. The
hybrid combination of sexist structures with other structures mean that some
women are more privileged than other women; effective democratic feminist
organizing fully recognizes that women who are positioned differently in terms of
race, class and sexuality do not have the same access to material resources.
Fuss insists that what appears to be a challenge to essentialism in constructionist
theory often amounts to a mere “displacement” of essentialist terminology while
the underlying essentialist presuppositions are kept intact (1989:4). Although
Fuss’s critique is useful in this respect, her argument can be enriched by integrating
an analysis of power relations into her anti-foundationalism. After demonstrating
the insufficient degree of pluralization in various feminist theories, it would be
useful to examine the strategic conditions in which women’s movements have in
fact constructed compelling feminist subject positions and have actually made
progressive feminist solidarities meaningful for many different women.
Following Fuss, we should consider theories that appear to mark a significant
departure from essentialism, but actually reintroduce essentialism. Some Marxist
theorists, such as Hall in his earlier work, argue that the clearest calls for close
attention to historical specificity, and some of the strongest warnings against the
imposition of universal theoretical rules—that which social science calls
“methodology”—on empirical cases, can be found in the work of Marx himself.
Hall cites a passage in Capital, Vol. III, in which Marx discusses the different
ways in which surplus labor is extracted in various political formations, including
the peasant society, the slave-based or plantation-based economies, and the “Asian”
formation in which the state operates as both landowner and sovereign.
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The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped
out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination
and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts
back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire
configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations
of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case
the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to
the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally
corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and
manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which
we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice,
and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and
dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case.
(Marx 1981:927)

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Marx allows for some degree of reciprocal determination—the relationship between
the rulers and ruled does react back on the economic sphere—but the determining
effects of the political on the economic are always secondary to the primary effects
of the economic on the political. In this moment, Marx reproduces the determinist
closures that can be found in his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1969a). For Hall, the “materialist premise” expressed by Marx in this
passage is that political formations are “grounded in their material conditions of
existence” (Hall 1980:322).
This “materialist premise” in Marx’s discourse is complemented by a second
premise, namely the “historical premise.” Hall notes that Marx continues this
passage by immediately qualifying his remarks.
This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same in its major
conditions—from displaying endless variations and gradations in its
appearance, as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances,
natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from the
outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analyzing these
empirically given conditions.
(Marx 1981:927–8)
According to this second premise, the simple imposition of an abstract model
upon a specific empirical situation is illegitimate. Commenting on another passage
in Capital, Hall argues that the “specific forms of [political and ideological structures]
cannot be deduced, a priori, from this [economic] level but must be made
historically specific ‘by supplying those further delineations which explain their