Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

particular way that black people occupied that identity, lived that
identity, and struggled around it, produced something which had never
been seen before.
(1997:293)
Some aspects of liberal feminist discourse, to take another example, are now
thoroughly normalized. We cannot find a significant political bloc today in a
liberal democratic regime that would claim that it is impossible to decide whether
or not women should have the vote. The principle of suffrage rights for women
has been normalized to such a degree that it has become embedded deep within
a wide range of subject positions through which gender is interpreted. In liberal
democratic regimes, feminists and anti-feminists alike generally take this principle
for granted. Other aspects of feminist discourse, such as the conception that all
women have the right to control their own bodies and therefore ought to have
access to contraception, abortion and the choice to conceive, are more
controversial; these feminist elements are not as widely integrated into the subject
positions through which gender is lived. As Daly contends, the opposition
between the antagonistic discourses on AIDS (is it a non-moral virus or divine
retribution for sin?) and on abortion (is it a woman’s reproductive right or
murder?) cannot be resolved with reference to utterly neutral facts. When we
take a position on these issues, we are necessarily making a value judgment
(Daly 1994:179).
Further, we can and in fact do arrive at temporary solutions to impossible
conflicts between competing value claims by citing political traditions. And we
select some traditions rather than others insofar as we have found—consciously
and unconsciously—that they can offer identifications that are compelling and
effective enough in our current predicament. As Hall points out, this process always
takes place in a strategic and antagonistic context. “Identification means that you
are called in a certain way, interpellated in a certain way: ‘you, this time, in this
space, for this purpose, by this barricade with these folks’“ (1997:292). In our
citations, we redeploy the moral judgments that are constitutive of those traditions,
even as we introduce a small degree of innovation in their meaning. Again, this

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does not mean that convention fully determines our moral judgment, for each
political horizon has to be interpreted with respect to new problems, and, as the
context of each application of the horizon shifts with each new case, the possibility
of a somewhat novel redefinition of the horizon emerges. To the extent that we
identify with a single political tradition, it tends to dispose us towards a certain
range of judgments, but it never resolves our moral dilemmas for us in advance.
Obviously, the situation becomes even more complex as we identify with an
overdetermined ensemble of political traditions.
At a more “micro-social” level, our interpretations of terms such as “justice” or
“equality” within the democratic tradition take on greater specificity and
refinement as we are located within specific roles in different social spheres. We
have, for example, standards for determining whether a parent is competent in
the sense that he or she respects the rights of his or her children; we would use
somewhat different standards to assess the human rights competency of a police
officer or a prison guard. Because we are always already positioned within specific
social roles that are shaped by conventional standards, and because those standards
are shaped in turn by a more or less shared political horizon, we never occupy an
“originary position” in which we are utterly incapable of making judgments.
Since those who are embedded in local practices—of literary criticism,
law, education, or anything else—are “naturally” heirs of the norms and
standards built into those practices, they can never be without (in two
senses) norms and standards and are thus always acting in value-laden
and judgmental ways simply by being competent actors in their
workplaces. The post-structuralist characterization of the normative as a
local rather than a transcendental realm, far from rendering ethical
judgment impossible, renders it inevitable and inescapable.
Antifoundationalist thought, properly understood, is not an assault on
ethics but an account of the conditions—textual and revisable, to be
sure—within which moments of ethical choice are always and genuinely
emerging; it is only if ethical norms existed elsewhere that there would be
a chance of missing them, but if they are always and already where you
are they cannot be avoided.
(Fish 1994:39)
We never arrive at a moment in which every choice has equal value for us, for the
subject positions through which we grasp our choices always bear traces of past
political struggles within them. A theory of normative decision-making is therefore
not only compatible with Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of the contingency of
articulation, it is integral to that formulation.