Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

participate in the annihilation of culture. Power not only manufactures meaning;
it incites the demand for meaning. From this perspective, the alienation of the
“masses” is not the effect of their ideological mystification. On the contrary, their
indifference and withdrawal into the molecular worlds of the private is their only
true form of resistance (Baudrillard 1983). Values, however, are never completely
drained out of even the most popular spectacles. We need only consider the
American public’s fascination with events such as the Rodney King beating, the
Los Angeles uprising, the O.J.Simpson trial and the bombing of the federal building
in Oklahoma to find evidence of the enduring popular search for values within
spectacles.
The distance between Laclau and Mouffe and Lyotard is not as great. Lyotard
affirms the complexity of the social: he conceptualizes the social as an ensemble of
irreducibly plural language games (1984:19). Each language game has its own
distinct rules of formation, just as every social sphere in Walzer’s theory has a
specific conception of the good. The individual self is, for Lyotard, not an isolated
atom; she is positioned vis-à-vis a whole complex web of language games (1984:15,
22, 25). Like Laclau and Mouffe, Lyotard asserts that there is no metanarrative
that can resolve the plurality of discourses into a single, all-comprehending totality
(1984:26–7, 36, 40–1). Lyotard shares with Laclau and Mouffe a suspicion regarding
the coercive potential in those moments of Habermas’ discourse in which the
latter constructs universal consensus as the political ideal. For all of Habermas’
claims that such a consensus could, in ideal conditions, be reached through
coercion-free dialogue, Lyotard insists that power relations would always be present,

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and that progress towards such a consensus would always depend on the suppression
of the heterogeneity of language games (1984:xxv, 10, 30, 65–6, 81–2).
Lyotard’s rejection of the totalistic aspects of metanarratives, however, leads
him to dismiss the possibility of a political practice that would seek to articulate
different positions, forces and movements together. He is not altogether agnostic
with respect to political values; he speaks out clearly and forcefully against
“terror”: the condition in which obedience to the rules in a language game is
secured solely through brute domination (1984:63–4). From his perspective,
however, the only possible form of governance is temporary and precarious “local
determinism[s]” (1984:xxiv, 66). Dallmayr would argue, by contrast, that when
it does appear to us that we are caught up in utterly isolated struggles, we may
actually be dealing with elements that are situated within a regime that has
learned how to conceal its systematic character, rather than atomistic fragments
(1993:102). Lyotard’s principle of “local determinisms” cannot adequately address
these conditions.
Lyotard is also woefully mistaken when he claims that “most people have lost
the nostalgia for the lost narrative” (1984:41). For all their failures to deliver on
their promises of a seamless world, fundamentalist religious, nationalist and
totalistic ethnic discourses continue to flourish. Consider, for example, the
tremendous success of Patrick Buchanan’s religious fundamentalist Republican
Presidential bid in 1996 or the vicious nationalism that characterizes not only
Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party but also significant portions of the Serbian
opposition forces as well. We cannot be so enamored with postmodern fashion
that we ignore the popular effects of discourses that operate as metanarrative-
pretenders; an effective response to the nostalgia for totalistic closure must be
offered. Although Lyotard shares with Laclau and Mouffe the view that every
institutionalized language game always remains open to contestation, he only
advocates practices of interruption, displacement and subversion (1984:16–17).
For Lyotard, the political practices favored by Laclau and Mouffe, such as the
construction of alternative identities, progressive institutions and counter-
hegemonic blocs, would be so vulnerable to reactionary decline and the coercive
suppression of difference that they could never be legitimately deployed in the
name of radical democracy.
Laclau and Mouffe’s position is closer to that of Derrida in this respect.
Deconstruction is often mis-interpreted as an approach that can only affirm the
endless play of difference. Derrida contends that post-structuralist theory can
account not only for the failure of closure, but also for the necessity of constructing
some sort of partial and imperfect closure.
Once it is granted that violence is in fact irreducible, it becomes
necessary—and this is the movement of politics—to have rules,
conventions and stabilizations of power. All that a deconstructive point
of view tries to show is that since conventions, institutions and consensus
are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes

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micro-stabilizations), this means that they are stabilizations of something
essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus, it becomes necessary to stabilize
precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability
that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that
there is a need for stability.
(Derrida 1996:83–4)
Both Laclau and Derrida would contend that the demonstration of both the failure
of closure and the paradoxically necessary attempt to achieve this impossible end
is on its own insufficient as a political practice. Interruption effects must be
thoroughly articulated together with democratic normative commitments and
practices that aim to create the institutions necessary to defend and to promote
radical democratic difference (Laclau 1996f:77–8, 87–9; 1996b:119).
Against Lyotard, Mouffe asserts that radical democratic pluralism must always
strive to maintain both the autonomy of social elements and their
interconnectedness and mutual transformation. Again, it is specifically the radical
democratic pluralist form of citizenship that can play this complex linking role
(Mouffe 1993b:77–8). For Mouffe, any “extreme pluralism” that fails to value the
construction of a “‘we,’ a collective identity that would articulate the demands
found in the different struggles against subordination,” dangerously negates the
political just as liberalism does with its illusions of neutral procedures and universal
rationality (1996b:247). Citizenship can only become the site of democratic
articulations to the extent that it is centered on a firm commitment to equality
and human rights. A radical democratic pluralist society would, for example,
tolerate the formation of fundamentalist religious communities, but only insofar
as the latter did not attempt to impose anti-liberal principles onto the polity as a
whole. Religious communities cannot be allowed to construct a form of citizenship
that undermines redistributive welfare programs in the name of the work ethic,
bans civil rights for gays, violates women’s rights to choose abortion and censors
the work of radical artists.
All differences cannot be accepted and…a radical-democratic project
has also to be distinguished from other forms of “post-modern” politics
which emphasize heterogeneity, dissemination and incommensurability
and for which pluralism, understood as the valorization of all differences,
should be total.
(Mouffe 1992a:13)
Radical democratic pluralism does not, therefore, amount to an infinite tolerance
for any difference. Radical democratic pluralism would protect the principle of
tolerance for democratic difference precisely by vigorously attacking each and
every anti-democratic position. There is nothing contradictory in radical
democratic pluralism’s lack of tolerance for anti-democratic positions, because
radical democratic pluralism must aim to “protect as much as possible the autonomy

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of people to pursue a variety of goals” (Cunningham 1987:194). It would promote
progressive forms of affirmative action and multiculturalism, for example, while
conducting a full-scale assault on racism. Where neo-conservatives take a purely
individualist and ahistorical approach and claim that it is impossible to differentiate
between democratic and racist recognitions of racial difference, radical democratic
pluralism would refer explicitly to historical and group-based data on inequality
to support its distinctions.