Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

From organic crisis to the institutionalization of a new
imaginary
Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony provides many valuable theoretical
formulations that allow us to extend Butler’s and Hall’s analyses. Following
Gramsci, Laclau insists in his early work that every analysis of a strategic discursive
intervention must begin with historical contextualization. In what Gramsci calls
an “organic crisis,” there is a dramatic collapse in popular identifications with
institutionalized subject positions and political imaginaries. At this point, the
prevailing discursive formations are peculiarly vulnerable to critique from any
number of perspectives. The meaning of key signifiers, such as “democracy,”
“freedom” and “equality,” are unusually available for multiple alternative
articulations (Laclau 1977:103). Although identification with subject positions
never fully meets the subject’s goal of making herself “at home” in her given
structural positionings, she tends to experience the gap between the explanations
provided by her subject positions and the material effects of her structural
positionings in a particularly acute manner during an organic crisis. The 1960s in
the United States is a case in point. Traditional patriotism failed to incite mass
support for the Vietnam War, while traditional patriarchal, racial and political
discourses were denounced as morally bankrupt by growing numbers of activists.
In these and other similar conditions, we could say that more and more subjects
become caught up in an “identity crisis”; their sense of alienation can become
especially unbearable at this moment, such that their drive to seek out alternative
explanatory frameworks is intensified. We should also note that in a fully-fledged
breakdown of the social order, the experience of an identity crisis is shared not
only by many of the disempowered but also by a significant proportion of the
dominant groups as well.

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Hegemonic strategies are particularly effective during an organic crisis. More
and more subjects become unusually open to innovative political discourses; they
therefore begin to experience the network of social structures into which they
have been thrown as antagonistically blocking them from becoming what they
believe to be their true selves—a phantasmatic construction that is itself always
shifting. As this experience of lack becomes more and more acute, competing
political forces will attempt to “hegemonize” the social: they will attempt to offer
their specific “systems of narration” as a compensatory framework, and they will
represent that framework as the only one that can resolve the identity crisis (Laclau
1977:103; 1996h:44). The emerging hegemonic discourse works simultaneously
to deepen the identity crisis by further undermining the crumbling traditional
regime, to construct a new framework for identification, and to represent that
framework as if it exhausted the terrain of legitimate discourse.
Gramsci makes an important distinction between different strategic situations.
In moments in which power is heavily concentrated in a singular state apparatus,
as was the case in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century, then resistance should
be deployed according to a “war of maneuver” strategy: a single front that is
mobilized directly against the single power center. In contemporary complex
societies, however, we are rarely confronted with a situation in which power is
heavily concentrated in a single center and wielded like a subtractive instrument
according to a uniform logic. With Foucault, Gramsci contends that we are now
generally confronted with situations in which power is concentrated in diverse
institutional centers and deployed in complex and productive relations throughout
the social according to multiple and hybrid logics. In these conditions, resistance
should take the form of a “war of position”: a complex ensemble of struggles that
take place at multiple strategic sites in state apparatuses, civil society and the
family (Gramsci 1971:236–9).
The multiple struggles that take place in a “war of position” deployment must
be unified to gain maximum effectiveness, but in a site-specific manner such that
their difference is not canceled out. In Gramsci’s terms, an increasingly
sophisticated and strategically effective unifying strategy should move through
three stages. In the first and crudest stage, a social movement is organized according
to what Gramsci, invoking Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, calls its “economic-
corporate” interests. At this stage, the social group’s solidarity is defined in the
most particularistic terms. As the movement begins to act more and more as a
hegemonic agent, redefining its demands in the light of other demands, and offering
its discourse as a nodal point that symbolically sums up the interests of the other
movements, it becomes first a “social class” and then a “party” (Gramsci 1971:181).
The hegemonic discourse functions as the political “glue” that holds the historic
bloc together as it stands in opposition against its enemy bloc. The process of this
transition is enormously complicated, and involves complex reconstructions of
identities and values. Further, each movement’s influence in these multilateral
negotiations varies according to its institutionalized authority; I will return to this
difficult problem in the Conclusion.

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Against Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe argue that we cannot predict which
movement will become the hegemonic agent, for this depends upon the specific
conditions that obtain in a given historical formation. In his more recent work,
Laclau also apparently differs with Gramsci in his emphasis on the formal character
of hegemonic discourse. As we have seen, Laclau argues in these texts that the
compelling aspect of a hegemonic discourse consists primarily in the orderly and
coherent nature of its social imaginary, and not in its actual content.
The difference between Laclau and Gramsci on this point is not as great as it
may appear at first glance. Gramsci contends that although every party is in one
sense “the expression of a social group,” a party can, in hegemonic conditions,
“exercise a balancing and arbitrating function between the interests of their group
and those of other groups, and succeed in securing the development of the group
which they represent with the consent and assistance of the allied groups.” In an
especially provocative phrase, he claims that the arbitration function of the party
is analogous to that of the constitutional monarch who “reigns but does not govern,”
and that the party must always strive “by various means to give the impression
that it is working actively and effectively as an ‘impartial force’” (1971:148). In
these passages, Gramsci refines his conception of hegemony: hegemony consists
not merely in the unification of diverse social groups through articulation, but
also in the construction of a political leadership that offers itself as an apparently
“neutral space” for the inscription of a broad range of political demands—as nothing
less than the horizon that makes all political discourse possible.
This formal aspect of hegemonic discourse is also emphasized in Lefort’s analysis
of what he calls the “invisible ideology” that prevails in contemporary Western
societies. The discourse of consumption, for example, constructs an apparently
closed universe in which multiple demands can be satisfied, but its framing function
remains invisible insofar as totalization becomes latent. Following Baudrillard,
Lefort suggests that our desire for a consumer product is not driven by any specific
interest for that commodity in its particularity; on the contrary, we desire the