Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

citation of a prior and authoritative set of practices. It is not simply that
the speech act takes place within a practice, but that the act is itself a
ritualized practice. What this means, then, is that a performative “works”
to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions
by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function
performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity
of force.
(1997a:51)
To follow Butler’s example, a racial slur can have a tremendous material effect: it
can link the speaker with a racist community, and it can disempower the listener
(assuming here that she is a person of color) by reminding her that the present
moment is in part structured, officially and unofficially, by a powerful racist
tradition. If the listener attempts to reverse the tactic—if she in turn mobilizes
her identification with other people of color and cites a collective response from
the anti-racist tradition—then the dissimulation dimension goes to work. American
law tells her that the speaking situation is not one in which the traces of past
traditions have been cited and collective identifications mobilized, that it is merely
a singular moment involving two utterly isolated individuals, and that unprotected
speech (“fighting words”) cannot be defined with respect to their content (Butler
1997a; Matsuda et al.1993; Williams 1991:112–15). Ironically enough, if there is
an “empty signifier” in this story, it is the racial slur—not in the moment of its
operation as a credible threat, since that depends upon its citationality, but after
its historicity has been strategically suppressed by the neo-conservative judiciary.
Signifiers such as the Confederate flag only appear to be totally “empty” and
therefore perfectly open to a new articulation—in this case, articulation as a
harmless emblem of “Southern culture”—insofar as the political forces that are
interested in the erasure of its historicity have prevailed (Williams 1995:29–30).
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As a hegemonic discourse gains authority, it becomes the framework through
which more and more identifications become possible, as more and more subject
positions are reconstructed with reference to its logic. At its highest moment of
authority, the hegemonic discourse becomes an imaginary.
The imaginary is a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an
absolute limit which structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the
condition of possibility for the emergence of any object.
(Laclau 1990a:64)
In the terms used by the Thatcherites, a hegemonic discourse strives to represent
itself not just as a list of political positions or a bloc of concrete social agents, and
not just as one alternative among many, but as the only possible alternative to
total chaos.
This is the key element in Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, for Hall asserts that
the hegemonic advance of Thatcherism depended in large part on its ability to
operate as a social imaginary. Many of the political demands in the Thatcherite
program were constructed such that they signified much more than their literal
content. The Thatcherites did not, for example, merely depict their attack on
local government autonomy as a sound constitutional reform; they consistently
linked local governments with wasteful spending on programs that primarily
benefited blacks, Asians, unions and homosexuals. In this and many other cases,
the Thatcherites’ demands signified an authoritarian populist common sense that
responded effectively to everyday concerns about the economy, the family, race,
gender and sexuality. Thatcherism became a defining framework for British politics,
and a framework for identification on the part of just enough British voters—
including many voters who rejected Thatcher’s literal positions. This is not to say
that given the popularity of racism and homophobia, any political demand
whatsoever would have been accepted as long as it had been promoted in
specifically racist and homophobic terms. The equation of local government
autonomy with homosexual elements had to be “plausible” in order for this to
work, and the boundaries of the “plausible” are always somewhat rigid in a given
historical moment. New articulations, such as the equation of local government
autonomy with the promotion of homosexuality, can gain plausibility insofar as
they model themselves after already normalized traditions. In the Thatcherite
case, for example, homophobic articulations gained plausibility because they
borrowed extensively from racist traditions (Smith 1994b).
As it becomes an imaginary, the hegemonic discourse becomes embodied in a
number of different key institutions, thereby ensuring the incitement of
identifications within its framework in as many different sites in the social as
possible. This is a crucial aspect of its operation: “The constitution of a social
identity is an act of power [and] identity as such is power” (Laclau 1990a:31). To
the extent that a hegemonic discourse becomes an institutionalized horizon, it
rules out alternative frameworks for identification as increasingly illegitimate,

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immoral, irrational and, finally, incoherent. Institutionalization therefore always
entails an exercise of power: the brutal exclusion—concealed or explicit—of
alternative frameworks. Further, institutionalization itself involves all sorts of
complex strategic maneuvers to support this exclusion. In this sense, the condition
of possibility of every identification is the effective operation of power
mechanisms—either the institutionalization of a hegemonic discourse, or the
advance of a counter-hegemonic discourse. Without power, there would be no
“objectivity,” in the sense that there would be no identities, and, without identities,
nothing would incite the political practices that build up social structures (Laclau
1990a:32). “Even in the most radical and democratic projects, social transformation
thus means building a new power, not radically eliminating it” (Laclau 1990a:33).
Although identities and social structures always remain incomplete, they can
become highly stabilized through normalization and institutionalization in
favorable historical conditions.
The objectivity that we are confronted with, then, is like the accumulation of
the traces that are left behind by power relations, and the institutionalization of
these traces through regulated acts of iteration. Laclau, borrowing from Husserl,
calls this accumulation of the traces that are built up by social apparatuses
“sedimentation.” Through sedimentation, practices that were at one time strange
and unusual tend to become routinized, novel exclusions are increasingly taken
for granted, and the political character of identity formation is more or less
suppressed. In a metaphorical sense, sedimentation “spatializes” temporality: every
series of iterated institutionalizations seeks to master the dislocations that remain
fundamental to every social structure (Laclau 1990a:41–5). In this condition, for
example, one political slogan or metaphor seems to naturally evoke several others
(Laclau 1977:102).
The social never actually becomes fully colonized by hegemonic institutions; it
always to some extent “overflows the institutionalized frameworks of ‘society’”
(Laclau 1994:3). While images of perfect closure are necessary for the extension
and intensification of hegemony, these images are wholly illusory (Laclau 1996i).
If “sedimentation” consists of institutionalization and the forgetting of an
institution’s political origins, “reactivation” takes the form of re-politicization. A
truly subversive counter-discourse will construct an alternative framework through
which the forgotten political and contingent character of normalized identities
and institutionalized social structures can be grasped (Laclau 1990a:34). However,
once a specific articulation is institutionalized, it will be increasingly difficult to
promote a radically different articulation in an effective manner (Laclau 1996i).
This is not because of anything inherent in the signifiers themselves; in logical
terms, the possibilities for alternative articulations are infinite in number. In actual
historical conditions, however, a given articulation only becomes effective, in the
sense that it becomes a popular interpretative framework through which structural
positionings are lived, insofar as it is embodied in authoritative institutions. The
relative balance of power between institutions is always a contextually specific
matter. We could say, therefore, that while alternative articulations are always

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logically possible, a given alternative may or may not be strategically effective,
depending on the given historical conditions.
The political meaning of reactivation, considered in and of itself, is politically
undecidable. The mere demonstration of the contingency of the social formations
that appear to be necessary does not, on its own, lead to any particular sort of
ethical position. New racist discourse, for example, demonstrates the contingency
of Western whiteness by portraying the latter as profoundly vulnerable to
contamination and corruption, but then proceeds from this demonstration to
promote the cleansing of racial and ethnic otherness from Western culture. A
critique that only demonstrates the impossibility of closure does not necessarily
lead to an “ethical imperative to ‘cultivate’ that openness” or to a commitment to
democratic values (Laclau 1996f:77).
The work of a hegemonic discourse is never finished; it remains endlessly
troubled by alienation—a condition that can become acute even among its most
fervent supporters—dysfunctional incitements, and resistances inspired by
“outsider” discourse. Even with, for example, the massive shift towards the
formation of multi-media conglomerates that operate on a global scale, Hollywood
films still make up only a fraction of world cinematic production (Shohat and
Stam 1994:30–1). Although Disney’s foreign policy is now more influential than
that of many countries, American mass culture has not fully succeeded in
unilaterally imposing its products on the “Third World.” Using a rich conception
of hegemony, Shohat and Stam conclude that even the most powerful media
conglomerates cannot extinguish the possibility of resistant cultural work. They
do nevertheless insist that this potential will only become effectively activated to
the extent that it is politically organized (1994:354).
One weakness of a hegemonic discourse is paradoxically exacerbated insofar as
it becomes institutionalized as the very horizon of the social itself. Laclau considers,
for example, a society in which the resistance tradition of an indigenous people
expresses the principle of popular opposition. Other communities and movements,
such as radical peasants, urban squatters and militant trade union workers, will
tend to appropriate indigenous symbols as they position themselves in opposition
against dominant institutions (Laclau 1977:180). At some point in this borrowing
process, the previous connotation of the indigenous symbols will be weakened
and their new connotations will become more vague, allowing more and more
diverse groups to position themselves under their banner. This representational
strategy of condensation (Laclau 1977:177) will eventually make the unifying
symbols so vague that the specificity of their oppositional meaning will be lost
(Laclau 1996h:45). Radical democratic pluralist traditions are equally vulnerable
to the value dilution process. Although feminist discourse has not exactly achieved
hegemonic status, it has nevertheless been subjected to complex processes of
appropriation by right-wing political forces and corporate marketing discourses.
Key feminist principles have been made into increasingly vague and empty symbols
and then re-articulated with de-politicized discourse and even right-wing values
(Eisenstein 1996; Smith 1997a). A defense of a radical democratic pluralist feminist

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politics in the face of these hostile appropriations would have to include what
Laclau calls “reactivation,” namely radicalizing counter-appropriations.