Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

participation in the United States: popular expectations about what governments
ought to achieve have been dramatically reduced, while popular paranoias about
evil forces lurking within state apparatuses have been deliberately promoted. To
the extent that more centrist political projects, such as Clinton’s conservative
Democratic movement, borrow key strategies from the authoritarian hegemony
tradition, we should anticipate a greater tendency on their part towards the
neutralization of democratic contestation (Smith 1997a).
There is nothing in the contradictions within authoritarianism, however, that
will by themselves lead to its decline. Not only can contradictory political discourses
remain brutally effective, they can also make their contradictions a source of
strength. One of the virtues of Laclau and Mouffe’s redefinition of hegemony—
from Gramsci’s vision of an articulated bloc of actual subjects to their conception
of the institutionalization of a new horizon, the taken-for-granted background
knowledge that supplies the hidden assumptions behind authorized political
discourse—is that it allows us to grasp the subtle and complex aspect of hegemony
politics. As Hall argued with respect to Thatcherism, an authoritarian hegemonic
project only needs to achieve the disorganization of the potential opposition and

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a minimal degree of mobilization such that the regime can pass itself off as the
expression of the popular will (Hall 1988a).
Gramsci contends that where authoritarian “passive revolutions” have become
institutionalized, democratic forces will have to wage a protracted “war of position”
and struggle to advance an “expansive hegemony.” Multiple struggles that are
plural and contextually sensitive in form will have to be deployed at each of the
various sites throughout the social in which the “passive revolution” has become
entrenched. Where a “passive revolution” seeks to neutralize the democratic
opposition and to construct a simulacrum popular movement while perpetuating
structural inequality, an “expansive hegemony” seeks to promote a genuinely
democratic mobilization of progressive social movements (Buci-Glucksmann
1979:228–9; Mouffe 1979b:182–3).
The Gramscian distinction between “passive revolution” and “expansive
hegemony” also allows us to clarify Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of radical
democratic pluralism. Authoritarian hegemony aims to achieve a maximum
disciplining of difference; even as it pretends to endorse pluralism, it can only
promote a pseudo-multiculturalism that is entirely compatible with institutional
racism. Radical democratic pluralism, by contrast, attempts to construct the sorts
of hegemonic discourses that enhance and promote democratic forms of plurality
and difference. Confronted with a plurality of progressive struggles already in
motion, it seeks to release each of their democratic potentials, while bringing
them together in mutually constitutive articulatory relations. It values the
autonomy of each struggle, not only as a good in itself, but also for its practical
value. In many cases, autonomy facilitates the sort of contextually specific
contestation of oppression and exploitation that is needed in today’s complex and
hybrid social formations. Further, it values the promotion of hybridized democratic
identities, for “hybridization does not necessarily mean decline through the loss of
identity: it can also mean empowering existing identities through the opening of
new possibilities” (Laclau 1996e:65). Where authoritarian hegemony strictly
regulates the development of political contestation, radical democratic pluralist
hegemony multiplies the points of contestation and seeks to broaden the terrain
of politicization or reactivation (Laclau 1996d:99). The universalistic effects of
the radical democratic pluralist horizon tend to institutionalize deeper and deeper
recognition of the plurality and autonomy of the public spaces created by
democratic struggles. To the extent that the specific discourses of the relatively
autonomous progressive struggles are successfully articulated with a radical civic
sense, the multiplication of these public spaces becomes a source of strength for a
democratizing society (Laclau 1996b:120–1).
If authoritarian hegemony has a fundamentally contradictory structure, radical
democratic pluralist hegemony has a paradoxical central principle: the more that
we advance towards its realization, the more impossible its realization becomes.
Radical democratic pluralism is a good that remains a good only insofar as it is not
fully institutionalized (Mouffe 1993b:4, 6). The challenge of radical democratic
pluralism is that it must gain strategic ground not only by subverting dominant

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institutions, but by founding and defending new ones as well. At the same time, it
must guard against the potential that is inherent in its own institutions simply
because they are institutions, namely the bureaucratization and disciplining of
the social according to exclusionary principles. In a radical democratic pluralist
movement, the definition of the good life must always be kept open to contestation;
“nothing is definitely acquired and there is always the possibility of challenge”
(Laclau 1996d:100). No blueprint for an ideal society could fully grasp all of the
exclusions that are built into contemporary institutions and anticipate the
unintentional anti-democratic effects of apparently democratic strategies. We can
only begin to imagine subjects who have yet to be invented, let alone their rights
and responsibilities in communities that will only faintly resemble our own.
Democratic activists of all kinds from only a few centuries ago would be bewildered
by contemporary democratic politics. We have no reason to assume that we are
peculiarly endowed with an ability to make all contemporary and future
antagonisms transparent. A space for permanent democratic dissent must therefore
be built into the radical democratic pluralist imaginary, for it is through contestation
and struggle that exclusions can be brought to light and new democratic institutions
can be imagined and established.
This point can be illustrated with reference to the debate on multicultural
curricula. Radical multicultural educators are not arguing that we ought to include
works by women, gays, blacks, Latino/as, Asians, indigenous people and peoples
of the Third World in the Western “canon” because they are the only texts that
are meaningful for our minority students. Their argument is that traditions of
resistance among oppressed and excluded peoples have built up tremendous
resources of wisdom, and that that wisdom is embedded within minority discourses.
As Gutmann contends, “There are books by and about women, African-Americans,
Asian-Americans, and Native Americans that speak to neglected parts of our
heritage and human condition, and speak more wisely than do some of the
canonical works” (1992:18). Shohat and Stam similarly assert that their
“polycentric multiculturalism” “grants an ‘epistemological advantage’ to those
prodded by historical circumstances into what W.B. DuBois has called ‘double
consciousness,’ to those obliged to negotiate both ‘margins’ and ‘center’ (or even
with many margins and many centers), and thus somewhat better placed to
‘deconstruct’ dominant or narrowly national discourses” (1994:48–9). Alexander
and Mohanty, citing Moya, also claim an “epistemological advantage” for the
oppressed, but insist on the mediating role of interpretation.
The experience of repression can be, but is not necessarily, a catalyst for
organizing. It is, in fact, the interpretation of that experience from within
a collective context that marks the moment of transformation from
perceived contradictions and material disenfranchisement to participation
in women’s movements.
(1997:xl)

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Structural positioning in itself does not guarantee a political outcome; it is only
when the experience of oppression is organized in terms of the interpretative
framework that is provided by radical subject positions that subversive texts and
practices are produced.
Further, a radical multicultural curriculum does not embrace any kind of
separatism, for it aims to raise students’ awareness about the constitutive relations
between different cultures. For Shohat and Stam,
polycentric multiculturalism is reciprocal, dialogical; it sees all acts of
verbal or cultural exchange as taking place not between discrete bounded
individuals or cultures but rather between permeable, changing individuals
and communities. Within an ongoing struggle of hegemony and resistance,
each act of cultural interlocution leaves both interlocutors changed.
(1994:49)
Shohat and Stam extend their radical approach into their critique of Eurocentrism.
Such a critique would remain conservative if it depicted Europe as a naturally
distinct entity unmarked by political struggle and internal and external exclusions;
constructed Europeans as a singular people bound together by a homogeneous
and timeless cultural tradition; and represented European power as an omnipotent
evil capable of achieving total victory on a global scale. Within their approach,
an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism also has to attend to the hybrid differences
and complicated histories that constitute Europe itself (1994:4). In this sense,
Shohat and Stam (1984) reproduce Bernal’s radical intervention; the point is not
merely to find hybridity and difference on the margins, but to interrupt the
metropole’s foundational myths as well.
Multiculturalism, according to then Modern Language Association President
Stimpson, is the “necessary recognition that we cannot think of culture unless we
think of many cultures at the same time” (Levine 1996:143). As Levine indicates,
radical multiculturalism studies women, immigrants, workers, lesbians and gays
and racial minorities not just to bring ethnic and gender difference into our
curricula, but to promote a better understanding of socio-economic power.
It is crucial to study and understand as many of the contributing cultures
and their interactions with one another as possible, not as a matter of
“therapeutic” history, as the opponents of multiculturalism keep insisting,
not to placate or flatter minority groups and make them feel good, as
they also assert, but as a simple matter of understanding the nature and
complexities of American culture and the process by which it came, and
continues to come, into being.
(Levine 1996:160)
Even a society that approaches radical democratic pluralism will tend to
institutionalize a specific way of thinking; the danger is that domination will become

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normalized and the democratic wisdom at the margins of the social will not be
heard. It is only through permanent contestation that every “canon”—even the
most apparently radical “canon”—will be constantly exposed to democratic
challenges.
Against Habermas, who constructs power-free communication as a regulative
ideal, Laclau and Mouffe affirm the permanence of power relations. Although
Rorty wants to expand the community of “we liberals” through persuasion and
the incitement of solidarity-oriented sentiment, rather than argumentation that
seeks to ground itself exclusively on context-independent rationality, he also places
far too much faith on the construction of consensus, and fails to grasp the practical
value of perpetual contestation (Mouffe 1996a:8). In the spirit of Gramsci’s centaur
metaphor, Laclau and Mouffe argue that every form of communication, including
persuasion, negotiation, and dialogue, is necessarily intertwined with power
relations, and that this would remain true in any possible society. Like all post-
structuralists, they hold that we cannot ground our ethical decisions in a necessary
foundation; every political position that we take is in this sense contingent. Again,
this is not to endorse relativism: since our choices are always conditioned by
normative traditions, we never inhabit a space in which all the choices before us
have equal validity. The traditions that shape our normative decision-making are
the residual effects of contingent political struggles. This means that every
normative decision taken within historical traditions—traditions that are only