Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) and actual policies such as the elimination
of welfare entitlement (Smith 1997a) and the militarization of inner city policing
that aims at total containment of these peoples (Davis 1991, 1992) express the
idea that the “underclass” has become a “disposable population.”
Only a few years ago, American adult workers from working-class communities
who held basic educational qualifications had a fairly good chance of obtaining a
semi-skilled or skilled job that paid a livable wage. With the profound
transformation of the American economy, workers with these same qualifications

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now find themselves cycling between non-unionized low-paid work—usually in
unskilled service sector and manufacturing employment—and welfare. The
“disposable population” discourse legitimates the sharp decline in their standard
of living and the large-scale reduction in government expenditures on housing,
education and health programs that might ameliorate their conditions. It is of
course a myth that the state apparatuses evenly deployed large-scale education,
housing and health programs that aimed to assimilate the entire population, white
and non-white, wealthy and poor, citizen and immigrant alike. Many populations
in the United States never experienced this “golden age” of disciplinary public
investment on a massive scale in the first place. But, to the extent that these
programs were indeed deployed, especially between the New Deal years and the
1970s, the public policy emphasis with respect to the “underclasses” has now shifted
from assimilation to policies of deliberate neglect. To return to Laclau’s remark,
what we have in this case is not simply a “decline in the integrationist abilities” of
this particular Western state; we have a shift towards banishment and quarantine
with respect to the “underclass.” Laclau’s question about the incitement of
conformist political participation is not really an issue with respect to the
“underclass,” because the poor, and poor minorities in particular, have already
been structurally excluded from participation in the most important arenas of
decision-making (Hero 1992; Guinier 1991).
Laclau’s equation of the decline of the welfare state with the increasing inability
for the state to incite conformism—along the functionalist lines, say, of Althusser’s
“ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1971)—nevertheless remains
problematic. We may be entering into a terrain in which other hegemonic forces
are producing basically the same effect. Consider, for example, the reduction in
public support for cultural projects. As private capital displaces public investment
in this sphere, we are certainly not entering into a new era of radical multicultural
expression. The huge oligopolies in the media, entertainment and information
technology sectors may embrace Disney-fied images of multiculturalism, such as
Pocahontas, The Lion King, Aladdin and Puerto Rican “Barbie,” and their
“synergistic” niche marketing might give us sanitized images of rebellion, such as
To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newman, First Wives Club and Waiting to
Exhale, but they are certainly not embracing radical multicultural projects. In
fact, there is an expanding demand for these neutralized depictions of difference
as transnational corporations and state apparatuses become increasingly interested
in “diversity management”: the domestication of racial and gender antagonisms
and the marketing of simulated multiculturalism (Lubiano 1997:239).
Education cuts, to take another example, are creating the conditions in which
fewer minorities obtain the advanced training that they need to engage in effective
political resistance, as fewer of them are able to attend the best schools, colleges
and universities, and the quality of the rest of the education system rapidly declines.
Education cuts also strike first at the most vulnerable institutions and programs,
but their effects are transmitted throughout academia. The substitution of adjunct
professors for tenure-track and tenured faculty has a much greater chilling effect

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on unconventional scholarship than the most vociferous anti-multiculturalism
campaign. Where the Kuhnian principle—namely that innovation comes largely
from the margins of a discipline (Kuhn 1962)—obtains, the loss of tenured positions
at the lower and middle ranges of the highly stratified academic market will have
an impact on the entire system: professors at elite institutions will practice their
craft in an increasingly isolated, rarefied, nepotistic, routinized and backward
context. Within a single institution, cuts or even their mere threat heighten
interdepartmental and intradepartmental antagonisms; all too often, multicultural
programs become a synecdochical signifier of excessive proliferation of
specializations that urgently requires administrative rationalization. This in turn
not only escalates criticism of the multicultural programs that have barely gained
a foothold in the education system, but also promotes the sort of self-disciplining
within these programs that endangers the careers of the more creative multicultural
educators. Gifted students witnessing these conditions choose either to leave
academia altogether, or to gain credentials in the most mainstream aspects of
their profession, contributing further to the ossification of the multicultural
programs that survive the cuts. None of these developments can even remotely be
interpreted as a gain for radical multiculturalism. As Readings argues, the
university’s role in producing and protecting national culture has indeed been
sharply reduced, but this transition has only made way for the intensive
corporatization and transnational bureaucratization of the academy (1996).
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