Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Conclusion: multicultural difference and the political
1 As Mercer points out, Gramsci develops this distinction between “passive revolution”
and hegemony through a comparison of the relatively conservative Italian Risorgimento
and the popular French Revolution (1980:129–30).
2 Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of permanent contestation can be usefully compared
with Nancy’s “la communauté désoeuvrée” (1991:40) and Readings’ “community of
dissensus” (1996:185, 187–93).
3 Laclau’s remarks can be usefully compared with Balibar’s argument, namely that “racism
reveals the non-universalistic component of nationalism,” insofar as it operates as a
“symptom of the contradiction between particularism and universalism which
primordially affects nationalism, a symptom of the double-bind to which any claim of
identity as national identity, both individual and collective, is unavoidably subject”
(1994:194, 195). From Balibar’s perspective, racism does not simply use universalistic
discourse to conceal its exclusionary program; nor is it only the case that racist
particularism can be made compatible with universalism. He contends that racism and
universalism are like Hegelian contraries; each concept is “inside” the other and affects
the other from the “inside.” Universalism has no essence; it can in principle be thought
without being affected from the inside by racism. But because the weight of tradition
bears so heavily on the present—there has never been a single definition of the human
that did not contain within itself the principle of human hierarchy; there has never
been a nationalism that has not attempted to resolve the tension between its promised
egalitarianism and the persistence of inequality by referring to natural differences—the
ground for such radically new universalistic thought would have to be prepared, and
that would require, in turn, extensive collective struggle and profound social change
(1994:191–204).
4 See, for example, the work of Fusco (1995), Shohat and Stam (1994), the Chicago
Cultural Studies Group (1994), Gutierrez (1994), Christian (1994), Spivak (1997)
and Minh-ha (1997). Although Walzer’s remarks about “footloose” individuals,
“postmodern vagabonds,” the divorce rate, and the political strategies of radical social
movements are problematic, he nevertheless rightly argues that genuine multicultural
tolerance must entail a defense of group differences and an attack on economic inequality
(1997:98–112).
5 It could be objected that excluded minorities see through this sort of displacement and
tokenism, but given the contemporary political structure, that is often beside the point.
Actual minorities usually lack organized access to our imperfect democratic institutions;

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in some cases, their votes do not matter at all (Guinier 1991; Hero 1992). From the
perspective of a hegemonic force, political strategies must aim first and foremost to
constantly remobilize popular identifications among the imagined “majority.” As I have
argued with respect to homophobia, when an official insults a minority and then
apologizes, it does not really matter whether or not the apology’s ostensible audience
believes that the apology is sincere. What matters is that the “soft-core” bigots who
support the official because he or she is a bigot, and yet enjoy fantasizing that they are
“mainstream” and “tolerant,” are thereby reassured and taught yet again how to identify
with bigotry in a rebuttable manner (1997b). Balibar, referring to fake scientific racist
discourses, institutional racism, Eurocentric cultural policies and colonization, states,
“Such political and ideological processes work effectively only if those who carry them
out actually believe in their legitimacy and, indeed, in their truth, or in their being
grounded in true doctrines” (1994:195). The task for a hegemonic formation is not just
to make sure that it builds a supporters’ bloc by appealing to individuals’ socio-economic
interests, for subjects never make decisions based on instrumentalist analysis alone. It
also has to offer compelling frameworks for popular identifications—even among, and
sometimes especially among, the individuals who stand to make socio-economic gains
from its policies—and it has to constantly adjust those frameworks as the mobile strategic
terrain presents new challenges.
6 Ironically enough, D’Souza makes the same point about anti-racism: “By a curious
somersault of history, the anti-racist has become the mirror image of his enemy.” He
claims that liberal anti-racists are mainly responsible for the perpetuation of racism
since they promote a cultural relativism that conceals blacks’ cultural deficiencies,
perpetuates dependency among blacks, and censors whites’ “natural” and “rational”
antagonistic feelings towards their cultural inferiors (1995:243).
7 While Readings’ study of corporatization in the contemporary university (1996) is
insightful and suggestive, there are many weaknesses in his text. He gives a problematic
historical account of the university’s development (see, for example, Levine 1996 for
an alternative account of the debates on the American academy’s mission in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries), he equates “ideology” with the needs of the nation-
state, he constructs the social as a totalistic functionalist system that is driven solely by
capital, and he oversimplifies the effects of capital’s globalization. Because the
restructuration that Readings identifies is accompanied by the accelerated stratification
of the academic job market, increased differentiation between well-endowed private
institutions and their more vulnerable private and public counterparts, and intensified
competition between academic departments—and even between the sub-fields within
a single department—for institutional legitimation and access to resources, it becomes
all the more urgent that we grasp the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship
between the rise of transnational capital and the contemporary transformation of the
academy. Readings is also not sufficiently critical on the question of the corporatized
academy’s standards; rather than taking its discourse at its word and treating its standard
of “excellence” like an empty signifier, we should analyze the ways in which the
corporatized academy deploys intensive paradigm management techniques as it
“rationalizes” its structure. Where Readings claims that women’s studies and ethnic
studies programs, for example, are perfectly assimilable within the corporatized academy
as long as they achieve a proper degree of “excellence,” it should be noted that that
achievement is often reserved in advance solely for the most neutralized forms of these
programs, namely the ones that successfully mimic the mainstream discourses within
their parent disciplines. Finally, Readings does not pay enough attention to the insidious
character of market rationality. A single elite institution could adopt his alternative
standards; it could transform itself into a “dissensual community” and provide for

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permanent contestation on the meaning of academic standards. But if it acted in
isolation, if it did not simultaneously work in solidarity with less elite institutions, it
might find that its special “anti-corporatization” approach will ultimately become
transformed into a highly marketable commodity. Anti-capitalist cultural criticism does
not necessarily resist commodification (Adorno 1990); “anti-corporatization” academic
discourse could merely create favorable conditions for the construction of elite
intellectual theme parks.
8 See, for example, Gitlin’s Twilight of Common Dreams (1995).
9 For all his valuable historical scholarship, Hobsbawm’s discourse becomes problematic
when he embraces this position in his “Identity Politics and the Left” (1996).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, B. (1993) “Post-Marxism and the New Social Movements,” Canadian Review of