Professional Documents
Culture Documents
An introduction
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, Nos. 23 MarchMay 2012, pp. 185206
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636187
186 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
I
Even as this introduction is being composed, the so-called people without
history, or on the edge of history, are commingling with the people within
history in Cairos Tahrir Square. They are joined, of course, by those who
assume the mantle of being makers of history, or midwives of history and with
the people who presume to write history. This commingling, sometimes called
the third wave of democratic revolutions, is actually the third coming of the
people whose disorderly political potential goes well beyond the usual liberal/
republican democratic imaginary (Huntington 1991). This phenomenon of the
people without history imposing themselves on the people within history, in
streets and squares from Tiananmen (1989) to Azad (Tehran) to Tahrir and so
many other places, motley and majestic is rattling politics as it is normally
understood. These eruptions of the people without history are different from
all those colour-coded revolutions in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe the
Czech Velvet (1989), the Georgian Rose (2003) and the Ukrainian Orange
(2004) revolutions which were revolutions of the people who had been
exiled or gulaged from a history which they once rightfully inhabited, as is the
proclaimed destiny of every European. Their exile and homecoming in history,
however violent and disorderly, was prefigured in the annals of that not-so-
universal narrative, the European Enlightenment.
The new entrants now at the gates of history are different. To incorporate
them, economically if not politically, one might have to announce the end of
history (as would Francis Fukuyama 1992) or declare that the world is flat (as
would Thomas Friedman 2009). The flat world at the end of history, if there is
one, is part of the planet of slums the primary residence of the people
without history today. History is not ending and the agora cannot be gated; the
people are here, gathered and poised; they have always been here, invisible
only within the Hegelian optic. This coming of the people cannot be orderly
precisely because they are already here. Becoming visible is not a sequential
process; one cannot stand in a line to be visible and to be hailed as a political
subject. It happens suddenly as an event.
Moreover, there are and will be attempts to deter and block them,
sometime with brutal force in the name of law and order to obviate chaos,
sometimes by the well-worn dilatory tactics in the name of orderly transition
and consolidation towards a democratic future. They will be sequestered, they
will be starved and they will be crushed. But they would not go away, they will
not disappear and they keep coming. The whole world is watching, concedes
even the supreme self-appointed midwife of democracy, the President of the
United States. As they watch, some are terrified, some are elated and many are
anxious, but does anyone understand this plenitude of the people
misrecognized as crowd, as mass, as multitude? Who are they, if they are
not the long awaited unified revolutionary agent in and of history? They are the
people.
AN INTRODUCTION 187
The intellectuals, both in the West and those trained in the Western
intellectual traditions, have been scrambling to theorize this third coming of
the people, most notably Etienne Balibar, Partha Chatterjee, Ranjit Guha,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Ranciere, James
Scott and Paolo Virno, who are building on an earlier tradition of reflection,
fraught with gaps and contradictions, from an eclectic group of thinkers
Camus, Fanon, Freire, Gasset, Hobsbwam, Rude and others. Prominent and
distinctive among all of these contemporary thinkers is Ernesto Laclau, who
has been steadfast in his commitments to explore and understand the politics of
the people during his long scholarly career of almost half a century. Although
resolutely theoretical in his orientation, Laclau was engaged in the rough and
tumble of progressive politics as a young writer/ideologue in his native
country of Argentina with its long and complex history of populism. So he
has had to grapple with the idea of the people from the very the beginning of
his forays into politics and the political. Thus, neither the people nor populism
makes Laclau nervous. He has grown up with that conceptual pair. He is able
to theorize the people without a guilty conscience, without sanitizing it or
smuggling it in through the back door. While Argentina is not a typical country
from the global south, its present cannot be understood primarily in terms of
its European genealogies. The Argentina contacts and contexts have been
relevant to Laclaus work, even though not always highlighted. Under the
seemingly very European surface of Laclaus theoretical texts, there flow
currents that come from elsewhere and are stirred by praxis.
II
This special volume of essays critically engages and interrogates Ernesto
Laclaus On Populist Reason (OPR) (2005), generally considered the most
influential of his writings since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) co-
authored with Chantal Mouffe (1985). In the two decades separating the two
books, the political and intellectual landscape changed dramatically. HSS was
part of a remarkable and extended intellectual movement on the political Left
to rethink the tattered legacy of Marxism and to forge a new socialist politics in
the aftermath of the events of Paris/1968. The very first sentence of HSS
announces that Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. Positioning
itself explicitly as post-Marxist, HSS did, indeed, play a pivotal role in shaping
highly contested debates about how to formulate the theoretical agenda and the
political strategy for an emergent New Left. While systematically distancing
themselves from the essentialist economist categories of orthodox Marxism,
Laclau and Mouffe unambiguously located their project within the broader
Marxist endeavor to theorize and to engage in a radical democratic politics
committed to promoting free, plural and egalitarian societies:
188 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
What sort of a new political imaginary would supplant the old one
characterized variously as Jacobin and Stalinist? The one proposed in HSS
takes it bearing and orientation from the specific theoretical and historical
conjuncture in which the Left, especially the European Left, found itself in the
decades leading up to the 1980s. During that period, the social conditions
shaping everyday life under the existing socialist regimes were dismal and
rapidly deteriorating. The economic stagnation and the corrupt and inefficient
bureaucratic administration in the Soviet Union and her satellite states could
not be explained away by invoking the constraints and necessities imposed by
the cold war or by the alleged containment thesis. For decades, any attempt
at internal reforms was discouraged, if not ruthless crushed as in Budapest and
Prague. The debilitating Afghan adventurism and the Polish impasse did little
to lift the prospect of reform and rejuvenation within the existing socialist
societies teetering on the brink of economic collapse. Even the communist
victories in Vietnam and Cambodia and the continued survival of the Castros
Cuba, secured at massive cost and hardship for people in those countries, was
hardly sufficient to offset the massive gloom among the socialists, both
intellectuals and activists, in search of an alternative.
Against such a darkening background, HSS presented itself as bold and
guardedly optimistic alternative. That alternative drew its grounding and
direction from a radical, but not class-centred reading of an expanded
conflictual social field:
The rise of the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national
and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by
marginal layers of population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical
forms of social struggles in countries on the capitalist periphery*all these
imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which
create the potential, but no more than a potential, for an advance towards
more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 1)
undergo another mutation in OPR as the very limit of the namable in the
differential field, it continues to serve as the background against which a given
hegemonic position/relation is contingently established in a struggle between
antagonistic fronts. The counter hegemonic struggles are possible precisely
because hegemony is always contingently secured and requires a sustained
discursive labour (on both socio-material and symbolic planes) to uphold it.
There is copious critical commentary on Laclaus innovative recuperation
and re-theorization of Gramscis concept of hegemony.2 No other concept has
been more central to Laclaus political thinking in more than four decades of
writing. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Laclaus answer to Judith Butlers
rather odd question as to whether hegemony is still a useful category for
describing our political dispositions would be resoundingly affirmative (Butler
et al. 2000, p. 44). In those long and tumultuous decades, rather trying times
for the Left, the concept of hegemony has been indispensable not only for
explaining the failure of the essentialist categories, historical formulations and
political projections of orthodox Marxism but also to account for the resilience
of a capitalist economy that continues to thrive under democratic as well as
authoritarian regimes that manage to govern, perhaps not with requisite
legitimacy, but certainly not by force alone. On the other hand, the concept of
hegemony has also played a decisive role in identifying, exploring and
encouraging (by the simple act of recognition) new democratic and quasi-
democratic emancipatory social movements that continue to erupt despite
sustained and organized ideological attempts to discipline and incorporate, if
not erase them. The crossing of order and disorder and their shrinking
temporalities in democratic societies has made hegemony an increasingly
attractive explanatory suture so much so, that now it is regularly bandied
around in high-brow journalistic circles. To be sure, having had to carry such a
huge hermeneutic burden, the concept of hegemony has become strained and
diluted. While critics, often friendly, have been busy detecting slippages,
noting ambiguities and marking inconsistencies in the multiple meanings and
models of hegemony in Laclaus oeuvre, Laclau has been steadily refining the
concept and elaborating on its links to other concepts in its orbit such as
antagonism, discursive/articulatory practices, the play equivalence and
difference, political subjectivity, popular identities and so on.
In this introduction, I am not concerned with precisely mapping the
conceptual parameters of Laclaus theory of hegemony. What I wish to do is to
ascertain the extent to which Laclaus theorization of hegemony anticipates and
prepares the ground for the two distinctive features of OPR, namely, the trope
of the people as an empty signifier and the progressive tendency to characterize
the political as rhetorical. Furthermore, I want explore the role the concept of
contingency plays in facilitating this two-fold turn to the people/populism
and to the rhetorical.
It is generally agreed that under the conceptual rubric of hegemony, Laclau
offers, among other things, an analytic account of political practice and of
AN INTRODUCTION 193
Mouffe 1985, pp. 105112). Any sign is asymmetrically split and the play of
signifier and signified is uncontained and excessive. Articulation is Laclaus name
for the practice that gives shape and identity to a discursive formation and
makes the elements within it intelligible in their relationality. Articulation (or
disarticulation) is the discursive practice par excellence of fixing and unfixing,
sedimentation and reactivation, quilting and dissemination in the differential
field of the particulars, and it is shaped by contingency rather than propelled by
necessity. Here one can see a relatively clear homology between how the
political institutes the social and how articulatory practices discursively
constitute a hegemonic position/relation. The positing of a social ontology
of heterogeneity and antagonisms and the quasi-transcendental turn in
discourse analysis are perfectly aligned. One moves seamlessly from the
infinitude of the social to the infinite play of the disseminating sign. Only the
political that manifests itself in articulatory practices can arrest, stabilize and fix
the play in a differential field of the meaningful. Here, too, the reign of
contingency never ceases. Since there is no such thing as zero-degree
hegemony, with no recourse to Spinoza (an essentialism of the totality) or to
Leibnitz (an essentialism of the elements), as Laclau ironically muses, the
drama of coming together and coming apart of the social and the making and
unmaking of the hegemonic is necessarily political and carried out by the
steady, sometimes dissonant, beat of articulatory practices pierced with
contingency. This is one way contingency embeds itself in anything that might
be deemed necessary.
An account of practice cannot possibly dispense with an account of the
subject, the articulating subject engaged in hegemonic practices. Following in
the footsteps of Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger and also drawing on
Foucaults analytic of finitude, Laclau assumes that the short-lived Age of
Man is over and with it the category of the originative subject. Once the idea
of a subject as an agent both rational and transparent to itself and as the
origin and basis of social relations is seen as philosophically untenable, the
constructive task begins of theorizing how the subject or more precisely a
multitude of subject positions arise in discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985,
p. 115). This is a rather delicate task. In rejecting the notion of the originative
subject, one must resist a double temptation: neither simply posit in its place a
proliferation of dispersed subject positions each encased in its particularity, nor
seek to locate a unified subject of discourse in and among the ensemble of its
dispersed positions. Like any other element in the differential field of the
meaningful, a given subject position finds its identity in relation to other
subject positions and those relations are variable not only of opposition and
similitude and of contiguity and substitution but also of mutual embedding.
Here, once again, contingency holds sway. The way an articulating subject, the
subject of hegemony, comes to be constituted through a differential positioning
and cross-embedding of subject positions (individual and collective identities)
is not explicable by recourse to a narrative of necessity, organic or teleological.
AN INTRODUCTION 195
III
This is the basic conceptual architecture that Laclau develops and elaborates in
HSS (with Mouffe) and in essays leading up to and immediately following that
book. This architecture has remained relatively intact in the two volumes of
essays published between HSS and OPR, despite various revisions and
refinements, such as rethinking the category of subject as a constitutive lack
rather than as a suture of multiple discursively dispersed subject positions.
Prodded by Zizeks Lacanian critique, Laclau has come to view the dispersed
subject positions as refractive effects of an originary lack in the very notion of
the subject as such. Even this important revisionary move from a Foucauldian
to a Lacanian view of the subject has not significantly altered the conceptual
balance. There are other shifts in focus and accent, some more important than
196 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
others, say from nodal points to empty signifiers and from representation to
naming, but the larger conceptual edifice remains recognizably the same.
So the question naturally rises: what is old and continuous and what is new
and discontinuous in OPR? This is a difficult question to address with a thinker
like Laclau, who seems to be relatively monogamous, if not indifferent,
towards the object domain. By contrast, one can track the career of Habermas,
whatever its value, in terms of changing themes and concerns from the
public sphere to law to religion, or in terms of his debates with different
interlocutors with Gadamer on hermeneutics, with Niklas Luhmann on
systems theory and with Rawls on political liberalism. To be sure, Laclau also
has had a rich set of interlocutors: Frank, Miliband and Poulantzas in Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory (Laclau 1977), his long-standing pedagogical
engagement with colleagues and students at the Essex School of discourse
analysis, and more recently Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler in Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality (Butler et al. 2000). Moreover, HSS is many ways is an
extended critical engagement with the long Marxist tradition and especially
Gramsci. Nevertheless, one cannot easily track the evolution of Laclaus
theoretical project in terms its productive engagement with different themes
and interlocutors. It seems that energy and innovation in Laclaus work
is generated internally from the ways in which conceptual architecture itself is
coded and configured. If one accepts this view of the generative movement
within Laclaus thought, then one is prone to believe that the trope of the
people as an empty signifier, so central to OPR, is already prefigured in his
earlier reflections on hegemony. This view is also supported by the fact that
Laclau has always worked with a basic set of intuitions regarding social
ontology its heterogeneity, its contingency and its discursivity on the one
hand, and its radical openness to being shaped (or more precisely, being
instituted) by the political on the other. The force of these intuitions, while
guiding and energizing his conceptual endeavor, has not been deflected or
attenuated, as is often the case, by an encounter with the strangeness and
resistance of the object domain. There is, however, one crucial exception to all
of this: Laclaus enduring commitment to a radical democratic project. If there
is a theme or an object of inquiry in the conventional sense that engages Laclau
deeply and continuously, it is democratic politics and its radical egalitarian
possibilities in our time. There is no runner up candidate. Therefore, I propose
to argue that Laclaus turn to the trope of the people as the paradigmatic
empty signifier is not simply motivated by the conceptual possibility and
trajectory already implicit in his earlier theorization of hegemony, but rather
that possibility is forced to the surface by the tumultuous career of the
democratic project in our time.
A theory of hegemony developed in HSS is explicitly directed at exploring,
identifying and promoting radical democratic politics. That objective is
announced in the subtitle and the final chapter emphatically states that a
radical democracy project is the only viable alternative the New Left can
AN INTRODUCTION 197
pursue in the wake of democratic revolutions, old and new. For Laclau,
democratic revolution marks a decisive mutation in the political imaginary of
Western societies that occurred a little over two hundred years ago (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985, p. 155). The key features of that mutation, among others,
are: the end of hierarchical and unequal type of societies, the affirmation the
sovereignty of the people and the insistence that social relations should be
based on principles of liberty and equality. These imaginary directives,
especially the rhetoric of liberty and equality, seep into every aspect of the
social life and give rise to a subversive democratic culture. For instance, as
Tocqueville presciently notes that (i)t is not possible to conceive of men as
eternally unequal among themselves on one point, and equal on others; at a
certain moment, they will come to be equal on all points (Laclau and Mouffe
1985, p. 156).
This new democratic imaginary also brings into full visibility the hitherto
occluded social ontology of radical heterogeneity, precisely the one posited by
Laclau. In a closed hierarchical social order, each individual is placed in a
differentiated but fixed position; hence, social relations are geared to
reproduce unequal situations and subordinated subjects. This is the state of
almost zero-degree hegemony where politics can only be repetition. With the
advent of democratic revolution, the hierarchical order dissolves and an open,
unfixed, and differential terrain of the social becomes manifest. Politics can no
longer be repetition and the political must now work through the
heterogeneous and antagonistic social field to articulate a new order unguided
by teleology. The logic of equivalence which aligns differential but autonomous
subjects to form a bloc or to facilitate a decision or to force a closure becomes
the primary and generative form of political practice. Under the equivalential
logic, no subject can claim priority a priori. Even socialist demands, like
demands of any other subject, say, the feminist or the ecologist, should be
viewed as a moment internal to democratic revolution (Laclau and Mouffe
1985, p. 156). The trajectory of the equivalential practice, aside from its
performative commitment to the ever expanding and often conflicting claims
of liberty and equality, cannot be predicted. It could go any which way.
The growing complexity and differentiation of advanced capitalist societies
also makes it increasingly difficult to forge an equivalential chain that can
traverse the whole of the social terrain to constitute a unified popular front.
Instead, one finds a proliferation of new social movements and the subject
positions associated with them, ranging from feminism and environmentalism
to those opposing racism, war, globalization and more. The emancipatory
projects associated with each of these movements are not bound together by
something that can be characterized as either natural or logical. Whatever the
alleged affinity between feminism and anti-racism, it cannot be presumed.
What binds them together has to be discursively articulated. The play of
equivalence and difference is never complete. The autonomy of differential
elements and subjects aligned within an equivalential chain cannot be fully
198 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
Laclaus own outline of the conditions that made possible the emergence
and expansion of popular identities is rather cursory and consists in the
diagnosis that we inhabit a historical terrain where proliferation of
heterogeneous points of rupture and antagonisms require increasingly
political forms of social reaggregation [PR 230]. The interrelated
historical conditions behind this phenomenon of increasing social
dislocations are subsumed by Laclau under the label of globalized
capitalism. But as Laclau himself knows very well, the dislocations
produced by globalized capitalism cannot explain why it was the name of
the people which came to occupy such a central role within our
imaginary. It could have been any other signifier, since the potential
content of political reaggregation is not predetermined by the pure fact
or form of dislocation.
(Marchart 2005, p. 13)
202 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
One could argue that other signifiers, say the citizen-subject of liberal ilk, are
always already over-burdened with doctrinal content, which places them at a
disadvantage in the struggle to claim to represent the imagined political whole
without invoking the more inclusive name of the people. Invoking the name of
the people is not mere rhetoric, and even if it were, that invocation has
consequences. The rhetoric of the people is constitutive in so far as it
invariably dilutes the doctrinal content of any interest or party that invokes and
deploys it. The greater the divisions, antagonisms, and dislocations within the
social, the greater is the need for an emptier, thus more inclusive, political
subject to suture and articulate the unity amidst difference. But that articulated
unity is fragile, almost spurious, because the people as a trope both contains
the heterogeneous as a differential field of contending particulars but also
marks the limits of their representability. Within this context of democratic
limits, certain elements in Laclaus conceptual edifice naming, empty
signifiers and dislocations become more radical and prominent.
The tumultuous career of the democratic project in the latter half of the
twentieth century and into the present, especially as it has evolved in the global
south, has disclosed not only deep divisions and irreparable dislocations but
also the progressive jettisoning of doctrinal contents, be they liberal,
republican or socialist. Here one sees democracy in its starkest form,
simultaneously overburdened with and stripped of accidental doctrinal
content, as a radically open and unpredictable mode of governance. Hence,
populism, agnostic towards its content, was able to emerge, as it has in the
global south, as the exemplary mode being political, the democratic sublime
that is affectively charged and ambiguously designated. Here discourses on
Laclaus radical pluralist democracy and Habermas deliberative democracy
coexist and vie for attention with Zakarias (2003) illiberal democracy and
Manns (2004) the dark side of democracy. Democracy, it seems, is
increasingly capable of confounding its theorists.
IV
This volume consists on ten essays followed by a reply from Ernesto Laclau.
The essays are arranged to match the sequence and groupings in Laclaus reply.
As is customary with Laclau, he responds to each essay by identifying key ideas
and arguments that motivate and structure it. Furthermore, he critically
assesses each essay both imminently in terms of its avowed trajectory and goals
and also how it incorporates and addresses his work, especially OPR. Laclau
follows this critical format fairly consistently, with only occasional deviations.
Since Laclau introduces each essay thematically before offering a critical
response, it seems redundant to provide a similar introduction here.
Moreover, Laclaus reply, while polite, is also pointed and sharp in stating
AN INTRODUCTION 203
his disagreements with many of the authors in this volume. This too is
characteristic of Laclau. He rarely pulls his punches irrespective of who his
interlocutor, someone distinguished and established as a Judith Butler or a
Slavoj Zizek or some young scholar who is just beginning to test her
interpretive intuitions and skills. There are several essays in this volume by
both established and novice scholars that are sharply dissected and critiqued by
Laclau. This also prevents me from offering a critical introduction to the
essays. In this context, the privilege of critically engaging and interpreting
essays belongs to Laclau, whose book is the critical object of this volume,
rather than to one of the co-editors. Hence, I will confine myself to identifying
the range of topics covered by the authors.
The first essay by Lisa Disch offers a comparative account of the idea of
political representation, especially within the folds of modern democratic
imaginary, in the works of Hannah Pitkin and Laclau. She notes that Laclau
brings to the study of representation an additional constitutive/symbolic
dimension of identificatory naming that is missing in Pitkin or dismissed by
her as manipulative. The two following essays, by Oliver Marchart and Henry
Krips, respectively, show how the social whole can be articulated at different
levels with different political effects. Marcharts essay initiates a critical
dialogue between two modes of political analysis with which Laclau is closely
associated both as scholar and teacher: the micro-political forms of resistance,
as analyzed by cultural studies in the Birmingham tradition and the macro-
political hegemonic formations as analyzed by the Essex School of political
discourse analysis. Kripss essay attempts to rethink the under-theorized
phenomenon of new social movements and also valorize it (against its
detractors like Habermas, who privileges the politics of the public sphere) as a
venue for enacting new forms of radical political agency. Towards that end,
Krips draws on Laclaus theorization of populist logic to show that new social
movements present a new post-liberal form of democratic-emancipatory
political agency anchored in the less organized and heterogeneous life world.
The next essay about the role of affect in marking the limits of a
democratic community comes from Ivor Chipkin, who writes from the vexed
political space of South Africa. Since a political community has to address the
question of inclusion and exclusion, he asks, how might a radical democracy,
given its openness and plurality, construct self-referential boundaries? To
address that question, Chipkin engages in an extended mediation on the
relevant writings of Laclau and Mouffe.
The next set of three essays by Randall Bush, Christian Lundberg and Gloria
Perello and Paula Biglieri, respectively, are offered as Lacanian interrogations of
Laclaus more recent work, especially OPR, in light of the latters own
considerable interest in and engagement with Lacan. According to Bush,
Laclaus notion of rhetoricity, more precisely the rhetoricity of the social,
draws its hegemonizing motivation and energy from the crossing of the orders
of the symbolic and the real while marginalizing the imaginary. To obviate the
204 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
Notes
1 This moment of the institution of the social through contingent decisions is
what I call the political. This quotation is from an interview with
Worsham and Olson (1999). For an analogous quotation, see Laclau and
Mouffe (1985, p. 153): (T)he problem of the political is the problem of the
institution of the social, that is the definition and articulation of social
relations in a field criss-crossed with antagonisms.
2 For an excellent essay on Laclaus concept of hegemony, see Howarth
(2004).
3 See especially the essay entitled, Universalism, Particularism, and the
Question of Identity (Laclau 1996).
Notes on contributor
References
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