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The Charmed Circle
of Ideology
A Critique of
Laclau and Mouffe,
Butler and Žižek
Geoff Boucher
The Charmed Circle of Ideology
Anamnesis
Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and recollection of what has been lost, forgotten, or efaced. It is therefore a
matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is
also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new.
To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis.
a re.press series
The Charmed Circle of Ideology:
A Critique of Laclau & Moufe, Butler & Žižek
Geof Boucher
re.press Melbourne 2008
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© re.press 2008
This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which
means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as
you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatsoever and that you in no way alter, transform or build
on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse
or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more
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Author: Boucher, Geof
Title: The Charmed Circle of Ideology :
A Critique of Laclau & Moufe, Butler & Žižek
ISBN: 978-0-9805440-4-6
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To Frauke and Annika
Contents
Acknowledgements
page ix
Introduction: Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
1
1. “New Times”: The Emergence of Postmarxism
19
2. Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field: Laclau and Moufe
on Postmodern Socialist Strategy
77
3. The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler
127
4. Radical Negativity: Žižek’s Lacanian Dialectics
165
Conclusion: Theories of Structuration, Theories of Ideology
231
Bibliography
239
Index
273
vii
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a doctoral dissertation and still bears some of the
scars of that experience. Were I to write this from scratch today, I would
probably write a diferent book. It remains, nonetheless, a valid immanent
critique of postmarxism. I wish to acknowledge the following persons for
commenting on chapter drafts: Maria Boucher, Matt Sharpe, Jeremy Moss,
Justin Clemens. David Bennett read the entire thing many times and assisted greatly. Many conversations with Russell Grigg, Justin Clemens and
Matt Sharpe, together with acquaintance with their work, assisted me with
the development of my position on Žižek and psychoanalysis, and I wish to
acknowledge their inluence on my views. The remaining mistakes are those
that neither reason nor friendship could part me from. Above all, I want to
thank Frauke and Annika Hofman.
ix
Introduction
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
Marxism is at the nadir of its fortunes. A new generation of militants and intellectuals is less likely to read Marx because they have resolved to struggle
for a socialist revolution, than because the fashionably abstruse philosopher,
Jacques Derrida, claims that “there will be … no future without Marx”
(Derrida, 1994: 13). For the last two decades—ever since the collapse of Eastern Bloc Communism—the mood of the Left has been dominated by intense rethinking and by the afects associated with the work of mourning. In
the wake of 1989, the Western Left has had to contend with the ideological
undertow (the impossibility and undesirability of socialism), the transformation of the major programmes for both reform and revolution (the collapse of state planning and the command economy) and the absence of progressive political alternatives (the ascendancy of neo-conservative hegemony
combined with the transformation of the social democratic parties into liberal democratic formations). Sweeping inferences are drawn from the decline of the socialist tradition, on the lines of Étienne Balibar’s declaration
that, although “Marx will still be read in the twenty-irst century, not only
as a monument of the past, but as a contemporary author,” nevertheless, we
“have to recognise that Marxism is an improbable philosophy today” (Balibar, 1995c: 1, 118).
The procession of major theoretical igures iling past the “last instance”
of the inal relinquishment of Marxism is truly impressive—and depressing. The ranks of postmarxism constitute a nearly comprehensive “who’s
who” of the leading thinkers and activists of the 1970s New Left. Theoretical authority and conjunctural relevance appear to ballast postmarxism.
Nancy Fraser, for instance, argues that “Marxism as the metanarrative or
master discourse of oppositional politics in capitalist societies is inished. So
too is Marxism as a totalising theory of the system dynamics, crisis tenden1
2
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
cies, and conlict potentialities in capitalist societies” (Aronson, 1995: Fraser cited 111). The emergence of the postmarxian ield from the aftermath
of the avant-garde theoretical Marxism of Louis Althusser and his cothinkers seems to seal the doom of historical materialism, and to leave no alternative but to accept that the liberal-democratic “end of history” is also the
inish of Marxism. Instead of the programme of democratic socialism, the
Left seems to be conined to the “criticism of actually existing democracy”.
Renouncing the ambition to transform the world, the Left has to enter the
new “postmarxian ield of critical theorising”: “the only possible future for
Marxism is as one contributing strand among others in this new postmarxian ield” (Aronson, 1995: 111).
Postmarxian Discourse Theory
Nonetheless, the new postmarxian ield of discourse analysis and radical
democratic politics is not, as some Marxists have claimed, just an “ex-Marxism without substance” (Geras, 1990: 127-168). In many respects, the postmarxian discourse theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moufe, Slavoj
Žižek and Judith Butler represent the most ambitious and challenging eforts
to reconstruct the project of the Left. In the wake of the collapse of historical Communism and the rise of globalisation, the programme, politics and
constituency of the Left is radically in question. The increasing complexity
of the social ield and the widespread acceptance of anti-essentialist theories
in philosophy, politics, cultural studies and social theory, seem to have rendered historical materialist class-analysis untenable. Meanwhile, the emergence of new social movements around unprecedented social antagonisms
mean that the political practices of the class-based Left have become marginalised, at precisely the moment when the popular base of the mainstream
parties is in decline and the agenda of neo-liberalism is under questioning by
radical rightwing movements. Instead of lamenting the decline of class politics and the accumulating irrelevance of the Left, Laclau and Moufe have
sought to re-articulate the conceptual framework within which radical Left
politics could be imagined as a potential alternative to both social democracy and the neo-liberal conservative parties.
Elaboration of postmarxism’s “radical democratic Imaginary” involved
a deconstruction of Marxism, especially of the alleged tendency in Marxian theory to theorise the proletariat as the incarnation of universality. Postmarxism rejects the concept of the historical process as governed by an inexorable logic of historical necessity, culminating in rational mastery of society
and the reconstruction of a transparent socialist order that would not need
any political processes. Instead, Laclau and Moufe develop an agenda that
seeks to integrate socialist strategy within the social revolution inaugurated by modernity, which they claim is characterised by democratic politics
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
3
and the permanence of social conlicts. Developing from their postmarxian
manifesto, Hegemony and Socialist Strateg y: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(1985; hereafter, HSS) Laclau and Moufe elaborate a new theory of discourse in support of their radical democratic programme. Butler and Žižek
have made major contributions to this theory while redeining its strategic
concepts. The publication of the joint work by Butler, Laclau and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000; hereafter, CHU ), with its declaration of a common trajectory and allegiance to the
project of radical democracy, marked an important step in the consolidation
of postmarxism as a distinct tendency.
This work critically maps, for the irst time, the tendency of postmarxism deined by the political strategy of radical democracy, from its inception
in HSS to its formulation as a distinct tendency in CHU. No previous study
presents the combined work of Laclau and Moufe, Butler and Žižek as a
distinct political tendency and in the light of their total theoretical production. While valuable introductions to postmarxian discourse theory exist,
these have restricted themselves to an exposition of the work of Laclau and
Moufe, with only some supplementary positions taken from Žižek (Smith,
1998; Toring, 1999).1 Likewise, the critical literature on Laclau and Moufe,
Butler and Žižek is limited by its restricted focus, taking these theorists serially, rather than severally, as it were. This literature is reviewed in the
relevant chapters. In general, however, it is possible to say that this literature lines up “for” or “against” postmarxism (and correlatively, “against”
or “for” Marxism). My investigation attempts to do something diferent. By
1. Laclau and Moufe, Žižek and Butler are central to this project, but not alone. Their
work has directly produced research in sociology, politics, economics, cultural theory and
philosophy by Torben Dryberg (Dryberg, 1997), David Howarth (Howarth, 2000a), Aletta
Norval (Norval, 1996), Anne-Marie Smith (Smith, 1994) and Yannis Stavrakakis (Stavrakakis,
1999). Their work has indirectly produced a growing body of research inspired by postmarxian discourse theory (Howarth, 2000b; Howarth and Norval, 1998). It has linked up with the
deconstructive philosophy articulated by Simon Critchley (Critchley, 1999; Critchley, 2002)
and with the feminist political philosophy of Wendy Brown (Brown, 1995; Brown, 2001). I
do not analyse the entire range of the empirical studies canvassed by these authors, nor do
I analyse every development in the research programme of postmarxian discourse theory.
In general, I concentrate on the central statements by my primary theoreticians, drawing
upon this supplementary work when necessary. Of course, Butler and Žižek are important
theorists of considerable stature in their own right, with independent contributions to cultural studies and political theory. I do not engage with the important research programme in
queer theory that has been strongly shaped by Butler’s extraordinarily inluential work, concentrating instead on her contribution to postmarxian discourse theory. Likewise, I do not
investigate Žižek’s contributions to ilm theory and psychoanalysis, although I do draw upon
the productions of some of the “Ljubljana Lacanians”—Mladen Dolar (Dolar, 1993; Dolar,
1996; Dolar, 1998), Rastko Močnik (Mocnik, 1993), Renata Salecl (Salecl, 1994; Salecl, 1998;
Salecl, 2000) and Alenka Zupančič (Zupančič, 2000)—where necessary to illuminate Žižek’s
positions. Finally, Moufe’s positions are not necessarily identical with those of Laclau, and
my discussion nowhere presumes an accord that is not explicitly stated.
4
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
critically mapping the political trajectory of postmarxian discourse theory,
it seeks to radicalise postmarxian discourse theories towards a postmodern
Marxism. Following the US Marxist, Fredric Jameson, I contend that the
postmodern is the horizon within which every radical politics develops today ( Jameson, 1991: 297-418). Therefore, a contemporary socialism has to be
articulated through critical engagement with postmodern politics.
Postmarxism is an efort to retrieve the legacy of Marxism for the postmodern condition. Radical democracy attempts to “describe a political
project which rethinks hegemonic strategy in the new historical conditions
of contemporary societies” (Laclau, 2000a: 294). The main question, therefore, is not whether postmarxism represents a fresh episode in the “treason
of the intellectuals,” a peridious “retreat from class” (Wood, 1998) whose
ambition is the “randomisation of history” (Wood, 1997a: 16). I accept Laclau and Moufe’s explanation that postmarxism represents a form of radical postmodern politics that seeks to recover the socialist initiative on transformed historical terrain, by articulating socialist strategy as an extension of
the democratic revolution of modernity (Laclau, 1990: 97-134; Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 149-193). In question is whether the new theories of discourse
and the strategy of “radical and plural democracy” promoted by postmarxism actually succeed in the objective of articulating a contemporary socialist
strategy. I seek therefore to intervene in the central debate on the contemporary theoretical agenda: does the advent of poststructuralism really mean
the end of historical materialism? Is it the case that, as Laclau claims, postmarxism has become “an inevitable decision for anyone aiming to reformulate a political programme for the Left in [contemporary] historical circumstances” (Laclau, 1990: xii)?
To respond to this question, I critically map the tendency of radical
democratic politics from a perspective informed by Structural Marxism
(sometimes known as “Althusserian Marxism”), evaluating the justiications
for joining the “criticism of actually existing democracy” and entering the
new “postmarxian ield of critical theorising”. I seek to determine the “unity-in-diversity” of postmarxian discourse theory by analysing the diferent
positions of Laclau and Moufe, Žižek and Butler, and deining the nature of
the underlying unity of radical democratic politics. According to the “joint
declaration” by Butler, Laclau and Žižek, HSS appears as the programmatic
text for the new tendency, because it “represented a turn to poststructuralist theory within Marxism” (Butler, Laclau et al., 2000: 1). What are the effects of poststructuralism on Marxism and do they necessarily involve the
renunciation of class analysis? What are the theoretical consequences of taking discourse as the model of social practice and what political perspectives
does it open, or foreclose?
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
5
Post-Marxism and Post-Marxism
Laclau and Moufe’s characteristic claim is to retain key insights from Gramsci (hegemony) and Althusser (overdetermination) while deconstructing the
history of Marxist politics and consigning the remainder “to the museum of
antiquities” (Laclau, 1990: 181). The rejection of Marxist-Leninist politics,
however, belies the importance of historical materialism as a social theory
for the major theorists of postmarxism. Generally speaking, radical democratic postmarxism suggests not only a speciically leftwing postmodernism,
but also the continued negotiation of the Marxian legacy. As Laclau explains in a conciliatory moment, postmarxism has not “rejected Marxism.
Something very diferent has occurred. It’s Marxism that has broken up and
I believe that I’m holding on to its best fragments” (Laclau, 1990: 201).
Yet the very term “post-Marxism” seems to relect a crucial ambivalence. Right from the beginning, the “post” in postmarxism was regarded as
a calculated ambiguity, delineating something indeterminate, lying between
temporal eclipse and intellectual supersession (Geras, 1990: 62). Stuart Sim’s
survey essay, “Spectres and Nostalgia: Post-Marxism/Post-Marxism” views
the hyphenation as dividing the postmarxian ield into two camps (Sim,
1998: 1-15). Following Sim, we can suppose that “to be post-Marxist is to have
turned one’s back on the principles of Marxism,” whereas “to be post-Marxist is, in the style of Laclau and Moufe, to attempt to graft recent theoretical
developments … on to Marxism, such that Marxism can be made relevant
to a new cultural climate that is no longer responding to classical Marxist doctrine” (Sim, 1998: 2). Sim positions postmarxism within the political
vacuum on the Left created by the collapse of historical Communism and
the discrediting of classical Marxism. In this void, suggests Sim, the unity of
the ield of postmarxism is given by its retrospective on Marxism, whether
that retrospective is positive—in which case postmarxism retains the ghost
of Marx—or negative—in which case a certain nostalgia for the lost total
theory can be detected. But if the nostalgic remainder active within postMarxism manifests itself as a perennial aroma of lost faith and repetitions of
apostasy, the spectrally Marxian dimension of post-Marxism seems less motivated. “One is left wondering why post-Marxism needs Marxism at all,” Sim
writes, “and what meaningful contribution it can make to a postmodern
politics of the kind Laclau and Moufe are espousing” (Sim, 1998: 2).
Contra Sim, I contend that this question can be answered precisely. Traditions are constituted through complex dialectics of betrayal and renewal,
and the many strands in the Marxian tradition are no exception. 2 The lead2. For a discussion of tradition, authority and betrayal, consult Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (Osborne, 1995: 127-138). Osborne’s position, mediated by a reading of Walter
Benjamin, implies the existence of a multiplicity of tendencies within a tradition and the
political dimension of the conlict of interpretations that are adjudicated by traditionary
authorities. For traditionary authority consult Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Ga-
6
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ing example is Western Marxism, whose turn to an exploration of social
subjectivity, as the antidote to classical Marxism’s mechanical objectivism,
constitutes the paradigm of dissidence in the Marxian tradition (Anderson,
1979). Likewise, Laclau and Moufe’s claim, to deconstructively separate the
theoretical gold of radical insights from the metaphysical dross of Marxism, displays all of the contradictory elements proper to a “betrayal” of tradition that remains internal to its framework. Indeed, Laclau and Moufe’s
concepts of discursive practice and hegemonic articulation are designed to
operate by retaining the Marxian insight into the historicity of social relations, while avoiding the deconstructive criticism of metaphysical principles. Postmarxism’s characteristic turn, from a reiied totality to subjectivity as a principle of rupture, is reminiscent of Western Marxism as a whole
and tends to mark postmarxism as an internal moment of the history of the
Marxian tradition.
Hence the dense atmosphere of ambiguity surrounding postmarxian
declarations of continued faith in, and apostasy towards, the Marxian legacy. On the one hand, postmarxism insists that it is “beyond Marxism,”
and therefore resolutely post-Marxist. It has dispensed with the centrality
of the working class, the materialist postulates concerning historical existence and the importance of class relations for social structuration, and embraced postmodern ethical relativism, historicist skepticism towards foundational claims and a constructivist ontology of discourse that often borders on
subjectivism. Yet, at the same time, as I show in what follows, key concrete
analyses are conducted from a recognisably Marxist frame. So, on the other
hand, postmarxism maintains what can only be described as a tortured loyalty to the strands of the Marxist tradition.
Laclau and Moufe have vigorously defended themselves from accusations on the Left that they are simply ex-Marxists and have taken some
pains to make their relationship to Marxism explicit. “We believe that,”
they argue in their reply to one such criticism:
by clearly locating ourselves in a post-Marxist terrain, we not only
help to clarify the meaning of contemporary social struggles but also
to give Marxism its theoretical dignity, which can only proceed from
recognition of its limitations and of its historicality. Only through such
recognition will Marx’s work remain present in our tradition and our
political culture (Laclau and Moufe, 1987b: 130).
Now, “our tradition and our political culture” is a notoriously vague expression. So, in response to further questioning, Laclau again returned to
the theme:
damer, 1998: 277-285) and Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, volume three (Ricoeur, 1988:
207-240). Laclau’s grasp of the category of tradition springs primarily from Gadamer and
reproduces his tendency to regard traditions as unitary, thereby depoliticising the conlict of
interpretations.
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
7
as far as I am concerned, the deconstruction of Marxist tradition, not
its mere abandonment, is what proves important. The loss of collective
memory is not something to be overjoyed about. It is always an
impoverishment and a traumatic fact. One only thinks from a tradition.
Of course, the relation with tradition should not be one of submission
and repetition but of transformation and critique. One must construct
one’s discourse as diference in relation to that tradition and this implies
at the same time continuities and discontinuities (Laclau, 1990: 179).
The conclusion is as unavoidable as it is surprising: postmarxism thinks
from the tradition of Marxism, in terms of a diference from and within that
tradition. While postmarxism is linked to the cultural turn and postmodern
politics, its radicalism springs from a continuous (deconstructive) renegotiation
of its relation to Marxism.
Post-Althusserian Theories of Ideolog y
I contend that postmarxism in its emergent state remains in a relation of
negative dependency upon Marxism, which it relies upon for theoretical
raw material, endlessly re-traversing a deconstruction of historical materialism so as to generate its substantive positions. This relation to Marxism can
be further speciied, because postmarxian discourse theory begins as a development of the post-Althusserian concept of ideology. To be exact: postmarxian theory departs from Althusser’s “notes for an investigation” into
“ideology and ideological state apparatuses,” or the “ISAs essay” (Althusser,
1971: 127-186). This is crucial, because postmarxism prolongs and even exacerbates the central problem in the Althusserian theory of ideology. The
problem with Althusser’s essay is the incomplete synthesis between the critical concept of ideology (ideology as a mystiication of exploitative social relations) and the neutral conception of ideology (ideology as a neutral terrain
on which social agents contend for hegemony) (Larrain, 1983: 88-121).
In the Althusserian problematic, the “ISAs essay” was intended to solve
the diicult question of how the complex whole of the social formation,
which had been described as a “structural eternity” (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 107, 189), was nonetheless capable of historical transformations as
a result of political interventions. Althusser’s adaptation of the psychoanalytic concept of the Imaginary3 for the Marxist theory of ideology implied a
shift beyond the supposition that ideologies are mainly conceptual systems
3. According to Žižek, “in the imaginary relation, the two poles of opposition are complementary; together they build a harmonious totality; each gives the other what the other lacks
… The symbolic relation is, on the contrary, diferential: the identity of each of the moments
consists in its diference to the opposite moment … it is not complementary to the other, but
on the contrary, takes the place of the lack in the other. … Finally, the Real is deined as a point of
the immediate coincidence of the opposite poles,” that is, a traumatic impossibility, or logical
inconsistency (Žižek, 1989: 171-173).
8
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
(mistaken theories of social relations), towards the hypothesis that ideologies
are a modality of lived experience. According to this conception, ideology
is a subject-centred body of representations that inserts individuals into social practices by aligning their social subjectivity with the requirements of
their existence as mere supports of the structure. “So ideology,” Althusser
summarised:
is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world. This relation,
which only appears as “conscious” on condition that it is unconscious,
in the same way only seems to be simple on condition that it is complex,
that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations, a second
degree relation. In ideology men do indeed express, not the relationship
between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the
relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes
both a real relation and an “imaginary,” “lived” relation (Althusser,
1969: 233).
The mystiication inherent in ideology springs from its subject-centred
misrecognition of decentred social structures, not from a motivated distortion of economic relations. Althusser’s embrace of the neutral conception of
ideology as a process of subject-formation—that is, the formation of political
subjects through their interpellation, or “hailing,” by the state machinery
in the process of education, formal democracy, civic life and so forth—represented a breakthrough. Ideological “state” apparatuses function by “interpellating,” or hailing, individuals as socialised subjects whose political
subjectivity is characterised by an ineluctable misrecognition of their social
existence. According to Althusser’s extraordinarily inluential essay, ideology consists of ritualised practices in institutional contexts and so ideology
has a material existence (Althusser, 1971: 133).
In the “ISAs essay,” Althusser jettisoned residual functionalist assumptions, present in For Marx, which made subjects into mere cultural dupes. At
a stroke, Althusser’s essay opened a non-reductive conception of ideology
and transformed the Structural Marxist problematic, from a deterministic
one dominated by structurally necessary social reproduction (Althusser and
Balibar’s “structural eternity”), to a probabilistic universe in which social reproduction becomes something contested by politicised social subjects. Because ideology is an ensemble of material practices producing subjects, it is
impossible to reduce ideology to an epiphenomenal “false consciousness”
that merely relects the relations of production. The subject-positions produced by ideological institutions depend upon the balance of forces in the
state apparatus and on the existence (or not) of counter-hegemonic ideological apparatuses—meaning that social reproduction is something contested,
not something automatic. In the English-speaking world, this essay massively inluenced—via the Birmingham School of sociology and ilm studies
centred on the journal Screen—the programme of cultural studies, as the in-
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
9
vestigation of the cultural practices constitutive of social subjectivity. 4
Despite its suggestive character, however, Althusser’s essay did not resolve the central problem of Structural Marxism, for Althusser’s position
now encountered the opposite diiculty. Having dispensed with the assumption of an automatic social reproduction that might generate “structural
eternities,” Althusser had to explain why nonetheless, on balance, it was
most probable that the social formation would continue to exist. Most likely,
class relations would continue to be reproduced through the production of
class-based subject-positions, unless explicitly contested (by, for instance, the
French Communist Party, to which Althusser belonged). But if the state was
not just an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, but instead a complex institutional structure enjoying its own relative autonomy from the relations of production, then why would the “ideological state apparatuses”
produce ideologically submissive working-class subjects? What was the link
between social subjectivity and the reproduction of social classes? Althusser’s essay broached this question in the “Afterword” (Althusser, 1971: 183186), but never resolved it, leading to an entire generation of post-Althusserian eforts to re-interpret this essay through the lens of neo-Marxian theory
and post-structuralist philosophies.
One of the most inluential eforts to solve the problem of the relation
between ideological competition and class power was essayed by Laclau,
who proposed to cut the Gordian Knot of the reproduction of class relations
by completely separating social class and ideological subjectivity. Henceforth, Laclau declared, classes were economic and ideologies were … well,
ideological. Yet, in this operation, Laclau also severed the critical and neutral components of Althusser’s theory of ideology, so as to dispense with
the class element. This results in a Marxism best described as an economic reductionism of a structuralist variety (or structuralist economism), exempliied by Laclau’s own Politics and Ideolog y in Marxist Theory (1977) and
Moufe’s contributions to Gramsci and Marxist Theory (1979). This might be
briely described as the proposition that while the social relations of production and the productive forces exhaust the deinition of the fundamental classes of capitalist society, classes loat in a non-capitalist political and
cultural environment, which they try to hegemonise as political and cultural supplements to their economic dominance. Subsequently, Laclau and
Moufe repudiated this position and turned to a deconstruction of structuralist economism in Hegemony.
While Laclau and Moufe (in particular) represent structuralist economism as exhausting the totality of the Marxian legacy, this is actually not accurate. Indeed, their deconstruction of structuralist economism in HSS tends
4. The landmark text of the Birmingham school that uses Althusser’s essay is Hebdige
(Hebdige, 1991); for a survey of the theoretical origins of cultural studies, see Hall (Hall,
1992). For the lineage of Screen, consult Easthope (Easthope, 1983).
10
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
only to invert the problems of economic reductionism while dispersing the
political conclusions of this form of Marxism into a politics of indeterminacy. In postmarxian theory, Politics and Ideolog y in Marxist Theory is relied upon
as the deinitive demonstration of the “class essentialism” and “economic reductionism” of Marxism, inal evidence that historical materialism means
the “disappearance of politics” into economics (Smith, 1998: 43-83; Toring,
1999: 15-34). Indeed, Laclau has retroactively reconstructed this “Gramsci-inspired critique of Structural Marxism” as the inception of his postmarxism (Laclau, 1990: 202). Politics and Ideolog y in Marxist Theory is therefore
something of an “ur-text” of postmarxian discourse theory. My contention
is that this work is fundamentally lawed. Laclau arrived at a highly unstable
transitional position that combines the assertion that every phenomenon is
overdetermined by class with the proposition that ideology is class-neutral.
Laclau’s “Gramsci-inspired critique of Structural Marxism” (Toring, 1999:
15-34) led to postmarxian historicism once the structuralist economism of
this transitional phase was subjected to deconstruction in HSS.
Post-Althusserian theory thereby entered the charmed circle of ideology, where the ideological struggle at irst displaced, and then completely
subsumed, the political and economic struggles. Once the characterisation
of ideology as both social foundation and societal cement is accepted, then
ideological discourse becomes constitutive of both social relations and subjects’ worldviews. Ideological discourse now constitutes a unity of objective
institutions and discursive interpretations (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 107),
which determines that a henceforth generalised “discourse” constructs everything (Laclau, 1990: 104), from the matter of distant stars to the terrestrial
competition between ideological worldviews. I maintain that such a theory
of ideological discourse creates a charmed circle, in which everything appears to be a result of political subjectivity, meaning that postmarxian discourse theory necessarily gravitates towards relativism.
The Problem of Historicism
Where Althusser claimed that the mode of production is the “absent cause”
of the social formation that is “present only in its efects,” post-Althusserian historicism alleges that there exists no such cause, absent or otherwise
(Laclau, 1990: 59). The social ield is conceptualised as a lat surface, upon
which social agents inscribe diferent hegemonic articulations unconstrained
by any hidden structural matrix (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 98). Lacking any
reference to a determinate extra-discursive materiality, postmarxian theories of discourse necessarily include theory itself (their own included) within the charmed circle of ideology. Accordingly, for Laclau, the postmodern
Left needs to “reformulate the values of the Enlightenment in the direction
of a radical historicism” (Laclau, 1990: 84). By rejecting every “epistemolog-
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
11
ical break” between science and ideology, postmarxism postulates that theory is merely an ideological worldview, rendered coherent by its presentation
as an explicit doctrine (Laclau, 1996a: 299).
Historicism is a relativist hermeneutics, which postulates the incommensurability of historical epochs or cultural formations and therefore denies the possibility of a general history or trans-cultural universals. Best
described as “a critical movement insisting on the prime importance of historical context” to the interpretation of texts, actions and institutions, historicism emerges in reaction against both philosophical rationalism and scientiic theory (Hamilton, 1996: 2). According to Paul Hamilton’s general
introduction:
Anti-Enlightenment historicism develops a characteristically double
focus. Firstly, it is concerned to situate any statement—philosophical,
historical, aesthetic, or whatever—in its historical context. Secondly,
it typically doubles back on itself to explore the extent to which any
historical enterprise inevitably relects the interests and bias of the
period in which it was written … [and] it is equally suspicious of its own
partisanship (Hamilton, 1996: 2).
It is sometimes supposed that a strategy of socio-historical contextualisation represents the alpha and omega of materialist analysis—e.g. Jameson’s celebrated claim that “always historicise” is the imperative of historical
materialism ( Jameson, 1981: 11). I contend, on the contrary, that although
necessary, contextualisation alone is radically insuicient. This strategy of
historical contextualisation, as I shall demonstrate in the course of my investigation apropos of postmarxism, sufers from three serious defects. The historicist problematic depends upon the reduction of every phenomenal ield
to an immanent network of diferential relations and the consequent evacuation of the category of cause from its theoretical armoury (Copjec, 1994b:
1-15). It is therefore unable to theorise the hierarchy of efective causes within
an overdetermined phenomenon and must necessarily reduce to a descriptive list, progressively renouncing explanation for interpretation. Secondly,
lacking a theoretical explanation of the unequal factors overdetermining a
phenomenon, historicism necessarily lattens the causal network surrounding its object into a homogeneous ield of co-equal components. As a consequence, historicism’s description of the social structure or historical sequence gravitates in the direction of a simple totality, where everything can
be directly connected to everything else. Thirdly, the self-relexive turn to
historical inscription of the researcher’s position of enunciation into the contextual ield results, on these assumptions, in a gesture of relativisation that cannot stop short of relativism. The familiar performative contradictions of relativism then ensure that historicism must support itself through an explicit
or implicit appeal to a neutral metalinguistic framework, which typically
12
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
takes the form of a historical master narrative or essentialist conception of
the social totality. The inal result of the historicist turn, therefore, is that
this “materialist” analysis is in actuality a form of spiritual holism.
Historicism relies upon a variant of what Althusser called “expressive
causality,” which acts through “the primacy of the whole as an essence of
which the parts are no more than the phenomenal expressions” (Althusser
and Balibar, 1970: 187). Expressive causality postulates an essential principle whose epiphenomenal expressions are microcosms of the whole (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 187-192). Whether this expressive totality is social or
historical is a contingent question of theoretical preference. When the social
ield is regarded as an expressive totality, the institutional structures of a historical epoch—economy, politics, law, culture, philosophy and so on—are
viewed as externalisations of an essential principle that is manifest in the apparent complexity of these phenomena. When the historical process is considered to be an expressive totality, a historical master narrative operates to
guarantee that the successive historical epochs represent the unfolding of a
single essential principle. Formally speaking, the problem with expressive
(also known as “organic” and “spiritual”) totalities is that they postulate a
homology between all the phenomena of the social totality, so that the social
practices characteristic of the distinct structural instances of the complex
whole of the social formation are regarded as secretly “the same” ( Jameson,
1981: 34-52).
In the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács, for instance, the historicist problematic begins from the relativisation of theory, whereby that it is claimed that
historical materialism is the “perspective” and “worldview” of the revolutionary class and that, in general, theory (philosophy) is only the coherent
systematisation of the ideological worldview of a social group (Lukács, 1971:
149). No distinction of kind exists between theory and ideology, opening the
path for the foundational character of ideolog y, expressed through the Lukácsian
claim that the ideological consciousness of a historical subject is the expression of objective relations, and that, correlatively, this historical subject (the
proletariat) alienates-expresses a free society by means of a transparent grasp
of social processes (Lukács, 1971: 27, 187-188). The society, as an expression
of a single structure of social relations (where the commodity form and reiied consciousness are theoretical equivalents) is an expressive totality (Lukács,
1971: 83, 85), so that politics and ideology can be directly deduced from philosophical relations. According to Lukács’ directly Hegelian conception, the
historical subject is the uniied proletariat, which, as the “creator of the totality of [social] contents” (Lukács, 1971: 123), makes history according to its
conception of the world, and thus functions as an identical subject-object of history (Lukács, 1971: 149). The identical subject-object and the transparency of
praxis therefore form the telos of the historical process. Lukács reduces the
multiplicity of social practices operative within the social formation to the
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
13
model of an individual “making history,” through the externalisation of an
intellectual conception of the world. Lukács therefore arrives at the inal element of the historicist problematic, namely, a theorisation of social practice on
the model of individual praxis, presented as the historical action of a “collective
individual” (Lukács, 1971: 137-140). This structure of claims is vulnerable to
philosophical deconstruction (Gasché, 1985) and leads to individualist political conclusions (Althusser, 1976).
In the light of the Gramscian provenance of postmarxism, however, it
is important to note that while the explicit target of Althusser’s critique was
the Hegelian totality, Althusser is equally critical of the aleatory posture of
Gramsci’s “absolute historicism,” regarding it as exemplary of the impasse
of radicalised historicism (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 119-144). Althusser
argues that Gramsci preserves the philosophical structure of historicism exempliied by Lukács and so the criticism of “expressive totality,” or spiritual
holism, also applies to Gramsci. According to Gramsci, “the philosophy of
praxis is absolute ‘historicism,’ the absolute secularisation and earthiness of
thought, an absolute humanism of history” (Gramsci, 1971: 465).5 Gramsci’s
is an “absolute” historicism because it subjects the “absolute knowledge”
supposed to be possible at the Hegelian “end of history” to historicisationrelativisation: instead of absolute knowledge, every truly universal worldview becomes merely the epochal totalisation of the present. Consequently,
Gramsci rejects the conception that a social agent might aspire to “absolute
knowledge” by adopting the “perspective of totality”. If anything, this exacerbates the problems of historicism by bringing the inherent relativism of
the position to the surface. Ideology, conceptualised as the worldview of a
historical subject (revolutionary proletariat, hegemonic alliance), forms the
foundation of the social ield, because in the historicist lens a social system is
cemented by the ideology of the dominant group. Philosophy (and by extension, theory) represents only the systematisation of ideology into a coherent
doctrine, while politics is based on ideological manipulation as its necessary
precondition. Thus, for historicism, every “theoretical” intervention is immediately a political act, and correlatively, theory becomes the direct servant
of ideology.
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
For Althusser, Gramsci’s reconstruction of Marxism as the “philosophy of
praxis” necessarily leads to historicist relativism. This is not because of some
subjective defect on Gramsci’s part, but because historicism is an intellec5. The best analysis of Gramsci’s work remains Perry Anderson’s seminal essay on the
“antinomies of Gramsci” (Anderson, 1976). For an Althusserian analysis of Gramsci, see
Buci-Glucksmann’s (sometimes forced) extended interpretation of the Prison Notebooks (BuciGlucksmann, 1980). An example of the historicist interpretation of Gramsci is provided by
Boggs (Boggs, 1976).
14
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
tual structure, or “theoretical problematic”. Althusser’s central claim is that
the theoretical problematic determines the limits of what can be articulated
within a research programme. Therefore, the “project of thinking Marxism as an (absolute) historicism automatically unleashes a logically necessary
chain reaction which tends to latten out the Marxist totality into a variation
of the Hegelian totality” (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 132). Drawing upon
Althusser’s concept of “theoretical practice” (Althusser, 1969: 182-193), I deine the postmarxian ield as constituted by a process of theoretical production whose moments consist of theoretical raw materials (a speciic historical
and theoretical relation to Marxism), a theoretical problematic, or conceptual
framework (postmarxian historicism) and a body of theoretical knowledge,
or ensemble of substantive theoretical positions (the formulation of a new
theory of discourse and the political strateg y of radical democracy).6 Nonetheless, despite the polemical thrust of my analysis of postmarxism, the Althusserian
concept of a problematic is designed not as an excuse for denunciations, but
as a research instrument. Speciically, Althusser claims to develop a structural hermeneutic capable of producing the textual unconscious of a theoretical work, locating in its ruptures and silences the existence of contradictions that are the unspoken question to which the text is a reply (Althusser
and Balibar, 1970: 28). If postmarxism is an ensemble of “answers without
questions,” then the aim of a post-Althusserian analysis is to disclose the
open question that a speciic historico-theoretical moment generates. I shall
6. The reader may be surprised to see Althusser’s old telescope being dusted of to map
the theoretical debates of the twenty-irst century (Thompson called it an “orrery,” but it remains more than a museum-piece). While Althusser’s theory of science has been immensely
reined and developed in the work of Roy Bhaskar (Resch, 1992; Collier, 1994), the structure
of the Althusserian concept of “problematic” remains close to Bhaskar’s idea of the scientiic
“production of ideas from ideas” (Bhaskar, 1978; Bhaskar, 1979)—both Resch and Collier
make this point (Resch, 1992; Collier, 1994). Secondly, the Althusserian distinction between
the knowledge-object and the real object is similar to Bhaskar’s distinction between, respectively, the transitive and the intransitive objects of science. There are two major diferences
between Althusser and Bhaskar. Firstly, Bhaskar maintains—and I support this conclusion—
that within a realist ontology, the cycle of knowledge-generation must improve scientiic
knowledge of the intransitive object. This resolves the tension in the Althusserian conceptual
universe between a theory of historical epistemology and Althusser’s commitment to realist
materialism. Secondly, Bhaskar develops a non-metaphysical materialist dialectics—Althusser is an anti-dialectician—that, while highly critical of both Hegel and Marx, represents a
major contribution to historical materialism (Bhaskar, 1991: especially “Marxian Dialectic I,”
344-347 and “Marxian Dialectic II,” 348-353). Bhaskar’s dialectics revolves upon “transformative negations,” that is, determinate ontological negations, and emphasises the irreducibility of dialectical contradictions to logical contradictions (Bhaskar, 1991: 6, 56-63). Broadly
speaking, Bhaskar designates processes characterised by the unity (not the identity) of opposite determinations, in the form of enabling constraints on action that generate “double-bind”
situations, as “dialectical,” and this is the sense of the word hereafter in this work (Bhaskar,
1991: 56). Dialectical theory does not support performative contradictions, which remain the
“basic form of theory/practice and relective inconsistency” (Bhaskar, 1991: 44).
Critically Mapping the Postmarxian Field
15
show in the course of this investigation that this question revolves upon the
problem of structuration, that is, the generative dialectical process whereby
structures are reformed while acting as matrices of partial constraint to their
own transformation, at once ground and result of transformative practices.
In other words, I intend to demonstrate that postmarxism exhibits the
characteristic erasure of social complexity and reinstitution of expressive totality theorised by Althusser as the inevitable consequence of embracing the
historicist problematic. I do not for a moment deny the complexity and unevenness of Laclau and Moufe, Butler and Žižek; nor do I suppose that a
theoretical problematic afects every researcher in a ield identically; nor, inally, do I dispute that they are sometimes manifestly aware of the problems
associated with historicism. What I claim is that the historicist problematic
functions as a theoretical unconscious that prevents postmarxism from exploiting many of its own insights, and that, insofar as historicism is only
criticised episodically and not structurally, it remains the centre of gravity,
governing, in the inal analysis, postmarxism’s substantive positions. I maintain that the historicist problematic is characterised by ive key positions: the
relativisation of theory, the foundational character of ideology, the expressive conception of history, an identical subject-object and a theory of social
practice modelled on individual praxis. These characteristics form the basis
for my chapter sequence, whereby I shall demonstrate that postmarxian discourse theory is structured by the historicist problematic.
In this work, I am interested in the moment of emergence of postmarxism: broadly speaking, from Hegemony and Socialist Strateg y (1985) through to
the joint declaration of tendency in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000).
Speciically, I am interested in the way in which embrace of the historicist
problematic during this formative period sets up the positions of Laclau and
Moufe, Butler and Žižek within expressive and individualist conceptions of
history and praxis. In another work, I shall critique the subsequent development of these positions, starting from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000)
and tracking through to the present.
In Chapter One, I locate postmarxism in its historical context and explain how the relativisation of theory determines the postmarxian conception of the necessity for a shift “beyond Marxism”. In Chapter Two, I turn to
the major theoretical statements of postmarxism in the works of Laclau and
Moufe. I demonstrate that a latent expressive totality of history subtends
the problematic of Laclau and Moufe, and I show that this determines the
limits to their deconstruction-inlected post-Althusserian theory of ideology.
Chapter Three places Butler’s Foucault-inspired post-Althusserian theory of
ideology under the critical lens. I suggest that the successive waves of theorisation of Butler’s inluential concept of “performativity” represent so many
eforts to escape from the implications of a set of assumptions regarding discourse that lead ineluctably towards a conception of social practice modeled
16
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
on individual praxis. investigates the theoretical hesitations, political reversals and ethical uncertainties in Žižek’s Lacanian-inspired post-Althusserian theory of ideology, to propose that Žižek’s break from postmarxism towards a messianic Marxism is informed by an impossible desire to recreate
the identical subject-object of history. Finally, Chapter Four investigates the
theoretical hesitations, political reversals and ethical uncertainties in Žižek’s
Lacanian-inspired post-Althusserian theory of ideology, to propose that
Žižek’s break from postmarxism towards a messianic Marxism is informed
by an impossible desire to recreate the identical subject-object of history.
Although the postmarxists have made some important advances in the
theory of ideology, my investigation is critical of the tendency’s collapse into
historicism, especially its abandonment of causal historical explanation for
a relativist political hermeneutics. While accepting the necessity of a Marxist engagement with poststructuralism, I contend that any post-Althusserian
theory needs to fully grasp the historical and theoretical stakes involved in
Structural Marxism’s incomplete break from classical historical materialism. Laclau and Moufe, Butler and Žižek radically underestimate the sophistication of Structural Marxism, which does not need to resort to a dismissal of poststructuralism in order to produce a viable contemporary class
analysis. I seek to integrate many of the insights of postmarxism to outline
an expanded theory of class politics that escapes the “charmed circle of ideology,” that is, postmarxism’s tendency to reduce politics and economics to
ideological struggles.
1
“New Times”: The Emergence of Postmarxism
Marx somewhere says that every incomplete revolution is followed by a crapulous depression, during which the old order regains its ascendancy by
driving radical thinking into the margins of political life. When “the year of
the barricades” (1968) was followed not merely by three decades of neo-liberal counter-ofensive, but then by the disappointment trailing after the democratic revolutions of 1989, this crapulous depression—ably documented by
Terry Eagleton (Eagleton, 1996)—turned into “desolation” and “mourning”
(Aronson, 1995: 4, 9). Yet, as Freud reminds us, the transition from the desolation of melancholia to the work of mourning (and the subsequent adoption of a new ideal) is often accomplished via a moment of manic euphoria
(Freud, 1984: 251-268). On the Left, this euphoria takes the form of a celebration of the supposed paradigm shift “beyond Marxism” inspired by the
advent of “New Times, New Social Movements and New Democracy,” of
which postmarxism is supposed to be the theoretical expression.1
The notion that historical materialism now stands behind the “New
Times,” stranded by history, still speaking the discourse of a less complex
society, has acquired the force of a popular prejudice. Postmarxism, aligning itself with these themes, has been celebrated as a postmodern politics in
tune with the emerging realities of economic globalisation, worldwide democracy and postmodern culture (Eschle, 2001: 53-84; Nash, 2000: 1-45).
This “paradigm shift” entails the transformation of social and cultural the1. The expression “new times” comes from the journal Marxism Today, a pioneering advocate of the thesis of the advent of a new, postmodern reality that rendered the class-struggle
prognoses of the Left invalid. For a devastating critique of the politics of Marxism Today,
consult Saville’s article (Saville, 1990) and for an analysis of the “enriched Gramscianism”
that forms the general context for the concept of new times propounded by Marxism Today,
consult Harris (Harris, 1992).
19
20
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ory, in line with the dominant philosophical motif (philosopheme) of radical
contingency, and the abandonment of discourses of redistributive justice for
the postmodern strategy of multiple struggles for cultural recognition (Fraser, 1996: 1-39). These are taken to be “self-evidently” incompatible with historical materialism. The concept of an “obviously” postmarxian social reality belongs with the idea that the collapse of “actually existing socialism”
(or historical Communism) means the end of socialism as a historical movement. Together they constitute the received popular wisdom of the age.
Laclau and Moufe accept the common sense of the epoch and systematise it philosophically. According to Laclau and Moufe, not only has “the
era of normative epistemologies come to an end,” but embracing “the discourse of radical democracy [means] … renouncing the discourse of the
universal” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 192). In line with postmodernism, Laclau announces that the Left needs to “reformulate the values of the Enlightenment in the direction of a radical historicism and to renounce its
rationalistic epistemological and ontological foundations … to expand the
democratic potentialities of [the socialist] tradition, while abandoning totalitarian tendencies arising from its reoccupation of the ground of apocalyptic
universalism” (Laclau, 1990: 84). Targeting Marxism’s supposed insistence
that the proletariat is the direct incarnation of political universality, Laclau
announces that “the more ‘universal’ the idea to be embodied is, the greater
the distance from the historical limitations of the social agents intended as
its bearers will be, and the more likely it is that the result will be a monstrous
symbiosis” (Laclau, 1990: xi). In other words, to avoid a new Stalinism, we
need to embrace the relativisation of the universal that is the correlate to the
postmodern “end of Enlightenment”. Supposedly, the Left needs to accept
the conclusions of the postmodern analysis: that there is no privileged social
agent for historical change, no special structural level that holds the key to
social development and no uniied space of political contestation where the
contradictions of the social formation condense (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
85). In the light of the supposed ineluctability of these historical and intellectual transformations, Laclau claims, postmarxism has become “an inevitable decision for anyone aiming to reformulate a political programme for the
Left in [contemporary] historical circumstances” (Laclau, 1990: xii).
This chapter probes the justiications for a “paradigm shift” to postmarxian theory, seeking to elucidate the links between postmodern culture
and radical democratic politics. Postmarxism, I maintain, relies upon a concealed historico-spiritual narrative, according to which, the new epoch of
“postmodernity” is to be expressed through a shift from modern to postmodern politics and culture. This epochal “spirit of the age”—a sort of “Hegel-lite”—is represented through the concept of “New Times,” which functions to frame postmarxism’s empirical arguments for the redundancy of
modern concepts of emancipation. Generally speaking, postmarxism’s ra-
“New Times”
21
tionale for moving “beyond Marxism” is advanced by means of three major empirical claims: (1) that the main causes of social conlict in the contemporary world cannot be explained from a Marxist perspective; (2) that
the agency of the new social movements renders the notion of a proletarian
subject of history bankrupt; and, (3) that Marxism cannot generate a democratic programme.
Accordingly, the chapter is divided into ive sections. In the irst section,
I examine the claims that the “New Times” represent an epochal transition
beyond modernity. In the second section, I probe the related argument that
the “New Times” mandate a “paradigm shift” to postmodern theory. Then,
in sections three, four and ive, I investigate the major social theoretical and
political claims of postmarxism: the forms of social conlict in the contemporary world; the role and nature of the New Social Movements (NSM); and,
the relationship between Marxism and democracy. In the relevant sections
of this chapter I examine the evidence for the postmarxian claims and conclude that the postmarxian arguments exhibit some key anomalies. But I
also contend the entire methodological approach of postmarxism—which I
maintain is a form of cognitive and moral relativism—leads to a major conceptual problem. Postmarxism relativises theory so that theory becomes another expression of the historical process, on the same level as ideology. The
erasure of the epistemological distinction between theory and ideology, especially when linked to an historico-spiritual totality, begins by supplanting
explanation with description and ends by imposing structures of ideological
misrecognition onto theory. I therefore not only highlight the empirical realities that constitute theoretical anomalies for the postmarxian claims, but
also I seek to demonstrate that postmarxian theory regards social existence
through the characteristic distortions of the ideological lens. In subsequent
chapters these anomalies are explained within a theoretical framework that
supplies an alternative to postmarxism.
In the irst section of the chapter, I demonstrate that postmarxism relies
upon an ideological conception of “postmodernity,” which supports an expressive relation between history and theory. I then confront the irst major
postmarxian claim, that Marxism has failed to explain the crisis dynamics
and the main lines of conlict in contemporary societies (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 149-193; Steinmetz, 1994: 176-212). In refuting this, I trace postmarxism’s imposition of an imaginary unity onto diverse social phenomena,
through the replacement, in successive theorisations of the contemporary
conjuncture, of theoretical structures by subject-centred phenomenological
descriptions. Secondly, following a widely accepted belief on the Left (Giddens, 1994a), postmarxism holds that the new social movements (hereafter, NSM)—composed of a diversity of non-class-centred social movements
centred on identity politics, including urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian,
feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional and sexual minority movements, and
22
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
so forth (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 159)—are the bearers of the “social revolutions of our time” (Laclau, 1985: 42). Postmarxists claim that the advent
of the NSM invalidates the Marxian conception of the historical process
and provides the deinitive refutation of historical materialism (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 3; Moufe, 1988: 31; Smith, 1998: 3; Steinmetz, 1994: 177). In
the third section of the chapter, I demonstrate that, in the classical ideological style, postmarxism transforms the NSM into the specular opposite, or
inverted mirror-image, of the “traditional working class”. One consequence
of this is that postmarxism is forced to advocate the untenable claim that
the NSM have nothing to do with class location. As an alternative, I propose
that the empirical evidence suggests that eliminating class from the explanation of the NSM is as futile as reducing them to class politics: the empirical evidence suggests that the NSM are the result of complex social determinations including class location. Finally, it is supposed that increasing social
complexity and postmodern pluralism undermine the socialist conception
of political strategy, meaning that Marxism cannot produce a democratic
political programme for contemporary society (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
177; Smith, 1998: 115). This is a structure of misrecognition which depends
upon a massive act of theoretical repression, namely, the elimination of postmarxism’s radical dependence on the legacy of Eurocommunism. I show
that there is an actuality a long tradition of democratic theory in Marxism
and—more importantly—a number of important practical experiments in
democratic politics. I thereby demonstrate that the functional role of ideology—the concealment of contradictions—is an important aspect of the postmarxian substitution of ideological competition for theoretical debate.
THEORIES OF A NEW EPOCH OF POSTMODERN POLITICS
The Crapulous Depression of “New Times”
Postmarxian politics—the strategy of radical democracy—is generally supposed to be a postmodern politics that is the expression of a new society.
During the 1980s, Laclau and Moufe launched the manifesto of the new
political and theoretical current of postmarxism. They proposed that the
Left stood at a turning-point between historic oblivion and a new direction,
and advocated turning towards a radical and plural democracy as a reconceptualisation of socialist strategy.
The “evident truths” of the past—the classical forms of analysis and
political calculation, the nature of the forces in conlict, the very meaning
of the Left’s struggles and objectives—have been seriously challenged by
an avalanche of historical mutations which have riven the ground on
which those truths were constituted (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 2).
Accordingly, the Left was faced not only with the falsiication of its stra-
“New Times”
23
tegic perspectives, but also the exposure of “actually existing socialism” as
a new form of domination. Nonetheless, the situation was not solely characterised in terms of the delegitimation of Marxism and the retreat of the
progressive movements. To the contrary, strategically misreading the defensive conjuncture as one of advance, Laclau and Moufe maintained that a
“whole series of positive new phenomena underlie these mutations,” such as
the NSM and the “atypical forms of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery”. Conjuncturally, therefore, “Western societies face a crisis
of governability and a threat of dissolution at the hands of the egalitarian
danger” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 2). However, this conjuncture was also
marked by a crisis of the classical Marxist concept of revolution, which allegedly rested upon the inaugural character of the revolutionary act, whereby
the uniied proletariat seizes state power and uses this as an institutional locus from which society can be rationally reconstructed (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 178). The Marxian schema relies upon a universal social agency (the
proletariat) and a unique position from which social transformed can be effected (the state):
What is now in crisis is a whole conception of socialism which rests
upon the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of
Revolution, with a capital “r,” as the founding moment in the transition
from one type of society to another, and upon the illusory prospect of
a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render
pointless the moment of politics. The plural and multifarious character
of contemporary social struggles has inally dissolved the last foundation
for that political imaginary. Peopled with “universal” subjects and
built around History in the singular, it has postulated “society” as an
intelligible structure that could be intellectually mastered on the basis
of certain class positions and reconstituted as a rational, transparent
order, through a founding act of a political character. Today, the Left
is witnessing the inal act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 2).
Responding to the crisis of socialism in the broadest possible sense, then,
Laclau and Moufe proposed to jettison revolutionary insurrection, vanguard parties and the universality of the proletariat. The classical Marxist perspective is incompatible, they argued, with the increasing functional diferentiation of contemporary societies, the plurality of socio-political
projects brought to light by the NSM and the democratic politics of the New
Left. In most respects, it seems to me that one can only agree with their
broad general perspective. What is less obvious is that this critique of classical Marxism entails a rejection of post-classical (contemporary) forms of
neo-Marxism. Equally un-argued seems to me the notion that the crisis of
historical communism and classical Marxism automatically rules out any
reconstruction of historical materialism and socialist strategy that might dis-
24
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
pense with insurrectionary violence, vanguard parties and the ontological
centrality of the proletariat, but retain socialist transformation, progressive
organisation, universal claims and the hope of post-capitalist emancipation.
But this is precisely what Laclau and Moufe do rule out.
Curiously, despite invoking social complexity, theorists of postmarxism
do not hesitate to retotalise the social ield through the metaphor of “new
times”. Laclau and Moufe, for instance, present an “avalanche of historical mutations” and not an explicit structural analysis, whose incompatibility with contemporary Marxism relies upon the massive repression of recent
theoretico-political history. This invocation of a new epoch, within which
Marxism could be dismissed rather than reconstructed, has an instructive
precedent. Relying on metaphor to contain the dispersion of a host of perhaps unrelated developments was openly advocated in the collaboration by
the former Marxism Today editorial collective, in their New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. According to Stuart Hall, the term “new times”
was developed in the British context to embrace diverse concepts describing
several structural transformations:
If we take the “new times” idea apart, we ind that it is an attempt to
capture, within the confines of a single metaphor, a number of diferent facets
of social change, none of which has any necessary connection with the other. In
the current debates, a variety of diferent terms jostle with one another
for pride of place, in the attempt to describe those diferent dimensions
of change. They include “post-industrial,” “post-Fordist,” “revolution
of the subject,” “postmodern”. None of these is wholly satisfactory. …
Each, however, signiies something important about the “new times”
debate (Hall, 1989: 117 emphasis added).
In other words, the potentially divergent trajectories of these emergent
developments are totalised by nothing more than the metaphor of “new
times”. This argument trades on the temporal dialectics of modernity—the
valorisation of novelty—while introducing an epochal totalisation of history
explicitly delegitimised by postmodern theory (Osborne, 1995: 1-27). Likewise, for Laclau and Moufe the catch-all rubric of “increasing social complexity” contains phenomenal diversity in a conveniently undeined terminological unity, while at the same time masking their fundamental reliance
on a vulgar Marxist methodology that reels of cultural and intellectual developments from an evolutionary logic working in the social base (Barrett,
1991: 75-76; Landry, 1991: 47). The relevant structural transformations include commodiication and the introduction of scientiic management of the
labour process, as well as bureaucratic rationalisation and the transformation of liberal ideology (Laclau, 1990: 52-59; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 159171). Astonishingly, these correspond closely to the Marxian categories of relations of production, productive forces, politics and ideology, as well as:
“New Times”
25
The decline of the classical working class in the post-industrial countries;
the increasingly profound penetration of capitalist relations of production
into all areas of social life, whose dislocatory efects … have generated
new forms of social protest; the emergence of mass mobilisations in
Third World countries which do not follow the classical pattern of class
struggle … [and] the exposure of new forms of domination established in
the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Laclau, 1990: 97).
These conclusions depend upon a paradoxical structure of claims whereby a fairly unreconstructed Marxism seems to be the most sensitive instrument for the diagnosis of its own irrelevance; thereafter, discursive interpretation supplants structural analysis and the enumeration and investigation
of social movements and political institutions recedes to the background.
Nonetheless, aggregating all of the statements in which Laclau and Moufe
make speciic declarations regarding the emergence of “new times” (Laclau,
1985; Laclau, 1988: 81; Laclau, 1990: 1-4, 58-59; Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
2, 57; Moufe, 1988: 31; Moufe, 1992d: 1-14; Moufe, 1992e: 1-8), we obtain
the following general structural transformations.
Philosophical. The exhaustion of the legacy of Enlightenment metaphysics
(“essentialism”) in modern philosophy and social theory brings the end of
foundational universality and the advent of the postmodern shift from necessary foundations to contingent horizons (Laclau, 1988: 63-82; Moufe,
1988: 31-46).
Social. The increase in social complexity consonant with “disorganised capitalism,” characterised by the decline of the classical working class, leads to
a condition of absolute dispersion where the structural dominance of capital
accumulation dissolves (Laclau, 1990: 58-59).
Political. The advent of the NSM has a pluralising efect which displaces every ontologically privileged social agency (Laclau, 1985). These movements dislodge class politics, which, it turns out, “is just one species of identity politics, and one that is becoming less and less important” (Laclau,
2000a: 203).
Historical. The massive discrediting of the socialist tradition, linked
to the collapse of historical Communism and decline of class politics, as
a result of the exposure of “state socialism” as a new form of domination.
Radical democracy, as a postmodern politics, seeks to salvage what remains
viable in the Marxist tradition and to dispatch the rest “to the museum of
antiquities” (Laclau, 1990: 181).
These transformations constitute the “new times,” whose major theoretical expression is the “end of Enlightenment”. Regardless of the increasing
social complexity that these structural mutations certainly represent, postmarxism immediately reduces this to the simplicity of a shift in the “spirit
of the times” by means of the historical thesis of “postmodernity,” thereby
linking theory and structure in an expressive relation.
26
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
Postmodern Theory and the “End of Enlightenment”
My contention is that Laclau and Moufe remain entirely enclosed within
the horizon of postmodern ideology, which postulates an epochal totality
of “postmodernity”. According to John Frow’s exhaustive survey of the literature (Frow, 1997: 1-57), the generally accepted description of postmodern
culture involves dispensing with: essentialist foundations; ixed domains of
cultural values (ixed universality); the uniied subject; and, history as transcendent to its textual forms. These four categories broadly correspond to
Laclau and Moufe’s structural transformations.
For Frow, two signiicant problems attend upon most descriptions of
postmodernism, namely, the tendency to deduce the content of cultural forms from the postulated existence of postmodern culture (Frow, 1997:
15)—that is, the transcendental illusion that turns a regulative hypothesis
into a constitutive principle—and the construction of epochal totalities correlative to a shift in “worldview”. As Frow warns:
The problem is that of any totalising vision: … the construction of
domains of practice as massive unities (“the aesthetic”) and their
expressive linkage to other uniied domains. Pseudo-totalities generate
pseudo-histories; the epochal sense of the concept of the postmodern
depends for its existence on historico-spiritual ictions (Frow, 1997: 53).
Postmodernism as an expressive concept is generally counterposed to
the epochal concept of the Enlightenment. This frequently results in the
sort of travesty of the history of ideas that is the hallmark of an ideological simpliication. According, for instance, to the high priest of postmodern
theory, Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern “end of master narratives”
means the impossibility of any totalisation of society and history, linked to
the tendency of every global emancipation to turn into a new totalitarianism
(Lyotard, 1997). The major themes (ideologemes) of this “end of Enlightenment” include the rejection of every foundational universality (for instance,
human nature) and the supposition that society is a rational totality grounded through an essential substrate (Vattimo, 1988). Postmodern theory repudiates the concept of a unitary subject—especially any “subject of history”
and all privileged social agencies—that might institute a transparent society
through its control of humanity and mastery of nature (Vattimo, 1992). The
utopian dream of social harmony, linked to historical teleology and the notion of a foundational act inaugurating the end of politics, is repudiated as
the very root of the totalitarian temptation (Stavrakakis, 1999: 99-121).2
2. Marxist critiques of postmodernism can be divided into three categories. Criticism
of postmodernism as a modality of the “lived experience” of everyday life—that is, criticism of postmodern ideology, aimed at theoretical statements as they function within a
“worldview”—includes Eagleton (Eagleton, 1996), Norris (Norris, 1990; Norris, 1992; Norris,
1993) and O’Neill (O’Neill, 1995). Marxist criticism of the aesthetic productions of postmod-
“New Times”
27
Lukács, for instance, as a Hegelian Marxist, would be the very quintessence of everything that postmodernism brings into question. For Lukács,
the foundational universality of the commodity form brings into existence
the capitalist social totality, along with its rationally cognisable dynamics of
commodity reiication (Lukács, 1971: 83). This in turn brings forth the proletariat as a potential “historical subject,” capable of rendering the social
totality transparent through a dialectical theory grounded in social praxis,
which culminates in the social revolution, considered as the founding act in
the inauguration of a harmonious communist society that is beyond politics
(Lukács, 1971: 149).
On the postmarxian conception, modernity is a historical region characterised by the incomplete emergence of the modern from the legacy of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, meanwhile, is considered a “re-occupation” of the modern by theology, whereas the postmodern condition becomes “modernity without illusions” (Toring, 1999: 275). The postmarxism led by Laclau and Moufe entirely follows this ideological conception
of the relation between modernity and postmodernity. Laclau proposes the
epochal thesis that the modern era is characterized by the “reoccupation”
of modernity “by the medieval millennialist apocalypse” (Laclau, 1990: 74).
The Hegelian-Marxist moment is dismissed along these lines, together with
the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century master narratives and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (Laclau, 1990: 75). Where modernity—
supported by Enlightenment—proposed a progressive advance in conscious
mastery of the natural and social worlds, leading towards a post-political
utopia, the new epoch represents “a growing awareness of limits” and the
exhaustion of the discourse of the new (Laclau, 1990: 4). This enables a
“radical critique of all forms of domination” and the “formulation of liberation projects hitherto restrained by the rationalist ‘dictatorship’ of the Enlightenment” (Laclau, 1990: 4). In the light of the abandonment of universality as a regulative ideal and the repudiation of any moment of global rupture
with capitalism, postmarxism claims that the path opens to a multitude of
partial solutions to particular problems—not Emancipation, but emancipations (Laclau, 1990: 215, 225; Laclau, 1995a: i-iv; Laclau, 2000c: 196). Instead of the utopian politics of global emancipation and the realization of a
rational society through non-alienated subjectivity, postmodernism supposedly leads to a proliferation of localised resistances aiming to “maintain the
diferend” rather than to eliminate power. It promotes multiple and partial
ern culture include Callinicos (Callinicos, 1989), Jameson (Jameson, 1991; Jameson, 1994)
and Harvey (Harvey, 1989). Finally, Marxist criticism of speciically postmodern theoretical
ideologies includes Ebert on postmodern feminism (including Butler) (Ebert, 1996), Palmer
on discourse theory (including Laclau and Moufe) (Palmer, 1990), Geras (Geras, 1990) and
Wood (Wood, 1998) on “postmarxism,” and Wood et. al. on postmodern historical ideology
(Wood, 1997b).
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
emancipations, through a dispersed plurality of struggles for cultural recognition, by contesting the “microphysics of power”. The totality of these theoretical shifts, linked expressively to historical transformations, is supposed to
constitute a new, postmodern “paradigm”.
Before investigating this new political paradigm, we need to become
relatively sure that radical democracy conforms to this description of postmodernism, for Laclau and Moufe have sometimes sought to distance postmarxism from postmodern politics. According to Laclau and Moufe, radical democracy is politically modern and culturally postmodern. The crisis in the
modern project of self-foundation (the philosophical project of modernity),
far from undermining to the modern project of self-determination, actually
extends it scope. At the same time, Laclau and Moufe cautiously disengage
their position from the political quietism characteristic of many postmodern
theorists, such as Baudrillard (Laclau, 1990: 214).
Substantively, however, Laclau and Moufe’s postmarxism is characterised by the relativisation of the universal, while their position rejects emancipatory politics for micropolitical struggles and a plurality of relatively autonomous social antagonisms. The salient characteristic of the postmodern
turn for politics is the relativisation of the universal (Feher and Heller, 1988:
12); thus, Laclau and Moufe follow the policies of postmodernism to the letter, while denying their attachment to the programme of a postmodern politics. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner’s distinction between ludic (conformist) and resistance (oppositional) postmodernism is invaluable in this context.
Their encyclopedic survey characterises postmodernism as a “radicalisation
of modernism” and proposes that resistance postmodernism “is a product of
the new social movements” (Best, 1997: 26). Hence, Best and Kellner claim,
Laclau and Moufe’s position is the leftwing of postmodern politics (Best,
1997: 271-273).
Radical Democracy as Postmodern Politics
The correctness of Best and Kellner’s surmise that radical democracy is
the leftwing of postmodern politics is supported by the content of Laclau
and Moufe’s declarations regarding postmodernism. For Laclau, “postmodernity … has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical and
political experience” (Laclau, 1988: 63). Postmodernity is characterized by
the weakening of foundationalism and the decline of master narratives, but
does not constitute an absolute break with modernity, nor is postmodernism
a complete novelty compared to modernism. Laclau claims that “postmodernity does not imply a change in the values of the Enlightenment modernity, but rather a particular weakening of their absolutist character” (Laclau, 1988: 67). He proposes that while the ontological status of modern
categories is in question, their content is not (Laclau, 1988: 66). According
“New Times”
29
to this perspective, postmodern politics retains the content of the emancipatory demands of modernity, but rejects the idea that the totality of these demands constitutes a uniied whole, together with the metaphysical grounding of these in a universal and necessary foundation (Laclau, 1988: 63-82).
“It is the contraposition between foundation and horizon that … enables
us to understand the change in the ontological status of emancipatory discourses,” Laclau claims, where a “horizon” is a “formation without a foundation … [that] constitutes itself as a unity only as it delimits itself from that
which it negates” (Laclau, 1988: 81). Laclau rounds up the usual Enlightenment suspects—the totality of history, its rational foundation, the transparent society, global human emancipation, all based on full identities and the
discourse of essences—to assert that postmodernity exposes the contents of
Enlightenment to the efects of a multiplicity of contexts (Laclau, 1988: 72).
With these remarks, Laclau not only locates radical democracy within the
postmodern, but also explains the permanent dependence of postmodernism on the modern, which it must endlessly traverse deconstructively in order to generate any substantive positions.
We need to retain this sense of the postmodern exhaustion of novelty
and its explicit yet paradoxical dependence upon the modern, as we turn
to Moufe’s position. For Moufe, “it is unlikely that Marxism will recover”
from Stalinism and “the challenge to class reductionism posed by the new
social movements” (Moufe, 1988: 31). Using the distinction between self-determination (autonomy) and foundational project, it is possible to split modernity’s epistemological project from its political project, because—Moufe
asserts rather than argues—there is no necessary articulation between these
two aspects of modernity (Moufe, 1988: 32). Following Claude Lefort, modernity is deined at the political level by the Democratic Revolution of Modernity (Moufe, 1988: 33-34), which, Laclau explains elsewhere, is regarded
by postmarxism as the political correlate to philosophical deconstruction
(Laclau, 1990: 212-214). Indeed, according to Moufe:
If one sees the democratic revolution as Lefort portrays it, as the
distinctive feature of modernity, it then becomes clear that what one
means when one refers to postmodernity in philosophy is to recognise
the impossibility of any ultimate foundation or inal legitimation that is
constitutive of the very advent of the democratic form of society and thus
of modernity itself (Moufe, 1988: 34).
The implication is that postmodern philosophy is the expression-recognition of an epochal totality: postmodernity as modernity at last cleansed
of Enlightenment rationalism. Accordingly, contemporary political strategy
“requires us to abandon the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment, the
essentialist conception of the social totality and the myth of the unitary subject” (Moufe, 1988: 44). For Moufe, the leading efects of this deconstruc-
30
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
tion of foundations that is the correlate to the Democratic Revolution of Modernity are the dispersion of the unitary subject (Moufe, 1988: 35) and the
particularisation of the universal (Moufe, 1988: 36).
While the particularisation of the universal raises the spectre of relativism, Moufe replies that politics is the sphere of doxa, whose criterion of legitimacy and validity is not truth but persuasion (Moufe, 1988: 37). Moufe’s
reply—politics is the sphere of rhetorical persuasion and not logical truth,
and therefore always was dominated by relativism—is exemplary of what
might be called the skeptical function of postmodernism (Dews, 1987; Dews,
1995a). For it does not follow at all from the deconstruction of foundations—
and therefore the contingency of the universal—that we need to renounce
universality (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 191) as the opposite extreme from
“Enlightenment fundamentalism”. Universality can become a regulative
ideal that is permanently subject to revision, instead of the ixed substrate
of human nature. This is the argument presented by Hans Bertens,3 who
characterises postmodern politics in the following terms (Bertens, 1995: 185208): a shift from macropolitics to micropolitics; the transition from global
emancipation to local and partial emancipations; and, the gravitation from
party politics to imagined communities. Although accepting that the politicisation of the social means that every social relation can potentially be contested and transformed—albeit piecemeal and nominalistically—Bertens
nonetheless objects to the failure of postmodern politics to legitimate its own
claims. According to Bertens, “postmodernism simultaneously undermines
all traditional macropolitics, in that it rejects the metanarratives in which
all macropolitics, those of the left as well as those of the right, classically
ground themselves” (Bertens, 1995: 189). Nonetheless, the claim to partial
emancipations requires a concept of social progress—for instance, Laclau’s
“construction of a more global [inclusive] social imaginary” (Laclau, 2000c:
197)—that postmarxism is no longer prepared to defend.
Despite referring to social complexity, then, postmarxism tends to reduce
the complexity of contemporary social transformations to simple expressions of the “new times,” thereby instigating an expressive relation between
historical mutations and theoretical paradigms. This expressive conception
of the history-theory relation then legitimates a new political programme—
the shift from universal Emancipation to a multiplicity of partial emancipations—which is supposedly the correlate to the postmodern condition. Postmodern politics, characterised by the relativisation of political universality,
3. Bertens divides postmarxism into two camps: the particularisation of the universal (Best
and Kellner - historicism); the universalisation of the particular (Laclau and Moufe - particularism). While formally these possibilities represent the two anti-universal alternatives
operative in postmodern politics, I am not convinced that a substantive diference exists
between them. Witness, for instance, the subsequent convergence of Best and Kellner with
Laclau and Moufe (Best, 1997: 271-273).
“New Times”
31
rejects any transcendental foundation to the modern project of self-determination and exposes this project to the efects of a multiplicity of localised
contexts. The result is a gravitation towards open relativism, best expressed
by Moufe’s claim that politics is the domain of contingent pragmatic interventions determined by rhetoric, rather than rational interests or universal
values (Moufe, 1992e: 9-22, 135-154).
“PARADIGM SHIFT”: THE PROBLEM OF COGNITIVE RELATIVISM
Theoretical Problematics versus Relativist Paradigms
Postmarxism’s leap from absolutism (transcendental foundations) to relativism is unnecessary, for it neglects the possibility opened by historical
epistemology, namely, a historicised conception of conceptual foundations
as a replacement for transcendental philosophy. Indeed, the performative
contradictions characteristic of the “postmodern paradigm” identiied by
Bertens (following Habermas) happen because of a conlation of the relativisation of the contents of universality with the abandonment of theoretical universals altogether. 4 Moreover, the relativism promoted by concepts such as
Laclau’s “emancipations” and Lyotard’s “diferend” actually depends upon
the idealist conception of theoretical frameworks as systematised ideological worldviews.
I claim that by contrast with the Althusserian concept of a theoretical problematic, the relativist notion of a “postmodern paradigm,” as the
expression-recognition of structural transformations, imposes the structures of ideological misrecognition onto theoretical positions. According
to Althusser, an “epistemological break” lies between historical science and
humanist ideology, consisting in the crossing of certain thresholds of formalisation, whereby the subject-centred, practical discourse of ideology is
transformed into the concept-centred, theoretical discourse of science. As I
will explain in more detail in a moment, in theoretical discourse, the problems posed for formalised analysis lead to the generation of knowledge,
based on the raw materials of experience (for instance, observation statements). But theoretical discourse breaks with the epistemological framework
of its raw materials, because it refuses to accept as inal data the description
of phenomena observed by a subject and submits these instead to a proc4. The employment of “performative contradiction” as a criticism of postmodern theory
was pioneered by Habermas (Habermas, 1987), who deines the category as follows: “a performative contradiction occurs when a constative speech act k(p) rests on noncontingent
presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition, p” (Habermas, 1999: 80). Martin Jay glosses this less formally as “when the locutionary dimension of a
speech act is in conlict with its illocutionary force,” and this is the sense in which I employ
the category (Jay, 1992: 29). It implies no commitment to discourse ethics. It is instead the
elementary index of logical consistency.
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ess of theoretical construction and then formal testing. Ideological practice,
by contrast, is based on the coherence of the lived experience of a subject,
and so it is necessarily subordinates theoretical re-description and hypothesis testing (when it does these at all) to the subject-centred registration of
the signiicance of events. Where the paradigmatic expression of theoretical discourse is mathematical physics, the paradigmatic expression of ideological practice is personal narrative.
Accordingly, Althusser maintains that ideology does not pose problems
but rather provide readymade solutions (to pseudo-problems), thereby reducing knowledge to a phenomenon of (mis)recognition. Drawing upon the
concept of the mirror-stage from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusser proposes that ideological misrecognition functions exactly as the Imaginary
register does in psychoanalysis. By supplying a corporeal image, uniied in
the mirror of language, the alienated ego functions as an instrument by
which the subject intervenes in the world, at the cost of a permanent misrecognition of the decentred structures of social existence (Lacan, 1977: 1-29).
Likewise, ideology is characterised by its Imaginary structures—that is, by
its subject-centred construction of specular dualisms (for instance, “good”
versus “evil”) between imaginary unities (for instance, “postmodernity”),
whose “obviousness” is the very hallmark of an ideological distortion. The
standard analogy for the distinction between science and ideology is that of
the Copernican Revolution, where mathematical abstraction negates the
apparently blindingly obvious “fact,” drawn from personal experience, that
the sun rotates around the earth. Althusser conducted exactly such a revolution in Marxism with his conceptual shift from historical teleology and expressive totality, based in the unity of social praxis, to decentred social structures accessible only to formalised theoretical practice.
The equation of theory with ideology that postmarxism relies upon is
made explicit in the notion of theoretical paradigms. Michèle Barrett, for
instance, proposes that the relativisation of the universal—the dethroning
of the working class in Marxian discourse—represents a paradigm shift and
suggests that Marxists should take “a look at the world … through the glasses of Laclau and Moufe,” instead of criticising postmarxism from the perspective of universal emancipation (Barrett, 1991: 78). To approach postmarxism with categories such as “class,” “universal,” “social formation,”
and so forth, is impossible, because a paradigm shift implies an incommensurability between theories and hence the meaninglessness of the old terms
in the new discursive universe. Barrett therefore claims that to respond from
the position of a global theory with an excoriation of Laclau and Moufe as
ex-Marxists is radically to fail to engage with the substance of postmarxism.
This substance would appear to be a conceptual and moral relativism that
is secreted by the very concept of a conceptual paradigm. How can a theoretical problematic—a research programme—form a worldview, operative
“New Times”
33
in everyday life, that we might just “try out” for a few days? The idealist voluntarism of this conception of theory might alert us that we should check
the label on the packet marked “paradigm” before swallowing. If conceptual “paradigms” are optative worldviews that are completely incommensurable, then what basis exists for making decisions regarding politics and
theory? The danger is that this can become an ideological ruse designed to
exclude debate. And does this not rely upon an expressive conception of the
relation between the social complexity of everyday life and postmodern conceptual paradigms? To evade the relativist impasse implicit in this voluntarist conception of theory, we have to establish whether a rational basis for
theoretical evaluations exists.
At this point I wish to introduce a distinction between relativism and
relativisation. I do so because historical epistemology—rather like the postpositivist epistemology of Imré Lakatos’s concept of the “methodology of scientiic research programmes”—recognises that no scientiic framework can
claim absolute correspondence to the real. Indeed, it is a postulate of historical epistemology that the real is unknown: all science provides is more
or less plausible constructions of the unknown cause of phenomenal experience. Yet these scientiic frameworks are not conceptual paradigms, because
it is possible to rationally adjudicate between them in the historical scale. The
distinction between relativisation and relativism, then, resides in whether, despite relativisation, there exist common standards of comparison or constant
elements shared between theoretical frameworks. (This terminology is inspired by analogy with the Special Theory of Relativity, where despite the
diferent results obtained in distinct frames of reference, a matrix of transformation exists that can convert the results of one frame into those of another frame, by virtue of the universal constant of the speed of light, which is
the same in all frames of reference.) Likewise, the distinction between the relativisation of theoretical problematics and the relativism of conceptual paradigms rests
upon the existence of a set of paradigm-neutral criteria that enables comparison between diferent theoretical problematics.
For proponents of postmodern relativism, conceptual paradigms are incommensurable “worldviews,” and so no basis for comparison exists. But a
“worldview” is exactly what a research programme is not—except in the idealist vulgarisations of Heideggerean and Kuhnian theories of science popular with postmodern theory. For instance, Best and Kellner, despite their
perceptive remarks on Laclau and Moufe’s politics, insist that postmodern
politics represents a “major paradigm shift” and so one either gets with the
(new) times, or decides (equally arbitrarily) to remain stuck in the modernist
paradigm. In motivating this efectively voluntarist position, Best and Kellner invoke Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, maintaining
that the new paradigm is part of a postmodern epoch that includes the postmarxian politics of Laclau and Moufe, technology, science and “emergent
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
forms of culture and everyday life, as well as … the advent of an expanding
global economy and new social and political order” (Best, 1997: ix). According to Best and Kellner:
Typically, one paradigm is replaced by another when a discipline reaches
a crisis state that calls into question the explanatory adequacy of the
existing paradigm, such that emergent problems are no longer seen only
as “anomalies” and ad hoc solutions are no longer convincing. The shift
to another paradigm is a non-cumulative, discontinuous development
whereby novelty rules and tacit assumptions, theories and techniques
emerge that are incommensurably diferent from what preceded (Best,
1997: 254).
The problem is the claim of incommensurability. If theoretical problematics in actuality obey the rules of Kuhnian conceptual paradigms—that is,
the decision for a conceptual paradigm is arbitrary because the paradigm
is a closed universe and no rational adjudication between paradigms is possible—then in reality, arguments about the relative merits of postmarxism
are a waste of time. For it is not possible to arbitrate in this way: it is a “take
it or leave it” proposition. (And this explains the frustration that many feel
when confronted by the postmarxian position—it seems to be a voluntarist
ultimatum based only on the suasive appeal to novelty implicit in the “New
Times” rhetoric.) But the argument from Kuhnian philosophy of science in
fact works against postmarxian voluntarism, for Kuhn himself quickly recognised the limitations of his position and introduced a key amendment to
the theory, one that eliminated the postulate of incommensurability.
For Kuhn—accepting the legitimacy of certain subsequent modiications to the initial theory proposed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1970)—a “paradigm” refers to the “disciplinary matrix” of a research
community (Kuhn, 1970: 182-184; Kuhn, 1977: 297-299). This includes the
shared symbolic generalisations unquestioningly accepted by this community (for instance, a basic accord on the historical importance of a certain
theory), an agreement on heuristic models, research values (for instance, accuracy and honesty) and metaphysical assumptions—comparable to Lakatos’ notion of the “hard core of metaphysical postulates” forming a scientiic
research programme (Lakatos, 1978). The genesis of the notion of paradigm
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains that a paradigm is centred by
a practice of exempliication, which determines the core problem in the ield
and its best solution. The virtue of the concept of a paradigm is that it emphasises the contextual determination of theoretical propositions. The problem is that for Kuhn, scientiic revolutions are akin to political revolutions
in two decisive respects: they depend upon intersubjective consensus degenerating beyond a critical point (the accumulation of anomalies leading to a
crisis of conidence in a paradigm); and their outcome depends solely upon
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political techniques (rhetorical persuasion) (Kuhn, 1970: 94, 102). Because
paradigms are incommensurable, there exist no rational means for arbitrating which theory is better—leading to the proposition that even when two
theories logically contradict each other, there are no bases for a grounded
judgement that one is more justiied than another (Kuhn, 1970: 198-199). In
the process of withdrawing from this extreme position, Kuhn acknowledged
that there exists a singular “shared basis for theory choice,” involving accuracy, consistency, scope of application, elegance (simplicity) and productivity
for new research (Kuhn, 1977: 321-322). That is, Kuhn’s revised theory supplies a list of constitutive elements of a theoretical paradigm, together with
a set of ive paradigm-neutral criteria for judgement between paradigms. In
the terms developed here, it means that the extended concept of a paradigm
represents an acceptance of the relativisation of theoretical perspectives that
nonetheless rejects relativism. This brings Kuhn’s inal theory signiicantly
closer to the Althusserian-Bachelardian concept of a theoretical problematic
(Lecourt, 1975: 1-15).
In Defense of the “Althusserian Revolution”
It follows from consideration of the possibility of comparisons between theoretical problematics that Laclau is wrong to suppose that the critique of ideology relies upon a naïve, immediate access to extra-discursive reality and
that “all critique will necessarily be intra-ideological” (Laclau, 1996a: 299).
Ideology critique can appeal to a rational analysis of theoretical contradictions and to the evidence that constitutes an anomaly for the theory—that
is, ideology critique can proceed from internal critique to the postulation of
an alternative explanatory framework. But this is a possibility that Laclau
seems keen to exclude. Laclau’s position states, in the clearest possible fashion, his belief that rational debate with other theoretical positions is merely a
question of (ideological) assertion and counter-assertion. Indeed, the proposition that “all critique will necessarily be intra-ideological” can be decoded
as follows: we only listen to the arguments of those who already share our
worldview. This is not a hard-headed and practical assessment of the realities of political debate. It is a rejection of all theoretical inquiry and rational
debate between research programmes and, as such, it is an open confession
of dogmatism.
In elaborating his position, Laclau seeks to modify the Kuhnian position of (for instance) Barrett, Best and Kellner, adding to the incommensurability of discourses the proposition of the openness of paradigms. For Laclau, the “closure” of ideological worldviews/conceptual paradigms—their
apparent existence as self-enclosed discursive universes with no outside—is
the “highest form of misrecognition,” for every ideological paradigm includes a hidden dialogical reference to its theoretical competitors (Laclau,
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1996a: 300, 304). But this is a quite diferent proposition to Kuhn’s opening
of paradigms to rational arbitration, for Laclau is categorically not proposing that there exist paradigm-neutral standards of theoretical inquiry from
which to judge competing paradigms. To the contrary: competition between
paradigms is based on ideological rivalry and not on explanatory credibility,
so that the dialogical constitution of conceptual paradigms or ideological
worldviews as instrumental to the conducting social conlicts against political antagonists makes the possibility of rational debate recede, not advance.
Instead of opening theories to rational adjudication, this reduces theoretical debate to ideological competition, supplementing the problematic notion of a conceptual paradigm with the stricture that these are dialogically
constructed as ideological instruments. One only has to recall the iasco of
Lysenko’s “proletarian science” in the former Soviet Union—a conceptual
paradigm answering perfectly to Laclau’s requirements of ideological serviceability and discursive insularity—to realise what is wrong with this description of theoretical debate.
Postmarxism’s radical relativism therefore springs from the rejection of
every “epistemological break” between theory and ideology. The Althusserian claim that historical materialism founds the science of history (Althusser, 1976: 151) smacks, according to postmarxism, of the “profoundly
anti-democratic habits of leftwing thought,” secreting “an obsolete positivism” (Laclau, 1990: 204) and a latent totalitarianism. In Leninism, this “authoritarian tendency … can be found in its imbrication between science and
politics,” which “postulates a monolithic and uniied understanding of the
whole of the social process … based on the ontologically privileged position
of a single class—which, in turn, is transformed into the epistemologically
privileged position of a single political leadership” (Laclau, 1990: 206). This
accusation might characterise Lukács’ position in Lenin (1924)—where absolute knowledge of the expressive totality, developed through the agency
of the proletariat as identical subject-object of history, is deposited with its
“vanguard party” (Lukács, 1970: 24-38)—but it scarcely applies to Althusser. For Althusser’s anti-positivist conception of scientiic (theoretical) practice was directed in opposition to the Stalinist leadership of the Communist
parties and their claim to possess a inal philosophical truth (Anderson, 1980;
Elliott, 1987). Althusser’s claim that Marxism is a general—not a total—history was met with accusations of apostasy, while the assertion of the relative
autonomy of theoretical practice scandalised the advocates of “social praxis,” that is, the “dialectical unity” of the ontological privilege of the proletariat with its special epistemological claims.
Science, unlike philosophy and religion, advances only provisional
knowledge based on the best explanation and lacking the inal seal of the
Truth, that is, some form of Divine Guarantee of the correspondence be-
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tween theoretical categories and the historical process.5 “Every recognised
science,” Althusser insists, “not only has emerged from ideology but continues endlessly to do so (its prehistory remaining always contemporary, something like an alter-ego), by rejecting what it considers to be error” (Althusser,
1976: 113). For Althusser, theory constitutes “a minimum of generality necessary to be able to grasp a concrete object” (Althusser, 1976: 112) which, unlike ideology, is conducted through explicit rules and is therefore susceptible
to revision (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 59).
The speciic efectivity of a science is determined by the nature of its
historically produced conceptual framework, or “problematic,” which constitutes the relative autonomy of a science in relation to the ield of ideology
from which it sprang (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 133).
A science can only pose problems on the terrain and within the horizon
of a deinite theoretical structure, its problematic, which constitutes its
absolute and deinite condition of possibility, and hence the absolute
determination of the forms in which all problems must be posed, at any
given moment in the science (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 25).
According to Althusser, the structure of theory consists of three steps
(Althusser, 1969: 182-193). In “Generalities I,” always-already “worked-up,”
or theoretically inluenced, ideological categories form the raw material for
theoretical practice. In “Generalities II,” these categories are subjected to a
problematic, by which theoretical operations are performed on this raw material. In “Generalities III,” new conceptual knowledge and substantive theoretical positions are produced.
The method developed by Althusser can be described as a “structural
depth hermeneutic” (Resch, 1992: 174-178). Althusser proposes a “symptomatic” interpretation, methodologically inspired by psychoanalysis, where
the text is formed through the “unconscious operation” of a problematic
whose structural principles govern the relation between the latent and manifest texts of a theory. He refers to a dialectical circle of interpretation (Al5. While it is certainly correct to assert that Althusser initially lapsed into precisely this
rationalist illusion—claiming that “dialectical materialism” supplied a “Theory of theoretical
practice” (Althusser, 1969: 168), that is, a scientiic theory of materiality that functioned as a
guarantee of the truth of historical materialism—this was abandoned following Althusser’s
own “epistemological break” in 1967 (Althusser, 1990: 69-166). Robert Resch demonstrates
that the underlying consistency of Althusser’s thinking, based on the continuity of the realist
and materialist concepts of theoretical practice, means that “Althusser’s proposition, that
science is constituted by the transformation of ideology into knowledge by means of theory,
holds up even after the diference between science and ideology is reformulated in functional
rather than rationalist terms” (Resch, 1992: 182). Althusser’s self-criticism of “theoreticism”
accepted the non-existence of every guarantee (and therefore the relativisation of knowledge), the role of philosophy as a transmission belt between theory and ideology, and that
every science is constituted by breaking continuously with its (henceforth) ideological prehistory in a potentially endless series of theoretical revolutions.
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
thusser, 1969: 38), where progressive readings are successive approximations
(Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 74). Althusser’s structural hermeneutics yields
a combination of textual interpretation and causal explanation, which “divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same moment
relates this to a diferent text, present as a necessary absence in the irst”
(Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 28). For instance, Marx’s radical break with
philosophical anthropology makes possible a “symptomatic” interpretation
of political economy, whereby the lacunae of theoretical economics can be
interpreted as disclosures of class interests.
So—how is debate between theoretical problematics possible? Laclau’s
early (Marxist) work supplies an exemplary description of this process (Laclau, 1977: 60-61). Because every theoretical problematic transcendentally constitutes the empirical object it investigates, no direct contrast between
problematics on the basis of empirical evidence is possible. The consequence
is that “a theory is only false to the extent that it is internally inconsistent,
i.e., if in the process of construction of its concepts it has entered into contradiction with its postulates” (Laclau, 1977: 60). Flowing from this, Laclau
concludes that “theoretical problems, to the extent that they are truly theoretical, cannot, strictly speaking, be solved: they can only be superseded”
(Laclau, 1977: 60). Because the problematic determines the legitimate phenomenal ield for a theory—that is, it schematises a phenomenal diversity so
as to align empirical reality with theoretical categories and thereby make
sensations into objects of possible experience ( Jameson, 1972: 89)—“the empirical resolution of the problem consists, strictly speaking, of the negation
of its existence on the theoretical plane” (Laclau, 1977: 61). Laclau suggests
that empirical veriication or falsiication highlights the existence of anomalies (phenomena that cannot be fully grasped by the conceptual system of
a theory), but that this does not inherently negate the theory. It only leads
towards the alternatives of theoretical reconstruction or shift in problematic. With the emergence of a new theory, the problems generated within
the horizon of the former theory are not solved, but simply superseded, that
is, “dissolved as a problem with the emergence of a new theoretical system”
(Laclau, 1977: 61). From this, the major logical elements in a rebuttal can be
deduced: (a) the designation of empirical realities that constitute theoretical
anomalies; (b) the identiication of the theoretical roots of these anomalies;
(c) a demonstration that these roots constitute theoretical contradictions,
leading to the collapse of the conceptual system; (d) an alternative system
that resolves the contradictions of the former theory (Laclau, 1977: 61-62).
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
Having established, contra postmarxism, that the critique of ideology is not
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merely intra-ideological, I want to begin to rebut postmarxism along the
Althusserian Marxist lines suggested above. The remainder of this chapter
therefore concentrates on the “empirical realities that constitute theoretical anomalies” for postmarxism, by examining the empirical evidence for
postmarxism’s major sociological and political claims. At the same time, I
begin to introduce the main lines of a theoretical alternative to postmarxism, drawing upon Regulation Theory, neo-Marxist sociology and leftwing
Eurocommunism.
Before doing so, however, I have to digress in order to examine a second objection to my accusation that postmarxism leads to relativism. In response to this accusation, Laclau and Moufe reply that “‘relativism’ is, to a
great extent, an invention of the fundamentalists” (Laclau, 1990: 104). Their
reply is based on an ontology of discourse, according to which “outside of
any discursive context, objects do not have being; they only have existence” (Laclau, 1990: 104). Laclau and Moufe claim that discursive articulation is the
primary ontological process in the constitution of the real, so that entities
lack any determinacy unless discursively constituted as beings. “Discourse”
has a general meaning and a specialised deinition within their theory of
hegemony. I shall discuss the specialised deinition in the chapter on HSS;
the general deinition embraces both linguistic and non-linguistic elements
(physical objects, human actions) (Laclau, 1990: 102), speech acts and nondiscursive practices (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 107), considered equally as
diferential identities in open, relational complexes. For Laclau and Moufe,
“every identity or discursive object is constituted in the context of an action,” so that, for instance, “a stone exists independently of any system of
social relations, but it is … either a projectile or an object of aesthetic contemplation only within a speciic discursive coniguration” (Laclau, 1990:
101-102). In other words, a thing has no natural properties aside from its
social context, as the being of the object is historically transitive, while its
existence is intransitive (Laclau, 1990: 103), and “natural facts are also discursive facts” (Laclau, 1990: 102). As opposed to scientiic realist positions,
which form the epistemological basis of the post-Althusserian forms of historical materialism I advocate in this analysis, anti-realist positions have dificulty in theoretically discriminating between science and pseudo-science,
leaving them open to the charge that they conlate epistemology and politics (Chalmers, 1990).
The literature documenting scientiic realism’s response to social constructivism is extensive, and considerations of length prevent me from reproducing the arguments in detail. Nonetheless, the arguments proposed
by advocates of scientiic realism seem, in the absence of any examination
of the relevant literature by Laclau and Moufe, to be devastating. The conident assertion that it is possible to diferentiate the indeterminate existence of the entity from its determinate (discursively constructed) being is the
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
hallmark of positivism (Newton-Smith, 1981: 19-43). From the antediluvian positivism of Popper through to contemporary constructive empiricism,
the natural world is an inert posivitivity whose meaning is completely constructed through radically incommensurable theoretical paradigms (Newton-Smith, 1981: 44-101, 148-182). Philosophically, constructive empiricism
is very close to forms of neo-Kantian nominalism and forms of pragmatism
(Norris, 2001: 133-166, 167-195). Not only can the discursive claims of radical
meaning variance not be sustained, but the positivist programme (in its contemporary empiricist form) cannot manage to avoid the slide towards theoretical obscurantism and moral relativism (Norris, 1997: 6-43; Norris, 2001:
167-217; Norris, 2002: 23-57). Incapable of diferentiating between pseudoscientiic obscurantism and scientiic research programmes, and unable to
explain the most striking features of the scientiic enterprise (for instance,
the increasing accuracy of theories and their ability to integrate the results
of widely varying investigations), contemporary “post-positivist” anti-realism ends up converging with anti-epistemological anarchism (Feyerabend)
and political apologetics (Rorty) (Bhaskar, 1989: 146-179; Norris, 1996: 154179; Norris, 2001: 133-217).
Laclau and Moufe’s position appears to be a form of transcendental
argument, as they emphasise that while every phenomenon has discursive
conditions of possibility, the discursive—as horizon—has no conditions of
possibility (Laclau, 1990: 105). While Laclau is evasive when questioned (Laclau, 1990: 220), he is elsewhere happy enough to identify discourse with
the encounter of the linguistic turn and transcendental philosophy (Laclau,
1993). In keeping with neo-Kantian nominalism, then, Laclau and Moufe
insist that discourses are only quasi-transcendental, that is, they are empirical processes that can be politically transformed, yet they transcendentally constitute the being of the object. Hence, unlike Kant, Laclau and
Moufe suppose that the system of transcendental categories is historically
and culturally variable, efective only in localised contexts. However, their
discourse theory rests upon the epistemic fallacy, namely, “the view that
statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements
about knowledge” (Bhaskar, 1978: 36). This fallacy is concisely reprised by
Laclau in his claim that “all truth is relative to a discursive formation” (Laclau, 1990: 196). Laclau and Moufe avow that their position is similar to Richard Rorty’s pragmatism (Laclau, 1996b: 60; Moufe, 1996a: 1). As such,
it is vulnerable to the convincing refutation of pragmatism presented by defenders of scientiic realism (Bhaskar, 1989: 146-179; Norris, 2001: 133-166).
Laclau and Moufe maintain that their position is realist (because objects
exist independently of thought) and materialist (because the being of objects,
as penetrated by historically variable and politically contested discourses, is
irreducible to conceptual relations) (Laclau and Moufe, 1987b). These deinitions of realism and materialism are unsustainable in relation to the his-
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tory of philosophy and the meaning of these terms in contemporary theories
of science (Geras, 1988). They are also highly problematic positions to take.
By evacuating the determinacy of material objects, Laclau and Moufe deny
the possibility of any extra-discursive controls on theory and so reject the
central postulate of contemporary realism, that transitive knowledge enables an exploration in depth of the intransitive object. Secondly, in insisting
that the irrationality of the real is the main determinant of materialism, Laclau and Moufe encourage conlating the irreducibility of the real to logical
relations with the supposed impossibility of generating formal theoretical
propositions (for instance, general natural laws of tendency, as in mathematical physics), lowing from their deinition of “realism”. This runs a serious
risk of terminating in obscurantism.
That Laclau and Moufe’s ontology of discourse necessarily leads to relativism can be seen by considering some entities that (unlike stones) provide
a test of this form of constructive empiricism: discourses and quarks. The
irst test, “discourses,” represents a self-relexive application of the theory
to itself. This is legitimate because Laclau and Moufe explicitly refuse any
distinctions between discourse and practice, meta-theory and object language. Discourses exist, on their hypotheses, but lack any being except when
speciied in another (meta-)discourse. Thus, for instance, a discourse—say,
HSS—presents a series of determinations of some theoretical objects (social
agents, social relations, some historical events) while itself, as a discourse,
lacking any determinacy, except when speciied metadiscursively (through
its insertion in a history of Marxism, or in a critical analysis). Hence, the
claim that HSS presents an anti-essentialist discourse, while Marxism is an
essentialist discourse, becomes highly problematic as a claim regarding the
object, since on this ontology such claims really only disclose something
about the claimant. This is an extremely improbable result, but one that follows ineluctably from their premises, for the alternative (that a discourse,
taking advantage of the self-relexive properties of language, can specify itself through nested metalinguistic statements) leads immediately to the collapse of the ontological dichotomy between indeterminate existence and determinate being. For a self-determining object is exactly what is excluded
from this ontology, and Laclau and Moufe’s central postulate is that there
is no diference in kind between stones and discourses, so discourses cannot
be a special sort of object.
Purely theoretical entities, such as quarks in quantum physics, present
Laclau and Moufe’s ontology with a special problem and expose why it is
that this position secretes a form of positivism. Now it is not the being of
the object, but its existence that is in question. This ontology should conclude
that the entities do not exist, for if realism (as they construe it) reduces to
the proposition that discourse can only form the being of the object, but not
constitute it as an existent, then theoretical entities become only explanato-
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ry posits. In this case, the conident assertion that a clear distinction exists
between the existence of objects (for instance, quarks) and their being (their
properties) will gradually unravel, for the generally accepted proposition of
the theory-ladenness of observations will lead to progressively calling into
question the theory independence of every phenomenon. But the ontology of
discourse stands or falls with the postulate that the indeterminate existence
of the entity can be asserted aside from every determination of its being.
Furthermore, Laclau and Moufe have no basis for claiming any explanatory superiority for quarks over, for instance, gods. They can only claim that
since, with Laclau, “all truth is relative to a discursive formation” (Laclau,
1990: 196), as a result of historical contingencies, gods simply do not belong
in the discursive universe of modern science. This efectively rests the distinction between science and pseudo-science on historical facticity instead
of explanatory power.
Laclau and Moufe’s position culminates in a perspectival relativism
verging on sophism. They assert, as a result of their discursive ontology, that
there is no rational or ethical superiority to democracy and airm the supremacy of politics over ethics and epistemology (Moufe, 1996a: 1, 4). Further, they airm that the political ield is characterised by groundless efforts to persuade persons (in other words, by rhetorical sallies in the spirit of
sophism, perhaps modelled on contemporary media-dependent politicians,
such as Tony Blair) (Moufe, 1996a: 5). Presumably, one such purely rhetorical efort is their own claim that postmarxism promotes self-determination
through acts of political identiication (Laclau, 1990: 44; Laclau, 1996b: 49).
At the same time, Laclau and Moufe, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter
Three, maintain an inconsistent stance in that they do not fully accept the
relativism of their own position. Nonetheless, their strident insistence that
theory is the direct servant of politics, and their assertion that there is no
diference whatsoever between theory and ideology, is a striking instance
of the historicist basis of postmarxism—and a startling demonstration of its
limitations.
SOCIAL CONFLICT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
From Marxisant Analysis to Ideological Manipulation
The Althusserian conception that an epistemological break—consisting in
the crossing of certain thresholds of formalisation—separates theoretical
problematics from ideological worldviews not only explains that the problem with the postmarxian position is its subject-centred character, but also
highlights the possibility (and the importance) of extra-discursive controls
on theoretical debate. For many postmarxists, however, the very existence
of an intransitive world is confused with “the possibility of concretely expe-
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riencing a world beyond ideology” (Porter, 2002: 43). Nothing could more
graphically illustrate the subject-centred character of postmarxian phenomenology. The Althusserian idea of a distinction between science and ideology, by contrast, summarises precisely the impossibility of experiencing a
non-ideologically constituted world, despite the structured existence of the
real. Unlike the postmarxian stance, however, the Althusserian position accepts the necessity of a conlict of interpretations, but supplies methodological grounds for conducting rational debates.
A case in point is postmarxism’s major social theoretical claim—that
Marxism has not grasped the crisis dynamics of contemporary society.
This is related to the supposition that instead of strictly capitalist social formations, “postmodernity” is characterised by dispersed “discursive formations” lacking the unity of a dominant structure (Laclau, 1990: 57-59).
The problem with the postmarxian analysis is that it substitutes a political
hermeneutics based in the acceptance of the postmodern ideological horizon for an explanation of the social causes underlying the relativisation of
the universal. This imposes the characteristic structures of ideological misrecognition onto theoretical analysis, as postmarxism tends to conlate phenomenological description with structural analysis, and implies the legitimation of an ideologically motivated blindness. Because there is no longer
a distinction between theory and ideology, a conceptual paradigm is only
the coherent expression or philosophical systematisation of the ideological
worldview held by a particular social agent. This leads to cognitive relativism, where the conlict between conceptual paradigms becomes the highest
expression of the political competition between ideological worldviews. As
a result, postmarxism resiles from historical explanations of the causes of
events for interpretative “interventions” that make theory the direct servant
of an ideology. The archaeology of this process can be traced in successive
analyses of contemporary politics that emerged before and after the collapse
of historical Communism. As ideology progressively supplanted theory, the
postmarxian analysis of the political conjuncture became marked by a retreat, from a Marxisant analysis based in forms of post-Structural Marxism,
towards a phenomenological description of the “new times” bordering on
ideologically-driven celebration.
The major postmarxian claim involves rewriting theoretical history,
for Laclau and Moufe’s initial assessment of the political conjuncture was
based on a combination of their theory of ideological articulations with perspectives drawn from the renovation of Marxism undertaken by the post-Althusserian school of Regulation Theory (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 159-171).
Invoking the analysis of Fordism by Michel Aglietta, the leading theoretician of the Regulation School, Laclau and Moufe allude to the Fordist regime of accumulation as a motor for the commodiication of social relations
whose outcome is that “there is now practically no domain of individual or
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collective life which escapes capitalist relations” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
161). They propose that the NSM are the result of the hegemonic postwar
formation encountering structural limits to its articulation of economics,
politics and ideology, combined with political resistance to the “new forms
of domination” that spring from the Fordist mode of social regulation. According to HSS:
One cannot understand the present expansion of the ield of social conlict
and the consequent emergence of new political subjects without situating
both in the context of the commodiication and bureaucratisation of social
relations on the one hand, and the reformulation of liberal-democratic
ideology—resulting from the expansion of struggles for equality—on the
other (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 163).
According to Laclau and Moufe’s Marxisant analysis, then, the emergence of the NSM needs to be analysed from the “double perspective” of the
transformation of social relations characteristic of the postwar hegemonic
formation, and “the efects of the displacement into new areas of social life of
the egalitarian imaginary constituted around liberal-democratic discourse”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165).
The fact that these “new antagonisms” are the expression of forms of
resistance to the commodiication, bureaucratisation and increasing
homogenisation of social life itself explains why they should frequently
manifest themselves through a proliferation of particularisms, and
crystallise into a demand for autonomy itself. … Insofar as, of the two
great themes of the democratic imaginary—equality and liberty—it was
that of equality which was traditionally predominant, the demands for
autonomy bestow an increasingly central role upon liberty (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 164).
The Marxisant element of Laclau and Moufe’s analysis is close to the
Marxist proposition that the diferential histories of the distinct social levels
(economic, political, ideological) result in diferent efects (commodiication,
bureaucratisation, consumerism), that are recombined in the space of politics (hegemonic articulations). In line with their earlier revision of Structural Marxism (Laclau, 1977: 81-142; Moufe, 1979a: 168-205), however, Laclau
and Moufe substitute ideological struggles for political conlict as the privileged terrain where social contradictions are resolved, replacing hegemonic
articulations with ideological manipulation. The postmarxian element of
the analysis therefore insists that the political space is governed by ideology and uniied through the “permanence of the egalitarian Imaginary” in
modernity (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 160). The emergence of the NSM is
regarded in this light as “a moment of deepening of the democratic revolution” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 163). The emergence of the NSM can then
be regarded as a continuation of the fragmentation of the “unitary subject”
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of classical Marxism that highlights “the plurality of the social and the unsutured character of all political identity” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 166).
Laclau and Moufe’s position is therefore based on Marxism, but seeks to
break with the proposition that hegemonic articulations are governed by the
exigencies of the accumulation of capital, and attempts to substitute ideological manipulation for the space of politics. The task of the Left is (uncontentiously) “to construct a new historic bloc in which a plurality of economic,
social and cultural aspects are articulated” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 170).
For Laclau and Moufe, though, the twofold character of the “democratic
Imaginary” (equality and liberty) is central to this analysis, and not the constraints on hegemonic articulations imposed by the accumulation of capital,
or the constitution of political space by the institution of the nation-state.
Lacking an analysis of the structural constraints imposed by capitalism,
their conception of the primacy of ideological struggle breaks loose from the
social ield and tends to suppress the relevance of economics and politics.
Laclau and Moufe’s analysis of the neo-liberal eforts to construct a new
hegemonic articulation follows the same structure as their assessment of the
conjuncture, especially as regards the totalising role of the ideological struggle. “It cannot be doubted,” Laclau and Moufe sum up, “that the proliferation of antagonisms and of ‘new rights’ is leading to a crisis of the hegemonic formation of the postwar period” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 168). They
indicate that, for the Left, the New Right (Thatcher, Reagan) holds the key
to grasping a new political logic, because “its novelty lies in its successful articulation to neo-liberal discourse of a series of democratic resistances to the
transformation of social relations” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 169). Neo-liberalism is opposed to the postwar extension to the concepts of equality and
liberty to include material capabilities and social rights (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 171). The New Right articulates liberalism to free market economics
and a restricted democracy, based on the “chain of equivalences, equality =
identity = totalitarianism” and the airmation of the sequence “diference =
inequality = liberty” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 174). “We are thus witnessing the emergence of a new hegemonic project, that of liberal-conservative
discourse, which seeks to articulate the neo-liberal defense of the free market economy with the profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social tradition of conservatism” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 175). Drawing upon Stuart
Hall’s controversial analysis of Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism” (Hall,
1983) and Allen Hunter’s assessment of Reaganite discourse as a “specious
egalitarianism” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 170), Laclau and Moufe claim
that this demonstrates the “fundamental ambiguity of the social,” namely,
the “polysemic character of every antagonism,” which exposes “the impossibility of establishing in a deinitive manner the meaning of any struggle,
whether considered in isolation or through its ixing in a relational system”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 170). Nothing, for Laclau and Moufe, is inher-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ently Right or Left. There are only relational social antagonisms, lacking
the strategic pole of reference that structural constraints might supply.
The Emergence of a New Mode of Social Regulation
By contrast with the postmarxian tendency to latten social conlict onto ideological struggles alone, according to Regulation Theory—following Aglietta’s pathbreaking work (Aglietta, 1979)—modes of social regulation are a
historic bricolage that combine a regime of accumulation with a diversity of cultural institutions and forms of the state, to constitute a relative unity, capable of
temporarily (in the historical scale) securing social reproduction.6 A mode of
social regulation is deined as “the conjunction of the mechanisms working
together for social reproduction, with attention to the prevalent economic
structures and social forms” (Boyer, 1990: 20). These mechanisms can be
speciied as the “general laws [of tendency]” through which “the determinant structure of a society is reproduced,” by means of “the transformation
of social relations to create new forms that are both economic and non-economic, that are organised in structures and themselves reproduce a determinant structure, the mode of production” (Aglietta, 1979: 13-16). The elements
articulated in a mode of social regulation include the regime of capital accumulation, the state form and its variations of political regime, and the hegemonic culture and dominant ideologemes.
Springing from the Structural Marxism of Althusser and cothinkers,
Regulation Theory is a “structuralist, but ‘historicised’ Marxism” (Boyer,
1990: 85), incorporating insights from Kalekyian (post-Keynesian) economics and the Marxist political theory of Nicos Poulantzas (Boyer, 1990: 93).
Modes of social regulation represent the post-Structural Marxist adaptation of the Gramscian concept of a “historic bloc”. A historic bloc is based
on the hegemonic position of a social alliance, incorporating a mobile equilibrium of force and consent, that is, a shifting balance of forces within the
historic compromise of a determinate social settlement. Regulation Theory
begins from the Althusserian description of the social formation as a totality
of structural instances articulated on the basis of a mode of production. By
6. My grasp of Regulation Theory is based primarily on Michel Aglietta’s exemplary A
Theory of Capitalist Regulation (Aglietta, 1979) and supplemented by Robert Boyer’s superb
introductory work, The Regulation School (Boyer, 1990). Regulation Theory has been applied
to the problems of inlation and monetary theory by Alain Lipietz in The Enchanted World
(Lipietz, 1985) and to speciic national crises of the Fordist mode of social regulation in
Boyer’s Japanese Capitalism in Crisis (Boyer, 2000) and Bob Jessop et. al., Thatcherism (Jessop,
Bonnett et al., 1988) and The Politics of Flexibility (Jessop, 1991a). Alain Lipietz has explored
the major, especially monetary, dimensions of the crisis of Fordism in Mirages and Miracles
(Lipietz, 1987) and the main aspects of the emergent, post-Fordist mode of social regulation
in Towards a New Economic Order (Lipietz, 1992). A major (institutionalist) alternative theory of
the postwar boom and present crisis is provided by a persistent critic of Regulation Theory,
Robert Brenner, in “The Economics of Global Turbulence” (Brenner, 1998: 1-229).
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47
contrast with the necessary character of social reproduction assumed by Althusser and Balibar, however, Regulation Theory regards social relations as
structured by social practices that are continuously undergoing contestation
and redeinition. This accords with the Marxist analysis, that the diferential
histories of the regional structures in the social formation are recombined on
the ield of “social class practices” (Poulantzas, 1973: 123-141, 275-295). Class
struggles on this terrain condense at the level of the nation-state, because
the political instance has the function of maintaining the unity of the social
formation (and therefore acts as the nodal point where diverse social contradictions overdetermine political conlicts), which represents a “material condensation of the relation of forces” (Poulantzas, 1978: 123-153). The concept
of a mode of social regulation therefore corresponds to Poulantzas’ concept
of the ield of social practices, the diachronic complement to the synchronic structural matrix of the mode of production ( Jessop, 1985: 53-148). While
a mode of social regulation is a relatively uniied hegemonic strategy that
secures social reproduction, this constantly involves contestation of social
practices and the shifting balance of the interests of the dominant and dominated within the social compromise. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that
this form of Marxism overlooks the political aspect of social relations and regards politics only as a superstructural level (Laclau, 1990: 56).
The paradigmatic instance of a mode of social regulation is Fordism,
which dominated the industrialised economies from the 1930s to the 1970s
and is now in the process of break-up and recomposition into a new mode of
social regulation. The term Fordism was coined by Gramsci in the analysis
of the 1920s and refers to the structure of capitalist accumulation then becoming predominant in the United States. The Fordist mode of social regulation depended on production-line technology operated by semi-skilled
process workers, combined with mass consumption, governed by means of
an interventionist state based on the historic compromise of the welfare state
and tripartite (state, unions, capital) bargaining institutions, and culturally
conditioned by mass consumption of standardised products within nuclear family units. These relatively independent elements were selected and
combined during the massive social conlicts of the 1930s and the Second
World War, crystallising as a result of the emergence of a hegemonic capitalist strategy under the leadership of the internationally dominant US economy in the postwar period.
Against Laclau and Moufe’s exaggeration of the importance of ideological factors, Regulation Theory enables us to identify the social causes of
postmodern politics as being anchored in the break-up of the postwar mode
of social regulation. The conclusion arrived at by Regulation Theory is that
capitalism in the advanced industrialised countries is in transition from the
Fordist regime of accumulation, characterised by intensive accumulation
and mass consumption, to a post-Fordist regime combining extensive ac-
48
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
cumulation with highly individualised (niche-marketed) mass consumption
(Boyer, 1990: xv). The political conjuncture of protracted crisis and then
social reconstruction that is the historical context for postmarxism springs
from the unevenness of the transition from Fordism to a nascent post-Fordist mode of social regulation. Because of international and domestic rivalry between diferent models of post-Fordism, and the incompleteness of the
transition from Fordist production to post-Fordist production in the globally
hegemonic United States, post-Fordism displays greater diversity and heterogeneity than Fordism exhibited (Ruigrok, 1995). Although the United
States enjoys unprecedented global dominance, there is a disparity between
the military might of the world’s sole superpower and its restricted economic
dynamism, which has not equalled the productive gains and proitability of
the postwar period.
A glance at the details of this analysis makes it possible for us to explain
the phenomena described by Laclau and Moufe as efects of the structural
transformations analysed by theorists of the regulation school. Despite the
lack of a uniied post-Fordist hegemonic strategy, there are certain leading
aspects of the rival post-Fordist paradigms that can be clearly diferentiated from the Fordist social settlement ( Jessop, 1991a). The competing postFordist modes of social regulation are characterised by extensive accumulation (lexible specialisation operated by highly skilled labour) combined with
mass consumption, governed by means of a combination of the “workfare”
state and the decentring of tripartite bargaining institutions, and culturally conditioned by diversiied consumption of highly diferentiated products
within non-traditional family units. The process of transition to post-Fordist regulation involves economic globalisation, the relative decline of the
nation-state and the aestheticisation of the commodity form. The relativisation of the political universal and the new importance of cultural subjectivity are both linked to the major mechanism of the break-up of Fordism,
namely, the internationalisation of production. Where Fordism was a nationally centred developmental model, the post-Fordist regimes of accumulation are characterised by a new international division of labour and the
globalisation of production (Dicken, 1998). This ruptures the structural integrity of national social formations by inserting them into an increasingly
integrated (although highly segmented) world economy. As national economies cease to relate externally to the international division of labour and
become increasingly integrated into a highly segmented world economy, the
lack of structural closure of national social formations generates massive
dislocations in domestic industry, social equality, mechanisms of governance and the ability of multicultural states to absorb cultural diversity. The
conclusion to be drawn is that the dislocation of contemporary social formations is less a result of structural dispersion, than a consequence of a new
regime of capital accumulation.
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The Post-Fordist Regimes of Accumulation
The major diference between Laclau and Moufe’s initial analysis of the
conjuncture and that of Regulation Theory is therefore not the concept of
Fordism or the signiicance of the NSM, but whether the structural matrix
of capitalism acts as a decisive constraint on hegemonic articulations. Laclau and Moufe’s analysis suggests that ideological manipulations are the
key to a leftwing renewal and proposes that these obey a discursive logic, according to which nothing predetermines the possible articulations of a social
antagonism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165). The authors, despite announcing that nothing constrains hegemonic articulations, nonetheless persist in
regarding capitalist relations of production, bureaucratic authoritarianism
and possessive individualism, as structural matrices whose abolition “every project for radical democracy necessarily includes” (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 165).7 Laclau and Moufe are inconsistent, then, in at once denying
the existence of structural constraints and insisting that certain elements of
the radical democratic programme are not negotiable. By insisting that the
crisis of Fordism is the result of ethico-political struggles alone, and that the
leftwing response is the extension of the democratic revolution, Laclau and
Moufe misrecognise limits of structural variation as value-decisions of the
NSM. This conforms exactly to Althusser’s description of ideology as a subject-centred misrecognition, in which structural roles appear as the results
of autonomous decisions.
According to Laclau, the new “discursive formations” of “disorganised
capitalism” are characterised by a situation whose novelty:
lies in the fact that the nodal point around which the intelligibility of the
social is articulated does not now tend to be displaced from one instance
to another in society, but to dissolve.… Accordingly, articulation is
constitutive of all social practice [and] … dislocations increasingly
dominate the terrain of an absent structural determination (Laclau,
1990: 59).
This absent structural determination was the mode of production as an
“absent cause” and the “nodal point” of the social formation used to be the
“structure in dominance”. But now, in view of the fact that there is no bourgeois revolution—only “family resemblances” between democracies (Laclau, 1990: 22)—we have to conclude that there is no capitalism, only “fam7. Possessive individualism: “in all those cases where the problematic of possessive individualism is maintained as the matrix of production of the identity of the diferent groups,
this result [specious egalitarianism] is inevitable” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165). Bureaucratic
limitations on democracy: “it is necessary, therefore, to broaden the domain of the exercise of
democratic rights beyond the limited traditional ield of ‘citizenship’” (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 165). Capital accumulation: “every project for radical democracy necessarily includes
… the socialist dimension—that is to say, the abolition of capitalist relations of production”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165). Emphasis added throughout.
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ily resemblances” between economies. Indeed, Laclau stipulates expressly
that this is his view. “Instead [of capitalism],” Laclau speciies:
there are global conigurations—historical blocs, in the Gramscian
sense—in which the “ideological,” “economic” and “political,” and
other elements, are inextricably fused and can only be separated for
analytical purposes. There is therefore no “capitalism,” but rather
diferent forms of capitalist relations which form part of highly diverse
structural complexes (Laclau, 1990: 26).
But the absence of a structural determination means the elimination of
the concept of a mode of production and therefore the redundancy of the
category of “capitalism,” disorganised or otherwise. Hence, the occasional
references to “the decline of the classical working class in the post-industrial
countries” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 57) in reality express what is central:
the end of capitalism as the unity of a mode of exploitation and the advent
of a new society, characterised by difuse oppressions and dispersed resistances. No other sense can be made of the Panglossian claim that today, “a
plurality of subjects exercise a democratic and negotiated control of the productive process on the basis of this fragmentation, thus avoiding any form
of dictatorship, whether by the market, the state or direct producers” (Laclau, 1990: 83).
By contrast with the current postmarxian vision of the dispersion of the
structural dominance of capital accumulation, Laclau and Moufe’s initial
Marxisant diagnosis that “there is now practically no domain of individual
or collective life which escapes capitalist relations” was correct. Regimes of
accumulation can be described as the contingent articulation of a distinct
labour process with certain norms of consumption, whose “combination”
speciies the structural matrix for economic institutions and deines the limits of variation of class struggles for a historical period. The labour process of post-Fordism is distinct from the Fordist production line operated by
semi-skilled labour. By contrast with this intensive mode of accumulation,
the lexible specialisation and automated production characteristic of postFordism takes advantage of continuous technological innovation in information and communications equipment to accelerate the turn-over time of
ixed capital (Harvey, 1989). Highly skilled operators work in production
teams on the basis of constant quality improvement and multi-skilling to enable rapid re-allocation of production tasks. The mobility of capital and centrality of process innovation leads to premium on highly-skilled and “lexible” employees, with high cultural capital and the ability to learn new tasks
through constant retraining. This leads to the massive restructuring of wage
relations, the nation-state and everyday life generally known as “globalisation”. The breakdown of the ixed mental/manual division of Fordism and
the integration of worker suggestions through industrial participation has
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51
led some social democratic advocates of post-Fordism to imagine that this
is a “new age of democracy” and not a new modality of exploitation (Mathews, 1988; Mathews, 1989a; Mathews, 1989b). This is belied, however, by
the increasing polarisation of wealth that accompanies post-Fordist regimes
of accumulation (Giddens, 1994a; Giddens, 1998; Giddens, 1999; Giddens,
2000; Giddens, 2001).
Instead of Laclau’s impressionistic assertion that contemporary social
formations are characterised by the dissolution of economic structures, the
sociology of globalisation suggests that the world economy is gripped by intense international rivalries, which unleash signiicant new class struggles.
Winfred Ruigrok and Rob Van Tulder conclude from their survey of international restructuring that no uniform “post-Fordism” can be detected in the
world economy (Ruigrok, 1995: 12-35). In particular, the process of the international restructuring of capital is marked by an emerging rivalry between
three powerful regional blocs, characterised by distinct variations of the
post-Fordist regime of accumulation. “Toyotism” (Asia-Paciic, centred on
Japan), “Macro-Fordism” (the Americas, centred on the US) and Fordismwith-“lexible-specialisation” (Europe, centred on France, Italy and Germany) are emerging as the hegemonic regimes of accumulation within the pertinent regional blocs (Ruigrok, 1995: 36-62). These can be associated with
the diferent hegemonic strategies promoted by social forces in the relevant
geographical regions, and therefore with quite diferent emergent articulations between cultural, political and economic social practices. This is a level of explanatory detail absent from Laclau’s supericial and contradictory
claim that despite the dissolution of the capitalist mode of production, “diverse” capitalist “complexes” nonetheless exist.
Secondly, and equally pointedly, class struggle is not, despite postmarxian insistence to the contrary, on the wane. Major transformations in the
quality and nature of work accompany post-Fordist techniques of “lexible
specialisation”. Regulation Theory demonstrates by empirical methods (instead of ideological assertions) that the “renegotiation” of the relation between wage labour and capital remains the central determinant of the rate
of proit, and therefore of the viability of an entire mode of social regulation
(Aglietta, 1979; Bowles, Gordon et al., 1983). The incorporation of the union
movements into a framework of state-supervised collective bargaining might
be declining, but class conlict in the industrialised democracies is not (Davis, 1999; Moody, 1988; Moody, 1997). Indeed, the Thatcherite attack on union rights has been described as the “white heat of a post-Fordist revolution”
( Jessop, 1991b: 135-161). Yet, post-Fordism has both intensiied class inequalities and mystiied them, through social and spatial fragmentation that has
undermined workers’ solidarity and fragmented working-class communities
(Antonio and Bonanno, 1996: 3-32). Additionally, the process of forging a
new mode of social regulation is incomplete. This generates intense social
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
conlict between the diferent groups included in, and those excluded from,
the emerging social settlement of post-Fordism—a conlict dynamised signiicantly, but not exclusively, by class antagonisms.
Postmodern Politics and the Cultural Turn
The postmodern relativisation of the political universal and the postmodern fragmentation of social subjectivity therefore needs to be considered in
the context of the generative social processes of the relative decline of the
nation-state and the commodiication of cultural practices. While the political process results in a decentring of national politics (and the rise of local
antagonisms), the cultural process involves the dialectics of extreme individuation and generalised exchangeability. In line with postmodern ideology, postmarxism tends to imagine that the multiplication of the sites of social antagonism and the plurality of NSM mean the advent of an unlimited
potential for democratisation (Laclau, 1985: 42; Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
149-193). This lines postmarxism up with the mainstream ideology of a postmodern politics “beyond Left and Right” (Giddens, 1994a), which misrecognises the decentring of class politics for its absolute decline and predicts the
relentless advance of democracy without considering the anti-democratic
potentials of post-Fordism.
It is here that Laclau and Moufe most blatantly substitute ideological
misrecognition for political analysis. HSS proposes that in politics, “the fundamental concept is that of ‘democratic struggle’ and … popular struggles
are merely speciic conjunctures resulting from the multiplication of equivalence efects among the democratic struggles” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
137). This substitutes a speciically leftwing requirement—the irreducibility of democratic struggles—for a general theory of political processes. As
a description of anti-democratic populist movements and ideologies, such
as fascism (Laclau, 1977: 81-142) and neo-conservatism (Hall, 1988: 19-56,
123-160), it is plainly wrong. Further, postmarxism considers that because
of the “increasing complexity of the social” and the growing lexibility of
subject-positions (the overdetermination of political identities), “democratic
struggles tend less and less to be uniied as ‘popular struggles’” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 133). Without the uniication of democratic struggles into a
popular front alliance, however, no expansive hegemony is possible. The replacement of theoretical analysis with ideological requirements results in a
performative inconsistency between radical democratic theory and politics.
The task of the Left presupposes, at a minimum, an analysis of the institutional determinants of the neo-conservative embrace of “authoritarian
populism” and an appreciation of the structural reforms necessary for progressive democratisation. Despite accepting that the neo-liberal efort to articulate a new hegemony involved the recuperative “divide and conquer”
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strategy of sectoral concessions to social movement demands for liberty (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165-166), Laclau and Moufe restrict the Left to the
“fundamental” task of deepening and expanding “liberal democratic ideolog y”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 176). This reduction of institutional and strategic
analysis to a rapturous embrace of “liberal democratic ideolog y” evades the
diicult question of the institutional impact on representative democracy
of the emergent mode of social regulation. Laclau and Moufe overlook the
structural constraints on liberal democracy and the increasingly authoritarian character of the post-Fordist state.
Regulation Theory, by contrast, proposes that the relative decline of
the nation-state does indeed bring about a decentring of hegemonic politics,
combined with the relativisation of the political universal ( Jessop, 1990: 192272). Nonetheless, the new mode of social regulation imposes signiicant limitations on industrial democracy, the democratisation of the state and the articulation of equality with liberty ( Jessop, 1991a; Jessop, Bonnett et al., 1988).
Following the analysis of Poulantzas, modernity institutes politics as the ield
of hegemony because capitalism excludes extra-economic coercion from the
labour process ( Jessop, 1990). The nation state operates as a universalising
instance external to the economic realm and political struggle revolves upon
this “neutral arbiter,” requiring the dominant class to portray its interests as
those of the nation as a whole (Poulantzas, 1973: 104-117). Popular-democratic sovereignty in the bourgeois republic nonetheless becomes explicitly politicised during the twentieth century with the advent of the interventionist
state, leading to signiicant concessions (social rights, formal liberties) (Poulantzas, 1973: 55-56; Poulantzas, 1975: 165-168; Poulantzas, 1978: 165-168),
combined with institutional restrictions on popular sovereignty and the retreat of democracy towards elite competition (MacPherson, 1972; MacPherson, 1977). Towards the end of the twentieth century, the growth of multinational corporations and the internationalisation of capitalism forced the
state to withdraw from economic intervention towards the management of
social crises, and mass struggles precipitated by state intervention led to the
emergence of the NSM (Poulantzas, 1978: 240-247). Poulantzas identiies
the contemporary tendency of the state form as “authoritarian statism” and
identiies its characteristics as “intensiied state control over every sphere of
socio-economic life combined with a radical decline in the institutions of political democracy and with the draconian and multiform curtailment of socalled ‘formal liberties’” (Poulantzas, 1978: 203-204).
Lacking an evaluation of the trend towards plebiscitory politics orchestrated through the mass media as something linked to corporate expansion
and the relative decline in national sovereignty (Boggs, 2000), Laclau and
Moufe massively underestimate the signiicance of authoritarian populism
in the current conjuncture.8 Indeed, Laclau and Moufe appear to conlate
8. By “authoritarian populism,” I mean neo-conservatism’s “unceasing eforts to construct
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
the postmodern dispersion of the subject with the advent of a new form of
subjectivity that is, efectively, a post-capitalist subjectivity beyond possessive individualism. According to Moufe, the dispersion of the subject across
a multiplicity of (potentially contradictory) subject-positions implies a postindividualist conception of democratic rights (Moufe, 1988: 35). Amplifying these sentiments, Laclau claims that the contemporary proliferation of
political identities is the condition of possibility of radical democratic politics (Laclau, 1990: 81-82). Yet, there is a link between a socially fragmented
and dispersed polity and the plebiscitory legitimation of authoritarian populism, because this latter depends upon political demobilisation combined
with demagogic scapegoating. Laclau and Moufe conlate these dimensions
because they do not support their analysis of the transformation of liberal
ideology with an assessment of the structural transformation of parliamentary democracy.
Secondly, postmodern subjectivity needs to be related to the commodiication of cultural forms. In the consumption norms of the emergent postFordist regimes of accumulation, a new culture plays an increasingly important role, based on the massive growth of advertising and its integration into
product design (Fine and Haug, 2002; Haug, 1986). In accordance with the
analysis of Fredric Jameson, we can insist that postmodernism is a new cultural dominant (hegemonic cultural style) ( Jameson, 1991). Following Jameson, I contend that postmodernism is the new hegemonic culture within capitalist social formations characterised by the emergent post-Fordist modes
of social regulation. This position is informed by Jameson’s argument that
cultural forms have to be examined from the perspective of “cultural revolution,” whereby social subjects are “reprogrammed” for the lifeworld of
the dominant mode of production ( Jameson, 1981: 95-99); Jameson further
speciies that a microcosm of this process happens during transitions between distinct stages of capitalism ( Jameson, 1991: xii-xv). While the analysis presented by Regulation Theory is economically as convincing as Mandel’s concept of “late capitalism” (Mandel, 1978b), relied on by Jameson, the
notion of post-Fordism avoids the periodisation problems encountered in
Jameson’s position (Harvey, 1989: 38; Soja, 1989: 60-61).
The hegemonic cultural style of postmodernism can be characterised as
a radicalisation of modernism under conditions of the commodiication of
the movement towards a more authoritarian regime from a massive populist base,” based on
national-popular interpellations that are anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian (Hall, 1988:
146). Hall’s basically Laclavian position on the primacy of ideology (Hall, 1988: 123-173) was
subjected to devastating criticism by Jessop and cothinkers (Jessop, Bonnett et al., 1988: 57124)—the work includes a reprint of Hall’s reply to their criticisms in which he accepts their
charge of a one-sided, polemical exaggeration of the importance of ideology—who did not
so much object to “authoritarian populism,” as to its complete independence from economics
and politics (Jessop, Bonnett et al., 1988: 66-67).
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55
the aesthetic. With the commodiication of the aesthetic, the “great divide”
between mass culture and high modernism is destroyed, leading to postmodern “popular” culture (Huyssen, 1986). Popular culture exists in a condition of “complicit critique,” where the utopian potential of the modernist
work is blunted by a self-relexive knowledge of its insertion into the very
sphere of commodity circulation that it criticises (Hutcheon, 1988; Hutcheon, 1989). At the same time, grasping the aestheticisation of the commodity
(and the commodiication of the aesthetic) in terms of a general economy of
the “commodity-body-sign,” which includes the products destined for individual consumption as markers of distinction and “reiied” images of material satisfaction, inserts popular culture within the total circuit of the commodity without any nostalgia for the lost modernist utopia (Miklitsch, 1996:
5-40; Miklitsch, 1998a: 61-95). The contemporary proliferation of identities
(Giddens, 1991), sometimes impressionistically described as “postmodern
schizophrenia” ( Jameson, 1991: xx), is therefore best regarded as an extreme
individuation commensurate with the combination of extensive accumulation and product diversiication characteristic of post-Fordism (Cross, 1993;
Lee, 1993). It is in this context of the new importance of postmodern culture
for social reproduction and the proliferation of commodiied identities that
the “rise and fall of the NSM” can be grasped as integral to the transition
from Fordism to post-Fordism.
CLASS ANALYSIS AND THE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
A New Social Agency for the New Times?
In the context of the emergence of a new mode of social regulation, the cultural politics of the NSM cannot be considered part of a “paradigm shift”
“beyond Left and Right”. Instead, they appear as efects of social causes,
connected to the economic structures, political dynamics and cultural dialectics of post-Fordism. This brings us to the second major postmarxian
claim, according to which the challenge posed to Marxism by the NSM is
supposed to be deinitive (Moufe, 1988: 34). According to Laclau, class is
completely inadequate to explain contemporary conlict. He proposes that
the shift to identity politics indicates that the NSM constitute a new social phenomenon which explodes the paradigm of class politics and replaces it with identity politics (Laclau, 1985: 27-29). As supporters of the thesis
that the NSM emerge from a radical structural break (Laclau, 1990: 52-55),
Laclau and Moufe hold that identity politics—driven by the “democratic
Imaginary”—is the central dynamic of contemporary social conlict (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 149-193) and class struggle is becoming increasingly
irrelevant (Laclau, 2000c: 203). Where industrial conlict emerges, this is
the result of identity conlict between consumers and is not traceable to the
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
politics of production (Laclau, 1985: 31), so identity politics is not shaped by
capitalist production, but by broader cultural concerns. Capitalism does not
determine the emergence of the NSM because “the capitalist system” is not
a relevant theoretical determination (Laclau, 1990: 58-59), while the emergence of the NSM demonstrates the irreducibility of the social to dynamics of capital accumulation and instead, its distribution across a plurality of
sites of conlict, governed by independent social logics (Laclau, 1985). Yet,
as I have indicated, the combination of the globalisation of production, decline of the nation-state and increased importance of culture precipitates
new forms of social conlict that have everything to do with capital accumulation and class politics.
Globally, the novelty of the NSM can be diferentially determined by
contrast with the “old” or traditional working-class movements. The decisive diferential trait is supposed to be the new role of cultural and symbolic forms of protest, completely absent from the “old” social movements
(Cohen, 1985). According to theorists of the NSM, the “traditional” social
movements were centralised, hierarchical, socially homogeneous political
movements, oriented to the control or transformation of the state by means
of mobilisation around material needs and political demands, and lacking a
focus on identity and cultural practices. By contrast, the NSM are organised
in grassroots, decentred and participatory networks within civil society (Melucci, 1989) and follow the strategy of “self-limiting revolution” or localised
reforms (Arato and Cohen, 1992), aiming to reduce state control rather than
control the state (Touraine, 1985), by means of an orientation to the transformation of cultural signiication and the constitution of new political subjectivities (Touraine, 1977). Whereas the materialist values of working-class mobilisation involve redistributive struggles in the conventional political arena,
the post-materialist values of the NSM engage the quality of life and aim for
the reconstruction of identity, values, lifestyles, cultural symbols and knowledge (Dalton, 1990; Giddens, 1994a; Giddens, 1998; Giddens, 2000; Inglehart, 1990a; Inglehart, 1990b; Inglehart, 1997). The NSM are focused on the
new politicisation of everyday life as opposed to state politics and centred on
symbolic contestation in the cultural sphere instead of power confrontation
in the political domain (Melucci, 1996). According to NSM theorists, these
transformations mean that the workers’ movement that dominated the politics of the nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries cannot now perform a
leading role in the constitution and contestation of social structures.
Recent investigations, however, have exploded the claim of “newness”
and it emerges that the category of “new” social movements cannot be empirically sustained. It overstates their novelty (Plotke, 1990; Plotke, 1995), ignores their predecessors and mistakes an early position in the cycle of protest
for a new type of protest (Tarrow, 1994), neglects a long-standing historical cycle of cultural critique (Brandt, 1990), and misinterprets a generation-
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al phenomenon as a categorical shift in social action. Social movements of
the traditional nineteenth-century working-class are revealed to possess all
the attributes of the “new” (Calhoun, 1993; Tucker, 1991), while traditions
of cultural struggles, documented in working-class historiography (Croteau,
1995; Thompson, 1963), have been deployed damagingly against the stereotyped dichotomy of “cultural” NSM and “state-centred” working-class
movements. Hence, the sharp distinction between traditional working class
and the NSM has not survived scrutiny.
Instead of the historical teleology of the increase of social complexity
and the arrival of an expressive postmodern social totality, replete with a
new social agency, reconsideration of the continuity between the “new” and
traditional social movements enables us to “constitute our theoretical notion of modernity, not as a master narrative, but in a way that relects both
its heterogeneity and contestation and that takes full account of the central
place of social movements within it” (Calhoun, 1993: 418). Indeed, the history of social movement struggles is coextensive with modernity and the
“newness” of the social movements is partially the result of their marginalisation in the history of social theory (Wallerstein, 1990: 13). Certainly, with
Laclau and Moufe, the French Revolution catalysed the spread of mass
mobilisations for liberty and equality throughout Europe and the world
capitalist system, where they continue to inform contemporary social movements (Calhoun, 1993: 390-395; Wallerstein, 1990: 13-53). The historically
speciic rise of social movements is linked to the emergence of mass politics centred on the nation-state—like it or not, the central focus of politics
in modernity—and therefore to the possibility of hegemonic strategies. Instead of a process of continuous expansion of the logic of the French Revolution, though, as Laclau and Moufe suggest, social movement struggles have
been conditioned by the structures of the world capitalist system, developing
in nationalist, socialist and communist directions as a consequence of the
centre-periphery division in the world economy (Shannon, 1989; Wallerstein, 1990; Wallerstein, 1991). World systems theory demonstrates the existence of six varieties of “anti-systemic movements” in response to this politico-economic distribution (Wallerstein, 1990: 13-53), while the concept of
social movements as bearers of alternative modernities, including state socialism, “Islamic Jacobins” and Apartheid (Ray, 1993), adds a cultural dimension irreducible to the “expansion and deepening of liberal ideology”
thesis of Laclau and Moufe.
Beyond Left and Right?
In question, then, is not the existence and extent of “new” social movements
linked to the rising importance of struggles for cultural recognition, nor the
existence of non-class social antagonisms, nor yet the emergence of novel
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middle-class layers. Nor can there be a dispute that the politics of many social movements are relatively autonomous from the logic of class struggles.
This means, for instance, that the ight against women’s oppression cannot
be reduced to the struggle against speciically capitalist exploitation. The
Marxist claim is that the contradictions of capitalism nonetheless overdetermine the forms of women’s oppression and that this non-class social antagonism exists as articulated to class structures (Barrett, 1980). Michele
Barrett’s landmark Women’s Oppression Today argued against the emergent
postmarxian position of Cutler, Hussein, Hindess and Hirst, that ideology,
politics and economics were completely independent, and that women’s oppression was located in ideological relations exclusively. Barrett accepts the
non-class nature of the family as a social institution and adopts the position that women’s oppression is primarily located in ideological relations of
gender construction. Drawing upon the materialist anthropology of Claude
Meillassoux and the “mixed modes of production” debate (Meillassoux,
1981; Wolpe, 1980; Kuhn and Wolpe, 1977), however, she argues that familial structures are articulated to capitalist social relations as subordinated structures, so that the wage relation and the commodity form condition
both the domestic economy and gender relations. As such, the non-class antagonism of gender relations (1) has both primary ideological and secondary
economic aspects that are conditioned by capitalism and (2) takes on a class
signiicance insofar as the gender division of labour in the domestic space
fundamentally conditions the segmentation of the labour market for wage
labour. However, the non-class gender opposition is an antagonistic relation
that is analytically primary in the explanation of family structures: class conditions gender, rather than explains it; gender relations have a diferential history that is externally related to the histories of the economic, political and
ideological structures of capitalism; thus, the position advocated (then) by
Barrett is not a form of reductionism. In other words, non-class antagonisms
are relatively autonomous but “overdetermined” by class relations, which is
equivalent to claiming that the capitalist mode of production is a structure
in dominance.
To state all this more abstractly, then, the signiicant diferences between contemporary Marxism and postmarxism concern the existence of
structural tendencies as determinants of social conlict and the relevance of
structural location as a conditioning factor in the adoption of subject-positions. Because postmarxism holds that identity politics arises completely independently of class relations, constituting an autonomous or free-loating system governed by ideology and not by material needs or state politics, Laclau
and Moufe are forced to defend the untenable claim that capitalism is not a
relevant determinant of social conlict and to deny the pertinence of the category of structural (class) locations.
According to Laclau’s major article on the NSM, “the concept of class
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struggle … is totally insuicient as a way of accounting for contemporary
social conlicts” (Laclau, 1985: 29). Laclau and Moufe deny the theoretical validity of a replacement of the proletariat by the NSM within the neoHegelian paradigm of Gorz and Touraine, who seek a “new subject of history” and merely “invert the Marxist position” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
169). Instead, the authors contend that while discourse theory reveals that
workers’ struggles always were a form of identity politics, nonetheless, the
speciicity of the politics of the NSM constitutes a democratic advance commensurate with social complexity (Laclau, 1985: 42). In support of this position, Laclau criticises classical Marxism, which determines the identity of
agents in the relations of production, so that politics means the “representation of interests” (Laclau, 1985: 28). Classical Marxism designates the social
agent as a pre-constituted referent of political discourse and assumes an a
priori unity to the ensemble of subject-positions of the agent in production.
The leading characteristic of the NSM is that the unity of these determinations has broken up, so that “it has become increasingly impossible to identify the group, conceived as a referent, with an orderly and coherent system
of ‘subject-positions’” (Laclau, 1985: 28). In other words, contemporary social clashes bring to light the multiplicity of subject-positions occupied by the
agent and the conlict potential of this overdetermined ensemble.
The supposed unity of the subject in reality consists of a decentred (differential) ensemble of subject-positions (worker, Black, female, and so forth)
(Laclau, 1985: 31). “It is thus impossible to speak of the social agent as if we
were dealing with a uniied, homogeneous entity. We have rather to approach the social agent as a plurality, dependent on the various subject-positions by which s/he is constituted within various discursive formations”
(Laclau, 1985: 31-32). Because of the lack of coherence of this ensemble of
subject-positions, it is impossible to regard political subjectivity as the representation of a pre-constituted interest that can be derived from the structural location of the agent. The central characteristic of the NSM is that social
antagonism is determined not by the clash of interests, but by the fact that
an ensemble of subject-positions has become the focal point of social conlict and political mobilisation (Laclau, 1985: 32). According to postmarxism, then, the NSM respond to the negation of identity and not to structural
determinations.
In HSS, however, a somewhat more extended analysis is conducted in
relatively evasive terms, for Laclau and Moufe generally resort to quasifoundational language. When explaining the causal factors operating in the
emergence of the NSM, their descriptions suggest a scission between subjectpositions and structural location, as in, for instance, their conjunctural analysis in terms of a “double perspective” of “the transformation of social relations” and “the efects of the displacement … of the egalitarian Imaginary”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 165). In the article on the NSM, however, Laclau
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is more candid. Laclau conceptualises social classes, structural levels and so
forth “as complexes resulting from the contingent articulation of smaller entities” (Laclau, 1985: 31). The new units of analysis are “subject-positions”
(Laclau, 1985: 32), that are contingently articulated together into discursive
formations (social relations). This social theory can be characterised as a
form of radical liberalism based on logical atomism, resulting in the complete dispersion of the social ield, linked to a descriptive empiricism of the
“diverse complexes” of contemporary “post-industrial” society.
The convergence of Laclau and Moufe’s position with the “beyond
Left and Right” stance of the post-industrial utopians, theorists of relexive modernity and advocates of Critical Theory should alert us to the ultimate political stakes in this debate. The “traditional” social movement of
the working class has deined the agenda of the Left since the early the nineteenth-century and has meant that the Left-Right opposition tends to relect
the class division of society (Giddens, 1994a) and a principled distinction between social equality (the Left) and natural inequality (the Right) (Bobbio,
1996). Where for Giddens, for instance, the NSM appear as an adjunct to
the class struggle, which remains the major dynamic of capitalism, for Laclau and Moufe the working class is (at best) an appendage to the NSM.
Once class politics becomes secondary (relexive modernity, Critical Theory) or irrelevant (postmarxism, post-industrial theory), the Left-Right distinction ceases to be the primary political division in modern society. Laclau
and Moufe, of course, reject this entailment (Laclau and Moufe, 2000). I
endorse their refusal to abandon the Left-Right distinction, based on the sociological and philosophical reasons just considered—but it is very diicult
to see how they can actually avoid it, on the basis of their position.
New Social Movements and Post-Fordism
Postmarxism’s insistence on a non-class politics, combined with an exclusive concentration on ideology, functions to occlude the connection between
post-Fordism and the lexible identities promoted by many of the NSM. The
problem is that Laclau and Moufe—on ideological grounds alone (Laclau,
1985: 28; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 150)—reject the idea that the structural tendencies of a mode of social regulation are crucial determinants of social conlict, preferring to believe that the novelty of the NSM lies in the
autonomous activation of certain subject-positions as sites of contestation.
It is surely signiicant that not only (as we have seen) do Laclau and Moufe
neglect these pronouncements when it comes to concrete analyses, but that
the postmarxists who actually engage in empirical studies of the NSM also
ignore them, or reverse them completely. According to a postmarxian survey conducted in the 1990s, “despite the emergence of new sites of struggle
that cannot be comprehended in terms of class dynamics, capitalism re-
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mains the dominant structure of the contemporary world” (Carroll, 1994:
16-17). Indeed, many of the NSM articulate the concerns of workers left out
of the Fordist social compromise and the emergent grievances of social categories of consumption (Carroll, 1994: 3-26). Another postmarxian survey
of Regulation Theory and the NSM concedes that “capital accumulation
remains the mainspring of advanced societies, even if the sociologically deined working class is declining in size … and … this process will continue
to deine the main positions in social conlict” (Steinmetz, 1994: 185). On the
basis of her work on race in Britain (Smith, 1994), Smith claims to “extend”
Laclau and Moufe’s position by introducing the distinction between “structural positions” and “subject-positions” (Smith, 1998: 4, 55-63)—a “supplement” that efectively repudiates the original.
Laclau and Moufe are keen to reconceptualise workers’ struggles as
“always-already” identity based. They argue that workers’ struggles in the
nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries were either relatively depoliticised
reformist struggles in production, or radical responses “to transformations
which called into question traditional forms of worker identity” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 168-169). Thus the crucial determinant of the radicalisation
of working-class struggles in production was political identity and not the
structural determinant of capitalist exploitation. Conversely:
Once the conception of the working class as a “universal class” is rejected,
it becomes possible to recognise the plurality of the antagonisms which
take place in the ield of what is arbitrarily grouped under the label
of “workers’ struggles,” and the inestimable importance of the great
majority of them for the deepening of the democratic process (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 167).
The decisive conclusion for postmarxism is that the multiplicity of discursive contexts that informed these struggles prevent any identiication of
a singular and unitary working class (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 167). This
strikes at the straw target of vulgar Marxism (for which capitalist exploitation automatically generates radical resistance), but is not a serious engagement with post-Althusserian Marxism at all.
The claim that workers’ struggles are a form of “identity politics” is
nothing new, or shocking, from an Althusserian perspective, because political subjectivity is constituted through ideological interpellations that lend
the subject a social identity. It is on the basis of “lived experience” that subjects enter political conlicts, and no doubt democratic ideology is one (but
not the only) determinant of the radicalisation of struggle (socialist, populist
and religious radicalism, for instance, are also common). Yet, in the Althusserian perspective, the “reality shocks,” engendered by the contradictions
between the “Imaginary relations” constitutive of ideology and the “real
conditions of existence” that ideology misrecognises, can lead to the articu-
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lation of new forms of social subjectivity that conform more closely to the
structural locations occupied by a social agent (Althusser, 1990: 1-42).
Indeed, Laclau’s earlier work (within the research programme of Structural Marxism) provided a superior explanation of this phenomenon, compared to the eclipse of structural factors behind ideological manipulation
characteristic of the postmarxian position. From Laclau’s initial position, it
is clear that political crises, arising from an accumulation of structural contradictions, are experienced irst and foremost as identity crises for social
agents (Laclau, 1977: 103). When social agents do not belong to fundamental
classes of production, the ideological crisis becomes increasingly crucial and
this increases the importance of the ideological instance in the inal resolution of the political crisis in the social formation as a whole (Laclau, 1977:
104). In particular, the democratic struggle represents competition for the
middle classes, whose identity as “the people” is more important than their
class-identity (Laclau, 1977: 114). It follows that the “struggle for the articulation of popular-democratic ideology into class ideological discourses is the
basic ideological struggle in capitalist social formations” (Laclau, 1977: 114).
These references to the middle classes would later be discretely erased and
replaced by the entirely non-class NSM. Nonetheless, they throw signiicant
light on the overdetermination of an ensemble of non-class subject-positions
(for instance, female, Black, lesbian) by a class subject-position (for instance,
working-class or middle-class), suggesting that popular-democratic identities tend to be those adopted by non-working-class subjects.
The article by Joachim Hirsch—drawing on the perspectives of Regulation Theory—supplies evidence for my analysis. Hirsch demonstrates that
the NSM in Germany emerged from the crisis of Fordist social regulation
and that their contradictory tendencies might be expected to lead to internal
divisions if a new, post-Fordist mode of social regulation emerged as a hegemonic project. Far from dismissing the NSM, Hirsch emphasises that they
“are a contradictory battle ground in the struggle for a new hegemony” and
that “within these struggles, [they] play a very complex and rather contradictory part” (Hirsch, 1988: 51, 53). The NSM are both “the only real opposition” and—because of their ideological heterogeneity and dismissal of the
class analyses of the “traditional Left”—potentially “the unconscious vehicles for the establishment of just this new form of capitalist exploitation and
hegemony” (Hirsch, 1988: 53). In the absence of any recognition of the class
dynamics and the dominance of regimes of accumulation in social life, the
exclusive emphasis on the cultural politics of identity-formation (leading to
new, lexible identities), linked to emergent niche-markets for products targeting speciic identity choices, might easily become incorporated into postFordist social regulation. With particular reference to the German Greens,
Hirsch warned that “the formation of a political party that relates to alternative cultures and new social movements might have the vicious efect of
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splitting them and domesticating them into the established forms of parliamentary politics … the new social movements in fact might prove to be not
so much radical ighters for a new and better society, but political and ideological catalysts of a really unfriendly form of capitalist post-Fordism” (Hirsch, 1988: 54). Hirsch’s analysis was conirmed several years later, when the
division in the Greens between “Realos” and “Fundos” became the keynote
in the transformation of this “new” social movement into a political party of the old style, in government with the centre-right Social Democracy
(Bramwell, 1994). What this indicates is that the connections between postFordism and the lexible identities promoted by the NSM generates political
polarisation, which refutes Laclau’s supposition that subject-positions are entirely independent of structural determinations.
The postmarxian “farewell to the working class” is only the most recent
in a century of adieus. What has inished is not class conlict and the social
agency of fundamental classes, but instead the possibility of the progressive
simpliication of social contradictions and the model of a homogeneous and
uniied proletariat in confrontation with an equally deinite bourgeoisie. On
this question, Laclau and Moufe (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 7-46), following Althusser and Balibar (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 183-192), are perfectly correct. Contemporary class relations are characterised by the interpenetration of multiple and conlicting determinants of structural location
and the consequent heterogeneity and internal diferentiation of classes, races and genders (Poulantzas, 1975; Wright, 1985). Class never appears in an
unalloyed form, being instead permanently imbricated with elements from
relatively independent forms of social domination (Aronowitz, 1992; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). The existence of structural tendencies based in
the inal analysis in the dynamics of the accumulation of capital means that
every non-class antagonism is trapped in the “gravitational ield” of class
contradictions. While there is no isomorphism between structural locations
and subject-positions, nonetheless the structural dynamics of late capitalism determine a polarisation within non-class and middle-class movements,
leading to the emergence of tendential class-political dimensions inside the
NSM. As Laclau’s Marxist work concluded, while “not every contradiction is
a class contradiction, … every contradiction is overdetermined by the class
struggle” (Laclau, 1977: 106).
The novelty of the NSM consists not in their absolute distinction from
the traditional working class, but instead from a new coniguration of old
elements (material grievances, political demands, claims for cultural recognition), combined with historically speciic activation of social layers and
the emergence of new middle strata, linked to technological and economic
changes. What emerges, then, is that the dynamics of social movement activism are conditioned by transformations in the structure of capitalism.
Class-composition and the balance of class forces continue to overdetermine
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the NSM, leading to the phenomenon of the NSM articulating a politics hegemonised by middle-class concerns (Croteau, 1995; Eder, 1995). This is not
the claim that the politics of the NSM can be reduced to class questions—
merely that, contra postmarxism, class remains a highly relevant dimension
of contemporary social conlict.
MARXISM AND DEMOCRACY
The End of the “Jacobin Imaginary”
The continued relevance of class politics and the necessity for a structural
analysis of advanced capitalism expose the deiciencies in the postmarxian
position, highlighting the need to reconsider the relation between Marxian theory and socialist strategy. The logic of Laclau and Moufe’s rejection of Marxism is straightforward and cumulative. Increasing complexity
fragments the social ield, leading to a pluralisation of social actors and political conlicts, which tends to difuse throughout the decentred “discursive
formation”. Accordingly, Marxist theory supposedly cannot penetrate the
non-class dynamics of contemporary social conlict; and the socialist programme, based on the ontological centrality of the proletariat, the hypothesis of increasing class polarisation and the unitary character of the political
space, cannot accommodate political diversity. This leads to the necessity
for a new political strategy capable of welding together sectoral demands
into a relatively uniied coalition. Abandoning the concepts of “privileged
points of rupture and the conluence of political struggles into a uniied political space” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 152), radical democracy embraces
the postmodern multiplicity of social antagonisms on the basis of a completely relational theory of hegemony. This chain of arguments culminates
in what is, according to Laclau and Moufe, their central thesis. They dedicate the programmatic chapter of HSS to the exposition of “the thesis that it
is … [the] continuity between the Jacobin and the Marxist political imaginary which has to be put in question by the project for a radical democracy”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 152).
Laclau and Moufe’s main contention is therefore that the Jacobin Imaginary of Marxism and the radical democratic Imaginary of postmarxism
are irreconcilable opposites. Indeed, the fundamental obstacle to radical
democracy turns out to be the “ultimate core” of “essentialist ixity,” located “in the fundamental nodal point which has galvanised the political imagination of the Left: the classic concept of ‘revolution,’ cast in the Jacobin
mould … [which] implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act,
the institution of a point of concentration of power from which society could
be ‘rationally’ reorganised” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 177). Marxism, in the
inal analysis, cannot adapt to social complexity and democratic politics, be-
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cause it is based on philosophical rationalism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 3).
Where classical Marxism is grounded in “foundational character of the revolutionary act,” postmarxism deines a new, anti-essentialist social theory.
This contention, and not debates around the emergence of a new mode of
social regulation or the sociological novelty of the social movements, is the
ultima ratio of the authors’ position. The justiication for a shift to the postmarxian ield stands or falls with this claim.
There is something enigmatic about Laclau and Moufe’s presentation
of this claim through a genealogy of the category of hegemony in Marxist
theory (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 7-92). Despite claiming that the positions
advanced in HSS could equally have been arrived at without any need for an
analysis of twentieth-century Marxism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 4), Laclau
and Moufe engage in endless deconstructions of Marxism (Laclau, 1995a:
84-104; Laclau, 1990: 1-85; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 7-92), as if exhibiting
a repetition compulsion. As always, a repetition compulsion evidences the
traumatic loss of an object and the desperate quest to relocate it (that is, the
force of an unconscious desire).
According to Laclau and Moufe, the concept of hegemony was introduced to supplement the economist logic of historical necessity, governing
classical Marxism, with a political logic of contingency. On the basis of the
“increasing complexity of the social,” Marxist politics became subjected to
conditions of the fragmentation of the working class, the isolation of political movements and the separation between economic and political struggles (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 2, 8-9). According to Laclau’s subsequent
summary, HSS demonstrates that: (1) classical Marxism rests upon the thesis of an evolutionary development leading to class polarisation and social
simpliication; (2) in response to a crisis of perspectives, a series of proposals
for the integration of social fragmentation, through symbolic political action, emerged as means to salvage the basic theoretical schema; (3) the tactics of the united front and the socialist adoption of democratic tasks in the
socialist revolution responded to increasing social complexity (“combined
and uneven development”), leading to the category of hegemony; (4) “from
the Leninist concept of class alliances to the Gramscian concept of ‘intellectual and moral leadership,’ there is an increasing extension of hegemonic
tasks”; (5) this demonstrates an internal movement in Marxist theory from
evolutionary essentialism towards contingent political articulations (Laclau,
1990: 120-121).
Laclau and Moufe’s analysis of this deconstructive movement follows a
historical sequence and culminates with the “Gramscian watershed,” which
they represent as a partial break with the “essentialism” characteristic of
Marxism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 65-71). Their treatment of Gramsci’s
breakthrough is evasive, though, because this is presented as the conclusion
to a historical narrative of increasing social complexity, designed to demon-
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strate the replacement of class politics (and the ontological centrality of the
proletariat) by democratic politics (and the emergence of the NSM). The
discussion of twentieth-century Marxism is followed by two chapters of theory-construction that begin from the anti-essentialist break of Althusserian
Marxism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95-110).
What Laclau and Moufe have done is to invert the historico-theoretical sequence, for in the history of effective socialist politics, Gramsci comes
after Althusser. As Moufe once recognised, “if the history of Marxist theory during the 1960s can be characterised by the reign of ‘Althusserianism,’
then we have now, without a doubt, entered a new phase: that of ‘Gramscism’” (Moufe, 1979b: 1). The revival of Gramsci within the Western Left
depended upon the advent of Eurocommunism, as a political strategy, within the Western European Communist parties during the mid-1970s (Moufe,
1979b: 1). Yet, there is only one (indirect) mention of Eurocommunism in Laclau and Moufe’s entire deconstruction of Marxist history—in a footnote
relating to Gramsci (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 69). Secondly, the problem
that the revival of Gramsci responds to is not ontological but speciically political: not social agency but political strategy. The central problem confronted by Eurocommunism was not the fragmentation of the working class, but
instead the political terrain of socialist strategy, namely, parliamentary democracy. The main debate on the Left in the 1970s concerned “whether it
was possible to reconcile the line of the hegemony of the proletariat—at the
heart of Gramsci’s strategy—with the pluralist line of the [Eurocommunist]
‘historic compromise’” (Moufe, 1979b: 13). This reverses exactly the prognosis of Laclau and Moufe’s central contention, namely, the continuity between Marxism and the Jacobin Imaginary, for as Moufe says, the worry
was that the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) might have gone “too far” in
accepting democratic politics and have “abandoned” proletarian hegemony.
For Moufe, at that time, there could be no question of presenting Marxist
hegemony in a totalitarian light, (as exclusive of pluralism), for the Gramscian conception of ideology implies hegemonic articulations between heterogeneous materials, opening the possibility for “a strategy of democratic transition to socialism: a possible Eurocommunism which avoids both
the perils of Stalinism and social democracy” (Moufe, 1979b: 15). By a few
years later, the hopes raised by Eurocommunism had been dashed. For Laclau and Moufe, the moment of Eurocommunism became subject to a massive theoretical repression that evacuated it completely from the landscape
of Marxist history, leaving only one, tiny, symptomatic footnote as evidence
that it had ever even existed. In the light of the previous discussion of the
continued relevance of class analysis, it is revealing that Laclau and Moufe’s
watershed document, designed to legitimate a repudiation of Marxism for
forms of postmodern politics, almost completely erases the most signiicant
recent development in Marxist politics—the one with the potential to refute
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their insistence that Marxism is an inlexible, rationalist doctrine alien to
contemporary political realities.
Eurocommunism: A Massive Gap in the Postmarxian Analysis
The “end of the Jacobin Imaginary” (that is, Leninist ideology) arrives
with Eurocommunism in the 1970s (Ross, 1980: 112-134) and not with the
“avalanche of historical mutations” detected a decade later by Laclau and
Moufe. Eurocommunism broke the “continuity between the Jacobin and
the Marxist political Imaginary” by rejecting Leninism for democratic socialism, not by repudiating Marxism for radical democracy.9 Of course,
abandoning the Leninism in “Marxism-Leninism” is a modest historical
change and not a vast metaphysical transformation that requires the theoretical vocabulary of “social Imaginaries” and “discursive formations”.
Nonetheless, its omission is immensely signiicant, for it completes the process of the imposition of structures of ideological misrecognition onto theory
that characterises postmarxian historicism. The existence of Eurocommunism vitiates the specular opposition between totalitarianism and democracy that is implied by the postmarxian claim that it is impossible to separate “the Jacobin and the Marxist political Imaginary” without abandoning
class politics and historical materialism. For Eurocommunism breaks with
the core components of the “Jacobin Imaginary”—the singular and foundational character of the revolutionary act, the state-centred vision of social
reconstruction through enlightened class dictatorship and the uniication of
9. I am not suggesting that Eurocommunism was the irst Marxist movement to embrace
either parliamentary democracy or forms of participatory democracy, only that the Eurocommunist moment ruins Laclau and Moufe’s artiicial teleology and indicates that massbased democratic alternatives have existed in the Marxian tradition. Historically, the social
democracy (the Second International) defended the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy,
although the drift towards reformism of the social democracy makes this an ambiguous
legacy. Luxemburg defended parliamentary democracy from a revolutionary perspective
after the Bolshevik October, while in general the Third International under Lenin clearly
advocated forms of participatory democracy. Following the Stalinisation of the Third International, Trotsky defended the necessity of revolutionary democracy in the transition to
socialism; curiously, The Revolution Betrayed is a work not mentioned by Laclau and Moufe
(Trotsky, 1991). Nonetheless, and without any facile conlation of Lenin and Stalin, ambiguities exist in the Marxist tradition. Contemporary democratic socialists have continued
to disentangle the analytical ambiguities in the Marxist tradition and extended the long
work of resistance to Stalinisation by Western Marxists. Robin Blackburn’s extended essay
on socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall provides a historical and political overview
of the theoretical resources for contemporary democratic socialism and the major debates
regarding the strands of the Marxian tradition (Blackburn, 1991). Another perspective on
the possibilities for democratic socialism today is provided by Michael Harrington (Harrington, 1993). It is worth contrasting the scope and ambitiousness of these programmes with
the piecemeal reforms and protest politics advocated—under the banner of socialism!—by
Laclau and Moufe.
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the revolutionary subject “in the moment of proletarian chiliasm” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 84)— from a Marxist perspective. This means postmarxism cannot be considered “an inevitable decision for anyone aiming to reformulate a political programme for the Left in contemporary historical circumstances,” for instead of the specular binary of the postmarxian axiology
(radical democracy or a new Stalinism), the real situation is characterised
by a complex ield of theoretical and political diferences—including within
Eurocommunism (Boggs, 1980), whose left and right wings remain invisible
in HSS’s lonely footnote.
Indeed, despite the inlated claims to have discovered a new paradigm, postmarxism actually inherits the programme and strategy of Eurocommunism and represents a contemporary continuation of the dominant,
rightward-moving tendency within the Eurocommunist “revolution in liberty”. The strategy of radical democracy is substantially anticipated by the
programme of “structural reforms” and “advanced democracy” advocated
by the Western Communist parties in their Eurocommunist incarnation.
The major diference is that postmarxian strategy substitutes the agency
of the NSM for the role of the working class. Yet the postmarxian supplement—“Eurocommunism plus the new social movements”—adds nothing programmatic whatsoever to the Eurocommunist formula of the mixed
economy, political democratisation and cultural hegemony, while refusing a
strategic analysis of the destiny of Eurocommunism.
The major postmarxian contributions to socialist strategy are foreshadowed in the Eurocommunist-inspired rectiications to Leninist politics in
the period from 1974 to 1990. Eurocommunism discarded the vanguard
party, the univocal bourgeois character of the liberal democratic state and
the strategic objective of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Substantively,
Eurocommunism involved three major elements. (1) The renunciation of the
vanguard party for mass formations that would participate in alliance politics with equal partners in a democratic front. (2) The democratisation and
decentralisation of the state, through the extension of parliamentary control
over the state-apparatus, linked to the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat for liberal socialism. (3) Renunciation of the command economy for market socialism, involving a democratically planned mixed economy together
with programmes for workers’ self-management as an integral part of the
extension of democracy (Boggs, 1982; Carrillo, 1978; Claudin, 1978; Marzani, 1980; McInnes, 1976). The political strategy of Eurocommunism during the 1970s embraced democratic politics and therefore went beyond the
popular front led by the proletarian party. It embraced a multi-class transitional strategy including regular alternation of leaderships involved in
political competition and the negotiated formulation of joint programmes
representing political compromises (Napolitano, 1977). This completely dis-
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credits Laclau and Moufe’s representation of Marxist history as dominated
by philosophical rationalism.
Eurocommunism abandoned the Leninist vanguard party—characterised by centralised structures and restricted debate—for a pluralist internal
framework. According to Santiago Carrillo (General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, or PSE), political pluralism entails the renunciation
by the Communist party of the claim to be the sole bearer of working-class
interests and the acceptance of an equal partnership in an unfolding social
alliance, constitutive of a “new political formation”. The party seeks to remain a “leading force” that shapes state institutions and social processes
without becoming identical with the state. Dictatorship is avoided by virtue of economic and political decentralisation and democratisation, combined with power sharing by alliance partners and regular elections (Carrillo, 1978: 120-137; Claudin, 1978: 166-188). Do Laclau and Moufe (Laclau,
1990: 81-84; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 149-192) add anything to this?
Based on the complexity of modern society and the popular base of liberal democracy, Eurocommunist leaders theorised the liberal-democratic state
as an arena of contestation, rather than as a direct instrument of political
domination (Carrillo, 1978: 120-137; Claudin, 1978: 143-164; Marchais, 1977a:
182-192; Mujal-Léon, 1983: 42-87; Napolitano, 1977: 24-89). The state in advanced capitalism is traversed by class antagonisms and is the site of strategic
class struggles, where diverse social forces struggle for hegemony. Therefore,
the Leninist policy of frontal insurrection and the destruction of the bourgeois state was replaced by a strategy of progressive internal democratisation (Antonian, 1987: 117-135). The concept of a foundational revolutionary
act was replaced by an entire historical stage of “advanced democracy,” traversed by the shifting equilibrium between social forces representing a new
social order (Claudin, 1978: 122-165). Taking advantage of the relative autonomy of the state, Eurocommunist strategy sought to gradually “take-over”
within the apparatus, employing institutions as levers for tilting the balance
of forces in the direction of the popular movement. When Laclau and Moufe
theorise that a hegemonic alliance “becomes the state” (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 154) through exercising discursive control of social institutions, in what
does their distance from mainstream Eurocommunism consist?
Nonetheless, multiple problems persisted in Eurocommunist practice,
amply supported by deiciencies in the theories outlined by the leaderships
of the parties. In general, mainstream Eurocommunist doctrine was characterised by an evolutionary gradualism close to the positions of Kautsky,
where parliamentary reforms would gradually broaden the basis for a national-popular alliance and narrow the support-base for pro-capitalist policies (Mandel, 1978a). In line with earlier, Stalinist doctrines of historical
stages in a linear evolution, mainstream Eurocommunism supposed that
socialist construction could only begin at the end of this protracted proc-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ess (Mandel, 1978a). Eurocommunism’s renunciation of vanguardism combined bureaucratic inertia with a democratic theory. The dominant rightwing pursued a course that subordinated mass initiatives and participation
to the interests of the party apparatus, excluding militant trade-union struggle or extra-parliamentary mobilisations. In Italy, for instance, Eurocommunist electoralism degenerated into what Maria Macciocchi called a “spectacle” of ideological supericiality, involving “oratorical contests” between
leaders who encouraged the passivity of their supporters (Macchiochi, 1973:
22-43). In France, the leadership sabotaged internal democratisation and
thereby systematically prepared the sectarian debacle of the 1978 electoral
defeat (Althusser, 1978; Antonian, 1987). Unable to internally reform and revise their strategic perspectives at the same time, the Eurocommunist movement eventually gravitated towards a form of parliamentarism.
For the leftwing of Eurocommunism, the social democracy and the
Communist parties equally failed to develop a democratic political practice that might recognise the legitimacy of representative democracy while
avoiding the trap of parliamentary cretinism. According to some commentators, the problem for the Left was that radicals were not able to develop forms of participatory democracy supported by a mass movement that
might counter-balance the recuperative efects of participation in liberaldemocratic governments (Poulantzas, 1978; Weber, 1978). Within the Eurocommunist movement, a relatively dispersed leftwing alternative existed—including theoreticians such as Althusser, Balibar, Buci-Glucksmann
(Buci-Glucksmann, 1980) and Poulantzas (Poulantzas, 1978)—that promoted the strategic alternative of democratic politics combined with mass mobilisations (Antonian, 1987). While the Left Eurocommunists (Fernando Claudin, Pietro Ingrao, Lucio Magri, Rossanna Rossanda, Nicos Poulantzas)
tried to form a theoretical alternative and political tendency within the developing Eurocommunist current, the Right held power in the parties (Antonian, 1987: 87-102). Instead of building on this tendency, Laclau and Moufe
shift deinitively in the direction of the rightward-moving mainstream of
Eurocommunism—away from socialism and towards a form of parliamentary reform politics whose explicit “aim is not to create a completely diferent kind of society” (Moufe, 1990: 57).
In the absence of an institutional analysis of Communist history, Laclau
and Moufe’s discursive genealogy tends to obscure the potential for bureaucratisation inherent in any protracted democratic struggle, which must necessarily happen on a parliamentary terrain profoundly shaped by the highly
centralised nation-state. Lacking any analysis of the failure of Eurocommunism—beyond the ritualistic invocation of “class reductionism,” which,
after all, did not prevent Lenin from taking power—Laclau and Moufe virtually condemn postmarxism to a repetition of mainstream Eurocommunism’s worst defects. The Eurocommunist “Third Road” failed to materialise
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for historical and institutional reasons, not because of a supposed “theoretical
dualism” (which played a minor role in the iasco of Eurocommunism).10
The concept of a historical transformation of the working-class parties engaged in parliamentary politics, as a result of the tendencies towards bureaucratisation inherent in representational forms connected to the highly
centralised, modern state apparatus, supplies part of the explanation for the
limitations of mainstream Eurocommunist doctrine and practice (Przeworski, 1985). The rest of the explanation is linked to the “decline of the socialist tradition” in the twentieth century, generated within the combination of
theoretical restrictions springing from nineteenth-century doctrines on the
state and capital, and the practical efects of Stalinist (or Maoist) Communism (Boggs, 1995b). Together, these represent a materialist alternative to
Laclau and Moufe’s genealogy of a theoretical dualism within Marxism.
The Postmodern Strateg y of Cultural Hegemony
By the mid-1980s, the Eurocommunist parties were in decline as the political conjuncture in the West shifted sharply from hegemonic crisis to a
ruling-class ofensive led by Thatcher and Reagan. Leftwing demoralisation was exacerbated by two overlapping factors: the theoretical “crisis of
Marxism,” fueled by the “New Philosophy”; and, the persistent lack of engagement of the mainstream working-class formations with the NSM. Postmarxism thus emerges at the convergence of two crises: the historico-political crisis that surrounds eforts to forge a post-Fordist hegemonic strategy,
which is accompanied by the proliferation of social antagonisms in the form
of the NSM; and, the theoretical crisis of historical materialism, determined
by the advent of new discourses denouncing “essentialism” and advocating a postmodern epoch. These crises preserve a speciicity and originality
of their own and cannot be reduced to expressions of one another, for the
political crisis of the Left is connected to an institutional history, while the
theoretical crisis of Marxism extends beyond the mainstream parties of the
working class to embrace radical theory in general.
The “rebellion of subjectivity” conducted by the “new philosophers”
soon became the theoretical voice of the New Right (Benton, 1984: 173199).11 Its perennial themes—Marxism inevitably leads to Stalinism, “scientiic politics” equals technocratic authoritarianism, Enlightenment metaphysics is a form of rationalist dictatorship—were soon to be found liberally
distributed through postmarxian texts, following the collapse of historical
10. For accounts of the fate of the leading Eurocommunist parties, consult Boggs (Boggs,
1995b: 95-136) and Antonian (Antonian, 1987: 120-128). After 1990, Eurocommunism ceased
to exist.
11. For critical discussions of the “New Philosophy,” consult Dews (Dews, 1979; Dews,
1985), Lecourt (Lecourt, 2001). The main texts are those of Glucksmann (Glucksmann, 1980)
and Lévy (Lévy, 1982).
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
Communism (Aronson, 1995: 51-60, 91-121; Laclau, 1990: 4, 194, 206, 225).
This rightwing postmodern critique of “objectivism” purported to speak in
defense of the subject—reduced in the Althusserian lens to a mere bearer of
structures—but in actuality drove in the direction of epistemological relativism, typically conlating political criticism with high metaphysics in the
process. The fashion for recasting socialist strategy as foremost a question
of theoretical revision is exempliied by HSS. There was a grain of truth in
all this, of course, for while economic reductionism was not the direct cause
of the debacle of Eurocommunism, it was certainly a contributing factor to
the disdain for the NSM displayed by the Communist and (to a lesser degree) Socialist parties (Duyvendak, 1995). Some leftists, their hopes for Eurocommunist breakthrough destroyed by the legacy of Stalinism, not only
turned to the NSM as the surviving echo of the radical 1960s (Boggs, 1995a),
but simultaneously turned against the theoretical materialism that—it was
supposed—had framed this betrayal of revolutionary energies. “It follows,”
one study candidly declares, “that if a post-Marxist theory is to emerge on
a foundation of new social movements, its categories will correspondingly
have to be postmaterialist” (Boggs, 1986: 15).
The postmarxian tendency to relegate the NSM to the sphere of the cultural—and to equate this with the ideal—needs to be resisted. Althusser’s
deconstruction of the base-and-superstructure distinction involved the postulate that “ideology has a material existence” and this led to eforts to theorise, for instance, women’s oppression as relatively autonomous yet articulated to the gender-biased division of labour in capitalism, and perpetuated
by “ideological state apparatuses” (Barrett, 1980; Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978).
The control of sexuality is therefore systematically linked to the functioning
of capitalist economics. Yet, it is also relatively autonomous (which means:
they are analytically separable, enjoying distinct dynamics that are contingently articulated together). It is therefore impossible to oppose cultural
recognition to material oppression, as domination perpetrated through ideological practices exists as materialised and cannot be reduced to psychological processes. Gender is a basic structural principle of the social division of
labour, because it structures a gender-segmented labour market and determines the distribution of unpaid domestic work (Fraad, Resnick et al., 1994;
Hartsock, 1985; Molyneux, 1979), afects the determination of the “family
wage,” functions as a major ideological division within the education system
and familial socialisation (Foreman, 1977; Zaretsky, 1976), inlects the distinction between mental and manual labour on which the state apparatus
is based (Wilson, 1977) and represents a primary distinction (masculine and
feminine) between ideologically-constituted persons (Chodorow, 1978). Because the family is not a natural institution, but a social form articulated to
the dominant mode of production, the sexual division of labour and the social reproduction of gendered employees cannot be divorced from an analy-
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sis of the social reproduction of capitalism. Such an analysis is in stark contrast with Laclau’s assertion of the independence of subject-positions from
structural determinations (Laclau, 1985).
During the 1990s, the triumphalism of the liberal-democratic “end of
history” ceded to the renewal of ethnic nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms and neo-fascisms, as the conjuncture swung decisively rightwards.
This is the context for the neo-conservative cultural onslaught—the “culture wars” and debates on “political correctness”—and the Left resistance
in the form of multicultural “identity politics” and its theoretical arm, the
politicised wing of cultural studies. 12 This resistance has been divided and
ambiguous, however, and we are now in a position to suggest some reasons
why. Deep divisions have opened between the “cultural Left” and the “class
Left,” relecting not only the diference between NSM politics and class politics, but also the gulf between a post-Althusserian “Gramscianism” and
forms of neo-classical Marxism.
For the “class Left,” proponents of cultural recognition can be dismissed
as merely displacing economic problems. According to the “class Left,” the
strategy of cultural hegemony has fragmented the Left along identitarian
lines and destroyed the “common dreams” of political militants and the oppressed masses (Gitlin, 1994). This is generally linked to a wholesale rejection of poststructuralism as the antithesis of Marxism, engaged in a “descent
into discourse” (Palmer, 1990) by means of the “exorbitation of language”
and a “randomisation of history” (Anderson, 1984: 40, 48). For the “cultural
Left,” the “class leftists” are in actuality “Left Conservatives,” whose cultural and intellectual agenda is often shared with neo-conservatives, and whose
conception of class not only excludes real consideration of race and gender,
but depends upon the regressive theoretical postulate of “secondary oppression” and “the primacy of the economic” (Butler, 1998: 47). In other words,
“class leftists” are regarded as base-and-superstructure essentialists whose
progressive conception of political economy is entirely vitiated by a reactionary agenda in questions “merely cultural”. Meanwhile, the “cultural
Left” sufers from the central problem of what might be called a psychoanalytically-inlected, post-Althusserian “neo-Gramscianism,” whose theoretical sophistication is undermined by an exclusive concentration on ideological
struggle (Harris, 1992). According to Wendy Brown (certainly not a proponent of base-and-superstructure reductionism), postmodern politics involve
a “[t]heoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism”
(Brown, 1995: 14). We have to ask, “to what extent a critique of capitalism is
foreclosed by the current coniguration of oppositional politics, and not simply by the ‘loss of the socialist alternative’ or the ostensible ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the global order” (Brown, 1995: 61). She claims “class is invariably
12. For critical surveys of contemporary leftwing cultural politics and academic practices,
see Boggs (Boggs, 1993), Harris (Harris, 1992; Harris, 1996) and Palmer (Palmer, 1990).
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
named but rarely theorised” in the “multiculturalist mantra” of class, race,
gender and sexuality (Brown, 1995: 61). Indeed, “the political purchase of
contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part
through a certain renaturalisation of capitalism” (Brown, 1995: 60).
Where, therefore, the “class Left” reduces culture and ideology to political economy, by means of the base-and-superstructure metaphor, the “cultural Left,” interpreting Althusser’s essay on “ideological state apparatuses”
through the lens of poststructuralism and after the Right-Eurocommunist
“Gramsci,” reduces Gramsci’s “ethico-political hegemony” to ideological hegemony alone, and transforms this into a social foundation on the basis of
the assumption that “everything is cultural” (Nash, 2000: 30). This represents a restrictive deinition of hegemony that transforms ideology into a social foundation. It is to the roots of this position that we now have to turn.
2
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field: Laclau
and Moufe on Postmodern Socialist Strategy
Laclau and Moufe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strateg y is the History and Class
Consciousness of the postmodern.1 In a manner highly reminiscent of Lukács,
Laclau and Moufe initiate a sophisticated synthesis of Structural Marxism
and Gramscian political hermeneutics with motifs drawn from post-structuralist philosophy and contemporary theory, towards the construction of a
radical postmodern social theory. It is not only that this aspires to launch a
new research programme by locating the insights of Marxism within an expanded theoretical framework. It also seeks to break from the reiication of
mainstream Left politics and theory, especially the fragmentation of the politics of the new social movements, and the correlate essentialism of the Left’s
“Holy Trinity” of class, race and gender. Right from the start, the most astute commentator insisted that Laclau and Moufe had produced a “Hegelianism with a deconstructive twist” (Dallmayr, 1989: 127). If it is so, however, it is so unconsciously. The totalising vision, characteristic of both Hegel
and “the inverted Hegelianism of Marx” (Laclau, 1990: 75), of history as a
“rational and intelligible structure” governed by logical or historical necessity is precisely what they aim to break from (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95).
Yet, despite signiicant steps outside of classical dialectics, this efort to move
1. Consult Lukács (Lukács, 1971), especially the central essay, “Reiication and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (Lukács, 1971: 83-222). My assessment of Lukács as inaugurating the paradigm of Western Marxism is based on Jay (Jay, 1984: 81-127). Additional works
sympathetic to Lukács consulted for this study are Arato and Brienes (Arato and Breines,
1979) and Feenberg (Feenberg, 1981). For the Structural Marxist critique of Lukács, consult
Blackburn and Stedman-Jones (Blackburn and Jones, 1972: 365-387) and the criticism advanced by Stedman-Jones (Jones, 1971).
77
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
“beyond structuralism and hermeneutics” remains unconsciously tied to a
vision of history and politics of distinctly Hegelian provenance. Postmarxian historicism generates an expressive historical totality despite its insistence
on the fragmentation of the postmodern social ield.
When Laclau and Moufe launched their postmarxian manifesto, they
announced that they had broken with the expressive totality of Hegelian dialectics and strove to replace the vision of a necessary sequence of historical
stages with a contingent series of “historical blocs,” governed by the politics
of hegemonic articulation. This entails the replacement of the “Jacobin Imaginary” of classical Marxism-Leninism with a political Imaginary that is
“radically libertarian and ininitely more politically ambitious than the classic Left” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 152). Laclau and Moufe advocate that
democratic citizenship and radical plural democracy become master signiiers in a new leftwing social Imaginary that should replace the Leninist, or
“Jacobin” Imaginary. They seek to revitalise the Left project by promoting
an extension of the “Democratic Revolution of Modernity” to all regions of
society, while maintaining the framework of pluralism characteristic of liberal political theory. According to this conception, socialism becomes a moment in the unfolding of the Democratic Revolution, not its negation. For
Laclau and Moufe, the permanence of politics implies a post-utopian conception of historical development, as well as excluding the Hegelian expressive social totality. Yet, to the alarm of Laclau in particular, political allies
Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek have persisted in their belief that the theory
of hegemony is precisely a restatement of the Hegelian notion of the “concrete universal” (Butler, 2000a: 172-175; Žižek, 2000b: 235-249).
This postmarxian return to Hegel presents an enigma. It is Kant—and
anti-dialectical philosophy in general—that stands above the postmodern,
precisely as a reaction against the ascendancy of the existential interpretation of Hegel in postwar France.2 Likewise, deconstruction is not designed
to “twist” Hegel in the direction of detotalisation, but to subvert dialectics
completely, to efect “the destruction of the Hegelian relève [synthesis] wherever it operates” (Derrida, 1971: 40-41). Indeed, there can be no doubt that Laclau and Moufe intend to reject both speculative dialectics and the philosophy of praxis. But their theory of discourse is incoherent and relies for its
intelligibility on a latent speculative totality that is, if anything, made more
explicit in subsequent rectiications of their position. The root of this speculative identity of thinking and being is Laclau and Moufe’s rejection of the
distinction between discourse and practice, on the grounds that this distinction is merely a “diferentiation within the social production of meaning”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 107). By posing their theory of the social on the
terrain of meaning, Laclau and Moufe produce not a deconstructive social
2. For this interpretation of post-structuralism, consult Barnett (Barnett, 1998: 1-32), Descombes (Descombes, 1980: 1-13) and Dews (Dews, 1987: xiii-xiv).
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
79
theory, but a political hermeneutics radically at variance with key tenets of
post-structuralism. The consequence is that the postmarxian ield inaugurated by HSS is sprinkled with enigmatic “crop circles”: strange patterns
that seem the product of an alien intention, but are actually evidence of an
elaborate theoretical “hoax,” namely, the production of a “post-structuralist” social theory which makes large claims to a “materialist constructivism”
while being, in reality, resolutely speculative. This chapter explores these
“crop circles”—or, to adopt the Hegelian locution, “speculative germs”—so
as to determine their theoretical roots. Once the core concepts of postmarxian discourse theory have been indicated—concepts of discourse, hegemony,
antagonism and dislocation—the major political strategies—identity politics, radical democracy and democratic citizenship—can be evaluated. The
chapter concludes by investigating recent eforts to rectify the performative
contradictions in the theory of hegemony by supplementing its politics with
the deconstructive ethics of Otherness.
History and Class Consciousness in the Postmodern
Lukács, as a Hegelian Marxist, would be the condensation of everything
that is deemed politically regressive about the social theory of “the rationalist ‘dictatorship’ of Enlightenment” (Laclau, 1990: 4), of just about everything that the new social logic of postmodern culture brings into crisis.
In this context—which is theoretically and politically hostile to the concept
of totality—Laclau and Moufe’s recasting of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is designed to avoid the Lukácsian conception of society as an “expressive totality”. For Lukács, a single principle is “expressed” in all social
phenomena, so that every aspect of the social formation is integrated into a
closed system that connects the forces and social relations of production to
politics and the juridical apparatus, cultural forms and class-consciousness
(Lukács, 1971: 83). By contrast, Laclau and Moufe insist that the social ield
is an incomplete totality consisting of a multitude of transitory hegemonic “epicentres” and characterised by a plurality of competing discourses.
The proliferation of democratic forms of struggle by the new social movements is thereby integrated into a pluralistic conception of the social ield
that emphasises the negativity and dispersion underlying all social identities.
“Radical and plural democracy,” Laclau and Moufe contend, represents a
translation of socialist strategy into the detotalising paradigm of postmodern culture.
Nonetheless, like Lukács, Laclau and Moufe advance a new concept of
social practice that aims to resolve both theoretical and practical problems
thrown up by recent political setbacks. For Lukács, the objective of a new
conception of praxis is to establish the dialectical unity of theory and practice, so as to demonstrate that the proletariat, as the operator of a transpar-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ent praxis, is the identical subject-object of the historical process (Lukács,
1971: 149, 206). The subject of history is therefore the creator of the contents of the social totality, and to the extent that this subject attains self-relexivity, it is also the conscious generator of social forms (Lukács, 1971: 142
and 168). This enables Lukács to emphasise the revolutionary character of
class conscious as coextensive with revolutionary action (Lukács, 1971: 4681). Laclau and Moufe’s concept of discursive practice has the same efect—
with this diference, that Laclau and Moufe deny that discursive practices
can become wholly transparent to social agents (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
121-122). By reinscribing the concept of praxis within a deconstruction of
Marxism, Laclau and Moufe theorise a new concept of discursive practice
that “must pierce the entire material density of the multifarious institutions”
upon which it operates, since it has as its objective a decisive break with the
material/mental dichotomy (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 109). “Rejection of
the thought/reality dichotomy,” they propose, “must go together with a rethinking and interpenetration of the categories which have up until now
been considered exclusive of one another” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 110).
Critically, this means a fusion of the hitherto distinct categories of (subjective) discourse and (objective) structure in the concept of “hegemonic articulation”. This theoretical intervention is simultaneously a decisive political
advance, because it now becomes clear that, for instance, “the equivalence
constituted through communist enumeration [of the alliance partners within a bid for political hegemony] is not the discursive expression of a real movement constituted outside of discourse; on the contrary, this enumerative discourse is a real force which contributes to the moulding and constitution of
social relations” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 110). In other words, the opposition between theory and practice, discursive practice and structural conditions, is resolved by the new theory of hegemonic articulation. The operator of these discursive practices—the new agent of social transformation—is
at once the instigator of social relations and the formulator of discourses on
the social.
The most signiicant diference between Lukács and Laclau and Moufe
is their respective evaluations of Hegelian dialectics. Where, for Lukács, a
return to dialectical philosophy held out the prospect of a renewal of Marxian social theory, for Laclau and Moufe it is “dialectical necessity” that
constitutes the major obstacle to a radical postmodern politics. Laclau and
Moufe’s fundamental objection to dialectics is to the substitution of a logically necessary sequence for the contingency of the historical process. They
applaud the dialectical dissolution of ixity but deplore the supposed inversion of contingency into necessity and the imposition of a teleology of reconciliation. Hegel’s work, therefore, “appears as located in a watershed between two epochs” and is evaluated as “ambiguous” rather than simply
pernicious (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95). On the one hand, Laclau and
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
81
Moufe reject the Hegelian notion that “history and society … have a rational and intelligible structure” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95). This is regarded as an Enlightenment conception fundamentally incompatible with the
postmodern emphasis on contingency, initude and historicity. On the other
hand, however, “this synthesis contains all the seeds of its own dissolution,
as the rationality of history can only be airmed at the price of introducing
contradiction into the ield of reason” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95). Once
the impossibility of including contradiction within rationality is asserted, it
then becomes clear that the “logical” transitions between historical “stages”
are secured contingently:
It is precisely here that Hegel’s modernity lies: for him, identity is never
positive and closed in itself but is constituted as transition, relation,
diference. If, however, Hegel’s logical relations become contingent
transitions, the connections between them cannot be ixed as moments of
an underlying or sutured totality. This means that they are articulations
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95).
This is not a rejection of Hegel but a re-interpretation. Interpreted in this light,
Hegel’s “logical” relations are the language games that frame social practices—rather than formally rational structures deducible a priori—and their
“transitions” are only the contingent connections created by political articulations. In opposition to the logically necessary sequence of closed totalities, Laclau and Moufe insist on a historically contingent series of open discursive formations. Resolutely contesting the category of the totality, Laclau
and Moufe declare that:
The incomplete character of every totality leads us to abandon, as a
terrain of analysis, the premise of “society” as a sutured and self-deined
totality. “Society” is not a valid object of discourse (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 126).
So where Lukács once declared that “the category of the totality is the
bearer of the principle of revolution in science” (Lukács, 1971: 15), Laclau
and Moufe now announce, by contrast, that totality is an illusion because
“‘society’ as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial
processes is an impossibility” (Laclau, 1990: 90). Where Hegel was, there deconstruction shall be—or so it would seem.
The Controversy Surrounding Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Because the controversy surrounding HSS has concentrated on social fragmentation, its reliance on an expressive historical totality has tended to be
overlooked. Laclau alone has managed to grasp some of the implications of
his call for the Left to “reformulate the values of the Enlightenment in the
direction of a radical historicism” (Laclau, 1990: 84). In a mood of belated
penitence, Laclau recently explained that “if I assert radical historicism,
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
it will require some kind of meta-discourse specifying epochal diferences,
which will necessarily have to be transhistorical” (Laclau, 2000a: 201). That
is to say, radical historicism leads immediately to performative contradiction. But to ix a problem of this magnitude, it is not suicient to just jump of
the ground and shout “barley,” for this contradiction is built into the premises of Laclau and Moufe’s entire theory. Indeed, the performative contradictions that bedevil postmarxian discourse theory are only symptoms of a
deeper diiculty, located in the latent structure of the historicist problematic that subtends radical democratic politics. They are rooted in the expressive historical totality that this transhistorical meta-discourse invokes in
every historicism—something that continues to elude Laclau and Moufe.
Somewhat more surprisingly, however, this has not yet come to the attention of the critics of postmarxism, whose interventions have concentrated
exclusively on the postmodern social fragmentation celebrated by Laclau
and Moufe.
Of course, the break with the postulates of classical social theory, combined with the authors’ declaration that “if our intellectual project in this
book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist” (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 4), might have been expected to generate a furious debate.3 HSS provoked a small storm of denunciations and defenses, which continues to circulate, with unabated ferocity, in the journals of the trans-Atlantic Left.
From the very beginning, the conjunction of post-structuralism and Marxism implied in the designation “postmarxism” was regarded as a calculated
ambiguity. Critical opinion has remained polarised into camps deined by
allegiance to or rejection of postmodernism, while the Marxist part of the
label has been subordinated to the question of post-structuralism. This has
meant that assessment of HSS and its aftermath has not tended to get beyond
grasping alternately at one or the other of the main valences—that is, postMarxism versus post-Marxism—of the work.
The work was immediately scalded by Marxists as “beautifully paradigmatic” of the “retreat from class” by a disillusioned section of the Western Left (Wood, 1998: 47) and branded as “symptomatic of an intellectual
malaise” and an “ex-Marxism without substance” (Geras, 1988: 42). Laclau and Moufe were accused of a “fetishisation of dislocation” and the
dispersion of subjectivity in late capitalism (Bertram, 1995: 110). This implies their theory is incapable of demonstrating the minimum basis for the
3. For early positive reviews of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, consult Aronowitz (Aronowitz,
1988: 46-61; Aronowitz, 1992: 175-192), Ross (Ross, 1988) and Žižek (Žižek, 1990). Note that
Geras’ criticisms, “Post-Marxism?” (Geras, 1987) and “Ex-Marxism without Substance”
(Geras, 1988), and Laclau and Moufe’s reply, “Post-Marxism without Apologies” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1987b), are reprinted in Geras (Geras, 1990: 61-126, 127-168) and Laclau (Laclau, 1990: 97-134), respectively. Laclau and Moufe’s second reply to Geras’ irst article,
“History of Marxism” (Laclau and Moufe, 1987a), has not been reprinted.
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
83
formation of a collective will: “the new antagonisms, as Laclau and Moufe
make clear, are best suited for the postindustrial society in which there is no
opposition to a dominant system” (Bertram, 1995: 85). Indeed, denying the
validity of the distinction between structural location and subject-positions,
Laclau and Moufe cannot specify why some social groups might have an
interest in socialism while others (for instance, exploiters of labour-power)
might not (Mouzelis, 1988: 115). Laclau and Moufe—as is characteristic of
ideology—remain silent on their own historical and institutional conditions
of possibility (Callinicos, 1985). Their theory of identity as an ensemble of
free-loating subject-positions “looks sophisticated … but it only operates on
one level” (Osborne, 1991: 219) because it cannot grasp why the ideological
struggle is constituted through “the tension between the irreducible dimension of extra-discursive determinacy in the object and the plurality of its possible discursive constructions” (Osborne, 1991: 210). Indeed, the “long march
from Saussure to social democracy” of postmarxism has been enabled by a
discourse analysis characterised by a “fatal semiotic confusion between the
signified and referent” (Eagleton, 1991: 203, 209). This could also be called a
volatisation of the referent, resulting in the loss of credibility of postmarxism’s claim to any normative framework from which to criticise oppression
and a paradoxical “overpoliticisation” which is nothing but the mirror-relection of vulgar Marxism’s economic determinism (Eagleton, 1991: 213).
This leads to a political voluntarism that spurns conjunctural analysis for
ideological manipulations (Miliband, 1985; Rustin, 1988), and produces a
paradoxical superabundance of political possibilities that paralyses the will
(Butler, 1993b: 107).
And if that latter sounds remarkably like the negative assessment of
postmodernism current in Western Marxism, then it will be unsurprising
that this is also the basis for the postmodern support for Laclau and Moufe
(Ryan, 1988: 245). Indeed, HSS is accused from this direction of being still
“too Marxist” (Barrett, 1991: 76) and, more substantially, of theoretical dualism wherein social situations are analysed from a recognisably Marxist
paradigm, while theoretical questions are subjected to a post-structuralist
interrogation (Landry, 1991: 41-60). A sort of postmodern doxa regularly
claims Laclau and Moufe for the radical wing of postmodernism on the
basis of their pluralism (Nash, 2000: 1-45; Ross, 1988: vii-xxviii). Combined
with the endorsement of the valorisation of the particular over the universal,
this would constitute the dominant context of their reception (Zerilli, 1998).
Insofar as there is criticism emanating from this direction, it is for “abstraction,” a sin in the context of the nominalist celebration of the concrete (Aronowitz, 1992: 192).
Hence, the general framework of the debate has been to specify HSS in
terms of a retreat from class or adaptation to postmodern culture. Two exceptions to this rule are Fredric Jameson’s dialectical analysis of Laclau and
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
Moufe as a postmodern alliance politics that can be re-inserted into a contemporary Marxism once postmodernism is grasped as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” ( Jameson, 1991: 297-418), and Robert Miklitsch’s assessment of the postmarxian tendency to return to the concept of a social
foundation, be that economics (Resnick and Wolf ) or politics (Laclau and
Moufe) (Miklitsch, 1995: 167-196). As with Jameson’s dialectical position,
Miklitsch’s analysis cannot be accused of hostility to postmodernism (Miklitsch, 1998a: 57-59). This is what makes the demonstration, by both Jameson and Miklitsch, of Laclau and Moufe’s “hyperdiscursivity” (Miklitsch),
and indiference to commodiication, so damaging. According to Miklitsch,
postmarxism evacuates the materiality of the institutions of culture, which
are the basis for any strategy of hegemony and instead focuses on a merely
phenomenological “political” activism. “The irony of HSS,” he concludes,
“is that at the end, the only path left open to them is the one that they have
been travelling all the time … ‘a logical pulverisation of the social, coupled
with a theoretically agnostic descriptivism of the concrete situations’” (Miklitsch, 1995: 185).
Outside of these dialectical analyses, postmodernism and the abandonment of class-analysis are generally taken to be synonymous, so that there is
a remarkable convergence in the literature surrounding Laclau and Moufe,
difering mainly in the evaluative sign that is placed in front of the postmodern culture that they represent. Here, the reductionism of psychological ascription has often met up with some of the more predictable denunciations
of HSS. Postmarxism is politics as therapy (Cloud, 1994). It is the “opiate of
the intellectuals” (McGee, 1997: 201). It is a “very substantial failure of reasoning” and an “intellectual sickness” (Geras, 1988: 40). Why is everyone so
fascinated by it then?
Surely it’s clear. HSS acts as a screen, onto which the reader can project
virtually anything they like about postmodernism and the crisis of the
Western Left, because it is both politically indeterminate and theoretically overdetermined. HSS represents a symbolic act within a conjuncture
of political retreat—strategically misrecognised by Laclau and Moufe as
one of advance—and a reactivation of historical contradictions. It has to
be grasped as both an efort to break out of the reiication of Structural
Marxism and as a fundamental break with historical materialism, as a
theorisation of an expanded framework for Marxism and as an embrace
of postmodern dispersion. I shall show that the primary symptom of this
“overdetermined indeterminacy” is the oscillation of the theory of hegemony between two antinomic interpretations of the theory, namely, hegemony as a neutral frame of description of the politics of modernity and radical democracy as a partisan political project (Critchley, 1999: 112; Žižek,
2000h: 173-174). Radical democracy, I contend, exists in the space of indeterminacy created by this hesitation.
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
85
The Deconstruction of Marxism
According to Laclau and Moufe, Marxism is an “evolutionary paradigm,”
centred upon the concept of “historical necessity,” unfolding through the
“endogenous laws” operating in the “economic base” (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 7-46). For Laclau and Moufe, Kautsky constitutes the “degree zero” of
Marxism, because The Class Struggle manages to combine class essentialism
and economic reductionism into a single coniguration that determines the
trajectory of twentieth-century historical materialism (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 14-19). Economic reductionism refers to the theory of the simpliication
of social antagonisms leading to a inal confrontation between bourgeoisie
and proletariat, based on the assertion of an autonomous evolutionary dynamic operative in the economic infrastructure, which reduces politics and
ideology to mere superstructural relections of the base. For Kautsky, “the
structural moments or instances of capitalist society lack any form of relative
autonomy” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 15). Kautsky’s economic reductionism is combined with class essentialism, according to which every structural
diference is ixed “through the attribution to each of a single meaning, understood as a precise location within a totality,” yielding a singular class-belonging for every superstructural element (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 15).
In the irst sense, Kautsky’s analysis was simply economistic and
reductionist; but if this were the only problem, the corrective would
merely have to introduce the “relative autonomies” of the political and
the ideological, and render the analysis more complex through the
multiplication of instances within a topography of the social. Yet each one
of these instances or structural moments would have an identity as fixed and singular
as the instances of the Kautskian paradigm (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 15).
For Kautsky, class identity is fully constituted as a uniied subjectivity in
the economic base so that “the working class struggles in the ield of politics
by virtue of an economic calculation” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 15). Economic laws unfold in the base—leading to the proletarianisation of the middle classes—according to an evolutionary necessity, culminating in the moment of the terminal crisis of capitalism. The working-class party only has
to take advantage of an automatic revolution. For Laclau and Moufe, this
simplistic and evolutionary schema constitutes the paradigm for historical materialism. According to Laclau and Moufe:
Faced with the rationalism of classical Marxism, which presented history
and society as intelligible totalities constituted around conceptually
explicable laws, the logic of hegemony presented itself from the outset
as a complementary and contingent operation, required for those
conjunctural imbalances within an evolutionary paradigm whose
essential or “morphological” validity was not for a moment placed in
question (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 3).
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
Every subsequent development in Marxism is therefore reduced by Laclau and Moufe to an efort to complicate, extend and modify this basic
conception of society, by supplementing the logic of historical necessity with
the appendage of political contingency (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 47-48).
Laclau and Moufe’s major objection to Marxism, then, is that the base-andsuperstructure topography determines the supremacy of historical necessity
and the marginalisation of political contingency, leading to an evolutionary
teleology of social “stages”. This implies that the base and superstructure topography is regarded as the Marxian contribution to social theory.
The chapters on the genealogy of the category of hegemony are easily the
most accessible and well-known parts of HSS. Several lucid and sympathetic
accounts have been presented (Smith, 1998: 42-83; Toring, 1999: 35-77 and
101-119), together with some excellent critical commentaries (Geras, 1990:
61-126 and 127-168; Wood, 1998: 47-74). The critics highlight Laclau and
Moufe’s own reliance on an evolutionary logic, which inverts the Kautskian
schema (instead of progressive simpliication leading to a confrontation between polar classes, we have increasing complexity leading to a proliferation
of political actors) without modifying its teleological premises (Landry, 1991:
41-60). Marxists have criticised Laclau and Moufe’s reduction of Marxism
to a single, self-enclosed strand—that of the Second International and the
Communist parties—which itself develops according to the logical restrictions of its paradigmatic opposition between historical necessity and political contingency, and is supposed to determine the limits of variation of “superstructural” mutations such as Western Marxism. Indeed, the balance of
evidence is overwhelmingly against Laclau and Moufe’s construction of the
theoretical structure of historical materialism (Geras, 1987; Miliband, 1985;
Mouzelis, 1988; Rustin, 1988). The critics also expose the dependency of Laclau and Moufe upon a caricature of the plurality of Marx’s own texts. This
rests upon Laclau’s claim that historical materialism is determined by the
oscillation between historical necessity, operating through the “productive
forces” (the “1859 Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
and political contingency operating through the “class struggle” (The Communist Manifesto), which act as the fully-formed theoretical origin of Marxism
(Laclau, 1990: 6-9). Laclau and Moufe efectively produce a deconstruction of the institutionalised mainstream of the twentieth-century Marxist
movement—the Second International and the Communist parties—but this
is not the same as a critique of historical materialism, for it tends to transpose the crisis of the parties onto the problems of the theory. It is striking to
encounter an argument that emphasises the political aspect of theory-construction for its own productions, but refuses to accept that the ascendancy of
a travesty of Marxism during the twentieth century might have had something to do with political conditions such as the victory of Stalinism in both
the Soviet Union and the Communist parties. I regard the Marxist criticism
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
87
of the reductionism of Laclau and Moufe’s treatment of historical materialism as decisive and do not intend to traverse this territory in detail again.
I want instead to concentrate on how Laclau and Moufe’s deconstruction of Marxism goes awry because their opposition between historical totality and social fragmentation is based on the assumption that “every social
coniguration is meaning ful” (Laclau, 1990: 100). Laclau and Moufe’s deconstruction of Marxism is radically incomplete and veers towards a quasi-dialectical synthesis. They do this by mediating an opposition between
historical necessity and political contingency in the category of hegemony,
which becomes the quasi-transcendental ground for an expanded conception of politics and history. What Laclau and Moufe miss is the vital second
move in any deconstruction, namely, the moment of “dissemination,” which
is “not … polysemic dispersion,” but the airmation of “an always open ensemble of structures” that subverts every totalisation (Gasché, 1986: 237).
Instead of textual dissemination, Laclau and Moufe produce a polysemic
excess, a “surplus of meaning” surrounding the social (Laclau, 1990: 90;
Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 111), that is precisely symptomatic of a speculative synthesis.
Hegemony: The Gramscian Breakthrough
These considerations become crucial once we examine Laclau and Moufe’s
treatment of Structural Marxism. My contention is that in its general
structure, HSS is exemplary for its logical clarity and strict adherence to
the general form of deconstructive methodology, but that it departs from
the “substance”. Deconstruction consists of two, irreducibly heterogeneous
movements—which I shall term “reversal” and “dissemination” —whose
relation can be igured as chiasmatic crossing, or textual hybridisation (Gasché, 1986: 171-175). The opening moment of deconstruction recovers a marginalised term that supports the dominance of the central term—or transcendental signiied—in a ield, exposing the ield as constituted through
a binary opposition. Laclau and Moufe propose that twentieth-century
Marxism is dominated by the paradigmatic opposition between historical
necessity (central) and political contingency (marginal) (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: Chapter One, 7-46). Then, in conformity with the movement of deconstructive “reversal,” they propose that the ascendancy of the category
of hegemony in Marxist discourse evinces the subversive efects of political
contingency in the ield of historical necessity. Because, as they somewhat elliptically state, “this expression [hegemony] stemmed from the fracture, and
withdrawal to the explanatory horizon of the social, of the category of ‘historical necessity’” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 7), hegemony prepares a reversal whereby a new (postmarxian) discourse becomes possible, based on the
inversion of the previous hierarchy (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: Chapter Two,
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
47-92). At this point the second movement in deconstruction—the phase of
dissemination—begins, with the generalisation of the hitherto suppressed
possibilities of the category of hegemony. Hegemony, conceptualised as condition of mutual limitation or a relation of frontiers between necessity and
contingency, becomes the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility and
impossibility for the dyadic relation between a ield dominated by political
contingency and the efect of historical necessity. The quasi-transcendental
category of hegemony is linked in an infrastructural chain to several related quasi-transcendentals—social antagonism and discursive practice—in a
new social theory (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: Chapter Three, 93-148). Finally, in what should be the completion of dissemination, the subversive effects of the infrastructural chain are released within the reconstructed ield
of socialist strategy to work their radically democratic magic (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: Chapter Four, 149-193). Laclau and Moufe aim to cleave
two insights—hegemony and overdetermination—from Marxism, by showing how these concepts depend upon a logic opposed to the mainstream of
Marxist theory, with its supposed valorisation of historical necessity over political contingency. Laclau and Moufe’s deconstructive methodology aims
to delineate a new paradigm within which the essentialism of Marxism can
be consigned “to the museum of antiquities,” and it does so through the
proposition that the emergence of the supplement of hegemony conirms the
postmodern thesis that Enlightenment essentialism is being refuted by the
increasing complexity of the social (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 47-92).
According to Laclau and Moufe, the concept of hegemony was introduced to supplement the economist logic of historical necessity governing
classical Marxism with a political logic of contingency. The category of hegemony arose in classical Marxism in response to a crisis, where the logic
of historical necessity appeared to have detoured through an “exceptional”
situation, namely, the increasing fragmentation of the proletariat and the
stubborn refusal of the capitalist system to terminate itself in economic catastrophe. On the basis of the “increasing complexity of the social,” Marxist politics became subjected to conditions of the fragmentation of the working class, the isolation of political movements and the separation between
economic and political struggles (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 2, 8-9). This increasing complexity determined the conditions where the supplement of political contingency acted deconstructively within the ield of historical necessity. Laclau and Moufe claim that the concept of “hegemony” in Marxism
became the locus where the disruptive efects of political contingency both
proliferated and remained contained within the logic of historical necessity.
According to the authors, this produced four salient results: (1) the mechanism constitutive of the social agent shifts from the efect of a structural location to the result of a symbolic uniication; (2) the historical necessity that
assigns historical tasks to fundamental classes retreats before the contingent
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
89
political articulations required by combined and uneven development; (3)
the concept of class alliances is displaced by the category of hegemony; (4)
the political strategy of the Communist parties moves from external combinations that “march separately” in the united front to an efort towards
“moral and political leadership,” where the popular front led by the proletarian party strives to accomplish national reconstruction through achieving an ideological hegemony that forges a new collective subject (Laclau,
1990: 120-121; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 47-92).
For Laclau and Moufe, Gramsci’s explicit theorisation of hegemony
represents a watershed in the break with economic reductionism because
this replaces the Kautskian notion of a progressive social polarisation, leading to the confrontation between paradigmatic classes, with the transformation of social alliances into political subjects (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
65-71). Gramsci suggests that a fundamental class becomes hegemonic when
it articulates its sectoral interests as the general interest and begins to exert
“moral and political leadership” (Gramsci, 1971: 57-58, 180-182). Gramsci
refers to the articulation of a hegemonic strategy as the highest expression
of political class struggle in the transition from the infrastructure to the superstructure (Gramsci, 1971: 57-58). Laclau and Moufe’s early analyses suggested that the fundamental classes struggle for hegemony principally on
the ideological terrain, where new political subjects are forged. Gramsci’s
concept of ideology as the social cement that permeates the social formation breaks with the base-and-superstructure topology and prepares the Althusserian position that ideology is an ensemble of material practices, rather
than a superstructural “false consciousness” (Laclau, 1977: 81-142; Moufe,
1979a: 168-205). As Laclau and Moufe conclude, “intellectual and moral
leadership constitutes, according to Gramsci, a higher synthesis, a collective
will, which, through ideology, becomes the organic cement unifying a historical bloc” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 67). Political subjects are no longer
classes but social alliances, which do not take power, but become the state
by becoming hegemonic, that is, the historic bloc controls the normative
and institutional framework of society by maintaining relations of consent
and coercion throughout society (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 67). Yet, Gramsci’s historical blocs can take shape only around a fundamental class, and
for Laclau and Moufe, “this is the inner essentialist core which continues to
be present in Gramsci’s thought, setting a limit to the deconstructive logic
of hegemony” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 69). Because Laclau and Moufe
hold positions of structuralist economism, they suppose that the political
transformation of the fundamental class into a unifying principle within a
historic bloc presupposes that fully constituted class identity is generated in
the economic ield. This reintroduces the dualism between the political contingencies of the hegemonic struggle, operative primarily on the ideological
terrain, and the historical necessity guaranteed by the economic structure,
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
which acts to unify the historic bloc “in the last instance”.
Thus, in HSS, Laclau and Moufe confront the “last redoubt of essentialism—the economy” and undertake a demonstration of the political contamination of Marxism’s supposedly endogenous economic laws (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 75-85). “It is not the case that the ield of the economy is
a self-regulated space subject to endogenous laws,” they conclude; “nor does
there exist a constitutive principle for social agents which can be ixed in an
ultimate class core; nor are class positions the necessary location of historical interests” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 84-85). The consequence is that we
face the dichotomy of “an absolutely united working class that will become
transparent to itself at the moment of proletarian chiliasm” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 84-85), or the more comforting prospect of “… the new forms
of struggle in the advanced capitalist countries,” that is, “precisely a context
dominated by the experience of fragmentation and by the indeterminacy of
the articulations between diferent struggles and subject positions” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 13). By inverting the hierarchy between historical necessity and political contingency—by making the category of hegemony, dominated by political contingency, the centre of a new discourse and displacing
the category of structure, dominated by historical necessity—Laclau and
Moufe employ a marginalised term to reverse the binary hierarchy that,
they claim, constitutes the Marxist paradigm. They thereby produce a postmarxian discourse.
Laclau and Mouffe’s “Speculative Germs”
The exemplary logical structure of HSS enables us to pinpoint exactly where
Laclau and Moufe insert their “speculative germs” into an erstwhile deconstruction of Marxism. Having asserted the subversive efects of the category of hegemony in the ield of Marxist discourse, Laclau and Moufe
commence the disseminatory phase of their deconstruction by reinscribing
“hegemony” into a reconigured discursive regime, based on the supremacy of political contingency over historical necessity. Yet, instead of directly
confronting this task, they “detour” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 96) so as to
begin to deconstruct the ield of Structural Marxism, in the interests of the
construction of a postmarxian identity politics (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
97-105). For Laclau and Moufe, the moment of theoretical incoherence in
the Structural Marxist research programme arrives with the logical contradiction between symbolic overdetermination and “economic determination
in the last instance” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 98). Laclau and Moufe’s recasting of overdetermination quietly deletes two crucial components of the
Althusserian position: the notion that these are overdetermined contradictions
is repudiated on the grounds of a generalised rejection of contradictions (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95, 148 note 35); and, the mechanisms of ideological
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
91
displacement and political condensation are shorn of any institutional determinants and assimilated to solely ideological processes. This evacuates the
materialist content of Althusser’s notion of overdetermined contradictions
and opens the path to a speculative recapture of post-Althusserian theory.
In an assessment of the aftermath of Althusserian Marxism that implicitly critiques their own contributions to the post-Althusserian theory of
ideology, Laclau and Moufe criticise the proposition that every contradiction is overdetermined by class as “a new variant of essentialism” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 98). “In the original Althusserian formulation,” Laclau
and Moufe suggest, “a very diferent theoretical undertaking was foreshadowed,” namely, “a critique of every type of ixity,” by taking up symbolic
overdetermination as the basis for a new concept of articulation (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 104). They claim that the antinomies of Althusser demonstrate the impossibility of combining ideological articulation with economic
determination and propose that it follows from this that social relations have
to be theorised as a “plane of signiication” beyond which there exists absolutely nothing (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 97-105). Hence, “the symbolic—
i.e., overdetermined—character of social relations implies that they lack an
ultimate literality which would reduce them to necessary moments of an immanent law” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 98).
As Laclau and Moufe point out, the concept of overdetermination derives principally from psychoanalysis and in this context must not be interpreted as a mechanical multi-causal theory. Instead of the mechanical
concept of a multiplicity of unequally weighted causes constituting an effect, overdetermination refers to the formation of nodal points where several chains of signiication intersect in a single signiier, thereby investing this
“master signiier” with the libidinal energy contained in the many discursive articulations (Laplanche, 1973: 292-293). Althusser’s concept of “overdetermined contradiction” was designed to be the opposite of the Hegelian
simple—or essential—contradiction, because the existence of relatively autonomous structural instances with asymmetrical efectivities led to the imprinting, in any social contradiction, of its complex conditions of existence
(Althusser, 1969: 161-218). The psychoanalytic notion of a disjunction between the libidinal energy of an articulation and its conscious registration as
meaning is homologous to the Marxist concept of the gap between the complex structural determinants of an efect and the subject-position(s) through
which this is lived as an event by social agents. Althusser’s conception of the
“overdetermined contradiction” maintains, from its inception, the Marxist insistence on the ideological displacement and political condensation of
economic antagonisms, and reciprocally, the ideological and political determinants of a class contradiction, so that “exceptions” to the “pure contradiction” between classes are the rule (Althusser, 1969: 87-128, especially
99-100, 104). To claim a contradiction between the essays “Contradiction
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
and Overdetermination” and “On the Materialist Dialectic” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 98) is textually insupportable—and Laclau and Moufe do
not bother to try to demonstrate this. Instead, they turn to the problems in
another work altogether, Balibar’s treatment of the “Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism” in Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 199308; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 99-105).
Laclau and Moufe’s Gramscian thesis that ideology is fundamental to
the social formation, not only as a functional social cement, but also as the
basic modality of social subjectivity that acts as a condition of possibility for
politics and economics, efectively reduces politics and economics to ideology. Laclau and Moufe insist that overdetermination:
is a very precise type of fusion entailing a symbolic dimension and a
plurality of meanings. The concept of overdetermination is constituted
in the ield of the symbolic, and has no meaning whatsoever outside
it. Consequently, the most profound potential meaning of Althusser’s
statement that everything existing in the social is overdetermined, is the
assertion that the social constitutes itself as a symbolic order (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 97-98).
In line with their earlier analyses of ideological articulations, Laclau
and Moufe consider that overdetermination means the formation of political subjectivity through the combination of a multiplicity of subject-positions (Laclau, 1977: 81-142; Moufe, 1979a: 168-205). In other words, consideration of the psychoanalytic meaning of overdetermination allows Laclau
and Moufe to substitute the ideological mechanisms of subject-formation
for the materialist principles of social production, as rules for the composition of the social ield. Indeed, in a text published contemporaneously with
HSS, Laclau claims that subject-positions are the social atoms from which
classes, structures, nations and so forth are constructed (Laclau, 1985: 32).
This claim—discreetly erased from the surface of HSS but distinctly present
as a latent assumption—reveals the accuracy of Laclau and Moufe’s admission that their position on Structural Marxism is close to that of Hindess and
Hirst (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 145 note 6). Indeed, it potentially understates the extent of the convergence. The authors note of Hindess and Hirst
that the concept of political contingency between pre-constituted structural
elements arrived at by a “rationalist deconstruction” of Structural Marxism
excludes diacritical articulation (the elements remain positive social monads
immune to diferential relations) and therefore implies an essentialism on
the lines of Leibniz (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 103). For Laclau and Moufe,
by contrast, the articulation of subject-positions reciprocally modiies these
diferential elements (on the fundamental lines of Saussurean linguistics,
they are diferential positions, not positive realities). In consequence, “society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely con-
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sist of the relative and precarious forms of ixation which accompany the
establishment of a certain order” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 98). By means
of such pronouncements, Laclau and Moufe hope to evade the impasse of
Hindess and Hirst, namely, “a logical pulverisation of the social, combined
with a theoretically agnostic descriptivism of the ‘concrete situations’” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 104).
Yet, Laclau and Moufe’s invocation of psychoanalysis testiies against
them, for surely the cornerstone of the Lacanian “return to Freud” is the
insistence that a “sexual determination in the last instance” operates in the
discursive articulation of the “formations of the unconscious,” in the form of
the determining role of the Real of the drive in the articulation of Symbolic desire (Fink, 1995a; Fink, 1997). The Lacanian position does not reduce
overdetermination to a mechanical causality, but neither does it airm that
the discourse of the analysand is ininitely plastic. Instead, Lacan’s “Gödelian structuralism” (Fink, 1995a: xiv) maps the systematic distortions of discourse onto structural diagnostic categories (psychosis, perversion, neurosis)
based on distinct unconscious mechanisms (foreclosure, disavowal and repression) (Fink, 1997: 76-78). These distinct mechanisms for the production
of “surplus enjoyment” (Žižek, 1989: 49-53) involve diferent positions of the
object in discourse. By analogy with Althusser, we might say that the distinct
modes of production of surplus enjoyment are manifest as the dominance of
the object in a certain register of discourse. Prima facie, there is no theoretical inconsistency in the combination of a determination in the last instance
with the overdetermined character of every diferential ield. By contrast,
deletion of the libidinal energy contained in an overdetermined articulation means the coninement of analysis to the interpretation of meaning
and implies the reduction of psychoanalysis to a hermeneutics. Laclau and
Moufe produce what is efectively a pre-Freudian position whose terminus
can only be—as Ricoeur’s hermeneutic “recovery” of Freud unfortunately demonstrates—the tracing back of gaps in meaning to another, “deeper”
meaning, culminating in the speculative endeavour “to see Hegel’s problematic in Freud” (Ricoeur, 1970: 468).
The “Social Production of Meaning”
The novelty of Laclau and Moufe’s politics of ideology depends upon the
category of discourse, which is supposed to supersede the Marxian paradigm of labour as the model of social practice. Laclau and Moufe’s “original insight” into the consequences of the shift from structure to discourse
is that discursive practice designates a new model of social acts. Broadly
speaking, discursive practice refers to the selection and combination of social relations (structural elements) into articulated combinations that are deployed in space and time by social agents in the ield of social practices.
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By contrast with some leftwing commentators on Laclau and Moufe’s discourse theory (Callinicos, 1985; Geras, 1990; Palmer, 1990; Wood, 1997b),
I do not contend that the very conception of the social ield as the result of
“discursive practices” is a mistake. The classical Marxian conception of labour as the paradigm of human activity (Geras, 1984; Lukács, 1978; Lukács,
1980) is not automatically superior to the postmodern concept of discourse
as the model for social practice. Indeed, the postmodern model has two distinct advantages. It is impossible to arrive at the absurd position of airming that social labour comes before language (Lukács, 1980: 49). Secondly,
the discursive problematic includes from its inception consideration of social
relations as inherently dialogical, that is, constituted in relations of dominance and subordination through dialectical processes of opposition and
diferentiation (Bakhtin, 1981: 259-422; Vološinov, 1973). Instead of conceiving human activity as operating directly on an inert natural “raw material,” discursive practice airms the primacy of contested social relations as
the mediation between humanity and nature. Additionally, the notion of
discursivity suggests human initude, in line with Kant’s conception of humanity as characterised by a merely “discursive intellect” (as opposed to an
Intellectus Archetypus, with the god-like power to grasp intuitively the essence
of things). Contrary to the ideological after-image, apparently conjured for
some Marxists, of the omnipotent speaker spinning social relations at will,
in a theoretical parody of magical realist literature where “anything goes,”
discursive practice implies a limited agent, restricted by the materiality of
social relations, operating under conditions of only partial knowledge.
Nonetheless, Laclau and Moufe’s overall conceptualisation of discursive practice is seriously lawed, mainly because they simply transpose the
syntax of ideological practices (the articulation of subject-positions through
the action of ideological master signiiers) onto the entire ield of social practices, reducing the transformation of the social formation to a question of
ideological manipulation. The leading efect, therefore, of the combination
of Laclau and Moufe’s selective interpretation of “overdetermination” with
their Gramscian criticism of Structural Marxism, is to enable a relapse of
“overdetermined contradiction” back towards the Hegelian “simple,” or
“essential” contradiction. The authors therefore betray their own fundamental insight.
Laclau and Moufe’s postmodern theory construction begins from the
rejection of Foucault’s distinction between discourse and practice on the
grounds that these are merely diferentiations in the “social production of
meaning” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 107). There are serious consequences
for this position. The irst is that they deny the exteriority of events to discourse, and therefore fall into the constructivist trap of being unable to specify why discursive regimes are historically transformed. The second is that,
by insisting on textual polysemy, the centre of a hegemonic formation be-
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
95
comes a locus of the saturation of meaning, that is, a political symbol. We
have to examine these consequences sequentially, because taken together,
they constitute discourses as ideological worldviews (expressive totalities).
Laclau and Moufe’s strategy is therefore to add certain provisos to the model (relative totality, temporary ixation of meaning, incompleteness of discourses
caused by a constitutive outside) that are designed to prevent this relapse into
expressive totality. Straightforwardly, from the perspective of Laclau and
Moufe’s discourse theory, it is impossible to theorise the complexity of a social formation. Instead, as we shall see, the postmarxian version of “complexity” is a horizontal proliferation of hegemonic centres, which amounts
to the multiplication of simple political antagonisms and not the complexity
of an overdetermined social contradiction.
While Laclau and Moufe airm the existence of the external world and
the materiality of discourse, they claim that the being of every object is discursively constructed (Laclau, 1990: 97-134). This blocks the path to the regional distinction between social (discursive) practices and the materiality of
the object (the natural properties of objects and extra-discursive conditions
of emergence of discourse). For Laclau and Moufe, no object is given outside of a discursive condition of emergence, and so:
if the so-called non-discursive complexes—institutions, techniques,
productive organisation, and so on—are analysed, we will only ind
more or less complex forms of diferential positions among objects, which
do not arise from a necessity external to the system structuring them and which can
only be conceived as discursive articulations (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
107 my emphasis).
According to Foucault’s distinction between the discursive and the extra-discursive, the rules of formation of a discourse must be articulated with
its extra-discursive conditions, because extra-discursive events transform the
mode of existence of discourse by modifying its conditions of emergence, insertion and functioning (Foucault, 1985: 162-165; Foucault, 1991: 66-67). All
that Laclau and Moufe retain from Foucault is the concept of discursive formations as regularities in dispersion. This regularity represents an ensemble
of diferential positions: “This ensemble is not the expression of any underlying principle external to itself—it cannot, for instance, be apprehended either by a hermeneutic reading or structuralist combinatory—but it constitutes a coniguration, which in certain contexts of exteriority can be signified
as a totality” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 106).
Laclau and Moufe suppose that “discursive practices” involve the construction of relations of equivalence and diference whereby the identity of
discursive elements is modiied. They deine:
articulation [as] any practice establishing a relation among elements such
that their identity is modiied as a result of the articulatory practice. The
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structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call
discourse. The diferential positions, insofar as they appear articulated
within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call
element any diference that is not discursively articulated (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 105).
Following structural linguistics, we can say that the discursive moments
have the form of a diacritical ield composed of diferences. Yet, the entire
ield of diferential moments has an equivalence with respect to a master signiier that “represents” the unity of the discourse. Discourses are constituted
by the tension between diference and equivalence existing within the relatively ixed discursive moments and these two logics are in a relation of mutual limitation or dynamic equilibrium. The logic of diference is the logic
of social identity, whereas the logic of equivalence is the logic of frontal social antagonisms. Laclau and Moufe align diference with the operation of
metonymy, the contiguity of signiiers in the diachrony of the utterance and
the psychoanalytic category of displacement. Likewise, they compress the
operation of metaphor, the paradigmatic substitution of signiiers in the synchrony of the linguistic ield and the psychoanalytic category of condensation. “If diference exists only in the diachronic succession of the syntagmatic pole,” they claim, “equivalence exists at the paradigmatic pole” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 132). In an articulated totality, the relations are necessary.
This necessity derives from the regularity of structural positions rather than
from an underlying intelligible principle, yet contingency and articulation
are only possible because “no discursive formation is a sutured totality” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 105). A discursive semi-totality has an exterior, and
this “constitutive outside” functions to pierce its relational logic with contingency and renders it incomplete, ensuring that “the transition from the elements to the moments is never entirely fulilled” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
105). Indeed, Laclau and Moufe conclude, “there is no social identity fully
protected from a discursive exterior that deforms it and prevents it becoming fully sutured” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 105).
The concept of discourse requires that the practice of articulation “must
pierce the entire material density of the multifarious institutions” it operates
on (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 109), so that “enumerative discourse is a real
force which contributes to the moulding and constitution of social relations”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 110). The evasions and incoherence of Laclau
and Moufe’s concept of discourse—signaled here by the ambiguous words
“pierce” and “contributes,” when the context indicates that discourses are
the materiality of institutions and social relations are discourses—have been
abundantly documented (Eagleton, 1991: 210-211; Geras, 1990: 127-168). Laclau and Moufe claim that objects exist independently of discourse, but have
no extra-discursive being (so, for instance, the material properties of the object are merely discursive articulations) (Laclau, 1990: 97-134). By emptying
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existence of every determinacy, they arrive at a neo-Kantian idealism, because “for Laclau and Moufe, ‘objects’ oscillate between determinacy and
existence. What they are categorically denied is the possibility of a determinate existence” (Osborne, 1991: 209). The sophisms advanced in support of
this position—“to refer … directly to … an extra-discursive object will always require the prior delimitation of the extra-discursive [a]nd insofar as
the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by … discourse” (Butler, 1993a:
11)—do not survive a moment’s examination. For the delimitation of a region is not the same as its formation: this simply confuses an epistemological
condition with the ontological constitution of the object.
The Concept of Discourse
The central claims of critical scientiic realism—that the being of the object is determinate yet not in principle completely knowable and that scientiic
discourse, by approximating to the properties of the object, indeed refers indirectly to the extra-discursive—are not confronted by Laclau and Moufe
at all. They cannot therefore be said to have confronted Marxism’s distinctive claim to base a politics on exactly this conception of scientiic research.
Laclau and Moufe conine their reply to their critics to the accusation that
Marxists make “an illegitimate detour through the referent” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 118)—that is, that Marxists appeal to a pre-discursive reality
as grounds for the distinction between discourse and structure. While this is
true of Geras—whose appeal to a pre-discursive “human nature” as the basis for an anthropology of labour is precisely an “illegitimate detour through
the referent”—it is not true of Eagleton, Jameson or Miklitsch. What Laclau
and Moufe eliminate is the possibility of a post-discursive, constructed referent that is not entirely covered by discourse (Eagleton, 1991: 209). Laclau
and Moufe’s insistence that there is nothing outside the text involves a “tautological entrapment in the world of social construction [that] is incapable
of providing an account of the cause that governs the production of social
constructions of reality” (Stavrakakis, 1999: 67). Their concept of a “constitutive outside” in the form of the “ield of discursivity” surrounding every
discourse cannot salvage this position, because while every discursive totality has an exterior, “this exterior is constituted by other discourses” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 146 note 20). Hence, for Laclau and Moufe, there is no
post-discursive referent whose properties do not endlessly dissolve once more
into the labyrinth of signiication. Laclau and Moufe’s conlation of ideological discourse with discursive practice means that their discourse theory
is strangely indiferent to the regional syntax of social structures and unable
to perform even elementary institutional analysis (Miklitsch, 1995).
Let us consider this closely for a moment. Taking a mode of social regulation as exemplary of the materialist concept of hegemonic articulation, it
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is possible to say that this mode, as a historic bricolage, results from the contingent articulation of “loating” social elements into a new coniguration
capable of securing social reproduction. Laclau and Moufe’s concept of discourse is therefore highly suggestive. Nonetheless, they think that relations
of equivalence and diference regulate the discursive combinations of social
elements, and that these “loating” elements are subject-positions, not structural elements. This reduces, as we have seen, the complex institutional relations that hold between, for instance, domestic units, regimes of government, norms of consumption and the regime of accumulation, to patterns of
signiication. Consequently, Laclau and Moufe ignore the mobile equilibrium between institutional ixity and social dislocation within and between
these structural elements—an equilibrium that depends upon inancial constraints, political decisions, material limitations and ideological shifts—because their theory is only capable of thinking in terms of metaphor (equivalence) and metonymy (diference). Quite straightforwardly, this complex and
shifting network of relational constraints is irreducible to merely “equivalence and diference”. Laclau and Moufe’s position amounts to a “theory of
discourse” indiferent to the constraints of social grammar and institutional
syntax, material inequality and substantive diferences, use-value and social
norms, whose reduction of everything to value-like relations bears a suspicious resemblance to free-market ideologies in which every social relation is
equally a commodity. Furthermore, the assertion that the “loating signiiers” articulated in discursive practices are subject-positions (Laclau, 1985),
combined with the claim that discursive articulations penetrate the materiality of institutions, implies an isomorphism between subject-positions and
structural elements, so that the articulation of subject-positions necessarily
entails the reconiguration of social structures. The notion that a subjectposition can act as a “nodal point,” or metaphor, for a complex ensemble of
social practices and institutional structures implies a drastic reductionism in
which this network of relations is lattened onto the regionally dominant ideogeme. Such a position gravitates towards a crass functionalism, according
to which subject-positions are directly linked to social tasks, and conversely,
the reconiguration of political subjectivity itself substitutes for generalised
social struggle.
It is impossible to accept that the result of discursive practice is necessarily another discourse, for this obliterates the distinction between the synchronic structure of the social formation (which is not necessarily able to be
re-articulated in a conjuncture) and the diachronic horizon of action of social agents (which deines the structural elements that can be selected for discursive combinations in a political conjuncture). Nor do Laclau and Moufe
actually hold this position, for they distinguish between “sedimented” (or
naturalised) structural elements and contested, discursive moments, proposing that “temporalised” discursive moments become “spatialised” into
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structural elements through repetition. So the structured totality resulting
from a successful articulatory practice should in reality be called a structure.
The advantage of this position is that it invokes a deinite process of structuration—from structure to discourse to a modiied structure (Giddens, 1984;
Leledakis, 1995)—instead of a merely phenomenological description of the
diference between structural elements and discursive moments. It also invokes the distinction between the substitution of material elements within a ixed structural coniguration and the transformation of the structure
through the discursive disarticulation of dominant structural matrices.
Laclau and Moufe maintain their formal stance that discursive articulation leads only to another discourse because, despite their insistence that
discourses modify material structures, they evacuate the materiality of the
structural elements combined in discursive practices and treat them only as
bearers of meaning, efectively conlating ideological discourse with discursive practices. This enables Laclau and Moufe to deny the pertinence of
the distinction between structural determinations (the totality of which cannot be articulated in a conjuncture) and subject-positions (which can be articulated) (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 118-120). They would object that only
“loating signiiers,” dislodged from a diferential structure by their articulation in (socially antagonistic) relations of equivalence, can be discursively articulated in a conjuncture (Laclau, 1995a: 36-46; Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 134-136). Laclau and Moufe therefore relate social antagonism to the
proliferation of loating signiiers (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 134-136) and insist that “every antagonism, left free to itself, is a loating signiier, a ‘wild’
antagonism which does not predetermine the form in which it can be articulated to other elements in a social formation” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
171). This implies that the disarticulation of a structure results from political
conlict (through ideological articulations)—meaning that, for instance, economic crisis results from political conlict, and correlatively, that a social crisis
is always produced through the emergence of new political agents (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 136). Quite simply, this is nonsense (think, for instance,
of the Great Depression, which in Weimar Germany produces a political
crisis)—and Laclau and Moufe do not believe it either, for their analysis of
the NSM proposes that these emerge from the combination of intrinsic structural tendencies with political resistance (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 159-166).
Yet, they cannot modify their theoretical position because accepting the existence of determinate structural locations and the materiality of structural
elements conlicts with the assumption that every element is a semanteme, a
bearer of meaning, whose articulation and disarticulation depends, not on
any material properties, but on the ability of the “social text” to produce a
“surplus of meaning”.
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The Category of Hegemony
The major problems with Laclau and Moufe’s category of hegemony low
from their idealist constructivism with its focus on textual polysemy. By inverting the master (or empty) signiier that hegemonises a discursive formation into a point of maximal saturation of meaning, Laclau and Moufe
transform hegemony into a theory of semi-expressive totality. This model is
supplemented with the postmodern assertions that there exist a multiplicity
of hegemonic nodes in a social formation and that consequently, no unity of
rupture is possible, only a proliferation of dispersed subject-positions.
While discourses are theorised as a “regularity in dispersion,” the unity
of a discourse is theorised in terms of hegemony, and the formation of a discourse involves “cutting out” a partial totality from the sea of meaning, or
“ield of discursivity,” that surrounds the social:
The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of
nodal points which partially ix meaning; and the partial character of this
ixation proceeds from the … constant overlowing of every discourse by
the ininitude of the ield of discursivity (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 113).
According to Laclau and Moufe, the constitution of hegemony involves
the construction of chains of equivalence and diference that link disparate signifying elements as moments of a relatively uniied, but fundamentally incomplete, discursive totality. A dispersed ensemble of heterogeneous elements is uniied by their articulation with an empty signiier, so that
the identity of the elements is modiied by their reciprocal interactions and
thereby totalised as a diferential ield (a discourse). Political identities are
formed within discursive totalities—historical blocs—but, lowing from the
incompleteness of discourse, every political identity is inherently incomplete:
the Left is decompleted by the existence of the Right, for instance.
A social and political space relatively uniied through the instituting of
nodal points and the constitution of tendentially relational identities is what
Gramsci calls a historical bloc. The type of link joining the diferent
elements of the historical bloc—not unity in any form of historical a priori,
but a regularity in dispersion—coincides with our concept of discursive
formation. Insofar as we consider the historical bloc from the point of
view of the antagonistic terrain in which it is constituted we will call it a
hegemonic formation (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 136).
A relational ield of diference and equivalence is “sutured” by the existence of master signiiers (also known as points de capiton, nodal points and
empty signiiers). The master signiier creates and sustains identity of a certain discourse by constructing a knot of deinite meanings (Žižek, 1989: 95).
According to Laclau and Moufe, the ield of discursivity causes some signiiers to loat as the result of the overdetermination of their meaning, until a
master signiier intervenes and retroactively constitutes their identity by ix-
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101
ing the loating signiiers within a paradigmatic chain of equivalence.
Hegemony needs to be conceptualised, supplementing Gramsci, as both
a mobile equilibrium between force and consent, and as a relation of frontiers
between antagonists, where hegemonic articulations occur in a ield crisscrossed with social antagonisms (i.e., negativity): “Only the presence of a
vast area of loating elements and the possibility of their articulation to opposite camps—which implies constant redeinition of the latter—is what constitutes the terrain permitting us to deine a practice as hegemonic” (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 136). Without equivalence and without relations of shifting
frontiers it is impossible to consider politics as the articulation of hegemony.
Laclau and Moufe, however, reject the Gramscian assumption that a war
of position happens through the division of society in two camps. Indeed,
Laclau and Moufe claim that the hegemonic form of politics only becomes
dominant in modern times through a proliferation of diferences and that as
part of the “increasing complexity of the social,” this process is primary.
We will therefore speak of democratic struggles where these imply
a plurality of political spaces, and of popular struggles where certain
discourses tendentially construct the division of a single political space
into two opposed ields. But it is clear that the fundamental concept
is that of “democratic struggle” and that popular struggles are merely
speciic conjunctures resulting from the multiplication of equivalence
efects among the democratic struggles (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 137).
Clearly, Laclau and Moufe have abandoned the notion of fundamental classes as the terrain for hegemony and the single hegemonic centre as
the normal social topography. Instead, they conceptualise the social ield
as constrained within the poles of totality (a structure of necessary relations
without antagonisms) and atomisation (a proliferation of loating signiiers
through the multiplication of antagonisms). However, Laclau and Moufe
stress that “in a given social formation, there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points,” implying that hegemony is only ever tendential and localised (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 139). Therefore, they ofer a new deinition
of organic crisis as a “conjuncture where there is a generalised weakening of
the relational system [that] deines the identities of a given social or political space, and where, as a result, there is a proliferation of loating elements”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 136). There is no single ruptural unity but rather
a proliferation of antagonisms (and hence dispersion of subject-positions).
Hegemonic articulation, then, designates the practice of articulating
links between discourses and modifying existing discourses, through the
construction of diferential and equivalential relations between existing discourses. Hegemonic articulation is not an aggregation of dissimilar elements
into an external combination of fully constituted political constituencies, because the act of hegemonic articulation entails the reciprocal modiication
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of the identity of all of the elements involved in the articulation. The theory of hegemony therefore involves a critique of mainstream “alliance politics” and “coalition building” activities. For Laclau and Moufe, by creating
equivalences between the demands of alliance partners, and simultaneously
deining the alliance in opposition to some antagonist, hegemony involves
the expansion of a discourse into a horizon of social meaning. This represents a wholesale usurpation of the concept of discursive practice by the operations of ideological discourses, for what Laclau and Moufe neglect is
that the transformation of institutions and the articulation of ideological
oppositions are seldom synchronised. A critical determinant of the destiny
of every political strategy is its ability to maintain solidarity between alliance partners despite the scission between ideological discourse and institutional transformations. While the creation of equivalences between subjectpositions precedes the reconstruction of institutions, the articulation of a new
social cement, in the form of a new hegemonic ideology, follows from institutional reconstruction. Laclau and Moufe’s theory collapses these distinct
political and ideological processes into a specious unity, generating a political voluntarism prone to mistaking ideological manipulations for institutional conquests.
Social Antagonism
For Laclau, antagonism springs from dislocation, which is the result of “the
disruption of structure by forces operating outside it”. Laclau and Moufe
refer to this menacing “beyond” as a “constitutive outside” and argue that
every ield of internal (diacritical) relations contains an implied reference to
an external “social antagonism”. Inspired by Staten, Laclau identiies the
“constitutive outside” with both social antagonism and the conditions of existence of a discourse. According to Laclau and Moufe, “every society constitutes its own forms of rationality and intelligibility by dividing itself; that
is, by expelling outside itself any surplus of meaning subverting it” (Laclau,
1990: 51; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 137). Indeed, the formation of hegemony
necessitates this act of exclusion, for “limits only exist insofar as a systematic
ensemble of diferences can be cut out as totality with regard to something beyond them, and it is only through this cutting out that the totality constitutes
itself as formation” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 143).
Political identities are formed within discursive totalities—hegemonic
blocs—but, because the “ield of discursivity” overlows every discourse,
no political identity is complete: every subject-position is a loating signiier
whose polysemy makes possible limitless rearticulation. Since political identities are formed through equivalential oppositions (“us” and “them”), every
identity is relationally determined, or rendered incomplete, by the necessary
existence of an antagonistic identity against which it is deined. Hegemonic
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103
articulation ultimately involves the negation of identity, through the exclusion of a political opponent from the discursive universe, and this leads to
social antagonism.
The logic behind this position is straightforward. Hegemony is constructed by articulating a diferential ield as existing in equivalence with
respect to a master signiier. Consider a diacritical ield, S, S1, S2, … , Sn,
which is articulated in equivalence with a master signiier, S1:
S
S
S
S
…
n
S
The master signiier—as a signiier—is itself binary, that is, deined
solely by its diference. Yet, this diference cannot be with respect to the ield
it articulates, since the master signiier is not diferent from the ield S, S1, S2,
… , Sn, but (ex hypothesi) equivalent to it. Therefore another signiier must exist,
“elsewhere,” that diacritically deines the master signiier.
Let us call this signiier m, the excluded marginal element:
S
S
S
S ............................. m
…
n
S
In this diagram, the dotted line S1—m indicates that only the trace (in
the deconstructive sense) of m remains imprinted on the discursive totality
hegemonised by S1. Yet, this trace is suicient to deny all of the social identities articulated in the ield S, S1, S2, … , Sn, a complete identity. As a result,
social antagonism exists between the ield hegemonised by S1 and the excluded
margin, m. Now, presumably m is itself the master signiier of another discourse, or a loating signiier that can potentially become the master signiier
of another discourse.
To concretise the concept of social antagonism, consider the following
example, based on Laclau’s diagram (Laclau, 2000a: 303).
feminism
trade unionism
ecology
…
“Radical
Democracy”
(The Left)
..........................................
“Natural
Inequality”
(The Right)
socialism
FIGURE: The social antagonism between political Left and Right, seen from the Left.
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In the igure, a political alliance of the Left, hegemonised by the radical democratic Imaginary, constructs a social antagonism with the Right by
excluding the signiier “Natural Inequality”—selected as the master signiier
of the political Right following Norberto Bobbio (Bobbio, 1996: 60-81). The
social identities in the alliance of the Left are decompleted by the existence
of the Right, which antagonises their identity and prevents the Left alliance
from becoming coextensive with the social formation.
Laclau and Moufe claim that what distinguishes the social antagonism
from both logical contradiction and real opposition is that the latter two are
objective relations whereas social antagonism puts into question any objectivity. This really means that Laclau and Moufe relapse into a perspectival
relativism, whereby there is no appeal to any reality beyond one’s discursive
universe. Abandoning the concept of social antagonism as contradiction,
they insist that the distinction between real opposition and social antagonism is that:
Real opposition is an objective relation—that is determinable, deinable—
among things; contradiction is an equally deinable relation among
concepts; antagonism constitutes the limits of every objectivity, which
is revealed as a partial and precarious objectification. … Antagonisms are
not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of
society (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 125).
In other words, “real opposition” implies the radically external perspective of a neutral metalanguage or “view from nowhere,” whereas social
antagonism is something that one is always inside. Indeed, for Laclau and
Moufe “the price of identifying ‘society’ with the referent would be to empty it of any rationally speciiable content” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 126).
If social antagonism helps to establish the boundaries of a discursive formation, it also, at the same time, prevents a discourse from constituting an objective rational and fully intelligible reality. As such, social antagonism is,
at once, the condition of possibility and impossibility of society (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 125). Social antagonism is therefore a quasi-transcendental.
For Laclau and Moufe, there are two main types of antagonism—popular antagonisms and democratic antagonisms. Popular antagonisms divide
social space into two opposed camps, while democratic antagonisms only
divide minor portions of social space (they are local or regional antagonisms). The expansion of the equivalential chain tends to polarise the social
and produce a populist logic. By contrast, so-called democratic antagonisms
make the world increasingly complex. The example par excellence is the NSM,
whose democratic politics represent the wave of the future, for today, “partly because of their very success, democratic struggles tend less and less to be
uniied as ‘popular struggles’” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 133).
The intuitive plausibility of Laclau and Moufe’s phenomenology of ide-
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
105
ology derives from the way it appeals to the experience of belonging to a political movement. Yet, as a social theory, this is fraught with incoherence. Laclau and Moufe propose a fundamental symmetry between the oppressed
and the oppressor, implying a perspectival relativism, according to which
my judgement that the other is my oppressor is simply an expression of a
relational identity (which is necessarily decompleted by the antagonist). For
this reason, Laclau and Moufe’s deinition of oppression involves reference
to a third party, observing the conlicting parties in a social antagonism.
But if discourses ix meaning, then how can there be social dialogue between discourses? How can the observer communicate their judgement to
the antagonistic parties? What happens when conlicts arise between alliance partners? Secondly, if we cannot speak of social formations, but only of
discursive formations, in what sense do democratic or popular antagonisms
“divide social space”? What can “hegemony” (as a mobile equilibrium between force and consent, which implies dominance of a context traversed by
internal faultlines) mean, when Laclau and Moufe relegate antagonism to an
external condition?
Political Symbolism
Laclau and Moufe’s real solution to the diiculty of the oscillation between
an imaginary social unity and political fragmentation in the symbolic ield
involves reference to an expressive totality subtending every discourse. Laclau and Moufe explain that they “have referred to ‘discourse’ as a system
of diferential entities … such a system only exists as a partial limitation
of a ‘surplus of meaning’ which subverts it … [and] we will call it the field
of discursivity” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 111). The “ield of discursivity” as
a “surplus of meaning surrounding the social,” is the totality of discourses
(Smith, 1998: 85). This totality is not descriptive (an empirical register of all
discourses), but transcendental (the totality constitutes every entity), for discursivity is not a collection of objects, but rather a “theoretical horizon for
the constitution of the being of every object” (Laclau and Moufe, 1987: 86).
The history of philosophy supplies another name for this ultimate discursive
horizon that constitutes the entirety of being: the Absolute.
For Laclau and Moufe, instead of generating a social syntax, the “social production of meaning” culminates in a veritable “crisis of symbolic
overproduction”. The impossibility of a ixed centre or closed discursive totality, due to absence of a transcendental signiied, results in discursivity as
the “no-man’s land” surrounding every discursive totality with a “surplus of
meaning” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 111). To deine this theoretically, they
rely on Derrida’s inluential essay, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (Derrida, 1978: 278-293) and his demonstration that “the absence of the transcendental signiied extends the domain
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and the play of signiication indeinitely” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: Derrida cited 112). Following Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of structure, Laclau and Moufe suppose that a discourse is a temporary and partial
totalisation whereby the transient imposition of a structural centre creates
a relative ixity in signiication. Laclau and Moufe gloss this to claim that
“it is not the poverty of signiieds but, on the contrary, polysemy that disarticulates a discursive structure” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 113). The “ield
of overdetermination,” the “ield of discursivity,” polysemy as a “surplus of
meaning” “surrounding” any discursive totality and the action of différance
are identical in Laclau and Moufe.
The problem is that Laclau and Moufe interpret the “impossibility of
an ultimate ixity of meaning” not in terms of the excess of signiication over
meaning, but instead in terms of an excess of meaning over signiication:
“it is not the poverty of signiieds but, on the contrary, polysemy that disarticulates a discursive structure” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 113). While they
draw upon Derrida for this position, there is no textual support in the citation ofered, or in general in Derrida’s work, for their interpretation. Indeed,
in the article cited, Derrida explains that it is the excess of the signifier that
replaces the transcendental signiied (Derrida, 1978: 284). In the well-known
Limited Inc., for instance, Derrida insists that dissemination is the opposite of
polysemy (Derrida, 1988: 9, 20-21). It is not the polysemic richness of the text
that Derrida opens to the movement of dissemination, but rather the action
of différance conceived as a lack, which bursts the semantic horizon with the
possibility that meaning and non-meaning might be reciprocal conditions
of each other’s emergence. Hermeneutics, with its stress on the ininity of
meaning and the endlessness of interpretation, remains, for Derrida, within
the assumptions of logocentric metaphysics, since the concept of an unclosable horizon of meaning implies a determinate centre and an anticipation of
coherence. Polysemy, for Derrida, can only be dispersion from some original unity. The play of dissemination consists precisely in a “disruption that
bursts the semantic horizon” (Derrida, 1971: 45). Both determinate meaning
and polysemic excess, for Derrida, are formed at the expense of both nonmeaning and the productive play of signiication that creates meanings beyond the semantic horizon of any hermeneutic procedure (Dews, 1987: 12-13;
Gasché, 1986: 174, 218, 237-244). Installing a transcendental signiied at the
centre of a discourse is the archetypal gesture of metaphysics; Derrida, by contrast, enjoins us to think the concept of a decentred structure. Likewise, the
Lacanian master signiier is not an imaginary image or transcendental signiied, but a nonsensical placemarker for the subject’s castration, or symbolic
lack. The master signiier is a signiier without signified. It is only in the transference (in the retroactive projection by which the subject identiies with a
master signiier) that this appears—in a psychoanalytic variant of ideological misrecognition—as the locus of an Imaginary Meaning.
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What this means is that Laclau and Moufe’s “empty signiier” is continuously replaced in their discourse by a transcendental signiied, or political symbol, that lends an imaginary unity to the discursive ield. Laclau initially proposes that:
there can be empty signiiers within the ield of signiication because
any system of signiication is structured around an empty place resulting
from the impossibility of producing an object which, nonetheless, is
required by the systematicity of the system (Laclau, 1995a: 43).
This is not in principle diferent to the Lacanian concept of the master
signiier as instigating contingency, or lack. Thus far, what we have is a politicisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and a perceptive analysis of the possible links between the Lacanian concept of the master signiier and Derrida’s theory of différance. The diiculty in the analysis only emerges when
Laclau and Moufe attempt to square this with their concept of the ield of
discursivity as a surplus of meaning. For this concept of discursivity as a ield
of overdetermination only its together with a logic of political symbolism.
Laclau frames the notion of an interruption in signiication on the model of the sublime. The empty signiier is a result of a “blockage in the continuous expansion of the process of signiication” (Laclau, 1995a: 43). This interruption is a consequence of the presence of social antagonism as the limit
of any social totality. That is to say, the breakdown in signiication lows
from the necessity for any hegemonic identity to deine itself by marginalising some term and constituting itself in opposition to this negated term.
“This relation,” notes Laclau, “by which a particular content becomes the
signiier of the absent communitarian fullness is exactly what we call a hegemonic relationship” (Laclau, 1995a: 43). The role of the empty signiier, then,
is discussed in terms not of its function as a placemarker for lack and a nonsymbolised loss, of an inability to signify the totality, but in the capacity of
representation of the utopian aspirations of a social alliance.
In every concrete example drawn up by Laclau and Moufe, this usurpation of existential lack by political symbolism takes place. The paradigmatic case is Luxemburg, where the general strike becomes the site of the
overlow of the political signiier by the ideological signiied of class unity
and revolutionary desire.
[T]he mechanism of uniication is clear: in a revolutionary situation,
it is impossible to ix the literal sense of each isolated struggle, because
each struggle overlows its own literality and comes to represent, in the
consciousness of the masses, a simple moment of a more global struggle
against the system. … This is, however, nothing other than the deining
characteristic of the symbol: the overlowing of the signiier by the
signiied. The unity of the class is therefore a symbolic unity (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 11).
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Symbolic overdetermination becomes the concrete mechanism for the
uniication of the disparate subject-positions created through sectoral struggles. In the case of Perón, “Perónism … was rather a series of symbols …
[and] the symbols of a particular group at some point assume a function
of universal representation”. This universal representation was that of “a
pure, abstract absent fullness”. “Yet the chains of equivalences constructed
by the diferent factions of his movement had gone beyond any possibility
of control” and led to the military coup as a means of retotalising the social
(Laclau, 1995a: 55-56). This, again, makes the empty signiier into a political symbol that opens a crack onto the ield of discursivity and permits the
overlow of meaning to disrupt the social totality. Indeed, Laclau proposes
that these symbols form social Imaginaries, because “once the symbol’s circulation has reached a certain level of generalisation in the representation of
a vast range of antagonisms, they become the necessary surface for the inscription of any new demand” (Laclau, 1990: 79).
The diference between this political symbolism, and the post-structuralism from which it is supposed to issue, could not be more stark. Following
Žižek, Laclau and Moufe’s misrecognition of the master signiier (the signiier without signiied) “a point of extreme saturation of meaning” is exactly
an “ideological anamorphosis” (Žižek, 1989: 99). This might be passed of
as a description of the political process, were it not for the combination of its
reproduction in theoretical material and the underlying problem of the ield
of overdetermination as a surplus of meaning. The conclusion has to be that
Laclau and Moufe have performed an ideological inversion, amounting to
the replacement of symbolic processes by an imaginary unity.
The Democratic Revolution of Modernity
For Laclau and Moufe, the expressive historical totality that subtends every “discursive formation” is the unfolding of the Democratic Revolution of
Modernity (hereafter, DRM). Following Claude Lefort, Laclau and Moufe
conceptualise modernity as inaugurated by a “democratic revolution” that
invokes “the dissolution of the markers of certainty” by negating the possibility of the direct incarnation of power in the body of the Prince (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 152-159; Lefort, 1988: 16-18). In modernity, by contrast
with the ancien régime, the imaginary uniication of society is a function of the
temporary and contingent occupation of the locus of power by some particular group and the corresponding hegemonisation of the content of the universal. According to Lefort, “this leads to the emergence of a purely social
society, in which the people, the nation and the state take on the status of
[ideal] universal entities” (Lefort, 1988: 18). As Žižek explains, no party can
permanently embody the will of the people, so that the governing party necessarily speaks only temporarily “in the name of the people,” “as a kind of
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
109
surrogate, a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign” (Žižek, 1989: 147).
This means that within modernity, the locus of power is coextensive
with the “Real-impossible” universality of the people, the nation and the
state, that is, is rendered an empty place by the DRM. Recognition of the
constitutive nature of the gap between a particular project and the impossible site of universality is the condition of possibility for democratic politics (Laclau, 1995a: 46). This power is a symbolic place that cements society
by creating a myth of uniication around some universal value. The empty
place of power is therefore also the locus of the empty signiier. It is political
symbolism—the ability to signify in the name of the absent fullness of community—that is the “empty place of power,” indicating that this is a dominant ideology, or “social imaginary,” and not an institutional site. Indeed, it
is the “permanence of the democratic imaginary” in modernity that is the
condition of possibility for the strategy of radical democracy (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 155).
According to Laclau and Moufe, the “decisive mutation in the political imaginary of Western societies took place two hundred years ago and
can be deined in these terms: the logic of equivalence was transformed into
the fundamental instrument of the production of the social” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 155). This logic of the equality of rights migrates progressively from the political to the economic, cultural and so forth, seen by Laclau
and Moufe as an extension of the “equivalential displacement peculiar to
the democratic imaginary” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 158). The logic of socialism, feminism and the new social movements can all be expressed as localisations of this equivalential logic. However, the DRM also entails the extension of a diferential logic, the logic of liberty, in tension with the notion
of equality. This logic individualises and marks the diference between moments of the social. It is the logic of autonomy, and therefore a constitutive
part of the identity of the social movements that might comprise any Left
project. These two logics constitute a ield of tension within the social, whose
poles are totalitarianism (as the end point of total equivalence) and social atomisation (as the inal result of absolute diference). Radical democracy locates itself in the dynamic equilibrium that circulates between these poles, a
distant echo of the French Revolution’s epochal revolution in ideology—instituting a “truly new … social imaginary” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 155).
Laclau and Moufe’s theory rests upon a historical master narrative of
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, according to which the shift
from ixed diferences and absolute equivalence, to the relation of frontiers
between diference and equivalence characteristic of modernity, hinges
upon the institutionalisation of the DRM (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 155).
This master narrative of the transition from a static feudalism—where ixed
diferences allocate rigid social roles while millenarian equivalences generate organic totalities—to the reign of capitalist modernity—where the invis-
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ible hand of equivalence and diference allocates political power to hegemonic alliances (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 138), reads like a parody of vulgar
Marxism transposed into the language of high metaphysics. Once the DRM
creates an “empty place of power,” the hegemonic form of politics predominates on the basis of constant dislocations of the structure. Nonetheless, the
lost organic totality continues to haunt modernity, for the “relation by which
a particular content becomes the signiier for an absent communitarian fullness is exactly what we call a hegemonic relationship” (Laclau, 1995a: 43). Modernity evacuates the contents of this totality, but not its form—that is to say,
the empty signiier and the empty place of power stand in for the “communitarian fullness” which their forms continuously invoke. What replaces the
substantive community of pre-modern society is, as we have seen, the “ield
of discursivity” as a froth of social possibilities, and “every discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the ield of discursivity by expanding signifying chains which partially ix the meaning of [a] loating signiier” (Toring, 1999: 98). This sea of excess signiication, coextensive with the “empty
place of power,” is none other than the “democratic imaginary”—that is,
the fundamental level of the social.
The “democratic imaginary” of the DRM forms a “discursive exterior” to every relation of subordination, enabling these to be transformed into
relations of oppression (that is, something contested rather than merely endured) (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 154, 159). In a breath-taking simpliication (Osborne, 1991: 210-215; Rustin, 1988: 162-173; Wood, 1998: 64-71), this
thesis lets Laclau and Moufe interpret the entire history of social struggles,
from the nineteenth century onwards, as the extension and deepening of the
DRM (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 152-159). Armed with a unitary conception
of the NSM that now also subsumes “class identities,” Laclau and Moufe
can propose that the task of the Left “cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but, on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy … [through] expanding the chain of
equivalents between the diferent struggles against oppression” (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 176). In HSS, therefore, the new hegemonic project for the
Left—the struggle for a radical and plural democracy—is conceptualised as
an expression of the DRM.
Modernity is therefore theorised as springing from the foundational
character of an inaugural political act. It is not, therefore, that Laclau and
Moufe renounce a universal revolution entirely—only that they relegate
this to the historical past and erect an ethical barrier to every efort to make
this happen more than once. The “dissolution of the Jacobin Imaginary,”
the end of the leftwing dream of an inaugural political act, announced at
the beginning of HSS, then, is the result of Laclau and Moufe’s supposition
that this act has already happened and cannot be repeated. The best we can do is
live with the consequences, namely, engage in the critique of “actually exist-
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
111
ing democracy” and accept that “the objective of the Left should be the extension and deepening of the democratic revolution initiated two hundred
years ago” (Moufe, 1992d: 1).
The Performative Contradictions of Radical Democracy
The contradiction, between Laclau and Moufe’s claim that socialist revolution as a foundational act is the mainspring of leftwing malaise (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 177) and their advocacy of another foundational revolution as inaugurating an expressive historical totality, is only the leading
edge of a series of performative contradictions. The characteristic relativist
conlation of ideology (the “democratic Imaginary”) and discourse theory
means that performative contradiction becomes the condition of existence
of postmarxism’s fundamental positions. Indeed, the notion of founding a
New Left politics on the basis of the generalised myth of the “radical democratic Imaginary” (Laclau, 1990: 177-196; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 190)
should leave us feeling uneasily like we are being asked to accede to selfmystiication. Postmarxism cannot justify its intervention ethically or defend its politics as something more than another particularism. It cannot
substantiate its claims that the political agon of radical democracy is anything more than a redescription of parliamentary politics through a rosetinted ideological lens.
The performative contradictions begin from Laclau’s eforts to justify a
preference for democratic politics. Modernity is not only constituted by the
democratic revolution, but also by post-democratic totalitarianism. Laclau
and Moufe simultaneously claim that totalitarianism is impossible (total
equivalence meaning the elimination of all diferential identity) and prohibited, something that is an ethical abomination.
Postmarxism silently assumes that democracy is ethically valorized, but
refuses to defend this on ethical grounds, lending Laclau’s debate with English deconstructionist, Simon Critchley, its evasive quality. The substance of
Critchley’s argument is to ask: “if all decisions are political, in virtue of what
is there a diference between democratizing and non-democratizing decisions?” (Critchley, 1999: 112; Critchley, 2002: 2). Two replies are possible: a
normative response (democratic decisions are more egalitarian, pluralistic
or participatory) or a factual answer (democratisation is taking place and hegemony is simply a description of this process). The normative claim is depoliticising—in Laclau’s terms—because it admits a basis for political decisions outside politics. The factual account risks the collapse of the theory of
hegemony into the descriptive process and the voiding of any critical claims.
Thus, Critchley reads HSS as “Machiavellian,” in the popular sense of the
term: an ethically indiferent political calculus designed to secure ascendancy for any group prepared to utilise this political technology. This leaves La-
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clau uncomfortably close to complicity with the dislocatory logic of contemporary capitalist societies (Bertram, 1995: 82; Critchley, 2002: 2).
Laclau replies that HSS presents ethics and politics as a unity by virtue
of a Gramscian “politicisation of ethics” (Laclau, 1995c: 93). In opposition to
the ethics of ininite responsibility towards the Other promoted by Critchley’s interpretation of deconstruction (Critchley, 1993), Laclau proposes that
deconstruction is a decisionism (Laclau, 1995c: 94). Insofar as hegemony is
the inverse of the operation of deconstruction as theorised by Laclau, this
makes hegemony a theory of decision. So, for Laclau, “if deconstruction discovers the role of the decision out of the undecidability of the structure, hegemony, as a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain, requires
that the contingent connections existing in that terrain are fully shown by
deconstruction” (Laclau, 1995a: 103). Hegemony and deconstruction are one
another’s inverse: hegemony goes from undecidability to the decision, while
deconstruction reveals the contingent character of the original decision.
While this would seem to mean that Laclau endorses the Machiavellian
interpretation of their work, their actual claim is that HSS is Gramscian in
that it theorises hegemony as a mobile equilibrium between politics and ethics. Recently, Laclau has elaborated upon this “politicisation of ethics” (Laclau, 2000b: 79-86). Postmarxism depends upon an ethical decision to accept the transcendental status of the distinction between ethical universality
and particular norms, or contextually bound maxims of conduct. The moment of ethics corresponds to the formal universality of the absent fullness
of society (the impossible yet necessary dream of a harmonious, organic totality), while political contents and concrete social norms are inter-twined in
particular complexes (Laclau, 2000b: 74-85). As Critchley observes, in this
reintroduction of ethics into postmarxism, the distinctions ethical/normative, form/content and universal/particular line up with the distinction ontological/ontic (Critchley, 2002: 3). Not only is the alignment of ethics and
ontology characteristic of Western metaphysics, but this position is incoherent—for Laclau and Moufe, the being of every object is supposed to be discursively constructed, ruining the claim to oppose ethics to politics. Laclau
denies that this system of oppositions determines his work (Laclau, 2002),
but he can only do so by reiterating the claim that the ethical is linked with
the empty signiier (Laclau, 2000b: 84; Laclau, 2002: 1). This means either
that the ethical is linked with the locus of the empty signiier, the empty place
of power (in which case it is identiied with abstract universality as the locus
of the ontological constitution of the social ield), or that the ethical is the
empty signiier (in which case the ethical is only a masked particular and no
distinction between ethics and norms exists).
As Žižek identiies the underlying problem with Laclau’s “politicisation
of ethics”:
[Laclau] oscillates between proposing a neutral formal frame that
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113
describes the working of the political ield, without implying any speciic
prise de parti, and the prevalence given to a particular leftist political
practice. … Laclau’s notion of hegemony describes the universal
mechanism of ideological “cement” which binds any social body together,
a notion that can analyse all possible socio-political orders, from fascism
to liberal democracy; on the other hand, Laclau nonetheless advocates a
determinate political option, “radical democracy” (Žižek, 2000h: 174).
This alternation between a formally neutral, metalinguistic claim that
is belied by the partisan content of the statement is evidence of the efort
to try to occupy the pure position of metalanguage at the level of the enunciation. This extends all the way through Laclau and Moufe’s position:
radical democracy is a neutral theory of politics and a partisan project;
democratic citizenship is the horizon of democratic politics and the aim
of a new grammar of political conduct; ethics is only an efect of political
decisions, but nonetheless radical democracy should be preferred as more
egalitarian. For Žižek, this is the basic problem with postmodern political
theory: its reluctance to adopt an openly partisan position of enunciation
betrays its hysterical dependence on the demand of the Other for a legitimization of its political position. Instead of an autonomous, openly stated,
partisan theory, we have the convoluted attempt to occupy the “view from
nowhere” of pure metalanguage, the Imaginary position of the “impossible fullness of society”.
Ethical Universality and Political Particularism
The most signiicant of the “crop circles” in Laclau and Moufe’s theory is
that the elementary hegemonic operation (speaking in the name of the people) is theorised explicitly as a performative contradiction. For postmarxian discourse theory, “society … is a plurality of particularistic groups and
demands” (Laclau, 2000b: 55) and the universal is an empty place that it is
impossible to occupy. This makes every hegemonic agent into an impostor
whose “universality” is only a masked particular. According to postmarxian
discourse theory, when a hegemonic agent speaks, their position of enunciation is transformed from “I speak” to “the people speaks” (Toring, 1999:
177, 193). This implies that the position of enunciation is an abstract universal, while the content of the statement expresses a sectoral interest. But this
only means that the hegemonic agent gets involved in something like the “liar’s paradox,” because recognition of the impossibility of universality is supposed to be constitutive of democratic politics—that is, the hegemonic agent
is trapped in a performative contradiction, whereby their implied position
of enunciation depends upon a universality that their statement denies. Indeed, “the assertion of universality by those who have conventionally been
excluded by the term often produces a performative contradiction of a cer-
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tain sort” (Butler, 2000d: 38). The hedging qualiications (“often … of a certain sort”) indicate just how uneasy the postmarxists are with this position—
yet the theoretical claim that the oppressed retain their particularity while
articulating a universal claim indicates that performative contradiction always happens (Butler, 2000d: 39).
The problem is that the discourse theory of Laclau and Moufe is predicated upon the existence of an absolute gap between the abstract universal
and any concrete particular, in a reaction against the alleged teleology of the
direct incarnation of universality in the moment of “proletarian chiliasm”
(Laclau, 1995a: 22-26). While in HSS, Laclau and Moufe’s “renunciation of
the discourse of the universal” comes perilously close to an endorsement of
postmodern particularism (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 3), recently Laclau has
distanced postmarxism from strands of radical particularism in postmodern theory and multicultural politics (Laclau, 1995a: 20-35, 48-54). Laclau
brands as reactionary the identitarian “politics of authenticity” that accompanies complete rejection of the universal, because it lands the oppressed
group in the position of performatively undercutting their appeal to universal human rights and democratic entitlements (Laclau, 1995a: 48). In line
with the postmodern position on universality, however, Laclau proposes that
the deinition of universality is contextually determined, and that the incommensurability of contexts ensures that there exist only local deinitions
of universality (Laclau, 1995a: 34, 51-54). Nonetheless, Laclau argues that
the extreme postmodern position implies regression to a “state of nature,”
in which the competition between singularities destroys social cohesion in a
shower of antagonistic fragments (Laclau, 1995a: 33-34). Reintroduction of
social cohesion (a postmodern social contract recognising diference, for instance), while preserving the elimination universality as an explicit factor in
politics, only means its re-inscription as the ontological ground of the totality in another form (Laclau, 1995a: 58). The postmodern and multicultural
attack on universality therefore presupposes precisely what it excludes.
Yet, it is not at all clear that Laclau and Moufe can escape the problems
of the postmodern position. Because particular identities are not fully closed,
but exist as articulated into chains of equivalence, the universal “emerges
from the particular” as an irreducible dimension of the chain of equivalence
that creates the limits of every system (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). This serves to
partially negate particular identities by introducing “the dimension of relative universality” (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). For Laclau, this means the dimension of universality generated by the formation of discursive equivalences is
not an a priori unconditional universality (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). The relative
universality proposed by Laclau and Moufe cannot exist before—or independently of—a chain of equivalences, formed through discursive articulations, that links particular identities (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). In line with
Laclau and Moufe’s postmodern nominalism, this conception of universal-
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ity converts every “concrete universal” into a mere generalisation lacking
the key features of a transcendental (universality and necessity, constitutive
capacity) (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). The key feature of these particular social
identities is that they can exist before their articulation into a chain of equivalences—and so, because this chain is contingent, they lack any constitutive
reference to their “universal”. This is why Laclau claims that “diference
and particularity are the necessary starting point” for postmarxism (Laclau,
1995a: 65) and that the universal springs from the particular (Laclau, 1995a:
28). It is therefore impossible for Laclau and Moufe to evade their own objection to postmodern theory, namely, that postmodern particularism negates the constitutive dependence of every particular upon the universal,
unless the particular has reference to a deeper essential universal ground—in
which case Laclau and Moufe have fallen into the trap of an essentialist totality subtending the atomised ield of social particulars.
Laclau and Moufe have failed to make the elementary distinction between formal universality as a regulative ideal and the “relative universality” of the contents of the universal advanced by a determinate social alliance. In actuality, Laclau’s claim that formal universality is not a regulative
ideal is incoherent, for he immediately appends the claim that the dimension of universality is “just an empty place unifying a set of equivalential
demands” (Laclau, 1995a: 30-33). This describes exactly a regulative ideal. Because the particular sectoral identity of a social agent cannot exist
without its articulation to universality, as the agent becomes hegemonic by
transcending corporatism, its particular identity is not just “hybridised” (as
Laclau accepts, it begins as hybridised), but asymptotically eliminated. The
example of Mary Wollstonecraft—invoked by both Laclau (Laclau, 1995a:
30-33) and Butler (Butler, 2000d: 39)—testiies against the “primacy of the
particular,” for this involves precisely such an articulation of an expanded
content for the universal in the name of its form. No performative contradiction
is involved in this articulation.
By contrast, the performative contradictions of postmarxism indicate
the remainder of an unmediated particularism that resists universalisation,
namely, the clinging of Laclau and Moufe to the postmodern identity politics of the NSM (Osborne, 1991: 215-221). This is conirmed by Laclau’s reintroduction of the problematic of representation within the theory of hegemony, which supposes the existence of a pre-discursive substance that is
“represented” by a signiication (Laclau, 1995a: 84-104; Laclau, 2000c: 211).
Laclau claims that the hegemonic agent is “constitutively split between the
concrete politics that they advocate and the ability of those politics to ill the
empty place” (Laclau, 1995a: 54; Laclau, 2000b: 68). This conjures a vision
of hegemonic agents “illing” the empty place, conceptualised as the insertion of a pre-constituted object into a socio-political slot. This is an incoherent position, as it supposes the existence of a split between an extra-discur-
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sive particularity that is politically articulated to a universal function without
fully transforming the original social particularity. Now, according to discourse theory this split is impossible: a sectoral identity is constituted through hegemonic articulation and therefore contains internal reference to universality
(Laclau, 1995a: 31). In recent interventions, Laclau has tried to salvage his
position by accepting the regulative status of formal universality (Laclau,
2000c: 196), while at the same time maintaining that the universal only
exists incarnated in a social particular (a sectoral identity), that universality supposes a radical exclusion, that only a social Imaginary universalises
particular demands, and so the empty signiier is a representation of an impossibility (Laclau, 2000c: 207-211). This position reintroduces the absolute
split between abstract, regulative universality, and the “concrete universal”
of a hegemonic particular, elevated to quasi-universal status through exclusions. The basic relation between an originary particularity and an entirely
unexplained regulative universality remains. Laclau claims that the postmodern relation between universal and particular is “undecidable” (Laclau,
1995a: 20-35)—because there exists a mutual conditioning of universal and
particular—yet in actuality Laclau and Moufe transform the universal into
a mere generalisation subordinated to the primacy of the particular, while
all the time relying upon the regulative ideal of a formal universality as “an
empty place unifying a set of equivalential demands”.
Democratic Citizenship and Radical Subjectivity
Where the dialectics of universal and particular explain how socially fragmented actors can form a collective will capable of instituting a new social order, the concept of democratic citizenship is intended to theorise the
production of a new social cement (Moufe, 1992e: 3-4, 60-73). The strategy of radical democracy involves the formation of a new “common-sense”
through the articulation of a chain of equivalences between the struggles
of the oppressed for equality and rights (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 182;
Moufe, 1992a: 31). This common-sense needs to be “sedimented” into a
new moral and political grammar of the “way things are done” in contemporary social conlict, so that the political conquests of the Left become relatively ixed, through the generation of a new political subjectivity beyond
possessive individualism. Central to this strategy is the extension of democratic rights beyond liberal practices of privatised citizenship (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 183-185). To theorise this strategy, Moufe proposes a deconstructive synthesis “beyond liberalism and communitarianism” that might
reconcile individual liberties with complex equality in a new form of political subjectivity.
Following Balibar’s argument (Balibar, 1994c: 1-15; Moufe, 1992a: 2832), Moufe accepts that democratic citizenship is the modern form of po-
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litical subjectivity. According Balibar, the advent of a citizenship based on
equal rights means that “citizenship is not one among other attributes of subjectivity; on the contrary it is subjectivity, that form of subjectivity that would
no longer be identical with subjection for anyone” (Balibar, 1994c: 12). The
problem for Moufe is to integrate Kantian liberal conceptions of citizenship
(based on the primacy of the individual and the neutrality of the state) with
Hegelian communitarian alternatives (based on the primacy of community
and the partiality of the state). Moufe proposes that liberalism and communitarianism share a common reference to the political community of the
modern nation state (Moufe, 1992e: 23-40), that might act as the mediating
ground for a progressive synthesis (Moufe, 1992e: 41-59). She rejects both
the liberal theory of the state as a neutral instrument and the communitarian postulate of the primacy of a substantive community, and wants to combine the liberal notion of democratic citizenship (political subjects as bearers of equal rights) with the communitarian concept of the partiality of the
state (the “empty place of power” as hegemonised by a particular conception of the universal) (Moufe, 1992a: 28-32). Moufe proceeds arithmetically, claiming that Rawls cannot tolerate real political dissent (Moufe, 1992e:
41-59) and that Walzer’s complex equality implies the elimination of social
antagonism (Moufe, 1992e: 23-40). Instead of excluding political antagonisms as “irrational,” radical democratic hegemony would entail the promotion of activist citizenship—a militant political subjectivity—that would
support a radical democratic government through mass mobilisations within the framework of democratic contestation.
Moufe’s synthesis of liberal individualism and communitarian republicanism, however, is extremely fragile because it consists of an articulation of
ideologemes lacking any institutional analysis beyond a recapitulation of the
liberal conception of the political universality of the capitalist state. By introducing political conlict and social antagonism into liberalism and communitarianism, Moufe arrives at a conception of democratic citizenship
through identiication with the ethico-political principles deined by a political community. For Moufe, the political community in question is neither
instrumental nor substantive, but a social Imaginary that deines a political
commonwealth shaped in and through exclusionary hegemonic struggles
(Moufe, 1992a: 30; Moufe, 1992e: 135-154).
According to Moufe, the political community needs to be redeined in
terms of “what we can call, following Wittgenstein, a ‘grammar of conduct’
that coincides with the allegiance to the constitutive ethico-political principles of modern democracy” (Moufe, 1992a: 30). Reconceptualisation of the
political community in terms of a grammar of conduct re-establishes the lost
connection between ethics and politics (Moufe, 1991; Moufe, 1992b). Her
deconstructive reworking of the liberal and communitarian notions of democratic citizenship suggests that she envisages democratic citizenship “as a
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form of political identity that is created through identiication with the political principles of modern pluralist democracy, i.e., the assertion of liberty
and equality for all” (Moufe, 1992a: 30). That is to say, Moufe advocates
subject-formation through identiication with the DRM.
Democratic citizenship is a “common political identity of persons who
might be engaged in many diferent communities and who have difering
conceptions of the good, but who accept submission to certain authoritative
rules of conduct,” which function as a set of procedural guarantees for democracy (Moufe, 1992a: 31). Moufe’s position implicitly rests upon a distinction between universal form—identiication with the political community as an ensemble of formal procedures for the resolution of conlicts—and
particular contents—operationalised though the notion of identiication
with a speciic interpretation of the democratic rules. The problem is that
democratic citizenship is at once a universal mode of subjection and a radical subjectivity corresponding to a particular politics. Hence, the contradictory imperatives to identify with both the universal political community
(the “empty place of power”) and the radical principle of the DRM (Moufe,
1992e: 71-73). This is because the concept of radical democratic citizenship is
supposed to supply a form of identiication providing a militant political subjectivity that might form a new social cement beyond possessive individualism, by refusing the ixed boundary between private and public that in the
dominant ideology restricts the extension of the DRM (Moufe, 1992a: 32).
It is diicult—if not impossible—to imagine how this divided identiication promotes militancy beyond bourgeois civic activism or encourages
social antagonisms and political conlict. Radical democratic citizenship is
at once the particular subjectivity of the oppressed contesting domination
and the universal subjectivity of the dominant. Indeed, Moufe’s concept of
democratic citizenship as a culture of the democratic agon implies that politics is not about radical transformation at all, but is instead a constructive response to social frustration, a sort of steam valve. According to Moufe, this
can be done by securing a political consensus on basic democratic values
and procedures while allowing dissent over the interpretation of the precise
meaning of these values and procedures (Moufe, 1992e: 130-132; Moufe,
1996b). Within such an agonistic democratic society, enemies would not
be destroyed, but turned into adversaries involved in political competition
(Moufe, 1999: 39-55): “To envisage politics as a rational process of negotiation between individuals is to obliterate the whole dimension of power and
antagonism—what I call ‘the political’—and thereby completely miss its nature” (Moufe, 1992e: 140). At the same time, the democratic expression of
social antagonism is constrained by value consensus and a prudential morality (Moufe, 1992e: 152), which is held to difer from liberalism in that it does
not rely upon any metaphysical foundation in a rational universality. Moufe
opposes the equation of universality with neutrality, denying that democra-
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119
cy requires any moral consensus grounded in universal ethics (Habermas) or
political procedures grounded in a transparent rationality (Rawls). In place
of these, she substitutes a prudential moral consensus and a concept of political rationality grounded in accepting equality and freedom. This seems
to me identical with modern, post-metaphysical liberalism as presented by
Rawls (Rawls, 1993).
Moufe’s problem once again is that the assertion that liberal citizenship is a universal form of political subjectivity performatively undercuts
the “radicalism” of the postmarxian statement. This leads to an evacuation
of social content, so that radical democratic citizenship becomes little more
than a self-relexive civics. The only way to escape this dilemma is to accept
that the demand for a radical citizenship obeys an unconditional universal
imperative—the imperative of égaliberté, or “equaliberty”—that transcends
the contents of the universal speciied by the dominant liberal ideology.
Moufe suggests this—“equality and liberty for all”—but the existence of an
unconditional universal is exactly what Laclau and Moufe deny.
Radical Democracy and Socialist Strateg y
According to Moufe, “the objective of the Left should be the extension and
deepening of the democratic revolution initiated two hundred years ago”
(Moufe, 1992d: 1). Yet, the relation between the “socialist strategy” advertised by HSS and radical democracy has remained crucially indeterminate.
The latent contradiction between the assertion that there is an anti-capitalist dynamic inherent in the extension of the democratic revolution to
the state bureaucracy and the economic region of the social (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 178), and the simultaneous claim that within radical democracy, the elimination of constitutive antagonisms such as that between labour and capital would be a totalitarian negation of the project (Laclau and
Moufe, 1985: 186-192), suggests that this indeterminacy is the result of a
structural ambivalence located in the premises of the theory. Moufe’s theory of the democratic agon, secured through a new form of radical subjectivity
that refuses to “go all the way” to the expropriation of the means of production, indicates the kinship between radical democracy and the “self-limiting
revolution” of social democratic politics. For radical democracy does not
substitute for the (long vanished) “proletarian dictatorship,” but for the democratic transition to socialism that Eurocommunism theorised as a stage of
“advanced democracy”. Postmarxism keeps the conceptual form and abandons the substantial notion of transition, replacing it with the permanent
agon of radical democracy and democratic citizenship.
The radicalism of this democratic politics apparently springs from the
“egalitarian-equivalential Imaginary” and the fundamental demand for
equality. “A radical and non-plural democracy would be one which consti-
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tuted one single space of equality on the basis of the unlimited operation
of the logic of equivalence” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 176). Meanwhile, a
plural and non-radical democracy would mean the division of political space
into a competing multiplicity of zones on the basis of the unlimited operation of the logic of diference. In the light of the “complexity of the social”
and the “proliferation of political spaces” wrought by the new social movements, “the demand for equality is not suicient, but needs to be balanced by
the demand for liberty,” which leads to respect for the separation of political
spaces (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 176). Hence, Laclau and Moufe conceptualise the hegemonic strategy of a New Left as “the struggle for a maximum
autonomisation of spheres [of struggle] on the basis of the generalisation of
the equivalential-egalitarian logic” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 167).
The logic of liberal democracy alone does not guarantee the defense
of individual freedom and a respect for individual rights. It is only
through its articulation with political liberalism that the logic of popular
sovereignty can avoid becoming tyrannical; then one cannot speak of
the people as if it was one homogeneous and uniied entity with a single
general will (Moufe, 1990: 60).
It is necessary “to discard the dangerous dream of a perfect consensus,
of a harmonious collective will, and to accept the permanence of conlicts
and antagonisms” (Moufe, 1990: 58). Carl Schmitt demonstrates why democracy must be plural: for Schmitt—plausibly in Moufe’s view—communism and fascism are democratic in that they homogenise the society
(Moufe, 1999: 39-52). The political implications of this concept of “democracy” are unacceptable for postmarxism. It is worth noting the category
mistake—the confusion of institutionalised political processes with the ontological constitution of the social ield—on which this absolutely bizarre
equation of totalitarianism and democracy is based. What this reveals is a
persistent slippage in postmarxian discourse, whereby the lack of attention
to the distinction between politics as that dimension of social practice constitutive of social relations, and the political as an institutional terrain or
structural region, leads to their conlation under the sign of the ambiguous
concept of the “political institution of social relations”. It also exposes the
absurdities to which the abandonment of the distinction between the material aspect of social practices (the extra-discursive) and their diferential aspect (the discursive) inally leads. For politics as a dimension of social existence can only ontologically homogenise the entire social ield if it is granted
the divine power to constitute the materiality of every object—something
that Laclau and Moufe endorse.
According to Laclau and Moufe, “it is not in the abandonment of the
democratic terrain but, on the contrary, in the extension of the ield of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state, that the possibil-
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121
ity resides for a hegemonic strategy of the Left” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985:
176). Radical plural democracy entails the pluralisation of democracy and
the displacement of the DRM throughout the social. Nonetheless, despite
the ambiguity of “democratic terrain,” they specify that the task of the Left
“cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to
deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy”
(Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 176). Instead of defending the institutions of parliamentary democracy and political rights, then, we are enjoined to support
the dominant ideology.
Laclau and Moufe claim that the essential diference between liberals and postmarxists is that while liberals regard the public/private distinction as ixed, postmarxists regard it as a lexible frontier. At the same time,
Moufe’s theory of the democratic agon makes it clear that border incursions
are going to be temporary raids and not the progressive elimination of capitalism. Indeed, Laclau and Moufe’s theory of a direct conlict between the
liberal principle of freedom and the democratic principle of equality implies
a closed universe of inverse proportionality, where every gain in equality
represents a loss of liberty, and vice versa. When, therefore, they claim that
the struggle for a radical plural democracy seeks to displace the quest for liberty and equality to the economic sphere, we can expect that this is not going to signiicantly improve the prospects for socialism.
The radicalism in question here is therefore a metaphysical radicalism, namely, the acceptance of the groundlessness of all grounds (Laclau
and Moufe, 1985: 176) and the “indeterminate character of democracy”
(Moufe, 1996c). As Moufe speciies, “the aim is not to create a completely
diferent kind of society, but to use the symbolic resources of the liberal democratic tradition to struggle against relations of subordination not only in
the economy, but also those linked to gender, race or sexual orientation, for
example” (Moufe, 1990: 57-58). Supposedly, the “political Imaginary” of a
radical plural democracy provides the Left with a new hegemonic strategy
potentially capable of engendering and unifying a broad range of progressive political struggles. However, postmarxists hastily add that this is predicated upon the unrealisability of radical plural democracy, which provides
neither an actually realisable blueprint nor a utopia (Laclau and Moufe,
1985: 190). This lows from the closed economy of equivalence (equality) and
diference (liberty), so that a condition of possibility of a further democratisation of society is also its condition of impossibility. According to Moufe,
we have to conclude that radical plural democracy takes the deconstructive
form of the promise of a “democracy to come,” which is neither a regulative
ideal, nor an indeterminate teleological judgement (Moufe, 1996c). This
messianic promise is completely empty, both socially and politically.
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The Democratic Imaginary as a Social Foundation
Laclau advances the bold metaphysical claim that “every age adopts an image of itself—a certain horizon, however blurred and imprecise—which
somehow uniies its whole experience” (Laclau, 1990: 3). Instead of a necessary social foundation, then, the postmodern theory of Laclau and Moufe
presents the political institution of the social ield through the dominance of
the “democratic Imaginary”. This Imaginary, forming a “discursive exterior” to every discourse, functions as a contingent social foundation based not
in a conception of substance (human nature, for instance), but in an institutionalised political decision. Where modernity—supported by Enlightenment—proposed a progressive advance in conscious mastery of the natural
and social worlds leading towards a post-political utopia, the new epoch represents “a growing awareness of limits” and the exhaustion of the discourse
of the new. This leads to a “radical critique of all forms of domination” and
the “formulation of liberation projects hitherto restrained by the rationalist ‘dictatorship’ of the Enlightenment” (Laclau, 1990: 4). What is important
about this new conjuncture, then, is the emergence of the new social movements and post-structuralist philosophy represent a self-reflexive break from
the logic of the incarnation of universality. The critical question for Laclau,
however, is recognition of the existence of the democratic Imaginary as a
universal social myth:
The imaginary is a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an
absolute limit which structures the ield of intelligibility and is thus the
condition of possibility for the emergence of any object (Laclau, 1990: 64).
Now, this is exactly how we have seen the ield of discursivity described.
Suddenly, the reason behind the description of the ield of discursivity as a
surplus of meaning becomes clear: the ield of discursivity is a social Imaginary that has the form of a social myth, that is, the meaningful space that
forms the “imaginary horizon” (Laclau, 1990: 67) for a society, forming the
“view from nowhere” of an atemporal principle of harmony.
To support this truly extraordinary thesis, Laclau and Moufe theorise
modernity as a historical totality, grounded in the transcendental horizon of
the ield of discursivity and dynamised by processes of dislocation springing
from the foundational event of the Democratic Revolution. In New Reflections, Laclau essays a description of the contemporary social ield in terms of
the category of “dislocation”. According to Laclau, dislocation is “the very
form of” temporality, possibility and freedom (Laclau, 1990: 41, 42, 43). In
an audacious metaphysical arch, Laclau connects dislocation (temporality)
to myth (spatiality) to generate a new transcendental aesthetic (Laclau, 1990:
65) composed of two heterogeneous components in constant tension. Laclau
envisages the social structure as proceeding through a sequence of openings (dislocatory events) and closings (hegemonic articulations) of the social
Crop Circles in the Postmarxian Field
123
ield (Laclau, 1990: 41-65). This theory of localised historical “epicycles” is
totalised within Laclau and Moufe’s master narrative of the “extension and
deepening” of the DRM. Strictly speaking, this is impossible, for Laclau’s
position rules out every historical generalisation, as it adopts a postmarxian variant of the Althusserian concept of diferential histories, but subtracts
from this theory the unity of a structure in dominance that makes a social
theory of capitalism possible. This does not detain Laclau, however, who
calmly asserts the existence of “disorganised capitalism” as a new historical
epoch (Laclau, 1990: 57-58). According to Laclau, the increasing complexity of the social diagnosed in HSS produces a multiplication of social antagonisms and a decentring of the social formation that inally culminates
in postmodernity. The mode of production as an “absent cause”—together
with the shifting locus of the structure in dominance—is replaced by a horizontal pluralisation of the social ield.
This rapidly degenerates into a celebration of the structural dislocations
caused by capitalist restructuring. In line with the political Thermidor announced by New Reflections (read: second thoughts) on the Revolution, Laclau
shifts towards a politics of indeterminacy which claims that “the greater the
structural indetermination, the freer the society will be” (Laclau, 1990: 44).
Laclau refuses to supply a concrete political programme on the basis that
“the greater the dislocation of a structure is, the more indeterminate the political construction emerging from it will be” (Laclau, 1990: 51). The paradox is that as possibilities are actualised and social agents self-determined
through acts of social identiication, the result is a reduction in liberty (Laclau,
1990: 44). Laclau proposes, then, that capitalist crisis is freedom, while the
project of radical democracy is designed to reduce freedom by partially determining the social ield as a discursive formation!
The postmodern condition is therefore characterised by multiple struggles for recognition, whose accomplishment constitutes so many partial and
temporary emancipations. After the disintegration of Emancipation, the collapse of Universality and the end of History, then, the quantum lux of micro-emancipations, contingent and particularised universalities and pocket
histories ensures that this “steady state” universe is characterised by a minimum of energy fomenting in the political vacuum left by the death of master
narratives. According to Laclau:
it is not the speciic demands of the emancipatory projects formulated
since the Enlightenment which have gone into crisis; it is the idea that the
whole of those demands constitute a uniied whole and would be realized
in a single foundational act by a privileged agent of historical change. …
Indeed, it is not just that emancipatory demands are diversifying and
deepening in today’s world, but also that the notion of their essential
uniication around an act of global rupture is fading (Laclau, 1990: 215).
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This collapse of the “Enlightenment fundamentalism” of emancipatory demands leads to their democratisation because “the absence of a global
emancipation of humanity allows the constant expansion and diversiication
of concrete ‘emancipatory’ struggles” (Laclau, 1990: 216).
We would speak today of “emancipations” rather than “Emancipation”.
While the socialist project was presented as the global emancipation of
humanity and the result of a single revolutionary act of institution,
such a “fundamentalist” perspective has today gone into crisis (Laclau,
1990: 225).
Not surprisingly, the “end of history” looms into sight at this point in the
argument, for “if the ‘end of history’ is understood as the end of a conceptually graspable object encompassing the whole of the real in its diachronic
spatiality, we are clearly at the ‘end of history’. … In another sense, however,
we can say that we are at the beginning of history, at the point where historicity inally achieves full recognition” (Laclau, 1990: 84). This is the familiar
idealist schema whereby historical periodisation depends upon the forms
of epochal self-consciousness—and, in a wonderful Hegelian inversion of
Marx, the beginning of history is not the society of material abundance, but
the self-relexive grasp of the process of the spirit’s self-production.
3
The Politics of Performativity:
A Critique of Judith Butler
“Performativity” has entered the lexicon in the academy as one of the most
celebrated contributions to cultural theory of the last decade.1 According to
Butler, performativity combines an intentional, dramatic performance of
identity (Butler, 1999a: 177), with the repetition of the institutionalised conventions of performative speech acts (Butler, 1993: 12). She draws on Foucault’s insight into how power generates resistance to insist that in adopting
a stance of enunciation in conformity with social norms, the subject implicitly positions themselves as rejecting the transgressive subject-positions that
the dominant ideology forecloses. Accordingly, political resistance remains
latent within hegemonic norms. This is supplemented by Derrida’s deconstruction of speech act theory, which, Butler argues, shows how the statement, within socially accepted speech acts performed in a multiplicity of
contexts, has the potential to go awry because of the diferential nature of
the signiier and the unlimited character of the context. It follows that performances of social identity on the borders of hegemonic norms have the
subversive potential to awaken latent possibilities for political resistance.
Finally, Butler brings a psychoanalytically-inluenced understanding of the
formation of subjectivity through power to propose that even the conformist subject, because of their never-surmounted proximity to transgression
and the always-fragile character of hegemonic speech acts, remains forever
a divided, “melancholy” subject, riven by the unmourned loss of foreclosed
identity possibilities. Performances of identity involve, in her view, a tem1. Parts of this chapter have been published as “Judith Butler’s Postmodern Existentialism:
A Critique,” Philosophy Today 48(4) (pp. 349-363) and “The Politics of Performativity,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy (1) (pp. 112-141). For a bibliography of Butler’s works to
2001, consult Eddie Yeghiayan’s bibliographic website for the Wellek series of lectures given
by Butler and published as Antigone’s Claim (Butler, 2001), at http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/
scctr/Wellek/butler.html (accessed on 01 May 2008).
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poralised process, where the ideological rituals formative of social identities
“sediment,” over time, into the materiality of institutions and the surfaces of bodies (Butler, 1993: 9). The openness of the process of structuration
means that subjectiication is not something permanent or stable, but rather represents the precarious assertion of identity through an always-ambiguous demarcation of mainstream subjectivity from marginalised alternatives. Generally speaking, because social identities are the permanently
divided result of the ritualistic repetition of conventions, the possibility for
subversion of the reigning social norms remains an ineradicable potential
of all social relations.
Butler’s description of the temporalised process of structuration, which
seeks to avoid recourse to political voluntarism, or the sovereign intentionality of the autonomous individual, is an important efort to rethink Laclau
and Moufe’s discourse theory. Yet Judith Butler’s theory of discourse is constituted by a basic tension: on the one hand, the political subversive potential of the concept of performativity requires an intentional dramatisation,
where an agent selects from a repertoire of possible subject-positions; on the
other hand, though, Butler insists that performativity is not reducible to a
voluntarist notion of theatrical performance, but involves the insertion of
subjects into discursive networks that transcend individual intentions. Butler
maintains that the theory of performativity involves a “subjectless conception of agency”. The problem is that Butler’s subject-centred phenomenology cannot escape the historicist assumption that subjective praxis, modelled on individual identity transformations, is the principle of institutional
structuration. The original formulation of the theory of performativity—in
Gender Trouble (1999) [1990]—produced an interpretation of Foucault’s discourse analytics and Derrida’s deconstruction that was profoundly inlected by existential Hegelianism. Interpreting the process of subject-formation
through the Hegelian lens of the “struggle for recognition,” Butler proposed
that social institutions are the consequence, not the cause, of social subjectivity. Consequently, the concept of agency that underlies Butler’s notion of
a politics of the performative remains that of abstract individualism, lacking
in social speciicity and continually wresting with the pseudo-problem of authorial intentionality. Thus, Butler never completely breaks from a central
assumption of historicism, namely, that it is legitimate to transpose the forms
of individual praxis onto social processes of institutional structuration.
Butler has made several eforts to rectify her “new existentialism”
(Schrift, 1997: 153-159; Schrift, 2001: 12-23) and constrain individual praxis.
Part of the problem is that Butler’s point of departure remains Althusser’s
“ISA’s Essay”. Each reiteration adds new layers of post-structural theory to
her interpretation of ideological interpellation (Butler, 1993a: 121-140; Butler, 1995; Butler, 1997a: 71-102; Butler, 1997b: 106-131), without confronting
the major underlying conceptual issue in that essay, namely, Althusser’s as-
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signment to ideology of the responsibility for explaining major structural
change. Butler compounds this by reading the “ISAs Essay” upside-down,
as it were, not as an essay on how structures form subjectivity, but as the inspiration for a theory of how subjectivity shapes material institutions and
corporeal realities. The notion that identity formation is the basis for institutional structuration overturns Butler’s sources (Althusser and Foucault), to
produce a generalised category of performativity, modelled on individual
dramatic performances, whose leading characteristic is its ability to transcend its contextual determinants. In this sense, Butler can be said to have
fully elaborated Laclau and Moufe’s idealist insistence on “the material character of every discursive structure” (Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 95), by inverting Althusser’s airmation of the materialised existence of ideology into a
theory of the ideological generation of materiality.
It is Butler’s intention to develop a subjectless conception of agency.
But her declarations against the sovereignty of the classical individual run
in the opposite direction to the implications of her work. By conining the
individual agent within discursive conventions and introducing the unconscious as a limit on conscious intentionality, Butler tried to demonstrate that
“agency conditioned by … regimes of discourse/power cannot be conlated
with voluntarism or individualism, … and in no way presupposes a choosing subject” (Butler, 1993: 15). Such strong declarations are, as I shall demonstrate in this chapter, continually undermined by the structure of theoretical claims in Butler’s work. Notwithstanding the promising aspects of
conceptualising discursive practices as performative speech acts, Butler’s
theorisation remains abstract and individualistic (McNay, 1999: 178, 189).
Butler’s assertion that “agency begins where sovereignty wanes” (Butler,
1997a: 16) needs to be understood, in this light, less as a claim to a post-Nietzschean, non-subjective form of agency, but as a theoretical limitation on
the otherwise unconstrained power of the individual to manipulate structures. This result is diametrically opposed to the project of developing a
subjectless conception of agency.
Gender Performances
Butler’s theory of identity rejects the essentialist conception of gender as a
substantial diference expressing an underlying natural sexual division. She
conceptualises gender as constructed through social rituals supported by
institutional power. In line with social constructivism, Butler proposes that
gender identities are cultural performances that retroactively construct the
“originary materiality” of sexuality (Butler, 1993: 10). The implication is that
gender is not the expression of an “abiding substance,” but a naturalised
social ritual of heterosexuality (Butler, 1993: 12; Butler, 1999a: 22), and that
there is a connection between the “metaphysics of substance” and the “iden-
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titarian categories of sex” (Butler, 1993: 12; Butler, 1999a: 22-25). Extending
this analysis, Butler claims that the body is not a natural, material entity,
but a discursively regulated, cultural construction (Butler, 1999a: 24), while
gender is a performative that produces constative sex (Butler, 1993: 11; Butler,
1999a: 33).
Butler is resolutely hostile to the conception of an underlying substantial
agent (“person”) or natural entity (“body”). “[G]ender is always a doing,”
she asserts on the authority of Nietzsche, “though not a doing by a subject
who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (Butler, 1999a: 33). According to
Butler, there is no natural body before cultural inscription:
Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce
the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political
genealogy of gender ontologies … will deconstruct the substantive
appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate … those acts
within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the
social appearance of gender (Butler, 1999a: 43-44).
Despite drawing on Freudian theory, for Butler, the psychoanalytic concept of the Law is a product of the heterosexual matrix and has to be deconstructed, to demonstrate the plurality and dispersion of social norms,
and the historicity of sexual taboos. She performs a historicist reading of
Lévi-Straussian anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, inspired by
Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, to propose a conception of
gender identity that is supposed to be historically speciic and socially mutable (Butler, 1999a: 45-100). According to the Foucauldian critique of the
repressive hypothesis:
desire and its repression are an occasion for the consolidation of juridical
structures; desire is manufactured and forbidden as a ritual symbolic
gesture whereby the juridical model exercises and consolidates its own
power (Butler, 1999a: 96).
The “repression of desire” actually creates a ield of anticipated transgressions, because any norm is constituted through a citation of its exceptions. Rejecting psychic interiority as the correlate of the repression of desire, Butler shifts “from interiority to gender performatives,” by following
Foucault in the proposition that normalisation involves the body as the site
of a compulsion to signify (Butler, 1999a: 171). The style of the subject is the
very modality of its subjection, because this inscription of individuation, taking the form of writing on the surfaces of the body, designates the “soul” as
the “prison of the body”:
The igure of the interior soul understood as “within” the body is
signiied through its inscription on the body, even though its primary
mode of signiication is through its very absence, its potent invisibility. …
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The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself
as a signifying lack (Butler, 1999a: 172).
Butler proposes that homosexuality and bisexuality operate as the “constitutive outside” of heterosexual norms (Butler, 1999a: 98), so that “the ‘unthinkable’ is thus fully within culture, but fully excluded from the dominant
culture” (Butler, 1999a: 99). Yet, the signiication of heterosexual identity
on the body, as a necessarily divided and recited statement of the norm
and its constitutive exclusions, “efects a false stabilisation of gender” (Butler, 1999a: 172). Inspired by deconstruction, Butler claims the “citational,”
or repetitive and decontextualisable character of performative utterances,
opens the possibility for marginal subversion of the reigning gender norms
through “resigniication,” or the repetition of a signiication in a new context. Drawing upon an analysis of drag as an instance of resigniication, she
concludes that “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which
gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin” (Butler, 1999a: 175).
The subversive repetition of gender norms in unprecedented contexts displaces and denaturalises the hegemonic universality of heterosexuality, constituting a practical deconstruction of the politics of gender normalisation.
Therefore, the destabilisations efected by parodic recitation and marginal
gender practices “disrupt the regulatory iction of heterosexual coherence”
(Butler, 1999a: 173). “That regulatory ideal is then exposed as a iction,” she
argues, “and a norm that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating
the sexual ield that it purports to describe” (Butler, 1999a: 173).
The norms of heterosexuality are sustained through acts that “are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport
to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal
signs and other discursive means” (Butler, 1999a: 173). Drag performances
reveal that genders are simulacra (copies without originals) (Butler, 1999a:
175). Gender, then, is not constative but performative, and “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and efectively
mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Butler, 1999a: 174). The demystiication of gender identities
through parodic performances leads to Butler’s advocacy of a “stylistics of
existence,” modelled on Sartre and Foucault. In a highly revealing early formulation, Butler claimed that gender needs to be considered “as a corporeal
style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Butler, 1999a: 177 emphasis added).
Multiple Struggles for Cultural Recognition
Before analysing the theory of gender performances in more detail, though,
I want to examine its medium of propagation, because the signiicance and
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limitations of Butler’s theory can only be grasped in their politico-historical context. During the last 30 years, a shift in the political grammar of social claims has happened, from political demands for redistributive justice
to identity-based struggles for cultural recognition (Fraser, 1996: 2-3, 11-39).
According to Fraser, “the ‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conlict,” where “group identity supplants class
interest as the chief medium of political mobilisation” (Fraser, 1996: 11). In
this context, postmarxism, as the left wing of postmodern politics, has been
tremendously inluential, with its theory that the incompleteness of identity
is the root of social antagonism.
The shift from redistributive justice to cultural recognition frames Butler’s work, in particular, and conditions her ambiguous relation to identity-based struggles.2 To anticipate somewhat, Butler’s ambivalence towards
“identity politics” can be summarised by observing that while Butler formally rejects the sovereign intentionality of the autonomous individual, she
nonetheless accepts a central postulate of identity politics, that the quest for
identity is the motor force of contemporary social conlict. There is a signiicant diference, however, between airming the conjunctural centrality
of struggles for cultural recognition, and making them into the generative
principle of all social conlict. Of course, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the quest for self-identity underlies an individual’s participation in
social movements. But that does not mean that the social movement must
be only and exclusively oriented to the airmation of the self-identity of its
members. A trade union, for instance, might struggle for demands relective
of the material self-interest of its members, at the same time as participation
in the union campaign bestows a social identity transcending self-interest
on campaigners. Forms of postmarxism such as Butler’s, in short, conlate
recognition of the importance of cultural struggle with its supposedly exclusive generative role in social structuration, and confuse the motivations
that drive social movement participation with the aims of the social struggles themselves.
By reworking the quest for identity as a struggle for intersubjective recognition—rather than the expression of the originary freedom of the autonomous individual—Butler returns identity politics to the existential Hegelianism defended in her Subjects of Desire (1987). Existential Hegelianism seeks,
along lines pioneered by Alexandre Kojève, to combine the Hegelian dialectic with the individual decision on an existential project (Kojève, 1980), thus
2. Nancy Fraser warns that “in the United States today, the expression ‘identity politics’
is increasingly used as a derogatory term for feminism, anti-racism and anti-heterosexism”
(Fraser, 1996: 17-18), and her expression, linked to Axel Honneth’s pathbreaking study of the
dynamics of “cultural recognition” (Honneth, 1995), seems preferable. Nonetheless, and with
this warning in mind, the term “identity politics” does capture the position of one wing of this
debate, which regards individual identity as the mainspring of social conlict.
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locating identity-formation in a matrix of cultural possibilities dominated by
struggles for recognition. Butler’s intervention therefore efectively decentres
identity politics without producing an epistemological break.
It is Butler’s preference for the Hegelian conception of the struggle for
recognition as the driving force in social conlict that inluences her opposition to Fraser’s hypothesis of a shift from political economy to cultural
struggles (Butler, 1998: 33-47). Rejecting “the neo-conservatism within the
Left that seeks to discount the cultural” (Butler, 1998: 47), Butler questions
whether the economic reductionism of the “class Left” seeks to violently reimpose a new orthodoxy based on vulgar materialism. She also suspects
that this position secretes homophobia, because the implied equation “merely cultural equals despised sexuality” aims to “reinstitute the discredited notion of secondary oppression” (Butler, 1998: 47). But then her argument takes
a surprising—and symptomatically weak—turn.
Returning to the socialist feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, Butler argues that the social regulation of sexuality, through the institution of the
family and the reproduction of gendered norms in the skilling of labour
power, is an essential component of the capitalist mode of production (Butler, 1998: 38-43). The political bite of this position depends upon the assertion that “homophobia [is] central to the functioning of political economy”
(Butler, 1998: 41 emphasis added), and so the “merely cultural” turns out to
be directly economico-political. Characteristically for forms of social interactionism (that privilege intersubjective relations above structural determinations), then, Butler’s social theory relies on functionalist assumptions that
are explicitly contested by the literature she cites in support of her position— for instance, Michele Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today (Barrett, 1980:
93-96). Anti-reductionist positions based in Althusserian social theory, such
as that of Barrett, opened up the possibility of sustaining the argument that
cultural struggles are equally as important as economic and political ones.
But the relative autonomy of cultural forms that this argument requires depends on a refusal of the economic reduction of either women’s oppression
or homophobic exclusion to functional components in the capitalist mode of
production—precisely the move that Butler’s position reverses. But if I am
right that Butler’s postmarxism relies on a conlation of motivation with orientation that makes the quest for self-identity through struggles for cultural
recognition into the motor force of all social conlict, then this is a move that
she must make.
At the same time, Butler associates “class Left” resistance to the shift
from the pole of political economy to the pole of cultural recognition with
the classical Marxist assumption that culture is entirely excluded from political economy. From the classical perspective, culture igures as a contingent
superstructural variation, external to the operations of the mode of production. Again, the Althusserian position that originally made positions like
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Butler’s possible is excluded from consideration as a social theoretical alternative to the binary opposition: class Left = political economy = class Marxist economic reductionism; cultural Left = cultural recognition = post-structuralist forms of postmodern politics. And to be fair to Fraser too, Butler’s
criticism is a distortion of her position. Fraser’s distinction between economic injustice and cultural denigration is analytic, designed to enable the construction of a system of ideal types, polarised between “exploited classes,”
sufering economic injustice and demanding redistributive remedies, and
“despised sexualities,” enduring cultural denigration and calling for symbolic recognition. Butler overlooks the analytic character of this distinction,
which is based on the explicit statement that this separation is impossible in
practice (Fraser, 1996: 15), and seeks to conceptualise a political shift that
relects the relative autonomy of the institutional terrains of contemporary
capitalism (Fraser, 1995: 68-93). To associate Fraser—who endorses the struggle for cultural recognition as the demand for a new type of justice, based on
the distribution of cultural goods (Fraser, 2000: 107-120)—with the denigration of cultural struggles is excessive, perhaps even egregious.
Indeed, Butler contests the division between political economy and cultural recognition by assimilating it (quite speciously in Fraser’s case) to another opposition, between “cultural recognition and material oppression” (Butler, 1998: 41). She is then at liberty to demonstrate the cultural materialist
case for the materiality of ideological apparatuses, to rehearse the argument
that race and gender are modalities in which class is lived, and to assert the
material aspects of the oppression of a “despised sexuality”. What this demonstrates is that culture is materially linked to political economy. It does not
demonstrate that they are the same, which is what Butler needs to show to
defend her suggestion that an analytic distinction between political economy
and cultural recognition is impossible (Butler, 1998: 41).
The clear entailment of Butler’s claim, combined with the assumption
that gender identities are directly functional to economic reproduction, is that
the social ield is a homogeneous functional whole. Such a conception, while
consonant with the Hegelian notion that ethical life (the objective institutions of social life) forms an organic totality, is directly opposed to the leading contention of postmodern “identity politics,” that the multiple subjectpositions “adopted” by the subject are not determined by social structures
(Laclau, 1985: 32; Laclau and Moufe, 1985: 118-121). For if the adoption of a
marginalised subject-position directly afects the social structure, then it follows that the relation between normal subject-positions and structural determinations is not even relatively autonomous, but actually an isomorphism.
By contrast, in her work on speech act theory, Butler explicitly refuses any
collapse of the regional distinction between signiier and materiality (Butler,
1993: 4-12), or between speech act and social conduct (Butler, 1997a: 72-77).
Behind this inconsistent refusal of the analytic distinction between redis-
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tributive justice and cultural recognition, then, lies something else, which is
preigured in Butler’s silence regarding Fraser’s criticism of performativity,
namely, that it theorises sexual emancipation as the liberation from identity
(Fraser, 1998: 140-149).
While the struggles of the New Social Movements deinitely combine
economic, political and cultural demands, struggles for cultural recognition
do not aim directly at political rights, universal justice, economic redistribution and so forth. By contrast with the standard political logic of modernity—the dynamic of social equality and political liberty—demands for cultural recognition rely upon claims for recognition of the worth of individual
bearers of marginalised symbolic identities (Honneth, 1995). For Butler, recognition of marginalised identities cannot be solved by a redistribution of
cultural goods, as a shift in the distinction enjoyed by a social identity implies the consolidation of its existence. Thus, instead of claims to redress
denigration, Butler proposes the dispersion of the “identitarian” polarity of
the “heterosexual matrix,” which, she claims, constructs homosexual identities in the irst place (Butler, 1999a: 129, 176, 185, 189). Despite the apparent radicalism of this claim, its efect, in context, is (as I shall show in this
chapter) to prevent the emergence of demands for political liberation and
social equality.
According to Butler, “in a sense, all my work remains within the orbit of
a certain set of Hegelian questions,” revolving upon desire and recognition,
the subject and alterity (Butler, 1999b: xiv). For proponents of the Hegelian struggle for recognition, the realm of social signiication enjoys primacy in the determination of the structures of ethical life, because the Hegelian assumption is that the development of subjectivity is the main dynamic
in historical transformations. The subject can only know itself through another, but the process of recognition and constitution of self-identity impels
the efort to annihilate or subordinate the other (Butler, 1987a: 37). As Butler indicates, the Hegelian shift to the cultural ield generating the modern
(Kantian) individual does not for a moment negate the postulate of worldconstituting subjectivity. Indeed, the attributes of the “universal individual”
are transposed onto social subjectivity, while a disembodied phenomenological intentionality looks on and describes the progress of consciousness.
Therefore the Hegelian subject is interpreted as a “struggling individual on
the brink of collective identity” (Butler, 1987a: 58), who paradoxically requires the recognition of the Other they negate. Butler’s position is a postmodern variation on this line,3 and her diference with identity politics—as
3. For the Hegelian exposition of mutual recognition, see Hegel (Hegel, 1952: ; Hegel,
1977). For an eloquent contemporary defense and exposition of the concept of recognition,
consult Williams (Williams, 1992: ; Williams, 1997). For the Hegelian theory of history, see
Hegel (Hegel, 1956). Axel Honneth’s pathbreaking work on mutual recognition (Honneth,
1995) is of course the implied referent of this debate. Honneth reconstructs the Hegelian
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I shall demonstrate—consists in the shift from individual to intersubjective
generative mechanisms of social structures and political conlicts. While social subjectivity is the generative principle of institutional structures, individual identity is the main transformative agency. Butler’s assertion of the
materiality of culture, I suggest, therefore masks a fundamental defense of
the primacy of individual subjectivity in the transformation of objective
structures.
Beyond Identity Politics?
Butler’s intervention into struggles for cultural recognition adapts an existential Hegelianism to postmodern theory, then, by recasting the masterslave dialectic as the relation between dominant identity, generated within
the “heterosexual matrix,” and marginalised homosexual identities. She recasts the “identitarian” categories of identity politics as relational complexes
in a dialectical process and then interprets this through the lens of a Foucauldian understanding of power as multiple and productive. According to
Butler, the heterosexual matrix generates a power deployed through multiple sites, and the normalisation of heterosexuality requires the prohibition
and exclusion of homosexuality. Indeed, Butler proposes that all socio-political identity is dialogically structured because it includes a hidden reference to its “constitutive outside,” in an abject, marginalised identity (Butler,
1993: 15-16). For instance, normative heterosexual gender identities are supported/subverted by a melancholic dis-identiication with their marginalised “exterior,” in homosexuality.
The concept of the quest for self-identity as the driving force in social
conlict rehearses the Hegelian theory of the struggle for recognition on the
terrain of so-called “postmodern identity politics”. It is the primacy of subjectivity that represents the continuity between Butler’s Hegelian theory and
identity politics. Butler, of course, is no stranger to analysing the tenacity
of a conceptual constellation—even, or perhaps especially, one consisting
of a structure of misrecognition—for this was the thesis of her investigation
on the French reception of Hegel. The “labour of the negative” of the Hegelian “subject of desire,” she proposes, is preserved in negation in the successive criticisms of the teleological narrative of the Phenomenolog y of Spirit
(Butler, 1987a). Butler, in Subjects of Desire, explains this structure of “negainsights in the context of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and a variant of discourse ethics, to
supply a concept of the subject as produced within an intersubjective struggle for recognition
whose highest form is the desire for solidarity. Where for Honneth, the struggle for recognition thereby becomes the motor force for moral progress—legitimating the notion that
social conlicts represent an ethical learning experience for societies and that the progressive
expansion and democratisation of ethical life springs from the resolution of these conlicts in
mutual recognition—for Butler, postmodernism means the impossibility of any such unitary
and linear “master narrative”.
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137
tion without transcendence,” or “preservation despite negation,” operative
in the “general economy” of post-Hegelian theories of the subject. Despite
the migration of the self-relexive self-identity of Hegel’s subject from a regulative concept (Hyppolite, Kojève) (Butler, 1987a: 63-92), to an imaginary
yet necessary ideal (Sartre) (Butler, 1987a: 101-174), and its termination as a
meretricious iction to be endlessly denounced by poststructuralism (Lacan,
Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) (Butler, 1987a: 175-238), Butler contends that
Hegelian self-relexive identity nonetheless lives a return of the repressed in
the poststructuralist prolongation of the subject of desire. Thus, Butler defends the relevance of the phenomenological project even while accepting
the fragmentation of subjectivity and the end of the master narrative of increasing self-identity (Butler, 1987a: 230-238).
That Butler’s brilliant analysis of existentialism and post-structuralism
can nevertheless anticipate the trajectory of her own work, vis-à-vis identity
politics, can be explained through her supposition that the subject of desire,
as the centre of knowledge, is preserved, not exposed, by its division and
decentring (Butler, 1987a: 175). What this suggests is an indiference to the
distinction between subject-centred phenomenological description and the
“process without a subject” of theoretical knowledge. The project of a phenomenology of subject-formation—leading to a subject-centred description
of a subjectless process of agency—is inherently contradictory. In postmodern theories of the “subject-efect,” the “subject” (the ego) is dispersed across
a multiplicity of subject-positions and its world-constituting power is denaturalised, revealed as the product of cultural discourses. In this case, transcendental subjectivity has not been shaken, merely transferred to the ield
of cultural practices, which function as subject to the object of institutionalised materiality. One consequence of this strategy is that the underlying assumption of the world-constituting power of the subject—which in identity
politics takes a blatantly Cartesian form—is not challenged by Butler, but
merely displaced.
According to advocates of identity politics, the autonomy of subject-positions from structural determinations is the deining characteristic of the
politics of the NSM (Aronowitz, 1992: 1-9; Aronowitz, 1994: 5-79; Smith,
1998: 54-86). Theories of identity-based social conlict, as we have seen in
chapters One and Two, concentrate on the ability of the individual to select
from a “menu” of subject-positions, asserting that the luidity of identity is a
necessary condition for democracy and that progressive multicultural politics depends upon a conceptual shift from essential identities to multiple subject-positions (Smith, 1994: ; Norval, 1996: ; Howarth, 2000). This constellation of positions deines identity politics as that particular strategy, within
the broad ield of cultural politics, which privileges the conscious intentionality of the autonomous individual and their ability to rationally select from
a subjective menu of options. Discourses of identity therefore converge upon
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contemporary liberal political philosophy, which theorises procedural guarantees (the neutrality of the state and citizen rights) for individuals, whose
conception of the sovereign good is held to be contextually selected from a
personal hierarchy of values (Rawls, 1985: ; Rawls, 1993).
Indeed, Butler’s original idea of identity as an intentional dramatic performance suggests a voluntarist conception of individual agency. When this
is combined with Butler’s functionalist grasp of social theory, performativity becomes reminiscent of structural-functionalism’s notion of the individual’s ability to obtain critical distance from their social roles. Despite Butler’s subsequent disavowal of voluntarism (Butler, 1993: 15), her early work
has frequently been invoked as a theoretical support for the notion that gender is a voluntary dramatic performance initiated by a conscious subject, a
subject which “wears its identity as drag” (Probyn, 1995: 79) and whose intentions govern the subversive or recuperative political meanings of its acts.
Many of Butler’s supporters— such as, for instance, David Bell and cothinkers— apply the theory of performativity developed in Gender Trouble to reinstate the sovereign intentionality of the autonomous individual. Taking gay
skinheads as exemplary of a “progressive identity” (Bell, Binnie et al., 1994:
35), they claim that this is the result of “consciously inhabiting” an otherwise hostile cultural milieu (Bell, Binnie et al., 1994: 36). This consciousness
converts a subcultural uniform into subversive parody because, although the
gay skinhead “passes” as straight amongst heterosexuals, their street presence surreptitiously enables “mutually constituting exchanges of glances,”
whereby “gay skinheads create a queer space in a heterosexual world, which
is in itself empowering” (Bell, Binnie et al., 1994: 37).
In an important critical analysis of identity politics, Moya Lloyd traces
the reliance of Butler’s supporters on authorial intention to persistent ambiguities in Butler’s own position (Lloyd, 1999: 195-213). Butler at once asserts
the constructed character of social identities and appears to tacitly assume
that an unreconstructed strategic calculation of interests remains the basis
for political interventions. In the hands of Butler’s supporters, this leads to
a voluntarist theory of the radical mutability of gender performances which
neglects the regional distinctions between parody and politics, performance
and performative, intentionality and agency (Lloyd, 1999: 199-203). In this
way the sovereign intentionality of the rational agent characteristic of liberal political philosophy makes its explicit reappearance within postmarxian discourse.
Imaginary Subjects
The revealing notion of social identity as an intentional dramatic performance betrays a conviction that individual praxis is the genetic origin of
social structures. In reply, Butler’s supporters claim that her “Nietzschean-
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Foucauldian” subjectless conception of agency is the main resource for contesting the voluntarist interpretation of performativity (Schrift, 1997: ; McNay, 1999). According to Butler, “all signiication takes place within the
orbit of a compulsion to repeat,” so that the task for a subversive identity
politics “is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat and, through a radical
proliferation of gender, to displace the very norms that enable repetition itself” (Butler, 1999a: 148). The structural constraints surrounding the agent,
condemning the individual to strategies of recuperative or subversive repetition of speech acts, supposedly prevent any voluntaristic interpretation
of a subject who wilfully “decides,” on a day-by-day basis, to adopt this or
that subject-position (Garber, 1996: 183-184; Salih, 2002: 43-71). Likewise, it
is claimed that the Foucauldian dimensions of Butler’s theory prevent any
facile slippage from “performative speech acts” to “dramatic performances”
(Schrift, 2001: 12-23). Butler claims that the agency in question is not that
of the subject (as in individualist-voluntarist accounts), but of language itself,
whereby we can locate “‘agency within the possibility of a variation on …
repetition” (Butler, 1999a: 145).
Butler’s supporters are insuiciently critical of her defense, however, for
what is in question is not the omnipotence of the subject, or their ability to determine the ield of subject-positions in a postmodern form of intellectual intuition. In question is the phenomenological assumption that a free-loating
intentionality, standing aside from all processes of subjectivation, might become the launching point for the decision of “how to repeat”. Who (or what)
decides “how to repeat”? On what basis is the decision to resist power made?
Assuming that it is ultimately conceded that the subject decides on the basis
of strategic calculations of material interests, or alternatively on the basis of
unconscious desires, where are these interests formed and what is the eicacy of individual resistance? Does the formation of social subjectivity actually
determine objective structures? Can it really be claimed, without lapsing into
voluntarist forms of idealism, that the adoption of identities somehow “precipitates” the materiality of institutions?
By depriving the subject of its power as genetic origin of structures and
instead analysing the process of subjectiication as a variable and complex
function of power, Foucault appears to eliminate the autonomous individual. For Foucault, ritualised institutional practices take the form of disciplinary norms that literally conform subjects by subjecting them to regimes of
bodily signiication—drills, routines, conventions—which inscribe the illusory psychic interiority of the soul on the socialised exterior of the body,
so that “the soul is the prison of the body” (Foucault, 1977: 30). Foucault’s
imaginary “soul” corresponds exactly to Althusser’s ideological “subject”.
The resistance of the subject (now taking into account the conlation of the
psychoanalytic and political meanings) is merely a ruse of power, for power
depends upon this illusory interiority and its frustrated struggles with au-
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thority for its elaboration, extension and penetration into the depth of the
individual. The problem is that this results in a form of objectivist determinism that prevents the emergence of efective resistance while mechanically reducing the subject to a mere relection of the social ield (an efect
of institutional socialisation, that is, a cultural dupe). Foucault’s subsequent
work on the “aesthetics of existence,” instead of solving this problem, merely inverted it, asserting that although the subject is formed through constraints, nonetheless, the possibility remained open for “practices of liberation” of a voluntarist kind (McNay, 1994: 88-124). It might be said, then,
that Foucault exposes the constitutive subject—the better to save the political individual.
Despite making some advances concerning the openness of structure
as a condition for agency, Butler rehearses Foucault’s trajectory in reverse,
shifting from individualist voluntarism to mechanical objectivism, in part
because her conception of subjectivity and objectivity remain damagingly
abstract (McNay, 1999: 177-178). Drawing on the Foucault of Discipline and
Punish, Butler claims that genealogical investigation of gender categories discloses “the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity
categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses, with
multiple and difused points of origin” (Butler, 1999a: viii-ix). The collocation of a (later) introduction repudiating the autonomous subject, with an
(earlier) exposition of performativity in terms of an “intentional, dramatic
performance” of identity, makes for interesting reading. Certainly, the sovereign subject of classical, liberal political philosophy and social theory is
inished. In its place stands the post-liberal political individual, who only
intervenes within an intersubjective network. Dethroned from the position
of generative origin and constitutive subject, the individual in the theory of
performativity nonetheless remains the primary force in the transformation
of institutional materiality. In a series of displacements, Butler seeks to disperse the notion of an originary identity, which she associates with the constitutive subject. She denies the pertinence of the Cartesian pre-discursive
identity of conscious intentionality and substantial entity (“I think therefore
I am”), citing Nietzsche’s claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, efecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a iction added to the deed—the deed is
everything” (Butler, 1999a: 25). What Butler is rejecting is the notion of psychic interiority and substantive entity as constituting a pre-discursive selfidentity. As she comments:
One might be tempted to say that identity categories are insuicient
because every subject-position is the site of converging relations of power
that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical
challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply. For there
is no self-identical subject who houses or bears these relations, no site at
which these relations converge. This converging and interarticulation is
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the contemporary fate of the subject. In other words, the subject as a selfidentical identity is no more (Butler, 1993: 229-230).
The potential incoherence of claiming that while individuals are interpellated as subjects, there is no “site at which these relations converge,” indicates the strain of simultaneously asserting the dispersion of the ego and
the determination of the body by psychic structures. The problem is that
in swinging from subjective voluntarism to mechanical objectivism, Butler
has not, in actuality, dispensed with the assumption of a pre-discursive intentionality. She has only translated the register of its existence, from selfknowledge, to auto-afection. To see why, we need to examine the thesis that
the subject is formed through Imaginary processes.
Foucault’s imaginary “soul” corresponds exactly to Althusser’s ideological “subject”. Indeed, Althusser’s reduction of the subject to exclusively Imaginary relations (that is, to the ego) prepared the multitude of post-Althusserian, postmodern conceptions, which, beginning with Foucault’s work,
Discipline and Punish, regarded the subject as reducible to a dispersed multiplicity of subject-positions. Althusser’s position is revisited in Butler’s important article, “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All” (Butler, 1995:
6-26), where Butler expands upon the thesis that the Imaginary is solely responsible for subject-formation, by taking advantage of the paradoxes of the
philosophy of relection. Her central claim is that “for Althusser, the eicacy
of ideology consists in part in the formation of conscience” (Butler, 1995: 13),
so that “to become a ‘subject’ is, thus, to have been presumed guilty, then
tried and declared innocent” (Butler, 1995: 16). Indeed, because this efect of
“hailing” is not a singular act, but a continuous repetition of ideological interpellations, the subject-citizen is constantly demonstrating their innocence
through conformist practices.
Butler grasps the anticipation of identity efected in ideological interpellation as an ambivalent relation to authority that precedes identity-formation, based on a combination of guilt and love. A passionate attachment to
the image of the law that precedes subjectiication is the basis for this ambivalent pre-identiication, which makes it possible for subjects to recognise
themselves in the call of conscience. The “subject” is “driven by a love of the
law that can only be satisied by ritual punishment” (Butler, 1995: 24). This
does not solve the problem, of course, but instead merely displaces it from
categories of knowledge (the problem of how I can know myself before the
mirror image) to the register of afect (the problem of how I can love my existence suiciently to want to be called into being by a guilty conscience).
Butler therefore accepts the postulate of a pre-discursive auto-affection, so that
the subject originally desires identity. Indeed, she claims that the “I” comes
“into social being … because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my
existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers
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existence” (Butler, 1997b: 104). Glib references to Nietzsche notwithstanding, the postulate of a pre-discursive, narcissistic auto-afection as the mainspring of the subject originates with Fichte, who was the irst to propose that
the subject is initially the deed of self-positing (Henrich, 1982: 15-53).
Melancholy Identity: The Unhappy Consciousness
The supposition of an originary narcissism is the basis for Butler’s later resurrection of psychic interiority, including a spectacular repudiation of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis (Butler, 1993: 22). Butler’s limited
rehabilitation of psychoanalysis insists that Freud remains an indispensable
resource for thinking subjection and subjectivation, because without the
psyche there is no possibility of resistance. As Butler suggests, the psyche resists and exceeds the normalisation process (Butler, 1997b: 14-15):
Does the reduction of the psychoanalytically rich notion of the psyche
to that of the imprisoning soul not eliminate the possibility of resistance
to normalisation and to subject formation, a resistance that emerges
precisely from the incommensurability between psyche and subject?
(Butler, 1997b: 87).
Butler is suggesting that something (the “psyche”) exists beyond, and
sometimes interrupts, the Althusserian “subject” or Foucauldian “soul”. I
would certainly endorse this assertion of Butler’s. But what exactly is the status of Butler’s psyche? Is it a restatement of the psychoanalytic concept of
the unconscious? Is the philosophical notion of primordial auto-afection the
same as the Freudian concept of primary narcissism, or the Lacanian mirror stage (Lacan, 1977: 1-7)? Butler’s rhetoric, I suggest, resonates with psychoanalytic terminology, but without any theoretical correspondence. She
constantly conlates the elementary psychoanalytic distinction between the
repression of unconscious desire and the resistance conducted by the ego,
generating a generalised politico-psychological “resistance”. This should
warn us that her relation to Freudian theory is one of syncretic appropriations through selective citation, rather than a theoretical synthesis.
Butler argues that the “sublimation” of body into soul leaves a “bodily
remainder” which exceeds the processes of normalisation, and this remainder survives as a “constitutive loss” that marks the body as a signifying lack
(Butler, 1997b: 92). Hence, according to Butler, “desire is never renounced,
but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation”
(Butler, 1997b: 56; Butler, 1997a: 117). Her contention is that heterosexuality
emerges from a simultaneous repudiation and preservation of primary homosexuality, because “renunciation requires the very homosexuality that it
condemns” (Butler, 1997b: 143). Therefore, she claims, both heterosexuals
and homosexuals exist in a culture of gender melancholy, unable to mourn
a lost homosexual cathexis (Butler, 1997b: 139).
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The central category for Butler’s concept of identity is melancholia,
which is distinguished psychoanalytically from mourning by the inability
to acknowledge the loss of a libidinal object-cathexis (Freud, 1984: 251-268).
Speciically, Butler claims that the primordial object-cathexis is homosexual, and melancholic heterosexuality is generated through the prohibition
of this libidinal investment (Butler, 1999a: 63). Interpreting melancholia
through the Freudian notion of the ego as a precipitate of abandoned objectcathexes (of identiications), Butler combines this with the Freudian observation that the ego is a bodily ego (Butler, 1993: 13). However, she literalises
what for Freud is a body-image and makes the physical surface of the body
coextensive with the ego (Prosser, 1998: 41). Butler also asserts—rather than
demonstrates—that the taboo on incest is preceded by the prohibition of homosexuality (Butler, 1999a: 63). For Butler, this implies that hyperbolic gender identiications (rigid identities, or identitarianism) are instigated through
the melancholic inability to mourn a lost primordial homosexuality, and so
heterosexuality is characterised by the structure of self-loathing typical of
melancholia.
Butler’s speculations regarding the melancholic formation of subjectivity are indeed interesting. In the more rigorously theorised form of Kleinian relections, such ideas have been productively applied within psychoanalysis to think the lost maternal object beyond the exclusive concentration
on the paternal igure characteristic of some Lacanian theory (Lupton and
Reinhard, 1993: 1-34). The claim, however, that before any gendering of
the subject, the subject desires the parent of the same gender (for this is the
structural requirement of the claim to an originary homosexuality in both
masculine and feminine subjectivities) seems an impossible loop, and Butler
does not try to support it with any Freudian references.
Most importantly, though, Butler’s explanation of the processes of repression and identiication does not suiciently diferentiate between the
Freudian concept of “introjection” and the Hegelian notion of “intro-relection”. Where the Freudian process involves metaphorisation, the Hegelian category invokes the igure of metonymy. Initially, Freud supposes in “The Ego
and the Id” that the mother is the object of a libidinal cathexis (Freud, 1984:
19-39). This cathexis is prohibited and the object becomes “lost” for the ego
through the process of repression. In this process the image of the father as
authority igure (as agent of prohibition) is taken into the unconscious substrate of the ego (“introjected”), where it is set up as an ideal identiication.
Thus, the Freudian process involves a substitution of an idealised igure for
a libidinal object. By contrast, the Hegelian process of intro-relection happens when the essential structure of an external process is relected into
an internal process, becoming its dynamic. The diference is immense: in
Freudian identiication, the psyche cannot be a microcosm of the society,
whereas in Hegelian intro-relection, this is precisely what it is.
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The Hegelian “Unhappy Consciousness” is the result of the slave’s internalisation of the authority of the former master, resulting in a psyche
split between the universality of abstract laws and the particularity of sensuous existence (Hegel, 1977). Taking itself as an object of scorn, the Unhappy Consciousness oscillates between spiritual universality and material
singularity (Butler, 1997b: 46), becoming an “incessant performer of renunciation” (Butler, 1997b: 49) and a fascinated spectator to its own abjection
(Butler, 1997b: 50). Initially, as we have seen, Butler combines the Hegelian
dialectics of master and slave (recast as heterosexuality and homosexuality)
with the Foucauldian theory of power as multiple and productive, to theorise the conlict between the heterosexual matrix and a marginalised homosexuality. The next step is to return to Discipline and Punish and re-read it
through the Phenomenolog y of Spirit (Butler, 1997b: 33). Just as in Hegel’s Phenomenolog y, then, where the conlict between master and slave is intro-relected in the “Unhappy Consciousness,” the melancholy subjectivity diagnosed in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) is the intro-relection of the struggle
for identity analysed in Gender Trouble. The Butlerian “psychic life of power”
springs from the intro-relection of the conlict between heterosexual matrix and homosexual margin, to form a melancholic subjectivity divided between an airmed heterosexual identity (“the subject”) and a denied homosexual identity (“the psyche”).
As with the Hegelian work, the main focus of Butler’s reconceptualisation of the “Unhappy Consciousness” in The Psychic Life of Power is the emergence of intersubjective rationality (the “world of culture”) from within the
dialectics of self-consciousness. Butler proposes that the destructive rage of
heterosexual melancholia is cultivated by the state and internalised by citizens-subjects, but that an aggressive melancholia can be productively deployed to destroy the superego agency and turn the ego’s hatred outwards
against the “culture of death” (Butler, 1997b: 190-191). Butler’s tendency is to
directly equate the positive legal framework of the society with the psychic
structure of prohibitions that institutes subjectivity, relected in the (otherwise strange) call to resist interpellation and “expose the law [of culture] as
less powerful than it seems” (Butler, 1997b: 130). Thus, the “psychic life of
power” turns out to be a igure for the relection of power structures into a
divided subjectivity, whereby a state-sponsored structure of marginalisation
and a “culture of death” become intro-relected into the psyche as a melancholic heterosexuality.
Furthermore, “in Psychic Butler seems to conlate performativity, performance and psychotherapy as she argues that what is ‘acted out’ in ‘gender performances’ is the unresolved grief of a repudiated homosexuality”
(Butler, 1997b: 146; Salih, 2002: 132-133). These conlations are evidence for
a systematic return to the ego-dominated politics of identity, where Butler’s
initial blurring of performative speech acts and intentional dramatic per-
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145
formances is now compounded by an identiication of the resistance of the
ego with political subversion. In line with this preference for the mirror relations of the Imaginary over the diferential structures of the Symbolic, Butler’s progressive politics display openly the dialectics of imaginary rivalry
characteristic of the structure of the ego. Endorsing narcissistic rage, Butler
stages a triumphant resurrection of the individual psyche while denouncing the supposed unity of the ego. She proposes that the renunciation of any
claim to unitary self-identity holds open the prospect of constructive mourning instead of destructive melancholia. Recognition of melancholia involves
accepting self-division and otherness, Butler claims, so that the other is installed as an identiication in the ego (Butler, 1997b: 195-196). The Butlerian
programme, it should be becoming clear, represents a sort of “Ego Psychology in reverse”: where Ego Psychology sought to fortify the ego in the name of
social adjustment (Lacan, 1988), Butler seeks to disperse the ego in the interests of permanent marginal subversion. Far from efecting a Freudian analysis of the subject, Butler’s individual, driven forward by the incompleteness
of an impossible desire for self-identity, rehearses the existential-Hegelian
conception of the “Unhappy Consciousness,” after postmodernism.
The Symbolic Law and the Phallic Signifier
Butler’s critical appropriation of psychoanalysis aims to retrieve the notion
of a “morphological Imaginary”—or bodily ego (Butler, 1993: 13)—from
what she takes to be Lacan’s “heterosexist structuralism” (Butler, 1993: 90).
But, her conception of the psyche has in common with the Freudian unconscious only (as Althusser might have said) a lexicon and some theoretical opponents. It is closer to the postmodern conception of the dispersion of
the formerly “uniied ego”: speciically, the division of the ego into multiple
partitions as its specular totalisation of an ensemble of subject-positions is
exposed as imaginary. Irrespective, then, of the criticisms that Butler accurately directs to Lacan (and Žižek) for their personal attitudes on particular
questions (Butler, 1993a: 187-222; Butler, 2000a: 143-148), her global opposition of the imaginary morphology of the bodily ego to the unconscious instituted through a prohibition on incest efectively defends the ego from the
unconscious.
It needs to be said that Butler’s positioning of homosexuality as a subversive margin within a homophobic culture has a political signiicance as a
rhetorical intervention. This rhetorical stance also explains the claim to the
“subversive” potential of surrendering a coherent identity and the assertion
that positioning the marginalisation of homosexuality on the same level (if
not a more fundamental level) as the taboo on incest somehow opens new
prospects for liberation. As with drag, homosexual desire “panics” heterosexual identity by disclosing powerful repressed desires (Butler, 1997b: 136).
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Intuitively, Butler’s claim that the hyperbolic identiications of “completely straight” identities are symptomatic of repressed desire (Butler, 1997b:
147)—if not heterosexual melancholy—is appealing.
Nonetheless, the idea that homosexuality is “produced” to maintain heterosexuality is politically and theoretically problematic. Politically, it lirts
with the reduction of queer identity to a functional role in relation to heterosexuality: “reading Butler, one occasionally gets the impression that gay
desire is not complete unless it is somehow installed subversively inside heterosexuality” (Dollimore, 1996: 535). In Freudian terms, because what happens in identiication is the substitution of an image of authority for a libidinal object, claiming a primary homosexuality is equivalent to the collapse
of homosexual desire.
Butler’s rehabilitation of psychoanalysis involves the elaboration of an
“alternative imaginary to the hegemonic imaginary” (Butler, 1993: 91) centred on what she calls the “lesbian phallus”. It also entails a rejection of the
“sexual diference fundamentalism” that makes the phallic signiier into a
phallic symbol, whose privileged referent is always the penis (Butler, 1993:
84). Butler is suspicious that a feminist rejection of the phallus (for instance,
for the maternal body as privileged) reinstates the very structure of essentialism that it reacts against. Therefore, she seeks to deconstruct the phallus—
and the polarity according to which men “have” the phallus while women
have to “be” the phallus—by means of a relativisation and decentring of
the privilege of the phallic signiier. Defending this position, Butler explains
that:
The phallus as signiier within lesbian sexuality will engage the spectre
of shame and repudiation delivered by that feminist theory which
would secure a feminine morphology in its radical distinctness from the
masculine. … Traversing these divisions, the lesbian phallus signiies a
desire that is produced historically at the crossroads of these prohibitions,
and is never fully free of the normative demands that condition its
possibility and that it nevertheless seeks to subvert (Butler, 1993: 86).
In line with the general conception of performative resigniication as
always-already enmeshed in the heteronormative matrix it contests, Butler
opts for subversion instead of separatism. As a result of her deconstructive
intervention, Butler claims that “if the phallus is an imaginary efect … then
its structural place is no longer determined by the logical relation of mutual exclusion entailed by a heterosexist version of sexual diference” (Butler,
1993: 88).
To complete this retrieval of psychoanalysis, Butler confronts not only
Lacan’s essay on “The Signiication of the Phallus” (Lacan, 1977: 281-291),
but also his theory of discursive registers. Butler collapses the distinction between Imaginary and Symbolic, while rejecting the Real entirely (Butler,
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1993: 78-79, 187-222). This is critical to her discursive strategy, for “Butler
does not distinguish the Imaginary other from the Symbolic Other, a collapse of terminology equivalent to suggesting that there is no diference between the subject and the ego” (van Pelt, 2000: 151). Indeed, Butler’s practice
sometimes appears simply to be the collocation of apparently incriminating
quotes, in the service of what she herself calls a “selective reading of Lacan”
(Butler, 1993: 72). The efort to play of Freud against Lacan produces a theoretical syncretism that does not really come to grips with the fundamental
purpose of Lacan’s registers, or Freud’s topography, namely, to demarcate
what is strictly unconscious from that which the ego might accept.
Butler’s retrieval of psychoanalysis is nonetheless strategically vital to
her enterprise, because her claim to evade voluntarism rests upon the assertion that in performativity, “what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to
disavow, what remains opaque [and] unconscious,” and “the opacity of the
unconscious sets limits to the exteriorisation of the psyche” (Butler, 1993a:
24). Indeed, Butler probably would reject the allegation that she collapses
the unconscious subject into the conscious ego, for she states that “the psyche, which includes the unconscious, is very diferent from the [ego]: the
psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning efects of the discursive
demand to inhabit a coherent identity” (Butler, 1997b: 136). These formal
assertions, however, are belied by the theoretical content of her eforts to
theorise the unconscious, for Butler’s belief in the primacy of the Imaginary—pre-eminently the register of the ego—means that she has no theoretical resources to lend substance to the claim to think a discourse beyond
that of imaginary rivalries.
Indeed, while for Butler, the unity and centredness of the bodily ego exists only as sustained by the “sexually marked name” (Butler, 1993: 72), the
phallic signiier performs exactly the same role in the Symbolic that the
specular totality of the body plays in the Imaginary (Butler, 1993: 76, 81).
When Lacan claims a disjunction between the dualisms characteristic of
the Imaginary and the decentred diferential order of the signiier, Butler
insists that the Symbolic phallus exists by virtue of a denial of its constitution through the specular Imaginary (Butler, 1993: 79). From the relatedness
of Imaginary and Symbolic, Butler derives, rhetorically, the textually unsupported proposition that the Imaginary is primary and original. Consistent
with this position, Butler maintains that the phallic signiier is privileged because it alone has a unitary signiied (Butler, 1993: 90), and that this can only
be a symbol of the penis. The absolute determination to interpret the phallus
as an Imaginary recapitulation of anatomy that is at work here is displayed
when Butler cites Lacan—“Il est encore moins l’organe, pénis ou clitoris, qu’il symbolise” (Butler, 1993: Lacan cited 83). Instead of translating “penis or clitoris,” Butler glosses this straightforwardly as “the phallus symbolises the penis”
(Butler, 1993: 83).
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It seems that Butler has mistakenly interpreted Lacan’s position, that the
phallic signiier is that which is “to designate as a whole the efect of there
being a signiied” (Butler, 1993: Lacan cited 82), to mean that the phallic
signiier alone has a signified. For a symbol is nothing else except the excess of
signiied over signiier in an image—something which would indeed license
the claim that “if the phallus is an imaginary efect, a wishful transiguration, then it is not merely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called into
question, but every distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary”
(Butler, 1993: 79). But Lacan explains that the phallic signiier is a signiier without signified, a moment not of the polysemic excess of meaning, but
of nonsense. Hence Lacan’s progressive theoretical shift, from the “phallic
signiier” to the master signiier (Fink, 1995a: 55-56). Butler claims to employ psychoanalytic categories descriptively and with no reference to clinical or empirical literature, conducting instead a “cultural engagement with
psychoanalytic theory” (Butler, 1997b: 138). Let us recall which culture this
is: that of homo economicus, the commodity and the ego. It should come as no
surprise then, that Butler’s highly imaginative and methodologically unconstrained use of psychoanalytic categories actually leads towards a denial of
the speciically Freudian unconscious.
Butler’s Postmodern Existentialism
Butler’s denials that she has produced a new existentialism are therefore not
very convincing. The ainities between performativity and existentialism
are genetic, as Butler’s theory of gender develops directly from existentialism
(Butler, 1986: ; Heinämaa, 1997: ; Hughes and Witz, 1997), and structural,
as the fundamental reliance of existential phenomenology on transcendental intentionality remains a latent assumption of Butler’s work. According to
her, of course, performativity is “not a return to an existential theory of the
self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts” (Butler, 1999a: 181). This
is a misrecognition, for there remains “a great deal of existentialist thinking
still at work in Butler’s philosophy,” and French existentialism can be said to
enjoy a “return of the repressed” in performativity (Schrift, 2001: 14-15).
The leading contention of Sartrean existentialism is that the self is constituted through its acts in a continuous movement of transcendence, so that
self-identity is only an imaginary (albeit necessary) ideal, “futilely” pursued
by human agents. In actuality, far from relying on a pre-discursive agent
and act, Sartre deines consciousness as a “transcendental ield without a
subject” (Sartre, 1969: 235). Butler’s criticism of the subject as a substantive
agency is therefore in line with Sartre’s critique of the phenomenological assumption that conscious intentionality can self-relexively know itself as a
uniied ego. Sartre divides the “non-positional” transcendental intentional-
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149
ity of consciousness from the social identity (the ego) of the individual. As
Butler herself recognises:
Every intentional movement of consciousness towards a speciic
transcendental object presupposes consciousness’ non-positional
awareness of itself as the agent of consciousness; and yet this agency only
becomes explicit through its actual deeds (Butler, 1987a: 128).
For Sartre, the retroactive construction of the subject of the action (the
“me”) is distinct from the agency that acts (the “I”), an opposition Sartre translates into the existential opposition between objectiied identity
“in-itself” and transcendental subjectivity “for-itself”. Thus, Butler’s claim
that in existentialism the self and its acts are pre-discursive is false, as regards the social identity of the agent that is retroactively known through
their actions.
Butler’s target, however, is probably the Sartrean revival of the Fichtean
concept of a “pre-relexive cogito”. According to this conception, “non-positional consciousness,” as a recasting of the transcendental “unity of apperception,” and the externality of the world, as the existential recasting of the
transcendental “object in general,” enjoy the pre-relexive unity of the cogito.
This is a pre-discursive identity, but it is quite distinct from the “self and its
acts,” for where the “pre-relexive cogito” is transcendental, the social identity
of the agent, known through its actions, is empirical.
My contention is that Butler herself, insofar as the philosophical structure of her position is basically existentialist, cannot avoid something along
the lines of a non-positional consciousness, or transcendental intentionality, “behind” the multiple subject-positions adopted by the empirical agent.
Indeed, as we have seen, Butler’s solution to the problems of relection is
exactly the same as the neo-Fichtean and post-Sartrean position of Dieter
Henrich, suggesting that she is, in reality, very far indeed from any postmodern “subjectless conception of agency”. That conception is expressed
through her claim that “agency conditioned by … regimes of discourse/
power cannot be conlated with voluntarism or individualism, … and in no
way presupposes a choosing subject” (Butler, 1993: 15). The idea is that the
individual’s intentions are constructed discursively and unconsciously constrained. But her repudiation of Foucault for psychoanalysis turned out to
be a defence of the ego from the unconscious. Now I will show that Butler’s
discussion of the discursive construction of individual intentions makes no
sense unless we suppose that a non-positional intentionality is an unstated
assumption of her position.
Now, I can imagine an objection at this point, that the subject described
by Butler is not only constructed in discourse through the acts it performs,
but also functions only as a retroactive grammatical iction masking a performative construct (Butler, 1999a: 25). Even when Butler claims that gender
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is a choice (Butler, 1987b: 128-129), this does not mean that an agent stands
back from gender and voluntarily selects, for “choosing” refers to reinterpretation of gender norms (Butler, 1987b: 131). This is the basis for the distance
that Butler claims to detect between performativity and existentialism. She
rejects the terminology of “existential project” for “political strategy,” and
“linguistic expression” for “discursive performance,” on the basis that the
existential project, externalised in social action or linguistic expression, relies upon an underlying substantive agent (Butler, 1999a: 25).
Butler’s conception of the agent is that they are always-already interpellated into a gender identity and located in an overdetermined ield consisting of a multiplicity of subject-positions, confronting the problem of “how to
repeat”. Interestingly, this develops through an adaptation of the existential
phenomenology of Beauvoir (Butler, 1986: ; Butler, 1987b) and Merleau-Ponty (Butler, 1989). The resources for “how to repeat” arrive from the polysemic excess of subject-positions in the cultural ield, which acts to decomplete
every identity while ensuring that the individual is always located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping discourses (Butler, 1999a: 6). Once again,
though, this (high postmodern) position does not solve the problem, but
merely displaces it, while at the same time raising the additional problem of
moral relativism.
Once we conceptualise the agent as a ield of dispersed, multiple subjectpositions, then who, or what, decides which position to adopt in a context?
How and why are some forms of interpretation politically progressive—a
practice of liberation (Foucault)—while others are deemed to be oppressive? Butler, of course, sometimes appears to think that every form of subjection involves exclusions, which would mean that any hegemonic subjectivity
is intrinsically oppressive. In this case, her position is that of the Beautiful
Soul, whose permanent stance of marginal subversion is in actuality a cover for a thoroughgoing complicity (Nussbaum, 1999). However, to the extent that Butler, in recent texts, appears to revive the perspective of liberation through an increasingly inclusive universality (Butler, 2000a: ; Butler,
2000b: ; Butler, 2000c), the problem of the interests of the subject, and therefore, for Butler, of intentionality, returns.
Any phenomenolog y of the adoption, by the agent, of a multiplicity of subject-positions, must necessarily situate its description of the contents of subjective experience as a non-positional consciousness. When Butler calls for
“critical desubjectivation” as an act of resistance to the law (Butler, 1997b:
130), how else are we to understand this, except than as an appeal to a disembodied intentionality somehow “behind” the dispersed multiplicity of
subject-positions adopted by the individual? What else can the celebration
of the dispersion, even the non-identity, of the subject entail, if we are to consider this as a political act (as opposed to a suicidal abdication of moral and
social responsibility)? Thus, Butler seems to rehearse the existentialist con-
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ception of a permanent split between temporalised existence and spatialised
essence, subjective transcendence and reiied identity, in the theory of performativity. Her core proposition, that every postulation of identity is “a sign
of exhaustion, as well as of the illimitable process of signiication itself” (Butler, 1999a: 143), while couched in the terminology of the “linguistic turn,”
efectively means that the identity of the agent is continuously deposited in
the wake of a movement of subjective transcendence efected by a disembodied intentionality. That “discourse” replaces the “transcendental ield” does
not fundamentally alter the existentialist ainities of Butler’s conception of
subjectivity—something celebrated by at least one of her adherents (Schrift,
1997: ; Schrift, 2001).
Speech Act Theory as a New Ontolog y?
The phenomenological roots of Butler’s theory are clearly exhibited in the
claim that performative speech acts somehow transubstantiate the referent,
for this claim relies upon the assumption that transcendental subjectivity
constitutes not just the epistemological forms, but also the substantial materiality of the object-world. Speciically, the theory of performativity supposes that illocutionary declaratives miraculously transform not only the social
status of the speaking subject, but also the sexed materiality of the res cogitans.
For Butler (somewhat incredibly), the performative character of social identity suggests that the ontological characteristics of the body are conferred by
the discursive matrix which constitutes its gender positioning (Butler, 1999a:
136-140). Indeed, as one criticism of Butler has already noted, the deconstruction of substantialist ontology makes room for a new ontology of gender
performativity (Williams and Harrison, 1998).
To grasp the limitations of Butler’s theory of performativity, we need to
attend closely to the technical distinctions relevant to speech act theory. The
distinction between constative and performative speech acts corresponds to
the diference between saying something and doing things with words. A
constative utterance describes a state of afairs according to criteria of veracity (a statement of correspondence to reality that can be true or false) and so
semantics is the proper domain of the constative. By contrast, a performative utterance does something (alters the status of the referent) in the enunciation. For instance, “I do” in a marriage ceremony does not report that
the person is married, but instead makes (does) the bond of marriage (Austin, 1962: 13). Unlike the constative statement, the performative utterance
cannot be true or false—it can only be, in Benveniste’s terminology, “legitimate” or “illegitimate” (Austin uses the less politically suggestive terms “felicitous” and “infelicitous”). According to Austin’s main stipulation, “there
must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional efect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain
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persons in certain circumstances” (Austin, 1962: 14). Searle, following Austin, refers to the institutional context within which the performance can be
legitimate as the “conditions of satisfaction” of the performative aspect of
the utterance (Searle, 1969).
It is well known that Austin abandoned the initial binary distinction between constative and performative for a ternary distinction between illocutionary force (performative dimension), locutionary act (constative dimension) and perlocutionary consequences (the ability of speech acts to engender
consequences in partners in dialogue, for instance, persuasion) (Austin, 1962:
98-100). Austin’s explicit motivation for the shift is the radical instability of
the division between two distinct classes of speech acts, which necessarily
yields to an analysis of the diferent aspects of every speech act. Every speech
act contains both a locutionary and an illocutionary component. This efectively subverts the true/false distinction as the criterion for the validity of the
locutionary act. For the veracity of a statement now depends upon the context implied by the utterance, and this context is determined by the “conditions of satisfaction” of the illocutionary act. As Austin notes, “the truth or
falsity of a statement depends upon what you were performing in what circumstances” (Austin, 1962: 145). Equally, however, the duality of the speech
act subverts the notion, beloved of discursive idealism, of the “magic of performatives,” where the constative dimensions of speech acts can be entirely
forgotten, and discourse can be held to mysteriously transmute the natural
properties of the referent. For the illocutionary force of the utterance now
depends upon what factually is the case in the context that supplies the “conditions of satisfaction” for the performative legitimacy of the speech act.
Indeed, the abandonment of the performative/constative distinction has
important implications for the referential employment of language. The fable of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” can clarify the relation between illocutionary force and locutionary accuracy. Every locutionary act (“the Emperor
has new clothes on”) can be trivially rephrased to make explicit the illocutionary assertion implied in the referential claim (“I believe that the Emperor has new clothes on”) (Searle, 1979). The Emperor’s mistake is to believe
that an illocutionary assertion can completely over-rule the locutionary accuracy of the speech act, forgetting that “generally, in the performance of
any illocutionary act, the speaker implies that the preparatory conditions of
the act are satisied” (Searle, 1969: 65). These preparatory conditions are institutional conventions external to the speech act (for instance, those governing rational belief-formation); making an assertion does not alter these conditions—instead, these conditions regulate the legitimacy of the illocution.
Thus, Butler’s assertion that “the constative claim [to describe sex] is always
to some degree performative,” is, strictly speaking, trivial, and does not at
all demonstrate that “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the
same time a further formation of that body” (Butler, 1993: 11, 10).
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Butler’s reluctance to accept the full consequences of Austin’s revised position is compounded by an uncritical acceptance of Derrida’s deconstruction of speech act theory (Derrida, 1988). Because Butler’s theory is founded
on the deconstructive position, the signiicant limitations of Derrida’s concept of “citationality” weaken the infrastructure of the theory of performativity (Butler, 1999a: 12-16). Austin makes two aspects of the illocutionary dimension of speech acts perfectly clear. Illocution depends upon convention
and not intention. In the illocutionary act, “the act is constituted not by intention or by fact, but by convention” (Austin, 1962: 128). Illocutionary force
depends primarily upon the conventionally sanctioned authority of the executor, and therefore upon the social and institutional context, and only secondarily upon the actual wording of the statement. Secondly, “when speech
act theory contextualises utterances by directing attention to the things they
do as illocutions, it simultaneously makes it impossible to decontextualise utterances by attending solely to what they do as locutions” (Petrey, 1990: 27).
For instance, the appearance of the sentence, “the constitution is suspended” in a sensational pamphlet or a government decree illustrate the possibility of a single locution in entirely diferent illocutionary contexts (with
distinct illocutionary forces). Taken together, the relative separation of illocution and locution, together with the non-decontextualisability of speech
acts, means that in no sense does a word “drag its context around with it,”
like a snail with its shell. Thus, the context of signiication, when considering the illocutionary force of the speech act, is not diacritically structured on
the same level as the signiiers in the utterance; the signiication of the utterance engages an illocutionary syntax whose reference is the analytically
distinct ield of the institutionally deined “conditions of satisfaction” of the
illocutionary act (Searle, 1969: 54-71).
Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin has rightly been described as “bizarre,” for its insistence (despite the textual evidence) on the centrality of intentionality to speech act theory, and for its ambivalence regarding illocutionary force (performative success) (Dews, 1995: 54). Petrey demonstrates
that Derrida’s grasp of speech act theory involves the decontextualisation of
the utterance and therefore a neglect of the illocutionary context of speech
acts (Petrey, 1990: 131-146). Derrida attributes the force of language to its
transcendence of context, with the inevitable entailment that his deconstruction of speech act theory is obliged to consider “the structure of locution … before any illocutionary or perlocutionary determination” (Derrida,
1988: 14). Deconstruction is, in other words, pre-Austinian, as “the abstract
identity of a locutionary formulation is not pertinent to its contextual illocutionary force” (Petrey, 1990: 139). Indeed, Derrida appears sometimes to be
unaware of Austin’s shift from performative/ constative to illocution/ locution/ perlocution (Petrey, 1990: 148-150). Butler also ignores the implications
of this shift when she continues to suggest that the performative materialises
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the constative. Likewise, the concept of “resigniication” falls into the deconstructive trap of imagining that a decontextualised locution continues
to enjoy the same category of illocutionary force (reverse interpellation as a
form of declarative) regardless of institutional context.
Discursive Materialisation
In Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler claims to provide “a poststructuralist rewriting of discursive performativity as it operates in the materialisation of
sex” (Butler, 1993: 9). For Butler, the idea of the performative expresses both
the arbitrary bond between social identity and natural embodiment, and
the notion that, following the Foucauldian conception of “discipline,” every
performance inscribes social norms upon the materiality of the body. Dramatically over-extending this conception, Butler proclaims that gender performativity materialises sex, including the anatomical reality of the natural
body. Butler supports this contention with the assertion that, referring to the
process of designating anatomical sex, “medical interpellation … shifts the
infant from an ‘it,’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ [through] naming” (Butler, 1993: 7). As
we have seen, this claim involves a forced interpretation of speech act theory, a misreading which mistakes a transformation in the social status of the
referent for a well-nigh alchemical transmutation of its physical properties.
In actuality, therefore, the work develops the phenomenology of gender performances essayed in Gender Trouble to its logical conclusion, in the rejection
of scientiic materialism for philosophical idealism.
Butler asserts that the body is “a process of materialisation that stabilises
over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (Butler,
1993: 9). Imperceptibly, Butler’s rhetorical shifts shade “the efect of boundary” into the quite diferent claim that discourse enters the depths of matter and invests the organs with a function. In particular, Butler seems to
be saying that through the “interpellation” of sex at birth, the infant is discursively “assigned” a biological sexuality (Butler, 1993: 7-8). To the extent
that she indeed does lirt with just such a claim, we have to agree that “[t]
he assertion that sexual diference is discursively constructed strains belief” (Epstein, 1995: 101). Butler’s discussion of genetics in Gender Trouble, for
instance, risks obscurantism. Characteristically arguing through rhetorical questions, rather than explicit declaratives, she asks: “is it not a purely
cultural convention … that an anatomically ambiguous XX individual is
male, a convention that takes genitalia to be the deinitive ‘sign’ of sex?”
(Butler, 1999a: 140).
Despite having identiied elements of ideology in the genetic inquiry
she analyses, Butler’s contention that the genitalia (and therefore, biological reproductive functions) have nothing to do with sex is indeed strange. It
is the rhetorical slippage from “small testes which totally lacked germ cells,
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i.e., precursor cells for sperm” (Butler, 1999a: medical report cited 137), to
“anatomically ambiguous,” that enables this fragile construction. The individuals in question are anatomically deinite although underdeveloped
and sterile. Gender relates to a cultural subject-position that includes sexual pleasure, while sex designates the organic functions that enable the biological reproduction of the species. The “sex organs” designate my sex,
whether I am naturally sterile or medically sterilised, or not. This is not to
deny the existence of an anatomical continuum, or of statistically rare cases
of dual, ambiguous or transient genitalia. But sex refers to the statistically
overwhelming poles constituting this continuum. Why is it politically progressive to deny the results of scientiic inquiry? It seems to me more like a
politically regressive anti-scientiic prejudice that denies the possibility for
any epistemologically robust empirical realism. Butler’s (accurate) point is
that the existence of a polarised continuum of anatomical structure cannot directly determine the variegated and historically variable spectrum of
gendered subject-positions. It is also indicated, by the research that she canvasses, that chromosomal variation may have an only refracted impact on
anatomical forms and functions. The relation between DNA sequences and
physical morphology may well obey a complex relation, rather than a linear
determination. How this dematerialises the anatomical bearers of organic
functions into gendered subject-positions is left hanging, unanswered, in her
characteristic rhetorical question.
Butler seems incapable of making the elementary distinction between
medical intervention into natural processes and the transcendental constitution of their cultural signiicance. This would be a step backwards compared to, for instance, Kant, whose transcendental idealism does not preclude the results of science because material reality is only constituted by the
categories of the understanding, rather than entirely formed by discourse.
Indeed, the title of her book positively trades on the semantic ambivalence
of “matter” (materiality/signiicance), apparently deliberately conlating the
two. In Gender Trouble, for instance, she claims that the “external genitalia”
are “essential to the symbolisation of reproductive sexuality” (Butler, 1999a:
140 emphasis added). Strange to relate, the genitalia also have a functional
relation to reproductive sexuality; they are not reducible to cultural symbols. Bodies that Matter, instead of retracting this claim, extends it, by enhancing the ability of “performativity” to go beyond merely conforming surfaces,
to invest matter in depth (Ebert, 1996: 113-149).
Butler preserves a margin of ambiguity in her theorisation, insisting that
“the point has never been that ‘everything is discursively constructed’” (Butler, 1993: 6). She rejects the “divine performative” that exhaustively forms
a pliant materiality, insisting that a remainder of materiality escapes construction (Butler, 1993: 6). In Bodies that Matter, Butler proposes the substitution of the model of the “constitutive outside” to discourse (Butler, 1993:
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8) for the “cultural construction of everything”. This deploys Laclau and
Moufe’s terminology within a radically diferent ontology, since for Laclau
and Moufe the “constitutive outside” is another discourse, not the extradiscursive referent. Nor is it entirely clear where this revision leaves Butler,
for this constitutive outside is nothing else than the construction of identities through exclusionary means, whereby “a set of foreclosures” is “refused
the possibility of cultural articulation” (Butler, 1993: 8). Butler’s new position
tends to undermine the Foucauldian account of performativity, for the political potentials of the former theory depended upon the radical inclusion in
the cultural ield of the excluded transgressions constitutive of the norm. Indeed, the claim that power necessarily cited its transgressions formed the basis for subversive resigniication within the cultural ield and the consequent
displacement and proliferation of norms. At other times, the indeterminacy
of Butlerian “matter” seems to indicate that this position is only the standard positivist opposition between an inert materiality and the transcendental constitution of its signiicance (Butler, 1996: 108-125). It is easy to see why.
Once the excluded, abjected sexualities, as a “constitutive outside,” are regarded as something on the order of matter itself—a matter that resists articulation—it is diicult to see how a subversive politics can develop at all.
The Politics of Performativity
Excitable Speech (1997) tries to redress the lack of historico-political speciicity in Butler’s theory by outlining a politics of the performative. Butler examines several categories of illocutionary act—including “hate speech” and
gay declaratives in the military—to redeem the claim that efective performances of alternative identities defy calculation and the assertion that these
acts transform institutional structures (Butler, 1993: 8). The centrepiece for
this demonstration is her theorisation of resigniication through the category
of the perlocutionary consequences of speech acts. Where the illocutionary
force of a speech act is conventional, the perlocutionary consequences are
unconventional, depending on the mobilisation of afect in dialogue partners (as in the distinction between warning someone and generating the
side-efect of alarming them). For Butler, the basic idea is that the subject is
generated through interpellation-subjection, in a process whereby individuals are assigned “injurious names” (for instance, “queer”), but that by taking
up these names as airmations a “reverse interpellation” can be efected,
generating militant subjectivities instead of conformist subjects. This is the
meaning of Butler’s condensed claim that “insurrectionary speech becomes
the necessary response to an injurious language” (Butler, 1997a: 163). What
in one context is injurious speech (“queer”) becomes, in another context, the
bearer of insurrectionary language, not, it is implied, directly through its illocutionary force, but rather through the unpredictable consequences of us-
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ing it as if it were a diferent illocution. Butler’s claim, therefore, treats illocution as if it was locution, and neglects the all-important institutional context
of the speech act. Indeed, the collapse of the illocution/locution distinction
is directly stated in Butler’s assertion that “the critical and legal discourse
on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech” (Butler, 1997a: 163). Unfortunately, the entailment is that her “reverse interpellation,” or “resigniication,” is a locutionary pseudo-declarative, lacking the
required illocutionary force, and so the promised politics of performativity
do not actually materialise.
Butler’s major thesis is that speech is constitutively “out of control,” because its efects exceed the “sovereign” intentionality of the conscious agent
(Butler, 1997a: 15). As Butler states, “agency begins where sovereignty wanes.
The one who acts … acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted
as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic ield of enabling constraints from the outset” (Butler, 1997a: 16). While such claims are enthusiastically received by Butler’s supporters as evidence of her subjectless conception of agency (McNay, 1999: 178-181; Salih, 2002: 100), her position actually
does nothing more than restate the fundamental contention of speech act
theory, that the illocutionary force of the utterance depends on social context and not individual intention. Recognition of the importance of social
context might be expected to generate a “politics of performativity” oriented
to a radical reconstruction of institutions. The twist is, however, that Butler’s conception of the politics of speech acts depends on the radically untenable claim that social context is irrelevant to the political implications of
the utterance. As we shall see, far from developing a subjectless conception
of agency, this enables Butler to return to her perennial theme of the individual resisting their subjection through oppositional cultural practices; like
Foucault, Butler dethrones the omnipotent subject so as to save the political
individual.
Butler rejects both the ability of sovereign intentionality to govern
speech, and the simultaneity of utterance and injury supposedly required
by the construction of hate speech as illocutionary acts (Butler, 1997a: 16).
She opposes the theory of the performative employed by legal theoreticians
such as Catherine McKinnon, for whom, Butler claims, the performative
is an immediately eicacious expression of the sovereign intentionality of
the individual agent, and equivalent to a physical action (Butler, 1997a: 15).
We have already seen that any interpretation of speech act theory such as
McKinnon’s must be specious. Instead of directly contesting the legal reading of speech act theory, however, Butler reasserts her deconstructive criticism of Austin, to imply that performatives are generally ineicacious and
temporally delayed, beyond the conscious control of the speaker and distinct
from physical acts. The rationale for this position is to create a gap between
the existence of hegemonic norms and their employment by social agents in
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speech acts, preventing any monolithic conception of the social ield. Its effect, however, is that Butler uses the speech act/social conduct distinction to
drive a wedge between hate speech and acts of violence.
Butler cites legal theory to the efect that what is really at stake in hate
speech is an illocutionary force, operative in certain contexts, directed at
negating the social identity of the victim (Butler, 1997a: 16), which suggests
that the question of sovereign intentionality is a pseudo-problem. Instead of
directly intervening into the debate on how speech act theory supports legal judgements, however, she maintains that the power of words to wound
resides in unanticipated efects generated through a loss of context and opposes every efort to link illocutionary force to institutional conditions (Butler,
1997a: 16). She proposes the adoption of a perlocutionary model, according
to which the injury done to the victim of hate speech results unpredictably
and in a delayed way (Butler, 1997a: 16). Because her deconstructive interpretation of speech act theory neglects any taxonomy of illocutionary acts,
Butler is in no position to contest the conservative assertion that these acts
have the force attributed to them by the Right. Indeed, the consequence of
her stance is that she attacks as “conservative” Bourdieu’s efort to connect
speech to institutions so as to raise the question of social equality (Butler,
1997a: 16), and rejects his “ampliication of the social dimension of the performative” (Butler, 1997a: 16). By contrast, Butler insists on the break with
context supposedly performed by “insurrectionary” resigniication, thanks
to its ability to act in unconventional ways (Butler, 1997a: 16). In other words,
Butler restricts speech act theory to decontextualised locutions and unconventional perlocutions, discarding illocution entirely as “conservative” and
insuiciently “insurrectionary”. As usual, however, when ultra-revolutionary rhetoric becomes a means whereby social questions are rejected for an
“autonomous” dimension of language (Butler, 1997a: 16), Butler’s position
masks a thorough-going political individualism.
By insisting on the distinction between speech and conduct (Butler,
1997a: 15), Butler retreats from the central claim of discursive materialisation, that no clear boundary between speech acts and material reality exists. Indeed, the assertion that the speech act does not, after all, “constitute
the referent to which it refers” (Butler, 1997a: 16), efectively admits that
the efort to elaborate a politics of performativity entails the collapse of the
metaphysics articulated in Bodies that Matter. Now Butler, in her anxiety to
deny the efects of social context on illocutionary force, moves in the opposite direction. In the instance of “coming out” in the military, where the authorities decreed that to say “I’m gay” is equivalent to a sexual act, Butler,
instead of contesting this ludicrous interpretation of expressive illocutions,
maintains a rigid split between speech and conduct (Butler, 1997a: 112). Unfortunately, therefore, Butler does not even mention that an assertive declaration (“I’m gay”) attaches a declarative illocution to a state of afairs by,
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in this instance, attributing a property to the speaker (Searle, 1979: 18-20).
Such a declaration cannot, under any circumstances, be considered to be
“homosexual conduct” equivalent to sexual intercourse, since this latter presupposes two persons—intercourse is not something that I have with myself.
She makes some excellent points regarding homosociality in the military
and the repression of homosexual desire in hyperbolic masculinity (Butler,
1997a: 121), but entirely fails to contest the abuse of speech act theory relied
upon by the military authorities.
Butler is resolutely opposed to most (but not all, as we shall see) forms of
legal redress and oicial censorship, on the grounds that state intervention
may strengthen those institutions while being deployed against the victims of
hate speech. In opposition to racial viliication, Butler proposes not state intervention (legislation), but radical mobilisation and practices of resigniication. Her concern is that speech act legislation functions as state censorship
and becomes the precedent for banning homosexuality in the military and
censoring pornography. In line with the deconstructive indiference to the
locution/illocution distinction, she claims that the state, by reiterating hate
speech acts, repeats discursive violence and prosecutes the victim, inally
protecting hate speech as “free speech” (Butler, 1997a: 121). Her insensitivity
to the possibility that a single locution can have diferent illocutionary force
in distinct contexts encourages Butler to directly equate legal discourse and
hate speech, leading to an apparently ultra-left dismissal of all legal redress
and state protection as counter-productive. At the same time, Butler claims
that she “is not opposed to any and all regulations,” such as, for instance,
“hate speech regulations that are not state-centred, such as those that have
restricted jurisdiction within a university” (Butler, 1997a: 102, 101). This is
an interesting position to take, considering that (1) she works in one, and (2)
according to the Althusserian model of ideological interpellation, the education system is the modern ideological state apparatus.
The ethico-political consequences of Butler’s stance are disturbing. Butler proposes that the model of the sole originator of speech is a consequence
of the juridical model, which needs to fabricate an author so as to ind them
guilty (Butler, 1997a: 50). Hence, the law produces hate speech so as to legislate censorship and fabricates a culpable subject so as to prosecute them.
Subjects, Butler claims, are not uniquely accountable for their speech because the subject is a “belated metalepsis,” or subject efect (Butler, 1997a:
50), a retroactively installed substitution of a “guilty party” after the citation
of a speech act. The immediate implication of taking this seriously in a legal context would be that it is possible for every speaker to plead diminished
responsibility. Butler claims that the citationality of speech ampliies ethical
responsibility for hate speech, however, by making individuals accountable
for “the manner in which such speech is repeated” (Butler, 1997a: 50 my italics). This returns us once again to the loop of “how to repeat,” and the pseu-
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do-problem of the “remaking of language ex nihilo” (Butler, 1997a: 50); my
earlier comments regarding the distinction between the omnipotence of the
subject and a non-positional intentionality apply once again, with full force.
In Excitable Speech Butler claims that the question of responsibility is “alicted with impurity from the start” and “intimates an ethical dilemma brewing at the inception of speech” (Butler, 1997a: 28). It is more likely, however,
that the ethical dilemma springs from Butler’s posing of the question.
An immediate index of this is the logical contradiction involved in the
concept of resigniication. As an alternative to police protection and legal
redress, Butler suggests that victims of hate speech exploit the open temporality of the sign (Butler, 1997a: 121). Speech acts do not take place in the
punctual instant of the utterance, but represent a “condensation” of the historicity of a social ritual and a semantic history, and so an utterance may
be “excessive to the moment it occasions” (Butler, 1997a: 14), raising the
possibility of resigniication as a political alternative. Resigniication, she
suggests, “depletes” the term of derogatory history and converts it into an
airmation (for instance, queer, black, woman) (Butler, 1997a: 158). This
possibility springs from the hypothesis of the contextual determination of
the value of the sign. Nonetheless, despite these theoretical ruminations,
Butler in actuality rehearses the leftwing commonsense, that resignifying
“queer” is something diferent to deploying “nigger,” and that citing a pornographic image is diferent to burning a cross. She claims this is because
of the signiicance of the historicity of the sign (Butler, 1997a: 57). The two
claims (the contextually determined value of the sign, and the historicity
of the sign) are in logical contradiction. Likewise, Butler asserts that when
the oppressed lay claim to their universal human and political rights, from
which they have hitherto been excluded, they produce a performative contradiction (Butler, 2000d: 38). Even for supporters, “Excitable Speech does not
provide a clear idea of how interpellatives may be replayed or their meanings altered” (Salih, 2002: 115).
“On the whole,” Lois McNay concludes, “there is a tendency in Butler’s
work to conine discussion of the politics of the performative to a series of
dualisms … which are far from adequate to capturing the complex dynamics of social change” (McNay, 1999: 178). We might add that the abstract
and formal theory of agency provided by performativity restricts gender
politics to the question of symbolic identity (Fraser, 1995), to the exclusion
of considerations of material equality and social practices (Hull, 1997). Butler’s eforts to concretise agency and salvage performativity tend to consolidate these problems rather than rectify them. The consequence is that
“the primacy that Butler’s model accords to the process of symbolic identiication results … in a disregard of the speciicity of socio-political power”
(McNay, 1999: 181).
The problems in Butler’s theory spring from the combination of the
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historicist assumption that individual praxis can be transposed onto social
structuration, and the existential-Hegelian roots of her phenomenology of
subjectivation. For Butler, the incompleteness of identity is the result of the
dialectics of the self and other in the social ield, so that— in classic Fichtean-Sartrean style— the shock of the encounter with the other sets permanent
limits to my self-identity. Butler claims that:
The “incompleteness” of each and every identity is a direct result of
its diferential emergence: no particular identity can emerge without
presuming and enacting the exclusion of others, and this constitutive
exclusion or antagonism is the shared and equal condition of all identityconstitution (Butler, 2000c: 31).
The permanent stance of marginal subversion follows from this conception of the necessity for the self to exclude the other, so that while Butler formally advocates the development of an inclusive universality, no new social
order can be imagined that would not, in fact, be based upon domination.
Sartre’s impasse— that ethics is both necessary and impossible— is here repeated on the terrain of discourse theory, so that the social norms that make
sociality possible can only be conceptualised as a constraint upon the spontaneity of the self. The problem with this theory is that it reduces the social ield
to the sum of dyadic interpersonal collisions, lattening the complexity of social formation and institutional contexts onto a pseudo-dialectic of narcissistic identiication and sibling rivalry. No wonder, then, that the “collective
dimension is missing from Butler’s account of performative resigniication,
whose underpinnings in a theory of psychic dislocation conine its explanatory force to the private realm of individual action” (McNay, 1999: 189).
As a consequence, Butler’s theory oscillates between voluntarism and
determinism, swinging between strategic calculations based in transparent
intentionality and the assertion that efective performances defy calculation
entirely. This does not lead to an efective politics. Instead, it can only repeat
the impasse of Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence,” condemned to a series
of performative contradictions that culminate in explicitly supporting liberal anti-censorship struggles against any efort to raise the question of substantive equality. As her supporters concede, Butler’s “position … primarily
addresses politics at the level of the individual agent enacting their gender
while subjected to various cultural constraints” (Schrift, 1997: 157). Instead
of lending substance to Laclau and Moufe’s excessively formal theory of
discourse, performativity evacuates the social content of diferent practices,
with a consequent inability to specify their institutional context. Indeed, in
this sense, performativity is to be strictly opposed to performative speech
acts, for the latter only operate in a social context, whereas performativity
enjoys the veritably miraculous power to generate performative efects irrespective of conventions. The repercussion is that rather than clarifying the
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relation between discursive practice and institutional structures, performativity tends to disperse all structural constraints. The global result of these
diiculties is that the trajectory of Butler’s theory describes a series of unsuccessful eforts to evade the deadlock of what can only be called a postmodern existentialism, while the politics of performativity remain within the envelope of radicalised liberalism.
4
Radical Negativity: Žižek’s Lacanian Dialectics
In The Sublime Object of Ideolog y (1989) and subsequent books, Žižek completely rewrites Laclau and Moufe’s deconstructive theory of discourse in terms
of Lacanian psychoanalysis.1 Žižek’s intervention proposes that the unconscious subject is the unruly by-product of ideological interpellation. He combines this reconstructed theory of ideology with Hegelian philosophy, to create a remarkable new social theory based in “Lacanian dialectics” (Dews,
1995). At the same time, he makes strenuous eforts to escape the metaphysical implications of the historicist problematic. By developing a structural
concept of the autonomous subject, Žižek not only supplies a sophisticated extension of the theory of ideological interpellation, but also furnishes
an ethical basis for democratic socialism. Žižek’s intervention identiies the
missing link in post-Althusserian theories of ideology—the unconscious subject as the unruly by-product of ideological interpellation—while making
strenuous eforts to escape the gravitational ield of the historicist problematic of postmarxian discourse analysis.
Nonetheless, the conclusions towards which Žižek is driven, apparently on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis, are nothing less than extraor1. Parts of this chapter have been published in “The Antinomies of Slavoj Zizek,” Telos: A
Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought (129) (2004), pp151-172, and “The Law as a Thing: Zizek
and the Graph of Desire,” in Geof Boucher, Jason Glynos and Matt Sharpe (Ed.’s), Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Essays on Slavoj Zizek, with a Reply (London: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 25-46.
Žižek’s reply is “Ethical Socialism? No, Thanks! Reply to Boucher,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal
of Critical Thought (129) (2004), pp173-189. I have not altered my position because—as the
reader may judge for themselves—Žižek does not appear to me to have a reply. To say, as he
does, that this expresses a political diference is not to defend his side of that diference—only
to state the obvious. As for the expressly Kantian character of my position, as opposed to
Žižek's Hegelianism, I continue to hold to this and would add that it was Žižek who claimed
that Hegel is the most consequent of Kantians.
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
dinary, and tend to undermine any conidence we might have in the theoretical machinery that permits such deductions. In Žižek’s “philosophical
manifesto of Cartesian subjectivity,” The Ticklish Subject (2000), we are cheerfully informed by the author that embracing this reinvigorated Cartesianism necessarily leads to ethical decisionism and political voluntarism (Žižek,
2000h: 114-115). These are condensed, for Žižek, into the igure of a “voluntarist decisionism,” which is to be combined with “Cartesian mechanism”
to produce, in what must rate as an alchemical triumph, a “materialist theory of Grace” (Žižek, 2000h: 116-119). Indeed, Žižek’s recent espousal of
a “politics of Truth,” that would subvert contemporary capitalism, just as
Christianity undermined the Roman Empire (Žižek, 2001d: 4-5), is part of
a package deal. This comes complete with a defence of the excesses of Leninism (Žižek, 2001e), a theory of the proletariat as the “singular universal”
of capitalist society that is reminiscent of Georg Lukács’ notion of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history (Žižek, 2000h), an intellectual return to the speculative heights of Schelling’s Romantic philosophy
(Žižek, 1996), and a metaphysically well-endowed revival of Pauline theology (Žižek, 2000e; Žižek, 2001d).
I am not convinced that this quasi-religious politics of redemption is the
only (or the best) conclusion that can be drawn from Žižek’s work. My question: will the real Žižek please step forward? My strategy: to play Žižek of
against Žižek, so as to recover a non-Cartesian Žižek. To do this, I interrogate Žižek’s interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The basic thrust of
my argument is that—contra the neo-Cartesian Žižek—the Lacanian “divided,” or unconscious, “subject before subjectivation” is not a mirror-image,
in the unconscious, of the ego. The unconscious subject does not possess the
properties of transparent self-relexivity, punctual unity and world constituting agency supposedly possessed by the Cartesian ego. Lacanian psychoanalysis does not—as its critics suppose (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1992)—reinstate
the philosophy of consciousness by transposing the unitary subject into the
unconscious. But this, as I shall demonstrate, is exactly what Žižek has recently begun to claim. My analysis retraces what might be described as a
“cascade of errors” in Žižek’s work. From the very beginning, a series of tiny
mistakes and minor omissions have begun to accumulate. They all point in
a single direction: dispersion of the ego, unity of the unconscious. Uncorrected, they have acquired a momentum of their own and begun to colonise
Žižek’s theoretical apparatus. To trace the evolution of this problem, I begin
from an analysis of Žižek’s interpretation of Althusser via the “Graph of Desire,” showing how his treatment of the subject results in an antinomic conception of the relation between Symbolic and Real. This condemns Žižek
to lurch between these antinomic poles, hesitating between the alternatives
of total complicity with “obscene enjoyment” or a catastrophic rupture with
existing symbolic structures. Then I investigate the theoretical consequenc-
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167
es of this conception and examine the political and ethical dilemmas that
result. Finally, I trace these problems to Žižek’s recent, neo-Cartesian embrace of the uniied unconscious and show how this impedes the search for
a political strategy in today’s conditions.
I.
Drawing on the Lacanian theory of the subject, Žižek explains the mechanism of ideological interpellation with reference to Lacan’s “Graph of Desire” (Žižek, 1989: 87-129; Lacan, 1977: 292-325). Designed to replace the
Freudian topography of the ego, superego and id,2 Lacan’s topology of the
“subject of the signiier” formalises the fundamental operations of social discourse. It theorises the Imaginary and Symbolic identiications of the subject, as well as the “subversion of the subject” through the logic of unconscious desire driven by the Real of libidinal investments, or “enjoyment”.3
2. Richard Boothby’s Death and Desire (1991) provides a useful irst approximation to the
relation between the Freudian subject and the Lacanian subject, one that allows us to provisionally map Lacan’s often arcane topological “registers” (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and
the Real) onto the more familiar psychic agencies of the Freudian topography of the psyche.
The Freudian agencies of the ego, the (social) superego and the id map onto the Lacanian
registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real (Boothby, 1991: 106, 172-174). “From a Lacanian point of view, the source of what Freud called a ‘death drive’ is to be located in the tension between the real and the imaginary, between the ‘real of the body and the imaginary
of its mental schema’ (Lacan). The pressing toward expression of somatic energies alienated
by imaginary identiication constitutes a force of death insofar as it threatens the integrity of
that identity” (Boothby, 1991: 67). Indeed, “the death drive may be said to involve the emergence of the real in the disintegration of the imaginary—a disintegration that is efected by
the agency of the symbolic” (Boothby, 1991: 136). The symbolic actualises the unbinding of
energies bound in the alienated structure of the ego: therefore, Lacan claims that “the signiier … materialises the agency of death” (Lacan, 1972: 52). From a Lacanian perspective,
the concept of the death drive, as a drive towards diference beyond identity, fragmentation
over wholeness, heterogeneity as subversive of homogeneity, “is identiiable with the drive
to signiication” (Boothby, 1991: 136). The opposition between Symbolic signiication and
the non-symbolised Real coincides with the distinction between desire and drive. The Real
is both the fullness of enjoyment that can be postulated as existing before the advent of the
Symbolic and the remainder that persists after symbolisation, evident in the persistence of
impossibilities within the symbolic (Fink, 1995a: 26-29). Yet, there exists a major diference
between the Lacanian subject and the Freudian subject. For Lacan, the psyche is not composed of an ensemble of agencies: indeed, the agency of the subject of modernity tends to
exist only momentarily, as a “surging forth” of something unexpected within the articulation
of a discourse. If there is any agency, it is the agency of the letter, of the signiier.
3. I have consulted Bruce Fink’s lucid exposition of Lacanian psychoanalysis extensively
in the preparation of this dissertation (Fink, 1995a; Fink, 1995b; Fink, 1995c; Fink, 1995d;
Fink, 1996a; Fink, 1996b; Fink, 1997). Also useful was Joël Dor’s introduction to Lacan (Dor,
1997). Both oicial English translations of Lacan’s seminars and papers (Lacan, 1974; Lacan,
1977; Lacan, 1986; Lacan, 1987; Lacan, 1988a; Lacan, 1988b; Lacan, 1993; Lacan, 1996)
and some unoicial translations of material not available in English (Lacan, 1989a; Lacan,
1989b) were consulted for this dissertation. Jacques-Alain Miller’s articles on the master sig-
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The “Graph of Desire” can be regarded as consisting of two analytically disniier and “extimacy” (Miller, 1978; Miller, 1994) represent authoritative commentaries on
key Lacanian concepts. Needless to say, Žižek’s popular introductions form the best possible entry point into Lacanian theory (Žižek, 1991b; Žižek, 1992b; Žižek, 2001c). The wonderful, discursive introductions to desire, sexuation and the object (a) by Darian Leader
are unsurpassed for their accessibility, conceptual accuracy and sheer wit (Leader, 1996;
Leader, 1998; Leader, 2001). Other material on Lacanian psychoanalysis consulted included
the following. Joan Copjec’s presentation of the opposition between Lacanian theory and
postmodern historicism was decisive in the formation of my main contention regarding postmarxian theory, although she deals with the impact of Foucault on ilm theory and not with
postmarxian social theory (Copjec, 1994b). See also her introduction to Supposing the Subject
(Copjec, 1994a). Mark Bracher’s accessible exposition of Lacanian discourse theory presents
the “four discourses” and major Lacanian concepts (divided subject, object (a), master signiier, knowledge) was invaluable (Bracher, 1994), as was Russell Grigg’s entry on discourse in
A Compendium of Lacanian Terms (Glowinski, Marks et al., 2001: 61-70). Yannis Stavrakakis’ essay on Lacanian politics is valuable, although it subjects Lacan to the problematic of Laclau
and Moufe without recognising that Lacan cannot be aligned with historicism (Stavrakakis,
1999). I confess to a strong ainity for Richard Boothby’s unorthodox interpretation of Lacan
through the lens of Freudian libido theory (Boothby, 1991), not least because it supplies a
working model through which one can derive and confirm Lacanian propositions (as opposed
to merely accepting the word of the master). Tamise van Pelt’s introduction to Lacan’s three
registers is insightful, although she tends to conceptualise the relations between Imaginary,
Symbolic and Real as a musical score (as diferent “instruments” or “melodies” inhabiting a
homogeneous space) and not as a formal topology (as a system of formal relations between
heterogeneous operations inhabiting disjoint spaces) (van Pelt, 2000). On Lacanian concepts,
I have relied especially on Eric Laurent for the distinction between alienation and separation
(Laurent, 1995) and Maire Jaanus for the drives (Jaanus, 1995). These concepts are further
explicated by the excellent contributions to the collection entitled Reading Seminar XI (Feldstein, Fink et al., 1995). Lacan’s seminars on desire (Lacan, 1989a; Lacan, 1989b) are available
as unoicial translations by Dr. Cormac Gallagher; Žižek and Dor on the “graph of desire”
(Dor, 1997: 195-245; Žižek, 1989: 87-129) are extremely useful introductions. The relation of
desire between subject and object is raised especially in the contributions to the collection
entitled Reading Seminars I and II (Feldstein, Fink et al., 1996). Two of Fink’s students, Julia Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, develop a Lacanian interpretation of tragedy that concretises
key Lacanian concepts, especially the “graph of desire” (Lupton and Reinhard, 1993). The
essays presented in the Sic series (from Verso) are highly useful introductions to the subject
(Žižek, 1998b), the object (a) (Žižek and Salecl, 1996) and the “formulae of sexuation” (Salecl,
2000). Several collections of Lacanian essays can be found (Apollon and Feldstein, 1995;
Malone and Friedlander, 1988; Pettigrew and Rafoul, 1996), containing contributions of
varying quality. Shoshana Felman’s work on Lacan and speech act theory is now a classic
(Felman, 1983), and John Forrester’s work on Lacan and Derrida, while not really Lacanian, develops an insightful commentary on the psychoanalytic concepts of the temporality
of speech (Forrester, 1990). Jonathan Lear produces an existential Lacan in support of a
relatively depoliticised psychoanalytic ethics (Lear, 2000). A related shift happens in Stuart
Schneiderman’s homage to Lacan as a philosopher of “being towards death,” which minimises the problem of sexuality as the inal determinant in the psychoanalytic ield (Schneiderman, 1983). These compare unfavourably with Alenka Zupančič’s brilliant reconstruction of
Lacanian ethics from a Kantian perspective informed by Žižek’s work (Zupančič, 2000). A
feminist introduction to Lacanian theory is presented by Elizabeth Grosz (Grosz, 1990) and
Patricia Elliot writes a critical introduction to the often highly unorthodox appropriations of
Lacan in psychoanalytic feminism (Elliot, 1991). Finally, somewhat dated introductions that
Radical Negativity
169
tinct, but actually connected levels, which broadly correspond to the distinction between conscious and unconscious: “the level of [discursive] meaning
and the level of [libidinal] enjoyment” (Žižek, 1989: 121). As Žižek explains,
the major advance in his work identiies that:
The crucial weakness of hitherto “(post-)structuralist” essays in
the theory of ideology descending from the Althusserian theory of
interpellation was to limit themselves to the lower level, to the lowest
square of Lacan’s graph of desire—to aim at grasping the eiciency of an
ideology exclusively through the mechanisms of Imaginary and Symbolic
identiication. The dimension “beyond interpellation” which was thus
left out has nothing to do with some kind of irreducible dispersion and
plurality of the signifying process—with the fact that the metonymic
sliding always subverts every ixation of meaning, every “quilting” of the
loating signiiers (as it would appear in a “poststructuralist” perspective).
“Beyond interpellation” is the square of desire, fantasy, lack in the Other
and drive pulsating around some unbearable surplus-enjoyment (Žižek,
1989: 124).
Žižek opposes the postmodern reduction of the subject to a dispersed
multiplicity of subject-positions, lent a merely imaginary unity by a political
symbol. The concept of dispersed, multiple subject-positions promulgated
by Laclau and Moufe concentrates on ideological misrecognition of decentred discourses, theorising the formation of the subject in terms of a “subject-efect” of the multiplicity of discursive practices constitutive of the interpellated individual. By contrast with postmarxian theory, Žižek maintains
that the Lacanian (divided) subject is the quasi-transcendental condition of
possibility and impossibility for the relative unity of an ensemble of subjecttend to present Lacan as a structuralist, but that still make a valuable contribution to the
literature on Lacan, come from Anthony Wilden (Wilden, 1968), Ellie Sullivan (Ragland-Sullivan, 1986) and Annika Lemaire (Lemaire, 1977). Early eforts to come to grips with Lacan
whose importance today is strictly limited include Jane Gallop’s largely mystiied commentary on Écrits (Gallop, 1985) and the somewhat more solid work by John Muller and William
Richardson (Muller and Richardson, 1982). For the historical context for the development
of Lacanian theory consult Catherine Clement’s critical history (Clement, 1983). The best of
the critical material on Lacan is without doubt the deconstructive essay, The Title of the Letter (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1992), which develops Derrida’s comments in The Post Card (Derrida,
1987: 411-496). The limitation of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s treatment is that they allege,
on the basis of a single seminar in Lacan’s Écrits, that the unconscious subject is a centred
subject (that is, that Lacan transposes the classical subject to the domain of the unconscious).
This ignores the signiicance of the object (a) and the concept of “extimacy,” which precisely
decentre the unconscious subject. The opposite criticism is produced by Manfred Frank (Frank,
1989), who claims that the decentring of the unconscious subject prevents the development
of a subjective identity and efectively disperses the subject into the text of its utterances. For
a reply to this position, see Peter Dews (Dews, 1987). For hostile criticisms of Lacan’s work,
consult Marcelle Marini (Marini, 1992), Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991) and
François Roustang (Roustang, 1990). This is not, of course, a comprehensive bibliography of
works on Lacan; for a more complete bibliography, consult Marini (Marini, 1992).
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positions. Instead of focusing on the relation between Imaginary mirror-images and Symbolic diferences, he concentrates on the dimension “beyond
interpellation” that forms in the intersection of the symbolic ield with the
“Real of enjoyment”.
Lacan provocatively interpreted the Cartesian cogito as a disjunctive syllogism (“I think where I am not, and I am where I do not think”) to emphasise the distinction between the “substanceless subjectivity” of the subject
of the enunciation, and the embodied existence of the human individual (Dolar, 1998: 11-40; Lacan, 1998: 13). Following Lacan’s interpretation,
Žižek supposes that there exists a permanent discord, or irreducible alienation, between social subjectivity and material existence. In other words, the
dimension “beyond interpellation” that subverts every ideological form of
social subjectivity arises not from textual dissemination, but from the unbridgeable gulf between subjection to the signiier and the materiality of the
body. For Žižek, therefore, post-Althusserian theories of subjectivation lowing from Derrida and Foucault miss both the “I think” and the “I am”. They
thereby degenerate into a discursive idealism that concentrates on the efects
of textual polysemy on a dispersed ensemble of subject-positions, to the exclusion of both transcendental subjectivity and embodied existence.
Žižek’s work is undoubtedly a breakthrough. Following Mark Bracher,
we can anticipate that “Lacan’s formulation of … a circular causality between the Symbolic and the Real makes it possible to account for the fact
that individual subjects are produced by discourse and yet manage to retain some capacity for resistance” (Bracher, Alcorn et al., 1994: 1). Contrary
to postmarxian discourse analysis, political resistance arises from the subject, not from the “undecidability” of the text. Yet, like all breakthroughs,
Žižek’s Lacanian dialectic is unevenly developed, stamped with its origins
in the historicist-relativist problematic of Laclau and Moufe. In the end, despite abandoning postmarxism for Marxism, Žižek does not manage to go
beyond historicism.
This chapter performs a symptomatic analysis of a series of political
reversals, ethical hesitations and theoretical uncertainties that betray the
existence, in Žižek’s work, the reinstatement of the identical subject-object
of history. Žižek’s politicisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis relies upon a
slight, yet signiicant, vacillation in the relation between the Lacanian subject and its object. The strategy of this chapter is to demonstrate that Žižek’s
work can be divided into two periods: the postmarxian period of “radical
democracy” and the Marxist period of “Pauline Materialism”. The period of “radical democracy” runs from The Sublime Object of Ideolog y (1989) to
The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994), while the period of “Pauline Materialism”
spans The Indivisible Remainder (1996) to The Ticklish Subject (2000), as well as
more recent, minor works. Contra Žižek, the two periods are not absolutely
distinct, but instead express diferent articulations between the divided sub-
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171
ject to the “eternally lost,” “sublime object,” the Lacanian object (a). The
articulation between Žižek’s construction of Lacanian psychoanalysis and
his political ideology is crucial. Because an efective critical “division of labour” operates between Lacanian psychoanalysis and theories of ideology,
critical reception of his work has grasped alternatively at its politics, or its
Lacanian theory, without fully connecting the two. 4 In the postmarxian pe4. My position develops the insights of Sharpe into the antinomies that plague Žižek’s
position (Sharpe, 2001a; Sharpe, 2001b). By demonstrating that the poles of the “antinomies
of Slavoj Žižek” correspond to two distinct periods, I resolve Žižek’s apparent self-contradictions into technical (as opposed to descriptive) antinomies, that is, opposite conclusions from
identical premises. I then demonstrate that the latent philosophical assumption upon which
this antinomic structure rests is that of “intellectual intuition”. That is, I show how a critical
solution to the antinomy is possible. Postmarxian critics of Žižek include Laclau’s exasperated claim that Žižek regresses to a Lukácsian Marxism devoid of concrete programmatic
suggestions (Laclau, 2000b: 195-206), combined with the allegation that Žižek’s Lacanian
dialectics efect a reduction of the social ield to an allegory of the psyche (Laclau, 2000a:
288-296). For Daly, a reconciliation between deconstructive pan-textualism and the psychoanalytic category of enjoyment is possible once the Real is recast as the fantasy accompaniment of textual formations (Daly, 1999: 87) (which is psychoanalytic terms means, once the
Real is domesticated for deconstructive consumption by being reduced to the Imaginary).
Thus Žižek is to be criticised for not noticing that (with Laclau and Moufe) the universal
grows from the particular, enabling a democratic “extension” of nationalism (Daly, 1999:
89). (Žižek’s actual position is that the particular subverts/supports the universal, suiciently
indicating the limits of Daly’s “radicalism”.) Glynos endorses some of the most problematic
aspects of “Žižek’s anti-capitalism” on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of the thesis
of a “deep structural homology” between capitalism and hysteria (Glynos, 2001: 78). Late
capitalism is therefore (by inference) the descent into perversion, leading to an efort to cast
Žižek’s proposal for a social “cure” as an ethical opposition to capitalism. Glynos explains
that “if the dynamic logic of capitalism serves as one of Žižek’s central targets, it is because
it relies upon a certain sort of subjectivity”—literally so, for in this perspective, desire is the
motor of capitalism (Glynos, 2001: 86-88). Glynos is not alone: Soto-Crespi claims to detect
(following Žižek) a homology not only between surplus value and “surplus enjoyment,” but
also between the psychic operations of alienation (lack) and separation (loss), and the economic functions of commodiication and exploitation (Soto-Crespo, 2000). Donahue, likewise endorses Žižek’s “late Marxism” as a critical expression of the postmodern condition
(Donahue, 2001). Thus, for supporters and critics of Žižekian postmarxism alike, “the Real”
designates the homology between social subjectivity and political economy, something to
be deplored or explored, according to theoretico-political preference. Butler’s postmarxianfeminist critique of Žižek is a major statement of feminist suspicion towards the category of
the Real and its link to the “phallic” signiier (Butler, 1993: 196-211, 216-220; Butler, 2000:
140-151). While I am critical of Butler’s position on psychoanalysis, as canvassed in detail
in Chapter Three above, her position on Žižek exposes the political (as opposed to theoretical, which I believe she misrecognises) stakes in the “Real of sexual diference”. In briefest
compass, Lacan’s “formulae of sexuation” appear to be symbolisations of the two possible
logical stances towards totality: inconsistency and completeness (“masculine”); consistency
and incompleteness (“feminine”). There is absolutely no justiication for assigning sexes to
these logical operations—a position which, as Butler proposes, necessarily encourages the
notion that natural biological diferences in reproductive organs form the zero-degree of
human diference. That this is not exactly what Lacan states (Copjec, 1994b: 201-236), has
not prevented the conservative wing of Lacanian theory from developing what can only be
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riod of radical democracy, following Lacan, this relation is a disjunction. In
the period of “Pauline Materialism,” this becomes an identity of subject and
object. The hinge between the two periods—the moment of the break—is
the encounter with the metaphysics of the philosopher of German Romanticism, F. W. Schelling, in Žižek’s The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Abyss
of Freedom (1997).
In the Lacanian terms developed by Žižek, an identical subject-object
appears as an identity of the “subject before subjectivation” and the “sublime
object of ideology” in the moment of the political decision. This efectively
makes the subject the “creator of the totality of contents” (Lukács) of the entire social ield—an idealist position that involves an explicit rehabilitation of
the discredited doctrine of “intellectual intuition” pioneered by Schelling. I
contend that it is this impossible desire that keeps Žižek within the “event horizon” of the historicist problematic despite his recent rejection of postmarxism, trapped in the paradoxical position of denouncing postmodern politics
whilst launching joint declarations of tendency with Laclau and Butler.
called a “sexual diference fundamentalism”. Note that my brief is against the “Real of sexual
diference,” not the category of the Real, whereas Butler conlates the two without realising
that it is only the later Lacan who makes sexual diference into the stake of the Real. Note
also that the assumption that Žižek somehow “represents” the masculine position and Butler
the feminine is inaccurate: Clemens demonstrates that, in Lacanian terms, the opposite is
true (Clemens, 2003: 113-132). Žižek’s reliance on the politically-suspect positions of Laschian social psychology (the dethroning of paternal authority in the decline of the nuclear
patriarchal family leads to the rise of the incomparably more ferocious “maternal superego”
and the “pathological narcissist” of late capitalism), combined with dismissals of the NSM as
mere cultural displacements of class antagonisms, support the suggestion that a reactionary
cultural agenda is latent in the Žižekian Real. For Porter, the notion of a non-ideological
reality is a contradiction in terms, and so Žižek’s Real can only mean a “non-place” (a utopia of disalienation, maintained as the necessary-impossible ethical standard that generates
the imperative to engage in ideology-criticism) (Porter, 2002). Herbold combines Butler’s
arguments with a variant of this “there’s no such thing as a non-ideological reality” argument to propose that Žižek’s reliance on patriarchal theories vitiates his ideology-critique
by gendering the non-position “outside ideology” (Herbold, 1995: 112). Thus, for Žižek’s
feminist and postmodernist critics, the Real is some-thing, although disagreement exists as
to whether this is ultimately nature or utopia.
For the Lacanian critics—for whom the Real is a relation irreducible to a worldly referent,
whether a natural object or a social space—Žižek’s politics are irrelevant or “inconsistent”
with psychoanalytic neutrality. From this perspective it is questioned whether psychoanalysis
can make a meaningful contribution to social theory (Bellamy, 1993) and whether psychoanalytic categories have any really extra-clinical referents (Nicol, 2001). While many psychoanalytic thinkers salute Žižek’s popularisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Reinhard, 2001),
deplore its criticism of the postmodern dispersion of the subject (Flieger, 2001), express their
fascination with its religious overtones (Moriarty, 2001; Wright, 2001), or try to align Žižek
with the themes of Lacan et la Philosophie (is it philosophy? Anti-philosophy? Continental philosophy? Or perhaps—incredibly—Anglo-American philosophy?), the common denominator is a withdrawal from analysis of Žižek’s politics. Thus the Lacanians invert the most
frequent criticism of Žižek—that his cultural and political investigations are only illustrations
for psychoanalytic propositions—into an implied or explicit endorsement of this practice.
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Three Centres of Gravity … and Death
The problems with Žižek’s ethico-political stance are rooted in a philosophical anthropology of the death drive as the “real kernel” of human existence.
This anthropology secretes the metaphysics of “intellectual intuition,” or
the notion of an identical subject-object of history, as its “philosophical unconscious”. In philosophical terms, the notion of an identical subject-object
belongs to the problem of “intellectual intuition,” a possibility, according to
Kant, excluded for humanity’s merely “discursive intellect” (Žižek, 1993: 1819, 38-39; Kant, 1993: 61-68 (B59-B72), 106 (B44), 228-30 (A83/B339-A287/
B343)). In intellectual intuition, instead of regulative ictions, the Ideas of
reason become principles directly constitutive of phenomena, and correlatively, the subject capable of “intellectual intuition” can directly intuit the
noumenal aspect of the object. For an intellect capable of “intellectual intuition,” then, the Ideas of reason would immediately be objects of possible
experience, forming a sensible nature, and so such an architect of the universe would efectively generate the forms of the world from its intentional
positing of objectivity. In other words, such a subject “expressively” generates the social totality from the contents of its intentions. This idea, revived
by Fichte in the form of the “identical subject-object,” transforms the inite
human into a demi-god able to mould sensible nature into a moral world order, in conformity with the Ideas of the subject. What German philosopher
Dieter Henrich calls “Fichte’s original insight” into the supposed possiblity of intellectual intuition (Henrich, 1982), formed, according to some interpretations, the basis for Schelling’s philosophy. Intellectual intuition was
rehearsed in the twentieth century in the form of Lukács’ Hegelian Marxism, which found in the proletariat an “identical subject-object of history”
(Lukács, 1971: 149).
For Žižek, the Lacanian “Real of enjoyment”, explains the openness
of the historical process and replaces Laclau and Moufe’s category of the
“ield of discursivity” as the explanation of why discursive totalities cannot
become “structural eternities”. The subversion of symbolic structures by the
force of desire (dynamised in the inal analysis by the death drive) explains
the “restlessness” of the subject within every discursive structure. Instead of
the “end of history” characteristic of, for instance, Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel (Kojève, 1980), in Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics the agonic
process of social struggle is endless.
To anticipate somewhat, the basic Lacanian idea of the death drive
can be summarised under the Freudian heading of the “absence of an ideational representation of the drives”. Because a direct representation is missing, contingent empirical objects are “elevated to the dignity of the Thing,”
functioning, through sublimation, as substitute-representations constitutive
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of the libidinal goals of the subject (Lacan, 1986).5 In Žižek’s social theory,
these material objects are ideological rituals (connected to master signiiers),
by which individuals are interpellated as subjects.
Žižek theorises the logical zero-degree of human subjectivity, the moment between two master signiiers, as the zone “between the two deaths”
(between symbolic death, where the absence of any master signiier equals
the non-existence of social identity, and real, natural death). This is graphically captured in the “sublime” image of Eastern European rebels in 1990
“waving the national lag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out,
so that instead of the symbol standing for the organising principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its centre” (Žižek, 1993: 1). “It is
diicult to imagine,” Žižek adds, supporting the claim that the death drive
replaces Laclau and Moufe’s ield of discursivity, “a more salient index of
the ‘open’ character of a historical situation ‘in its becoming’” (Žižek, 1993:
1). At the risk of labouring the point, the hole in the lag igures the absence
of the ideational representative of the drives, the “void” of the “Thing” (the
id, or drives), contingently illed by various master signiiers (red stars, radical democracy, The American Way of Life…).
Despite the exasperation Žižek seems to generate in his critics, the relation between the “hole” of the death drive and the “political symbol” of the
master signiier maintains the unity of his theory, preventing his complex
synthesis from collapsing into a competing multitude of inconsistent positions. According to Žižek, his work contains:
three centres of gravity: Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology. … The three theoretical
circles are not, however, of the same weight: it is their middle term, the
theory of Jacques Lacan, which is—as Marx would say—“the general
illumination which bathes all the other colours and modiies their
particularity” (Žižek, 1991a: 3).
I conjecture that there is a functional distribution of theoretical roles
amongst these “three centres of gravity,” into, respectively, historical dialectics, the unconscious subject and postmarxian politics. This distribution can
be related to the Lacanian theory of the three registers: the Symbolic order
of the signiier (Hegelian dialectics); the Real of enjoyment structured by fantasy (Lacanian psychoanalysis); and, the Imaginary order of ideological misrecognition (postmarxian theory). Why, then, does the middle term deine
the “speciic gravity” of the rest of Žižek’s theoretical ensemble? My claim is
that the death drive forms a supplementary fourth centre of gravity, which
ballasts the Žižekian problematic, forms the very “substance” of Žižek’s
work, links Žižek’s “three centres of gravity” into a theoretical coniguration
and centres his research on the problem of the subject-object relation. Inso5. See (Žižek, 1994c: 87-112) for Žižek’s commentary.
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175
far as the death drive is coextensive with the Real of enjoyment (Žižek, 1989:
132), and this is located in the slot marked “Lacan,” Žižek can legitimately
claim that his work consists of three components, but that one part determines the speciic gravity of the other parts. The category of the Real overdetermines Žižek’s entire theoretical ensemble, leading Žižek to successively
(and dangerously) identify the Real with the dialectical concept of the historical violence that founds a social totality, the psychoanalytic hypothesis of the
death drive as a disruptive “third domain” between nature and culture, and
the postmarxian hypothesis of ineradicable social antagonism.
According to Žižek, psychoanalysis explains how the multiplicity of social antagonisms generating postmodern struggles for cultural recognition
are actually “a multitude of responses to the same impossible-real kernel”
(Žižek, 1989: 4). He enlarges on this proposition:
The subject is constituted through his own division, splitting, as to the
object in him; this object, this traumatic kernel, is the dimension that we
have already named as that of “death drive,” of a traumatic imbalance,
a rooting out. Man as such is “nature sick unto death,” derailed, run of
the rails through fascination with a lethal Thing (Žižek, 1989: 181).
The “lethal Thing,” Žižek’s “kernel of the Real,” stimulates/catalyses constant, but incomplete, eforts to symbolise the unnatural nature at
the centre of human existence. According to him, this core is “radically
non-historical: history itself is nothing but a succession of failed attempts to
grasp, conceive, specify this strange kernel” (Žižek, 1989: 5). In keeping with
all philosophical anthropologies, therefore, Žižek postulates an ahistorical
foundation for the unity of the concept of Man:
In this perspective, the “death drive,” the dimension of radical negativity,
cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it
deines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it;
the thing is not to “overcome,” to “abolish” it, but to learn to recognise
it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental
recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it (Žižek, 1989: 5).
The death drive, in other words, is the anthropological basis for the (negative) unity of the “human condition”. Interpreting the “discontents of civilisation” as a “hole” in every symbolic order, Žižek makes the death drive
into the basis of everything from political revolutions to cultural styles. The
“kernel of the real” is therefore also the theoretical kernel of Žižek’s work—
it is not a speculative annex, but its fundamental basis—as demonstrated by
the overdetermination, by the Real, of Žižek’s “three centres of gravity”.
That the category of the Real overdetermines Žižek’s interpretation of
Lacan is clear: his Lacan is the “third period” Lacan of the Real as a hole
in the Symbolic ield—the Lacan of the logic of fantasy, identiication with
the sinthome, the incompleteness of the Other and the mysteries of the Bor-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
romean knot (Žižek, 1989: 131-136). It is also the Lacan of an increasingly
strident insistence on the “Real of sexual diference” as the deadlock structuring every symbolisation. For Žižek, the concept of the Real is also crucial to preventing his Lacanian dialectic from relapsing into the speculative
metaphysics of intellectual intuition.
The problem is, however, that the conceptual architecture of Žižek’s
synthesis secretes a philosophical unconscious that relies upon “intellectual intuition” as its fundamental structure. The moment we have made the
“Real kernel” of human nature into the root of both social antagonism and
the historical process we risk a philosophical anthropology where the Hegelian thesis of the “substance as subject” designates a “vanishing,” “repressed” moment of identity between the subject and object. Žižek’s social
theory and cultural anthropology is therefore constantly menaced by a relapse into the supposition of an identical subject-object of history.
Lacan: The Real of Enjoyment
Žižek’s fundamental strategy for evading an identical subject-object of history is to insist on the permanent alienation of subject from object. According to him, the gap between Symbolic and Real, historical social formations
and human nature never closes, and so no society is ever the direct expression of the “subject of history,” just as there is no form of social antagonism
that directly manifests the “kernel of the Real” in social relations. Indeed,
Žižek’s Lacanian dialectic seems to reject any philosophical anthropology
of an “identical subject-object of history,” where the Hegelian dictum of the
“substance as subject” entails the alienation-expression, by the “subject of
history,” of the social totality.
Žižek’s energetic denials of speculative metaphysics are apparently sustained by the Lacanian inverse proportionality between subject and object,
because the mutual exclusion (and paradoxical imbrication) of symbolic desire and the “Real of the drives” generates a permanent unruliness in the
subject, efectively preventing any inal reconciliation of subject and object.
I am convinced that, despite Žižek’s “non-metaphysical” orientation to dialectical theory, it is fundamentally the Lacanian relation between the “divided subject” and its “eternally lost object” that maintains the separation
of subject and object, and prevents the emergence of an “identical subjectobject”. The subject of desire is alienated from the structure and separated
from an eternally “lost” object, condemned to a futile quest for completeness. The self-identity of the Lacanian subject is as impossible, from this perspective, as the identity of subject and object. So long as Žižek sticks to the
Lacanian subject, he avoids metaphysical relapse.
To grasp how the relation between Symbolic and Real works in Žižek’s
dialectics, then, we need to attend to some theoretical propositions of La-
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177
canian psychoanalysis, for my contention will be that, at a certain point,
Žižek’s position involves a signiicant revision of basic principles. Freud arrived at the concept of the death drive as a regulative hypothesis designed
to account for the phenomena that could only be explained by the categories of repetition compulsion and traumatic re-enactment (Freud, 1984:
269-340 especially 295). Yet, in the characteristic slippage from regulative
hypothesis to constitutive principle that vitiates many of Freud’s anthropological insights, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” moves inexorably towards
the “death instinct” and a speculative discussion of the government of necessity within the “living substance” (Freud, 1984: 316-317). Before long, we
are on the terrain of the speculative opposition between construction and
destruction (life and death), proper to Schopenhauerian philosophy (Freud,
1984: 322). The “elemental” struggle between speculative principles as directly constitutive of the subject’s acts is precisely what a regulative hypothesis does not license, as this cannot constitute empirical reality, but only provide an ideal focus for the convergence of theoretical categories.
Now, as is well known, the hypothesis of the death drive is a central
component of Lacan’s return to Freud. Lacan’s revision of the concept of
the death drive transforms Freud’s biological instinct into a denatured drive
and thereby restores its status as a regulative hypothesis. The Lacanian subject is not only divided in the Symbolic through “lack” (alienation)—the
“lack” of a proper signiier—but also decentred in the Real through “loss”
(separation)—the “loss” of an ideational representative of the drives.6 The
category of “lack” (alienation) is based on Lacan’s identiication of the distinction between the “subject of the statement” and the “subject of the enunciation”. The Lacanian subject—radically distinct from the conscious ego,
or “subject of the statement”—is identiied with the “subject of the enunciation” as a “fading” in discourse that results from the permanent split between the irreducible temporality of the enunciation and the synchronic network of propositions into which the statement is inserted (Fink, 1995a: 36-41;
Žižek, 1991a: 155; Lacan, 1998: 26). The efect of the insertion of the human
individual into language is not only the generation of an unconscious subject, however, but also the evacuation of libidinal satisfaction from the body,
leaving only rem(a)inders in the form of the erogenous zones.7 Phenomeno6. The Lacanian subject maintains a tenuous link with the material existence of the human subject as a natural being, but refuses any direct access to natural need and biological
instinct as a delusive immediacy. The human being’s entry into language involves not only
the division of the subject into consciousness and the unconscious, but also the bending of
the instincts into the repetitive motion of the drives. This aligns the satisfaction of the drives
with the concept of a “primal scene” or traumatic encounter with a master signiier and
suggests that the drives are “warped” into their circular path by the action of this signiier.
Lacan’s revision of the concept of the death drive transforms Freud’s biological instinct into a
denatured drive and thereby restores its status as a regulative hypothesis.
7. Symbolically-constructed desire aims for this “real object” as that which lies “beyond”
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logically, the unconscious “subject of desire” is alienated into language and
forced to seek, through a series of substitute-objects, for an eternally lost “object”. This (logically) second operation of “loss” (separation) invokes the igure of the “death drive,” for despite the “montage” of a multiplicity of drives
(oral, anal, scopic, invocatory), these can be regulatively totalised through
their identiication in the last instance with the generative cycle of sex and
death. The libidinal satisfaction of the drives is conceptualised by Lacan as
“enjoyment”—the “only substance known to psychoanalysis” (Lacan)—and
theorised as structurally distinct from “substanceless subjectivity”—hence Lacan’s recasting of the cogito as disjunctive. Jacques-Alain Miller igures this
paradoxical relation of “internal exclusion,” between divided subject and
object (a), as “extimacy,” designating the impossibility of an irruption into
the Symbolic Order of the “Real of enjoyment,” or libidinal object of the
drives, in any form other than hallucination (Miller, 1994).8
The Lacanian conception of the death drive, as the absent cause of the
compulsion to repeat, is a regulative iction and not a substantive entity (i.e.,
a biological instinct) (Fink, 1995c: 232-239). A repetition compulsion implies
a “fault” in the diferential process of signiication—something that “resists
symbolisation” and “returns to the same position”—and licenses Lacan’s
topological interpretation of the death drive as “Real” (Žižek, 1989: 132).
The Real of enjoyment therefore designates a remainder, a surplus enjoyment that escapes the network of the signiier and fastens to a signifying formation, rendering it porous. As Žižek explains:
The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel
resisting symbolisation and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no
ontological consistency. … This is precisely what deines the notion of
the metonymic object of desire. The drive, by contrast, accomplishes its goal—the achievement of satisfaction through repetition—in the structurally missed encounter with this “real
object” (Lacan, 1998: 177-181). Drive and desire, therefore, work at cross-purposes, and it
follows (somewhat paradoxically) from the endless rotary motion of the drive that the drive
is this “object,” that is, in the inal analysis, the libido as object-cause of desire, the object (a)
(Lacan, 1998: 197-199). Consequently drive, identiied by Lacan with sexuality and death
(Lacan, 1998: 199), thrives on the paradoxical satisfaction of the missed encounter, while
desire only exists when it can pursue the metonymic object of desire that is efectively a
screen concealing the object of the drives. The collapse of this linguistically mediated screen
threatens the annihilation of desire, registered by Lacan as the “aphanisis,” or eclipse, of the
divided subject before the approach of the object (a) (Lacan, 1998: 207-208, 216-219). Colloquially, for psychoanalysis, we might say that “getting what we really want” would represent a
catastrophe, namely, the extinction of desire, the inability to “want anything anymore”. The
Lacanian divided subject is therefore elementally social: were the subject whole, undivided,
able to “get of” on itself—equivalent to the coincidence of the divided subject with the object of the drives—this would represent the implosion of the subject’s relation to language,
equivalent to a psychotic break.
8. Lacan explains this conception of psychosis as a linguistic disorder, caused by the invasion by the Real into an imperfectly formed Symbolic Order, in Seminar III (Lacan, 1993).
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traumatic event: a point of failure of symbolisation, but at the same time
never given in its positivity—it can only be constructed backwards, from
its structural efects (Žižek, 1989: 169).
In Žižek’s postmarxian period, the Real receives a materialist deinition, because it is identiied with the traumatic event of a missed encounter
and with political contingency (which Žižek igures as a “surplus”), and with
“Real-impossible” structural contradictions in the social formation (which
Žižek describes as a “substance”). As Žižek explains, “the Real is an ‘entity’
which must be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure” (Žižek, 1989: 162), something that does not
exist, but nonetheless exercises a structural causality (Žižek, 1989: 163). The
Real is simultaneously posed and presupposed by the Symbolic as its “absent
cause”: the Real possesses both “corporeal contingency” as the substance of
(pre-symbolic) enjoyment and “logical [in]consistency,” as a series of disruptive efects in the symbolic texture (Žižek, 1989: 171).
While Žižek sustains the relation of mutual exclusion between Lacanian
subject and object, the Real, as an absent cause, remains an “empty grave,”
a structural impossibility. More recently, however (and perhaps with some
warrant from the later Lacan), the death drive is transformed from a hypothesis unifying certain analytic categories, to a distinct domain animating the living substance, that is, the place (and not the logical zero-degree) “between the
two deaths”. This necessarily involves the transformation of the Real from
a regulative hypothesis into something directly constitutive of phenomenal
reality—that is, into a speculative principle. “The place ‘between the two
deaths’,” Žižek airms, is “a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying
monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic kernel in the midst of
the symbolic order” (Žižek, 1989: 135). It must not be thought that this domain is the empty space beyond the Limit, the depopulated space of a purely
theoretical unity (regulative ideas as “concepts without objects”). Instead, for
Žižek, Lacan’s later work licenses a systematic exploration of the Beyond and
its intensive population with uncanny monsters and sublime heroes. The chief
exhibit in this bestiary is the “excremental” igure of the Žižekian “saint,”
whose most important attribute is that he or she is a subject who has become
an object—that is, an undivided subject who is simultaneously an object in
the Real (Žižek, 1997a: 79; Žižek, 2000e: 374-375). The suspicion that this odd
character is nothing less than a postmodern (i.e., abject) version of the identical subject-object will be conirmed in the course of this chapter. No wonder,
then, that Žižek claims that in Lacan’s (read, Žižek’s) inal work, the Real approaches what formerly was the Imaginary (Žižek, 1989: 162). It does so, I suggest, because the emergence of fantastic entities is precisely the index of the
step from the legitimate employment of reason into transcendental illusion.9
9. Žižek defends Hegel from the Kantian accusation that dialectics is a protracted relapse
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The Hegelian Performative
Nonetheless, Žižek categorically denies that the Hegelian “speculative identity” of the “substance as subject” entails regression to the pre-modern metaphysics of expressive totality posited by an identical subject-object, or “cosmic spirit,” along the lines of Charles Taylor’s inluential reading of Hegel
(Žižek, 1993: 29-33, 125-161; Žižek, 2000h: 70-124; Taylor, 1975). On lines
consistent with contemporary “non-metaphysical” dialectics, Žižek produces a non-teleological interpretation of the “negation of negation” as grounding every identity in its quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility and
impossibility (Žižek, 1989: 176-177; Žižek, 1991a: 30; Žižek, 1993: 120-124;
Žižek, 1994c: 190).10 Seeking to defend Hegel from the allegation that diainto pre-Critical metaphysics on the grounds that Hegel is actually a more consequent Kantian than Kant, for instead of plunging into speculations regarding the noumenal beyond,
what Hegel does is to disperse the supposition of an inaccessible absolute truth. (Hegel disperses the inaccessibility of absolute truth, not the illusion of a inal Truth—hence the claim of
the Logic to conceptualise the very Being of God qua Logos.) This is the signiicance of Žižek’s
repetition of the Hegelian proposition that “the supersensible is appearance qua appearance”
(Žižek, 1989: 193-199). The notion that truth forms a standard of knowledge beyond the phenomenal ield is a postulate, revealing that this impossible standard is an effect of the decision
to limit knowledge, and so with this recognition “Truth is already here” (Žižek, 1989: 191).
Žižek can therefore bring together Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian registers to suggest
that this impossibility, paradoxically located within the symbolic ield, but only cognisable
by means of a self-relexive “shift of perspective,” is what Lacan means by the Real. The
Real—especially the object (a)—is a “mere semblance” that adds nothing to the phenomenon, consisting of a non-existent anamorphic object “that can be perceived only by a gaze
‘distorted’ by desire” (Žižek, 1991b: 12). It is worth noting that Žižek’s Hegelian solution to
the division between noumenon and phenomenon, Truth and knowledge (absolute Truth, as
opposed to relative truths), is the opposite of contemporary scientiic conceptions of dialectical processes. Where Žižek tries to save Truth by sacriicing knowledge—by discovering an
object that does not exist for an objective gaze (Žižek, 1991b: 12)—materialist dialectics saves
knowledge by sacriicing Truth (Bhaskar, 1991: 15). In question is not Žižek’s description of
the subjective logic of the object (a), but its linkage with Hegelian metaphysics in the service
of a social theory and political strategy.
10. The non-metaphysical dialectics developed by Klaus Hartmann and followers responds to the metaphysics of “cosmic spirit” with two critical moves: the elimination of metaphysical explanations and the introduction of contingency into the structure of the dialectic,
considered as a category theory. Hartmann’s works in translation are relatively limited (Hartmann, 1966; Hartmann, 1972; Hartmann, 1988). The English-speaking non-metaphysical
school includes—directly—Terry Pinkard’s reconstruction of the Phenomenology (Pinkard,
1994) and the Logic (Pinkard, 1989), Richard Winield’s investigation of the Philosophy of Right
(Winield, 1988), Alan White’s analysis of the post-Hegelian (Schellingian) criticism of Hegel’s
ontology (White, 1983)—and indirectly—Robert Pippin’s reconstruction of Hegelian social
philosophy (Pippin, 1989; Pippin, 1999) and Robert Williams’ studies on the theory of recognition (Williams, 1992; Williams, 1997). Tony Smith has applied non-metaphysical dialectics
to a reconstruction of the logic of Capital (Smith, 1989). Žižek is explicitly inluenced by Pippin (Žižek, 1993: 265 note 12), but his theory of ethical life is very close to Williams’ contention
that mutual recognition involves the dynamism of the identity and diference of the Other,
that is, the Other is recognised, but not known, or known, but not recognised, instigating the
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lectics produces an expressive totality driven by the historical teleology of
dialectics of the struggle for recognition as a permanent feature of ethical life (Williams, 1997).
According to the non-metaphysical school, a metaphysical explanation involves proposing a
suprasensible entity as the explanatory ground for a phenomenon: the phenomenon “x” is
only possible if “Φ” exists. By contrast, a category theory reconstructs the intelligibility of a
domain of social practice (including natural science) by producing a systematic arrangement
of interlocking categories as the explanatory conditions of possibility for the intelligibility of
the phenomenon: the phenomenon “x” is only intelligible if the category “Φ” is employed
(Pinkard, 1989: 15). That is, Hartmann interprets Hegel as a “transcendental ontology” paradoxically “devoid of existence claims” (Hartmann, 1988: 274). In the light of this research, it
emerges that Taylor’s is the “Fichtean” interpretation of Hegel initially promoted by Hegel’s
rival, the theological philosopher Schelling (Pinkard, 1989; White, 1983). This is a somewhat
forced reading of Hegel. As Hartmann recognises, the “non-metaphysical” interpretation of
Hegel is forced to discard the philosophies of nature and history as “speculative” in the bad,
Kantian sense. Further, for Kant, post-critical metaphysics divides into two camps: theology
(or special metaphysics) concerns metaphysical entities as explanatory grounds; ontology (or
general metaphysics) concerns existence claims for being as the ground of phenomena. Kant,
for instance, claims in the metaphysical exposition of the transcendental categories of space
and time to have deduced the existence of space and time as aspects of being. This is a metaphysical ontology on Kant’s terms. The diference between pre- and post-critical metaphysics is that for Kant, a metaphysical ontology can only be inferred from the transcendental
examination of human rationality—not deduced from the divine rationality or the structure
of nature independently of human knowledge. After Kant, metaphysical ontology remains,
but only as a postulate of reason and not as a foundational claim. White concedes that Hegel
retains a general metaphysics or metaphysical ontology, but defends the proposition that
this is an inference from the immanent examination of rationality—that is, a post-critical
ontology (White, 1983: 15). Pinkard demonstrates that, from a consistent non-metaphysical
perspective, this is unnecessarily defensive (Pinkard, 1989; Pinkard, 1994). Nonetheless, both
are compelled to accept that Hegel does sometimes lapse into expressive conceptions of totality and teleological constructions of the dialectic. The idea of dialectical rationality as a
“transcendental ontology” is useful, however, because it focuses attention on the infamous
“logical hierarchy” in Hegel in a way that explains the dialectical sequence of categories
without reference to an externally imposed teleology. The interpretations ofered by both
Pippin and Pinkard sharply diferentiate between a transcendental and speculative argument. While the transcendental argument can supply the necessary and universal conditions
of possibility, a speculative argument supplies a better explanation, but not the only possible
explanation. Dialectical theories are therefore retrospectively justiied in precisely the same
way that scientiic theories are. Once Hegel is grasped as a post-critical “completion” of the
Kantian programme of demonstrating the universal and necessary conditions of possibility
for experience, it becomes clear that “Hegelian dialectic is no mysterious form of logic that
transcends or is an alternative to ordinary logic. It is a strategy of explanation for a philosophical program that attempts to reconcile most of the major dualisms in the history of philosophy. … [B]ecause Hegel took himself to be engaged in something like the Kantian “science of reason,” he was mistakenly led to see his dialectic as providing not only explanations
of the possibility of categories but also derivations of the necessity of that set of categories” (Pinkard, 1989: 6). Pinkard’s non-metaphysical reconstruction of dialectical category theory as an
“explanation of possibility” has signiicant implications for the conception of the “negation of
the negation”. In this context, then, “contradiction” and “negation” are discursive operators
for ordering categories systematically, as opposed to logical operators for making formal
inferences. Dialectical contradiction, in the context of constructing a systematic theory of
categories implies that a category, considered as a general principle that uniies a the divers-
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social reconciliation, Žižek performs a “Hegelian critique of Marx” (Žižek,
1993: 26). He airms that:
“Substance as subject” ultimately means that a kind of ontological “crack”
forever denounces as a semblance every “worldview,” every notion of the
universe qua totality of the “great chain of being”. … In short, “Hegel as
absolute idealist” is a displacement of Marx’s own disavowed ontology
(Žižek, 1993: 26).
The “lack” in the structure—the inconsistency of every totality, the existence of social antagonism—prevents any automatic social reproduction
that might exclude the dimension of political subjectivity. On Lacanian
lines, Žižek proposes that what Marx lacks (and Hegel supplies) is a concept
of the hysterical subject as correlative to the inconsistency of the social structure. Provocatively proposing that Hegel is the original postmarxist (Žižek,
1989: 5-6), Žižek reads “substance as subject” as a Hegelian anticipation of
Althusser (Žižek, 1993: 139-140), whom Žižek interprets as a partial rectiication of the Marxian ontology of social reconciliation. “Substance as subject,” therefore really means the permanence of alienation, interpreted after
Lacan as castration. As a result, Žižek regards the dialectical process as governed by contingency and driven by the “Real kernel” of the death drive:
The absolute negativity which “sets in motion” dialectical movement
is nothing but the intervention of the “death drive” as radically nonhistorical, as the “zero-degree” of history—historical movement includes
in its very heart the non-historical dimension of “absolute negativity”
(Žižek, 1989: 144).
Žižek insists that every dialectical totalisation brings a rem(a)inder that
renders the totality incomplete. This is the Lacanian equivalent of Derrida’s
celebrated shift from the “restricted economy” of classical dialectics to the
“general economy” of the signiier. Hence, the inclusion of the death drive
within the process of dialectical negation implies a breach in the “restricted
economy” of the dialectic, breaking with historical teleology and expresity of a manifold, contains a “contradiction” between what it inherently is qua category (a
uniier of a manifold) and what it is explicitly (the moment of unity alone). By unfolding the
moments of unity, diference and unity-in-diference, a series of interconnected categories
can be developed that represent “determinations” (speciications) of some category, whereby
the category is expanded from an abstract simplicity to a concrete complexity. Because, for
Hegel, determination is negation, the three moments of categorical reconstruction (abstract
unity, abstract diference, concrete unity-in-diference) develop the “negation of the negation”. Yet, in the non-metaphysical perspective, this is not a unique and necessary rational
exfoliation of being from thought, but instead a contingent (hypothetical) reconstruction of a
ield of knowledge that “explains possibility” through this sequence of quasi-transcendental
categories. The “negation of the negation” is not teleological in non-metaphysical dialectics.
This does not negate the force of Althusser’s criticism of “expressive totality” as a condemnation of vulgar Hegelian metaphysics, whose real object, however, may very well have been
Stalinism (Jameson, 1981: 34-39).
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sive totality. Therefore, Žižek claims, dialecticians need to learn to “count
to four,” by locating the dialectical triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) in the
fourfold matrix that includes “the non-dialecticisable excess, the place of
death … supposedly eluding the dialectical grasp” (Žižek, 1991a: 179). The
means for this transformation is the death drive, which restructures the dialectical triad from “thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis” to “Imaginary, Real, Symbolic” (Žižek, 1993: 120-124); following cothinker Mladen Dolar, “the imaginary balance changes into a symbolically structured network through a
shock of the Real” (Žižek, 1989: 183). The inclusion of the “supplementary
fourth” element of the death drive into the dialectical triad so transforms
Hegel that Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics becomes, for several commentators,
completely unrecognisable (Dews, 1995: 236-257; Gasché, 1994: 213, 278-279
note 214). This is not a problem for Žižek, however, who avers that “the only
way to ‘save’ Hegel is through Lacan” (Žižek, 1989: 7).
The efect on dialectics is startling: dialectics becomes a “squared totalisation,” a meta-narrative of a historical sequence of failed integrations,
enabling Žižek “to discern the strange ‘logic’ that regulates the process by
means of which the breakdown of a totalisation itself begets another totalisation” (Žižek, 1991a: 99). In other words, dialectics becomes the philosophy of
an impossible existential quest for a complete identity, instead of the historical master narrative of the ascent to absolute knowledge (Žižek, 1991a: 6168; Žižek, 1993: 171). Instead of a linear evolution, history is cyclically structured by an endless series of incomplete political revolutions.
Žižek’s paradigmatic critical intellectual is Hegel, whose Phenomenolog y
of Spirit is interpreted as “an ‘existential dramatisation’ of a theoretical position whereby a certain surplus is produced: the ‘dramatisation’ gives the
lie to the theoretical position by bringing out its implicit presuppositions”
(Žižek, 1991a: 142). Indeed, Žižek praises Hegel as “the most sublime of hysterics,” because Hegel managed to articulate the dialectical logic governing the permanent disjunction between enunciation and statement (Žižek,
1989: 191). In hysteria, an impeded traumatic kernel is converted into a somatic symptom:
[And] a homologous conversion is what deines the “igures of
consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenolog y of Spirit … In “dramatising”
his position, the subject renders manifest what remains unspoken in it,
what must remain unspoken for this position to maintain its consistency.
Therefore every “igure of consciousness” implies a kind of hysterical
theatre (Žižek, 1991a: 142).
The “elementary matrix” of Žižek’s ideology-criticism is exactly this
process of dramatising theoretical “igures of consciousness”—“a problem
disappears when we take into account (when we ‘stage’) its context of enunciation”
(Žižek, 1991a: 145)—as indicating a subjective position of enunciation in re-
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lation to a “form of life”. The hysteric (the critical intellectual) exposes the
castration of the master by disclosing that the truth of subjects’ adherence
to the master signiier is not grounded upon its ultimate rationality, but instead on the secret yield of libidinal satisfaction (“enjoyment”) that sustains
their allegiance. Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics is designed to expose the contingency of every master signiier and its dependence upon the libidinal investments of the subject (Žižek, 1993: 2).
Instead of teleological metaphysics, then, Žižek interprets Hegel as supplying a “logic of the signiier” (Žižek, 1991a: 74-100; Žižek, 1994c: 47-50)
that coincides with the concept of a “Hegelian performative”. Dialectics,
Žižek insists, reveals the radical contingency of every performative inauguration of a new social order. The “Hegelian performative” designates the
moment in which the subject, whose hegemonic articulation succeeds in
founding a new social order, acts as a “vanishing mediator” in the historical
process (Žižek, 1991a: 195-215). Dialectics therefore disperses the mirage of
historical teleology by revealing the repressed historical violence that founds
every social totality. In the aftermath of the traumatic event of inauguration, the historical violence of social institution is “gentriied,” transformed
from the radical negativity of social antagonism into the political positivity
of a diferential structure (Žižek, 1991a: 195-215). The means for this is the
ideological fantasy of a harmonious society, or “social fantasy,” which “closes the gap” between the chain of signiication and the master signiier. But
what exactly is this “repressed violence,” and in what way is this cyclical theory of history supposed to be dialectical?
As Žižek explains, it is generally supposed that Hegel converts Fichte’s
speculative equation, “I = I” into something like “the absolute subject = the
expressive totality of society and history”. Not so, Žižek claims: “Hegel converts the Fichtean I = I into the absolute contradiction Spirit = Bone … the
subject is posited as correlative to an object which precisely cannot be considered as the subject’s objectivisation” (Žižek, 2001c: 88). But what exactly is
this foreign body that prevents the emergence of an expressive totality?
Everything hinges, according to Žižek, on the dialectical circle of “presupposing the positing” and “positing the presuppositions”. Every performative speech act requires the existence of an institutional or conventional background, with the implication that an inaugural declaration (for instance, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man) must necessarily misire. The paradox is
that an institutional background is a presupposition of a declarative speech
act, yet in order to inaugurate a new social order, this background must be
posited by the declaration itself. For Žižek, this implies the existence of “impossible” performatives—pure inaugural declarations—that coincide with
the creation of new social orders and new master signiiers. The corollary is
that the performative status of the declaration is “originally repressed,” appearing as a constative (Žižek, 2001c: 96-99). In other words, the “stain on
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the mirror” correlative to the subject, the foreign body that resists incorporation in an expressive totality, is nothing other than the act of positing an
expressive totality! This act, the act of a subject capable of generating forms
of objectivity from “the absolute self-transparency of a pure performative,”
is what is “originally repressed” as a traumatic deed of self-positing (Žižek,
2001c: 88). Thus, the identical subject-object is the “originally repressed”
ground of the division between subject and object, enunciation and statement, which necessarily appear phenomenally as opposites. Is it necessary
to add that this “solution” to the problems of the philosophy of relection is
“Fichte’s original insight,” served up by Žižek as Lacanian dialectics?
Postmarxism: Hegemonic Dialectics and Political Subjectivity
We have seen that Žižek relies upon the Lacanian relation of inverse proportionality between subject and object for his claim that “saving” Hegel
through Lacan prevents a return to metaphysical dialectics. Yet Žižek also
airms that in the Act of social inauguration, subject and object coincide
in the igure of a “headless subject,” a “saint” possessed by the death drive.
This completely cancels any inverse proportionality between subject and object, invoking instead the Romantic demigod capable of an act of “intellectual intuition”. Likewise, we have seen that Žižek conceptualises the historical process as an endless dialectical sequence, in which the subject appears
as phenomenally estranged from the structural “substance”. Every dialectical totalisation results in a non-dialectical remainder, he claims, thus squaring the circle of a Lacanian dialectics. But this non-dialectical remainder
turns out to be nothing other than the originally repressed act of an identical subject-object.
We therefore have to ask whether an endless dialectical progression,
based on a quest for self-identity that departs from an original fusion and
returns to an impossible unity, is not, after all, a repetition of the Hegelian
“struggle to the death for pure prestige,” recast in the language of psychoanalysis.11 In Žižek’s opening intervention into the postmarxian ield (Žižek,
1990: 249-260) he proposes, in a variation on the “substance as subject” motif, to read postmarxism not only as political competition, but also as social
division. Žižek distinguishes the social reality of the antagonistic ight—a
political competition between apparently symmetrical opponents—from
the Real of social antagonism—where the radically asymmetrical antago11. For Alexandre Kojève, for instance, the lesson of the existential reading of Hegelianism was the interpretation of the “end of history” not as a determinate historical terminus,
but as the abandonment of the search for a divine guarantee for human rationality (Kojève,
1980). The Kojèvian “sage” combines existential resoluteness in the teeth of the “mineness”
of death with the dialectical recognition that the quest for identity culminates in the spiritual
substance of universal ethical life, thus celebrating the lack of metaphysical supports for social institutions as a personal conquest with general implications.
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nists, master and slave, engage in a ight to the death for social recognition
(Žižek, 1990: 253). He aligns this opposition with the distinction between
conscious subject-positions (the social reality of the antagonistic ight as political competition) and the unconscious subject (hegemonic dialectics as the
Real of social antagonism). Žižek can then propose that the division in the
subject leads to an unconscious drive to annihilate the other, who appears
before the subject as an object blocking self-identity. As Žižek subsequently
explains, the divided subject encounters the other as embodying their lost
“sublime” object, with the consequence that the subject is driven by the
phantasmatic desire for wholeness to destroy the corporeal body of the other, so as to recapture the subject’s “lost” object (Žižek, 1993: 68-69).
Žižek’s interpretation of hegemonic politics through the master-slave dialectic, as something like the “elementary matrix of intersubjectivity,” generates signiicant problems, compounding his uncritical acceptance of the
transposition of concepts drawn from the psychology of individuals onto
the ield of political agency. Strictly speaking, the master-slave dialectic is
not a form of intersubjectivity at all, because instead of having reference to
a shared universality, the master is the universal, while the slave is “nothing,” a singularity. In Hegel’s discussion, therefore, the master-slave dialectic is the transcendental genesis of the ield of intersubjectivity, not its paradigmatic form (Hegel, 1977: 111-119; Hyppolite, 1974: 168-177; Pinkard, 1994:
55-62). Worse still, Žižek lacks the dialectics of servile labour that enables
Hegel to make the transition from the master-slave dialectic to the opening
form of intersubjectivity, the “unhappy consciousness” (Hegel, 1977: 119-138;
Hyppolite, 1974: 190; Lukács, 1975: 480-481, 537-567). Not only does this
mean that for Žižek, the social formation is regarded as entirely constituted
by the master’s universal—literally, the “master’s signiier”—and hence, the
social formation is an expressive totality, but there is no way to get from the
“dialectics” of universal and singular to hegemonic politics. Instead, Žižek’s
social theory can only generate the perspectives of total revolt or servile
complicity: this is a “dialectics” incapable of elaborating increasingly complex forms of ethical life. In this optic, history appears as an endless cycle of
overthrows, generating no progress, which can be modelled on the Lacanian “formulae of sexuation”—the “Real of sexual diference” between masculine and feminine (Žižek, 1993: 45-80)—that is, an eternal opposition between ixed principles, “master-masculine” and “slave-feminine”.
Perhaps these considerations explain Žižek’s extraordinary indiference
to the critical Hegelian distinction between the “absolute negativity” of “the
natural negation of consciousness … which remains without the required
signiicance of recognition” (Hegel, 1977: 114) and the “radical negativity”
of self-consciousness, which generates a continuous movement of transcendence in quest of self-relexivity through mutual recognition. Žižek employs
“absolute negativity,” or “abstract” negation, as if it were equivalent to “rad-
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187
ical negativity,” or “determinate” negation, because, for him, the “absolute
negativity” of the death drive dynamises the historical process, by energising the “radical negativity” of the “substanceless subjectivity” of the unconscious subject. It is not the desire for recognition, but the drive to annihilate
the other, that supplies the fundamental dynamism, if not of progress, at
least of “the eternal return of the same,” namely, the endless cycle of political revolutions. Yet, if desire is the desire of the Other, while drive is a pure
desire, desire of desire itself, then on this dialectical schema, drive will be the
return of desire into itself—conditional upon the recognition of the “nonexistence,” that is, the contingency, the inconsistency, of the Other. But this
is precisely the schema whereby Reason, taking itself as an object, inally returns from the long exile of the Spirit into Hegel’s “end of history,” once it
realises that rationality is not resident in God or Nature, but is the product
of intersubjective consensus.
Žižek’s reliance on the Hegelian dialectic to develop a social theory,
then, implies that the struggle for recognition (the master-slave dialectic)
is inally a desire for self-identity, that is, for the coincidence of subject and
object. According to Hegel, “the object of Desire is … the universal indestructible substance … the Notion of Spirit” (Hegel, 1977: 110)—that is, the
universal medium of intersubjective community, in which “I” is “we” and
conversely (Hegel, 1977: 110). And as we shall discover, the “universal Truth”
that Žižek will deliver himself of consists exactly in the revelation that the
highest deed of self-relexive subjectivity is the production of a new master
signiier, whereby the subject who refuses to give way on their desire indeed
arrives at the “spirit of community”. There is surely no warrant for this in
Lacan. What is lost in Žižek’s translation of psychoanalysis into spiritual dialectics is the relation of mutual interference between desire and drive, and
therefore the counter-inality dominating the Lacanian conception of the
“dialectic of desire”. For Lacan, the self-relexive culmination of the dialectic in an identical subject-object is structurally impossible as a social act. For
Žižek, by contrast, the articulation of an “impossible,” performative contradiction turns out to disclose the Absolute itself, in a “vanishing” moment of
social inauguration.
Radical Negativity: The Philosophical Anthropolog y of the Death Drive
Despite Žižek’s denials, then, the major elements of the metaphysical interpretation remain in position: an expressive relation between theoretical ideologies and cultural formations, combined with the agency of the subject,
as “vanishing mediator” in the generation of discursive totalities, implies a
theory where the social totality is the alienation-expression of a “subject of
history”. Again, Žižek’s explicit anthropology appears to refuse this conclusion, while in actuality relying on the structure of “intellectual intuition” for
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its truth-claims.
Žižek employs the concept of the Real of enjoyment as a hole in the
Symbolic ield to present a post-structural anthropology that departs from
Lévi-Strauss.12 Instead of the Symbolic ield delineated by structural anthropology, which exhibits the closure characteristic of a centred structure, he
conceptualises the socio-symbolic ield as decentred, perforated by a hole at
its centre. This hole is the Real of social antagonism, and at the centre of
the structure we ind not an ahistorical governing principle, but instead an
empty signiier, a zero-symbol that is the site for political contestation and
contingent articulations. Although Lévi-Strauss’ two tribal moieties seem to
inhabit diferent discursive universes, “the very splitting into the two ‘relative’ perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant”—not, Žižek anxiously assures us, “to the objective, ‘actual’ disposition of buildings, but to a
traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism”—which happens to be ideology as the social “zero-institution” (Žižek, 2001c: 221). The modern political
Left and Right, Žižek adds helpfully, behave as do these two moieties. The
struggle for hegemony, then, “is … precisely the struggle for how this zeroinstitution will be overdetermined, coloured by some particular signiication” (Žižek, 2001c: 222).
At the same time, this is a post-structural anthropology, in that the root
of social divisions is not some positively existing characteristic of human nature, but instead the “negative essence” of the signiier. Social antagonism is
an expression of the Real of social diference (whose root, Žižek proposes, is
sexual diference), which can ultimately be explained through the very existence of diference per se, as a diference that retroactively appears to pre-exist
every diferential signiication (Žižek, 2001c: 223). This diference “in-itself”
12. (Žižek, 2000c: 112-113; Žižek, 2001c: 221-222). According to Žižek, “a tribe is divided
into two subgroups, “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we
ask an individual to draw … the plan of his village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we
obtain two quite diferent answers, depending on his belonging to one or the other subgroup.
Both perceive the village as a circle, but for one subgroup, there is, within this circle, another
circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other subgroup,
the circle is split in two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the irst group
(let us call it “conservative corporatist”) perceives the plan of the village as a ring of houses
more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the
second (“revolutionary antagonistic”) subgroup perceives the village as two distinct heaps
of houses separated by an invisible frontier. The central point of Levi-Strauss is that this
example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group membership: the very splitting into the
two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant—not to the objective,
“actual” disposition of buildings, but to a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism that
inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize” and come
to terms with; an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the village’s plan are simply two
mutually exclusive attempts to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the
imposition of a balanced symbolic structure” (Žižek, 2001c: 221-222).
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forms the core of Žižek’s anthropology. As we have seen from Žižek’s (post-)
structural anthropology, the only certainty is that social division exists. But
once social division (pure diference) is grasped as certain knowledge, we
have arrived at the (absolute) Truth. Indeed, it is by means of the basic matrix of self-relexive inversion that Žižek can denounce the efort to occupy
a neutral metalinguistic position of enunciation while at the same time producing a theory of the Truth of ideology. Žižek correlates the shift from the
desire for a neutral-universal stance to recognition of its impossibility with
the move from desire to drive, Symbolic to Real (Žižek, 1994d). This suggests a phenomenology of ideology, whereby the subject strives towards the
limits of subjectivity, without for a moment abandoning the valorisation of
subject-centred descriptions of experience characteristic of Žižek’s rejection
of science for philosophy (Resch, 2001). Such a position is grounded in idealist assumptions regarding the primacy of thinking over materiality, so that
“logical inconsistency” gradually, but inevitably, supplants “corporeal contingency” as the basic deinition of the Real (Resch, 1999).
Žižek accepts the postmodern criticism that ideology-critique implies
a privileged position of enunciation from which the agent can denounce
ideological mystiication, but proposes that nonetheless we must not renounce the concept of an extra-ideological reality (Žižek, 1994d: 17). According to Žižek:
“I am a replicant” is the statement of the subject at its purest—the
same as in Althusser’s theory of ideology, where the statement “I am
in ideology” is the only way for me to truly avoid the vicious circle of
ideology (Žižek, 1993: 41).
Robert Pfaller shows how Žižek equates an ambivalent self-relexivity
with non-ideological truth, implying that the subject, by manifesting their
grasp of the impossibility of non-ideological subjectivity, nonetheless manages to “vanishingly” enunciate a non-ideological proposition (Pfaller, 1998:
225-246). This “vanishing” form of (non-)subjectivity is theorised by Žižek
as “subjective destitution,” the “place between the two deaths” occupied by
those sublime heroes (who are equally abject monsters) reduced to automata
of the death drive. According to Žižek, then, the performative contradiction
inherent in the self-relexive claim to a “universal ideology” is less an index
of delusion than a testimony to truth—as Pfaller shows, Žižek relies upon
the claim that the “liar’s paradox,” qua impossible statement, is self-relexively inverted into the enunciation of an impossibility (Pfaller, 1998: 233-234).
Thus, just as “the supersensible is appearance qua appearance,” the nonideological is ideology as ideology. That is, the moment a universal stance
is conceptualised as merely relative, only the result of subjective positioning
“in ideology,” we have already grasped the truth of ideology by self-relexively enunciating a performative contradiction. Žižek can therefore main-
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tain that “stepping out of … ideology is the very form of our enslavement to
it” (Žižek, 1994d: 6), while conducting the criticism of ideology: non-ideological objectivity is a limit condition of subjectivity (“subjective destitution”),
whose existence can be self-relexively inferred from within ideology.
The circular character of Žižek’s position generates a link between the
“leap of faith” and “absolute knowledge,” reminiscent of Lukács’ “wager on
communism” before writing History and Class Consciousness. It is therefore not
surprising that Žižek’s constant polemical denunciations of “historicism,”
for its lack of recognition of the “non-historical kernel of human existence,”
are laced with bold claims to have adopted a “dogmatic” stance, so that,
for instance, we are informed that “Marxism and psychoanalysis are ‘infallible’ at the level of their enunciated content” (Žižek, 1994c: 183). To claim
that Žižek remains within the gravitational ield of historicism will perhaps
generate consternation, for the dominant tendency in criticisms of Žižek is
to take a position for or against his supposed anti-historicism. Crusader for
Cartesian certainty, defender of the cogito and supporter of the Truth-Event
of militant materialism (the October Revolution), Žižek has produced numerous critiques of “postmarxian historicism” and “postmodern sophism”
(Žižek, 1993: 1-5; Žižek, 1996b: 214-218; Žižek, 2000c: 112-114; Žižek, 2001c:
80-81). In opposition to the historicist tendency of radical democratic postmarxism, Žižek has from the beginning proposed that “over-rapid historicisation makes us blind to the real kernel that returns as the same through
diverse … symbolisations” (Žižek, 1989: 50). His position is that it is impossible to entirely contextualise a phenomenon: the dissolution of every event
into its socio-historical context implies the positioning of the analyst in the
“view from nowhere,” the god’s-eye position of pure, neutral metalanguage
situated “above” the historical texture. The apparently modest perspectival
relativism of the historicist therefore masks an extraordinarily immodest
claim to perfect neutrality, to possess the “master’s gaze, which viewing history from a safe metalanguage distance, constructs the linear narrative of
‘historical evolution’” (Žižek, 2001c: 80). Žižek connects the metanarrative
of legitimation that supports historicism with the fundamental operation
of ideology (Žižek, 1991a: 130) and regards deconstruction as the “highest
expression” of contemporary historicism, because its endless recontextualisations engage precisely such a metalinguistic claim (Žižek, 1989: 153155; Žižek, 1991a: 87-90). What historicism overlooks is the eternal return
of the same of difference itself in every historico-symbolic text, conceptualised
psychoanalytically as “lack” (the absence of a presence) (Žižek, 2000c: 114;
Žižek, 2001c: 223).
The problem is that this deinition of the Symbolic as based in a pure,
non-conceptual diference, besides having surprisingly Deleuzian overtones
(Deleuze, 1994), coincides with Žižek’s deinition of the Real, collapsing
“lack” into “loss,” Symbolic into Real—and subject into object.
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II.
Against the conceptual background of Žižek’s Hegelian tendency to close
the gap between subject and object, it should not be surprising that despite
the brilliance of his Lacanian interpretation of ideological interpellation,
several small, but signiicant, revisions lead to a reversal of the Lacanian
“agency of the letter” into a Hegelian “agency of the subject”. Žižek’s extension of the Althusserian concept of ideological interpellation is a powerful
Lacanian reformulation of the process of subject formation. By introducing
an unconscious dimension to the Althusserian subject, Žižek can explain the
hidden dependence of the subject on libidinal investments that are denied
in conscious discourse. My contention is, however, that Žižek’s exposition
of the Lacanian graph of desire as an extension of the theory of interpellation drifts subtly from Althusser and Lacan towards Hegel and Schelling.
We therefore have to examine this discursive inversion—which determines
Žižek’s theoretico-political impasse—very closely in the next sections. I investigate the accuracy of Žižek’s interpretation of the Lacanian “Graph of
Desire,” in the light of the inluence of the historicist problematic of Laclau
and Moufe on his work. Then, I propose to clarify the opposition between
the Althusserian-Lacanian “agency of the letter” and the Hegelian “agency
of the subject” by means of Lacan’s matrix of the four discourses (Bracher,
1994: 107-128; Žižek, 1998c: 74-113). I claim that Žižek’s reformulation replaces the Lacanian discourse of the master with a hysterical discourse on
interpellation.
Beyond Interpellation: The Lacanian Interpretation of Althusser
The Lacanian interpretation of Althusser involves two signiicant rectiications to the concept of ideological interpellation. (1) Althusser’s imaginary
relation to the real conditions of existence becomes less important, in interpellating the subject, than the role of an ideological “master signiier” (for
instance, “God,” or “Communism”), which is held to form the horizon of
expectations for the subject by totalising every chain of signiication. (2) The
material rituals of ideological practice are considered to be efects of an unconscious repetition-compulsion, generated by the trauma of interpellation,
so that the unconscious dimension in ideology is rooted less in its subjectcentred character, than in the existence of psychic division and intrapychic
conlict.
The Althusserian vignette of “hailing,” however, involves the paradox
that individuals recognise themselves as the object of an interpellation before they
have acquired the minimal self-identity constitutive of subjectivity. The Lacanian interpretation of Althusser accepts the force of this paradox, namely, that the subject’s entry into language happens by means of the intervention of an initially meaningless command. This interpellation primordially
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wounds the subject, permanently dividing the subject between an inefable
singular existence and an anticipatory social identity that is structurally incomplete. The nature of this wound is the absence of the “ideational representative of the drives”: the drives cannot be directly represented in the psyche, only appearing through delegates, suggesting to Lacan the model of a
“hole” that is contingently illed by substitute objects.
Adapting Lacan’s notion to the theory of ideology, Mladen Dolar suggests that the interpellation of subjects proceeds by means of the introjection
of the ideological command as an uncomprehended alien object—a meaningless material voice, a blind authoritarian gaze (Žižek, 1996a)—that is only
retroactively accepted as the locus of Meaning (Dolar, 1993: 75-96). Žižek proposes that “belief is an afair of obedience to the dead, uncomprehended letter,” and expands upon this apropos of “Kafka as critic of Althusser”:
Of course, in his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser gave
an elaborated, contemporary version of this Pascalian “machine”; but
the weak point of his theory is that he or his school never succeeded
in thinking out the link between the Ideological State Apparatuses and
ideological interpellation … The answer to this is, as we have seen, that
this external “machine” of State Apparatuses exercises its force only in
so far as it is experienced, in the unconscious economy of the subject,
as a senseless, traumatic injunction. … That leftover, far from hindering the
full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it
(Žižek, 1989: 43).
The persistence of an enigmatic ideological interpellation in the unconscious tends to hystericise the subject, thus instigating an existential questioning with the potential to undermine the ideological interpellation itself.
The after-efects of this traumatic process of division between the signiier
and enjoyment continue to resonate in the unconscious, which is “structured like a language,” composed of introjected representations, leading to
a variety of “formations of the unconscious,” ranging from everyday parapraxes to hysterical symptoms. Lacan’s conception that “the unconscious is
structured like a language” depends upon the distinction between the signiier (the Symbolic Order that consists of diferences without positive terms)
and the letter (the material support of signiication that is inherently meaningless). For Lacan, the unconscious is composed of letters which function as
objects in the drives (Fink, 1995c: 223-229; Žižek, 1994c: 173). These letters
are the depository of the subject’s unconscious identiications to a sequence
of introjected master signiiers, considered not as elements of the chain of
signiication, but as objects lodged in the unconscious (Fink, 1995a). Paradigmatically, these letters are objects (a) (Lacan, 1974: 83-100). According to Lacan, the object (a) is both the object in desire—the phantasmatic substance
of the desired object, which is always the desire of the Other, that is, the desire to be desired by the Other—and the cause of desire—a void in the sub-
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193
ject that converts the linearity of instincts into the circularity of drive. The
unconscious therefore consists of a chain of master signiiers that simultaneously function as objects (a), material letters in the combinatory of the unconscious. Hence, the Lacanian subject is both divided between the master
signiier (meaning) and the object (a) (being) (Žižek, 1996b: 79), and decentred,
because of the non-coincidence of the metaphorical master signiier with the
object (a) as metonymy of an impossible desire. If the master signiier is the
“metaphor of the subject,” substituting in discourse for the material existence of the subject, and this master signiier is also the metonymy of the desire of the subject, then whenever the subject designates an object of desire in
a chain of signiication governed by this master signiier, they constitutively
absent themselves from this discourse even as they indicate that their “real”
object lies perpetually beyond the horizon of what they are speaking about.
Following Dolar, the object (a), or “sublime object of ideology,” is the objectival aspect of the master signiier—its material existence as a letter—and
it functions as the “rigid designator” within, or “objective correlative” to,
the signiication governed by the master signiier (Žižek, 1989: 95-100). Approximately, the sublime object—the Lacanian object (a)—is the phantasmatic “referent” of the master signiier, the impossible desire that the master
signiier “ixes” into position as a sublime “beyond” to the ideological ield,
while the “subject before subjectivation” is the vanishing “inal signiied” of
the master signiier (Žižek, 1991a: 27). An ideological interpellation, introjected into the psyche of the subject as a meaningless command, instigates
a compulsion to repeat the senseless material rituals of ideology. The force
of ideological interpellation depends efectively on the lodgement of a fragment of the state machine within the subject, in the form of a senseless, traumatic stain, a dead letter, an unintelligible command to obey.
By means of this conceptual apparatus, Žižek claims to theorise “enjoyment as a political factor,” that is, the material rituals of ideological practices as efects of a repetition-compulsion. Because the master signiier is an
object for the drives, there is a libidinal satisfaction in the repetition of the
rituals associated with ideological practices: the acting out of the material
aspect of the symbolic ideological ritual gratiies the libidinal investments
of the subject. For Žižek, the paradigmatic instance of this libidinal investment is the Fisher King from the Grail legend, whose performative incompetence exposes a senseless repetition-compulsion, that is, an enactment of an
ideological ritual lacking the master signiier. This “enjoyment,” the libidinal investment in the material ritual, shorn of the formal screen of performative signiication, is externalised as the suppurating wound in the Fisher
King’s thigh (Žižek, 1989: 76-84; Žižek, 1993: 145-199). The basic idea is that
we are held to the ideological mystiication not just because it “explains” the
“real conditions of existence” from a subject-centred perspective, nor even
because the ideological master signiier totalises the discursive ield and en-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
ables meaning to emerge, but because we “get of ” on, obtain libidinal satisfaction from, the stupid material ritual. The Althusserian thesis that ideology consists precisely of such institutional rituals and material practices
(“kneel down and you shall believe”) exposed, for instance, the mode of operation of the Stalinist regimes, as well as the most efective path towards
generalised resistance (Žižek, 1993: 229; Žižek, 1994c: 59-65), and can be applied to commodity fetishism, where we persist in mystiied practices despite
formal knowledge of the mechanisms of exploitation (Žižek, 1989: 11-53).
The Lacanian “Graph of Desire”
In Chapter Three of The Sublime Object of Ideolog y, Žižek provides a virtuoso
exposition of the “Graph of Desire” as a Lacanian extension to the Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation (Žižek, 1989: 87-129). Despite my
fundamental agreement with Žižek’s intentions, I want to draw attention to
two aspects of Žižek’s demonstration that introduce a shift towards an identical subject-object. The irst is Žižek’s understatement of the unconscious
Symbolic Law, which leads him to treat the unconscious as consisting exclusively of libidinal enjoyment, neglecting to stress the fundamental generative role of the prohibition of incest. The second is Žižek’s substitution of the
agency of the subject—who is supposed to “anticipate” their interpellation in
an act of decision—for the Lacanian agency of the letter—where the subject
has their name efectively imposed on them as an alien destiny. The main
stake in Žižek’s discussion is his demonstration that “beyond” the dispersed,
multiple subject-positions occupied by the agent, there lies not only the logical quasi-transcendental of the empty (“barred,” or unconscious) “subject
before subjectivation,” but also the materiality of the object of the drives and
the unconscious libidinal investments of the subject. In general, in the postmarxian ield, Žižek’s concepts of the “subject before subjectivation” and the
“sublime object of ideology” depend upon the category of the Real of enjoyment as the hidden support for, and subversion of, the Symbolic ield. On
this basis, Žižek aims to theorise “enjoyment as a political factor,” that is, the
hidden dependence of the reigning master signiier upon a now “vanished”
intervention of the “subject before subjectivation,” whose current hysterical
posture is sustained by a secret yield of enjoyment gained from their subjection. The aim of this analysis will be to liberate the subject from the illusion
of the existence of a “sublime object of ideology” and to force recognition
of the world-constituting power of the subject qua vanishing mediator in the
historical process. By employing the Lacanian “Graph of Desire,” Žižek
therefore aims to demonstrate why enjoyment is the truth of ideology and to
explain how it is possible for the critical intellectual, on the basis of this revelation, to preserve critical distance from the master signiier.
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195
Completed Graph
S(∅)
Enjoyment
(◊D)
(◊a)
Castration
d
s (O)
O
Signifier
Voice
e
i(o)
I(O)
FIGURE: The completed form of the Graph of Desire (Žižek, 1989: 121; Lacan, 1977: 313).
In the lower “level” of the Graph of Desire, the vector running from
the “Signiier” to the “Voice” represents the diachronic dimension—or syntagmatic axis of selection—of a diferential chain of signiication. The synchronic dimension of the process of anchoring—or paradigmatic axis of
combination—is represented as an equivalential chain running from the
divided subject, , to the Ego-Ideal, I(O). (This vector travels through the
strictly unconscious upper “level” of the Graph of Desire, discussed below.)
What Lacan designates as the “efect of retroversion” indicates that the intervention of a master signiier ixes the meaning of the chain of signiication: “the point de capiton represents, holds the place of, the big Other, the
synchronous code, in the diachronous signiier’s chain” (Žižek, 1989: 103).
The retroactive result of the intervention of the master signiier is symbolic
identiication, I(O), which stands both for an Imaginary Other and for the
Ego-Ideal that is the locus of the symbolic identiication of the subject. The
intersections of the diachronic chain and synchronic ield—where S2 is replaced by s(O), the meaning of the locution, and S1 by O, the Other, that is,
locus of the code, or “treasury of the signiier”—deine at once the minimal
diferential articulation, S2—S1, and the equivalential relation created between these terms by the operation of the master signiier. The point i(o)—
or ideal ego—is the locus of the metonymic object—the object that metonymically designates the object of desire. The point e—or ego—denotes the
“me” of intersubjective discourse. The ego is constituted through the imag-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
inary misrecognition of a diferential (decentred) subject-position as a centred identity. Lacan refers to the loop travelling through the points , e, O,
s(O), i(o), and I(O), as the “chatterbox,” because this represents an ego-dominated discourse wherein the subject, trying to express themselves, primarily makes an efort to realise an ideal that is supported by an imaginary selfconception (Lacan, 1989a: Seminar of 6 November 1957). Less prejudicially,
it is the circuit of rational discourse, for “apart from being the circuit of the
transmission of information … it is the locus of the concrete discourse of the
‘speakingbeing’ trying to make themselves understood” (Dor, 1997: 200).
It cannot be over-emphasised that for post-Althusserian theories of ideology, the circuit of rational discourse is all there is. For postmodernism, the chain of
signiication is a chain of “loating” subject-positions, articulated within the
horizon of action of a political conjuncture, totalised by means of a political
symbol. According to Ernesto Laclau, for instance, a dispersed ensemble of
subject-positions (gay, black, worker, etc.) attains its relative unity through
the exceptional position of one of the subject-positions (for instance, radical
democrat), which acts as a universal equivalent and thereby homogenises
the otherwise heterogeneous sheaf of identities. Žižek opposes the postmodern reduction of the subject to a dispersed multiplicity of subject-positions,
lent a merely imaginary unity by a political symbol. The thrust of Žižek’s
argument is, however, that the “subject before subjectivation” and the “sublime object of ideology” cannot be reduced to a question of the identity of the
agent. In the Lacanian terms developed by Žižek, this debate can be explored by means of the following question: given that the Lacanian “Graph
of Desire” consists of two analytically distinct “cells,” or levels, why is there a
second level, “beyond” the interplay of Imaginary identity and Symbolic identification?
The opposition between the signiier and the letter—and the persistence of the letter in the unconscious—provides the basis for the Lacanian
explanation of why there is something more than the “circuit of rational discourse”. The lack of a inal signiier in the process of interpellation implies
the incompleteness of identity—leading to quest for a guarantee in the Real
for the singular existence of the subject. The subject experiences their lack of
a inal signiier as the loss of an object, paradigmatically, the loss of fusional
unity with the mother correlative to their entry into language. Bruce Fink
refers to this eternally lost object—the object (a)—as a rem(a)inder from the
entry into language, and it can be described (approximately) as the unconditional demand for an impossible fullness (Fink, 1995a: 60-61). The existence of a phantasmatic, or “sublime” referent of the master signiier explains
“why Lacan developed his graph of desire apropos of … a drama of failed interpellation” (Žižek, 1989: 120): in “alienation,” the subject loses its fusional unity with the mother and enters language under the sign of an incomprehensible master signiier; in “separation,” the master signiier is experienced as a
contingent placeholder for a lost plenitude that the subject desperately seeks.
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197
The subject of desire is the void of an empty placemarker in discourse—
the logical space occupied by successive (incomplete) identities. At the same
time, these identities, successively adopted by the subject, are bound into a
relative unity by the characteristic stance that the subject takes up towards
these identities—in short, by the way that the subject “gets of ” on various
subject-positions, by the characteristic libidinal investment that the subject
makes in an identity. Hence, every interpellation-subjectivation is haunted
by the possibility for the emergence of a hysterical question, addressed to the
master signiier: “is that it?” As Žižek explains:
the only problem is that this “square of the circle” of interpellation, this
circular movement between symbolic and imaginary identiication,
never comes out without a certain leftover. After every quilting of the
signiier’s chain, which retroactively ixes its meaning, there always
remains a certain gap, an opening which is rendered in the third form of
the graph by the famous Che Vuoi?—“You’re telling me that, but what do
you want with it, what are you aiming at?” (Žižek, 1989: 111).
The (hystericising) question—“Che Vuoi?” “What do you want?”—is experienced by the subject as an unbearable anxiety. Anxiety—the only emotion that never lies (Lacan)—bears witness to the dimension of the death
drive, the dimension of the Real of enjoyment. It is critical to stress that the
anxiety generated by the enigmatic (non-)reply of the Other points beyond
identity: the hysterical question is not “what am I,” but “what do I want,”
not just a question of the incompleteness of identity, but primarily of the
libidinal investments that subvert every identity. “The hysterical question
opens the gap of what is ‘in the subject more than the subject’ of the object in
subject which resists interpellation-subordination of the subject, its inclusion
in the symbolic network” (Žižek, 1989: 113). Hence, the hysterical question,
by highlighting the contingency of the master signiier, refers to the failure
of interpellation, to the inability of the subject to fully assume their symbolic
mandate. According to Žižek:
This is the dimension overlooked in the Althusserian account of
interpellation: before being caught in the identiication, in the symbolic
recognition and misrecognition, the subject () is trapped by the Other
through a paradoxical object-cause of desire in the midst of it, through
this secret supposed to be hidden in the Other: ( ◊ a)—the Lacanian
formula of fantasy (Žižek, 1989: 44).
For Žižek, this “what does the Other want from me?” indicates the Symbolic dimension of desire, as opposed to Imaginary demand (Žižek, 1989:
112). Desire, deined by Lacan as what in demand is irreducible to need, is
borne by the signiier and takes the form of an enigma, for it is ultimately
the desire of the Other.
The subject is always fastened, pinned, to a signiier which represents
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him for the other, and through this pinning he is loaded with a symbolic
mandate, he is given a place in the intersubjective network of symbolic
relations. The point is that this mandate is ultimately always arbitrary:
since its nature is performative, it cannot be accounted for by reference
to the “real” properties and capacities of the subject. So, loaded with
this mandate, the subject is automatically confronted with a certain Che
Vuoi?, with a question of the Other (Žižek, 1989: 113).
Žižek’s explanation is consistent with Lacan’s explication of the Graph
of Desire apropos of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Lacan, 1989b), which Lacan interprets as the drama of the reluctant adoption, by the subject, of an arbitrarily imposed symbolic mandate. The subject can only enter the Symbolic (the
social ield) by means of a retroactive identiication that results in an anticipatory (Imaginary) self-identity—an anticipation that can only be ratiied in the
“future anterior” as what the subject discovers itself as “having meant”. The
fractured dialectic of alienation into an anticipatory, imaginary identity and
retroactive, symbolic identiication with an enigmatic signiier, determines
the perpetual undercurrent of anxiety that pertains to the existence of the
subject. The subject enters the social ield, then, by assuming a symbolic
mandate, and, since the reply of the Other is necessarily enigmatic, what
the subject inds upon thus entering the Symbolic Order is automatically the
disjunction between their anticipatory identiication and the enigmatic (non)
conirmation in the reply of the Other. This disjunction marks out the space
of the question mark, Che Vuoi?
( ◊ a): “Divided Subject Desperately Seeks Lost Object …”
The completed form of the “Graph of Desire” illustrates the inal form of the
libidinal economy of the Lacanian subject. Paradigmatically, the two levels of Lacan’s graph represent the permanent gap between the enunciation
and the statement (Lacan, 1998: 138-139), recast by Žižek in terms of the illocutionary force (the performative dimension) and the locutionary content
(the constative dimension) of that speech act by which a person assumes a
social mandate (Žižek, 1989: 113; Žižek, 2001c: 69-110). The two resulting
levels of the graph (meaning and enjoyment) articulate the diferent aspects
of the perforation of the Symbolic Order by “a pre-symbolic (real) stream
of enjoyment—what happens when the pre-symbolic ‘substance,’ the body
as materialised, incarnated enjoyment, becomes enmeshed in the signiier’s
network” (Žižek, 1989: 122). As Žižek summarises, the general result of the
insertion of the human body into the realm of the signiier is that:
by being iltered through the sieve of the signiier, the body is submitted
to castration, enjoyment is evacuated from it, the body survives as
dismembered, mortiied. In other words, the order of the signiier (the
big Other) and that of enjoyment (the Thing as it embodiment) are
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199
radically heterogeneous, inconsistent; any accordance between them is
structurally impossible (Žižek, 1989: 122).
The second stage of the Graph is unconscious and the line passing from
“Enjoyment” to “Castration” represents an unconscious chain of signiication that persists beneath the conscious articulations of the subject. This suggests the existence of an unconscious positioning of the subject, at the level
of the enunciation, with respect to the ield of the Other and the objects of
unconscious desire. To grasp what Lacan means by the discontinuous line of
unconscious signiication, it is worth noting that he considers paradigmatic a dream of Anna Freud, aged two years old (recounted by Freud), which
connects the subject to a string of objects denied her during the day. Without
hesitation, Lacan locates the surname at the symbol S(Ø) and the forbidden
objects at ( ◊ D), the symbol for the drives (Lacan, 1989b: Seminar of 3 December 1958). The signiier of the incompleteness of, or lack in, the Other,
appears at the intersection of enjoyment and the signiier:
as soon as the signiier is penetrated by enjoyment, it becomes inconsistent,
porous, perforated—the enjoyment is what cannot be symbolised, its
presence in the ield of the signiier can be detected only through the
holes and inconsistencies of this ield, so the only possible signiier of
enjoyment is the signiier of the lack in the Other, the signiier of its
inconsistency (Žižek, 1989: 122).
Correlative to this inconsistency of the signiier stands the inconsistency
of the social—the unconscious recognition that the symbolic social structure
is “crossed-out by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack” (Žižek, 1989: 122). This inconsistency in the ield of the social prevents any closure and implies that the
subject is not radically alienated in the structure as a mere bearer of structures. On the right hand side of the intersection of enjoyment and the signiier stands the formula of the drive, ( ◊ D), indicating the incompleteness of
the evacuation of enjoyment from the body. The drive and its satisfactions—
obtained in the endless circuit around the object (a)—are inscribed on the
body as the erogenous zones and designated by D, symbolic demand (as opposed to natural need). Žižek interprets ( ◊ D) as the formula of sinthome:
“a particular signifying formation which is immediately permeated with enjoyment—that is, the impossible conjunction of enjoyment and the signiier”
(Žižek, 1989: 123).
Žižek’s proposition is that fantasy is the means by which the gap between
the upper and the lower levels of the “Graph of Desire” is closed. As Žižek explains, “fantasy … is a construction enabling us to seek maternal substitutes,
but at the same time a screen shielding us from getting too close to the maternal Thing” (Žižek, 1989: 119-120). For Žižek, this supplies “the key” to the
loop of enjoyment, the unconscious circuit of the second stage of the graph:
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
instead of imaginary identiication (the relation between imaginary
ego and its constitutive image, its Ego-Ideal) we have here desire (d)
supported by fantasy; the function of fantasy is to ill the opening in
the Other, to conceal its inconsistency. Fantasy conceals the fact that
the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic
impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolised—i.e., the
real of jouissance: through fantasy, jouissance is domesticated, “gentriied”
(Žižek, 1989: 123).
Fantasy appears as the response to the dreadful enigma of the desire (or
lack) in the Other and, at the same time, fantasy constructs the frame within
which it is possible to desire. As the subject’s response to the intolerable anxiety provoked by the incompleteness of the Other:
fantasy functions as a construction, as an imaginary scenario illing out
the void, the opening of the desire of the Other: by giving a deinite answer
to the question “What does the Other want?” it enable us to evade the
unbearable deadlock in which the Other wants something from us, but
we are at the same time incapable of translating this desire of the Other
into a positive interpellation, into a mandate with which to identify
(Žižek, 1989: 115).
In other words, we reconcile ourselves to our social position by means of
a fantasy of participation in a meaningful whole: indeed, “society as a Corporate Body is the fundamental ideological fantasy” (Žižek, 1989: 126). By
virtue of the role of fantasy in linking the empty enunciation of the Law to
its concrete statement in a particular master signiier, in the inal loop of the
synchronic arc, the divided subject rejoins the Ego-Ideal through the detour
of the unconscious structure:
First we have S(Ø): the mark of the lack of the Other, of the inconsistency
of the symbolic order when it is penetrated by enjoyment: then ( ◊ a),
the formula for fantasy; the function of fantasy is to serve as a screen
concealing this inconsistency: inally, s(O), the efect of the signiication
as dominated by fantasy; fantasy functions as “absolute signiication”
(Lacan); it constitutes the frame through which we experience the world
as consistent and meaningful (Žižek, 1989: 123).
Fantasy defends the subject from the pure desire characteristic of the
death drive, by constructing the frame for reality, within which symbolically
mediated desire becomes possible. Fantasy is the key to the conversion of a
contingent, retroactive identiication into an apparently necessary, anticipatory identity—but it must not be forgotten that fantasy is in the last instance
an illusion, masking the radically disjunctive character of the dialectics of
symbolic identiication and imaginary identity. To reduce the unconscious
to fantasy alone represents a grave error, for it obscures the fundamental conlict—between a Law of prohibition and the objects of the drives—active in
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201
the unconscious psychic economy. Such a reduction would efectively make
the unconscious into a unity, transposing the self-identity of the classical subject into the register of the unconscious.
Political Strateg y and Social Identification
Žižek’s motivations for introducing the “agency of the subject” into his Lacanian dialectics are clear: the ambition of ideology criticism is to replace
conformity to the existing structures with identiication with the new social
order. If ideological interpellation represents an imposition, governed by the
dialectics of retroactive identiication, then how is the subject supposed to
swap acceptance of existing domination for a proleptic identiication with
liberation? The Althusserian conception of a political struggle between and
within the ideological state apparatuses might have supplied the key to this
question. Žižek, however, having conceptualised the unconscious as rotating
solely around the ideological sinthome, cemented by (the old) social fantasy, is
in a position where his answer to this question has to involve supplying the
subject with an entirely new unconscious.
Žižek suggests that fantasy, as “a screen masking a void,” is fundamentally meaningless and therefore cannot be demystiied through the standard
leftwing procedures of ideological criticism (historical contextualisation and
institutional analysis of “who beneits”). The social fantasy cannot be reduced to a diferential chain of signiication structured by “nodal points,” or
master signiiers, because these are supported, in the inal analysis, by “the
non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment” (Žižek, 1989: 124). For
Žižek, nationalism occupies the place of the unconscious Thing that supplies the centre of gravity and hidden support for democracy (Žižek, 1993:
222). Nationalist enjoyment, Žižek claims, is the inherent opposite of the
neutral-universal liberal democratic framework, “in the sense that the very
project of formal democracy opens the space for fundamentalism” (Žižek,
1993: 221). Once again, we see Žižek’s tendency to align formal universality
with the (pre-)conscious discursive ield and to make this dependent upon a
non-universalisable singularity in the Real. Indeed, in the paradigmatic instances of neo-Nazi racism and ethnic nationalism, Žižek criticises leftwing
“discursive idealism” for actually reinforcing these identiications (Žižek,
1993: 202-208). By discursively identifying the inconsistency behind ideology, the Left efectively highlighted the yield of stupid enjoyment gained
through material rituals, and in the absence of institutional reconstruction,
this acted to promote these ideologies (Žižek, 1993: 209-211).
Because every discursive ield is ultimately sutured by a real kernel of
enjoyment—because every ideological meaning is supported by an institutional ritual—Žižek develops what might be called, slightly ironically, the
“two tactics of postmarxian radicalism in the democratic revolution”. These
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
tactics are to “search and destroy,” or, as Žižek explains, the interpretation
of symptoms and the traversal of the fantasy:
One is discursive, the “symptomal reading” of the ideological text,
bringing about the “deconstruction” of the spontaneous experience of its
meaning—that is, demonstrating how a given ideological ield is a result
of a montage of heterogeneous “loating signiiers,” of their totalisation
through the intervention of certain “nodal points”; the other aims at
extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at articulating the way in which—
beyond the ield of meaning but at the same time internal to it—an
ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment
structured in fantasy (Žižek, 1989: 125).
Assuming that politics provides an extra-clinical instantiation of these procedures—an assumption that rests upon the dubious analogy between party
and analyst, and depends on a highly tendentious interpretation of the “difference” between Lenin and Kautsky on class consciousness (Žižek, 2001d)—
what happens then? The leftwing political problematic involves not only forging new symbolic identiications, but also a reconiguration of the subject’s
basic relation to ideological fantasies in general, without which ideological
struggle degenerates into mere manipulation. Take for instance the Marxian
“fundamental fantasy,” expressed in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, of communism as disalienation in a harmonious society. By contrast with the postmarxian demand to completely abandon all utopias (Stavrakakis, 1999: 99-121),13 psychoanalytically-informed leftist commentators
have suggested that “traversal of the fantasy” means recasting utopia as an indeterminate teleological judgement, that is to say, its retreat from foundation
to a horizon (Copjec, 1996: xxv-xxvi; Homer, 1998). Socialist politics retains
the vision of communism as a regulative goal and not a social blueprint.
Žižek’s answer to this problem is “subjective destitution”. For Žižek, the
reduction of the subject to an “excremental remainder” reveals the elementary matrix of subjectivity: “if the Cartesian subject is to emerge at the level
of the enunciation, he must be reduced to the ‘almost nothing’ of disposable
excrement at the level of the enunciated content” (Žižek, 2000h: 157). This
13. The postmarxian position is that the subject has to accede to their castration, to the
human condition of lack. Translated into contemporary theory, this means recognition that
the empty place of power cannot be permanently occupied by a social force claiming to incarnate universality, that is, acceptance that parliamentary elections are the inal horizon of
radical politics (Stavrakakis, 1999: 134-136). For Stavrakakis, developing these sentiments to
their inal conclusion, the problem is utopia: traversal of the fantasy means rejection of every
utopia, especially communism (Stavrakakis, 1999: 99-121). Lumping together the dreams of
fascist conquerors with the hopes of the oppressed in “one reactionary mass,” Stavrakakis
advocates a post-utopian politics that (surprise!) bears a suspicious resemblance to liberal
democratic parliamentarism. This implies a post-ideological condition that is not post-political—surely a contradiction in terms, redolent of the liberal multiculturalist desire to reduce
political conlict to the management of neutralised diferences.
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picturesque description supports two distinct strands of argument in Žižek’s
work. “Subjective destitution,” as the desolation of narcissism and the disclosure of the contingency of identiications, means the revelation, to the
subject, that every ideology is to some extent arbitrary, and the corresponding recognition that the sublime beyond, menaced by the social antagonist,
never existed. This is equivalent to the Lacanian ethical stance of “not giving way on one’s desire,” as a persistence in the struggle for the Cause, despite a radical renunciation of the richness of wish-fulillment dreams of
plenitude (Žižek, 1989: 120). On these lines, Žižek says that traversal of the
fantasy means the “loss of loss,” the recognition that the object (a) is an object that exists only in fantasy and that the Other is also lacking (a inal answer) (Žižek, 1989: 122).
Žižek, however, in line with the broadly Lukácsian variant of “anti-historicism” he espouses, also wants an anti-scientiic and post-ideological subjectivity, “beyond fantasy,” but not necessarily beyond utopianism. Therefore, he introduces a third stage, which is efectively the double negation of
the starting point in symptomatic analysis:
First, we had to get rid of the symptoms as compromise formations,
then, we had to “traverse” the fantasy as the frame determining the
coordinates of our enjoyment: … i.e., our access to “pure” desire is always
paid for by the loss of enjoyment. In the last stage, however, the entire
perspective is reversed: we have to identify precisely with the particular
form of our enjoyment (Žižek, 1991a: 138).
For Žižek, the traversal of the fantasy brings the subject to the pulsion of
the death drive around the ideological sinthome. “Going through the fantasy” is, for Žižek, therefore strictly correlative to identiication with a sinthome
(Žižek, 1989: 124), as “the truth about ourselves” (Žižek, 1989: 128). Identiication with the sinthome means identiication with the singular marginalised element that sustains the dominant ideology—for instance, identiication with the persecuted Jew or immigrant worker—and its elevation to a
new universal. This relatively innocuous looking New Left politics of sympathetic identiication makes a class politics impossible (as the most oppressed
are not necessarily in the best position to change the system) and implies a
decision grounded in Truth, correlative to an act in the Real. Indeed, it follows ineluctably from Žižek’s postulates that traversal of the fantasy involves
a step beyond sociality. The consequence is not subjective realignment, but
the step into psychosis. This is such a signiicant step that Žižek hesitates on
the lip of this conclusion from some time.
III.
Now that we have an accurate understanding of the meanings of the symbols in the second stage of the Graph of Desire, we are in a position to grasp
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the signiicance of a slight, but crucial, omission in Žižek’s exposition. In
brief, while many Lacanians identify the symbol S(Ø) with the Symbolic
Law (as an empty enunciation, a non-fungible “No!”) (Fink, 1995a: 57-58;
Zupančič, 2000: 140-169), Žižek associates it only with the dimension of the
incompleteness of the symbolic order. What Žižek has done is to make the
“loop of enjoyment,” the second stage of the Graph of Desire, rotate solely
around the ideological sinthome (for instance, the racist enjoyment of ethnic
ultra-nationalism), supported by the ideological fantasy, which as an unconscious sequence of material letters is immune to every interpretive demystiication. The consequences are serious, because this makes the Žižekian
unconscious the exclusive domain of a non-universalisable, singular enjoyment, which is supported by unconscious fantasy. The Žižekian subject is
therefore a “Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” monster: on the surface, a defender of
rational universality, but beneath this veneer, a secret devotee of obscene nationalism, vicious anti-semitism and/or patriarchal sexism. Because of the
way Žižek has structured this subject, there is no way to get beyond the oscillation between democratic politics and obscene enjoyment, except by dispensing completely with the unconscious. The entailment of Žižek’s position
is therefore that challenging the reigning “social fantasy” means a movement beyond the Symbolic Law. Not surprisingly, his position is plagued by
a series of antinomies—political reversals, ethical hesitations and theoretical
uncertainties—that betray the existence of an identical subject-object, located in the upper level of the Graph of Desire.
Symbolic Law versus Superego Enjoyment
Žižek’s exposition of the “graph of desire” substantiates his claim that beyond identiication-interpellation lie both the unconscious “subject beyond
subjectivation” and the materiality of the drives. Hence the signiicance of
Žižek’s contentions that “the last support of the ideological efect … is the
non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment” and that “an ideology
implies, manipulates … a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy” (Žižek, 1989: 124-125). This pre-ideological enjoyment, aligned by Žižek
with the enjoyment of the mother (that is, with incestuous enjoyment, or fusional unity with the mother), is connected in his work with the Lacanian
concept of the Thing, that is, the id and the drives. As Lacanians have commented, this puts the “id” back in “ideology,” with a vengeance (Lupton
and Reinhard, 1993). By linking ideological subjectivity to the existence of
extra-ideological enjoyment, structured by unconscious fantasy, Žižek hopes
to explain the longevity of political systems that seem to lack popular legitimacy, and to develop a political strategy capable of confronting the astonishing resilience of pro-capitalist ideologies. He also proposes to demarcate
the space of efective anti-capitalist resistance from the “inherent transgres-
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sions,” the pseudo-radical diversions (for instance, racism), built-in to the
structure of contemporary multinational capitalism. The problem is that
Žižek’s interpretation of the unconscious subject in terms of a “pre-ideological enjoyment” tends to neglect the strictly Freudian aspect of the unconscious, namely, the prohibition of incest (as opposed to incestuous enjoyment),
recast by Lacan as the “Symbolic Law”. The result of Žižek’s treatment is
that the unconscious reduces to a singular (that is, non-universalisable, nondialecticisable) enjoyment, one that is impervious to discursive intervention
because it is located before, or beyond, culture—surely a strange position to
take for someone inluenced by Freud’s “talking cure”.
Under the inluence of the historicist problematic of Laclau and Moufe,
Žižek proposes to theorise the “dependence of Law on the process of enunciation, or … its radically contingent character” (Žižek, 1989: 37). While not
formally incorrect, the conclusions Žižek develops from this interpretation
conlate the necessity of the enunciation of the Symbolic Law (for every nonpsychotic) with the contingency of the statement which is its vehicle. Lacan’s
“Nom du Père,” by contrast, with its deliberate homophonic play on the relation between the paternal “no!” (to incest) and the paternal name, highlights
this analytic separation between the (necessary and universal) enunciation
of a prohibition and the (contingent and particular) baptismal statement. Indeed, according to Bruce Fink, Lacan not only analytically separates these
two aspects into alienation and separation, but also aligns the dialectics of
primary and secondary repression with these two logical moments. In alienation, a non-displaceable “No!” (the incest prohibition), as an empty enunciation without a statement whose matheme is S(Ø), is substituted for enjoyment of the (m)Other, whereas in separation, the paternal signiier, whose
matheme is S1, substitutes for the desire of the (m)Other. The mathemes of
the Lacanian “graph of desire” can therefore be assigned a Freudian interpretation, where S(Ø) stands for primary repression, in the advent of the incest prohibition and the formation of the unconscious, while O, the Other,
is the locus in which the Oedipal conlict is resolved by means of the paternal name, S1, in the process of secondary repression and identiication with
the paternal image, or Ego Ideal. It follows that the opposition between the
Symbolic Law and the Real of enjoyment is a division (a decentring) within
the upper, strictly unconscious, “cell” of the “graph of desire” and not an opposition between the upper and lower levels.
By contrast, Žižek tends to present the distinction between Symbolic
Law and the Real of enjoyment as coextensive with the opposition between
ideological meaning (lower level of the graph) and superego enjoyment (upper level of the graph). Žižek systematically maps this distinction onto several case studies, meaning that the division between symbolic ield and real
enjoyment has many incarnations. These include: “enlightened cynicism”
(Symbolic) and “ideological enjoyment” (Real) (Žižek, 1989: 28-33); “cyni-
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cal distance” (Symbolic) and “ethnic nationalism” (Real) (Žižek, 1993: 200216); “democratic politics” (Symbolic) and “bureaucratic enjoyment” (Real)
(Žižek, 1991a: 231-252), and; the “oicial public law” (Symbolic) and its “supplementary framework of illegal transgressions” (Real) (Žižek, 1994c: 54-85).
Since the opposition between ideological meaning and superego enjoyment
is aligned with the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious,
his move has very serious implications. Indeed, a series of equivalences is
created, which reproduces precisely the split between ideological meaning
and unconscious enjoyment, Symbolic and Real, lower level and upper level
of the Graph of Desire, at work in Žižek’s conception of the divided subject.
At the highest theoretical level, however, this distinction takes the form of
the opposition between “symbolic public Law” (Symbolic) and the “superego transgressions” (Real) that support the Law (Žižek, 1994c: 54).
In so far as superego designates the intrusion of enjoyment into the ield
of ideology, we can also say that the opposition of symbolic Law and superego
points towards the tension between ideological meaning and enjoyment: symbolic
Law guarantees meaning, whereas superego provides enjoyment which
serves as the unacknowledged support of meaning (Žižek, 1994c: 56).
Implied in Žižek’s conception of the relation between superego enjoyment (the enunciation) and ideological meaning (the statement) is the phenomenalisation of the unconscious Symbolic Law (its replacement with the
master signiier), and the conlation of primary and secondary identiications. Indeed, Žižek explicitly aligns the lower level of the graph (“the level of ideological meaning”) with the symbolic Law and on this basis claims
to theorise the “predominance of the superego over the law” (Žižek, 1991a:
241). The basis for this claim is the proposition that:
superego emerges where the Law—the public Law, the Law articulated
in the public discourse—fails; at this point of failure, the public Law is
compelled to search for support in an illegal enjoyment. Superego is the
obscene “nightly” law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its
shadow, the “public” Law (Žižek, 1994c: 54).
Žižek’s condensation—“public Law,” as a collapse of Symbolic Law into
public legality—indicates exactly the conlation at work in his fundamental insight. According to Žižek, in illing out the contents of the universal,
the master signiier necessarily stages a sequence of exclusions, which, instead of undermining the reigning ideology and/or legal framework, actually support it and legitimate forms of extra-legal coercion (Žižek, 1993: 4647). He claims that this obscene superego supplement “represents the spirit
of community,” compelling the individual’s identiication with group identity, despite (or because of) its violation of the explicit rules of community life
(Žižek, 1994c: 54). Žižek risks a second revision:
What holds together a particular community most deeply is not so much
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207
identiication with the Law that regulates the community’s “normal”
everyday circuit, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the
Law, of the Law’s suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with a speciic form
of enjoyment) (Žižek, 1994c: 55).
Inverting the entire discussion of the role of the master signiier in the
process of interpellation, Žižek now claims that identiication happens not
to the master signiier, but with its exclusions, or inherent transgressions.
Claims to oppose “postmodern anti-Enlightenment ressentiment” and its celebration of particularism notwithstanding, Žižek makes the “loop of enjoyment” supreme with respect to the Symbolic Law, so that the only efective
resistance to power is a complete exit from the ield of universality.
For Žižek, the splitting of the Law into “Symbolic Public Law” and an
obscene superego supplement is a consequence of modernity, for the advent of a neutral-universal law implies the repression of the “authoritarianpatriarchal logic that continues to determine our attitudes” (Žižek, 1994c:
56). According to this account, Kant is the decisive marker of the modern
splitting of the political ield into a formal, empty universality (democracy,
autonomy) and the prohibited Thing that supplies its unacknowledged support (the national Thing, the supreme good), because formal democracy and
Kantian autonomy are both constituted by the evacuation of the locus of the
supreme value (of the empty place of power, of the supreme good) (Žižek,
1993: 220-222). Kant both designates the space of the National Thing (the
ideological supreme Good) and prohibits the crucial step into nationalism.
Indeed, “illing out the empty place of the Thing by the Nation is perhaps
the paradigmatic case of the inversion which deines radical Evil” (Žižek,
1993: 222). Žižek’s claim is that nationalism occupies the place of the unconscious Thing that supplies the centre of gravity and hidden support for
democracy. Nationalist enjoyment, Žižek claims, is the inherent opposite
of the neutral-universal liberal democratic framework, “in the sense that
the very project of formal democracy opens the space for fundamentalism”
(Žižek, 1993: 221). Once again, we see Žižek’s tendency to align formal universality with the discursive ield and to make this dependent upon a nonuniversalisable singularity in the Real. This connects with the claim that:
It is a commonplace of Lacanian theory to emphasise how this Kantian
moral imperative conceals an obscene superego injunction; “Enjoy!”—
the voice of the Other impelling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty
is a traumatic irruption of an appeal to an impossible jouissance … The
moral Law is obscene insofar as it is its form itself which functions as a
motivating force driving us to obey its command—that is, insofar as we
obey moral Law because it is law and not because of any positive reasons:
the obscenity of moral Law is the obverse of its formal character (Žižek,
1989: 81).
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Despite explicitly acknowledging the inadequacy of every representation of the Law, Žižek cannot resist the temptation to draw conclusions from
the representation (S1) regarding the relation represented (the moral law,
equals the Symbolic Law). From Žižek, then, we learn that the moral law is
supported by meaningless, obscene enjoyment (Žižek, 1989: 80-81) and that
the obscene, perverse dimension of Kantian moral formalism inally appears in fascism (Žižek, 1989: 82).
By contrast, Žižek’s cothinker Alenka Zupančič, demonstrates that the
Kantian moral law, which can be aligned with the Lacanian Symbolic Law,
is distinct from the superego because it is “beyond the master signiier,” existing as an unconscious “enunciation without statement,” and manifest only
as affect (anxiety, respect) (Zupančič, 2000: 140-169). According to Zupančič,
the matheme of the moral law is therefore also S(Ø), indicating that this
“enunciation without statement” is an empty injunction to “do your duty,”
experienced by the subject as an unbearable anxiety (“respect,” in proximity
to dread). Thus, according to her account, the pressures to conform to group
identiications, emanating from the superego agency—which for psychoanalytic theory are sometimes associated with criminal acts, for instance, with
“ethnic cleansing”—are always counter-balanced by the existence of moral
conscience. Consequently, the path towards resistance to regimes that violate human rights runs through universality, and the subject can legitimately
be held responsible for their acts.
Political Impasse
Žižek is on the horns of a dilemma. The supremacy of the “non-universalisable singularity” of unconscious enjoyment—paradigmatically, that is, the
secret dependence of democratic politics on nationalist enjoyment—dictates
a politics torn between the alternatives of total capitulation or catastrophic rupture. On the one hand, democratic politics, discursive universality,
public legality, and so forth, are all lent their “ontological consistency” by
the hidden ballast of the “national Thing,” which Žižek equates with a repressed “ethico-political Act” of social inauguration, and describes as “the
Political” (as opposed to mere everyday politics) (Žižek, 2000h: 187-191). Discursive formations are therefore relatively stable, because they are supported by the permanently vanished “political Act/national Thing/the Political,” which persists as a kernel of enjoyment, structured by an unconscious
fantasy that somehow subsists beyond institutional relations. On the other
hand, the “Political/Act/Thing,” the “kernel of the Real,” has exclusively
sinister connotations, because Žižek aligns it with bureaucratic idiocy, illegal transgressions, racist jouissance, partiarchal sexism, and so forth. The
ballast of democratic politics therefore turns out to be the dead weight of
nationalist enjoyment, and so-called “ethnic cleansing” is revealed as the
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209
“repressed truth” of liberal democracy (Žižek, 1993: 208). Worse, the nationalist fantasies that structure this hideous enjoyment are at once tenacious—they can apparently easily survive the destruction of the institutions
that called them into being (Žižek, 1993: 209)—and so nebulous that we are
enjoined not to ight them directly, but instead to promote alternative institutional arrangements altogether … which would no doubt have their own
secret fantasy support. Žižek’s vision of modernity is relatively grim, then,
and certainly lends little credibility to his claim (Žižek, 1989: 7), to defend
the Enlightenment from the depredations of postmodern skepticism. To the
contrary: Žižek reads like a late Romantic denunciation of modernity. Thus,
on the surface of things, we have Enlightenment universality and modern
liberty … but beneath this veneer, the ghosts of the past and totalitarian jouissance reign supreme; by day, the modern subject is a perfect Dr Jekyll, but
at night, a veritable Mr Hyde.
Grasping the democratic horn of the dilemma, it seemed that Žižek
would opt for a politics of “enthusiastic resignation” to democratic invention (Žižek, 1990: 259)—including issuing Churchillian apologies for liberal parliamentarism (Žižek, 1991b: 28)—accompanied by the ethical strategy of “maintaining the gap” between politics and “the Political” (Žižek,
1991a). Turning aside from the foundation of the political ield in the “national Thing” or the “revolutionary Act,” leftwing theory would accept the
consequences of human initude, supplementing its politics with an ethically-based repudiation of the utopian fantasy of social harmony. Postmarxism,
he claimed, defends the “inherently ethical” stance of eternal mourning for
its historical defeats: the Left must return to and re-mark the trauma of the
Lost Cause, and, by means of “empty” symbolic gestures, mark its impossibility (Žižek, 1991a: 273). Renouncing the lethal fascination with gestures of
political institution, characteristic of, for instance, classical Marxism, postmarxism would remain on the ield of hegemonic struggles marked out by
the boundaries of liberal democracy. Eschewing the desire for a foundational political Act, the Left has to endlessly repeat the gesture of the missed encounter, acting as the perennial “vanishing mediator” in the victory of liberal democracy, within the ield of the nation state (Žižek, 1991a: 271-273).
Eternal bridesmaid, the Left is incapable of proposing a new social order
and must “enthusiastically” resign itself to the role of loyal opposition. Beginning from such assumptions, however, it is equally elementary for Žižek
to deduce that multicultural tolerance, political liberties, struggles for cultural recognition and even radical social reforms are all secretly supported by the unconscious enjoyment gained from compliance in deed (if not in
words) with nationalistic rituals. Even radical reforms, in other words, are
nothing but the “human face” of the obscene enjoyment generated by the
capitalism-nationalism nexus. For instance, Žižek follows this logic to arrive
at the classic ultra-left position that “the neo-Nazi skinhead’s ethnic violence
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is not the ‘return of the repressed’ of the liberal multiculturalist tolerance,
but directly generated by it, its own concealed true face” (Žižek, 2000h: 205).
Instead of conceptualising the political ield as struggles for hegemony, traversed by a shifting balance of forces (within which, reforms represent concessions, not tricks), Žižek describes politics in terms reminiscent of base-andsuperstructure reductionism.
To appreciate the cruelty of Žižek’s dilemma, it is worth considering the
paradigmatic instance of the distinction between symbolic ield and “obscene enjoyment,” the division between democratic politics and nationalist
enjoyment. The implication of Žižek’s historicist position—the foundational
role of the dominant ideology combined with the expressive conception of
totality—is that democratic politics and nationalist enjoyment are inextricably bound. Thus, for instance, ultra-nationalism in Eastern Europe, Žižek
wrote during the break-up of former Yugoslavia, “is returning to the West
the ‘repressed’ truth of its democratic desire” (Žižek, 1993: 208). According
to Žižek (and quite plausibly), “a nation only exists as long as its speciic enjoyment continues to be materialised in a speciic set of social practices and
transmitted through national myths that structure these practices” (Žižek,
1993: 202). For Žižek (not so credibly), “the national Thing functions …
as a kind of ‘particular Absolute’ resisting universalisation, bestowing its special
‘tonality’ upon every neutral, universal notion” (Žižek, 1993: 206-207). So,
while Žižek provides an insightful analysis of the psychological mechanisms
driving ethnic nationalism—“the late Yugoslavia ofers a case study of …
a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment” (Žižek, 1993:
204)—the logic of his position determines that this concludes with the “speculative identity” of democratic politics and ethnic cleansing.14
Žižek’s dilemma generates constant zigzags in his politics. Indeed, the
stance of “enthusiastic resignation” is penetrated by ambivalence regarding liberal parliamentarism—indeed, it leads to an abstentionist position regarding the nationalist fantasy—and so a reversal into its opposite becomes,
once catalysed by the horrors of the break-up of Yugoslavia, virtually inevitable. While many indices of this transformation exist—the Leninist party
14. Once again, Žižek is probably correct to assert that the imperialist intervention in
Bosnia facilitated, rather than hindered, the process of ethnic cleansing, culminating in the
reactionary solution of “ethnic cantonment”. This is an empirical question, linked to the
economic, political and military interests of the Western nations involved in the break-up
of former Yugoslavia. Žižek elevates this into an a priori assertion, linked to the expressive
conception of nationalist enjoyment as the inherent obverse of democratic politics. As with
Lukács, this philosophical lattening of the political terrain can only lead to the collapse of
democratic politics into liberal parliamentarism, leading to the search for “real democratic”
alternatives (council communism, soviet power), as if the entire historical experience of the
Bolshevik Revolution could be circumvented with a better grasp of psychoanalytically-enhanced Hegelianism.
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211
(from fetish to analyst) (Žižek, 1995);15 Stalinism (from perversion-instrumentalisation to tragic instrument of historical progress) (Žižek, 1989: 142-145;
Žižek, 1991a: 170-173; Žižek, 2000h: 194, 379); Lenin (from Jacobin terrorist to decisionist “Master”) (Žižek, 2000e)—the role of the Jacobin regicide
is exemplary. This is because the “Jacobin paradox”—the problem of how
to hold open the “empty place of power” in societies characterised by democratic invention, without inadvertently occupying (and thus, illing) this
locus—is the conundrum of modern politics. As Žižek shifts back and forth
between democratic politics and a direct assault on the “kernel of the Real,”
the Jacobin regicide travels the distance from being denounced as an “empty acting out” (Žižek, 1991a: 256), to its dramatic endorsement as a radical
decision, expressing absolute freedom (Žižek, 2000h: 192). But even supposing that such a judgement were valid, how on earth would such a leap “into
the Real” be accomplished?
For Žižek, only the “authentic Act” disturbs the reigning ideological
fantasy and discloses the truth of the social totality (Žižek, 2000h: 369-392).
Therefore, for Žižek, identiication with the sinthome, the commission of an
ethico-political Act and traversal of the fantasy are equivalent. As Žižek explains, the archetypal Act is a political revolution (Žižek, 2000h: 375). Yet,
it follows from Žižek’s construction of the opposition between Symbolic Order and the Real that this must happen “in the Real,” through the unilateral declaration of a new social order. The consequences of conceptualising
the distinction between hegemonic politics and the Act of institution of the
“Political Thing” on these lines are relatively alarming—Žižek’s exemplars,
for instance, are increasingly drawn from fantasy and terrorism—and generate a constant vacillation between democratic politics and quasi-religious
militarism.
Žižek defends his stance by means of the distinction between “acting
out” and the “passage à l’acte,” or Act. While “acting out is still a symbolic
act … addressed to the big Other … a ‘passage to the act’ suspends the dimension of the big Other, as the act is transposed into the dimension of the
Real” (Žižek, 1991a: 139). This distinction valorises what for many analysts
indicates catastrophe, and neglects Lacan’s distinction between “acting out”
as impotent protest and the performative legitimacy of the symbolic act. For
Žižek, quite explicitly, “the ‘passage to the act’ entails … an exit from the
symbolic network, a dissolution of the social bond” (Žižek, 1991a: 139). By
becoming an incarnation of the object (a)—that is, an embodiment of an unconditional demand—subjects “separate” from the social ield and liberate
themselves from every master signiier (Žižek, 2001c: 69-105). Needless to
say, however, there can be no question of performative felicity in the context
of the complete dissolution of conventional authority (Austin, 1962). Hence
15. Compare this with (Žižek, 2001g).
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Žižek’s belief that the political Act involves an “impossible,” unilateral performative, an inaugural declaration spoken in opposition to every existing
convention (Žižek, 2001c: 96-99). Not surprisingly, as this aspect of Žižek’s
theory becomes central, the rhetoric of a “suicidal” and “psychotic” (Žižek,
1991a: 101) Act increases in stridency (Žižek, 1996b: 32-39; Žižek, 2000f: 151156; Žižek, 2000h: 374-381).
Grasping the “political Act” horn of the dilemma, then, leads Žižek towards ambiguous references to the Khmer Rouge and Shining Path (Žižek,
1993: 224-225), coupled with the adoption of a Year-Zero-style rhetoric
(Žižek, 2000e: 127), culminating in the advocacy of a militaristic, quasi-religious community, “beyond democracy”. Is it necessary to add that this
dichotomy—liberal parliamentarism or revolutionary totalitarianism—accepts, in advance, the legitimacy of the Right’s construal of the political ield?
Contra Žižek, breaking the “Denkverbot” on revolutionary politics does not
have to involve abandoning the notion of totalitarianism (Žižek, 2001b)—a
gesture that can only fuel the worst sort of suspicions. Instead of an openness
to the new social movements, Žižek’s position is perilously close to an ultraleft refusal of the diference between capitalist democracy and military dictatorship, redolent of the politics of Third Period Stalinism.
Despite the elaborate conceptual apparatus that makes such deductions possible, Žižek’s programmatic contributions display a certain “poverty of philosophy”. Žižek’s political impasse springs from the opposition
between the democratic universal and nationalist singularity, leading to an
oscillation between an “enthusiastic resignation” that smacks of cynical acceptance, and an ultra-left, voluntarist refusal of democratic politics. While
Žižek’s concept that nationalist enjoyment sustains parliamentary reformism indicates the importance of combining hegemonic politics with institutional reconstruction, he displays a supreme indiference to theories of
alternative democratic forms, or indeed, to any theorisation of the institutional forms of popular sovereignty. If the Thing supports democracy, then
to destroy the Thing, we have to destroy democracy, and replace it with a
religious community (Žižek, 2000h: 177). Hence the exemplary status of the
otherwise unintelligible references to the Hegelian Monarch and the Hegelian “ethical” (sometimes, “religious”) community that pepper Žižek’s work.
The Hegelian Monarch is the “democratic” solution to the Jacobin problem,
that is, a formal head of state who serves as a “rubber stamp” for parliamentary decisions. This must be interpreted as a form of plebiscitory presidential Bonapartism designed to protect democratic forms, while the “religious
community” is the Hegelian organic totality beyond the nation-state (and
therefore also beyond democracy). The oscillation between the advocacy of
presidential Bonapartism and a religious commune determines the compass
of Žižek’s “politics”.
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Ethical Hesitations
Žižek’s political vacillation is repeated on ethical terrain, as the hesitation between an ethics of desire, linked to the prohibition on disturbing the
Thing, and the plunge into the “suicidal act,” igured as an ethics of the
Real. Žižek seeks to oppose a “spontaneous ideology of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” according to which the endless metonymy of desire is the way to
keep the lethal Thing at a minimal distance. This maintenance of the gap
prevents the “danger of yielding to fascination with the Thing, and being
drawn into its lethal vortex, which can only end in psychosis or suicidal passage à l’acte” (Žižek, 1996b: 96). According to the contemporary prolongation
of the “New Philosophy” into an “ethical ideology”—a perspective apparently supported by conservative Lacanian interpretations of the ethics of
desire—any act that aims to actually contribute to the good can only terminate in radical evil; hence, the role of ethics is to prevent any militant ethics
and denounce any redistributive politics (Badiou, 2001).
By implication a Kantian ethics—involving the renunciation of the content of the Supreme Good for an ethics of universal duty—the “ethics of desire” promotes an ethical variant of the politics of “enthusiastic resignation”
that we have just examined. Žižek denounces this as the logic of the “spurious ininity,” the regulative ideal of the ininite perfectability of humanity
which serves to mask an actual lack of empirical progress. This is, of course,
arguably a complete misunderstanding of the concept of a regulative ideal,
which does not at all imply an alibi for stagnation, but instead thinks the empirical approach to a conceptual ideal as asymptotic. Indeed, Žižek himself
recognises that the Hegelian replacement for the regulative ideal, namely,
the Notion, is deinitionally unrealisable, because the Notion is characterised by turning into its opposite, once empirical reality achieves the ideal.
His opposition to the postulate of a gap between phenomenal ethico-political striving and the strictly conceptual plane of regulative ideals is therefore,
in actuality, grounded in other (highly metaphysical) considerations—as we
will shortly see.
Žižek links the emergence of the modern subject to the advent of the
nation state, through the event of the French Revolution, and especially,
through Kantian philosophy, which he evidently regards (with Hegel) as its
“highest expression”. As is well known, Kantian ethics involves a rejection
of every particular Supreme Good as a legitimate justiication for ethical action, for a formal ethics of universality whereby the ethical basis for action
is tested according to the principle of universalisability, and not against its
ability to yield results in support of an ethico-political cause. Interpreting
the problem of nationalism along these lines, Žižek argues that Kant both
designates the space of the National Thing (the ideological Supreme Good)
and prohibits the step into nationalism. Indeed, “illing out the empty place
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of the Thing by the Nation is perhaps the paradigmatic case of the inversion
which deines radical Evil” (Žižek, 1993: 222). The utopian fantasy of the
content of the Thing—the harmonious society beloved of totalitarian ideology—is to be opposed to the ethics of desire, which really means the maintenance of desire in dis-satisfaction. Reminiscent of Žižek’s own postmarxian ethics from his radical democratic period of “enthusiastic resignation”
(Žižek, 1991a: 270-273), this ethics characterises the political ield in terms
of the radically ambiguous relationship of the people to the national Thing,
the kernel of the Real around which the life of the community revolves. But,
asks Žižek, “how can we avoid recognising a reference to the contemporary
political landscape, with its two extremes of unprincipled liberal pragmatism and fundamentalist fanaticism?” (Žižek, 1996b: 97).
Thus, for Žižek, the only alternatives opened by the “spontaneous ideology of Lacanian psychoanalysis” are political liberalism (supported by a
psychoanalytically enhanced Kantian ethics) and its “inherent transgressions,” ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and so forth. In his recent statement of an ethics “beyond the Good,” Žižek asks:
Is not Lacan’s entire theoretical ediice torn between … two options:
between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/
suicidal immersion in the Thing (Žižek, 1997b: 239)?
Whatever the case with Lacan, this certainly identiies the internal issure in Žižek’s work. When it comes to the decision, however, Žižek is for the
“lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing”. In his recent insistence that diabolical evil and the supreme good are formally identical (Žižek, 1997b: 213241)—because they represent the moment of ethico-political institution—
Žižek aims, in his inimitably hyperbolic style, to oppose the deployment of
Lacanian theory in support of an anti-radical ethics. By shifting the register,
from Symbolic desire to the Real of the drives, Žižek hopes to open another path to a radical ethics. The starting point for this new ethics is nothing
less than the Kierkegaardian trope of a “religious suspension of the ethical”
(Žižek, 2001c: 82), which Žižek also igures as a “Leftist suspension of the
Law” (Žižek, 2000h: 223). A blatant contradiction, this position makes sense
only if we accept Žižek’s assumptions: if discursive universality (and therefore everyday morality) is secretly supported by some venal enjoyment, then
the only way to really defeat this racist/sexist/nationalist/etc. jouissance is to
jump clear from the existing ield of ethico-political universality altogether,
in an ethico-politico-metaphysical “great leap forward”. Not surprisingly,
then, this road travels by way of the adoption of a curious rhetorical combination of messianic religious motifs and slogans reminiscent of Cultural-Revolution-period Maoism. Hence, we have the proletarian chiliasm of
“Pauline materialism” and the injunction to “repeat Lenin” (Žižek, 2001g),
the advocacy of the “gesture of the authentic master,” the “irrational vio-
Radical Negativity
215
lence” that founds a new, spiritual community through a “supreme crime”
(Žižek, 2000e), and so forth.
For Žižek, the consequences of his reconceptualization of the ethics of
the Real are enormous: it “delivers us from guilt” and abolishes the objectivity of the distinction between Good and Evil (Žižek, 1996b: 98). If the origin
of the ethical injunction—the moral law, and in the inal analysis, the Other
of the Symbolic Law—is itself incomplete, Žižek argues, perforated by the
Real of enjoyment, then there exists no guarantee of the morality of the subject’s actions. This is certainly true: there exists no guarantee, no certainty, that
the actions of the subject are ethically legitimate—and it is for precisely this
reason that Kant developed a series of testing procedures, not to deduce ethical maxims from pure concepts with apodictic certainty, as Hegel thought,
but in order to rationally test the moral propositions that already exist in
the ield of the intersubjective debate over political afairs, moral problems,
social questions, and so forth. Far from abolishing the distinction between
ethical and unethical, right and wrong, a universal ethics leads us to accept
that while most proposals for action are ethically legitimate (even though
on other grounds we might disagree with them), there are some, branded
somewhat archaically by Kant as “evil,” that are simply illegitimate. These
are the moral maxims that fail the tests of universality. Žižek is apparently
only incidentally interested in this aspect of the question, however, for several other considerations are at work in this position, among them the Hegelian trope of ethical progress as necessitating a “crime” against ethical life
(a transgression of social norms). Although Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel is
questionable,16 it is probable that the principal consideration at work here is
his supposition that it is possible to aim, not for the inherent transgressions
of an ethico-political ield, but for the “foreclosed” “kernel of the Real” that
sustains the dialectics of social norm and moral transgression.
Žižek’s exploration of this lethal plunge—the correlative to the political
Act—happens through the trope of “diabolical evil” (Žižek, 1997b: 213-241).
For Kant, evil exists as radical evil, which designates not a special class of
16. The Hegelian dialectics of crime as a demand for recognition and the expansion of the
law are superbly (and completely unambiguously, unlike Žižek’s unilateral “supreme crime”)
covered in the work of Williams and Honneth. (Honneth, 1995; Williams, 1997). In Hegel’s
own work, the role of Caesar in Rome, Socrates in Athens and Napoleon in Western Europe exemplify the “criminal” act that executes the “ruse reason” and leads to an expanded
conception of ethical life. See (Hegel, 1956). These actions are justiied in the light of a
teleological conception of history: Hegel by no means condones unilateral violence or mere
criminality, but instead suggests that certain universal conceptions were correct, despite their
non-acceptance by the society of the time, and proposes that violence has historically been
justiied in their realisation. For a contemporary (neo-Hegelian) interpretation of the potential conlict between a universal ethical imperative and the concrete norms of social conduct
in a given milieu, consult Agnes Heller’s useful reconstruction of the concept of ethical life
(Heller, 1988; Heller, 1990; Heller, 1996).
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actions, but the root of the human condition in what we might call “pathological narcissism,” that is, making the performance of ethical duty conditional upon some narcissistic satisfaction. Kant rules out the human commission of acts of “angelic good” or “diabolical evil” for the straightforward
reason that in “diabolical evil,” the noumenal moral law becomes phenomenalised as an empirical action (Copjec, 1996: xvi-xx). What fascinates Žižek
and cothinkers, however, is the interpretation of Kant’s discussion of regicide, where “the state commits suicide,” as the locus classicus of the suicidalrevolutionary act of “diabolical evil”. In this act, it is the King’s sublime body
that is killed, through the formal act of execution. Zupančič, for instance,
claims that Kant is “shaken” by this act of “diabolical evil” because “he is
compelled by his argument to describe it in exactly the same words he used
to describe and ethical act” (Zupančič, 2000: 85). Zupančič summarises:
“diabolical evil, the highest evil, is indistinguishable from the highest good,
and they are nothing other than the deinitions of an accomplished ethical
act” (Zupančič, 2000: 92). In terms of the structure of the ethical act, the
diference between good and evil is irrelevant. Zupančič is simply echoing
Žižek’s claim that “the good is nothing but the name for the formal structure
of action” (Žižek, 1997b: 213-241; Zupančič, 2000: 92).
Implied in Žižek’s conception of the ethical act—apart from its explicit moral relativism—are several consequences: the direct intrusion of the
Symbolic Law into consciousness; the direct intervention of the noumenal
realm into the phenomenal domain; and the obliteration of subjective division in the “act of an undivided subject”.17 These conditions equal an identical subject-object. Žižek’s relections on Copjec’s work, in a chapter signiicantly entitled “The Unconscious Law,” might have launched a serious
reconsideration of his “original insight,” with its implicit equation of the
Symbolic Law with the lower level of the Graph of Desire (Žižek, 1997b: 213241). Instead, it formed a platform for the leap into the “abyss of freedom”.
Before following Žižek into the “abyss of freedom,” though, where he will
rehabilitate the doctrine of the identical subject-object, we have to observe
the fall of the last barrier between Žižek and high metaphysics, namely, the
collapse of the Lacanian relation of “aphanisis,” or inverse proportionality,
between subject and object.
Theoretical Uncertainty
Perhaps Žižek’s best front cover is the dead octopus on The Indivisible Remainder (1996). The indivisible remainder in question is, of course, the uncanny
“subject before subjectivation”—and presumably the graphic alludes to “the
materialist subject as the point at which nature ‘runs amok’ and goes of the
17. There are some signs that Žižek has begun to retreat from the pseudo-problem of “diabolical evil,” without, however, retracting the identical subject-object that is its correlate.
Radical Negativity
217
rails” (Žižek, 1996b: 73). This subject is the abyss of freedom that diferentiates humanity from nature, a radical negativity in relation to all existence,
the void in the Symbolic ield, the “vanishing mediator” in the historical
process. Indeed, this might be regarded as Žižek’s fundamental theorem:
“the ultimate ‘vanishing mediator’ between nature and culture is the death
drive” (Žižek, 1991a: 207); and, as Žižek explains in a recent major work, “in
Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivisation is the pure negativity of the
death drive prior to its reversal into the identiication with some new master
signiier” (Žižek, 2000h: 160). If this unconscious “subject before subjectivation” were to meet the light of day (appearing, for instance, as a repulsive
dead octopus), it would open one baleful eye, ix the person with its dreadful gaze and pronounce the words of truth: “I am what is in you more than
yourself; I am the death drive”.
Or would it? On a second pass, the death drive is not the divided subject,
but instead the object (a), the uncanny “extimate” thing within the “subject
beyond subjectivation”. On this interpretation, the death drive is the traumatic kernel in the subject, and the divided subject, , is, in the last analysis,
the subject divided as to the object (a), the Thing which both attracts and repels the subject (Žižek, 1989: 180).
The process of interpellation-subjectivation is precisely an attempt to
elude, to avoid this traumatic kernel through identiication: in assuming
a symbolic mandate, in recognising himself in the interpellation, the
subject evades the dimension of the Thing (Žižek, 1989: 181).
Now the subject before subjectivation is the void in the Symbolic ield,
a subject that tries to avoid the encounter with the Thing that it is in the
Real, namely, the death drive in its rotary motion around the object (a). All
Symbolic identiication happens not as a fundamental decision by the death
drive to adopt an existential project, but instead as a decision by the empty
“substanceless subjectivity” of the (unconscious) Cartesian subject to evade
the anxiety and disgust provoked by the encounter with the “rotary motion
of the drives”.
In the recent account, then, = death drive. In the initial theory, however, (a) = death drive.
Between the two moments stands Žižek’s speculative philosophy of the
Act. This metaphysics of the decision is explicitly posed as an exposition
of “dialectical materialism,” that is, as isomorphic to the primordially repressed historical violence which founds that social ield explored in “historical materialism” (Žižek, 1996b: 43). For Žižek, this means that the “ultimate speculative identity” happens when the “authentic Act” of the subject
suspends the existing Symbolic Order (coextensive with the social ield, for
Žižek) only to inaugurate a new “big Other” (Žižek, 1996b: 144). This is
a metaphysical exploration of the problematic of the “great leap forward”
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that we have already seen is the root of Žižek’s political zigzags and ethical
hesitations. Žižek constructs a chain of equivalences: irst, the speculative
identity of the object (a) with the Symbolic Order (Žižek, 1996b: 143-147);
then, the speculative identity of the subject with the Symbolic Order. The
clear implication is that in the Act, the subject and object are “speculatively” identical. Yet, this is “perhaps the hardest speculative nut to crack” for
Žižek, and so he can only indicate that the Lacanian motif of creation ex nihilo means that:
Although one has to be careful not to confound the Act qua Real with
the performative gesture of the Master-Signiier, the two are nonetheless
closely connected: the ultimate paradox of the process of signiication, its
“highest mystery,” is the fact that the Act qua Real … is simultaneously
the “vanishing mediator” that founds the Symbolic Order. … In short, the
Act qua Real and the Master-Signiier are not “substantially” diferent
(Žižek, 1996b: 146-147).
In other words, the historical subject, via the “highest mystery” of the
transubstantiation of the death drive, creates the totality of the Symbolic
Order (social ield). The “ultimate paradox” of Žižek’s theory is an identical
subject-object of history.
IV.
According to the dustjacket of The Ticklish Subject, “Žižek argues for a radical
politics … unafraid to make sweeping claims in the name of a universal human subject”. The concept of the unconscious subject as the “absent centre
of political ontology” makes a lot of sense: central, as a universal, but constitutively absent because unconscious, the subject is the lynchpin of political
resistance and the basis for an ethical conception of socialism. The problem
lies in the execution, where “in a typical Žižekian inversion, the spectral
Cartesian ego is reborn, but this time as its exact opposite, the id” (Eagleton, 2001: 50). To be precise, Žižek reconceptualises the id so as to attribute
to it exactly the same properties (punctual unity, self-relexivity, world-constituting agency) formerly assigned to the Cartesian “uniied ego,” the original “identical subject-object” in modern philosophy. This is the metaphysical root of the “antinomies of Žižek” that we have just encountered. Žižek
thematises his metaphysics under the heading of the “abyss of freedom” and
the “decision-event of Truth,” and bases his claims to anti-historicism and
anti-capitalism on the foundation of the world-constituting decision of the
identical subject-object. Instead of a radical politics for the twenty-irst century, I suggest, Žižek’s metaphysical radicalism risks descent into irrationality and relativism.
Radical Negativity
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The Abyss of Freedom
Žižek’s lugubrious speculations on the undivided subject as incarnation
of the death drive are supported by the high metaphysics of the “abyss of
freedom,” the encounter with the Romanticism of Schelling. According to
Schelling’s Romantic theological fantasy, the rational world of the Logos
emerges from a divine decision to abandon the insane and formless vortex of
cosmic creation, and enter temporality as the immortal substance. Nature,
Schelling proposes, is the Odyssey of Spirit, inally reaching consciousness
in humanity. Unhesitatingly projecting this creation myth onto humanity
via the doctrine of “intellectual intuition,” Schelling proposes that humanity is the “identical subject-object,” because humanity is a formal incarnation of the divine substance (Schelling 1997). Žižek’s delight at this speculative schema is evident. So is the fragility of his philosophical defense of this
fantasy as rational solution to a serious cognitive problem. Straining credibility beyond the breaking-point, Žižek interprets Schellingian metaphysics
as an anticipation of psychoanalysis, and recasts the divine decision as the
contingent encounter with the Real of the drives, in the unconscious “choice
of neurosis,” equivalent to the Kantian original decision upon a moral disposition (Žižek, 1997a).
For Žižek, the drive is beyond the Symbolic Law (Žižek, 1997a: 78-79)
and the rotary motion of the drives is a pre-symbolic antagonism (Žižek,
1997a: 19). At a stroke, this re-naturalises the drives, returning them, against
Lacan, to biological instincts. “At the beginning proper stands a resolution,
an act of decision that, by way of diferentiating between past and present,
resolves the unbearable tension of the rotary motion of the drives”—that
is, makes the transition from drive to desire (Žižek, 1997a: 15). Schelling’s
pseudo-problem is that there is strictly no way to exit from the rotary motion of the drives unless the drives themselves are preceded by a mysterious
“X” that “contracts” the drives. As we have seen, Schelling’s “solution” is an
identical subject-object who, through “intellectual intuition,” posits both the
totality and the distinction between subject and object. Let us once again examine why an advocate of Lacanian theory will encounter grave problems
following Schelling.
Formally speaking, Žižek is able to prevent the emergence of an identical subject-object by proposing that the “subject before subjectivation”
(symbolised by the Lacanian matheme, ) is in a relation of inverse proportionality with the “sublime object of ideology” (symbolised by the Lacanian
matheme, object (a)), so that the approach of the object (a) means aphanisis
(fading) of the subject, . The only “identical subject-object” is the fantasy
relation (symbolised as ◊a), where the “losange,” ◊, designates a relation of
“internal exclusion” or “extimacy” between and (a). So long as Žižek sticks
to the Lacanian orthodoxy, then, he is quite immune to any allegation that
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he restores an identical subject-object.
Žižek, as we have just seen, exhibits a certain resistance to the consequences of crushing Lacanian theory in the speculative nutcracker. It is
therefore left to Zupančič to make the full implications explicit. She claims
the abolition of the division of the subject in the ethical Act—a subjectless
act of a “full subject”—reveals the normal, pathological state of the divided
subject by contrast with the Act. “The subject is ‘realised,’ ‘objectiied’ in this
act: the subject passes over to the side of the object. … In an act there is no
‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective igure
that arises from it … [which] follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or ‘subjectivation without subject’” (Zupančič, 2000: 104).
Less directly, Žižek states the same conclusion:
[T]he authentic act that I accomplish is always by deinition a foreign
body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and
repels me, so that if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my
aphanisis, self-erasure. If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject
of subjectivisation, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic
integration and recognition, of assuming the act as “my own,” but,
rather, an uncanny, “acephalous” subject through which the act takes
place which is “in him more than himself”. The act thus designates the
level at which the fundamental divisions and displacements usually associated with
the “Lacanian subject” … are momentarily suspended (Žižek, 2000h: 374-375
emphasis added).
This means that the Kantian objection to the intrusion of noumenal
freedom into the phenomenal domain (the subject as moral author of the
world is a god; correlatively, the intrusion of the noumenal realm implies
that suspension of the subject’s freedom, because this god manipulates all
phenomenal events in line with a moral purpose) applies to the Act. For
Kant, were God to intrude directly into the phenomenal world, humanity
would become mere puppets of the Divine Will and not autonomous subjects. For Žižek, “the highest freedom coincides with … a reduction to a
lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures” (Žižek, 2000h: 375).
Žižek therefore reinvents the doctrine of intellectual intuition by means of
the claim that the punctual unity of the radical will is capable of unilaterally
inaugurating a new social order.
Event of the Resolute Decision
As a consequence of the problematic of absolute freedom, Žižek’s “philosophical manifesto of Cartesian subjectivity” (Žižek, 2000h: 2) necessarily
leads to ethical decisionism and political voluntarism (Žižek, 2000h: 114115), cognitive irrationalism (Žižek, 1997a: 76) and the transposition of individual psychology (madness) onto social formations (Žižek, 2000h: 34-41).
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These are condensed, for Žižek, through the igure of a “voluntarist decisionism” combined with “Cartesian mechanism,” into a “materialist theory
of Grace” (Žižek, 2000h: 116-119). This position, as archaic as it is irrational,
cannot possibly found a radical politics for the twenty-irst century. To the
contrary: it has strong neo-conservative ainities.
Decisionism—as exempliied by Carl Schmitt (Hirst, 1999: 7-17)—
departs from a monological concept of subjectivity and postulates a prediscursive kernel that acts as the nucleus of decisions, without reference
to ethical norms. On the basis of the theory of the “abyss of freedom,” it
is impossible for Žižek to avoid an ethical decisionism that intensiies the
problems of Heidegger’s theory of the “resolute decision” upon an existential project, elaborated in Being and Time (1927) (Heidegger, 1996: 233-277).
Heidegger’s conception of “anticipatory resoluteness” through the recognition of the “mineness of death” is overshadowed in contemporary debates
by Heidegger’s notorious Nazi entanglement. The major philosophical problem with Being and Time is not decisionism (Osborne, 1995: 168-175), however,
but the transposition of the individual “resolute decision” onto the “historical destiny” of social collectives (Heidegger, 1996: 341-370 especially 352).
As Žižek explains, the resulting neglect of the element of sociality means
that the individual decision is ethically indiferent, while nations are treated as persons with a “destiny” (Žižek, 2000h: 11-22). Ethical decisionism
might therefore not be Heidegger’s problem—but it certainly is Žižek’s, for
Žižek supplements a theory of the “insane” decision, which results from the
breaking of social bonds, with the postulate of a pre-symbolic kernel, in
the form of a unitary will, that precedes the decision. This not only neglects
the medium of sociality—an “inadequate deployment of the Mitsein”—it actively negates social existence and advocates the destruction of social norms
and political legitimacy. On the basis of this theory, Žižek—the defender of
Cartesian philosophical science against the onslaughts of the postmodern
relativists—inds it diicult to discriminate between democracy and totalitarianism without resorting to a determination of social content that contradicts the asocial character of the Truth-Event (Žižek, 2000e: 138-139; Žižek,
2002: 39).
In the light of his thesis of the death drive as the undivided will of an
identical subject-object, Žižek seeks to integrate Alain Badiou’s concept of
the Event of Truth into Žižek’s post-Althusserian problematic of ideological interpellation (Žižek, 2000h: 128). Žižek salutes Badiou’s resurrection of
the metaphysical dimension of “the politics of (universal) Truth” (Žižek, 2000h:
132) and opposes this to the postmodern dogma that “events do not happen”
(Žižek, 2000h: 135). For Žižek, this Truth can only be the repressed historical genesis of Being in a contingent political act of social inauguration, that
is, a violent revolution. According to Žižek, “the truth-event consists in the
elementary ideological gesture of interpellating individuals” (Žižek, 2000h:
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141). Yet, the entailment of this position is that there exists no neutral gaze
that might discern the Event and arbitrate any claim:
Thus, there is no neutral gaze of knowledge that could discern the
event in its efects: a decision is always-already there—that is, one can
discern the signs of an Event in the situation only from a previous
decision for Truth, just as in Jansenist theology, in which divine
miracles are legible as such only to those who have already decided for
Faith (Žižek, 2000h: 136).
Referring approvingly to Lukács (Žižek, 2000h: 137)—who claimed that
real decisions precede knowledge of the situation and described his conversion to Communism as a “Pascalian wager”—Žižek proposes that the
decision precedes any undecidability. This stance of irrational faith enables
Žižek to impatiently dismiss the question of how to arbitrate whether a social movement is “truly the Event, not just another semblance of an Event”
(Žižek, 2000h: 138). Accepting Badiou’s anti-Enlightenment claim that religion is the formal model of political commitment, Žižek nonetheless feels
compelled to ask how despite the fact that, today, religion is a pseudo-event,
St Paul remains the philosopher of the formal conditions of the truth event.
“Nonetheless, the problem remains of how it was possible for the irst and
still most pertinent description of the mode of operation of the idelity to a
Truth Event to occur apropos of a Truth Event that is a mere semblance,
not an actual Truth” (Žižek, 2000h: 143). For Žižek, “from a Hegelian standpoint, there is a deep necessity in this, conirmed by the fact that in our century the philosopher who provided the deinitive description of an authentic political act (Heidegger in Being and Time) was seduced by a political act
that was undoubtedly a fake, not an actual Truth-Event (Nazism)” (Žižek,
2000h: 143). So—“what if what Badiou calls the Truth-Event is, at its most
radical, a purely formal act of decision? [W]hat if the true idelity to the
Event is ‘dogmatic’ in the precise sense of unconditioned Faith?” (Žižek,
2000h: 144). In other words, Badiou does not suiciently vigorously reject
the Enlightenment position that politics is based on the demystiication of
religious illusions.
Nonetheless, sensing the relativist void opening before his feet, Žižek
claims that the Hegelian position on the “singular universal,” the element
that embodies the void of the situation, is that it subverts the situation by “directly incarnating the universal” (Žižek, 2000h: 144). Hence, the problematic of proletarian chiliasm, the moment of the identical subject-object in a
total revolution, is linked to the expressive totality and the direct incarnation of universality as the “solution” to the postmodern constellation. The
truth-event is a Pascalian wager (Žižek, 2000h: 144), that involves a temporal loop (Žižek, 2000h: 144), which narrativises history as an evolutionary
sequence, whereby the present is redeemed in the future thanks to the event
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(Žižek, 2000h: 144). Which sounds like Žižek’s description of the fantasy. Indeed, “is not the circular relationship between the Event and the subject …
the very circle of ideology?” (Žižek, 2000h: 145).
The Decline of Symbolic Authority: Žižek’s “Anti-Historicism”
It is therefore not surprising that Žižek’s constant polemical denunciations
of “historicism,” for its lack of recognition of the “non-historical kernel of
human existence,” are laced with bold claims to have adopted a “dogmatic” stance, so that, for instance, we are informed that “Marxism and psychoanalysis are ‘infallible’ at the level of their enunciated content” (Žižek,
1994c: 183). To claim that Žižek remains within the gravitational ield of
historicism will perhaps generate consternation, for the dominant tendency in criticisms of Žižek is to take a position for or against his supposed anti-historicism. Crusader for Cartesian certainty, defender of the cogito and
supporter of the Truth-Event of militant materialism (the October Revolution), Žižek has produced numerous critiques of “postmarxian historicism”
and “postmodern sophism” (Žižek, 1993: 1-5; Žižek, 1996b: 214-218; Žižek,
2000c: 112-114; Žižek, 2001c: 80-81). In opposition to the historicist tendency
of radical democratic postmarxism, Žižek has from the beginning proposed
that “over-rapid historicisation makes us blind to the real kernel that returns
as the same through diverse … symbolisations” (Žižek, 1989: 50). His position is that it is impossible to entirely contextualise a phenomenon: the dissolution of every event into its socio-historical context implies the positioning of the analyst in the “view from nowhere,” the gods-eye position of pure,
neutral metalanguage situated “above” the historical texture. The apparently modest perspectival relativism of the historicist therefore masks an extraordinarily immodest claim to perfect neutrality, to possess the “master’s
gaze, which viewing history from a safe metalanguage distance, constructs
the linear narrative of ‘historical evolution’” (Žižek, 2001c: 80). Žižek connects the metanarrative of legitimation that supports historicism with the
fundamental operation of ideology (Žižek, 1991a: 130) and regards deconstruction as the “highest expression” of contemporary historicism, because
its endless recontextualisations engage precisely such a metalinguistic claim
(Žižek, 1989: 153-155; Žižek, 1991a: 87-90). What historicism overlooks is
the eternal return of the same of difference itself in every historico-symbolic
text, conceptualised psychoanalytically as “lack” (the absence of a presence)
(Žižek, 2000c: 114; Žižek, 2001c: 223). The problem is that this deinition of
the Symbolic as based in a pure, non-conceptual diference, besides having
surprisingly Deleuzian overtones (Deleuze, 1994), coincides with Žižek’s definition of the Real, collapsing “lack” into “loss,” Symbolic into Real—and
subject into object.
Žižek can salvage his position from relativism only on the basis of an ex-
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plicit advocacy of expressive totality, that is, by undermining the non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel. According to Žižek, there exists a structural homology between liberal capitalism and hysterical subjectivity (Žižek,
1993: 209-210). The basis for this assertion is the dubious theoretical identity
between surplus value and “surplus-enjoyment,” grounded in the “structural homology” between the self-transcending limit of capitalism and the relation between prohibition and transgression in psychoanalysis (Žižek, 1989:
49-53). The result is that, as Jason Glynos demonstrates, the “logic of desire is the motor of capitalism” (Glynos, 2001: 88). The substantive diferences between the libidinal investments in the formation of social subjectivity, and the material basis in surplus labour-time for institutional relations,
should warn us against any premature telescoping of the speciicity of the
ideological and economic. Žižek’s position risks collapse into an insipid (and
conservative) functionalism that denies the coeicient of resistance in social
subjectivity, by suggesting that forms of individuation are only functional for
capital accumulation (or vice versa, for Žižek’s idealism). Žižek’s precious formalism, which makes every form of structural imbalance somehow secretly
“the same,” licensing the collapse of structural regions into single generative
mechanism, is exactly what Althusser criticised under the heading of “expressive totality” ( Jameson, 1981: 34-37).
Žižek’s indiference to Marxist theory leads to his endorsement of Hardt
and Negri’s baroque, Deleuze-inspired fantasia as a “new Communist Manifesto” (Hardt, 2000: dustjacket; Žižek, 2001d: 190-205), presumably on the
basis that their exploration of the late capitalist desiring-machines of global
empire supports his own conjecture that the lexible identities of the NSM
correspond to “Spinozist late capitalism”. Indeed, for Žižek, the proposition that “Spinozism”—by which Žižek means Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus—is the “ideology of late capitalism” efectively displaces postmodern culture from that role (Žižek, 1993: 211-219). For
Žižek, the postmodern celebration of dispersed, multiple subject-positions in
the processes of deterritorialised global capitalism, “far from containing any
kind of subversive potentials … designates the form of subjectivity that corresponds
to late capitalism” (Žižek, 1993: 216). The inconsistent modes of particularised
enjoyment to which this “subject” surrenders are nothing but the operations
of multinational capital. Hence, Žižek suggests, the alternatives of Althusserian Marxism and Deleuzian postmodernism are only the critical and celebratory aspects of a single process of late capitalism.
Unlike Lukács, for whom commodity reiication was the mechanism of
expressive uniication of the capitalist totality, for Žižek (with Hegel), this
mechanism is subjectivity. With the shift to late capitalism, perverse subjectivity supposedly emerges as the universal mode of subjection. According to
Žižek, the break-up of the nuclear family correlative to globalisation leads
to a decline in paternal authority and its replacement by the ferocious “ma-
Radical Negativity
225
ternal superego” (Žižek, 1991b: 97-104). This has potentially catastrophic
results: because the father is connected to symbolic authority, society slides
into a decline in symbolic eiciency where symbolic ictions are replaced by
imaginary simulacra and the resort to the Real of violence (Žižek, 2000h:
315). The autonomous critical subject is increasingly replaced by the “pathological narcissism” of a perverse subjectivity, which is paradoxically dependent upon the very authority it disavows, a resentful conformist whose
failed rebellion drives in the direction of self-punishment or sadistic vengeance upon others. In a revenge of the language on Lacanian hyperbole,
then, we are presented with the spectacle of the “collapse” of a big Other
who “does not exist” (Žižek, 2000h: 326). For Žižek, this signiies the collapse of the Symbolic Order, and its fragmentation into a multiplicity of domains of signiication as belief in symbolic authority is destroyed by knowledge
(Žižek, 2002).
Žižek therefore accepts the decline of Oedipus and the emergence of multiple contingent identities, but rejects the narrative according to which this is
a straightforward process of liberation: “the danger lies not in the remainders of the past, but in the obscene need for domination and subjection engendered by the new ‘post-Oedipal’ forms of subjectivity themselves” (Žižek,
2000h: 360). Žižek’s position implies that political revolution is fundamentally a restoration of Oedipal subjectivity and a redemption of the “big Other,” redolent of a religious “cure” for postlapsarian wickedness. From this
position it is impossible to evade the slide into self-instrumentalisation. Just
as the Stalinist presents themselves as the instrument of the historical process destined to save modern culture from its descent into barbarism, Žižek
opposes a redemptive universality “to come” to “globalisation-with-particularisation” and its perverted subjectivity.
Pauline Materialism: Žižek’s “Anti-Capitalism”
According to Žižek, the new “end of history” of the post-Communist global hegemony of American inance capital—the event-less reality of the New
World Order—intensiies the depoliticisation characteristic of modernity.
The result, Žižek suggests, is “postmodern post-politics,” which:
no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and pacify
the “returns of the repressed,” but much more efectively “forecloses” it,
so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their “irrational”
excessive character, are no longer simple “returns of the repressed” but,
rather, represent a case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic) which, as
we know from Lacan, returns in the Real (Žižek, 2000h: 198).
The deadlock of the contemporary world, then, is that the declining eficiency of symbolic authority and the post-political technocracy exempliied
by the “global Third Way” of Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair, generate
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the combination of depoliticised apathy and anti-political fundamentalism
that means that violence is increasingly the matrix for the resolution of social conlicts. This leads Žižek to the classic ultra-left position that “the neoNazi skinhead’s ethnic violence is not the ‘return of the repressed’ of the liberal multiculturalist tolerance, but directly generated by it, its own concealed
true face” (Žižek, 2000h: 205).
Žižek’s efort to create an emancipatory politics capable of breaking
through the supposed pseudo-dialectic of cynicism and violence leads him
to declare himself a “Pauline materialist,” or ethical Marxist. As he explains, “the New World Order, as in medieval times, is global, but not universal, since it strives for a new, global order with each part in its allocated
place” (Žižek, 2000h: 176). Therefore:
Today, more than ever, one has to insist that the only way open to the
emergence of an Event is that of breaking the vicious cycle of globalisationwith-particularisation by (re)asserting the dimension of Universality
against capitalist globalisation. … [W]hat we need today is the gesture
that would undermine capitalist globalisation from the standpoint of
universal Truth, just as Pauline Christianity did to the Roman global
Empire (Žižek, 2000h: 211).
Žižek’s argument becomes increasingly incoherent from this point onwards. According to Žižek, and despite the assertion that capitalism replaces the universal with “globalisation-with-particularisation,” there exist
three universals today: the “Real universality” of international capitalism;
the “Symbolic universality,” the reigning symbolic iction of multicultural tolerance; the “Imaginary universality” of the ideal of égaliberté (Žižek,
2000h: 213). This invokes a new “concrete universality” of “relexive modernity,” distinct from the concrete universal of the twentieth century, involving
a “postmodern, post-nation state” form of globalised life supported by the
reigning iction of multicultural tolerance (Žižek, 2000h: 214). This allows
Žižek—with proponents of “relexive modernity”—to interpret neo-fascism
and religious fundamentalism as desperate defenses against the new, rootless
“void of universality” (Žižek, 2000h: 217).
The postulate of an expressive totality of late capitalism enables Žižek to
interpret cultural and intellectual phenomena as mere aspects of a unitary
process. On these lines, postmodern theory, postmarxian politics, multiculturalism, human rights, political liberties and parliamentary democracy are
nothing but the “human face” of “capitalist globalism”. Indeed, it licenses
(for Žižek) practices of psychological labelling little diferent from the vulgar
Marxist practice of premature class ascription. Žižek’s discourse is generously larded with psychoanalytic “invective,” so that highly respected interlocutors are described as “perverts” (Deleuze, Foucault, Butler) and “hysterics” (Derrida, Laclau). Multiculturalism involves a condescending distance
Radical Negativity
227
towards the multiplicity of cultures that secretly relies upon a “neutral-universal” stance elevated beyond the militant particularisms—but this supposedly neutral stance is in actuality precisely based on capitalist globalisation
and the universalisation of the Western form of life, before which every other culture appears as a particular (Žižek, 2000h: 216). Postmodern politics
becomes entangled in the “unprecedented homogenisation of today’s world”
and a depoliticisation of social conlict, where “the price of this depoliticisation of the economy is the depoliticisation of politics … political struggle
proper is transformed into the cultural struggle for the recognition of marginal identities and the tolerance of diferences” (Žižek, 2000h: 218).
Žižek (quite correctly) criticises the situation where only the populist extreme Right now criticises capital, while the radical Left occupies itself with
the struggle for cultural recognition on the basis of capitalism (Žižek, 2000h:
355). “Leftists support a strong State as the last guarantee of social and civil
liberties against Capital; while Rightists demonise the State and its apparatuses as the ultimate terrorist machine” (Žižek, 2000h: 356). Yet, beyond
the remedy of a “Leftist suspension of the Law,” a suspension of the ethical
in the name of a true universality to come (Žižek, 2000h: 223), Žižek is remarkably reticent regarding concrete alternatives. Žižek’s opposition to the
leftwing politics of enthusiastic resignation supposedly does not include hostility to the reform agenda of postmodern politics: “I am pleading for a ‘return to the primacy of economy,’ not to the detriment of the issues raised by
postmodern forms of politicisation, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more efective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on,
demands” (Žižek, 2000h: 356). Yet, elsewhere, Žižek analyses the discursive
form: “of course, …, but …,” as the discourse of disavowal. He claims the
real question is “how are we to reinvent the political space in today’s conditions of globalisation?” (Žižek, 2000h: 222). I suggest that Žižek has no real
answers—hence the rhetorical question.
Based on his conceptualisation of the “Lacanian Thing” as secretly
identical to the Cartesian ego, Žižek can only lurch between the poles of
an antinomy. For the postmarxian Žižek of the radical democratic period,
the death drive (the Thing) represents the dimension of radical negativity that cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions.
Therefore:
it is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this antagonism, but
that the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian
temptation; the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been
perpetrated in the name of man as a harmonious being, of a New Man
without antagonistic tension (Žižek, 1989: 5).
Indeed, this fantasy of the absolute crime that opens a New Beginning is
sadistic. It is the fantasy that “it is possible to create new forms of life ex nihi-
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
lo, from the zero-point”. From the vantage of Žižek’s radical democratic period, it is “not diicult to see how all radical revolutionary projects, Khmer
Rouge included, rely on this same fantasy of … the creation ex nihilo of a new
(sublime) Man, delivered from the corruptions of previous history” (Žižek,
1991a: 261). But, on the other hand, prohibition eroticises, and so there’s an
irresistible fascination in the “lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing” and
“creation ex nihilo”—at least for the hyper-Marxist Žižek of the period of
“Pauline Materialism”. Hence, in the “unplugging” from the New World
Order by the “authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collectives” that Žižek now urges (Žižek, 2000e: 160), “there is a terrifying violence
at work in this ‘uncoupling,’ that of the death drive, of the radical ‘wiping
the slate clean’ as the condition of the New Beginning” (Žižek, 2000e: 127).
This sort of “Year Zero” rhetoric may be meant as a provocation to the relativists, as a gesture of deiance towards the contemporary prohibition on
thinking about revolution (Žižek, 2001b). Nonetheless, I suggest that this
combination, of Leninist voluntarism and “irrational” Pauline materialism,
does not resist the postmodern couplet of cynical distance and irrational
fundamentalism, but repeats its terms.
Conclusion
Theories of Structuration, Theories of Ideology
Postmarxism lives its desire for radical social transformation as an exile. As
before, with the Romantics and then the New Left, the failure of revolutionary hopes generated in the 1960s (and briely renewed in 1989) has led to
aesthetic compensations for political marginalisation. The failure of revolution now necessitates a detour—more or less permanent—through ideological manipulation, before it might once again be possible to return to mass
politics: in a very familiar pattern, postmarxism seeks to transform political subjectivity where once it strove to change the world. Theorising political insurgency as a semi-divine force irrupting from a dimension “beyond”
the “discursive formation,” postmarxism is quick to add that this stands no
chance of global success. As beits a generation for which messianic aspirations have cooled, the very best that can be hoped for is a localised shift in
the balance of forces. Indeed, when postmodern anti-Enlightenment animus
grips theorists of postmarxism, its positions resemble a “chemical wedding”
of Structural Marxism with the “New Philosophy”. Despite the hypostatisation of contingency and the insistence on the openness of the historical
process, one thing is absolutely certain, lowing from the constitution of the
political ield with an iron necessity: because identities are formed through
processes of exclusion and subordination, every victory is at once a fresh defeat; every liberation is automatically a new enslavement. At once radically
libertarian and deeply cynical, postmarxism postulates a fundamental symmetry between the emancipatory politics of the oppressed and the repressive
politics of domination. Hegemonic politics is theorised in radically “Machiavellian” terms, as a neutral technology of manipulation and domination
that the Left would be well advised to learn to control. Because all social
formations are fundamentally constructed upon exclusion and marginalisa231
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
tion, the real question becomes one of how to swap the leading personnel,
rather than whether to transform the social order.
At the same time, however, postmarxism has really tried to preserve the
radical impetus of socialist politics within a transformed historical conjuncture. Postmarxism secretes a deep desire for liberation, expressed as a radical disdain for everyday politics and the art of government, together with a
privileging of “the political” as the moment of social antagonism and spontaneous plebeian rebellion. Many political positions oscillate between radicalised liberalism and an ultra-left refusal of everyday politics. A thoroughly
progressive hostility towards every form of pseudo-natural domination animates the imprecations hurled at “essentialism,” mistakenly considered by
postmarxism to be a legacy of a now obsolete Enlightenment rationalism,
rather than the enduring form of ideological mystiication. While the turn to
social subjectivity as a principle of structuration is reminiscent of Romantic
theories, in postmarxian theory the analysis of hegemonic politics is linked
to the problems of speciically socialist strategy. The defense of “the political” is aimed towards keeping alive exactly this strategic possibility in the
context of postmodern culture and poststructuralist philosophy. The political has the status of the “postmarxian Thing,” the forbidden and unnamed
desire that animates the merely formal unity of a shared trajectory beginning in Althusserian social theory. “The political,” as a moment of irruption
and revolutionary openness, is counterposed to “the political ield” of routine politics, characterised in modernity (for postmarxism) by democratic
competition. From Laclau and Moufe (“the political”), through Žižek (“the
political Act”), to Butler (“resigniication”), the post-Althusserian postmarxists are searching for a principle of transcendence that might reactivate the
moment of social inauguration. Postmarxism at once yearns for a universal revolution (“the political” as the moment of social inauguration) and denies the validity of universality. It thereby organises the sabotage of its own
programme and safeguards its unsatisied desire. Accordingly, postmarxism
is a protest politics designed to shift the new social movements to the left,
but is not itself capable of generating new radical forms. Indeed, the recent
rise of rightwing populism and religious fundamentalism exposes the reliance of postmarxism on a radicalised variant of liberal political theory, one
which valorises social particularity, cultural diference and localised democratic initiatives, whilst becoming increasingly allergic to the equivalential
logic of social confrontation. As with all radical forms of liberalism linked
to protest politics, then, postmarxism expresses a hysterical demand to the
political masters designed to force them to ix their system. For the perennial return and retreat of “the political” is the very locus of the postmarxian
programme, dependent as it is upon the permanent deferment of the moment of “the political” for the efective sabotage of every “socialist strategy”.
This movement is perfectly expressed by Laclau’s admission that radical
Theories of Structuration, Theories of Ideology
233
democracy inally consists only of “the introduction of state regulation and
democratic control of the economy, so that the worst efects of globalisation
are avoided” (Laclau, 2000c: 206)—a “radical” programme not too distant
from the policies of Third Way social democracy.
Postmarxism is a deeply contradictory phenomenon. On the one hand,
postmarxism preserves a radical impulse that leads it to position itself on the
leftwing of politics and to resist the drift “beyond Left and Right” that aflicts mainstream political parties and social theories. On the other hand,
the historicist problematic that informs postmarxism leads it to reject political universality and engage forms of theoretical and moral relativism whose
political implications are, at best, ambiguous, and at worst, reactionary. After the collapse of Communism, some ex-Marxists embraced the “criticism
of actually existing democracy,” announcing the perspective of “ive hundred years of reforms” and the gradual maturation of political subjectivity
before any substantial social transformations might once again become possible (Aronson, 1995). Post-Althusserian postmarxism—as the radical wing
of postmodern politics—announced, by contrast, an urgent programme of
“radical democracy” and “democratic citizenship” as the “corrective to the
liberal vision,” and declared that the very existence of “the political” was
threatened by the imposition of the “New World Order” and its liberaldemocratic consensus (Moufe, 1992d: 1-8). Yet, postmarxism’s hostility towards universality, resonating with some of the most reactionary themes of
the “New Philosophy,” leads its projected resistance to the New World Order astray every time. During the 1990s, postmarxism hailed the irruption
of new ethnic nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms and political particularisms as a veritable “return of the political”. Radically misreading this
political conjuncture as a repudiation of universality (as it had strategically
misread the late 1980s as a conjuncture of democratic advance instead of a
political retreat before an ascendant neo-liberalism), postmarxism celebrated this “return of the repressed” as a break with the supericial consensus
on “individualism, rationalism and universalism” (Moufe, 1992d: 1-8). A
decade later, and the leading theorists of postmarxism have discovered that
without universality, there can be no resistance to domination—let alone
a social alternative—for every modern demand for liberation expresses a
claim on an empty (formal) universal. The titles of the contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality—“Constructing Universality,” “Competing
Universalities,” “The Role of Universality in the Construction of Political
Logics,” and so forth—should tell the story of a fundamental rethink, leading to a break with the historicist problematic. Until the underlying assumptions of historicism are theoretically confronted, however, every such efort
to shift beyond political hermeneutics and ethical relativism only leads back
into the charmed circle of ideology.
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
TOWARDS AN ALTERNATIVE AGENDA FOR THEORETICAL
RESEARCH
I have demonstrated that the postmarxian ield, as deined by the political
strategy of radical democracy, is governed by the historicist problematic,
which acts as a theoretical unconscious limiting the ability of Laclau and
Moufe, Butler and Žižek to think social complexity and radical strategy.
I have sustained the thesis that the historicist problematic is characterised
by ive key positions: the relativisation of theory, the foundational character
of ideology, the expressive conception of history, an identical subject-object
and a theory of social practice modeled on individual praxis. In Chapter
One, I showed that postmarxism’s abandonment of the distinction between
theory and ideology leads to a transposition of structures of ideological misrecognition onto theoretical formulations. In examining post-Fordism, the
NSM and the history of Marxism, postmarxist theory betrays characteristically ideological structures of subject-centred descriptions, binary axiologies
based on mirror relations and the occlusion of inconsistencies behind imaginary histories. Chapter Two showed that the major theoretical statements of
Laclau and Moufe rely upon a latent, expressive totality of history, centred
on the master narrative of the unfolding of the “Democratic Revolution of
Modernity”. In Chapter Three, I proved that Butler’s theory of “performativity” depends upon a conception of social practice modeled on individual
praxis. Finally, Chapter Four, I demonstrated the existence of an impossible
desire to resurrect the doctrine of the “identical subject-object of history” in
Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics, proposing that the theoretical advances in his
work need to be systematically separated from his idealist speculations. This
sequence was selected on the basis of choosing the theorist who best exempliied a particular aspect of the historicist problematic; while Laclau and
Moufe, Butler and Žižek all display symptoms of the inluence of the entire
matrix of the historicist problematic, this inluence is unevenly developed,
and cannot be said to somehow make them all “the same”.
Indeed, there do exist real diferences between Laclau and Moufe,
Žižek and Butler, and the best way to capture these is to reconsider the original problem of the historicisation of Althusser’s “structural eternities”. Postmarxian discourse theory is in search of a principle that might introduce
historical transformation into the social formation, puncturing the structural necessity governing the totality with political contingency, and thereby rendering the social formation open, or incomplete. Political contingency therefore acts in postmarxian discourse theory as a principle of rupture,
whose privileged location is, according to postmarxism, to be encountered
in the realm of ideology (the formation of social subjectivity in the ield of
discourse). The divergences between the major theorists of post-structuralism—Derrida, Lacan and Foucault—are the basis for the diferent princi-
Theories of Structuration, Theories of Ideology
235
ples of rupture advanced by Laclau and Moufe (“discursivity,” equals différance), Žižek (the Real) and Butler (the dialogical structure of power and
resistance), respectively.
The problem with all of the positions in the postmarxian ield, however,
is that they implicitly equate the transformation of social subjectivity with
the historicity of social formations, thereby collapsing theories of structuration into theories of ideology. HSS is the most egregious instance of the
transposition of an innovative theory of ideology onto the entire social ield,
by means of a novel concept of discursive practice that cannot withstand serious scrutiny. In actuality, postmarxian discourse theories are post-Althusserian theories of ideology, inlated beyond their capacity into theories of social structuration. By returning to the moment of Althusser’s “ISAs essay”
and recontextualising this within the constellation of theoretical problems it
sought to solve, it becomes possible to grasp the limitations of making political subjectivity solely responsible for the transformation of social formations.
Then it becomes possible to separate new insights into social structuration
from the advances in the theory of ideology generated by postmarxism.
The signiicant advances in the Marxian theory of ideology generated
in the movement from Politics and Ideolog y in Marxist Theory, through HSS and
Socialist Strateg y, to The Sublime Object of Ideolog y, need to be separated from the
question of structuration and shorn of their historicist assumptions. Žižek’s
adaptation of Lacanian psychoanalysis not only stands at the end of this line
of development (thereby beneiting from earlier breakthroughs), but seems
the most promising from the perspective of the recognition of the role of the
subject in social processes, and for an ethical basis for democratic socialism.
Žižek’s theory of ideology represents a major breakthrough, and one that, I
have suggested, consists of two tendencies in a complex theoretical coniguration. In Žižek’s early, radical democratic incarnation, he presented a Lacanian theory of social subjectivity within a grasp of the ethico-political ield
that accepted the terms of debate of the opponent. Žižek’s later, “Pauline
Materialist” turn makes sometimes strident eforts to correct the political
complacency of the early work, but in so doing inverts the theoretical constellation into a Hegelian teleology. It is therefore not just a question of opposing Žižek’s early to the recent work, but rather of theoretically disentangling the many strands of his thinking.
At the same time, the insight that replacing labour as the model of social practice with a concept of discursive practice enables theorisation of the
dialogical, or contested, existence of social relations, needs to be explored in
depth. The concept of “discourse” as the selection and combination of differentially-related structural elements need not be limited by a literalisation
of what is efectively the theoretical metaphor of speech. The restriction of
discursive practice to metaphor and metonymy, equivalence and diference,
arbitrarily constrains the thinking of social processes and can only model
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The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
institutional formation at the cost of excessive abstraction. Once it is liberated from the constraints of a theoretical formalism that relects Laclau and
Moufe’s illegitimate transposition of ideological relations onto institutional
structures, the concept of discursive practice can theorise the articulation of
structural elements by social forces in the “ield of social relations” (Poulantzas), within the horizon of action of a political conjuncture. Throughout my
investigation, I have suggested an alternative agenda for theoretical research,
seeking to radicalise and extend the historicised Structural Marxism known
as Regulation Theory. Taking the historical bricolage of structural elements
in a mode of social regulation as exemplary of a “hegemonic articulation,” it
becomes possible to think the structural constraints and institutional syntax
that regulate “discursive practices,” thereby moving beyond an exclusively
linguistic conception of hegemonic articulation. Ideological discourses are
one component of every hegemonic articulation, not the inal horizon of all
political strategy.
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London and New York: Verso.
Zupančič, Alenka (2000). Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London and New
York: Verso.
Index of Proper Names
References to Ernesto Laclau, Chantal
Moufe, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek
suppressed (as the work deals throughout
with these thinkers).
Aglietta, Michel 43, 46, 51
Althusser, Louis 2
“Epistemological break” 31-38
Position on Eurocommunism 71
“Structure in dominance” 5, 12-13,
72, 90-93, 201, 224
Theory of ideology 7-9, 11, 61, 128129, 141, 159, 165, 169, 189, 191-194,
233
Anderson, Perry 6, 13, 36, 73
Antonio, Robert 51
Austin, J. L. 151-157, 211
Badiou, Alain 213, 221-222
Bakhtin, Mikhail 94
Balibar, Étienne 1
On égaliberté 116-117
On Marx 1, 63
Position on Eurocommunism 70
Reading Capital 7-8, 12-14, 31-38, 92
Barrett, Michèle 24, 32, 35, 58, 72,
83, 133
Beck, Ulrich 51, 225
Benton, Ted 71
Bertens, Hans 30-31
Best, Stephen 28, 33-35
Bhaskar, Roy 14, 40
Bobbio, Norberto 60, 104
Boggs, Carl 13, 53, 68, 71-72
Boothby, Richard 167
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 169
Bourdieu, Pierre 158
Bowles, Samuel 51
Boyer, Robert 46-48
Bracher, Mark 168
Brown, Wendy 3, 73
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 13, 70,
Calhoun, Craig 57
Callinicos, Alex 27, 83, 94
Carrillo, Santiago 68-69
Claudin, Fernando 68-69
Cohen, Gerald 56
Copjec, Joan 11, 168, 171, 202, 216
Critchley, Simon 3, 84, 111-112
Croteau, David 57, 64
Dallmayr, Fred 77
Deleuze, Gilles 137, 190
Derrida, Jacques 1, 78, 128, 137, 168170, 182, 226, 234
Différance 105-107
On speech act theory 127, 153-154
Descombes, Vincent 78
Dews, Peter 30, 71, 78, 106, 153, 165,
273
274
The Charmed Circle of Ideolog y
169, 183
Dolar, Mladen 3, 170, 183, 192-193
Dor, Joël 167
Eagleton, Terry 19, 26, 83, 96-97,
218
Fink, Bruce 93, 148, 167-168, 177178, 192, 196, 204-205
Foucault, Michel 15, 94-95, 127, 128131, 137, 139-142, 149, 150, 157, 161,
168, 170, 226, 234
Frank, Manfred 169
Fraser, Nancy 1-2, 20, 132-134
Freud, Sigmund 19, 93, 130, 141-145,
146-148, 167-168, 173, 177, 199,
205,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5-6
Gasché, Rodolphe 13, 87, 106, 183
Geras, Norman 2, 5, 27, 41, 82, 8486, 94
Giddens, Anthony 21, 51-52, 55-56,
60, 99, 225
Gramsci, Antonio 5, 13, 19, 46-47,
50, 65-66, 74
Habermas, Jürgen 31, 119
Hall, Stuart 24-25
Hardt, Michael 224
Hartmann, Klaus 180-181
Harvey, David. 27
Hegel, G. W. F. 12-14, 20, 27, 59,
78-82, 91, 93-94, 127-128, 133,
134-137, 143-145, 161, 165, 173-174,
180-184, 185-187, 191, 212,213, 215,
224, 235
Heidegger, Martin, 33, 221-222
Heller, Agnes 28
Henrich, Dieter 142, 149, 173
Hindess, Barry 58, 92-93
Hirst, Paul 58, 92-93
Homer, Sean 202
Honneth, Axel 132, 135
Hutcheon, Linda 55
Huyssen, Andreas 55
Hyppolite, Jean 186
Inglehart, Ronald 56
Jameson, Fredric 4, 11, 12, 27
Jessop, Bob 46-48, 51
Kant, Immanuel 40, 78, 94, 117, 135,
155, 165, 173, 178-181, 207-208,
213-216, 219-220
Kellner, Douglas 28, 33-35
Kierkegaard, Soren 214
Kojève, Alexandre 132, 137, 173-174
Kuhn, Thomas 33-35
Lacan, Jacques 3, 16
Desire 167-170, 177-180
Drive 177-180, 192-198
Imaginary 32, 142, 145
Name-of-the-Father 146-147, 204-208
Object (a) 171, 186-187, 191-192, 199200
On Descartes 170, 218
Real 93, 172-176, 177-180
Symbolic 93, 106, 145-148
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 166
Lakatos, Imré 33-34
Laplanche, Jean 91
Larrain, Jorge 7
Lear, Jonathan 168
Lecourt, Dominique 35, 71
Lefort, Claude 29, 108-109
Lenin, Vladimir 36, 67-70, 166, 202,
210-211, 214, 228
Lévy, Bernard-Henri 71
Lipietz, Alain 46
Lukács, Georg 12-13, 27, 36, 77, 7981, 94, 166, 171-173, 186, 190, 203,
210
Lyotard, Jean-François 26, 31
MacPherson, C. B. 53
Mandel, Ernest 54, 69-70
Marchais, George 69
McNay, Lois 129, 140, 161
Miliband, Ralph 83, 86
Miller, Jacques-Alain 167, 178
Mujal-Léon, Eusebio 69
Napolitano, Georgio 69
Norris, Christopher 26, 40
Osborne, Peter 83, 221-222
Pinkard, Terry 180-181
Pippin, Robert 180-181
Poulantzas, Nicos 46-47, 53
Index
Rawls, John 117-119, 138
Resch, Robert 14, 37, 189
Ricoeur, Paul 93
Ruigrok, Winfried 48
Sartre, Jean-Paul 131, 139, 148-149,
161
Saussure, Ferdinand de 83, 92
Schelling, F. W. J. von 166, 172-173,
180-181, 219-220
Searle, John 152-154
Sharpe, Matthew 171
Stavrakakis, Yanis 26
Taylor, Charles 180-181
Toring, Jacob 3, 10, 27, 86, 110, 113
Touraine, Alain 56
Trotsky, Leon 67
Vattimo, Gianni 26
Wallerstein, Immanuel 57, 63
Walzer, Michael 117
Wood, Ellen 27
Zupančič, Alenka 168, 204, 208,
216, 220
275
philosophy/social theory
The Charmed Circle
of Ideology
A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe,
Butler and Žižek
Set against the collapse of social theory into a theory of ideological
discourse, Geoff Boucher sets to work a rigorous mapping of the contemporary field, targeting the relativist implications of this new form of philosophical idealism. Offering a detailed and immanent critique Boucher
concentrates his critical attention on the ‘postmarxism’ of Laclau and
Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. Combining close reading and careful exposition
with polemical intent, Boucher links the relativism exemplified in these
contemporary theoretical trends to unresolved philosophical problems of
modernity. In conclusion Boucher points to ‘intersubjectivity’ as an exit
from postmarxist theory’s charmed circle of ideology.
Geoff Boucher lectures in the School of Communication and Creative
Arts, Deakin University. His previous works include The times will suit
them: postmodern conservatism in Australia (with Matthew Sharpe)
and Traversing the fantasy: critical responses to Slavoj Žižek (with Jason
Glynos and Matthew Sharpe).
Cover image: Untitled, 2007, Elizabeth Newman, hoop pine plywood,
cedar, electrical fittings, fluorescent tubes. Image courtesy of the artist
and Neon Parc.
www.re-press.org
ISBN 978-0-9805440-4-6
re.press