Reflections on Post-Marxism: Laclau and Mouffe's Project of Radical Democracy in the 21st Century 9781529221855

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Half-title
Series
Reflections on Post-Marxism: Laclau and Mouffe’s Project of Radical Democracy in the 21st Century
Copyright information
Table of contents
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
Notes
References
2 Democracy beyond Hegemony
Introduction
Some strong points of agreement
Economism and reductionism in Marxism
My lingering concerns
The party and the state
Their attachment to hegemony
So what about democracy?
Democracy beyond hegemony
Conclusion
Notes
References
3 Democracy without Hegemony: A Reply to Mark Purcell
References
4 The Post-Marxist Gramsci
Introduction
A Marxist for all seasons?
Recasting hegemony: to Gramsci … and beyond
Mourning Gramsci: beyond left melancholia
Conclusion
References
5 The Post-Marxist Gramsci: A Reply to James Martin
Note
References
6 The Limits of Post-Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political Theory in Film and Cultural Studies
Introduction: from too theoretical to not theoretical enough
Fighting literal discourse with particular texts
Particular Lee Laclauian
Universal Lee
Media ties
Natural Bourne identities
Notes
References
7 The Limits of Post-Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political Theory in Film and Cultural Studies
Note
References
8 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: The Evolution of Post-Marxism
Hegemony and socialist strategy
The later work of Ernesto Laclau
The post-Marxism of Chantal Mouffe
Conclusion
References
9 Laclau and Mouffe’s Blind Spots: A Reply to Philip Goldstein
References
10 Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-Material Knot1 as a Non-hierarchical Ontology
Introduction
Discourse theory’s relationship to the material4
The concept of the discursive-material knot
Positioning the assemblage at the ontic level
Examples of knots and assemblages
Invitations and investments
Conclusion
Notes
References
11 Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-Material Knot as a Non-hierarchical Ontology: A Reply to Nico Carpentier
References
12 From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s Post-Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-Republicanism
Introduction
Neo-republicanism and post-Marxism: on domination, subordination and oppression
From domination to emancipation and freedom
Pettit and Laclau on politics as contestation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
13 From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s Post-Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-Republicanism: A Reply to Gulshan Khan
Theorising the present, theorising beyond the present
References
14 Spectres of Post-Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-Marxist Texts
Introduction
Jean Baudrillard: The mirror of production
Jean-François Lyotard: Libidinal economy
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and socialist strategy
Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx
Relativism v absolutism: differends or false consciousness?
Conclusion
Notes
References
15 Spectres of Post-Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-Marxist Texts: A Reply to Stuart Sim
Reference
Index
Front Cover

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Reflections on Post-Marxism Laclau and Mouffe’s Project of Radical Democracy in the 21st Century

EDITED BY STUART SIM

REFLECTIONS ON POST-​MARXISM

Global Discourse Books in the series were first published as special issues of our Global Discourse journal. The Global Discourse book series is an interdisciplinary, problemoriented series of applied contemporary thought operating at the intersection of politics, international relations, sociology and social policy. The series scope is broad, encouraging interrogation of current affairs with regard to core questions of distributive justice, wellbeing, cultural diversity, autonomy, sovereignty, security and recognition. Authors are encouraged to explore the international dimensions and implications of their work.

Also available The Limits of EUrope Identities, Spaces, Values Edited by Russell Foster and Jan Grzymski

Find out more at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/global-discourse

REFLECTIONS ON POST-​MARXISM Laclau and Mouffe’s Project of Radical Democracy in the 21st Century Edited by Stuart Sim

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-2183-1 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-2184-8 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-2185-5 ePdf The right of Stuart Sim to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editor and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: blu inc Front cover image: blu inc Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents Notes on Contributors

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1 Introduction 1 Stuart Sim 2 Democracy beyond Hegemony 10 Mark Purcell 3 Democracy without Hegemony: A Reply to Mark Purcell 29 Ronaldo Munck 4 The Post-​Marxist Gramsci 32 James Martin 5 The Post-​Marxist Gramsci: A Reply to James Martin 52 Georges Van Den Abbeele 6 The Limits of Post-​Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political 59 Theory in Film and Cultural Studies Paul Bowman 7 The Limits of Post-​Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political 79 Theory in Film and Cultural Studies: A Reply to Paul Bowman Andrew Rowcroft 8 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: The Evolution of 84 Post-​Marxism Philip Goldstein 9 Laclau and Mouffe’s Blind Spots: A Reply to Philip Goldstein 99 Philippe Fournier 10 Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-​Material Knot 104 as a Non-​hierarchical Ontology Nico Carpentier 11 Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-​Material Knot 123 as a Non-hierarchical Ontology: A Reply to Nico Carpentier Mads Ejsing and Lars Tønder 12 From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading 128 Ernesto Laclau’s Post-​Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-​Republicanism Gulshan Khan v

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13

14 15

From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading 151 Ernesto Laclau’s Post-​Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-​Republicanism: A Reply to Gulshan Khan Andreas Ottemo Spectres of Post-​Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-​Marxist Texts 156 Stuart Sim Spectres of Post-​Marxism? Reassessing Key 175 Post-​Marxist Texts: A Reply to Stuart Sim Richard Howson

Index

180

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Notes on Contributors Paul Bowman, School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, UK Nico Carpentier, Charles University, Czech Republic Mads Ejsing, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Philippe Fournier, University of Montreal, Montreal, Research Fellow at the Montreal Centre for International Studies (CERIUM), Canada Philip Goldstein, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Delaware (Wilmington), USA Richard Howson, Sociology Program, University of Wollongong, Australia Gulshan Khan, University of Nottingham, UK James Martin, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Ronaldo Munck, Head of Civic Engagement, Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland Andreas Ottemo, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Mark Purcell, University of Washington, USA Andrew Rowcroft, University of Lincoln, UK Stuart Sim, Department of English and Creative Writing, Northumbria University, UK (retired)

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Lars Tønder, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, Irvine, USA

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1

Introduction Stuart Sim1 To anyone on the left working in the academic world in the 1980s, the publication of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (1985) came as something of a bombshell. Attacks on Marxism as both theory and practice had been building up steadily for some time by then, and there was a recognisably post-​Marxist slant to many of these –​Jean Baudrillard’s The mirror of production ([1973] 1975), Jean-​François Lyotard’s Libidinal economy ([1974] 1993), and Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst’s Pre-​capitalist modes of production (1975) and Mode of production and social formation (1977) all came out in the 1970s and all left their mark on the development of left-​wing thought in the period –​but it was Hegemony and socialist strategy that fully established post-​Marxism as a theoretical position. As the authors announced in the Introduction to the book, setting an agenda for the post-​Marxist cause in the process: But if our intellectual project in this book is post-​Marxist, it is evidently also post-​Marxist. It has been through the development of certain intuitions and discursive forms constituted within Marxism, and the inhibition or elimination of certain others, that we have constructed a concept of hegemony which, in our view, may be a useful instrument in the struggle for a radical, libertarian and plural democracy. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 5) Critics quickly weighed in, with Normas Geras (1987: 43), for example, dismissing the book as ‘ex-​Marxist’, and asserting ‘that if there are good reasons for not being, or for ceasing to be, a Marxist, so-​called post-​Marxism isn’t one of them’.2 Undeterred, Laclau and Mouffe soon replied that theirs was a ‘post-​Marxism without apologies’ (1987: 79–​106), and it was 1

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a position they never backed down from. The tension that exists between being post-​Marxist and post-​Marxist has exercised critics ever since, and comes through in all the chapters in this book, which collectively set out to assess the legacy left by Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of the Marxist project and its implications for our own times. It is a tension that informs their subsequent work too, as they strive to refine the positions and concepts outlined in Hegemony: that is, to flesh out what it would mean to construct a radical democratic politics, and thus move from Marxism to pluralism on the left. Marxism has always had a problem with dissent, and post-​Marxist pluralism was designed to overcome this; the intention being to open up political debate on the left to include new social movements that did not conform to the Marxist template of how revolutions against capitalism were supposed to occur (Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion constitute more recent examples of the trend). Radical democracy can be seen as an attempt to appropriate identity politics for the left’s struggle against social injustice internationally. The contributors to this book offer a wide variety of approaches, and critiques, of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism from a political situation that has changed very dramatically since Hegemony first appeared. In the interim, the Soviet system has collapsed, right-​wing ultra-​nationalism and White supremacism are on the rise throughout the West, Brexit has created a serious rift in the EU (as has the migrant crisis), and the Trump presidency has left deep divisions in both American and international politics. In the midst of all this, the left is struggling to make its voice heard. Laclau and Mouffe open Hegemony by declaring boldly: ‘Left-​wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The “evident truths” of the past … have been seriously challenged by an avalanche of historical mutations which have riven the ground on which those truths were constituted’ (1985: 1). The crossroads look even more bewildering now, the mutations progressively more unpredictable, and the evident truths even less valid. But not all Reflections on post-​Marxism’s contributors are that pessimistic (although I will admit to leaning in that direction myself as editor), and there is a genuine attempt overall to reassess Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism in the light of where global politics now stands. The question lying behind the book is: what role does post-​Marxism have in a non-​Marxist world? Is it just a case of keeping Marx’s ideas in circulation, if constantly under review, or is there a more positive impact that post-​Marxism can have on the contemporary political scene? In the most overtly post-​Marxist chapter in the collection, Mark Purcell (Purcell, 2022: 10–28) offers a new take on the concept of democracy, attempting to extend it past Laclau and Mouffe’s version by seeking out a ‘democracy beyond hegemony’. Acknowledging their positive impact on socialist thought overall, he nevertheless argues that we should be ‘going beyond Laclau and Mouffe’ and what is for him ‘their limiting assumption 2

Introduction

that democracy must always be balanced by hegemony’. Ronaldo Munck’s (Munck, 2022: 29–31) spirited response to Purcell’s provocative analysis of radical democracy illustrates just how wide the spectrum of opinion can be on post-​Marxist topics; proof that Laclau and Mouffe’s work has not lost its ability to provoke controversy. Munck disagrees with Purcell’s contention that hegemonic politics and radical democracy are at variance, and argues instead that there can be ‘no construction of democracy without a strategy for hegemony’. James Martin (Martin, 2022: 32–51) revisits Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of Gramscian hegemony to consider how fair this is to Gramsci’s overall legacy. He concludes that ‘even if it rather reduced Gramsci to the marker of a theoretical impasse within Marxism and the bearer of a logic that exceeded his own communist politics’, this was a necessary corrective to an essentialist strain in the left’s thought that was preventing it from responding productively to social change. Hegemony’s use of Gramsci is to be seen as ‘a bid to force the left to think outside the traditional narrative of left melodrama without necessarily abandoning its insights altogether’. While commending Martin’s ‘astute’ analysis of Gramsci’s place in post-​war Marxist thought, Georges Van Den Abbeele (Van Den Abbeele, 2022: 52–8) feels that Gramsci’s ‘pessimistic utopianism’ offers more scope for re-energising socialist strategy in our time than Martin’s reading allows. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is the concern of Paul Bowman (Bowman, 2022: 59–78) who uses film texts (The Bourne Identity and Bruce Lee’s kung fu output) to bring out what he sees as its limitations with regard to cultural studies. Identifying a logocentrism ‘silently’ at work in Laclau’s oeuvre, Bowman recommends that it be ‘interrogated with a view to its productive displacement and eventual decolonisation’. Bowman’s use of post-​Marxist theory in this area of popular cultural studies is for Andrew Rowcroft (Rowcroft, 2022: 79–83) ‘novel’ and ‘provocative’, raising some interesting issues about the relationship between theory and practice in martial arts that could enable us ‘to contemplate new concrete universals’. Phillip Goldstein (Goldstein, 2022: 84–98) traces the development of Laclau and Mouffe’s work from Hegemony onwards, concluding that they still offer justification and support for the new social movements which have continued to emerge, and that they still speak to the ‘identity politics’ of our time. For Philippe Fournier (Fournier, 2022: 99–103), however, there are ‘blind spots’ to be noted in Laclau and Mouffe’s thought that render their legacy somewhat more problematic. His reply argues, for example, that their ‘theorisation of ideology and resistance does not provide us with a satisfactory conception of subjectivity, critique and political strategy’. Nico Carpentier (Carpentier, 2022: 104–22) sets out to ‘enrich’ Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘discourse theory by combining and cross-​fertilising it with new materialist approaches’, arguing ‘that a genuine balance of the material and the discursive is required’ rather than either having to be taken as dominant. In their reply, Mads Ejsing and Lars Tønder (Ejsing and Tønder, 2022: 123–7) 3

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draw on the new materialist thinkers Karen Barad and Jane Bennett to suggest that we see the discursive and the material as ‘co-​extensive’; that is, ‘as hyphenated (discursive-​material) as well as performatively constituted’. Gulshan Khan (Khan, 2022: 128–50) puts Laclau ‘into conversation’ with the neo-​republican theorist Philip Pettit, to bring out the more challenging and subversive character of Laclau’s thought on countering domination. Whereas Pettit’s more traditional liberalism sees oppression as a condition that can be altered by working within the system to generate reform, Laclau’s position is that ‘any genuine politics of emancipation must contest the underlying structural sources of subordination that persist in modern societies (unequal social relations) despite our formal equality as citizens’. Pettit has more faith in the institutions of a liberal democratic society than Laclau does, but for Khan both approaches have their role to play in the struggle to create a truly emancipated society. Andreas Ottemo’s (Ottemo, 2022: 151–5) response to Khan argues that the difference in the two thinkers’ work is best understood as a distinction between ‘politics’ and the ‘political’. Although Pettit has more to say about ‘concrete politics’ than Laclau does, Ottemo points out that Laclau-​influenced scholars in the Essex School have actually addressed that lack, and are therefore worth consulting. My own chapter (Sim, 2022: 156–74) looks back on Hegemony and three other key works in the development of post-​Marxism: Jean Baudrillard’s The mirror of production ([1973] 1975), Jean-​François Lyotard’s Libidinal economy ([1974] 1993) and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), to see what resonance each might have now several decades after they first came out and in the much changed socio-​political climate noted earlier. In reply, Richard Howson (Howson, 2022: 175–9) questions whether the relativism that Sim identifies as central to these texts’ line of argument ‘demands a leaving behind of Marxism or anti-​Marxism’. Assessing Laclau and Mouffe’s legacy makes it necessary to address the various unresolved issues that post-​Marxism leaves us with. One of Marxism’s strengths is its comprehensiveness: it details exactly why revolutionary situations come about, and how to take advantage of them when they do. In other words it offers a system, not just a socio-​political critique. Post-​Marxism loses that template and has to construct another for radical democracy to become a realistic alternative to Marxism. From Hegemony onwards Laclau and Mouffe are wrestling with that problem, and it is to their credit that they kept trying to make radical democracy a more concrete theory, something that could form the basis of a dynamic political programme on the left. Whether they ever resolve the tension between post-​Marxism and post-​ Marxism is another matter, however, and there are differing views about this expressed throughout the book. We might regard radical democracy as yet another unfinished project, indicative in that sense of a wider problem on the left, of how to build in pluralism to its political model while keeping 4

Introduction

the right at bay. The ‘struggle for a radical, libertarian and plural democracy’ has become considerably more complicated by the right’s appropriation of radicalism and libertarianism, terms which have come to mean almost the opposite of what Laclau and Mouffe envisaged. Neoliberalism, for example, can claim libertarian credentials (which patently do not work to everyone’s advantage, privileging an elite instead). Identity politics has been appropriated by the right as well –​White supremacism could qualify as that, as could any form of the ultra-​nationalism that is spreading across the West. It is to this confusing world that post-​Marxism has had to adjust since Hegemony came out. Much of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Hegemony career was spent attempting to refine their use of the concept of hegemony, and to flesh out the notion of radical democracy. It was a journey designed to take them from post-​ Marxism as a descriptive theory, telling us what was wrong with Marxism, or at least to be considered unworkable given the way geopolitics had developed over the course of the 20th century, to a prescriptive theory setting out a political programme that could replace Marxism, something the left could rally round without feeling constrained by Marxism’s chequered historical record. There is no doubt that radical democracy holds the key to Laclau and Mouffe’s legacy; indeed, I would say to the legacy of post-​Marxism as a movement of thought in general. The question really does need to be asked, however, whether Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism did evolve all that much past Hegemony, or whether their demolition of the much used and abused concept of hegemony, and the serious issues this raised about the validity of Marxism as both political and theoretical movement, perhaps represented its high point. The question of whether we can extract a workable political theory from their body of writing, whether it ever really does make the transition from the descriptive to the prescriptive that it seemed to be promising in Hegemony, has to remain open. That is a problem that the left as a whole currently shares: how to find a robust, electorally resonant theory able to deal with what has turned into a sharp turn to the right in Western political life, with dissent being systematically closed down by authoritarian-​minded governments. One of the ways that Laclau sought to refine the concept of hegemony was through the concept of the empty signifier, although it is a concept that raises more questions than it answers, especially when it comes to his attempt to rescue the notion of populism from the right. The empty signifier gives us a populism of the right, and a populism of the left, which brings to mind Derrida’s response to the ‘Heidegger Affair’ in the 1980s, when he argued that there could be ‘a Heideggereanism of the right, and a Heideggereanism of the left’, and even ‘a Marxism of the right, and a Marxism of the left’ (Derrida, 1988: 32). One way of interpreting this would be to say that populism means what you want it to mean; just as Derrida appears to be 5

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conceding that Heideggereanism does, and Marxism too. One can easily see why classical Marxists would object to such an open-​ended approach to what for them is a science of society that supersedes all other socio-​political theories; but it leaves post-​Marxists in a quandary as well. Do we have to accept a post-​Marxism of the right, and a post-​Marxism of the left? Can the empty signifier work to the right’s advantage as much as to the left’s? Mouffe seems to concede as much in her latest book, For a left populism (Mouffe, 2018: 1), where she explores what needs to be done by the left in what she considers to be a ‘populist moment’ in Western political history. In this context, Žižek’s objection to Laclau’s reinterpretation of populism, that it ‘harbors in the last instance a long-​term proto-​fascist tendency’ (Žižek, 2006: 556), is worth reflecting upon, and it brings us onto the subject of exactly how Laclau and Mouffe conceive of pluralism. A commitment to pluralism forms a critical part of their critique of Marxism, which they reject on the basis of its authoritarian and totalitarian bias (as Adorno had done previously in Negative dialectics, 1973). One suspects that their pluralism has a rather narrow range, however: would it, could it, include the far right, for example? Particularly when it comes to the very far right? Mouffe makes it clear in The democratic paradox (2000), and then again in For a left populism, that everyone in a pluralistic radical democratic system is expected to obey the rules as they engage in adversarial politics, requiring them to be agonistic rather than antagonistic in approach; but that is of course precisely what the very far right refuse to do. One can hardly imagine encompassing White supremacists within a radical democratic polity, which means that pluralism has to be given limits –​and the practicalities of that are daunting. Both Laclau and Mouffe agree that setting limits is a necessary element of radical democracy, but that means a recourse to exclusion of ostensibly extreme elements from the political process, which brings into play the proto-​ fascist tendency that Žižek warns about. Whoever is doing the excluding is determining exactly what is acceptable in that society, and it is easy to see how this could turn authoritarian in manner. Although ‘proto-​fascist’ seems a rather harsh way of putting it, one can see why Žižek is wary of radical democratic populism. It has to be asked, too, just how persuasive Mouffe’s concept of agonism actually is, and how much her notion of an adversarially based politics differs from the current parliamentary system. If everyone was acting in good faith, and genuinely trying to convince opponents of the validity of their view without any animosity as such (all parties committed to a fairly leftish orientation, one has to assume), then politics would be a much more productive activity. The objection has to be raised, however, that this sounds more like a superior debating club than politics as it is generally practised in existing democracies. The practicality of it really needs to be explored, particularly the practicality of it working in a political situation where there 6

Introduction

are extremes of right and left to contend with –​as we now find ourselves in with the rise of ultra-​nationalism and White supremacist movements throughout the West in recent years. In an era of Trumpism and Brexit, one has to wonder what the likelihood of a mutually respectful adversarial debate being constructed is; Brexit could be described as an empty signifier, and we all know the difficulty that has caused. Post-​Marxist pluralism is a brave attempt to resolve Marxism’s traditional antipathy to dissent (most obviously seen in the communist era), but it envisages a social system without the extremes that we are now experiencing –​and that have bedevilled global politics for so long. This is not to belittle Laclau and Mouffe’s achievement in revealing Marxism’s philosophical weak points and repeated historical failings, but whether post-​Marxism offers a truly viable alternative in political terms of reference has to be much more questionable. Perhaps what the development of their thought reveals more than anything is the limitations of post-​Marxism as a theory. I would argue that For a left populism does not really extend the ideas of Hegemony and socialist strategy to any significant extent. Despite such criticisms, there is no doubt that post-​Marxism was something which just had to happen, and it is to Laclau and Mouffe’s credit that we are still debating these issues more than 30 years since Hegemony burst on the scene. All the contributors to Reflections on post-​Marxism agree that their work still resonates and still repays close attention, although it is sad to say that the left has not been able to build on it to the extent that Laclau and Mouffe had clearly hoped they would: radical democracy remains an ideal, rather than a specific programme for political change. They may have left us with unanswered questions, therefore, but they are the right kind of questions nevertheless, and they need to keep being addressed. Notes 1

2

The original idea for this book came from Mark Edward, who continued to edit it with Stuart Sim through its early stages, until he unfortunately had to withdraw from the project. For more on this controversy, see my edited collection Post-​Marxism: a reader (Sim, 1998).

References Adorno, T.W. ([1966] 1973) Negative dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Baudrillard, J. ([1973] 1975) The mirror of production, translated by Mark Poster, St. Louis, MO: Telos Press. Bowman, P. (2022) The limits of post-​Marxism: The (dis)function of political theory in film and cultural studies, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism: Laclau and Mouffe’s project of radical democracy in the 21st century, Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp 59–78.

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Carpentier, N. (2022) Enriching discourse theory: The discursive-​material knot as a non-​hierarchical ontology, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​ Marxism, pp 104–22. Derrida, J. (1988) The ear of the other. Otobiography, transference, translation, translated by Peggy Kamuf, edited by Christie McDonald, Lincoln, NA and London: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, translated by Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge. Ejsing, M. and Tønder, L. (2022) Enriching discourse theory: The discursive-​ material knot as a non-​hierarchical ontology: A reply to Nico Carpentier, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 123–7. Fournier, P. (2022) Laclau and Mouffe’s blind-​spots: A reply to Goldstein, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 99–103. Geras, N. (1987) Post-​Marxism?, New Left Review, 163: 40–​82. Goldstein, P. (2022) Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: The evolution of post-​Marxism, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 84–98. Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.Q. (1975) Pre-​capitalist modes of production, London, Henley and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.Q. (1977) Mode of production and social formation, London: Macmillan. Howson, R. (2022) Spectres of post-​Marxism?: Reassessing key post-​Marxist texts: A reply to Stuart Sim, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 175–9. Khan, G. (2022) From domination to emancipation and freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s post-​Marxism in conjunction with Philip Pettit’s neo-​ republicanism, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 128–50. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1987) Post-​Marxism without apologies, New Left Review, 166: 79–​106. Lyotard, J.-​F. ([1974] 1993) Libidinal economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Athlone Press. Martin, R. (2022) The post-​Marxist Gramsci, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 32–51. Mouffe, C. (2000) The democratic paradox, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2018) For a left populism, London and New York: Verso. Munck, R. (2022) Democracy beyond hegemony: A reply to Mark Purcell, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 29–31. Ottemo, A. (2022) From domination to emancipation and freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s post-​Marxism in conjunction with Philip Pettit’s neo-​ republicanism: A reply to Gulshan Khan, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 151–5.

8

Introduction

Purcell, M. (2022) Democracy without hegemony, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 10–28. Rowcroft, A. (2022) The limits of post-​Marxism: The (dis)function of political theory in film and cultural studies: A reply to Paul Bowman, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 79–83. Sim, S. (ed) (1998) Post- ​ M arxism: a reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sim, S. (2022) Spectres of post-​Marxism?: Reassessing key post-​Marxist texts, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 156–74. Van Den Abbeele, G. (2022) The post-​Marxist Gramsci: A reply to James Martin, in S. Sim (ed), Reflections on post-​Marxism, pp 52–8. Žižek, S. (2006) Against the populist temptation, Critical Inquiry, 32(3): 551–​75.

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2

Democracy beyond Hegemony Mark Purcell

Introduction I have what I consider to be a long relationship with Laclau and Mouffe. It began in the early 2000s when I embarked on a sustained engagement with the second edition of Hegemony and socialist strategy (hereafter HSS), and with Mouffe’s subsequent solo work. I found both to be extremely useful for making a critique of a Habermasian consensus theory that dominated planning thought back then (for example, Innes, 1995; Forester, 1999). But as my relationship with Laclau and Mouffe developed, they slowly became central to my thinking about democracy, a political idea that is now at the very core of my work. It is ironic, then, that as I began thinking about this chapter, I realised that I did not remember very well what their idea of democracy was. Their way of conceiving of democracy, what they call a ‘radical and plural democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: xv), is not in the front of my mind anymore. That is partly due to age and to my failing memory, but it is more because other writers have stepped forward to occupy my attention when I think about democracy –​writers like Rancière, Hardt and Negri, Lefebvre, Castoriadis, Virno, and Butler –​and Laclau and Mouffe have, as a result, faded into the background. And so in a way this chapter is an effort on my part to investigate why that shift occurred, why I do not think about Laclau and Mouffe much anymore when I think about democracy. I think an important part of the reason can be traced to their idea of hegemony, and to their claim that hegemony and democracy must be balanced, or held in tension. I will try to explain why I have trouble with that claim below. But to just sum it up here: I want to move in the direction of democracy, and away from hegemony. You could say that, in a sense, the content of Laclau and Mouffe’s politics are to ‘blame’ 10

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for them falling off my radar. But I want to be careful here. This chapter is not really the story of how my work moved beyond their outdated ideas. Because in going back through their work while preparing for this chapter, I found that their arguments were quite subtle and fecund. While I want to object to some of their political positions, I also want to stress that their work remains vibrant, and it offers considerable theoretical resources that we can and should use in thinking about democracy today.

Some strong points of agreement Those resources include, but are not limited to, Laclau and Mouffe’s effort to save Marxism by radically rethinking some of its key tenets. This rethinking was radical enough that some insisted, including Laclau and Mouffe (2000: 4), that their politics had gone beyond Marxism, and should be called ‘post-​ Marxism’. These debates are well known, so I will not linger on them (see Geras, 1987, for an anti-​post-​Marxist position). But I do want to voice my emphatic agreement with key elements of their argument here.

Economism and reductionism in Marxism I think it remains crucial to remember, and continually rearticulate, the enduring importance of Laclau and Mouffe’s rejection of economism and class reductionism in Marxism. Throughout the 20th century, and right up through 1985 when the first edition of Hegemony and socialist strategy was published, there was no shortage of Marxists peddling economism, the idea that economic production is a more important sphere of human activity than other spheres. This error led easily to class reductionism, the idea that economic class is a more important social category than other categories.1 Taken together, these two ideas produce a workerism that assumes that ‘the working class represents the privileged agent’ for bringing about social change (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 177). Swirling around these toxic ideas are others, like structuralism, essentialism and foundationalism. Much of what Laclau and Mouffe are trying to do in HSS is to articulate a politics that makes these positions impossible. They draw on heterodox thinkers like Lacan, Derrida and Wittgenstein, among others, to insist that political identities and agendas are never given a priori but must be forged anew, each time, in the context of political struggle. That is because, for Laclau and Mouffe, there is no transcendent set of forces that oversees and gives meaning to politics. Political subjectivity and meaning must be worked out immanently, by the actors involved. There is no unique privileged position from which a uniform continuity of effects will follow, concluding with the transformation of society as a whole. All struggles, whether those of workers or other political subjects, 11

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left to themselves, have a partial [and contingent] character, and can be articulated to very different discourses. It is this articulation which gives them their character, not the place from which they come. There is therefore no subject –​nor, further, any ‘necessity’ –​which is absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order, and which constitutes an absolutely guaranteed point of departure for a total transformation (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 169). As a result, they reiterate, ‘the meaning of each struggle is not given from the start’. Moreover, no group carries any more status or importance than any other into a struggle (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 87). No group can claim, as Gramsci did for the proletariat (1971: 57, 161, 240; see also 2000: 142, 174), to be the ‘leading’ group. All subjects and subject groups, therefore, must start their interactions from a position of parity. While this litany of ontological claims might seem a bit heavy-​handed, I suspect Laclau and Mouffe felt they needed a very strong medicine to cure the disease. In that effort I stand with them fully. I am all for the idea of ‘post-​Marxism’, if by that term we mean a definitive going beyond the tradition of economism and class reductionism in Marxism, an anti-​essentialist Marxism that thinks in terms of a contingent politics of horizontal articulation among multiple groups. I support that way of understanding post-​Marxism because I oppose economism and reductionism, but I also support it because it implies there is something else about Marxism, beyond economism and reductionism, that is worth recovering. The problem with economism and reductionism is not that they think economic production and class are important political questions, because they are. The problem is that they claim those political questions are necessarily more important than other political questions. The question of who controls the means of production, what social effects that control has, what role the State plays in that control, and how we might mobilise to change that control are, for me, all very much Marxist questions. Here I would point specifically to the young Marx, to the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, economic and philosophic manuscripts, or On the Jewish question, where he offers penetrating critiques of both capitalist alienation and State domination, and he suggests ways we might struggle to change those forms of oppression and create alternative ways of life. These issues can and should be understood as Marxist critiques, as Marxist political alternatives. At the same time, the disastrous plan of The communist manifesto, in which one form of oppression (capitalism) is traded, impatiently and clumsily, for another (workers’ party authoritarianism), is also a Marxist programme, one we are now well aware leads over the edge of a cliff. So I embrace the double movement of post-​Marxism, away from economism and reductionism, and towards those still vitally relevant ideas that are also part of the tradition of Marxism. In short, I embrace the post-​Marxism Laclau and Mouffe defend, if somewhat vaguely, in 12

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the preface to the second edition: ‘the process of reappropriation of an intellectual tradition, as well as the process of going beyond it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2000, ix).

My lingering concerns The party and the state Of course, everything depends on what we choose to reappropriate and what we choose to go beyond. I have already named some of what I think we can discard. Let me add to that list some in this section, before saying more about what we should retain. We should, I argue, move energetically away from the Party and the State as political forms, and move instead towards democracy. Laclau and Mouffe share this inclination, to some extent. But still, it is fair to say they remain far more willing than I to allow a role for Party and State in their political vision. In sketching the terrain of this issue, Laclau and Mouffe clearly oppose an extreme pro-​State position. They decry what they call ‘statism –​the idea that the expansion of the role of the State is the panacea for all problems’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 177). While this idea might seem overstated, like they are presenting us with a straw person, I think it is still very much a danger in our current context. Of course the idea has been with us since The communist manifesto, but it presents itself to us today as a desire to return to the Keynesianism that preceded the neoliberal era. Under Keynesianism, we imagine, an assertive national State intervened on behalf of the poor and working class in the form of economic redistribution. In our current era, where a dominant neoliberal policy regime produces appalling and worsening inequality, such redistributive interventions by the State are a very alluring option. And so we are faced with something like the statism Laclau and Mouffe decry, since expanding State intervention to redress inequality always presents itself as a more desirable alternative to the neoliberal retrenchment that pervades our political economy. Though Laclau and Mouffe do not mention it, this statism has a twin, a ‘partyism’ that insists that a political movement does not have any real impact –​it does not really matter –​until it organises itself into a Party with the goal of taking State power. There are elegant and crude versions of such partyism. The crude versions are typified by those postmortems of the 2011 uprisings (Egypt, Greece, Spain, Occupy, and so on) that complain that the movements were inadequate because they did not take the next step of organising into a strong and decisive Party. Žižek (2011) is the most egregious example: But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-​ organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no 13

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central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus [sic] was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness. It is important to correct Žižek’s false claim about a ‘majority consensus’ that the goal is ‘to exert pressure on political parties’, since one of the main thrusts of the movements in Greece, Spain and Occupy was the realisation that the State and its parties are incapable of being the solution.2 As a result there was a conscious turning away, by many, from the seats of power, and a conscious turning towards each other in order to explore how we might be the solution to the problems we face. But of course the most wrongheaded element of Žižek’s argument is this ‘strong body’ that can implement its ‘quick decisions … with all necessary harshness’. Such a body is precisely what we do not need. And even though Žižek’s vision is a particularly horrifying instance of this line of thinking, it is broadly in agreement with the more generally shared argument that the 2011 movements ultimately amounted to little because they did not organise into parties and take State power. The more elegant version of this argument for the Party is exemplified by Jodi Dean’s (2016) Crowd and Party. Dean realises that in order to defend the Party today, she cannot merely recycle a crude ‘strong body’ conception. So for her, the Party is not so much a vanguard of leaders willing to make harsh decisions as it is an affective core around which wide and diverse movements can coalesce. While her Party is far preferable to Žižek’s, still she presents it to us just in order to prosecute the same complaint, that people themselves –​Dean’s ‘crowds’ –​can never achieve anything important if they do not develop a Party organisation. This Party line of thinking has manifested itself in significant practical initiatives as well. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and the 2016 candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the United States, for example, are all attempts to channel the energies of the 2011 uprisings into organised political parties that can bring about ‘real’ change by getting candidates elected to government positions so that they can govern differently than the current governments are governing. I think we need to discard this line of thinking, to escape from the trap of both statism and partyism. We certainly need, at the very least, to cease thinking that the State and the Party are necessary to our political success. And while I am wary of rushing too quickly in the other direction, to a purist anti-​State and anti-​Party asceticism, nevertheless 14

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I would encourage us to err in that direction. That is because the State and the Party are not neutral tools that can be used for good or for evil, depending on who controls them. They are, instead, necessarily relations of domination. Both State and Party, by their normal operation, alienate people from their power, and they vest that power in a subset of leaders whose job is to govern the population. From the point of view of democracy, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Purcell, 2013, 2016), this is a move in precisely the wrong direction, towards oligarchy rather than democracy, no matter what concrete outcomes –​greater equality, better services, less war –​are achieved. So where do Laclau and Mouffe stand on these issues? As we saw, they object to statism, and they do so in the same breath as their denunciation of economism. They argue that these ideas have been the two fundamental obstacles to effective social change (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 177). At the same time, their political imagination, rooted as it is in the concept of hegemony, in the dynamic of some coalition of groups imposing their agenda on other groups, presents an obvious role for the State to play. It is difficult to imagine, as a practical matter, how the counter-​hegemonic project they advocate does not necessitate at least some significant engagement with the State, if not its wholesale capture. And the same could be said of the Party as well. That is admittedly circumstantial evidence, but it is supported by the fact that Laclau and Mouffe are, at times, explicitly agnostic on the question of the Party. They insist and this is again born of their struggle against economism and class reductionism that ‘it is impossible to specify a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms’. That is, we cannot assume, before the fact, what outcomes will emerge from a given realm of political contestation. They apply this argument directly to the Party: The party as a political institution can, in certain circumstances, be an instance of bureaucratic crystallisation which acts as a brake upon mass movements; but in others it can be the organiser of dispersed and politically virgin masses, and can thus serve as an instrument for the expansion and deepening of democratic struggles. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 180) On that page they make the same claims about the State. In certain circumstances, they say, the State can be ‘transformed into a bureaucratic excrescence imposed by force upon the rest of society’, but in other circumstances it can act to disrupt oppressive, exploitative or abusive relations in civil society in ways that advance the democratic project. In other words, in these passages they are taking the line that the Party and the State are neutral containers that can be used for positive or negative outcomes. It depends on who uses them and how. But here their anti-​essentialism has 15

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steered them right back into the arms of The communist manifesto, where Marx and Engels implicitly adopt the same ‘neutral-​container’ view when they claim that once a workers’ Party controls the State, all our problems will quickly be solved.3 It is the capitalist Party and State that are the problem, they think, and the solution is a workers’ version of both. And so I think it is fair to say that Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism does not really move us beyond this Marxist idea, that the Party and the State are neutral political forms. They fall short of what we need, which is, I argue, a much more clear-​eyed theorisation of the Party and State as political relations that are themselves oppressive and anti-​democratic, irrespective of who controls them and how they use them to govern. But the situation is, unfortunately, even a bit more troubling than that. Laclau and Mouffe are not simply offering the Faustian bargain of greater redistribution or better services in exchange for an expansion of Party and State authority.4 They are going further, to suggest that the Party and the State can, in the right circumstances, deliver a very different good: the deepening of democracy. It is this suggestion that I want to object to most vehemently. The idea that it is possible to use the Party and the State to deepen democracy is a fool’s errand, because it ignores the anti-​democratic relation that lies at the heart of both Party and State. The founding political relation that both the Party and the State institute, as Hobbes makes crystal clear in Leviathan, is the alienation of power from actual people to an entity that is different from them and is sovereign over them. This political relation is precisely the opposite of democracy, in which people retain their power and use it to manage their affairs for themselves. So, while it is certainly possible to use the Party and the State to effect all manner of desirable outcomes, the deepening of democracy can never be one of them. The only way we can deepen democracy is to do it ourselves.

Their attachment to hegemony While Laclau and Mouffe are somewhat coy about their position on the Party and State, there can be no doubt about their commitment to theorising politics as a relation of hegemony. The political field, they say, can never be sutured such that universal agreement is achieved, and so that field will always be marked by difference, disagreement and conflict. The social field, in other words, can never be made singular, it must always remain plural. As a result, they claim, achieving any sort of overall social stability must be done through hegemony, through one coalition of particular groups coordinating their actions such that they are able to impose their will on other particular groups. To be clear, this argument is not normative, they are not claiming politics should be this way. It is ontological –​they are claiming politics are this way, necessarily. 16

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Now of course Laclau and Mouffe are very subtle here, and they rely greatly on Gramsci, who is also subtle. Gramsci does not imagine that this imposition of one group’s will on another is carried out entirely, or even primarily, by force. Rather, hegemony involves both coercion and consent. Whenever possible, non-​hegemonic groups are cajoled into agreeing that the hegemonic group’s agenda is best. In situations where such consent is not possible, of course, coercion can certainly also be used. Laclau and Mouffe add further nuance to these dynamics by distinguishing among three kinds of relations: subordination, when group X is subject to the decisions of group Y; oppression, when group X considers group Y’s control to be illegitimate; and domination, when a third party agrees that group X’s subordination is illegitimate. So we should not oversimplify and say that in a hegemonic relation some groups dominate others. We could say, using Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, that hegemony must always be a relation of subordination, and frequently also involves some measure of oppression and/​or domination. This concept of hegemony, and Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking surrounding it, is burdened by State thinking, corrupted by the ideas of sovereignty and subordination that are so central to the political relations that the State institutes. In that way, through this concept of hegemony at the heart of their thinking, their entanglement with the State is deepened, and their willingness to invite the State into their political imagination grows. A classic example of hegemonic politics is one we have already seen, the hegemony of the Keynesian welfare State. Of course not every group in society will judge that arrangement to be in their best interests, and so a coalition of many groups –​workers’ organisations advancing a claim for greater equality and employment stability, populist politicians, dirigist economists, and so on –​will need to form a coalition that imposes the welfare state regime on other groups. To do so, they must not only pass legislation to institute welfare policies, but also they must establish a new common sense that the welfare State is in the best interests of the nation as a whole. Many groups will accept this new common sense. Those that do not will need to be marginalised, disciplined and even coerced. The typical concrete outcomes of such a hegemonic coalition are things like national-​ scale progressive taxation schemes, or massive national government spending to stimulate the economy, or laws that mandate high minimum wages, worker safety or job security –​in short, desirable5 social outcomes brought about by State mandates. Of course, neoliberals have offered a strident critique of such mandates, arguing instead for minimal government intervention in, and regulation of, economic markets, an arrangement they claim will maximise freedom. But of course the freedom maximised by the neoliberal scheme is the freedom of economically powerful actors, not the freedom of normal people. Laclau and Mouffe offer a long critique of the neoliberal position (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 171–​175), but in doing so they gloss over, and 17

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even defend, the State mandates of the welfare State model. They could very well have agreed that State mandates are undesirable without accepting the neoliberal alternative of unfettered corporate capitalism. And they do, in fact, worry briefly about ‘bureaucratic forms of state power’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 163). But ultimately they defend the dirigist programme of the welfare State. And more than that, they judge the Keynesian hegemonic project of the post-​war years to have been, in the end, a ‘deepening of the democratic revolution’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 163). It is true, as Laclau and Mouffe stress, that the era of Keynesian hegemony saw a proliferation of political rights (‘positive’ or ‘social’ rights like employment protection, education or health), and that proliferation of rights encouraged a whole suite of new claims for equality made by marginalised groups. There also emerged, as a result of these claims, a ‘proliferation of antagonisms’ and subject positions (they are thinking here of the feminist, gay, environmental and peace movements) in the national polities of the welfare states. However, in Laclau and Mouffe’s imagination, these new claims, made by these new subject groups, could only be pursued by means of a hegemonic project. The new forms of equality could only be realised, and made to endure, by one coalition of groups successfully subordinating, oppressing and dominating another coalition of groups. In Laclau and Mouffe’s mind, any change of regime like this, any ‘construction of a new order’, will always involve such asymmetrical relations of subordination and control (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 189). They will always involve hegemony.

So what about democracy? But Laclau and Mouffe are also clear in their commitment to democracy. The subtitle of their book is, after all, ‘Towards a radical democratic politics’. Clearly they are interested in theorising –​and advocating for –​ democracy as well as hegemony. At times, it seems Laclau and Mouffe think hegemony and democracy are compatible, or at least can coexist in the same radical democratic project. In Chapter 4, they argue that hegemonic articulations can set us in the direction of either ‘right-​wing populism and totalitarianism on the one hand’, or ‘a radical democracy on the other’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 168). The idea that a hegemonic project can move us in the direction of radical democracy suggests that they think it is possible to invent a different kind of hegemonic order, a better, non-​ subordinating, democratic order. This line of thinking would hew to their ontological starting point that all politics are hegemonic politics, but it seems to propose a political order that is qualitatively different than either the current neoliberal State-​capitalist order (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: xvi), or a right-​wing populist authoritarian alternative. Those latter orders would 18

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use subordination and oppression as part of their normal functioning. But in suggesting this hegemonic struggle towards radical democracy, Laclau and Mouffe seem to be intimating the possibility of using hegemony to deepen democracy to the point we have moved beyond the subordination and oppression that hegemony entails. However, there are other times, and I think it is correct to say these times are more prevalent, and more decisive, when Laclau and Mouffe seem to accept the more reasonable position that hegemonic politics and radical democracy are at odds. Democracy for them ‘is only a logic of the elimination of relations of subordination and of inequalities’ –​and so it is ‘not a logic of the positivity of the social’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 188). Their unfortunate jargon in that last phrase is trying to say that democracy is not a logic that can construct a new social order. For that we need a hegemonic logic. And so, we can often see them advocating a balance between democracy and hegemony, because the two are working in opposite directions, one to end subordination and maximise equality, the other to preserve hierarchy and control; one to destabilise a social order established through subordination, one to preserve that social order. The hegemonic project for the construction of a new order, they argue, must create ‘an unstable balance and a constant tension with the subversive logic of democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 189). And so the project is a contradictory blend of opposites, hegemony for-​ and-​against democracy: This allows us to see … the project for a radical democracy as an alternative for the Left … it must base itself upon the search for a point of equilibrium between a maximum advance for the democratic revolution in a broad range of spheres, and the capacity for the hegemonic direction and positive reconstruction of these spheres on the part of the subordinated groups. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 189) Here, as in many other places, hegemony and democracy are in tension, working in opposite directions, and must be brought into balance in the future social order Laclau and Mouffe envision. They theorise a very similar relationship of balance inside hegemonic coalitions. Among the various groups, they argue, there must be a balance that mirrors that between hegemony and democracy, a balance between ‘the logic of equivalence’, which draws groups into the hegemonic alliance and ensures its discipline and internal order, and ‘autonomy’, which allows groups to act as they wish without being dictated to by the wider goals of the alliance. Too much equivalence casts us back into the bad old days of dogmatic Marxist movements, and too much autonomy risks a proliferation of unconnected local struggles that cannot advance a counter-​hegemonic project (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 184). 19

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In the past I have given Laclau and Mouffe credit for something more than this balance between hegemony and democracy. I have argued (Purcell, 2013) that they envision the possibility of a sea-​change, a movement towards democracy that reaches the point of moving beyond hegemony into a polity in which democracy prevails. Or, in a slightly less rosy view, I have them imagining a hegemonic project that moves us ever more in the direction of democracy, and away from hegemony, even if we can never arrive at a purely democratic form of life. But in re-​engaging with their work for this chapter, I came to think instead that this position of balance, a stable tension between the two opposing forces of hegemony and democracy, is most true to the political vision that Laclau and Mouffe advocate. They embrace hegemony as the ontologically unavoidable mode of being political, and they see us using hegemony to try to augment its opposite energy, the energy of democracy. But for them democracy can only be augmented so much. It must be balanced by hegemony, by the subordinating-​and-​dominating force that is capable of constructing a social order. I think this ‘balance’ position is troubling, because it inhibits democracy’s potential. It is troubling because Laclau and Mouffe underestimate democracy by judging it incapable of being a sustainable form of life. But it is also troubling because they think we must use anti-​democratic means –​hegemonic struggle –​to bring about more democracy.6 Why not, instead, augment democracy by committing to the project of democracy? Instead of ‘back to the hegemonic struggle’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: xix), why not ‘back to the struggle for democracy’?

Democracy beyond hegemony Such a struggle for democracy would be greatly aided if we had a way to conceive of politics that does not give hegemony –​and subordination and domination –​pride of place in our political imagination. We could, then, conceive of the possibility of thinking and acting politically without making hegemony the core of our strategy and vision. Such political thinking is not just idle speculation. There are numerous political theorists who are trying to develop just such a politics beyond hegemony. I just want to mention three, to give you an idea of what such thinking might be like. Agamben (2016), for example, finishes his Homo Sacer series with an attempt to theorise political relations in a way that makes sovereignty, and its associated hierarchy and subordination, impossible, or, better, unsayable and unthinkable. He proposes that we might replace the ‘constituent power’ that, we assume, must found all political communities with a ‘destituent potential’, a power7 ‘that never resolves itself into a constituted power’ (2016: 268). Agamben tries to imagine a relation between bodies – he calls it ‘use’ –​that always remains immanent to those bodies, that can never be alienated from those bodies, and that, therefore, never allows the emergence of a Hobbesian political 20

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power that transcends our concrete lives-​in-​common. Paolo Virno (2006), for his part, explores something quite similar. He wants us to think how we might mobilise ‘a power that refuses to become government’ in order to invent radically different ‘forms-​of-​life’ (Virno, 2006: 201–​202). He hopes we might be able to fashion ‘non-​State republics’ that develop forms of ‘nonrepresentative and extraparliamentary democracy’, in which we turn ourselves away from the sovereign and begin to work out, together, how we want to live. Both Agamben and Virno8 take much inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, in which they try, similarly, to theorise non-​sovereign relations among agents in a range of spheres, from psychology to geology to music to politics. And they hope, in some sense, that these non-​sovereign relations can come to pervade our lives together. Late in Anti-​Oedipus, they propose the possibility of a ‘revolutionary break … a sudden and unexpected irruption … of desire that breaks with causes and aims and overturns the socius, revealing its other side’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 377). They want their schizoanalytic process to develop ‘to a point where the process cannot extricate itself, continue on, and reach fulfillment, except insofar as it is capable of creating – what exactly? –​a new land’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 318). When trained on the State relation in particular, this process, if successful, would help individual agents and groups go beyond a society in which the State relation predominates, to reach a new land in which sovereignty and transcendent authority are no longer the ways things are done. Of course there is no shortage of practical efforts in this direction as well, experiments with forms-​of-​life that do not assume that hegemony and subordination must be a central feature of political relations. Among the many instances of such efforts, I want to make special mention again of the movements of 2011. In Greece and Spain in particular, not only was there a strong sentiment that the Party and the State were lost causes and that people needed to come up with solutions for themselves, there was also widespread experimentation with political practices and institutions –​ consensus decision-​making, assemblies, spokescouncils, affinity groups, non-​ violent resistance to police, and the like. These practices provided people with a measure of organisation such that they were able to act, but they did not accept hegemony or transcendent authority as necessary features of this organisation. Of course the enactment of these practices was never perfect. An ideal community free from hegemony was not actually achieved. But what I want to highlight here is the clear and conscious desire to create political community beyond hegemony, and the concerted, if inexpert, attempts to practice it. I am aware that both of these accounts, theoretical and empirical, are too brief, and much more could be said about these efforts. I am merely trying to demonstrate the existence of, and begin to flesh out, a political 21

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imagination that is different from Laclau and Mouffe’s, to show that we have access to other ways of thinking and doing politics that do not put hegemonic and subordinating relations at the centre of their imagination. In order to develop a fuller account of that political imagination, in the rest of this section I present an account of my own way of thinking about politics today, 15 or so years after the start of my journey with Laclau and Mouffe. I call this way of thinking politics ‘democracy’. Like Laclau and Mouffe, I understand democracy differently from the way it is conventionally understood. That conventional understanding sees democracy as a society that is governed by a liberal-​democratic State, a structure that allows the governed to occasionally select who they want to be their governors. I also agree with Laclau and Mouffe that one important alternative, deliberative democracy, suffers from the desire to eliminate antagonism and difference in the drive to achieve a rational consensus (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: xvii; see also Purcell, 2009). Instead, democracy is, for me, a popular mobilisation around the desire to govern ourselves. This mobilisation does not turn its face towards the Party or the State and seek to appropriate their power. It does not demand changes in the way the Party or the State is governing. Rather, in democracy people rouse themselves and decide to take on the project of governing themselves. It is critical to understand that this project is an extremely long-​term one. It involves us choosing to struggle every day, throughout our lives, to accept more and more responsibility for managing our affairs for ourselves. We do not take up this project in order to disempower the Party or the State, although that will necessarily be the result, if we are successful. We do not take it up in order to destroy capitalism, although, again, that will be a necessary outcome. We take up this project, instead, in order to develop our own powers. We take up democracy in order to grow stronger, and healthier, in the very long term. We take up this project to more fully realise what we are capable of. This will not be an easy project, of course. It will take practice, work, effort. We are all fully capable of democracy, but our ability to manage our affairs for ourselves is not always well developed. It must be improved through practice. The project of democracy is the project to become better able to govern ourselves. To do that we have to practise. We must continually engage in the practice of democracy. As we practise, as we grow stronger, more able, and more confident –​as we come to recognise and realise our own power –​we will depend less and less on others to govern for us. Of course this will mean that the State, and its fundamental relation of sovereignty, will increasingly become unnecessary, and it will fall into disuse. It will not wither away because class has been abolished, as in The communist manifesto. It will become a relic, an artefact of a different time, because we have developed, over time, a new form of life in which we govern ourselves. 22

Democracy beyond Hegemony

It is important to reiterate that this project will not be completed overnight, or in the next election cycle, or even in the next generation. It is a long-​term project. It is so long term, in fact, that it will not be completed at all. There will be no final condition in which we have become fully democratic. Here I find wisdom in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​structuralism, in their insistence that society cannot be permanently ‘sutured’ into a seamless and unified whole. The desire to govern ourselves, however well we develop it, however strong it becomes in us, will always coexist with the desire to be governed, with the desire to surrender our power to another who will govern for us. Even if we succeed in building a form of life in which democracy is pervasive, in which democracy is the way things are done, the State form, and its relation of sovereignty, will always be lurking, always seeking to reassert itself. Even in the new land, for Deleuze and Guattari, we will never cease warding off the State. The project of democracy is a perpetual struggle to develop our ability to govern ourselves and a perpetual struggle to ward off the desire to be governed by another hegemonic understanding of politics. It is not possible to engage in a hegemonic project for democracy. It would be absurd to suggest that those who have committed themselves to the project of democracy should hegemonically impose that project on those who have not committed themselves to the project. The very point of the project is that we must decide for ourselves to take up the project. To have democracy imposed by one group onto another, either by coercion or consent, is absurd. It would not deepen democracy, it would undermine it. Relations of subordination, not to mention oppression and domination, are precisely what democracy turns away from, precisely what it must continually ward off. Democracy must be a joyous project in Spinoza’s sense, a project that increases one’s power to act into the world. For the project to grow and spread, it must produce a joyous affect in those who have taken it up, and that affect must encourage or inspire others who encounter it to take up the project themselves. ‘But that’s too passive!’ the proponents of hegemony will object. You cannot wait around and hope social change spreads among people to the point that it pervades the social field. You have to act decisively, and impose that change on those who are unwilling to adopt it.9 My response is that while such decisive action can, at times, bring about social change more quickly, it will not be social change in the direction of democracy. What I am suggesting is that we should accept democracy as the social change we seek, rather than justice or equality or redistribution or rights or climate action and so on. That does not mean that those other questions will be ignored. They just will not be the point of our political struggle. For example, democratic communities will certainly grapple with the issue of equality, with how much equality is appropriate, and what kind. But equality will be an open-​ended question for those communities to work 23

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on democratically, rather than an a priori value that is accepted as good without question and pursued by any means necessary. This latter thinking would sum up the Bernie Sanders movement in the contemporary United States and its desire for greatly expanded federal-​government programmes to redress inequality. It is a perfectly understandable desire in our era of stark inequality, but it is also a desire to move in precisely the opposite direction from democracy. To move in the direction of democracy, then, we would not assemble a counter-hegemonic bloc to impose democracy on the hegemonic bloc of not-​democracy. Instead, we would commit to the project of democracy and start engaging it immediately. And we would encourage others to join in the project, such that it grows and spreads to involve as many others as possible. This strategy is not so far-​fetched as it may seem to the hegemonically minded, because, recall, democracy is necessarily a joyous project. It is a difficult one, to be sure, but it is also necessarily joyous because, as we practise the art of governing ourselves, and we become increasing adept at it, we will, as a result, increase our power to act into the world. That is what it means to produce a joyous affect, again in Spinoza’s sense. This affect may not be exactly the same as ‘joy’ the way we commonly think of it, but still, Spinozan joy will create an affect we experience as desirable, as ‘choiceworthy’ in Aristotle’s terms (for example, 1998: 1333a 29–​30). We will know it to be good for us, and we will want to continue our democratic project. If the project does not produce joy in this way, if it produces sadness by sapping our energy, or dampening our will to act, then it is not the right project, and we will abandon it. The project of democracy, then, will be successful if it can grow and spread by expressing its own strength, if an increasing number of people find it to be more joyful than their current form of life. If democracy is successful in this way –​or, rather, if we are successful in carrying out the project of governing ourselves –​it is possible to imagine democracy proliferating to the point that the system flips, that we spill over into a radically new world in which democracy is a given, a normal way of life, the way things are done. Democracy will not be dominant or sovereign in this new world; rather it will have spread to the point that it pervades this new world, pervades our thinking, pervades our practice. In this new world, it will not occur to us (much) to have a State govern us. We will rarely think of the State at all, because it will seem to us to not be of much use. It will seem obsolete, absurd. To reiterate, democracy’s pervading this new world will never be total, and it can never be permanent. It is not as though democracy is our primordial default state, and once we reach it we will remain in that condition forevermore. Even in this new land where democracy pervades, non-​democratic ways of life –​State, sovereignty, hegemony, domination, capitalism –​will always exist and will continually reassert themselves. 24

Democracy beyond Hegemony

Democracy is a perpetual project: it must always be actively chosen, and practised, and its joyous effect renewed. Of course, in the short term, a system-​flip is not the most likely event. It is not something we should be expecting, and think we have failed if it does not happen soon. It is better to expect noticeable, but still very much incomplete, growth of the democratic project. We might even expect fits and starts: great expressions of democratic desire followed by periods of relative inactivity. This is how I suggest we should understand the mobilisations of 2011. They were a great cry, on the part of many, announcing their commitment to the project of democracy. The result was a remarkable outburst of democratic activity, over the course of a sustained period, sometimes a year or more, in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Spain, Greece, Chile, Brazil, Turkey, Israel, the United Kingdom, and even the United States. This outburst has not led, between 2011 and the present day, to a flip in the system like I sketch above. It has even given way to a reinstitution of authoritarianism in Egypt, and a ‘Partification’ of democratic desire in Greece, Spain, and the United States. But let me try to say this clearly: it is precisely the wrong reaction if one were to say, “well, see, these outbursts died out because democracy is impossible. Society needs to have order imposed on it hegemonically. These movements failed because they did not understand that. They did not develop strong leadership, or form a Party, or seize State power and govern towards democracy”. No. Those are all arguments in the direction of sadness, arguments that move us away from democracy. The project of democracy is ongoing, unfolding out into the long term. And it was augmented by 2011, even if it did not produce a system-​flip that some –​those stuck thinking in the idiom of the Russian Revolution –​expected.

Conclusion In the last section, I seem to drift further and further away from Laclau and Mouffe’s politics. I say we should move away from hegemony and towards democracy, while they insist on a position of balance, or tension, between the two. Even though they advocate a politics of “radical democracy”, they do not leave open the possibility of democracy as a way of life beyond hegemony, or beyond the State. I think, instead, that we are capable of pursuing such a way of life, and even, if we are lucky, actually achieving it at times. But I do not want this chapter to leave the impression that there is an insurmountable chasm between my project and theirs. There remain numerous important points of connection, and I want to stress that I think Laclau and Mouffe offer the project of democracy, as I conceive it, a 25

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wealth of intellectual resources that are vitally important. We should not lose sight of those connections in the shadow of my (long) discussion of the differences. The first connection is that, in their determined campaign against economism and class reductionism, Laclau and Mouffe adopt a more general stance that politics can never have a privileged point of rupture (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 152). The field of politics is, therefore, radically open and undetermined. They use this theoretical tool in the struggle against economism and class reductionism, to argue, against so many Marxists, that control of the means of production is not, a priori, a more important political issue, and the working class is not, a priori, a more important political subject. The importance of each political issue and political subject, on the contrary, must be established a posteriori, in the course of the actual struggle. As a result, Laclau and Mouffe insist on ‘the multiplication of political spaces and the preventing of the concentration of power in one point’. These are ‘preconditions of every truly democratic transformation of society’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 178). Amen. But of course both the Party and the State are precisely this: an attempt to concentrate power in one point. I would rephrase their argument only slightly to say that any democratic project must continually ward off the concentration of power in any one point. But the heart of the idea remains. If we are generous here, we can read Laclau and Mouffe’s crusade against the a priori privileging of one issue/​ subject over others as a struggle, more generally, against transcendence, against the idea of one authority rising above all others. They are suggesting that politics should only ever be a struggle among immanent forces, that no force transcends the others a priori. Such immanent politics would ward off the emergence of the State, founded as it is on precisely the idea that the State is transcendent a priori. Laclau and Mouffe are, without doing so explicitly, making an argument here against the very idea of sovereignty. Even if they never say it out loud, this implicit argument against State sovereignty is borne of their struggle against ‘apriorism’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 179). We can, if we want, draw this thread out of their argument and put it to work in our own. Such threads are numerous in HSS, but let me point out just one other. On page 178 they say something very stimulating. They say that workers’ self-​management is not enough, that radical democracy requires ‘true participation by all subjects in decisions about what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and the forms in which the product is to be distributed’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: 178). Here again, of course, they are working on the problem of class reductionism. But what is also interesting in this passage is that the workers’ self-​management they refer to was, traditionally, a movement apart from (and superior to) the traditional Marxist plan for a workers’ Party to seize the State and abolish property and class. It was, instead, a directly democratic movement by workers to 26

Democracy beyond Hegemony

appropriate the means of production and manage production themselves.10 Laclau and Mouffe are merely extending this concept beyond the working class, to everyone. This extension is what people in the 1960s and 1970s (such as Vaneigem, 1974, and Lefebvre, 2009: 193–​194) called ‘autogestion généralisée’, or generalised self-​management. Laclau and Mouffe present this move as part of their project to deepen democracy, to imagine democracy more radically than either aggregative liberal democracy or Habermasian deliberative democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 2000: xvii). But it is hard to see how this project of generalised self-​management would be carried out by means of Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic projects. Surely it is, almost by definition, a project that cannot be imposed on others, but a project that must be taken up, consciously and willingly, by people who want to manage their affairs for themselves. And so I want this reflection to end by saying, in the big picture, here’s to Laclau and Mouffe. Here’s to their crusade against economism, class reductionism, essentialism, and apriorism. These were, and are, crucial resources for our struggle ahead. But also, here’s to going beyond Laclau and Mouffe. Here’s to pushing out beyond their limiting assumption that democracy must always be balanced by hegemony. Here’s to going beyond hegemony and farther out in the direction of democracy, perpetually, so that we can discover what we are capable of, and what joy democracy can bring. Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10

A brilliant demonstration of how dumb this idea is can be found in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Set in the 1930s, it presents a white communist paternalistically lecturing a black inhabitant of Harlem, telling him that if he understood the world more ‘scientifically’, he would see that racism only appears to be what oppresses him, and that class oppression is the real problem. Think of the cries and banners in Madrid:‘que se vayan todos’, and ‘no nos representan’. That characterisation may seem unfair and too simple, but I am not sure it is. The manifesto is surprisingly ham-​handed (not to mention, in retrospect, disastrously wrong) in its thinking about political strategy. The way Bernie Sanders currently is in the United States. Desirable to the left, of course, not the right. This seems to repeat the foolishness of The communist manifesto, in which Marx and Engels urge workers to use State power to cause the State to wither away. And, really, it repeats the foolishness of the neoconservatives in the United States in the 2000s, who wanted to invade other countries in order to bring them the gift of democracy. This is a power in the sense of Spinoza’s potentia, rather than potestas. I should mention Hardt and Negri’s work here as well (2004, 2012).They are a part of the same Italian autonomist tradition as Agamben and Virno, and they are also deeply inspired by the work of Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari. And, recalling Žižek (2011), to do that,‘one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness’. Castoriadis (1997) should also be mentioned here as an eager supporter of workers’ self-​ management over and above a Party/​State strategy. 27

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References Agamben, G. (2016) The use of bodies, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Aristotle (1998) The politics, translated by C. Reeve, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Castoriadis, C. (1997) The Castoriadis reader, edited and translated by D. Curtis, New York: Wiley-​Blackwell. Dean, J. (2016) Crowd and Party, London: Verso. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. ([1972] 1977) Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forester, J. (1999) ‘Dealing with deep value differences’, in L. Susskind, S. McKearnan and J. Thomas-​Larmer (eds) The consensus building handbook, Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp 463–​493. Geras, N. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism?’, New Left Review, 163, May-​June. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Smith, London: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (2000) The Antonio Gramsci reader: selected writings 1916–​1935, edited by D. Forgacs, New York: NYU Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire, New York: Penguin. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2012) Declaration, New York: Argo-​Navis. Innes, J. (1995) ‘Planning theory’s emerging paradigm’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 14(3): 183–​189. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2000) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (2009) State, space, world: selected essays, edited by N. Brenner and S. Elden, translated by G. Moore, N. Brenner, and S. Elden, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Purcell, M. (2009) ‘Resisting neoliberalization: communicative planning or radical democratic movements?’, Planning Theory, 8(2): 140–​165. Purcell, M. (2013) The down-​deep delight of democracy, New York: Wiley. Purcell, M. (2016) ‘For democracy: planning and publics without the state’, Planning Theory, 15(4): 386–​401. Vaneigem, R. (1974) De la Grève Sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée, Paris: Éditions 10/​18. Virno, P. (2006) ‘Virtuosity and revolution: the political theory of exodus’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds) Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 189–​212. Žižek, S. (2011) ‘Shoplifters of the world unite’, London Review of Books, 19 August, www.lrb.co.uk/ ​ 2 011/ ​ 0 8/ ​ 1 9/ ​ s lavoj- ​ z izek/​ shoplifters-​of-​the-​world-​unite

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3

Democracy without Hegemony: A Reply to Mark Purcell Ronaldo Munck

My own engagement with Ernesto Laclau goes back to the mid-​1970s in the UK when he was for a time my PhD supervisor at Essex, after I had arrived from Argentina some years after he had. I thought then that he was forsaking Marxism for some illusory post-​structuralist politics that would take him far away from socialism. In the years since, I have taken his work, on his own, and of course the landmark Hegemony and socialist strategy with Chantal Mouffe (1985), as basic building blocks for any reconstruction of democratic socialism after the collapse of its actually existing and most alternative variants. I will not comment here on Mouffe’s work insofar as she developed a quite distinct theory of democracy, in my opinion, after this joint work. Mark Purcell’s chapter represents a heterodox account of democracy and, in certain respects, Laclau’s work. His statement that ‘hegemonic politics and radical democracy are at odds’ and that ‘it is not possible to engage in a hegemonic project for democracy’ seemed, in fact, quite at odds with the underlying political intent of Hegemony and socialist strategy and Laclau’s work since. Lest there be any doubt, Laclau consistently advocated a liberal-​ democratic-​socialist society, as he put it, and a democratic revolution, in which the principle of equality pervades all dimensions of social life and erases the distinction in liberal theory between the public and private spheres. As to the concept of hegemony that Laclau articulates, it is anything but in contradiction with democracy. Rather, hegemony is the key concept around which to think strategically about how we might implement the democratic revolution. It is not a process of imposing anything on anyone as Purcell argues, but something that emerges from the political interaction of different

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social groups in a process of ongoing struggle that constitutes the social. There is no construction of democracy without a strategy for hegemony. Purcell’s alternative to Laclau’s perspective is that ‘in democracy people rouse themselves and decide to take on the project of governing themselves’ and that this ‘mobilisation does not turn its face towards the Party or the State and seek to appropriate their power’. This seems to me an anarchist perspective, which is fine, but then let’s call it that and not criticise Laclau for placing hegemony before democracy. In fact, in Latin America since the rise of the ‘pink tide’ after 2000, there was a resurgence of ‘autonomism’ under the influence of Hardt and Negri and John Holloway, in particular, who popularised the Zapatista experience along those lines. Laclau (2001) and many more of us (for example, Munck, 2018) pointed out that under this theoretical perspective, politics became unthinkable. In practice, these currents became isolated and were not successful in terms of offering a viable alternative to the actually existing left-​of-​centre governments. Conversely, the lessons of Hegemony and socialist strategy were debated and developed in many circles and Laclau himself played a significant role in this political spring. Within the piece, Purcell focuses on Hegemony and socialist strategy as a self-​contained political statement and does not engage with further work by Laclau or his Latin American frame. I would argue that it is not possible to understand Laclau’s theoretical-​political project, from his first writing in English on Argentina in 1970 in New Left Review through to his On populist reason of 2005, without understanding that Peronism was always his overt or covert reference point. On populist reason (2005) started with a review of the literature on populism from Le Bon to Tarde and McDougall, but also including Taine and Freud. These sections represent a clearing of the decks before Laclau moved on to construct a new theory of populism. The basic conclusion is that the classics either dismissed or downgraded populism. Due to a general denigration of the masses it could not be conceived as a legitimate way of constructing political bonds. A key task for politics, according to Laclau, was ‘constructing the people’ and, perhaps provocatively, he argued that populism was a key element of socialist politics. The relationship between populism and democracy is given particular emphasis, as well as the topic of political representation. For Laclau the construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par excellence and there is no political intervention that is not populistic in some way. Laclau imagines populism through an arsenal of rhetorical tools (‘floating signifiers’) that can be put to disparate political uses. This populism can be both subversive of the existing order and assist in its reconstruction after a crisis. This is not a purely theoretical construction, however, and Laclau engages creatively with Peronism (again), but also with populism in the US and, my personal favourite, with the legacy of Kemal Attaturk in Turkey. To my mind this is political sociology at its best with 30

REPLY: Democracy without Hegemony

a continuous interaction between social and political conjunctures. It still merits attention today and it would be valuable for Purcell’s work to engage with that corpus of work more broadly. As we look across Latin America since 2000 we see situations where this treatise on ‘populist reason’ could provide a relevant and exciting theoretical lens for radical democratic politics. The parallels between Chávez and Perón, for example, have been much discussed in Latin America. Likewise, the rise of Evo Morales and the nationalisation of Bolivian oil show parallels with 1950s nationalist populism. Of course, this is a different era and globalisation sets a very distinct context for these national-​popular movements, but what Laclau provided us with were the theoretical tools to explore the diverse continuities and discontinuities. This contrasts, for example, with Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire, which provided us with no coherent explanation of the sources of social antagonism, as Laclau rightly pointed out. It would also be essential to deploy this thinking today in understanding the rise of right-​wing populism in the global North in recent years, as in the cases of Trump, Brexit, and so on. The relationship between democracy, populism and hegemony is extremely complex. In developing his schema, it would be valuable for Purcell to engage with the notion of populism –​a pretty crucial theme in Laclau’s work and, now, in practice, at the centre of contemporary politics. In conclusion, I disagree with Purcell in counter-​posing democracy and hegemony. I also disagree that the combination of approaches adopted from Hardt and Negri, Agamben and Paulo Virno represents an alternative. Laclau was, to be clear, very open to the influence of Foucault and Deleuze/​Guattari for example. He maintained a respectful dialogue too with Antonio Negri, who cannot be reduced to what his followers say. The task of building a radical democracy is still before us. In pursuing that task, Laclau’s (and Gramsci’s) notion of hegemony remains important. References Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laclau, E. (1970) ‘Argentina: imperialist strategy and the May crisis’, New Left Review, 62: 3–​21. Laclau, E. (2001) ‘Can immanence explain social struggle?’, Diacritics, 31(4): 3–​10. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2000) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Munck, R. (2018) ‘Rethinking the left: a view from Latin America’, Global Discourse, 8(2): 260–275.

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4

The Post-​Marxist Gramsci James Martin

Introduction The figure and legacy of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891–​1937), was indisputably central to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) radical reworking of the theory of hegemony. Without Gramsci’s prison writings of the 1920s and 1930s (see Gramsci, 1971, 1995), their claim to be unveiling a new, ‘post-​ Marxist’ (rather than a non-​or even anti-​Marxist) mode of thinking would have lacked one its key foundations. More than most other Marxist thinkers, Gramsci offered insights that remained engaged with the classical Marxist concerns of political struggle and revolutionary advance and yet avoided being assimilated to its cruder, deterministic formulations. Moreover, his early death following imprisonment by Mussolini’s Fascist regime prevented him from being neutralised by Stalinism and allowed his posthumous memory to be associated, instead, with a radical anti-​Fascist tradition in Italy that distanced him from other, sectarian variants of Communism. Gramsci’s apparent political and intellectual independence therefore enhanced his post-​war reception among radical and left-​wing intellectuals of various persuasions. But this was achieved largely by separating his theoretical innovations from his immediate political preoccupations and commitments. In key respects, Laclau and Mouffe’s account of hegemony and their appeal to a Gramscian tradition of political theorising extended the de-​ contextualisation of Gramsci’s legacy. For them, his innovations around hegemony signified an abstract ‘logic’ of social constitution more than it did a framework for examining concrete entities such as the state, civil society, intellectuals or revolutionary agency. Hegemony was elevated in their work to a principle of societal articulation –​that is, it describes the contingent, global formation of the space and limits of political contests as such –​rather than a theory of specifically capitalist domination or class politics. This post-​ Marxist account of hegemony, which endorsed a pluralistic understanding of 32

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domination that fitted with the diversity of struggles under ‘late capitalism’, converged with the then ascendant ‘post-​structuralist’ philosophies and theories of ‘discourse’ that affirmed the intrinsically multiple and malleable character of power relations. Although Gramsci was not himself aligned to this form of theorising, Laclau and Mouffe’s view of his work as tendentially amenable to it presented him as a kind of double agent in the Marxist camp whose overt commitments were secretly incompatible with the implicitly deconstructive logic of his thought. The effect of this reading, I want to argue, was to advance a view of Gramsci as a prescient theoretician of anti-​foundational radical politics that, strangely, both made him contemporary and effectively distanced his work from the present. In what follows, I explore the origins of that reading in the wider posthumous appropriation of Gramsci’s ideas, which amplified the concept of hegemony as a general analytical framework adaptable to various contexts. I then examine the way this legacy was drawn upon by Laclau and Mouffe to disclose a subversive undercurrent within the Marxist tradition, permitting hegemony –​and its component focus on the state, subjectivity, and the ethical dimension of strategy –​to be substantially recast around a wholly new conception of political subjectivity. Finally, I assess what was missed and gained in this post-​Marxist reading and suggest that, while it failed to explore important and valuable aspects of Gramsci’s work, nonetheless it invited a valuable interpretive attitude of ‘mourning’ for what has been lost in radical political theory: namely, the notion of an authentic political subject that endows left critique with moral and epistemological certitude. This attitude remains a substantial challenge for radical political theory and is distinguishable, I argue, from other left traditions that continue to invoke a ‘melancholic’ longing for that subject.

A Marxist for all seasons? In a sense, Gramsci’s work has always been ‘out of context’. His prison writings, upon which so much of his post-​war reception was built, were never obviously intended for publication nor, given his premature death, could their content be easily aligned to any singular authorial intention. Written partly in code to evade the prison censor and continuously revised over time (partly in dialogue with events outside prison; see Spriano, 1979), there is no final determination on what the texts of the Notebooks might mean for later readers. By consequence, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony and other topics have been open to various readings with different and frequently contradictory slants in their orientation. While it is illuminating to guide one’s reading of the Notebooks by reference to contemporaneous developments in Marxism (see Femia, 1981; Piccone, 1983), to the wider traditions of Italian political thought (see Bellamy and Schecter, 1993; 33

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Jacobitti, 1981), or to immediate problems and issues that Gramsci faced as a political thinker and activist (see Martin, 1998a) – all of which reveal different keys to unlock his insights –​no contextual conditions can end speculation about what his work means nor how it might be ‘applied’ in new contexts. This is a bonus in many ways, but it also means that the elaboration of Gramsci’s insights is powered by debates and concerns in an ever-​changing present, leading to what Alistair Davidson (1972) once benignly characterised as the ‘varying seasons’ to studies of his work. But the seasonal shifts in interpreting Gramsci began long before his own demise. Even as a young socialist activist in Turin in the years after the First World War, Gramsci’s reputation was that of an eclectic and independent thinker who could not be aligned simply to a precise established tradition. Gramsci associated with liberals and anarchists, parliamentary socialists and trade unionists, as well as his fellow revolutionary socialists (see Levy, 1999; Martin, 2008: especially Chapter 3). At a moment of profound ideological disaggregation and traumatic political ferment, when personal and party allegiances rapidly shifted, it is no surprise to find Gramsci associated with numerous groupings, many of them eager to reject the establishment ideologies of complacent liberalism and revisionist socialism (see Martin, 2015). In his ‘early’ career as a student and journalist, Gramsci was influenced by figures such as popular French syndicalist Georges Sorel, liberal aesthetician Benedetto Croce, and even the conservative Hegelian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile (see Badaloni, 1975; Schecter, 1990). It was only after 1921, with the formation of the Communist Party of Italy and its strict obedience to Soviet dominated Marxism-​Leninism, that Gramsci appeared to nail his colours to a mast. Even then, his reputation was never one of sectarian allegiance (see McNally, 2015) and in the early years following the Second World War, he was recalled by many as an ‘anti-​fascist martyr’ alongside other figures such as the ‘revolutionary liberal’, Piero Gobetti (see Spriano, 1977; Martin, 2008: 112–​120). These associations underscore the point that, whatever his declared allegiances to socialism and Marxism, Gramsci had always been a figure who could be ‘claimed’ from a variety of perspectives, with contrasting accents to his writing making it open to selective emphasis (on which, see Liguori, 1996). Thus the eventual publication of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, under the editorial auspices of his erstwhile comrade Palmiro Toglitatti, then the leader of the Italian Communist Party, initially presented Gramsci as a loyal follower of Marxism-​Leninism (Togliatti, 1967). Later, as Togliatti himself inched away from adherence to the Soviet regime, Gramsci’s distinctly ‘national’ route to socialism –​that is, his independence from the Soviet model of revolution –​came to be emphasised (Gundle, 1995). Later Italian readers of Gramsci continued in this direction, underscoring distinctly libertarian and un-​Leninist dimensions in his early writings and, in the work of the 34

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post-​war philosopher, Norberto Bobbio (himself a socialist rooted in the anti-​fascist experience), the liberal aspects to Gramsci’s Marxism in his focus on superstructures and civil society (see Bobbio, 1986). In the 1970s he was even associated with the Maoist ‘cultural revolution’ (Macchiocchi, 1974) and, later, the parliamentary democratic strategy of ‘Eurocommunism’ (see Sassoon, 1987). As Gramsci’s work was eventually translated into other languages, his reputation emerged as an independent-​minded, anti-​deterministic Marxist, untainted by Stalinism and uniquely attentive to the cultural dimension to revolutionary politics. Separated from his own political circumstances and choices (which seemed increasingly distant and largely unfathomable in the consumer capitalism of the post-​war decades), he became an ambivalent, even malleable figure, presciently sensitive to the non-​economic, ideological and cultural factors that permeate and shape capitalist society and yet insistent, at the same time, on the need for a strategically calculating revolutionary party –​conceived as a ‘modern Prince’ (Gramsci, 1971: 125–​205) –​built, broadly, on a hierarchical vanguardist model. This puzzling mix of reflective open-​mindedness and hard-​nosed centralism made him hard to place in any single camp. Yet in combining the contrasting elements of a rich historical and cultural awareness with a strategic grasp of the ever-​shifting positions in the wider class ‘relations of force’, Gramsci’s Notebooks offered the emergent European New Left a unique, non-​Soviet Marxist resource for analysing the distinctive conjunctures, national variations, and deeper, ‘organic’ structures of modern capitalist orders. His elaboration of hegemony, rather than his affiliations or analyses of local conditions, came to be viewed outside Italy as the conceptual centrepiece of his prison writings and analyses –​a mobile framework consisting of generalised observations and principles concerning class cultural and political domination that, when recast analytically, could be applied to the empirical analysis of diverse social orders and conjunctures (see Pizzorno, 1970; Portelli, 1973). Hegemony –​and thus Gramsci, understood as its intellectual ‘originator’ –​promised a conceptual bridge between the Marxist preoccupation with class power and revolutionary agency and the wider concerns of other types of domination and struggles for emancipation, which came to the fore in the late 1960s and 1970s. To understand the debates around hegemony into which Laclau and Mouffe intervened in the late 1970s, and which eventually informed Hegemony and socialist strategy, it helps to break down the Gramscian type of analysis into three overlapping dimensions that form its core themes: the state, subjectivity, and ethics. Gramsci’s account of hegemony permitted these dimensions to extend to a range of interpretations and emphases. In the first instance, his analysis of hegemony shifted attention from the economic ‘base’ to the ‘superstructural’ form of class power in the state (see Gramsci, 1971: 235–​236). Gramsci had insisted that class domination in the 35

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‘West’ (as opposed, that is, to Russia) was never operative simply at the level of property relations or coercion but, moreover, was mediated through a wider project of national ‘leadership’, which supplied a consensual basis to class power (Gramsci, 1971: 238–​239). In this aspect, his prison writings riffed on the liberal-​nationalist and Hegelian preoccupations of Italian thinkers for whom ‘hegemony’ was already a concept in use (see Jacobitti, 1981; Bellamy, 1990). Marxist-​Leninist concepts of the state, understood as a discrete instrument of class power to be ‘seized’, were also important but Gramsci folded into these an understanding of state building as the formation by a class or class fraction of a national-​popular programme ‘to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’ across ‘civil society’, which then formed part of a wider, ‘integral’ conception of the state (Gramsci, 1971: 244). Hegemony was thus modelled on an image of state building conceived as a positive and ongoing process of ‘educating’ and ‘civilising’ its citizens (1971: 246–​247), driven by social classes but extended beyond narrow interests and powers to encompass the fabric of social institutions and cultural practices outside the formal architecture of government. This state building perspective lent the Marxist principle of class domination a flavour of strategic contingency and subtle variation over the traditional assertions of mono-​causal determination and homogeneity. Second, Gramsci gave critical attention to the intellectual, cultural and ideological forms of civil society as the means through which consent was subjectively assembled. If modern ‘bourgeois’ domination involved efforts to forge a ‘collective will’ or common ‘conception of the world’ (Gramsci, 1971: 323), then it followed that political subjectivity did not automatically or wholly follow from one’s position in relations of production. Gramsci recognised the practical need to win over subjects both by forging a coherent intellectual and ideological project, but also by ensuring that this project imposed ‘intellectual and moral order’ on pre-​existing, if fragmented, common sense attitudes and beliefs (1971: 325). Freed from reduction to class, regional social identities, local traditions and a plurality of ‘traces’ of popular belief could be approached not as intrinsically inferior forms of ‘false consciousness’ but as legitimate, if contradictory, ways of experiencing the world. A hegemonic national-​popular subjectivity –​and not just a temporary coalition of interests –​was key to an alternative revolutionary project and demanded appreciation of the sheer range of attitudes and values that influenced popular allegiances. Third, hegemony was for Gramsci a necessarily ethical matter in so far as a state building project –​built upon the dissemination and renewal of popular common sense –​ought to be itself an emancipatory process, rather than just a crude scramble for power. Gramsci did not devote any effort to normative questions, partly because his own socialist values were already formed by the time of his imprisonment. Like many other Marxists, such 36

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preoccupations were often viewed as secondary to the mechanics of taking power. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s scattered remarks imply that hegemony was inescapably ethical because an inclusive and popular project had to be formulated around a reasoned image of society and its normative potential; that is, it had to establish a critical ‘praxis’ through which new socialist values could be socially grounded (see Gramsci, 1971: 330–​ 331, 332–​333). For Gramsci, that meant a vision of social relations that overcame rigid distinctions between ‘masses’ and ‘elites’, common people and ‘intellectuals’, workers and peasants, centre and periphery –​concerns that reflected Italy’s uneven modernity in the early 20th century. A socialist society for him had to be rooted in the possibilities of equal participation, intellectual equality and social responsibility enabled by industrial forms of production. At the same time, the route to this socialism was, in his view, inescapably one that demanded rigid discipline through an organised party. That meant that the ethics of proletarian hegemony stemmed not only from the ‘spontaneous’ organisation of workers but also from the disciplined organisation of a party regularly in contact with its ‘mass’ base (Gramsci, 1971: 198). Here Gramsci’s Leninism sat uneasily alongside his egalitarianism: where one insisted on the necessity of elite control, centralism and disciplined commitment, the other envisaged plurality, creativity and intellectual freedom (see Martin, 1998b). We can view the alternating accents in the debates of the 1960s and 1970s over Gramsci’s ideas in relation to these three areas. His theorisation of state building as the model for a politics of hegemony was vital to developments in ‘Western Marxism’ as class domination came to be understood as a highly mediated process involving both controlling apparatuses of coercion and, increasingly, integrative cultural practices and unifying national strategies that partially included rather than simply coerced the working classes. The capitalist state, in its various permutations and extensions across civil society, was viewed as the institutional medium for hegemonic strategies and Gramsci became a frequently referenced figure in the radical political sociology of post-​war capitalism, although with varying emphasis on the degrees of popular consent to bourgeois power (see Miliband, 1973; Poulantzas, 1973, 2008; Jessop, 1990).Nonetheless, one could still claim either that Gramsci was a committed Leninist with his ultimate commitment being to what he called a ‘war of manoeuvre’ to overthrow the capitalist state; or, by contrast, that he was more of a gradualist, with emphasis being on the long-​term ‘war of position’ across civil society (see Gramsci, 1971: 235). Those who highlighted the unavoidable and irreconcilable clash of class interests emphasised hegemonic strategy as largely a preparation for a coming revolutionary assault (see Harman, 1983); those for whom the struggle for cultural hegemony, as the ongoing negotiation of consent through ideological ‘apparatuses’, included those of a more revisionist persuasion interested in 37

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exploring the complex negotiations of class power through the media, crime or the law (see Hall et al, 1978; Hunt, 1993). Questions over subjectivity were hugely important sources of theoretical innovation at this time, too. Transformations in post-​war society led to significant changes in class cultural identities but also to the growing presence of non-​class forms of political subjectivity, such as anti-​war movements, feminism, lesbian and gay rights, and anti-​racist politics. New developments in the study of culture, especially, began to explore the diverse inflections of ‘popular’ forms of cultural consumption with Gramsci as an inspiration (see Harris, 1992). Hegemony came to have an appeal as an overarching concept to capture the layered and unevenly distributed nature of capitalist domination in light of an increasingly fragmented and plural understanding of subjective identity. When these approaches were combined with philosophical developments in post-​structuralist theories, the notion that class ideology was a structurally secure or homogenous formation imposed from above began to be displaced by attention to the way ‘subaltern’ beliefs, attitudes and values coalesced around fragments of common sense related, for example, to race or gender (see Hall, 1986). Gramsci’s attention to ideology as a lived experience –​but an experience with many ‘traces’ and dimensions, constantly refigured in the play of social struggles –​rather than a set of pre-​prepared beliefs imposed on public consciousness came widely to be appreciated. Yet even here it was easy to insist that class remained central to Gramsci, even if the diversity of social identities was accepted. Gramsci thus endorsed both the primacy of ‘national-​popular’ configurations at a political level while remaining attached to the primacy, at an economic level, of class as the historical force grounding subjectivity. Finally, the ethical dimension to hegemony was widely debated as the democratic character of modern socialism came under greater scrutiny. The expansion of new social movements around diverse political demands jarred increasingly with the idea of socialism as a unified moral community. These ‘new’ struggles were often recognised as aligned to socialism but distinct from its assumed normative concerns, which were focused on the centrality of the workplace, labour and production, and accompanying images of noble, masculine solidarity. If socialism was to connect numerous and diverse struggles, then surely plural interests and moral diversity rather than class interests and dutiful solidarity now needed to be affirmed (see Salvadori, 1970)? And yet if hegemony was fundamentally a class project, how could these relations with other struggles be sustained? Gramsci was felt by some interpreters to be a figure uniquely interested in a revolutionary project defined by plurality and democracy (see Sassoon, 1987). But he was equally open to the charge of implicit authoritarianism by virtue of his Leninist view of the party as a leading vanguard whose authority stems not from democracy as such but from its superior grasp of 38

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the structural primacy of the working class in the transition to socialism (see the discussion in Femia, 1981: Chapter 5). It is clear, then, that Gramsci’s scattered and uncoordinated observations on hegemony could legitimately support a gradualist notion of radical social transformation that prioritised capturing civil society rather than violent assault on the state; an anti-​deterministic theory of subjectivity that accepted different social identities beyond class and recognised the value of unifying national-​popular values and non-​class aligned ideological currents; and a theory of politics whose ethical orientation was towards the consensual formation of a new and inclusive common sense, not a dogmatic imposition of ideology. But his work also endorsed the principle of revolutionary violence in finally overthrowing the bourgeois state, the historical primacy of class identity in generating ‘conceptions of the world’, and the need for strict party discipline in pursuit of a unity of purpose that necessarily constrained pluralism and anticipated the dissolution of formal freedoms in a workers’ state. That Gramsci’s work gathered and contained these tensions was testament to the uniquely imaginative and comprehensive character of his prison writings. But it was also evidence of the peculiar conditions of crisis that characterised his context and which permeated his reflections, allowing contrasting principles of national-​popular leadership and class revolution to intertwine (see Martin, 1997). Uniquely softening the epistemological foundations of classical Marxism while affirming a nuanced version of Leninism, Gramsci’s work inevitably was replete with tensions he could not resolve. In that respect, Laclau and Mouffe’s innovation in Hegemony and socialist strategy was to recast hegemony in a new theoretical vocabulary to move beyond these tensions. For them that meant, above all, ditching the epistemological foundations of historical materialism that gave primacy to objective economic structures in state building, to the subjective basis of social identity, and to the ethical parameters of socialism. But before exploring the place of Gramsci in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​ Marxist work, it is worth briefly noting their earlier separate contributions to the Marxist debates that recirculated Gramsci’s ideas in the 1970s. Both engaged critically with the prevailing Marxist theories of political subjectivity by way of the key concept of ideology, filtered notably through the insights of Althusser (1971) for whom this constituted an independent ‘level’ of social existence. Laclau (1977), for example, sought to highlight the specifically political dimension of ideology by way of the experience of Latin American populism. Populist struggles, he argued, sought to coordinate different social classes and struggles by deploying ideas of ‘the people’ or ‘nation’ in their opposition to a ‘ruling elite’. Populist ideology might have class ‘inflections’ but ideology as such was not reducible wholesale to a mirror of class relations of production. Instead, certain ideological elements fulfilled the independent 39

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function of ‘articulating’ social classes. ‘Articulation’ was thus one of the key terms in Laclau’s interrogation of then contemporary Marxist theories. Likewise, Mouffe (1979b) also emphasised the way ideology forges political subjects independently of class relations. But, for her, this was an insight owed directly to Gramsci in his critical departure from Second International Marxism and she explored closely the European debates around his arguments in the Notebooks (see Mouffe, 1979a). However, in the mid to late 1970s, both Laclau and Mouffe remained committed to a broadly Marxist frame of reference and saw their contribution as one of extracting an expanded understanding of ideology that worked to join social classes with other democratic social movements, rather than renouncing the privilege of class in radical politics as such. Controversially, however, in Hegemony and socialist strategy they brought together their individual insights to recast hegemony as a principle of societal articulation, rejecting the residual determinism of their prior work and, perhaps paradoxically, placing Gramsci directly at the centre of their concerns.

Recasting hegemony: to Gramsci … and beyond The outstanding argumentative manoeuvre made by Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and socialist strategy consisted in shifting the ontological status of hegemony from a theory of ideology to a ‘new political logic’ of social constitution. What did this mean? In essence, it meant amplifying the idea of articulation, making it the principle underlying all social relations and identities rather than a subordinate moment within capitalism. ‘Society’, they argued, ‘was not a valid object of discourse’ if it was viewed as governed by a ‘single underlying principle’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111). The social totality could no longer be conceived as an objective structure with a ‘positive’ essence for which ideology functioned as a more-​or-​less glutinous medium joining together the otherwise firmly established layers of economy and state (1985: 95–​96). Rather, society was more like an incomplete but ongoing narrative –​akin to a text – than a material object. What gave it coherence was not something fundamentally outside subjectivity but a capacity to keep weaving together its various parts into a coherent story through which subjects could identify. That did not mean society could be narrated any way whatsoever or simply at will –​its components are often firmly fixed in their own storylines –​but it did suggest that the overall coordination of social arrangements was ‘incomplete’ and open to inventive transformation. There was no ‘necessary’ script or archetypal agency outside the narrative, no global ‘direction’ to history or fundamental class actor that had to be acknowledged. Social relations were constituted not around an objective core but through narrative threads that could, in principle, be blended in infinite, complex and contradictory ways. Hegemony, for Laclau and Mouffe, 40

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therefore designated the logic –​or implicit conceptual structure –​of relating otherwise disparate elements of ‘the social’ by way of merely contingently and selectively assembled narratives. This alteration to hegemony’s ontological status radically changed the character of the component dimensions of state, subjectivity and ethics, noted above. Inevitably, it altered the significance of Gramsci, too, by presenting him as an agent in the deconstruction of the Marxist tradition. Let us look at these aspects in turn. Laclau and Mouffe’s reformulation of hegemony elevated the status of ‘politics’ beyond merely a moment of adjusting state and civil society to the demands of economic relations of production. Hegemonic politics, Gramsci had understood, did not unfold within an established ‘totality’ of social relations but was what secured ‘the very unity existing in a concrete social formation’ (1985: 7). In displacing the Marxist notion of societal form endowed by a mode of production, Laclau and Mouffe presented political action as a distinct and independent practice of installing a dominant frame to social order. The central motif of this political logic was ‘antagonism’ –​ political opposition to a blocking force that is presented as preventing the full constitution of society, thereby anchoring a narrative that incites subjects to invest in the prospect of society as an achievable order. There were, of course, many kinds of antagonisms but none (such as class struggle) could be endowed with automatic primacy over the others. Hegemonic politics entailed the temporary elevation of one antagonism to stand ‘metaphorically’ as the ‘negative essence’ unifying all others (1985: 95). While Gramsci’s state building language of ‘historic bloc’, war of position/​ manoeuvre, and relations of force, captured elements of this contingent assemblage of discrete parts into a relational unity, his account of hegemonic politics remained wedded to an awkward ‘sociological’ language that implied clearly delineated, rather than fully relational, objects and agents. Thus his shifting emphasis in the binaries of state and civil society, coercion and consent, sometimes made it unclear precisely whether hegemony was more a narrowly political arrangement (forged through the state with coercive backing) or a deeper cultural process (achieved exclusively through consent) (see Anderson, 1976–​77; Howarth, 2015). Nor did he insist on antagonism as the key moment in the unification of an ensemble of such forces since class antagonisms remained for him theoretically privileged. Thus Laclau and Mouffe supplanted many of Gramsci’s concepts with a symbolic lexicon of ‘articulation’, and ‘chains of equivalence’ and ‘difference’, which emphasised the building of a nation-​popular discourse to govern social relations, with varying degrees of force and consent. Indeed, the state (when mentioned at all) was viewed rather abstractly, as a site of contingent struggles rather than a privileged institutional framework (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 180). In their new vocabulary, strategic and action-​oriented concepts rather than structural constraints were central, leading some critics to accuse them of 41

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‘voluntarism’ (for example, Rustin, 1987) and to bemoan the absence of firm sociological grounding (see Mouzelis, 1990). Key to Laclau and Mouffe’s framing of hegemonic politics was, famously, the concept of ‘discourse’ (1985: 105–​114). With this concept, subjectivity was again centred as the necessary medium of hegemonic articulation. But where Gramsci had explored ideology and common sense –​understood as conscious, if often unreflective, psychological constructs for conceptualising experience –​Laclau and Mouffe drew upon post-​Freudian (and, following Althusser, specifically Lacanian) ideas of subjectivity that underscored the largely unconscious and affective organisation of identity via the internalisation of ‘chains’ of symbolic difference (1985: 114–​122). Discourse described an ‘articulatory practice’ that conjoined polyvalent symbolic elements into a relatively stable, but essentially unfixed, relational whole. When elements were articulated discursively, the identity positioned in that discourse was thus modified in the process, as was the totality. Thus when democracy and capitalism are articulated, they both alter as a consequence rather than remain fundamentally distinct. The subject was ‘discursively constituted’ in so far as it invested itself libidinally in roles and positions in discourses which nonetheless could, in principle, be endlessly reconnected to numerous other discourses. What coordinated articulations was not anything material or objectively external to them but, rather, the antagonistic identification of a symbolic opponent (for example, capitalists, racists, fascists), which contingently fixed and stabilised otherwise precarious discursive ‘positions’ (for instance, as worker, citizen or national subject). Hegemony was thus a process weaving together new and old discourses (such as, for example, feminism, gay rights, socialism) with floating discursive elements (such as equality, freedom, rights, and so on) around opposition to global antagonists in order to maintain wider coalitions and models of social organisation (1985: 134–​145). Importantly, Laclau and Mouffe now fundamentally rejected Gramsci’s (and, more generally, Marxism’s) ‘essentialist’ presupposition of structural primacy to social class as the anchor fixing subjective identity and political alignment. There was no one single type of hegemony but, rather, multiple, co-​existent and intertwined hegemonies (for instance around race, class, gender, locality, ethnicity and so on) whose articulation could take many forms, with varying degrees of inclusion and exclusion (1985: 137–​138). With this rejection of the primacy of class identity and economic determination, Laclau and Mouffe now explicitly presented the ethical quest for hegemony as a strategy for a ‘radical and democratic pluralism’ (1985: Chapter 4). While some critics on the left suspected this was a capitulation to ‘bourgeois democracy’, there was, as we have seen, a much longer history of debates in European socialist and communist parties about how social movements could be reconciled to assertions of the primacy 42

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of class demands and identity. Hegemony of the earlier variety, for many, amounted to a dogmatic and potentially undemocratic imposition of domination. Laclau and Mouffe’s resolution was to present hegemonic unity as a looser framing of political subjectivity that aligned various demands around a global contest for rights and liberties. This was a reoccupation of democratic radicalism but it was no bourgeois individualism; nor did it imply only a model of representative democracy. It certainly rejected the classic ‘Jacobin’ model of a party-​led revolutionary politics that invested authority in a vanguard organised outside parliamentary institutions, which had preoccupied Gramsci (1985: 176–​177). Thus Laclau and Mouffe decisively renounced the idea of a privileged theatre or script of political struggle: ‘there is not one politics of the Left whose contents can be determined in isolation from all contextual reference’ (1985: 179). If social agency was open-​ended and multiple, then a radical democratic ethics was to be organised around the principle of open-​ended and ever evolving differences, not an a priori communal identity. It is clear that the driving logic behind their elaboration of hegemony was radically different from Gramsci’s. As David Howarth (2015: 195) points out, their project was ‘not intended as an intervention in Marxist and Gramscian scholarship’ but sought primarily to extract insights from Gramsci to reconstruct hegemony anew. Although Gramsci problematised economic determination in upholding class power, foregrounded subjectivity in securing consent, and endorsed a politics that recognised the diversity of identities and traditions that any hegemonic strategy needed to gather, ultimately he remained complicit in the economism of Marxist theory. Laclau and Mouffe did not dispute any of this; nor did they seek to align Gramsci with their own project. In fact, they made little attempt to discuss his historical context, biographical circumstances or distinctive project at all (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 65–​71). ‘Gramsci’s theoretical innovation’, they underlined, ‘is located at a more general level’ than his particular biography or analysis of Fordist capitalism (1985: 66). Instead, Gramsci appeared as a theoretical inspiration to their deconstructive reading of Marxist political theory, presenting him as a subversive germ within the body of the tradition; a ‘watershed’ figure who fundamentally unsettled its epistemological and political commitments (1985: 65). That permitted them both to recognise his insights –​in expanding the ‘logic of hegemonic politics, as a logic of articulation and contingency’ thereby breaking with overt economism (1985: 85) –​and to signal his limitations –​in remaining implicitly attached to economic determination as the singular, privileged ‘space’ of hegemonic politics (1985: 137). In effect, Gramsci was presented as inconsistent in his reasoning: he demolished the deterministic frame, rejected its model of base and superstructure, but continued to endorse economistic implications in conceptualising the parameters of political strategy. It is in this 43

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breach between a deconstructive logic and its full intellectual and strategic implications that Laclau and Mouffe sought to locate their own innovation: It is clear from the above that we have moved away from two key aspects of Gramsci’s thought: (a) his insistence that hegemonic subjects are necessarily constituted on the plane of the fundamental classes; and (b) his postulate that, with the exception of interregna constituted by organic crises, every social formation structures itself around a single hegemonic centre. As we pointed out earlier, these are the two last elements of essentialism remaining in Gramscian thought. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 137–​138) Thus we might say that Gramsci functioned as an argumentative device in the theoretical elaboration of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism, more so than a direct political inspiration. His purported inconsistency opened the way to their own manoeuvre ‘beyond Gramsci’ (1985: 136) towards a consistent theorisation of hegemony. In so doing, they distanced themselves from particular sociological or organisational questions while asserting continuity with a specific critical insight in his writing, with the implication that this insight enabled them to radicalise ‘certain of Gramsci’s concepts’ for contemporary radical politics (1985: 178). ‘Hegemony, ‘historical bloc’ or ‘war of position’, for example, could now be recast for radical democratic purposes. Like other appropriations of his ideas, this appeal associated Gramsci with a particular theme in his work and allowed him to operate as a guarantor of their continuity with a radical political tradition within Marxism. This is how Gramsci continued to appear in Laclau and Mouffe’s later citations following the publication of Hegemony and socialist strategy –​not as an analyst of state power, ideological consent, or even as critic of capitalism but, rather, as the limit point of Marxism’s effort to theorise radical politics.

Mourning Gramsci: beyond left melancholia So far I have argued that Gramsci’s significance for Laclau and Mouffe’s project lay, to a great extent, in offering up a theoretical framework whose ‘logic’ they understood to be fundamentally at odds with his own Marxist commitments. His attention to political struggles and to subjectivity went further than any other Marxist in expanding the principle of contingency over economic necessity. In accentuating this aspect as the logic of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation continued the post-​war convention of separating off Gramsci from his historical circumstances so as to appropriate aspects of his ideas with which they could develop their own critical project. Inevitably, the effort to locate in his work the germ 44

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of a post-​Marxist orientation discarded a whole variety of other legitimate insights and potential approaches to his work, much to the alarm of many (see Forgacs, 1989). How on earth could a revolutionary such as Gramsci be assimilated to a radical democratic pluralism without betraying the essence of his politics? However, here I think we need to appreciate the audacity of Laclau and Mouffe’s argumentative manoeuvres, often missed because of the baffling complexity of their language and ideas. Although Gramsci appeared to be utterly central to their innovations, theirs was nonetheless a rather deracinated –​if highly sophisticated –​appropriation that, ultimately, consigned him to history. Suspended between the seemingly dying project of Marxism and the radical democratic politics yet-​to-​be-​born, the post-​ Marxist Gramsci, I want to suggest, encapsulated an interpretive attitude of ‘mourning’ for the left. What do I mean by an attitude of mourning? Mourning refers to the process of negotiating loss, that is, the way a lost object of affection –​a person, experience or an idea –​is held closely present as one adjusts, eventually, to its absence. More than just a psychological disposition, mourning creates an interpretive space to enable the transition from one way of being to another. In this respect, mourning is oriented towards the future; it is a means of approaching new circumstances by positioning oneself, momentarily, more firmly than ever behind the old (see Derrida, 2001). While it is possible, as Freud (2005) pointed out, for mourning to become ‘melancholic’ –​that is, to become obsessively attached to the old object and refuse to let it go, often to the detriment of one’s own integrity –​mourning is often a positive way of ceding to the new. In this respect, the ghostly presence/​absence of Gramsci in Laclau and Mouffe’s work might be said to have offered up a space of negotiation for left political theorising. Gramsci, as I have suggested, is present as an intellectual point of reference but also absent as a substantial historical figure with whom Laclau and Mouffe seek to engage beyond extracting general insights. He provides the frame but not for the most part the content for rethinking radical political strategy. Laclau and Mouffe’s later work persistently cites Gramsci with affection, yet he is not especially interesting to them as a figure beyond such references. As the source of a political logic, rather than a political experience, programme or model of organisation, his presence simultaneously signals for them the validity of a coalitional form of emancipatory politics and the loss of any epistemological certainty to this vision, especially in the form of an organised revolutionary process rooted in the structure of industrial capitalism. In that respect, Laclau and Mouffe’s reclaiming of Gramsci for post-​Marxism was simultaneously a way of letting him go, that is, of negotiating away the inheritance of Marxism by taking its most inventive adherent as their point of departure. For some on the left, Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony appeared to advance too readily beyond dependable points of reference 45

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in Marxian socio-​political analysis. The initial reception of Hegemony and socialist strategy was marked, not surprisingly, by some bitterness and claims of ‘betrayal’ (see, for example, Geras, 1987, and Laclau and Mouffe, 1987). Yet a good number of initial sceptics also came to accept that their work was not the threat it at first appeared (see Hall, 1988). It neither denied the existence of class nor refused the pervasive influence of capitalist economic relations, particularly of neoliberalism, in conditioning society and left political strategy. For others, however, a starker choice was on offer: either we should accept the continued validity of Gramsci’s project (or key aspects of it) or recognise that the game is up and the hegemonic form of politics is over. The first position is, broadly, that of Marxists for whom the framework of historical materialism remains defensible, meaning that hegemony refers by necessity to a practice operative fundamentally within the structure of capitalism and hence unavoidably aligned to its class relations (see, for example, Joseph, 2002). The latter are viewed not as ‘discursive positions’ whose inflections may be infinitely rearticulated so much as objectively material relations constituted outside ideology and hence intrinsically privileged points of reference in any radical politics. Gramsci’s work, from this perspective, is irreducible to some abstract logic and is still relevant in its particular sociological content and revolutionary political inclinations. On the other hand, the second position involves rejecting Gramsci’s model precisely in order to salvage the radical left project from the compromises and constraints of hegemonic politics. For recent critics of Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci ‘is dead’; new forms of social activism render obsolete the authoritarian logic implicit in the very idea of hegemony (see Day, 2005). While hegemony theory may enable critical insights into capitalist (and other forms of) domination, its roots in a statist view of power means Gramsci offers no genuine insights for thinking a contemporary radical politics of emancipation. Formulated to understand revolution in industrial capitalism and to promote a disciplined and wholesale alternative, hegemony fails truly to recognise the spontaneous forms of popular politics and anti-​ capitalist resistance that persistently escape the rigid logics of articulation. As Beasley-​Murray (2010: xv) insists: ‘At its limit, the logic of hegemony simply identifies with the state by taking it for granted’. But, he continues, ‘something always escapes’ the transcendent articulations of hegemony and a radical politics worthy of its name must be able to understand the ‘immanent’ forms on their own terms. These alternatives to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxist theorisation of hegemony offer illuminating if contrasting insights into how differently to conceptualise contemporary radical politics. But they are premised on a similar assumption that Gramsci’s legacy is an either/​or matter: either he speaks to a present that remains largely conceivable in Marxian terms or his legacy is an anachronistic framework that cannot be salvaged. The 46

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danger here is that instead of mourning, the enthusiastic acceptance-​or-​ rejection ends up in a kind of ‘left melancholia’: a refusal to negotiate the loss of certainty concerning the bases and direction of radical left politics. That is to say, there is a continuing attachment to the spaces and frontiers of struggle that will produce a unified radical political subject from the underside of capitalism. As Elizabeth Anker (2015) argues, left melancholia is often expressed in narratives of antagonism between ‘innocent victims’ subjected to the malign forces of ‘evil villains’ whose misdeeds are the fundamental cause of their victim’s oppression. This narrative –​which finds a key source of inspiration in Marx and Engels’ Communist manifesto –​offers up a ‘melodramatic’ structure in which ambivalence and complexity is removed in favour of an implied moral and epistemological certainty over the prospects of radical struggles for freedom. For Gramsci’s advocates, these struggles pertain fundamentally to class politics within capitalist structures, however complex and layered such structures are shown to be; for his detractors, they extend beyond established class politics to popular contests that regularly escape the statist logic of unification. For each, there is a dimension of authentic struggle whose antagonism sits outside hegemonic framing and that radical left politics is charged with acknowledging as the purified subject of its vision for emancipation: Gramsci’s legacy is thus either welcomed for recognising this dimension or it is viewed as incapable of helping us think it anew. In refusing this logic of either/​or, Laclau and Mouffe presented an interpretation of Gramsci whose attitude was unsentimentally and selectively directed only to his theoretical innovations and not to his politics. Their appropriation of his name was a bid to force the left to think outside the traditional narrative of left melodrama without necessarily abandoning its insights altogether. Antagonism and emancipation remain as touchstones for their hegemonic approach to politics. But the direction of their reading was irrefutably away from Marxist political reasoning, with its calculations over the proximity of other ideologies to the supposedly socially grounded (or rational) interests of classes. Political struggles, they implied, were intrinsically impure and inauthentic because they do not pre-​exist the logic of antagonism through which they emerge. Which is not to say that some antagonisms are not more extensive and deeply rooted than others. But, having taken us to this insight, Gramsci’s contribution to its reformulation was otherwise wholly limited for a pluralistic politics where political subjectivity was to be forged contingently from highly diverse struggles and identities. Much of Laclau and Mouffe’s important innovations to radical political theory, I believe, hang fundamentally on this emptying of hegemony of any privileged social content or normative commitments in favour of an admittedly formalistic frame quite at odds with the melodramatic flavour of ‘victims’ versus ‘villains’, oppression versus freedom, which so often underscores the moral certitude 47

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of left thinking and divides society along a single antagonistic frontier. This position, of course, creates problems of its own, which I will not explore here, about how far one can go with an abstract framework of this kind to understand and positively unify specific political struggles. For it may be that in mourning Gramsci, we bid farewell to a stable or consistent idea of emancipation that makes radical left politics appealing.

Conclusion Gramsci has been an undoubtedly attractive figure in radical political theory on the left since the end of the Second World War. To a great extent this has been in spite, rather than because, of the precise details of his revolutionary politics. That he was a revolutionary is important since it invests his reflections with an awareness of the contingent and relational structure of society. But in his later writings from prison he did not fetishise the revolutionary moment so much as attend to its complex conditions and ever-​present obstacles. Thus his thinking has drawn attention from theorists across the political spectrum precisely because it cannot be presented as a simple programme of action but, instead, explores how such action becomes possible or not. The probing yet fragmented nature of his prison writings –​but also his own personal history of largely non-​sectarian politics –​have permitted his name to function as a bridge to other left and radical traditions, despite his own professed commitment to communist politics in a broadly Leninist mould. There is simply more to Gramsci’s later intellectual enquiries than can be contained in a single set of strategic imperatives or political alignments. Laclau and Mouffe’s appeal to Gramsci, then, was another variant in a lengthy tradition of utilising his insights to reflect on the conditions of radical politics. But their post-​Marxist recasting of hegemony was distinctive because it inaugurated a process of relinquishing the Gramscian inheritance by reclaiming and amplifying only a selective aspect of his thought. In this –​inevitably –​something was both lost and gained. What was lost was a close attention to the distinctive context and commitments that shaped his world and made possible his insights. But what was gained was a whole new vocabulary of theoretical enquiry that drew sustenance not from canonical texts and epistemological certainties but, rather, from an elevation of politics to the ultimate horizon of any social order. This was certainly among Hegemony and socialist strategy’s most enduring contributions, even if it rather reduced Gramsci to the marker of a theoretical impasse within Marxism and the bearer of a logic that exceeded his own communist politics. But in so controversially deploying Gramsci ultimately to move beyond Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe offered a framework to avoid the tendency to a left melancholy that seeks out an authentic subject of emancipation liberated from uncertainties of politics itself. 48

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References Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (1976–​77) ‘The antimonies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100: 5–​78. Anker, E.R. (2015) ‘The Manifesto in a late-​capitalist era: melancholy and melodrama’, in T. Carver and J. Farr (eds), The Cambridge companion to The communist manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 214–​233. Badaloni, N. (1975) Il marxismo di Gramsci. Dal mito alla ricomposizione politica, Turin: Einaudi. Beasley-​Murray, J. (2010) Posthegemony: political theory and Latin America, London: University of Minnesota Press. Bellamy, R. (1990) ‘Gramsci, Croce and the Italian political tradition’, History of Political Thought, 11(2): 313–​337. Bellamy, R. and Schecter, D. (1993) Gramsci and the Italian state, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bobbio, N. (1986) ‘Gramsci and the concept of civil society’, in R. Bellamy (ed), Which socialism? Marxism, socialism and democracy, Cambridge: Polity. Davidson, A. (1972) ‘The varying seasons of Gramscian studies’, Political Studies, 20(4): 448–​462. Day, R. (2005) Gramsci is dead: anarchist currents in the newest social movements, London: Pluto. Derrida, J. (2001) The work of mourning, edited by P.-​A. Brault and M. Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Femia, J.V. (1981) Gramsci’s political thought: hegemony, consciousness, and the revolutionary process, Oxford: Clarendon. Forgacs, D. (1989) ‘Gramsci and Marxism in Britain’, New Left Review, 176: 70–​88. Freud, S. (2005) ‘Mourning and melancholia’, in On murder, mourning and melancholia, London: Penguin. Geras, N. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism?’, New Left Review, 163: 40–​82. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selection from the prison notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1995) Further selections from the prison notebooks, edited by Derek Boothby, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gundle, S. (1995) ‘The legacy of the prison notebooks: Gramsci, the PCI and Italian culture in the cold war period’, in C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff (eds), Italy in the cold war: politics, culture and society 1948–​58, Oxford: Berg. Hall, S. (1986) ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Enquiry, 10: 5–​27. Hall, S. (1988) The hard road to renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the left, London: Verso. 49

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Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order, London: Macmillan. Harman, C. (1983) Gramsci versus reformism, Socialist Workers Party Pamphlet, London. Harris, D. (1992) From class struggle to the politics of pleasure: the effects of Gramscianism on cultural studies, London: Routledge. Howarth, D. (2015) ‘Gramsci, hegemony and post-​Marxism’, in M. McNally (ed), Antonio Gramsci, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp 195–​213. Hunt, A. (1993) Explorations in law and society: toward a constitutive theory of law, London: Routledge. Jacobitti, E.E. (1981) Revolutionary humanism and historicism in modern Italy, London. Yale University Press. Jessop, B. (1990) State theory: putting capitalist states back in their place, Cambridge: Polity. Joseph, J. (2002) Hegemony: a realist analysis, London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and ideology in Marxist theory, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism without apologies’, New Left Review, 166: 79–​106. Levy, C. (1999) Gramsci and the anarchists, Oxford: Berg. Liguori, G. (1996) Gramsci conteso. Storia di un dibattito 1922–​2012, Rome: Editori Riuniti. Macchiocchi, M.A. (1974) Per Gramsci, Bologna: Il Mulino. Martin, J. (1997) ‘Hegemony and the crisis of legitimacy in Gramsci’, History of the Human Sciences, 10(1): 37–​56. Martin, J. (1998a) Gramsci’s political analysis: a critical introduction, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Martin, J. (1998b) ‘Between ethics and politics: Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals’, Modern Italy, 3(1): 67–​85. Martin, J. (2008) Piero Gobetti and the politics of liberal revolution, New York: Palgrave. Martin, J. (2015) ‘Morbid symptoms: Gramsci and the crisis of liberalism’, in M. McNally (ed), Antonio Gramsci, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp 34–​51. McNally, M. (2015) ‘Gramsci, the United Front Comintern and democratic strategy’, in M. McNally (ed), Antonio Gramsci, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp 11–​33. Miliband, R. ([1969] 1973) The state in capitalist society, London: Quartet. Mouffe, C. (ed) (1979a) Gramsci and Marxist theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mouffe, C. (1979b) ‘Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci’, in C. Mouffe (ed), Gramsci and Marxist theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp 168–​204. 50

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Mouzelis, N.P. (1990) Post-​Marxist alternatives: the construction of social orders, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Piccone, P. (1983) Italian Marxism, London: University of California Press. Pizzorno, A. (1970) ‘Sul metodo di Gramsci: dalla storiografia alla scienza politica’, in P. Rossi (ed), Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, vol. 2, Rome: Editori Riuniti. Portelli, H. (1973) Gramsci e il blocco storico, Bari: Laterza. Poulantzas, N. (1973) Political power and social classes, London: New Left Books. Poulantzas, N. (2008) The Poulantzas reader: Marxism, law, and the state, edited by James Martin, London: Verso. Rustin, M. (1987) ‘Absolute voluntarism: critique of a post-​Marxist concept of hegemony’, New German Critique, 43: 146–​173. Salvadori, M.L. (1970) Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia, Turin: Einaudi. Sassoon, A.S. (1987) Gramsci’s politics, 2nd edition, London: Hutchinson. Schecter, D. (1990) ‘Gramsci, gentile and the theory of the ethical state in Italy’, History of Political Thought, 11(3): 491–​508. Spriano, P. (1977) Gramsci e Gobetti, Turin: Einaudi. Spriano, P. (1979) Antonio Gramsci and the Party: the prison years, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Togliatti, P. (1967) Antonio Gramsci, edited by Ernesto Ragionieri, Rome: Editori Riuniti.

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The Post-​Marxist Gramsci: A Reply to James Martin Georges Van Den Abbeele

In proposing his ‘post-​M arxist Gramsci’, James Martin provides an inestimable service in unpacking the complex and contested legacy of the great Italian activist and political theorist. But beyond what Anglo literary historians would have termed his ‘reception’ (or their Gallic counterparts, perhaps even more suggestively, his ‘fortune’), Martin reads the haloed place Gramsci holds in the post-​war Western Marxist tradition as exactly where strident divergences in that tradition have emerged, most particularly between those who, according to him, remain mired in varying modes of left melancholia and those who have successfully mourned the loss of what we used to call the socialist alternative. The seeds of these divergences, as Martin knows well, lies both in Gramsci’s own strategic and shifting political alliances but also in the fragmented state of his writings, most notably those written under the especially brutal conditions of fascist imprisonment. To this extent, attempts to render a systematic or coherent understanding of the Gramscian corpus meet the same pitfalls encountered in the interpretation of other incomplete or fragmented works, such as those by Sappho, Pascal or the late Wittgenstein (although, as deconstructive colleagues would argue, a completed and coherent opus is no guarantee of conceptual unity). In any case, Martin astutely evokes the riveting sets of what he calls the ‘tensions’ that run through Gramsci’s thinking, culminating in a ‘puzzling mix of reflective open-​mindedness and hard-​nosed centralism’, and ‘endors[ing] both the primacy of “national-​popular” configurations at a political level while remaining attached to the primacy, at an economic level, of class as the historical force grounding subjectivity’. While the existence of these tensions does provide the compelling background for Martin’s at times devastating 52

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account of the various ‘selective’ readings of Gramsci that have put his work into the forefront of servicing an ever more divergent set of political concerns and positions, it is also hard not to read as a sign of the times that we are speaking in terms of productive ‘tensions’ rather than of dialectic, whether the contradictions at stake be resolvable or not. But if any term marks the conflicted legacy of Gramsci’s thought, that would be the concept of hegemony, whose vagaries Martin effectively unpacks in terms of its relation to the state, subjectivity, and ethics. In the first instance, the coercive power of the state is expanded and mediated through the institutions of civil society in ways that inculcate ‘a consensual basis to class power’ (Gramsci, 1971: 238–​239). But, this hegemonic construction of consent implies, in the second instance, forms of political subjectivity that, as Martin specifies, ‘do not automatically or wholly follow from one’s position in relations of production’, such as, most famously with Gramsci, the regionalist identities (North versus South) that played across the uneven economic development of post-​Risorgimento Italy and raised specific challenges to a coherent, nationwide socialist strategy. Finally, with regard to the third instance, Martin argues, hegemony was for Gramsci a necessarily ethical matter in so far as a state-building project –​built upon the dissemination and renewal of popular common sense –​ought to be itself an emancipatory process, rather than just a crude scramble for power. While these dimensions of hegemony can nonetheless be convincingly framed within a classic Marxist-​Leninist project, all three also opened up potential divergences that would question the key tenets of historical materialism in defining the objective economic basis of class identity, state power, and socialist struggle. Martin astutely tracks the resulting cracks opened up within Western Marxism by Gramsci’s apparent relevance for new social movements not based in class, on the one hand, and on the other, by intellectual developments such as poststructuralism that emphasised forms of contingency and complexity in understanding relations of power to specific subjectivities. The watershed moment in these developments, according to Martin, came with the publication of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and socialist strategy in 1985, a work that both brings a certain interpretation of the Gramscian concept of hegemony to the centre of political praxis and yet, as Martin, also observes, essentially evacuates what remains of classic Marxist determinism from that concept, in turn, ironically ‘consigning Gramsci to history’ in the very act of appropriating him. As such, Gramsci becomes for Laclau and Mouffe a kind of ‘double agent in the Marxist camp whose overt commitments were secretly incompatible with the implicitly deconstructive logic of his thought’. As such, concludes Martin, Gramsci is of surprisingly 53

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little interest to Laclau and Mouffe and functions more ‘as an argumentative device’ for the theoretical development of their own brand of post-​Marxism rather than as a ‘direct political inspiration’. The result is a full-​blown crisis in the reception of Gramsci, which leads to what Martin describes as an ‘either/​or’ response. On the one hand, according to Martin, there is a vigorous reassertion of the continuing contemporary relevance of Gramsci and the theory of hegemony in classic Marxist terms as essentially grounded in economic determinism; on the other hand, a complete abandonment of the Gramscian legacy as ‘anachronistic’ or irrelevant within the changed circumstances of today’s world. And if I read Martin correctly, both sides of the dilemma engage in a form of ‘left melancholia’ by their continued espousal of a unified and authentic subject of emancipation. For Martin, Laclau and Mouffe are understood resolutely to refuse the either/​or alternative of such left melancholia by their emptying of hegemony of any privileged social content or normative commitments in favour of an admittedly formalistic frame quite at odds with the melodramatic flavour of ‘victims’ versus ‘villains’, oppression versus freedom, which so often underscores the moral certitude of left thinking and divides society along a single antagonistic frontier. By ‘shifting the ontological status of hegemony from a theory of ideology to a “new political logic” of social constitution’ based in the contingencies of antagonisms, equivalencies, complexities and ever-​morphing subject positions, Laclau and Mouffe would eschew the pitfalls of left melancholia and proceed to a thoroughgoing mourning that leaves Gramsci behind even as he remains the empty moniker for their elaboration of a radical democratic pluralism as a fundamentally different project and concept of politics. And while they themselves remain as they claim ‘post-​Marxist’ to the extent that class and economic determinants still continue to play a prominent but no longer the predominant role in their concept of politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 4), the broader vision of an endlessly abstract and coalitional form of political action with no epistemological certainty also begs the question of what could make such a politics able to draw the motivations, if not the enthusiasm, of political subjects. Martin alludes to this new dilemma near the end of his paper and teasingly announces a further exploration of it elsewhere: This position [of Laclau and Mouffe], of course, creates problems of its own, which I will not explore here, about how far one can go with an abstract framework of this kind to understand and positively unify specific political struggles. For it may be that in mourning Gramsci, we bid farewell to a stable or consistent idea of emancipation that makes radical left politics appealing. 54

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Such a conclusion is exacerbated by a view of political struggles as ‘intrinsically impure and inauthentic because they do not pre-​exist the logic of antagonism through which they emerge’. Deconstructing the concept of hegemony, in other words, may leave us with not much in the way of ‘socialist strategy’, to cite the last half of the title to Laclau and Mouffe’s major work. And if this is what mourning leads us too, then despite all the issues, frankly I will take melancholia any day. Perhaps the alternative need not be framed again in either/​or terms of mourning or melancholia but perhaps as both mourning and melancholia, or even neither mourning nor melancholia, some new utopian renegotiation of the leftist past that acknowledges its failures and defeats while simultaneously conjuring up an emancipatory vision of a future capable of eliciting the kind of enthusiasm and commitment to make the necessary ‘impurity’ of politics and coalition building turn into inspired and durable action. Recently, Enzo Traverso (2016) has compellingly argued for such a rehabilitation of left melancholia, not as nostalgic and ineffective handwringing or melodramatic victimology but as the very call to struggle, as the unique political sensibility capable of finding inspiration out of the courageous acts of vanquished heroes. Far from being the ‘conservative tendency’ bemoaned by Wendy Brown (2003), Traverso sees melancholia as a form of resistance in a situation where ‘a successful mourning could also mean identification with the enemy: lost socialism replaced by accepted capitalism’ (Traverso, 2016: 45). He argues contra Freud to ‘depathologize’ melancholia and to see it, at least in the context of utopian and emancipatory leftist politics, as an ‘enabling process’ and ‘not demotivating or demobilizing’ (Traverso, 2016: 45–​51). In political terms, it would be a tragic ‘fusion between the suffering of a catastrophic experience … and the persistence of a utopia lived as a horizon of expectation and a historical perspective’ (Traverso, 2016: 51). In other words, ‘melancholia means memory and awareness of the potentialities of the past: a fidelity to the emancipatory promises of revolution, not to its consequences’ (Traverso, 2016: 52). What Traverso (2016) accordingly calls the ‘dialectic of utopian melancholia’ (p 51) both acknowledges ‘the danger of failure’ and ‘the hope of success’, to cite Lucien Goldmann but also Gramsci’s remark that ‘the only “scientific” prediction was struggle’ (p 53). Traverso could have cited that other, even better known example of Gramscian wit, the equally pithy and more overtly dialectical one that does provide a kind of motto for a utopian melancholy: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.1 For Martin, the problem with left melancholia is the fixation on ‘an authentic subject of emancipation liberated from the uncertainties of politics itself ’, while the work of mourning enabled by Laclau and Mouffe leads us to ‘bid farewell to a stable or consistent idea of emancipation that 55

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makes radical left politics appealing’. The dissymmetry here between an ‘authentic subject’ on the one hand, and a ‘consistent idea’ of emancipation on the other, is telling. Indeed an ‘idea of emancipation’ may not necessarily suppose ‘an authentic subject of emancipation’. While Martin seems to conflate the two and vacillates between them, one could also observe in this gap precisely the space in which Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as socialist strategy can effectively take place, namely as a way to maintain what ‘makes radical left politics appealing’: the idea of emancipation over and against its potential limitation to any given subject or subjects of emancipation. Indeed, I would argue the immense, persuasive power of the Marxist Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is precisely in its ability to overcome various divisions of alienated labour. And while the so-​called ‘southern question’ looms large in his thinking, it is less a question of specifically regional identity than of overcoming the divide between industrial and agricultural labour, with each side understanding its implication in the capitalist relations of production that exploit them equally if differently. Overcoming the state and ideological forces that work to pit the one against the other, both kinds of workers (regardless of region per se) find solidarity in the idea of their common emancipation from the chains of capitalist exploitation. For the post-​Marxist Gramsci, however, hegemony would seem to have developed as a shifting alliance of different identities, or ‘subject positions’ not necessarily motivated by any common set of economic determinants (race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on). Laclau and Mouffe claim to be still ‘Marxist’ (1985: 4) to the extent that class remains a key player without subsuming all other positions to itself, but the weaker alternative evokes the reputedly pragmatic coalition politics of the Euro-​American centre-​left over the last half-​century. In this sense, and as we have seen over the last several decades, the so-​called practical left ends up embracing the neoliberal love of the state reduced to mere technocracy, with the disastrous results we are witnessing. While the liberal left has presented itself as the friendly face of diversity, the right has everywhere bolstered its electoral fortunes through the wedge politics of difference and privilege. In the absence of that lost socialist alternative, whose proper mourning also means its active forgetting, both right and left have been complicit in the rapidly escalating inequality enabled by the worldwide triumph of capitalism. Within the context of the 1985 publication of Hegemony and socialist strategy, the concerns about dwindling working class enthusiasm for the left as well as the need to find a theoretical model that also effectively integrates the spread of new social movements make sense, especially within the contemporary Western discomfort with the outcomes of existing socialism as represented most prominently in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and other avowedly communist regimes. 56

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Forty years later, the urgency is that of thinking through the commonality of how the various subject positions identified through coalition politics are all, in different ways, increasingly stressed under the hyper-​exploitation of late capitalism. Developments such as the ‘Occupy’ movement with its vitriol against the 1% may represent a brief glimpse of what a contemporary counter-​hegemonic socialist strategy might look like. Gramsci, if we recall one of those ‘tensions’ Martin cites in his work, would no doubt have seen the failure of this movement as a result of its excessive faith in spontaneity and corresponding lack of a centralised party apparatus able to lead beyond the momentary ecstasy of revolt to a genuine transformation, aka revolution, of society and an emancipation from the capitalist mode of production. I come back then to the concept of utopian melancholia. The ‘idea’ of emancipation states itself more as a lack than as a loss, which situates it as the very horizon of politics, the utopia we can never properly mourn and be done with because it is not yet the case. The idea of emancipation can lead us forward whether or not it is concretely ‘realisable’. Utopia is thus not necessarily opposed to pessimism, but is only meaningful when dialectically energised by it, to cite again Gramsci’s slogan of pessimismo dell’intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà. While Laclau and Mouffe correctly offer a frank word of caution against the passive comfort of awaiting the iron rule of history to be more or less self-​propelled into its end as classless society, and that the indefinite fight for radical democracy is by definition endless and requires forever an ongoing collective struggle, such pragmatism may also, on the other hand, de-​energise the left’s traditional constituencies and finds its sinister riposte in the kinds of authoritarian populisms we see all around, which are also typically fuelled by regressive, decadent utopianisms that rest on the claims of a single strongman to bring back a supposedly lost but utterly imaginary past: right-​wing melancholia, if you like. As Martin correctly concludes, ‘something was both lost and gained’ in Laclau and Mouffe’s revisionary mourning of Gramscian hegemony, but whether and in what ways his legacy can still inspire further possibilities and repercussions, that remains to be seen. Many years ago, in the throes of new left revisionism there was the call for a ‘return to Marx’. It would seem, at this point, that a call for a return to Gramsci might well be in order, at least if we want to think beyond the confines of a post-​Marxist Gramsci and reignite the radical, if melancholically infused, utopianism of his thought and the urgency of his clarity in seeing through the false populisms of his time, which have lately come back to haunt us. Note 1

The slogan appears in various places and in varying versions across Gramsci’s writing, a full detailing of which has even generated a Wikipedia entry: https://​it.wikipe​dia. org/​ wiki/​Pessimismo_​dell%27intelligenza,_​ottimismo_​della_​volontà 57

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References Brown, W. (2003) ‘Resisting left melancholia’, in D.L. Eng and D. Kazanjian (eds), Loss: the politics of mourning, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 458–​465. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Traverso, E. (2016) Left-​wing melancholia: Marxism, history, and memory, New York: Columbia University Press.

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The Limits of Post-​Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political Theory in Film and Cultural Studies Paul Bowman

Introduction: from too theoretical to not theoretical enough One value of Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory of hegemony and discourse is that it can so readily and productively be translated into and applied or deployed in studies of all kinds of things in all kinds of academic disciplines and fields. As theorised by Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is a relational concept that enables us to conceptualise hierarchies, conventions, structures, values, norms, biases and preferences of all kinds, in terms of the interplay of relative gravities of different kinds of power and the formations and transformations of relations and kinds of influence (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Importantly, the concept of hegemony can be expanded, extracted or extrapolated from the realms of political discourse proper, and applied to show that there can often be said to be hegemonies in such things as aesthetics, styles, fashions, norms, practices, relationships, and in fact in conventions of any kind. There can be hegemony in international relations, in interpersonal relationships, in the most private ways of thinking, and of course in conventions and regimes of representation. As such, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and hegemony enables such ideas as the otherwise oxymoronic formulation ‘cultural politics’ to come into its own. Arguably, taken to its ultimate conclusions, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and hegemony could actually be said to transform a term like ‘cultural politics’ from being an oxymoron into being a pleonasm –​transforming ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ from being regarded as ostensibly discrete and different to their being regarded as inextricably 59

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intertwined, two sides of the same coin, or tied like a Gordian Knot. Arditi and Valentine (1999) called this ‘the contingency of the commonplace’, a perspective which means that, from this point of view, anything and everything is at least potentially political. Consequently, by theorising the contingency of all practices –​whether ostensibly political, cultural, social, or whatever –​the theory of hegemony and/​as articulation (or of hegemony as established by articulatory practices) has long been found highly useful across a range of academic disciplines and fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences. In the prominent 1990s essay ‘Post-​Marxism and Cultural Studies’, for instance, Angela McRobbie argued that Laclau and Mouffe’s theory actually provided a kind of retroactive theoretical foundation –​one that retrofitted and explicitly spelled out the ontological basis –​of what had been going on for a while in a very wide range of more or less ‘politicised’ postmodernist and poststructuralist academic and intellectual efforts, such as cultural studies (McRobbie, 1992). In other words, although Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘post-​Marxist discourse theory’ was born in the realms of political studies, it derived from and fed back into wider academic understandings of politics and the political across the university, and especially within the realms of what was increasingly referred to as (capital-​t) Theory. The term ‘Theory’ emerged to evoke a shifting cluster of literary theoretical, postmodernist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and related forms of cultural theorising, in which a number of prominent authors and texts managed to transcend or transgress erstwhile disciplinary boundaries and to find a very diverse readership (Hall, 2002; Birchall and Hall, 2006). This meant that works of Theory from one field or discipline –​whether from literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, history, or others –​ would often find a readership in some very different disciplinary contexts. Laclau and Mouffe’s ground-​breaking work of political theory, Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (1985) is perhaps an exemplary case of this.1 This is not to say that Laclau and Mouffe’s work was universally accepted or that it did not draw criticism (Bowman, 2007). It received a lot of criticism, especially from other political theorists, and particularly from those who saw themselves as remaining true to Gramscian Marxism in ways that differed from Laclau and Mouffe’s radical poststructuralist rereading. Ironically, Hegemony and socialist strategy also received criticism from cultural studies’ own ‘father figure’, Stuart Hall, whose own (influential) understanding of cultural and political processes had earlier been significantly informed by Laclau’s first book, Politics and ideology in Marxist theory (Laclau, 1977). However, like many others, Hall regarded Laclau’s second book, Hegemony and socialist strategy (co-​authored with Chantal Mouffe), to be a step too far –​too far into ‘theory’ and too far away from paying close attention to the 60

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specificities and complexities of variable historical contexts and formations (Hall et al, 1996). The terms of this and other criticisms of Laclau and Mouffe’s work are familiar. Such criticisms have often involved the claim that Laclau and Mouffe’s work is ‘too theoretical’. However, while my own exploration of their theoretical and analytical orientation is informed by such criticisms, I would like to make a different kind of critique here. This still derives from a politicised tradition of cultural studies, and relates to Stuart Hall’s criticism that Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work moves too far away from the specificity of what Hall called conjunctural analysis, and relies too much on a kind of overarching theory of everything, so to speak. But my criticisms will also come from a different direction. In my critique, Laclau and Mouffe’s approach will not be presented as too theoretical. Instead, it will actually be presented as not theoretical enough. A key early iteration of the critique I will develop can be found in a 1992 book by John Mowitt, in which he urges cultural studies scholars to hesitate before adopting what was then called the ‘post-​Marxist discourse theory approach’ of Laclau and Mouffe (Mowitt, 1992). Mowitt advocated a critical hesitation before diving into the conceptual universe organised by terms like discourse, hegemony, articulation, antagonism, equivalence, difference, and so on, on the basis of the argument that there is a lot that this sort of paradigm is constitutively incapable of seeing. The book in which Mowitt sets out this argument is Text: the genealogy of an antidisciplinary object (1992). One of the initial and initialising genealogical observations made within this work is that the term ‘discourse’, as theorised by Laclau and Mouffe, is demonstrably both historically and conceptually derived from and reductive of an older and more expansive notion: namely, ‘text’. Mowitt’s argument is that the elaboration of the notion of the text and the cluster of terms that emerged alongside it –​such as textuality, intertextuality, deconstruction, and so on –​was a significant intellectual (and immanently political) achievement. Moreover, it is an achievement that should be developed in all of its subtlety, complexity and sophistication, rather than formalised, standardised and reduced –​which is what Mowitt claims the Laclau and Mouffe approach ended up doing. Whether or not we agree with this, Mowitt’s genealogical study of the emergence of the notion of the text reveals that, before the development of ‘discourse theory’, the elaboration of the notion of the text was already a hugely significant paradigm shift in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Moreover, it was an advance that the subsequent theoretical formalisation of ‘discourse’ carried out by Laclau and Mouffe entirely relied upon. The problem, for Mowitt, is that it was a theoretical elaboration that simplified and homogenised the historically and conceptually prior notion (or paradigm) of text and textuality. 61

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This may not appear to be too much of a problem. Indeed, the metaphor of ‘discourse’ seems to offer advances on ‘the text’ in many ways. For instance, discourse certainly seems to convey a sense of process, of movement, of temporal change and development, whereas the metaphor of ‘text’ might seem to imply a bounded object, in isolation and fixity. In fact, the common sense understanding of the relationship of text to discourse is that discourses are made up of texts. Nonetheless, taken to its extreme, the critique that Mowitt stages of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory involves the claim that their theoretical paradigm does not simply generate insights into the world, or produce a new kind of visibility. It also produces or enables specific kinds of blindness. This becomes a reason why (to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall) cultural studies might want to ‘say yes and no at the same time’ to this kind of theory. Yes, the concept-​metaphors of discourse theory are massively suggestive, generative and productive, enabling us to capture key dynamics and processes of the social, cultural and political world; but still, there are dangers and limits. This can be expressed by using a pair of terms favoured by poststructuralist discourse theory: the onto and the ontic. The term ‘onto’ refers to ‘ontological’, while ‘ontic’ means ‘actually existing’. Using these terms, poststructuralist and postfoundationalist theory contends that ontology is ‘the political’, whereas actually existing institutions are the realm of politics, which is ‘ontic’ (Mouffe, 2005; Marchart, 2007). Normally these terms are deployed in discussions about ‘the world’. But if we focus them on post-​Marxist discourse theory itself, then we might say that this kind of theory prefers an ‘onto-​’ focus over an ‘ontic’ one. It prefers to talk about ‘big processes’ or ‘fundamental ideas about reality’, rather than about particular details and matters of reality. In such discussions, the ‘onto’ focus (talking about ‘fundamental ideas about reality’) can easily come to appear to be a ‘macro’ focus (talking about ‘big processes’). Consequently, whether onto or macro, this kind of orientation might actually come to work to make our analyses blind to many of the realities of either ‘micro’ or otherwise (merely) ‘ontic’ events, processes and situations of the world. This criticism may strike some readers as very complicated or convoluted. This is because it is formulated in the kind of language and concepts preferred by many poststructuralist political theorists. However, in a way, it is just a restatement (in user-​unfriendly terms) of the kind of criticisms that Stuart Hall made about the direction that post-​Marxist political theory appeared to be taking in the 1980s. To evoke and expand slightly on Hall’s words, the claim is that, in this kind of theory we hear a lot of talk of ‘positionalities’ but very little of actual positions, a lot about ‘contingent articulations’ but a lot less about what these actually are and what is contingent upon what, how that works in specific contexts, and so on. The claim is that such ‘political’ theorists tend either to deal with ‘macro-​political’ issues, or to 62

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trade in ‘onto-​political’ theory, rather than seriously attending to specific details, particular contexts, specific encounters, particular relations, specific institutions, particular media, and so on. In what follows I hope to show some of the ways in which this tendency may be (or become) limited and limiting, and to offer some suggestions for reorientation.

Fighting literal discourse with particular texts Specifically, the line of criticism that I would like to explore here boils down to the following assertion: that the approach of Laclau and Mouffe in 1985 (and all subsequent ‘Laclauian’ theory) is literalist and realist. In what follows, I will try to explain what I mean by this, and how it helps us to see the limits of the field of applicability of Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical understanding of cultural or discursive politics and the political. I will do so, first, by way of a reflection on the ‘discursive status’ of the emergence, proliferation and development of martial arts within multiple areas of global popular culture and in diverse discursive contexts. This reflection will begin by posing ‘Laclauian’ questions to and about both the texts and the ‘hegemonic project’ of Bruce Lee –​a martial arts film star who was arguably both pioneer and pinnacle of the so-​called ‘kung fu craze’ of the 1970s (Bowman, 2010b). From a political studies or discourse analysis perspective, the question to be posed would be whether the international kung fu craze of the 1970s and the subsequent growth and proliferation of martial arts in and as popular culture has any ‘political’ charge or political dimensions at all. Because of constraints of space, this will be a necessarily truncated account of only some key aspects of what we might call the popular cultural discourse of martial arts. But it will set the stage for my concluding discussion of an ostensibly simple Hollywood film. My ultimate conclusion will be that even supposedly ‘simple’ action films may have complicated cross-​cultural consequences and even cultural-​political force and value, in unexpected ways –​ways that cannot be predicted or perhaps even perceived within an orthodox deployment of the theory (Chow, 1995; Bowman, 2013a). The principal action film considered at the end will be The Bourne Identity (2002). The ultimate point of the journey from Bruce Lee through global mediatised martial arts discourse to this particular Hollywood film is to suggest some ways in which ‘cultural/​political’ discourse, or the political dimensions of popular culture, can be said to outrun or outpace the Laclau/​ Mouffe paradigm –​a paradigm that in one sense may seem to capture all of this but in another sense remains completely blind or insensitive to it. Before proceeding further, a note on the texts I will be using. What follows will principally deal with elements of what might be called the later Laclau. Accordingly, I will refer less frequently to ‘Laclau and Mouffe’ and more to ‘Laclau’, often using the adjective ‘Laclauian’. This is because, 63

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after co-​authoring their 1985 Hegemony and socialist strategy, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s work went in slightly different directions. They would occasionally publish chapters and chapters side by side in the same publications, as in Mouffe’s important 1996 edited collection Deconstruction and pragmatism (Mouffe, 1996). But Mouffe went on to write more about different matters in politics with reference to a range of theorists, while Laclau concerned himself principally with developing his own theory of politics (or rather, the political). This work was arguably a direct development from the shared approach announced in 1985, but much was new. Consequently, what follows will often refer only to the name Laclau, or use the term ‘Laclauian’. This is because much of the relevant refinement of ‘their’ argument took place in Laclau’s subsequent single-​authored publications. For instance, it was only later on in his career that Laclau argued that antagonism produces an entity or identity in, through or as the production of a demand (Butler et al, 2000; Laclau, 2005). This (Lacanian) line of argumentation is certainly consistent with the orientation of Hegemony and socialist strategy, but it is not until much later that Laclau decides to claim that the fundamental unit or focus of political analysis should be the demand. Similarly, it was only after 1985 that Laclau argued that cultural particularities contest and compete with each other for dominance, universalisation and/​ or hegemony. Such arguments can be projected back onto Hegemony and socialist strategy, but it is only post-​1985 that Laclau states them in these terms.2 There are other such developments, but I single these out because it is with these that we will begin. For, I want to see what might happen when we use some of these Laclauian terms in the analysis of an example that is ‘outside’ of the field of politics ‘proper’. As mentioned, the example is Bruce Lee, king of the global kung fu craze of the 1970s, enduring icon of martial arts culture internationally, and also easily categorised as ‘trivial’, ‘pop cultural’ and (accordingly) ‘not political’. However, Lee was no mere image or empty vessel. Rather, he developed and disseminated some hugely influential arguments about his understanding of and hopes for the realms of martial arts. He had, in fact, a kind of hegemonic project.

Particular Lee Laclauian Non-​martial artists should be aware that the eternally returning question of martial arts is ‘which martial art is best?’ Whenever Bruce Lee was asked such a question, he would answer with words to this effect: as a species, humans only have two hands and two feet –​so really, how many ways to fight can there be? The implication here is that there should be only one universal martial art. Lee preferred to say that he was against styles: styles ‘separate and divide us’, he would say. In Laclauian terms, Lee could be said 64

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to be against particularisms –​whether local, regional, national, institutional, traditional, or disciplinary. He was for universalism. He was for rational ‘scientific’ experimentation; for testing and verification; for working out what worked best. He was against ‘tradition without reason’, and rejected the idea of necessary or inevitable differences between cultures, styles or traditions in martial arts. To him, these signalled only limitation (Lee, 1971). He often made this argument in writing, and sometimes this argument made it onto the screen: Lee’s famous fight with Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon and his unfinished film, Game of Death, for instance, are both structured as lessons about the importance of emancipation from cultural and disciplinary strictures and stultification (Bowman, 2010b, 2016). In effect, Lee believed that martial arts plural should be universalised as martial art singular. Regional, ethnic or disciplinary styles should be overcome, and one set of (human) parameters and potencies should be uncovered. The proper route to this would be through research and experiment. This would necessarily be iconoclastic, colour-​blind, transcultural, and universalist (Miller, 2000).3 However, in his apparent belief in the one, the ultimate, the universal, both history and theory reveal Lee’s theory to be idealistic: the inevitable failure of Lee’s theory, hope or prediction illustrates what Laclau would term the mutually constituting and reciprocally subverting relations between universalism and particularism (Laclau, 1992, 1996; Zerilli, 1998). Singularity is permanently deferred. Given our current interest in the work of Laclau and Mouffe, I will explore this point and this relation. But, I want to be clear that this will be done in the spirit of exploration and enquiry rather than as an effort merely to prove one thing ‘right’ and another thing ‘wrong’. In other words, I am not merely going to use or abuse Bruce Lee to ‘prove’ this or that point of political theory. Instead, I want to explore Bruce Lee and other issues in order to probe some of the limitations of this kind of political theory. Ultimately, however, I will suggest that this political theory –​one that has been so influential in media, cultural studies, and other areas of the university, and from which we draw such suggestive terms and concepts as universalism, particularism, antagonism, articulation, hegemony, and so on –​may nonetheless turn out to yield a rather limited conception of politics and the political, and indeed have a rather limited field of applicability in the study of the complexity of media, culture and society, and their relations, including those that have a political charge or are politically consequential. I hasten to add, however, that none of this will necessitate a rejection of Laclau and Mouffe, although it will suggest the need for ‘translation’ and reconstitution, in order to produce more (and quite possibly better) insights. To put this as provocatively as possible, my suggestion is that perhaps this political theory –​and maybe even political theory per se –​has only very limited applicability, even when used to analyse ‘cultural’ politics. 65

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All of this might seem theoretical. But it matters, in two directions: first, insofar as any kind of politicised media or cultural studies needs concepts of politics and the political; and second, insofar as political studies surely also reciprocally need concepts or understandings of media and culture. Given the necessity of political theories and concepts, it may seem reasonable for media or cultural studies to import them directly from the field of political theory (Bowman, 2007). But, it deserves to be asked: can we actually trust the concepts of politics and the political that have been built in political theory? Do they actually work in (or for) media and cultural studies? Are they the best conceptualisations? Can they be universalised, or translated, or are they particular or singular to political theory? To phrase this in terms of Mowitt’s suggestion that the ‘discourse paradigm’ might be regarded as a reduction of the earlier ‘textual paradigm’ from which it derives, we might ask: what might the Laclau/​ Mouffe discourse paradigm not be able to see? One polemical possibility might be that it cannot ‘see’ what we call culture; that it cannot ‘see’ the complexities of media; and that it cannot ‘see’ any of this because this theory –​these sorts of theory, or the terms and concepts that organise them –​is essentially logocentric. Consequently, if this poststructuralist political theory turns out to be fundamentally logocentric (and maybe therefore also phonocentric, anthropocentric, realist and metaphysical), then it becomes important to establish what status its concepts have when our concerns lie with media and culture. Such fields are not necessarily dominated or driven by written or spoken words, or by intentionality, demands, assertions or collective wills, and they do not necessarily entail self-​present entities and identities demanding things of each other. Yet, in Laclauian theory, media and culture are a key part of what Laclau calls the contingent and therefore political ‘discursive terrain’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). As Laclau put it in 2000: We gain very little, once identities are conceived as complexly articulated collective wills, by referring to them through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilisation. The really important task is to understand the logics of their constitution and dissolution, as well as the formal determinations of the spaces in which they interrelate. (Laclau, in Butler et al, 2000: 53) All of this suggests that media and culture are in a sense crucial for a Laclauian understanding of ‘politics’, even though Laclau himself never seriously undertook any analysis or anatomy of them. This is why I will highlight some differences between the ‘ways of looking’ (or paradigm) of political studies, on the one hand, and the paradigm of ‘politicised’ film, media or 66

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cultural studies, on the other. This exercise might be read either as signalling the extent to which disciplinary particularisms and limitations are inevitably involved in the building of any theory; or it might be read as the effort to establish a field, topos, or site of cross-​disciplinary disagreement, which may constitute a contact zone that might creatively modify both fields. So, to pose a provocative and hopefully productive question: what happens when we think about universalism and particularism not in terms of ‘political processes proper’ but by way of things that traverse the putatively distinct but entangled realms of media, culture, body, psyche, and which may even supplement politics –​such as mediatised martial arts? The pair ‘universalism and particularism’ in Laclau’s work come from Hegelian philosophy. They are a complex and important pair, with many dimensions and ramifications. I want to zone in on that, in Laclau’s work, they are what Jacques Derrida (1982, 1987) would call logocentric: they are words about words; and moreover, words that presume that what matters –​whether exclusively or most –​are arguments (about arguments) about ‘consensus’. For instance, in the mid-​1990s, Laclau had this to say about the ‘dominant tendencies’ in approaches to questions of universalism and particularism: We could say, with reference to the contemporary scene, that the dominant tendencies have been polarized around two positions. One of them unilaterally privileges universalism and sees in a dialogical process a way of reaching a consensus transcending all particularism (Habermas); the other, dedicated to the celebration of pure particularism and contextualism, proclaims the death of the universal (as in some forms of postmodernism). (Laclau, 1996: viii) Here, Laclau’s formulation of the political problematic is dominated (or hegemonised) by the idea of ‘consensus’, and specifically of whether consensus is possible or impossible. It is to this extent that Laclau’s focus and his discourse is logocentric. As already suggested, perhaps this is necessarily the case with all political studies: political studies is a field so structured by words about words about actions that the discourse of politics is surely what Derridean deconstruction might regard as the most ‘metaphysical’ of all discourses. What this means for us here is that we might start to wonder about the extent to which such a discourse can help us to think about –​ let alone to ‘understand’ –​the complexities of mediatised cultural politics.

Universal Lee To return to the universalism of Bruce Lee, let’s note that despite repeated and ongoing efforts to realise Bruce Lee’s universalist ambition the vision 67

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or dream of a kind of global levelling in martial arts practice has not yet come to pass. There have certainly been drives towards the eradication of particularisms in martial arts, as the emergence and growing hegemony of ‘mixed martial arts’ (MMA) today attests. But one ‘universal’ martial art has never been found. However, this failure is not, as Bruce Lee believed, because martial artists are so blinkered, conformist and shackled to this or that particular tradition or stricture that they are unable to ‘break free’ from the fetters of ‘style’ and to ‘liberate [themselves] from classical [disciplines]’ (Lee, 1971). It is rather because, as Laclau argued, each and every universalism –​each and every sense or theory or claim of universality –​is constituted from some particularism or particularity: there is no escape from contingency; context is everything. Difference happens. We can see the work of a (hegemonising) particularity that becomes placed in the position of a universal in Bruce Lee’s own particular ideas of what is universal. Lee’s ideas about the essential, the necessary and the best were based on a belief in the superiority of directness and straight lines in attack. This belief comes from his formative training in wing chun kung fu, a style that privileges straight lines and directness. Subsequently, Lee sought out direct linear techniques wherever he could – most famously championing Western boxing’s ‘straight lead’ and European fencing stances (Tom, 2005). However, as every martial artist knows, once your opponent knows how you fight, then your techniques, moves, strategies and tactics can be comprehended, anticipated and combatted by counter-​moves, strategies and tactics. There are no objectively superior techniques. Indeed, if there is any ‘essence’ to fighting, it is not (as Lee once argued) that it is ‘simple and direct’; it is rather that fighting is a bit like the game ‘rock, paper, scissors’, or the Chinese idea of the ‘five elements’: A might beat B, but C can beat A, and B can beat C, and so on and so on –​in a potentially endlessly moving, morphing, modifying and modulating process. As mentioned, Lee’s belief in the superiority of simple directness was arguably little more than a reflection of the extent to which his own thinking about combat had been hegemonised at an early stage by the theory underpinning a particular style –​the art of wing chun kung fu. This particularism would remain actively dominant in Lee’s theory and practice, even though later on he would come to say that he had abandoned Chinese kung fu as such –​precisely because he wanted to transcend particularism. Indeed it is clear that his own approach (that he named jeet kune do) is indebted much more to the principles of European fencing and the approach to punching advocated by boxers such as the Welsh Jim Driscoll than to anything specifically or necessarily Chinese (which is not to say that these same principles are not present in specific Chinese martial arts; Tom, 2005). The point to be emphasised is that Lee’s avowed abandonment of his formative wing chun kung fu approach still retained quite a residue –​or strong traces – of the preference for certain of wing chun 68

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principles and preferences (Inosanto, 1994). In other words, despite Lee’s convictions about universality, we can see that his thoughts and practices were hegemonised throughout by one very precise sort of contingent particularity.

Media ties Hopefully this quick analysis of one of Bruce Lee’s positions on an abiding concern for all martial artists shows how unexpectedly useful and relevant Laclauian political theory ideas can be, even when wrenched from their ‘proper’ political theory context and applied in unusual ‘cultural studies’ cases. However, we have not yet discursively situated Bruce Lee or clarified why any of this might matter to anyone anywhere. And certainly, an elementary question for any discourse analysis might be: why single out Lee as important? A subsequent question for us will then be: how might any such example (in this case, of mediatised martial arts discourse) supplement our understanding of politics? To take the first question first. Many commentators have argued that Bruce Lee was immediately a pole of what Bill Brown (1997) calls ‘cross-​ethnic identification’. Moreover, both T.M. Kato (2007) and Vijay Prashad (2001) argue that Lee functioned as a key player in decolonisation struggles –​specifically what Kato (following Jameson) calls the struggles to decolonise postcolonial consciousness. Lee’s amazing choreographies redirected transnational multi-​ethnic desires towards an Asian set of activities (‘Oriental’ martial arts), and he was the first major male alternative to the ubiquitous white Western movie hero (Bowman, 2010a, 2010b, 2013b). We could go on –​situating Bruce Lee as important and influential in context after context, in different ways and for different reasons with different effects. However, doing so achieves more than demonstrating his macro-​ discursive status or importance. Rather, as even this fleeting overview of some interpretations of Bruce Lee suggests: any textual or discourse analyses of Bruce Lee are inevitably going to take us far afield, and lead us in different directions. For there was much more going on in, through and around Bruce Lee and the emergence of an international multicultural popular cultural discourse of martial arts in the 1970s. (I have filled two books with discussions of this ‘much more’, and I still feel that I have barely scratched the surface.) One thing that it is pertinent to mention in this context is the place that the cinematic texts of Bruce Lee (along with other Hong Kong martial arts films), via their global distribution, played in cross-​ethnic and postcolonial cultural processes. What Bill Brown calls Lee’s ‘generic ethnicity’ and the emotive ‘ethnic-​underdog-​versus-​the-​oppressor’ plots of his Hong Kong films offered was a kind of imminently politicising (albeit fundamentally fantasy) vision of agency. For these reasons alone, Bruce Lee 69

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could be written into many more kinds of postcolonial media or popular cultural histories than he has been. In more obviously ‘discourse theory’ or ‘discourse analysis’ terms, Lee ‘himself ’ must be situated in the flows between a hypercapitalist Hollywood and a colonial Hong Kong. But this does not necessarily make the ‘effects’ of Lee’s texts either simply capitalist or simply to do with Hong Kong or British colonialism. In fact, the effects of his texts seem to have been ‘felt’ most powerfully in postcolonial and ghettoised/​ racialised contexts, although they were certainly not limited to them. And an interesting thing, widely noted by commentators, is that what was seen in these celluloid spectacles was widely received as being somehow political in ways that were not necessarily perceived in other ostensibly ‘similar’ martial arts films (Bowman, 2013b). In a literal sense, in Bruce Lee’s and other martial arts films of the 1970s, virtually all viewers, the world over, were seeing what they believed to be ancient martial arts, from China and Japan.4 Of course, these were only ever, at most, ‘invented traditions’ (Anderson, 1991; Said, 2005), or even Baudrillardian simulacra (Baudrillard, 1994). Indeed, the very object or field called ‘martial arts’ was effectively invented in popular cultural discourses through these cinematic ‘(re)presentations’ or simulacra. Accordingly, this mediatised discourse arrived fully-​formed, as if it were ancient and timeless. Moreover, it had our opening question already inscribed within it: which style is best? This question was there from the start, and it remains the animating problematic of discourses about martial arts (even if the answer given by Bruce Lee films was always the same: what is best is what Bruce Lee does). Since the 1970s, at least, such mediatisation has always both fuelled and impeded –​or skewed –​the evolution or development of martial arts (like the Lacanian object-​cause of desire). The drive to answer the question ‘which style is best?’ via the institution of ostensibly no-​holds-​barred MMA competitions such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) first deconstructed and even seemed to jeopardise the very idea of particular styles surviving. But over time ‘mixed martial arts’ inevitably became just one institution or approach among others. Moreover, as brutal and efficient as MMA is, people now know that it is fundamentally a sport. And sport –​ surely –​is a very different thing to the martial. Accordingly, those looking for ‘the ultimate’ martial art continue to look. And one place they look is to the unequivocally martial practices of the military.

Natural Bourne identities The most well-​known military martial arts styles currently available in some form to civilians include the US Marine Corps Martial Arts 70

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Programme (MCMAP), the Russian military style called sistema, the Israeli martial art, krav maga, and Filipino martial arts, variously called arnis, kali or escrima. There are others. However, none of these martial arts are anywhere near as well known as the arts disseminated cinematically in the 1970s, such as ‘kung fu’, ‘karate’ and ‘taekwondo’. This difference likely arises because military styles are often ugly, bloody, brutal, necessarily painful and unpleasant to practice, plus they have no immediate sporting interpretation or application. So they cannot easily be branded as either pleasant or uplifting. Indeed, to extend arguments made by both Bill Brown and Slavoj Žižek at different times: these arts cannot easily be existentialised or ideologically recuperated as ‘spiritually uplifting’ or as ‘paradoxically peaceful’ (Reid and Croucher, 1984) or ‘self-​improving’ practices (Brown, 1997; Bowman, 2010b, 2013a). Nevertheless, one such military martial art was selected to be the style of fighting used by a Hollywood action hero in a film that immediately transformed mainstream movie fight choreography by setting a new standard. This was the Filipino art of kali or escrima. It was chosen as the style of fighting used by Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity series of films.5 What happens when we expose this to the questions of universalism and particularism? In Laclau, the universal is an empty place that is variously hegemonised by words, claims, or, in Laclau, demands (Laclau, 2005). These words, claims, demands and assertions are always traceable back to complexly articulated political wills. So a demand can always be tied to a particular entity, an entity that Laclau regards as having come into existence with and through and in the formation of the demand. The aim of the group/​demand is to universalise or hegemonise the demand until it is satisfied and they/​ it can recede into the slumber of realisation/​satisfaction. ‘They’ will only persist as an entity to the extent that they are implicit (because hegemonic), or should they need to wake from the slumber of their satisfaction in order to defend their achievements. So far, so logocentric. However, what I hope to be able to suggest in the light of the cases of the mediatisation of martial arts that I have mentioned is the way that what we might call mediatised universals (in our case, the performance of the superiority of various particular martial arts at particular times via complexly articulated technological platforms, relations and contexts) do not necessarily arise as the result of some simple claim. Claims can be and are made. But the visual spectacle (and the textual complex) is not reducible to the logic of consensus or dissensus that hegemonises political theory (Laclau, 1992, 1996). Moreover, in relation to the political theory claim that universals are produced through the political constitution of the group, let us recall that all of the major popular fashions in martial arts of the world have a complex and shifting relation not only to media but also to colonialism, postcoloniality 71

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and/​or decolonial projects. However, they cannot be simply attached to any one identity or any one claim. The kung fu craze of the 1970s emerged from what Rey Chow has taught us to regard as the highly complex location of colonial Hong Kong (Chow, 1998) and it flared up first (and most) in a range of particularly politically and socioeconomically complex urban centres and ghettoes, the world over. The first US martial arts actors were trained in the Japanese and Korean arts that they had learned as a direct consequence of American military action and occupation in these areas (it was Japanese and Korean arts that were first imported to America en masse, by returning servicemen; Krug, 2001). Karate-​do itself had already been reconstructed as Japanese by its ‘founder’, Funakoshi Gichin, who actually took the art from Okinawa to Japan in the early 20th century. In Okinawa, it had long been called not ‘karate-​do’ (which was Funakoshi’s Japanification of the name, meaning as it does empty-​ hand-​way), but ‘China hand’ –​a name that registers the multiply-​colonised status of the Ryukyu Islands themselves (Funakoshi, 1975). There are many other examples of complex processes and relations between martial arts and the moves from colony to post colony to nation. In Brazil, for instance, there is the case of capoeira –​which was first an art of African slaves and then a martial art of the Brazilian underclass. All kinds of authorities have, by turns, tried to outlaw it, to sportify it, to gentrify it, to standardise it and otherwise to domesticate or nationalise it (Assunção, 2005; Downey, 2005). There have been similar cases in Shanghai with Jing Wu, in China generally with wushu, in Indonesia with pencak silat, in Europe with fencing, and so on (Eichberg, 1983; Wilson, 2009). The point to be made here is that each of these arts clearly in some sense hegemonised various cultural, countercultural and mainstream scenes, but no audible claim has been made arising in formation with them. This is doubtless why critics like Žižek and a number of people (such as those discussed by Bill Brown) regard the constitution of identities via martial arts films to be symptomatic of failed class longing (Brown, 1997). But, I would add: when we are dealing with the forces or flows of media and culture, the matter of collective or political identity constantly moves and recedes, and never seems to be fully or properly present, like the parallax of a rainbow. Of course, there is always the rejoinder: media and culture are not politics. Yet, to reiterate, they must have some relation to politics. As Laclau himself argues: the universal is an empty place, variously filled with hegemonic contents and contestations in the discursive terrain. Media and culture are the Laclauian discursive terrain. So what, then, might we make of the curious simultaneous centring and erasing of Filipino martial arts in The Bourne Identity films? I say centring and erasing because at no point in the films is the Filipino character of Jason Bourne’s fighting style ever indicated. Quite the contrary, in fact: Jason 72

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Bourne is the ultimate secret product of the US government. His fighting style is presented as a pinnacle only attained by the most elite soldier of the US military. In other words, here a Filipino particularism is passed off as American dominance. In Laclauian terms, the universal is always a particularism that has become hegemonic. But here, US universalism is represented by a Filipino particularism (‘under erasure’ or ‘sous rature’, as poststructuralists used to say). This is something that Laclauian theory seems ill-​equipped to deal with; at least, not until its residual realist, literalist phonocentrism –​its inheritance from political theory ‘proper’ –​has been somewhat displaced, or indeed decolonised. For, to stay with our example: this hegemonic particularism does not literally or ‘really’ relate to or reflect the achievement of any kind of Filipino demand or reflect any kind of Filipino political entity. Indeed, if we were to regard culture as property, then it would be easy to conclude that a nasty white Hollywood has once again expropriated the cultural heritage of one of its own former colonies. This would be one kind of anti-​colonialist mode of reading. However, it would be premised on a problematic belief in culture as involving property and ownership rights. This is a common belief, but it is one that plays into the hands of ethnonationalist essentialism (do you really have to be Filipino to ‘do’ Filipino martial arts?). Of course, I do not want to disparage claims of lineage or the importance of heritage. Far from it. I am aware that the Filipino martial arts are in a complex and ongoing dialogue with processes of decolonising, nation-​ building, community-​building, culture construction, heritage preservation, economic stimulation, and so on, in much the same way as are many other martial arts and sports the world over. I am equally aware that many Filipino martial arts masters have died in poverty and that unknown numbers of family schools and styles and lineages have vanished without trace (Wiley, 1996). And it is for these reasons and more that I also feel uneasy when I see clips on YouTube of martial arts classes in shiny clubs in the US or Europe in which students are dressed up in traditional Filipino outfits to practise the art. But, at the same time, I have also heard Filipino masters state (again, on YouTube) that the situation is simply this: as soon as Westerners get into something, they dominate it, they master it –​and not in a bad way: they dominate it through love, time, effort and commitment. The vast majority of people in the Philippines do not have the money or time to devote to these arts. Comparatively affluent Westerners do. Which is why the martial arts themselves travel, become diasporic, and are much more mobile than the people of the places from whence they come. They can even be, so to speak, paradoxically disembodied bodily diasporas –​physical practices moving from body to body without physical contact. Reciprocally, in response to the mainstreaming of Filipino martial arts in Hollywood choreography, new drives have been initiated both in the 73

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Philippines and in diasporic Filipino communities to embrace and showcase their martial arts. Documentaries are being produced, traditions are being constructed, reconstructed, (re)invented, fleshed out, fabulated. The postcolonial Philippines and Filipinos are not simply victims. No one has been ‘duped’ (Chow, 1993). In fact, the translation between cultures that is occurring here, in and through and around –​because of –​the image, constitutes the bringing into visibility of that which may otherwise have remained occluded. Of course, the main text of the Bourne series makes absolutely no reference to the Filipino dimensions of Jason Bourne’s fighting style. But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to find out about the choreographic style. A quick Google search will suffice. And as the many ‘making of ’ clips on YouTube and the ‘how to fight like Jason Bourne’ websites that sprang up in the wake of the film’s success all let us know: it is Filipino Kali.6 So what can we see here –​or not –​in this simple action film? What is happening in it, through it, or because of it? I would suggest: we can see some ways in which non-​literal, non-​direct, and constitutively mediated transactions between cultures can both take place and not take place. Western appropriation, here, may not be so unequivocally despicable. The ‘fake’ image, the simulation, can also be a source of cultural encounter. Cultural dialogues can be non-​logocentric. The forging of cultural relations can be both between or across cultures, and between a culture and itself, and on both sides of the spectacle. The film can be read simultaneously as yet another moment of the ‘internal’ relationship Hollywood has with itself, and with other cultures, and as a moment of the ‘internal’ relationship that a postcolonial culture can come to have with itself, its others and its own otherness through the processes of mediatisation. It is a cultural translation. And in the words of Rey Chow: ‘If translation is a form of betrayal, then the translators pay their debt by bringing fame to the ethnic culture’ (Chow, 1995: 202). Filipino martial arts have achieved increased fame recently, thanks to DVD and post-​DVD technologies and conventions, involving the production and dissemination of ‘extras’ like ‘making of ’ mini-​documentaries and interviews with directors, stunt performers and fight choreographies (Hunt, 2014). With these technological developments, the long-​unacknowledged centrality of Filipino martial arts in Hollywood fight choreography has received some redress, and a whole host of economic, cultural and even political consequences have flowed from this. Filipino martial arts have gained prestige and importance both in the Philippines and internationally, in multiple ways with multiple consequences. And this is just one ‘little’ case. An ‘orthodox’ political discourse analysis might have been inclined to write it all off as trivial at the outset. However, it is my hope that a new generation of readers of both media/​culture and politics/​political theory will continue to employ the contributions of the 74

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late (great) Ernesto Laclau in analyses of objects, practices, phenomena, institutions and encounters from all areas of, across, between and among cultures, without limiting the use of Laclau’s texts to ‘politics proper’ and without forcing cultural analyses to operate in terms of ultimately simplifying universalisms at the expense of complex particularities. To make the best use of Laclau’s (and Mouffe’s) theoretical advances, my suggestion is that the logocentrism that silently hegemonises or universalises this corpus be noted and interrogated with a view to its productive displacement and eventual decolonisation. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Nonetheless, as Jennifer Slack (1996) has argued, Laclau and Mouffe’s contribution to the development of cultural studies and cultural/​political theory has often been unjustly ‘written out’ of many of the ‘official’ histories of cultural studies. My choice of these two examples of arguments is motivated or tendentious. I single them out here because the relations between demand and political identity and particularity and hegemony are not only at the core of Laclauian political theory but also pertinent to my critique. For both of these arguments imply some problematic assumptions. One is the assumed relation between politics and identity. For instance, one often sees in Laclau the assumption that a group has its own proper identity. This may not be permanent or total, but Laclauian theory makes a claim that political identities are constituted through the antagonism and the demand. Postcolonialist scholars or theorists may worry that therefore this paradigm remains deaf and blind to all but the noisiest and most present of entities and identities. What of the subaltern? What of the silent or silenced? The unseen? The unheard? The postcolonial media theorist might want to ask: what if the element expropriated from the silent or the silenced is actually showcased and moved centre stage? What if that which becomes universalised or hegemonic in the mainstream of the mainstream –​in other words, hegemonic in the hegemony –​is something from the subaltern place, context, people, community? As will become clear, I am thinking specifically of the incorporation of Filipino martial arts into the choreography of The Bourne Identity trilogy –​which is discussed at the end of this chapter. Not unlike science. However, Lee did not use the term martial science. He retained the term martial art –​because, for him, every individual practitioner should find their own way to ‘honestly express’ themselves. His belief in the inevitability of individual difference (but not cultural difference) is why, for Lee, hand-​to-​hand combat remained art and not science. There is no ‘one size fits all’ formula; there is only feel and flow and degrees of effectiveness, and no simple objectivity: what works is what you can make work. As he once reputedly put it, ‘the fastest punch is the one that lands first’. So, Lee’s universalist humanism allowed for singularity (individual uniqueness) but not particularity (local, regional or institutional cultural uniqueness). Of course, no matter how ‘old’ or ‘young’ these arts may ‘really’ have been, the martial traditions, first of China and then of Japan were thoroughly mediatised –​by Hollywood, Hong Kong, Japanese and other regional film industries –​throughout the 1970s. But the term ‘real’ is problematic here: for, with Lee, we were not really seeing ancient Chinese arts, but rather his own hybrid style; just as with the Japanese enemies in his films, we were not really seeing real Japanese arts, but rather those arts as imagined in Hong Kong. The series itself involved more than one director, and a very varied crew; but along with the main character, Jason Bourne (played by Matt Damon), one other crucial thing at least

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6

that remained constant in the production of the films was the films’ fight choreography, and the films’ fight choreographer, Jeff Imada. This is particularly pertinent because, arguably, it was in large part the fight choreography (along with the cinematography) that ‘made’ these films –​that made them stand out, that defined them, that made them unique and memorable. The fight choreography certainly caused ripples that reached the very heart of mainstream movie production discourse, to the extent that even action staples like the eternally returning James Bond movies reacted by changing their cinematographic and action-​choreographic styles in response to the paradigm shift effected by the Bourne choreography. The fight choreographer, Jeff Imada tells us: Bourne does kali combined with some military stuff and –​in his words –​‘some Bruce Lee stuff ’. Is this the casual, blasé nonchalance of an arrogant westerner who simply regards all this ‘stuff ’ as ‘stuff ’, and conflates it indiscriminately? Maybe. But Jeff Imada is himself the protégé of Dan Inosanto. Dan Inosanto is both ethnically Filipino and a close friend and senior student of Bruce Lee. Indeed, Inosanto is one of the very few people authorised directly by Bruce Lee to teach his martial art. After Bruce Lee’s death in 1973, Inosanto continued to teach both Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do and the Filipino martial arts, before going on to work in fight choreography. Jeff Imada, a contemporary and friend of Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, followed Inosanto into this work.

References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revised edition, London: Verso. Arditi, B. and Valentine, J. (1999) Polemicization: The contingency of the commonplace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Assunção, M.R. (2005) Capoeira: a history of an Afro-​Brazilian martial art, London: Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Birchall, C. and Hall, G. (2006) New cultural studies: Adventures in theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bowman, P. (2007) Post-​Marxism versus cultural studies: theory, politics and intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bowman, P. (2010a) ‘Sick man of transl-​Asia: Bruce Lee and Rey Chow’s queer cultural translation’, Social Semiotics, 20(4): 393–​409. Bowman, P. (2010b) Theorizing Bruce Lee: film-​fantasy-​fighting-​philosophy, contemporary cinema, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Bowman, P. (2013a) Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the dragon through film, philosophy and popular culture, London and New York: Wallflower Press. Bowman, P. (2013b) Reading Rey Chow: visuality, postcoloniality, ethnicity, sexuality, New York: Peter Lang. Bowman, P. (2016) ‘The intimate schoolmaster and the ignorant sifu: Poststructuralism, Bruce Lee, and the ignorance of everyday radical pedagogy’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 49(4): 549–​570, https://​doi.org/​ 10.5325/​philr​het.49.4.0549. 76

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Brown, B. (1997) ‘Global bodies/​postnationalities: Charles Johnson’s consumer culture’, Representations, 58 (Spring): 24–​48. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left, London: Verso. Chow, R. (1993) Writing diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies, Arts and politics of the everyday, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Chow, R. (1995) Primitive passions: visuality, sexuality, ethnography, and contemporary Chinese cinema, film and culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Chow R. (1998) Ethics after idealism: theory, culture, ethnicity, reading, theories of contemporary culture, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of philosophy, Brighton: Harvester. Derrida, J. (1987) The truth in painting, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Downey, G. (2005) Learning capoeira: lessons in cunning from an Afro-​Brazilian art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eichberg, H. (1983) ‘Force against force: configurations of martial art in European and Indonesian cultures’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 18(33): 33–​65. Funakoshi, G. (1975) Karate-​do: My way of life, [S.l.]: Kodansha. Hall, G. (2002) Culture in bits: The monstrous future of theory, London: Continuum. Hall, S., Morley, D. and Chen, K-​H. (1996) Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, London: Routledge. Hunt, L. (2014) ‘Enter the 2-​Disc Platinum Edition: Bruce Lee and Post-​ DVD Textuality’, JOMEC Journal, no 5 (June): 1–​12, http://​cf.ac.uk/​ Jomec/​ Jomecjournal/​5-​june2014/​Hunt_​BruceLee.pdf. Inosanto, D. (1994) Jeet Kune Do: the art and philosophy of Bruce Lee, London: Atlantic Books. Kato, T.M. (2007) From kung fu to hip hop: revolution, globalization and popular culture, New York: SUNY. Krug, G.J. (2001) ‘At the feet of the master: three stages in the appropriation of Okinawan Karate into Anglo-​American culture’, Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, 1(4): 395–​410. Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and ideology in Marxist theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, London: NLB. Laclau, E. (1992) ‘Universalism, particularism, and the question of identity’, October, 61 (Summer): 83–​90. Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), New York: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, London and New York: Verso. Laclau, E, and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Lee, B. (1971) ‘Liberate yourself from classical karate’, Black Belt Magazine. 77

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Marchart, O. (2007) Post-​foundational political thought: Political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press McRobbie, A. (1992) ‘Post-​Marxism and cultural studies’, in Cultural studies, L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P Treichler (eds) New York and London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2000) The tao of Bruce Lee, London: Vintage. Mouffe, C. (1996) Deconstruction and pragmatism, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the political, London: Routledge. Mowitt, J. (1992) Text: the genealogy of an antidisciplinary object, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Prashad, V. (2001) Everybody was kung fu fighting: Afro-​Asian connections and the myth of cultural purity, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Reid, H. and Croucher, M. (1984) The way of the warrior: the paradox of the martial arts, London: Century, by arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1983 (1984 [printing]). Said, E. (2005) ‘Invention, memory, and place’, in P. Leistyna (ed), Cultural studies: from theory to action, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 256–​269. Slack, J. (1996) ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’, in D. Morley and K.-​H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, London: Routledge, pp 113–​129. Tom, T. (2005) The straight lead: the core of Bruce Lee’s Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do, North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing. Wiley, M.V. (1996) Filipino martial culture, Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing. Wilson, L. (2009) ‘Jurus, jazz riffs and the constitution of a national martial art in Indonesia’, Body & Society, 15(3): 93–​119. Zerilli, L.M.G. (1998) ‘This universalism which is not one’, Diacritics, 28(2): 2–​20.

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The Limits of Post-​Marxism: The (Dis)function of Political Theory in Film and Cultural Studies: A Reply to Paul Bowman Andrew Rowcroft What’s left of post-​Marxism? In particular, the concepts and categories developed by the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau during the 1970s, and later with Chantal Mouffe and others in the 1980s and 1990s. This question is not readily answerable, or at least appears in the negative, for the second decade of the 21st century has seen the welcome reconstruction of materialism, economic contexts, production, totality, and dialectics as vital explanatory tools in coming to think critically about the present conjecture.1 Long gone then, or at least seriously weakened, are the approaches of language, discourse, heterogeneity and symbol. This status is, in part, attributable to the explosion of new political contexts which possess a radical distinctiveness that has not yet settled into predetermined critical patterns. Indeed, what remains particularly significant about these contexts, ranging from recent terrorist insurgencies, conflict in Africa and the Middle East, climate change, ecological crisis, austerity measures, and new anti-​capitalist protests, is how strongly they exhibit the exhaustion of a specific strain of discourse centred on language, symbol, difference and deconstruction, while calling for the development of new critical materialisms as prerequisites for any plausible account of 21st century culture (see Coole and Frost, 2010: 1–​46). As Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (2013) have argued, new critical endeavours that confront the waning radicalism of the old theoretical approaches must be attentive to power, agency and political critique, but without reprising the discursive or textual paradigms that sustained the work of previous scholarly efforts. 79

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We should hesitate to dispose with post-​Marxism in its entirety, however. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson on this issue, the variability of specifically Marxist political ideologies means that post-​Marxism appears cyclically, offering a regeneration of older, more traditional Marxist models. For Jameson, it is precisely these very features – the abandonment of revolution, the derision of the Hegelian inspired dialectic, the embrace of mass social democracy –​‘that first appeared in the post-​Marxism of our own era when more sophisticated versions of that diagnosis and its prescription alike began to reappear in vaster and greater numbers’ (Jameson, 2009: 374). For Jameson and many others, this reappearance was most powerfully marked by Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985). Laclau’s breakthrough work Politics and ideology in Marxist theory (1977) had retained the classical Marxist tradition (the primacy of production and economic laws) as an ‘ontological anchorage point’ (Laclau, 2011: 11) but the later joint work argued for a rejection of Marxism’s grounding in objective class relations. We can, then, more correctly speak of multiple post-​Marxisms rather than simply post-​ Marxism per se. The focus of the many post-​Marxisms differ according to the way in which they treat the development of capital. This project has been approached on a variety of conceptual terrains: for instance, the argument that capitalism has been supplanted by a new stage of post-​capitalism, as Paul Mason argues; a rejection of the antagonistic basis of class and the primacy of the economic for a heterogeneity of processes governed by consumption and the symbol, as staked out by Baudrillard; or even that capitalism is more responsive to collective needs, and so revolution can be exchanged for social democracy (see Mason, 2015). All approaches argue for a mutation in the basic structure of capitalism described by Marx, one in which the pre-​existing formation is replaced in a movement towards greater economic complexity. Paul Bowman sets out to answer this question of what’s left of post-​Marxism in a novel way. Turning to the study of martial arts, Bowman attempts to transform the often dense theoretical concerns of Laclau into more profitable critical-​cultural exposures. In thinking about the emergence of globally popular cultural discourses on martial arts, and martial arts culture and practices in particular, Bowman argues we can deepen and enrich the field of contemporary political and media studies. Bowman hopes that a new generation … will continue to employ the contributions of the late (great) Ernesto Laclau in analyses of objects, practices, phenomena, institutions and encounters … without forcing cultural analyses to operate in terms of ultimately simplifying universalisms at the expense of complex particularities.

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Readily admitted by Bowman is the notion that terms and concepts [such] as universalism, particularism, antagonism, articulation, hegemony … may nonetheless turn out to yield a rather limited conception of politics and the political, and indeed have a rather limited field of applicability in the study of the complexity of media, culture and society. The problem is the logocentric approach of Laclau and Mouffe, which ‘perceive[s]‌a very limited range of factors; specifically, political identities formed through political demands’. For Bowman, however, this necessitates not ‘a rejection of Laclau and Mouffe’ but rather ‘the need for “translation” and reconstitution, in order to produce more (and quite possibly better) insights’. This ‘very limited applicability, even when used to analyse “cultural” politics’ (italics in original) means we should still seek to employ the contributions of Laclau to a range of cultural phenomena. Bowman’s use of post-​Marxist theory for martial arts studies is provocative, engaging and well-​informed. One can certainly accept the growth and development of martial arts in popular culture as possessing a strong political dimension, or as Bowman suggests, that ‘supposedly “simple” action films … have complicated cross-​cultural consequences and even cultural-​political force and value’. Similarly, one can follow the hegemonic project of Bruce Lee –​his attempt to transform and unify martial arts practices –​to move, to use Laclau’s parlance, from the particular to the universal. As Bowman argues, Lee ‘was for rational “scientific” experimentation; for testing and verification; for working out what worked best. He was against “tradition without reason”, and rejected the idea of necessary or inevitable differences between cultures, styles or traditions in martial arts’. In the Laclau perspective however, Lee’s approach would be guilty of attempting to subvert one to the other, and the failure of his project illustrates ‘what Laclau would term the mutually constituting and reciprocally subverting relations between universalism and particularism’. The question of universalism and particularism in relation to martial arts seems to have been addressed in the creation of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), to which Bowman briefly refers. This event, created in 1993, features a ‘mixed martial arts’ tournament among combatants from all traditions –​including boxing, wrestling, Kung Fu, Judo, sambo, karate, kickboxing, and Brazilian jiu-​jitsu (BJJ). Bowman is much more sceptical of this ‘universal’ solution to the problem of martial arts, positing a distinction between philosophical practice (the art of martial arts) and sport: The drive to answer the question ‘which style is best?’ via the institution of ostensibly no-​holds-​barred MMA competitions such as the … UFC

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first deconstructed and even seemed to jeopardise the very idea of particular styles surviving. But over time ‘mixed martial arts’ inevitably became just one institution or approach among others. Moreover, as brutal and efficient as MMA is, people now know that it is fundamentally a sport. And sport –​surely –​is a very different thing to the martial. Accordingly, those looking for ‘the ultimate’ martial art continue to look. The defence for the UFC as a universal project –​a two decades long pressure testing programme which effectively removes any distortions inherent in an adherence to tradition –​is sidestepped by Bowman here. As Sam Harris (2011) argues, herein ‘lies a crucial distinction between traditional martial arts and realistic self-​defense’. For Harris (2011), traditional martial artists ‘assume ready stances, just out of each other’s range, and then practice various techniques or spar (engage in controlled fighting). This does not simulate real violence’. And, as Harris (2011) notes, It doesn’t prepare you to respond effectively to a sudden attack, in which you have been hit before you even knew you were threatened, and it doesn’t teach you to strike preemptively, without telegraphing your moves, once you have determined that an attack is imminent. We could say the UFC represents an arena analogous to Lee’s hegemonic desire ‘for rational “scientific” experimentation; for testing and verification; for working out what worked best’. To enter into a discussion of which martial art is best is to engage in process of evaluation and testing, a bridging between reality and theory. As such, for Harris (2012), specific martial arts engaged in this type of approach, principally BJJ, offer ‘a powerful lens through which to examine some primary human concerns —​truth v. delusion, self-​knowledge, ethics, and overcoming fear’. The emergence and development of MMA in the 21st century has effectively exposed the weaknesses of other martial arts as fighting systems, and marks a major contribution to Lee’s hegemonic project of martial arts universalisation. The distinction between the technical skill and effectiveness of specific martial arts, and the more avowedly philosophical properties of more traditional fighting practices or systems, is worth considering further. Unfortunately philosophical discussion is unlikely to save you in a dark alley, and indeed there is certainly no reason to suggest that the effectiveness of certain martial arts, such as BJJ, mean a less spiritually rewarding experience of training. Until proved otherwise, the UFC may represent a new concrete universal in the practice of martial arts. Note 1

See for example, Coole and Frost (2010); Eagleton (2016); and Pendakis et al (2014). 82

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References Adiseshiah, S. and Hildyard, R. (eds) (2013) Twenty-​first century fiction: what happens now, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2010) New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eagleton, T. (2016) Materialism, New Haven, CT: Yale. Harris, S. (2011) ‘The truth about violence’, 5 November, https://​samhar​ ris.org/​ the-​truth-​about-​violence/​ Harris, S. (2012) ‘The pleasures of drowning’, 6 February, https://​samhar​ ris.org/​ the-​pleasures-​of-​drowning/​ Jameson, F. (2009) Valences of the dialectic, London: Verso. Laclau, E. ([1977] 2011) Politics and ideology in Marxist theory: capitalism, fascism, populism, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Mason, P. (2015) Post-​capitalism: a guide to our future, London: Allen Lane. Pendakis, A., Diamanti, J., Brown, N. Robinson, J. and Szeman, I. (eds) (2014) Contemporary Marxist theory: a reader, London: Bloomsbury.

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Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: The Evolution of Post-​Marxism Philip Goldstein

In their groundbreaking Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe develop a new account of radical politics in which the subjective construction of hegemony establishes political conditions, not the objective historical stages and class contexts of traditional Hegelian Marxism. On this basis, they forcefully justify the politics of contemporary women’s, African-​American, gay, peace, ecological and working class groups and organisations and oppose both the hegemony of the new right and the ‘classism’ and revolutionary orientation of the radical left. In their later work, they both elaborate this justification of those movements and move in new directions. In On populist reason (2005) and The rhetorical foundations of society (2014), Laclau draws on poststructuralist discourse or rhetoric as well as notions of populism or the masses to show that hegemony involves antagonism, frontiers or we/​they oppositions, equivalential logic, and other elements. By contrast, in On the political (2005) and Agonistics: thinking the world politically (with Wagner, 2013), Mouffe elaborates the notion of the fissured subject which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony (1985: 122–​34), was constituted by the antagonisms of diverse social movements or the dislocation of social structures; however, her new accounts of the antagonisms or, as she says, ‘agonisms’ dividing the political field forcefully oppose universal norms of rationality or democracy in order to establish a genuine pluralism on a national and a world scale.

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Hegemony and socialist strategy In Rhetorical foundations, Laclau explains the experiences which led him to write Hegemony and socialist strategy in 1985. He says that, in the 1960s, when he was part of the resistance to the Peron government in Argentina and to the military dictatorship which replaced it, the trade unions were allied with the dictatorship, while middle class and student movements opposed it (Laclau, 2014: 1–​4). Although this state of affairs was contrary to Marxist theory, which considers the working class revolutionary, he did not reject Marxism; instead, he, along with Chantal Mouffe, developed alternative accounts of Marxism. For example, he and Mouffe accepted Louis Althusser’s Marxist critique of the Hegelian belief that predetermined historical stages or economic contexts explain social development (see Althusser, 1969). Althusser’s account rightly attributes to ‘overdetermined’ historical developments diverse and incompatible meanings, not the literal import, full identity, and contradictory character which the fixed stages of Hegelian theory require; however, while Althusser remained committed to the working class and its parties, Laclau and Mouffe deny that the working class is a privileged agent achieving ‘full presence’ in a ‘transparent’ communist society; rather, represented by trade unions, it is only one of many movements. Moreover, while Althusser faults the foundational rationalism of Hegelian Marxism, he preserves its economic determination in the last instance. Instead of revealing the incompatible meanings of historical developments, the concept of overdetermination was, they claim, made ‘compatible with … determination in the last instance’ (and was, as a result, reductive); as they say, it was unable ‘to produce the totality of its deconstructive effects in Marxism’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 98). In addition, Laclau and Mouffe accept Althusser’s belief that the ideological apparatus of the state interpellates or constructs a subject and, thereby, reproduces itself. Althusser claimed, however, that scientific Marxism resists this ideological interpellation and effectively grasps the nature of reality. He maintains that, while ideology explains the subject’s role in a society’s socioeconomic structure, science can escape ideology and grasp reality if it rigorously develops its concepts and its terms. Laclau and Mouffe adopt, by contrast, the poststructuralist belief that, since objects do not simply or literally mirror their socio-​historical contexts, the distinction between object and context, discursive and non-​discursive practices, or ‘thought and reality’ breaks down. Rhetoric matters, then, more than scientific truth, which does not overcome bias. In Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985: 110) terms, ‘[s]‌ynonomy, metonomy, metaphor… are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted’. Moreover, they adopt Antonio Gramsci’s claim that the ideological hegemony of ruling elites explains a society’s political formations, but they do not accept Gramsci’s belief that the hegemonic 85

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war of position situates hegemony outside discourse. On the contrary, they maintain and extensively develop the notion that the discursive conflicts by which contending political parties seek to impose their hegemony explain their values and identities; the ‘logic of hegemony, as a logic of articulation and contingency, has come to determine the very identity of the hegemonic subjects’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 85). In other words, no one is above or escapes the fray, whereas for Gramsci, they do escape. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 85) say, Gramsci claims that ‘the ultimate core of the hegemonic subject’s identity is constituted at a point external to the space it articulates’. Elaborating Carl Schmitt’s notion that politics involves the antagonism of friends and enemies, they suggest, in addition, that hegemonic discourses construct stable but partial or dislocated subjects whose antagonisms ensure that they fail to achieve the ‘full presence’, totality, or closure sought by both Gramsci’s and Hegelian Marxism. As negativity, antagonism does not imply a positive new context or ‘aufhebung’, as the traditional Hegelian notion of negativity does; rather, antagonisms keep hegemonic discourse from constructing the literal import, full identity, and contradictory forces reflecting the predetermined stages of the historical totality. Hence, they deny the Marxist claim that the working class establishes communism at history’s end. In what is their most important and distinctive claim, they show that what exposes the fissures within hegemonic discourses is not the conflict of classes but the antagonisms of political movements, including women, minorities, gays, peaceniks, trade unions, ecologists, and others (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 159–​164). Étienne Balibar (1996), Alain Badiou (2002), and others repudiate such ‘identity politics’. As Badiou (2002: 114–​115) says, to abandon the working class is to renounce ‘politics as an independent thought process’ and to accept ‘the established social order’. While Laclau and Mouffe do dismiss both the objective truth and scientific neutrality of Marxist theories, including the revolutionary character of the working class, they forcefully defend contemporary social movements, including women’s, black, Hispanic, gay, trade unions, environmental, and other movements, thereby justifying broad, progressive coalitions. With the slogan ‘Stronger together’, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign recognised the importance of such coalitions.

The later work of Ernesto Laclau In On populist reason (2005) and other later work, Laclau elaborates this poststructuralist account of hegemony; however, On populist reason (2005: 32–​ 33) faults the crowd psychologists who, like Auguste Taine, treat populism as a vague and ill-​defined concept because they assume that the isolated individual is rational but that crowds are pathological or violently emotional and barbaric. The recent rise of populist parties in France and Germany 86

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and the success of US President Trump’s populist rhetoric would support this criticism. Laclau grants such objections but defends populism on the rhetorical grounds that it explains hegemony. As he says (2005: 13), by enlarging ‘the model of rationality in terms of a generalised rhetoric (what, we shall see, can be called “hegemony”)’, populism will appear ‘as a distinctive and always present possibility of structuration of political life’. The generalised populist rhetoric which Laclau adopts elaborates the poststructuralist notion that, as he and Mouffe claimed in Hegemony and socialist strategy, discourse is a system of differences with no outside or essence. The conventional distinction between denotation and connotation, a distinction adopted by the crowd psychologists, breaks down because language is a system with no positive terms, as Ferdinand de Saussure’s account of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic aspects of discourse suggests (Laclau, 2005: 68–​69). In The rhetorical foundations of society, Laclau elaborates this account of discourse. Drawing on Jakobson’s account of metaphor and metonomy, he argues not only that rhetoric, rather than economic contexts, structures political spaces but also that such rhetoric is figurative or tropological (Laclau, 2014: 58–​60). One implication of this figurative rhetoric is, as Laclau suggests, that naming does not refer to an external object; naming constitutes the objects to which it refers. Calling a house one’s home is not, for example, the same as calling it one’s residence. Since the signifier names an object retroactively or after the fact, this object also invokes desire or affect, which he explains in Lacanian terms as ‘the object petit a’ (Laclau, 2014: 8). Žižek objects that what really explains this petit object is the traditional Marxist notions of reification and false consciousness. Laclau argues, however, that these are totalising Hegelian notions and that, as a result, they possess a fullness which is not compatible with the partial Lacanian object. As he says (2005: 133), ‘the logic of hegemony and that of the Lacanian objet a largely overlap and refer to a fundamental ontological relation in which fullness can only be touched through a radical investment in a partial object’. Based on this account of naming and discourse, he argues that in populist rhetoric the people’s requests become demands if they are denied and are linked by their equivalences, what he terms an ‘equivalential logic’, despite their differences. As he notes (2006: 652), ‘People whose demands concerning housing are frustrated see that other demands concerning transport, health, security, schooling, and so on are not met either’ (see also Laclau, 2005: 72–​74). An ‘equivalential’ chain proceeds from the unifying effects of the external denial of these people’s demands for health, security, housing, and so on. Both the differences of these demands and their equivalences constitute, then, ‘differential’ and ‘equivalential chains’ which are opposed yet necessary. Žižek complains, however, that these chains are closely connected, but Laclau does not recognise ‘the full inner entwinement of these two logics’ (2006: 557); however, Laclau considers 87

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their opposition necessary because the opposition gives the demands a universality which is limited only by the limits of discourse. At the same time, the differences of the demands establish an antagonism which gives them their limits or frontier. The people seeking better schooling, for example, may oppose those wanting better health, but they all oppose those denying the importance of such demands. In other words, an internal frontier divides society into camps, an equivalential chain unifies a people’s demands (Laclau, 2005: 154), and the construction of a popular identity consolidates the equivalential chain (p 162). In Laclau’s rhetorical terms, a demand that, like defending domestic values, represents the totality, instead of a particular content, is an ‘empty signifier’ because the totality it represents has no outside or objectivity (Laclau, 2005: 69–​71). In Emancipation(s) (1996), which elaborates his rhetorical view of hegemony, Laclau examines more fully the notion of an empty signifier. He claims once again that, because of the antagonisms dividing movements or groups, the articulation imposing hegemony constructs a frontier whose signifiers are contested by the divided movements. This system of signification involves a logic of exclusion which, he adds, makes the signifiers empty. That raises the question of how a signifier can be empty and still be a signifier. His answer is that, to have limits, a signifying system requires an exclusion or, in Freudian terms, a lack of an object. This lack of the object which is required by the limits of the system produces an empty place. The empty signifier points to the empty place, showing the positive or real impossibility of the object required by the system (Laclau, 1996: 40). Laclau notes, for example, that in the ex-​communist states the demand for free markets was more than an economic matter; it included a number of differential demands, including freedom from and independence of the communist bureaucracy and catching up with the West. In this way the demand for free markets achieved an absent or empty fullness (Laclau, 2005: 89). This logic of exclusion also means that, while each element is different, it enters at the same time into relations of equivalence. To preserve the fullness of the community, the chain of equivalences must remain open or universal; however, the community can achieve only an absent fullness or empty totality. Laclau’s argument is that hegemony enables a particular content or element to signify this absent fullness. For example, bread, peace and land, which were the demands of the Russian Revolution, named justice and peace and other universalities and were in opposition to the Tsarist regime. This opposition, together with their universal character, enabled them to express other demands as well and, as a result, made them empty signifiers (Laclau, 2005: 96–​97). The articulation which establishes an empty signifier as the frontier of antagonistic demands Laclau considers hegemony. As he says (2005: 71), the empty signifier represents an ‘incommensurable totality’ and, as a result, embodies the ‘unachievable fullness’ of a hegemonic identity. 88

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Laclau shows, for example, that, in the United States, the People’s Party of 1892 divided society into two antagonistic camps, the small man versus the oligarchy, and set up equivalences making it a national and not just a sectional or regional movement. To do so, the People’s Party supported the presidential campaign of the Democrat William Jennings Bryant, whose platform had many populist elements and meant to constitute the people as a political force and oppose the business or corporations supporting the Republicans. Bryant was defeated by McKinley, whose ‘progressivism’ meant keeping each section of society in place and defending white supremacy and corporate power. In Laclau’s terms, the populist movement of the People’s Party was unable to inscribe differences in an equivalential chain; instead institutional differences prevailed (2005: 201–​206). This failure suggests that both differential chains of demands and chains of equivalence explain the articulations which would establish hegemonic identities like the People’s Party. Moreover, Laclau distinguishes differentiality from heterogeneity, which indicates the broad differences of various elements. For example, the Marxist definition of a worker as one who sells his labour and the capitalist as one who extracts surplus value does not explain the antagonism between the worker and the capitalist because this definition of the worker does not imply that the worker resists his or her exploitation. Heterogeneity does explain the antagonism because it accounts for the worker’s identity, which is external to production. Temporarily unemployed workers matter for capitalist production but are also outside it or are heterogeneous. The outsiders or underdogs –​the heterogeneous –​establish the antagonistic frontier in capitalist production. As Laclau (2006: 665) says, such heterogeneity characterizes modern capitalism: ‘Contemporary capitalism generates all kinds of imbalances and critical areas: ecological crises, marginalization and unemployment, unevenness in the development of different sectors of the economy, imperialist exploitation, and so on.’ Oliver Marchart complains that the heterogeneous is a troublesome concept. Citing Laclau’s (2005: 83) claim that populism ‘requires the dichotomic division of society into two camps—​one presenting itself as a part which claims to be the whole’, he objects that the heterogeneous is that which falls outside this very game, which is not part of the dialectics between difference and equivalence … The heterogeneous is … not even a part (without being the negation of a part), because the term ‘part’ makes sense only in relation to other parts or to a whole. (Marchart, 2005: 15) Laclau claims, however, that heterogeneity, not exploitation, explains women’s, ecological or working class antagonisms. This claim suggests, in other words, that the notion of the heterogeneous justifies the emergence 89

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and development of feminist, environmental, trade union, and other radical movements seeking hegemony. In Emancipation(s) Laclau also distinguished between empty universals and floating signifiers. He says that a group’s demands require universality but cannot be universal without denying their particularity. To preserve their particularity, he considers what happens if the frontier dividing the group and the regime is contested because the oppressive regime becomes hegemonic. In that case, the democratic demands are made by rival hegemonic projects, and the meaning of the signifier becomes indeterminate. The reason is that, when the same democratic demands are taken up by rival hegemonic projects, the demands acquire independence from their frontiers. That independence makes them indeterminate or floating signifiers. In other words, signifiers whose meaning is indeterminate between frontiers are floating signifiers (Laclau, 2005: 131). An interesting example Laclau provides is the signifiers ‘regular guy’ and ‘average Joe’, which count as floating signifiers because they were shared by the populism of the progressive New Deal and the conservative Richard Nixon group. Before the Second World War, there was no conservative populism; rather the liberals supporting the New Deal defended a progressive populism. Thanks to Cold War anti-communism, conservatives established a populism which opposed the liberal elites of the north-​west but still spoke of ‘the regular guy’ and the ‘average Joe’, rather than the ‘parasites’ and ‘producers’ of the New Deal’s populism (Laclau, 2005: 135–​136). In The rhetorical foundations of society (2014: 20–​21), Laclau also examines the logic of equivalence and empty and floating signifiers, but he claims that they explain the workings of ideology. Seeking to preserve the notion of ideology, which critics have abandoned because the distinction between the ideological and the non-​ideological breaks down, he argues that ideological distortion is essential or constitutive. That is, contrary to Althusser, who claimed science overcomes such distortion, there is no way to escape it (Laclau, 2014: 14–​15). Ideology may, then, be embodied or incarnated in an object, in which case it represents an ‘absent fullness’, rather than distortion. The logic of equivalence, however, overcomes both the distortion and its opposite, incarnation in a particular object, because it involves both incarnation and distortion. Understanding ideology involves understanding equivalence and its excess or ‘floating’ as well as its limited or empty signification (Laclau, 2014: 21). As I noted, by means of such floating signifiers as the ‘average Joe’ or the ‘parasites’, the anti-​communist rhetoric and economic demands of Richard Nixon’s conservative populism, for example, acquired universality but still preserved their particularity. Žižek (2006: 556) objects that Laclau’s notion of populism ‘harbors in the last instance a long-​term proto-​fascist tendency’ because it displaces social antagonism onto ‘the antagonism between the unified people and its external 90

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enemy’. Žižek considers this displacement a kind of reification, but Laclau (2006: 649) denies that in populism the incarnation of the universal in the particular is a form of reification; rather, such an incarnation is inherent in any antagonism establishing hegemonic identities. He complains, moreover, that classical theories of democratic representation conceive of the will of the people as constituted before representation; however, constructing a people shows that representation is the primary terrain of the social. As a result, he agrees with Claude Lefort, who considers the democratic symbolic an empty place opposed to the hierarchical society based on the body of a monarch. Laclau (2005: 164–​166) objects, though, that, while Lefort rightly opposes the democratic symbolic framework and totalitarianism, the spectrum of possible movements is more diverse than this opposition of democracy and totalitarianism allows. In addition to complaining that the notion of populism harbours a proto-​ fascist tendency, Žižek (2006: 563) objects that ‘Laclau seems to oscillate between the formal notion of the Real as antagonism and the more empirical notion of the Real as that which cannot be reduced to a formal opposition’. In Rhetorical foundations, Laclau addresses these issues fully, showing that the notion of antagonism derives from Kant’s account of real opposition and differs from Hegel’s dialectical contradiction, in which spirit or freedom transcends such opposition. Kant says that, contrary to Leibnitz, who claims that there are only ‘real’ contradictions, contradictions take place between propositions while only real objects have ‘real’ oppositions. In other words, Kant distinguishes contradiction and real opposition on the grounds that contradiction is conceptual, whereas real opposition takes place between actual things. On this Kantian basis, Lucio Colletti and Della Volpe argue that, when Marxists speak of social contradictions, they really mean social antagonisms or real oppositions. Laclau objects, however, that Colletti and Della Volpe mix up opposition and antagonism. Antagonism involves the negativity in which the identity of the ‘us’ is denied by the identity of the ‘them’. Opposition involves no such negativity. In a similar manner, Hegel mixes up dialectical contradiction and real opposition. Dialectical and real opposition are both objective relations, but, to explain the movement beyond the opposition, dialectical contradiction illegitimately smuggles into its opposed terms positive or real empirical assumptions: ‘The negative term is itself positive’ and cannot be reached by ‘a purely logical method’ (Laclau, 2014: 105). Laclau objects, then, that dialectical contradiction treats negativity as a transitory moment, not as constitutive, and reduces antagonism, which Coletti, Della Volpe, and other Kantians treat as transitory, to negativity. Moreover, as Laclau argues, antagonism interrupts a full identity, but dialectical and real opposition presuppose full identities. Lastly, Žižek (2006: 562) objects to Laclau’s critiques of the ‘revolutionary’ proletariat. In response, Laclau elaborates the criticisms of Marxist theory 91

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which he and Mouffe produced in Hegemony and socialist strategy. Once again he denies that the working class is a privileged agent, but he goes on to argue that Marx’s account of historical development undermines its centrality because his distinction between it and other groups breaks down. Marx considered the working class a privileged agent and faulted the lumpenproletariat, who are the rabble –​thieves, criminals, poor people –​ excluded from production; however, Marx also considered finance capitalists and unproductive labour in general to be the lumpenproletariat. Laclau (2006: 664) concludes that, as a result, the notion of the lumpenproletariat is not consistent with Marx’s account of productive labour and, as a result, undermines the proletariat’s claim to a central role in historical development. In addition to criticising the Marxist notion of productive labour, Laclau addresses the Marxist claim that the opposition between working class particularism and universal social transformation is resolved as history simplifies the social structure into two classes. He argues, as many have, that, instead of simplifying, the social structure became more complex, and the rationalisations of this complexity multiplied. Some Marxists defended dispersed working class struggles, but these struggles led to the workers’ assimilation, while others defended violent revolution, which succeeds only in preserving working class identity (Laclau, 1996: 50–​51). Similarly, in Rhetorical foundations (2014: 70–​71), Laclau objects that Marxism described the historical development leading to capitalism’s crises and collapse; however, capitalism recovered from its crises and the socialist faith was shattered. Marx claimed, in addition, that in the bourgeois revolution the bourgeoisie support democratic procedures and bring the working class into existence. Since this historical development broke down in Russia, where the working class emerged when the bourgeoisie was too weak to establish democracy, Lenin formulated the notion of combined and uneven development and justified thereby working class support of democratic procedures. Laclau (2006: 669) objects that Lenin and later Marxists still supported the classical view of historical development even though the notion of combined and uneven development did not fit it, and neither did the South American revolutions of the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to this critique of the working class’s revolutionary character, Laclau notes that the Russian revolution introduced the notion of hegemony, which Gramsci developed into a justification of democratic demands. That is, while Hegel considered the state higher than civil society, Marx valued civil society over the state. Unlike Hegel and Marx, Gramsci maintained, Laclau (2005: 107) says, that an underdog, which he terms ‘a particularity –​ a plebs’, ‘claims hegemonically to constitute a populis, while the populous (a universality) can only exist in a plebs’. Democratic demands like bread, peace and land are, then, formulated by an underdog or plebs and presuppose some exclusion or deprivation indicated by their symbolism. The people 92

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as the locus of the democratic demands results from the hegemonic overdetermination of a particular demand which, Laclau (2005: 127) says, functions as an empty signifier or object petit a. José Berlanga objects, however, that such a symbol or signifier works effectively as an ‘object a’ for a collective and produces affection and enjoyment. Laclau thereby ‘pictures a governmental technique that shares its premises with liberalism, as long as it starts from a loss, from a lack, from affection, from the unsustainable solitude of human beings, from demands’ (Berlanga and Ledo, 2010: 176). In other words, because Laclau speaks of a lack or of demands, he implicitly accepts liberalism, which means, Berlanga and Ledo (2010: 162) say, the ‘identification and isolation of demands, attending to them in their specificity, dismantling them from a conception of the world—​what Laclau calls a “system of equivalences”—​ and a neutralizing of the possibility of the dualistic and native antagonism’. Since Laclau’s account of hegemony or populism does not dismantle equivalences or neutralise antagonism, Berlanga and Ledo (2010: 162) add that, for Laclau, ‘the way for civil society to become “people” again is to see how the premise of liberalism fails in its pretension of homogeneity and produces its opposite, “the people” ’. Berlanga is correct; however, Laclau’s poststructuralist discourse situates his accounts of hegemony and populism outside conventional liberalism, whose failures do not, as a consequence, explain his accounts. Moreover, Berlanga rightly faults Laclau’s ‘technified rhetoric’, which makes his views less accessible, but considers it not as beneficial as the ‘eccentric, heterogeneous, supply-​producing rhetoric’ of neoliberalism. As Berlanga (2010: 168) says, ‘it is easier to construct a populist logic upon the old liberal government …, with its logic of demands, than upon neoliberalism and its logic of supply’. Berlanga assumes that the goods which neoliberalism could provide the women’s, gay, black, environmental, peace movements and other groups matter more than their demands, which Laclau’s populism justifies. Since Hegemony and socialist strategy, Laclau has shown, however, that it is the demands of the hegemonic movements which provide the benefits or goods, not neoliberal policies.

The post-​Marxism of Chantal Mouffe Like Laclau, Mouffe elaborates the post-​Marxism which she and Laclau developed in Hegemony and socialist strategy. Her later work also argues that it is hegemony which establishes the political identities and antagonisms explaining the divisions of a democratic politics. Her later work does not, however, fault Hegelian and Althusserian Marxism; it critiques the rationalist theories of Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and others who maintain that democratic rights are universal values based on the end of antagonism and social division and the establishment of consensus (Mouffe, 2005: 10–​13). She 93

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denies that the fall of communism and the failures of social democracy justify the dismissal of antagonism and imposition of centrism, as such theories maintain (Mouffe, 2005: 57–​59). Moreover, she blames such theories for the success of neoliberal policies, including the ‘New Labour’ of Tony Blair, the welfare-​ending policies of Bill Clinton, and the rise of Europe’s right-​wing populist parties (Mouffe, 2000b: 6–​7). One could add the centrist policies Hillary Clinton adopted during her unsuccessful campaign for president of the United States. To begin with, in On the political Mouffe faults the deliberative democracy defended by rationalists like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas and contextualists like Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer, who claim that a culture’s democratic ideals depend on its liberal institutions (2005: 88–​89). She grants that the deliberative democracy of the rationalists accepts a plurality of values but faults its belief that reasoning by equals can establish a consensus. Such claims deny the necessary tension or opposition between modern democracy’s two traditions: the liberal tradition, which emphasises the rule of law, defence of human rights, and the respect of individual liberty; and the democratic tradition, which involves equality, popular sovereignty, and identity of the governing and the governed. These two traditions are necessary but opposed, yet the rationalists’ deliberative democracy does not, she claims, acknowledge this opposition (Mouffe, 2000b, 93; see also Mouffe, 2000a: 9) Their deliberative democracy also does not acknowledge the antagonisms of a pluralist society. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, she explains that such antagonisms derive from the opposition of ‘we’ and ‘they’, which are the political identities establishing the field of politics. Schmitt argues, however, that the political field requires homogeneity, not pluralism, whereas Mouffe (2000b: 50–​51) defends pluralism as well as political antagonism, which, like Laclau, she construes in poststructuralist terms as a constitutive outside or frontier dividing the ‘we’ and the ‘they’. Moreover, she goes on to distinguish ‘antagonism’, which is the violent opposition of friends and enemies, and ‘agonism’, which is the adversarial opposition of a ‘we’ and a ‘they’ working within accepted procedures. It is a democratic politics that changes antagonism into agonism (Mouffe, 2000b: 13). Robert T. Tally, Jr. (2007: 4) objects that, for all this criticism of deliberative democracy, Mouffe does not advocate anything different in practice; however, this objection mistakes her objective, which is to promote a left-​wing, pluralist politics justifying the women’s, African-​American, trade union, environmental, and other movements, rather than the rational consensus of the deliberative theorists. More comprehensive, Margret Grebowicz (2007) grants that the consensus sought by deliberative democracy establishes an ethical ideal, as Mouffe claims, but denies that this ideal precludes antagonism. The account of the political developed by Jean-​François Lyotard and others 94

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also establishes an ethical norm but, Grebowicz (2007: 26) says, it allows antagonism, which she equates with violence: It is not the case, however, that the very idea of viewing politics through the lens of ethics necessarily commits one to plurality without antagonism. For Lyotard, … the encounter with the other is precisely the essential possibility of violence. Mouffe grants that hegemony does not preclude violence but identifies antagonism with the ‘we/​they’ opposition, which in a democracy is, she argues, adversarial or agonistic, rather than violent (2000b: 13). Grebowski (2007: 27) also objects that such an adversarial opposition is necessarily ethical: ‘How does one recognise the legitimacy of an opponent, if not by means of the ethical encounter?’ Mouffe maintains, however, that the ‘they’ or other is constructed as a frontier or outside, not as an ethical encounter, and that in agonism the other agrees to abide by rules, rather than violently engage enemies in antagonism. Mouffe effectively shows, in short, that the rationalists’ deliberative democracy denies the importance of antagonism in a pluralist democracy. So does the contextualist democracy of Rorty and others, but it draws on the philosophy of language of Ludwig Wittgenstein to suggest that liberal democracy is only one language game among others. Rorty argues, for example, that one cannot derive a universalist theory of democracy from a philosophy of language because, as Wittegenstein claims, such philosophies are based on ‘shared forms of life’ (Mouffe, 2000b: 65). Mouffe grants that Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not support such a universalist theory but objects, just the same, that Rorty never denies the superiority of the democratic ‘way of life’ or acknowledges the role of antagonism in constituting political identities (Mouffe, 2000b: 67). As a consequence, neither deliberative nor contextualist democracies recognise that hegemony imposes the antagonisms which constitute such identities. Deliberative democracy especially dismisses such antagonism in the name of a consensus imposed by rational deliberation (Mouffe, 2000b: 89). More importantly, Mouffe (2005: 68) shows that establishing such a consensus has given rise to right-​wing parties like the French Front National, which challenges the centrism of conservatives and socialists. With the fall of communism and the growth of globalised corporations, conservative scholars like Anthony Giddens argue, in addition, that our ‘globalized, post-​industrial democracy’ puts such antagonisms aside and fosters a ‘new life’ politics addressing the individual, letting him or her make things happen (Mouffe, 2000b: 109). Mouffe (2000b: 26–​27) objects that, embodied in the New Labour of Tony Blair and the democratic conservatism of Bill Clinton, such an individualist politics denies real conflicts of interest, 95

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fosters community and solidarity, not antagonism, in the workplace, and rejects the benefits of social democracy. In Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, unlike the rationalists, favour a break with modernity and a transition to a postmodern or ‘alter modern’ society because of globalisation and the evolution of post-​Fordism, in which the collective labour power of the intellectual and of immaterial labour, which they term the multitude, displaces factory workers. Mouffe objects that what explains post-​Fordism is not the workers’ struggles but capitalist exploitation, which turned the demands for autonomy of the 1960s into a new hegemony (Mouffe and Wagner, 2013: 71–​72). It is the many struggles of the women’s, black, trade union and other political movements which will, she argues, transform the institutions of the modern state. By contrast, Hardt and Negri’s strategy of withdrawal from social institutions or exodus from them is based on a policy of immanence preserving Marx’s belief that the institutions of the state will wither away (Mouffe and Wagner, 2013: 79). This strategy neglects radical negativity or antagonism. Moreover, the policy of immanence assumes social space is homogeneous, whereas antagonism assumes that such a space is heterogeneous (Mouffe and Wagner, 2013: 78–​79). In Agonistics: thinking the world politically (2013), Mouffe elaborates her opposition to the liberal rationalism imposing consensus, defending individualism, and denying collective forms of identity. Once again she claims that this liberal belief denies the importance of antagonism, which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony and socialist strategy, is based on a radical negativity making objectivity impossible (Mouffe and Wagner, 2013: xi). Antagonism means politics is about a ‘we/​they’ opposition constituted by a ‘something other’ establishing an outside and expressing the passions denied by the rationalist view. Agonism makes this opposition adversarial, rather than antagonistic. Having restated her views in this way, she proceeds to argue for a pluralist or ‘multipolar’ world with different political orders and no central authority. In this world, democracy may take many forms besides the liberal, western model (Mouffe, 2012: 639). Some countries, like China, will not be democratic but this difference will not foster antagonism (Mouffe, 2012: 639). Other cultures, including Islamic cultures, explain personal autonomy and individual lives in different ways (Mouffe, 2005: 32). In the case of the European Union, she argues that it should not accept the individualist and rationalist framework because that framework does not grasp collective or national and regional forms of identification or allow the citizens of the EU to examine different ways of envisaging those forms of identification (Mouffe, 2012: 637). An agonistic EU would, moreover, acknowledge the multiplicity and diversity of its collective identities and allow people to participate in a variety of democracies, including regions as well as nation states (Mouffe, 2012: 639). Janet Conway and Jakeet Singh 96

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(2011: 692) object that, like Laclau, Mouffe does not acknowledge ‘European colonial domination over most of the world’; however, Mouffe (2012: 638–​ 639) does favour a ‘multipolar world’, which would have different political centres expressing the peoples’ various choices and which, as a consequence, would oppose European colonialism. Similarly, Tally objects that Mouffe neglects the economic conditions affecting the political. The way the world looks has less to do with politics and much more to do with globalisation and imperialism (Tally, 2007: 6). Mouffe (2012: 634) maintains, however, that an agonistic EU would enable nation states to survive in a globalised world. Without an agonistic EU, the left has no alternative to the neoliberal globalisation allowing corporations to lay off domestic workers and hire cheap labour in foreign countries. The deregulation and privatisation promoted by New Labour in the UK and Conservative Democrats in the US have only consolidated the neoliberal hegemony. To an extent, in the 2016 presidential elections in the US, Hillary Clinton’s loss can be attributed to her reluctance to address the issues posed by this neoliberal hegemony.

Conclusion Since the publication of Hegemony and socialist strategy, Laclau and Mouffe have elaborated their critiques of traditional Marxist and liberal theory. They still defend the hegemony of left-​wing movements, but they have developed this view in different ways. As I have suggested, Laclau takes poststructuralist accounts of discourse or rhetoric to explain hegemony. This discourse provides insightful accounts of populism, including the notions of antagonism, frontiers or we/​they oppositions, empty signifiers, equivalential logics, differential logics, ideology, and heterogeneity. Mouffe, by contrast, elaborates the notion of the fissured subject which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony (1985: 122–​134), was constituted by the antagonisms of diverse social movements or the dislocation of social structures; however, her new accounts of the antagonisms or, as she says, ‘agonisms’ dividing the political field forcefully oppose universal norms of rationality or democracy in order to establish a genuine pluralism in both national and global contexts, including the European Union. Taken together, their work shows how fully and forcefully post-​Marxist theory can justify and support the radical democracy enabling feminist, African-​American, environmental, trade union, and other modern political movements to establish their hegemony. References Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, New York: Random House.

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Badiou, A. (2002) Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil, translated by Peter Hallward, New York: Verso. Balibar, É. (1996) ‘Structural causality, overdetermination, and antagonism’, in A. Callari and D.F. Ruccio (eds), Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory: essays in the Althusserian tradition, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Berlanga, J.L. and Ledo, J. (2010) ‘The liberal roots of populism: a critique of Laclau’, The New Centennial Review, 10(2): 151–​182. Conway, J. and Singh, J. (2011) ‘Radical democracy in global perspective: notes from the pluriverse’, Third World Quarterly, 32(4): 689–​706. Grebowicz, M. (2007) ‘Standpoint theory and the possibility of justice: a Lyotardian critique of the democratization of knowledge’, Hypatia, 22(4): 16–​29. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, New York: Verso. Laclau, E. (2006) ‘Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics’, Critical Inquiry, 32(4): 646–​680. Laclau, E. (2014) The rhetorical foundations of society, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Marchart, O. (2005) ‘In the name of the people: populist reason and the subject of the political’, Diacritics, 35(3): 3–​19. Mouffe, C. (2000a) Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism?, Political Science Series 72, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna. Mouffe, C. (2000b) The democratic paradox, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the political, New York: Routledge. Mouffe, C. (2012) ‘An agonistic approach to the future of Europe’, New Literary History, 43(4): 629–​640. Mouffe, C. and Wagner, E. (2013) Agonistics: thinking the world politically, New York: Verso. Tally, R.T., Jr. (2007) ‘The agony of the political’, Postmodern Culture, 17(2), Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/​pmc.2007.0024 Žižek, S. (2006) ‘Against the populist temptation’, Critical Inquiry, 32(3): 551–​575.

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Laclau and Mouffe’s Blind Spots: A Reply to Philip Goldstein Philippe Fournier

Philip Goldstein’s essay does an excellent job at tracing the main tenets and evolution of Laclau and Mouffe’s respective bodies of work. Rather than going through the finer details of Goldstein’s demonstration, I would like to focus on some of the aporias in Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory, particularly as they relate to ideology and resistance. Despite agreeing with them on a number of points, I will argue that Laclau and Mouffe’s theorisation of ideology and resistance does not provide us with a satisfactory conception of subjectivity, critique and political strategy. More generally, their iconoclastic brand of post-​Marxism, even as it has evolved and adapted over time, points to the enduring and seemingly unbridgeable gap between poststructuralism and Marxist critical theory. On the surface, this critique, and the debate that flows from it, looks rather tired and passé. Recent strands of thought like new materialism are explicit in their willingness to move beyond such disputes. Even for those that continue to identify as poststructuralists or Marxists, inter-​theoretical debates are few and far between and scholarly communities are increasingly insular and homogenised. Indeed, the attempt to synthesise or least take seriously the challenge of French theorists like Foucault and Derrida to the universalising and determinist features of Modernity and therefore Marxism, bravely attempted by intellectual stalwarts like Laclau and Mouffe, seems to have faded out of view, especially outside political and cultural theory. If this enterprise seems fraught at the theoretical level, one cannot but recognise that, from a practical standpoint, hesitation between horizontality (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013) and verticality or identity and class still infuses debates within sociopolitical movements. Since the representations, demands and actions of these movements are surely important concerns for 99

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social theorists, perhaps intractable philosophical debates about agency and structure, discourse and materiality, universal norms and value relativism are here to stay, even if there is little hope that these will be resolved or superseded any time soon. Let us start with Laclau’s conception of ideology, which has ramifications on a whole range of issues. For Laclau, the ‘critique of ideology’ is made difficult, if not impossible by the fact that there is no extra-​discursive standpoint from which we can judge whether there is some distortion at work in individual or popular consciousness. This leads him to assert that an approach doing away with distortion and asserting that there are only incommensurable ‘discourses’ amounts to a (seemingly uncritical) ‘new positivism and objectivism’ (Laclau, 1997: 299). Rather than settling for the notion that all (floating) signifiers are in some sense interchangeable, Laclau suggests that ‘the very notion of an extra-​discursive viewpoint is the ideological illusion par excellence’ (1997: 299). That is to say, the teleological, rationalist and universalist bents of modern thought are all instances of ideological closure, which must be resisted at every turn. At the same time, Laclau tells us that ideology is unavoidable as it refers to our desire for transcendence, which our representations are invariably unable to grasp. We can only gesture at broad signifiers like freedom; our theories and representations will only ever be approximations. However, as Žižek (1989) attests, these illusionary pursuits are necessary to keep us from going over the edge. Laclau’s prudence is in order as universals have had a habit of turning into exclusionary philosophies and political programmes that elide singularity. Seen in this light, the project of renovating Marxism initiated by Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and socialist strategy is a worthy one. However, I agree with Maeva Cooke’s (2006) assessment that one needs to distinguish between metaphysical and ideological closure in order to ground any sort of critique of ideology. While metaphysical closure is a ‘normal’ and ongoing feature of subject formation, ideological closure ‘results when projections of metaphysical closure are used to maintain and reproduce social relations of oppressive power’ (Cooke, 2006). Knowing that the attainment of fullness is neither possible nor desirable, it must nonetheless be possible to identify structures of oppression and wilful as well as unwitting strategies to maintain them. Marxist thinkers from Gramsci to Althusser have defined ideology both as lived-​experience and distortion, meaning that it is both a cognitive map to the social and political world and an instance of false consciousness. We need to keep hold of a (qualified) version of the latter in order for critique to be possible. Laclau and Mouffe’s version of ideology also lacks a clear indictment of liberalism and capitalism, which is understandable considering they do not see ideology as a stable collection of ideas (Freeden, 1996) that can be studied and critiqued and that they value the representation of difference within a liberal-​institutional framework. Laclau and Mouffe’s 100

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radical democratic agenda, even as it entails statist forms of representation, would not be so problematic if it were better articulated against the backdrop of evolving material conditions. Published in the mid-​1980s, Laclau and Mouffe’s reconstruction of Gramscian hegemony into a convergence of disparate discourses, which establish chains of equivalence, does not translate into a sufficiently firm warning about the emerging neoliberal rationality under Thatcher and Reagan. Indeed, what they see as the ‘democratic consumer culture’ of the 1980s is in some ways a positive omen because it habilitates and frees individuality from the rigid identifications of the past (Bertram, 1995: 89). What Laclau and Mouffe fail to see, over and above a definition of neoliberalism as a contingent discursive formation, is the extent to which it inhabits and shapes the soul of the individual subject, recuperates individuality to its own ends and fixes the material parameters of existence. The problem the left is faced with after nearly four decades of neoliberalism goes well beyond lapsing into essentialism. Its predicament is more existential than academic. Its challenge is to unpick and overturn the deeply ingrained common sense (such as meritocracy and individual responsibility) notions that have seeped into individual and collective consciousness and the structural changes that have reshaped the workings of capitalism on a global scale. It has become clear that opposing and resisting neoliberalism will take more than celebrating the dislocation of the subject (and the democratic (re)openings that supposedly follow) or hoping for an accidental convergence of disparate discourses. This brings me to the issue of resistance in Laclau and Mouffe’s work. At the end of his essay, Goldstein argues that Laclau and Mouffe’s work is key to help us understand contemporary social movements. To some extent, this is correct. The multiplicity of struggles that emerged in the throes of the cultural revolution in the 1960s forced a reconsideration of Marxist analytical categories. Laclau and Mouffe are right to assert that social class is no longer the sole determinant of identity and historical development. In many ways, deconstructionist and discourse-​based critiques were more appropriate to theorise hybridity and metaphysical doubt in an era of increased intercultural exchange and spatiotemporal compression. Laclau and Mouffe see the multifarious expressions of singularity as opening onto a radically antagonistic social and political space, one which institutional representation struggles to cope with. Their notion of radical democracy means to make liberal-​democratic institutions ever more inclusive, by continually breaking down the barriers that restrict or deny diverse forms of existence. This is why Laclau prefers to speak of the people, as an aggregation of singularities, instead of class. Here, Laclau and Mouffe are influenced by Gramsci’s injunction that there needs to be a wilful aggregation of social struggles and a form of universal symbolism for there to be any kind of resistance. But for Gramsci, 101

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counter-​hegemony has a precise objective and normative content. It is directed against capitalist oppression and seeks to avoid the collective descent into fascism. In this context, individuals who resist and subscribe to universal symbolism do so consciously, even as their identities are built up through their experience of struggle and through sociocultural context. For Laclau and Mouffe, however, hegemony and counter-​hegemonic processes are set in the post-​ideological realm of language. At its worst, this means that there is no way of distinguishing between left and right populism, that individual subjects cannot rise above the play of language games and that discourses are not grounded in any stable feature of socioeconomic life. Again, the big problem here is that neoliberalism, far from being threatened by it, has been particularly accommodating towards multiplicity and difference. As Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued, Empire’s biopolitical machine has been very successful at recuperating the creativity emanating from the multitude. It has also filled floating signifiers like freedom with libidinous enjoyment and has basically replaced the more or less organic solidarity of the welfare state with a barely updated Darwinism. This is the full circle of ideology –​it is instinctive enough to work through individual perception without it being entirely conscious or even fully accepted and its main tenets are willingly disseminated by those who stand to gain from it. Combined with the rise of inequality, wage compression and economic volatility, the celebration of difference has at least contributed to a backlash among the increasingly apprehensive middle and working classes in the Western world. It is less than clear that Laclau and Mouffe provide us with the means to actively change the meaning and operationalisation of signifiers like freedom. Presumably taking her cue from Foucault, Mouffe argues that resistance is not directed at a single enemy from a single subject position but that it takes place at multiple nodal points. What Mouffe forgets is Foucault’s assertion that capillary power cohabitates with sovereign power (this is admittedly underdeveloped in Foucault), which hints at centralised political and class power. Resistance must take place on different scales and registers at one and the same time. Laclau and Mouffe’s momentous re-​reading of Marxism in the era of new social movements has greatly contributed to its internal critique. The question is whether several decades later this internal critique, fuelled by anti-​essentialist philosophical postures, has ‘done its job’; in other words, if it has sufficiently softened the exclusionary and determinist biases of Marxism, provided we hold on to the critique of and emancipation from capitalism. As mentioned earlier, the ongoing antipathy or mutual indifference between poststructuralists and Marxists is reflected in a series of very real challenges and contradictions within social movements and political formations. These continue to make resisting neoliberalism or imagining alternatives to it a burdensome task. Lines of fracture on the left have partly 102

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enabled an obviously irrational and destructive socioeconomic model to maintain itself. They have also, sometimes unwisely, ended up favouring identity politics over economic/​material conditions. These divides have an obvious impact on counter-​hegemonic or anti-​elite strategies as they prevent any sort of determination on what comes first, on what should be the priority. Contra Laclau and Mouffe, I think it is high time that we look for commonalities, not through the fog of singularities, but through the basic elements that, for example, Trump’s and Sanders’ supporters can agree on. Otherwise, existing cultural divides, which we should strive to untangle slowly, patiently and organically, will only widen. References Bertram, B. (1995) ‘New reflections on the “revolutionary” politics of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’, boundary 2, 22(3): 81–​110. Cooke, M. (2006) ‘Resurrecting the rationality of ideology critique: reflections on Laclau on ideology’, Constellations, 13(1): 4–​20. Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and political theory: a conceptual approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laclau, E. (1997) ‘The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology’, MLN, 112(3): 297–​321. Prentoulis, M. and Thomassen, L. (2013) ‘Political theory in the square: Protest, representation and subjectification’, Contemporary Political Theory, 12(3):166–​184. Žižek, S. (1989) The sublime object of ideology, London and New York: Verso.

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Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-​Material Knot1 as a Non-​hierarchical Ontology Nico Carpentier

Introduction In their discourse-​theoretical work, Laclau and Mouffe explicitly validate the material,2 for instance, when they write that ‘the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 82, emphasis in original). This does not mean that the material is strongly present in their work. Arguably, more can be done to make the material visible in relation to discourse theory. This chapter aims to contribute to the enrichment of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory by combining and cross-​fertilising it with new materialist approaches. Discourse theory remains the starting point of this enrichment operation, though, which is why the chapter starts with a discussion on the role the material plays in discourse theory, in order to then argue for a more extensive role for the material. This cross-​fertilisation of the discursive and the material is labelled the discursive-​material knot, to capture and emphasise the idea that the relationship is non-​hierarchical. This strategy is, in other words, aimed at preventing one of the two components from gaining the upper hand. In order to achieve this objective, the chapter will turn to the notion of the assemblage, but also two less commonly used concepts –​the invitation and the investment –​will be introduced. It important to emphasise, even in the introduction, that the discourse-​ theoretical and the new materialist approaches both validate the material and the discursive, respectively, even if they do not develop their theoretical reflections on this ‘other’ component as much as they could have done. The post-​Marxist agenda in Laclau and Mouffe’s work is only one example.3 104

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In Hegemony and socialist strategy (hereafter HSS), Laclau and Mouffe aim to decentre the notion of class, a position that Wood ([1986] 1999: 4) has called the ‘declassing of the socialist project’, but which is better labelled as the de-​essentialisation of class, where also the discursive nature of class is acknowledged and the creation of a chain of equivalence between different democratic struggles is proposed, without ignoring the main thrust of the socialist project. Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 192) describe this position in the following words: Every project for radical democracy includes, as we have said, the socialist dimension –​that is to say, the abolition of capitalist relations of production; but it rejects the idea that from this abolition there necessarily follows the elimination of other equalities. But this statement, with its reference to the relations of production, also illustrates that the material dimension has indeed been integrated into Laclau and Mouffe’s work without, though, developing a sophisticated theoretical reflection about the material, and its entanglement with the discursive. This tension between absence and presence highlights the need for more theoretical reflections on entanglement itself, moving beyond the mere recognition of the ‘other’ side as important, but developing a non-​hierarchical model that carefully looks at the interactions between the discursive and the material, reflecting not only whether the discursive and material are entangled, but how this entanglement works, and which concepts are needed to organise this reflection. This chapter will propose one way of thinking about the mechanics of entanglement, as a discursive-​material knot, highlighting the theoretical-​conceptual potential of three concepts, namely the assemblage, the invitation and the investment. 4

Discourse theory’s relationship to the material

One of the main critiques on Laclau and Mouffe’s work is of relevance here, namely the label of idealism that has often been attributed to their work. One example is Joseph’s (2003: 112) statement, commenting on Laclau and Mouffe’s work: ‘the idea that an object only acquires an identity through discourse is a clear example of the epistemic fallacy or the reduction of intrinsic being to transformative knowledge’. He continues that Laclau and Mouffe’s idealism ‘reduces material things to the conceptions, not of an individual or a geist, but of a community’ (Joseph, 2003: 112). Others, in particular Geras (1987: 65), are harsher in their language, accusing Laclau and Mouffe of a ‘shamefaced idealism’. This critique has, in turn, provoked responses of disagreement with Geras’s rather extreme position, but the idealism thesis is often maintained. For instance, Edward (2008) argued that 105

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it was appropriate ‘… to label Laclau and Mouffe as idealist because their discourse analysis concentrates on how interpretations and meanings are given to the world from humans. This is their “constructivist idealism” ’. In Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985, 1987) work, we do find a rather clear acknowledgement of the material dimension of social reality, which is indeed combined with the position that discourses are necessary to generate meaning for the material. This –​what Howarth (1998: 289) called their –​‘radical materialism’ opposes the ‘… classical dichotomy between an objective field constituted outside of any discursive intervention, and a discourse consisting of the pure expression of thought’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108). Pre-​ empting the idealism critique, their position is defended through a series of examples5 that refer to materiality: An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’ depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertions that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108) Several other authors have defended Laclau and Mouffe’s claim on a non-​ idealist position (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 109; Schou, 2016: 302). Also, Torfing (1999: 45–​48) argued that Laclau and Mouffe’s model is materialist because it questions the symmetry between the ‘realist object’ and the ‘object of thought’. This (described by Torfing as) non-​idealist constructivism presupposes ‘… the incompleteness of both the given world and the subject that undertakes the construction of the object’ (Torfing, 1999: 48). One more author that defended Laclau and Mouffe against the idealism critique is Hall (1997: 44–​45), who constructed his own language game in order to make this point: Is Foucault saying … that ‘nothing exists outside of discourse?’ In fact, Foucault does not deny that things can have a real, material existence in the world. What he does argue is that ‘nothing has any meaning outside of discourse’. As Laclau and Mouffe put it: ‘we use it [the term discourse] to emphasize the fact that every social configuration is meaningful’. There are also more specific traces of the material in Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. One important trace can be found in Laclau’s use of the notion of dislocation. Although this concept already featured in HSS, it 106

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took a more prominent role in New reflections on the revolution of our time, where Laclau (1990b) used it to further theorise the limits of discursive structures. In most cases, dislocation gains its meaning in relation to the discursive; for instance, when Laclau (1990a: 39) claimed that ‘every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time’. In this meaning, dislocation supports the notion of contingency, but is also seen as the ‘very form of possibility’ (Laclau, 1990a: 42), as dislocations show that the structure (before the dislocation) is only one of the possible articulatory ensembles (Laclau, 1990a: 43). It thus becomes ‘the very form of temporality, possibility and freedom’ (Laclau, 1990a: 41–​43, summarised by Torfing, 1999: 149). At the same time, there is also a more material use of the dislocation in Laclau’s work; for instance, when he talked about the ‘dislocatory effects of emerging capitalism on the lives of workers’: ‘They are well known: the destruction of traditional communities, the brutal and exhausting discipline of the factory, low wages and insecurity of work’ (Laclau, 1990a: 39). This connection between the dislocation and material events becomes even clearer in Torfing’s (1999: 148, my emphasis) description of the dislocation, which, according to him, ‘refers to the emergence of an event, or a set of events, that cannot be represented, symbolized, or in other ways domesticated by the discursive structure which is therefore disrupted’. It is important to clarify that in this context the notion of the event refers to a material change that at least has the potential to dislocate a particular discourse. An event, in its materiality, dislocates a discourse because this discourse turns out to be unable to attribute meaning to the event, while the event simultaneously invites for its incorporation into this discourse. The emphasis on change (or on novelty) and the event’s dislocatory potential can be illustrated with Žižek’s (2014: 11) description of ‘The basic feature of an event’ as ‘the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme’. In Deleuze’s (1993: 77) reference to the event as ‘a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples’, support for the more material emphasis can be found. He goes on to stress the movement and articulation of the event: ‘extensive series have intrinsic properties (for example, height, intensity, timbre of a sound, a tint, a value, a saturation of color), which enter on their own account in new infinite series’ (Deleuze, 1993: 77). There are other traces of the material in Laclau and Mouffe’s work. As Biglieri and Perelló (2011) have argued, Laclau’s (2005) On populist reason introduces the material6 through the concept of social heterogeneity. Laclau defined this concept as a particular exteriority: ‘the kind of exteriority we are referring to now presupposes not only an exteriority to something within a space of representation, but to the space of representation as 107

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such. I will call this type of exteriority social heterogeneity’ (Laclau, 2005: 140). Biglieri and Perelló, (2011: 60) labelled it ‘a structure with a beyond’. Another trace of the material in Laclau and Mouffe’s work occurs through the performative. For instance, in HSS, they write ‘we will affirm the material character of every discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108, emphasis removed), a position they then illustrate by referring to Wittgenstein’s famous language game and the performative dimension of language. Even if these traces of the material exist –​(mainly) in Laclau’s work –​and despite Laclau and Mouffe’s plea for a position that Howarth (1998: 289) termed ‘radical materialism’ as a ‘tertium quid’, their strong orientation towards the analysis of the discursive components of reality, and, more specifically, towards the analysis of signifiers as democracy, socialism and populism, remains. Practically speaking, this means that in their specific analyses they will pay considerably less attention to material components of reality (as, for example, bodies, objects, organisations, technologies, or human interactions).If we return to some of the critiques on Laclau and Mouffe’s alleged idealism, we can find this kind of argumentation. For instance, Edward (2008) wrote that Laclau and Mouffe are ‘more concerned with discourse than they are about geology (inorganic), biology (organic), and technology (alloplastic)’. A similar, but stronger critique can be found in Joseph (2003: 112), who, in my opinion, overstated the argument, but is still a good representative of the critique that the material remains too much at a distance, in particular when he wrote: To say that without discourse the object is meaningless is to say that its natural properties are insignificant until discursively articulated, that it is in fact discursively rather than physically constituted. And this leads to the idealist notion that changes in description lead to changes in the object itself.

The concept of the discursive-​material knot Although Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory frequently emphasised the importance of the material, these critiques make it clear that there is still a need to expand the theoretical reflections on the ways that the discursive and the material are entangled. One metaphor to capture (and label) this entanglement, is the knot,7 and more in particular, the discursive-​material knot (Carpentier, 2017). Different theoretical frameworks and traditions have identified this need to further theorise the mechanics of entanglement, and this project is definitely not the first plea to study what Hardy and Thomas (2015: 692) have called ‘the material effects of discourse and the discursive effects of materiality’. 108

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What makes this project different is that it takes, as the previous parts already suggest, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory as the starting point, considering (at least some of) the critiques on discourse theory,8 oscillating between loyalty and disloyalty, in always respectful ways for their work. This re-​thinking is aimed at expanding discourse theory, infusing (or infecting) it more with the material and using the mutation to feed further theorisations and empirical research. At the same time, it is important not to privilege the discursive over the material, or the material over the discursive. The discursive-​material knot needs to be a non-​hierarchical9 ontology that theorises the knotted interactions of the discursive and the material as restless and contingent, sometimes incessantly changing shapes and sometimes deeply sedimented. But this relation of interdependence should never result in one component becoming more important than the other. In this sense, the metaphor of the knot is important to express this intense and inseparable entanglement, but we should also acknowledge the limits of this metaphor and keep in mind that the knot can never be unravelled or disentangled. What we can do, as analysts of the discursive-​material knot, is follow the rope (a bit like Actor Network Theory (ANT) researchers ‘follow the actor’ –​see Law, 1991; Ruming, 2009). When engaging in this expanding discourse theory project, the accomplishments of ‘old’ materialisms need to be acknowledged (after all, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is a post-​Marxist theory) but especially the developments in the field of new materialism10 (which aims to rethink and revalidate the role of the material in cultural theory) offer a solid ground for an expanding discourse theory project. In the new materialist approach (or set of approaches), the material is seen as ‘agential matter’ (Barad, 2007: 246) or ‘generative matter’, a concept that Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012: 93) attributed to DeLanda (1996). Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012: 93) immediately added to their reference to ‘generative matter’ that the new materialist approaches are aimed at avoiding being locked in the dualism of ‘matter-​of-​opposed-​to-​signification’. Instead, new materialism ‘captures mattering as simultaneously material and representational’(Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 93), a crucial position that prevents either the role of the discursive in producing meaning, or the agentic role of the material, being ignored. A similar position can be found with Rahman and Witz (2003: 256), when they wrote: The social constructionism being worked at here is not one that is limited by physical matter, but rather one that is able to incorporate body matters as an indivisible part of lived, gendered experience and action. Thus the scope of the social or the cultural evoked … confronts the limits of constructionism, whether sociological or discursive, by 109

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sometimes admitting, sometimes asserting the body as a problematic yet inescapable component of a social ontology of gender and sexuality. The new materialist agenda is translated in a focus on a ‘material-​semiotic actor’ (Haraway, 1988: 595), or the use of a ‘material-​discursive’ (Barad, 2007) approach. At the risk of engaging in a semantic play: the order of the two concepts, as the discursive-​material, matters. It is important, first of all, to emphasise that the starting point of this project is discourse-​theoretical, which is then combined with an effort to make the material more visible in this discourse-​theoretical strand. This more developed approach towards the discursive has an additional advantage, as it enriches new materialism and enables us to think more in detail how the discursive and the material are entangled. Also, the label of the discursive-​material knot has been introduced to generate distance from some of the new materialist stances that are not shared. Although I am very sympathetic towards the idea of moving away from the discursive-​material dualism, and I applaud the existence of pleas to strike a balance, the alleged domination of the representational, and the need to give the representational and linguisticality ‘its proper place, that is, a more modest one’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 98), is sometimes hard to agree with, and could be interpreted as imperialist strategies. There are more kind versions (such as Kirby 2006), but also some of the new materialist language towards post-​structuralist authors, such as Butler, is sometimes slightly uncomfortable. This citation from Barad (2007: 145, my emphasis) contains some of the language that generates my discomfort: … however, Butler’s concern is limited to the production of human bodies (and only certain aspects of their production, at that), and her theorization of materialization is parasitic on Foucault’s notions of regulatory power and discursive practices, which are limited to the domain of human social practices.

Positioning the assemblage at the ontic level It is also important to keep in mind that the ontology of the discursive-​ material knot operates at all levels of the social. Here, Foucault’s (1977) ‘micro-​physics of power’ offers a good parallel to the multi-​level nature of the discursive-​material knot. Foucault argued in Discipline and punish that the workings of power enter the micro-​processes of the social, structuring all our social relations. A similar argument can be made for the discursive-​material knot. The knotted interaction of the discursive and the material – in always particular and contingent ways –​structures large-​scale assemblages, such as 110

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state apparatuses, armies or markets, but it also enters into the micro-​processes of the everyday without these different levels ever becoming disconnected. In order to capture the translation of the discursive-​material knot into social practice, the use of the concept of the assemblage is proposed. While the discursive-​material knot is theoretically located at the ontological level, the assemblage is positioned here at the ontic level, in order to theorise how the flows that characterise the social, with their endless range of possibilities to become fixated and to fixate, are arrested and channelled into particular combinations of the discursive and the material. It is the assemblage that enables us to think of the social as a tapestry, characterised by assemblages with their increased densities, surrounded by ever-​moving flows.11 In order to theorise and clarify the role of the assemblage in the discursive-​ material knot, we can turn to Guattari’s work on the machine. In his chapter ‘Machinic heterogenesis’, Guattari (1993: 14) referred to the ‘first type of machine that comes to mind’, which is that of ‘material assemblages … put together artificially by the human hand and by the intermediary of other machines, according to the diagrammatic schemas whose end is the production of effects, of products, or of particular services’. In the next sentence, Guattari immediately pointed to the need to go beyond the ‘delimitation of machines in the strict sense to include the functional ensemble that associates them with humankind to multiple components’. This list of components is lengthy, and includes material and energy components, semiotic components that are diagrammatic and algorithmic, social components, components related to the human body, representational components, investments by what he called desiring machines, and abstract machines. Guattari (1993: 14) termed this functional ensemble the machinic assemblage, in which the basic material components are called proto-​ machines: ‘the utensils, the instruments, the simplest tools and, … the least structured pieces of a machinery will acquire the status of a proto-​machine’. Still, Guattari’s approach to the machinic assemblage includes more than matter. For instance, DeLanda’s (2006: 12) work on assemblage theory uses this idea, as he distinguishes between the material and the expressive roles of the components of assemblages, although he is quick to add –​and rightfully so –​that ‘expressivity cannot be reduced to language and symbols’. If we cross-​fertilise these ideas with the discourse-​theoretical approach used here as starting point, then we can only repeat that the discursive dimension and our sense-​making practices of proto-​machines should also be considered of fundamental importance in assemblages. Finally, also contingency remains present in the discursive-​material knot (and in ‘its’ assemblages). Contingency can originate from the interaction between both components of the discursive-​material knot, or from changes over time. Again, the discursive-​material knot functions without necessary hierarchy between its constituent components. The introduction of more 111

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agencies, also in relationship to technologies, proto-​machines and other materials, shows a richer landscape of forces that can destabilise existing sedimentations, and create more contingency. If we combine the logics of the assemblage and articulation, then the constitution of an assemblage can be altered through any re-​articulation or disarticulation, whether this is discursive or material. For instance, Massey’s (2005: 94) words –​‘about the truly productive characteristics of material spatiality’ –​show the contingency brought about by the material: … its potential for the happenstance juxtaposition of previously unrelated trajectories, that business of walking round a corner and bumping into alterity, of having (somehow, and well or badly) to get on with neighbours who have got ‘here’ (this block of flats, this neighbourhood, this country –​this meeting-​up) by different routes from you; your being here together is, in that sense, quite uncoordinated.

Examples of knots and assemblages The recognition of the interconnectedness of the discursive and the material is hardly new. It has been made in a variety of fields, in many different ways, using very different conceptual frameworks. For instance, in cultural studies, there has been a very strong emphasis on the process of meaning-​giving in discussing media content, but also media technologies. As Du Gay et al (1997) illustrated with the case of the Sony Walkman, a very material media object was used to generate distinctions and to support their user’s identity constructions. These meanings are attributed through the production process of these proto-​machines, but also, the consumption process is a location of a multitude of meanings, which these authors position as part of the ‘circuit of culture’. From a position within architecture studies, Dovey (2013: 134) has made a similar point, emphasising the interconnection between the discursive and the material, for instance, when she wrote that, ‘the assemblage is not a thing nor a collection of things. Buildings, rooms, trees, cars, gates, people and signs all connect in certain ways and it is the connection between them that make an assemblage.’ Also in cultural geography, and in particular in discussions about spatiality, we can find this emphasis on the interconnection between the discursive and the material. Castree (1995: 13, emphasis in original) approvingly pointed to the ‘attempts to take seriously … the materiality of nature’, but also argued for combining this taking-​the-​material-​seriously with a constructionist position ‘because we always come to understand “natural” entities posited as ontologically real and outside us through and in terms of categories, concepts and language’ (Castree, 1995: 15). In For space, Massey (2005: 9) formulated three opening propositions, 112

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which also illustrate the combination of the material and the discursive in her thinking about space. The first proposition is ‘that we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions’ (Massey, 2005: 9). Second, Massey emphasised the plurality of space, where ‘Multiplicity and space [are seen as] as co-​constitutive’ (Massey, 2005: 9). Finally, Massey’s (2005: 9) third proposition is ‘that we recognise space as always under construction’: Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-​ between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. When focusing on place –​as a concrete ‘point in space’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2014: 267), or as a ‘type of object’ (Tuan, 1977: 17) –​its constructed nature is often emphasised. Here we can find the combination of material construction processes, where ‘places are marked out by boundaries (walls, fences), and by physical features (buildings, trees, pavements, street furniture)’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2014: 267), with social (or discursive) construction processes where ‘norms, values and meanings’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2014: 267) are invested in particular places. These materials are simultaneously coded (or double-​coded –​see Jencks, 1977) and given meaning in a variety of ways. Even if, ‘[c]‌ompared to space, place is a calm center of established values’ (Tuan, 1977: 54), it is still the object of varying signifying practices, and of discursive struggle, in which the material, through the logic of the invitation, plays an important role. Cresswell (1996: 59) stressed both that significatory diversity and the invitational role of the material when he wrote: places are the result of tensions between different meanings and … they are also active players in these tensions. Places have more than one meaning. Some meanings are complementary and fit neatly on top of each other. Other meanings seem to be incompatible –​to be awkward and displaced –​if they are located with other meanings. The incompatibility is not natural or inevitable (we need only realise that some places have different meanings at different times –​meanings that may have once seemed heretical). Rather meanings are said to be incompatible by someone whose interests lie in preserving a particular set of meanings.

Invitations and investments This allows us to return to the discursive, and to Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse-​theoretical position that discursive frameworks are needed to 113

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provide objects with meaning. But this last argument is only partially satisfying, as it still brings about the danger of presupposing a hierarchical relationship between the discursive and the material, where the discursive –​ quite literally –​holds the last word. Arguably, if we want to enrich discourse theory by a more (new) materialist perspective, we also need to look for concepts that allow us to think this theory of entanglement, and the mechanics of entanglement. This can be done by looking at approaches that have developed more in-​depth reflections about the material and bring their concepts within the discursive-​material knot. One concept, which features in psychology and design studies (among other fields), could be (partially) helpful and should at least be considered here: the notion of the affordance. To describe affordances, Gibson (1979: 18) referred to ‘these offerings of nature, these possibilities or opportunities’, whereas, for instance, ‘[b]‌oth the air and the water do afford breathing’. Later in his book, when talking about animals, Gibson (1979: 127) described the notion more, by referring to ‘[t]he affordances of the environment [that] are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill … It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment’. In this sense, an affordance ‘points two ways, to the environment and to the observer’, which enables Gibson (1979: 141) to avoid ‘dualism in any form, either mind-​matter dualism or mind-​body dualism’. In a later version, Norman (1988: 9, emphasis in original) introduced a broadened version of the affordance, which, in contrast to Gibson, integrates perception within the notion of the affordance, as his definition exemplifies: the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used … Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed. Here, the notion of the affordance also obtains a psychological dimension (which has been critiqued –​see Lindberg and Lyytinen, 2013; Soegaard, 2015), shifting the exclusive attention away from the material, although both Gibson’s and Norman’s work can still be read as an attempt to think about the materiality of objects, without isolating it from the social (or the cultural). Nevertheless, their approach –​what Gibson (1979: 127) called the theory of affordances –​still attributes a fairly passive role to the material, which limits its usability in the context of the discursive-​material knot. In our search for a more promising theoretical concept, and for a better understanding of its grounding, we need to look at ANT, as the material is attributed a 114

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more active role in this theoretical field, by articulating it with agency. As Latour (2005: 73) put it: ‘objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt’. ANT’s claim is that objects (or, more broadly, non-​humans) should be integrated into the study of the social, first of all because the material is an integrated and crucial component of the social: ‘When power is exerted for good, it is because it is not made of social ties; when it has to relate only on social ties, it is not exerted for long.’ (Latour, 2005: 66) But more importantly in this context, objects enter into co-​determining relationships with humans; after all: ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor’ (Latour, 2005: 71). Through the connections with humans, objects can become mediators and/​or intermediaries, and thus become implicated in the social. Bennett (2010: viii) referred to the vitality of matter to describe this, which is ‘the capacity of things –​edibles, commodities, storms, metals –​not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’. Similar arguments have been made in relation to architecture: Love (2013: 752) referred to ‘the materiality of architecture’, which ‘can be understood through the active position of objects that actively defines subjects and explores both the practical and socio-​symbolic aspects of objects’. She referred to an earlier chapter, written by Vellinga (2007: 763), who raised a similar point: ‘it has become clear that it is really no longer possible to study the house and understand its cultural meaning without looking at its material, architectural aspects’. For instance, how the rooms of a house (or a home) are organised plays a role in ‘the development of intimacy and in ordering and segregating space in specific gendered ways’ (Bennett, 2002: 17). This type of argument is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 208) (older) discussion on segmentarity –​where ‘the house is segmented according to its rooms’ assigned purpose; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the nature of the work and operations performed in it’. Also, Foucault’s (1977: 30) work on the prison, with its emphasis on walls and cells, on the prison’s ‘very materiality as an instrument and vector of power’ is important to mention here: Foucault’s work is an elegant illustration of the combined workings of the discursive and the material. In his work, the material prison is (part of) a ‘political investment in the body’ (Foucault, 1977: 25): ‘power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault, 1977: 26), all of which is embedded in a society’s power/​knowledge conjuncture. Also, in new materialist approaches, the emphasis is placed on a broader perspective on agency, shifting it away from an exclusive connection with human activity, or with things, for that matter. Barad’s (2012: 54) re-​conceptualisation illustrates this argument: ‘Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an 115

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enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements.’ As she also formulates it: ‘[a]‌gency is about possibilities for wordly re-​configurings’ (Barad, 2012: 55). This connects with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984: 36) definition of the machine as a system of interruptions: machines interrupt the flow in particular ways, allowing some usages and disallowing others. Still, these processes are not outside the discursive-​material knot, as human and non-​humans become discursified, even when this occurs reluctantly, as Mackenzie (2002: 5) noted: [Proto-​m achines] strongly [resist] reduction to discourse and signification. Rather, it tends to condition them. This is not to say that technology, or some aspect of technology, is outside discourse. Rather it is to say that we can think, signify, make sense and represent who we are in part only because of technology. The conceptual solution that I would like to propose here, in order to integrate the material more into the discourse-​theoretical perspective, is based on the notion of the invitation as the positive version of the dislocation. Discourse is indeed needed to provide meaning to machines, proto-​machines, and assemblages of machines, at the level of their production and their consumption (or use). Simultaneously (proto-​) machines have a materiality that invites for particular meanings to be attributed to them, and that dissuades other particular meanings from becoming attributed to them. In its structure, this invitational logic is similar to the way that Buckingham (1987: 37), inspired by Iser’s (1978) work, talked about television programmes (in particular, the British soap opera, EastEnders) and the invitation that these programmes extend towards the viewers to identify with, for instance, particular characters. As Turner (2005: 127) wrote, ‘[f]‌rom this perspective, texts do not produce or determine meaning, they ‘invite’ their readers to accept particular positions’. In the more material version of the invitation that I am advocating here, materials extend an invitation to be discursified, or to be integrated in discourses, in always particular ways, grounded in their material nature. These invitations, originating from the material, do not fix or determine meanings, but their material characteristics still privilege and facilitate the attribution of particular meanings through the invitation. This does not imply that the logic of the invitation functions outside the discursive-​material knot. Materials like objects and technologies consist of an endless and restless combination of the material and the discursive, where the material invites for particular discourses to become part of the assemblage, frustrating other discourses, and assisting in other discourses (and materials) to be produced. Even if the material has the capacity to invite for particular meanings, it is also always invested with meaning, which brings us to the second 116

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concept to be proposed. Hegemonic orders provide contextual frameworks of intelligibility that intervene in these assemblages –​in this sense, there is no need to give up on the basic discourse-theoretical position. This also implies that discourses impact on the production of materials, not only to give meaning to them, but also to co-​determine their materiality. To use a deceivingly simple object, made famous by Heidegger (1996), as an example: a hammer is made to be a hammer, partially because of all sorts of material characteristics that facilitate hammering and that give the hammer its handiness (to use one of Heidegger’s terms), but also because of a series of discourses related to construction work, manual labour and carpentry, efficiency, creation and aesthetics. There is, in other words, an interacting combination between materials and the cultural codes engrained in them, and between the material invitation and the discursive investment. To capture this engraining of meaning into the material, the concept of investment can be used, inspired by how, for instance, Marres (2012: 113) used it, even if she only mentions it en passant, when she discussed the deployment of empirical devices in demonstrational homes, and remarked: ‘it facilitates the investment of material entities with normative capacities’. Again, we should not forget contingency here, as the material, through its agency, can dislocate particular discursive orders (but also disrupt or destroy other materials). It can also form assemblages, and –​through its agencies, invitations and investments –​strengthen existing discursive orders. What it cannot do is escape from the discursive-material knot, and permanently dominate the discursive (or be dominated by it). Moreover, the invitation of the material is not compelling, but can be ignored by a particular discursive order, or an alternative interpretation may arise from that particular discursive order, even if the threat of dislocation always remains, which only provides further support for the presence of contingency.

Conclusion One of the striking similarities between discourse theory and new materialism is that both approaches acknowledge the importance of the material and the discursive, respectively, but lack a strongly developed conceptual framework to theorise this ‘other’ material or discursive component. Obviously, discourse theory has much to offer in relationship to the conceptualisation of the mechanics of discourse, while, similarly, new materialism offers a well-​ developed vocabulary in thinking through the mechanics of the material, but they remain remarkably silent about each other’s mechanics, even if they often refer to each other. Arguably, this makes it difficult for both approaches to theorise the nature of the entanglement (or the knot). Simultaneously (and ironically), it makes the combination of both approaches both possible and desirable. Still, thinking though this entanglement is not a matter of merely 117

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integrating two conceptual lists, and in some cases, additional concepts (as, for instance, investment and invitation) are much needed for the development of the discursive-​material knot. The theoretical development of this ontology also has strategic importance, in that it facilitates a better and more constructive dialogue between different (critical) fields, for instance, between those that are explicitly engaged with discourse theory and new materialism. But I also would like to argue that the development of the discursive-​material knot is one way to take a step back from the still-​existing tension (or semi-​latent struggle) between two other intellectual projects that are committed to the emancipatory project(s) that post-​Marxism advocates, namely cultural studies and (critical) political economy. The ontology of the discursive-​material knot offers another route of thinking about the relationship between the discursive-​representational and the materiality of the economy. This strategy might be better suited to strengthen the chain of equivalence between the different critical projects, in contrast to each side trying to explain to the ‘other’ side that the ‘own’ approach has been misunderstood (as Garnham, 1995, did), or trying to create a new enemy that unites both (as Babe, 2010, did). By now, the reader might be able to guess that I am not too sympathetic towards Babe’s (2010: 196) proposal to solve this conflict by surrendering to –​or eliminating –​the other. Babe’s (2010: 196) summarises his proposal as follows: Reintegrating critical political economy and cultural studies also means, most fundamentally, setting aside poststructuralist cultural studies. In fact, if poststructuralist cultural studies is disregarded, political economy and cultural studies (cultural materialism) are united already. In contrast, I would like to argue that a way out of this conflict might be to organise a more fundamental reflection about the discursive and the material, as the project of the discursive-​material knot does, in its own way, accompanied by the immediate acknowledgement that many other routes remain open. The development of the theoretical framework of the discursive-​material knot reaches out to the scholars working in cultural studies and (critical) political economy, but also to scholars who are more directly committed to discourse studies and to new materialism, calling upon all of them to make further progress in better theorising entanglement, as this promises to produce an opportunity for creating a chain of equivalence of the different critical projects, very much in line with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985: 176ff) proposal in HSS. For this intellectual project to be successful in its bridging (or ‘sqridging’12) role, I would also argue that a genuine balance of the material and the discursive is required, without one of these two components (and ‘their’ proponents) having to win a glorious victory, not even in the last instance. A tie is just as good. 118

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See Carpentier (2017). This chapter uses parts from this book. Reproduced with permission of Peter Lang Inc., New York, USA. Grounded in Ingold’s (2007) chapter ‘Materials against materiality’, I consciously use the notion of ‘the material’ –​and not the notion of materiality –​as the overarching notion. This choice for ‘the material’ is aligned with the ways that Laclau and Mouffe used ‘the political’ and ‘the social’. Of course, also new materialist work contains traces about the role of the discursive; see, for example, Iovino and Oppermann (2012). This and the following parts re-​use text from The discursive-​material knot (Carpentier 2017) reproduced with permission of Peter Lang Inc., New York, USA. See Laclau and Mouffe (1987: 82–​83) for another example. To do justice to Biglieri and Perelló’s (2011) work, they refer to the Lacanian Real. My argument is here that their analysis shows the presence of the material, not that I claim that the Real and the material are the same. Even if Lacan uses the concept of the knot to argue for the interdependence of the orders of the Real, symbolic and imaginary, this chapter uses the metaphor of the knot without subscribing to the specificity of the Lacanian model. Some of these critiques were discussed in Carpentier and Spinoy (2008). We should remain realistic about what (academic) language allows us to do, and the constraints it creates. Having to work with (academic) language sometimes causes the discursive and the material component to be discussed separately, in a particular order. In these cases, one component always has to come first, but this is done without ever implying that their relationship is hierarchical. Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012: 93) located the origins of the label ‘new materialism’: in the work of Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti from the second half of the 1990s. This is very reminiscent of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985: 112) description of how a discourse functions (which is explicitly inspired by Lacan), and can be expanded to the workings of the discursive-​material assemblage: ‘Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre.’ See Carpentier (2014) for an explanation of this metaphor.

References Babe, R.E. (2010) Cultural studies and political economy: toward a new integration, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. with Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) ‘An interview with Karen Barad’, New materialism: interviews and cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, pp 48–​70. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bennett, T. (2002) ‘Home and everyday life’, in T. Bennett and D. Watson (eds), Understanding everyday life, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 1–​50.

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Biglieri, P. and Perelló, G. (2011) ‘The names of the Real in Laclau’s Theory: antagonism, dislocation, and heterogeneity’, Filozofski vestnik, XXXII(2): 47–​64. Buckingham, D. (1987) Public secrets: EastEnders and its audience, London: British Film Institute. Carpentier, N. (2014) ‘On walls, squares, bridges and Sqridges. A framework to think about North-​South dialogues in communication and media studies’, Journal of Latin American Communication Research, 4(1): 12–​29, http://​alaic.org/​jour​nal/​ index.php/​jlacr/​chapter/​view/​88 Carpentier, N. (2017) The discursive-​material knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation, New York: Peter Lang. Carpentier, N. and Spinoy, E. (eds) (2008) Discourse theory and cultural analysis: media, arts and literature, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Castree, N. (1995) ‘The nature of produced nature: materiality and knowledge construction in Marxism’, Antipode, 27: 12–​48. Cresswell, T. (1996) In place/​out of place: geography, ideology, and transgression, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. DeLanda, M. (1996) The geology of morals. A neo-​materialist interpretation, http://​www t0.or.at/​delanda/​geology.htm DeLanda, M. (2006) A new philosophy of society. Assemblage theory and social complexity, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984) Anti-​Oedipus. Capitalism and schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New materialism: interviews and cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Dovey, K. (2013) ‘Assembling architecture’, in H. Frichot and S. Loo (eds), Deleuze and architecture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 131–​148. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H. and Negus, K. (1997) Doing cultural studies. The story of the Sony Walkman, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Edward, M. (2008) ‘A (brief) critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis’, 11 September, https://​stru​ggle​swit​hphi​loso​phy.wordpr​ess.com/​ 2008/​09/​11/​a-​brief-​ critique-​of-​laclau-​and-​mouffes-​discourse-​analysis/​ Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison, London: Tavistock. Garnham, N. (1995) ‘Political economy and cultural studies: reconciliation or divorce?’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12(1): 62–​71. Geras, N. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism?’, New Left Review, 163: 40–​82.

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Gibson, J.J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception, New York: Psychology Press. Glynos, J. and Howarth, D. (2007) Logics of critical explanation in social and political theory, London and New York: Routledge. Guattari, F. (1993) ‘Machinic heterogenesis’, in V.A. Conley (ed), Rethinking technologies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 13–​27. Hall, S. (1997) ‘The work of representation’, in Stuart Hall (ed), Representation. Cultural representations and signifying practices, London: Sage, pp 13–​64. Haraway, D.J. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–​599. Hardy, C. and Thomas, R. (2015) ‘Discourse in a material world’, Journal of Management Studies, 52(5): 680–​696. Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Horton, J. and Kraftl, P. (2014) Cultural geographies. An introduction, London: Routledge. Howarth, D. (1998) ‘Discourse theory and political analysis’, in E. Scarbrough and E. Tanenbaum (eds), Research strategies in the social sciences, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 268–​293. Ingold, T. (2007) ‘Materials against materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1): 1–​16. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2012) ‘Material ecocriticism: materiality, agency and models of narrativity’, Ecozone, 3(1): 75–​91. Iser, W. (1978) The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response, Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Jencks, C.A. (1977) The new paradigm in architecture: the language of post-​ modernism, London: Academy Editions. Joseph, J. (2003) Hegemony: a realist analysis, London and New York: Routledge. Kirby, V. (2006) Judith Butler. Live theory, London and New York: Continuum. Laclau, E. (1990a) ‘New reflections on the revolution of our time’, in E. Laclau (ed) New reflections on the revolution of our time, London: Verso, pp 3–​85. Laclau, E. (ed) (1990b) New reflections on the revolution of our time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism without apologies’, New Left Review, I/​166: 79–​106 Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-​network-​theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Law, J. (1991) ‘Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations’, in J. Law (ed), A sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination, London: Routledge, pp 1–​23. Lindberg, A. and Lyytinen, K. (2013) ‘Towards a theory of affordance ecologies’, in F.-​X. de Vaujany and N. Mitiv (eds), Materiality and space. Organizations, artefacts and practices, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 41–​61. Love, S. (2013) ‘Architecture as material culture: building form and materiality in the pre-​pottery Neolithic of Anatolia and Levant’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 32: 746–​758. Mackenzie, A. (2002) Transductions. Bodies and machines at speed, London and New York: Continuum. Marres, N. (2012) Material participation. Technology, the environment and everyday publics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Massey, D. (2005) For space, Los Angeles: Sage. Norman, D.A. (1988) The design of everyday things, New York: Basic Books. Rahman, M. and Witz, A. (2003) ‘What really matters? The elusive quality of the material in feminist thought’, Feminist Theory, 4(3): 243–​261. Ruming, K. (2009) ‘Following the actors: mobilising an actor-​network theory methodology in geography’, Australian Geographer, 40(4): 451–​469. Schou, J. (2016) ‘Ernesto Laclau and critical media studies: Marxism, capitalism, and critique’, tripleC, 14(1): 292–​311. Soegaard, M. (2015) ‘Affordances’, in (ed) The glossary of human computer interaction, Aarhus: Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-​ design.org/​literature/​ book/t​ he-g​ lossary-o ​ f-h ​ uman-​computer-​interaction/​ affordances Torfing, J. (1999) New theories of discourse. Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek, Oxford: Blackwell. Tuan, Y.-​F. (1977) Space and place. The perspective of experience, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, G. (2005) British cultural studies, London: Routledge. Vellinga, M. (2007) ‘Anthropology and the materiality of architecture’, American Ethnologist, 33: 756–​766. Wood, E.M. ([1986] 1999) The retreat from class: a new true socialism, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2014) Event: a philosophical journey through a concept, New York: Melville House.

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Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-​Material Knot as a Non-​hierarchical Ontology: A Reply to Nico Carpentier Mads Ejsing and Lars Tønder Nico Carpentier’s chapter, ‘Enriching discourse theory’, is a welcome contribution to debates in post-​structuralist theory regarding the relationship between the discursive and the material. More often than not, these debates have implied a kind of ‘camp thinking’ based on a sharp, and rather unhelpful, divide between the two sides. Carpentier avoids such thinking, and instead he proposes an innovative language, structured around terms such as ‘knot’, ‘affordance’, and ‘invitation’, to show how the discursive and the material are always-​already implicated in each other. If we want to resist parts of this innovative move, it is not because we question the motivation behind it; in fact, we wholly agree that a reconceptualisation of the relationship between the discursive and the material is crucial to the development of the post-​structuralism that Laclau and Mouffe (together with many others) inaugurated more than 30 years ago. The question, however, is whether the best way to do this is to assume the need for a ‘knot’ in the first place. Should we begin with a split between the discursive and the material or do these categories only become relevant after the event or experience ‘has happened’? The ‘new materialism’ on which Carpentier draws (as do we) makes a case for the latter. New materialism begins by insisting that material ‘stuff’ is neither passive nor mechanical, but rather embodies degrees of agency that enable it to affect real change across time and space. The name for this capacity, in Jane Bennett’s felicitous vocabulary, is ‘thing-​power’ (Bennett, 2004: 375). While thing-​power highlights the vibrancy nested in all modes of materiality, the concept does not amount to a rejection of discursive 123

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phenomena. According to Bennett, the discursive and the material are indeed two sides of the same coin, a point Bennett repeatedly underscores in her accounts of events such as the 2003 Northeast American blackout where discursive and material forces colluded to the surprise of everyone involved (Bennett, 2005). New materialism’s interest in this collusion is even clearer in Karen Barad’s work, which consistently invokes the ‘material-​discursive’ as starting point for any analysis of the world broadly understood (Barad, 2007: 132). Barad substantiates this wager by showing how the so-​called ‘discursive’ and ‘material’ share the same mode of becoming, which Barad, with reference to the work of Judith Butler, discusses under the heading of ‘performativity’ (Barad, 2007: 60). The fact that a scholar trained in theoretical physics finds inspiration in a concept developed to unveil a post-​ structuralist logic of representation suggests that something other than a ‘tie’ or a ‘knot’ is involved in the relationship between the discursive and the material. Rather than approaching the discursive and the material as two separate categories looking for a meeting point, it may be more productive to envision them as co-​extensive processes giving shape to reality as such. One way to clarify this intuition is to look closer at the concept of performativity. According to Barad, performativity is a global concept that applies to the world as such: ‘All bodies, not merely “human” bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-​activity –​its performativity’ (Barad, 2007: 152). Barad takes this to mean that both discourse and matter are performative: neither discourses nor material objects are fixed entities that precede material-​discursive intra-​actions; they emerge through them (Barad, 2007: 137). Barad’s use of the neologism ‘intra-​action’ signals here an important conceptual shift, with significant implications for how we conceptualise both the discursive and the material. Whereas the more familiar notion of ‘interaction’ relies on an image of the world inhabited by separate entities with inherent boundaries and properties, the notion of ‘intra-​action’ emphasises the relational and entangled nature of the various material-​discursive agencies out of which boundaries and properties emerge (Barad, 2007: 139). Accordingly, the discursive and the material are co-​ extensive, because all discursive practices are material (re)configurations of the world, and all material practices are discursive in the sense that they (re)configure what ‘matters’ (Barad, 2007: 148–​152). Hence, the use of the ‘material-​discursive’. What ‘matters’ is not whether the impetus for change is discursive or material: rather, the more relevant question is how the resulting change affects both registers at the same time. This way of approaching the issue encourages us to question whether a term such as ‘the knot’ is the right one to use. Simply put, there is nothing to tie; the discursive and the material co-​exist to such an extent that it becomes difficult to determine where one ends, and where the other begins. As already indicated, this starting point does not commit us to a strict identity between 124

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the two, but instead encourages us to conceptualise the differences as internal to the relationship keeping them together as co-​extensive. Carpentier hints at this possibility when he substitutes ‘entanglement’ for ‘knot’ in his initial account of how ‘invitation’ helps us to conceptualise the passage from the material to the discursive. New materialists have long been interested in the concept of entanglement, which shows up in Barad’s work (Barad, 2007: ix), but in fact reaches back to how Merleau-​Ponty, in his ontology of the flesh, encourages us to approach both the discursive and the material in their incipient phases. According to Merleau-​Ponty, entanglement is not some secondary phenomenon that comes after the settlement of other, more general categories of Being. Quite the opposite! It is due to the power of entanglement that categories such as ‘the discursive’ and ‘the material’ emerge in the first place. As Merleau-​Ponty puts it, ‘the thickness of the flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968: 135). While more needs to be said before this way of formulating the issue can form a fully-​fledged alternative, it may already now be possible to outline some of the likely advantages. Most obvious is that the view introduced here avoids reducing materiality to a structural lack that has no meaning or significance for communication in the broad sense. The difference between the discursive and the material is not whether one has meaning and the other not –​as Bennett and other new materialists have argued, meaning is not reserved for the discursive, but can also be found within specific modes of materiality, which often express it in ways that are hard to access in purely discursive terms (Bennett, 2009: 52–​61; Panagia, 2009: 11–​13). From this follows a more adequate starting point for the ontological ambitions that also motivate Carpentier’s own contribution. If ‘entanglement’ is the starting point for all modes of emergence, and if the principle for this emergence is ‘performativity’ (in the sense developed by Barad), then it no longer seems right to say that ‘assemblages’ are merely ‘ontic’ in nature (as Carpentier suggests they are). Assemblages are not simply instances of Being, that is, ways of expressing a more general structure hovering in the background, but must be seen as the basic unity for all modes of life. This way of lifting assemblages from the ‘ontic’ to the ‘ontological’ level is crucial to most new materialists, including Bennett and Barad. To them, existence is not possible without some kind of assemblage, one that includes the discursive and the material, the human and the non-​human, the mechanical and the organic, and so on and so forth. The main reason for adopting this view is that it disarms the dangers associated with dualistic thinking, especially as it pertains to the risk of imputing a hierarchical relationship where matter is only ascribed significance when it reaches the level of discourse. Carpentier acknowledges this risk, and 125

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he stresses repeatedly, including in the title of his essay, that the discursive-​ material knot is supposed to be a non-​hierarchical relation. Still, we worry that fragments of another, more dualistic view creep back in. Consider the notion of an ‘invitation’ as an attempt to integrate the material into Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. According to Carpentier, ‘materials extend an invitation to be discursified, or to be integrated in discourses’. Carpentier substantiates this argument by suggesting that that the material cannot ‘escape from the discursive-​material knot’. Both arguments seem to imply a movement from (insignificant) matter to (significant) ‘discursified’ matter, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain the view that matter, too, can be both vibrant and agentive. While it is true, as suggested by Barad’s use of the hyphenated ‘material-​discursive’, that matter and discourse are always-​already imbricated with each other, this insight is obscured by theorising discourse as separate from, and even prior to, matter. To avoid this, we need a more radical approach, one in which discursive practices are themselves ongoing material reconfigurations of the world that bring boundaries, properties and meaning into being (Barad, 2007: 148). Such reconfigurations are not limited to social discourse and human action, but are also the result of material processes that exceed human discourse. Another way of saying this is that instead of insisting on discourse theory as the starting point for thinking about the relationship between discourse and matter, we should take seriously the claim of new materialists that human discourses are material and agentive components of the world that exist alongside and are entangled with numerous other kinds of agencies. Whether we should begin our specific analyses with studying human discourses, or whether it makes more sense to begin with other forms of material-​discursive agencies, will depend on the composition of the assemblage in question. Adopting this new materialist position as our starting point will not only allow us to avoid pitfalls such as the ones just described; it will also allow us to untie the ‘knot’. Or perhaps even better: it will allow us to realise that there is no need for a knot to begin with. We conclude by noticing that the issue at hand not only is a theoretical one but also has profound practical implications. Today, more than ever, we must scrutinise the ways in which we, as scholars and as participants in social practices, engage with the material world and other forms of earthly life. As Latour and others have demonstrated, we have for far too long relied on a view that separates too sharply between, on the one hand, the social and discursive human world of ‘freedom’ and, on the other hand, the natural and material world of ‘necessity’ (Latour, 1993). This division has allowed for a privileging of society over nature, discourse over matter, the human over the non-​human. The result, in Barad’s words, is that ‘the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter’ (Barad, 2007: 132). Combined with Enlightenment ideals of human mastery and control, this division has 126

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ushered in an instrumentalisation of the natural world, thereby painting a picture of nature as lifeless, predictable and, essentially, governable. In turn, this view has helped justify extractivist practices and ideologies according to which the Earth is, first and foremost, a resource that can, and should, be instrumentalised and utilised to the benefit of humans, and humans only. Today, the emergence of anthropogenic climate change is, in a most dramatic fashion, a testament to the contradictions and dangers of such a vision. To counter this, we must challenge our anthropocentric assumptions and attend more seriously to the various forms of non-​human life, including those that exceed the theoretical language of (human) discourse. This concern lies at the very core of the new materialist agenda. As Bennett, Barad and others show, we must change our theoretical horizons in order to avoid the dichotomy between human world of ‘activity’ and a world of ‘passive’ matter. This includes new ‘arts of noticing’ that open our senses to the complex, and often fascinating, worlds of non-​human life, including those of plants and funghi that live and operate at temporalities and scales notably different from our familiar human ones (Tsing, 2015; see also Coles, 2005). The hope is that these and other theoretical innovations can help cultivate new and more ethical and responsive sensibilities towards the more-​than-​human world. References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2004) ‘The force of things: steps toward an ecology of matter’, Political Theory, 32(3): 347–​372. Bennett, J. (2005) ‘The agency of assemblages and the North American blackout’, Public Seminar, 17(3): 445–​466. Bennett, J. (2009) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things, Durham: Duke University Press. Coles, R. (2005) Beyond gated politics: reflections for the possibility of democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, B. (1993) We have never been modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1968) The visible and the invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Panagia, D. (2009) The political life of sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsing, A.L. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s Post-​Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-​Republicanism Gulshan Khan

Introduction Since the publication of Hegemony and socialist strategy in 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe are widely acknowledged as leading representatives of post-​Marxism and ‘radical democratic’ theory. They have sought to transform the left political imaginary beyond the impasses characteristic of traditional Marxist categories (Sim, 2000; Wenman, 2003). Both Laclau and Mouffe in their single authored works have developed distinct and original contributions to political theory. Mouffe has engaged with mainstream political theory and developed her own agonistic approach (Mouffe, 1993, 2000, 2005; Wenman, 2003). Laclau has reworked of a range of concepts drawn not only from Marxism, but also in part from other traditions across political theory and political science. This is evident not just in Hegemony and socialist strategy, but also in his subsequent publications: New reflection on the revolutions of our times (1990), Emancipation(s) (1996a), and On populist reason (2005). In these texts, Laclau creatively rereads key concepts –​such as hegemony, populism, emancipation, and representation – through the lenses of poststructuralism, and to further develop and re-​signify these ideas in innovative directions. He sought specially to augment the legacy of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and to further develop the Gramscian emphasis on politics, or the realm of the ‘superstructures’, that is, against reductionist or ‘economistic’ readings of Marxism. For Laclau, this was 128

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an effort to explain the growing diversity of struggles –​not only socialist struggles, but also feminism, environmentalism, and so on –​from the late 1960s onwards. In so doing, he fashioned a range of innovative concepts –​for example the idea of a struggle over ‘empty signifiers’ and the need for a ‘chain of equivalence’ between alternate demands –​each designed to explain the dynamics at play in the struggle for emancipation and freedom. Of course, these accomplishments have not been without controversy. They have, for example, provoked a hostile reaction from those committed to traditional Marxist forms of analysis (see Geras, 1988; Eagleton, 1991). Despite these responses, however, Laclau is arguably the foremost post-​Marxist of the late 20th century and the influence and impact of his work is gradually growing. Eight years after his death, Laclau’s legacy is flourishing. This is evident, in the growing influence of the Essex School of discourse analysis which was founded by Laclau and where his ideas have been further developed by subsequent generations of thinkers; most notably by David Howarth and Jason Glynos who have developed the methodological approach of ‘social logics’ of critical explanation (social, political and fantasmatic), which explicitly reworks Laclau’s and Mouffe’s post-​Marxism (Howarth, 2000, 2010; Glynos and Howarth, 2007). More generally, Laclau’s categories continue to influence new generations of radical left thinkers: from key political figures in Latin America to those associated with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Moreover, his ideas are gradually gaining more traction within political science, where his conception of populism remains the most sophisticated account of this pressing contemporary political phenomena. In the secondary literature, Laclau’s work has most often been contrasted with other continental thinkers, for example with the contributions of Gilles Deleuze, Antoni Negri, William Connolly, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. These are valuable and interesting contributions, which have, for the most part, focused on the ontological differences between these various thinkers, seen for example variously as theorists of ‘abundance’ and ‘lack’. Here, I take a new and different approach, one that amalgamates the respective strengths of continental and analytical theory to provide a multi-​ layered analysis of contemporary forms of domination and to better aid our understanding about the kinds of struggle needed to address them. My objective is to keep the focus on Laclau’s contribution to political theory, and to evaluate the political implications of Laclau’s post-​Marxist understanding of the concepts of domination and conversely of emancipation and freedom. To scrutinise these ideas, I bring Laclau’s approach into conversation with another important contemporary political theorist with whom Laclau would not normally be associated. This is Philip Pettit, who works broadly within the analytical tradition of contemporary political theory, and who in several important works –​and most notably Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government in 1997 –​has developed an influential neo-​republican conception 129

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of liberty as ‘non-​domination’. Pettit’s impact on Anglo-​American theory is significant to the point that neo-​republicanism is the ‘major alternative to liberal political theory’ (Besson and Marti, 2009: 3). The paper weaves back and forth exploring points of similarity and difference between Laclau and Pettit, and this juxtaposition brings out aspects of Laclau’s theory that are perhaps otherwise overlooked. My objective is not simply to dismiss Pettit’s approach, and in fact we see that there is much to be admired in the neo-​republican conception of non-​domination, but an examination of the limits of Pettit’s perspective also helps to foreground the strengths of Laclau’s theory and vice versa. This reading discloses the important elements that are carried over from the classical Marxist categories, and creatively readapted in Laclau’s post-​Marxism. This comparison takes us beyond an interpretative exercise to better address complex forms of power and domination in late modern society. On one level, we see that Pettit and Laclau share much in common. Like Laclau, Pettit’s approach focuses on prospects for changing existing institutions so they better serve the freedom of citizens. Pettit avoids the worst excesses of the tendency towards abstraction which often defines analytical, or ‘ideal theory’. At the core of Pettit’s theory is his notion of liberty as non-​ domination, which he draws from the republican tradition, but of course this language of domination/​non-​domination is also associated with Marxism, as well as other critical approaches such as feminism. Indeed, as we will see: the concepts of domination, emancipation and freedom each have shared roots in both the republican and Marxist traditions, and part of my objective here is to compare their respective reworkings of this common heritage.1 Indeed, both Laclau and Pettit aim to reconfigure power and domination towards more democratic and egalitarian relations. In Laclau’s terminology we could say that –​in different ways –​they each seek to expand the logic of equality within the public realm. Furthermore, because of these broad shared objectives, Laclau and Pettit also share a common aversion towards liberal conceptions of freedom in terms of non-​interference or ‘negative liberty’. From each of their respective viewpoints, liberal conceptions of freedom are inadequate because they do not take account of what Pettit, following in the republican tradition, calls ‘arbitrary power’, which can still operate in society even when there may be no explicit interference in the ‘free’ choices of individuals. Despite these common points of reference, we see also that the two authors exhibit considerable differences, and that these variations have significant consequences for their respective conceptions of politics. These dissimilarities manifest across two key and interrelated fault lines. The first is in their respective conceptions of agency. Here, we see that Pettit, like many in the analytical tradition, works with methodological individualism, whereas Laclau develops a complex account of structure and agency in 130

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his account of what he calls structural ‘dislocation’. Indeed, for Pettit, individuals are the always the potential bearers of either arbitrary power or freedom and when he attempts to explain more structural manifestations of power,2 he effectively models collective or group agency on methodological individualism (Allen, 2015: 122). By way of contrast, Laclau starts from the (Althusserian) premise that the dominant structures ‘interpellate’ individuals as subjects, but, on Laclau’s account, they fail repeatedly to achieve this aim, that is with any completion or ‘totality’. Moreover, it is in this constitutive failure of social structures to ever fully determine an objective order that we find the potential emergence of a subject of freedom and emancipation, in a moment of structural ‘dislocation’ (Laclau, 1996a: 101; 1996b: 54).3 These are crucial differences, and they lead, in turn, to another key distinction between the two authors, which is that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, while Laclau’s notions of emancipation and freedom function at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order. The paper is divided into three sections. In the opening section, I compare Laclau’s and Pettit’s respective conceptions of ‘domination’. We see that Pettit’s neo-​republican theory provides valuable resources for understanding the exercise of arbitrary power by an individual, which he models on the relationship between master and slave. However, despite his acknowledgement that the cultural, economic and legal organisation of society enables some people to invade the choices of others, Pettit’s emphasis on the limiting the capacity of one agent to exercise power over another cannot adequately account for structural domination such as unequal social relations, and this is in marked contrast to Laclau. Moreover, Laclau introduced a set of conceptual distinctions between domination, subordination and oppression, and these categories add further depth to the analysis of arbitrary power of an individual’s will and influence. They draw attention to the crucial moment when subordinate groups become conscious of their ‘oppression’ and a social space emerges to draw the existing institutions into question and provide an alternative. The differences between the neo-​republican and Laclau’s post-​Marxist theory are highlighted in this section regarding two alternate readings of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. In the second section, I examine their respective understandings of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom’. Again, we see that the idea of emancipation, and the associated idea of ‘liberation’, is derived both from the republican and Marxist traditions. However, Pettit does not model his theory of freedom as non-​domination on the idea of emancipation, and this is despite his reference to the master and slave relationship. This stands in contrast to 131

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Laclau, for whom emancipation remains the focal point of political struggle, despite formal equality, and who maintains the idea of the possibility of a more radical transformation in the underlying structures of society. In fact, Laclau retains key elements of the Marxist conception of emancipation, and the differences between Pettit and Laclau are further illustrated here regarding Marx’s famous distinction between ‘political’ and ‘human emancipation’. In addition, Laclau differentiates between emancipation and freedom, and he understands ‘freedom’ in terms of indeterminacy as well as self-​determination. In the final section, I consider more generally Laclau’s and Pettit’s alternative conceptions of politics. We see that both thinkers place a premium on democratic contest in challenging and overturning arbitrary power. Nevertheless, in keeping with the differences which have emerged in the earlier sections, we see also that Pettit understands contestability as a politics of ‘redress’ within the existing institutions, whereas Laclau’s focus is on the struggle for hegemony and the possibility of transformation in the present institutional order. I conclude with the suggestion that the neo-​republican and post-​Marxist conceptions of politics each outline important elements in the struggle against subordination and domination.

Neo-​republicanism and post-​Marxism: on domination, subordination and oppression At the core of Pettit’s neo-​republican theory is the idea that political agents are free when they are not subject to arbitrary controlling power by an alien individual will. This is distinct from the characteristically liberal view, as defended for example by Isaiah Berlin (1969), which associates freedom with the absence of interference or obstacles. For Pettit, an individual can be subject to the impact of domination or arbitrary power where the capacity for such interference exists, even when there are no explicit obstacles to his/​her free choice, or when the power to interfere in those choices is not directly exercised. Domination is the ‘alienating control on the part of other persons’, and to experience non-​domination is therefore not only to find yourself unconstrained by others, but also, more importantly, to find yourself in a situation where no one has the potential to interfere on an arbitrary basis in the choices that you make (Pettit, 1997: 52, 67; 2012: 84).4 Along with other contemporary neo-republican theorists such as Quentin Skinner, Pettit invokes the relationship between the master and the slave to illustrate what is at issue in a relationship of ‘domination’. Under ancient conditions of slavery, the slave is dependent on the master and at his mercy. This is particularly evident in the circumstances of the ‘lucky’ slave who happens to have a benevolent master. Although this slave may live a contented life, the slave’s relative security remains entirely dependent on the good will of his 132

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master. The master has arbitrary control or dominium over the slave and this state of dependency creates uncertainty and unpredictability for the slave, in response to which the slave develops a servile and slave-like mentality. In ancient Roman society, a comparable dynamic was also inherent in the relationship between the head of the household, the pater familas, and his wife and children. This is evident in the etymology of the English term domination, which has its roots in Roman law and is derived from the Latin word dominatus referring to a ruler or master (dominus) of a house (domus) (Lovett, 2010: 3). Unlike the slave who was considered a ‘thing’ and literally the property of the master, Roman women and children had the status of legal persons in Roman law, but they were nonetheless still dependent on the father/​husband who had responsibility for them and who could exercise autocratic power over them, and they were ultimately at the mercy of his goodwill. This conception of ‘dependency’ is at the core of the ancient idea of domination, and Pettit reworks this idea in his theory of ‘arbitrary power’. Conversely, Pettit describes freedom as not ‘having to depend on the grace or mercy of others, being able to do one’s thing without asking their leave or permission’ (Pettit, 2003: 394). Pettit uses Henry Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to further demonstrate the difference between the liberal notion of freedom as non-​interference and his notion of freedom as non-​domination (Pettit, 2014: xiii). I recount his reading of this play because this also helps to differentiate Pettit’s interpretation of domination from Laclau’s. A Doll’s House is set in 19th century Norwegian society and narrates the domestic affairs of the Helmer household. Nora Helmer, the wife of a successful banker Torvald (who is on the verge of a promotion), is being blackmailed by Krogstad (a bank employee) about a loan she took out early in her marriage to help pay for Torvald’s treatment when he was ill. Such a revelation will destroy Torvald’s honour and therefore his career. Torvald is sickened when he discovers that Nora lied and acted like a ‘criminal’ by forging her father’s signature on the official loan papers (Ibsen, 2014: 59). However, once the creditor Krogstad sends back the bond of her debt, Torvald forgives Nora. He reconciles himself to her deed, with the thought that her fraudulent actions were a manifestation of her infantile behaviour.5 Pettit says that Nora ‘is the doll in the doll’s house, not a free woman’ (Pettit, 2014: xiv). Indeed, for Pettit, Nora’s relationship with Torvald is exemplary of the relationship of domination. Although Torvald does not directly interfere with Nora, she nonetheless remains unfree (despite her ‘negative liberty’) because she censors her actions to stay within Torvald’s approval. In other words, she adopts a servile mode of behaviour. For example, she covertly eats macaroons because Torvald frowns upon her eating them. Pettit says that Nora’s freedom is dependent on Torvald’s good grace, and if Torvald withdrew his goodwill she would be subject to his arbitrary power (Pettit, 2014: xv). On Pettit’s 133

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account, for Nora to be truly free she needs to be free from domination, and, as he sees it, this requires safeguards against arbitrary interference in one’s choices as well as resources and legal protections against anyone else’s capacity to interfere (Pettit, 2014: xv). These are important insights into the machinations of power, and this neo-​ republican view has had a significant impact across contemporary political theory. However, Pettit has elaborated his conception of domination within a methodologically individualist approach where it is individual ‘agents’ who are the bearers of arbitrary power, or conversely who can be agents of freedom. If structural forms of power were to count as ‘domination’ then, according to Pettit, we ‘would lose the distinction between securing people against the natural effects of chance and incapacity and securing them against the thing that they may try to do to one another’ (Pettit, 1997: 52–​53). However, this set of alternatives is too limited. In addition to the consequences of interfering actions by one agent over another and the natural effects of chance, from a post-​Marxist perspective we need to grasp also the impact of other modes and asymmetries of power such as rank, status, influence and control; for instance, those that take systemic forms of subordination, such as the unequal distribution of wealth in society, or the processes of normalisation that leave some individuals and groups in positions of privileged and superior status and others in a subordinate or inferior position. These modes of ‘domination’ cannot be reduced to natural inequalities or chance, but nor can they be readily traced to the capacity of one agent to exercise his/​her will over another. Pettit’s approach contrasts with many feminists, for whom ‘male domination is a structural and institutionalised feature of a whole society’ embedded in norms and practices (Friedman, 2008: 256). However, it also contrasts with more ‘critical’ republicans who similarly appreciate that patriarchy permeates throughout society in dominant social norms that hinder women even when they are formally legal citizens (Laborde, 2008: 16, 48).6 Indeed, it is crucial to appreciate that the systemic causes of patriarchy and other forms of domination cannot be readily referred to will or to the capacity for one agent to interfere in the choices of another agent, and here Laclau’s theory can be particularly instructive. Laclau’s poststructuralist conception of structure and agency retains core elements of the conventional Marxist understanding of the role of structures in shaping social subjectivities. At the heart of Laclau’s approach is a reworking of the Marxist idea that we are ‘bearers of historical structures’, or, as Laclau puts it, of the dominant ‘discourses’ that, following Louis Althusser, socialise (interpellate) us as subjects (Laclau, 1990). However, Laclau rejects the idea that capitalist relations of exploitation always have an overriding priority (even in the ‘last instance’), and he additionally stresses the constitutive incompletion of structural closure or ‘totality’. These processes 134

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of structural determination are never fully determinate or complete, and it is this inherent ‘dislocation’ of structural closure that leaves open a certain space for agency or freedom, ‘insofar as [agents] actualise certain structural potentialities and reject others’ (Laclau, 1990: 30). Moreover, this model of incomplete or dislocated structure is further accentuated with reference to a poststructuralist account of identity formation. Again, in contrast to Pettit’s conception of the relationships formed between individual agents, on Laclau’s account identities are not initially self-​referential, but rather always already (essentially) formed in relation to one another (Laclau, 1990). In addition, these dynamics of intrinsic relationality are inherently relationships of power, that is, where certain options are available, while others are necessarily suppressed or foreclosed (Laclau, 1990: 18). In other words, relations of identity involve hierarchy and exclusions which demarcate and distinguish one identity from another.7 These are crucial methodological discernments, and because of these insights Laclau further proceeds to differentiate between alternative forms of identity/​relations. Most importantly, for the discussion here, in his co-​ authored work with Chantal Mouffe, Laclau struck a crucial distinction between the concepts of subordination, oppression and domination. In Laclau’s approach each of these terms carries specific connotations, and it is evident that the term ‘domination’ here has a somewhat different meaning to the neo-​republican conception of arbitrary power that I have just outlined above. In fact, Laclau uses the term subordination (and not domination) to describe an asymmetrical relationship of arbitrary power, where one ‘agent is subjected to the decisions of another’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 153).8 This unequal and asymmetrical relation between two or more agents is not a one-​off instance nor is it a relation of oppression (as we shall see below), but entrenched or sedimented norms and practices in society. Such situations are still widespread in families (husband/wife) and workplaces (employer/​employee) and are not necessarily doubted by those engaged in them (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153).9 However, what interests Laclau are the circumstances by which these hierarchical relations come to be seen as illegitimate, and perceived as relationships of ‘oppression’, from the perspective of subordinate groups and/​or individuals. Pettit’s focus is on the individual agent and this is also the case for others who use the term domination in the analytical tradition.10 Laclau defines the circumstances of ‘domination’ precisely in terms of a moment of awaking: when the subordinate agent begins to perceive a set of hierarchical relations as unfair or unjust (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 159). This is further linked to another core category in Laclau’s approach which is the notion of ‘antagonism’. As we will see in more detail in the subsequent sections, Laclau envisages political struggle in terms of the circumstances by which subjugated identities come to realise that some external identity or practice –​the identity of ‘the 135

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oppressor’ –​is oppressing them and preventing the full constitution of their own identity (Laclau, 1990: 21). Laclau calls this situation a relationship of ‘antagonism’, whereby ‘the oppressed [increasingly] constitute their identity by denying the identity of the oppressor’ (Laclau cited in Worsham and Olson, 1999: 24). For Laclau, a relation of oppression is ‘relations of subordination which have transformed themselves into sites of antagonism’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153–​154). Moreover, it is precisely in these moments of ‘antagonism’ that the ‘undecidable nature’ of the given set of social relationships become ‘visible’, because here the unequal and hierarchical power relationship that had previously appeared as normal and natural are now destabilised and rendered potentially open to change (Laclau, 1990: 35). It is clear from this brief summation that Laclau shares a great deal with the neo-​republican conception of the exercise of arbitrary power. At the same time, however, it is evident that Laclau’s understanding of the relationship between structure and agency is not just concerned with the arbitrary will of individual agents but also the arbitrary power of social relations, processes, norms and practices that place some individuals and groups in subservient positions and others in positions of control and influence. He also appears to have a far stronger emphasis on the circumstances by which oppressed groups become conscious of relationships of subordination and thereby draw those norms and practices into question. We will see in subsequent sections that these differences further play out in their respective conceptions of political struggle. First, however, we can further accentuate these alternatives by returning to A Doll’s House. Although Laclau does not himself offer a reading of the play, we can nonetheless consider the relationship between Nora and Torvald from a Laclauean perspective and contrast this with Pettit’s reading. Pettit’s interpretation of A Doll’s House demonstrates his concern with the agentic relationships between two individuals. Pettit’s emphasis is clearly on the ways in which Nora is subject to the idiosyncrasies of Torvald’s will, attitudes and decisions. But the ‘subject positions’ of these two agents are also established within a wider system of subordination. Nora is a subject of 19th century Norwegian society which legitimates patriarchy. Her identity as a daughter, wife and mother is constituted by a system that considers such subordination normal, natural and therefore legitimate; and she does not contest her identity or consider herself ‘oppressed’. In the act of marriage, Nora is handed over as an object of property from her father to her husband, with whom a similar subordinate relationship is reproduced (Ibsen, 2014: 40). The normalising power of these structures mean that Nora and Torvald are each socialised into their respective subject positions, they internalise and identify with them. On a Laclauean reading (and following Althusser and Jacques Lacan), we might say that Nora (like all subjects) has an imaginary 136

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relation to her own lived conditions of existence. Nora does not consider her relationship with Torvald to be unjust –​to be a relationship of ‘domination’ or ‘oppression’ –​or at least this is so up to the point when her imaginary relation with Torvald is shattered. This happens in a crucial ‘dislocatory’ moment in the play, that is, when Nora grasps that Torvald would not risk his life, honour or status to save her standing (Ibsen, 2014: 39). At this point, the forms of identity and identification that sustain Nora’s subject positions are interrupted or dislodged, and she begins to question the legitimacy of her society and the background structures which treat her unfairly. It is clear also that the kinds of solutions that Pettit proposes to address relations of arbitrary power –​legal protections and safeguards that limit the capacity for one individual to exercise arbitrary power over another –​cannot address the modes of subordination built into these background structures. On the Laclauean reading, what is required instead is an understanding of how Nora could turn this initial moment of ‘dislocation’ into a set of political demands that might start to draw the existing institutions into question, and to further understand these requirements we turn now to Laclau’s reworking of the ideas of emancipation and freedom. Again, a comparison with the neo-​republican perspective is helpful in bringing out the distinctiveness of his approach.

From domination to emancipation and freedom Since the early modern struggles to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, the idea of ‘emancipation’ has been associated with the act of setting someone free from a relation of oppression or bondage. Emancipation is clearly an important category in Marxist theory, evident for example in Marx’s analysis of the modern wage/​labour relationship in terms of ‘wage slavery’, and manifest also in his famous distinction in ‘On the Jewish question’ between mere ‘political emancipation’ (in the form of bourgeois civil rights) and genuine ‘human emancipation’ (characterised by the abolition of private property, and hence of ‘wage slavery’; Marx, 1994). The term ‘emancipation’ is also a central category in Laclau’s post-​Marxist theory, and this is evident in the collection of essays he published in 1996 with the title Emancipation(s). In this section, we see that the term derives from the Roman republican tradition, and I consider points of contrast between ‘emancipation’ and the related notions of ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’. I first recall the etymology of the term ‘emancipation’, before exploring the way this idea functions respectively in Pettit’s and Laclau’s theories. Surprising perhaps, given his explicit reference to the master and slave relationship, we see that ‘emancipation’ does not play any significant part in Pettit’s neo-​ republican theory. There are in fact good reasons for this, and again these insights point towards key differences between Pettit’s neo-​republicanism 137

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and Laclau’s post-​Marxism. To further draw out these differences, I read their respective positions in light of Marx’s political/​human emancipation distinction; with Pettit’s theory operating exclusively at the level of formal political rights and freedoms, whereas Laclau’s approach retains important characteristics of what Marx called ‘human emancipation’, albeit also with important qualifications. The term ‘emancipation’ comes from the Latin emancipatusis, which is a compound of two Latin words ex and mancipum, which signify ‘away’ and ‘ownership’ respectively; hence emancipatusis means to ‘give away ownership’. In Roman law, ‘emancipation’ did not in fact refer to the liberation of slaves from their bondage, but to a legal mechanism for releasing someone (child/​or wife) from the control of another (father/​ husband) and thus altering their status (Gardner, 1998: 10). The term was used, for example, to refer to ‘freeing of a son from the legal authority of the male head of the family, thus making him responsible for himself in law’ (Roberts, 2014: 583; Gardner, 1998: 10). Although sons could establish independence in this way, this did not apply to a slave because his/​her status in society was considered as a ‘thing’ and not a person. However, slaves could become ‘liberated’ from their bondage, but this was through the process of ‘manumission’ which took the form of ‘ceremonies performed by the master, [and] legally recognised within a society’ (Harrill, 1995: 4). Despite these subtle differences, following the modern struggle against chattel slavery: the terms emancipation and liberation have come to be seen as more or less equivalent, and they have been generalised to refer to any struggle to liberate someone from injustice and oppression, and often against the will of the ‘oppressor’ (Biesta, 2010: 41). In other words, since the time of the Enlightenment, emancipation has come to mean ‘the liberation of slaves without the observance of any manumission procedures [and] regardless of the slaveholder’s [or master’s] interests’ (Harrill, 1995: 4). In the 18th century, the term emancipation was ‘used in relation to the emancipation of slaves, in the 19th century to the emancipation of women and workers’ and in the 20th century to the independence from colonial rule (Hewlett, 2007: 1; Biesta, 2010: 42). Marx’s use of the term clearly follows in this same broad tradition (see Hewlett, 2007). Given Pettit’s invocation of the master/​slave relationship to describe the circumstances of domination, we might expect him also to model a theory of politics on the idea of emancipation. However, in fact we find that, apart from few scattered references, emancipation plays no substantive or significant role in Pettit’s neo-​republicanism conception of freedom as non-​ domination. The reason for this is that the point of departure for Pettit’s analysis is existing Western democracies where the status of individuals has been formally equalised in law. Indeed, this context of formal equality under the law sets the basic parameters for Pettit’s approach where his focus 138

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is on ‘arbitrary relations’ of power that manifest in the dynamics between individual agents. However, background structures of inequality and undue influence, or what Niko Kolodny calls unequal social relations, persist under conditions of formal equality and in democracies (Kolodny, 2014a, 2014b). So, while Pettit states that ‘freedom involves emancipation from any subordination, liberation from any such dependency’ (Pettit, 1997: 5), his invocation of the master/​slave metaphor functions only as an analogy. His is not a politics of setting someone free from an oppression, because all individuals are already considered equal citizens of the democratic republic. Instead, Pettit’s concern is to counter the residual elements of arbitrary power that some agents wield over others, and this through legal redress as well as a politics of contestation. Nevertheless, as we will see in more detail in the final section, this is a politics that is played out essentially within the context of the existing institutions. If we turn to the categories that Marx introduced in ‘On the Jewish question’, we could say that Pettit’s approach operates exclusively at the level of what Marx calls ‘political emancipation’. Marx used this term to describe the formal freedom of individuals, characteristic of modern liberal democracies, and which he associated with the liberation of the bourgeoisie from pre-​modern aristocratic and feudal structures. On Marx’s reading, modern democracies clearly allow (some) individuals a degree of freedom in the form of rights and protections from state interference, but this formal freedom is intrinsically linked to an atomistic vision of society (which is destructive of genuine human sociality), as well as to ‘real’ capitalist social relations that are anything but free, such as for the class of labourers who are forced to sell their labour power under impoverished and exploitative conditions (Marx, 1994). Marx was of course aware that the circumstances of modern wage labourers are different from ancient and modern forms of slavery, but the deeper point is that there are nonetheless elements of force, influence and exploitation inherent in capitalist wage/​labour relations, despite the formal freedoms of employment contract, or, more generally, despite the supposedly ‘contractual’ basis of modern state and society (Marx, 1994). Marx is not entirely dismissive of modern formal political and civic freedoms, but the key point is that –​even if the formal rights of citizens are extended to the labourers themselves (as of course they have been since the time of Marx’s writing) –​the ‘bourgeoisie revolution’ is nonetheless only one stage in the direction of a more fundamental movement towards genuine ‘human emancipation’ which Marx associated with a more fundamental set of changes in the underlying social order of capitalist society. And this can only be achieved through the ‘self-​emancipation’ of the working class from the tutelage of the wage/​labour relationship (Engels, 1990: 60). Laclau’s theory breaks with some of the core assumptions at work in Marx’s account of ‘human emancipation’. Most significantly, Laclau rejects 139

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the claim that the ‘exploitation’ characteristic of the wage/​labour relation represents the single most important fault line of oppression that underpins modern capitalist society (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 124–​125). On Laclau’s account, capitalist exploitation must be placed on an equal ontological status with other fault lines of domination, for example, gender oppression, the oppression of diverse sexualities, of the environment. He also clearly rejects the teleological assumptions of Marx’s theory of history, which presume a certain necessity in the forthcoming proletarian revolution and which portray the post-​revolutionary communist society in terms of de-​conflicted or pacified society; seen as synonymous with the realisation of ‘man in his species being’ and with a post-​political ‘administration of things’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 1990; Marx, 1994). These assumptions drop out of Laclau’s post-​Marxist and anti-​essentialist approach. Nevertheless, despite these theoretical moves, it is evident also that Laclau retains what is arguably the core of Marx’s political/​human emancipation distinction, which is the idea that any genuine politics of emancipation must contest the underlying structural sources of subordination that persist in modern societies (unequal social relations) despite our formal equality as citizens, and that the moment of ‘emancipation’ allows for the possible emergence of a different kind of institutional ordering. Indeed, Laclau has been explicit in asserting that we need to retain and rework these core elements of conventional Marxist theory. In Laclau’s terminology, this means that: a) the struggle for emancipation has an essentially ‘dichotomous’ form, in the sense that any moment of emancipation is mutually exclusive –​it forms a decisive break with the order that preceded it; and b) emancipation has an intrinsic ‘ground dimension’ in the sense that it must take place at the foundations of the social fabric and not just at the level of political and legal institutions, so that all spheres of society are potentially transformed (Laclau, 1996a: 2). It follows from these insights that Laclau’s understanding of politics cannot be reduced to a defence of existing liberal democratic institutions, as suggested by some of his more conventional Marxist critics (Geras, 1988: 2, 54). Not only is Laclau’s conception of emancipation incompatible with Berlin’s vision of ‘negative liberty’, Laclau’s position is incommensurate with any more general defence of the status quo. While rights and formal legal protections are important, their realisation does not exhaust the sources of oppression in society, and Laclau’s politics reaches out for a more fundamental shift in the existing institutions, whereby people will come to socially relate to one other in egalitarian ways that are distinct from the existing capitalist society. However, despite this clear line of emphasis in Laclau’s work, we need also to further distinguish between his conception of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom’. In Laclau’s theory these terms are not synonymous. Moreover, I would suggest that there are in fact two core aspects to Laclau’s idea 140

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of ‘freedom’, again neither of which are compatible with the idea of ‘negative liberty’ or reducible to the possession of formal political rights. This is freedom understood respectively as indeterminacy and as something like self-​determination. We have already examined Laclau’s conception of freedom as indeterminacy in the previous section (in his theory of structural ‘dislocation’). Indeed, Laclau thinks of freedom as indeterminacy when he writes that it is because of ‘dislocation’ –​because of the failure of the structure to fully constitute the subject as an object –​ that there is freedom (Laclau, 1990: 44, 47). Indeed, this ‘absence of determination’, provides a crucial moment in the emergence of any political struggle, and so the ‘greater the structural indetermination’ in a given conjuncture of social forces, the ‘greater the freedom’ (Laclau, 1990: 35, 40). This conception of freedom as indeterminacy is distinct both from the struggle for emancipation (a struggle for liberation from ‘oppression’, outlined above), and from the idea of freedom as a creative and collective act of self-​generation. This latter conception of freedom Laclau associates with the emergence of a new hegemonic/​symbolic order, with the self-​determination by a people or populous, which can (but not necessarily will) arise from a struggle for emancipation (Laclau, 1996a: 1, 13).11 Implicit in these distinctions is the assumption that the struggle for emancipation is a necessary but insufficient element in the actualisation of ‘freedom’. In this regard, Laclau is, I think, close to the fundamentals of two other continental thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Despite other significant differences in detail, each of these three thinkers differentiate between what Laclau calls ‘emancipation’ (which for Arendt and Foucault is ‘liberation’) –​a struggle to be liberated from necessity or oppression –​and the notion of (what all three thinkers call) practices of ‘freedom’, and which they associate with something like an initiatory or generative moment (see Arendt, 1965; Foucault, 1944: 284–​245). Like Arendt and Foucault, Laclau also places a premium on political contestation, as the source of this generative moment, and in the final section we look more closely at the detail of Laclau’s understanding of political struggle.12 Again, the details of Laclau’s understanding of politics are brought out through a comparison with Pettit’s neo-​republicanism.

Pettit and Laclau on politics as contestation Laclau and Pettit both associate politics with contestation, and they each see political struggle as a key mechanism for challenging domination. This emphasis on the value of political conflict is often associated with ‘agonistic’ theories of democracy, which have recently been reconstructed by Mark Wenman (2013). Wenman emphasises the link between contemporary 141

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agonistic theories and the work of Machiavelli, who stressed the productive force that contest plays within the republic as a way of repeatedly challenging hierarchy and inequality. Neither Laclau or Pettit are typically associated with agonistic theory; however, we can read each of their contributions as falling broadly within this tradition. Furthermore, in keeping with the differences we have thus far established, we see in this final section that Pettit emphasises the importance of the permanent possibility of contesting claims to power and authority within the existing institutions, as a necessary condition for challenging arbitrary power (Pettit, 1997: 172–​96; 2000). Whereas, for Laclau, the decisive element of political struggle is associated with the moment that the existing regime is unable to accommodate and contain a series of political demands, at which point he says we see the emergence of a genuinely populist movement, one that has the potential to alter the symbolic horizon of meaning and hence to establish a new institutional order. Again, these are significant differences, and the objective here is to compare them. I nonetheless conclude with the claim that they each represent important dimensions of political struggle. Thus far, we have seen that Pettit highlights the role of legal protections, which are designed to limit the capacity for arbitrary interference either by the state over its citizens or of one individual over another. However, unlike the predominant strands within contemporary liberal theory, Pettit does not think we can fully ensure the freedom of citizens through legal mechanisms or on the basis of procedural neutrality. Because of his emphasis on individual agency, Pettit is concerned with the element of discretion that resides in decision making (despite formal rules and procedures), and so he is focused on the need for institutions and forums that will enable citizens to challenge and contest government/​public decisions (Pettit, 1997: 187, 277). He develops a rich account of a ‘contestatory democracy’ understood as a supplement to the main institutions of electoral democracy, and at the heart of which is the idea of the right of the people to call public decisions into question. Indeed, Pettit understands contestation in terms of an individual’s or a minority community’s capacity to review legislation and administrative and judicial decision making; that is when they can show that their ‘avowable perceived interests’ have been ignored (Pettit, 1999: 181; 1997: 195). This might take the form of bringing a particular decision ‘before a public commission or parliamentary inquiry on the grounds that it is improper in some way, challenging it before an administrative appeals tribunal, or complaining about it to an ombudsman’ (Pettit, 1999: 181). This implies that the people have a certain ‘editorial’ role in democracy in addition to the ‘authorial’ role of their collective will, and in particular, this allows for a check upon the excesses of the majoritarian principle, which, says Pettit, can often be the source of an ‘ultimate form of arbitrariness’ (Pettit, 1997: 8). 142

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Pettit’s emphasis on democracy as contestation has come under considerable criticism. For example, David Owen (2009) shows how Pettit’s theory reduces contestation to a vehicle through which we negotiate conflicts of interests rather than a medium through which we work out our civic identities; John McCormick (2011) makes the case that Pettit’s contestatory procedures are not at the fore of his conception of politics but operate only in a reactive manner where citizens react to governments and Richard Bellamy (2016) suggests that, in reality, all voices do not get an equal hearing and that the wealthy are most likely able to trigger the review of political decisions in this way. These are important and insightful criticisms, and I broadly concur with the view that Pettit offers an overly narrow conception of political contest, which is of course in keeping with the main characteristics of his theory we have outlined in the previous sections. My sense is, however, that the kind of politics that Pettit describes nonetheless remains an important element in the struggle against subordination, and I come back to this in the conclusion. First, however, we need to compare his conception of politics with Laclau, and of relevance here is Pettit’s insistence that ‘popular movements’ do not form the basis of his theory of democratic contestation (Pettit, 1997: 195). Indeed, Pettit is clear that his objective is to provide mechanisms whereby individual citizens can exercise greater control over public decision making (Pettit, 2012: 185). Moreover, this will often involve an element of ‘depolitisation’, so that cases can be heard by experts and away from the tumult of popular discussion (Pettit, 1997, 2012). The process of ‘depolitisation’ is deeply problematic for challenging subordination and arbitrary power and, as Bellamy identifies, it cannot escape power relations and therefore risks engendering domination (Bellamy, 2007: 146–​174, 175). As we will now see, these points of emphasis are in marked contrast to Laclau. Like Pettit, Laclau accentuates contestation in his account of ‘radical democracy’. He says, ‘there is democracy [only] as long as there is the possibility of unlimited questioning’ (Laclau, 1990: 187). However, we might situate Laclau’s conception of democratic contest precisely where Pettit leaves off. As we have already noted in the previous sections, Laclau thinks of politics in terms of competing hegemonic struggles. Genuine politics, on Laclau’s account, is not something that is contained within the existing institutions, but also refers to those moments of dislocation when one symbolic social order is drawn into question and is possibly superseded by an alternative regime. In his late work, Laclau elaborated these ideas in the terms of a distinctive theory of ‘populism’ (Laclau, 2005). However, there is a clear consistency in the detail of Laclau’s conception of democratic struggle running throughout his publications, from the time of Hegemony and socialist strategy onwards, and the key elements in his approach are as follows. On Laclau’s account, every 143

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political context is defined by a set of ‘demands’ and these demands are directed towards the existing institutions. The existing regime will seek to respond to these discrete demands and to prevent them forming any kind of equivalence with one another. To the extent that the demands are fulfilled, they will be repeatedly absorbed in the existing institutions. Pettit’s politics of democratic ‘redress’ seems to operate exclusively at this level. However, Laclau is interested in what happens precisely when the politics of redress fails: when the existing regime is unable to absorb the individual demands. At this point, according to Laclau, the individual demands start to see themselves in a relationship of ‘antagonism’ with the existing regime, which increasingly comes to be perceived as the ‘oppressor’. Here the demands also change from being ‘requests’ that could potentially be absorbed within the current system, to ‘claims’ that require broader transformations in the existing order (Laclau, 2005). Now the diverse demands also come to see themselves in a common ‘chain of equivalence’: they recognise their correspondence with each other in their shared opposition to the exiting regime that oppresses them all. This creates a ‘frontier effect’ or dichotomous struggles of ‘us versus them’; and from here on the demands are engaged in a more general struggle for ‘emancipation’. Finally, to the extent that this struggle is successful, one of the demands begins to operate as a representative or a stand in for the series of demands, that is, it comes to embody a ‘generalised demand’ that might, in turn, form the basis of a new symbolic or hegemonic order.13 Once again, we see that there are important points of similarity but also crucial differences between the neo-​republican and post-​Marxist conceptions of politics as contestation. Where Pettit’s focus is clearly on the importance of democratic contest within the context of the existing institutions, Laclau’s conception of politics as the struggle for hegemony exhibits important continuities with Marx’s idea of ‘human emancipation’. Indeed, Laclau associates the function of the ‘generalised demand’ with the embodiment of a certain ‘universality’ or fullness –​it transcends the particularity of the discrete individual demands –​and in his late writings Laclau linked this moment of universality with ‘populism’ and with the construction of ‘the people’ (Laclau, 2005: 223). At the same time, however, we must note also once again important qualifications in Laclau’s post-​Marxism, because on Laclau’s reading the hegemonic embodiment of universality only ever takes the form of a temporary personification of an (essentially) absent fullness, and so this moment of plenitude could never be fully realised, for example in the form of a communist society at the ‘end of history’ (Laclau, 1996a: 47–​ 65). In fact, Laclau understands democratic politics precisely in terms of an open-​ended (non-​dialectical) struggle of different groups to temporally stand in for this impossible fullness. 144

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Conclusion The juxtaposition with Pettit’s neo-​republicanism has accentuated certain facets of Laclau’s theory. We have seen how his is not a theory of contestation internal to the existing institutions. To the contrary, there are important elements of continuity between Laclau’s work and aspects of classical Marxism. We have noted also several limitations in Pettit’s approach. I nevertheless conclude with the thought that both neo-​republicanism and post-​Marxism provide important insights for the perennial struggle against subordination and arbitrary power. The movement of democratic struggles over the past three centuries has overturned many forms of oppression in Western societies. This has given rise to the formal equality of citizens, but these struggles have also altered, to some degree, the more structural conditions of oppression embedded in wider societal norms and practices. For example, the position of women in society has changed significantly because of several waves of feminist activism, and we no longer recognise many of the societal norms that formed the backdrop to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Having said that, it is also evident that Western societies are still characterised by many hierarchical and oppressive social relations and forms of inequality, and the relationship between Western and non-​Western states and societies is also characterised by entrenched and systemic structures of power. Because of these ongoing conditions, Pettit’s focus on a politics of redress within the existing institutions is a step towards politics of ‘non-​domination’, but neither should we entirely dismiss the kinds of politics that Pettit describes and focus exclusively, with Laclau, on moments of hegemonic transformation. As some critics of Laclau have pointed out, his theory ‘has little to say’ about the specific institutional arrangements that might facilitate radical democracy (Keenan, 1995: 82). And it is precisely at the level of institutionalised contestation, where Pettit makes a valuable contribution. Indeed, we do not have to choose decisively –​at the level of theory –​between these alternatives, and we should see them instead as both relevant strategies in an overall struggle against subordination.14 By way of closure, we can further illustrate the potential complementarity of these perspectives regarding the thought of John Locke. Indeed, Pettit likens his model of contestatory democracy to Locke’s conception of popular sovereignty under a mixed constitution, which enables the citizens to contest the decisions of their representatives and to resist abuses of power (Pettit, 1999: 183; Pettit, 2012: 213; Lovett and Pettit, 2009: 25). This is an important tradition in modern political thought, one which links back also to Machiavelli’s emphasis on the productive role of contest within the republic, and I think this vision of politics continues to be of great importance in the context of contemporary political struggles. There are times, however, when the struggle with arbitrary power requires citizens to go further; to 145

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reclaim what Locke calls their ‘natural power or liberty’ from the existing institutions, so they might reconstitute the body politic in the form of a new institutional order. In Locke’s thought this implies a natural right to resistance and revolution, and in Laclau this is the ever-​present possibility of a decisive moment of transition to a new hegemony. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Stuart Sim and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and helpful comments. I would also like to thank Mark Wenman for discussing these ideas in detail. I thank the British Academy for providing the conditions to facilitate this piece of work. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

It is important to note that there is an alternative mode of the neo-​republican revival within contemporary continental theory: see Hardt and Negri (2009). See for example, McCormick (2003), Markell (2008), Hirschmann (2009) and Thompson (2013). For Laclau, dislocation is inscribed into the logic of any structure and it is the trace of contingency within the structure. See Pettit (1997: 30) for his earlier notion of arbitrary power as not tracking the avowable interests of those affected by it. Nora is in a relation of servitude to Krogstad until the bond of her debt is returned. Indeed,Torvald acknowledges that ‘there can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends upon borrowing or debt’ (Ibsen, 2014: 5). Pettit has more recently sought to address structural forms of domination where he acknowledges that certain economic, cultural and legal conditions enable some people to interfere with the choices of others (Pettit, 2012: 62). His response has been to limit the capacity for agents to exercise interference in other people’s choices and he sees law as the best means to address this. This move is to be welcomed; however, this nonetheless reflects Pettit’s methodological individualism. Changes in the law and forms of law enforcement are very important measures and protections, but they are not equivalent to a change in the wider conditions such as norms, practices and processes that sustain entrenched relations of subordination and hierarchy that are reproduced through seemingly innocuous everyday practices and forms of socialisation embedded in institutions. See Kolodny (2014b) for why the law is not sufficient for social equality. In some of his earliest writings, Pettit also engaged the traditions of French (post) structuralism or anti-​phenomenologists (Pettit, 1975). However, two key differences distinguish Pettit’s and Laclau’s reading of Saussure’s structural model of signification. First, Pettit appears to accept Saussure’s synchronic approach to language as a closed system of differences. This has the effect of naturalising the existing structure, whereas Laclau’s poststructuralism rejects the fixity and closure of any system, draws attention to the power relations that sustain semantic units and rules, and emphasises the subject’s capacity to challenge the predominant discourse. Second, Pettit claims that Saussure’s structural model of meaning, with its account of structure in terms of the relations between the units within a language, cannot be carried over from the linguistic to non-​linguistic domains (Pettit, 1975: 70). For Pettit, Althusser, Lacan and Foucault cannot be counted as structuralists under the definition he uses. This is because there is nothing in Althusser’s ‘ideology’, 146

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8 9

10

11

12

13

14

Foucault’s ‘archive’, and Lacan’s ‘unconscious’ to ‘correspond properly to the [structural role of the] sentence in a language’ and are instead languages [structures] in their own right (Pettit, 1975: 70).This is an important difference between Pettit and Laclau, and provides some explanation regarding how the word ‘structure’ is used in their respective approaches. For Pettit, structure is theorised in an individualist manner. See also Howarth et al (2016). Kolodny (2014a, 2014b) questions Pettit’s use of the term domination and suggests that the examples he provides –​such as the slave and the slave holder or patriarchal relations –​ are instances of relations of subordination and more specifically relations of superiority and inferiority. He says they are relations of social inequality. See Vrousalis (2013) for whom domination is not just asymmetrical power relations (power over) where one agent affects another but where the power-​overing is done so in a way that is disrespectful (demeaning, degrading, humiliating). For Vrousalis (2013: 140), the relation between master/​slave, serf/​lord and husband/​wife in the patriarchal family all involve disrespect. He theorises domination from a third person perspective looking at the relationship between two agents. For Laclau, domination is the perspective from the individual/​group who becomes aware that she/​he is subordinated and subjugated to unequal social relations such as hierarchy or patriarchy. Laclau’s conception of subordination shares similarities with Niko Kolodny’s (2014a, 2014b) concerns about subordination understood as inequality in social relations (relations of inferiority and superiority) that enables some people to have greater opportunity to influence decisions and outcomes. For Laclau, freedom involves self-​determination where an ‘act of decision’ takes place in an undecidable terrain (1996b: 52, 54).This is different from Pettit’s notion of political decision where a resolution is reached after rational consideration and deliberation. For Laclau, following Derrida,‘decision’ or ‘madness of the decision’ cannot be rationalised and it provides the conditions for the emergence of the subject (1996b: 54, 55). Several contributors –​including Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and various feminist writers –​ have stressed limitations in the idea of ‘emancipation’. The struggle for emancipation can become a trap, because it inscribes the oppressed into a set of subject positions constructed by the dominant regime of power. The emancipatory logic also seems to imply that the oppressed person becomes free because of the act of emancipation, and this can ‘install dependency into the heart of emancipation’ (Biesta, 2010: 41, 45). Laclau is mindful of these problems, and careful to insist that emancipation is a necessary but insufficient condition of freedom understood as self-​determination. This summary of Laclau’s approach is reconstructed from several sources across his various publications. As we have noted, there is a remarkable consistency in the core elements of Laclau’s conception of the struggle for hegemony, from 1985 onwards. From Glynos and Howarth’s (2007) social logics perspective, we could say that the differences between Laclau and Pettit are that Laclau’s focus is on ontological conditions (the political) while Pettit’s is ontic issues (politics).

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Laclau, E. (1990) New reflections on the revolutions of our time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1996a) Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1996b) ‘Deconstruction, pragmatism hegemony’, in S. Critchley, J. Derrida, E. Laclau and R. Rorty (eds), Deconstruction and pragmatism, London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy, London: Verso. Lovett, F. (2010) A general theory of domination and justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovett, F. and Pettit, P. (2009) ‘Neorepublicanism: A normative and institutional research program’, Annual Review of Political Science, 12: 11–​29. Marx, K. (1994) ‘On the Jewish question’, in L. Simon (ed.) Marx: selected writings, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, pp 1–​26. Markell, P. (2008) ‘The insufficiency of domination’, Political Theory, 36(1): 9–​36. McCormick, J. (2003) ‘Machiavelli against republicanism: on the Cambridge School’s Guicciardinian moments’, Political Theory, 5: 615–​643. McCormick, J. (2011) Machiavellian democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mouffe, C. (1993) The return of the political, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2000) The democratic paradox, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the political, London: Routledge. Owen, D. (2009) ‘The expressive agon’, in A. Schaap (ed), Law and agonistic politics, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 71–​86. Pettit, P. (1975) The concept of structuralism: A critical analysis, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, P. (1999) ‘Republican liberty, contestatory democracy’, in C. Hacker-​ Cordon and I. Shapiro (eds), Democracy’s value, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 163–​190. Pettit, P. (2000) ‘Democracy, electoral and contestatory’, Nomos, 42: 105–​44. Pettit, P. (2003) ‘Agency-​freedom and option-​freedom’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15(4): 387–​403. Pettit, P. (2012) On the people’s terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, P. (2014) Just freedom: a moral compass for a complex world, New York: Norton. Roberts, E.A. (2014) A comprehensive etymological dictionary of the Spanish Language with families of words based on non-​European roots Volume 1(a-​g), USA: Xlibris LLC. Sim, S. (2000) Post-​Marxism: an intellectual history, New York: Routledge. Thompson, M. (2013) ‘Restructuring republicanism freedom’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39(12): 187–​208. 149

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Vrousalis, N. (2013) ‘Exploitation, vulnerability and social domination’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 41(2): 131–​157. Wenman, M. (2003) ‘Laclau and Mouffe: splitting the difference’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29(5): 581–​606. Wenman, M. (2013) Agonistic democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worsham, L. and Olson, G. (1999) ‘Hegemony and the future of democracy’, JAC, 19(1): 1–​34.

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From Domination to Emancipation and Freedom: Reading Ernesto Laclau’s Post-​Marxism in Conjunction with Philip Pettit’s Neo-​Republicanism: A Reply to Gulshan Khan Andreas Ottemo

Theorising the present, theorising beyond the present In ‘From domination to emancipation and freedom’, Gulshan Khan puts Ernesto Laclau’s work –​particularly aspects of it that concern domination, subordination and oppression –​in dialogue with a somewhat unconventional partner, namely the neo-​republican political theorist Philip Pettit. This is a fruitful approach that allows Khan to bring out some particular strengths in Laclau’s theorising on these matters. Initially framed as a conversation between two equal partners, it should be noted that Khan uses Pettit more as a vehicle for bringing out particular qualities in Laclau’s work, rather than strictly comparing the two or putting them in dialogue on an equal footing. Indeed, as Khan soon admits, examining ‘the limits of Pettit’s perspective also helps to foreground the strengths of Laclau’s theory’, and I would suggest that this is the main point of the chapter, in contrast to the ‘vice versa’ aspired to. The points of similarity and difference chosen to focus on in the chapter strike me as correlating well with areas particularly central to Laclau’s work and with questions Pettit has less to say about. I would suspect that this relative silence on the part of Pettit has more to do with the two theorists’ different ambitions, rather than reflecting the general ‘superiority’ of Laclau’s theory over Pettit’s. As long as one does not read the chapter as a 151

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strict comparison and is aware that the conversation is to some degree ‘rigged’ in favour of Laclau, this is not a problem. Instead, Khan usefully employs Pettit’s work to shed light on some of the particularities of Laclau’s work, pertaining specifically but not solely to the relation between domination, emancipation and freedom. The discussion of Pettit’s reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the way this is contrasted with a suggested Laclauean reading of the same play, is illuminating in several ways. Khan uses it to illustrate the limits of the neo-​republican notion of freedom as non-​domination with regard to understanding structural power. Arguing that the methodological individualism inherent in Pettit’s approach effectively makes it impossible for him to ‘adequately account for structural domination’, Khan contrasts this incapacity with Laclau’s elaborated theorising of the relation between structure and agency. Khan shows how Laclau theoretically models agency as the manifestation of structural undecidability and, I would add, hence explains the ‘origin’ or ‘cause’ of agency in a theoretically consistent way, whereas Pettit models collective agency on methodological individualism and hence assumes rather than explains agency. Khan goes on to argue: These are crucial differences, and they lead, in turn, to another key distinction between the two authors, which is that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, while Laclau’s notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order. (emphasis added) As can be seen, Pettit is identified here as a theorist of what is, while Laclau is acknowledged for also providing ways of thinking beyond what is –​about more revolutionary change. This is a central distinction that Khan returns to throughout the chapter. In my view, it can be connected to the broad distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ often emphasised when a distinctively post-​structural intervention into political theory is argued for (Marchart, 2007). As one of Laclau’s exponents within the Essex School, David Howarth suggests that, to understand the mode of theorising Laclau and Mouffe engage in, one must acknowledge that: Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive approach is not concerned with the nature of specific types of object, practice, institutions, or even concrete discourses. In Heidegger’s terms, they are not conducting an ontical analysis of particular sorts of entities, but are concerned with the necessary presuppositions of any inquiry into the nature of objects and social relations… In short, they are concerned with ontological questions, 152

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and seek at this level of inquiry to criticize other ontologies and develop their own alternative. (Howarth, 2000: 112, emphasis in original) This can be considered both a weakness and strength in Laclau’s theorising, for partly paradoxical reasons. On the one hand, this abstract level of theorising is probably one of the reasons Laclau’s work is applicable within so many different disciplinary contexts and has been able to remain continually relevant for so long. It is also, I believe, one reason Laclau’s theorising is useful for thinking not only about the present but also beyond the present. Keeping a certain distance to particular ‘ontic’ categories such as race, gender and class provides room for theoretical imagination, allowing one to think politics differently. Thus, one can avoid getting caught up in ‘what is’ and engaging in a purely negative critique that is largely reactive and formulated in a register of ressentiment (in a Nietzschean sense; see Johansson and Ottemo, 2015). Instead, insistence on the primacy of the political and the necessarily contingent nature of any particular social formation central to Laclau’s work provides the basis for a mode of theorising that encourages us to imagine alternative hegemonic projects. In Laclau and Mouffe’s case this would be a radically democratic order (although one can discuss how necessary the relation between their political theory and this normative goal is). Simultaneously, the ontological focus and subsequent abstractness of Laclau’s theorising has been criticised for hindering precisely such envisioning of possible future orders. As Khan points out, some critics argue that Laclau ‘ “has little to say” about the specific institutional arrangements that might facilitate radical democracy’. Khan suggests that this can be considered both a strength and a weakness in Laclau’s theorising and, conversely, that it is both a strength and a weakness in Pettit’s work that he has more to say about ‘specific institutional arrangements’ and ‘the level of institutionalised contestation’. Ultimately, however, Khan argues that ‘we do not have to choose decisively –​at the level of theory –​between these alternatives’, and that it may instead be fruitful to think of them in terms of complementarity. I am inclined to agree to some extent, but would like to add that this need to engage with the more concrete and ‘fleshy’ matters of politics on the ontic level (as opposed to the ontological realm of the political) has also been addressed from within Laclau’s own horizon, through other members of the Essex School. As Howarth notes regarding Laclau and Mouffe’s early work: They tend to over-​emphasize the ontological dimension at the expense of the ontical, which means that their concepts and logics are in danger of appearing too thin and formalistic, and need to be supplemented by a range of thicker concepts and logics. (2000: 117) 153

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As Khan too notes in passing at the beginning of the chapter, Howarth has himself –​together with Jason Glynos in Logics of critical explanation in social and political theory (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) as well as in more recent writing (Howarth, 2010, 2013; Howarth et al, 2016) –​engaged in furnishing such ‘thicker concepts’ and middle-​range categories, useful for making Laclau and Mouffe’s work more applicable to concrete empirical studies. Glynos and Howarth (2007) articulate this project as a response to two common critiques often directed at post-​structural discourse theory, namely that a methodological and a normative deficit plague this tradition. The methodological deficit is largely tackled through the development of thicker concepts and logics such as those mentioned above, while the normative deficit is addressed by articulating a distinctively post-​structural understanding of critique and what it means (for both empirical subjects and the political theorist) to be critical. This brings me to the last point I would like to make in relation to Khan’s chapter. As Khan points out, Pettit and Laclau differ in their way of understanding domination, not only in the sense that Laclau has more to say about structural domination, but also because Laclau offers a more fine-​ grained understanding of the different shapes that domination takes. Dividing the notion of domination into three different relations –​subordination, domination and oppression –​allows Laclau to theorise, first, situations where power asymmetries are taken for granted and considered natural (subordination, as in the first part of A Doll’s House), second, situations where such asymmetries give rise to grievances or dislocatory experiences but are not turned into publicly articulated political claims (domination), and, third, situations where power asymmetries are recognised as oppressive and give rise to political demands (oppression). These distinctions are important, as Khan shows, because they enable a more fine-grained analysis of the mechanisms involved in both sustaining unjust conditions and challenging them. I would add to this that this conceptual triad is also important in addressing the role of the political theorist in explicitly critical political research. This is because discussing not only the objective conditions of the workings of ‘arbitrary power’ and what legal regulations could obstruct it (with Pettit) –​conceptually including in the analysis a subjective/​experiential aspect (emphasising the subjective recognition of a relation as unjust, and hence shifting it from a relation of subordination into domination or possibly oppression) –​also foregrounds the role of the researcher and, by extension, the normative grounds for labelling a relation as worthy of critique. As Howarth (2010) argues, in the case of subordination, it is not only the involved agents who fail to recognise a relation as hierarchical, but also the political theorist/​researcher. In the case of domination, however, a moment of normative engagement on the part of the researcher is involved in the very naming of the relation as 154

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domination. For such critique to be credible and potentially transformative, the values brought to the table by the researcher have to be acknowledged and articulated with the ‘values and identities encountered in the practices interpreted: what we might deem the “counter-​logics” of social domination and oppression’ (Howarth, 2010: 328). Following Howarth’s analysis, it is the combining of such engagement with the recognition that our own normative stances as researchers are always contingent themselves that enables an ethically sound critique of a situation to be formulated. What we can see here, then, is that the distinction between subordination, domination and oppression is not only analytically useful for theorising a political situation. Rather, this distinction also provides room for thinking reflectively about the role of the political theorist in challenging unjust orders and pushing for emancipation and freedom. References Glynos, J. and Howarth, D. (2007) Logics of critical explanation in social and political theory, London: Routledge. Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse, Buckingham: Open University Press. Howarth, D. (2010) ‘Power, discourse, and policy: articulating a hegemony approach to critical policy studies’, Critical Policy Studies, 3(3–​4): 309–​335, doi: 10.1080/​19460171003619725 Howarth, D. (2013) Poststructuralism and after: structure, subjectivity and power, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Howarth, D., Glynos, J. and Griggs, S. (2016) ‘Discourse, explanation and critique’, Critical Policy Studies, 10(1): 99–​104, doi: 10.1080/​ 19460171.2015.1131618 Johansson, T. and Ottemo, A. (2015) ‘Ruptures in hegemonic masculinity: the dialectic between ideology and utopia’, Journal of Gender Studies, 24(2): 192–​ 206, doi: 10.1080/​09589236.2013.812514 Marchart, O. (2007) Post-​foundational political thought: political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Spectres of Post-​Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-​Marxist Texts Stuart Sim

Introduction Marxism has always had its share of internal critics, but from the 1970s onwards a distinctively post-​Marxist critique of the Marxist tradition began to emerge. Certain key texts of that era set out to question the Marxist tradition, often in a quite radical way. Among the most prominent were, in chronological order of original publication, Jean Baudrillard’s (1973) The mirror of production, Jean-​François Lyotard’s Libidinal economy (1974), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy, and Jacques Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx. Collectively, these built up a formidable body of critique of Marxism and its cultural legacy, ranging in approach from outright rejection –​anti-​Marxist to some –​to calls for substantial revision of both its concepts and objectives. Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 5) insisted in Hegemony and socialist strategy that they saw their enterprise as being both ‘post-​ Marxist’ and ‘post-​Marxist’. To a certain extent, although with qualifications, the same could be said of Specters; but Baudrillard and Lyotard can both be described as post-​Marxist, rejectionists rather than revisers. Clarifying his position in an interview in the aftermath of Hegemony and socialist strategy’s publication, Laclau (1990: 201) was to state that ‘I haven’t rejected Marxism. Something very different has occurred. It’s Marxism that has broken up and I believe I’m holding on to its best fragments.’ From the standpoint of several decades on, however, what has been the legacy of each text: a dead end, or a signpost to the future of left-​wing thought? This chapter reassesses these four key works to consider whether they still resonate meaningfully today, either theoretically or politically, given the many significant social changes that have taken place since they were written. How do they appear in what has been for some time now a climate of rampant neoliberalism? Or, for 156

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that matter, one where religious fundamentalism, particularly the Islamic variety, is thriving? And where there has been a marked shift to the right in the political complexion of the Western world, with nationalism becoming an ever more important factor, and the phenomena of Brexit and the Trump presidency signalling a marked downturn in the appeal of the left among the general population. A key point to make before moving on to the texts themselves is that all of them emerged from the poststructuralist or postmodernist movements which were so influential in academic and artistic circles in the latter decades of the 20th century. Poststructuralism and postmodernism arose in reaction to certain intellectual trends and conventions, questioning the assumptions these were based on. Specifically, they set out to challenge what they saw as the tyrannical authority exercised by structuralism and modernism in critical and artistic activity (as in the dominance of ‘brutalist’ architecture; see, for example, Jencks, 1991). But the battles they fought are not the ones we face now and, as their concerns have dated, their influence has declined sharply. That post-​Marxism is very largely a product of the intellectual climate created by poststructuralism and postmodernism, particularly their commitment to relativism, has to raise the issue of whether it can transcend the eclipse of these movements. The extent to which relativism can resonate in the current socio-​political situation does need to be addressed.

Jean Baudrillard: The mirror of production Baudrillard (1975: 17) takes issue with the obsession with production in Marxist thought and socio-​political practice, arguing that this hinders rather than facilitates the Marxist project of liberation: ‘A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity.’ Since the 1970s when Baudrillard was writing The mirror of production, however, industrial manufacturing has declined dramatically in the West, with China in particular taking over much of this activity as it is able radically to undercut production costs in comparison to those of Western workforces. In that sense, there still is that obsession in communist China with production, since the Chinese Communist Party is dependent on being the global powerhouse for this in order to provide employment for its huge, and still expanding, population. The fear is that the Chinese masses would become ungovernable should this source of employment and income dry up, hence the Party’s willingness to turn the country into a major supplier of consumer goods for Western companies, and to build its economy round that. So China must produce more and more, even if the process hardly can be said to liberate its citizens from the demands of the system. The West is often shocked to find out how poor the working conditions can be in Chinese industry, although that has 157

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not deterred multinationals from continuing to utilise it –​or consumers from buying the products that result. There is a massive irony here in that a communist country now underpins the West’s consumer culture, in effect producing to order for the capitalist system. Baudrillard’s main complaint is that Marx is not radical enough in his response to capitalist society, that he accepts its goals at face value, and is simply concerned to see these delivered in a less exploitative fashion –​ although as Baudrillard goes on to argue, that cannot be delivered if the system maintains its basic character. Marx, in other words, does not really challenge the ethos of capitalism, just the way it is currently being managed: ‘Comprehending itself as a form of the rationality of production superior to that of bourgeois political economy, the weapon Marx created turns against him and turns his theory into the dialectical apotheosis of political economy.’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 50) There is nothing to be gained by continuing on in this vein Baudrillard decides, provocatively claiming that this signals the end of the classical Marxist project: ‘For us, the critique of the political economy is basically completed’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 51). Marxism is little more than the mirror of capitalism in its obsession with production, and that is preventing, rather than aiding, the goal of human liberation that was the motivation for Marx’s work. Marxism is just as guilty of ‘the elevation of man to an economic abstraction’ as the capitalist system is, and is fatally compromised by this connection (Baudrillard, 1975: 57). Baudrillard feels this puts everything about Marxist theory in question, and makes the point in characteristically provocative fashion: ‘Can the quantitative development of productive forces lead to a revolution of social relations? Revolutionary hope is based “objectively” and hopelessly on this claim.’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 59–​60) Baudrillard regards Marxism as implicated in the concept of progress, to be realised through the joint efforts of science and technology: in other words, the ‘Enlightenment project’, as we have been led to conceive of it, that is the driving force behind modern society. It is based on a series of assumptions: ‘Scarcity exists and must be abolished; the Productive Forces exist and must be liberated; the End exists and only the means need be found.’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 60) Nature, from this perspective, is there to be exploited by humanity, and that means that the class struggle is only about who controls the process. Taking that over, however, would not alter the system and the assumptions on which it was built; humanity would still be caught up in the spiral of scarcity-​production-​end. Baudrillard’s point is that as long as we are bound by that endlessly-​reproducing sequence, then social relations will remain largely the same. He rejects the idea that the sequence is an intrinsic element of human existence, arguing that it was not there in pre-​industrial society: ‘Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 67), but it is not justified in doing so. To argue that line is to argue that there is 158

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no dialectic of history, which at a stroke removes one of the most crucial assumptions of the Marxist model. Without a dialectic of history Marxism loses its claim to be a science of society. As far as Baudrillard is concerned, Marxism is based on false premises. It backdates its main principles onto human history, when in fact they only apply to the epoch in which Marx is writing: Baudrillard is even sceptical that these principles can apply to the 1970s when he is writing, given the extent of cultural change in the interim. The proletariat of Marx’s day hardly exists in the West any more, and the precariat that has in some ways replaced it is a very disparate grouping that lacks the common experience that could link the 19th-​century industrial working class together. Marxism depends on a teleology which Baudrillard considers very suspect: that all of human history has been leading towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. Past societies are then viewed as mere stepping stones towards the current situation, with the bourgeoisie creating the conditions that will generate the ultimate victory of the proletariat and the realisation of a utopian communist society. Baudrillard is quite scathing about the intellectual sleight of hand that this involves: Earlier modes of production are never envisaged as autonomous or definitive; it is unthinkable that history could have been arrested with them. The dialectic limits them to being no more than successive phases in a process of revolution that is also a cumulative process of production. (Baudrillard, 1975: 111) A theory that is descriptive of the ideological conditions of its own time is imposed on both the present and the future, in what Baudrillard witheringly dubs a ‘Euclidean geometry of history’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 123). A more problematical aspect about production is beginning to arise in the use of robots in the industrial process. This is a system that can only become more widespread, and a future looms where production largely bypasses the human. There will certainly be liberation from the tyranny of the production line as this happens, but the social cost of this change has barely begun to be addressed, and it has the capacity to be very destructive. Marx had speculated that under a fully-​developed communist system, individuals would be freed to use their talents as they saw fit, without being tied to the production system: ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind’ (Marx and Engels, 1965: 45). That utopian scenario assumes individuals have the resources to do so financially, however, rather than simply being rendered unemployed, and quite possibly unemployable, by technological innovation and left with no means of subsistence. If the latter proved to be the case, then a neo-​Luddite 159

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nostalgia for being involved in production could well develop in a robot-​ intensive society –​not to mention a considerable degree of social unrest. Marxism describes a society in which human labour is being ruthlessly exploited, but whether it can have any purchase at all in the society where production requires progressively less in the way of human labour, is more problematical. Baudrillard does raise this issue, referring to the paradox of social groups who are compelled to fight for a place in the circuit of work and of productivity, the paradox of generations who are left out or placed off limits by the very development of the productive forces. The reverse of capitalism’s initial situation. (Baudrillard, 1975: 132) It is a problem that has become far worse since the 1970s, with the phenomena of zero-​hours contracts and unpaid internships becoming so widespread, and the development of robot labour can only make the situation far worse. Baudrillard is right to query the validity of Marxist theory under these circumstances.

Jean-​François Lyotard: Libidinal economy Libidinal economy is very much a product of the aftermath of the 1968 événements and the feeling of despair that settled on so many soixante-​huitards like Lyotard after the collapse of their revolutionary hopes. The work’s notorious attack on Marx gets down to a level of the personal that both philosophers and critics generally studiously avoid, revealing an angry, and not always very rational-​sounding commentator. Marx is slated for his inability to finish projects, missing numerous deadlines for Capital, for example, and then continuing to produce additional material even after volume I had finally been published. It was to be left to Engels to collate this into volumes II–​IV, to complete the work as we know it today. Marx’s inability to conclude his researches, however, while more than somewhat unprofessional (irritating to publishers certainly), is hardly an argument against the quality of what he did actually write: late or not, its impact can hardly be denied. Neither is it all that relevant to his work to speculate on Marx’s libido, as Lyotard also provocatively does: that is no more reason to reject Marxist theory than its founder’s slow publishing rate. That said, it does have the virtue of raising the issue of the place of the emotions in revolutionary thought, and that is worth flagging up in any assessment of Libidinal economy’s value. Lyotard does have an overall philosophical rationale for his turn from Marxism, however, and this is revealed through several other of his works. It is his rejection of the notion of a universal theory, which of course Marxism claims to be as the ultimate ‘science of society’ that 160

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renders all others obsolete. That is what the, heavily laid-​on, irony of Libidinal economy is signalling by complaining of Marx’s inability to finish Capital: ‘the perpetual postponement of finishing work on Capital, a chapter becoming a book, a section a chapter, a paragraph a section, by a process of cancerization of theoretical discourse’ (Lyotard, 1993: 96). Marxism from this perspective is not a complete, unified theory, but a work in progress, quite possibly indefinite progress, which alters its status quite considerably. For Lyotard, as for the poststructuralist and postmodernist movements in general, there is no theory that is going to cover all possible eventualities, that will remain true for all times and all places, anyway. The problem this leaves the thinker with, however, is relativism: how do you construct a counter-​theory to the one you are dismissing, if an epistemologically watertight, overall theory is from your perspective an untenable aim? Sceptics have wrestled with that dilemma since classical times, and Lyotard is no exception. Scepticism always functions much better as a negative critique than a constructive theory, and postmodernism as a whole is rather stuck with that situation. Being a highly political animal, Lyotard recognises the need to confront this issue since politics is structured around value judgements, and indeed can hardly exist without them. He therefore puts forward several suggestions as to how to continue to make value judgements while remaining a relativist. This is revealed best in the series of interviews with Jean-​Loup Thébaud that go to make up Just gaming ([1979] 1985). Lyotard takes a pragmatist line to justice, and therefore to value judgement, here: ‘One works “case by case” ’, as he puts it, ‘even when one is producing a constitution’ (Lyotard and Thébaud, 1985: 28). There are to be no preconceived concepts that prescribe precise rules when it comes to problems of justice and morality: decisions must be arrived at by assessing the particular circumstances at work in a given situation, rather than by conforming to any overall code decreed beforehand. There are parallels to be noted with utilitarianism in that respect, in that nothing is determined in advance, but is instead arrived at in terms of the circumstances obtaining; in other words, case by case (although the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’ – see Bentham, 2007 –​is some kind of guideline, albeit a very flexible one). To act in this way is in Lyotard’s terms of reference to be ‘pagan’; to be flexible in attitude, and sensitive to the sheer complexity of moral dilemmas. Lyotard’s flexibility as regards value judgement extends to political organisation, in that he favours small, coalition-​type groupings designed to challenge particular social or political abuses, rather than working through mass party channels with more rigid concepts of hierarchy. ‘Little narratives’ are meant to be temporary, with specific goals in mind: once these have been achieved then they can be dissolved (see Lyotard, 1984). These are all developments in his thought in the aftermath of Libidinal economy; but the message that comes out clearly from the work is that other methods 161

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of conducting political life must be devised, that Marxism is no longer functioning effectively as an agent of social change. Lyotard certainly feels it has gone past the point of being revised and updated; in his view, it no longer has anything significant to say to his generation of the left. Libidinal economy is more a cry of rage than an analysis of Marxist theory, an ‘outburst’ as Lyotard admits (Lyotard, 1993: 120); but that speaks volumes about just how low Marxism’s stock had fallen in the aftermath of 1968. It is almost as if there is no point even entering into dialogue with Marxism anymore. In that respect, Lyotard presents himself as an anti-​Althusser, and he puts it in the bluntest possible terms: We no longer want to correct Marx, to reread him or to read him in the sense that the little Althusserians would like to “read Capital”: to interpret it according to “its truth”. We have no plan to be true, to give the truth of Marx. (Lyotard, 1993: 96) A further sideswipe against ‘the paranoiacs calling themselves Marxist politicians’ (Lyotard, 1993: 96) shows just how little room there is for any kind of cooperation or compromise with the Marxist tradition on Lyotard’s part. Marxism is rejected in its entirety, Lyotard insisting that ‘we are not going to do a critique of Marx, we are not, that is to say, going to produce the theory of his theory’ (Lyotard, 1993: 103). That is what is wrong with The mirror of production, in Lyotard’s view; for all the work’s acknowledged virtues, Baudrillard’s ‘anger ultimately aims at the true once again’ (Lyotard, 1993: 104). Lyotard feels no need to go down that road anymore; Marxism for this thinker has simply become irrelevant to political life.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and socialist strategy Hegemony and socialist strategy remains the key text for post-​Marxists in its demolition of Marxism as a universal theory. It is a work that is painstaking and thorough in the manner in which it takes apart the concept of hegemony, its use and abuse by Marxist thinkers over the years, and what it reveals about deep-​seated structural flaws in the Marxist model of society. The authors’ championship of new social movements correctly detected the influence these could exert on the socio-​political landscape, as well as their continuing attractiveness as a means of taking on the establishment. The advent of austerity politics has generated a range of such movements throughout Europe; for example, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and the Momentum group operating within the Labour party in the UK being among the most prominent, all of them concerned with challenging the hegemony exercised by neoliberal economics. Their success has been fairly 162

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limited to date, but the principle holds about movements emerging outside the political mainstream, deploying non-​standard tactics to challenge the existing political order, which is felt to have become ossified and unresponsive to the needs of the wider electorate. Orthodox left-​wing thought has become progressively marginalised. Various nationalist movements have also arisen in recent years, which are far more problematical to support from a post-​ Marxist viewpoint: the Front National, in France, for example, as well as neo-​fascist parties in German and Hungarian politics. The Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland might just qualify for support, given its left-​leaning social democratic bias, very much at odds with the current Westminster set-​ up. Social democracy is hardly the aim of any of the neo-​fascist parties, with their stridently anti-​immigrant rhetoric and often openly racist worldview, rooted in white supremacist assumptions. Nevertheless, Laclau and Mouffe did succeed in alerting the left to changes in the way the general population was beginning to think about politics, and its increasing resort to protest politics. Protest politics in the form of new social movements cutting across class lines does not fit in very well with the classical Marxist scheme of how society develops. Following on from Adorno’s Negative dialectics (1973), Hegemony and socialist strategy offers yet another critique of the Marxist conception of social totality, making extensive use of deconstructive principles to do so. Deploying Derrida’s argument that there is no fixed centre to systems, they argue that the social system is always in a state of transition, hence it cannot be pinned down by any set of transhistorical laws, as classical Marxism insists. This amounts to an attack on essentialism and determinism, the presence of which in classical Marxist theory had created a need for the concept of hegemony, in order to cover those instances that contradicted the expected determined pattern of events. Hegemony was an attempt to ‘save the system’ in Marxism, but it had to be resorted to repeatedly, and revised repeatedly, to cover yet more eventualities that did not conform to the theory’s claims about how societies developed. Laclau and Mouffe’s critique strikes at the very heart of Marxism in this regard, particularly its claim to be a scientific theory of society, on the basis of which predictions can be made in the political domain: The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-​defined totality. ‘Society’ is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing –​and hence constituting –​the whole field of differences. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111) They insist on ‘the openness of the social’ (1985: 113), which means that new movements, new states of affairs that theories like Marxism could not have 163

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predicted, are always emerging. In their vision of the social, nothing is determined in advance. There is instead a ‘terrain’ of possibilities for political actions that is not circumscribed by transhistorical laws: Since all identity is relational –​even if the system of relations does not reach the point of being fixed as a stable system of differences –​ since, too, all discourse is subverted by a field of discursivity which overflows it, the transition from ‘elements’ to ‘moments’ can never be complete. The status of the ‘elements’ is that of floating signifiers, incapable of being wholly articulated to a discursive chain. And this floating character finally penetrates every discursive (i.e. social) identity. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 113) It could be said that Hegemony and socialist strategy is a revision, of sorts, of Marxism, in that it is designed to cross-​reference a Marxist sensibility with the notion of plurality. To its critics, however, this is to move out of the Marxist framework altogether. Grafting plurality on to Marxism is to undermine its revolutionary potential for such thinkers, who can only interpret it as an act of anti-​Marxist intent (as Norman Geras, 1987, very notably did). Laclau and Mouffe, however, see no alternative but to proceed in that direction if Marxism is to play any role in contemporary politics. Their goal is the development of a ‘radical and plural democracy’, where, each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 167) They reject the notion of a homogeneous working class, insisting that this group, too, is made up of a plurality of identities that renders it unable to function as the central rationale for the construction of a socialist society. There are still struggles to be fought that involve this group, but it should not be considered dominant within these; other groups, such as the many new social movements, need to be factored in as well, and there will not be a unity of belief or objectives among every constituent member engaged in the struggle. Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of the rightward shift in Western political life still resonates powerfully today, more than 30 years down the line: ‘We are thus witnessing the emergence of a new hegemonic project, that of liberal-​ conservative discourse, which seeks to articulate the neo-​liberal defence of the free market economy with the profoundly anti-​egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism of conservatism’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 175). 164

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That discourse is now the controlling one in Western political life; its dominance such that it has survived the credit crisis of 2007–​08 and the austerity politics that came in its wake, as Western governments scrambled to save the neoliberal discourse that they all had been backing so confidently. Austerity has helped to justify regressive social policies such as zero-​hours contracts, which have swelled the ranks of the precariat, eroding hard-​won workers’ rights in the process, as well as various swingeing cuts in welfare entitlements. The precariat certainly displays a plurality of interests, and that has been to the advantage of the neoliberal community, since the precariat lack even the notional unity of the old industrial working class they have so largely replaced. The Labour party in the UK, however, still considers itself to be the representative of the working class, and pitches its message to this class, as if it still existed in its previous incarnation and substantial numbers. There has been much talk among the leadership in the past few years to the effect that New Labour had lost touch with the party’s traditional support, and that it has to be won back by presenting it with a traditional socialist programme of action: nationalisation of key utilities, extension of the welfare state, and so on. While this would undoubtedly benefit much of the precariat, they do not constitute a homogeneous entity, being a group that cuts across class lines, and has radically varied interests and political beliefs. Neither is the trade union movement in the UK of anything like the socio-​ political importance it was in the first few decades after the Second World War: numerically, it too is shrinking. There is still that assumption within Labour that there can be a unity of culture under the sign of socialism. But that is just what Hegemony and socialist strategy is denying is ever going to be possible, thus becoming a self-​defeating exercise. Radical democracy is designed to operate in the absence of that unity, and therefore to adopt a much more tactical, and flexible, mode of operation. Pinning down exactly what this new mode would involve in the way of tactics is much more difficult to discern, however, and Hegemony and socialist strategy concludes fairly weakly in that respect, with some descriptive assertions that lack any clear plan of action: The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal; the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 191) In the wake of the impact of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, those are sentiments that would find wide acceptance on the left (if not, of course, with traditional Marxists or old-​style socialists). Yet we are fully justified in asking what they are actually suggesting we do in political terms of reference. 165

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Radical democracy remains an intriguing idea, although also a problematical one when it comes to concepts like opposition and dissent. Mouffe goes on to address these in The democratic paradox, where she expands on the idea of agonism as a basis for political life in a radical democratic system. Agonism is designed to replace either the antagonism or the compromise which she regards as the bane of standard democratic politics in the West, with its adversarial bias. Agonism, on the other hand, assumes full and frank exchanges of ideas which deliberately steer clear of any attempt at compromise: the latter being ‘the typical liberal perspective’ (Mouffe, 2000: 111), which she feels will always hinder the development of the radical democratic project. The point is to persuade opponents to acknowledge your position as preferable to theirs, switching over to your side in consequence, dropping their erstwhile beliefs in the process. This sounds attractive enough, until we face up to what to do if your opponent bluntly refuses to accept the grounds for debate in the first place. Such a situation is only too likely to arise if the far right, or far left for that matter, is the opponent: basically anyone disposed towards an authoritarian form of regime which leaves no room for dissent, because it feels itself to be the sole repository of the truth. Islamic fundamentalism would be no more accommodating. Mouffe’s answer to this is to insist that such opponents would have to be disqualified from taking part in the system altogether, since they constitute disruptive elements to the running of a radical democracy. Such openly antagonistic clashes are only too easy to imagine, however, and it would seem unlikely that radical democracy could ever remove political extremism entirely from the socio-​political process. In fact, we give every impression since the book was written of having moved into an age of extremism that recalls the 1930s. Laclau returns consistently to the subject of hegemony over the course of his career, insisting that it is in its nature that it will always fall short of the degree of control that the dominant group behind it are striving for: Th[e]‌operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification is what I have called hegemony. And, given that this embodied totality or universality is … an impossible object, the hegemonic identity becomes something of the order of an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an unachievable fullness. (Laclau, 2005: 71) Politics is only really possible because there is this unachievable fullness, and it begins from groups making demands. Populism results when there is ‘the unification of demands in an equivalential chain’ leading to ‘the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links’ (Laclau, 2005: 77). 166

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The empty signifier enables dissent to become politically significant, and the kind of populism that Laclau describes presumably could form the basis of the radical democracy he and Mouffe champion. Yet, as Laclau makes clear in On populist reason, populism can take many forms, and it is right-​ wing populism that is currently the most successful in building its demands into politically powerful equivalential chains: not the type of ‘radical’ that Hegemony and socialist strategy envisaged at all. The ‘openness of the social’ and ‘the unevenness of the social’ (Laclau, 1996: 43) works for the right no less than the left, and the overdetermination that led to the creation of the revolutionary left now seems to be producing a white supremacist, proto-​ fascist movement throughout the West. We are back with the ‘democratic paradox’, which could be summed up as the difficulty of reconciling a Marxism-​derived radical democracy with pluralism –​especially if, as Mouffe insists, there has to be a certain amount of exclusion from that pluralism.

Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx Derrida’s venture into post-​Marxism in Specters of Marx pictures Marx as at best a ghostly presence in terms of contemporary politics, but, crucially, one that continues to haunt us and to do so quite persistently. Socialist thought will always have to account for Marx and Marxism somehow or other, whether from a positive or a negative standpoint: ‘We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not’ (Derrida, 1994: 13). Derrida is also right to point out that there are many Marxes, that he can be, and has been, adapted to a wide variety of purposes – not all necessarily consistent with the traditional communist project. Marx ceases to be a metanarrative, becoming instead a growing series of narratives, freed from ‘the dogma machine’: There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them. (Derrida 1994, 13)1 Marx, in other words, has just become part of our wider cultural heritage, to be raided for ideas without necessarily committing one to his overall scheme. Lyotard had made this very clear in Libidinal economy when he insisted that ‘[a]‌Marxist political practice is an interpretation of a text, just as a social or Christian spiritual practice is the interpretation of a text’ (Derrida, 1994: 95–​ 96). To a classical Marxist, however, that is anathema, being an unacceptable downgrade from its status as the ultimate ‘science of society’. For the latter, 167

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it is not enough to be merely one of the major influences on our thought, Marx has to be the measure of all others, which post-​Marxism is denying he ever can be any more. Post-​Marxists like Laclau and Mouffe are happy to view Marx as an inspiration, but not to feel bound by the letter of what he said –​and more importantly, by the body of practice that has grown up in Marx’s name. Derrida is highly critical of the current state of world politics, which he argues demonstrates the need for a continued engagement with the Marxist tradition of thought: ‘At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-​capitalism and neo-​liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts.’ (Derrida, 1994: 37) Since that was written, however, neo-​capitalism and neoliberalism have been only too successful in installing themselves as the dominant ideology globally. Marx’s ‘ghosts’ may still be around but they have not succeeded in impeding the relentless advance of neoliberalism. Derrida tears into Fukuyama (1992), much in the news at that point for his claim that liberal democracy (underpinned by neo-​ capitalism and neoliberalism, of course) had triumphed in the geopolitical arena, pointing out all the contradictions in his thesis. If only to counter such claims, it is necessary to keep Marxism in play in the realm of public debate, even in spectral form, but Derrida is insistent that classical Marxism has to be transcended, given its teleological, eschatological character. For Derrida it becomes a question of where Marxism is leading and where is it to be led: where to lead it by interpreting it, which cannot happen without transformation, and not where can it lead us such as it is or such as it will have been. (Derrida, 1994: 59) Derrida (1994: 64) is emphatic in his rejection of ‘Marxist dogmatics linked to the apparatuses of orthodoxy’. It is not just liberal democracy that the left has to combat, however, as there are many other forces that any kind of ‘transformed’ Marxism is faced by: ‘Entire regiments of ghosts have returned, armies from every age, camouflaged by the archaic symptoms of the paramilitary and of the postmodern excess of arms (information technology, panoptical surveillance via satellite, nuclear threat, and so forth)’ (Derrida, 1994: 80). In order to resist these ‘regiments’, Derrida (1994: 85) argues, a ‘New International’ will be required. This will be in the spirit of Marxism, and Derrida gives a list of what it will be taking issue with in contemporary culture; but, as with radical democracy, the problem remains of how to implement this in our current political structures. Key to this spirit is a commitment to ‘self-​ critique’, but precisely how effective that would be against ‘regiments of

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ghosts’ (Derrida, 1994: 88) fired by dogmatism would have to remain an open question. For all its complicated arguments, Specters is yet another attempt to distance Marx from the history of Marxism, and particularly the history of communism. Marx is seen to introduce a new form of radicalism into modern life, one based on the principle of self-​critique, and Derrida is fulsome in his praise of this achievement. Specters is undeniably post-​Marxist in orientation, therefore, but it does break down into a series of generalities: political oppression is bad, capitalism is exploitative, and so on. Whether we need Marx to make us realise that is more contentious, as Marx has not been the only thinker to hold such views. Yet his spectre does continue to haunt the left, which cannot avoid having to come to terms with that situation. Unfortunately for the left, however, there is also the spectre of Stalin to think about.

Relativism v absolutism: differends or false consciousness? All of the texts looked at are critical to an understanding of how post-​ Marxism has developed as a theoretical position, and they have been instrumental in provoking debate across the left as to Marxism’s status in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet system. A critical point to arise from each of them is that Marxism has to move away from its authoritarian bias, rooted in the particular historical tradition of communism, and acknowledge both the validity and the value of internal dissent. There has to be much more engagement with conflicting worldviews, whether these are from Marxists, post-​Marxists, or anti-​Marxists. If all Marxism is to be is a theory of world revolution based on a totalitarian model, which cannot countenance any deviation at all from doctrinal purity, then it is due to become little more than a historical curiosity. That is just not the way the world is constructed now, nor is likely to be in the foreseeable future; nor was it that way even in communism’s heyday, hence its failure to carry everything before it. Classical Marxism was never really able to accept the idea that the world could be made up of different socio-​political systems; that not everyone could be persuaded by the virtue of the communist system above all others. Unfortunately, that is only too common a failing of ideologies. Post-​Marxists, on the other hand, see the necessity of operating within that kind of world, espousing a political relativism to follow on from their epistemological relativism. Classical Marxists will never agree on this point, believing that theirs is the only possible system, and that nothing else could qualify as a science of society of similar value to communism. Political absolutism works in the same manner as epistemological, refusing to admit the validity of other positions, simply regarding them as wrong-​headed. For post-​Marxists, 169

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however, the world is never that straightforward; it requires constant adjustment of tactics to meet changing circumstances, tacitly acknowledging that no science of society could ever explain everything, or exert total control over everything either. As Adorno insisted in Negative dialectics, the dialectic will always be open, never as totalising as classical Marxists claimed it to be –​and based their political strategies upon. Political absolutism nevertheless continues to be a powerful force, with radical Islam a very pertinent example of how it can still attract followers. Nationalism, too, has returned with a vengeance in recent years, featuring its own brand of fundamentalist tendencies. It has to be conceded, therefore, that absolutism fills a need that many feel for an all-​enclosing system of belief that makes sense out of the confusion of the world around them. Relativism can leave many people feeling helpless, as if they are at the mercy of events, with no code to fall back upon that tells them what to do or how to live. Both Marxism and radical Islam will provide this, and its appeal is undeniable. Post-​Marxists have to wrestle with such beliefs, with the fact that they are likely always to exert a pull on a significant proportion of the populace. It has to be acknowledged that relativism is destabilising, and that many will as a result seek refuge in absolutist explanations, finding these more comforting. The reaction of believers in absolutist systems generally is to criticise relativists for their negativity. The question often asked is, ‘well what would you put in its place?’ It is as if any criticism of the absolutist position would only be worth considering if it had an alternative all-​purpose absolutist explanation all set up to take over. But that holds the danger of merely substituting one form of authoritarianism, one apparent guarantee of certainty, for another. To Lyotard (1988), that would be yet another case of refusing to accept the existence of a differend, the incommensurability of two conflicting ways of life. Marxists cannot admit that there is a differend, preferring to see it as an example of false consciousness in action, but relativists recognise that this has to be worked around, and that it will require a pragmatic response. Absolutists remain prone to ascribing false consciousness to any belief that runs contrary to their own, whether they are operating from a Marxist or a religious standpoint (neoliberals are not all that much different either, with their insistence that they have created the perfect economic system, and that it is the fault of human beings if it ever goes wrong). Differends are no more than illusory for such believers: a refusal to face up to reality, as they conceive of it. What relativism reveals very starkly, especially given the ire it can arouse in opponents, is how wedded humankind in general appears to be to universal theories. The ongoing search for this, in both politics and science (still striving to put together a truly comprehensive theory of its own for the physics of the universe, a complete ‘standard model’), suggests that it fills some deep human need to make sense of existence, to find meaningful patterns instead of mere randomness. That is what relativist-​inclined theorists 170

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are calling into question, and why they succeed in creating such strong opposition. By the same token, scepticism, and with it relativism, keeps arising too, providing a necessary counterweight to absolutist worldviews, whether from Marxists, religious fundamentalists or zealous neoliberals. Post-​Marxism is a critical element in this process.

Conclusion So what can we take from each of these texts? The mirror of production, Libidinal economy, and Hegemony and socialist strategy are all attacks on the authoritarian bias of classical Marxism, and of the consequent subordination of the individual to the system that this involves. Neither Baudrillard nor Lyotard think there is much point in revising Marxism, both arguing that it is based on essentially false premises. Laclau and Mouffe are only too aware of the flaws in Marxist theory as well, but they feel they can go past these to create a new form of left-​wing political action that would preserve something of the spirit of Marx’s work –​and that motivation must not be lost. Lyotard’s rejection of Marxism, effectively in total, has been all too prophetic, however, in terms of how not just Marxism, but left-​wing thought in general, has come to be so marginal a presence in the political process across the West. For the time being anyhow, the 21st century would appear to be the century of the right, with both socialism and social democracy in open retreat across most of the West. Radical democracy remains stalled at the level of an interesting idea, and it would have to be said that the current political climate is not exactly propitious for its development. Derrida’s venture into post-​Marxism shares Laclau and Mouffe’s concern with keeping the spirit of Marx alive, although the argument does become more than a bit tangled up in differentiating between spirits, spectres, and ghosts, such linguistic game-​playing being a Derrida specialty. Specters is, predictably enough, an illustration of deconstruction in action: positions never quite cohere, meanings keep shifting, neither Marx nor Marxism is ever unequivocally present for us. The notion of Marxism as a spectre that is always ‘to come’, ‘a non-​present present’ as Derrida (1994: 6) typically obliquely puts it, is hardly likely to have much appeal for the traditional left, since it would seem to undermine the possibility of successful revolutionary action. One could interpret ‘to come’ in a more positive way, however, as meaning that no revolution will ever resolve all human problems, that changes must continue to be made to prevent dogmatism settling in, and that is a very valid point to make. The fact that there has been such a marked swing to the right politically in the West, however, means that relativism has a critical role to play in countering the absolutist, totalising pretensions of right-​wing ideology. Post-​Marxism’s anti-​teleological bias, well demonstrated in all the texts 171

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being assessed here, directly contradicts the general assumptions of right-​ wing political theory, no less than it does of classical Marxism. Relativism and scepticism are more relevant than ever now in political debate –​on the left as well as the right (although they do face awkward problems in dealing with ‘post truth’ and ‘fake news’2). The argument of each of the texts above is that the left can no longer claim to have an all-​embracing narrative, and that it will have to be more tactical in its approach: perhaps in the fashion of Lyotard’s ‘paganism’, with its ongoing development of ‘little narratives’ to address a constantly shifting socio-​political situation and set of concerns. Too often, the left is fighting yesterday’s battles rather than adapting to changing cultural circumstances. The transformation of the proletariat into the precariat, for example, requires a change in mindset on the left, as does the rapid spread of the gig economy. It could be argued that post-​Marxism is more a symptom of the left’s current dilemma than a solution to it, and, as such, a fairly ambivalent signpost to the future of left-​wing thought. Derrida asserts that our current situation ‘obliges us to think … another space for democracy. For democracy-​to-​come and thus for justice’ (Derrida, 1994: 169), but no definitive guide as to what this should involve, or how it could be made truly effective, emerges from this exercise in reassessment. Yet as long as teleology and eschatology remain powerful forces geopolitically, then post-​Marxism, and in particular the post-​Marxist texts above, will continue to resonate. They demonstrate the need for relativism when engaging in contemporary politics, and also warn against returning, as in the fashion of Slavoj Žižek (2008) in A defence of lost causes, to the metanarrative of classical Marxism. Collectively, the texts analysed provide a persuasive argument against lost causes, and as long as any of the left is drawn towards that kind of self-​defeating romanticism, then they should remain required reading: if nothing else, they tell us what the left should not be doing. On a more positive note, the concept of radical democracy can still provide a framework for the development of a more tactically-​oriented, ‘pagan’, left-​wing political thought and action, one that can encompass new ideas to cope with phenomena such as robotisation and globalisation: the intention behind it remains appropriate. A universal wage as a basic safeguard against the loss of job opportunities associated with the latter is an indication of the kind of new thinking required –​a ‘little narrative’ to address a particular problem. The left can deploy relativism to its advantage, therefore, just as long as it is willing to work with a fluid set of principles and objectives rather than a set metanarrative. Post-​Marxism cannot give us such a metanarrative to work with, its whole focus is to dismantle the notion that there ever can be one, but that is the challenge the left now faces: how to operate without that entity to fall back on. In that sense post-​Marxism is a signpost to the future of left-​wing thought, just not the detailed one that 172

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our history has led us to expect would always be at our disposal: a muted endorsement, agreed, but an endorsement nevertheless. Notes 1

2

See Terrell Carver, The postmodern Marx (1998), for an attempt to open up Marx to multiple interpretations. They have already been implicated in the rise of these phenomena by some critical commentators:‘if everything is a “social construct”, then who is to say what is false? What is to stop the purveyor of “fake news” from claiming to be a digital desperado, fighting the wicked “hegemony” of the mainstream media?’ (D’Ancona, 2017: 92).

References Adorno, T.W. ([1966] 1973) Negative dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Baudrillard, J. ([1973] 1975) The mirror of production, translated by Mark Poster, St. Louis, MO: Telos Press. Bentham, J. ([1823] 2007) An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, New York: Dover. Carver, T. (1998) The postmodern Marx, Manchester: Manchester University Press. D’Ancona, M. (2017) Post truth: the new war on truth and how to fight back, London: Ebury. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, translated by Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The end of history and the last man, London: Hamish Hamilton. Geras, N. (1987) ‘Post-​Marxism?’, New Left Review, 163: 40–​82 Jencks, C. (1991) The language of post-​modern architecture, 6th edition, London: Academy Editions. Laclau, E. (1990) New reflections on the revolution of our time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On populist reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, London: Verso. Lyotard, J.-​F. ([1979] 1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.-​F. ([1988] 1993) The differend: phrases in dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.-​F. ([1974] 1993) Libidinal economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Athlone Press.

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Lyotard, J.-​F. and Thébaud, J.L. ([1979] 1985) Just gaming, translated by Wlad Godzich, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, K. and Engels, F. ([1845] 1965), The German ideology, London. Mouffe, C. (2000) The democratic paradox, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2008) In defense of lost causes, London: Verso.

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Spectres of Post-​Marxism? Reassessing Key Post-​Marxist Texts: A Reply to Stuart Sim Richard Howson

Stuart Sim in his chapter offers a review of four texts that have made important contributions to critical theory since the 1970s. Each text engages critically with what might be termed classical Marxism and further, each text seeks to re-​think classical Marxist ideas so as to assess their contemporary value. As a result, Sim’s analyses show that while the directions and outcomes of each text might differ somewhat, there is a conceptual thread that ties each text together and then in turn, connects each text to the signifier ‘post-​Marxism’. This conceptual thread presented in the conclusion is relativism. Certainly, this conclusion has been important for critical theory because it has set a limit on the ability of classical Marxism to take a hegemonic position in the field. But there is also not a lot that is necessarily controversial about this conclusion, and certainly in the context of these texts. Notwithstanding the importance of exposing relativism as an important limit in the development of critical theory this chapter makes another important but far more controversial contribution to this collection on Laclau and Mouffe and post-​Marxism, which in turn can be organised around two issues. The first issue is the exposure of the complexity inherent to the meaning of the signifier: post-​ Marxism and, for this reviewer at least, this is connected to Sim’s position that its signified can be and/​or is marked, somewhat antagonistically, by the inclusion of a rejection of or (anti)-​Marxism. The second is organised around the contemporary ‘nature’ of post-​Marxism and in particular the theoretical engagement with relativism via postmodernism and poststructuralism and further, this offers an opportunity to consider how we ‘should’ understand this engagement. Sim is correct in making the point very early in the 175

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discussion that Marxism has ‘always had its share of internal critics’. In other words, critical evaluations and revisions have very often come from within the Marxist camp itself and these have been accepted primarily because certain foundational principles were considered not to be put in jeopardy. For example, the idea that the concepts of hegemony or even overdetermination could be read as, or might support, a post-​Marxist project would and has certainly elicited strident challenge from some quarters. In this response, the aim will be to briefly discuss these two controversial issues that emerge from this chapter and in a way that hopes to respond to why relativism is important to critical theory but perhaps not always for the reasons assumed. For this reviewer, post-​Marxism has value insofar as it offers insightful contributions to a continuing process of opening up classical Marxism to scrutiny at a particularly vulnerable moment in its history and in a way that had not been experienced throughout its application. The texts that Sim refers to and analyses are good examples of this opening up albeit for very different reasons. However, the most controversial contribution to this project by these texts is that each uses a stock of knowledge (organised around the concept of relativism) that exists outside of the internal life of the classical Marxist theory and, as such, seeks to question certain of its foundations. It is this stock of knowledge that has prompted the many critics of post-​Marxism to reject the idea that Marxism can be opened up in this way and further, that it has any value in terms of adapting it to the ‘real’ contemporary social and political conditions. Classical Marxists can accept that some people may continue to reject or no longer identify as Marxist (anti-​Marxism poses no real threat) but to claim alignment to some of the principles and tenets of Marxism while moving beyond others, in a way that has been historically unacceptable, is untenable. For the classical Marxist protagonist, the scrutiny and critique that post-​Marxism develops and elaborates from this stock of knowledge is antithetical to its foundational principle: structure. Drawn primarily from the postmodernism/​poststructuralism stable of critical theory, this stock of knowledge lacks practical/​material applicability (the critique of relativism) because in the final analysis it is disconnected from the real conditions of life and of course, revolution, so it can only ever be a purely theoretical exercise. As a result, the attack on classical Marxism’s principle of structure has had its core nature diminished with the consequence of expunging many key arguments, themes and concepts, which in turn, causes the corpus of Marx’s work to be transmuted and deranged. For many classical Marxists then, the revision of the theory on the basis of this new stock of knowledge is the real villain, even in the contemporary moment. Certainly, all these texts represent in some way a set of arguments and justifications for why classical Marxism can no longer represent the reality of capital in the contemporary moment. Or to paraphrase Derrida, once we can get past the ghost of capital, then everything must begin again but, 176

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most importantly, never as a new beginning but always as the beginning with a memory: Marxism. The critique of capital in each of these four texts as Sim points out is underpinned by a critique of structuralism that, in turn, produces dogmatism around the classical Marxist form of production. This dogmatism demands that the non-​material is relegated to a position of less importance and/​or excluded from the material reality of life and then, in turn, enables identity to assume a singularity through the historical movement of the structure towards the pure and ultimately dominant working class and the oppression of all other identifications. However, does the critical content within these texts, which seeks inter alia to bring into the fold the non-​ material and the plurality of identity –​in other words, relativism –​represent a form of rejection that is anti-​Marxism? It is possible to see in these texts, as Sim points to, specific ideas and moments that challenge the theory and practice of classical Marxism suggesting a rejection that appears as a form of ‘anti-​Marxism’ but what cannot be rejected or ignored within these texts is Marxism itself, its existence and its impact on how the contemporary world of capital is understood and most importantly, the need to engage with it. However, as suggested above, the basis of the classical Marxist critique of post-​Marxism is that this rejection as anti or revision is applied through a fundamentally problematic stock of knowledge that holds at its centre: relativism, in all its manifestations. The second issue raised above also goes to the issue of the ‘post-​based’ stock of knowledge that is being applied to the critique of classical Marxism. To argue for an anti-​Marxism to be included in the meaning of post-​ Marxism goes to the heart of the critique of the idea that we can engage in a leaving behind of modernity because of the existence of postmodernity. The key point is that to suggest that one’s position is ‘anti-​something’ is to suggest that that something sits outside of the ‘thing’ in question because it is opposed to the ‘thing’ or is its opposite. Here Laclau’s (1989) discussion about the efficacy of postmodernism to critical theory is important. The emergence of postmodernism (and poststructuralism) occurred because postmodernity achieved two intellectual operations. The first is to challenge the claim to the foundational status of certain discourses and the second is to challenge the validity of the unifying abilities of the metanarrative. Both these postmodernist operations are very often considered to sit outside of modernist processes and, therefore, in opposition to them. However, perhaps more importantly, they require us to change our understanding of modernity insofar as they set out the limit that separates these two historical phenomena (modernity/​postmodernity). In other words, where there are foundational and ossified principles within a structure that, in effect, work to unify a reality and maintain its path towards progress we speak of modernity. For Sim, the argument via post-​Marxism is that relativism or the idea that foundations are fluid and as a result unity is problematic can also become the new opposite. 177

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But the crucial point here is whether this new opposite can represent a complete supersession of modernity and then a new foundation. To accept the outmodedness of metanarratives as a core feature of postmodernity (as would Lyotard) imposes on postmodernity a logic of foundations that also exposes the limit of modernity. Further, this gives rise to the argument that there is in place a discourse that provides a clear and logical articulation of an ‘end’ to modernity. For example, Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s texts are considered by Sim as examples of an anti-​Marxism that leaves behind classical Marxism and, as such, contributes to a discourse of the ‘end’. However, if postmodernity was to include such a thesis then it would in fact be sustaining what it purports to have left behind. This is evident in the idea that where an end manifests, there will be a new to take its place, and that the new that is thrown up becomes the foundation for the determination of all that lies before it. Further, to uphold the thesis for the start of the end of the metanarrative may well appear to be anti-​foundationalist, anti-​essentialist and anti-​determinist in a way that reflects the complexity of contemporary society. But on closer inspection this can only achieve minor advancement in terms of how we can understand the contemporary moment. This is because the foundations that underpin structure and that provide meaning are held to give to us knowledge of the modern world; in other words, a world of full coherence and presence. In the new postmodern world, the foundational principles of modernity are simply replaced with a new stock of knowledge in which is produced a new metanarrative that demands the truth of relativism and the multiplicity of atomised narratives. It could certainly be argued that postmodernity articulates, for example, a theoretical disintegration of foundations, newness, meaning and identity but it does so not by privileging one over another but by engaging in a critical review of the construction of meanings and identities in a way that demands more than a simple rejection of modernity and, instead, a movement to an anti or opposite set of foundations. So via this argument, this movement must articulate a process whereby the very foundations that underpin history and structure as progress and truth and that are brought to life by modernity are adjusted through a the new foundationality of relativism and then where possible the equivalential chaining of these elemental discourses, which if it were to occur undermines its own relativism. So, to claim Baudrillard and Lyotard are rejectionists and anti-​Marxists requires not simply their individuality of opposition but rather, their equivalence in opposition but – problematically –​without undermining relativism. So as the argument goes, what can be claimed as postmodernity’s achievement through this proliferation of meaning is not the obliteration and leaving behind of modernity or even a specific reworking of its principles and practices but rather, a series of demands that really only seeks to challenge its ontological status. In other words, post-​Marxism exposes 178

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and questions the limits on the knowledge of structure as well as, meaning and identity and in so doing, puts in place antagonism at the limit of this opposition. Where antagonism exists, then the validity of the existence of the one is not given from itself but from the relation it has to its opposite. The existence of the critique of Marxism, whether revisionist or rejectionist (anti), whether postmodernist or poststructuralist, cannot in this context move to a singular autonomous position but rather, only exists because of its relation to its opposite. This reviewer has enjoyed revisiting these texts in the process of writing this response and again it became clear why their content remains important and relevant to knowledge about contemporary society and how we can better understand our future. But they are not important because they demand our dismissal of classical Marxism but rather because they emphasise the need to keep an engagement with Marxism in a way that can question and challenge its foundations so as to better understand the contemporary reality. Each of these texts exists primarily because of Marxism; not postmodernism or poststructuralism or even post-​Marxism, so that with a sense of the sociological imagination our movement to the future demands that we, today, never lose interest in the past. Reference Laclau, E. (1989) ‘Politics and the limits of modernity’, Social Text, 21: 63–​82.

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Index References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (146n3). A absolutism v relativism  169–​71 Actor-​Network Theory (ANT)  109, 114–​15 Adiseshiah, S.  79 Adorno, T.W.  170 affordance  114 Agamben, G.  20 agency  115–​16, 130–​1, 134–​5, 152 agonisms  84, 94, 96, 166 agonistic theory  142 Agonistics (Mouffe)  84, 96 Allen, A.  131 Althusser, L.  39, 85, 90, 134 ancient Rome  133, 138 Anderson, B.  70 Anker, E.  47 antagonism  41, 47, 64, 166 and Kant  91 in Mouffe’s later work  94–​6 and oppression  135–​6, 144 and politics  86 see also agonisms; class struggle; political struggles; contestation, politics as; social movements Anti-​Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari)  21 arbitrary power  Laclau  135, 136 Pettit  130, 131, 132–​3, 133–​4, 137, 139, 142, 154 architecture studies  112, 115 Arditi, B.  60 Arendt, H.  141 Argentina  85 articulation  40, 42 assemblages  110–​13, 125, 126 Assunção, M.R.  72 austerity  162, 165 autogestion généralisée  27 B Babe, R.E.  118 Badiou, A.  86

Balibar, É.  86 Barad, K.  109, 110, 115–​16, 124, 125, 126 Baudrillard, J.  178 The mirror of production  156, 157–​60, 162, 171 Beasley-​Murray, J.  46 Bellamy, R.  143 Bennett, J.  115, 123–​4, 125 Berlanga, J.  93 Berlin, I.  132, 140 Bertram, B.  101 Besson, S.  130 Biesta, G.  138 Biglieri, P.  107–​8 Birchall, C.  60 Black Lives Matter  2 Blair, T.  94, 95 Bobbio, N.  35 Borown, B.  69 Bourne Identity  71, 72–​3, 74, 75–​6n5, 76n6 Bowman, P.  60, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 80–​2 Brazil  72 Brazilian jiu-​jitsu (BJJ)  81, 82 Brexit  2, 7 Brown, W.  55, 71, 72 Bryant, W.J.  89 Buckingham, D.  116 Butler, J.  64, 110, 124 C capillary power  102 Capital (Marx)  160, 161 capitalism  56, 57, 80, 89 see also neo-​capitalism capitalist state  37 Carpentier, N.  108 Castree, N.  112 Chávez, H.  31 China  70, 72, 96, 157–​8 Chow, R.  63, 72, 74 cinematic texts  see film texts

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civil society  36, 39 class  101, 105 see also working class class domination  35–​6, 37 class politics  47 class power  38, 53, 102 class reductionism  11–​13, 26 class struggle  41, 158 Clinton, H.  86, 97 Colletti, L.  91 colonialism  71–​2 see also postcolonialism communist manifesto (Marx and Engels)  12, 16, 27n6, 47 consensus  67 constituent power  20 constructivist idealism  106 contestation, politics as  141–​4 see also antagonism contestatory democracy  142–​3 contextualist democracy  95 contingency  117 contradiction  91 Conway, J.  96–​7 Cooke, M.  100 counter-​hegemony  102 Cresswell, T.  113 Croce, B.  34 cross-​ethnic identification  69 Croucher, M.  71 Crowd and Party (Dean)  14 cultural discourse  63 cultural geography  112–​13 cultural hegemony  37–​8 cultural politics  59–​60 cultural studies  3, 60–​2, 65–​7, 69, 112, 118 culture  72, 73 D Davidson, A.  34 Dean, J.  14 decolonisation  69 DeLanda, M.  109, 111 Deleuze, G.  21, 107, 115, 116 deliberative democracy  22, 94–​5 democracy  10, 96 contestatory  142–​3 contextualist  95 deliberative  22, 94–​5 and hegemony  18–​20 beyond hegemony  2–​3, 20–​5 without hegemony  29–​31 liberal  4, 22, 94, 95, 168 plural  164 social  163 see also radical democracy democratic paradox  167 democratic paradox, The (Mouffe)  6, 166

democratic rights  93 dependency  133 depolitisation  143 Derrida, J.  5–​6, 67, 163, 172, 176 Specters of Marx  156, 167–​9, 171 destituent potential  20 dialectic of utopian melancholia  55 dialectical contradictions  91 dialectical opposition  91 differentiality  89 Discipline and punish (Foucault)  110 discourse  42, 61–​2, 63, 87, 100 discourse analysis  69–​70 Essex School of  129 discourse theory  3, 104–​18 Bruce Lee  70 critiques  154 and cultural politics  59–​60 discursive-​material knot  108–​10, 114, 116, 117, 118, 124–​6 assemblages  110–​13, 125, 126 poststructuralist  62 relationship to the material  105–​8, 113–​18, 123–​7 dislocation  106–​7, 131, 141, 146n3 dogmatism  177 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen)  133–​4, 136–​7, 146n5, 152 Dolphijn, R.  109, 110 domination  17, 131, 132–​7, 140, 146n6, 147n9, 147n10, 154–​5 see also class domination; non-​domination Dovey, K.  112 Downey, G.  72 Du Gay, P.  112 E economism  11–​13, 26 Edward, M.  105–​6, 108 egalitarianism  37 Eichberg, H.  72 emancipation  55–​6, 57, 131–​2, 137–​41, 147n12 Emancipation(s) (Laclau)  88, 90 Empire (Hardt and Negri)  31, 95, 102 empty signifiers  5–​6, 7, 88, 167 empty universals  90 Enlightenment project  158 entanglement  105, 108–​9, 114, 116, 117–​18, 125 equality  23–​4, 29, 37 see also inequality; unequal social relations equivalence  90 Essex School of discourse analysis  129 ethics  36–​7, 38 Europe  72 European Union  96, 97 events  107 Extinction Rebellion  2

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F feminism  134, 145 Filipino martial arts  71, 72–​4 film  see Bourne Identity; Lee, B. film texts  3, 69–​70 floating signifiers  30, 90, 100, 102 For a left populism (Mouffe)  6 For space (Massey)  112–​13 Foucault, M.  102, 110, 115, 141 Freeden, M.  100 freedom  131, 132, 133–​4, 135, 139, 140–​1, 147n11 Freud, S.  45, 55 Friedman, M.  134 Fukuyama, F.  168 Funakoshi, G.  72 G Gardner, J.  138 generalised self-​management  27 Gentile, G.  34 Geras, N.  1, 105, 140 Gibson, J.J.  114 Giddens, A.  95 globalisation  97 Glynos, J.  106, 129, 154 Gobetti, P.  34 Goldmann, L.  55 Gramsci, A.  32–​48, 52–​7 legacy  3, 52–​3 posthumous appropriation of  33–​40 proletariat  12 significance for Laclau and Mouffe  17, 40–​4, 53–​4, 85–​6, 92, 101, 128 attitude of mourning  44–​8, 55–​6, 57 social struggle  101–​2 Grebowicz, M.  94–​5 Greece  13–​14, 21, 25 Guattari, F.  21, 111, 115, 116 Gundle, S.  34 H Habermas, J.  94 Hall, G.  60 Hall, S.  60–​1, 62, 106 Haraway, D.J.  110 Hardt, M.  30, 31, 95, 102 Hardy, C.  108 Harrill, J.  138 Harris, S.  82 Hegel, G.W.F.  92 Hegelian theory  85 hegemony  16–​18, 92–​3 and counter-​hegemony  102 and cultural politics  59–​60 and democracy  18–​20 democracy beyond  2–​3, 20–​5 democracy without  29–​31 and empty signifiers  88

Gramsci  17, 32, 33, 35–​9, 53, 56, 85–​6 Laclau and Mouffe’s reformulation  32–​3, 40–​4, 45–​6, 53–​4, 57, 101 Hegemony and socialist strategy (Laclau and Mouffe)  class  105 criticism  60–​1 Gramsci  53 hegemony  40, 84 post-​Marxism  1–​2, 156, 162–​7, 171 reception  46 Heidegger, M.  117 Heideggereanism  5–​6 heterogeneity  89 Hewlett, N.  138 Hildyard, R.  79 Holloway, J.  30 Homo Sacer (Agamben)  20 Horton, J.  113 Howarth, D.  43, 106, 108, 129, 152–​3, 153–​4, 154–​5 Hunt, L.  74 I idealism  105–​6, 108 identity  75n2, 91, 135, 136, 164 identity construction  112 identity politics  2, 3, 5, 86, 103 ideological closure  100 ideology  38, 39–​40, 90, 99, 100, 102 Indonesia  72 inequality  56 interaction  124 intra-​action  124 investment  117 Invisible Man (Ellison)  27n1 invitations  116–​17 Iser, W.  116 J Jameson, F.  80 Japan  70, 72 Joseph, J.  105, 108 Just gaming (Lyotard and Thébaud)  161 justice  161 K Kant, I.  91 karate-​do  72 Kato, T.M.  69 Keenan, A.  145 Keynesian welfare state  17–​18 Keynesianism  13 Kolodny, N.  139, 147n9 Kraftl, P.  113 Krug, G.J.  72 kung fu  68 kung fu craze  63, 72

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L Laborde, C.  134 Labour Party  162, 165 Laclau, E.  antagonism  64 conception of ideology  100 criticism  60–​1 discursive terrain  66 dislocation  106–​7 later work  84, 85, 86–​93, 128–​9 legacy  4–​6 and Pettit  129–​46, 151–​5 domination  132–​7, 146n6, 147n9 emancipation and freedom  137–​41 politics as contestation  141–​4 reading of Saussure  146n7 universalism and particularism  65, 67, 71 see also Hegemony and socialist strategy (Laclau and Mouffe); New reflections (Laclau); On populist reason (Laclau); Politics and ideology in Marxist theory (Laclau) language  87, 95, 102, 110, 119n9, 146–​7n7 language games  102, 106, 108 Latin America  30, 31, 39 Latour, B.  115, 126 Ledo, J.  93 Lee, B.  63, 81 cinematic texts  69–​70 universalism  64–​5, 67–​9 Lefort, C.  91 left melancholia  47, 54, 55 Leibniz, G.  91 Lenin, V.  92 Leninism  37, 38–​9, 39–​40 liberal democracy  4, 22, 94, 95, 168 liberal left  56 liberalism  93 see also neoliberalism liberation  138, 141 liberty  130 see also freedom Libidinal economy (Lyotard)  156, 160–​2, 167, 171 Locke, J.  145, 146 logocentrism  66, 67, 81 Love, S.  115 Lovett, F.  133, 145 lumpenproletariat  92 Lyotard, J.-​F.  170, 172, 178 Libidinal economy  156, 160–​2, 167, 171 M Macchiocchi, M.A.  35 Machiavelli, N.  142, 145 machines  111, 116 Mackenzie, A.  116 Marchart, O.  62, 89, 152 Marres, N.  117

Marti, J.-​L.  130 martial arts  3, 63, 80–​2 Filipino  71, 72–​4 Lee, Bruce  64–​5, 67–​70, 81 Marx, K.  12, 92, 96, 137, 139 see also Capital (Marx); communist manifesto (Marx and Engels) Marxism  2 critique  156–​73, 175–​9 Hegemony and socialist strategy (Laclau and Mouffe)  162–​7, 171 Libidinal economy (Lyotard)  160–​2, 167, 171 The mirror of production (Baudrillard)  156, 157–​60, 162, 171 relativism v absolutism  169–​71 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  167–​9, 171 economism and reductionism in  11–​13 and poststructuralism  99, 102 scientific  85 strengths  4 Western  37, 53 see also post-​Marxism Mason, P.  80 Massey, D.  111, 112–​13 master-​slave relationship  132–​3, 138, 139 material  discursive-​material knot  108–​10, 114, 116, 117, 118, 124–​6 assemblages  110–​13, 125, 126 relationship to discourse theory  105–​8, 113–​18, 123–​7 material-​discursive  124, 126 McCormick, J.  143 McRobbie, A.  60 media  66–​7, 72 mediatised universals  71 melancholia  45, 47, 54, 55, 57 Merleau-​Ponty, M.  125 metaphysical closure  100 micro-​physics of power  110 military martial arts  70–​1 Miller, D.  65 mirror of production, The (Baudrillard)  156, 157–​60, 162, 171 mixed martial arts (MMA)  68, 70, 81–​2 Morales, E.  31 morality  161 Mouffe, C.  criticism  60–​2 ideology  40 later work  84, 93–​7 legacy  4–​5, 6 see also Agonistics (Mouffe); democratic paradox, The (Mouffe); Hegemony and socialist strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) mourning  44–​8, 55, 57 Mowitt, J.  61–​2, 66

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N naming  87 nature  126–​7, 158 Negative dialectics (Adorno)  170 negative liberty  130 Negri, A.  30, 31, 95, 102 neo-​capitalism  168 neoliberal globalisation  97 neoliberalism  5, 17, 94, 101, 102, 168, 170 neo-​republicanism  130, 131, 132–​7, 152 see also Pettit, P. New Labour  94, 95, 97, 165 new materialism  4, 99, 104, 109–​10, 115, 117–​18, 123–​4, 125–​6 New reflections (Laclau)  107 non-​domination  130, 131, 133, 145, 152 Norman, D.A.  114 Norris, C.  65 O object petit a  87 Occupy movement  57 On populist reason (Laclau)  30, 84, 86–​7, 107–​8, 167 “On the Jewish question” (Marx)  139 On the political (Mouffe)  84, 94 “ontic”  62 “onto”  62 ontology  62 opposition  91 oppression  17, 131, 135–​6, 138, 144, 145, 154, 155 overdetermination  85 Owen, J.  143 P Panagia, D.  125 particularism  65, 67, 68, 71, 73, 81–​2 particularity  90 Party  13–​16, 26 partyism  13 People’s Party  89 Perelló, G.  107–​8 performativity  124, 125 Perón, J.  31 Pettit, P.  4, 129–​46, 151–​5 domination  132–​7, 146n6, 147n9 emancipation and freedom  137–​41 politics as contestation  141–​4 reading of Saussure  146n7 place  113 plural democracy  164 pluralism  6, 7, 94 political absolutism  169–​70 political action  41 political discourse  63 political emancipation  139, 140 political freedom  131 political opposition  see antagonism

political parties  see Party political struggles  43, 47–​8, 54–​5, 131, 132, 141–​2, 152 see also antagonism; class struggle political studies  67 political subjectivity  see subjectivity political theory  65–​6 politics  26, 41, 86, 132, 140, 166 as contestation  141–​4 key task of  30 v. political  4, 62, 152–​3 Politics and ideology in Marxist theory (Laclau)  80 populism  5, 6, 30–​1, 39, 86–​7, 89, 90–​1, 102, 144, 166–​7 populist reason  31 postcolonialism  69–​70, 71–​2, 74 post-​Fordism  96 post-​Marxism  7, 11, 12, 54, 99 and capital  80 key texts  4, 156–​73, 175–​9 Hegemony and socialist strategy (Laclau and Mouffe)  1–​2, 156, 162–​7, 171 Libidinal economy (Lyotard)  160–​2, 167, 171 The mirror of production (Baudrillard)  156, 157–​60, 162, 171 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  167–​9, 171 relativism v absolutism  169–​71 unresolved issues  4–​5 postmodernism/​postmodernity  157, 177–​8 poststructuralism  53, 99, 102, 157, 177 poststructuralist discourse theory  62 power  microphysics of  110 see also arbitrary power; capillary power; class power; constituent power; sovereign power; thing-​power power relations  115, 135 practical left  56 Prashad, V.  69 Prentoulis, M.  99 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci)  33, 34, 35 prisons  115 production  see mirror of production, The (Baudrillard) progress  158 progressivism  89 R radical democracy  2, 26, 57, 164, 165–​6, 172 as contestation  143–​4 and the far right  6 and hegemony  3, 19, 29, 31 and liberal-​democratic institutions  101 social dimension  105 as unfinished project  4–​5, 171 radical democratic ethics  43

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Index

radical materialism  106, 108 radical political theory  47–​8 Rahman, M.  109–​10 Rawls, J.  94 real opposition  91 reductionism  11–​13, 26 Reid, H.  71 relativism  161, 175, 177 v. absolutism  169–​71 resistance  see antagonism; social movements rhetorical foundations of society, The (Laclau)  84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92 Roberts, E.A.  138 robots  159 Rorty, R.  94, 95 Russian revolution  92 S Said, E.  70 Sanders, B.  14, 24 Saussure, F. de  146n7 Schmitt, C.  86, 94 Schou, J.  106 scientific Marxism  85 Scottish National Party (SNP)  163 segmentarity  115 Shanghai  72 Sim, S.  128 Singh, J.  96–​7 slavery  see master-​slave relationship social change  23 social class  see class; working class social contradictions  91 social democracy  163 social logics  129 social movements  86, 101–​2, 162–​3 social relations  37 socialism  38–​9, 56 society  40, 163 v. nature  126–​7 see also civil society Sony Walkman  112 Sorel, G.  34 southern question  56 sovereign power  102 sovereignty  20, 26 space  112–​13 Spain  13, 14, 21, 25 Specters of Marx (Derrida)  156, 167–​9, 171 Spinoza, B.  24 State  13–​16, 17–​18, 24, 26, 35–​6, 41, 53 state building  36, 37 statism  13, 15 structural closure  134–​5 structuralism  177 subject positions  136, 137 subjectivity  36, 38, 39, 42, 53 subordination  17, 131, 134, 135, 140, 143, 154, 155

T Tally, R.T., Jr.  94, 97 text  61–​2 see also film texts Text (Mowitt)  61 Thébaud, J.-​L.  161 Theory  60 thing-​power  123 Thomas, R.  108 Thomassen, L.  99 Toglitatti, P.  34 Tom, T.  68 Torfing, J.  106, 107 Traverso, E.  55 Tsing, A.L.  127 Tuan, Y.-​F.  113 Turner, G.  116 U Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)  70, 81–​2 unequal social relations  139 United States  89 universalism  64–​5, 67–​9, 71–​2, 73, 81–​2 universality  90, 144 utilitarianism  161 utopian melancholia  57 V Valentine, J.  60 value judgement  161 van der Tuin, I.  109, 110 Vellinga, M.  115 Virno, P.  21 Volpe, D.  91 W Walzer, M.  94 welfare state  17–​18 Wenman, M.  128, 141–​2 Western Marxism  37, 53 Wiley, M.V.  73 Wilson, L.  72 wing chun kung fu  68 Wittgenstein, L.  95 Witz, A.  109–​10 Wood, E.M.  105 workerism  11 workers’ self-​management  26–​7 working class  85, 86, 92, 164 class domination  37, 177 class reductionism  26 Keynesianism  13 Labour Party  165 Leninism  38–​9 self-​emancipation  139 Z Zapatista experience  30 Zerilli, L.M.G.  65

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REFLECTIONS ON POST-​MARXISM

object petit a  87 partyism  13–​14 populism  6, 90–​1

Žižek, S.  events  107 ideology  100 martial arts  71, 72

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“Timely and engaging, this is the book on radical democracy that the present multiplication of turning points urgently needs. With extraordinarily stimulating essays and rejoinders, critical responses and forceful replies, this is intellectual dialogue in a pluralist environment at its very best.” Geoff Boucher, Deakin University

Stuart Sim is retired Professor of Critical Theory at Northumbria University.

The world has changed dramatically since the emergence of post-Marxism, and a reassessment is needed to determine its significance in the modern world. First published as a special issue of Global Discourse, this book explores the theoretical position of post-Marxism and investigates its significance in recent global political developments such as Brexit, Trump and the rise of the far right. With valuable insights from international contributors across a range of disciplines, the book puts forward a strong case for the continuing relevance of postMarxism and, particularly, for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy.

ISBN 978-1-5292-2183-1

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