I write this paper for an old fashioned reason that democracy without politics is deemed to illusion, and so the case that, politics without democracy brings nothing to neither individual liberty nor social justice. But we also know very well how liberty and justice has been at the center of contemporary debate that marks the conflicting line between socialism and liberalism, either in theory and practice.
A broad array of theoretical attempts has been made to reconcile both stances, and Laclau’s theory of hegemony contributes, at least in my short-lived knowledge, a greatest deal to an urgent call for understanding the possibility and impossibility of democracy as fully materialized practice.
Throughout the course of this essay, I will highlight some tenets of his central conceptualization of politics as articulatory, contingent, and displaced practices, and how the meaningful democracy should be thought of if ‘pro-democrats’ seek to hegemonise social and political terrain in which diversity of interests, identities, subject-position and movements are in place.
The central question of this paper points to how the fundamental shift in the status of politics within his theoretical framework of Radical Democracy offers productive ground for hegemonic project of radicalizing/politicizing emancipatory contents of democracy. But also, as I will argue in the last two sections of this paper, this project is actually facing immense social and political ‘conservatism’ that goes together with the contemporary practices of liberal democracy.
The possibility of hegemony, as political agenda of the project, takes place insofar as politics is no longer understood as a means for democracy, but a practice which is constitutive for identity production, subject making, and collective interest/will formation. Contrast to Marxist’s treatment of politics as ideological or super-structural practice, the centrality of politics, lies in its function for the disclosure of fixity of identity and community that makes possible the chain of equivalences. It is through the chain, differences are politically activated, negotiated, contaminated and facilitative to the creation of new democratic individuality.
Here his theory of politics undermines, rather than drawing upon, liberalist essentialising of human freedom, will and interest where the notion of civil society predominates, as well as socialist notion of people’s sovereignty and will in which working class and class struggle become superior to other actors and modes of collective struggles. In short, in making politics radically democratic, one has to deal, first of all, with productive nature of politics from which difference in interests and will is contested and unified to the extent that one’s interests interlinks with others, leading to plus-sum game rather that zero sum game.
In this notion of politics, democracy has no ontological foundation, or it is not foundational to political practices, nor essentially universal, but a horizon where multiplicity of identity and interest operates to the production and maintenance of common goods.
Consequently, neither one individual nor group is bestowed ontological privileges of being democrat/tic, be they ecological, gender, peasant, or human rights movements. Like people in discourse analysis, democracy is empty signifier that can mean many things or nothing dependent politically upon context, rules, forces, actors and values circulating and operating in certain society.
To rescue democracy from being rhetoric of the genderism, classism, statism, populism, anti-capitalism and ecologism, the greatest task of the so-called genuine democrats is not to renounce liberalism or socialism, but create chain of equivalence among these movements in democratic struggles against contemporary constellation of power relation where capitalist corporations and nation-states rejoice under the banner of the globalization fate following the triumph of neo-liberalism in the last three decades.
Laclauan Primacy of Politics in Post-Marxian Tradition
After two decades of communist downfall, Marxian legacy in political thought still lingers. Derrida’s deconstruction, Foucault’s genealogy/archeology, Deleuzean Schizophrenia have revoiced even louder, with certain sympathetic tone, an immanent Marxian resistance against certain form/norms of hegemonizing life-world, what they respectively call Logocentrism, Bio-Power, and Oedipalism (Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1980; Deleuze, 1983).
Interestingly, the growing acceptance of their visionary framework takes place when they are no longer taking side, at least publicly, with the Left project. Despite the radicalness of their vision, their strategy to coming to terms with liberalist notion of human freedom and social justice escapes them from being thrown into ‘anti-left’ climate in European continent and Anglo Saxon academic world following the heydays of neo-liberalism in recent decades. Or, if we are not at odds with Antonio Negri (1999: 5-9), the Marxian legacy reaches us today solely because it comes to us in form of specter, with spectral style, that re-inspires us to reactivate our human spirituality for genuine liberty and justice Marx announced in 1845.
It might be true nowadays that Marx’s notion of human freedom and solidarity has been expanded, if not significantly revisited, to embrace all sects of thought in the Left and Right only when it reverses back into inspiring words for better humanity than when it was raised up as Communist Party’ slogan and official ideology. In this light, Laclau’s contribution to Post Marxian tradition occupies quite unique position inso far as his assertion about centrality of politics relates intimately to the Marx’s political project of ‘Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt darauf an, Sie zu verandern’ (1988: 506). The prime task of political philosophy should go beyond merely interpreting by the act of changing existing reality.
Source Pewarta Nusantara
By taking politics at the centre of his theoretical formulation of hegemony, political struggle, which is not explicitly declared by the above post Marxian thinkers, finds its strong enunciation in his breakthrough by mapping the middle ground for both Left and Right project. As clearly stated in his Preface to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985: xv), there is an immediate call for politicizing the overall social-relations. The Left with its return to back to class struggle as ‘redistribution paradigm’ needs to be combined with the Right project known as identity politics of ‘recognition paradigm’. Reconsolidation of this mixed struggle is what he calls hegemonic project of radical and plural democracy, or ‘Back to Hegemonic struggles’.
In Marxian tradition, economy instead of politics becomes the sole source of power and domination. Speaking in phenomenological fashion, economy raises to the status of the ontology of the social, where access and control over means of production determine types of relation of production. It follows that whatever change in social relation, human subjectivity and human interactivity reflect automatically the concrete shift in economic base.
In this causalist notion of human reality and history, working class is given primary role of history making, the sole possessor of pure consciousness and historical necessity. It is from this reasoning that this class of people is essentialised, fixed and ontologically assumed as universal class. The notion of class struggle, then, treated as universal struggle, in the sense of ‘universal’ value of enlightenment. Class struggle as political act against the state as confined institution of dominant class, considered as mode or instrumental to the constitution of new society. Or better say, politics is technical arsenal while economy is constitutive terrain for human identity, subjectivication and historical moves.
In this context, Marxian politicization of relation of production, explicit in slogan like false consciousness and fetishism, by extension, means politicization of working class’ interests and will as something pre-determined before the course of the politization itself. Class struggle no longer thought as the act of universalizing certain category of interest and identity, but as channeling that have been taken as universal, fixed and historically pre-determined.
Primacy of economy in this old tradition of Marxism becomes the main target of Laclau’s critique when referring to the question of how society, including like human identity and subjectivity is constituted, displaced and reproduced. Following his discourse theory, those notions reflect discursive facts, at the limit of fixity or closure essentialist thought tends to draw upon (David Howard, 2000: 103-104). Economy as actual practice of domination and subordination is celebrated as materially constitutive for what the society and the state is, from which the latter is thought of as superstructure, merely reflection of the former.
Discourse theory, in contrast, does not take into account this generalized demarcation due to the fact that the possibility of the state is made upon the impossibility of the society and vice versa. Neither state nor civil society can be fully constituted for both entities are open to mutual confluence. Following Derrida, both remains in undecidable terrain of social objectivity, where politics as moment of decision, particularly human and collective agency are the most transparent channel of forces, conflict and power relation (Laclau, 1996: 47). By taking the primacy of economy, Marxism perceives power as singular, repressive, not productive for the reproduction of both entities, including human subjectivication.
For Laclau, politics, or discursively speaking, the political, is the instituting moment of society. If in Marxism politics only enjoys ontic status—only communist party or working class is the legitimate driving force that produces class struggle/politics, in Laclauan discourse theory it shifts to the ontological level of social positivity. With social positivity in mind, politics must be understood as articulatory practices where there has been plurality of subject identity and positions power structure, either in state or in society.
It is through this practice that both the state and society are permanently unstable, an open space where struggles and resistance are made possible. Both entities never remain the same in the eyes of discourses that inhabit them (1985:191). So the history of the state and the society are discontinual, or their history is that of discontinuity rather that continuity, as well as plural in conjunction with plurality of discourses that mark the instability of societal and state terrain.
It equally applies to the issue of human identity, its history and displacement. Articulatory practice goes beyond mere representation in liberal democracy’s notion of interest and will. There no longer exists ‘illusion of immediacy’ as ingrained in liberal myth of final harmony between self and consciousness, individual and society, state and society, or uninterrupted link between alienation/distancing and complete appropriation.
In opposing the mystification of human ‘essence’ (identity, interest and will) as propagated by possessive individualism of liberal democracy and excessive classism of social democracy, politics as articulatory practice signifies social terrain in which identity, interest and will of individual and groups are contaminated and over-determined to the extent that facilitates human productivity and creativity. It is because such practice is contingent articulation so politics cannot be conceived of as autonomous practice.
In this terrain, neutrality has no place to hide its mask, but rhetoric among other rhetoric as result of conditionality of surplus of meaning in that contaminated terrain. Genderism, ecologism, religious fundamentalism and puritanism, for quick instances, emerge within the instability of the certain hegemonic discourse of liberalism-globalism, where the latter as antagonism as well as master signifier that makes possible the emergence/production of these new demands from within its own confinement.
‘Depoliticization’ of plural civil society, or making civil society depoliticized by ways of essentialising the demarcation between the realm of politically non-contaminated entity/civil society and that of legitimate political authority/the state, never succeeds for the fact that the former is the locus in quo of power- relation/power struggles [Dyrberg, 1997:189-190]. But it is also a dangerous affair, if not mutually mystifying, in the new trend to politicizing civil society against the liberal state while discarding the plurality of identities and conflicting interests whose circulation and confrontation have precluded the fixation of societal terrain, its definition and frontiers.
Insofar as politics is not taken as the ontology of the social, both depoliticization by state apparatuses and politicization by certain interest group in civil society are mirroring each other, a double gesture of surveillance technology from the very center of neo-liberalism paradigm.
Situating our discussion on Laclauan primacy of politics in contemporary debate in Post Marxian tradition between his Radical Democracy (together with Chantal Mouffe) and Habermasian Deliberative Democracy in the age of information society and neo-liberalism, it is fairly obvious that both streams share both similarities and divergence. They agree that democratic demands require articulation and advocacy. Procedural democracy, for instance, are strongly criticized for implementing aggregative model of representation that in one point, is in contrast with their assertion about politics as not simply registering already existing interests but also constituting moment of that interest and political subject (Laclau, 1985:xvii; Habermas, 1999:244-245).
The point where they differ lies in their concepts of how conflict and compromise relate to the nature of the political. In deliberative democracy, conflict of interest in societal field is taken as conditionality of rational consensus. Insofar ideal type of speech communication can be enacted to accommodate societal difference, a common will possibly be produced. It follows that it is in this ‘autonomous terrain’ of civil society that dialogical and instrumental politics can interpenetrate leading to confront the latency of overwhelming regulatory and governing conduct on the part of the state (apparatuses and institutions).
Against this normalizing discourse of deliberative democracy, Laclau and Mouffe propose a radically different notion of conflict, that is, conflict should be perceived of as conditionality of politics. To eliminate the conflict of interest necessarily means to eradicate the political itself, and simultaneously, the closure of society, of differences and multiplicity which democracy should perpetuates and advocates (Mouffe, 1996: 9-11; 1989:41).
The attainment of consensus among different, conflicting demands is not the final resolution of democratic politics, but success or result of a hegemonic articulation where certain particularity of interests/will incorporates other particularities, and both the hegemonic particularity and the hegemonized others are neither fully reconstituted nor rehabilitated as before. In last instance, in that hegemonic relation between particularities there simultaneously emerges antagonism against which such hegemonic project by hegemonic particularity assumes or exercise ‘articulatory role’ for other particularities (Laclau, 2005: 150).
What Habermas call rational and final consensus is replaced by Laclau with contingent product of politics, continuously exposed to rupture and mutation. To summarize this debate, one can say that Habermas emphasizes consensus as outcome of rational negotiation, while Laclau sees consensus as the opening of new resistances; or better say, politics for the former is for reconciliation of autonomous rational subject and will in favor of order and regulation, while in the latter politics as never ending struggles for change where will and interest are enduringly redefined and contested.
The influence of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony plays decisive role in Laclauan conceptualization of politics. The failure of class struggle emanates first of all from its theoretical fallacies where, among other, working class is imparted ideologically with the promethean mystification, as the sole savior of humanity. Gramsci’s breakthrough by incorporating non-working class actors into his political project marks a farewell with Marxism. For Gramsci, the failure of Left Project is not that its promise of justice is mystifying and deluding, but simply because it fails to hegemonise social terrain [Gramsci, 1971]. Slogan ‘working class as universal class’ proves to have been a self-defeating prophesy.
Drawing upon Gramsci’s fragmented work Laclau expands this concept as central category in his Radical Democratic Project. In his project, the principal task of the enlightened Left is to bring new vision about what could be a different way of organizing social relations, ‘one which restore the centrality of politics over the tyranny of market forces’ [1985: xix]. Not different from Gramsci, Laclau sees that the Left remains in the defensive nature, and ignores the fact that the social terrain is there for the well informed activist to cultivate for change. Since the state and society are both result of political crafting, politicization of social relation are waiting for new actors who might occupy diverse subject position and identity in power structure.
Hegemony: Against Double Gesture
It seems clear from the outset that Laclau’s usage and understanding of democracy remains limited to his conceptualization of hegemony, that is, democracy is one among other discourses humanity ever produced. But this kind of discourse is hegemonic, contaminating social terrain. It not only unites but simultaneously divides social spaces, subjects, position and identity. It defines people into masses and elites, the ruling and the ruled, the representative and the represented and so forth.
As we have been reminded by Laclau, it is called hegemonic not because the values it declares are naturally or essentially universal, but it has so far proved triumphant in universalizing its historical particularity in different cultures and places. So the universality of democracy is recognized in this framework insofar as it is understood as political universality, a contingent product of hegemony by actors and institutions that requires careful inquiry rather than persecuting it as western racism and other stereotyping that mostly favored by conspirational theories.
I am not going into the depth and richness of the debate about what true democracy is or should be, but to take up one central treatment that Laclau offers, that is, the relation between democratic logic and hegemonic project. As we already noted, as long as politics is the ontology of the social, democracy can no longer be thought of as ground or foundational to the political. Because it is a result of hegemonic practice, it at least appears as horizon in what landscape diversity of interest and identity are conflictingly intermingled. However, there resides constant problematic or tension between its status as advocating diversity and its ontic genesis in proclaiming unitary demos. The notion that all men are born equal is of course not drawn upon social facticity, but an imaginary egalitarianism deeply enmeshed in Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian traditions.
Our point is that equality cannot be an operative ground for democratic politics solely because all interests are confluential in the sense that the fulfillment of one’s interest and will is realizable at the expense of other’s interests [985:184]. Consequently, the possible trap of liberal democracy is the fact that equality facilitates the actualization of obsessive Individualism, fascism, racism, genderism and so forth. At this stage, liberal democracy dictates factional actualization but has nothing to do with the fundamental change in the structure of domination and subordination in the society.
What Laclau’s theory of hegemony seeks to assert is that there is a void left by Liberal democracy discourse that should be taken by hegemonic articulation in social terrain. The insistence upon individual rights, including its expansion into indigenous people’s rights, is not without problematic if remains confined to the equality principle. Individual rights will impossible to be defined in isolation, but contextualized in certain social relation which determines the subject position.
For Laclau, if this individual rights needs to be leveled up into ‘democratic rights’, such rights should be exercised collectively, not in terms of interest groups or parochial demands, but in terms of unifying these diverse demands into chain of equivalence leading to articulatory practices by hegemonic actors or institution available for this project. Democracy, in this treatment, is no longer pluralist but plural and radical. It prerequisites the condition where each demand/interests is thought of not as fixed, but exposed to be contaminated and over-determined with other interests in the hegemonic relation of the project.
So, plural for its recognition of difference, and radical is for its openness to contingency.
Source Rumah Filsafat
The notion of rights comes together with the notion of demand. The granting of rights is justified as long as there are demands around which such rights will protect and release them. The relation between rights and demand is internal to each other. In feudalism, one’s rights relates in fact with the degree and sort of possession in the relation to hierarchical structure of the society. But in our age of human rights, one can demand his or her rights solely because that is what international covenant dictates, regardless of factual impossibility in the existing structure of power relation.
What does this actually epitomize? In my understanding, it reflects a double gesture of minimal but self-defeating yet deluding, politicization of larger part of the population. As modern technology of control, human rights regime lends a human face to the totalitarian neoliberalism. Situated in an ideological and symbolic ambience in the aftermath of communist collapse, world population has been made incapable of imagining new society or fundamental change in the power structure, at local, national and world wide.
If we follow in depth the multiplicities of direction neo-liberalism is taking today, human rights regime seems to have been the transparent counterpart of its hegemonic project. Either instrumental or facilitative to the project, this regime dictates fragmentation and break up human interacvity, by politicizing parochial or sectorial aspect of life-world, while, as consequence, leaving us as masses in the thousand capillaries of neo-lib surveillance. In post-Marxian allegory, we are a bunch of happy machines for the overall operation of this technology of power at home, in school, neighborhood and in our citizenship.
From explanation above, it seems that we today are actually confronting uneasy circumstances for radical change. This is made more perturbed by the fact that in the confinement of human rights dictates, well informed sections of the population are conditioned to believe that their demands are specific, segregated from others and, the worst, their demands have what Laclau calls ‘manifest destiny’ [2005: 127].
This is the case when we approach multiculturalism issue nowadays. Children and teenagers are taught on day to day basis, in school, churches, mosques, and academic books, and mass media—that they are essentially different from other kids; that they should uphold their cultural tradition at any prices because it is ‘the tradition that has made up what they are now’. Consequently, tolerance means negative compromise, a sort of distancing rather that conversation and confrontation with actual difference. This compromise annuls human creativity and development, the blockage of potentials fundamental to democratic struggles against symbolic, regulatory and institutional arrangements in which they coexist.
At this point, communal violence interrupts social terrain, as factual mutation of resistance from against objective antagonism of the power structure into scapegoating violence among groups or communities. In his brilliant critique of the effects of Clash of Civilization theory, Armatya Sen (2006:156) discloses the existing state-pioneered practice of what he calls ‘plural mono-culturalism’—the state sponsors this negative multiculturalism by promoting more-and more religious based schools following the ‘war on terrorism’ policies, in USA, European countries, and larger part of Asia and Africa.
This brings us back to Laclau’s assertion that logic of liberal democracy does not automatically fit to the logic of hegemonic project of radical democratic politics he is proposing in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. There is challenge for democratic struggles to think that democratic demands as flickering of trans-class consciousness may no longer as powerful and sounding as liberal demands produced by hegemonic neo-lib.
One of the central characteristic of democratic demand is the ingredient of popular will inherent in socialist demand, as opposed to, for instance, bourgeois demand. The latter, at least in western revolutionary history, seeks to overthrow feudalism and absolutism, while popular will as contingent product of hegemonic struggles among different social forces and historical actors in certain period and society to overthrow the existing capitalist relation of production that incapacitate them to enjoy the fruits of economic development.
Laclauan democratic demand inherits from Marxian tradition which he declares as politically significant to retain in contemporary struggle for democratic power structure. As indicated by ample evidence in Western political history, socialist demand could be combined with bourgeois demands to face mutually accepted antagonism, while respective main agenda is put into historical agenda, without guarantee that it would be fulfilled. The point of the story is that by calling a demand democratic means that it cannot be as fully a demand as it was before enters into chain of equivalence with other demands in their hegemonic struggle for democratic power.
It is this point of divergence between Laclau and Gramsci. For Gramsci [1978: 443] collective will or popular will as resulted from hegemonic relation between social forces (peasants and working class, for instance) remains embodying dominant agenda or interests of dominant forces in that alliance, and that relational identity in the chain is merely supplement to the success of overthrowing of mutually accepted antagonism. While for Laclau, Gramsci remains trapped in essentialising political subject/dominant forces and its identity (1985:69-70). The contingent result of hegemonic struggle of democratic demand can be the overthrow of old power structure, the newly structuring of social relations, newly contaminated identity and political subject.
Their divergence starts from different treatment of politics; Gramscian politics is still an vehicle or functional category for societal transformation and political revolution, while Laclauan politics, as we have already discussed at length, is constitutive of that transformation, not only power structure but also political subject and identity. In short, for the former the final fate of democratic transformation belongs to the primacy of agency, while for the latter the inclusive prospect of democratic struggles springs enduringly from the primacy of politics.
Drawing upon the theoretical backdrop, there is of great urgency to consider the growing complexities of social relation in our time and links them into the framework of radical democratic politics as Laclau suggests. From the ways he makes connection as well as disconnection between democracy and hegemonic project, we are informed, within the supremacy of (neo) liberal paradigm today, that, taking for granted the supposedly acclaimed hypothesis that politicizing democracy is the best route to structural transformation marks the limits of that project.
When the social diversification and fragmentation, resulting from the technology of regulating and governing difference, are more loudly voicing the need for rights provision, we need to question ourselves, what sort of rights we’re talking about, how it is demanded, and how it relates to other rights and demands. Or extremely put, how does it happen that what I or my group demand now is what this technology of power actually in need to operate!. Amidst the Janus-faced democracy of our time, what sort of hegemonic actors should be made of, how they come to the fore, and what strategies best suit this radical project?
The above set of questions is what Laclau does not elaborate in detail. His theoretical manifesto leaves us in the void of the political. Like Derrida or common style of thinking in poststructuralist literary genre, Laclau seems to offer challenges not only to the Left but also to those who are not accustomed with programmatic theorizing of politics and hegemony. Similar to that curiosity, the void, that is, the political dimension in the constitution of the social, perhaps, should not be filled with his hegemonic project alone, but with plural projects contingent upon levels and types of existing discourses one inhabits and seeks to change within certain social terrain.
One may wonder that he has surely anticipated the internal trap of his radical democracy, at least in theory, that if he steps forward to identifying who and what institution or movement at present capable of executing this project, such move contradicts the ambivalent nature of the present ‘democratic’ movements, which in my above analysis, are reconstituted within symbolic and institutional constraints of neo-lib technology of producing a web of meanings and ‘political’ subject. However, theoretically speaking, the privilege Laclau enjoys is that his anti-essentialising political categories such hegemony, articulatory practices, and radical democracy prevent him from proposing profile of hegemonic actors/movements and blueprint of strategy plus tactics that Left orthodoxy favors at most.
Bringing Emancipatory Politics Back In
With his theorizing of politics as articulatory practices, no one can completely master the political field. This time neoliberal institutions and apparatuses may proclaim their nodal inscription into social terrain, but insofar as politics is the ontology of the social, the space remains open for new different discourses to collaborate and seeks ways to hegemonise this neo-liberal contaminated terrain.
In his concluding words for his book, ‘..the field of the political as the space for a game which is never ‘zero-sum’, because the rules and the players are never fully explicit’ [1985:193].
The existing but paramount practices of procedural democracy is somehow not enough as horizon for mutual recognition and responsibility; and as an insertion into our undemocratic ways of market oriented ways of life, these procedures of ‘self-assertion’ [competition/election, competence, judicialization of politics, for instances of procedural requirements) tend to accelerate the closure of democratic radical politics that Market has initiated in public sphere. From the radical democratic point of view, we need to rethink this double gesture of ‘depolitization’ which most of us claims as ‘politicization’ of popular control over public matters.
But it is also possible to be optimistic that such practices will redefine its own limits, or come to realize its impossibility of total fetishism of political liberty that cast upon equality principle. In Laclauan social terrain, as complex and overlapping as our contemporary society, search for total justice of/for oneself or a group is facilitated by political practices, but ‘why justice becomes a dominant ideal in participatory acts and not in emancipatory struggles’ can be another way of tracing the genealogical emergence of this ‘self-assertion’ paradigm of libertarianism in certain society as ours today.
In my extended analysis of how double gesture of liberal democracy effects the possible moves of Laclauan radical democratic politics, there must have been a certain degree of semantic consensus, that both emancipation and participation have appointed to different explosive directions, either in concept or political praxis. As we have noted in passing, procedural democracy leaks popular participation to the extent that it incapacitate them to realize the assertive aspect of its practices. Here to participate, either to elect or elected, means to make sure that one’s rights and demand are inserted into official institutions of governing and ruling with transparence of zero-sum result and moves.
While with emancipation as explanatory category in radical democratic politics, one begins with the statement ‘vote counts but resource decides’ in the sense that one or a group has realized the problematic of liberal democracy in relation to individual autonomy and development. With emancipation, one is inspired to deconstruct his position and identity in political power structure, taking critical distance before making well informed decision to participate into the so called ‘popular sovereignty practices’.
Only then does there possibly rises further problematization that the procedural practices of democracy conceals its possessive individualism and parochialism which has no meaningful yet structural connection with the notion of people or demos. Basic tenet of emancipatory struggle in radical democratic politics, if I keep following Laclauan theoretical track, is enlightenment as actual horizon and ingredient for meaningful liberty and social responsibility.
People have to be made capable of knowing where and what his or her subject position and role within the capillaries of power technology in the society. It points to knowing relational dimension of his/her identity with other and knowing that asserting his/her will and demand means in first place the shifting of other’s identities so far configured in the systemic power relation. This is the very core of political enlightenment dating from Marx with his class consciousness up to Gramsci with his historical block agenda.
With such political enlightenment, radical democracy presupposes multiplicity of reason and affects. Predominance of reason in politics tends to result in rationalization, calculation and judicialization of contested nature of identity, will and interest formation, that then leads to technoratism and elitism in favor of defending the existing hierarchal structure of inequality and domination. Not only politics is made instrumental, but also emancipatory content of reason is exhausted to the extent where instrumental rationality in politics predominates, as abundantly criticized by Critical Theorists from Horkheimer to Habermas.
By acknowledging that rationality alone cannot count for radical democracy, or briefly say, the instrumental-purposive aspect of reason only advocate self-assertion in contemporary liberal democracy, radical democracy needs to politicize emancipatory aspect of reason which categorically called affect or sentiment for others, that is, recognition for relative difference. This opens the possibility to hegemonise social terrain and social relation with self-interactivity instead of self-assertion.
It might be true that what we are lacking today is not democracy with all of its normativity, practicality, and technicality, but first of all, its radicalness and openness to be inscribed or contaminated with other democratic traditions and practices. In sofar as liberal democracy heavily laden with moral orientations such as bad/good or right/wrong accompanied with cognitive orientation like competent/incompetent and correct/incorrect, radical democracy allows productive conversation among political subjects or entities (politicians, gender activist, human rights activist, political parties, interest association, and the like). This means that ethical orientation of democracy should be in place if ‘intimacy’ is taken as another crucial category in revisiting and expanding contemporary notion of equality principle.
Politics and ethics go together in political moment of social/entity constitution and formation in social terrain. Politics produces ethics, while ethic makes politics unstable and productive. Ethics as collective decision in forms of rules of command and governance facilitates politics to operate while simultaneously exposed to be changed by the same political process. In her illuminating essay Deconstruction, Pragmatism and Democracy [1996: 9-11], Mouffe, following Derrida’s notion of undecidability of decision, reminds us that both political decision and ethical responsibility depart ultimately from the undecidable aspect of consensus.
It is correct to say that political equality facilitates free individual’s participation to craft consensus, but the decision out of consensus cannot be made stable and fixed since ‘politicization never ceases because undecidability continues to inhabit the decision’. Shortly speaking, it is the undecidability that makes hundred years of political activity since Aristotelian time of ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ up to Barackian century of ‘Yes We Can’. Human interactivity in a polity is constituted through the working of certain ethics, since the latter offers contingent but normative foundation for collective arrangement and command.
The location of political intimacy in this analytical spectrum is internal to ethics as normative ground of the integration and change of certain political community. The creation, as well as the overthrow of collective arrangement springs not only from rationality but also from affects, a political care and responsibility of oneself and other. It then follows that to hegemonise social terrain which is overlapping, divided, fragmented and depoliticized, radical democrats must be those who are capable of making of equivalential chains among diverse political subjects and identities by problematizing the existing rhetoric of liberal justice/equality in relation to the larger spectrum of structural political domination and economic servitude.
Following Laclau and Mouffe, this type of visionary leadership shares no resemblance with the political leadership among communist comrades, bourgeois entrepreneurs, fascist agitator, socialist democrats, communitarian defenders, republican advocates, and other types ever produced within essentialist framework. Their agenda is emancipatory struggle in politicizing this fundamental problematization through which larger sections of the population approach to face-to-face with unitary antagonism, that is, the existing hegemonic neo-liberalism, in whose webs and capillaries they have ironically become its functional apparatuses. By way of cynicism, if you are an essentialist in believing that the genealogy of your identity and community takes place in isolated ways, neither contaminated nor over-determined with other culture and knowledge, you better go back in time living in the age of Hitler and Stalin.
The uniqueness, if not the greatest achievement, of radical democracy as political philosophy is its path-breaking critique of essentialist thinking either in Gramscism and Marxism in general, or in both academic tradition of civic republicanism and liberalism in contemporary scholarly world [Mouffe, 1989:42-44].
All these traditions share similar conception of self and community, like unencumbered-self in liberalism or unitary-situated self’ in communitarianism. For both Laclau and Mouffe, the problem remains in the very core of unitary subject or entity inherent in multiple mutation of this unitary subject. Consequently at the inter-community level, there operates language games that defend respective myth of unitary self, culture, or group.
In line with this popular fetishism, practices of liberal and procedural democracy facilitate and set ‘democratic’ battlefield where and through which politics of essentialising produces variants of ‘non-negotiable’ ideologies. Streams of these ideological communities come to believe that this model democracy is better that worst other, as the only game in town, as if revolutionary potentials in human interactivity no longer capable of interruption and command. It is in this perplexing context that radical democracy through hegemony as central category of its political analysis offers us the possibility of new political language for the restoration and radicalization of emancipatory content of modernity.
As Mouffe [1989: 44] makes clear, radical democracy remains within the problematic of modernity and presented as one theoretical strategy among other in deepening democratic project of modernity itself. It seeks to link together contemporary diverse democratic struggles, and such a task requires the creation of new subject positions that would allow the common articulation of labor, peasant, gender, ecology, human rights, indigenous people, antiracism, anti-sexism, and other various but interrelated protest/advocacy movements.
Source The Collector
Conclusion: Toward a Starting Point
This essay is to present, or perhaps, rewrite some of central concept in radical democracy Laclau, together with his wife Mouffe proposes, and to reflect them on the contemporary context of neo-liberalism’s hegemonic technology of power. My own intervention, which makes this essay possible, revolves around:
[1] My analytical elaboration of Laclauan politics as the ontology of the social or social positivity that leads me to invent the term ‘primacy of politics’ as to opposed it with primacy of economy in Marxism, primacy of agency in Gramscism, and primacy of consensus in Habermasian Deliberative Democracy. All of these streams of thought dwell in Marxian heritage that nowadays provokes ‘political turn’ in post-structuralism.
[2] Problematization of hegemonic project of radical democracy in relation to what I call ‘double gesture’ of liberal democracy within the neo-liberal confinement. This is a question that the project should carefully address if hegemonic links between movements is to be crafted. Double gesture is taking place in any moment when democracy becomes the official language of power. It is a moment of politicization and depoliticization altogether, of totalization and fissuring of meaning, of possibility and impossibility of democracy itself.
[3] As response to the challenge (problematization), this essay inserts a recurrent theme in Derrideran deconstruction of logo-centrist modernity into this radical democratic project. At conceptual level, emancipatory politics is, in my mind, a preliminary move decisive to build up hegemonic chains of equivalence among diverse contemporary movements, either as alternative to participatory politics of liberal democracy or as deepening/employing democratic effects of procedural democracy.
This requires not only new subject positions [radical democrats] but also, most of all, new form of individuality that respects and tolerates others, not because that what traditionalism and liberalism dictate with a set of dogma and rules of order and tolerance, but because his enlightened consciousness about how and by what ingredients self and community are constituted at the first place. Insofar as essentialism controls our ways of politicizing ours or other voiceless identity and interests, that is the end of productive intimacy in politics, because in that ways we are blocking flows of multiplicity of desire and knowledge that guarantee human interactivity and development.
(UiO, Oslo, Norway, Spring 2008)
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