Radical democracy: hegemony^ reason, time and space 1

Transcription

1 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995, volume 13> pages Radical democracy: hegemony^ reason, time and space 1 Wolfgang Natter Department of German and Committee on Social Theory, University of Kentucky* Lexington, ICY 40506, USA Received 1 April 1994; in revised form 20 April 1995 Abstract. Taking her present essay as my point of departure, I elaborate key aspects of Chantat Mouffe's theorization of radical and plural democracy. In particular, I stress the importance of rearticulating hegemony, reason, and time and space for a theory of politics and the political commensurate with radical democracy. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffc's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy concludes by postulating radical democracy as a "form of politics which is founded not upon dogmatic postulation of any 'essence of the social', but, on the contrary, upon an affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every 'essence', and upon the constitutive character of social division and antagonism" (1985, page 193). The stress on contingency and the nonfixity of identity of identity in an open-ended condition of becoming, ever mutable and constituted by struggle or social divisionremains a consistent theme in Chantal Mouffe's work. Her work is post-marxist, emphatically informed by an immanent tradition of Marxist theory and social critique, but also a post-marxism reformed out from its many essentialisms, ideological assumptions, and 'necessary' guarantees. The book's double emphasis on porous identities and against the rigid prioritization of class as the privileged marker of identity charted a clear position for a democratic socialism and against a Sovietstyle Marxism, East or West. Hegemony was and is a timely book, particularly for those of us who have felt similar reasons to continue asking Mouffe's question in pursuit of radical democracy: "What does it mean to be on the left today?" (1988, page 31). Hegemony In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Laclau and Mouffe seek to conceive of a politics which would embrace new social movements that had emerged around issues not containable by the category of class: for example, race, gender, ethnicity, gay rights, and the environment. It occurs to me that the authors' reaction to Marxism's double crisis in both theory and praxis also operated against the many who in the 1980s reacted to the politics of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and Kohl with a melancholic despair to the hegemony these names synecdochically stand for. Contrasting a view of 'hegemony' which (despite Gramsci) in everyday parlance sees it as a type of relation in totality (telos, structure, identity), Laclau and Mouffe stress an understanding of it as an "hiatus that had opened in the chain of historical necessity", an "absent totality", a "response to a crisis" rather than the "majestic unfolding of an identity" (1985, page 7). Their understanding of hegemony suggests that the crisis of the left, the double crisis of the preceding decade (deepened by the ground lost in t Prepared for a session on "Post-Marxism, Democracy, and Identity", organized by the Socialist, Urban, and Political Speciality Groups at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, CA, 1 April 1994.

2 268 W Natter the political-representational sphere) could and should be opened to a reformulation of the meaning of the political and the practices of radical politics. It also enables us to remember the articulation of the political in the 1980s as something less than the complete free-fall of left-liberal politics which many of us might otherwise recall. (1) In "Postmarxism: democracy and identity" (1995), as in numerous essays on these interlinked issues, Chantal Mouffe has found it important to historicize the concepts of democracy, reason, and identity in order to preserve their use-value for contemporary theory and practice. (2) She has argued that what is called for is less a reinvention of the (democratic) wheel, than a politics which would deepen and radicalize the modern democratic tradition. Surely the assertion that "all human beings are free and equal", as we find formulated within this tradition, makes it unlikely that we need to find more radical principles for organizing society. What is called for instead is a politics which would implement those democratic ideals where they have taken hold even if 'only' as ideal constructs. Certain notions of democracy and reason, meanwhile, are welded together in the minds of many rationalists, with consequences that Mouffe argues inhibit the practice of democratic politics and the fostering of democratic subject positions. Thus the importance, as explored in the present essay (Mouffe, 1995), of (dis) articulating the relationship between the two by distinguishing between separate aspects of modernity formulated during the Enlightenment. Lastly, radical democracy, which seeks to extend politics to ever more realms of the political (that is, to bring ever more relations of social life into the realm of politics), requires a different notion of the subject than that provided by Enlightenment rationality individuals as rational actors, maximizing self-interest (3). Mouffe replaces this sovereign subject pursuing rational 'interest' with a conception of identity which starts by seeing it as a lack, an empty place to be filled by identifications which provisionally assert, then subvert and reconstitute previous articulations of identity. In place of the bounded subject, selfmastered and autonomously exercising mastery of the world, radical democracy stresses the nonessential character of the soi, neither destined to 'arrive' at a preconstituted point, nor the repository of historical 'progress'. Partial fixations, mappable collectively as nodal points, serve to limit the flux of the signified under the signifier, but do not contain the ceaseless flux of signification. In the recent past, the radical left has tended to reject the liberal democratic tradition tout court because of the ease with which the radical principles carried within it have been subsumed by hegemonic capitalist culture and become an W As Mouffe uses the term, articulation refers to a link which establishes between various positions a contingent, unpredetermined relation. (2) The interlinkage of these issues can be followed from "Radical democracy: modern or postmodern?" (Mouffe, 1988) to "Democratic politics today" (1992a). < 3 > As summarized by Mouffe in the present essay, this is a subject understood as "a rational transparent entity which could convey an homogenous meaning on the total field of her conduct by being the source of her actions" (1995, page 260). The problems for radical politics that ensue from such an understanding of a unified bounded subject transparent to itself have also been recognized by social theorists outside the psychoanalytic tradition. In his inaugural lecture (1931) as director of the Institute for Social Research, for example, Max Horkheimer noted the problems of a Kantian social philosophy as being rooted in the philosophy of the isolated subject: those spheres of being understood as projections of the autonomous person. Kant, Horkheimer continues, "made the closed unity of the rational subject into the exclusive source of the constitutive principles of each [including political] cultural sphere" (1993, page 2). Horkheimer quotes the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue to discover a moral subject as a person "subject to no laws other than those that it gives to itself (either alone or at least together with others)".

3 Radical democracy 269 apoligist for 'capital interest'. Judging the hegemony of a capitalist organization of the economy to likely be an ongoing condition, Mouffe asks whether one cannot usefully distinguish radical democratic principles from their actual but contingent historical articulation (as a set of only partially realized ideals and practices), by viewing these contexts as uneven and partial realizations of democratized social relations. Rather than taking the partial realization of professed democratic ideals as evidence of their merely ideological character within capitalism, her question itself an example, I believe, of hegemony in the above sense- reads: Why not take "the declared principles of so-called 'formal bourgeois democracy* literally and force liberal democratic societies to be accountable for their professed ideals?" ( '*> Wherever these principles and the rights they 'guarantee* have been instituted whether in the interest of capital(ist) development or in the battle against communism or fascism, for example, or in response to whatever other particular crises of capital further awaits radical and plural democracy recommends a politics which builds upon these while working to extend to ever more dimensions of social relations the principles of 'free and cquap such that they might be articulated by and for ever more settings. Mouffc's position likewise contests that of right-wing liberals who insist that one cannot have political liberalism without capitalism. The latter have found succor in a familiar reading of Western modernity and modernism. If one finds reasons to acknowledge that capitalist relations constitute an insuperable obstacle to the realization of democracy, must one accept another half of a binary that equates the defense of private property and the capitalist economy with (liberal) democracy, as many right-wing liberals assert? Mouffe's position, by contrast and importantly, disarticulates the rise of democratic practices and liberal institutions from their 'necessary' connection to capital development; it distinguishes (and separates) political from economic liberalism, "Defending and valuing the political form of society specific to liberal democracy does not commit us to the capitalist economic system" (1992a, pages 2-3). Thus, a commitment to democratic liberal values does not entail a commitment to a citizenship whose 'identity' is founded on private property. This nonidentity also means abandoning the idea of determination in the last instance by the economy beginning with the simple reason that it does not contrary to what neoclassical economics tells us really make sense to speak of the economy as if it could exist idependently of the ideological or political relations that constitute it (Mouffe, 1993)< 5). This can readily be analyzed historically (within the twohundred-year history of post-1789 Western nations, for example); indeed, I argue further below for the crucial necessity of such historical-spatial analysis in the interest of further working towards the realization of radical democracy in the present. Radical and plural democracy continues a struggle against capitalism without breaking with the gains materialized institutionally by constitutional or representative democracy, wherever these have in fact materialized. For Mouffe, hegemony ( 4 ) "Because of the wide gap between those professed democratic ideals and their realization, the general tendency on the Left has been to denounce them as a sham and aim at the construction of a completely different society. This radical alternative is precisely what has been shown to be disastrous by the tragic experience of Soviet style socialism, and it needs to be discarded. However, this does not mean that we have to resign ourselves to democracy in its present form" (Mouffe, 1992a, pages 1-2). ( 5 >This is the issue that for her marked the necessity of thinking beyond Althusser: "Once one accepts that there is no economy which could exist without political, legal; and ideological conditions of existence, then the economy cannot be seen as determining in the last instance those things which in fact provide its conditions of existence" (Mouffe, 1993, page 103).

4 270 W Natter entails a strategy of democratizing social relations in all available contexts and towards its further instantiation, calling in debt (Schuld) or credit wherever sufficient claim to them can be mobilized. Reason Thus, in the place of the life and death struggles between different camps of leftliberal thought regarding what is called 'the Enlightenment project', (6) Mouffe, following Blumenberg (and Rorty), answers Habermas in the present essay by distinguishing between two different Enlightenment logics: that of (political) self-assertion and (epistemological) self-grounding. For Mouffe then, the issue of whether we need to affirm (as for Habermas) or negate (as for Adorno/Horkheimer) what today rather facilely is referred to as 'Enlightenment reason', has misasked the question. This is the point she already made in refusing the question (which is also incorporated as an essay title), "Radical democracy: modern or postmodern?" (1988). Once epistemology is separated from politics, one can affirm the politics (self-assertion) of 'the Enlightenment' while jettisoning as historically contingent its epistemological 'grounding'. Instead of defending to the death a particular form and content of rationalism as abstract universalism Mouffe argues that its EnUghtenment formulation reason can hardly be grasped without reference to a rearguard defense waged against the church and theology. Is it possible that during the 18th century the necessity of mounting sufficient force to decenter God from social relations required the positing of universal reason and a singular voice, that is, a self grounding of 'man' which spoke with as much authority as had previously (a Christian) God? If you can answer yes, then you can take the next theoretical step with Mouffe, drawing on Blumenberg, and distinguish Enlightenment epistemology (self-grounding versus self-assertion) and see that questioning this form and content relation does not entail a rejection of modernity as, for example, Habermas has read Derrida's and Foucault's critiques as entailing but rather moves towards a reformulation of politics consistent with that other strand of Enlightenment tradition. Thus, in contrast to a current, reified understanding of it, Enlightenment reason is best understood as a strategic, hegemonic response to crises, in this case above all a crisis of self-legitimation. Her defense of the Enlightenment therefore disarticulates self-assertion from an epistemology of identity based on self-grounding. An identity 'which is not one', and the practices of politics based on difference, remain distant from those such as Habermas who ground identity in an 'unencumbered self. Why? His preservation of Enlightenment epistemology (self-grounding) and the historically contingent formulation of reason that for Habermas remains the litmus test of democratic rationality proves to be an obstacle to radical democracy, since it frames as its political subject an undifferentiated, essential human nature. Every assertion of universality (Enlightenment rationality) bears in it a disavowal of the particular and the refusal of specificity. A 'haunting' marking the nonpresence of inelimable singularity belongs to the structure of every hegemony. Behind the mask of so-called universal ideals have always been mechanisms of exclusion, demonstrated easily enough historically using categories of sex and race. Radical democracy, by contrast, demands that we < 6) The proper names Derrida and Habermas can stand for the positions involved here. A desultory misinterpretation of Derrida's project by Habermas can be found in The Philsophical Discourse of Modernity (1987, particularly pages ). See Derrida's response in the "Afterword" to Limited Inc (1989). A good-faith attempt to think the two together in a way that avoids demonizing Derrida as a neoconservative or Habermas as a crypto-totalitarian can be found in "Postmodernism, dialogue and democracy" (Jones et al, 1993).

5 Radical democracy 271 acknowledge difference the particular, the multiple, the heterogenous and the agonistic character of the political, but without falling into a false dilemma whose choices are either (a) recourse to universal criteria and totality, or (b) the rule of arbitrariness. Mouffe follows Hannah Arendt in positing politics as the sphere of doxa' rather than of 'truth', thus shifting (or returning) the terrain of the debate. As she has also argued elsewhere, what is called for is a new kind of articulation which will also have an epistcmological moment between the universal and the particular (1988, pages 36-38), one which draws upon Enlightenment selfreflection understood contingently, not as mythological dogma.. For Mouffe, radical democracy (unlike other political projects?) is without guarantees; it is instead open-ended, self-rcfleetively resistant to the temptation of Ideological closure (the elimination of difference). Democractic equivalence will not eliminate difference. The myth of (or desire for) a transparent society, reconciled with itself, has under conditions too familiar in this century, also materialized as totalitarianism or authoritarian nationalism (1988, page 41). Radical democracy (unlike liberalism) pursues a politics that embraces the political. Politics will always be about the political (that is, the dimension of antagonism which is present in social relations); there will never be the creation of a fully inclusive community where antagonism, division, and conflict will have disappeared (1992c, page 379). The dangers of closure and the holism which underwrite it, have become manifest again in the volition of intentionality and reception accompanying the ballyhooed re-turn of the 'end of history' thesis. Derrida has recently read this longing in Fukayama's argumentation as a recussitation of the model of a Christian State, a Holy Alliance (1994, page 61). (7) Yet, as Mouffe registers, any number of communitarians have also hoisted the holistic community as the ideal resolution of the political (1992a, pages 4-7). Against that communitarian temptation as well as the one poised by postmodern anarchy, Mouffe stresses that one should not expect relations of authority and power to completely disappear. Rather, radical democratic politics promote practices, discourses, and institutions that make room for the expression of conflicting interests and values, while contributing to the constitution of the 'we' of radical democratic forces (1992b). Modern democracy's specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order (Mouffe, 1995, pages ). For reasons just mentioned, this specificity also recognizes "the impossiblity of the complete realization of democracy and the final achievement of the political community" (1992b, page 238). Radical and plural democracy is a never-ending process. Towards the aim of radical and plural democracy, Mouffe conceives a radically different soi as the agent and arena of politics. The self-mastery of the subject Kant's ideal is replaced by a conception of identity lack, an empty place to be filled by identifications which provisionally assert, then subvert and reconstitute any identity. (8) The process of identifications may, wherever possible, attach to the symbolic resources of the liberal democratic tradition in order to deepen and reconstitute possible identifications in the orbit of radical and plural democracy. (7) Regarding the Communist Manifesto, which as we remember starts with the positing of a haunting (a spectre, in Europe), Derrida also offers the position that "no text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming worldwide, concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought" (1994, page 13). (8) "[Political practice in a democratic society does not consist in defending the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain" (Mouffe, 1995, page 261).

6 272 W Natter Time and space The never more than temporary determination of the subject (as nodal point) finds a corollary on the other side of the (collective) bar in the indeterminacy of shared transgenerational memory which constitutes (and constitute) history and tradition. Hegemonic cultural practices always attempt to fix the meaning of history and tradition, arranging any number of particularities and singular events into a manifold unity: the one story, the one identity, as in, for example, 'Nation'. Such attempts at normalizing hegemony can never be complete because of the dynamic of the constitutive outside that operates at the collective level. We need to carefully examine apparently stable historical-spatial articulations (or horizons of disarticulation) in order to overcome the notion of a tradition which is monolithic, natural, and inevitable. As an open-ended project, radical democracy has more than a passing interest in past struggles whose force as tradition either against or in support of democracy remains indeterminate. By distinguishing between tradition and traditional, Mouffe, like Walter Benjamin, offers a dynamic conception of the present's relation to the past. In it, events, victories, and defeats are not forever marked by the force which accompanied their 'arrival' at that place/moment. Walter Benjamin's vision ('secret heliotropism') of tradition in which one can "call into question every victory, past and present" of the rulers is relevant here (1969b, pages ). The democratic tradition in all its partial realizations is composite, heterogeneous, and open. This of course entails a notion of tradition which disentangles 'progress' from the passage of time. To undermine the affirmative force which ensues from historical and cultural markers documenting a teleology of progress, Mouffe's linkage of identity to a history of the subject's identifications redirects our attention to the deployment and use-value at work in forging collective identifications, understood now as ongoing and contingent historical and spatial nodal points. Viewed hegemonically, the victories that conspire to seal the fate of subsequent victims depend upon a tradition which appears (and is writable as) seamless, natural, and inevitable. Whether as a prearticulation so weighted that its fulfillment is 'destined' to arrive thereafter, or ex post facto as a selective ordering of past events which 'necessarily' demonstrate the present as a causal link in past-future teleology, neither of these dominant cultural strategies proves in fact to be so seamless that traces of refusal aren't in evidence. We need to look at the articulation of the political wherever dense cultural capital is at stake, in order to assess such historical-spatial movements as potential horizons of disarticulation where, once un-framed in Benjamin's sense, tradition can be actualized as what it always really is "thoroughly alive and extremely changeable" (Benjamin, 1969a, page 223). Of course, there is not only a (partially written) history but also a (partially mapped) geography of radical democracy, whose frame of analysis should span the 'age of adventure' to 'the global village'. Everyday experience of materialized social relations (for example, the built environment) likewise conspires to suggest a seamless web of 'naturalized' social space. Place understood in relation to the concept of identity articulated by Mouffe frees us from the appearance of regulated coherence and order and its suggestion of 'naturalized' place/identity, become monumentalized and immutable in everyday experience: "This way of posing the problem indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two preconstiruted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. This is really decisive. Because, if the 'constitutive outside' is present within the inside as its 'always real possibility', then the inside itself becomes a purely contingent and reversible arrangement" (1995, page 261).

7 Radical democracy 273 Again, there is both a geography and a history to be aetivated here, Following up some implications on (non)identity, one might very productively consider spatial orderings as likewise indeterminate, localr/able through nodal points, temporary fixations, always evolving, yet 'essentially* un-fixec! and necessarily producing difference or dislocation. Places, like piaeemakers, become multiple and overdetermincd sites of plural identification. Place in this view has a composite character, heterogenous, open, ultimately indeterminate and therefore contestable, like the political as understood by radical democracy. Neither places nor the identities which form around them are confirmations of a pregiven articulation, but are un-fixed agents and arenas of identity formation. Rethinking place-identity in this way should 'root out' the epistemology of self-grounding as it relates to space, but that will also entail a reformulation of the objectivism and essentialism paradigmatic in much social science. The kinds of evidence such a research program will likely discover may productively highlight historical and spatial nodal points where there are no longer only as a simple opposition the dominant and the dominated, whose stories are only recorded by the former. Such research should also promote consideration that one's identity as a citizen should not be made dependent on one's prearticulated ethnic, religious, or racial identity. The project of radical and plural democracy, by contrast, suggests starting with these powerful identifications (understood contingently) and trying to link them to democracy. Rather than denigrating these as 'atavistic 1 remnants (from the perspective of liberalism), it will be crucial in the next decade that such identifications become domesticated as elements of agonistic (not antagonistic) contention, rather than their becoming divorced from the political a politics unto themselves. (9) In as much as citizenship is itself an imaginary construct, let's imagine it democratically. References Benjamin W, 1969a, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction", in Illuminations Ed. H Arendt (Schockcn Books, New York) pp Benjamin W, 1969b, "Theses on the philosophy of history", in Illuminations Ed. H Arendt (Schocken Books, New York) pp Dcrrida J, 1989, "Afterword", in Limited Inc (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL) pp Derrida J, 1994 Spectres of Marx translated by P Kamuf (Routledge, London) Habcrmas J, 1987 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity translated by F Lawrence (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Horkheimer M, 1993 Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings translated by G F Hunter, M S Kramer, J Torpey (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Jones J P, Natter W, Schatzki T (Eds), 1993, "Postmodernism, dialogue and democracy: an interview with Richard Bernstein", in Postmodern Contentions: Politics, Epochs, Space (Guilford, New York) pp Kant E, 1964 Metaphysical Principles of Virtue translated by J Ellington (Hackett, Indianopolis, IN) Laclau E, Mouffe C, 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democractic Politics (Verso, London) Mouffe C, 1988, "Radical democracy: modern or postmodern? ", in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism Ed. A Ross (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp < 9 > There is a need "to work through nationalism and not negate it because, I think, those are forms of identity which are important for people and which should not necessarily be an impediment to democracy. I don't think that a strong sense of belonging to an ethnic group or nationality is something that is contradictory to a commitment to radical democracy" (Mouffe, 1993, page 98).

8 274 W Natter Mouffe C, 1992a, "Democratic politics today", in Dimensions of Radical Democracy (Verso, London) pp 1-16 Mouffe C, 1992b, "Democratic citizenship and the political community", in Dimensions of Radical Democracy (Verso, London) pp Mouffe C, 1992c, "Feminism, citizenship and radical democratic politics", in Feminists Theorize the Political Eds J Butler, J Scott (Routledge, London) pp Mouffe C, 1993, "An interview with Chantal Mouffe" disclosure number 3, Mouffe C, 1995, "Postmarxism: democracy and identity" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space p 1995 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain