Towards a Minor Theatre

It is "an avalanche of historical mutations," Laclau and Mouffe claim, that is responsible for the erosion of the relevance and validity of Marxist theory in contemporary society (1985, 1). The issue is social change, and how we understand it; or, rather, their proposition constructs a relation between two issues: a theory of history and the historicity of theory. As far as theorising history is concerned, Laclau and Mouffe highlight "the constant emergence of new forms of political subjectivity cutting across the categories of the social and economic structure" (13). This proliferation of struggles, usually grouped under the label "new social movements," or NSMs, indicates an historical mutation in the forms of political organisation which, if we are to take the development of society to be the result of interactions within the "structure/struggle" relation, demands that a theory of history be capable of thinking their specificity. This demand, it is clear, is far from objectionable; indeed, it would be necessary for any theory claiming to adequately grasp the contemporary development of society. What is less clear, however, is that such a development necessarily negates the historical or contemporary validity of the Marxist conceptual scheme. What would be needed for such a demonstration is a specification of the theory's claims to be able to understand such a historical mutation and the particular social conditions under which it is able to do so (i.e., its own historicity). Since such specifications would, presumably, be required of radical democracy itself, I shall initially defer my discussion of the claims and conditions of Marx's work in favour of an interrogation of that of Laclau and Mouffe's. In the course of doing so, I shall elaborate the ways in which Laclau and Mouffe construct Marxism's claims, and compare this construction to what I perceive as that which is to be found in Marx's own writings. My own negation of Laclau and Mouffe's "de-struction" of Marxism, and their consequent installation of the theoretical field of post-Marxism (Laclau 1987, 330), is founded upon this distinction--one that arises, I believe, due to their failure to engage directly with Marx. Furthermore, I believe that, in elaborating the claims and conditions of both, the historicity of radical democracy's theory of history itself will become apparent--suggesting that, as history has continued to "mutate," post-Marxism has rapidly approached its limits.

It is in response to an imperative arising from the struggle pole of the relation underlying social change and development that Laclau and Mouffe propose to reformulate Marxism. The proliferation of struggles which appear to escape the categories of social class has as its social conditions the phenomenon of "uneven and combined development." Marxism's attempt to think social change within these conditions took the form of "hegemony"--an attempt to grasp the nascent forms of social complexity that we experience so acutely under "postmodernism." With the introduction of this concept into Marxist theory, the antagonism between classes gives way to a struggle conducted on the basis of class alliances (Lenin), or opposed historic blocs (Gramsci). In short, as Laclau and Mouffe understand it, "Combined and uneven development becomes the terrain which for the first time allows Marxism to render more complex its conception of the nature of social struggles" (56). For Laclau and Mouffe uneven and combined development and hegemony constitute "a privileged zone of deconstructive effects" (Laclau 1987, 332), within which a "genealogy of post-Marxism may be traced" (1988, 337). It is on the basis of following through the deconstructive effects of the "logic of hegemony" on the terrain of Marxist discourse that their understanding of the constitution and development of society situates itself in a post-Marxist terrain. From this position, they insist:

It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 4)1

My critique will attempt to demonstrate that neither of these assertions are true. This will be based on a reading of subjectivity through the concept of "class composition," and capitalist development in terms of the "becoming total of bourgeois society"; the first I shall explore in the next chapter, the second, in the last. It will proceed through a conjunction of theoretical concepts drawn from "autonomist" Marxism (principally the work of Antonio Negri), Deleuze and Guattari's theory of subjectivity, semiotics and capitalism, and elements drawn from Marx's own writings. Since the way in which we understand the constitution of society--its organisational structures and their development, and the subjectivities which animate them--can determine the range of possibilities that we attribute to the practice of contemporary oppositional social formations, it is clear that these kind of theoretical disagreements can have very real practical effects when it comes to organising political action--or, indeed, a politicised cultural practice. The following attempt at a critique, however, is not conducted with the intent to arrive at a position from which it is possible to dismiss the work of Laclau and Mouffe; but rather, in pointing out some of their theoretical errors or limitations, to expand the range of possibility for radical political praxis. It will also serve as the basis for an affirmative and critical "postmodern" cultural practice, which will be developed in the final chapter.

The Constitution of Post-Marxist Society

Central to Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical project is the attempt to understand social complexity through the category of discourse (109-114). I think it would be correct to say that, irrespective of any differences between their historical conditions of validity, the distinction between Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism and Marxist theory turns on the preference for "discourse" over "production" as the central category through which to grasp social organization. (It is in this respect that we may also distinguish Laclau and Mouffe's work from the "postmodern" theory of Deleuze and Guattari, for whom production remains a central, though significantly reworked and expanded, concept. See in particular Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus [1972]. The irony being, of course, that the abandonment of "production" is that which is supposed to make one a postmodernist.) According to Laclau and Mouffe's model, the structure/struggle relation is thought of as one between a discursive structure (the "social order") and a field of differences external to that structure ("wild" antagonisms, "elements," or "floating signifiers" [171]); the latter of which may or may not become organised as a social identity (or an "overdetermined subject position" [165]) articulated to a counter-hegemonic "discursive chain." Consequently, contemporary social complexity is understood to produce "a fundamental asymmetry":

This is the asymmetry existing between a growing proliferation of differences--a surplus of meaning of "the social"--and the difficulties encountered by any discourse attempting to fix those differences as moments of a stable articulatory structure. (96)

This asymmetry, produced by the social complexity which arises from society's uneven and combined development, guarantees the "openness" of the social. The discursive structure of the social order is incapable of fully incorporating within a stable organization all elements of the social.2

Laclau and Mouffe insist that the coherence of a discursive structure is not derived from an underlying principle, such as "the logical coherence of its elements, or in the a priori of a transcendental subject, or in a meaning-giving subject à la Husserl, or in the unity of an experience" (105). Rather, their notion of the discursive is adapted from Foucault's in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), where the coherence is located in its "regularity in dispersion."3 They follow Foucault's rejection of four hypotheses of unity: "reference to the same object, a common style in the production of statements, constancy of the concepts, and reference to a common theme" (105). Since "diverse subject positions appear dispersed within a discursive formation" (109), were we to understand capitalism's ordering of production as a discursive structure, the unity of the working class (which traditional Marxism posited as arising from the social agents' common insertion under the relations of production) is thrown into question; in place of that unity, Laclau and Mouffe see only "a plurality of weakly integrated and frequently contradictory subject positions" (84). They are also keen to stress that "discourse" does not indicate merely "ideas" or "language":

[W]e will affirm the material character of every discursive structure. . . . The linguistic and non-linguistic elements are not merely juxtaposed, but constitute a differential and structured system of positions--that is, a discourse. The differential positions include, therefore, a dispersion of very diverse material elements. (108)

Insofar as this material character is stressed, such that "discourse" includes "institutions, rituals and practices" (109), Laclau and Mouffe's "discourse" comes close to the theorisations of "ideology" by Althusser or Gramsci. Their divergence from the latter comes from abandoning what they term the "essentialist assumption" about the coherence of ideology:

It was an a priori unity vis-à-vis the dispersion of its materiality, so that it required an appeal either to the unifying role of a class (Gramsci), or to the functional requirements of the logic of reproduction (Althusser). (109)

Consequently, Laclau and Mouffe's frequent use of the term "ideology" is always made with the understanding that by this they mean an anti-essentialist, or discursive formation--i.e., that the principle of coherence of an "ideology" is regularity in dispersion.4

If the coherence of the system of relations between differential elements, or the discursive formation, is based only on regularity in dispersion, then the practice of constructing those relations must operate according to the same logic. This form of practice Laclau and Mouffe term "articulation." They offer the following definition of their terms:

[W]e will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated. . . . [I]f contingency and articulation are possible, this is because no discursive formation is a sutured totality and the transformation of the elements into moments is never complete. (105; 106-7)

Here we have a succinct description of the conceptual apparatus Laclau and Mouffe use to understand society. Their discourse theory translates all elements of the social--social practice, agents, objects, relations, conditions--according to a post-structuralist linguistic model. Their "de-struction" of the history of Marxism is "the generalisation of the logic of the signifier to the ensemble of its theoretical categories" (Laclau 1987, 333). An "element" of the social--an unstable, differential position that is not discursively articulated--is understood to be a "floating signifier." When that element becomes articulated into a discursive chain (when the floating signifier is partially "fixed" as a stable position within a discourse/ideology), it acquires a stable "meaning," and is termed a "moment." Consequently, by virtue of the translation which their anti-essentialist model effects, Laclau and Mouffe insist that:

[T]he social constitutes itself as a symbolic order. The symbolic--i.e., overdetermined--character of social relations therefore implies that they lack an ultimate literality which would reduce them to necessary moments of an immanent law. There are not two planes, one of essences and the other of appearances, since there is no possibility of fixing an ultimate literal sense for which the symbolic would be a second and derived plane of signification. Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 97-98)

Following their reading of the social in terms of the logic of the signifier, a social order that managed to fully incorporate all elements into moments would have produced a "sutured totality."5 The social would no longer be characterised by an "openness," but rather, would have become a "closed symbolic order" (88). As we have seen, however, uneven and combined development guarantees the "openness" of the social. Since the social order is incapable of fully subsuming all differences within a stable discursive structure, all of the elements will never become moments. The openness produced by uneven and combined development makes "articulation" possible: a practice that attempts to partially fix the meaning of the proliferating differences within a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic discourse, but which will never be completely successful:6

If the social does not manage to fix itself in the intelligible and instituted forms of a society, the social only exists, however, as an effort to construct that impossible object. Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre. . . . [A] discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic. (112)7

As we have seen, understanding the social order as a discourse implies a particular way of conceiving the nature of social relations (the relations between differential positions): "a discursive structure is . . . an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations" (96). Since Laclau and Mouffe's elaboration of the concept of articulation forms one of the moments in which they construct the claims and conditions of Marxism, in order to counterpose their own post-Marxism, it is worth briefly following this elaboration. In a brief article, "Psychoanalysis and Marxism," Laclau highlights two sides of Marx's work (and adds "The same could be said about Hegel" [1987, 331]): Firstly, there is a side that affirms negativity (struggle and antagonism) and the opaqueness of the social (the ideological nature of collective representations). This side, Laclau suggests, corresponds to one of the first crises of the Enlightenment project.8 Secondly, Laclau identifies a side that attempts to limit and master that negativity and opaqueness. He describes it as a movement towards "mastery/transparency/rationalism" which is "perfectly compatible with the Enlightenment." It is understood as a side that affirms positivity; the "positivity of history and society as totalisations of their partial processes," and "the positivity of the subject--the social classes--as agents of history." In short, the second side is the theory of "communism conceived as homogeneous and transparent society" (332). In Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, although the focus is more on Hegel than Marx, essentially the same parameters are at work.9 Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism is founded on the rejection of the second foundational moment, and the establishment of the first as the constitutive principle of society.

This is achieved through their reading of the social in terms of "discourse." It is based on a particular understanding of the way in which contemporary society operates. Because the social is understood to develop through a process of "uneven and combined development," social complexity is "a central characteristic of the advanced capitalist social formations" (137). This produces the "asymmetry" of contemporary society identified earlier. Laclau and Mouffe's theory suggests that this growing complexity may be understood as a proliferation of "floating signifiers." Furthermore, these signifiers are antagonisms: "Every antagonism, left free to itself, is a floating signifier, a 'wild' antagonism which does not predetermine the form in which it can be articulated to other elements in a social formation" (171). They are conflicts that are enabled through the "frequently contradictory aspects of [capitalism's] . . . process of expansion" (158); that is, capitalist society's uneven and combined development. When Laclau and Mouffe refer to a "proliferation of differences," or "social complexity," therefore, they are referring to a multiplicity of struggles which, within political spaces made possible through the unevenness of capitalism's social development, contest the relations of domination which the latter attempts to impose.10 It is on the basis of this understanding, that Laclau and Mouffe establish "negativity" as the constitutive principle of society:

As the social is penetrated by negativity--that is, by antagonism--it does not attain the status of transparency, of full presence, and the objectivity of its identities is permanently subverted. From here onward, the impossible relation between objectivity and negativity has become constitutive of the social. (129)

According to their model, therefore, social relations cannot be considered as mediations of a totality ("society"). Such a totality is "impossible": by virtue of social complexity, it can never fully constitute itself. It follows that the transitions between the elements comprising the poles of social relations cannot be logical transitions.11 Rather, Laclau and Mouffe's theory insists that social relations are constituted through articulations, and the transitions between their elements are contingent:

In order to place ourselves firmly within the field of articulation, we must begin by renouncing the conception of "society" as founding totality of its partial processes. We must, therefore, consider the openness of the social as the constitutive ground or "negative essence" of the existing, and the diverse "social orders" as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of difference. Accordingly, the multiformity of the social cannot be apprehended through a system of mediations, nor the "social order" understood as an underlying principle. There is no sutured space peculiar to "society," since the social itself has no essence. (96)

Laclau and Mouffe's concept of articulation involves "forcing the myth of a rational and transparent society to recede progressively to the horizon of the social. This becomes a 'non-place,' the symbol of its own impossibility" (191). In place of "society" as a foundational and sutured totality, they assert that "There is no single underlying principle fixing--and hence constituting--the whole field of differences. . . . 'Society' is not a valid object of discourse" (111). The discourse of radical democracy, therefore, operates not on the basis of "foundations of the social order, but of social logics" (183). The social logic governing the practice of politics in contemporary society is, in their scheme, hegemonic articulation. Following Gramsci, their model regards history as "a discontinuous series of hegemonic formations or historical blocs" (71); where the discontinuity results from the alternation between the successful stabilisation of a hegemonic formation (a situation of maximum integration between negativity and positivity, or democratic demands and social organisation) and organic crises which disrupt that stabilisation and force a reconstitution (a situation where negativity, or social struggles, disintegrate the stable, organised system of differences) (189). Since Marxism is understood as, essentially, an Hegelian model of the constitution of society (insofar as it posits the existence of a social "essence"), contemporary political theory, in recognising the deficiencies of the latter, must situate itself in a post-Marxist terrain. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe's project of radical democracy insists that:

It is only when the open, unsutured character of the social is fully accepted, when the essentialism of the totality and of the elements is rejected, that . . . "hegemony" can come to constitute a fundamental tool for political analysis on the left. (192-3)

The Working Class and the Vicissitudes of Crisis

Since the object of this investigation is the nature of contemporary oppositional social formations, having given an account of Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical field, I shall turn now to their critique and reconstruction of what Marxism calls the working class--its constitution and the nature of its struggles. Laclau characterises the postmodern.i."postmodern"; sensibility as a response to the erosion of the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of modernity (Laclau 1988). Consequently, Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxism targets what they understand as its ontological privileging of the working class as the agent of historical transformation. Such privileging, they claim, is an unacceptable form of essentialism.i."essentialism"; given the plurality of subjects opposed to the dominant order in contemporary society.i."society";. What is being challenged here is the internal link between the dissolution of capitalism and the working class. Laclau and Mouffe approach this relation through a problematic constructed around the themes of (political) "identity" and "subjectivity" and their relation to the social agents' insertion under the relations of production. That these relations constitute a problematic may be traced to a precise moment in the history of Marxist thought--1898: "the crisis of Marxism."12 The Marxism that this statement heralds the crisis of, however, is of a particular form: Marxist orthodoxy; represented, in Laclau and Mouffe's account, by Kautsky's The Class Struggle (1892). Hence, it would seem, any reference to an earlier Marxism (i.e., that of Marx's own) is redundant. It is the disaggregation of the orthodox paradigm that enables a new logic of the social to begin to be thought. Laclau and Mouffe's intervention consists of unravelling the contradictions and correcting the errors in the various formulations of this new logic (centrally, of course, Gramsci's hegemony).13

The conditions that prompted the crisis were, of course, uneven and combined development: the synchronic presence of what were, according to the orthodox paradigm, distinct moments of a logical sequence of capitalist development. Uneven and combined development was the result of what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as the "transition to 'organized capitalism,' and the ensuing boom that lasted until 1914" (17). It produced, in "all areas of society, an autonomization of spheres," which made social relations increasingly opaque and difficult to explain in terms of the categories of orthodoxy (18). The autonomization produced fragmentations and discontinuities in what orthodoxy assumed to be unified: the working class. This "'structural pressure' of increasingly atypical situations" forced Marxism "to think those discontinuities and, at the same time, to find forms reconstituting the unity of scattered and heterogeneous elements" (18). In place of orthodoxy's presupposed closed totality of interior relations governed by logical transitions, in which the economic and political struggles of the working class are united by its constitution as an infrastructural datum, the various Marxist responses to the crisis were confronted with a "hiatus . . . in the chain of historical necessity" (7); the economic level thwarted, rather than provided, working-class unity. Their attempt to fill that hiatus, however--to rearticulate the relations and recompose the unity at the political level--tended to be based on a social logic that referred to orthodoxy's "absent totality." A dualism was thus introduced: consisting of orthodoxy's historical necessity on the one hand (fundamental identity at the economic level), and the contingent relations under uneven and combined development which limited that necessity on the other (the political relations). This dualism, however, produced a fundamental antinomy: "the economic base is incapable of assuring class unity in the present; while politics, the sole terrain where that unity can be constructed, is unable convincingly to guarantee the class character of the unitary subjects" (36-7). The dualism can be overcome in one of two ways, which, within Laclau and Mouffe's scheme, corresponds to either a Marxist or post-Marxist solution: either (1) historical necessity will abolish the contingent complexity (in which case the conditions of validity of the claims made in Marx's work are limited to a historically determinate level of capitalist development):

[T]he affirmation of the class struggle as the fundamental principle of political division always had to be accompanied by supplementary hypotheses which relegated its full applicability to the future: historical-sociological hypotheses--the simplification of the social structure, which would lead to the coincidence of real political struggles and struggles between classes as agents constituted at the level of relations of production; hypotheses regarding the consciousness of agents--the transition from the class in itself to the class for itself. (151-2)

Or, (2) the "contingent" complexity forces "historical necessity" to withdraw to the horizon of the social. As a result of this withdrawal, "the class nature of political subjects loses its necessary character" (13). For Laclau and Mouffe:

[I]nsofar as the identity of social agents ceases to be exclusively constituted through their insertion in the relations of production, and becomes a precarious articulation among a number of subject positions, what is being implicitly challenged is the identification between social agents and classes. (58)

It is on the basis of this second approach that Laclau and Mouffe dissolve the internal relation between the abolition of capitalism and the working class.

It is the crisis of orthodox Marxism that constitutes the relations between the working class (understood as a unified social "identity") and the relations of production as a problematic. "Post-crisis" Marxism attempted to engage with this problematic by developing a political logic which would link together the dispersed social agents into a unified force; "spontaneity" in Luxemburg, "class alliance" in Lenin, "permanent revolution" in Trotsky, and the "historic bloc" in Gramsci. The scope of this logic, however, was limited by the persistent "essentialism" of the Marxist understanding of subjectivity and historical development. The social agents were understood to have a "fundamental" class identity which was not subject to political contestation, and historical development was directed by the "tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity" (Marx 1867, 91). Either the first of these, or both (depending on whether the post-crisis response was revisionist or orthodox--an acceptance or denial of social complexity), gave the working class a privileged role in the overthrow of capitalism. This privilege resulted from an understanding of social class that situated it in relation to an "ontological foundation." This ontological foundation had a precise location within the social: the economy. Laclau and Mouffe's critique of the essentialism inherent in Marxism's understanding the working class as a "social identity" must therefore consist of a critique of the Marxist understanding of economic processes:

To assert . . . that hegemony must always correspond to a fundamental economic class is not merely to reaffirm determination in the last instance by the economy; it is also to predicate that, insofar as the economy constitutes an insurmountable limit to society's potential for hegemonic recomposition, the constitutive logic of the economic space is not itself hegemonic. (69)

Their attempt to demonstrate that this is not correct, and that a "discursive" model is better suited to comprehend the economy, provides the fundamental basis for their understanding of the possibilities inherent in the contemporary struggles of the working class.

In the Marxist schemes, the fundamental identity of the working class was not the result of hegemonic articulation because it was constituted by economic processes that operated according to the logic of capital--not the logic of hegemony. Within the parameters of classical Marxism's base/superstructure model, the objectivity of capitalist development (the logic of capital) necessarily produces the fundamental, subjective identity of the working class. "Subjectivity" in this model is not internal to the economy, but determined by it in the external space of the superstructures. Laclau and Mouffe identify three conditions for, and respective theses of, the validity of asserting this fundamental constitution of social agents by the economy: (1) the condition that the economy's laws of motion are of an endogenous nature, coupled with the thesis of the neutrality of the productive forces; (2) the condition that the social agents form a unity at the economic level, coupled with the thesis of the growing homogenisation and impoverishment of the working class; (3) the condition that the relations of production dictate "historical interests" to those agents positioned within them with the thesis of the working class's interest in socialism (76; 77). The negation of each of these conditions and theses forces us to "face the consequences" and enter the terrain of post-Marxism--or so they claim (85-88). In effect, the first (neutral productive forces--endogenous economy) provides the objective conditions which determine the second and third; which concern the nature of the social agents operating within the economy (unity--impoverishment; historical interests--interest in socialism). By identifying the labour process as a site of struggle, Laclau and Mouffe demonstrate that the productive forces do not develop according to "a pure logic of capital." The identification of those struggles challenges "the idea that the development of capitalism is the effect solely of the laws of competition and the exigencies of accumulation" (79; my emphasis). We already know the nature of the relation between the structure and the struggles opposing it--it is that between the social order's discursive formation and the field of differences, or the "surplus of the social," external to it.14 It is necessary, therefore, to assess how their discursive mode of theorising the social provides the means with which they conceptualise those struggles.

Theorising Post-Marxist Struggles

Laclau and Mouffe's theorisation is based on a fundamental distinction with regard to the relations established through the exercise of power and the resistance that it produces: they distinguish between relations of subordination and relations of oppression (152-159). The distinction subordination/oppression is parallel with the structure/struggle distinction: the relations of subordination are the structural relations which constitute subject positions within the discursive formation of the hegemonic social order, and the relations of oppression are those that constitute antagonistic subject positions within the discursive formation of a counter-hegemonic project of radical democracy. What concerns us in their theorisation is the way in which this distinction posits both the unity of oppositional social agents and their relation to their political objectives, or "interests."15

The relations of subordination involve the constitution of a social agent's identity by the social order. If we are considering the discursive structure constituted by the social process of production, they are the relations of production which establish the subject positions "worker" and "capitalist." Laclau and Mouffe insist that relations of subordination cannot be antagonistic, since they establish "simply, a set of differential positions between social agents, . . . a system of differences which constructs each social identity as positivity" (154). Relations of subordination "simply" subject a social agent to the decisions of another--the example of "an employee with respect to an employer" is given (153). Since the relations of production allegedly establish the worker's identity as a positive differential, and since this identity is not therefore antagonistic, the social agent's positioning under those relations does not imply any particular political objectives on their part. To be constituted as a worker does not automatically give a social agent a political programme, or set of interests:

"Serf," "Slave," and so on, do not designate in themselves antagonistic positions; it is only in terms of a different discursive formation, such as "the rights inherent to every human being," that the differential positivity of these categories can be subverted and the subordination constructed as oppression. This means that there is no relation of oppression without the presence of a discursive "exterior" from which the discourse of subordination can be interrupted. (154)

Within the structure of the social order, not only do the relations of subordination not dictate interests, but they do not produce a unified identity. The identities of those working under the relations of production are fragmented (or, Laclau and Mouffe would insist, "dispersed") in two ways: Firstly, the operations of the economic mechanisms divide the workers through both the division of labour and their employment by different capitalists. This is the economic fragmentation which post-crisis Marxism faced. For example, for Luxemburg "'economic struggle is split into a multitude of individual struggles in every undertaking and dissolved in every branch of production'" (qtd. in Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 9)--and Laclau and Mouffe assume these conditions still obtain. Secondly, the "political" forms of control exercised by the capitalists segment the labour market "according to the capacity of different groups of workers to resist their authority" (82). For example, the capitalists' use of racism and sexism, the exploitation of regional or foreign labour reserves, and the division between "a well-paid and protected sector, and a peripheral sector of unskilled or semi-skilled workers for whom no security exists" (82). Under these conditions, both economic and political mechanisms fragment the unity which Marxism posited for the working class. Furthermore, once the development of the productive forces is understood to be subject to struggles, then there can be no necessary future unification, since the political relations of such a unity would have to be constructed--that is, hegemonically articulated. Within the social order, therefore, there is no working class, since its relations of subordination do not constitute a unified and homogeneous agent. Instead, there is "simply" a dispersed complex of subjects exploited by capital:

[T]he very unity and homogeneity of class subjects has split into a set of precariously integrated positions which, once the thesis of the neutral character of the productive forces is abandoned, cannot be referred to any necessary point of future unification. (85)

Further, since any resistance those subjects may give to their exploitation cannot be considered "political" by Laclau and Mouffe unless it is articulated by an exterior discourse (152-3), within itself, the social order has no oppositionality.16

If relations of subordination construct a social identity as positivity, relations of oppression construct it as negativity. Laclau and Mouffe describe relations of oppression as "those relations of subordination which have transformed themselves into sites of antagonism" (154). Although they affirm, "with Foucault, that wherever there is power there is resistance" (152), they insist that only certain forms of resistance constitute political struggles. Political struggles are defined as "struggles directed towards putting an end to relations of subordination as such. . . . [A] type of action whose objective is the transformation of a social relation which constructs a subject in a relationship of subordination" (153). Relations of oppression consequently involve the formation of resistances against subordination into a unified collective struggle for social transformation. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe's task of identifying "the discursive conditions for the emergence of collective action" is at the same time one of identifying "the conditions in which a relation of subordination becomes a relation of oppression, and thereby constitutes itself as the site of an antagonism" (153).

As we have seen, social complexity (a result of uneven and combined development) ensures that the social order can never become a sutured totality, or a closed symbolic order of positive differential identities. It is this that enables relations of oppression to be constructed:

In every case it is the impossibility of constituting relations of subordination as a closed system of differences--an impossibility implying the externality of the subordinator and subordinated identities to each other, rather than their absorption into the system through their positions--which lies at the base of the relation of oppression. (156)

This externality of identities, however, is not produced by the social order, since it constructs subject positions as positive differentials. Rather, the externality is produced through the introduction of negativity into the constitution of an identity. This introduction therefore requires precise "discursive conditions," external to the social order, to be present:

[W]hat allows the forms of resistance to assume the character of collective struggles is the existence of an external discourse which impedes the stabilization of subordination as difference. . . . Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forms of resistance to subordination that the conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality. (159; 154; my emphases)

It is from the moment that the "democratic discourse" imposes itself "as the new matrix of the social imaginary" that the conditions of possibility for oppositional social practice against inequality are present (155).17

According to Laclau and Mouffe's model, an identity becomes antagonistic when, on the basis of a displacement of the democratic discourse (which is understood as "the fundamental instrument of production of the social"), its relation of subordination is discursively constructed as an external imposition. The unity of the (now politicised) identity is consequently a discursive unity: it has no principle of coherence other than the political actions (or hegemonic articulations) which structure it. The unity has no underlying essence or external principle as its basis. Furthermore, the consolidation of a social identity requires that it enter into a series of relations with other identities:

[I]t is only by coming out of itself and hegemonizing external elements that the identity of the two poles of the antagonism is consolidated. The strengthening of specific democratic struggles requires, therefore, the expansion of chains of equivalence which extend to other struggles. (182)

This means that, like the social order, the discursive formation of a struggle is never able to permanently fix the meaning of its social identities--"the sense of every social identity appears constantly deferred. The moment of 'final' suture never arrives" (86). Its fixation of meaning is always subverted by its relations with other, external discourses, which modify the identities of the forces engaging in the alliance (184). Within Laclau and Mouffe's theory, "This field of identities which never manage to be fully fixed, is the field of overdetermination" (111). The construction of a "working-class" identity, based on a displacement of the democratic discourse in order to challenge the subordination effected by the relations of production, is therefore a discursive construction. Not only does this mean that its unity has no underlying or external principle, it also has the effect of "de-totalising" Marxism's claim that the opposition between classes is, or will be, able to divide "the totality of the social body into two antagonistic camps" (151). The elements articulated into the discourse which constructs class identity ("socialism") can never be comprehensively fixed (they can never fully become moments), because they will always be subverted by a discursive exterior (the discourses constructing other social relations). The struggles that construct the antagonistic identity "working class," therefore, can have no privileged role; the discourse is one among many. The working class is one among a number of oppressed groups at the limits of the social order.18 The workers' demands are understood to be in no way privileged points of rupture of the social order.

Laclau and Mouffe's use of the concept of "overdetermination" indicates that the unity of a social identity is a symbolic unity: "it is a very precise type of fusion entailing a symbolic dimension and a plurality of meanings. The concept of overdetermination is constituted in the field of the symbolic, and has no meaning whatsoever outside it" (97). Articulation, as the construction of "symbols" (or "nodal points") which partially fix meaning, is a practice of uniting social agents around ideological "principles." Not only does the construction of a unified social identity proceed in this way--a unification of agents under a meaningful identity--but the political alliances between identities are constructed through the same form of (discursive) practice; that is, through an articulatory practice that constructs a counter-hegemonic ideology:

Ideology . . . [is] an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles. (67)

The political objectives articulated by a project of radical democracy, therefore, are a result of interaction and contestation between the ensemble of identities that comprise it, within the terms of the ideological principles which actively place them in alliance. In understanding workers' demands through this model, their efficacy is posited as dependent upon their ability to be articulated with other oppositional formations: "The workers' resistance to certain forms of domination will depend upon the position they occupy within the ensemble of social relations, and not only those of production" (85).

Since the subject positions of the workers, as constituted by the social order, are not antagonistic--and only become so through their articulation with an external discourse (a "socialist" discourse based on the extension of the democratic discourse into the realm of economic processes)--it follows that there is no necessary relation between those subordinated positions and an "interest" in socialism:

[T]here is no logical and necessary relation between socialist objectives and the positions of social agents in the relations of production; and . . . the articulation between them is external and does not proceed from any natural movement of each to unite with the other. In other words, their articulation must be regarded as a hegemonic relation. (86)

To conclude, Laclau and Mouffe believe that they have demonstrated that the dissolution of the capitalist social order does not necessarily lie with the working class. They believe that they have negated the validity of Marxism's understanding of the development of the productive forces, and have demonstrated that, in the absence of an articulatory practice based on the democratic discourse, there is no unified working class with an interest in destroying capitalism. It follows that political struggle can only be understood as a class struggle to the extent that "socialism" forms one of the basic articulatory principles of a project of radical democracy--to the extent, that is, that it practically forms a part of such a project.

Notes

1 Laclau and Mouffe also make a third assertion, in addition to those reformulating the nature of political subjectivity and of capitalist development, that concerns the nature of communism (conceived as a rational and transparent society) and society's transition to it (revolution). Although I will not be discussing this issue directly, I believe that Negri's re&emdash;working of Marx's understanding of the transition to communism in terms of the future elaboration of present forms of self&emdash;valorisation (the "future in the present"), provides sufficient material for a critique of Laclau and Mouffe's theorisations. See Negri, Marx Beyond Marx (1979) 151&emdash;190.

2 It is in the presupposition of uneven and combined development that Laclau and Mouffe's claims to understand the constitution of society and the significance of contemporary social struggles within and against it find their conditions of validity. Two questions present themselves at this point: Firstly, assuming those conditions, are Laclau and Mouffe's claims justified? That is, is radical democracy's form of hegemonic politics based on an accurate understanding of the conditions of uneven and combined development and the constitution of the society that is produced by it? Secondly, is the assumption of those conditions justified? That is, is the contemporary development of society characterised by uneven and combined development? The second question I shall return to in the third chapter. To answer the first, it is necessary to explore further some of the features and consequences for their conception of political subjectivity of their formulation of society and social change in terms of "discourse." My critique of Laclau and Mouffe in chapter two will attempt to demonstrate why their claims are not justifiable.

3 "The unity of discourses . . . would be the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time . . . . Paradoxically, to define a group of statements in terms of its individuality would be to define the dispersion of these objects, to grasp all the interstices that separate them, to measure the distances that reign between them&emdash;&emdash;in other words, to formulate their law of division. . . . Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the Ïuvre of a collective subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations. Such an analysis would not try to isolate small islands of coherence in order to describe their internal structure; it would not try to suspect and to reveal latent conflicts; it would study forms of division. Or again: instead of reconstituting chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy), instead of drawing up tables of differences (as the linguists do), it would describe systems of dispersion" (Foucault 1969, 32&emdash;33; 37).

4 See the note above for a brief description of Foucault's notion of "regularity in dispersion."

5 Laclau and Mouffe extend the concept of "suture" from Lacanian theory; specifically Jacques-Alain Miller and Stephen Heath's formulations. They describe this extension in the following way: "Hegemonic practices are suturing insofar as their field of operation is determined by the openness of the social, by the ultimately unfixed character of every signifier. This original lack is precisely what the hegemonic practices try to fill in. A totally sutured society would be one where this filling-in would have reached its ultimate consequences and would have, therefore, managed to identify itself with the transparency of a closed symbolic order. Such a closure of the social is, as we will see, impossible" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 88).

6 This partial fixation which is produced by an articulatory practice, or what they term the construction of "nodal points," corresponds to Lacan's concept of points de capiton: "privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 112).

7 An anticipatory remark may be made at this point: My critique of Laclau and Mouffe will focus on the inapplicability of "discourse" to capitalism, insofar as the capitalist process does not need to construct a "centre" or a "meaning" in order to work (that is, it is psychotic, in the sense which Laclau and Mouffe use the term here). In fact, what distinguishes capitalism from earlier modes of production is precisely this aspect. The capitalist process is such that, as Marx and Engels describe it, "All that is solid melts into air"&emdash;&emdash;or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it, capitalism is based on "deterritorialization." While both Laclau and Mouffe's and Deleuze and Guattari's theories use a post-structuralist model of semiotics to understand society, the particularities of their models produce vastly differing results. Their apparent identity under the label post-structuralist, of course, hides an essential difference: in this case, that between Derrida and Deleuze. (Accordingly, also, Foucault's work may be articulated with either model, and produce, again, quite different results.) My preference for Deleuze and Guattari's work derives from an understanding that their "linguistics of flows" (which they oppose to a "linguistics of the signifier" [1972, 241]) is better suited to an analysis of the semiotics of a capitalist society. As Catherine Clément has remarked: "What Félix [Guattari] says goes beyond all this, while Derrida confines himself strictly to the effectiveness of words" (qtd. in Guattari 1995, 153). I shall elaborate on these issues more fully in the next chapter.

8 I find Laclau and Mouffe's terms here imprecise, insofar as the "Enlightenment" and "Modernity" effectively become synonymous. Laclau presents the negative side of Marx's theory as a crisis of modernity. I would say rather that it is a crisis for the project of the Enlightenment, and that the state of crisis may be termed "modernity." Marx's work could be said to constitute what might be called the recognition of the "dialectic of enlightenment" (as in Adorno and Horkheimer). We should note, therefore, that an increasing stress on the negative moment does not necessarily lead to Laclau's post&emdash;Marxism. The dialectic can be a "negative dialectic," as in Adorno.

9 Perhaps Laclau and Mouffe's rejection of Marxism may therefore be described as a replacement of Marxism's Hegelian aspects with a Derridian logic.

10 See in particular Laclau and Mouffe's analysis of the NSMs in these terms (1985, 159&emdash;171). As we shall see shortly, uneven and combined development is not the only condition of possibility for these struggles. They also require the presence of what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as "the democratic discourse." See my section "Theorising Post&emdash;Marxist Struggles" below.

11 This second assertion, insisting that the transitions are not logical, attempts to contest the Hegelian assertion that "History and society . . . have a rational and intelligible structure" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 95). The coherence of "society," therefore, is not based on the logical coherence of a series of concepts, but rather on a discursive coherence&emdash;&emdash;regularity in dispersion. The relations between the elements are externally constructed, therefore, rather than being internal and conceptually specifiable ones.

12 An expression coined by Thomas Masaryk. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy (1985) 18.

13 While radical democracy may situate its theory "in a post&emdash;Marxist terrain" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 4), the conditions that provide its validity are shared, in their essentials, with "post-crisis" Marxism. The claims made by radical democracy, as a response to the problematic raised by the crisis, rest on the assumption that those conditions still obtain.

14 See the first part of my section "The Constitution of Post&emdash;Marxist Society" above.

15 In following the autonomist Marxist critique of orthodox Marxism's base/superstructure model, I am effectively agreeing with the general thrust of Laclau and Mouffe's negation of the first couplet (neutral productive forces&emdash;&emdash;endogenous economy). My disagreement with Laclau and Mouffe, however, insists that the logic of capital is the logic of class struggle, so that its laws of development are not constituted by a reciprocal subversion between the logic of capital (structure) and the logic of hegemony (struggles).

16 It may initially seem as though this way of understanding the social agents' positioning within the discursive formation of the social order entertains the same formal relations to political action as may be found in the base/superstructure model&endash;insofar as the structural positions within the social order (the base in classical Marxism) do not constitute antagonistic subject positions, but rather require another part of the social (in Laclau and Mouffe's theory, a series of exterior discourses constituted on the model of the democratic discourse; in Marxism, the political mediation of intellectuals between the working class and socialist objectives) in order to be constructed as oppositional subjects. The correspondence is not complete, though, since in Laclau and Mouffe's theory, the democratic struggles actively transform the positioning within the social order; thus, the relation between the two terms is not a relation of frontiers (as in the base/superstructure, or necessity/contingency model), but is a "reciprocal subversion of their contents" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 129). There is a formal correspondence, however, to the extent that in both models the oppositional quality&endash;that which makes a subject position antagonistic&endash;is understood to be exterior to the social agent's positioning within the social order (or the base in Marxism). We can note from this also that the use of the base/superstructure model and the privileging of the role of the intellectual presuppose one another within Marxist theorisations. It also, insofar as the working class are understood to require the mediation of intellectuals in order to have socialist objectives, denies Marx's understanding of communism as the real or actual movement of the working class, or its self&emdash;emancipation&emdash;&emdash;"not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx and Engels 1845&emdash;6, 162). Using Marx's understanding, the externality between the positivity of "utopia" and the negativity of present struggles cannot be maintained (as Laclau and Mouffe, and many Marxists, do&emdash;&emdash;see Laclau and Mouffe's chapter four). To follow Marx would be to insist on the unity of theory and practice&emdash;&emdash;on practical reflexivity&emdash;&emdash;and would force a reconception of the notion of the transition (see note #1). As we shall see, this exteriority is only able to be maintained through a crucial methodological shift in Laclau and Mouffe's theory, which I shall approach in the opening of the next chapter.

17 As Fredric Jameson has noted, Laclau and Mouffe retain of Marx "his diagnosis of the historical originality of his own time, as the moment in which the doctrine of social equality has become an irreversible social fact; but with the omission of Marx's causal qualification" (1991, 319). Although Jameson asserts that "For Marx, equality&emdash;&emdash;or the demand for it&emdash;&emdash;is the result of the equivalences instituted by wage labor" (428; note #12), he does not provide a reference to Marx's writings to justify his assertion. Marx's qualification is that it is the presence of exchange based on exchange value which provides the conditions of possibility for the democratic discourse: "Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power. And so it has been in history" (1857&emdash;8, 245). Indeed, it seems as though Laclau and Mouffe effectively reverse the causality in Marx's formulation, since it is the "democratic discourse" which establishes a "logic of equivalence." This was then "transformed into the fundamental instrument of production of the social" (155). It is clear that the "production of the social," here, is a discursive production. The problem with this formulation, of course, is that they cannot provide any explanation of where this discourse came from; its appearance is merely a fortuitous event.

18 "Antagonism as the negation of a given order is, quite simply, the limit of that order, and not the moment of a broader totality in relation to which the two poles of the antagonism would constitute differential&emdash;&emdash;i.e. objective&emdash;&emdash;partial instances" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 126).