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The Social
Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher. (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?) Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families". While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse". This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal. For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society. Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis. Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private. Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates. All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law. Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.
Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say. To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.
We can then properly understand, on the one hand, recent interest in solidarity and, on the other hand, the politics of recent unrest and protest. The moment of unity, that which ties all of the recent uprisings together, is solidarity; that is, a claim made in the name of the social against the social, a claim that asserts the priority of the social over the economic. Whether the particular issue is pensions (England), a fair contract (New York), precarity (France), immigration (United States), or race (New Orleans and the banlieues), the common political expression is that society is, ultimately, a public sphere of morality that asserts its priority over the economy.
When asked during the 1968 riots about what radicals should do, Alexendre Kojeve flippantly suggested that the students learn to 'read Greek'. He never finished that thought or explained himself; the reader was and is free to draw conclusions. Presently, the most radical thing one could do is become a sociologist and read Durkheim. That is, reclaim the centrality of solidarity and the social.
(Cross-posted to Theoria)
By Craig | April 4, 2006 in Democracy, Economics, Neoliberalism, Politics | Permalink
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I'm puzzled by this sentence: "According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse". This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal." I can't tell if this is really what Laclau is saying, or your explanation of what he is saying -- but it doesn't seem at all right. Except for a limited number of special cases, discourse does just fine with what Plato called doxa -- things that are half becoming and half being, unattached to a canonical identity. Discourse doesn't, after all, have to wait for the dictionary to come out, whereas the dictionary has to change with the discourse. Discourse gropes along just fine with multiple and shifting meanings and connotations accorded to various terms by various speakers. And this isn't just true of the language of the street, but of any kind of speech genre -- because there is a dispute in, say, biology between cladistics and the Linnean method of taxonomy doesn't mean taxonomy doesn't exist, or that a mouse is not a mus musculus . That we come up with context-sensitive uses of the word "society," so that certain substitutions for the word are blocked in certain instances, isn't a matter of false universality but a matter of an internal limit on how much we can claim for our research projects. "Society" becomes a term with a certain statistical probability of having such and such a relationship with other terms, then.
If there is any false hegemonizin' going on here, it is in this distorted image of discourse.
Posted by: roger | Apr 4, 2006 2:46:29 PM
great post--I'll mention the point I made at Theoria, namely, isn't it possible that recent events are not raised in behalf of society but in a more directly partisan way, elevating the part to the universal? if so, then one can assert that Laclau is wrong to emphasize claims to totality, pointing out that there are militant, partial solidarities.
Posted by: Jodi | Apr 4, 2006 2:48:09 PM
hi Craig,
I'm not sure I get it. When you say society is a moral domain able to make demands upon groups and individuals, do you mean that there is an entity called society, with a specific moral content and related demands? Or do you mean that society is the name for the posing of moral demands upon groups and individuals?
In the former, the moral content is given, such that another moral content would not be society at all. In the latter it sounds like any moral demand at all is society.
In the same vein, when you say that recent events are tied together by an assertion of social, do you mean that the different events do a similar thing - make a moral claim upon other individuals and groups - or that they demand the same specific things of other individuals and groups?
Best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 4, 2006 2:54:05 PM
Craig, I can't tell if you're simply misreading Laclau's concept of hegemony, or if there's a nuance to your argument that I'm missing. For Laclau, hegemony is the appearance of completion, a completion manifested through discourses of things like the "social," the "party," etc. There is no alternative to hegemony for Laclau, no outside the system, and no totality pregiven. Which in no way implies that one can't make demands on behalf of society and attempt a hegemonic articulation that can serve as the foundation for demand. Hence the idea of the empty signifier, the ideographic movement that provides a sense of fullness precisely because of its emptiness (cue Lacan). Which is, for Laclau, the only manner in which something like the social can form/be saved, precisely because of its impossibility in and of itself. In other words, the conditions of impossibility are the same as the conditions of possibility.
And I should point out that in the preface to the more recent edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe argue expressly against Blair and Clinton's third way politics. And that Laclau's emancipations is also a response to this, and much of it applies to Thatcher expressly. And that Mouffe's Return of the Political does the same thing, with slight variations.
But even if I thought you were right at some level on Laclau, I don't understand how a commonality, decontextualized from larger projects and work, signifies a strict homology between such disparate thinkers. It's like saying that for Zizek, "each big break in the history of the west" is "a kind of unplugging," which makes him identical to Patocka, or worse, that it makes him the same as George Bush, who viewed 9-11 as the unplugging of history that changed everything. Seems rather facile.
Which is why I am assuming I'm missing something.
But even in a situation in which I thought I agreed with your reading of Laclau
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Apr 4, 2006 8:44:15 PM
I'm happy for you to have a go at Laclau (Giddens, more so), Craig.
But while Durkheim is interesting, it's difficult to see how this might result in something other than communitarianism, what will all that organicism he's got going? His critique of capitalism is kind of nostalgic.
And what's this "public sphere of morality"?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Apr 4, 2006 10:01:49 PM
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