Laclau’s melancholical position

I should recognize that the work of Laclau has not been present in the Spanish debate as much as it deserves, in spite of having been accessible some time ago. Nobody will deny that his central work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, presented as a radicalization of democracy. In this book, the dominant presence is not Lacan, neither Foucault, but Gramcsi. Actually, Lacan appears in a footnote —much more centered on Miller, by the way— and in a passage that points the relevance of the matter «points de capito». In this direction, linking language and the social world, he quotes Lacan, besides Heidegger and Derrida, in his 1987 introduction. There, Laclau spoke using similar terms to those of Foucault at the moment of his difficulty, and manifested his interest about the problem of the subject. Assuming criticism on every kind of essentialism about the subject, either ‘Man’ or ‘Class’, Laclau mediated on the crisis of Marxism from a review inspired by Gramsci that affirmed the importance of the concept of hegemony. This concept was separated from every necessary law of history, affirmed the contingency and the autonomy of the political, was centered on a nude historicity, and encouraged play on the field of concrete facticity. In short, hegemony could be articulated in the historical present by means of an adequate administration of social antagonisms, of force fields. The political subject stopped being essential to the occupation of the space of whatever could be built. In his seminal book, this could only be carried on via a radicalization of democracy, destined to articulate the struggles against subordination, arbitrary domination and illegitimate power.

In 1985, Laclau and Mouffe found themselves continuing the traditions of Enlightenment and modern democratic revolution. They spoke above all for the countries of the capitalist periphery in which the popular and collective identities can arise from the fringes of class. Nevertheless, this fight should recognize the end of the Jacobin and Leninist imaginary, all that political-conceptual world that arises from the Sattelzeit of R. Koselleck: the universal subjects, the History as singular, the civil society like homogeneous structure or the autonomous logic of the productive forces. The concept of hegemony was not presented like the political complement of a deep objective logic, the equivalent of what ideology was to the bourgeoisie a political supplement due to the forms of concurrence through productive objectivity, is imposed against too human resistances.

On the contrary, hegemony implied the existence of a proper logic for the social. For Laclau this logic harbored a center of contingency that must be deciphered. Hegemony did not aim at producing the sense of truth in a society, but to carry out or to decide it. If this notion was characterized as Marxist was "simply" because it happens that «[Marxism] constitutes our own past». Thus, it was a post-Marxist confession. Actually, Gramsci and Foucault were together in their defense of contingency, reversibility, the war of positions, and their interest on relations between powers only mediated for the logic of subjectivity.

But it was not only a matter of post-Marxism. Laclau’s analysis was rooted in certain melancholic confession that we can find in a central chapter of his book on Hegemony, titled «Equivalence and difference». As I will show you, paradoxes in this passage are related to Laclau’s avoidance of Foucault’s conclusions when defining neoliberalism. In this sense, his analysis failed to disengage from a starting point that is internal to the liberal regime model. I am talking about a liberal presupposition in Laclau insofar it does not support a theory of neoliberal government, but shares traces with the situation that institutes liberal government. Thus, Laclau talks about global capitalism as if it still being governed in the first steps of liberal government, without identifying neoliberalism as a specific form of government. To seriously consider neoliberalism in 1987 was impossible; mainly because Foucault had not published his papers yet. This fact determined a limited use of Foucault — as we will see— besides a yet more limited use of Lacan. In any case, Laclau worked with tools previous to The Birth of Biopolitics, and this explains why we find his analysis to be old fashioned.

The decisive fact in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was that in the advanced-capitalist countries there was a scissors effect: the more democracy they had, the less «unity around a popular pole». Global capitalism, he asserted in the final comments to Populist Reason, represents a qualitative new moment in the history of capitalism, because it becomes harder to know «against who we are fighting». The complex categorical displacement led by Laclau unveils its final mechanism: in democratic society the friend-enemy distinction, the duality, the border effects, «stop being founded on an evident and given separation, in a framework acquired at once and forever.» So the present comes characterized by a «democratic position of the subject», and Laclau was melancholic about a «popular position of the subject». The latter is constituted from dividing the political arena into friend/enemy. The former does not divide society into dualities. At the core, both possibilities come from the social structure itself and both are based in the liberal differentiation between civil society and political society. Perhaps the more important theoretical affirmation is the following one, an assertion, by the way, that addresses Foucault’s case: «if society is never transparent to itself because its inability to auto-constitute as an objective field, neither is the antagonism, due to its incapability for dissolving absolutely the objectivity of the social». Actually, Foucault knew this, as he knew it was the key of current government: neoliberalism does not permit either a sovereign, or a dualistic antagonism, but flows of competence that emanate from the civil society and that demand plural arbitration. Laclau accepts the liberal premise and his aspiration is to transform the competence, the antagonism dislocated and in continuous proliferation, in a visible and dualistic antagonism.

His theory is complex and, to my knowledge, it is constituted —in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy— by the following elements: the point of departure in every kind of politics is to be found in civil society. This civil society is unavoidably permeated by proliferating differences. Any of these differences can produce antagonisms if its right is denied. Nevertheless, the specificity of neoliberal government consists of the impossibility to legitimately deny any free demand. The ‘outside’ of civil society and its differences consist of a relation with political power as «intelligible and ordered frameworks of a society» —Laclau asserts, as Foucault could have asserted. These frameworks rationalize their own power, as we have seen in Foucault, inasmuch they recognize that these differences are expressed as liberties that need a guarantee. But Laclau has in mind different scenarios. When he quotes Disraeli and his program to make one city from the two cities, he is expressing a regulatory idea where the classical liberal government arises from. Its logic consists in avoiding the difference to the maximum, in producing homogeneity and equivalences, whose truth is expressed in the national market. Laclau describes this long range process —a liberal government strengthener, in Foucault terms— as the disruption of the liberal pole and the absorption of the free particular demands into positivities recognized as rational and susceptible of being satisfied. The melancholic moment consists in assuming both the existence of a popular pole and the civil society as the social starting point. So the rationalization of the liberal government implies identifying and isolating demands, to attend to them in their specificity, to remove them from a conception of the world —what Laclau calls «set of equivalences»— and to neutralize the possibility of the dualistic and native antagonism. This use of civil society as the origin and, at the same time, an assertion of the melancholic position of people can only generate a singular movement: the trial to find the way for civil society to become people again. That is, to see how liberalism’s premises fail in their pretension of homogeneity and produce the opposite, the people.

Actually, Laclau does not clearly show the way for liberal civil society to be people again. one thing is, at least, clear: this movement implies considering ductile the notion of civil society. Laclau’s refusal of sociology in this point is a good alibi. Perhaps here is the reason why he feels comfortable talking about societies of limited modernity, as the Hispanic ones, where the liberal form of civil society has not taken root. In any case, the civil society that allows liberal government to exist is the one that articulates a clearly defined system of differences that Weber has called spheres of social action and Luhman social systems. The actions of liberty are not free from the beginning, but ordered and differentiated inside of those systems. They are scientific, economic, religious, erotic, ethical, aesthetic, moral demands. Laclau admits: «The more unstable the social relations are, as much as less managed a definite system of differences is, the more the points of antagonism will proliferate». That is true. But perhaps Laclau does not measure the efficiency that the differentiation between the spheres of social action produces for a liberal government; this efficacy impedes exactly what he demands: a logic of the equivalences that allows unification of all the demands in a common denominator and, thus, the founding of a duality. Laclau does not measure the differences introduced by the neoliberal phase in the old liberal government and, consequently, the different ways of understanding these spheres of social action, not as a zone of demands, but as a zone of enterprises.

At its core, Laclau’s melancholy comes from the work of Jacques Ranciere based on his studies on 19th century France. undoubtedly, Laclau’s categories reach their historical consistence in that period. Perhaps, if Laclau had used Foucault’s notion of liberal government he would have been freed of his melancholy. If he had used Foucault’s ideas on neoliberalism, then he would have had to renounce his statement. In any case, his ideas on the reversibility of the historical process are perhaps wider than what is reasonable. Laclau’s perennial problem is how a civil society can see the arise of a new people as a political subject capable of deciding the friend/enemy distinction and of puting in motion a new logic of hegemony: like in 19th Century, but in the 21st.

The argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was rather rudimentary and circular. What hindered the absorption of free demands was their presentation outside the systems of social differentiation. To do that, and to impede that the political framework dealt with them separatedly, the demands should be presented as part of a logic of equivalences that would draw attention to all of them. Thus, the positivity or difference between demands would be annulled and they will presented in their organicity, something complete and alternative that cannot be analyzed or rationalized by the framework of power. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau sustains that this is the only way to create an antagonistic situation; but at the same time, circularly, he defends that only negativity in the moment of attending to the demand —to transform the unattended demand from a partial entity to a symptom of more radical — can create that equivalence in the basis of the friend/enemy antagonism. The only way to break this circle is saying that the antagonism is already in the society. This was the evidence of Disraeli and the point of departure for liberal government. Actually, Laclau said clearly in 2002 what he meant in 1987: we must suppose that the antagonism is already in the society because “oppressive forces” create it. That is to say: our present society is like that threshold which was the period that gave birth to liberal government. When we employ Foucault’s analytical materials we cannot sustain this radiograph of the relation between the social and the political. As Laclau says, which constitutes the antagonism is one set (series) of negated differences considered as equivalents, not the differences themselves. The oppressive forces that he supposes are no longer the forms adopted by the liberal technique of government, nor are they the neoliberal techniques. Let’s accept that the liberal government strategy consists of attending to the demand in a state of difference; that is to say, as secondary struggle. If we are right, it is impossible to see the “oppressive forces”.

Affirming them is a circle in Laclau: there is a «certain required excluding innerness». If this happens, then the differences between the unattended demands will be negated, there will be seen a symptomatic equivalence between those negations, a concentrated antagonism will arise and with it the friend-enemy distinction, and with it the fractured social space will produce a coincidence with the political space, a hegemony will arise, and with it the new political subject, a people. This is just what liberal government avoids by mediating the demands through the institution of different spheres of action —which makes concrete the nature of things and of human social action—, and thus offers them analyzed to a rational government. Opposed to this, if we suppose an «excluding innerness», we are already supposing a fractured civil society, the inefficient systems of differentiation, and the possible differentiation friend/enemy. If this difference arises it is because it was put in the basis. It is a circle. If our point of departure is an ontology of the social that keeps inside oppressive forces, or an excluding innerness, then antagonism is served, and politics considered as hegemony that tries to achieve its position by destroying the enemy is always possible. But this social ontology is not accredited in a proper analysis of liberal or neoliberal societies. The obstacles to liberty are inherent to civil society, of course, and they make unavoidable the conflict. But this is neither antagonism nor friend/enemy distinction. On the contrary, in neoliberalism the conflict produces the legal regulation of the market as business production of equivalences that necessarily integrate the demands —because they are anticipated— and thus the negative equivalence of their refusal is diluted. Neoliberalism, as we have seen, centers on the regulation according to a market based on free competition of enterprises and differences, of heterogeneities based on the growth of the sense of liberty, which is produced in the shape of offerings which, however, are received in the shape of demands. Laclau’s prediction —a concentration of the conflict in the antagonism— does not seem to happen.

Regarding Laclau’s statements, it is easy to understand his movement towards a populist logic. Fundamentally, his argument consists in affirming that just when global capitalism makes it harder to exist that concentrated antagonism, populist reason becomes more effective because it keeps in mind the nature of things, the human nature, and the true structure of liberty. In the phase of advanced capitalism, the production of effects of duality, of effects of border, of friend-enemy distinction constitutes the first of political problems. This was already an statement in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. What in the past seemed to be a natural process —political ‘dualization’—, now must be governed and produced in front of neoliberal regulation. Populist reason —unlike in Foucault— would be the form of government that regulates the supposed nature of political things, the production of friend/enemy. This implies that «the entities that will face antagonistically» must be constituted. undoubtly, this suggests the true problem that Foucault did not want to undertake: ‘the hegemonic link transforms the identity of the hegemonic subjects’ due to its influence on the psychism of the political agents. The hegemonic link implies a transformation of the notion of liberty, a hermeneutic of the subject that abandons the one that offers its evidences to neoliberal government, that claims for a new truth. However, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy these constitutive processes —both of the collective and individual subjects— didn’t become visible. Perhaps this explains why in the 2002 prologue Laclau reminds that ‘the visibility of the originary acts of institution —in their specific contingency— is the condition for all hegemonic configuration’. The political program was o make visible the originary institution of the ‘subjectivity of the historical agents’. In Hegemony the matter depended on the identification of the enemy, who operated as an excluding representer that denied the demands and established equivalences among them. The enemy negatively developed the conformation of people. The priority of negativity was the premise of the analysis. But if global capitalism and neoliberal government has to be taken seriously, then such a thing could not be supposed. Populist reason should tackle things ab integro.

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