A liberal premise for populist reason

In Hegemony, Laclau-Mouffe appealed to Foucault and Lacan, but in a faulty way. Nevertheless, Lacan’s contribution interpreted by Zizek was decisive for Populist Reason. In spite of all, in this book, Laclau could neither avoid the logic of equivalence of demands, a kind of a market of unattended demands, a political counter-market that could call into question the market of liberal government. In principle, the argument was similar. As Laclau himself recognized in his polemic with Zizek his entire analysis started from the concept of demand. In Laclau’s words: ‘The minimal unit in our social analysis is the category of demand’. The liberal root is obvious here. The political subject in Laclau is previously a liberal subject and, to certain extent, it is seen as a consumer of certain goods. When Laclau has to justify why social actions are demands, he withdraws into the liberalist certainties on human nature: ‘The reason [...] is that the subject is always the subject of lack’. As in Lacan, this lack always encourages the need of a new desire, because it is based on the disproportion between the ‘fullness of the community’ and the particularism of a place for enunciation; in Lacan words, on the disproportion between enunciated desire and the unconscious as social language and as the desires of the others. Thus, Laclau, in what I consider an intelligent movement, states from Lacan the anthropological base of the liberal regime, and explains why there are demands continuously renewed, why they never end, why the human being is permeated by a political economy of desire that cannot be closed. In fact, as the modern Hobbesian subject, which gives this sense to desire is its dimension of infinite, of addressing to a totality that can never be reached. This infinite desire unveils something impossible to obtain, an irreparable loss, an emptiness that cannot be filled by any desire. In this direction, the broken desire appears as a ‘key category to explain the nature of the social contract’. Demand, destined to partially fill the abyss between lack and desire, obtains its meaning from the whole society, from the unconscious, from the language and, naturally, from the others; and here finds its link with human beings. What we have here is a version of the nature of things that is the point of departure for liberalism, now illuminated by the Freudian and Lacanian analysis. The thesis is that ‘individual psychology is simultaneously social psychology’, something that Weber already knew to be the key of the liberalism of the marginal utility as a key of the market. Demands come from identifications as a way of expressing emotional links to others whose desire is our desire now, they configure spaces of emotional mimesis that we use to fill the distances between the unconscious and society as a whole. Therefore, demands cannot be neither completely attended nor completely filled. Laclau has not been blocked where Foucault was.

But Laclau does not seem to assume the approach of Lacan —who shows the anthropological roots of capitalism— in an adequate form. From my point of view things are thus: the demand has as premise the linguistic activation of desire from the unconscious, the identification of a desire from the desire of others —offers. Given its finite character, it presents the impossibility to exhaust the unconscious or the whole of the social, to conquer the infinite object that would be able to fill the originary emptiness. Demand cannot build a stable psychical order, but only repetition, variation, discoursivity. The request for liberty has to do with this. Everything comes from the interpretation of the desire of others and from the linguistic strategies to express it. Everything that has been said on market and business has to do with the interpretation of the desires of others. When we interpret the desire of the others, when we activate our affection, we present products that resolve the demands of the others, that are founded at the same time in their interpretation of the desire of others. The interpretation of the desire from the social core is the originary. The proper affective offer of business work is previous to the demand. Here would be the point of departure for understanding the game of neoliberalism, which implies a transformation of the work at the moment it discovers its own affective character and understands economic success as an enterprise that produces objects able to resolve instincts. That is the reason why work has resolved the notion of merchandise: it has passed from being the inert object thought by Marx to be the material support of offering that attends to instincts. Here, power regulates the environment to make all the heterogeneities appear, all the hermeneutical statements of the subject, and supplies the dynamism of the symbolical with affective elements, with new offers to satisfy instincts able to generate demand, to expand through the market.

Laclau starts with liberalism speaking in terms of demand, the nature of things, the emotional-social link; but he does not want to assume the game between civil society and neoliberal power. Actually, he does not want to think neoliberalism in order to avoid what he is facing up to. He supposes liberalism because otherwise his analysis would not have a starting point. But he does not think about the new and the specific in neoliberalism because it is easier to build a populist logic on the old liberal government in its first phases —with its logic of demands— than on the neoliberal one and its logic of offers. For him, demand does not respond to the market-business offering, but to power. Actually, demand stems from request. Power as liberal government could articulate, identify, analyze and grant this request; as neoliberal government I would dare to say, does not receive demands, but regulates the competition that keeps the dynamism in the society, in the enterprise, in the capitalization of all, and in the market offers. Laclau needs to think differently. ‘Order’, he says, ‘cannot absorb completely demand, it is unable to constitute itself as a coherent whole’. But we already know too well that there is no demand for what has not been previously offered, since our desire is the desire of other. Naturally, we do not tackle a problem on the order of power, but on all kind of order, on all subjectivities. Neoliberal power knows it and refers productivity as totality in fieri, where demand unfolds after offer. This fact guarantees the continuity of liberty, the repetition and feeding of the homo oeconomicus as a premise of neoliberal government. For Laclau, the originary unattended demands by the liberal power produce something different. Then, requests become claims. For this to happen the «instance to what exigences are addressed» must be identified. «One has to discursively construct the enemy». The doubts of the circle in Hegemony and Social Estrategy appear again. To know the enemy would be the same than identifying the space for the people, the space for the friend. Both are equivalent.

If Populist reason signifies something related to Hegemony, then Laclau prepares to show the process through which people arises without an already given enemy. He is not assuming that oppressive forces —the enemy— constitute it. He pays attention to its conformation from the popular friend’s side. This is a decisive step. It allows him to explain the emergence of antagonism, even if power would have wanted to be liberal. Already in Hegemony, the differences between demands could be ordered in a logic of equivalence by means of certain «discursive forms». In assuming the social and linguistic dimension of the subject, Laclau did not see a different possibility than constructing a hegemony from the construction of a discursive space. In Hegemony, Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge was useful to support this argument. If discourse is regular in the spread of enunciations, this regularity comes neither from a conceptual constancy, nor from an identity in the object, but from configurative rules that offer to that spread its unifying principle. These rules were not defined. In Foucault they were practical instances. But, for Laclau, it was about a discursive spread that embodied a configuration of equivalence among the differential discursive positions understood as demands. certainly, the process of discursive spread implied something similar to Deleuzian logic on difference and repetition, a typical causa sui logic that would not allow the emergence of a totality as equivalence. This logic —as that of capitalism in its neoliberal stage— is interested in productivity, not in equivalence. Laclau’s concern, on the contrary, is to understand how an ‘exteriority to the spread is established, just to calculate the equivalence between enunciates-demands. His problem is classic: How can a form be produced from dispersion? The question is unavoidable, as Carl Schmitt knew when he established that the friend-enemy distinction resides in the production of Gestalt. Actually, Laclau’s argument is just a review of the technification of the technification in the construction of the enemy undertaken by Schmitt.

Laclau spoke of certain logics interested not in the dispersion, but in equality, form, the effect of totality, limits, and identity. In fact, his most interesting approach can be found in the fourth chapter of Populist Reason, titled «People and the discursive production of emptiness». There he identified this logics, interested in the production of equivalences, as «rhetorical discourses». He set the ontological constitution of the social that permits to understand the political in the rhetorical game that creates demands. There he gave this structuralist thesis: «totality is the condition of signification as such». This thesis is as strong as the following: «totality constitutes an object that is both impossible and necessary». It is like the originary lack. The concept, the desire, the demand, cannot cross the abyss that separates it from the unconscious as such, even though it is desire only if is connected with it. As we have seen, liberty funds the human constitution as long as it lives of the negativeness in that relation. Liberty requires, therefore, to persist in desire, because it is only there that remains the possibility of connecting with the totality of the unconscious, in spite of loosing it always. The logic of liberty remains in that disequilibrium. Nevertheless, Laclau has a different point of view which he embraces without considering to what extent neoliberalism meets better the necessities of his own Lacanian premises.

Laclau’s procedure can be resumed as follows: since there is an originary lack in human beings’ nature —a constitutive emptiness—, it is necessary to explore the possibilities this gap offers to politics. undoubtedly, liberalism and neoliberalism are anchored in this gap, trying to keep discursive equivalence fluid by means of a continuous production of offers that punctually interprets desire, even consciously renouncing to totality. In front of this circulation of significants devoted to their destiny —i. e., feeding the imaginary with the consumer’s subjects—, Laclau asks himself what would happen if the same originary lack that created the emptiness would became an object of desire itself. That is what he means when he asserts that the «category of totality» is indispensable. It is, of course, as the liberal regime —that, as a substitute of totality, ‘dynamizes’ the interpretations of desire in the truth of the market— knows; but Laclau demands the transformation of the lost totality into an object of desire in itself. If we introduce this category, the attended demands would be worthless. In front of the recovery of the originary lack, all demand would become equivalent, but now their value would be similar to nothing. In turn, every unattended demand would become a scheme, a verification of what we really desire, the only thing, the Real. The regime for the truth of the subject would not change. Laclau could say, therefore, that «what we have as a last resort is a failed totality, a place of unattainable plenitude».

Now, when this failed totality becomes a foreground of desire, there is an alternative possibility for Laclau. He asserts that it is possible that a particular reality, a demand, asumes the representation of that unattainable plenitude. We are now in front of the Hobbessian problem on how invisible reality can render visible. For Hobbes, this happens by transferring sovereignity, will, and the action of totality into a visible reality. Actually, this is related to the form —thinking only on individuals— in which the unity of the people becomes visible. This can be achieved by the investiture of a monarch. The procedure transforms one partial being in sovereign, and he is converted in turn in an unity that makes visible something that otherwise would be invisible: the people. For Laclau, this investiture is similar in its structure to the hegemonic formation: something particular represents the totality, something visible makes present the invisible, and something partial means universality. The emptiness behind particular desires is fulfilled with one. For this to happen, Laclau has affirmed the necessity of a radical investiture of the significant. undoubtedly, is an action analogous to a contract, a decision, an extreme nominalist action, and its only truth is the originary lack. Since the originary lack does not have a proper name, it can only achieve one by investiture, by that figurative name. This rhetorical operation is nothing but a catachresis: there is no proper name, it is only feigned for the totality. Hobbes would say that the sovereign is a Person, an agent. But it cannot be otherwise. Leviathan is a catachresis. The same in Laclau: «the political construction of the people is for this reason essentially catachrestic».

We have here evidently reintroduced the link between totality, plenitude, the sovereign representative, and the promise of total affectivity; everything that was represented by the Weberian notion of charisma, but with the following difference: now it is illuminated in its formative mechanism, as a radical investiture in the Freudian sense. If this instance becomes operative, then it is always possible to reject ‘attendible’ demands and to establish an equivalent for the unattended. All on condition that the originary lack —compared to which the rest is insignificant— becomes present by a symbolic representative. It contains the impossible totality that negatively unifies all the unattended demands and rejects all the attended, since they are an obstacle to adhere to the totality anticipated by the symbol, promised in it. The one who does not join to this symbolic totality is excluded inside the common space which it creates. The one who has configured a sublimated value refuses the equivalent values in the market, finds any attention to demands to be insignificant and only wants to possess the visible reality that has been invested with the capacity for representing the only real thing: totality. This would be the name for people.

This radical investiture cannot be conceptually represented. It escapes from every concept and takes us back to the mystical belonging, that Laclau examined in another book. All affection, deceived into merchantable equivalences —offers and demands— is now satisfied. The one who offers simple objects and desires, when what is wanted is the Real and the Total thing, is an enemy. «Who is responsible for this situation cannot be a legitimate part of the community; the gap between them cannot be crossed». Therefore we have the ‘Schmitt effect’ just isolated from every truth, from every notion of endangered life-form, from every existential dimension: created only from the rhetorical construction that encourages sublimation. It has been possible thus for rhetoric to build a social division. Schmitt never was a nominalist: the enemy is one other with and existence, a real one. Rhetoric can intensify, at the very most, strangeness, but never creates it. Laclau seems to say that in the age of neoliberalism rhetoric creates ex nihilo. In the meantime, neoliberalism continues to operate because its eccentric —heterogeneous, offer-producer, involved in the work of cultural industry— rhetoric is more accurate than the technified rhetoric which aspires to produce the crystallizing of hegemony.

What has been forged here is explicitly related to the «process of condensation of dreams». Of course, the same dreamed character can maintain an affective link with «the function of leadership». This is coherent since, in Kantian terms, if the thing in itself has no concept, then it can have any name. Laclau’s extreme nominalism, sustained on both Kripke and the Zizek of The Sublime Object of Ideology, eliminates any question about the truth of the radical investiture. The originary baptism imposes a name, defines an identity supported only by the significant. It is indifferent wether there are rejected demands arisen to equivalent consequences of an originary lack, or the imposition of the sense of an originary lack that rejects any of the demands attended by the system as equivalents. We will obtain the same from a melancholic fundamentalism, than from an articulated system of demands. The radical investiture is nominalist, and it can be called Allah, Yahweh, originary ethnicity or people. The central question cannot be found in the solvable demands, but in who solves them.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-10