On Populist Reason (as promised) (Ghost in the Wire)

I want to continue my review and discussion of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason, a book that I think makes some stunningly insightful arguments, even if I also think that the book suffers from some important limitations.

As I mentioned previously, Laclau develops an extremely convincing model of how it is that populist demands interact and enact hegemonic relations through the use of empty signifiers. Crucial to this relationship is the idea that the population (and their demands) are structured by an irreducible heterogeneity, which can only be bridged by concrete efforts to articulate shared identities. These efforts are possible because, despite the heterogeneity at work, everyone shares their differences as an equivalence, that is to say, that because everyone is different, and because each demand is different from every other demand, the only means by which identity and/or a demand can be articulated before or against another identity or demand is through a discourse that presupposes this difference. In other words, this irreducible difference is in fact both the bane and the possibility of democratic politics, for without its theoretical root, there could be nothing like an antagonism, and thus no means by which to demarcate political struggles.

Three immensely valuable conclusions follow.

Populism is understood as the critical fulcrum upon which our understanding of contemporary politics is based. Rather than an aberration or some demagogic monstrosity (a view often taken in works on populism), populism is in fact the basic structure of all democratic politics. This matters because it helps us to understand how to work for particular agendas without requiring the pretense of a revolution; it means that activism carries within it real possibilities not tied to some larger temporal horizon. Indeed, it would dispense with that horizon for anything other than purely strategic motives (for example, using that horizon as an empty signifier, or a modality of some signifier).
It means that rhetoric matters. As the process by which certain empty signifiers achieve dominance over others, rhetoric holds a privileged place within any thinking of politics, be it theoretical or analytically concrete. This is important, because there are a lot of models of political thought of late (and I'm thinking most explicitly of some psychoanalytical models like Stavrakakis') in which politics is explained entirely from a structural basis (that structure can be psychical, material (in some sense of capital), or what have you, and Laclau offers a war of rescuing the particular from the sublimating threat of the universal.
It offers a way of thinking politics and rhetoric in general, and populism in particular, without recoursing to dialectics and without offering any shifty recentering of the subject. This has obvious theoretical benefits, but I won't go into them here.

Now, as for limitations, there are two relatively pronounced one that merit consideration. Mind you, these are not faults with the argument, but rather limits to the argument itself. These limits may confound the argument, but that is by no means certain.

There is no understanding of any media device other than those that might be included under the very broad and generic monikor of "discourse." Laclau's tropological arrangement, and his belief in the all-governing power of the empty-signifier may be able to account for the role that, say, images play in shaping the public imaginary, but I think there are reasons to doubt it. Different technical apparatuses (media) produce different temporal and mimetic relations, and while images are likely subsumed within a larger discourse at some point, I think it likely that some rhetorical affect that remains endemic to the image is not properly conveyed in this theoretical arrangement. This is a project that I may take up at some point, maybe as a joint project, but for now, I just want to note the limitation and move on. I should note that, in questions, Laclau was fairly open about this limitation, noting that (I'm paraphrasing) with his background, it's just unrealistic to think that he would have a theory of media and of images. He suspects it works within this framework, but he's not sure, and he's not claiming to be.
The more obvious and politically problematic limitation is that the ontological structure of populism sketched by Laclau doesn't carry with it any necessary political direction, and as such describes both the structure of a nascent progressive or socialist movement just as it identifies the anatomy of an incipient fascist state. This is a good thing, theoretically, in that it offers another (though implicit) dispelling of any belief that liberal or radical democracy is fundamentally at odds with fascism rather than its necessary precondition, but it's a bad thing, practically, in that it offers little guidance to those interested in pursuing and articulating new hegemonic relations that accord well to progressive (dare I say "populist") ends. Laclau clearly entertains this possibility at an abstract level, but in terms of his examples (which are numerous, and to his credit), he suffers from a selection bias that implies that populist movements always trend toward what might be understood as progressive and/or socialist, when obviously this is not the case. I suspect that there are ways to expand Laclau's argument, and that some empty signifiers - particular topoi - are more dangerous than others in articulating a populist movement in ways that support the state in various ways, but that's the subject of a much larger project, or at a minimum, a very different post.

There is one fairly glaring fault with the book, one that deals with the basic unit of analysis, but it's a logical failure, not a practical one, and therefore affects the analysis little if at all, so I won't spend much time with it here, and will instead include it when I rewrite this in book review form.

Ghost in the Wire

On Populist Reason (as promised)

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