Ghost in the Wire

Starting from the basic unit of the demand, Laclau argues that invariably, for reasons that are essential, some demands will not get met by those who comprise the hegemonic order (remember, for Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is rather the name we give to the sedimentation and aggregation through which an incomplete articulation takes on the appearance of completion, which, given academic politics, is often synonymous with a bad thing). These demands antagonize the hegemonic social order, since they typically emerge from within that social order, and the fact that such demands aren't met implies that the social order fails in extending the values that supposedly comprise it. So when a demand is made that the government, for example, provide better social services in some specific area, services that are needed if we are to sustain evidence of American generosity, freedom, the American dream, etc. - whatever the signifier in question - that demand provides an individualized rupture within the hegemonic operation. At the same time, from different sectors, with different agents, and for different reasons, other demands will be made, and at some point a new hegemonic operation will emerge through which the individual demands will be recast as popular demands, as part of some higher order movement. This happens through a synecdochal operation through which a portion of the demands comes to stand in for the whole of the demands, thus altering invariably the constitution of both parties. The Lacanian notion that the name is the grounding of the thing is crucial here, for the naming of the popular demand as such, in that moment of synechdochal ascendency, is the moment in which democratic demands can properly be understood as populist, and not before. The book is ripe with examples of this operation, both hypothetical and empirical. Unions end up fighting racism, or any number of other issues unrelated to their own particular, individual demands on the system, but do so only after this synechdochal movement.

It's worth noting that Laclau's book, which provides an important space for rhetoric, does so with a very structural, tropological accounting of the subject. Participants noted some of the limitations of this incorporation, but I'll leave this issue to another time or post.

How does this synecdochal movement materialize? Through articulation of empty signifiers that provide a locus by which the synecdochal movement can displace and challenge the extant hegemonic order. These empty signifiers - like justice, peace, bread, land, rights, space, Lebensraum, etc. - provide a consitutive forc needed to mobilize as populist, because they provide a metonymic substitution, an absent fullness in Laclau's terminology. This is where Lacan enters the picture most obviously, with the empty signifier functioning along the lines of the objet A, the lost object of desire that only exists because of the elevation of the objet petit a, an elevation always tinged with a psychic, quasi-ontological nostalgia. Such an elevation is structurally necessary in politics because, as Laclau has noted elsewhere, society can never achieve a sense of fullness in the sense of completion - it must necessarily remain unsuccessful in completing itself. The Real is such that no symbolic order can ever appropriate it, and the symbolic realm of politics finds itself inherently incapable of completely filling the empty signifiers around which it structures itself. This is why demands invariably arise in any political arrangement, as symptoms of this necessary insufficiency. If the system could respond to the entirety of demands, thus negating the possibility of antagonism in situ, then there would be (in this bizarro world) no politics, because there would be a one-to-one correspondence between the public and the policy. This is, of course, a practical impossibility, though of course there are plenty of revolutionaries hopeful enough of their utopia to think we could come really, really close, if we just tried really, really hard.

So with one group of plebs coming to stand in for the whole of the populus and the articulation of an empty signifier, a new hegemonic operation is attempted, one that allows for a populist recoordination of the political terrain. There can be no revolution, no global strategy, because every supposedly universal move is in fact already inflected with the particular synechdochal movements that structure populist hegemony (and possibly any hegemonic order not structured by strictly restrictive totalitarian regimes, which would possibly exclude Soviet communism, though it would not exlude National Socialism, which relied on a certain force of citizen participation, at least ritual participation). And it makes no sense to believe that a certain master signifier trumps the signifying possibilities of the other empty signifers, as Zizek belives class does; that claim only makes sense if we take an uncomplicated view of the movement by which any sort of struggle, including class struggle, is articulated and aggregated from the realm of distinct individual demands (who all relate to class struggle differently even if we stipulate their intended desire to participate in it, a stipulation we could hardly support empirically) to the level of a populist claim.

I'll spend some time in a future post talking out what I find to be particularly insightful about this argument, and what I think are some fairly obvious problems with the model, but I'll give my readers - sorry - I mean I'll give my reader a bit of time to digest this before then. In the meantime, let me just say that Ernesto Laclau was, for a man of his stature and career, absolutely lovely and charitable as an interlocutor. He was funny without being caustic (except towards Zizek, who he beat on with some degree of regularity, in large part because folks kept trying to resolve impasses or respond to difficulties by citing Zizek as a way through certain tough problematics in political thought), and incredibly invitational and non-proprietary in his approach to thinking. By my impression, a very generous person and thinker. For what that's worth.