Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today

The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People

Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Giorgos Katsambekis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317071945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 'Arab spring', the Spanish indignados, the Greek aganaktismenoi and the Occupy Wall Street movement all share a number of distinctive traits; they made extensive use of social networking and were committed to the direct democratic participation of all as they co-ordinated and conducted their actions. Leaderless and self-organized, they were socially and ideologically heterogeneous, dismissing fixed agendas or ideologies. Still, the assembled multitudes that animated these mobilizations often claimed to speak in the name of 'the people', and they aspired to empowered forms of egalitarian self-government in common. Similar features have marked collective resistances from the Zapatistas and the Seattle protests onwards, giving rise to theoretical and practical debates over the importance of these ideological and political forms. By engaging with the controversy between the autonomous, biopolitical 'multitude' of Hardt and Negri and the arguments in favour of the hegemony of 'the people' advanced by J. Rancière, E. Laclau, C. Mouffe and S. Zizek the central aim of this book is to discuss these instances of collective mobilization, to probe the innovative practices and ideas they have developed and to debate their potential to reinvigorate democracy whilst seeking something better than 'disaster capitalism'.

Chapter 1
Post-hegemony: Politics Outside the Usual Post-Marxist Paradigm¹

Benjamin Arditi

The Post-Marxist Outline of Hegemony

Hegemony functions as the codeword for the mechanics of political activity within a paradoxical representation of totality that shows the inadequacy of all representation. Gramsci described it as the practice that shapes a national-popular collective will in its efforts to become state through wars of position. His theory of hegemony and the concomitant thesis of ‘becoming state’ widened the horizon of socialist politics by abandoning the Leninist putschist strategy of revolution as a mythical seizure of power. Gramsci nonetheless retains Lenin’s aspiration to reinstitute the whole through revolutionary action, incremental or otherwise, so like Lenin, his thinking about counter-hegemonic projects bears the imprint of a strong notion of totality. By the 1970s many of those who were sympathetic towards Gramsci and took their inspiration from his heritage, particularly theorists of the now defunct Italian Communist Party or close to its position – like Biagio de Giovanni, Massimo Cacciari and Giacomo Marramao – found this unsatisfactory and began to question it together with what they saw as remnants of class-reductionism in his thought. They became neo- and post-Gramscians, while others, who also made the move from critical Marxism to a critique of Marxism, started to refer to themselves simply as post-Marxists.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy fired the opening salvos of post-Marxism in English-speaking academic circles (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; for a discussion see Bowman 2007: 20–25). Their book remains a tour de force for anyone interested in a discourse-theoretical revival of the concept of hegemony; it reconstructs the political and intellectual itinerary of European Marxism, traces the genealogy of the concept of hegemony within that tradition and proposes a certain view of radical democracy as an image of thought for progressive politics. Their project in many ways continues the Althusserian critique while avoiding the metaphysics of the ‘last instance’: the target of Laclau and Mouffe (hereafter L&M) is the Hegelian expressive totality as well as essentialism, either under the guise of economism or of the transcendental subject as seen in class-reductionism. Their goal is to disengage the socialist project from its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century incarnations. They identify how, from Luxemburg to Trotsky, and from Lenin to Gramsci, the politics nurtured by historical materialism invariably resolved the play between the logic of contingency and the logic of necessity in favour of the latter. This enclosed the doctrine within the bounds of onto-theology and crippled the practical purchase of socialist politics.

The break with essentialism seeks to free the hegemonic form of politics, Gramsci’s key contribution to progressive political thought, from the constraints of laws of history and their designated subject of emancipatory politics, the working class. Their goal here is to update socialist politics for the complexities of a democratic and pluralist setting. In emphasizing political practice instead of the laws of history, L&M deliver us a post-Gramscian hegemony governed by contingency. Instead of invoking a general contradiction as a principle of explanation for oppression, rebellion and change, they speak of the articulation of a series of discrete struggles in chains of equivalence that suspend the particularity of struggles or, more precisely, that generate relations of equivalence that make each struggle signify its own particularity as well as a supplementary meaning. This supplement is critical, as it allows formally distinct struggles and demands to coalesce into a novel subjectivity to challenge a given constellation of power. Equivalence also requires the production of frontier effects or antagonisms – a moment of negativity – to separate an inside from an outside and therefore to demarcate the wide array of forces that will coalesce in a friendly collective ‘us’ confronting named adversaries. These chains and antagonisms can be macro or micro, state-oriented or unfold in the field of civil society.

The Ambivalence about the Ontic or Ontological Status of Hegemony

L&M’s reformulation of hegemony around the logic of contingency constitutes an important theoretical contribution. While one cannot understate the intellectual impact of their work among left-leaning academics, there is a lingering impression that their reflection on hegemony does not quite manage to cast off the spell of necessity they criticized so cogently in their book. How does this happen and why would it matter? This is what we have to assess. I want to address these questions from two angles.

The first one refers to the slippage between ontology and the ontic. Necessity appears in this post-Gramscian depiction of hegemony through an unspoken assumption about the relation between hegemony and politics: the hegemonic form of politics is hegemonic and necessary. It is hegemonic because the production of equivalence and frontier effects constitutes the analogical model for democratic politics, and necessary because more than a form of politics, it is the paradigmatic form of politics.² While the former is a historical and descriptive statement open to contestation (and I will present some reservations about this claim later), the implicit claim concerning the necessity of hegemony is more problematic in that it shields hegemony from the test of its own contingency. This is because of L&M’s ambivalence with regard to the status of this politics. They conceive hegemony as a typically modern phenomenon and an offspring of the democratic revolution, but also as the universal form of politics. To put it in Heideggerese, their take on hegemony is located less in the difference between the ontic and the ontological than in the oscillation between one and the other.

They first present us with an incremental account of the emergence of hegemony. L&M say that hegemony ‘is, quite simply, a political type of relation, a form, if one wishes, of politics’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139), in which case they locate it strictly at the level of the ontic: hegemony is a form of politics amongst other possible forms. What is the historical scope of this form? The authors give us the answer:

The hegemonic form of politics only expands as the open, non-sutured dimension of the social increases. In a medieval peasant community the area open to differential articulation is minimal and, thus, there are no hegemonic forms of articulation […] This is why the hegemonic form of politics only becomes dominant at the beginning of modern times, when the reproduction of the different social areas takes place in permanently changing conditions which constantly require the construction of new systems of differences. (1985: 138)

While it is clear that for them hegemony cannot apply to pre-modern situations, a specific timeline is not the decisive criterion as there are a number of contemporary experiences of religious, racial, ethnic or even more conventionally political codes like totalitarianism or dictatorship that equally forestall hegemonic politics. These experiences, some of them modern while others are revivals of pre-modern codes, aim to close off the possibility of questioning the legitimacy of authority or of recasting the prevailing way of thinking the relation between command and obedience. To go back to the passage quoted above, what really matters for L&M is that hegemony does not work in a scenario where ‘the area open for differential articulation is minimal’. They do not specify the threshold of differential articulation required for the enactment of the hegemonic form of politics, so we have no way of determining how minimal the requisite condition of this minimal area is. All they say is that there is a need of a space for articulation for hegemony to come forth.

However, we do know – because we are told so – that the dominance of hegemonic articulations begins with modernity and gets a boost from the democratic revolution. To use a language borrowed from Claude Lefort, modernity is relevant for L&M because it conceives order as a politically instituted artifice, and democracy expands the scope of hegemony by conceiving the institution of order as a continual process. L&M also suggest that the best is still to come: their own project of radical democracy seeks to provide the conditions for the blossoming of hegemony. Here their argument draws from Tocqueville, particularly a reference he makes to the democratic revolution in the introduction to Democracy in America. Hegemony, L&M claim, ‘can come to constitute a fundamental tool for political analysis on the left’ under conditions that ‘arise originally in the field of what we have termed the “democratic revolution”, but they are maximised in all their deconstructive effects in the project for a radical democracy’ (1985: 193). This might seem self-serving but it is not illegitimate. The democratic revolution functions as a condition of possibility for hegemony and L&M’s political project of radical democracy is the condition for a true realization of hegemony’s potential. Radical democracy would simply accentuate what the authors already see as a tendency.

Yet given this progression from a limited scope for differential articulation to a wider field of phenomena open to differential articulation, or from less hegemony to more hegemony, it is reasonable to ask whether an incremental account such as this might not imply a veiled telos of intensity. I mention it because the authors have already told us that the dominance of this historical form of politics has expanded continually throughout modernity. If this expansion is then turbocharged by radical democracy, then hegemony and politics will begin to converge asymptotically, at least as long as we remain within a democratic setting. I am not saying – or at least I am not saying yet but I will do so shortly – that for L&M politics and hegemony become indistinguishable but rather that the gap between them begins to close as we move towards radical democracy. This reduction of the distance between one and the other hinders the possibility of an outside of hegemony (more on this below).

Their second account of the status of hegemony moves away from the ontic level in which they anchored the incremental approach to hegemony. It has to do with the explanatory force of hegemony understood as the proper representation of the reality of politics. A parallel with Lefort is instructive here. Lefort conceived democracy as the truly historical society because it acknowledges the contingency of its own foundations. It erects an institutional stage where the conflicts about the norms, nature and form of the community are played out in front of all, granting visibility to the political institution of order or objectivity as a continuous, never-ending process (Lefort 1988). L&M rework this argument. Instead of speaking of democracy as the historical form of society, they suggest that hegemony is the historical form of politics par excellence because it makes us aware of the precarious and contingent status of all objectivity and power arrangements. Like in a correspondence theory of truth, hegemony provides us with a better fit with actual politics, or at least with modern politics and particularly its democratic variant, in which case the hegemonic form cannot be challenged, or can be challenged only by failing to recognize this fact.³

In the closing paragraph of their book they present this view most forcefully by saying that the field of the political is the field of a game called hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 193). One must then conclude that hegemony, a form of politics, morphs into politics proper: hegemony becomes the universal form of the political or at least of democratic politics.⁴ This universalism is not a problem for someone like Carl Schmitt, who was interested in the basic traits of the political – which he famously describes as an invariable code built around friend-enemy oppositions – and not in this or that particular form of politics. L&M, however, claim to be discussing a form of politics instead of politics or even the political as such, but end up conflating one with the other. Hegemonic articulations may be contingent, but the hegemonic form ends up being necessary. The authors have thus moved the concept and the practice from the ontic to the ontological level: hegemony has to do with the being of politics.

Laclau goes further in his solo work by affirming that hegemony is constitutive of the being of things. The hegemonic logic ‘is the very logic of the construction of the social’, and ‘hegemony is, in the final instance, an inherent dimension to all social practice’ (Laclau 1990: 208, 212). Here hegemony ceases to be a type of relation or a form of politics and becomes instead the ontological kernel or basic predicate of all social being. To say it quickly and provocatively, which means saying it at the risk of being somewhat unfair with Laclau by not addressing the many subtleties of his argument, the hegemonic form of politics is a fact and cannot be falsified.

In his more recent work the equivalence is no longer between hegemony and politics but between populism and politics. We should not ask, Laclau says, if a movement is populist or not but ‘to what extent is a movement populist’. He adds that this is the same as to ask ‘to what extent does the logic of equivalence dominate its discourse?’ Laclau also transfers the ontological status of hegemony to populism: he doesn’t leave much to the imagination when he asserts ‘“populism” is an ontological and not an ontic category’ (Laclau 2005a: 45, 44). In On Populist Reason he reiterates these claims by saying that ‘there is no political intervention which is not populistic to some extent’, in which case populism is a defining trait of all politics, and then adds that populist reason is the very logic of construction of the people and thus ‘amounts … to political reason tout court’ (Laclau 2005b: 154, 225). What we have here is an inflation of the field of ontology with a simultaneous reduction of complexity as hegemony, populism and politics turn out to be equivalent ontological categories.⁵

Hegemony Has No Outside: A Mode of Articulation Becomes Articulation as Such

The second way of looking at the assumption of necessity refers to the status of the notion and the practice of articulation in the work of L&M. The success of any hegemonic project hinges on how effectively it can construct a chain of equivalence between different demands, subject positions and forces that already exist or remain to be created – or more accurately, whose being will be modified through their articulation into a particular chain of equivalence. This, of course, is a tautological statement since the hegemonic form of politics revolves around the production of such chains. If politics consists of the production of equivalences and frontier effects around antagonism, then the absence of either would entail an absence of politics. L&M close off the conceptual space for non-hegemonic politics. The hegemonic form of politics has no beyond and therefore no outside. The absence of a beyond troubles the theory by depriving hegemony of an outside to define it, or alternatively, in L&M’s account hegemony knows of no outside except for the one afforded by competing hegemonic projects. This reiterates the circularity of the argument: in the absence of a ‘true’ outside that would set limits to this form, all politics become variants of the hegemonic form.

Proponents of the theory of hegemony could retort to this by saying that politics is about articulation or, if one prefers, about linking, as Lyotard calls it. In The Differend, Lyotard accepts the incommensurability of regimes of phrases or genres of discourse by saying that one cannot apply the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges to those of the judged genre without the risk of causing a wrong and creating a victim (Lyotard 1988: xi, 5, 8–11). This does not entail a celebration of discursive monads or self-referential regimes of phrases to avoid such a risk: for Lyotard the linkage between phrases of heterogeneous regimes is the unavoidable problem of politics. In fact, we can take his assertion that ‘to link is necessary; how to link is contingent’ as the basis for a minimal definition of politics: one could describe politics as a practice that deals with the contingency of links between incommensurables (Lyotard 1988: xiii, 29). The necessity of linking – which functions as an independent variable in Lyotard’s discourse – is not in question as it has the status of an axiom. The part about how to link is more interesting for us. This is because much of what is at stake in the discussion about the hegemonic form of politics revolves around the way one reads the phrase.

One way of interpreting Lyotard’s phrase is by focusing on the contingency of the link and therefore using it as an explicit rebuttal of claims about the necessity. The latter is a suspect notion because it presupposes that things have a meaning and one has to discover rather than construe it. The mechanical determinism of the Second International, for example, is based on a theory that claims to have uncovered the laws of history: its superior understanding of society and its transformations allows historical materialists to know where history is taking us.

This is precisely what L&M do. The strength of their theory of hegemony is the critique of necessary links and the affirmation of the contingency of every articulation. Contingency is another way of speaking of the singularity of the event, of that which escapes calculation while living off it: things are not random but they could have turned out differently if other decisions had been made in a given juncture. Contingency is a vindication of political inventiveness in the face of a seemingly inescapable iron cage of structural determinations. L&M reconstruct the Marxist tradition and build their case for hegemony around the political advantages of this possibility. As mentioned, they identify a tension between the logic of necessity and the logic of contingency, between the adherence to the determinist laws of motion of capitalism postulated by historical materialism and the vindication of political reasoning as a practice of articulation that cannot foresee or guarantee a given outcome. Invariably, necessity prevails in this tradition, especially from the Second International onward, and makes things go badly for Marxism in the West. L&M want to counteract the decline of socialist politics, so they are happy to go along with the label of post-Marxism as a means to break with essentialism. To do so they invoke hegemony – a political form that embraces contingency and accepts the incompleteness of any totality – as a practice of articulation that transforms the identity of that which it articulates. This is why they see hegemony as a mode of institution of objectivity: objectivity or the being of things is an effect of a hegemonic articulation and all institution is by nature precarious and incomplete. This avoids necessity, opens itself to the possibility of the event, and prevents the closure of politic...