Reorganisisng identity through the Political.

What entails Re-thinking the political, especially since the political is the sphere of identity formation, contestation and hegemonic practices that follow…

Politics is constitutive, it organizes human coexistence, where as the political has the inevitable dimension of antagonism. Mouffe demonstrates that despite the seemingly constitutive character of politics, it is through the discourse of the Political, with its operations “of power, conflict and antagonism”, where identity gets formulated based on antagonistic “we/ they oppositions”. Hegemony gets contested as polarities enter such identity formative exercises. Hegemony is generated through certain articulatory practices in the sphere of the social, fixing on certain dominant sets of meanings/ practices. The tools of Post structuralist discourse analysis helps recognize the agonistic (internally combative) character within dominant antagonisms.
Transforming antagonism into agonism means that the opposing parties begin to realize that there is no pure antagonism, with absolute conflicting ends (which will guarantee their respective identities), but that the opposing/antagonistic parties are but elements of opposition within the larger structure of the social. For example (and simplistically speaking), the Hindu and Muslim are conflicting identities, but are only so opposition to each other, but are will become singular (though conflicting, and retaining their irreducible plurality) combative species within the larger category of the nation as whole and must operate as a unity as against, another antagonistic element such as America.
Politics is the pragmatic whereas the Political is the field of metaphysical enquiries of ‘the self’. One of the imperatives of the Political, as examined through the framework of Post structuralism is the process of identity formation. In contrast to earlier forms of utopianism, Post structuralism denies any overarching criteria of progress; therefore the politics of identity formation will not be treated in the vocabulary of progress, an onward movement. Drawing from Post structuralist conceptions of the Political, one could say that it arbitrates a sense of ‘becoming political’ by thrusting a certain radicalism and critical structure onto the intuitive notions of the present as well as one’s presence in society. Going by these expansions, the Political is, one, an acute awareness of the present (even as this utopic exercise is often contested on the grounds of weather such an awareness is possible at all, given the fantasmagorial nature of political dissemination) and two, a re-enquiry of the objects and systems in the material/ relational world that seem static and walled. The way in which Marx conceptualizes Labour, is evidential of such an enquiry. Marx did not, as classical economic studies profess, ‘introduce’ the concept of Labour as an extension to the value theory of commodities (as if it were a progression of sorts). But Marxian dialectics culled out form within the conceptual framework of commodity, the immanent presence of Labour. This is a moment of political logic, where an underscored dimension of what is already, always naturalized within the social is contested through an examination into its immanent antagonistic dimension.

The discourse on market or that of exchange is the area of interest of Marx's analysis and critique. He re-examines existing categories like commodity, use value, exchange value through a conceptual framework which is flexible and transformable in course of enquiry.( a benchmark of discourse theory to be formulated a century after) It is not that he first develops a theoretical framework and then apply it to the existing social practice which is like' learning to swim before getting into water'.

Though in the previous post i pointed out that there is a discourse theory approach in the Marxian analysis and and in a way prefigures it, there is one fundamental difference which i want to point out. Marx sets out with his analysis from a purely economic standpoint, and in course of the investigation invokes the social through introduction of categories like class, working class etc. and relates them in purely economic terms. He knits the social and the economic in his analysis but maintains other domains like the political and cultural as separate reified categories which are consequences of the first two. This ontological separation between different types of social practices (which enables multiple subject positions with which a social agent can identify) whether understood as ideological, political, cultural etc. is well maintained in his analysis. The base- superstructure model clearly demonstrates this demarkation. Such a treatment involving separation of various social domains is against the basic axioms of discourse analysis which affirms the discursive character of all social practices and objects in the active process of interaction and interplay of changing relations and rejects a mode of analysis which treats them as separate domains of human activity.

Economics is not the limit

In comparing Marx's Capital to Laclau and Mouffe, we shouldn't get carried away by the fact that Marx's perspective seems to hang everything on economic relations. It's important to remember that not only is that because of the historical context in which Capital is written, but that is also Marx's avowed project in Capital. He is analysing economic relations alone, because that is what he is setting out to do. Whether this economic determinism is true of all of Marx, as most scholars seem to agree it is, is irrelevant to understanding the main point of difference between Marx's Capital and Post-Marxist IDA.

IDA can be seen as a project that can explain the dynamics of social change. The structuration of fields is understood as fluid and dislocatable by the operation of logics. Marx, on the other hand, appears not to be very interested in how change is brought about. In Capital, he can be seen as describing, in one sense, the structure of a discursive field, noting its laws, the objects, subjects and their subject positions. However, he does not pay attention to the fluidity of the field. He ends up ignoring the shifting, dynamic nature of the field he describes, and instead presents us with a stable structure that therefore appears deterministic.

Ethical frameworks - negotiable vs. otherwise

One limitation of Marx's analysis of political economy seems to be that he doesn’t explore other aspects of social being and uses class (money) as the main fulcrum of oppression and exploitation. This limitation could be the fact that when it was written (in the 19th century) most of the politics centered on imperialism and industrialization in a feudal and rigidly hierarchical form. Marx’s invaluable contribution given the conditions then is a seemingly indirect yet rigorous analysis of the ethics of capitalism and hence feudalism. This could be said to have initiated the process of dismantling of the assumption of hierarchy in society.

The post WWII world is more connected; there is acceptance of equality and democracy in its myriad forms, so it is natural that the oppression problematic is more complex and not solely based on economics.

By using possibility of multiple relationships among societal subjects and discourses as the basic framework, Laclau & Mouffe bring to fore the idea of negotiation (and hence hegemony) as the fulcrum of social change. While this construct presents with more possibilities to engage with society, a problem is the seeming diffusion of ethical frameworks, which could be said to be corollary to the idea of negotiation.

Through Methodology

(Not sure whether we were to post as comments or as a separate post, so here goes!)

One way in which Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Analysis can be connected to Marx's Critique of Political Economy is through their analytic methodology. Marx's Capital is not merely a study of an economic system, but a critique of political economy, because it seeks to analyse political relations in economic terms. In doing so, it tries to understand the political system in terms of a network of relations: forces of production, modes of production, capital, circulation, commodities and so on. This lays the analytical foundation for Discourse Analysis, in which Laclau and Mouffe propose that the world can be understood in a relational manner. Discourse Analysis draws on insights from linguistics (regarding signfication, for instance), as well as from political philosophy and economics. Drawing upon all this, Discourse Analysis appears to be taking Marxian relational understanding to its logical end, in insisting that all objects have meaning and that this meaning is produced socially, through discourse. They describe the discursive as a “theoretical horizon”; this horizon, I think they've discerned using Marx's analytic method, understanding the world in terms of relations, rather than mere objects.

Question:

How do we connect the post-Marxist 'Ideology and Discourse Analysis' with Marx's 'Critique of Political Economy'?


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