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.
I would like to make a case for why Marx's economic determinism is not irrelevant in understanding differences between Marxism and Post Marxist IDA – Laclau and Mouffe (architects of IDA) in their founding text of post-Marxism, ‘Hegemony and Socialist Strategy’ argue that there was an element of reductionism in classical Marxism because it tended to regard non-economic forms of oppression such as oppression on account of gender or sexuality as an inevitable by product of the mode of production. For example while Marxists would argue that capitalism excludes women from the social and industrial sphere because women's identities are naturally incompatible with involvement in the industrial, post Marxists like Mouffe and Laclau would argue that their is nothing inherent in women's identities to exclude them from the social sphere but they are excluded because they are a victim of the prevailing discourse which constructs them as socially inferior. So there is a failure of representation in Marxism according to Mouffe and Laclau. Their attempt is to synthesize Marxist insights with the post-structuralist emphasis on discourse as a source of identity. They argue that classical Marxism has failed to take into account the contingent nature of identity (as in the fluid and constructed nature of identity).
ReplyDeleteFurther, Mouffe prescribes radical democracy in which oppressed groups can contest identities they have been ascribed. They can be transformed into discoursing subjects or actively construct their own identities against the prevailing discourse. So radical democracy allows for the constitution of a discursive space which will empower the oppressed. So in one way their argument can be seen as a way of reintroducing democracy into Marxism as they attempted to unblock the problem of democracy in Marxist theory and address the fact that Marxism had created dictatorial societies.
Just to add to the earlier posts about economic determinism, another factor that probably contributes to this criticism of Marx’s analysis is perhaps its interpretation as a ‘totalising and unitary model’. This criticism is most apparent in Jean Francois Lyotard’s ‘The Post-Modern Condition’, where he analyses Marxism as a metanarrative of historical progress, and further illustrates its rejection by postmodernism due to its totalitarian effect. Lyotard instead endorses Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, describing smaller contexts or rules of behaviour and social articulation rather than the presence of one all-embracing structure. Laclau and Mouffe also draw from Wittgenstein in their formulation of discourse theory and so evince an implicit rejection of a single, all-encompassing discursive space,as is apparent in their theory of agonistic pluralism.Marx’s theory is also seen to take the form of a unipolar hegemonic order,especially in its later culmination in Communism, which negated the presence of other such multiple narratives, or indeed discursive spaces such as gender or sexuality. His dialectic method could also be a contributing factor because it creates binary oppositions such as the bourgeoise and proletariat based on the capitalist mode of production, and tries to understand the resultant social antagonism only within this ambit,as an either/or case which can be seen as reductionist, and therefore perhaps economically deterministic.
ReplyDeleteAlthough my post does not respond directly to Maithreyi, she points out stability which i would like to expand in some rudimentary manner and attempt to keep the dialectic in light of the stabilizing force.
ReplyDeleteIn laclau social reality produces and constitutes its own abstractions that allow for political articulation. Mouffe's Social and Political Identities and their formation are dependent on a dialectic. Political actions, interventions are a) a effort at creating new significations and new meanings (Which may result in the production of an empty signifier – session 1 and 4,), b) Negotiation of pre existing (dominent) discourses by opposition. This opposition is in the context of 'institutionalized force' which stabilizes meaning and relationships within any discourse or practice that organizes/ stabilizes social reality. Thus firstly there can be a cohesive meaning only when there is a certain amount of stability within these relationships within the context of an dialectic, an opposition. That stablity within the is brought about by institutional force. What is this institutional force that brings about stability. Laclau points to the projection of the self onto the other as a means of resolving this contestation (when discussing social anatagonisms - the potential of the social agent cannot be fully realized without a projection onto the other). The force that brings about stability between these relations of identity – social and political needs more thought. For inherent within this force is also resistance as Foucault says [extract in Michel Foucault: Ethics Subjectivity and Truth pp. 2 90] “power relations are ... mobile, reversible, and unstable”. Giddens seems to follow in a close trajectory when he questions this force: “all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are subordinate can influence the activities of their
superiors
”. In the panoptic resistance and opposition is inherent to the normalising force that is exerted to bring about stability. For that force could be subverted [for the resources for resistance are present] towards the superior, the surveyor, the guard, the state and inevitable the discourse that conditions the exercise of power. Similarly Althussers ISAs preempt foucault's panoptic gaze by the close examination of what it is that normalizes, conditions, and exerts authority. The foucauldian capillaries of power through which the utterance 'hey' [what Althusser examines] derives authority is closely linked to the ISAs and their collective exertion of authority.
Although IDA does not seem to directly analyze this trajectory, it is clearly implied in the writings of Laclau and finds some mention in Howrath. The stabilizing force therefore can be resisted, removed, reversed and is unstable for it produces the resources for resistance.