CONCLUSION

Multicultural difference and the political

As we have noted at various points, Laclau tends to embrace an increasingly formal conception of hegemony in his recent work. This tendency is problematic because it suppresses a historically specific analysis of the success and failure of rival political discourses. In this final chapter, I will offer some concluding remarks on Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony theory and the implications of their work for understanding historical contextualization and multicultural difference.

Authoritarian versus radical democratic pluralist hegemonic practices

As we have already seen in Chapter 1, radical democratic pluralism stands utterly opposed to all forms of domination, for it seeks to create the conditions for free individual self-development, and this requires in turn the elimination of oppression and exploitation. Radical democratic pluralism is also opposed to domination insofar as it fully accepts the legitimacy of democratic differences. Authoritarian hegemonic discourses perpetuate domination and yet may become “organic” to the extent that they resonate with already mobilized popular anxieties and incorporate fragments of some popular traditions. Given the fact that the democratic revolution remains one of the defining discourses of contemporary politics, authoritarian hegemonic projects often construct themselves as a

pseudo-“democratic” mobilization of ”the people“ against ”the establishment.“ They might, for example, represent multicultural forces, trade union strategies, feminist movements and even an imaginary gay voting bloc as if they constituted an omnipotent apparatus that threatened to violate the rights of the “general population.” Further, authoritarian projects do at times recognize the plural character of the social, but they aim to manage difference through the deployment of assimilatory, disciplinary and exclusionary strategies. Authoritarian discourses may make impressive attempts to construct apparently diverse social imaginaries, but ultimately they seek to reduce difference, to turn difference against itself, to incite self-surveillance and demonization, and to separate difference from what it can do (Smith 1994b).

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L Contemporary authoritarian hegemonic strategies often attempt to appropriate key elements from the democratic tradition, and to redefine democratic forces precisely as the anti-democratic “establishment,” thereby allowing them to represent profoundly reactionary causes as nothing less than popular liberation struggles. Various right-wing interest groups in the United States have borrowed substantially from the civil rights movement in the construction of their demands, including the National Rifle Association (“freedom to defend one’s family”); the tobacco industry (“freedom of choice”); the corporate lobby (“freedom from oppressive regulation”); the corporate medical insurance lobby (“freedom from socialized medicine”); mining, timber and real estate interests (“freedom from unjust ‘takings’”) and opponents of civil rights laws (“freedom from quotas”) (Pertschuk 1995). Homophobic forces often conceal their total rejection of liberal democratic pluralism by replacing their blatant genocidal language with pseudo-democratic denunciations of lesbian and gay “special rights.” Leaders of the Christian Coalition have attempted to construct their extremist movement as a democratic struggle by denouncing the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace and anti-Semitism, and by calling for new coalitions between the religious right, African-Americans and Jews.

In actuality, the religious right, neo-conservatives and new racists only pretend to champion liberal democratic rights and freedoms in order to defend traditional class, race, gender and sexual inequalities. We can explore the fundamentally contradictory structure of authoritarian hegemonic strategies with reference to the Gramscian distinction between “passive” and “popular” revolutions. A “passive revolution,” or “transformism,” portrays itself as a popular and democratic movement, but it actually engages in profoundly anti-democratic strategies. It neutralizes social movements by satisfying some of their demands in a symbolic and reformist manner, and co-opts some of the symbols and representatives of popular movements or popular political parties and includes them—albeit in disempowered roles—within the hegemonic bloc, while it shifts authority towards disciplinary apparatuses. Where a radicalized form of resistance would construct its opposition to the hegemonic bloc as an antagonistic relation, a co-opted form of resistance would abandon this antagonistic interpretation, and express its relation with hegemonic elements as simple, power-free difference (Laclau 1977:173). A co-opted form of multiculturalism, for example, would construct the social as a peaceful system of competing interest groups, while a more radical form would emphasize the oppressive and exploitative relations that obtain between dominant and subordinate groups.

Strictly speaking, Gramsci makes a clear distinction between “passive”

revolution and hegemony, for a “passive” traditional moment is largely statist and bureaucratic; the “masses” do not take an active part, and brute force, rather than the organization of consent, becomes predominant. Further, Gramsci insists that the “passive revolution” includes substantial economic intervention by the state, a dimension that is almost anachronistic in contemporary globalizing economies.

Gramsci’s conception of the “passive” revolution nevertheless contains the

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L provocative image of a pseudo-popular movement that wins some small degree of consent by responding to some of the popular demands from the grass-roots, while it actually uses that appearance of popular consent only to gain strategic ground for its fundamentally anti-democratic project (Laclau 1977:116; Buci-Glucksmann 1979:216–17, 224).¹

Contrary to received wisdom about the right, authoritarian political projects usually owe their effectiveness to their deployment of war of position strategies.

Unlike a totalitarian state formation, the state apparatuses in an authoritarian formation never become the mere instruments of dominant social groups, and never completely dominate or displace liberal democratic institutions. An effective authoritarian hegemony can nevertheless achieve a substantial transformation of key institutions such that they increasingly express its principles. An effective authoritarian hegemony would be able to advance simultaneously in multiple institutional settings; to adapt to the unique conditions at different sites in the social; to develop a specific form of political intervention at each site that best facilitates its extension and intensification; and to unify these plural micro-projects in pseudo-popular and pseudo-democratic terms, thereby foreclosing the possibility of radical resistance in advance.

Authoritarian hegemonic projects seek to absorb and to assimilate democratic forces by appropriating key elements of alternative popular worldviews, neutralizing their critical potential by redefining them, and then articulating these colonized elements—that is, integrating them in a transformative matter—into its worldview (Mouffe 1979b:182; Laclau 1977:161; Smith 1997a, 1997b). At this point, the limits of Laclau and Mouffe’s invocation of singular social movements (“the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay movement” etc.) become clear. Many authoritarian forces subversively borrow identity politics strategies from the Left and either promote right-wing elements within existing social movements or invent their own sanitized versions of grass-roots activism and “diversity.” In conformity with the American mainstream media’s rules, role models are substituted for political analysis, such that political struggle is displaced by a privatized discourse on identity-specific experiences (Williams 1995:128), with a right-wing twist. Anti-feminist women intellectuals, for example, are celebrated as the spokespersons for the attack on Women’s Studies that is launched in the name of vague pseudo-feminist principles, while mothers are featured as National Rifle Association leaders. Some black men and non-Anglo immigrants have emerged as prominent figures in the affirmative action and anti-multiculturalism movements. Speaking from what they call their special black and ethnic minority perspectives, they condemn affirmative action and multiculturalism for promoting racist divisions, thereby identifying the anti-racists as the worst racists. In addition to their legitimation of right-wing policies, these tactics also threaten to redefine feminist and anti-racist politics.

The deployment of these pseudo-popular strategies is of course a dangerous operation for authoritarianism, for expectations are raised and a limited degree of popular mobilization does actually take place. Even under the auspices of the

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L tightly controlled religious fundamentalist organizations, for example, leaders’

promises are made, rallies are organized, cross-class and multiracial male-only retreats are held, parents’ groups are formed, petitions are gathered, conference motions are approved, fax, phone and internet networks are set into motion, local participants are trained to run for office and so on. Authoritarian hegemonic forces strive to manage their pseudo-popular mobilizations with great care, such that genuinely autonomous grass-roots movements do not emerge (Laclau 1977:81–

142). Demonized figures such as foreign leaders, invading immigrants, hedonistic single mothers, greedy minorities, the drug-ridden and disease-spreading urban underclasses, corrupt union “bosses,” excessive queers and so on, must be constantly offered as popular enemies, such that the partially mobilized masses are united in a manner that forecloses genuinely democratic articulations. Authoritarian leaders engage in a complex attempt to inflame their followers’ hatred while steering the movement’s activism towards effective networking rather than the publicly visible expressions of vicious hatred that might damage the movement’s reputation (Smith 1994b, 1997a, 1997b).

Authoritarian forms of hegemony remain fundamentally contradictory, for they attempt to represent themselves as popular democratic movements, even though they engage in all sorts of containment strategies and pursue initiatives that perpetuate the unequal distribution of power. Often hegemonic politics only requires the construction of a minority of enthusiastic followers who can be synecdochically positioned as an imaginary majority, instead of actual popular mobilizations. This synecdochical substitution and the populist façade depend in turn on the demobilization of key sectors of the populace through blatant disenfranchisement tactics. In some cases, hegemonic forces drag the political center so far to the right that more and more people have no reason to participate in the political system. We are now witnessing extensive efforts to lower political participation in the United States: popular expectations about what governments ought to achieve have been dramatically reduced, while popular paranoias about evil forces lurking within state apparatuses have been deliberately promoted. To the extent that more centrist political projects, such as Clinton’s conservative Democratic movement, borrow key strategies from the authoritarian hegemony tradition, we should anticipate a greater tendency on their part towards the neutralization of democratic contestation (Smith 1997a).

There is nothing in the contradictions within authoritarianism, however, that will by themselves lead to its decline. Not only can contradictory political discourses remain brutally effective, they can also make their contradictions a source of strength. One of the virtues of Laclau and Mouffe’s redefinition of hegemony—

from Gramsci’s vision of an articulated bloc of actual subjects to their conception of the institutionalization of a new horizon, the taken-for-granted background knowledge that supplies the hidden assumptions behind authorized political discourse—is that it allows us to grasp the subtle and complex aspect of hegemony politics. As Hall argued with respect to Thatcherism, an authoritarian hegemonic project only needs to achieve the disorganization of the potential opposition and

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L a minimal degree of mobilization such that the regime can pass itself off as the expression of the popular will (Hall 1988a).

Gramsci contends that where authoritarian “passive revolutions” have become institutionalized, democratic forces will have to wage a protracted “war of position”

and struggle to advance an “expansive hegemony.” Multiple struggles that are plural and contextually sensitive in form will have to be deployed at each of the various sites throughout the social in which the “passive revolution” has become entrenched. Where a “passive revolution” seeks to neutralize the democratic opposition and to construct a simulacrum popular movement while perpetuating structural inequality, an “expansive hegemony” seeks to promote a genuinely democratic mobilization of progressive social movements (Buci-Glucksmann 1979:228–9; Mouffe 1979b:182–3).

The Gramscian distinction between “passive revolution” and “expansive hegemony” also allows us to clarify Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of radical democratic pluralism. Authoritarian hegemony aims to achieve a maximum disciplining of difference; even as it pretends to endorse pluralism, it can only promote a pseudo-multiculturalism that is entirely compatible with institutional racism. Radical democratic pluralism, by contrast, attempts to construct the sorts of hegemonic discourses that enhance and promote democratic forms of plurality and difference. Confronted with a plurality of progressive struggles already in motion, it seeks to release each of their democratic potentials, while bringing them together in mutually constitutive articulatory relations. It values the autonomy of each struggle, not only as a good in itself, but also for its practical value. In many cases, autonomy facilitates the sort of contextually specific contestation of oppression and exploitation that is needed in today’s complex and hybrid social formations. Further, it values the promotion of hybridized democratic identities, for “hybridization does not necessarily mean decline through the loss of identity: it can also mean empowering existing identities through the opening of new possibilities” (Laclau 1996e:65). Where authoritarian hegemony strictly regulates the development of political contestation, radical democratic pluralist hegemony multiplies the points of contestation and seeks to broaden the terrain of politicization or reactivation (Laclau 1996d:99). The universalistic effects of the radical democratic pluralist horizon tend to institutionalize deeper and deeper recognition of the plurality and autonomy of the public spaces created by democratic struggles. To the extent that the specific discourses of the relatively autonomous progressive struggles are successfully articulated with a radical civic sense, the multiplication of these public spaces becomes a source of strength for a democratizing society (Laclau 1996b:120–1).

If authoritarian hegemony has a fundamentally contradictory structure, radical democratic pluralist hegemony has a paradoxical central principle: the more that we advance towards its realization, the more impossible its realization becomes.

Radical democratic pluralism is a good that remains a good only insofar as it is not fully institutionalized (Mouffe 1993b:4, 6). The challenge of radical democratic pluralism is that it must gain strategic ground not only by subverting dominant

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L institutions, but by founding and defending new ones as well. At the same time, it must guard against the potential that is inherent in its own institutions simply because they are institutions, namely the bureaucratization and disciplining of the social according to exclusionary principles. In a radical democratic pluralist movement, the definition of the good life must always be kept open to contestation;

“nothing is definitely acquired and there is always the possibility of challenge”

(Laclau 1996d:100). No blueprint for an ideal society could fully grasp all of the exclusions that are built into contemporary institutions and anticipate the unintentional anti-democratic effects of apparently democratic strategies. We can only begin to imagine subjects who have yet to be invented, let alone their rights and responsibilities in communities that will only faintly resemble our own.

Democratic activists of all kinds from only a few centuries ago would be bewildered by contemporary democratic politics. We have no reason to assume that we are peculiarly endowed with an ability to make all contemporary and future antagonisms transparent. A space for permanent democratic dissent must therefore be built into the radical democratic pluralist imaginary, for it is through contestation and struggle that exclusions can be brought to light and new democratic institutions can be imagined and established.

This point can be illustrated with reference to the debate on multicultural curricula. Radical multicultural educators are not arguing that we ought to include works by women, gays, blacks, Latino/as, Asians, indigenous people and peoples of the Third World in the Western “canon” because they are the only texts that are meaningful for our minority students. Their argument is that traditions of resistance among oppressed and excluded peoples have built up tremendous resources of wisdom, and that that wisdom is embedded within minority discourses.

As Gutmann contends, “There are books by and about women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans that speak to neglected parts of our heritage and human condition, and speak more wisely than do some of the canonical works” (1992:18). Shohat and Stam similarly assert that their

“polycentric multiculturalism” “grants an ‘epistemological advantage’ to those prodded by historical circumstances into what W.B. DuBois has called ‘double consciousness,’ to those obliged to negotiate both ‘margins’ and ‘center’ (or even with many margins and many centers), and thus somewhat better placed to

‘deconstruct’ dominant or narrowly national discourses” (1994:48–9). Alexander and Mohanty, citing Moya, also claim an “epistemological advantage” for the oppressed, but insist on the mediating role of interpretation.

The experience of repression can be, but is not necessarily, a catalyst for organizing. It is, in fact, the interpretation of that experience from within a collective context that marks the moment of transformation from perceived contradictions and material disenfranchisement to participation in women’s movements.

(1997:xl)

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L Structural positioning in itself does not guarantee a political outcome; it is only when the experience of oppression is organized in terms of the interpretative framework that is provided by radical subject positions that subversive texts and practices are produced.

Further, a radical multicultural curriculum does not embrace any kind of separatism, for it aims to raise students’ awareness about the constitutive relations between different cultures. For Shohat and Stam,

polycentric multiculturalism is reciprocal, dialogical; it sees all acts of verbal or cultural exchange as taking place not between discrete bounded individuals or cultures but rather between permeable, changing individuals and communities. Within an ongoing struggle of hegemony and resistance, each act of cultural interlocution leaves both interlocutors changed.

(1994:49) Shohat and Stam extend their radical approach into their critique of Eurocentrism.

Such a critique would remain conservative if it depicted Europe as a naturally distinct entity unmarked by political struggle and internal and external exclusions;

constructed Europeans as a singular people bound together by a homogeneous and timeless cultural tradition; and represented European power as an omnipotent evil capable of achieving total victory on a global scale. Within their approach, an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism also has to attend to the hybrid differences and complicated histories that constitute Europe itself (1994:4). In this sense, Shohat and Stam (1984) reproduce Bernal’s radical intervention; the point is not merely to find hybridity and difference on the margins, but to interrupt the metropole’s foundational myths as well.

Multiculturalism, according to then Modern Language Association President Stimpson, is the “necessary recognition that we cannot think of culture unless we think of many cultures at the same time” (Levine 1996:143). As Levine indicates, radical multiculturalism studies women, immigrants, workers, lesbians and gays and racial minorities not just to bring ethnic and gender difference into our curricula, but to promote a better understanding of socio-economic power.

It is crucial to study and understand as many of the contributing cultures and their interactions with one another as possible, not as a matter of

“therapeutic” history, as the opponents of multiculturalism keep insisting, not to placate or flatter minority groups and make them feel good, as they also assert, but as a simple matter of understanding the nature and complexities of American culture and the process by which it came, and continues to come, into being.

(Levine 1996:160) Even a society that approaches radical democratic pluralism will tend to institutionalize a specific way of thinking; the danger is that domination will become

M U LT I C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L normalized and the democratic wisdom at the margins of the social will not be heard. It is only through permanent contestation that every “canon”—even the most apparently radical “canon”—will be constantly exposed to democratic challenges.

Against Habermas, who constructs power-free communication as a regulative ideal, Laclau and Mouffe affirm the permanence of power relations. Although Rorty wants to expand the community of “we liberals” through persuasion and the incitement of solidarity-oriented sentiment, rather than argumentation that seeks to ground itself exclusively on context-independent rationality, he also places far too much faith on the construction of consensus, and fails to grasp the practical value of perpetual contestation (Mouffe 1996a:8). In the spirit of Gramsci’s centaur metaphor, Laclau and Mouffe argue that every form of communication, including persuasion, negotiation, and dialogue, is necessarily intertwined with power relations, and that this would remain true in any possible society. Like all post-structuralists, they hold that we cannot ground our ethical decisions in a necessary foundation; every political position that we take is in this sense contingent. Again, this is not to endorse relativism: since our choices are always conditioned by normative traditions, we never inhabit a space in which all the choices before us have equal validity. The traditions that shape our normative decision-making are the residual effects of contingent political struggles. This means that every normative decision taken within historical traditions—traditions that are only partially of our choosing—could have been taken in a different way; none of them express absolute necessity. Where one alternative is chosen instead of others, this decision is ultimately based on force rather than rational necessity. The force in question may be quite minimal, such as the suppression of a given set of alternatives when a choice is made, or it may involve the most brutal forms of exclusion (Laclau 1996b:112).

In other words, social change is achieved not because the arguments of some historical groups are morally better than others when measured according to a universal standard, and not because the triumphant group’s discourse expresses a necessary moment in the unfolding of reason. For Laclau, the very notions of universal standards and historical necessity are strategic myths. In contemporary complex societies, social change is achieved because some political struggles and historical forces strategically prevail over the opposing groups and forces. We have seen that Laclau tends to argue that the success of a hegemonic strategy depends on its form—its provision of an orderly space for the inscription of political demands. Differing slightly with Laclau on this point, I would argue that a hegemonic force prevails to the extent that it deploys a combination of tactics—

involving violence, exclusion, articulation and redefinition, persuasion, the general framing of the political terrain, institutionalization and so on—that allows it to exploit the unique opportunities that are available in a given historical configuration. It should also be noted that in both this formulation and Laclau’s theory, the hegemonic agent is not a concrete subject; it is instead an historical force. As Nietzsche and Foucault argue, historical forces are always prior to the