Abstract
This article explores a contemporary problem pertaining to the progressive political projects of anti-racism, feminism, gay rights and green politics. It tackles the complex and conflicted situation whereby these once thoroughly oppositional projects now appear to occupy a hegemonic position, and suggests that this has paradoxically led to the demise of radical subject positions. I consider how progressive discourses have effectively become ‘detached’ from participatory social movements that once served as both their progenitors and guarantors, and address the problem of conceptual inertia, whereby discourses appropriated and modified by the political right and mainstream continue to signify an ‘original’ meaning, thus serving to bolster the moral legitimacy of their self-declared champions and defend them against critique. Rather than dismiss this mainstreaming as simply a betrayal, I stress that it describes a new terrain of political struggle that cannot be predicated on a nostalgia for radical subjects as we have historically tended to imagine them.
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Notes
In concordance with the orthodoxies of post-structuralist discourse theory, the category of the ‘subject’ throughout this article is understood ‘in the sense of ‘subject positions’ within a discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 115). As conditions of possibility in discourse, subject positions provide opportunities for acts of identification, though the openness of discourse negates the possibility of the transcendental and unified subject. Taking the contingency of discourse as its starting point, this article will explore the insight that no subject is therefore ‘absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order’ (ibid, p. 169). Although for reasons of clarity I sometimes spell out the term ‘subject positions’, all other references to the ‘subject’ or ‘subjects’ should also be taken as referring to subject positions rather than an understanding of subjects as social actors.
In such circumstances, it would be counterproductive to oppose the hegemonic consensus outright, for this would necessarily result in setting out an objection to our own arguments. Such ideas have been tried out – see, for example, the critique of liberal humanism in Alain Badiou's Ethics (2001), or (in comedy form) the recurring motif against ‘multiculturalism’ in the work of Slavoj Žižek (for example, 1997). While conceptually defensible, it is hard to see how opposition to the New Left consensus might generate anything more productive than a principled but politically impotent retreat into ultraleftism.
This does not mean that there is no semblance of radicality in hegemonic liberal-individualist versions of the New Left agenda. Indeed, it is to a large degree the mainstream simulation of the radical subject that arguably plays an important role in blocking radical subject formation, a point that will be discussed in more detail below.
This, incidentally, highlights a contradiction central to the logic of hegemony where the fate of the radical subject mirrors that of the proletarian subject in classical Marxism: it is axiomatic that hegemony needs the radical subject to bring it into being, yet the achievement of hegemony in turn destroys the conditions for the formation of future radical subjects (at least in relation to the same or similar grounds of subject constitution). Just as the real problem in socialist state practice became one of a discontinuity between the proletariat's imputed and actual roles, and thus between the imputed and actual character of its dictatorship, so the problem with New Left hegemony is the sense in which its achievement necessarily represents a revolution betrayed.
To put this question another way: why do I insist on describing what is hegemonic as a ‘New Left’ hegemony when it could be described as a liberal hegemony pure and simple? My insistence on this continuing relationship is to do with the importance of making a political claim from the left on hegemonic discourses. Sure, it would indeed be possible to give up on hegemonic forms of gay rights, ecology, feminism and anti-racism to liberalism, but how does this serve the possibility of their future development? To cede ‘ownership’ to liberalism risks rejecting social liberalism as an important component of a left politics and returning to an unhelpfully reductive model of political practice. Beyond this, the historicity of New Left discourses qua left-wing is, as I will argue in the next section, what has made them so attractive to the right. For this reason alone, it continues to be necessary to recognize what is ‘left’ in liberal hegemony.
Of course, the mainstreamed radical subject has its limits, most notably condensed in the contemporary figure of the ‘radical Muslim’, where radicality (and the subject-constituting trope of ‘radicalization’) is figured not only as a divisive force, but also, as Puar (2007) among others has pointed out, as a direct threat to what I am calling the New Left subject.
While in Laclau's terms social agents come into being through structural dislocation (Laclau, 1990, p. 60), what I am describing is the recentring of a dislocation (and thus the defusal of social antagonism) in such a way that still resembles a dislocation.
It is worth recalling here the problem set out by Stuart Hall in his critique of Laclau and Mouffe, to the effect that they have a tendency to neglect recognition of the historical forces ‘which continue to function as constraints and determinations on discursive articulation’ (in Grossberg, 1996, p. 148). While Laclau and Mouffe would be quite right to point to the essential contingency of signification, and argue that it is always possible to find new ways of developing hegemonic struggle, it is at the same time important to recognize that there are a practically limited range of discursive objects available in any particular conjuncture. The New Left discourses that have been co-opted by the centre and right were a long time in the making. They were the result of decades of political struggle, and therefore need to be engaged with rather than repudiated. As Mouffe herself reminds us, ‘[t]radition allows us to think our own insertion into historicity, the fact that we are constructed as subjects through a series of already existing discourses, and that it is through this tradition which forms us that the world is given to us and all political action made possible’ (Mouffe, 1993, p. 16). It would be unrealistic to try to construct from scratch a new politics uncorrupted and untainted by the centre and the right. Instead, it is necessary to recognize and make use of the ‘rhetorical reserves’ of New Left discourses’ ‘imputed ontological status’ (Bowman, 2008, p. 92). For a more detailed reflection on the historicity of discursive resources, see Bramall in this issue.
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Pitcher, B. Radical subjects after hegemony. Subjectivity 4, 87–102 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.26