Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005)
General ideas
In a previous article, Ernesto Laclau attempts to explain populism in general, and peronism in particular, criticizing those normative accounts and their negativation of that concept. Making use of the idea of “popular-democratic interpelations”, he states that class discourses are always articulated with the available discursive elements; in this sense, the crisis of the 1930s and its reframing by peronist discourse as an outcome of liberalism
and
elite
class
interests,
would
be
a
much
appropriated explanation than a inherit authoritarianism for
peronistas’ distrust of liberal democracy premises.1 Laclau recently retook some points of his theory in the 1970s with his book On Populist Reason (2005); on this attempt for a broader theory of populism, Laclau main argument is that populism “simplifies the political space, replacing a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise”, although he understands this logic of simplification as “the very condition of political action”2. Hence, populism should be defined not by its ideology, but by its form, which should be analyzed by social
sciences as a political expression as rational as any other. For Laclau, populism has been described in terms of “vagueness, imprecision, intellectual poverty, purely transient as a
phenomenon,
manipulative
in
its
procedures”
and
consequently, it would be impossible to characterize it in “positive terms”3. This implies in two equally problematic intellectual attitudes, the restriction of populism to one of its 1 Ernesto Laclau, “Towards a Theory of Populism.” Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: NLB, 1977), p. 143-198. 2 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 18. 3 Ibidem, p. 16.
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) historical variants, or to attempt a general definition, which will always be too narrow. The first step away from this denigration of populism would be not the rejection of its “vagueness” or “imprecision”; rather, Laclau questions if the ‘vagueness’ of populist discourses is not the consequence of social reality itself being, in some situations, vague and undetermined? Also, wouldn’t populism be, rather than a clumsy political and ideological operation, is a performative act endowed with its own rationality? Lastly, wouldn’t populism be “a constant dimension of political action”, instead of a transitional moment constantly related to the immaturity of social actors and structures? The solution proposed by Laclau necessarily passes through the assumption that, yes, the populist discourse simplifies the political space; but this simplification is a constitutive
part
confinement
to
of the
any
frontier.
Its
“unthinkable”,
an
politico-ideological
realm
of
the
operation promoted by the mainstream social sciences discourse, only happens while we still conceive it as “the simple opposite of political forms dignified with the status of a full rationality”4, a demoting and denigration constructed over
an
ethical
condemnation
of
the
populist
political
expressions in the continent. Laclau uses the idea of differential claims, to propose the possibility of achieving a universal, hegemonic claim. There are important theoretical contributions that Laclau make in his pursuit of a conceptualization of populism; the first and very basic one is that populism is not a is not a type of movement, but rather a political logic, that develops along social changes, which
“takes
place
through
the
variable
articulation
of
equivalence and difference, and the equivalential moment 4 Ibidem, p. 19.
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) presupposes the constitution of a global political subject bringing together a plurality of social demands”. This involves, “the construction of internal frontiers and the 5
identification of an institutionalized other”
. A second
aspect worthy to be mentioned is the idea that the plurality of demands did not necessarily imply into differentiality: “there cannot be a priori system unity, precisely
because
expression language
of of
the
unfulfilled
systemic a
demands
dislocations”,
populist
are
leading
discourse/operation
the
every to
be
imprecise and fluctuating, “not because of any cognitive failure, but because it tries to operate performatively within
a
social
reality
which
is 6
heterogeneous and fluctuating”
to
a
large
extent
. A last remark made by
Laclau is that although the logics of difference and equivalence that we referred to before are “ultimately antagonistic to one another, none the less need one another”;
it
means
that
it
is
precisely
“
because
a
particular demand is unfulfilled that with other unfulfilled demands
a
solidarity
is
established”.
Thus,
if
the
equivalential logic does not dissolve differences but inscribes them within itself, and if the relative weight of the two logics largely depends on the autonomy of what is inscribed vis-à-vis the hegemony exercised by the surface of inscription […] any social level or institution can operate as a surface of equivalential inscription”.
The
essential point is that, the equivalential chain necessarily plays a double role: “it makes the emergence of the particularism of the demands possible” – breaking with 5 Laclau (2005), p. 117. 6 Ibidem, p. 118.
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) the status quo – “but, at the same time, it subordinates them to itself as a necessary surface of inscription” 7 – introducing ‘ordering’ where there was dislocation or
anomie. For Laclau
the
political
becomes
synonymous
with
populism, in the sense that on his theory of power “the construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par excellence – as opposed to pure administration within a stable institutional framework”; it means that there is no political intervention which is not populistic to some
extent.8 *Dussel affirms that through mutual information, dialogue, translation of proposals, and shared militant praxis, these movements slowly and progressively constitute bridges for an analogical hegemon, which includes all demands but might, still following Laclau, prioritize some. On his analysis, Dussel prefers the term plebs to refer to people, since he is privileging the fracture caused by oppression and exclusion, and the people who is considered in opposition to the elites, oligarchs, the ruling
classes
of
a
given
established
political
order.
Remembering the notion of ‘bloc’ proposed by Gramsci, Dussel avoids a substantialization, since the term implies an inherent instability and it allows the contradictions that are typical of a “social bloc”, that is, originated from conflict in the material fields (ecological extinction, economic poverty, the destruction of cultural identity), disputed in cultural battles within civil society and then finally reaching the political society, the realm
of institutionalized politics and the State. “The emergence of the ‘people’ depends on the three variables I have isolated: equivalential relations hegemonically represented
7 Ibidem, p. 120. 8 Ibidem, p. 154.
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) through empty signifiers; displacements of the internal frontiers through the production of floating signifiers; a constitutive heterogeneity which makes dialectical retrievals impossible and gives its true centrality to political articulation” (156). Chapter 8 – Obstacles and Limits to the Construction of the ‘People’
“The need to stabilize the revolutionary process became a
leitmotiv of Peronist discourse (214). Perón as the ‘empty signifier’: “his word had to operate as a signifier with only weak links to particular signifieds”; “the demand for Perón’s return to Argentina became an empty signifier unifying an expanding popular camp”. The possibility of the tendentially empty signifier becomes entirely empty, in which case the links in the equivalential chain do not need to cohere with each other at all: the most contradictory contents can be assembled, as long as the subordination of them all to the empty signifier remains” (Freud and the extreme situation in which love for the father is the only link between the brothers)
(217) – what happened the more we advance into the 1960s. “Once in Argentina, Perón could no longer be an empty signifier: he was the President of the Republic and, as such, he had to
take decisions and opt between alternatives” (220). Different from what postmodern prophets of the ‘end of politics’, Laclau suggests “the arrival at a fully political era, because the dissolution of the marks of certainty does not give the political game
any
aprioristic
necessary
terrain
but,
rather,
the
possibility of constantly redefining the terrain itself” (222). Concluding Remarks
The constitutive role of social heterogeneity. “Heterogeneity, in the sense in which I conceive it, has as one of its defining
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) features a dimenstion of deficient being or failed unicity. If heterogeneity is, on the one hand, ultimately irreducible to a deeper homogeneity, it is, on the other, not simply absent but present as that which is absent. Unicity shows itself through its very absence (223). “We have, however, partial objects that, through their very partiality embody an ever-receding totality. The latter requires a contingent social construction, as it does not result from the positive, ontic nature of the objects themselves. This is what we have called articulation and hegemony – the starting point for the emergence of the ‘people’
(224). The minimal unit of analysis should not be the group, as a referent, but the socio-political demand. For him, “the unity of the group is simply the result of an aggregation of social demands – which can, of course, be crystallized in sedimented social practices. This aggregation presupposes an essential asymmetry between the community as a whole (the populous)
and the underdog (the plebs)” (224). He explains why the plebs is always a partiality that identifies itself with the community at large. “It is in the contamination of the universality of the populus by the partiality of the plebs that the peculiarity of the ‘people’ as a historical actor lies. The logic of its construction is what I have called ‘populist reason’” (224). “A popular demand is one that embodies the absent fullness of the community through a potentially endless
chain of equivalences”. The partiality of the universal: “a partial object, as we have seen, can also have a non-partitive meaning: not a part of a whole, but a part that is the whole” (225). The particularity in his theory is NOT merely the apparent field of expressive mediation; rather, it opposes “a non-transparent medium to an
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) otherwise transparent experience, so that an irreducibly opaque (non-)representative moment becomes constitutive”, whereas ‘people’ “is not a a kind of ‘superstructural’ effect of an underlying infrastructural logic, but a primary terrain the
construction of a political subjectivity”. The logic of hegemony: “This moment of fusion between partial object and totality represents, at one point in time, the ultimate historical horizon, which cannot be split into its two dimensions, universal and particular. History cannot be conceived therefore as an infinite advance towards an ultimate aim. History is rather a discontinuous succession of hegemonic formations that cannot be ordered by a script transcending their continent historicity. ‘Peoples’ are real social formations, but they resist inscription
into any kind of Hegelian teleology” (226). The relationship between naming and contingency. The role of affect in the constitution of popular identities. The passage from one hegemonic formation, or popular
configuration, to another will always involve a radical break. “What is crucial for the emergence of the ‘people’ as a new historical actor is that the unification of a plurality of demands in a new configuration is constitutive and not derivative. In other words, it constitutes an act in the strict sense, for it does not have its source in anything external to itself” (228). It’s
always a transgressive vis-à-vis the situation preceding it. The structural and the historical conditions that make the emergence
and
Structural:
“the
expansion
of
multiplication
popular of
identities
social
possible.
demands,
the
heterogeneity of which can be brought to some form of unity only through equivalential political articulations”. What are the conditions causing the balance to tip increasingly towards heterogeneity? Globalized capitalism. Heterogeneity belongs to the essence of capitalism, the partial stabilizations of which are
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005) hegemonic in nature (we cannot understand capitalism anymore as a purely economic reality, but as a complex in which economic,
political,
military,
technological
and
other
determinations entre into the determination of the movement of the whole) (230). It brings more instability than ever between concept and name. There is a point in which the name does not express the unity of a group, but becomes its ground. There is also the question of the discursive construction of social division; “there has been a multiplication of dislocatory effects and a proliferation of new antagonisms, which is why the antiglobalization movement has to operate in an entirely new way: it must advocate the creation of equivalential links between deeply heterogeneous social demands while, at the same time,
elaborating a common language” (231). The political as “contingent articulation”: “A demand for higher wages does not derive from the logic of capitalist relations, but interrupts that logic in terms that are alien to it – those of a discourse concerning justice, for example. So any demand presupposes a constitutive heterogeneity – it is an event that breaks with the logic of a situation. In the second place, however, the request for a higher level wage in terms of justice will be rooted in a wider sense of justice linked to a variety of other situations. In other words, there are no pure subjects of change; they are always overdetermined through equivalential logics. This means that political subjects are always, in one way or another, popular subjects. And under the conditions of globalized capitalism, the space of this overdetermination clearly expands” (232).
Ernesto Laclau – On Populist Reason (2005)
