… while this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from ‘essentialist’ Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, an so on, to the postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resignation at its heart — the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime (95).
postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’; the fact remains, however, that it does NOT in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.
Regarding JB:
[Butler] is well aware that universality is unavoidable, and her point is that — while, of course, each determinate historical figure of universality involves a set of inclusions/exclusions — universality simultaneously opens up and sustains the space for questioning these inclusions/exclusions, for ‘renegotiating’ the limits of inclusion/exclusion as part of the ongoing ideologico-political struggle for hegemony. The predominant notion of ‘universal human rights’, for instance, precludes — or, at least reduces to a secondary status — a set of sexual practices and orientations; and it would be too simplistic to accept the standard liberal game of simply insisting that one should redefine and broaden our notion of human rights to include also all these ‘aberrant’ practices — what standard liberal humanism underestimates is the extent to which such exclusions are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusion in ‘human rights’ would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what ‘humanity’ in ‘human rights’ means (101-102).
This passage from ‘essentialist’ marxism to postmodern contingent politics (in Laclau), or the passage from sexual essentialism to contingent gender-formation (in Bulter), or — a further example — the passage from metaphysician to ironist in Richard Rorty, is not a simple epistemological progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not that before, people were ‘stupid essentialists’ and believed in naturalized sexuality, while now they know that genders are performatively enacted; one needs a kind of metanarrative that explains this very passage from essentialism to the awareness of contingency: the Heideggerian notion of the epochs of Being, or the Foucauldian notion of the shift in the predominant épistème, or the standard sociological notion of modernization, or a more Marxist account in which this passage follows the dynamic of capitalism
So, again, crucial in Laclau’s theoretical edifice is the paradigmatically Kantian co-dependency between the ‘timeless’ existential a priori of the logic of hegemony and the historical narrative of the gradual passage from the ‘essentialist’ traditional Marxist class politics to the full assertion of the contingency of the struggle for hegemony … The role of this evolutionary narrative is precisely to resolve the above-mentioned ambiguity of the formal universal frame (of the logic of hegemony) — implicitly to answer the question: is this frame really a non-historical universal, or simply the formal structure of the specific ideologico-political constellation of western late capitalism? The evolutionary narrative mediates between these two options, telling the story of how the universal frame was ‘posited as such’, become the explicit structuring principle of ideologico-political life. The question none the less persists: is this evolutionary passage a simple passage from error to true insight? Is it that each stance fits its own epoch, so that in Marx’s time ‘class essentialism’ was adequate, while today we need the assertion of contingency? Or should we combine the two in a proto-Hegelian way, so that the very passage from the essentialist ‘error’ to the ‘true’ insight into radical contingency is historically conditioned (in Marx’s time, the ‘essentialist illusion’ was ‘objectively necessary’, while our epoch enables the insight into contingency)? This proto-Hegelian solution would allow us to combine the ‘universal’ scope of ‘validity’ of the concept of hegemony with the obvious fact that its recent emergence is clearly linked to today’s specific social constellation: although socio-political life and its structure were always-already the outcome of hegemonic struggles, it is none the less only today, on our specific historical constellation — that is to say, in the ‘postmodern’ universe of globalized contingency — that the radically contingent-hegemonic nature of the political processes is finally allowed to ‘come/return to itself’, to free itself of the ‘essentialist’ baggage … (106-107).
This solution, however, is problematic for at least two reasons. [1. it’s Hegelian, Laclau hates Hegel]
2. … from my perspective, today’s postmodern politics of multiple subjectivities is precisely not political enough, in so far as it silently presupposes a non-thematized, ‘naturalized’ framework of economic relations. … One should assert the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles and the totality of Capital are not opposed … today’s capitalism, rather, provides the very background and terrain for the emergence of shifting-dispersed-contingent-ironic-and so on, political subjectivities. Was it not Deleuze who in a way made this point when he emphasized how capitalism is a force of ‘deterritorialization’? And was he not following Marx’s old thesis on how, with capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’?
… MY KEY POINT … the need to distinguish more explicitly between contingency/substitutibility within a certain historical horizon and the more fundamental exclusion/foreclosure that grounds this very horizon. When Laclau claims that ‘if the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems’, does he not — potentially at least — conflate two levels,
- the struggle for hegemony within a certain horizon
- and the more fundamental exclusion that sustains this very horizon?
And when Butler claims, against the Lacanian notion of constitutive bar or lack, that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted thorugh exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, does she not – potentially at least – conflate two levels,
- the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions within a given field (say, of today’s late capitalist society)
- and a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field.
(107-108)