An enigma surrounds 'postmodernism'. The postmodern condition is supposed to be characterised by 'incredulity towards metanarratives,' by a hostility towards totalisation and by a rejection of the abstract universalism of Enlightenment rationality. The concept of postmodernism as an epoch in cultural history, however - as 'postmodernity' - is witness to a massive and persistent desire for totalisation in the medium of cultural form. As a recent study put it: “pseudo-totalities generate pseudo-histories; the epochal sense of the concept of the postmodern depends for its existence on historico-spiritual fictions”. [1] It is precisely this type of vulgar Hegelian “historico-spiritual fictions” of the totalising variety that postmodernism sets itself to destroy in the name of respect for difference, and through an explicit rejection of Hegelian philosophy at that. This - the return of metaphysical totalisation of a Hegelian kind - is what I would like to call the enigma of postmodernism.
In unravelling this enigma, rather than generating the 'night in which all postmodernists are grey' by producing an amalgam of supposedly postmodern philosophical positions, I have chosen to focus on a leading example of postmodern theory - postmodern discourse theory, as elaborated in particular by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. [2]
Postmodern discourse theory seeks to politicise post-structuralist theory and combine this with cultural analysis in order to show how rationality and social forms are underpinned by power. It employs a sophisticated synthesis of themes taken from Derrida, Foucault and Lacan (among others) which is representative of a wide range of postmodern theory today. [3]
Now, if the postmodern condition can be defined in terms of 'incredulity towards metanarratives,' then it is the totalising narrative told by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit that is the central exhibit in the postmodern museum of Enlightenment illusions. Hegel's Phenomenology dramatizes the ascent of natural consciousness to self-conscious universality via the famous sequences of struggles to the death for recognition. In many ways, the Phenomenology is a reply to Kantian philosophy, with its insistence on the ultimate unknowability of the real nature of things and its implication that we also cannot really know ourselves or others. Correspondingly, Kant elevates the universal injunction of moral duty above the partiality of action and the context-bound nature of cultural traditions.
For Hegel, this blindness in the midst of Enlightenment is intolerable. We are driven, Hegel supposes, by a desire for self-identity which includes a desire to really know the nature of things and other people. In confronting nature, consciousness realises that it sets the rules up that govern the split between the knowledge of appearances and the truth of the Real (as we might say today). Consciousness becomes self-consciousness and looks to find its self-identity as a self-conscious being in the social world of the struggle for recognition. But independent self-consciousnesses confront each other first as objects, striving to determine the identity of the other while themselves remaining free. This initiates the master-slave and subsequent dialectical pairs, culminating in the dialectic of the unhappy consciousness. The unhappy consciousness is a Kantian moralist, split hopelessly between the universality of its political convictions and ethical certainties, and the particularity of the knowledge of the world that informs its actions. The unhappy consciousness wants its acts to be culturally recognised as having universal significance; but it is hypocritical, since it denies this possibility to others and ultimately to itself. It lapses into virtuous contemplation and moralising, while the vicious way of the world proceeds unhindered. It is only when self-consciousness realises that the universality of action flows from its being a particular contribution to a collective project that this internal split is reconciled and cultural universality (mutual recognition) is achieved. Hegel's concept of ‘ethical life’ involves a rejection of abstract Kantian moralism, in favour of the concept of cultural tradition as the basis for moral life. Ethical life is universal when the cultural traditions are universal and self-conscious - when humanity begins to fashion itself consciously in the medium of universal culture. The French Revolution had, for Hegel, opened just such a period: Hegel argued that this universality was developing all around and had only to be brought to consciousness. “Reason governs the world,” Hegel notoriously announced, in the form of a universal constitutional state and a society organised into social estates where the competition for recognition could be reconciled with the drive towards cultural perfection.
Although postmodernism sets its face against this vision of reconciliation and mutual recognition, Hegel is evaluated as occupying a special place in the struggle between the Enlightenment and modernity:
“Hegel ... appears as located in a watershed between two epochs. In a first sense, he represents the highest point of rationalism: the moment when it attempts to embrace within the field of reason, without dualisms, the totality of the universe of differences. History and society, therefore, have a rational and intelligible structure. But, in a second sense, this synthesis contains all the seeds of its own dissolution, as the rationality of history can only be affirmed at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason. It would, therefore, be sufficient to show that this is an impossible operation, requiring constant violation of the method that it itself postulates - as was already demonstrated in the nineteenth century by Trendelenberg - for the Hegelian discourse to become something very different: a series of contingent and not logical transitions.” [4]
With the claim to have demonstrated this, Laclau and Mouffe believe that they have left behind the dialectic of desire and recognition with its culmination in mutual recognition and self-conscious universal culture. The consciousness of the progress of freedom and the drive towards a state where “reason governs the world” is replaced by a contingent sequence of 'hegemonic blocs'. The postmodern condition is one 'beyond emancipation': we have to abandon the 'Jacobin Imaginary' of total liberation by revolutionary transformation, and adopt a multiplicity of liberation projects that cannot be totalised into one universal act of emancipation.
To this end, postmodern discourse theory seeks to turn modernity against “the rationalist 'dictatorship' of the Enlightenment” [5] by criticising what it takes to be the 'four illusions of Enlightenment'. These are:
Postmodern discourse theory locates itself with the process of secular decentring characteristic of modernity. Marx decentred a united humanity from the centre of the Hegelian totality by showing how the universality of humanism was an ideology in the service of class domination. Marx famously claimed that history was made not by the universal human subject but by class subjects engaged in class struggles. Nietzsche decentred the pretensions of reason to legislate to reality by arguing that “truth is a mobile army of metaphors” and that rationality is discursively constructed in the service of different perspectives. Freud demonstrated that consciousness is not the centre of judgement and will but rather that unconscious impulse and desires drive consciousness.
Postmodern discourse theory therefore proposes that no identity is ever complete. It is on the contrary criss-crossed by divisions, defined in opposition to its various others, and penetrated by a constitutive lack of wholeness that is its very condition of possibility. Postmodern discourse theory suggests that we have to “abandon the discourse of the universal” and recognise the particularity of all claims to knowledge and truth. It is politics - the political decision that founds a rationality, objectivity and identity - that determines the 'foundations' of reality, and this politics is left 'suspended in mid-air' by postmodern discourse theory. We simply have to recognise, it is argued, that the social and cultural systems we have and can imagine - the actual and possible symbolic orders - are contingent and political, not universal, rational, or the immanent the goal of humanity and history.
In fact, the total of these three illusions of Enlightenment can be summarised by the fourth - the essentialist conception of the social totality. The characteristic gesture of the Enlightenment is to seek out an essential foundation 'beneath' the level of surface appearances which is supposed to ground the processes happening in every region of society. The concept of society as a unitary, and fully intelligible, structural totality, which is divided into base and superstructure, has been fiercely criticised by postmodernism. Postmodern discourse theory contends that structural totality “is always surrounded by an 'excess of meaning' which it is unable to master and that, consequently, 'society' as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility.” [6] Or, as Laclau and Mouffe elsewhere express it, “society is not a valid object of discourse”.
Taking advantage of the linguistic distinction between the signifier (word sound or graphic mark), the signified (meaning) and the referent (the object or concept), postmodern discourse theory draws upon deconstruction for an argument linking the construction of cultural meaning through signification to the political process whereby one meaning becomes normative. Derrida argues that:
“If totalisation no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field - that is, language and finite language - excludes totalisation. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.” [7]
In other words, if complete totalisation, and thus closure, is impossible, it is because the absence of a fixed center extends the process of signification within the structure infinitely. In the absence of a complete totalisation, a structure only exists as a field of significations within which an ambiguous and temporary order is established by a multiplicity of mutually substituting centers. The creation of a temporary structural order is conditional upon the exclusion of some marginalised term which threatens the order of the structure and prevents ultimate closure.
With this combination of discourse analysis, postmarxist politics and insights from post-structuralist philosophy, postmodern discourse theory creates a powerful synthesis that seeks to be about as far from Hegel as it can possibly be. I have attempted to summarise the outline of this synthesis as the 'eightfold way' of postmodern discourse theory.
Modernity is characterised by a democratic revolution that renders power an empty place. While sovereignty lies with the people, 'the people' is divided by social antagonisms that prevent 'the people' from being a homogeneous unity capable of self-government. Consequently, no individual or group can occupy the locus of power that provides the imaginary unification of society. The political parties in democratic politics are all aware of the gap between the universality of the people and the particularity of their own identity. Recognition of the constitutive nature of this gap is the condition of possibility for modern democracy. No party can embody the will of the whole people and all attempts to do so must necessarily be viewed as temporary, “as a kind of surrogate, a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign”. [8]
Postmodern discourse theory argues that there is a chasm between the universal and the particular, but it challenges the idea that a radical choice must be made between the universalisation of the particular and the particularisation of the universal. The fundamental claim of discourse theory is that by rethinking the notions of the universal and the particular we can account for their mutual conditioning.
The name for any bid for universality is 'hegemony' - meaning not only intellectual and political leadership, but also the power to define the norms of social action and meaning construction. This happens through alliance politics, where broad historical alliances of social groups make a bid for the empty place of power under the sign of some universal (say, progress, for instance). In this process the coalition partners modify their own identities through the production of internal consensus and seek to exclude some antagonist from decision making and the definition of cultural value (say, militant unions, for instance).
In the absence of a fixed centre, complete totalisation and hence complete closure, becomes impossible. The partial fixation of meaning produces an irreducible surplus of meaning which escapes the differential logic of discourse. The field of irreducible surplus is called the discursive (or field of discursivity) in order to indicate that what is not fixed is discursively constructed within a terrain of unfixity. Discursivity provides the condition of possibility and impossibility of a particular partial fixation of meaning.
So while the unfixed elements of a discourse belong to the field of discursivity, the partially fixed moments of a concrete discourse do not.
The privileged discursive points that partially fix the play of signification are termed empty signifiers or master signifiers. The master signifier creates and sustains the identity of a discourse by constructing a knot of definite meanings. According to the Lacanian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, “this does not imply that is simply the 'richest' word, the word in which is condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it 'quilts'” the point de capiton [master signifier or empty signifier] is rather the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity”. [9] As such, nodal points like 'God,' nation, party or class are not characterised by a supreme density of meaning, but rather by an emptying of their contents, which facilitates their structural role of unifying a discursive terrain. What happens is this: a variety of signifiers are floating in the field of discursivity as their traditional meaning has been lost; suddenly some master signifier intervenes and retroactively constitutes their identity by fixing the floating signifiers within what is called a 'paradigmatic chain of equivalence'.
Any attempt to expand a hegemonic discourse necessarily involves a totalising reduction of the field of the infinite play of meaning. For postmodern discourse theory, the operation of closure is impossible but at the same time necessary; impossible because of the constitutive dislocation which lies at the heart of any structural arrangement, necessary because without that fictitious fixing of meaning there would be no meaning at all.
Hegemonic articulation ultimately involves some element of force and repression. It involves the negation of identity in the double sense of the negation of alternate meanings and options and the negation of those people who identify themselves with these meanings and options. The negation of identity tends to give rise to social antagonism.
According to Laclau and Mouffe, the only alternative to the essentialist logic of a fundamental ground is that the limits of discourse are set by some constitutive beyond. A discourse, or a discursive formation, establishes its limits by means of excluding a radical otherness that has no common measure with the differential system from which it is excluded, and that therefore poses a constant threat to that very system. [10] Laclau calls this a “constitutive outside”. Postmodern discourse theory proposes that this constitutive outside is coterminous with social antagonism, and concludes that social antagonism is the condition of possibility and impossibility of the social.
The function of myth is essentially hegemonic: “it involves the forming of a new objectivity by means of the rearticulation of the dislocated elements”. [11] While the concrete content of myth might be some utopian vision, “the concrete or literal content of myth represents something different from itself: the very principle of a fully achieved literality”. [12] In other words, myth is a metaphor for the absent fullness of an achieved community - that is, a fullness which cannot be realised at present. Myth thereby becomes transformed into a social imaginary. A social imaginary is a horizon in the sense that it is not one object among other objects, but rather the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object. In this sense, the Christian millennium, the conception of progress held by the Enlightenment and positivism, and the communist dream of a classless society are all social imaginaries.
Democratic politics are conditional upon the recognition of the indeterminate character of the universal and the rejection of all attempts to fix its final meaning. Different political forces will nevertheless attempt to hegemonise the content of the universal. The attempt to hegemonise the universal will necessarily involve the production of empty signifiers other than that of 'the people'. The conclusion is that not only is indeterminacy the pre-condition for democracy, but, the “more the political imaginary is organised around empty signifiers, the more democratic that society will be”. [13] Accordingly, the belief in a consensus without conflicts and exclusions must be abandoned. “The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions, nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilise these passions, and to give them a democratic outlet”. [14] This would be done by securing a political consensus on basic democratic values and procedures while allowing dissent over the interpretation of the precise meaning of these values and procedures and their implications for our political choice between different ways of organising society. Within such an agonistic democratic society, enemies would not be destroyed, but turned into adversaries whose politics we might not agree with, but whose existence would be legitimate and should be tolerated. The limit for the agonistic inclusion of enemies as legitimate adversaries is, of course, those who apply anti-democratic means in their attack on the basic democratic values and procedures. According to Laclau and Mouffe, poststructuralist philosophy might help to sustain such an agonistic democracy that is capable of transforming enemies into adversaries.
The standard Marxist reply to postmodern discourse theory is a hostile rejection. It is accused of creating a normative vacuum, of being a theoretically agnostic descriptivism leading only to a logical pulverisation of the social, of being unable to distinguish between institutions and ideologies, of involving a fatal semiotic confusion between the signified and the referent. Postmodern discourse theory is very far from being any of these. Which is not to say that it really understands its own claims - far from it. The only way to arrive at an adequate Marxist critique of postmodern discourse theory is via the passage through a Hegelian criticism of Laclau and Mouffe.
The Hegelian reply to postmodern discourse theory is as powerful as it is simple. Postmodern discourse theory presupposes exactly what it omits: the totality of an intersubjective rationality expressed in the medium of a shared language. Laclau and Mouffe are caught in the standard performative contradiction of postmodernism, namely, in the very gesture with which they deny the possibility of a shared universe of meanings they demonstrate that their argument relies on such a totality for its intelligibility. What their argument says (the constative value of the propositions) and what it does (its performative character) by being said are in contradiction with each other - hence, a 'performative' contradiction.
In the moment in which the theory is articulated, the discursive totality it represents is by definition unintelligible to every other discursive framework. Yet the theory makes a direct appeal to the Left in particular to adopt postmodern discourse theory. Now, the postmodern reply might be that their discourse overlaps with a number of other discourses (structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics) and therefore has some elements but not all in common. Hence its intelligibility stems from the shared meanings it holds with a handful of other discourses, not from some intersubjective totality.
Let's have a look, then, at these 'shared elements'. Since a discourse constructs the frame of objectivity, we can suppose that a discourse provides the criteria for the objectivity of an interpretation. We are dealing here with cases of semantic ambivalence. Take for instance the term hegemony, held in common by Marxism and postmodern discourse theory. Unless the meaning of the term 'hegemony' has something in common between postmodern discourse theory and Marxism, or the meaning of the term is objectively ambivalent (implying that both the Marxist and the postmodern interpretations are valid within both discourses), then there will be no basis for intelligibility between the two discourses. They might both use the term 'hegemony,' but mean completely different things. Hence, in postmodern discourse theory, they would be effectively speaking 'different languages'.
So we have to suppose a region of shared meanings in the overlap between discourses. But this is only possible if one discourse includes the totality of the other within it, since the meaning of all of the elements within a discursive totality is 'fixed' by the master signifier. It follows that postmodern discourse theory must be a discursive totality that includes the discourses to which it appeals, by a totalising appropriative critique.
There is no a priori reason why the totalisation performed by the discourse of Laclau and Mouffe has to stop at the Left. And in fact, it doesn't - in their later work they appropriate elements of liberalism, communitarianism and even the right-wing decisionism of Carl Schmitt. This is, in other words, a shamefaced totalisation, a hidden reference to totality, a totality that dare not speak its name.
Indeed, the evidence of this secret or implicit appeal to totality is scattered all throughout postmodern discourse theory. One of the most important is the notion of the “field of discursivity” as a surplus of meaning excessive to any discursive totality. We recall that the master signifier that totalises a discourse is a representative of the “absent (impossible) fullness of community”. And we also recall that any political symbol possesses a surplus of meaning relative to the political struggles it represents. The master signifier is of course the political symbol par excellence. What, then is this 'surplus of meaning' invoked by the supposedly empty signifier? It is of course the same surplus invoked by the “field of discursivity,” namely, the fullness of community, not as absence but as presence.
We can pursue this criticism further. This totality - the community as that which totalises all of the particular discourses - is given a normative status by the “democratic revolution” that inaugurates modernity. Since this is the revolution that inaugurates modernity, it must be a modern revolution. That is to say, it must obey the rule set forth by postmodern discourse theory of the gap between the universal and the particular. Yet the democratic revolution affects all politics within modernity. It is therefore a universal revolution: the universality of the constitution of the empty place of power (ie. democracy). This democratic revolution is an ongoing process. Therefore every particular project - every bid for hegemony - contributes to this universal project, insofar as it is democratic i.e., it recognises its competitors as democratic antagonists and not as enemies.
This universality which includes both universal and particular is the normative basis for postmodern discourse theory and the reason that Laclau and Mouffe propose radical democracy. So far from ethics and politics being relative to some arbitrary decision, what Laclau and Mouffe give us is an ethical politics grounded in the concrete universal of an ongoing democratic liberation. We are 'beyond emancipation' only because the fundamental liberation has already happened. The efforts of postmodern discourse theory to demonstrate the universality of their claim point towards the means for resolving the differences between discourses, differences that Laclau and Mouffe are keen to deny resolution.
Let's take this analysis the final step. Radical democracy is in fact a proceduralism guaranteeing universal recognition of all democratic claims within the competition offered by representative institutions, and secured by universal cultural agreement. What is the nature of this agreement? It is the recognition that no particular group can incarnate universality but can only temporarily occupy the empty place of power. Why would anyone want to do so, we might ask. According to postmodern discourse theory, any discursive totality, as a partial fixation of meaning, gives rise to the illusion that it is the totality of meaning. This is an unavoidable aspect of modernity, mind you - it is the consequence of fixing the meaning of floating elements through the intervention of some master signifier that constitutes universality and objectivity within a discursive totality. Discourses generate ideology, in other words, the ideological illusion that their particular master signifier is the universal, really represents the absent fullness of community. We recognise this form of reductionism: it is essentialism, the brain-child of Enlightenment. Modernity spawns Enlightenment! This, in Hegelese, is the moment at which modernity 'posits its presuppositions' and becomes a self-replicating totality.
What we have, then, is a situation in which modernity is realising the democratic revolution through the medium of culture. This insight is only available by gaining distance on any particular liberation project and reflecting on the process itself. The name for this reflection is postmodern (or post-structuralist) philosophy and its result is the postmodern condition - modernity, in the happy expression of postmodern discourse theory, “for-itself”. What is this if not universal emancipation through mutual recognition?