Laclau and Democracy in Light of the Current Crisis

The current global economic crisis has obviously given rise to all kinds of legitimate fears. But it has also given rise to expressions of hope. Some, including colleagues contributing to this blog, have spoken of turning points in history, the possible end of the neo-liberal economic orthodoxies which gained institutional power in the late 1970s and 1980s, and hinted at the possibility of a more democratic future coming out of this current crisis.

I share these hopes. It seems to me that the present moment is ripe with potential, and it may in fact be the case that thirty years from now this period will be viewed as the same kind of watershed as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But, unfortunately, I believe the chances remain at least even that very little will change, that this present crisis will have been a hurdle for the expansion of neo-liberalism, only serving to slow it for a time. What will determine which of these possible futures (among others) emerges from the present crisis will be the nature of political action undertaken in the immediate future.

Creston Davis, in his post on this blog from October 4th, gives form to the concerns this crisis has raised for me. In discussing what has happened, he states that “the people finally grasp the truth of capitalism’s brutality,” referring to this as an “awakening” which makes it possible for us to “grasp reality and make it our own again.” He also notes the end of Cark Raschke’s post from Sept. 20, in which he invokes Jacques Derrida to the effect that this crisis “obliges us to think…another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and for justice.”

Again, I share these sentiments of hope. My concern is that we take care to avoid the trap of assuming the inevitability of such changes. There is no guarantee that this is one of the times that will, again in Creston Davis’ words, “inevitably change history.” There is no guarantee that “the people” will experience this crisis as an “awakening,” or that it will open the space for thinking democracy differently.

Let’s start with the notion of democracy. In terms I am drawing from the thought of the political theorist Ernesto Laclau, one could say that “democracy” has become an empty universal in many parts of the world, and certainly in the United States and Western Europe.^[1] Virtually anyone who wants to meaningfully impact society, anyone who wants to gain political traction for her ideas, at the popular level, must appeal to “democracy.” As Jacques Derrida puts it, “there are…claims or allegations of democracy everywhere, everywhere ‘we’ are….”^[2] “Democracy” is a virtually universal signifier (at least in “our” Euro-American context) in the sense that a virtually universal appeal is made to the term to legitimate all kinds of political configurations. And it is this universal appeal which renders the signifier “democracy” “empty”: The reason why people all over the political spectrum can make appeal to same signifier is that it has been emptied of any particular, determinant content.

This signifier becomes universally available precisely because each claimant to the “democratic” title fills the signifier with her own content. What emerges in the context of such an empty universal is a battle of position, according to which different sectors of the socio-political world seek to fill the signifier in such a way that their own, particular signified content is naturalized as the normative content of the universal term.

This is where my concern lies. There is no doubt that for some time a particular neo-liberal socio-political configuration has been the dominant, naturalized signified of “democracy.” The hope is that in the midst of this crisis, the paucity of neo-liberal political and economic configurations will have been demonstrated, leading to the demands of “the people” for more democratic economic and political institutions and structures. The difficulty confronting such hopes is that the proponents of these very same policies have also declared themselves, for the past thirty years, to be “democratic;” their claim has been that neo-liberal socio-political configurations are the result of the power (kratos) of the people (demos). The very real possibility therefore remains that they will somehow recover from this crisis, that neo-liberalism will even emerge on the other end of this gauntlet all the stronger, its survival representing the “triumph of democracy.”

The point is this: simple appeal to a “more democratic” socio-political configuration is not, in itself, sufficient to dislodge the dominant neo-liberal configuration because the latter also claims to embody “democracy.” Those who oppose neo-liberalism cannot place their trust in an organic or spontaneous emergence of democracy or the people in the wake of this crisis. What is required are active efforts to “fill” the signifier “democracy” in new ways. This is why I say that what need is more politics: The displacement of a naturalized meaning of “democracy” and its replacement with some alternative understanding is a political task, in the sense that it is not spontaneous and does not follow conceptually or logically from any set of existing socio-political or economic configurations.

Having stated my concerns, I can state why there is reason to hope. The opportunity to undertake this political task seems to present itself at present in a manner rarely, if ever, present in my lifetime (I am 32). If “democracy” is, indeed, the power of the “people,” what emerges is a unique opportunity to conceive of “the people” in a new way. Laclau has spent his career theorizing about radical politics on the post-Cold War world of advanced capital and identity politics and, in his most recent work, has expressly articulated his theory in terms of “the people.” Laclau theorizes that the social space is marked by divergent social groups whose identities are constituted through their differences from one another, as demonstrated by their divergent political demands. Significant social change can occur when these heterogeneous social groups are articulated as equivalent to each other with regard to some common political opponent. That is, significant social change requires that multiple social groups understand themselves not primarily in terms of their difference from one another, but as equivalent to one another vis-à-vis this common opponent.

What has emerged as a result of this economic crisis is the possibility of articulating such equivalences. That is, to put it in straightforward terms, things have gotten so bad that social groups which normally understand themselves in terms of their differences from one another are beginning to align themselves with one another against a common political enemy: neo-liberalism and its socio-political apparatuses. That is, the dominant socio-political actors and institutions have failed to meet the demands of enough heterogeneous sectors of the social that they can begin to align themselves collectively against that dominant sector. The present moment has created the conditions for an equivalential logic to take hold, which allows for reconceiving “the people” and “democracy.” So, for example, “democracy” can be conceived not as involving primarily the rights of private individuals to capital accumulation, but in terms of more egalitarian popular control of economic mechanisms, of a more equitable social space, and so on.

In Laclau’s thought, the constitution of “the people” through the articulation of equivalences in opposition to a common opponent is the political act par excellence, insofar as it rests on no anterior logic and cannot be understood as the unfolding of any immanent process. “The people” is not a social existent to be uncovered or expressed, but a political task. And this is the point: The present moment gives promise, insofar as this task seems attainable in a way that was virtually unimaginable only a few weeks ago. But the present moment is also perilous, insofar as this moment might be missed, specifically by failing to recognize that any action of “the people” to “grasp reality” and “make it their own,” to again play on Creston Davis’ phrases, requires an active response. Opponents of the neo-liberal order cannot sit back and passively way for the organic or immanent collapse of this order, to be followed by the subsequent rise of “the people.”

My hope remains that this is, indeed, the time not only to hope, but to act, for a democracy-to-come and for justice.

Dan Miller, Ph.D. candidate (ABD), is a part-time instructor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. He is also review editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. He can be reached at [email protected].