Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by Chantal Mouffe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Although heady, there is a reason why this book approaches (post)Marxist theory the way in which it does.
The basic push this book makes in tracing the history of Marxism is to recognize that formal equivalence creates a meta-formality of position that is not equitable with the content occupied by those positions. When we measure class struggle or lay upon a social field certain lines of oppression, the different intersections of these lines create nodes that are formally equal but actually different.
This concept relates directly to the recent rise in feminism of “intersectionality” in which different lines of oppression create localized views that cannot cohere. In other words in terms of feminism, a white woman that grew up in the 50s will have a different concept of feminism than a young middle eastern woman in college in the 2010s than a young white professional woman working in a corporate office in her 30s in the late 1990s. Each of the different social pressures create specific contexts that are inherently unstable. While our need to speak of these different pressures (for Mouffe and Laclau, in a Marxist context) in order to name them and specify how they operate the very act of nominalizing those positions will shift the field so that the context will be subtly different through its articulation. This correlates with the fact that oppression and nominalization are both social practices that operate through the articulatory process.
Much of the book seeks to introduce us to this quandary.
The concept of hegemony arises because of this need to cohere. In a way, Mouffe and Laclau introduce a Kantian-like transcendentalism in order to force a cohension of the mass of these inarticulations. While each localization “sees” its context from its own absoluteness, one that necessarily shifts in relation to other points of view, Mouffe and Laclau force coherency by constantly referencing an unchanging signification through the figure of Hegemony.
Liberalism is often characterized as a calibration of the state to its individuals. Social programs and welfare all engender individual optimization through the administration of the commons. The concept of Hegemony turns this around because in this view identity for each node is calibrated in relation to Hegemony so that each oppressive struggle can be indirectly relatable for each. A transcendental domain is necessary to enforce each node as coexisting with the others. In theory this appears to be the same worldview that most political groups have; but in truth most political views do not necessarily acknowledge the others as being viable views if a given local view supercedes the others’. Hegemony is meant to eliminate this problem of localization so that we get, as with Negri and Hardt a kind of “multitude”. While Multitude is written later, in the 2000s, it does share some features with Hegemony, although the concept of multitude is more a cacophony of incoherency and in that sense less “modernist” than Hegemony.
This “modernist” calibration to Hegemony as a teleological formation of each localization does however, run the risk of creating a fascism. As seen from the view of Hegemony, as Lauclau and Mouffe acknowledge, a revolution is merely only one minority becoming the State, so that its logic (its view) becomes the primary deployment of what everything is. Hegemony does always risk this problem of a minority of One, just as Hegemony runs the risk that a minority may retain power because all the other majorities do not want their peers to attain a more powerful position.
In this sense, while a short book, this is a highly theoretical exercise, one that becomes unclear in regards to practice. While logically sound, its rationalization is founded on a redeployment of the terms of engagement for progress of minority rights, one that would further highlight the relative instability of maintaining any coherent fairness as any expressible localization will shift through the very act of nominalization. While I do not believe they are incorrect, it is difficult to ascertain the pragmatic application of Hegemony in practice. In a way, this calibration of identity towards its others suggest a kind of Heidiggerian stance of dasein to mitdasien, although Mouffe and Lauclau do not make the same error of class equivalency that Heidigger, like Marx, also made.
