Ernesto Laclau

Metaphor and Social Antagonismsi

The order of society is only the unstable order of a system of differences that is always threatened from the outside. As an underlying mechanism that gives reasons for its partial processes, society never actually exists. Indeed, it is because no meaning is actually fixed that there is a space in which hegemonic struggle can take place.

One way of describing my project in this paper is that I want to continue the work of Max Black by extending the domain of metaphor from the area of science to that of social antagonisms. My argument will revolve around three basic concepts: hegemony, discourse, and antagonism.ii I will present these three concepts against the background of the thesis that society is ultimately impossible. Let me start by referring to a classic text in the history of Marxism, one that contains, in nascent form, many of the problems I will analyze: Rosa Luxemburgs Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. But let me first say something about the moment in which her book was written. The book was part of a considerable discussion about the role of mass strikes in overcoming the capitalist system subsequent to their successful use during the first Russian revolution. But, in fact, the book was also at the center of a still larger discussion concerning what was then called, for the first time, the crisis of Marxism, a phrase coined by Thomas Massaryk. The crisis was the result of a set of historical processes I can only briefly describe here. First, the great depression that had started in 1873 had come to an end toward 1896, and Marxists began to realize that this was not the last crisis of capitalism. Second, with the boom that ensured the end of the depression and lasted until the beginning of the First World War, many of the old certitudes were put into question. Among these, one in particular created a problem in the image of the identity of the working class which had existed up to that moment. This was the increasing dissociation between economic and political struggle, or the polarization within socialist politics between trade unions and the party as the center of decision. This was perhaps the first moment in the history of socialism where one sees a breakup of the different positions of the class subject and, increasingly, a decentering of classes as a nucleus of socialist politics. Finally, from the moment of crisis on, the identity of the working class was perceived increasingly as split. It is the problem of this split identity that Rosa Luxemburg deals with in her book. Luxemburgs answer to the problem of the unity of the working class involves what today we would call the unfixing of the meaning of any social event. She argues as follows: We are wrong in trying, /249/

a priori, to determine or fix the meaning of the strike or the party as moments in a socialist transition because, in fact, the unity of the working class is not achieved in that way. Instead, the unity of the working class is the process of the revolution itself. Luxemburg describes Russia at the time as a country in which there was widespread repression and, as a consequence, an accumulation of unfulfilled democratic demands. Then, in one locality we have a strike of a particular fraction of workers around a very localized and particular issue. But in this climate of generalized repression, the meaning of this strike cannot simply rest there. Immediately, this strike begins to represent, for the whole population, a resistance against the regime. And immediately the meaning of this event is transformed into political act. This, Luxemburg says, is the unity between political and ideological demands. It is not a unity that is given by any structure determinable a priori, but is constructed in this process of what today we would call the overdetermination of the meaning of a social event. The following year, another strike takes place in a different locality and about a different issue, not a union issue, but the same process of unity takes place. We see here that the unity of the class is precisely a symbolic unity. We have a symbol whenever the signified is more abundant than, or overflows, a given signifier. That is to say, we have a process of condensation. And in this process of condensation, the unity of a series of signifieds is created. If the unity of the class is created through this process of symbolic representation, the unity of the class itself is a symbolic event and belongs consequently to the order of the metaphor. This is the most profound sense of the spontaneity of Rosa Luxemburg: the perception that there is a kind of unity between elements in a social formation which totally escapes the category of necessity that had so far dominated the discourse of the Second International. But at the very moment she gives a place to this opening, she also closes her discourse in an essentialist way. There is, after all, a problem with this way of presenting the unity of the class. Here, two discourses are producing contradictory effects in Luxemburgs text. If the class is united through overdetermination of different struggles, why does the resulting entity have to be a class? Why could it not be some different type of social identity or social subject? Her answer is the traditional, rather then uninteresting one: because of the necessary laws of capitalist development. But if we withdraw the essentialist assumption, we immediately see, in a microcosm, many phenomena that are going to dominate the history of the twentieth century. In the countries of the Third World, this process of overdetermination of popular struggles creates social identities that are not essentially class identities. And in the case of the advanced capitalist countries, we also see that the dispersion of social struggles had created new forms of subjectivity which escape any kind of class identification. These developments introduce some gaps into the argument concerning the necessary laws of capitalist development as presented by the Second International. The concept of hegemony emerged in the Marxist tradition precisely as a concept destined to fill this gap. It emerged in the discussions of social democracy in Russia, discussions about the relationship between social classes and democratic tasks. For the old essentialist scheme, which was /250/

defended by Mensheviks in the last moment, there is a necessary succession of stages. The argument was that the bourgeoisie was extremely weak in the Russian case and could not take up its own democratic task, so it had to be taken up by the proletariat. The problem was the significance of this relationship of taking up tasks that do not correspond to the class essence of the subject as proposed by the Second International. What is the importance of this gap which had emerged in the chain of necessity? Within the Russian debates, Plekhanov argued that it was minimal and that the working class simply had to force the bourgeoisie to take up this task, while Trotsky argued that the gap was maximal and required a total transference of the democratic task to a new class subject in the process of revolution. But in the discourse of all the participants in this debate, this gap was seen as an abnormal situation that subsequent capitalist development was going to supersede. That is to say, the necessary complement of the Russian revolution was going to be the European revolution and, in this sense, the gap which the concept of hegemony tried to cover had itself to be quickly superseded. But, on the contrary, this gap became wider and wider. Thus, in the discourse of Leninism, this gap covers an entire historical space because the contradiction of the imperialist stage is such that there is no precise and necessary relation between the degree of economic development of a given country and its readiness for revolutionary process. Trotsky developed the consequences of this analysis when he argued that combined and uneven development is the historical law of our time. But then, do we not have to ask ourselves, if this unevenness is constitutive of all struggles, what exactly is normal development? The very idea of normal development has completely collapsed, and the identity and nature of political relations, once this category of necessity collapses, have to be out in question. This separation between those tasks that are essential to a class and those that are external to that class but have to be taken up by it creates a complex dialectic between interiority and exteriority. Once this class has taken up these democratic or popular tasks and enters into a complex system of political and social relations of a new type not predetermined by the class nature of the subject, this relation comes to be an integral part of the subjectivity of the class. Consequently, either the class ceases to be merely a class or, on the contrary, when viewed from the outside, the class is taking a purely instrumental and external relation with these tasks in order to esure a succession of political effects. Lenin made a rather eclectic attempt to solve this problem. Leninism, and the whole tradition of the Comintern, wanted to accept the complexity of the political scenarios in which working-class practices had to operate. Those complex scenarios were not explained at all by the pure relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is to say, by the struggle that was internal to the very identity of the class. On the other hand, Leninism wanted to maintain a pure class identity. Historical subjects were always classes. They attempted to fill this gap through the concept of the vanguard party which represented both the historical interests of the working class and a system of political calculation, which, while maintaining the homogeneity of class subjects, engaged in very complicated political operations. These in turn gave rise to a totally militaristic language. The essential definition of historical subjectivity as class remained as un-/251/

questioned as in Kautskyism. (I have elsewhere described Leninism as the surrealist moment of Kautskyism.) The problem of the relation between the internal and external exists at many theoretical levels and has a long history in Western thought. It was a central problem in Hegels philosophy as well as in much of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. The debate between Bradleys idealism and Russells logical atomism is, to a large extent, a discussion about the internal or external character of relations for certain series of given identities. In Gramsci, we find a new turning pointing this transformation of the dialectic between internal and external. In his concept of hegemony, he accepts the idea that many relations that do not have a class character in fact come to constitute the very identity of class subjects. There is no direct continuity between political subjectivity and classes in the economic sense. The dialectic between the internal and external has evolved to a new point. The concept of hegemony no longer involves the direction of elements whose identity remains the same through all the processes, as in Lenins argument. On the contrary, hegemony is a process of rearticulation, of the internalization through new articulations of something that was external. However, Gramsci still retains an element of essentialism because this process of interiorization of the external always has to take place around a class core. While the class core remains very deeply buried below an ensemble of layers, it is this class core that we see dissolving today. We can see not only that hegemony can take place whenever there is this process of the internalization of the external but also that there is no necessary core around which this internalization has to take place. In fact, what we are seeing today in advanced capitalist countries is a dispersion of positionalities of the subject, of the proliferation of struggles, none of which has an essence in itself; rather, each depends upon an ensemble of relations that need not be organized around a class core. From this, however, many problems emerge. First, if hegemony is no longer the hegemony of the class subject, whose hegemony is it? And second, what is involved in these hegemonic relations? To address these questions, I need to move from the historical terrain to a set of more theoretical considerations. I shall begin to answer these questions from a point, one among many possible starting points, within the trajectory of the Althusserian school. Althusser attempted to break with essentialist conceptions of social relations, and this break took place around the central concept of overdetermination. As this concept has been so frequently misunderstood as multiple causality, it is necessary to go back to its initial meaning in Althusserian analysis and to the precise constructive effects that this concept had to play within the field of Marxist dicursivity. For Althusser, it was not a causal concept at all. The concept was taken from two existing disciplines: specifically, linguistics and psychoanalysis. In these disciplines it has an objective dialectical connotation, particularly in psychoanalysis; and since this objective connotation is related formally to the content it designates, Althussers borrowing is neither arbitrary not metaphorical. That is to say, for Althusser there was a specific logic involved in psychoanalytic relations which had to be incorporated into historical analysis. The concept of overdetermination in Freud only makes /252/

sense within a symbolic world and involves the symbolic constitution of relations. Taking us back to the same point I drew earlier in my discussion of Luxemburg, Althusser initially uses the concept in his analysis of the Russian revolution. The deepest sense of the concept in Althussers analysis is that any kind of social relation is constituted in a symbolic way. However, the full development of the concept, its full constructive effect, could not be reached because Althusser attempted to make it compatible with another element of his theoretical system, namely, the concept of determination in the last instance by the economic. The latter concept had a double effect, even if determination in the last instance never arrives, as Althusser insisted; it is there, producing some precise theoretical effects in his discourse. First, it says that there is one element, the economy, which, which in whatever social formation we are speaking about, has to be defined separately from any kind of social relations. Otherwise, the concept of overdetermination in the last instance would be meaningless. Second, it implies the that society has an essence. Despite whatever mediating processes are involved, determination in the last instance defines the locus at which the particular effect-society is created. And once we have accepted that society has an ultimate structure, that is ultimately an intelligible and rational object, the concept of overdetermination can only circumscribe a field of contingent effects within a framework of necessity, which is the horizon of any possible social meaning. Subsequently, in both France and England, there was a sustained deconstruction of the Althusserian discourse which led to the liquidation of the architecture of the whole Althusserian system. However, this project did not redefine or reestablish what overdetermination means; there was no way back to the concept of overdetermination. On the contrary, it involved a logistic attempt to show that there was really no connection at all between elements where one had supposed the existence of a necessary connection. This project was carried out to its ultimate conclusion in the work of Hindess and Hirst in England, for example. The abandoned practically all the concepts of Marxist theorization through a purely logical critique of the consistency of Althusserian connections. The problem with this position is not their surrendering of the language of Marxism but rather that this is ultimately self-defeating. If you start by saying that there are no logical connections between two elements, then you have to ask about the internal connections within the elements themselves; and you will have to find there also that there are no necessary connections. The problem with this type of exercise is, simply put, that the structure of the social world is not the structure of a conceptual order. Here we can see an increasing polarization between an essentialism of the structure and an essentialism of the elements. That is to say, we are right back to the polemic between Bradley and Russell: either a logicism of structure or a logical atomism. The question is how we move outside of this critical situation. I think the way out is to start by considering the very terrain on which these two extreme positions constructed their discourse, the terrain of a closed system. Either we have a closed system of identities (Russell, Leibnitz) or a closed system of structure (Spinoza, Bradley, Plekhanov). But both position accept that society as such is a closed system. If we abandon this assumption, many of the theoretical problems discussed here begin to dissolve. Why? Because if the system is not closed, then the meaning of each /253/

element of the system and of the system as such is constantly threaten form the outside. Both relations and identity are always in a precarious state because there are no signifieds that can be ultimately fixed. In other words, relations never succeed in totally absorbing the identity every element. Each element has a surplus of meaning because it cannot be located in a closed system of difference. And at the same time, no identity is ever definitely acquired. Such a situation, in which there is a constant movement from the elements to the system but no ultimate systems or elements these are finally metaphoric expressions a structure in which meaning is constantly negotiated and constructed, is what I call discourse. The concept of discourse describes the ultimate nonfixity of anything existing in society. One must, of course, not reduce discourse to speech and writing but instead expand it to any kind of signifying relation. This concept of discourse is the terrain on which a concept of hegemony can be constructed. The closest use I find to the notion of discourse that I am proposing is in Derridas Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourses of Human Sciences. There he links the notion of discourse to the dissolution of any transcendental signifier. He argues that when the transcendental signifier is recognized as an illusion, when all we have is the constant sliding of difference, everything becomes discourse because discourse is precisely the moment of nonfixity. In other words, discourse is not a mental act in the usual sense. Material things, external objects as such, also participate in discursive structures. This is not unlike Wittgensteins concept of language games, which involves the constitution of a signifying order in which the materiality of the things themselves participates. Thus, the concept of discourse requires a radical reconsideration of the nature of the sign. To what extent do the two poles of language the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic involve two incompatible logics? I shall come back to this question at the end of my argument. Now let me turn to the notion of hegemony. Society as a structured space, as the underlying mechanism that gives reasons for or explains its own partial processes, does not exist, because if it did, meaning would be fixed in a variety of ways. Society is an ultimate impossibility, an impossible object; and it exists only as the attempt to constitute that impossible object or order. That is to say, the order of society is the unstable order of a system of differences which is always threatened from the outside. Neither the difference nor the space can be ultimately sutured. We can speak about the logic of the social, but we cannot speak of society as an ultimately rational and intelligible object. And the fact that we cannot speak of society in such a way is why we have to have a concept of hegemonic relations. Hegemonic relations depend upon the fact that the meaning of each element in a social system is not definitely fixed. If it were fixed, it would be impossible to rearticulate it in a different way, and thus rearticulation could only be thought under such categories such as false consciousness. If no meaning is ultimately fixed, conquered, mastered, then there is a space in which hegemonic struggle can take place. For example, I would say that the concept of hegemony is perfectly relevant to feminism because feminism can only exist in a hegemonic space. Consider the signifier woman: what is its meaning? Taken in isolation it has no meaning; it must enter into a set of discursive relations to have some meaning. But, on the one hand, woman can enter into relation of equivalence with family, /254/

subordination to men, and so on; and, on the other hand, woman can enter into discursive relations with oppression, black people, gay people, and so on. The signifier woman in itself has no meaning. Consequently, its meaning in society is going to be given only by a hegemonic articulation. Here Lacanian concept of point de caption, the nodal point that partially fixes meaning, is profoundly relevant for a theory of hegemony. Can one ever confront this movement of difference, this continuous deferral of the moment of reaching the transcendental signified? Are there certain experiences in which the vanity of the movement itself, the ultimate impossibility of any objectivity, manifests itself? Such a moment exists in society it is the moment of antagonism. I shall argue briefly that, first, antagonistic relations are not objective relations and, second, that antagonisms take place outside rather than inside society because antagonism is what limits the societal effect. There have been many discussions about antagonism, from theories of conflict to Marxist theories of contradiction, but most of these have taken for granted the meaning of what it is to be in an antagonistic relation and then they move immediately to speak about concrete antagonisms. I can use the discussions of Lucio Colletti and Dela Volpean school to describe the problem of antagonism. Colletti poses the distinction between real opposition and contradiction, which he takes from Kants discussion (in The Critique of Pure Reason) of Leibnitzs theory of contradiction. Briefly, a relation of real opposition is between two things, while a relation of contradiction is between propositions. A car crash is a real opposition, while asserting I am A and I am not A at the same time is a contradiction. Colletti argues that in a materialist perspective, which refuses to reduce the real to the concept, the concept of contradiction can play no function. We have to describe the entire ensemble of social antagonisms in terms of a theory of real opposition. But I dont think antagonistic relations are relations between things. A car crash is not an antagonistic relation; there is certainly no enmity between the two intervening entities. The concept of real opposition is either a metaphor from the physical world translated into social world or vice versa, but clearly it is not useful to try to subsume the two types of relations under the same category. Can we describe antagonisms, the, as contradictions? Given that we contradict each other constantly in social life, some people have concluded that contradiction does not necessarily involve any idealistic subordination of the real to the concept. For example, Jon Elser has argued that it is one thing to assert that the real is contradictory and other to assert that there are contradictions in reality; that is to say, there are situations in reality that can only be understood in terms of contradiction. However, even accepting the possibility of contradictions in reality, I do not think that we can speak of antagonisms as contradictions. After all, somebody can have two absolutely contradictory beliefs but they cannot live this contradiction in antagonistic terms. Codes of law can be partially contradictory without this contradiction generating any kind of antagonism. So how are we to explain antagonism? We might begin to rethink the question by asking what the categories of real opposition and logical contradiction have in common. The answer is that both are objective relations; they produce their effects within a system of differences. Alterna-/255/

tively, I want to argue that antagonistic relations are not objective relations at all but involve the collapse of any possible objectivity. In an antagonistic relation there is the particular possibility the object, the entity that I am, is negated. On the one hand, I am something, a pure presence, logos, identity, and so on. On the other hand, this presence is precarious and vulnerable. The threat which the other represents transforms my own being into something questionable. But at the same time those who are antagonizing me are also not a full presence because their objective being is a symbol of my not being; and in this way, their objective being is overflowed by a meaning that fails to be fixed, to have a full presence. Thus, antagonism is neither a real opposition nor a logical contradiction. A real opposition is an objective relation between things; a contradiction is an equally objective relation between concepts. An antagonism is the experience of the limits of any possible objectivity, the way in which any objectivity reveals the partial and arbitrary character of its own objectification. To use a simile from linguistics, if the language is a system difference, than antagonism is the failure of difference. And in this sense antagonism locates itself in the limits of language and can only exist as a disruption of language, that is, as a metaphor. If you examine any sociological or historical account of concrete antagonisms, you will find that the account explains the conditions and the processes that made the antagonism possible but becomes silent in the face of having to explain the antagonistic relation as such. For instance, those who explain how landlords began to expel peasants from the land inevitably reach a point at which they commonly say, And at this moment, logically, the peasants reacted. There is a gap in the text, and you, the reader of the account, must fill in the gap with your common sense, your experience, and so on. Antagonism is something that is showable but not sayable (using the Wittgensteinian distinction). Antagonism is the limit of the social, the witness of the ultimate impossibility of society, the moment at which the sense of precariousness reaches its highest level. Antagonism operates within a system of difference by collapsing differences. And differences are made to collapse by creating the chains of equivalence. For instance, if you say that, from the point of view of the interests of the working classes, liberals, conservatives, and radicals are all the same, I have transformed three elements that were different into substitutes within a chain of equivalence. If difference only exists in the diachronic succession of the syntagmatic pole, equivalence exists at the paradigmatic pole. Equating differences reduces the possible differential places the system can have. This is why any antagonism always tends to disrupt a system of differential positionality and to simplify the social space. Ultimately, antagonism can only operate in a world that is divided between two opposed camps, two paratactic successions of opposed equivalences. Why is this so? Because if we introduce a tertium quid, it immediately creates a precise location for each of what were previously two camps. And in this sense, antagonisms transform the two poles in objective relations. Antagonism only fully develops in a radically sharp opposition between two camps, with a frontier internal to the societal effect. To conclude, I want to raise two sets of questions that place the concept of antagonism into the context of contemporary political struggles. First, to what extent does the fact that left-wing politics in advanced in-/256/

dustrial societies is ceasing to be a politics of the frontier the result of the increasing difficulty of dividing the social space into two camps? In this sense, we are in transition to a new type of society in which the plurality of antagonisms cannot create the politics of the frontier in the traditional sense in which left-wing politics has been understood. And second, does the proliferation of social spaces divided into two camps give us the way to accede to a new conception of politics in which the unity and homogeneity of the politics world cannot be assumed?
i From: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 249-257 ii The present essay was delivered orally at the conference that provided the basis for this volume. The full argument is developed in the first three chapters of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985).