Abstract
Ingo Elbe wirft die Frage auf, was bestimmte poststrukturalistische Diskurse dem Populismus und seinen autoritären Verheißungen entgegenzusetzen haben. Genauer inspiziert er dabei Überlegungen von Chantal Mouffe, die in dem Fehlen handlungsfähiger Subjekte und der Undurchschaubarkeit des Sozialen Möglichkeiten zu neuen Bündnissen und Projekten sieht. Hier schließen sich Kollektive auf der Grundlage heroisierender Fiktionen zusammen, die ihre Fiktion allerdings nur in Abgrenzung zu dem, was sie dezidiert nicht sind, unterhalten können. Da Rationalität, Wahrheitsansprüche und überhaupt legitime Universalismen ausgeschlossen werden bzw. als Resultate strategisch verfahrender Machtinteressen verstanden werden, kann es keinen gemeinsamen Grund geben. Konflikte sind also nichts anderes als das Aufeinanderprallen beliebiger und dadurch gleichwertiger Affektgeschehen und der sie begleitenden Fantasien. Jede Auseinandersetzung ist die Manifestation einer Konfliktontologie. Elbe kritisiert, dass diese Überführung von Konflikten und ihren Trägern in ein bloßes Kontingenzgeschehen letztlich einen Determinismus bestätigt, der der Kritik autoritärer Charakterstrukturen erstens die Grundlage entzieht und diese Strukturen zweitens sogar fördert. Zudem besteht bei solchen Überlegungen eine gewisse Inkonsequenz mit fatalen Folgen, wenn sie trotz der Leugnung von Universalien allen Menschen eine Tendenz zu narzisstisch motivierter Kollektivbildung unterstellen, deren spezifischen Inhalt sie dann aber nicht mehr kritisieren können, eben weil sie sich die Grundlage zu solch einer Kritik entzogen haben. Elbe zieht daraus ein zusätzliches Fazit, nämlich dass sich rational und moralisch neutralisierte Konfliktontologien, wie sie Mouffe vertritt, letztlich selbst – wenn auch mehrmals gewendet – als Erzeugnisse des autoritären Charakters entlarven.
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Notes
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The problem here is that this edition is so diffuse that Islamists, too, could agree with this sentence. Concerning “freedom and equality” in this sense look at Nagel 2014, p. 146.
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Translated.
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“Everything is political”, according to the postmodern “affect-theoretician” Jan Slaby (2017, p. 162). Here, Mouffe moves towards Carl Schmitt again: His thesis that “only the actual participant” (Schmitt 2007a, p. 27) is capable of judging who is friend and who enemy, is reused and radicalized in 1933 by him claiming that the “belonging to a people or race” determines the possibility of individuals to judge and estimate any matter (cf. Schmitt 2001, p. 43). With a definition of power, which limits itself to a realization of the one and the exclusion of the other possibility (cf. Mouffe 2005, p. 26), a meaningful differentiation between power and domination as well as a criterium of delimitation of rational and irrational limitation of possibilities gets lost. In the best case, there are pragmatic, but not epistemic reasons to agree with a statement (cf. critically Boghossian 2006). This relativist discourse which determines the particularity of all discourses apparently does not want to be particular, it raises exactly the claim of a recognition by a general language-game, which it denies. This is the self-contradiction of a totalized criticism of reason or rather a relativist social constructivism.
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The terms “authoritarian-masochist” and “collective narcissistic” do not stem from Mouffe.
- 8.
Laclau/Mouffe already stress this with their reception of Sorel in the 80 s – and in a more and more radicalized form in the later work – the irrational basis of the foundation of political collectives through “emotionalization of the agents, arousal of affects and passions, intuitive effects of visual and linguistic imagery and with a non-communicable effect on their collective psyche.” (Priester 2014, p. 90, translated). In Laclau, too, the need for collective-narcissistic re-totalization of the individual which is understood as principally estranged, is in the foreground of his later work, cf. Priester 2014, p. 22 f., 42 ff., 117. With Fromm, it has to be noted that Laclau/Mouffe therein confound, just like the earlier Sartre, existential with historic-socio-political dichotomies and forms of estrangement. Cf. concerning this differentiation: Fromm 1999, p. 43–50.
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The fact that Mouffe uses the term instinct and drive simultaneously shows that it is not about scientific accuracy and that the recourse on psychological theories is exclusively instrumental in order to illustrate her dogma of the political.
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Cf. Laclau 1977, p. 157 according to whom “the specific conditions of production of any discourse … must themselves be understood as originating in other discourses.” When Laclau/Mouffe then stress that “the moment of political articulation could not be reduced to such movements” (Lauclau/Mouffe 1985, p. 32), then it becomes clear that the ‘elements’, too, are discursively generated in their meaning. Why then, do Laclau/Mouffe differentiate between ‘elements’ (e.g. proletariat and bourgeoisie) and ‘moments’ (e.g. proletariat and bourgeoisie as moments of left-wing populistically constructed ‘people’)? “The status of the ‘elements’”, so they write, “is that of floating signifiers, incapable of being wholly articulated to a discursive chain.” (p. 113) It is therefore not about objective interests, structures or requirements of material reproduction, which partly seem identity-shaping and are subsequently hegemonically modified by associative connections. Here, it seems to be formally about signifiers, whose meaning cannot be definitely determined and can constantly change. Urs Stäheli calls this surplus of significance, this “non-fixability of meaning” of social identities the, for Laclau/Mouffe’s way of thinking, constitutive “scope of the political”, which constantly guarantees conflicts and hegemonial shifts (Stäheli 2007, p. 124, translated). The model of identity formation is thereby an infinite regress of discursive constructions: A bigger box always contains smaller boxes, which then again contain nothing less than more boxes of discoursive constructions without a ‘soul’ – “nothing with something around (Nichts mit was drumrum)”, as the German Band Blumfeld once wrote (“Eine eigene Geschichte” from the album “L’etat et moi”). Paul Boghossian (2006) points to this self-contradiction of this “cookie cutter constructivism”.
- 11.
Already in the 1970 s, Laclau asserts (1977, p. 99) that ideological elements and claims “no necessary class connotation”. While e.g. Nicos Poulantzas believes that socialism is a proletarian, nation an immovable bourgeois demand, Laclau assumes that terms such as nation or ‘the Volk’ can be appropriated as ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’. The starting point is the linguistic recognition of de Saussure that signifier (symbol) and signified (meaning) do not necessarily have a connection. According to Laclau, ‘the Volk’ can then be defined coming from a national or a non-ethnical-proletarian conception. The subject position ‘I am a German worker’ means therefore something completely different – at least according to Laclau. Besides this, it can be noted that for Laclau not only ‘the Volk’/nation, but also antisemitism can be progressively appropriated (p. 98). Here at the latest, it becomes clear how dubious the immediate application of linguistic recognitions onto historic-socio-political phenomenon actually is.
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Translated.
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Translated.
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Cf. Schuck 2014. Schuck differentiates between subjective, positional and ethical interests. While subjective interests are individual preferences which are localised in the psyche of agents, positional interests are insofar objective as that they designate institutionalised expectations of behaviour (p. 308), which constitute themselves relatively independent from the performance of interpretation of the agents and which take ownership of agents within the pursuit of subjective interests, without having to affirm them (the positional interests). “Positional interests”, according to Schuck, “subjugate the possibilities of a good life – and not seldom also that of the very survival – socio-structurally limited purposes.” (p. 317, all following quotes translated). They certify the “existence of a causal influence of material circumstances on the efforts and preferences of action” of agents (p. 300) and show that interests are not “produced without preconditions – as if there were not social conditions, but only ‘pure’ social practise which at all times supply their own motifs.” (p. 314) It is therefore, for instance under capitalist conditions of socialisation, the objective interest of a human being without the means of production, to successfully sell his/her labour (positional interest due to social forms), if he/she has the aim of survival (transhistorical content of the interest). It is subjective on the contrary, whether he/she spends his/her loan on Laclau-books or beer (even if these preferences naturally do not emerge independently of socio-politcal factors).
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Laclau/Mouffe 1985, p. 41 f. Finally, according to this theory there are no independent, objective structures, causal relations or normative orders. Every order consists only through the subject which causes order, which here, in comparison to the classical theological occasionalism, is no longer called “god” but “discourse”. Concerning occasionalism in general, cf. Disse 2011, p. 172. This complex, too, was introduced into the political theory by Schmitt at an early stage, cf. Schmitt 1986, p. 74 ff.
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According to Marx and Engels 1956, p. 36.
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Translated.
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Possession of means of production/non-possession, zero-sum relation of variable capital and added value, vagueness of the length of the working day by means of the relation of exchange: labour-loan.
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Translated.
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Translated.
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Eagleton 1997, p. 60. Cf. also the thorough criticism of decisionism in Klar: 2007, pp. 70–80 and Taylor 1964. Therein, Laclaus/Mouffes demarcation of positions which allegedly claim to have found a ‘necessary’ or ‘last reason’ of conflicts (sometimes they even use the term ‘a priori’), a further mean to assert the ‘contingency’ of the reason. Cf. also Priester 2014, p. 133 f. (reference translated), who rightly finds that Laclau “constructs a logically derivable behaviour automatism” in order to hence infer „the inverse conclusion of the social”. The question remains whether Mouffe, with the insinuation of a drive of subordination – and at the same time in an especially crude, naturalistic manner – practises the information of a ‘last reason‘ herself.
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Translated.
- 26.
Cf. critically Priester 2014, p. 61, 131.
- 27.
That anti-plutocratism is a general hallmark of Left- and Right-wing populism is shown in Priester 2012, p. 183, 211, 223 ff. Cf. Sternhell et al. 1994, p. 248: “This was a variation…of the idea of an alliance of all ‘producers’ against all ‘parasites’… [t]his move was not surprising; from the first years of the century, it was one of the main routes of migration of the Left toward fascism.”
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- 29.
Jodi Dean quoted Bargu 2014, p. 718.
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Translated.
- 31.
This differentiation is formulated in earlier writings as the “popular” and “democratic subject position” (Laclau/Mouffe 1985, p. 133): According to Laclau/Mouffe “popular struggles [usw.] “popular struggles only occur in the case of relations of extreme exteriority between the dominant groups and the rest of the community” (p. 133). It remains enigmatic how, simultaneously to such cases of “utmost outwardness” it is possible that there can be an agonal-integrative perspective through a shared band. In other words: If Mouffe wants her agonism, she must give up populism, if she wants populism, she must say goodbye to agonism.
- 32.
It cannot be the task here, to provide an explanation for the complex causes of the surging up populism. Cf. for this Priester 2012, p. 237 ff. On the criticism of disseminated attempts at explanation from the perspective of political science, especially those who work with the “post-democracy”-theorem which comes close to Mouffe’s approach, cf. Jan-Werner Müller 2016, pp. 98–110.
- 33.
Already in Laclau’s adaption of Althusser’s theory of the subject constitution through ‘appellation’, emancipation is understood as a misjudged subjugation, at the time still under a communist collective: Laclau stresses that there are also “ideologies of the dominated sectors” in which the “mechanisms of self-subjection of the individual”, the “ethical compulsion” could serve revolutionary interests through an interpellation to the subject. (Laclau 1977, p. 101). Here, too, subjects are appealed to as individuals, which according to the premises by Laclau and Althusser would mean that an identification as a misjudgment as well as a subjugation is practiced.
- 34.
“What could constitute a ‘tamed’ relation of antagonism…?” “in defusing the potential antagonism that exists in social relations.”
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Creating “channels for the expression of political”.
- 36.
It is telling that it is Mouffe herself who accuses the anti-populist moralism of “perverse” mechanisms (76).
- 37.
Translated.
- 38.
Cf. the following paragraph with Elbe 2015.
- 39.
- 40.
Therefore, Mouffe’s hint that Schmitt criticizes “liberalism’s pretence of complete inclusiveness” and shows that there is “no inclusion without exclusion” (2005, p. 78), is more than opaque.
- 41.
Translated.
- 42.
Consequently, she not only criticises Habermas but also Rorty’s non-rationalist liberal universalism (Mouffe 2005, p. 88 f.), which sees, through economic prosperity and education for sympathy, an accomplishment of the persuasion of the Western model.
- 43.
Cf. also Mouffe 2005, p. 83 f., where “pluralism” takes the place of “an implementation at the world level” of the “Western democracies”.
- 44.
On the level of political science, Albrecht von Lucke (2016) rightly finds strong similarities of Left- and Right-wing populism.
- 45.
Translated.
- 46.
Cf. also Priester 2012, p. 95, 236.
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Elbe, I. (2022). The postmodern Querfront. In: Clemens, M., Päthe, T., Petersdorff, M. (eds) Die Wiederkehr des autoritären Charakters. Kritische Theorien in der globalen Moderne. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36203-4_10
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