Marxism has dominated Leftist political practice since its conception. Today, however, Marxism dominates predominately by virtue of its absence. Marxism has been dealt some traumatic blows, both intellectually and politically. Most noticeable in this regard has been the fall of ‘actually existing socialism’ following its symbolic death towards the end of the 20th century. This death has been accompanied by a loss of faith in the essentialist interpretations of history and/or the hope of there being a revolutionary subject. Without the presence of an actually existing communism, or hope of a revolutionary subject which might restore history, Marxism appears as dead as Fukuyama’s sense of history.
Marxism now exists only as passing reference to the bad old days, or, for some, the good old days of certainty. This break has been both ontological and political. The postmodern turn, with its associated focus on language and on particularity has been combined with the decline of communism and the increasingly resigned dispossession of the proletariat. Moreover, the events of 1968 – which simultaneously launched the start of a number of ‘new social movements’ and killed off the hopes of many a revolutionary – and of 1989, finally finished off Marxism as a political cause even if some outposts and out of fashion theorists, such as Žižek, did not get the message. These events, combined with the ‘turn to language’ that characterised the move towards postmodernity, meant that theorists could no longer speak of class struggle, of communism, and of the revolutionary subject, without an ironic smirk.
In this chapter we shall return the losses and gains for Marxism after its invasion by analytic concerns about the signifier. Rejecting the initial positivism of Marxism, we consider the ‘turn to language’ that has called into question the foundational fundamentals of Marxism. This discursive turn found a willing participant within Marxism itself as a way of explaining the failure of history to bring about its own consummation, and of the revolutionary subject to advance that progression. In doing so, Marxist theory moved away from the economy of historical materialism and into culture. What began as a supplement, however, has ended up colonising the entire approach such that the signifier ‘Marx’ appears to be no longer required in Leftist political practice.
Such a dismissal has been a major loss for global politics. The withdrawal from the universal and emancipatory dimension of Marxism has allowed for circumstances in which global capitalism has become more widely influential than any mode of politics in history. Today it seems the only feasible alternative to the market is a withdrawal into various religious fundamentalisms, themselves a reaction to the instability of capitalism and of its attendant social inequality.
While a move away from essentialism in favour of a focus on culture, on language, and on the politics of enjoyment might generally be applauded, the losses have been more significant. In particular forms of postmodern thought have sought to distance themselves from any sense of widespread emancipation, revolution and certainly any notion of the collective Good. Moreover, a gap has opened up between postmodernity and the economic. As a result, the Left – either in terms of the turn to postmodernity or in more administrative forms – has not been able to establish a critical sense of political economy and in particular politics after the discursive turn.
Towards the end of the 20th Century, however, Laclau’s re-reading of the Marxist category of hegemony offered the possibility of returning to the question of universality within the realm of discourse. Yet, although Laclau’s work provided a break from the flighty dominance of postmodern thought, his post-Marxism operates through a distancing of analysis from the economy. For Laclau and other post-Marxists, the economy was an element of discourse and thus could not be distinguished from the political. Whilst we might agree that the economy could not be anything but discursive, it is nonetheless vital to insist upon the role of the economy.
Two substantive consequences flow from Laclau’s conflation of politics and the economy. Firstly, he ends up largely ignoring the economy and capitalism in favour of democracy and the freedom provided by dislocations in the symbolic order. The materiality of class struggle or the suffering of bodies appears not to be on Laclau’s agenda. Secondly, Laclau reduces politics to discourse at the expense of materiality. Laclau’s ontology does not specify a driving source, as such, if language is only held together by reference to itself and politics is purely discursive, then fundamental political change should be relatively commonplace. If Laclau has rejected essentialism in favour of contingency, then political practices remain curiously stubborn.
In order to return to both the economy and materiality in Marxism, I turn to psychoanalysis, particularly Žižek’s Lacanian psychoanalysis. I find that although psychoanalysis and Marxism have a difficult relationship, the particularly Lacanian conception of language provides the possibility of restoring some of the traditional value of Marxism. Again, however, this comes at a cost as the potentially nihilistic failure of language to suture itself continues to haunt politics.
Positive Marxism
Marx’s work is often assumed to be the quintessential example of essentialism, from his grand explanation of the historical destiny of the working class to the inalienable good represented by communism. Certainly, much of postmodernity is built upon a rejection of this image. While we might acknowledge that Marx’s understanding of the essential direction of history might fit this image, ironically his conception of communism may have more in common with the postmodern rejection of abstract moralism. Nonetheless, the consequence of the turn to language has been a tendency to reject both the inevitability and scale of Marx’s theory of history, resulting in a breakdown in the political efficiency of Marxist politics.
Marx’s work was a fusion of description and prescription as he sought to develop a philosophy which changed what it sought to understand (Eagleton, 1997: 3). Marxism can be considered an ‘Emancipatory Philosophy’ which seeks to develop a relationship between epistemology and politics. Marx argued that an understanding of the contours of capitalism – particularly by the proletariat, who both suffer most from capitalism and are most able to act against it – would be enough to produce a revolutionary class transformation. Of course, knowledge does not bring change in the way Marxists imagined[1]. Indeed, much of the history of Marxism after Marx has considered why knowledge of exploitation under capitalism either remains hidden or has no effect upon those who are exploited – as we shall expand on throughout the remainder of this thesis, much of this explanatory duty has fallen to psychoanalysis.
Although Marx argued that historical change required a revolutionary subject rather than a teleological sense of itself, he very much relied upon a deterministic theory of history based around the materiality of production. This determinism can be represented by Marx’s supposed ‘base-superstructure’ model, through which he suggested that the mode of production came to determine political affairs. This model is based upon the following statement from Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy;
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Marx & Engels, 1980: 11-12)
From this idea, Marx argued that all social change comes from contradictions in the form of the economy. As such, the revolutionary transformation from capitalism to socialism and finally communism would come from the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. In this sense the ‘superstructure’ only mediated against the material contradictions of the economy (Eagleton, 1997: 13).
Moreover, Marx conceived that the human essence could be derived from the materiality of production, production here being divorced from the strictly economic. If postmodernity – and later modernity to an extent – has rejected any sense of foundationalism, Marx argued that ‘species being’ is the material ground for the human condition (ibid.: 17). Species being embodies both Marx’s deterministic view of materiality and production but also his conflation of description and prescription. For Marx, species being – how we are – determines how we should be.
Species being, otherwise known as ‘species essence’ (depending on the translation of the German Gattungsewesen) attempts to capture the social yet materialised nature of the human condition. What is essential to our species being is the recognised interdependence of human beings, a social bond required by the necessity of material production (production here is not reduced to economy). Through the specialisation of labour which characterises production under capitalism, Marx argued that the worker is alienated from this human essence; communism would bring about the end of alienation.
There is, of course, much more to be said about Marx’s conception of human nature and the possibility of avoiding its alienation. It is not, however, my intention to do so in this project. Rather mu task here is to reveal the extent to which Marx attempted to anchor his work in the kind of foundational ground specifically rejected in postmodernity.
As well as Marx’s concept of human essence, postmodern discourses have sought to move away from both the grand narrative of history and the sense of morality which is presumed to prevail throughout Marxism. In terms of a grand narrative, Marx argued that history before communism (which he labels pre-history) has been the story of class struggle as the forces and relations of production come into contradiction. It is through this narrative that Marx explained what he conceived as the major epochs of history; from primitive communism or tribal production to ancient, feudal and finally the capitalist mode of production. Each revolution in production had been caused by a breakdown in the relationship between those that control production and those who produce. This process proceeds, according to Marx, by way of the ‘iron laws of history’. Nonetheless, history for Marx was not a teleological process; rather history proceeds through the embodied actions of man. For this reason, although Marx argued that the transformation from the capitalist to communism mode of production was inevitable, he relied upon the proletariat as the revolutionary subject which would realise their destiny through self-knowledge of their historical position.
Certainly, Marxism affirms a grand explanation of the existing but whether it offers a sense of morality beyond this is a matter for debate (see Brenkett, 1983; Rosen, 2000; Wood, 2004: 18). Eagleton (1997: 43) asserts that Marxism is not structured around an abstract idealism but, rather, a rejection of the apparent contradiction between the ideals of modernity and the practicalities of capitalism. Marx’s rejection of capitalism is not so much in the name of the full expression of species being under communism but, rather, the end of the contradiction within capitalism that, according to Eagleton; “In accumulating the greatest wealth that history has ever witnessed the capitalist class has done so within the context of social relations which have left most of its subordinates hungry, wretched and oppressed” (ibid.: 44).
Marx did not suggest that communism represented any sense of the ‘Good’. Indeed, he rejected abstract moral explanations, refusing to critique capitalism in these terms. Marx argued that morality was just the ideology by which the ruling elite justify the existing relations of production (Wood, 2004: 127-142). Morality was never abstract in the sense of being outside of history, consisting of idealistic laws and standards of behaviour but, rather, sprung from existing material conditions. By contrast to utopian socialists of his time, Marx did not specifically argue that the wage-labour system was an injustice but, rather, the only form of economic justice available within capitalism. Although he might have used the term ‘exploitation’ to describe the vulnerability of labour to capital that produces surplus-value and the conditions of the worker, he did not use this term pejoratively (see ibid.: 242-264).
Although Marx did not explicitly reference his critique of capitalism to an abstract moralism, there does appear to be a hidden morality implicit in his work. One does not implore people to ‘throw off their chains’ in the name of history alone. Not only is Marx’s work often full with depreciatory terms such as ‘Robbery’ and ‘Injustice’ but his understanding of the alienated subject of capitalism as at odds with their ‘species being’ implies an understanding of the Good, even if Marx was unwilling to prescribe it any further in his conception of communism. Moreover, statements like ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!’ from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program appear to be as much of a moral imperative as anything we might find in the likes of Kant. Indeed, the Communist Manifesto forms a very programmatic statement – written as it is for a specific political purpose – although it was one that was at odds with the general thrust of Marx’s work. Nonetheless, Marx certainly had a strong dislike for the contemporary order and an equally forceful commitment to the possibilities of the future. Even if Marx’s original work was not a discourse of morality, Marxism and the forms of communism which have followed cannot be considered in the same light[2]. If Marx’s sense of essentialism was limited to history, much of the Marxism which followed installed communism as the transcendental sense of the Good.
In this sense, whilst we would do well to note Marx’s ambiguity in regards to morality, the construction of Marxism to which we respond in this thesis holds to an historical grand narrative and the transcendental Good of communism. I do so not to develop a straw-man which would allow for a cleaner academic argument but, rather, as a consideration of the consequences of Marx’s work. It is possible that Marx himself considered morality to be contingent but that has not been the predominant application of his politics. Moreover, Marxism has certainly relied upon a foundation but only in a descriptive conception of the path of history. For Marx, however, the descriptive merged into the prescriptive such that he did not require a moral foundation; history provided it for him. In doing so, Marx believed that he had circumvented the need for a moral foundation.
The relationship between Marxism, morality, and essentialism is obviously a difficult one – it could make for the foundations of a thesis in itself. Anything produced in this short section will be insufficient. Nonetheless, the vital point to be taken from this section is that Marxism, and the forms of communism that followed, relied upon a determinate sense of history, one that stemmed from an essential foundation. As a corollary, the impotence of Marxism as a response to capitalism in the 21st century came about because of the twin failure of the totalitarian regimes inspired by his work and the meta-narrative of history which suggested the inevitable transition between capitalism and communism. Marxism lost its efficiency as an intellectual and political current because the explanations and politics it relied upon were no longer considered valid, in large part of because of their failure as a political doctrine.
In response to these failures, Marxists began to both consider alternative forms of politics and less deterministic conceptions of history. This latter consideration turned to culture and politics as more than a simple reflection of the mode of production. In so doing this rethinking of Marxism became entangled with the reconceptualisation of culture itself and what came to be known as the ‘discursive turn’. Whilst this turn provided a necessary rethinking of Marxism, much has been lost.
Ontology and the Discursive Turn
The turn to language – otherwise known as the linguistic or discursive turn – which has dominated social theory since the 1960s is characterised by the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent development of post-structuralism. The focus on the ontological dominance of language turned the issue of representation and truth into a dilemma for modernism and a site of the state of impossibility for the postmodern. Rather than conceiving words to be an imitation of the thing they seek to represent, Saussure contended that meaning develops only in relation to other signifiers; meaning develops from the differences between signifiers, not from the referent. For this reason the signifier is arbitrary, contingent upon a history of relationships with other signifiers such that meaning is ultimately differential rather than natural. Because meaning is differential, there are no positive meanings – there are no signifiers which mean in and of themselves – and language becomes a negative substance (Ashenden, 2005: 197).
Saussure, however, considered language to be a system in the sense that all differential meanings form a closed chain: structuralism, for post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida, was not radical enough. Structuralism still reproduced the logic and pathos of Western metaphysics, giving language a systematic presence. Instead, Derrida problematised the notion of language as a system, describing it as ‘a structure lacking any centre’ (Derrida, 1967: 352) . In language, meaning is always deferred, and vitally does not catch up with itself; meaning is always ‘still to come’.
The turn to language led to the dominance of negative ontological theory. It rejected not only a grounding in a natural referent but also in a transcendental signifier; a signifier with a positive meaning that could somehow ‘fix’ the contingency of all meaning. In Marx’s terms this was the mode of production from which the superstructure developed. The rejection of the transcendental signifier has had immense implications for social theory and political practice. In theoretical terms, because any sense of meaning could only be grounded in language itself there is no outside to language; Derrida (1976: 158), for example, famously remarked that ‘There is nothing outside of the text’[3].
This rejection of realism is not necessary idealist. We do not necessarily have to go down the road of Bishop Berkeley, conceiving that only what is constructed in the mind exists. A tree does indeed fall in the woods despite no one being around to hear it crash. More pertinently, children die in poverty and ice shelves collapse regardless of their documentation[4]. This is a problem Laclau dealt with effectively in debates with traditional Marxists such as Norman Geras (1987) who were unable to come to grips with the consequences of his re-reading of Marxism through the notions of hegemony and discourse. Laclau states:
the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question. The fact that a football is only a football as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed rules does not mean that is thereby ceases to be a physical object. (Laclau & Mouffe, 1990: 100-101, original emphasis)
Nonetheless, language – or, in Laclau terms, discourse – provides the horizon through which things appear meaningful: there can be no sense of objectivity or transcendental truth. This has had significant political consequences, at a theoretical level at least. Political formations could no longer make appeals to something outside of themselves, such as God, the Nation, rationality or human nature. These concepts which once provided a guarantee existed only as differential elements in a chain of infinitely deferred meaning. Nonetheless, attempts to access an essentialist anchoring point have not ceased. Indeed, as political liberalism began to question what were once considered the foundations of a good society, various fundamentalist narratives have fought back. Many who would consider the concept of a ‘transcendental signifier’ to be academic mumbo-jumbo, still believe in the transcendental status of God and are willing to bring a gun to a town-hall meeting on health care reform to prove it (see Collins, 2009).
The overarching value of the turn to language, however, has been the capacity to understand these political movements as ideological attempts to fix the chain of meaning. Ideological critique became not a matter of revealing a concealed concrete truth – that there is no God, perhaps, or the contradictions in the mode of production – but, rather, a critique of the abstract manner in which ideological constructions are named. It did not matter what proper name was given to God, only that a God-like signifier can have a structuring role at all. Negative ontological political theory did not seek to substitute one truth with another – the Proletariat being a superior Truth than God – but, rather, began to consider what we meant by ‘Truth’. It is this move – from Truth to the meaning of Truth – that signalled a transition from traditional modernism to late modernism and postmodernism.
The turn to language, however, is not a paradoxically homogenous Truth in itself, somehow outside of history. Rather, it is itself an historical discourse, the fundamental elements of which continue to be a focus of debate. As we shall see in this chapter and the next, there are substantive differences between and within poststructuralist or postmodern ontologies and that of psychoanalysis. Moreover, these differences relate to significant distinctions both in what it means to practice politics and political performance itself. Nonetheless, it is vital to note that the turn to language was a significant moment in political theory. In terms of Marxism, this ontological movement marked a change from culture as a supplement to the economy to culture as a determinant in itself. The turn proved a significant threat to Marxism, already challenged by historical events, the link between which was only just becoming clear. What began as an attempt to supplement Marxism ended up rejecting it all together. Both moves occurred within the framework of postmodernism.
The Postmodern Break
Postmodernity is, according to Eagleton:
The contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human essence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity. (2003: 13)
Rejecting any possibility of a political anchor that would provide the basis for the kind of essentialism that once defined Marxism, postmodern discourses have emphasised the contingency of language and the differentiality of meaning. Without any metaphysical ambitions, postmodernism suggests a philosophical relativism that at best provides support for diversity, for difference and for a flowering freedom of identity positions. At worst this form of social constructivism leads to cultural support for a cynically debauched wallowing in consumerism and for an administrated hedonism quite divorced from the politics – and political consequences – of its construction.
Nonetheless, postmodernism did not develop in the absence of Marxism but partially as an attempt to reform it. Those acknowledged to be at the forefront of postmodernity, including Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, each began their work within the Marxist paradigm (Smart, 2005: 259). If, however, these theorists began with the Marxist problematic they largely distanced themselves from Marxism in their latter work. Lyotard, once an avowed Marxist and member of French rebel groups Socialism ou Barbarie and Pouvoir Ouvrier, began to theorise in earnest about the rise of postmodernity around the same time that he came to the realisation that the proletariat was no longer a feasible revolutionary subject (P. Anderson, 1998: 26). Indeed, as Lyotard expanded his conception of the postmodern condition, it became increasingly directed towards a rejection of the scale and economic determinism of Marxism. Marxism was just as much a rational meta-narrative as capital and, as such, both should be opposed.
There was much value in the rethinking of Marxism, one that started before the emergence of postmodernism in what came to be known as ‘Western Marxism’. Beginning with the likes of Georg Lukàcs, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, this label emerged largely as a way to distinguish between the ‘messy’ political practice of Marxism in the USSR and more critical and philosophical forms which emerged in the global West. Arising from attempts to explain the historical failures of Marxism and recognition that change had to be cultural to be effective as economic conditions alone would not produce revolution, Western Marxism focused more on culture and politics, generally discarding the economic determinism of historical materialism.
As a result of the move from economy to culture, much of the rethinking of Marxism was framed in terms of a reconsideration of the essentialist ontology which came to be expressed as the base-superstructure model. What started as an attempt to explain the failure of revolution resulted in the rejection of the idea of revolution altogether. Moreover, what begun as an attempt to place more emphasis on politics and culture has resulted in the death of the notion of economy altogether, except in practice: ironically, as Marxism and Leftist politics have moved away from the economy, capitalism and the logic of the market became more dominant. As Jameson (1991: 5) states ominously:
this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.
Postmodernism and Marxism
The strongest blow to Marxism was the first. When Lyotard rejected any sense of grand narrative, the narrative to which he referred was Marxism (Eagleton, 2003:38). The death of the grand narrative signals perhaps the most fundamental element of postmodernism; the rejection of foundationalism and essentialism. Awareness that the referentiality of language left social life without any ultimate guarantee, meant there could be no grand narrative on which to support a vision of politics; any such narrative would have to rely upon a signifier that did not rely upon another. Language proved to be a poor substitute for God or transcendental rationality.
Nonetheless, postmodernism looks suspiciously like “a new epic fable of the end of epic fables”, as Eagleton put it (ibid.: 45). This deterministic narrative about the rejection of deterministic epistemology has led to something of a normative crisis[5]; it has become academically embarrassing to speak seriously about morality. Morality was for those who broke up parties. If the grand narrative is dead, then everything and nothing is possible[6]. Postmodernism, in this sense, can be regarded as deeply conservative, both because the rejection of all foundations has led many to search for even deeper foundations – hence the rise of fundamentalisms in the 21st century – and because of the dismissal of emancipation that became associated with the death of determinism.
Only the most vulgar forms of postmodernity – generally found in cultural practice rather than political theory – dismissed ethics altogether, even if morality was a step too far. Postmodern thinkers began to reconsider what it meant to live the Good life, a large part of which included the rethinking of ‘Good’ meant and whether it was still appropriate to speak of it with a capital ‘G’. Much of the ethical thinking of those of a negative ontological bent is itself negative; a critique of those unities that should be differences. For these postmodernists, any hint of the normative or unity is immediately repressive. Benevolent as it might be to invoke the concept, it immediately restored the primacy of God: etymologists in search of the origins of meaning were the ultimate theists. Because language itself has a normative dimension – language is naturally repressive because it narrows down difference by turning differences into a categorical unity[7] – the task of postmodern ethics was to open up this unity in a celebration of difference (ibid.: 13).
The removal of the emancipatory drive can be regarded as the biggest loss of postmodernism. Without the presence of a transcendental signifier against which to index a sense of the Good, thoughts of global emancipation appear foolishly utopian. Laclau, although not considered a postmodernist, embodies the postmodern position when he states; “We are today at the end of emancipation and at the beginning of freedom” (Laclau, 1996: 18)[8]. Whose freedom is up for grabs is uncertain.
Emancipation is incommensurable with postmodern thought, as it invokes unfashionable universal constructions and collective movements whose rationale depended upon the of one or other grand narrative. Most importantly, emancipation rightfully brought up the question of the auspice under which it would occur. The prospect of widespread political transformation relied upon notions of power and universalism that were no longer palatable. Emancipation sounded too much like the unity of the concept, as opposed to the freedom of difference.
Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that postmodern forms of thought construct the social world unproblematically. The opposite is properly true: many forms of postmodernity – deconstructionism, for example – are hypercritical of existing constructions. It is just that for postmodern thought the problem of emancipation amounted to a deconstruction of the meta-physical assumptions inherent in the act of deploying the signifier rather than any material change in people’s lives.
Yet, postmodernism is not without value. The danger inherent in the illusionary nature of truth and essentialism has been the biggest lesson postmodernity has taught Leftist politics. No longer can we hold innocently to any sense of ideology, longing for the annihilation of an enemy who is nothing but an ideological construction. The Left should be more than reluctant to forget the horrors that have been committed in its name, particularly in the image of Marxism. As such, for Bauman, postmodernity is modernity without illusions, a reminder that modernism has limits (Bauman, 1993: 32)[9].
There is certainly value in a form of ethics which supports difference and breaks down barriers closed by essentialist anchors. Nonetheless, although the expansion of ethics and normativity provided by postmodernity should be applauded, we should not mistake the celebration of personal or cultural identifications as the political horizon of our time (see Žižek, 2000a)[10]. Indeed, the postmodern rejection of meta-narratives is intimately linked with the positioning of capitalism as the unacknowledged grand narrative of our time.
Moreover, no form of politics beyond the local – or even political engagement – appears to stem from any form of postmodernity, particularly in regards to the problem of global sustainability to which this thesis is directed. At best we might consider the disparate realm of postmodern thought to offer a critique of industrial modernism or a deconstruction of the manner in which capital is constructed. Nonetheless, for postmodern theorists, there appears to be something a little too material, too grand and perhaps too economic, about the contradictions of global capitalism – it brings back the haunting spectre of Marxism.
Indeed, we can consider that postmodernism – instead of being a radical form of emancipation from identity – is just the latest form of capitalism. If early modernity had considered capital to require the parochial discipline that characterised the industrial era, modernity’s combined and uneven entry into a postmodern era was considered to be a mortal threat to the interests of capitalism. For Jameson , however, postmodernity has actually saved capitalism from its own inherent contradictions (Jameson, 1991, 1996). He postulates that the burgeoning development of social identities that came with the birth of postmodernism became a seamless cure for the ills of overproduction, as, along with the financialisation of capital, new social identities were ideal for the development of new products and new markets.
These markets were created upon the predominant form of politics that has emerged from the turn to language and postmodernity, known as the ‘new social movements’, or identity politics. Whilst these movements have provided the impetus for the liberation of very real limitations upon subjective expression, they cannot be considered to be subversive. Rather than acting as a threat to capitalism, working women, racial enlightenment and sexual reform allowed the development of new and profitable markets. Postmodernism may have been experienced as liberation for those outside of the hegemony of the white man within Western nations but this expression has come to little more than the commodification of cultural difference. Westerners may have a more diverse range of restaurants at which to eat but for those who experience eating as an infrequent necessary, postmodern liberation remains entirely other[11].
Thus, while postmodernism acts as a valuable reminder of the dangers of totalising forms of modernist practice, it provides no answer to either the contradictions of contemporary capitalism or the pragmatic attempts to restore the smooth functioning of capital. Moreover, postmodernism operates as a supplement to the modernist approach to politics embodied by Sachs. Whilst this form of Leftist administrative politics works pragmatically towards softening the injustices of capitalism, postmodern culture allows for a celebration of its benefits. Ultimately there is something a little tragic about postmodernity; the Left appears gun-shy, unwilling to take power in any radical sense lest the mistakes of the past are repeated. It is, as Eagleton states in regards to the foundations of the Western empire; ‘a rather awkward moment in human history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions’ (2003:102). Whilst lessons must be learned from postmodern discourse on epistemology and ontology, contemporary circumstances, in which the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more apparent yet political alternatives are all but extinct, demand a re-entry into the political and the question of universality. Moreover, whilst the postmodern re-reading of Marxism has been necessary, this reading has taken away the universal (and economic) dimensions of Marxism’s critique of capitalism; that capitalism must be opposed through a discourse of emancipation is several steps too far for many forms of postmodern discourse.
Marxism remains, however, the radical alternative form of political economy with the potential to persist against the meta-hegemony of capitalism. It is only through Marxism that the dimension of political economy remains alive. In order to respond to the material contradictions of global capitalism, we must not accept the split horizon constituted by the likes of Sachs and the postmodernists. Rather, we must return to a rethinking of the Marxist tradition and the dimension of universality. The difficulty lies in proceeding with a Marxist approach without the materialist guarantee of history that supported the sense of normativity which hegemonised Marxian politics. We must consider how one can hold to class exploitation as the ultimate form of capitalism, or communism as unquestionable form of the Good, whilst accepting the ontological differentiality of the signifier. Even if we take comfort from Marx’s own rejection of morality, we must note that he was only able to hold this position on the basis of his determinist conception of history.
Against these difficulties, it has been the restoration of universality as a category, as has emerged within the discursive turn, which has provided the impetus for post-Marxist theory. For theorists such as Laclau, the discursive turn is not as a threat but, rather, a vital moment in the renewal of the Marxist historical project. Nonetheless, despite this restoration of the primacy of Marxism itself, the concepts of communism and class struggle appeared to fade away so as to leave Marxism without the critical edge provided by its theoretical foundations. It is to Laclau and post-Marxism that we now turn in order to consider these attempts to restore Marxism within the discursive turn.
(Post)Marxism, Laclau and the Shrinking Hegemony of Socialist Strategy
Perhaps the first text in what is now regarded as post-Marxist theory is Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). This breakthrough book introduced both discourse theory and its political dimension, radical democracy. Laclau and Mouffe began from within the Marxist tradition – the work attempts to re-articulate socialist strategy (emphasis is required on both these terms) and uses Gramsci’s reading of the Marxist concept of hegemony to do so – but establishes a strong break with Marxism, such that it is the first openly ‘post-Marxist’ text. Post-Marxist discourse is split, as British political theorist Mark Devenney states, between:
the need to keep in sight the normative idealism which underpins one spirit of Marx, the insistence that things ought to be otherwise[and] … On the other hand post-Marxist accounts cannot retain intact the rationalist and deterministic limitations of the Western Marxist tradition’ (2002: 9).
Moreover, following Jameson’s contention (1996: 1) contention that post-Marxisms emerge in response to changes in the structure of capitalism, New Zealand sociologist Chamsy el-Ojeili (2009) argues that we can identify a ‘Post-Marxism I’ and ‘Post-Marxism II’. He suggests that the first associates Marxism with the ‘sins’ of modernism and consists of a rethinking of its theoretical framework without necessarily developing the political consequences of this revaluation. As such, this move relocates the locus of ‘Marxist’ critique from capitalism to modernism. As a consequence, the central tenet of this form of post-Marxism is that the problem with both Marxism and capitalism is that they are both too rational, too modernist; instead, an entirely different mode of being is required. In this sense, post-Marxism remains Marxist by association only, having more in common with the forms of postmodernity described in the previous section (ibid.: 41-44).
By contrast, post-Marxism II, as conceived by el-Ojeili, is more of a rejuvenated response to the restructuring and expansion of global capitalism. These forms, and here el-Ojeili includes Badiou as well as Hardt and Negri, focus more on Marxist politics rather than their theoretical underpinning (ibid.: 46). We shall deal with all these approaches (within which we also include Žižek) through the remainder of the thesis as we consider the prospects for Marxism theory after the turn to language. For now, however, I shall consider Laclau’s rethinking of both Marxist theory and politics, acknowledging that post-Marxism has come to be ‘hegemonically’ characterised by Laclau’s discourse theory and the Essex school at which he is based.
Along with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau’s approach has been further supplemented with New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time (1990). In this text, Laclau (particularly in a chapter co-authored with Mouffe, Post-Marxism without Apologies (1990)) declares an affinity to Marxism and to the benefits of psychoanalysis but, ultimately, argues that it is the category of discourse which holds the trump card. For Laclau, if language constructs the social field, this construction is never complete, such that ‘Society does not exist’. This incomplete field of meanings is what Laclau labels discourse. The battle of politics – a battle of hegemony – is the ultimately impossible struggle to fix meaning around certain nodal signifier. These signifiers, which Laclau labels empty signifiers, establish a chain of equivalence.
It is around the empty signifier that Laclau, against the central thrust of postmodernity, attempts to return to the category of universality. This restoration, however, has little in common with the sense of universality apparent in the modernist tradition in which Marx was embedded. Early modernism – that established before the discursive turn – assumed an objective correspondence between language and the material world. As such, establishing a universal truth, either in terms of ontology or politics, was a matter of the correct epistemological approach. This is seen in Marx’s historical materialism, where he argued that an objective, and thus universal, truth could be established by using the correct interpretative tools. Moreover, this approach remains hegemonic amongst the ‘administrative Left’ we noted in the introductory chapter. Sachs, for example, assumes that natural science (and economics) is wholly objective. Moreover, he comes to argue that the capitalist form of economics is the universal form and can thus be applied ‘clinically’ to the symptoms of global capitalism (2005a).
In contrast, postmodernist forms of thought rejected the possibility of any form of universality, arguing that the lack of any final transcendental signifier meant that any attempt to find ‘Truth’ was ultimately differential and particular. For Laclau, however, the focus on particularism, as well as being philosophically inept, is also a form of political defeatism. Instead, if movements are to grip the polis they must appeal to universality. In regards to the impotence of particularly, Laclau (and Mouffe) state;
If the demands of a subordinated group are presented purely as negative demand subversive of a certain order, without being linked to any viable project for the reconstruction of specific areas of society, their capacity to act hegemonically will be excluded from the outset. (1985: 189)
Laclau (1996: 36) nonetheless argues – for the same reasons asserted by postmodernist thinkers – that the universal is impossible. Yet, he insists it is necessary. This simultaneous necessity is asserted by the presence of the empty signifier which holds the place of the universal. The signifier which holds this place is not naturally given but, rather, established by way of discursive battles for hegemony. Given that the categories of discourse and hegemony define the political field, political battles become strategic, with particular groupings forming coalitions under a single signifier. If at the moment the hegemonic Leftist signifier is ‘Green’, then ‘chains of equivalence’ have built around this signifier, with the result that Green groupings, whether political parties or otherwise, come to hold the multiple demands which characterise contemporary Leftist politics, most notably the politics of anti-discrimination.
Moreover, Laclau does not only designate a formal matrix of political performance but supplements this ontology with a normative vision, one that subverts the possibility of any sense of foundational normativity. Laclau’s sense of the normative stems, like Marx, from his ontological commitments. For Laclau, the contingency of language allows for the possibility of human freedom from ideological subjugation and containment. As such, the early Laclau suggested that this freedom is best represented by what he, amongst others, labels ‘radical democracy’.
Radical democracy has two readily identifiable dimensions. The first is a celebration of contingency. Laclau argued that; “True liberation does not therefore consist in projecting oneself towards a moment that would represent the fullness of time but, on the contrary, in showing the temporal – and consequently transient – character of all fullness” (1990: 193) and goes on to state; “A free society is not one where a social order has been established that is better adapted to human nature but one which is more aware of the contingency and historicity of any order” (ibid.: 211).
Yet, there is an apparent contradiction here, one that also haunted Marx’s work. It is because Laclau sought to envisage politics “beyond the positivity of the social”[12] (1985: 93) that he came to reject historical materialist politics in favour of a discursive reading of the Gramscian category of hegemony. This is, if nothing else, a conception of human nature, leading to a social order which is better adapted to that nature; one without the production of antagonisms which have haunted essentialist politics. Certainly, Laclau would be extremely reluctant to be associated with any notion of ‘human nature’ but such a postulation is simply the condition of possibility for any theory of being.
Ultimately, Laclau is unable to historcise his own sense of historicity. Instead, his post-essentialist sense of democracy sits somehow outside of the dialectics of history. This ahistorical positioning leads to Laclau’s conception of the content of the radical democratic horizon. This consists of an articulation around the fundamental inconsistency of discourse and hegemony. Laclau comes to suggest – with an increasingly loose reference to socialism – that the best strategy for Leftist politics is the development of an articulated coalition of what had come to be known as new social movements, predominately consisting of identity politics, post-colonialism and the burgeoning ecological movement. The key to this strategy has been the dismissal of any notion of a single, privileged, agent of change – the revolutionary subject – in favour of the politics of hegemony and the empty signifier.
Laclau’s work has come in for strident critique from within the discipline; so much so that has work has radically changed direction over recent years. The first critique pertains largely to the same issues that affect Lacanian ethics. That is, both the dismissal of the politics of a negative ontology, often by Marxists suffering from both nostalgia and more than a hint of historical blindness (cf. Geras, 1987), and the more considered critique of those that suggest that the Laclauian approach is unable to posit an normative sense of itself. In this sense Laclau’s Marxism is haunted by the same nihilism that has plagued continental philosophy since Kant, that of establishing a sense of the ‘Good’ without a foundational signifier which would guarantee the Good.
Laclau’s solution is a radical recognition of that which is not contingent; contingency itself. If, however, for Laclau the society that is most free is that which is aware of its dependency upon discourse, one must consider what this means for those bodies which have been excluded from the material fruits for society. One could perhaps expand Laclau’s thesis – which he does not do – to suggest that the exclusion of these bodies is entirely contingent and can thus be altered. Moreover, this awareness of the contingency of societal construction could be extended by including the previously excluded within a democratic chain of equivalence, such that the globally subjugated became included within a global demand for justice.
If Marx attempted to circumvent the problem of normativity with his ‘scientific’ historical materialism, which did not rely upon an ideological morality as much as a faith in the progress of history, then the postmodern critique of this determinism left Marxism without any reason to be ‘Marxist’. That is, without a transcendental support for the politics of class struggle and politics, either from a descriptive reading of history or abstract moral prescription, there appeared little reason for post-Marxist thought to reference itself to Marxism.
Indeed, this was the case with Laclau. Although his breakthrough text referenced a rereading of socialist strategy – and a rethinking of the contingency imposed by postmodernity – he came to rely on democracy and politics at the expense of class and the economy to such an extent that his work can no longer be reasonably considered to be Marxist. Marxism, it seems, had been reduced to an empty signifier around which the Left could rally to establish their radical credentials. In terms of political practice, the only difference – with the exception of some institutional tweaking – between the politics of radical democracy supported by the early Laclau and the liberal democracy practiced under late capitalism, is their theoretical reference point.
For this reason, for those who still hold to both a strident critique of capitalism and the validity of Marxist discourse, Laclau’s work has come under attack. The primary motivation behind post-Marxism is the economy cannot be an object in itself and as such cannot determine social relations other than through the contingency of hegemony. Thus the economy is not economic in and of itself but, rather, just another element of political discourse. Arguing that there is no difference between postmodern struggles and class struggle, Laclau rejects any sense of the primacy of the economy, contending; ‘class struggle is just one species of identity politics, and one which is becoming less and less important in the way we live’(Laclau, 2000b: 203). In a sense, Laclau is correct; class struggles are becoming less important in the way we (the West) live. It is just that for Laclau this is a point of celebration. Those on the wrong end of class struggle may have cause to disagree. It appears that the category of discourse collapses all other distinctions; the economy is as discursive as ideology. The difficulty with Laclau’s post-Marxism, however, is that it has struggled to develop a conception of the economic away from his rejection of Marx’s essentialist notion of the economy (Devenney, 2002: 18).
Devenney contends that post-Marxism’s loss of its critique of the economy should be treated symptomatically: it is not a contemporary aberration to be resolved with better application of the theory, as Devenney treats it but, rather, an indication of a structural impossibility within post-Marxism with regard to the impossibility of political economy and class struggle. If traditional Marxism, and as we shall see, Žižek, attributed a causal positioning to class struggle and political economy, this cannot be held within a discursive approach. Laclau’s theory of hegemony allows for an element to hold a determining position but this cannot be determined a priori – rather it is achieved through a battle for hegemony. Without this prioritising of the economy, Marxism loses much of its political edge.
Laclau’s position reminds us of the 1970s feminist slogan, ‘The personal is political’ and its infamous rejoinder ‘the personal is personal too, so piss off’. Yes, the economy is political but it is also economic. Just because the economy is always political does not mean that politics is equivalent to economics. Rather, the economy is always the political economy. We shall speak more to this matter in Chapter Six when we consider Žižek’s Lacanian critique of economy, determinism, and of causality.
Laclau’s (non)conception of capitalism and his rejection of any special status (or, indeed, content) to Marxism or class struggle leaves him with an overly optimistic, even naive, notion of political performance. Perhaps because of this, Laclau’s work remains abstract;– by contrast to Žižek, Laclau is not known for his detailed elaboration of actually existing politics. Indeed, in a recent heated dialogue with Žižek, Laclau accuses the former of ‘waiting for the Martians’ in a reference to Žižek’s desire to reinstall the category of class struggle (Laclau, 2006: 657). In response, Žižek states that waiting for Martians is the perfect way to describe Laclau’s theory of hegemony. The difference between Laclau and his own work, however, is that; “I[Žižek] (am supposed to) believe in real Martians, while he knows that the place of Martians is forever empty, so that all we can do is invest empirical agents with ‘Martian value’”(Žižek, 2008a: 294).
Finally, despite an initial affinity and endorsement of psychoanalysis, particularly in regards to the institutionalisation of lack in the struggle for hegemony, Laclau has struggled to integrate his reading of discourse with the materiality of psychoanalysis. As a consequence, it is difficult to conceptualise why universal signifiers would have any more hold over the subject than particular elements – an issue I shall respond to in some detail in the following chapter (see also Jason Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2003; Laclau, 2003; Stavrakakis, 2007).
In response to these criticisms, Laclau has subsequently moved away from Mouffe and radical democracy to a form of politics which focuses moren upon the potential for identification, rather than differentiation, provided by his conception of contingency. Laclau’s contemporary thought attempts to construct a theory of populism and ‘the construction of the people’ (Laclau, 2005, 2006), a strategy that has moved away from the institutionalisation of lack, to focus primarily on the role of affective identifications in the determination of hegemony. For Laclau, populism is a ‘pure’ form of politics, a politics which coincides with his theory of hegemony. There are few remnants, however, of the reliance upon contingency which dominated his conception of radical democracy. Instead democracy now accounts for one ‘moment’ within populist discourse.
Laclau conceives of populism as a neutral movement, like that of hegemony, as opposed to the proto-fascism attributed to it by liberals. Laclau prefers populism to class struggle because it keeps open the space of power rather than offering a privileged content as the general equivalent of all other struggles. Nonetheless, although Laclau contends that populism exists only in form without suggesting any content, like democracy the very form of its instantiation requires a minimal production of content. This political content consists of a construction of the people as a political subject, giving them, as Žižek’s contends, ‘Martian Value’. Just as Laclau opined that society does not exist, neither do the people. As such any construction of the people is a hegemonic one, requiring the exclusion of an antagonistic enemy from the chain of equivalence. In this way, Žižek suggests, not only is fascism a form of populism – ‘Jew’ is the ultimate signifier of lack constructed to fill the lack in the big Other – but populism entails a naturalisation and a potential suspension of the political (Žižek, 2008a:276-285).
Perhaps a more symptomatic example of Laclau’s understanding of populism comes from a 2010 report of British football hooligans uniting to protest against Islam. Normally composed of violently opposed groups associated with individual clubs – the groups included the Cardiff City Soul Crew and Bolton Wanderers Cuckoo Boys – the hooligans have begun protesting together under the title ‘English Defence League’, becoming mobilised against the presence of Islamic religion within the United Kingdom (Briggs, 2010). Here we have otherwise opposed groups – what Laclau would call particular elements – forming a chain of equivalence under an empty signifier ‘English Defence League’ in a battle for hegemony over the meaning of ‘British’.
To summarise, Laclau’s descriptive ontology has remained the same but his politics have flipped from the negative to the positive. Both radical democracy and populism rely upon a constitutive impossibility within linguistic structure. This point of impossibility signals the empty place of universality; the element which comes to hold this position is regarded as universal. For the early Laclau, politics should be directed towards holding this place open to allow the inherent dislocatory freedom of language to operate. By contrast, Laclau’s populism now suggests that the key task of any political movement is to hold the place of hegemony. This move suggests a radical transition from the politics of lack to the politics of jouissance, although Laclau does not use the term, which we shall expand upon in the next chapter before considering its political connotations in Chapters Four and Five.
Populism, at least in the sense in which it is practiced by politicians like Hugo Chavez, provides some hope for the hungry by mobilising resources around their plight; it certainly provides a feasible sense of politics, a politics which ‘work’. Nonetheless in doing so, it falls prey to the same factors that plagued Laclau’s conception of hegemony and radical democracy; an ethical deficit and an inability to consider capitalism in any detail. Moreover, although his notion of populism appears a more powerful political device, in relying upon the positioning of an antagonism to create ‘the people’, Laclau appears to be returning to the same positivising sense of the social against which he initially rallied. Populism may reject the historical naturalism of the revolutionary subject but in accepting that the place of the ‘people’ can and should be held, Laclau’s politics are not markedly different from forms of Marxism before the discursive turn; populism is Marxism without the economy.
Thus, whilst Laclau’s political applications of his theory of hegemony – in both its radical democratic and populist guises – is an effective form of politics across a limit range, his work does not restore Marxism in any manner which provides a response to the contradictions of the global economy. Although Laclau’s attempt to restore the dimension of universality to Marxist discourse should be welcomed, his politics, whether radical democracy or populism, operate through the exclusion of class struggle and the economy. Laclau’s work may mark an advance on the contingent ethics of particularity and difference that characterise the divergent realm of postmodernity but it has not been able to compensate for the losses associated with the rejection of historical materialism. In rejecting economic determinism, Laclau has rejected economy altogether and in doing so no longer engages with global capitalism. Instead Laclau’s work reads as a critique of the difficulties of the politics of modernity. By contrast, interactions between psychoanalysis and Marxism have tended to engage with political economy. Moreover, psychoanalysis, particularly in its Lacanian variety, has been able to return to materiality in its reading of the discursive turn.
Psycho-Marxism
Since its development, psychoanalysis – with its focus upon the unconscious, repression, sexuality, desire, and the death drive as the destructive core of humanity – has had a major impact on social theory. An engagement with psychoanalysis has enlarged understandings of ideology, of subjectivity, of the role of culture, and of enjoyment in politics and the relationship between the individual and society (Elliott, 2005: 175). Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) exemplified the use of psychoanalysis as a sociological pursuit as Freud developed an understanding of the manner in which the demands of civilised society required a level of repression in the subject that is expressed in a destructive manner[13]. I shall explore this more in Chapter Four.
Freud was re-read by Lacan – who maintained he was only supplementing Freud’s work –reworking psychoanalysis in light of Saussure’s structural linguistics, famously stating that the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan, 2006: 416) By this Lacan meant that ‘language, as a system of differences, constitutes the subject’s repressed desire’ (ibid.: 182). In this sense, unconscious desire, like language, constitutes an intersubjective space between and within individual subjects (ibid.: 183). Moreover, intersubjectivity – with the impossibilities associated with its constitution as a differential linguistic system – offers the mediating background for subjectivity. As social theorist Anthony Elliot (2004: 1) states:
For many, the theoretical advantages of Lacan’s Freud concerned, above all, his inflation of the role of language in the construction of the psyche, an inflation which happened to fit hand in glove with the ‘linguistic turn’ of the social sciences.
Lacanian theory, it seemed, had come along at just the right moment, speaking to the analytic dilemmas that came to be associated with postmodernism whilst responding to the problematic to which postmodernism became a response [14]. Against the postmodernists but within the linguistic turn, Lacanian psychoanalysis achieved an alternative hegemony by responding to several of the problems which haunted postmodernism. In particular, Lacanian thought sought to rehabilitate the categories of subjectivity, structure and the body, each of which shall be expanded on in much more detail in the following chapter. Moreover, through the rejuvenation of these concepts, Lacanian theory offered a new way to read Marxism and its relationship to the discursive turn.
The difficulties of combining psychoanalysis and Marxism are intertwined with the collective hope and traumatic failure of Leftist emancipation. Following the dis-ease with the halted progress of Marxist practice and theory, psychoanalysis has been long looked upon both as the saviour and the failure of radical Leftist politics. Yet no stable theoretical fusion has developed between the two traditions, and contemporary theory has come to regard the notion of collective emancipation as rather pathetically passé. Instead of hope, theoretical Leftism holds onto the contradictory fetishes of the necessity of the grand-narrative of capitalism and the contingency of language and culture, between which lies a theoretical waste land where only the brave or unaware dare to stride.
Psychoanalysis was initially attached to Marxism as part of the cultural turn which sought to explain the perceived shortcomings of Marxism in response to the continued presence and development of capitalism. In this initial relationship, characterised by the Freudian Marxism of Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School theorists, psychoanalysis was used to add a theory of subjectivity to Marxism in the face of the failure of the Marxist ‘revolutionary subject’. These theories of subjectivity focused mainly on the role of culture in mediating the effects of capitalism and preventing a true class consciousness from emerging.
If this could be described as the first phase of ‘Psycho-Marxism’ the second phase was dominated by Louis Althusser’s structuralist revision of Marxism (Miklitsch, 1998: 85). Althusser did not seek to fuse together the two discourses but, rather, take advantage of what he believed to be a structural homology between class struggle and the unconscious (Özselcuk & Madra, 2007: 86). Althusser’s return to Marx through psychoanalysis was the first to be dominated by Lacan, rather than Freud. As such, it cultivated a re-reading of Freud as well, framed in Lacanian terms. Althusser was perhaps the first to politicise Lacanian thought in his reworking of Marxism and ideology. Using Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage to exemplify (mis)recognition in ideology through what he called ‘interpellation’, Althusser’s work had a strong influence upon efforts to rework both Marxist determinism and the role of culture and ideology in maintaining the dominance of capital.
The movement from Freud to Lacan proved to be both a threat and opportunity for Marxist theory. Lacan’s emphasis on the structuring role, and ultimate failure, of language dismissed the foundations of Marxist essentialism and previously assumed forms of political action associated with communism. Communism may have remained as a reference point but the essentialist justifications had long disappeared, dispatched to a theoretical attic to allow for occasional bouts of nostalgia. Importantly, however, this dimension was not dismissed altogether. Althusser and those that followed remained committed to Marxism for a reason, although others, such as Laclau, may not have been so sure. The problem was that while psychoanalysis did not fall prey to the transgressive particularism of postmodernity, it did share a deep suspicion of politics, utopianism and revolution. If critics have found psychoanalysis woefully inadequate as a political touchstone, then traditionalist Marxists certainly did not find it a suitable torch bearer.
Although Marxism and psychoanalysis share several theoretical similarities – a committed engagement to reducing the gap between theory and practice, a similar notion of causality (in terms of class struggle and the unconscious respectively) and a radically divergent focus on generating change – in both their underlying ontology and optimism towards the prospects of political change they proved radically incompatible. For some, such as social theorist Sean Homer (2001), this makes any attempt to develop psychoanalytic Marxism as a singular practice a foolish pursuit. As such, he claims that Žižek’s “Lacanism appears to rule out the possibility of any orthodox ‘understanding’ of Marxism” (ibid.: 7).
Resonating with Homer’s sentiments, psychoanalysis in relation to politics remains intensely controversial. This is the case even though – as Stavrakakis (2007: 1) reports – it has become second in influence only to analytical liberalism[15]. Lacan is accepted as a theorist of cinema or sexuality but not of politics. Indeed, Elliot (2004:2), contends; “At its bleakest, the Lacanian symbolic was deployed to underscore the inevitability of social order and political domination as a fundamental state of human desire”. Moreover, Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey (Robinson, 2004; Robinson & Tormey, 2005, 2006), in relation to Žižek’s appropriation of Marxism, argue that the negativity inherent in Lacanian thought simply ends up reproducing the antagonism, domination and violence of capitalism, the very things they believe Leftist politics should seek to revoke.
Likewise, Homer (1996: 109) states that although psychoanalysis can engage in a “continuing critical dialogue with political and social theory”, its constitutive inability to develop a positive sense of ideology means that more reactionary positions will fill this gap and for this reason psychoanalytic discourse is an inappropriate partner for Leftist political practice. Furthermore, Elizabeth Bellamy (1993) comes to argue that whilst psychoanalysis has tremendous analytic potential, it does not offer any more fruitful opportunities for political action then had already been developed in the discursive turn. Psychoanalysis, it seemed, explained the domination of capitalism and the hopelessness of culture a little too well.
Much – if not all – of this criticism is directed at Žižek. It is directed at Žižek not only because he is the most significant scholar in the discourse but also because his form of politics relies heavily upon a reading of Marxism that both re-establishes and circumvents the central currents of traditional Marxist politics – most notably class struggle and communism. Žižek’s interpretation of Marxism operates as an antagonistic answer to the question of universality and truth. Without wanting to re-occupy any nostalgic sense of Marxist essentialism, he demands that the Left respond to the dominance of capital.
Žižek embodies the impossibilities of Leftist politics because whilst his work grapples with the same difficulties of representation that have brought the downfall of traditional Left (essentialist) politics, he maintains that the Left must not abandon the political terrain either by giving way to the dilemmas of representation or losing sight of the economy. As such, although couched within a reading of both psychoanalysis and Marxism, much of the remainder of this thesis entails a reading of the difficulties, challenges and possibilities offered by Žižek’s work. If in responding to the crisis of global sustainability we had reason to again turn to Marxism, in our reading of the difficulties of approaching Marxism after the discursive turn, we have cause to turn to Žižek.
As such, the reference to Marxism becomes largely implicit in the remainder of the thesis. Here I am not so much concerned with an overt discursive rejuvenation of Marxist politics – although this might well occur through the course and consequences of Žižek’s work – but, rather, the manner in which Žižek’s use of the Marxist tradition, in particular his return to the economy, class struggle, and communism, acts as a response to contemporary capitalism. Ultimately, the prospects for Marxist theory and political practice are beyond the scope of this project which instead focus upon a response to the material contradictions of global capitalism. If I began this response by reference to Marxism, this chapter has shown the difficulties of reviving Marxist political practice. Thus, whilst remaining within Marxism discourse and considering its value as a political resource, the identification of both the problems faced by Marxism and in responding to capitalism, has caused a turn to psychoanalysis, rather than Marxism, as the prime theoretical reference point.
Thus, having introduced the dilemmas of post-Marxism and the psychoanalytic response, it is now time to turn to psychoanalysis itself in order to properly consider Žižek’s work. Although I have thus far introduced psychoanalytic discourse as a positive contributor to Marxism, the situation is far more complex. Through its conception of symbolic castration, psychoanalysis allows for a reading of the discursive turn which is rooted in the body. In doing so it is better able to materialise discourse and explain the apparent fixity of the symbolic order. Moreover, primarily through Žižek’s work, a return to the economy is possible without reverting to a strict determinism (this shall be the subject of Chapter Six). In doing so, we see that following the rejection of historical materialism and the political vacuum which followed, psychoanalysis adds to the explanatory power of Marxism, providing an understanding of the difficulty of shifting capitalism and hence the possibilities for doing so without the inevitability of history.
As such, the psychoanalytic reading of Marxism suggests the possibility of restoring Marxism as a political force in order to provide a response to the global sustainability problematic. Conversely, whilst this ‘psycho-Marxism’ may be able to better explain why the contradictions of global capitalism prove to be obdurate, in the next chapter we shall see that no form of politics – certainly in terms of the material reproduction of shared social life – stems naturally from the combination of Lacan and Marx. If historical materialism produced not only a reading of capitalism but the inevitable progression of the revolutionary subject, Žižek’s dialectical materialism provides little such confidence. Indeed, Lacanian theory may act as the ultimate dismissal of traditional Marxist politics, leaving the question of politics and normativity in the rebellious hands of psychoanalytic discourse and its central troublemaker, Žižek.
[1] This is not a problem specific to Marxism; today’s strongest public critics of globalisation – Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and John Pilger most notably – seem to have the same sense of objective emancipation.
[2] As such, perhaps the important question in our consideration of the relationship between Marxism and essentialism is, ‘Which Marx?’ One cannot have access to a singular Marx but must instead construct a Marx through the discursive lens of our time. Indeed, the Marx to which we are responding here may not be Karl Marx himself but, rather, the hegemonic forms of Marxism. These constructions of Marx range from the strict analytic or scientific Marxian readings of history to the Stalinist Communist regimes of the 20th century.
[3] By this Derrida did not strictly mean that there is no materiality outside of textuality but, rather, that every text can only be interpreted through another text not by reference to an outside referent.
[4] This is not to degrade the political importance of representation, only to suggest that representation does not define existence.
[5] Given Marx’s own rejection of morality, there is something quite comedic about this normative crisis which followed the downfall of the hegemony of Marxism.
[6] This is the paradox of the death of ‘God’, otherwise known as the transcendental signifier. If the original fear of the theists (linguistic or otherwise) was that the dismissal of this guarantee would mean the end of order, then perhaps the opposite has occurred; we have invented new signifiers to fill this lack. Moreover, because they are self-imposed they have an even stronger disciplinary effect. We see this change in the move from a sovereign authority to the all-seeing discipline of panoptical control; if God is dead, then nothing, rather than everything, is permitted..
[7] For instance the concept of ‘tree’ collapses a number of different types of trees under a singular meaning. Likewise, the signifier ‘Women’ is repressive because it ignores the difference between different categories of Women e.g. Black women, black working women, black working homosexual Women, all of which are themselves are repressive concepts…
[8] Here Laclau contrasts emancipation and freedom by reference to transcendentalism and dislocation. Freedom occurs at the point of dislocation from the existing symbolic order. Freedom is not a place but, rather, an action. By contrast, for Laclau emancipation remains within a transcendental construction of a place of freedom that we might reach (1996: 18-19). This construction is confluent with a number of ethical positions after the discursive turn – Lacanian psychoanalysis one of them – it appears to have little in from those whose suffering is more than symbolic.
[9] Bauman, however, goes beyond this, suggesting that the postmodern subject is aware of truth itself. If we can consider this to be the case, it could only be a cynical recognition of truth – I shall discuss the structure of cynical reason in Chapter Seven.
[10] Identity politics, rather than being an exemplary element of postmodernism rather embodies the position of cultural studies between modernism and postmodernism. Identity politics, although a form of particularly concurrent with postmodernism, is an attempt to establish an essential unity that is quite opposed to the celebration of difference which characterises postmodernity. Nonetheless, in terms of political positioning, identity politics and cultural studies have much in common
[11] Moreover, no hegemonic mode of politics has developed from postmodern thought. This is no specific reason to discount it but it is worth noting that politics in the United States is divided between the pragmatist Democrats and fundamentalist Republicans rather than any sense of the postmodern. Postmodernism exists but as a form of cultural practice and commodification. For this reason, postmodern culture can be considered as a hegemonic historical response to the impossibility of class struggle – an impossibility I shall expand upon in Chapter Six.
[12] ‘Beyond the Positivity of the Social’ is the title of the most influential chapter in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, signalling a re-reading of hegemony and introducing the concepts of dislocation and antagonism.
[13] This is a line of thought further developed by Herbert Marcuse in particular (1956).
[14] Lacan himself was working contemporarously with postmodernism but his work has since come to be seen as a response to postmodernity.
[15] Elliot too remarks, “Indeed, for some considerable period of time, it seemed that theory just wasn’t theory unless the name Lacan was referenced” (2004: 1).
