Ernesto Laclau - The Populist Reason and the Play of Difference

Paul Nadal

LIT 281 Michael Hardt 9/24/2007

“There is no beyond the play of differences,” writes Ernesto Laclau in The Populist Reason, “no ground which would a priori privilege some elements of the whole over the others.”[1] Laclau here is writing about the constitutive relations that determine the social, relations which are for him fundamentally about the ways in which social life is a complex interplay between discourse, hegemony, and the socio-political activities which are their articulations. But exactly what does “the play of differences” mean for Laclau? More specifically, what new insights can be gleaned about the social constitution of political and collective identities from reading the notion of difference in Laclau’s conceptual system? What role does difference play in the production of antagonisms, and in turn, the making of historical subjects of social change? Such are the questions that this paper will attempt to examine by reading Laclau’s specific conceptualization of difference as a key to understanding his theorizations of populism and political life.

Laclau, in many ways, can be read as a philosopher of difference. And to the extent that difference signifies a general mode of alterity, it is perhaps appropriate that we start with difference to arrive at an understanding of the subject and aims of his book: populism and the delimiting of its ontological structure. Indeed, insofar as political scientists and historians have interpreted populism as a type of political culture, populism has occupied an aberrant, demoted, if not false, position vis-à-vis other normative ideological formations. As Laclau notes, the apparent vagueness and conceptual indeterminacy of populism have been tantamount to what he calls its ethical and discursive denigration in much of the scholarship about populist movements. From Margaret Canovan’s “typology,” Donald MacRae’s reductionism, to Kenneth Minogue’s negative critique, among others, populism emerges as a marginal, anomalous political project. It is Laclau’s aim therefore to interrogate the very terms by which populism has been evaluated (e.g., populism as being vague, indeterminate, irrational, impossible, etc.) in order to determine populism’s “differentia specifica in positive terms” (16). In doing so, Laclau aims to rescue populism from its marginal position within the social sciences and to demonstrate how the very terms by which past scholars have attributed populism as a denigrated political identity actually describe the nature of social life. As such, one of the major themes of The Populist Reason is precisely to construe populism not as a type of political identity, so much as a dimension of political culture, a “dimension that cuts across ideological and social differences” (15).

In positing populism as a dimension of political life rather than as a specific type of political formation, Laclau allows for an analysis of populism that is at once an analysis of the conditions of the social. That is to say, one can take Laclau’s conceptualization of populism –its presuppositions, logics, and structure – as also a general understanding of social formations, political organization, and cultural practice. As Laclau writes, “by ‘populism’ we do not understand it as a type of movement—identifiable with either a special social base or a particular ideological orientation—but a political logic” (117). This move from the particular to the general (or the universal to use Laclau’s terminology) is crucial. For what becomes important for us in Laclau’s analysis of populism is precisely the subject’s ostensible object, namely, the construction of the “people” that is constitutive of any populist movement. To say, as we did, that Laclau is a philosopher of difference is also to say that he is neither a philosopher of identity nor a philosopher of essence. For Laclau, existence precedes essence; and by the same token, political existence precedes its political form. The ‘people’ therefore is not preconstituted; it is fundamentally constructed, a process of construction which is necessarily political. This is why The Populist Reason begins with Laclau’s problematization of earlier attempts to attribute and fill populism with an identity. But rather than starting with identity, Laclau employs difference as his point of departure to analyze what had systematically been neglected in earlier studies of populism, namely, difference as a basis for understanding populism’s socio-political process of becoming.

By “difference” in Laclau I mean simply the concept of non-identity, a concept of difference which allows us to grasp and delimit in a determinate way the heterogeneous elements that make up the social. For, indeed, “difference” emerges in The Populist Reason in various contexts and often with competing valences. Difference qua demand, for example, Laclau means “the irreducible particularism of each individual demand” (139); difference qua subjectivity, on the other hand, means “the excluded other that is constitutive of my own identity” (140); and difference qua the social functions as general description about the heterogeneity of the discursive terrain. I would like to suggest here that what coheres these multivalent uses of the notion of difference in Laclau’s conceptual apparatus is the attention to the what he calls the hegemonic moment: the articulation of the particular as a representation of an impossible universality. “In a hegemonic relation,” as Laclau writes, “one particular difference assumes the representation of a totality that exceeds it” (72). That such a representation of a totality is necessarily a failed one, there is a fundamental unevenness in the social that is at once its condition of possibility and, as he argues, its political and revolutionary potential.

The radicality of difference for Laclau lies in the articulation it furnishes for a populist identity, that is, of the “people.” But, first, how does one conceptualize the “people” as such? If the “people” is not a preconstituted political identity but rather a political process of becoming, this becoming political for Laclau is grounded on “the play of differences.” To be sure, this particular idea of difference issues from Laclau’s reading of Saussurean linguistics, which presents signification as existing essentially on the plane of difference. To put it another way, the production of meaning is based on the differential relationships between signs with no positive terms. While more needs to be said about the isomorphism Laclau relies on between linguistics and the social, we will continue our discussion with Laclau’s premise that language or signification produces the social, or as he puts it, “rhetorical mechanisms…constitute the anatomy of the social world” (110). The play of difference that one can find in the world of signs is then analogous to the play of difference in the social world. As such, the hegemonic moment that is the emergence of the “people” can in turn be understood in terms of the catachrestic function of synecdoche, that is, the part coming to represent the whole.

Laclau apropos does not begin with the “people” (the whole, as it were, that would then be thought of as being conceptually closed with a predetermined content), but rather with the part which he takes as the smallest unit of any political analysis: namely, social demands and their deployments in the “play of differences.” This allows him to name the relations that determine the form and content of various demands, relations which can then be used as the ground for the production of the “people.” Social demands, on this view, then become the elements by which we can understand both the performative and articulatory practices of populism, as well as the affective dimensions of such practices (i.e., its desires, motivations, and cohesion around a sense of belonging).

Laclau makes two important distinctions with respect to social demands: there are democratic demands and there are populist demands. Insofar as democratic and populist demands name two modes of producing the social, Laclau argues for the radical potential of the populist camp. That is to say, it is in the structural dimensions of populist demands and their mobilization in which a genuine articulation of the “people” can be performed and actualized. This assertion rests on Laclau’s analysis of the logic of equivalence operative in populist demands and the comparison he makes with the logic of difference to be found in democratic demands. A potential confusion of terms emerges here in Laclau, which would make it seem to appear that the “logic of difference” in democratic demands would undermine the politicizing function of difference we have continued to assert thus far. Laclau clarifies: “equivalences can weaken, but they cannot domesticate differences” for “difference is necessary in the sense that the particularity of the demand must remain, in order for equivalence to operate” (79). While difference and equivalence are fundamentally incompatible, Laclau argues that they nevertheless require each other as necessary conditions for the production of the social. Indeed, for Laclau, “[t]he social is nothing but the locus of this irreducible tension” (80). On this view, the radical potential of populist demands, that is to say, its efficacy in articulating, organizing, and mobilizing antagonistic claims, rests on the deployment of difference through the logic of equivalence. According to Laclau, what populist demands achieve that democratic demands do not is precisely this maintenance and insistence on the particularity of a demand, while simultaneously unifying the plurality of such demands through what he calls an equivalential chain. To the extent that demands are internally split (by definition it is always unfulfilled), populist demands organize themselves by furnishing this inherent partiality (i.e., its internal formal differentiation) as a means of “attaching” themselves onto a total chain of equivalences. It is in this sense that the equivalential chain becomes the ground for populist movements, for insofar as the essential particularity of a demand allows the forging of equivalential relations (denoted as a semi-circle in p. 130), populist demands can come to signify a universality of a hegemonic, albeit non-dominant kind.[2] Conversely, if individual demands are absorbed into a dominant system without an appeal to an equivalential chain, but rather only as pure difference (as in the democratic camp), no group constitutive of the “people” can emerge. Herein then lies the radical potentiality of Laclau’s theorization of populism: “the construction of a global identity out of the equivalence of a plurality of social demands” (83).

What is demonstrated in Laclau’s division of society via democratic and populist demands are the various negotiations and points of tension between the particular and the universal, an antagonistic relationality which is fundamentally the irreducible tension that structures social and political life. It seems to me that Laclau’s illustration of democratic and populist demands also points to and hazards against the ideological pitfalls one can confront in working toward the construction of a populist form of sociality. On this view, the distinctions Laclau makes between the dynamics of difference through the variable logics of equivalences and differences can be used as an index for the failure or success of political projects. More specifically, Laclau seems to offer a way of measuring the populist potential of political projects by gauging the degree to which individual demands come to represent a universality through an equivalential chain, whose relational form, in turn, must articulate a “failed totality.”

The discourse and rhetoric of modernization come immediately to mind. When the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was founded in 1967, it sought to create a wider market by consolidating the regional economies of Southeast Asia, an integration that would make this economic collective competitive to foreign markets. The creation of an integrated ASEAN production base and market was then a response to the dominant influence of foreign transnational economies (this can perhaps be analogously described by using Laclau’s antagonistic pair of the “populist identity” and the “global enemy,” respectively). The initiatives for a Southeast Asian “common-market,” however, ultimately gave way to subsequent pressures of free-trade liberalizations by APEC, which consequently depressed the socio-economic life of Southeast Asia. One can see that the efforts toward forging a political alliance (embodied by the formation of ASEAN) were already circumscribed by the very terms which were the organization’s foundation: namely, developmentalism defined vis-à-vis First World standards of modernization as such. The internal frontier was in effect displaced, as it were, precisely because of the political organization’s desire, to use Laclau’s terms, for a totality which was ultimately incommensurate to the making of a genuine equivalential relation. More to the point, the universalizing discourse that is developmentalism was not sufficiently emptied out (i.e., it remained a universal discourse through and through) that would have enabled the accommodation and materialization of heterogeneous demands. What Laclau therefore highlights are the challenges of political organization: the negotiation of different demands, priorities, and desires and the working toward of oppositional forms of the political that are hegemonically effective.

Laclau, Ernesto. The Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso, 2005.

[1] Ernesto Laclau, The Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 68. All subsequent citations of this book will be indicated in the main text.

[2] The appeal to a universality for Laclau is necessarily a hegemonic articulation. But the non-dominant orientation of populist inscriptions of the universal is made possible by Laclau’s notion of empty signifiers, to which the particularism of individual demands can “attach” themselves but not wholly identify with a universal idea. Empty signifiers hence allow for the naming of a universality that transcends the actual particularity of demands.