>
> My impression is that Laclau and Mouffe are antagonistic to Foucauldian
> notions of discourse and power. Their notion of identity politics means
> identification with excluded minorities or workingclass groups -- they
> have been criticized for allowing small businessmen to claim the status
> of an excluded or oppressed group. They fault Foucault's work because
> his idea of power as imposing a normal subject amounts to what they
> consider a functionalist notion because theory can't free us from
> power's operations.
>
> How does that sound?
> Philip Goldstein
Your impression that they are antagonistic to Foucault is quite correct,
though I do not think it is quite in the way you describe it here,
though I could be misunderstanding you. Laclau and Mouffe argue that
meaning and politics are dependent upon some moment of identity or
identification, however precarious this moment might be. It is in this
way that Laclau moves towards the Lacanian dynamic of desire as an
always impossible movement towards identification -- a movement which is
impossible because no actual object to be identified with can fully
encapsulate the lost object that is being sought -- and Mouffe argues
with Schmidt for the necessity of a friend/enemy binarism.
For this reason, I do not think that your comment above is quite
accurate. It is not that Foucault's conception of power is one which
imposes a normal identity on a subject, because that is precisely what
Laclau states is his conception of power: "Our thesis is that the
constitution of a social identity is an act of power and that identity
as such _is_ power" ("Minding the Gap", written with Lilian Zac, in
Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities). Their problem with
Foucault is in fact very much the opposite of this. Take a look at the
couple of endnotes in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy where Laclau and
Mouffe speak about Foucault and you'll see what I mean. They go
specifically to the Foucaultian theme in the Archaeology of Knoledge
concerning the regularity in dispersion, and argue that since dispersion
only makes sense within a logic of totality, and since Foucault has
denied himself the means to see how this totality could be constituted
-- either by power, which is here merely dispersive, or by reference to
the old mechanisms such as oeuvre or tradition which Foucault has
already rejected -- that the project of tracing the limits of a
discursive field through dispersion is self-defeating.
The entire argument, I think, rests on a misreading of what Foucault is
trying to accomplish. It is also unsustainable on Laclau and Mouffe's
own terms. Laclau, for example, insists that their conception of
antagonism differs from Hegelian negativity in that it is not
dialectically recuperable into a positivity or totality (see
Emancipation(s), p. 29). But if this is the case, then it is
inconsistent to argue that Foucaultian dispersion presupposes totality,
since there is no reason to believe that this dispersion isn't precisely
a form of non-recuperable difference. Ultimately, their hostility to
Foucault, I think, clearly rests upon their prior commitment to the idea
that meaning requires identity -- a commitment similar to the one I
mentioned in that Foucault/Derrida thread initiated by Loren. This is
something that Foucault rejects, which is a central reason why I would
say, against Philip, that power for him doesn't create a normal subject
at all.
BTW, Stuart Elden had mentioned a while back that Laclau seems to have
changed his position with regards to Derrida and ethics. I heard a bit
about the Essex conference. All I can say to this is that having gone
through a Phd with Laclau, I'm sure on some level he might have changed
his views, but I'm not going to see this as some sort of complete
reversal until I see him reevaluate both his Lacanian position, and his
views on Foucault (and, for that matter, Deleuze). I have the feeling
he hasn't budged in these respects.
Later,
Nathan
n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxx
> My impression is that Laclau and Mouffe are antagonistic to Foucauldian
> notions of discourse and power. Their notion of identity politics means
> identification with excluded minorities or workingclass groups -- they
> have been criticized for allowing small businessmen to claim the status
> of an excluded or oppressed group. They fault Foucault's work because
> his idea of power as imposing a normal subject amounts to what they
> consider a functionalist notion because theory can't free us from
> power's operations.
>
> How does that sound?
> Philip Goldstein
Your impression that they are antagonistic to Foucault is quite correct,
though I do not think it is quite in the way you describe it here,
though I could be misunderstanding you. Laclau and Mouffe argue that
meaning and politics are dependent upon some moment of identity or
identification, however precarious this moment might be. It is in this
way that Laclau moves towards the Lacanian dynamic of desire as an
always impossible movement towards identification -- a movement which is
impossible because no actual object to be identified with can fully
encapsulate the lost object that is being sought -- and Mouffe argues
with Schmidt for the necessity of a friend/enemy binarism.
For this reason, I do not think that your comment above is quite
accurate. It is not that Foucault's conception of power is one which
imposes a normal identity on a subject, because that is precisely what
Laclau states is his conception of power: "Our thesis is that the
constitution of a social identity is an act of power and that identity
as such _is_ power" ("Minding the Gap", written with Lilian Zac, in
Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities). Their problem with
Foucault is in fact very much the opposite of this. Take a look at the
couple of endnotes in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy where Laclau and
Mouffe speak about Foucault and you'll see what I mean. They go
specifically to the Foucaultian theme in the Archaeology of Knoledge
concerning the regularity in dispersion, and argue that since dispersion
only makes sense within a logic of totality, and since Foucault has
denied himself the means to see how this totality could be constituted
-- either by power, which is here merely dispersive, or by reference to
the old mechanisms such as oeuvre or tradition which Foucault has
already rejected -- that the project of tracing the limits of a
discursive field through dispersion is self-defeating.
The entire argument, I think, rests on a misreading of what Foucault is
trying to accomplish. It is also unsustainable on Laclau and Mouffe's
own terms. Laclau, for example, insists that their conception of
antagonism differs from Hegelian negativity in that it is not
dialectically recuperable into a positivity or totality (see
Emancipation(s), p. 29). But if this is the case, then it is
inconsistent to argue that Foucaultian dispersion presupposes totality,
since there is no reason to believe that this dispersion isn't precisely
a form of non-recuperable difference. Ultimately, their hostility to
Foucault, I think, clearly rests upon their prior commitment to the idea
that meaning requires identity -- a commitment similar to the one I
mentioned in that Foucault/Derrida thread initiated by Loren. This is
something that Foucault rejects, which is a central reason why I would
say, against Philip, that power for him doesn't create a normal subject
at all.
BTW, Stuart Elden had mentioned a while back that Laclau seems to have
changed his position with regards to Derrida and ethics. I heard a bit
about the Essex conference. All I can say to this is that having gone
through a Phd with Laclau, I'm sure on some level he might have changed
his views, but I'm not going to see this as some sort of complete
reversal until I see him reevaluate both his Lacanian position, and his
views on Foucault (and, for that matter, Deleuze). I have the feeling
he hasn't budged in these respects.
Later,
Nathan
n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxx