Discourse Philosophy And Hegemony Politics

Class is the core concept of the political theories of Marx, who once predicted thatwith the continuous development of Capitalism, social relations would tend to besimplified, producing a more real class antagonisms, and the working class, with agrowing awareness of the revolution inevitably developed during the process of theintensified pauperization, would eventually become an “agent” of the historicalprogress to overthrow the Capitalism. However, an indisputable fact of the history afterthe World War II is that capitalist countries continue to move ahead through their ownconstant adjustment, and the working class hasn’t become revolutionary due to poverty,on the contrary become complicated and fragmented because of the adjustment ofindustrial structure as well as the new technological revolution. In this context, someMarxist scholars believed that the working class, as an organized and cohesive socialgroup, no longer existed. They began to abandon the ambitious interpretation ofhistorical materialism and make an attempt to find a revolution planning suitable forthe new situation of the post-Ford capitalism and the transnational capitalism. So thepost-Marxism came into being with Laclau and Mouffe as important representatives.The present study, based on an overall review of the evolution from the class politicsof Marx to the discourse political theory of Laclau and Mouffe, focuses on a logicalanalysis of the core clues of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse philosophy and thehegemonic struggle, and attempts to present the contemporary effect and theoreticallimitations of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse political composition from multipleaspects of the contemporary philosophy.This thesis is composed of three sections. The first section, with the real difficulties faced by Marx’s class political planningand the theory of class struggle as the theoretical background, reveals the derivationand development of the post-Marxism with Laclau and Mouffe as representatives.Through the theoretical analysis of Max Weber, Daniel Bell, Andre Gorz andChamplain Chas, the problem of the Proletariat is not simply a lack of “classconsciousness” just as what was described by Ceorg Lukacs, but the concept itself, asthe subject of the universal history. Laclau and Mouffe, deeply influenced bypost-structuralist, post-modernism, post-Wittgensteinian and Lacanianism, appliedanti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism to the deconstruction of Marxism, andabandoned some points of view in historical materialism including the decisive role ofthe production mode, the analytical method of economic base and the superstructureand the political vision of the Proletarian as the revolutionary subject, as they regardedthese above as a kind of “reductionism” based on essentialism. After overthrowing thetheoretical “mansion” of Marxism, they reconstructed “a perfect paradigm” with thetheory of “discourse” as the base, which is the fundamental reason why they couldbecome the “standard-bearer of post-Marxism”.The second section, taking Laclau and Mouffe ’s discourse philosophy as the coreanalysis, reveals the inherent logic and theoretical path of their discourse politicsconstruction. This present study argues that “discourse—society—politics” is the“Ariadne’s thread” in order to understand Laclau and Mouffe, and also a critical trilogyexperienced by them on their road from class politics to non-class politics. First of all,Laclau and Mouffe, relying on the theories of Saussure, Wittgenstein and Heidegger,believed that discourse was a “quasi-transcendental” form of people to grasp the world,and any object can not be separated from the possibility conditions rendered by it. Inanother word, the object is always presented in certain meaning construction throughdiscourse, based on which they constructed a kind of discourse ontology which aimedto break the binary opposition between materialism and idealism, spirit and reality, anddiscourse and non-discourse. Then, Laclau and Mouffe abandoned empiricalsociological theory, thinking that society was a connected practice by pluralistic discourse elements with heterogeneity, and was constructed around the antagonism,which always escaped from the fixed sense. As a result, they believed that societywould not be sutured finally at all and it would always be unfinished and inconclusive,which made Laclau and Mouffe break with the “essentialism” metaphysically. What’smore, through the power of discourse, Laclau and Mouffe elevated politics to thedimension of the ontological conditions of human and relied on the differences indiscourse and the same logic to construct a hegemony theory which can not be fullyintegrated but be able to form some sort of universal quality. The fundamental task ofpolitics is to construct the identity of the subject’s stand with the sense of unity throughhegemonic struggle. Any area of the hegemonic struggle has no priority to determinethe society and history, so the future and destiny of socialism can only be in the handsof the political planning for the “radical pluralist democracy”. This is a new socialistpolitical mode and historical imagination designed by Laclau and Mouffe for thepost-class era.On the basis of the analysis above, the third section makes an attempt to approachthe theory of hegemony further from such domains of philosophy, politics and culture(i.e. popular culture), and analyzes in a multi-dimensional dialogue its significance ofprogress and theoretical limitations. In terms of philosophy, the hegemony theoryemphasizes the trinity of rhetoric, psychoanalysis and political science. The author ofthe present study believes that the reason why Laclau and Mouffe attached greatimportance to rhetoric is that in their point of view, not all confrontations have politicalcharacteristics, but politics requires the conditions of discourse as its basis which canjust be provided by rhetoric with the discourse conditions of political antagonismthrough its role in giving the space to political imagination, intensifying the relation ofsubordination and expanding effectively the sphere of hegemony, so the revolutionarydimension of the “radical pluralist democracy” has been stimulated. However, toomuch emphasis on rhetoric in a sense makes the hegemony “a dominant right of thedemocratic form”. In the case that the dimension of the truth were “not present”, itwould be difficult for the idealized democratic forms of struggle to eliminate the possibility that the mass would be bewitched. Laclau and Mouffe gave so muchattention to psychoanalysis as they, starting from the subject of signifier, would showthe dislocation of the hegemony connecting process between democratic tasks andsocialist leaders. Zizek, in his critical analysis of the two, with the theory ofUnconscious by Freud and especially by Lacan, revealed the homology betweensurplus jouissance and surplus value proposed by Marx, and expected from it therevolutionary energy of the ideological critique. His analysis highlights the ontologicalstatus that can never be eradicated by antagonism, and further develops thepost-Marxist theory of hegemony. Moreover, Laclau and Mouffe stressed the politicalscience, which was the hegemony between modernity and post-modernity, with theway that by lowering the blasphemy for the ontology of every Marxist category,Marxist liberation discourse was synthesized to a limited degree not as a historicalbasis but as a historical context of the reality, in the premise of which its immediateeffectiveness was reiterated and fully elaborated. This is a more active stance toconstruct a theory after deconstructing it. Laclau and Mouffe also had dialoguesactively with contemporary political schools on the political level. First, they, on theone hand, admitted the positive significance of liberalism in providing discourseconditions for the development of individual freedom, and on the other hand, stronglycriticized that liberal democracy either led to, tolerated and even exacerbated thehighly unequal social order of the Capitalism, or confused moral discourse withpolitical discourse, thus resulting in the loss of real political dimension. Althoughsocialist democracy is able to make up for the disadvantages of liberalism, socialism,in the opinion of Laclau and Mouffe, is not interrelated with democracy in nature, andis just one part of the democratic revolution. The author of the present study believesthat this is a obvious misreading of Marxism. Though the liberal socialist democracyadvocated by Laclau and Mouffe witnesses an expansion of the scope of democracy, itwould ultimately be a “rootless” democracy as it had undergone the process of“de-economy-orientation” and “de-class-orientation”. The viewpoint of the presentstudy is further confirmed by the case study of the discourse antagonism of the popular culture. Laclau attached great importance to the fundamental role of the culturalstruggle field in the political identity. He continued to apply the contingency logic ofthe political field in the popular culture, insisting that the task of the popular culturewas also to break shackles and fetters of the Essentialism and resist the dominationlogic of the Capitalism by constructing the subject identity through the discourseantagonism with the aesthetic experience as its theme. This received the profoundrecognition of John Fiske, who also gave full play to it. He believed that the popularculture was not the product of the culture industry domination, but the result of thepublic creation. The mass enjoy the “pleasure” brought by evading or producing in theprocess of boycotting the power. He, in a populist stance, discovered and fullyaffirmed the inherent political potential of the popular culture in the micro-politicallevel of the daily life. However, the popular culture, with a lack of political andeconomic critique, finds difficulty to form a wide range of subject identity, not tomention the radical democratic politics under the hegemony. It is the difficulties on thepolitical level faced by the popular culture that is a symptom of the hegemony theoryof Laclau and Mouffe.