Date:         Thu, 21 Jul 94 11:36:31 EDT
From: EJPOPK00-AT-UKCC.uky.edu
Subject:      Re: Laclau and Mouffe and exploitation (repost)


Greetings.  Before a comment, let me add my quick introduction.  I am a Ph.D.
student in geography at the University of Kentucky.  My interests are diverse,
but I approach this list taking seriously many claims made by theorists who are
variously called 'postmodern' or 'poststructuralist'.  My interest in Marxism
stems from my firm belief that the social relations of production remain a (not
THE) key moment of oppression in contemporary society.  Hence, my interest in
the recent Laclau and Mouffe thread.  I just finished reading the book for
the first time, and it seems to me an important attempt to formulate an anti-
essentialist theory which can be applied to the conditions of exploitation
within the capitalist mode of production.  It seems to me that the most
productive possibilities arise out of seeing the economy as a discursive site
and a potential nodal point for articulatory practice.  My Master's thesis
examined what I called the 'discursive scripting' of the International Monetary
Fund - which I see as an attempt to challenge or disrupt the economic discourse
which is current orthodoxy at the IMF and other international agencies.
I am also reading _Capital_  for the first time (about half-way through V 2)
and so, would welcome any discussion that follows.

-----------------------
Now, a specfic reply:

On Tue, 19 Jul 94 16:17 CDT Andy Daitsman said:

>      It is in this context that L&M introduce their conceptions of
>subordination, oppression, and domination -- as a way of categorizing unequal
>relationships.  Subordination, they suggest, is a natural state, and that "we
>need to differentiate 'subordination' from 'oppression' and explain the
>precise conditions in which subordination becomes oppressive" (p. 153).  The
>key element is that an unequal relationship become an "antagonism" in order
>for it to become oppressive; until that occurs, people will accept such
>relationships without question.  That is, serfdom or slavery do not become
>oppressive until a discourse arises that asserts "the rights inherent to every
>human being" (p. 154), thereby giving rise to a discursive antagonism and to
>consciousness not just of inequality but also of injustice.  From a Marxist
>viewpoint, this assertion is little more than absurd.
>

I would read this a little differently.  I doubt that L & M would deny the
personal resistance by slaves serfs, women, etc.  However, such individual
acts of resistance cannot by themselves become politically efficacious until
they become articluated with struggles outside of these specific sites.

"Our central problem is to identify the discursive condition for the emergency
of a COLLECTIVE action, directed towards struggling against inequalities and
challenging relations of subordination." (p. 153, my emphasis).  In fact, "it
may be a question of relations of subordination ALREADY IN EXISTENCE which,
thanks to a displacement of the democratic imaginary, are rearticulated as
relations of oppression" (p 159, again my emphasis).

The idea is to destabilize an otherwise stable discursive structure by forming
relations of equivalence, which expose the constructed nature of the identities
formed there (and here, in this notion of 'equivalential displacement', I see
affinities with Lacanian psychoanalysis).  This seems to me to resonate with
a critique of the taken-for-granted that was so much a part of Foucault's work.
The idea is not that relations of opression do not exist without external
recognition, but that they cannot become transparent, and hence politically
opposable, if they are not recognized.

>      L&M are grappling with how to understand what Marxists used to call
>false consciousness: how is it that people willingly assist in the
>reproduction of the circumstances of their own domination by others?  Their
>solution is to assert that people in fact do not do that, that domination is
>only subordination viewed from an external reference point, and that until
>subordination becomes discursively antagonistic it is not in fact oppressive.
>(I think I'm reading them correctly.)  This is the precise point where the
>concept of exploitation disappears completely from the analysis.
>

This turns the notion of false consciousness on its head.  It is not that
peope do not recognize their own oppression, but rather that they do not
recognize others'.  Thus, those 'other' socially-constituted relations become
relatively "sutured" - to use L & M's phrase - that is, relatively fixed in
a particular discursive structure which hides their own constructed nature.

Thanks for the post, Andy - this is one of the more productive lists I've seen!

Jeff Popke
University of Kentucky


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