Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx".
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| Barrett |
Perhaps the primary target of Barrett’s in this text is the notion, which she seems to see as univocal and pervasive, that all ideologies are class ideologies. She then narrates the evolution of the idea of hegemony in Gramsci and its later reformulations in the work of Laclau and Mouffe. She acknowledges that Gramsci’s thoughts about ideology and hegemony are crucially important to the left, but that “his brilliant insights often stand alone or in some tension with each other” specifically as regards the question of the relations between ideology and hegemony. Nonetheless, she sees Gramsci, or at least the Gramsci of Laclau and Mouffe as situated “at the crucial breaking point of Marxism as a viable political theory” (235). She praises Gramsci’s attention to “psychological validity” in his consideration of ideology, as well as the fact that he is not an economic determinist (236). She also perseverates on the question of whether many of Gramsci’s reflections on “cultural and intellectual phenomena” doubting whether they ought to be understood as falling under the “rubric of ideology” at all (237-8). She discusses Gramsci notion of “contradictory consciousness” - that our intellectual or philosophical views may not cohere with our actual behaviors (238). She then introduces hegemony, describing it as “the organizing focus of Gramsci’s thought on politics and ideology” and that it should best be understood as “the organization of consent” (238). She tells us that “Gramsci emphasized the ‘lower’ - less systematic - levels of consciousness” and that he attended specifically to “the ways in which ‘popular’ knowledge and culture developed in such a way as to secure the participation of the masses in the project of the ruling bloc” (238). She mentions the dispute as to whether Gramsci thought hegemony pertained only to consent or if it also covers coercion of consent (238). She then narrates the role of “organic intellectuals” in Gramsci which is at this point well known (239). She deems that Gramsci’s thinking about ideology is as a sort of social cement and calls his theory of ideology “non-deterministic” (239-40). By that she means that “it [the consent of the governed] is not a matter of economic interests alone,” but instead has to be thought in terms of hegemony which would add “political, cultural and social authority” into the mix (240). This brings her to her primary bone of contention, “whether or not ideologies should be described as ‘class belonging’” (240). “It is precisely this that has now been been problematized at a very fundamental level” (240).
Barrett then turns to Laclau’s 1977 book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, though in general her position on it is as having one foot in the past and one in the future. This book is conserved to criticize reductionist tendencies in Marxism, specifically regarding the question of whether all ideologies must be seen as class-based (241). But she also finds that Laclau covertly reinserts class as the hidden motivator (242). She discusses Stuart Hall’s use of the concept of hegemony to look at Thatcherism,and some of the responses to this criticism, though this accounting does not seem to effect the general direction of her text.
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| Laclau (l) and Mouffe (r) |
She then turns to the properly post-Marxist work of Laclau and Mouffe, defending them against the criticisms of Marxists (in somewhat blanket fashion) and providing an overview of what she finds valuable in their work. She read Laclau and Mouffe as having effected a “paradigm shift” in in political theory by virtue of having adopted a number of post-structuralist positions such as the end of “universal discourses” (244-5). She writes that Laclau and Mouffe “now believe that theories such as Marxism are not viable on general grounds” (245). Why is that? In her telling (and this seems generally accurate), “Marxism is founded on a political imaginary” which “rests on the assumption that the interests of social classes are pre-given” (246). In a remarkably condensed restatement of Laclau and Mouffe’s position, Barrett writes that hey deny; 1) “the the economy if self-regulated and subject to endogenous laws”; 2) that “social agents are constituted” as class subjects; 3) “that class position is necessarily linked to ‘interests’” (247). Of the positive features of their position she cites only two, that “society is impossible” and their new “theorization of agency in radical democratic politics” (247). [This last bit is somewhat surprising, as it seems to me that what have deviled Laclau and Mouffe and since then Laclau alone is precisely the degree to which is account of agency fails to be theoretically satisfying. In Laclau’s case, I have written about this at some length elsewhere, but to be grossly reductive here, his account relies on a sort of ‘magic moment’ when social subject’s affects are are said to be engaged, yet Laclau’s account of this, using resources from Lacanian psychoanalysis, is psychoanalytically incoherent.] The thesis that society is impossible is derived, in Barrett’s account, from Derrida (though it obviously echoes the Lacanian formula “the big Other does not exist”) and says that “[t]he incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-defined totality” (Laclau and Mouffe qtd 247). This leads then to an explication of their notion of discourse, which Barrett says is a “materialist one that enables them to rethink the analysis of social and historical phenomena in a different framework” (248). Given the preceding, the social real is in a sense radical open and not amenable to closure, but hegemonic discourse attempt to suture these gaps in the social through the partial fixation of certain terms, called “nodal points” which operate along the lines of Lacan’s quilting points (249-50). The pay-off of all of this from Barrett’s perspective is that now “new social movements” organized around issues of identity politics in the main, are not, not so much on equal footing with class, but have replaced class as the relevant theoretical terms of interest (250-1). In the middle of this discussion she makes a remark about Laclau and Mouffe’s thought having been “taken up so extensively in literary critical theory” and how she hasn’t the time to expand upon why that might be the case (251). [This point struck me as inaccurate, or at least I do not know the scale of reference which would incline me to see this as the case. I did a search in the MLA database and restricted it to works published since 1985 (Barrett’s book was published in 1991) and compared the number of articles found referencing her two favorite theorists, either alone or together and contrasted that with those referencing Althusser or the ‘ideological state apparatus’ and my findings do not appear to support her contention.] In Barrett’s account, and certainly in Laclau and Mouffe either together or separately, the notion of democracy has in a sense replaced socialism or communism, both of which are seen in retrospect to have emerged from the “democratic revolution” (253-4). Lest her account be read as uncritical of Laclau and Mouffe, I should mention that she does critique it at a few points. Here she says that she cannot imagine how their account of the “‘anti-natural’ element of the democratic imaginary” can avoid collapsing back into “humanism and essentialism” (254). She is also troubled by the ambiguity of the term “equivalence” in their work, uncertain whether it denotes “equality” or perhaps simply “proportional weight” as in the use of the term in chemistry and how either of these is meant to work given their insistence on “difference” (254). She also faults the pair for retaining an interest in commodity fetishism, seeing this as an avatar of economic determinism (257). She feels that Laclau and Mouffe are in a sense, still a slave to Marxist thought, which in her view they have effectively already transcended, specifically their continued use of the term “capitalism” (257). So what is left, if anything, of ideology in Laclau and Mouffe? As Barrett tells it “both the category of ideology and that of misrecognition can be retained, but by inverting their traditional content,” that is to say, that ideology would not be a misrecognition in the sense of illusion, but instead “it would consist of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity” (259-60). [This seems a bit odd, given that so many of the thinkers in the book, and outside of it, have already jettisoned the notion of ideology as illusion, though Barrett seems unaware of this.] Barrett also faults Laclau for suggesting that it would be productive for “post-Marxism and psychoanalysis” to be brought closer together on the grounds that, in her words “90 percent of psychoanalysis is burdened with a leaden weight of essentialism and it is, in fact, only the Lacanian reworking of the theory that has stripped it of these positivities” and thus she concludes he ought to have said “post-psychoanalysis” instead (262). [I know that Lacan would have refused the term post-psychoanalysis and I strongly suspect that Lacanian analysts would adopt it either. As to her sense of percentages, she seems unaware that roughly half the practicing analysts in the world are Lacanians of one sort of another, but whatever - her point is not a critical one so much as an ungrounded swipe, as the issue of essentialism is by no means absent in the work of contemporary Kleinians, followers of Winnicot, etc].
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