I

The general theoretical situation in which contemporary social and cultural theory takes place is of course one in which ideas of the social and, consequently, of social change have been significantly altered in accordance with the ludic notion of language as the site of the uncontainable desiring “play"full-ness of the signifier, and the extension of language to include the social as such. The (post)modern moment is above all marked as the moment when, as Derrida says, “language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse” (Writing 280). Following the logic of Derrida's notion of discourse as a non-totalizable (because without a grounding “center") system of differences (which itself follows from Saussure's theorization of language as the site of relational and negatively determined “differences” and not “positive” and self-same entities)[2] the exemplary post-al theorization of the social (as the application of post-Saussarean [sic.] linguistics to social theory) is put forward in the neo-liberal political writings of Laclau and Mouffe.

In their classic text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Laclau and Mouffe argue that the “growing complexity and fragmentation of advanced industrial societies... in the sense [of].. . . a growing proliferation of differences” (96) demands a “break with orthodox essentialis[t]” and “abstract” (not “concrete")[3] notions of the social and social totality offered by classical Marxism which would (in their view) inadequately account for this “growing proliferation” in terms of a simple (read: simplistic) “diversification” of a sutured and originary (essential) totality. Rather, they argue, this “diversification” points to the fact that “totality” itself exists in a such a state of rupture and surplus meaning that "[t]he incomplete character of every totality leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of 'society' as a sutured totality. 'Society' is not a valid object of discourse... there is no single principle fixing —and hence constituting—the whole field of differences” (111). In the absence of such a “single principle” they argue that the social should be conceived of as “an ensemble of differential positions” modeled on “discourse” and organized according to the logic of “articulation” (94).

"Articulation”, as it is outlined by Laclau and Mouffe, further stands in opposition to the (dialectical) concept of “mediation” which belongs to the conceptual framework of “totality” and inscribes the social as a rational and intelligible (that is, conceptually apprehendable) system in which diverse elements are determinately connected according to a logic of “necessity”. “Articulation”, on the other hand, is a “practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (105). Such a conception is useful they argue because conceived as a “critique of every type of fixity” it stands as an “affirmation of the incomplete, open and negotiable character of every identity” (104). “Articulation” substitutes the logic of necessary connection with that of “contingency," and thus provides a notion of the social as an open-ended plurality of discourses—of Wittgensteinian (differential) language games—in the "process” of continual interaction and change without any “determination” by what they conceive of as a “reductive” and repressive “economic determinism."

The implications of such an analytics of the social is of course devastating for a theory of radical social transformation. To begin with, if on an epistemological level “society” is understood according to the logic of discourse as a signifying a-totality which is never “identical to itself” (113) then any possibility of transformation is occluded since transformation depends not only upon a determinate delineation ("identity") of the object which is to be transformed, but also upon its conceptual availability. In the absence of such a determinate identity the social itself is rendered as always already “other” than itself and thus as constitutively un-knowable and un-transformable: at any given moment both “more” and “less” than itself. On these terms, any intervention into the existing social relations can itself only be both “more” and “less” than itself. That is, can only be “indeterminate”, and thus not at all a transformation but only an inherently unstable discursive re-arrangement.

Moreover, the social seen as an ensemble of discourses entails that all social practices are understood as discursive practices (operating according to the immanent—non-deterministic and aleatory—mechanics of signification), none of which have any priority in organizing societies or exist in any necessary relation to other social practices, and thus none of which should be understood as being of primary importance to a politics of social change. What this argument thus effects in its claim to do away with “oppressive” epistemological “hierarchies” is to render class struggle against the exploitative economic practices of capitalist societies which fundamentally condition all social relations as existing in a relation of “equivalence” with, for instance, a “coalitional” activism (based on a contingent post-class “hegemony") aimed at effecting local reforms. But to render collective class struggle as equivalent to any other form of struggle and without any social “prior"ity is in fact to deny the very logic of class struggle in class societies. The relevance of class struggle stems from the fact that class is a prior social organization which precedes and explains the outcome (necessity) of all social practices. While ostensibly adhering to a “democratic” affirmation of all forms of struggle, Laclau and Mouffe quietly remove the notion of class struggle from the scene of intelligibility and install a coalitional (contingent) and local politics as the limit text to social change. In other words, contrary to their pluralist logic which assumes that “class struggle” and “radical democratic” coalitionalism can peacefully co-exist in the same political space of “hegemony”, being merely “different” modes of struggle, class struggle as a principled social practice aimed at overthrowing existing social structures is in conflict with coalition as a single-issue ameliorative political popul(ar)ism, and is irreconcilably opposed to it. On this view, valorization of a contingent and coalitional politics, is ultimately aimed at replacing class struggle with “cultural” and “ideological” (discursive) struggle along the lines of the “modification” of identity: continual re-forming of the boundaries of cultural representations—and not trans-forming of existing exploitative and hierarchical social arrangements.

This notion of “ideological” struggle as the “expansion of existing identity concepts” (Gender 15) receives, of course, its most forceful articulation from another arena of cultural discourse, in the writings of gender theorist Judith Butler who extends the implications of Laclau and Mouffe's politics of anti-"fixity” onto the terrain of contemporary notions of “agency” through her concept of “gender performativity”. Butler develops her notion of performativity on the basis of an up-to-date consolidation of the “analytic” philosophy of J.L. Austin and the “continental” philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Briefly, in his text of the 1950's How to Do Things with Words, Austin developed a theory of speech-acts which made a distinction between language as “constative” and language as “performative”. According to him, whereas the constative dimension entails the making of statements, or truth-claims about the world (belongs to the domain of epistemology), the performative dimension is not “about” anything, rather, it is that aspect of language that “does” something. That is, it constitutes actions of specific kinds in the very process of discursive articulation (belongs to the domain of rhetoric). This notion is supplemented by Derrida's reading of Austin in the 1970's, in which he argued that the possibility of the performative sign is its existence within the (a)structure of “citationality” or tropic “grafting” whereby, the citation itself (any sign) no longer need “refer” to anything, but in fact inscribes the possibility of an absolute break with any referent: “Every sign... can be cited, put between quotation marks” and “thereby... break with any given context and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely non-saturable fashion” (Margins 320). Butler's innovation has been to both radicalize Austin's notion of the performative on the basis of Derrida's understanding of citationality, and, proceeding on a generalized model of language as an “active” process, as a citational “doing” exceeding any “reference”, to argue for “performativity” as the very enabling condition of the “subject-in-language”: “identity [a]s [a] performatively constituted” and non-referential “performance” [Gender 25].

The theoretical significance of Butler's notion of performativity is of course its status as an “answer" to the conceptual impasse stemming from the internal contradictions in bourgeois discursivist social theory which on the one hand has claimed to offer a “liberating” vision of the social as discursively constructed and thus open to “reform” (ideological rearticulation), while on the other has seemed to “limit” the space of political “agency” in effecting such reform through a “linguistic determinism”. Framed by the classic philosophical opposition of “free will"/"determinism”, “performativity” is construed as offering a model of “agency” which bypasses both these positions since, as a practice of linguistic repetition (citation) of already existing discursive norms it does not assume a “voluntarist” agent ("free will"), while, as according to the Derridean logic of citationality as able to “break with any given context”, it is not “deterministic”. “Agency” then emerges “in the gaps opened up in regulatory norms... in the process of their repetition” whereby the “resignification of norms” as a question of ideological “subversion” becomes a matter “of working the weakness in the norm... of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” ("Critically” 26).

Although this opening up of “gaps” is regarded by Butler to be “progressive” insofar as it (potentially) allows for the “liberatory” emergence of “desire” (conceived of as constrained by “regulatory norms"=ideology) and the enabling of “democratic contestations” ("Critically” 20) over the status of the sign, it is in fact a conception which promotes “agency” in a vacuum in its conception of the subject-as-inherently (by virtue of the pan-historical properties of language), and spontaneously, an “act"iv(ist) agent. Subjects are not inherently and spontaneously agents (they are not inherently or spontaneously anything)—outside of the historical and material conditions of their existence, and Butler's notion of such an individualistic and spontaneous agency, by inscribing agency within the contours of “everyday” experience occludes a much more radical notion of agency: conceptual knowledge of social totality as the necessary and enabling condition of collective revolutionary intervention in the status quo. Indeed, Butler's idea of agency is in direct opposition to this latter formulation since on the ludic logic of différance “conceptual knowledge” is a contradiction in terms since “concepts”, far from being approximations of “truth," are merely allegories of their own self-signifying procedures and signs of the differential operations of discourse and thus are incapable of providing any reliable knowledge of the world (necessary for any determinate intervention). The political consequence of this position is of course highly significant, since, as Butler writes, although on the logic of her theorization of the subject as active-agent an inadvertent subversion of the ""terms of domination" may indeed take place, it would be impossible to “gauge the extent of [this] subversion. From what standpoint would one know?... subversiveness is the kind of effect that resists calculation" ("Critically” 29, original emphasis). Subversiveness, in other words, is beyond the domain of conceptuality. Yet, the question must be asked: is not the subject who does not need to know the consequences of her actions also the subject who can afford not to know? Isn't this subject, as a figure of unchecked desire who deconstructs ideology by virtue of her “excess"ive practices, specifically a bourgeois subject who finds herself unconstrained by the materiality of social practices and is thus merely an alibi for the “autonomous” and “free” agent of a triumphant free market capitalism which similarly imagines itself beyond any social consequences? On another theoretical level, this is precisely the point at which cultural constructionism comes up against a limit in the form of the “material”. In other words, how is the “material” to be understood in relation to the discursive model of the social which is proposed in the discourses of cultural construction, as a site which is available to intervention?[4] Butler's answer is to propose a “critica[l] redefin[ition]” of historical materialism's notion of the material as above all the effect of social relations of production through “a poststructuralist rewriting of discursive performativity” (13) to include the material as a discursive construction: “materiality [is] bound up with signification from the start” (Bodies 30). Further on, Butler clarifies:

... to be material means to materialize, where the principle of materialization is precisely what “matters” about the body, its very intelligibility. In this sense, to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where “to matter” means at once to materialize and “to mean” (Bodies 32).

On this logic the material is located in the domain of “intelligibility” or “meaning” such that materiality becomes a simulacral effect of language, available to intervention (on Butler's terms), only at the level of differential resignification that the performative signifies. The “material” is, in other words, completely cut off from social relations and becomes itself a (reversible) “process”, the implications of which theorization are clarified later on in her analysis. In an attempt to “counter... Foucaultian linguisticism, construed as a kind of discursive monism whereby language effectively brings into being that which it names” (Bodies 192), Butler adds that “materialization [is] governed by principles of intelligibility that require and institute a domain of radical unintelligibility that resists materialization altogether or that remains radically dematerialized" (35). As such, while evading the charge of theorizing “a divine performative" which “not only causes but composes everything which is its object” (6), Butler presupposes the existence of an object which exists only partially as a social object. That part of the object which “resists materialization”, functions as a “remainder” which, on the model of the Lacanian Real[5], is a site of such opacity that it is beyond the social, beyond history, and most importantly, beyond the transformative possibility of collective struggle. As a site “free” from labor relations and the conflictuality of the social (historical materiality), it is a “negative utopia” of the upper middle classes—on the model of desire—which prevents the realization of “immanent utopia” (Benhabib 35)—in the form of relations of production which are non-exploitative and oppressive, organized on the premise of meeting collective needs.

It is precisely this “remainder”, theorized along the lines of Laclau's notion of a “constitutive 'outside'" which exists in a relation of Derridean deconstructive supplementarity to Marxian totality, that is, as a textualized “outside” which is part of the economies of the “inside” and hence a moving site of undecidable significations, which ensures, in bourgeois theory, that the “outside” is not understood as the (revolutionary) ground for any effective opposition to the exploitative practices of the “inside”. Although Butler and others find such a notion of “constitutive outside” as politically effective: it “opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities” (Bodies 191) and preserves the “other"ness of the “other” as “undecidable"[6], it is, I am arguing, actually a very reactionary move since it limits social change to discursive resignification (a form of ideological struggle) and does not in any way address or change the fundamental condition of exploitation of one class (the proletariat) by another class (the bourgeoisie) in all class societies. Rather, it insures that all opposition is conceived of as immanent to the system (incremental reform) and elides any possibility for a radical theorization of the “outside” as a zone of implacable opposition to the “inside." What is finally at stake in positing that there is no such zone of objectivity[7] which cannot be absorbed into the “inside” (textualized)—a referent which grounds the play of signification (the moment of social transformation)—is the idealist elimination of any limit on the play of an ahistorical and autonomous desire, and the rewriting of objectivity as a mode of the subjective—a result of human “invention” and laws of signification which “exceed" the laws of history and extends the rule of capital over labor as unsurpassable.