Post-metaphysical culture and politics: Richard Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe

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Post-metaphysical culture and politics: Richard Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe

Glyn Daly

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of a post-metaphysical culture for our understanding of truth, objectivity and politics. In particular, it focuses on the influential work of Richard Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe and examines some of the chief criticisms which have been made of it. Our argument is that a post- metaphysical culture enables us to carry out two important tasks: (i) to move (in Barthesian terms) from a readerly to a writerly perspective on democracy and modernity; and (ii) to secure the themes of authorial and discursive violence as indispensable to the development of a writerly (and post-modem) democracy. In this context we identify crucial theoretical and political differences between the two parties. Rorty's 'liberal utopia', we argue, re-introduces an essentialist dichotomic language which is both inconsistent and inhibitive of the politics of the democratic challenge. On these grounds, we affirm the post-Marxist (anti-utopianist) argument concerning the constitutive and ineradicable nature of power and antagonisms as the very condition for meeting this challenge and for advancing a new vision of democratic community, citizenship and individuality.

What is post-metaphysical culture and what are its consequences for our understanding of politics and democracy? In order to explore this question we will be focusing on the provocative and influential work of Richard Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe. Through their respective emphases on anti- representationalism and discursive reality, these writers have sought to clarify a post-metaphysical perspective for the purpose of interrogating political issues.

In this paper we will elaborate the central themes and tenets of this perspective. At the same time, we will also address some ofthe main criticisms levelled against it by those who insist upon the ultimate necessity for objective foundations on which to base political judgement. In particular, the paper will investigate three main areas of contention: (i) the role of 'reason'; (ii) the

Economy and Society Volume 23 Number 2 May 1994 (CJ Routledge 1994

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grounds for political judgement and decision; and (iii) the relationship between 'modernity' and 'post-modernity' in respect to the idea of democracy.

Our argument will be that, while a post-metaphysicavanti-representationalist perspective does not generate its own political manifesto - and, therefore, does not necessarily lead to a specific kind of politics as some commentators have suggested1 - it nevertheless enables us to develop a new approach to politics, beyond epistemic foundations, in which a far deeper experience of democracy and liberty is made possible. Using Roland Barthes' terms, we will assert that a post-metaphysical culture enables us to move away from the limitations of 'readerly' democracies (common to liberalism and Marxism) and towards a more 'writerly' approach to democracy in which the opportunities for self-authorship may be expanded within the terms of a radical democracy.

On the basis of a writerly approach to democracy, moreover, we will emphasize essential political differences between Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe - again underlining the fact that there is not a definitive politics of post-metaphysical thought. Both Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe articulate the vital importance of a post-metaphysical perspective2 - in common opposition to a 'metaphysics of presence'. However, while the former uses this perspective to advance proposals for a 'liberal utopia', the latter, by contrast, are concerned to develop a politics in terms of what might be called a 'democratic anti-utopia'.

According to Rorty, the notion of a liberal utopia and of 'we liberals' is sufficient to accommodate all the democratic energies and potential of a progressive community. From our point of view, however, this must necessarily bring about an inhibiting of the democratic writerly possibilities of political struggles, particularly those directed against the liberal imagination (e.g. the feminist struggle against the liberal conception of the neutrality of the private domain).

From the perspective of post-Marxism, there are two major shortcomings in Rorty (see Laclau 1991; Mouffe 1988). The first is that he is not sufficiently historicist in respect to the ways in which 'liberalism' has been differently articulated and that, in consequence, he sees an axiomatic relationship between liberalism and democracy (in the same way that traditional Marxists see an axiomatic relationship between socialism and democracy). The second, and more important, is that, in his efforts to establish the harmonizing appeal of his liberal utopia, Rorty establishes a series of absolute dichotomies - refordrevolution, force/persuasion, private/public - which are illegitimate and impoverish our understanding of politics. Laclau and Mouffe, by contrast, not only underline the essential presence of antagonism, conflict and (discursive) violence as the necessary conditions for the possibility of the social (and, at the same time, the impossibility of a closed 'society'), but also see these as the positive attributes of any progressive communitarian imagination - hence the characterization of post-Marxism as formally anti-utopian thought (see Laclau 1990: 232).

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Post-metaphysical culture and politics 175

The central difference in political prescription, we would say, lies in the fact that, while Rorty wishes to remain a liberal, Laclau and Mouffe are rather concerned to develop the power of democracy (which includes within it a liberal dimension), in all its effects, as a subversive logic in which all our 'markers of certainty' become open to question (see Lefort 1988: 19). For Laclau and Mouffe it is the very fact that we are permanently in exile from any utopia - i.e. a model of society which could finally command the terrain of communitarian possibility - which allows for the development of new democratic games/acts of subversion and for the invention of hitherto unknown political imaginaries. This is the doom and the gift we share with Adam and Eve in paradise lost.

Our argument in this paper is that, in order to develop a writerly approach to democracy, it is necessary not only to develop a post-metaphysical culture -in which human beings and their communities are conceived as centre-less networks of historical and political identification - but also to combine this with a post-Marxist theory of hegemony in which power, conflict and repression can never be eliminated and always provide the potential for social re-making and discarding. In this respect, we will affirm the centrality of the idea of 'authorial violence' - i.e. the capacity to establish forms of identification through the repression of real alternatives - as integral to, and constitutive of, a radical democracy and liberty.

Beyond the myth of representation: the conjunctural character of political decisions

In a recent account of the history of intellectual development, Rorty has drawn an important distinction between 'representationalism' and 'anti- representationalism' (1991a: 1-17). The representationalist perspective is clearly expressed by Bernard Williams as a general conviction that 'we can select among our beliefs and features of our world picture some that we can reasonably claim to represent the world in a way to the maximum degree independent of our perspective and its peculiarities' (1985: 138-9). There is, in the representationalist perspective, an aspiration towards a final vocabulary of truth; a universal and transparent language which corresponds to the way the world actually is. This aspiration lies behind all those analytical traditions which - from the referent to the phenomenon to the sign - have attempted to establish direct access to a predeterminate reality and, from this ultimate vantage point, to adjudicate in the grand matters of 'truth', 'human nature', 'structure of history', etc.

Rorty argues that this perspective has now outlived its uses and that we need to break radically with the representationalist/correspondence theory of truth. Rorty draws upon the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and, more recently, Dewey and Davidson in order to galvanize an 'anti-representationalist' approach. The central assertion here is that there is no objective reality which

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can be universally represented through a neutral (philosophical) medium of language. In this regard, Rorty makes a distinction between the unobjectionable realist claimthat'the world is outthere'-i.e. that the world exists independently of human language/mind/history - and the claim that 'truth is also out there'. As he puts it: 'Truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind -because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own- unaided by the describing activities of human beings - cannot' (1989: 5).

Thus the world does not manifest an antecedent set of truths which simply need to be discovered - as aprocess of filling in the missingpieces of a pre-given puzzle. The world, in other words, cannot be represented/represent itself'as it really is' through a metavocabulary of truth. On the contrary, the world can be described only through particular languages and is, therefore, permanently exposed to competing redescriptions from other positionsAanguages.

Staten helps to clarify this point, hypothesizing the general objection that 'language may move around as much as you like, but it remains responsible to something that stands still'. He replies, however, that 'the trouble with this way of talking is that the postulated reality is no good whatever unless it can be fixed in a system of concepts, and then we are right back to language again. This does not mean 'we can't ever get outside oflanguage'-a remark which I have no idea how to make sense of - but merely that metaphysical propositions are necessarily formulated in language. Hence, in Wittgenstein's way oftalking, the interest of remarks like 'the chair goes on existing, whether I look at it or not' is conceptual or grammatical; that is, it is primarily an instance of how we talk about what we call 'objects" (1985: 157). In short, nothing can be signified beyond signification (Staten 1985: 71) and as such there can be no 'extra-disc~rsive'.~

Questions concerning the distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality', therefore, can make sense only within certain language-descriptions - e.g. art dealing, theoretical physics, paranormal studies, etc. - but cease to have any meaningwhen applied to the activity oflanguage-descriptions as a whole (Rorty 1992: 41). Now, ifthere is no access to a final representation of reality then this means we cannot assume a God's-eye standpoint in adjudicating between different language-descriptions. As Davidson puts it, 'there is no chance that someone can take up a vantage point for comparing conceptual schemes (e.g. the astrologers and the astro-physicists) by temporarily shedding his own' (1984: 185).

Rorty changes the metaphor and affirms that there is no 'skyhook' which could lift us out of history, context and particular language-de~cri~tions.~ What we are left with is a condition in which it is possible only to 'explain true in terms of 1anguageIknow' (Bennet 1985: 66).' To this effect, truth must be regarded in Nietzsche's terms as 'a mobile army of metaphors' (cited in Kaufman 1954: 46-7). Or, as Laclau and Mouffe put it, 'every object is constituted as an object of d i sco~rse '~ (1985: 107).

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Post-metaphysical culture and politics 1 77

In breaking with the representationalist, or correspondence, theory of truth both Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe demonstrate that philosophy cannot provide us with a manual of arbitration for making life choices. Questions like 'why be kind?' and 'why not be cruel?' cannot be theoretically or philosophic- ally solved because no neutral or ahistorical ground can be found on which to formulate an answer. Rather, such questions will be conjuncturally settled by those narratives -novels, ethnographies, journalist writings, etc. -with which we identif) and express our solidarity (see Rorty 1989: 94). In this way, a historical construction of community is established through a set of commonly shared vocabularies and hopes (which, in turn, are exposed to the possibilities of other hopes and vocabularies).

The charges levelled against this perspective are: (i) that it necessarily leads to relativism; and (ii) that it embraces irrationalism and randomness in which it becomes impossible to justify decisions and/or to discriminate between normative positions.

In regard to the first, Rorty points out that the 'relativist predicament' is actually a pseudo-problem - a problem which cannot be 'solved' (to the satisfaction of those who make the charge of relativism), only transcended. As he argues:

'Relativism' is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. . . . The philosophers who get called 'relativist' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought . . . . So the real issue is not between people who think one view as good as another and people who do not. It is between those who think our culture, or purpose, or intuitions cannot be supported except conver- sationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support.

(Rorty 1982: 166-7)

The 'anti-relativist', therefore, poses an exclusive alternative between an objective ground for assessing truth (the way things actually are) and a complete chaos of positions (corresponding to, at least, the number of people there are in the world at any one time) in which it is impossible to affix any truth whatsoever - either we have a necessary singularity or a necessary dissolution.

Anti-representationalism, however, makes it possible to cut through this alternative. Thus, 'truth' will always be conjuncturally put together as the result of a struggle between competing language-games/discourses.7 The movements from Newtonian to Einsteinian to post-Bohrian physics, for example, do not admit to an arbitrary relativism. Rather, they are the result of what Mary Hesse, following on from Nietzsche, calls 'metaphoric redescriptions' (1980) which open up new possibilities and create new 'truths'. Similarly, categories such as 'woman', 'citizen', 'consumer', 'rights', 'Europe', etc., are not inscribed as atemporal objectivities but, on the contrary, are the result of historically specific and ongoing constitutive practices - and this, of

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course, does not make these categories any less real or true according to their conjuncture. In the absence ofa God's-eye standpoint, and in the light ofwhat Rorty calls a 'de-divination of truth', the problematic of relativism dissolves and is absorbed within the continuing historical games of redescribing the world.

The second charge is made by those who insist on referring political judgement and rationality to an objective basis. Eagleton, for example, attempts to undermine the positions of anti-representationalism and discourse theory by arguing that a galley slave would be rationally given to rebellion not because of his perception of oppression - thereby introducing a well-known reduction of discourse to mental activity - but because of the factual condition of his oppression (1991: 206-8). Rorty responds in this way:

Anti-representationalists can happily agree with Eagleton that when the galley slave thought he was a justly lashed worm, he was wrong, and he is now right in thinking that his interests consist in escaping the galleys. But they will construe this claim as saying: if the slave tries the discourse of emancipation he will come out with better results than those he achieved with the discourse in which he viewed himself as a worm. Better by whose lights? Our's and Eagleton's. What other lights should we use? (As Putnam puts it: we should use somebody else's conceptual scheme? A worn's?). So when Eagleton says all women ought to become feminists because 'an unmystified understanding of their oppressed social condition would logically lead them in that direction', we anti-representationalists construe him as saying 'Those non-feminist women will get more of what we think they ought to want if they become feminists'.

(1992: 41-2)

In a similar vein to that of Eagleton, Geras argues that political intention must reflect objective reality if it is to have any real force (1987, 1988). In his dispute with Laclau and Mouffe, Geras takes the contemporary issue of HIV/AIDS in order to illustrate the dangers of ambiguity if one ignores objective foundations: 'For, you see, you can say not only that an earthquake is an expression of the wrath of God, but also that AIDS is; or that famines, widespread poverty, are. We might regard the first, in that case, as due punishment rather than the consequence of a non-moralising virus, and give prayer as the best way of dealing with the second. Laclau and Mouffe will not go this far. Why not?' (1988: 57).

Here Geras reveals the traditional metaphysician's desire for a hard-edged and undeniable truth whose power is irresistible. But, of course, living in the real world, we can see that the widespread forces of the moral right (and, indeed, the moral left) do invoke discourses of divine retribution in their various crusades against social 'undesirables' - thus, in contrast to Geras's assertion that 'Laclau and Mouffe will not go this far', it is clear that they would go this far in recognizing a contemporary political reality. Whether people are convinced one way or another over HIV/AIDS has nothing to do

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with the revelation of a truth (as if one were being shown the functioning of a castling law in chess). As Rorty puts it, "'Truth" is not the name of a power which eventually wins through, it is just the nominalisation of an approbative adjective' (1991b: 10). Conviction in this matter will depend upon the ongoing political attempts to make competing descriptions of HIV/AIDS compatible with people's wider descriptions (cultural, social, religious, etc.) of themselves and the world. Thus the reason why Laclau and Mouffe and 'we radicals' would (currently) choose the description of HIV/AIDS as 'the consequence of a non-moralising virus" is because it is morally compatible with our existing truth-descriptions and our desire to help HIV/AIDS sufferers.

This point becomes even clearer if we take the issues of abortion and eu- thanasia and the political and moral questions which surround them. These issues cannot be decided algorithmically - e.g. life has begun at point X therefore Y, or life has deteriorated beyond justifiable support at point A therefore B. On the contrary, they will be decided upon by ourselves, and all those 'experts' in full command of the 'facts', operating with certain hopes and vocabularies within particular conjunctures.

More widely, however, Geras charges that discourse theory is 'normatively indeterminate, fit to support virtually any kind of politics, progressive or reactionary' (1987: 35). Historicists like Laclau and Mouffe, however, do not see the force of this charge. Indeed, they would readily accept it as stating the obvious. Of course discourse theory is normatively indeterminate - if it were nornatively determinate it would simply be reinscribing, at another level, the type of metaphysical necessity it critiques/deconstructs. And, of course, discourse theory can be made use of by Geras' 'reactionaries'. It need hardly be pointed out, however, that this also holds true for foundationalism, which is regularly deployed by fascists, racists, sexists, etc., often with reference to foundationalist notions of 'human n a t ~ r e ' . ~ Even with Marxism - the foundationalist discourse which Geras and Eagleton prefer - we have seen how this discourse has been constructed in ways which have been used to justify the most appalling forms of repression in the twentieth century.

Thus, the problem of indeterminacy (moral, political or otherwise) is not confined to either a metaphysical or post-metaphysical culture but is an en- demic problem of living in communities which are historically constituted. It is not a problem, therefore, of getting one's first principles right, but rather a universal problem of political context. And, in this regard, we must affirm with Derrida that 'there are only contexts without any centre of absolute an- chorage (anchrage)' (1988: 12), and that, in consequence, all contexts are essentially vulnerable.

For anti-representationalists, therefore, it is crucially a matter of recognizing and accepting indeterminacy and contextual vulnerability as fundamental realities which we have to live with. Eagleton and Geras, on the other hand, express the metaphysician's hope of finding the philosopher's stone, or an amulet of Truth, which guards against contingency and delivers up a final

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discourse of immutability capable of withstanding the forces of subversion. Anti-representationalists simply do not see any possibility of this.

This does not mean that we are obliged to embrace randomness. On the contrary, anti-representationalists recognize that our decisions require a referential paradigm and that they take place within certain systems of belief. At the same time, however, they crucially affirm that we cannot go beyond all systems ofbelief, or climb out of all possible histories, and make decisions as if they were cosmic judgements. In other words, our decisions are always a matter for practical (not divine) reasoning and always take place -if this term is preferred - in relation to 'conjunctural foundations'.

The anti-representationalist perspective, therefore, does not abandon rationality but critiques the idea that it should have an ultimate foundation, i.e. that reason should be based on an algorithmic and predetermined structure for making decisions and discriminating between options. It is a critique, therefore, of rationalism - that is, a particular foundationalist discourse on 'reason' - which acknowledges that human beings are always in limited situations in which a final ground cannot be called upon to determine a decision. As Rorty puts it, 'we should not look for skyhooks, but only for toeholes' (l99la: 14).

What Rorty proposes is that we should abandon a theology of reason and move towards a much greater 'pragmatism'." This involves a fundamental shift in our approach to reason (and reasoning) such that abstract questions of the type 'are we representing reality accurately?' are rejected in favour of those of the type 'are there more useful conceptual instruments at our disposal?' (Rorty 1992: 41). Thus the process of truth making possesses no telos, i.e. a progressive convergence towards Truth and the way things actually are. Rather, it is a process which reveals the form of Kuhn's paradigmatic shifts in which human endeavour becomes identified with new descriptions as better ways of dealing with contemporary problems and priorities and thereby gives up on/represses the old descriptions of reality, e.g. the determination of the prima materia, the location of the soul, the anthropological value attributed to the skull dimensions of different races, the role of finitism and certainty, etc. The crucial point, however, is that a paradigm-free representation of reality, or final vocabulary, is never reached.

While anti-representationalism is incapable ofwriting its own manifesto or of generating a set of determinate politicaVnormative effects - properties which it shares with foundationalism - it nevertheless does provide the conditions for thinking new types of radical politics.

The central importance of anti-representationalism is that it enables us to move decisively away from the apodictic aspirations of theory and philosophy and towards the realm of politics. In this way, every conjunctural foundation, all vocabularies and all forms of practical reasoning become open to question. It enables us, therefore, to go beyond the 'dictatorship' of metaphysical decree - e.g. the laws of history, pre-given sites of political struggle, fixed notions of right-holders, human nature, etc. -and to see society as an ongoing process of

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re-invention rather than an objectivist structure revealed to adepts. It enables us, in other words, to see ourselves as limited historical labourers pragmatically putting our communities together from a number of starting points -without any claims to be rationally inviolable or to know the mind of God-and to see this process as essentially exposed to otherness and the historical possibilities of conflict and contestation over the very representation and dimensioning of 'the community7. In this respect, there can be no magical politics capable of transforming the world because of a privileged access to Truth, only the pragmatic politics of defending and creatingtruths through hegemonic will and constant discursive engagement.

Let us conclude this section. Anti-representationalism can no more guarantee a set ofoutcomes than foundationalism can, and may just as easily be made use of by reactionaries as progressives. The virtue of anti-representationalism, however, is that it recognizes this as the problem: aproblem ofliving and struggling as human beings within certain communities and in certain historical periods. T o this effect, anti-representationalism underlines the crucial importance of political context and hegemonic struggle, rather than theoretico-philosophical determination, in respect to our social realities.

Reactionary ideas (whether foundationalist or not) will not be overcome by scripture, nor will reactionaries be spontaneously transformed by our particular strain of the truth. An identity such as 'progressive' (or 'reactionary') is always polymorphously political - a site of historical and cultural determination - which does not square-up, in objectivist terms, along pre-given trenches of struggle (such as class opposition). We cannot objectively identifywhat it is to be progressive and then set it in foundationalist cement. The point is rather to see how such identities as 'progressive7 and 'reactionary' are historically derived and to develop forms of political solidarity and identification accordingly. For example, is the orthodoxy of the necessary leadership of the working class progressive or reactionary? By whose lights? From a feminist point of view? Again, answers to such questions can only be found through the political engagement of historical forces, not on Mount Olyrnpus.

'We progressives' cannot rest on our foundations. By historicizing the identity of 'progressive' we can appreciate both the contextual vulnerability of suchan identity and its potential for radical expansion beyond current limits. T o this effect, anti-representationalism provides the crucial conditions in which it becomes possible to take up the themes of equality and liberty in far more radical and expansive ways than either liberalism or Marxism were capable of doing and to develop the democratic imagination beyond epistemic constraints.

Readerly and writerly democracy: post-modern conversations with modernity

Mobilizing the terms of Roland Barthes, we would argue that a crucial political potential of post-metaphysical culture lies in the fact that it creates the

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conditions in which it becomes possible to move away from a 'readerly' approach to democracy and towards a 'writerly' one." The former approach has undoubtedly been historically dominant. Both liberalism and Marxism, for example, founded their theories of democracy on a naturalistic represen- tatiodfunctioning of a certain space: the economic. In these great projects of modernity the democratic subject was derived as an essential (ahistorical) identity whose liberation depended upon a particular economic closure: (i) the possessive individual within the free play of the market; (ii) the worker (as a possessor of labour power) within the socialization of the means of production.

Using Barthes' terminology, then, both liberalism and Marxism could be characterized as readerly approaches to democracy. That is to say, the narrative of 'democracy' (as based upon the relevant economic closure) is already given and it is simply a question of certain adepts revealing this narrative to the masses; of widening the readership so that people may discover their objective interests and what they were really intended for. In these approaches, therefore, people become steadily more aware of the particular democratic narrative - as in turning the pages of a book - and do not have an active (or dialectical) engagement with this narrative. They are processes, then, of 'enlightenment' and the passive consumption of pre-given representations of reality.

It is clear that these types of readerly democracy have become increasingly drawn into crisis as multiple and diverse forms of democratic subjectivity/ demands have developed beyond the promises of the liberal market or the socialization of productive means. This is particularly evident in the current era of disorganizing capitalism and socialism (see Daly 1991).

These readerly democracies, of course, were doomed from the beginning (although we should not underestimate their historical advances). There was never any possibility that an objectivist political economy could provide us with the one true reading of democracy - and thereby bring an end to history, conflict and ideology. The problem here, moreover, is not restricted to the political economy versions of readerly democracy, those which base themselves upon other final texts or 'extra-discursives' (human nature, race, gender, etc.) are doomed in exactly the same way. It is a problem of the readerly project as such. In order to liberate the democratic imagination, we would argue that a transition to both a 'writerly' and a 'post-modern' perspective is required.

Extending the argument of Barthes, a writerly democracy would be one in which the democratic subject is not reduced to a passive consumer of a given narrative of democracy. The democratic subject cannot simply be read off (e.g. the worker, the possessive individual, etc.) but, on the contrary, must be recognized as an essentially unstable locus for identities which is interactively involved with the constitution of 'democracy' as such. And, in this sense, a writerly democracy would be both modern and post-modern. That is to say, it would involve a certain impulse to the completion of the project of modernity

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but without recourse to a telos or to a given holistic structure with a rational foundation. Let us elaborate this point.

If democracy, as an imagination which develops (unevenly and ambigu- ously) from the Enlightenment, introduces a logic of equality and self- determination, then a writerly democracy involves the interactive constitution of new identities (and new 'democracies') - citizen, socialist, feminist, ecologist, etc. - through an invitation to complete this logic.12 The point is, however, that this logic can never be finally completed or domesticated. This is because of the essential possibility of taking up this logic in new ways; of opening new conversations with modernity through alternative language games. A writerly perspective on democracy and modernity, therefore, involves a different approach to the problem posed by Habermas.

Habermas asserts that radical democratic emancipation is only possible through a completion of the project of modernity as derived from the rationalist and universalist ideals of the Enlightenment (1985, 1987). But, as Hans Blumenberg (1986) points out, there exists at the very beginning of the Enlightenment a distinction between the political project of 'self-assertion' and the epistemological project of 'self-foundation' with no necessary relation between the two. In this respect, it becomes possible to retrieve and to radicalize the political logic of modernity beyond its epistemic limitations, i.e. the limitations of an objectivist completion of the 'self' (norms, values, identity, etc.). Taking a writerly perspective, then, we can liberate the possibilities of modernity by affirming its most radical character: its 'incompletability', i.e. an endless game of self-assertion (taking up the themes of equality and liberty) without pre-given limits.

A sense of the post-modern now becomes clear. A post-modern perspective, in these terms, would not constitute a simple abandonment of the attempts to complete it, but a recognition of its fundamental incompletability. A post-modern impulse, therefore, would consist precisely in the effort to take up the themes and logics of the modern but in an indeterminate number of ways, with an indeterminate number of Rorty's 'conversational partners', as an ongoing process of hybridization. There exists in this impulse, using iiiek's terms, a certain 'enthusiastic resignation': that is, an experience of ultimate impossibility and incompletability which incites enthusiasm (1990: 259-60).

Habermas continues to demand an approach which is based upon 'universalist problematics and strong theoretical strategies' - to which Eagleton and Geras would also subscribe - in which 'universal validity bursts every provinciality asunder' (1987: 208, 322). The anti-representationalist argues, however, that the very affirmation of 'universal validity' (gender/ sexual equality, environmental rights?) is one which cannot take place beyond all provincial or historical context. Now this manifestly does not mean abandoning the meta-narrative; to replace the meta-narrative with atomized narratives is simply an inversion on the same terrain of necessity (i.e. unity versus dissolution). As Laclau argues, it cannot be a question of abandonment but one of critiquing the ontological status of the meta-narrative (1988: 23).

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Indeed, the very articulation of the continual amplification of the discourse of rights and equality, without foundation, is one which precisely constitutes the meta-narrative of a post-modern (and we would say writerly) democracy - a meta-narrative which is put together through political and argumentative practices. To this effect, any notion of universal validity becomes something like 'general agreement' or 'large provincial context' (but no less vulnerable to other historical forces).

While Habermas believes that we necessarily do harm to the emancipatory project of modernity if we abandon its universal ideals, a writerly approach to democracy sees this as a crucially radical opportunity; an opportunity which enables us to move away from the limitations of epistemic scripture and towards the possibilities of political inscription and identification. Thus, it is not a question of accepting or rejecting modernity (as if it were a unified package), but of interrogating its historical validity and adequacy with a view to modulating and widening its emancipatory potential. T o be post-modern, in this sense, is to emphasize the spirit of modernity rather than its laws.13

In this context, a post-modern and writerly democracy would also be sensitive to the warnings of people like Foucault (and even Marx) that today's chains are invariably forged from the hammers which struck off those of yesterday. Moreover, as Rorty points out, this process of hammers-into- chains will not end with 'the invention of hammers that cannot be forged into chains - hammers that are purely rational, with no ideological alloy' (1991~: 15). The best that we can hope for is that those chains become lighter and more easy to break.

This also means that we must reject the traditional conception of Revolution; i.e. the idea that with a single hammer-strike we can make an absolute rupture with an impure past and establish a radically new foundation for the revolutionary society as a completely rational order (devoid of antagonisms and the abysses of ambiguity). Despite the brutal excesses of the Stalinist purges, the Chinese cultural revolution and the Khmer Rouge, etc., it is clear that a social formation cannot be wholly transformed by a single act of power - a point zero for the revolutionary era - but depends upon the overdetermination of a multiplicity of reforms in areas of the social which have been variously politicized. This is precisely what happened in the 'revolutions' of history.

The revolutionary act, as an act of total foundation, capable of overlaying and suppressing all social division, is permanently deferred. T o this effect we are always operating on a terrain of political reforms in which there is a diversity (indeed an increasing diversity) of the sites of power and resistance which can never be fully commanded by a single evocation to a new order.

However, it is at this point that a clear difference begins to emerge between the political prescriptions of Rorty and those of Laclau and Mouffe. For while both parties would identify themselves with the reformative rather than revolutionary forms of social re-making, the former emphasizes the efficacy of a kind of 'technicist reformism' through the expansion of a liberal utopia while

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the latter are concerned to articulate a 'revolutionary reformism' through the subversive logics of democracy.

In addition, we will argue that, insofar as a writerly approach to democracy presupposes the capacity for 'authorial violence' (see below), then the perspective of Laclau and Mouffe is more compelling and useful than that of Rorty. Thus, while the former are concerned to develop a theory of power and hegemony in their view of politics (in which antagonism and violence play a positive and constitutive role), the latter bases his political schema upon an essential elimination of the moment of force, thereby severely limiting the potential for authorial violence, and an exclusive emphasis on reform, persuasion and the purported free play of the private. We will argue that the most radical and writerly potential of the democratic imagination actively depends upon an anti-utopianist recognition of the essential possibility for conflict and authoriaVdiscursive violence.

Democracy, revolutionary reformism and authorial violence: utopian and anti-utopian logics

Rorty's vision of the utopian community is of a liberal society defined in this way: 'A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistics and other practices with suggestions for new practices' (1989: 60). Along with the emphases on reform and persuasion, Rorty also expresses the traditional liberal concern with the development of an uninhibited private realm. Rorty sees the private/public separation in terms of a clear division and argues that we should give up all those attempts which, since Plato, have tried to establish some kind of unity between these two realms (1989: xiii-xv). T o this effect, Rorty admires Derrida as someone who, according to him, has stopped 'trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resource and utility' (1989: 125).

As a liberal, Rorty sees all public attempts to define/enforce a substantive notion of the common good as having totalitarian implications which necessarily do harm to individual liberty. In this regard, Rorty is concerned to distance himself from 'radicals':

Radicals . . . want a world in which all things have been made new, and in which the rearrangement of little private things, the pursuit of idiosyncratic autonomy, is subsumed under some higher, larger, more thrilling communal goal. They want a public version of a sublimity which is, I think, necessarily private - the sublimity one attains by breaking out of some particular inheritance (a vocabulary, a tradition, a style) which one had feared might bound one's entire life.

(1991~: 19)

By contrast, Rorty wants a world in which the public space is limited to minimal functions - as something which 'can never be more than beautiful'

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(1989: 125) -and a private realm in which individuals are at 'leisure to pursue private perfection in idiosyncratic ways' (1991~: 19). In this context, citizens should be 'liberal ironists': that is, people who face up to the contingent nature of their own beliefs and desires and, at the same time, accept the avoidance of cruelty to others as their primary social goal (see especially 1989: 61-9).

In contrast to Foucault, Rorty believes that a community of 'we liberals' is sufficient for realizing our present and future communitarian and normative objectives (1989: 64). Indeed, at various points in his work, Rorty reveals a conservatism which is all too reminiscent of Daniel Bell's 'end of ideology' thesis. As he states: 'I think that contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement - an improvement which can mitigate the dangers Foucault sees. Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs' (1989: 63).

The first question which must be put to Rorty is: can 'we liberals' encompass all communitarian visions and possibilities? More so than, say, 'we socialists' or 'we anarchists'? Is the identity of 'we liberals' capable of being infinitely stretched without turning into something else? If it were, then Rorty would appear to have found something which cuts against his arguments concerning the contingent nature of identity.

In this regard, Laclau and Mouffe argue that Rorty crucially fails to historicize liberal identity. Laclau, for example, points out that the identity of 'we liberals' is always a historical construct which is put together against the different social and political forces which are present at the time: for example, the construction of liberal identity in opposition to, say, fascism is different from the previous construction in which fascism was not available as a credible alternative. It can never be enough, therefore, to be simply 'we liberals'. On the contrary, liberal identity will always involve a political struggle to overcome that which would subvert it: a hegemonic operation in which alternative discourses compete to recruit politically (and, thereby, modify) the identities of 'we liberals' in particular historical contexts (see Laclau 1991: 19-20).

Moreover, when Rorty refers to 'contemporary liberal society' it is clear that he is actually referring to 'liberal democracy', as if there were an intrinsic connection here. But as MacPherson (1975) has shown, the articulation between liberalism and democracy begins only around the middle of the nineteenth century and they are thus not necessarily related in any way.14 Indeed, Mouffe points out that Rorty fails to draw the relevant distinctions between a whole range of discourses - capitalism, liberalism, democracy, political liberalism and economic liberalism - and that, in consequence, he is compelled to offer a wholesale defence of the 'institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies' (Mouffe 1988: 10; Rorty 1983: 584). And if, in the modern age, liberalism has been modified by the logics of democracy, we may ask what is to stop democratic demands for equality and autonomy being taken up in new ways which further challenge and subvert the nature of existing liberalism?

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From a post-Marxist point of view, however, the central problem in Rorty's thought concerns his conception of politics. Rorty's vision of 'we liberals' is of a community which can be expanded to the nth degree in a way seemingly beyond power and ideology (indeed, as a final paradigm). Rorty's approach to politics, therefore, may be characterized as a 'friendly' one whereby people may be enlisted harmoniously to the 'we' of common liberal hopes and vocabularies. It is an approach in which the dimensions of antagonism and violence are conspicuously absent.''

Laclau and Mouffe, on the other hand, demonstrate that any 'we' depends for its constitution on the identification of a 'them'/'enemy' (see especially Mouffe 1992: 234-5). While this constitutive exterior (or otherness) means that the realization of an all-inclusive political community is permanently denied, at the same time, in providing a limit, it makes possible the affirmation of a political community - a 'not them' in order for an 'us'. The construction of a 'we', therefore, is never a simple process of expanding agreement or rationalizing consent (as the liberal myth would have it) but is, ultimately, based upon acts of power, repression and exclusion. T o this extent, antagonisms can never disappear and, indeed, are integral to the very construction of objectivity and the social.I6 In this regard, there will always be the possibility of politics/hegemony in which social frontiers may be destroyed/re-made in a way which crucially transforms the composition ofthe 'we' identity and its sense of otherness.

Rorty's 'friendly' approach to politics lies at the heart of a number of (false) dichotomies - of the type reform/revolution, persuasiodforce and private/ public - which he establishes in order to validate his liberal vocabulary. Indeed, we would even go so far as to say that, because Rorty is so concerned to reclaim the liberal tradition, he surreptitiously re-introduces a metaphysical-sounding language in which he is drawn towards the very sirens he wishes to avoid.

Let us first examine the contrasting conceptualizations of the reform' revolution and persuasiodforce distinctions. As we have shown, both Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe reject the classical notion of revolution as a foundational moment in which there is an absolute rupture with the past and a totally new and unified society is generated. However, Rorty's alternative to the essentialism of ruptural revolutionary violence, we would argue, presents an equally essentialist perspective on reform and persuasion in terms of the radical elimination of the former: that is, it falls back, totally, on reform and persuasion as the cancelling counterpoints to revolution and force.

In certain historical and contextual terms, of course, it makes perfect sense to speak of the distinctions between force and persuasion and reform and revolution. The question is, however, can we identify what Staten calls a 'boundary of essence' between these terms which is universally recognizable? As Laclau points out, inasmuch as revolutionary violence is always an overdetermination of a multiplicity of reforms, so too persuasive reform is an activity which constitutes rupture and always contains a dimension of force

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and violence (1991: 13). For example, in the very process of being persuaded/ reformed against a certain option - e.g. to give up smoking-then this must, by definition, involve the 'violent' repression of the existing optional pursuit. Taking a broader issue, such as abortion, here we can see that the contemporary reforms were not reached through final absolute agreement or harmonizing consent but, on the contrary, depended upon one discursive pole repressing and doing 'violence' against the other. It depended, in other words, on hegemonic struggle, i.e. a process of persuasion/reform which includes within it the constitutive other of violence and repression (see Laclau 1991: 17).

Moreover, reforms do not stay in place, as parts of an unfolding rationale, but are under constant threat from other discursive poleshe-groupings. With the rise of the new right in the 1980s, for example, we see how the earlier ('liberal') reforms over abortion came under fierce political attack and the hegemonic process of persuasion/politico-discursive violence began all over again. Thus there is no continuum of reforms which could give rise to a technicist social engineering.

Within this perspective, we are not obliged to choose between revolution and reform as absolute moments or to remain within the terms of an essential division between them. Revolution and reform are not mutually exclusive but are, in fact, mutually constitutive and subverting as the forces of discursive violence and repression are fully at play in games of hegemonic persuasion and identification. In this regard, it becomes possible to articulate a 'revolutionary reformism'. As Laclau argues:

But if, on the one hand, I am trying to relocate revolution within reform, on the other hand I am very much in favour of reintroducing the dimension of violence within reform. A world in which reform takes place without violence is not a world in which I would like to live. It could be either an absolutely unidimensional society, in which one hundred per cent of the population would agree with any single reform, or one in which the decisions would be made by an army of social engineers with the backing of the rest of the population. Any reform involves changing the status quo and in most cases this will hurt existing interests. The process of reform is a process of struggles, not a process of quiet piecemeal engineering. And there is here nothing to regret. It is in this active process of struggle that human abilities - new language games - are created.

(Laclau 1991 : 13)

From this point of view, moreover, the classical representation of emancipation in terms of a society which is completely free of antagonisms and violence is unsustainable. For in such a society (where fists would never be raised) there would be only the Spinozoist freedom of being conscious of a necessity, i.e. the recognition of a pre-existing harmonious order. A totally free society and a totally determined society, therefore, would be exactly the same (Laclau 1991: 15-16).

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Post-metaphysical culture andpolitics 189

By contrast, a genuine freedom, or radical liberty, actively depends upon the capacity to exhibit a certain discursive violence. A fully free decision to take option A (if it is not already determined) depends upon the ability 'violently' to reprednegate options Band C: violence, therefore, is not simply reducible to the moment of the physical but is inscribed within decision making as its condition of possibility. Thus, in contrast to Rorty, for Laclau and Mouffe antagonism and discursive violence may be regarded as the very 'ground' upon which liberty is constituted as an act of decision and as a widening of the domain of the possible.

A central and paradoxical assertion of post-Marxism, then, is that 'the existence of violence and antagonisms is the very condition of a free society' (Laclau 1991: 15). While particular forms of oppression can certainly be overcome through discursive violence (e.g. the repressionldefeat of reactionary attitudes towards women, blacks, gays, etc.), the very possibility of this overcoming can only take place insofar as (i) discursive violence can always be practised, and (ii) total freedom (as an antagonism-free stasis) can never be established.

With the notions of revolutionary reformism and discursive violence there is a recognition that there can be no final, paradigm-free, community - in terms of either a founding moment of rupture or a founding elimination of such rupture. Rather there exists a permanent tension between 'we'/'them' in which the reciprocal processes of subversion and affirmation reveal a further paradox in the historical creation of communities: 'it [the community] has to be essentially inachievable in order to become pragmatically possible' (Laclau 1991: 21). It is on the basis ofthis paradox that the prejudices and assumptions of any social order - including that of 'we liberals' - can be challenged by those who are excluded and are able to articulate new definitions of community.

In these terms, we can see that the writerly possibilities for taking up the logics of democracy in new affirmations of equality/self-determination depend upon widening the opportunities for authorial violence against real alternatives, e.g. 'I am A, B, C . . . but not X, Y, Z'. The question we must ask, however, is how can we secure the conditions for democratic forms of authorial violence and, moreover, how is self-authorship produced?

For Rorty, the answer to these questions is clear. Against the totalitarian and essentialist forms of domination which subsume individual energies and authorial possibilities in the public discourse of the 'higher, more thrilling, communal goal', Rorty embraces the idea of an unimpeded private realm in which people and their idiosyncratic visions of perfection can flourish. In this regard, we see Rorty in the full grip of the liberal myth of the private as an axiomatically neutral realm of self-creation and self-realization.

From a post-Marxist perspective, the idea of the private as a realm in which individuals can automatically achieve fulfilment is as much a fantasy as the idea of completing the collective good through exclusivist public determination. Again, what we need to do is to interrogate both sides of the private/public division with a view to deconstructing the conceptual terrain on

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which it has been based. T o this effect, we see that just as much as the public constitutes a certain regime of social conduct, so too the private is a power structure in which individuals are variously privileged, inhibited and re- pressed. Indeed, one of the central insights of feminism has been that the private is also a realm of sexist discrimination, violence and rape - hence the crucial assertion that 'the personal is political'. In this way, feminists argue that what has traditionally been considered part of a natural order of the private - femininity, motherhood, domesticity, etc. -actually needs to bepublicized: that is, put into political question and opened to regulatory forms of social intervention which take account of the specific demands of women as a new type of political identity.

Thus it cannot be a question of counterposing, in spatial terms, the 'good' world of private individual liberty to the 'bad' public world of communal goals. This is a false problematic. Indeed, in order for feminist women to challenge political exclusion and to achieve individual liberty and the kinds of 'personhood' to which Rorty refers (1991b: lo), it has been imperative to create new public spaces which are constitutive of this personhood and the new rights and authorial possibilities for women both 'privately' and 'publicly', thereby modifying the sense of each term and the nature of the frontier between them in a whole range of areas (law, education, work, child-care, sexuality, family, etc.).

The very possibility of self-authorship and self-realization for women, therefore, far from being guaranteed by an unimpeded functioning of the private, depends upon the creation of public spaces in which the traditions, language and policies of feminist liberty - indeed, the conditions for a feminist 'we' -can be articulated." Political authorship, in this sense, is never simply a private or spontaneous matter. On the contrary, it is crucially a process of identificatiodproduction within the terms of historical language games.'8 Thus women become empowered as choosers - able to commit acts of authorial violence ('I wish to be free/different from what you say I am') - through identification with those collective-public discourses which hold the idea of women's equality as part of the 'incontrovertible' and 'self-evident' truths of our time.

More generally, as Taylor has shown, the identity of the modern individual as a chooser and right-holder -with freedoms to pursue personal definitions of the good - is a historical construction founded upon the cultural and political development of a certain type of civilization, institutional practices, the universality of law and other forms of common association (see Taylor 1985: 200). In this regard, and in contrast to Rorty, public collaboration and communal goals, far from being necessarily incompatible with individual liberty, actually provide the conditions for the latter to exist (see Mouffe 1992: 228). Indeed, it is only as part of a community (with its traditions and language) that we can experience our sense of individuality.

On this basis, Laclau and Mouffe convincingly argue that the rights and affirmations associated with 'we X, Y, Z . . . who are excluded' can be

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adequately advanced only through the active multiplication (and not restric- tion) of public spaces; spaces which are different from, and more diverse than, the formal liberal public space of elections, separation of powers and universal law (although this space is also important). Through such multiplication it becomes possible to articulate new forms of personaVcollective liberty, to modify power relations and to widen the opportunities for self-authorship.

We cannot fall back, therefore, on a naturalistic idea of the private as if the language and culture of plurality and freedom were intrinsic to it. On the contrary, this language and culture have to be politically created and nourished in terms of strong communal objectives. In this regard, the public must be more than simply beautiful, it must be a vibrant political culture in which democratic forms of authorship are produced and voices of dissent can be heard.

The idea of democratic forms of authorship, however, clearly raises certain problems. For, undoubtedly, some forms of authorship will always threaten democracy and, crucially, vice versa. If 'society' can never find its natural con- sensual shape, if it is always an act of political construction - a carving out of historical possibility - and is always constituted against its 'non-society' as a power-complex of repression and exclusion, then the same must also apply to democracy. Thus democracy will necessarily entail certain prejudices and assumptions about authorship which are exclusive and negating of other authorial possibilities in order to sustain the idea of a generalized democratic good: in short, it will necessarily constitute a certain regime of power. This recognition, however, need not propel us towards Rorty's vision of totalizing communal obligations in which individuals are free only to dream.

In particular, Mouffe (1992) argues that we need to develop a civil discourse (a respublica) which is structuring of individuality/private authorship in a way which makes it compatible with the communal objectives of a plural and democratic citizenship. In this way, the success ofvarious groups struggling to overcome relations of domination and to establish new forms of personay collective liberty will be linked to their ability to establish common rules of political conduct and a solidaristic identity with each other in respect to the general democratic principles of universal equality and self-determination. The articulation of these rules and solidarity, of course, will depend upon hegemonic constitution. Thus, for example, there is no natural point of convergence between anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-capitalist identities - indeed each of these may alternatively exhibit aspects of racism, sexism and capitalism within them. It is imperative, therefore, that these identities are modified (through power/persuasion) in such a way that they do not inhibit or undermine each other and that their sense of autonomy is articulated with a mutual commitment to expanding the democratic cause. In this way, the plural culture of private authorship and multiple public spaces may be put together (in ten- dential terms) as a coherent community of radical democratic citizens; of civically minded individuals who recognize that their capacity to exercise personal liberty and authorial violence flows from, and is strengthened by, a collective political culture.

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Now clearly this does not mean reintroducing a finished narrative of democracy as a set of concrete objectives. What it does mean is that a radical and writerly democracy - if it is to remain democratic - must have a certain 'grammar' which is structuring, but not determining, of its language games (in just the same way that a common linguistic grammar structures the writing of novels but does not determine which novels are written)19 and is constitutive of those forms of authorship which are compatible with such a democracy. Individuality and authorship, therefore, emerge through a common form of identity - a shared endorsement of the post-Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and autonomy. And, to this effect, there can be as many forms of citizenship as there are interpretations and writerly affirmations of these values (see Mouffe 1992: 237), including, for example, the affirmation of an 'environmental citizenship'. In short, citizenship will always be an articulating principle which (again paradoxically) underlines the impossibility of a final inventory of political belonging.

In this perspective, communality/citizenship should not subsume individuality/authorship (which is the fear of Rorty) nor should individuality/ authorship subsume citizenship (which would leave no room for civic co-operation or a constitutive democratic practice). Rather, it is a question of creatively engaging with the tensions between the two types of identities in a way which secures the validity of both. T o this effect, Laclau and Mouffe demonstrate that it is possible to articulate an ethico-political form of social bonding to a plural and democratic community in a way which instils in its members a sense of civic obligation as a fundamental dimension of their identity as individuals -thereby enabling them to work together to collectivize a culture of liberty and equality as a communal good (a good which is neither substantive, i.e. citizen-dominated, nor instrumentalist, i.e. individual- dominated). And towards the end of the millennium, when the current global crises of social cohesion threaten to deepen even further, the creation of civically minded individuals appears all the more urgent.

Conclusion

Neither anti-representationalism nor foundationalist discourses can guarantee a set of social outcomes. The virtue of the former perspective, however, is that it recognizes this as the essential problem of living as human beings in certain historical periods. The hope of finding hard (self-representing) truths, with immutable and transformative powers, can be no more than a romantic fantasy. In the real world, truth, objectivity and moral progress will always be a matter of historical encounter; and there is no encounter which is immaculate or paradigm-free.

Far from embracing randomness or indifference, there is in the post- metaphysical perspective a recognition that truths are a political and historical labour which have to be constantly defended and interrogated in the context of

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otherness: dissent, invention, new voices which 'unsilenced, may say something which has never been heard' (MacKinnon 1987: 77). In this regard, we need to move beyond the conservative 'endism' of people like Geras and Eagleton, and all those who try to underwrite human experience with an un-challengeable vocabulary and objectivism.

The central political advantage of a post-metaphysical culture, we have argued, is that it enables us to move from a readerly to a writerly (and post-modern) perspective on democracy and, thereby, to take up the themes and logics of the Enlightenment beyond the epistemic limitations of such projects as liberalism and Marxism. Within the terms of a post-modern writerly democracy, moreover, we have identified crucial political and theoretical differences between Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe. From our perspective, Rorty's commitment to a liberal utopia leads to an uncritical use of a metaphysical-sounding set of dichotomies which both impoverish our understanding of politics and inhibit the writerly possibilities of the democratic challenge. By contrast, the post-Mamist emphasis on the constitutive and ineradicable nature of power and antagonisms is one which affirms the centrality of authorial and discursive violence as the very condition for meeting this challenge.

The post-Marxist perspective also recognizes that democracy, like any other socio-political system, will always be constituted through a power structure - a structure whose affirmation of its 'we' depends upon the repression of its 'them'. In order that this power structure be genuinely democratized, therefore, it is essential: (i) that a plural culture is actively created through the multiplication of public spaces (in which the conditions for wider forms of authorial possibility and empowerment can be secured); and (ii) that this plural culture is articulated through a certain 'grammar' of political conduct which is structuring (but not determining) of the new language games and affirmations in such a way that they are made compatible with the communal and constitutive objectives of the (non-substantive) democratic good, i.e. freedom and equality for all.

A democratic community will be one in which individuality/authorship will always have to be constitutively balanced (not separated) with the social and political responsibilities of citizenship: that is, as members of a shared community in which individuaVcollective rights can be created and main- tained. It is only through the production of this new type of citizenship, which establishes a democratic obligation to each other as a fundamental experience of individuality and authorship, that we can progressively develop our future communities; communities whose litmus test will always be not how it treats its members but how it treats 'strangers' and dissidents.

Department of Social Science The Manchester Metropolitan University

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Neil Carter for a positive reading of an earlier version of this paper and for much needed comic relief. My deepest gratitude, however, is to Helen McDowell for taking on the role of editor with alacrity, insight and not a little patience and diplomacy.

Notes

1 For example, Callinicos (1989). Harvey (1989), Norris (1990, 1992), Jameson (1991). Eagleton, moreover, even goes so far as to say that post-Marxism is 'grounded in a particular phase of advanced capitalism' (1991: 220), by which he presumably means that post-Marxism is in the service ofheflects late capitalism. 2 In this paper I take the various currents of thought of post-structuralism, Foucauldian historicization, discourse theory, anti-foundationalism, etc., as contribut- ing to a post-metaphysical perspective. The central tenet of this perspective is that 'society' and the 'self are centre-less and only take shape as historical and hegemonic constructions. 3 As in Wittgenstein's notion of 'language game', discourse involves both linguistic and non-linguistic reality (as in building a house, which involves a structured totality of linguistic demands and physicavsocial action). Thus, while the social cannot be understood independently of language, neither can language be separated (in absolute terms) from social practice. All experience and identity - and, indeed, the very materiality of the world - unfolds/is presented to us as a structured sign-sequence (see Derrida 1978: 280). Nothing, therefore, can have meaning outside the terms of a significatory structure -those who wish to identify an 'extra-discursive' can only do so by signifying it; that is, through a discourse. 4 Geras, on the other hand, believes that there is a skyhook perspective; that objectivity (the inherent properties of objects) can be accessed outside the terms of signification. He argues: 'If the objects we call stones would exist, would any of their properties with them? Such as make them a different kind of entity from, say, the one we call water, and such as would prevent what we call a bird from what we call drinking the first but not the second? If there is an affirmative here - that stones (for short) and water and birds would be differentiated by their properties even in the absence of discourse and so of classification - then part of what some philosophers call the being of objects seems to be right in there from the beginning with their existence. And if not, you cannot speak intelligibly about what exists outside thought at aN: about inherent properties, what wac the case in the prehistory of humankind' (1988: 55).

Here then is an example of the classic representationalist belief that the inner nature of objects may be revealed to us through a final representation whose power of truth cannot be denied, cannot be redescribed. In order to demonstrate this, Geras calls upon an authentic experience, a state of nature of the world, in which you can shake a stick at the 'inherent properties' of objects. The question which immediately arises, of course, is which experience is this? How is it authenticated? By whose conceptual scheme? The bird's?

To differentiate between objects does indeed depend upon a discourse/classifi- catory system - animavmineral, chemistry, anatomy, genetic make up and so on - which is historically contextualized and does not belong to the objects themselves (as if there were a nomenclature passed down from Adam). Even to speak of 'inherent properties' depends upon a certain historical discourse. The inherent properties of mercury, for example, were understood by alchemists in a different way from the

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scientists of today - no doubt these 'properties' will be represented differently again in the twenty-third century. Properties, therefore, are not given but are a relational matter of how we encounter obiects through sociaVrelieious/commerciaVindustrial. etc..

u " , ,

practices. In Kuhnian terms, there is never a paradigm-free point of verification in which the identity of an object (and its properties) cannot be redescribed according to a new paradigm. While certain paradigms can be rejecteutranscended, we cannot escape paradigms altogether and stand on neutral ground.

As regards prehistory (or history), of course we cannot say 'what was the case' in absolutist terms. Any discussion about prehistory - say the disappearance of the dinosaurs - depends upon the current construction of our (falsifiable) knowledge. 5 Bennet, in fact, is a representationalist and is deeply opposed to this type of assertion (see Rorty 1991: 157-8). 6 This assertion confounds Eagleton who argues: 'The thesis that objects are entirely internal to the discourses which constitute them raises the thorny problem of how we could ever judge that a discourse had constructed its object validly. How can anyone, on this theory, ever be wrong? If there can be no meta-language to measure the "fit" between my language and the object, what is to stop me from constructing the object any way I want?' (1991: 205).

Rorty replies to this: 'Anti-representationalists say: nothing stops you except other people, with other wants and interests, construing the object in different ways' (1992: 42). What prevents arbitrary whim and fancy, then, is not an irresistible final vocabulary but the humaddiscursive structures of power and repression which identifjr the nature of objectivity and social belonging in a historical manner. 7 Alongwith Eagleton and Geras, Norris disclaims this position insisting that '[tlhere are factual truths (and counter-factual falsehoods) which don't come down to a mere disagreement between rival viewpoints, language-games or discourses, but which involve determinate standards of veridical warrant and accountability' (1992: 110). Again, the question we must ask is, by which 'determinate standards' do we judge these truths and falsehoods? From which perspective shall we judge the true significance of (really existing) stars? the astrologer's? the cosmologist's? or by some yet-to-be- developed conceptual scheme capable of redescribing the 'fact' of the stars? When unemployment figures reach a certain threshold, does this signal impending doom for capitalism, or is it a 'necessary sacrifice' for economic recovery?

'Facts' do not present themselves nakedly or unbidden. They have to be given a significatory value and fixed within a conceptual framework and vocabulary which makes sense of them. It is precisely because of this that 'facts' are always vulnerable to redescription. It is within the context of this vulnerability, moreover, that new opportu&ties may be discovered. In this respect, Rorty might very well put this question to Norris: 'Suvvose that for the last three hundred years we had been using an &licit algorithm for determining how just a society was; and how good a phy&al theory was. Would we have developed either a parliamentary democracy or relativity physics?' (1991a: 43).

'Facts' are a matter of historical encounter and are always, in fact, 'facts for us'. 8 In medical science, moreover, we see continuing efforts to redescribe HIV/AIDS and to generate new truths about it in order to treat it and prevent its spread. And just as virological description changed the truths regarding illness and disease, we can imagine new (post-virological) descriptions of, and solutions to, AIDS which are far more effective than what is currently available - thereby debunking the dictum that 'AIDS is the consequence of a virus' as a twentieth-century myth which should be abandoned along with those surrounding, say, blood-letting. The problem for Geras, however, would be that he was strapped into a metaphysician's sandwich-board, a prisoner of his dogma, concerning the real nature of AIDS - illustrating Nietzsche's famous dictum that: 'Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies' (in Kaufmann 1954: 63). In this regard, Geras is doomed to repetition in which the limits

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of his moral universe are perfectly reproduced from a set of first principles. For anti-representationalists, by contrast, these first principles can never be found and, in consequence, our moral universe has unstable limits - but is crucially not without (conjunctural) limits - which ultimately depend upon political struggle and not a truth-tracking Euclidean geometry. 9 Despite a wealth of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Geras insists upon the existence of an objective human nature otherwise, he argues, we can have no reason for choosing one concept of 'man' over another (1988: 51). For Geras, humanist values must be referred to an anthropological foundation if they are to have any validity. Historicists, however, make a clear distinction (which Geras collapses) between the episternicidea of a human nature and the political construction of humanist values - with no necessary relationship between the two. Laclau and Mouffe, for example, show how the political articulation between the 'rights of Man' and 'European values' was used to justify extensive colonial domination (1985: 116). We would also add that the decimation of the Aborigines in the last century was scientifically justified by an anthropological foundation which denied them human status.

By recognizing the purely invented (and vulnerable) character of humanist values - as opposed to their intrinsic objectivity, waiting to be discovered and eternally colonized by the powerful - it becomes possible to liberate and to radicalize these values beyond epistemic foundations. This perspective also recognizes the attempts by ecological groups to extend humanist-type rights to animals and the environment, thus not only breaking with the tradition of fixing the identity of right-holders in advance, but also modifying the identity of human right-holders in regard to the construction of a more integrated type of planetary belonging.

Choosing between humanist values, therefore, is a matter of identification and takes place as a historical and political struggle. The feminist interventions, for example, very much involve the construction of new values against the old dogmas concerning the 'natural' role of women (passivity, nurturing, domesticity, eti.). Moreover, kese interventions do not come any closer to 'what women really are', nor do they assert women's essentially shared properties with men (and their definitions of gender, sexuality, political culture, etc.) (see Rorty 1991b: 4-5, 10). On the contrary, the feminist project may be regarded as creating a new language, experience and tradition and, indeed, a new type of 'human being' - a new bearer of rights with specific demands constituted against the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment (which has traditionally been based upon the exclusion of women and many other political identities).

Thus the physical existence of human beings does not dictate the forms which human identity, aspiration and culture should take. What it is to be a human being, and the nature of personhood, cannot finally be determined. These will always depend upon the social practices we share and the frontiers of social exclusion: in short, politics. 10 In a similar vein, Laclau and Mouffe have taken the Aristotelian concept of phronesis to develop a practical approach to reasoning. Thus, if we are trying to determine whether an enemy will attack by land or by sea, then an algorithmic approach - i.e. a computationally predetermined answer -is clearly not available (see Laclau 1988: 33). Nevertheless, it is still possible, through reasoning, to determine which type of attack is the more likely. This approach enables us to see human beings as limited historical agents and not as the embodiment of the Absolute Spirit. 11 In his seminal work, S/Z (1974), Barthes establishes an important distinction between readerly and writerly texts. In the former type of text, the reader is reduced to a mere consumer of a finished product and, in consequence, is 'left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text' (1974: 4). In writerly texts (such as avantegarde texts), by contrast, the reader is actively called upon to produce the text.

Here there is a fundamental difference in the approach to, and uses of, language.

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The readerly approach is one which sees language uncritically as a medium through which we can naturalistically represent reality. The writerly approach, on the other hand, focuses on language itself and invites us to consider how the illusion of reality gets filled out by the significatory games we choose to play in trying to complete a text.

Hawkes writes of this distinction: 'Where readerly texts (usually classics) are static, virtually "read themselvesn and thus perpetuate an "established view of reality" and an "establishment" scheme of values, frozen in time . . . writerly texts require us to look at the nature of language itself, not through it at a preordained "real world". They thus involve us in the dangerous, exhilarating activity of creating our world now, together with the author, as we go along' (1977: 114). 12 Here we see the need to go beyond Barthes. While Barthes sees the possibility of the reader taking on an authorial role, here there is a much broader process of the modification of identity in which new affirmations ('we citizens', 'we feminists', etc.) - indeed, new types of authorship - take place through identification with, and inscription within, democratic discourses. 13 In contrast to Norris, therefore, post-modem enquiry should not be seen in terms of an essentialist embracing of a-'thoroughgoing nihilism' (1992: 191) or as an abandonment of the traditions of the Enlightenment (1992: 30.41-2) and the 'old . . . values of truth, reason, and enlightened &itique9 (1992: 19). Rather, it is a matter of critiquing the absolutist status of the values of the Enlightenment with a view to providing better arguments and more secure (conjunctural) foundations for them, thereby enabling the project of modernity to be advanced beyond any particular epistemic horizon.

For Norris it is a case of all or nothing, such that he sees in post-modernism only a reactionary threat. Concurring with Chomsky, he argues 'the fact that truth is so often a contested or confictual domain is no good reason to embrace the kind of all-out sceptical or relativist outlook that provides a handy refuge, not only for postrnodern sophisticates like Foucault and Baudrillard but also for the various ideologues, media pundits, sources "close to the White House", compliant academic "experts" and other such willing purveyors of official disinformation' (1992: 107). Here Norris establishes a set of equivalences - the critique of modernity/Truth = relativism = official disinformation = right-wing ideology - as if there could be a logic of necessity only in support of the most conservative status quo. He does not consider, inter alia, how Foucauldian and post-modern themes have been taken up in areas of race, sexuality, gender, etc., in order to develop a much stronger politics of resistance (critiquing foundationalist notions of, and the 'best available knowledge' about, human nature). Indeed, Foucault's own commitment to radical causes is a matter of record.

In his latest sortie against post-modemism, we see further evidence of Norris' all-or-nothing approach. Thus, in his critique of post-Marxism, Norris states that Laclau and Mouffe 'go as far to argue that there is simply no relation between class or gender as conceived in "traditionaln . . . terms' (1993: 290). This is false. What Laclau and Mouffe actually argue is that there is no necessary relationship between class and gender (or other subject-positions), and manifestly not that there is necessarily no relationship between them - a position which would simply replace an essentialist totality with an essentialist separation (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 103-4). The linkage between the degree of trade union militancy of a male worker and his attitudes towards women (or other identities), for example, cannot objectively be determined. Rather it will depend upon hegemonic contest and the political discourses which are at play in a particular conjuncture. 14 Indeed, the origins of liberalism are with the earlier development of capitalism and the shift towards legalistic forms of individual proprietorship. 15 However, even in Rorty's own terms, we would argue that the dimension of antagonism is latently present and, as such, compromises his friendly-persuasive perspective. Rorty affirms that 'truth' is always a matter of redescription (the historic

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result of a competition between vocabularies). At the same time, he also maintains that the method of redescription is sometimes cruel and humiliating (in our terms, antagonistic) (1989: 89-90). And in his engagement with the objections of foundationalism, Rorty states that he will embark on a redescription in such a way that 'the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad' (1989: 44). From the point of view of the foundationalist, however, this must surely appear cruel, humiliating and antagonistic (and presumably accounts for the apoplexy of many foundationalists).

In more concrete terms, we would say that to be (for example) anti-racist is, in some degree, to be involved in the humiliation of racists - their language, their ideas, their principles, what they value - and to redescribe racists as not the guardians of a naturavmoral order but as the degenerates of an intolerable misanthropy. In this regard, we would say that antagonism implicitly plays a constitutive role in Rorty's liberal-ironist community. 16 Discursively speaking, objectivity must be 'violently' carved out of the infinite play of differences in order for it to be constituted as an intelligible order. Objectivity, therefore, is not given, it is an imposition; a willed order, with political frontiers (rather than spatial edges), which is constituted against that which would overwheldchange it. This argument lies at the base of Laclau and Mouffe's crucial assertion that 'antagonism is the limit of all objectivity' (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 125; Laclau 1990: 17). In this way, the authors introduce the fundamental dimensions of politics, power and antagonism and inscribe the hegemonic process within the heart of the anti-representationalist perspective and its account of objectivity. 17 In an article on feminism and pragmatism, Rorty appears ;o argue in support of this position and, in consequence, to compromise his liberal vrivate/vublic distinction. In a discussion of feminist separatism, he-writes 'individuals 1 even individuals of great courage and imagination - cannot achieve semantic authority, even semantic authority overthernselves, on their own. T o get such authority you have to hear your statements as part of a shared practice. Otherwise you yourself will never know whether you are a heroine or a maniac. People in search of such authority need to band together to form clubs, exclusive clubs . . . . So feminist separatism may indeed, as Rich says, have little to do with sexual preference or with civil rights, and a lot to do with making things easier for women of the future to define themselves in terms not presently available' (1991b: 9).

Now what is this saying if not that 'shared practice' and the formation of 'exclusive clubs' - in our terms, the creation of public spaces - is actually constitutive of the individuality, self-authorship (semantic authority) and the 'private' (as well as 'public') possibilities for women? 18 The use of 'author' in this perspective clearly does not signal a return to 'author as the origin of identity', thereby reproducing the classical agency/structure division. The author (or agent) is not a pre-discursive presence which, in Giddens' view, is 'intentional' (1984: 3-4,21-2,267). On the contrary, authorship/agency takes place through identifiation within and between discursive structures. The fantasy of identity-completion is always the promise of discursive structures: a contract which, in exchange for recruitment ('be one of us'). seeks to ward aminst disorder and contingency. The point is, however, these structures can ;ever fuiy 'fill out' identity or command authorial vossibilitv. This is because at the heart of all identitv is a traumatic kernel of non-being'- the ~acanian 'subject' which resists representatibn (the eternal 'who am I?') - which can never be totally determined or domesticated. At the same time, this subjectlnon-being makes possible new affirmations and acts of authorship in which people can identify themselves within new discursive structures.

This is why for Ziiek the subject -which must be strictly separated from all those vain attempts to finally represent it (i.e. agency/subjectivation) -is a 'constitutive void' and the 'subject of the signifier' (1990: 254; 1989: 175). Thus, if we take up the Lacanian argument, it is precisely because 'woman does not exist' that new forms of

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womanhood and feminist authorship become possible. Authorship, therefore, is not an independent origin: rather it is a process whereby affirmations of belonging to new structures of representation (with their own promises of fulfilment) take place in the context of the crisidfailure of previous structures. To this effect, the more open and indeterminate these structures of representation are - e.g. the Enlightenment considered as a conversational logic rather than an epistemic model - the more opportunities there are for authorial affirmations/violence and 'freedom'. 19 This is not to underplay the influence of grammar on writing, or writerl~ culture. The feminist subversion of the traditional signifier of the species ('he', 'him', 'man', etc.) continues to play a crucial role in altering the grammar in which authorship takes place. And in this respect we would say that a writerly democracy must also be aware of its grammatical regime which (in its structuring and repressive capacities) is also essentially open to subversion. For example, environmentalists and animal-rights campaigners are also, at some level, involved in a process of grammatical subversion in which the articulation of their demands transcends the traditional humanlnon-human distinction in an alternative construction of political identity which attempts to establish a new semantic authority over the idea of 'we' and 'global belonging', etc.

Bibliography

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Post-metaphysical culture and politics: Richard Rorty and Laclau and Mouffe

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