Ernesto Laclau, an erudite Argentinian whose big mistake was to do a PhD at Essex in the Seventies, published 'On Populist Reason' in 2005 which claims that populism is a way of constructing the political. This is silly. If there was no pre-existing elite, aristocratic, oligarchic, cadre based, or similar political configuration, how could there be a populism? The political must already be constructed before populism can arise.
Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, people forgot that Marxism was an Economic theory not a Paranoid delusion system. The fact is 'constructing' stuff, like 'surveilling' stuff, or 'repressing' stuff is costly. True, the Government may be watching you poop but where will it get the money to do so? It may the case that your turds have great revolutionary potential- but so do the turds of everybody else. It would simply be too expensive for any Government to spend all its time constructing a Society where everybody's pooping is being closely surveilled.
Laclau writes-
The main issue addressed in this book is the nature and logics of the formation of collective identities.
Our species evolved by natural selection as did our notions of nature and logic and identity and so forth. Game theory has certainly helped elucidate co-evolved processes and evolutionarily stable strategies and 'robustness' and 'capacitance'. Sadly Laclau only studied useless pedants, some of whom were also paranoid nutters, who were wholly ignorant of scientific developments. Thus he wrote nonsense.
My whole approach has grown out of a basic dissatisfaction with sociological perspectives
Sociology was considered a joke subject fit only for retards by the mid Seventies.
which either considered the group as the basic unit of social analysis,
in which case some potentially useful empirical work could be done
or tried to transcend that unit by locating it within wider functionalist or structuralist paradigms.
in which case bullshitting could prevail. Discourse turned out to be diarrhea.
The logics that those types of social functioning presuppose are, in my view, too simple and uniform to capture the variety of movements involved in identity construction.
Identities aren't constructed. Identity classes can have a naive set theoretic representation but this may not be constructible. There may be a 'logic' for a co-evolved process but that will only be discoverable after 'the end of time'. People like Laclau weren't told that they were completely ignorant of logic and category theory. They wasted their lives while, under Thatcher's benign gaze, little Essex girls were acquiring the self confidence and pizzazz to turn into gorgeous and successful women able to live as they pleased while looking good doing so.
Needless to say, methodological individualism in any of its variants - rational choice included — does not provide any alternative to the kind of paradigm that I am trying to put into question.
This is false. It is rational to choose regret minimizing strategies of a cognitively efficient type. This means there will be coordination games which in turn give rise to discoordination games such that cheap talk pooling equilibria will represent one type of 'group identity' while hedging occurs and income effects arise on discoordination games or 'costly signal' based separating equilibria. This is stuff like a bunch of shitheads getting power in the name of the proletariat or the Aryan race or Wimmin or whatever.
The problem with the costly credentials this cunt purveyed was that caused its possessors to have less influence and less affluence than Essex girls wot apprenticed at a tanning salon and now run a string of gyms or spas or whatever.
The route I have tried to follow in order to address these issues is a bifurcated one.
In other words, the guy is going to try walking down one road while also walking down a totally different road. Hilarious!
The first path is to split the unity of the group into smaller unities that we have called demands: the unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands.
How foolish! Groups exist because they can internalize supply and demand in a manner which allows them to aggregate both with respect to other groups so as to capture more of the gains from trade. Sadly, groups compete in this respect which tends to increase elasticity. This means that groups which want to survive should concentrate on 'internalizing externalities'- i.e. making ingroup transactions more beneficial- though this may involve creating a 'separating equilibrium' based on uncorrelated asymmetries or costly signals.
It's all very well trying to create a rainbow coalition of the insulted and injured and plain insane but the thing quickly falls apart unless that coalition has found ways for its members to help each other in a manner more beneficial than whoever it is that 'demands' are presented to. Thus we may go to Church to demand stuff from God but only keep going if we can help and be helped by others there.
This articulation,
i.e. demanding stuff
however, does not correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole:
why not? Women demanded the vote and got it. That's a stable and positive configuration right there. Women actually exist. They are very nice. I like them- as a whole, though no doubt I steer clear of those who jeer at me and waggle their little finger in the air to suggest that I have a tiny dick.
on the contrary, since it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order, it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it.
But everything in the social realm has that same feature. The monarch is both inside and outside the 'established order'- which is why there is a limit to what she can demand by way of a privy purse.
As this order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a coherent totality;
Yes it can. A coherent totality doesn't have to absorb shit. Humanity is a coherent totality. It has been demanding immortality and perpetual peace and lots of nice things for everybody to eat and a bigger dick and a wireless keyboard which didn't keep randomly discdeojjerkere
the demand, however, requires some kind of totalization if it is going to crystallize in something which is inscribable as a claim within the 'system'.
But this happens all the time when you say to the butcher 'I want two steaks and a dozen rashers of bacon'. You summed up the number of steaks your household needs for dinner tonight and how many rashers for breakfast for the rest of the week.
Stock and Commodity exchanges exist so as to totalize demand and supply. Parliaments tally votes cast by legislators who are themselves chosen on the basis of vote tallies.. Totalizing just means casting a total, the thing isn't rocket science.
All these ambiguous and contradictory movements come down to the various forms of articulation between logic of difference and logic of equivalence
Nope. This is just a case of Demand and Supply or, when markets are absent, rent extraction of consumer or producer surplus.
Laclau, poor booby, thought the 'demands' of various protest movements during the late Sixties and early Seventies had some sort of Hegelian sanctity. Sadly, they were shit because the leadership was shit and the followers were shit. Still, as the followers got older they voted for Thatcher and Reagan and so forth. One reason for this is that smart people were using 'logic' to create cool stuff- like personal computers- while stupid people were pretending there was something called 'logic of difference' or 'logic of equivalence'. This is not to say that a smart guy like William Lawvere- who was quite radical back in the early Seventies (e.g. he protested the implementation of the War Measures act in Canada) - couldn't extract something useful out of Hegel. It is merely to observe that cretins holed up in Essex were as stupid as shit.
Consider the following-
the impossibility of fixing the unity of a social formation in any conceptually graspable object
is why there is 'Kripke rigid designation'. I was quite happy to refer to the Baby as 'the Baby' but Wifey insisted he have a name just like a grown up person. I now see this was quite useful, coz babies don't stay babies.
However, babies-who-grow-up are a conceptually graspable object. So is any social formation which has a description in naive set theory.
leads to the centrality of naming in constituting that unity,
This is not the case. Laclau must have heard of the Tory Party- which currently rules the UK. The word Tory originally meant an Irish Catholic guerilla fighting Cromwell. It was applied to the Conservatives as a slur just as 'Whig' (a Scottish gaelic slur) was applied to the Liberals.
All sorts of other groups have been given names but most were evanescent- where now are the Mods or the Rockers?
Some groups can propagate through time because they 'internalize externalities' for their members. This is what Laclau and his fellow shitheads failed to do. Yes, they perpetuated an academic availability cascade- but it was shit. It couldn't pay for itself.
while the need for a social cement to assemble the heterogeneous elements once their logic of articulation (functionalist or structuralist) no longer gives this affect its centrality in social explanation.
If this reads strangely it is because the sentence is strange. Laclau started writing some bullshit about how names are totes important then felt he'd gone too far and started babbling about 'social cement'. It's like how if you have a house and you name it 'The Gables' but then all the cement dissolves and so the house falls down then your house is just the name 'The Gables'. It doesn't otherwise exist. Still, because I gave my house of cards the name 'Buckingham Palace', that's where I live.
Freud had already clearly understood it: the social bond is a libidinal one.
That ugly old cretin thought 'transference' was occurring and so all his patients were deeply in love with him which is why it was cool for him to keep taking their money. On the other hand, Laclau may have believed that 'social cement' was created by peeps rubbing up against each other and jizzing.
Why was Laclau getting his knickers in a twist about populism back in 2005? Argentina had experienced severe rioting in December 2001 because of limits placed on cash withdrawals following on from '98 crisis. But this popular rebellion produced only Kirscherism. On his death Cristina Kirscher said Laclau ‘had three virtues: he thought, did so with great intelligence, and in open conflict with the paradigms issuing from the centres of world power’. The problem was that 'paradigms issuing from the centers of power' aint utterly shit. That's why intelligent peeps need to study proper science and use proper logic. Otherwise, the populism they approve of will produce only Kirschers or- worse yet- Chavezismo.
Politics is the art of the possible. Thatcher prevailed because she made 'Dagenham Man' better off. He bought his Council House and invested in privatized companies. Thatcher fucked up Galtieri and Scargill. We liked that. Then she fell because she insisted on a Poll Tax which we thought cool when it was inflicted on the Scots- serves them right for wearing kilts- but which we didn't like when it was imposed on us.
Populism could give rise to a party which finds ways of making a better life for us possible. But so can pointy headed bureaucrats. All that matters is that something sensible is done. 'For forms of Government let fools contest/ Whatever is best administered is best.'
Sadly paranoid nutters don't get this. Thus suspicion gnaws at them-
the suspicion, which I have had for a long time, that in the dismissal of populism far more is involved than the relegation of a peripheral set of phenomena to the margins of social explanation.
Stuff that is 'peripheral' is at the margin. Where else could it possibly be? Why speak of it being 'relegated' by some sinister force?
What is involved in such a disdainful rejection is, I think, the dismissal of politics tout court,
Fuck off! We dismiss nutters who start raving about stringing up all the rapists and nuking China as 'populists' who are too shit to matter to actual politics.
and the assertion that the management of community is the concern of an adrninistrative power whose source of legitimacy is a proper knowledge of what a 'good' community is.
Laclau is against sound management, good administration and improved governance. Why? He had specialized in worthless shite.
This has been, throughout the centuries, the discourse of 'political philosophy', first instituted by Plato.
Fuck Plato. Only a Cretin would think actual politicians gave a toss about him.
'Populism' was always linked
to stupid shite peeps like me say- but don't mean. Vox populi is about letting off steam. On the other hand when we say stuff like 'we won't pay to keep troops in Afghanistan. We don't have the fucking money' then it as though God has spoken.
to a dangerous excess, which puts the clear-cut moulds of a rational community into question.
Like Brussels. But those in Britain whom Brussels was supposed to be cossetting- guys in the deprived areas getting a net transfer from the Social Fund- voted for Brexit because they knew that the money was being pissed against a wall. They wanted the fuck out of a mould which was fucking up their life chances.
This was perfectly rational.
So my task, as I conceived it, was to bring to light the specific logics inherent in that excess, and to argue that, far from corresponding to marginal phenomena, they are inscribed in the actual working of any communitarian space.
This stupid cretin doesn't get that neo-classical economics is all about the margin. What happens there determines the price vector for the 'communitarian space'.
With this is mind, I show how, throughout nineteenth-century discussions on mass psychology, there was a progressive internalization of those features concerning the 'crowd', which at the beginning — in the work of Hyppolite Taine, for example - were seen as an unassimilable excess, but which, as Freud's Group Psychology showed, are inherent to any social identity formation.
Why is this stupid cunt mentioning Taine and Freud in 2005? How fucking ignorant was he? The answer is very very fucking ignorant. Don't do a PhD in shite at Essex. Open a tanning salon. Set up a Zumba franchise or teach the Tango or get yourself a toupee and set up as an authentic Argentine gigolo.
. One consequence of this intervention is that the referent of 'populism' becomes blurred, because
you are bullshitting. You don't care whether what you are saying is true or false or even meaningful.
many phenomena which were not traditionally considered populist come under that umbrella in our analysis.
So, the referent of populism is what comes under its umbrella. The thing isn't blurred at all. You can easily see who is or isn't under a particular umbrella. Unless the umbrella is made of bullshit in which case those under it smell bad and are piteously whining for a hot shower with plenty of soap and a clean change of clothing.
Here there is a potential criticism of my approach, to which I can only respond that the referent of 'populism' in social analysis has always been ambiguous and vague. A brief glance at the literature on populism — discussed in Chapter 1 — suffices to show that it is full of references to the evanescence of the concept and the imprecision of its limits. My attempt has not been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the opposite: to show that populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political.
Only in the sense that a umbrella made of shit is a way of constructing a defense against the rain.
John Kraniauskas writes
The performativity of language
i.e. the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change
has been central to Laclau’s political theory since the 1970s:
because that theory is merely a stupid type of magic. Say 'Boo to Neoliberalism!' loudly and often enough and the thing is bound to disappear- worse luck.
first, as ‘interpellation’,
which is like 'ear-worms'- e.g. catchy jingles which get into your head
and more recently in On Populist Reason as what might be best described as a performative principle of ‘hegemonization’ – the affective process through which heterogeneous particulars (political demands) are gathered together (the ‘logic of equivalence’) under another (now become an ‘empty signifier’), and quasi-universalized as collective will: ‘no populism without affective investment in partial objects’. [3]
So, stuff like 'build that wall!' or 'lock her up!' But marketing guys are very good at coming up with that sort of stuff. They make a lot of money. They matter. Talking about 'interpellation' and 'hegemonization' is just sad. The thing looked smart in the Sixties, but by the time Thatcher was elected, it was a joke- like Citizen Smith of the Tooting Liberation Front. Later it was discovered that there was a Maoist collective in Lambeth headed by 'Comrade Bala', since jailed for slavery, who ' convinced his followers that everything was controlled by him from the sun, the moon, wind and fires; that he could overthrow governments, control natural disasters, and make people live or die In order to progress his cause, Balakrishnan invented "JACKIE" (an acronym for Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran) – a type of dangerous, mystical machine that monitored all thought and could control minds.' (Wikipedia)
It is shit of this sort which 'interpellation' and 'hegemonization' amounts to. Performativity forsooth! JACKIE aint an empty signifier. It is controlling your mind! (Like me, this nutter went to the LSE) Meanwhile Lee Kuan Yew was turning 'Comrade Bala's' Singapore into a country twice as rich, in purchasing power terms, as the UK.
Lee was plenty populist when he started off. But he was smart. He got his peeps to study STEM subjects. That's what made the difference.
The key shift in the understanding of this semiotic process of political signification from interpellation to performative hegemonization is not linguistic as such, however, but psychoanalytic –
No. It is psychiatric. True, JACKIE is a step or two beyond Laclau's bullshit- but those are easy steps to take if you keep stuffing your head with shit.
or, rather, it is a question of the psycho-affective dimensions of verbal communication: ‘[a]ffect is not something which exists on its own, independently of language; it constitutes itself only through the differential cathexes of a signifying chain’. [4]
Which is how come Comrade Bala got to rape members of his Maoist cult.
In this regard, On Populist Reason presents its account of the making of the populist political subject as a bottom-up investment of enthusiasm in an affective particularity (cathexis),
like JACKIE
rather than a top-down ‘summons’ into being by the symbolic order,
e.g. a hand written note from Chairman Mao
as it was in Laclau’s earlier work on fascism and populism in Politics and Ideology. In this sense, it suggests a democratization of the process,
such that Comrade Bala could have his own Maoist cult.
written from the perspective of ‘brothers’ and ‘mothers’ rather than ‘fathers’, the ‘little other’ rather than the ‘big Other’.
Bala thought women would play an important role in welcoming the Chinese People's Army to South London. After a police raid, his disciples were all women whom he would beat and rape coz he had a little 'other'. Sad.
The work of Jacques Lacan is, of course, central to
crazy shitheads everywhere- if ever they feel in need of a justification for their crazy beliefs.
both processes of subject production,
but only coz JACKIE is doing the subject production
the shift in its deployment by Laclau away from Althusser’s
who only managed to kill his wife, not rape a bunch of disciples. Sad.
well-known concept of ‘interpellation’ producing, in his view, an identification between the partial logics of the objet petit a (that little bit of the Real – or ‘maternal’ other – that makes its presence felt within the symbolic order), on the one hand, and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (also grounded, according to Laclau, in a logics of particularities), on the other.
i.e. Gramsci was as shit as Lacan- which wasn't true. No Italian can be as utterly shit as a French pseudo-intellectual.
In Laclau’s words:
The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are simply identical. .. The only possible totalizing horizon is given by a partiality (the hegemonic force) which assumes the representation of a mythic totality [an impossible, utopian reconciliation that is evoked by the now embodied ‘empty signifier’ conceived as a singularity rather than a universality – JK]. In Lacanian terms: an object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing. [6]
This means, translated back into Laclau’s Gramscian, that a particular interest becomes a general one, that is, hegemonic: its productive (and affective) ideological mechanics are now formalized and explained.
JACKIE orders you to swallow Comrade Bala's jizz. Do it now! You know you want to.
It occurs to me that Laclau might have given up a worthless type of study if only Bala had tried to stick his objet petit into that Argentine gobshite's gob. The little Malyalee too might have benefited from getting the shit kicked out of him.
On the other hand, maybe the two of them would have got married and opened an antiques shop together. I know just such a couple who live up the road from me. They were a great boon to the working class in this area. They'd buy up all the ugly tat proles inherit from maiden Aunts and sell them at a big profit. Soon they were pioneering the gentrification of this area. The proletariat could at last move to Essex and breathe free while getting silicon implants and fake tans. True, Essex girls were a figure of fun in the Nineties. But look at their kids- as handsome as Australians or Californians or whatever and just as self-confident and optimistic about the world.
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