Page 159 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 147

beings, that we remain in nature. What he’s talking about is the
elaborations of social and cultural organization which complete those
natural structures. Our genetic constitution is extraordinarly open-ended
and is thus a necessary but not sufficient way of becoming human. What is
happening, historically, is the massive complexification of the social, the
overdetermination of the natural by the social and cultural. So Nature can
no longer stand as the ultimate guarantee of materialism. Already in the
nineteenth century, Marx polemicized against that kind of vulgar
materialism but there was, and still is, a sense in which orthodox marxists
think that something is ultimately only real when you can put your hands
on it in Nature. We can’t be materialists in that way any longer. But I do
think that we are still required to think about the way in which ideological/
cultural/discursive practices continue to exist within the determining lines of
force of material relations, and the expropriation of nature, which is a very
different question. Material conditions are the necessary but not sufficient
condition of all historical practice. Of course, we need to think material
conditions in their determinate discursive form, not as a fixed absolute. I
think the discursive position is often in danger of losing its reference to
material practice and historical conditions.
Question: There seem to be two separate questions involved in your
description of that slippage. One is how politically and historically specific
the analysis is, and the other is whether opening the discursive terrain
necessarily takes you into reductionism. Is the slippage the result of
excessive abstraction and idealization that loses touch with the political
and historical limits on the ways in which particular discourses can be
articulated to one another? If what is lost in making the social formation into
an open field of discourse is a particular sense of historical necessity, of
limits within which languages are juxtaposed with one another in a social
formation, that is a much more limited kind of problem. One simple way
of posing that for Laclau and Mouffe might be to say that their position
doesn’t have enough of a political inflection. That’s not necessarily the
same as saying that, because they’ve opened the door onto thinking of
society as a discursive formation, they are necessarily pulled into
reductionism.
SH: I do not think that opening the door to the discursive field
necessarily takes you in that direction. It doesn’t take me there. So I would
prefer your first formulation. In Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory,
Laclau contests the a priori insertion of classes, for instance, into marxist
analysis because there is no way to substantiate such a philosophical a
priori. Yet he does reintroduce class as an historical determinant. Now I
find it very difficult to quarrel with that. I think the question of political
inflection is a very real problem with a lot of people who have taken the
full discursive route. But I don’t think I would advance that critique against
Laclau and Mouffe. The new book is quite striking in that it does try to