#laclau

In other words, for a populist, the cause of the trouble is ultimately never the system as such, but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not capitalists as such, etc.); not a fatal flaw Inscribed into the structure as such, but an element that does not play its part within the structure properly.

The problem, however, is the 'Left' that capitalism has relied on since the end of the cold war - namely, the liberal Left, the New Left, neomarxism, and most significant, postmarxism - have all lost their analytical credibility and cultural authority to varying degrees. Their analyses explain little of historical and social significance and tend to repeat familiar liberal themes in ever more seductive idioms that are aimed at shocking the bourgeoisie rather than advancing knowledge of the social. The writings of Left authors continue to give rhetorical pleasure to their readers: the more they have avoided confronting the class realities of the times, the more linguistically subtle and pleasing these texts have become. They have turned into sophisticated entertainment rather than effective work toward transformation of existing social relations. In a short note on Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, for example, a reviewer called it 'the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.' Nowadays, one reads such Left writers as Derrida, Laclau, Mouffe, Butler, Badiou, and Agamben mostly for amusement and finds humor in their making what they seem to think of as 'world shattering' statements, to use the words of Marx and Engels in their critique of Hegelian Left adventurism. The most familiar examples of this textually rich but conceptually blank analysis are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire and its sequel Multitude, in which the analysis of the contemporary situation has turned out to be as funny and seductive, but ultimately vacuous, as the political analyses in Vanity Fair. The most radical acts of postmarxists today seem to have become annotations of the theories of democracy in Nazi writers such as Carl Schmitt (Mouffe; Derrida; Agamben) or retreats to the liberalism of Hannah Arendt (Butler).

There is, however, an asymmetry here that is obfuscated by this straightforward solution: the political struggle is not one among other struggles (in a series alongside artistic, economic, religious, etc., struggles); it is the purely formal principle of antagonistic struggle as such. That is to say, there is no proper content of politics; all political struggles and decisions concern other specific spheres of social life (taxation, the regulation of sexual mores and procreation, the health service, and so on and so forth)—"politics" is merely a formal mode of dealing with these topics, Insofar as they emerge as topics of public struggle and decision.

The political consequences of this idealist move — in which, as Derrida says, everything became "discourse" (Writing and Difference 280) — are clearly articulated by the post-Marxist political theorist, Ernesto Laclau, who develops a ludic social theory "identifying the social with an infinite play of differences" ("Transformations" 39). Following Derrida, he argues that "to conceive of social relations as articulations of differences is to conceive them as signifying relations." Thus, not only is the social "de-centred," according to Laclau, but social relations, like all 'signifying systems," are "ultimately arbitrary" and as a result "'society' . . . is an impossible object" ("Transformations," 40-41). By reducing the social to "signifying relations," that is, to a discursive or semiotic process, Laclau renders social relations "ultimately arbitrary" (like any sign). This means that social relations cannot be subjected to such determining relations as exploitation since they are "arbitrary,' and if social relations are not exploitative (determined), they no longer require emancipation. In other words, Laclau and other ludic theorists, from Derrida to Drucilla Cornell, Foucault to Judith Butler, are not only rewriting the basic "struggle concepts" necessary for social change (e.g., "society," "surplus labour," "history," 'class." "exploitation," "use-value," and "emancipation") as a series of tropic Metanarratives, but they are also turning the realities that these concepts explain into "arbitrary," indeterminate, "signifying relations." Ludic theorists, in short, are troping the social. in so doing, they de-materialise various social "realities," cutting them off from the material relations of production, and turn them into a superstructural matrix of discursive processes and a semiotic, textual play of differance.