A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. V, No. The author dedicates the last section to a comparison of both approaches, concluding that DAP is an inspiring project that exceeds the limits of tradi- tional liberal theories of power and politics. All agree also, as I suppose, that power is one of the most essential elements of social life, without the analysis of which it would be impossible to understand what modern society is.
However, most theoreticians stress the fact that so far all attempts to create a unified, complete and satisfactory theory of power have failed. There are fundamental difficulties with defining what power is, how it is manifested and how it influences individuals, to what extent it conditions social behaviour, what are and what should be the limits of exercising power, as well as whether it is at all possible to create a model of power which would be characterized by respect both for individual rights and the rules of social justice.
Another problem, concerning not so much power itself as the theory of power, is connected with the fact that each attempt at formulating such a theory is inevitably related to a political choice, and thus becomes Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www. The Case of Laclau and Foucault ideological. There are usually two possible stances to take regarding these difficulties.
For some Bourdieu, Foucault, Laclau , any reflection on society which attempts to evade political implications is impossible. In effect, the only task for philosophy is the critique and demystification of this dependency. For others Weber, Parsons, Rawls , the possibility of grounding the theoretical discussion of power in the sphere of politics would only subvert its authority, and, what follows, the disciplinary grounding of such statements.
That is why, according to these theoreticians, it is necessary to defend the independence of knowledge from politico- social influences and try to construct models of power which would be empirically verifiable and philosophically answerable. All of them, though, seem to agree that one working definition of power and one objective and generally accepted theory based on that definition do not exist. Such methodological assumptions lying at the base of a theory will undoubtedly influence how the definition of power is constructed and how questions it forces are being answered.
I characterize the classic formulation thus: 1 the problem of power is usually analyzed in the context of its legitimacy or lack thereof, i. I argue that the classic formulation of the definition of power has only a limited analytical efficacy.
It cannot describe the way in which an individual is embroiled in the social and economic system of institutions, to Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www. An analysis of power in terms of how adequatly political institutions function and follow the law ignores a whole series of phenomena occurring in our present social and political reality which I in fact believe to be, quite crucial.
If there are significant social groups that consider themselves as having no influence on either current or long-term state policy e. Therefore, I contrast this classical conception of power with a modern one, characterized among other things by the crossing over of power relations beyond the sphere of political institutions, and the bracketing of the problem of legitimacy. Since the French and American Revolutions, a common conviction in political theory has been that power is maintained on the basis of general public support.
In democratic countries power has been seemingly maintained simply by citizens granting legitimacy to their representatives. In the modern concept of power the situation becomes more complex. The question of legitimacy turns out to be of secondary importance when it becomes apparent that the government endowed with legitimacy does not, in fact, rule in the name of the masses, but instead in the covert interests of the elites, certain classes, sexes, races, etc.
According to theoreticians of the modern approach to power, the exercise of power finds entirely new theatres of operation. Foucault, for example, points out manifestations of the exercise of disciplinary power in families, factories, prisons and schools, i.
Together with a changed view concerning the location of power, the borderline between the public and private spheres becomes blurred.
It is necessary to stress here that the opposition between the modern and the classical approaches to power cannot be reduced only to historical arguments.
I do not claim that the theories of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche represent the rupture between the classical and the modern epoch in the study of power. Instead, the opposition lies in the contrasting types of reflection. The most we can say is that in the 19th century, alongside the classical conception of power there emerged a new type of reflection on Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www. The Case of Laclau and Foucault power, which ultimately lead to the treatment of power as a cultural phenomenon.
Thus in the contemporary discussions of power both the classical and the modern models of thinking about power are applied. Among the contemporary representatives of the modern conceptions of power are e. Walzer, J. Habermas, E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe, S. Lukes, M. Foucault, W. Connolly, and many others. The classical theoreticians are, among others, M. Oakeshott, R. Dworkin, R. Nozick, J. Rawls, or R. It is important to notice that both the classical and the modern conceptions of power favor normative reflection, but it is of a different character in each case.
While most contemporary classical theoreticians of power concentrate on the problem of state government and its implementation of the rule of law or principles of justice and liberty e. Dworkin, Rawls , the modern thinkers will unravel the negative effects of the exercise of power outside political institutions in the classic sense, focusing on elements of social life such as education, habits, the influence of technology and media, access to the means of production, ideology, gender and race e.
Frankfurt school. Yet in both formulations one may condemn or seek to improve the form of government in the name of postulated normative ideals, such as autonomy, freedom, social justice, etc. The normative element seems to be something natural in the majority of theories of power. Most of them consist in capturing the difference between the existing state of affairs and the required state of affairs. The downside of this kind of analyses is that they are not capable of critically examining the existing social or political reality; they describe not what it is, but only what it should be.
Therefore a number of irresolvable difficulties arises in connection with the normative type of analysis of power, in many cases making it useless and contradictory. First of all, one assumes in this type of analysis that the position from which the demands have been raised is external in relation to the field in which they should be applied. Why should one system of values, e. Are there any bases other than religious ones for statements concerning the direction in which a given society should evolve?
My main goal in this text is to present, on the basis of the concept of power by Michel Foucault and the idea of hegemony by Ernesto Laclau, a mode of thinking about power which is free of the contradictions connected with both the normative and the classical reflection on power.
It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create the history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.
Foucault, , p. The fact is that in both approaches we can find a similar theoretical construction, based on some essentialist assumptions. The Case of Laclau and Foucault First of all, the issue is not to create an objective and unhistorical description of power. This means that there is no one- directional relation between power and knowledge, but rather that both elements mutually exchange and support each other.
Foucault believes that this kind of analysis does not exhaust the multiplicity of power relations operating in society. For instance, the image of the exclusion of madness and its submission to reason in Madness and Civilization has strong Freudian and Hegelian connotations. Foucault, c, p. The Case of Laclau and Foucault places the beginnings of this kind of thinking about power in the 17th century, in the English and French anti-monarchist movements, even if in both countries they were of a different character.
Society, according to Foucault, is based on real war, permanent and silent, which goes on behind the official declarations of peace. Everybody is engaged in this war, nobody stays neutral. These thinkers started to look for theoretical solutions which would take into consideration the importance of factors other than economic for the historical process.
The most important issue was no longer the position within the social structure, but rather the struggle against the common enemy—the tsarist regime. The economic factor becomes for him only one of the manifestations of the historical process. For Gramsci, such elements as race or religion are equally important. The main point of disagreement, however, was class reductionism, which Laclau completely dismissed toward the end of the s.
A clear conclusion of this process was the publication, together with Chantal Mouffe, of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy This work provoked a wave of discussion in the circles of contemporary Marxists. It should be stressed, however, that the principal arguments of the work were in agreement with the criticism of Marxism provided not only by the proponents of neogramscianism, but also by feminists, theoreticians of culture, and political scientists who were interested in the emergence of new social movements not directly related to class divisions.
This fact provoked the leftist intellectuals sympathizing with the Labour Party to revise their approach and beliefs. The Case of Laclau and Foucault people. Thatcher won not only the ballots of the middle class, but also of a significant portion of the working class vote.
To explain this phenomenon, many intellectuals returned to Gramsci and his idea of moral-intellectual reform. Laclau and Mouffe assume the task of removing these essentialist residues, attempting to elaborate on certain Marxist themes and to complete them by adding elements of social critique developed by poststructuralism.
To put it shortly: their main idea is to make essential an area of investigation that was previously considered only a supplementary field. To some degree, Marxism is a starting point for Laclau and Mouffe, but from their theoretical position a return to Marxism in the classical sense is impossible. There is no ultimate foundation of conflict that would be able to polarize the social while producing at the same time a clear and transparent picture of the social structure.
To perform such an act it is necessary to assume that the subjects participating in it have a pre- established identity. And this, in turn, results in the theoretical privileging of some social spheres, those in which these identities could find grounding.
Instead, Laclau proposes that every process of representation, as the principle of functioning of democratic societies, understood either liberally or in the Marxist context, assumes some interference with the identity of the representative as well as of the represented.
The original gap in the identity of the represented, which needed to be filled by a supplement contributed by the process of representation, opens an undecidable movement in two directions that is constitutive and irreducible. Laclau, , p. The representative then inscribes this interest into a complex reality totally different from that in which it was formulated, while at the same time this interest is transformed and established anew.
The political field is a result of the competition between many various forces, where both the identities and interests of particular agents are forged. Hence, multiple political alliances and configurations are possible which in no way reflect the traditional labels to which we got so used, and which do not fit the political reality. The goal of hegemony is to transform the demands of some social groups into universal ones, so that they would be able to encompass as many particular demands as possible, becoming their representatives.
That is why Laclau stresses so strongly the agonism of the political condition. Any success of the hegemonic struggle, consisting in the encompassment of the entire field of particular demands by one of the groups, is followed by the loss of that specificity which had been the reason for choosing that particular group as a representative of a broader field of interests.
From this moment the game of hegemony starts again from the beginning. There is no stable and long-term hegemony; it exists only as a temporary intervention, as the mobilization of demands against the existing regime. If we understand discourse as an open theoretical horizon through which the analysis of the social is possible, and if we assume together with Laclau that the discursive is a meaningful totality that is not organized around any original foundation, we can recognize the importance of the symbolic or Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.
The Case of Laclau and Foucault rhetorical level within the political sphere. Empty signifiers refer to any attempt at encompassing all the differences within a certain field of meaning; one can say that it is the practice of hegemony in the kingdom of meaning. There being a limit to this system is in fact the condition for its existence and for the process of signification.
When some set of elements is described as a system, it becomes indispensable to exclude what is not a part of this system.
This means constituting an outside by means of a limit—the borderline where the linguistic passes into the extra-linguistic. Speaking more generally, in order to exist every system of signification requires something to limit it, to separate it from what it is not, to exclude what is its opposite. According to Laclau, the limit of the process of signification must present an interruption, a breakdown in signification. Any political action aimed at attaining hegemony is usually connected with the offering of radical solutions to the undesirable state of affairs.
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