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ABSTRACT
Social constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with racism, chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative.
Notes
1. I argue that poststructuralism conflates the ethnic, the civic-national and other cognates because it does not engage with the specialized literature that draws relevant distinctions, mainly because this literature derives from Kantian frameworks. For example, although Kleingeld distinguishes among various kinds of nationalism and patriotism in “Kantian Patriotism” (313–41) her work is absent from incriminating commentaries on nationalism possibly because her reliance on Kantian sources is rejected by social constructionist and poststructuralists.
2. This happens because conceptual distinctions add nuance at the descriptive level but do not guarantee more favourable treatments at the normative-evaluative level. The value attached to a concept is a different matter from neat categorizations.
3. As Papastephanou argues in “Space, Time, and Rosi Braidotti’s Europe” (91–108), Braidotti’s stance toward national identity is a case in point.
4. Papastephanou, “Deconstructing the Ethnos-Nation Distinction,” 147–58; Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism; and “Patriotism and Pride,” 484–503.
5. Although ethnos and nation (ethnic and national) are in no way reducible to one another, I use them interchangeably for reasons of focus and space. For an analytical distinction between ethnos and nation that challenges their standard designations and the assumption of their interchangeability, see Papastephanou “Deconstructing the Ethnos-Nation Distinction.” While conflation should be avoided, acknowledgement of conceptual affinities between the ethnic and the national and in how some researchers treat them justifies referring to them interchangeably here to indicate how these terms are deconstructively and disparagingly treated within social-constructionist and discursive-analytical contexts. This does not imply that they are entirely interchangeable or let alone identical. Nor do I wish to perpetuate the conflation between them as in some current political philosophy and public discourse.
6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6, 7, 148, 149.
7. E.g., Torfing, New Theories of Discourse; Williams, “Introduction: Mannish Women and Gender,” 1–33.
8. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis, 102.
9. Undoubtedly, language, and thus a meaning system, plays an essential role in our lives and in our understanding of the world. Since naming something establishes its identity, how is it possible to distinguish the process of nomination from the creation/construction of identities? The implications of this question cannot be unravelled here, but it indicates the as yet unmet challenge of transcending identity. The subtly though incriminatory effects of Laclau and Mouffe’s constellation of exclusion constitutive of identity formation, empty signifiers and conceptualization of the notion of national attachment can, for instance, be found in Szkudlarek, “Semiotics of Identity,” 113–25.
10. Burr, Introduction to Social Constructionism, 3
11. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis, 5.
12. Burr, Introduction to Social Constructionism; Gergen, “The Social Constructionist Movement,” 266–75.
13. Burr, Introduction to Social Constructionism, 3–4.
14. Gergen, “The Social Constructionist Movement,” 267.
15. Burr, Introduction to Social Constructionism, 5.
16. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left.
17. This is the case especially in fields that do not specialize in detailed analysis of nationalism and related notions, yet disseminate the disparagement of national attachment as fashionable and, in some academias, hegemonic discourses.
18. Discourse analysis is a broader term which includes, amongst other things, critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology and Laclau and Mouffe’s approach. The present article singles out the latter for reasons of relevance, since their discourse analysis focuses on hegemonic practices and better explains the anti-ethnic, hegemonic discourse under consideration.
19. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 113.
20. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis, 25.
21. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 67.
22. According to Barrett in The Politics of Truth “hegemony is best understood as the organization of consent—the processes through which subordinated forms of consciousness are constructed without recourse to violence or coercion” (54).
23. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 105, 112.
24. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 40. For instance: “Order as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder ‘order’ is present as that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence” (44).
25. Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 39, 195, 192, 195, 202, 191.
26. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” 411–41; Sutherland, “Nation-building through Discourse Theory,” 185–202.
27. Szkudlarek, “Semiotics of Identity,” 121. Furthermore, “once positioned as such, it then works ‘back’ onto the chain of equivalent demands (like those of higher wages or union rights) and redefines them as cases in the struggle for national sovereignty. However, there is another dimension of that retroactive work that is of importance for educational applications. Once the movement has been iconically signified ‘as national’, its opponent (the Party) has been tacitly deprived of Polish nationality. Such identification made it easy to think of the Party as representing Soviet interests alien to the national ones” (ibid.).
28. According to Fearon and Laitin in “Violence and the Social Construction,” this proposition that identities are inherently evil “is still a constructivist-type argument due to its claim that not genes but the internal logic of discourses drives identity construction” (852). However, one might counter-argue that such an argument is of the essentialist-type, since it is in sharp contradiction with the constructionist claim that identity is neither stable nor unchanging. The latter claim entails the possibility of constructing identity in ways that do not incriminate an ‘enemy’. Overcoming the shackles of essentialist understandings of identity means that we may open the possibility of creating identities that acknowledge, defend even, the rights of alternative forms of otherness.
29. Williams, “Introduction: Mannish Women and Gender,” 3 (second emphasis added).
30. Smedley and Smedley, “Race as Biology is Fiction,”16–26.
31. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution, quoted in Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” 5 (emphasis mine).
32. Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” 543, 540.
33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 168.
34. Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” 70 (emphasis mine).
35. It seems that this assumption stems from the Hegelian conceptualization of the self-recognition struggle, but this cannot be unpacked here.
36. Connolly Identity/Difference, 67 (emphasis mine).
37. Ibid., 201.
38. Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 193 (emphasis mine), 191.
39. Iliades, “Discourse Analysis and Nation-building.”
40. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 195.
41. A passage in point: “exclusion and difference… emerge at the intersection of the symbolic with the real: what is excluded from the representation of a nation, from the construction of what is usually called ‘national identity’, insofar as the articulation of this identity is attempted through symbolic and fantasmatic means, is a certain pre-symbolic real. No matter how much we love our national ways of enjoyment, our national real, this real is never enough, it is already castrated, it is the real as staged in fantasy, in national myths and feasts. This is never enough; there is a surplus which is always missing” (ibid).
42. Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 156. Consider also: “fantasy can only exist as the negation of real dislocation, as a negation of the generalised lack, the antagonism that crosses the field of the social. Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production. Yet any promise of absolute positivity—the construction of an imaginarised false real—is founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real—a non-domesticated real—which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder” (ibid., 107–8; emphasis mine).
43. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 101, 101–2.
44. Wendt, “World State is Inevitable,” 527.
45. Abizadeh, “Does Collective Identity,” 58.
46. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism.
47. Gender, to paraphrase Butler in Gender Trouble, is constructed in the same way as race (xvi). Furthermore, “if gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders” (10). Thus social constructionism convincingly presents both nationality and sexuality as constructed and not as pre-determinate natural categories. The relationship between nationality and sexuality is a very interesting issue with several interconnected aspects: see Pryke, “Nationalism and Sexuality,” 529–46.
48. Fearon and Laitn, “Violence and the Social Construction,” 858, 860, 869.
49. Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” 1.
50. That human rights entail a discursive practice should not make us lose sight of the historical context where these practices emerged: according to Bowring in “What is Badiou Attacking,” human rights have also an ontological aspect, as they involved real struggles and tensions whenever their enforcement was raised. Moreover, the struggle for human rights and the issue of human exploitation are inseparable, insofar as exploitation is the prime motive for the struggle for rights and for equality. Hence, human rights have gone hand in hand with struggles for equal rights for all and in some cases have hindered violence and the perpetuation of oppression. Undoubtedly, this does not mean that human rights declarations is all that is needed for equality and for the struggle against cruelty. Although “human rights talk is often and increasingly the meaningless rhetoric of the powerful and the oppressor… it becomes real when articulating the present, not the endlessly deferred, claims of the oppressed” (ibid., 5).
51. Sumic and Riha, “Reinvention of Democracy,” 149.
52. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism.
53. This does not mean that the application of the principle of self-determination is unqualified. It means, however, that qualifying what is relevant or not to self-determination avoids state-of-exception double standards that trample over ethico-political principles.
54. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism, 153.
55. It would certainly be deconstructed also from a transcendent critical standpoint. By “transcendent” I mean from an outside perspective, from within an alternative framework beyond or even against some of the assumptions of either social constructionism or poststructuralism.
56. Peace and tolerance toward diversity are undoubtedly significant though not clear-cut and simplistic ideals. Yet in the discourse under consideration, when the deconstruction of ethnicity is presented as the absolute precondition of peace and tolerance toward diversity, it ironically ends up in a new form of injustice. Such deconstruction then constitutes another way of looking down upon difference and exerting violence upon the diversity that ethnicity represents.
57. Papastephanou, “Space, Time, and Rosi Braidotti’s Europe.”
58. This situation where someone becomes what he or she criticises (incriminator and crusader against evil) is a locus communis in anti-ethnic arguments. A case in point is the anti-ethnic arguments based on Lacanian theory. The Lacanian notion of jouissance (which explains the hatred of the Other as the one who supposedly stole the subject’s enjoyment) is employed to understand racism. For instance, leaving no room for affirming ethnic and national identities, Stavrakakis claims in Lacan and the Political that “nationalist propagandas are based on the assumption that the desire of each generation is to try to heal this (metaphoric) castration and restore the lost full enjoyment” (197). In other words, “the Other is hated because he is fantasised as stealing our lost Enjoyment” (202). However, such undifferentiated incrimination of ethnic and national identities itself constitutes another type of the fantasy of stolen jouissance: the ethnic-self and everyone who is ethnically self-determined are conceived as those who have stolen the lost enjoyment of progressive transcendence of identity and should therefore be deconstructed.
59. Badiou, Ethics, 13–14.
60. Papastephanou, “Cosmopolitan Dice Recast,” 1338–50.
61. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 164.
62. Yet this invites consideration of the following objection: should racist and chauvinist ethnic identities not be deconstructed? They should certainly be, but this could be a valuable operation directed at specific constructions of identity, not at identity per se. Political pathologies such as chauvinism, racism, xenophobia and the like, concern practices, outlooks and attitudes rather than supposedly rigid and essential identities. This means that problematic attitudes and practices rather than “problematic” identities should be the object of deconstruction. Such a distinction allows us to avoid the demonization of a personalized “evil,” since what is recognized as problematic is not one’s way of conceiving oneself but one’s way of acting.
63. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 208.
64. Kaufmann and Conversi, “Ethnic and Nationalist Mobilization,” 36.
65. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 46.
66. Papastephanou, “Onto-theology,” 461–85, and “Entangled in Stories,” 14–23.
67. Papastephanou, “Onto-theology.”
68. Papastephanou, “Entangled in Stories.”
69. Papastephanou, “Inward and Outward Patriotism,” 20–32; Papastephanou, “Cosmopolitan Dice Recast,” and “Patriotism and Pride.”
70. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism.
71. Peters, “Cosmopolitanism, Emancipation,” 124–45.
72. Papastephanou, “Inward and Outward Patriotism,” 27.
73. Ibid., 27. A case in point is the Turkish historian Akcam who criticizes Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide; Papastephanou, “Patriotism and Pride.”
74. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism.
75. In “We and Us” Eriksen seems to agree to some degree with this conclusion. Although he claims that “identities are created, strengthened and maintained through the enactment of contrasts with others” (yet not necessarily the enactment of conflict), he argues that “individuals who are members of several groups, based on a variety of principles—class, ethnicity, gender, profession, political persuasion and so on—are less likely to invest themselves uncompromisingly into conflicts than individuals whose entire self is defined in relation to a single group” (435).
76. Papastephanou, Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism.
77. Ibid.; Papastephanou, “Inward and Outward Patriotism,” “Cosmopolitan Dice Recast,” and “Patriotism and Pride.”
78. Papastephanou, “Cosmopolitan Dice Recast”; Papastephanou’s response to the question “how different and independent egos would consent on maxims of action without each of them absolutizing solipsistically her own standpoint or fearing that the other will do so,” in Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism, is as follows: “If we always assume that negotiation on world affairs is irrelevant or even prior to changes in our ways of treating others (or treating the environment), then we will never escape dilemmas such as the above.” This response illustrates the necessity to “prioritize understanding cosmopolitanism as treatment of others over agreement with them” (122).
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Kalli Drousioti
Dr. Kalli Drousioti received her Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Education from the University of Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2016. She has published articles in Greek and international scholarly journals. Her research interests include discourse analysis, ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, utopia and educational ideals.