Hegemony Now by Alex Williams

Author:Alex Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This stark analysis dovetails very neatly with our own.

Identities and Recognition

Brexit has been widely misunderstood as a contest about culture and values. But as we have demonstrated, it can better be thought of as a field of competing interests, and of competing attempts to orient a collective sense of possibility towards differing sets of interests, realisable at different temporal and spatial horizons. But is it really possible to separate considerations of ‘interests’ from considerations of ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ in a case such as this one? Clearly one cannot do so in an entirely clean fashion.

Our argument is not that issues of culture, identity, affect or value should be removed from the kind of analysis we have been undertaking here. Rather, our case is simply that culture, identity, recognition, and similar accounts of psychological political motivation can be better understood as ultimately a matter of material interests, once we have expanded what the word ‘interests’ actually denotes into an appropriately complex and multivalent conception.

Before we can do that, we need to acknowledge the scale of rejection that the concept of interests has received during the 1980s and ’90s, and up to the present day. We can cite at least two key examples, one of which we have already referred to. In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, as in that of other theorists heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the pursuit of coherent and stable identities (a pursuit that is always doomed to fail, according to the Lacanian model) at times comes close to being treated as the over riding objective and motivation of all politics as such. Within this framework, the very motivating factor in all politics and all political struggle is the desire to recover the ‘absent fullness’ (of both the self and society as such). The impossibility of doing so – the fact that there is always a gap between reality and fantasy, and that there are always antagonistic social relations that seem to block the final realisation of the fullness – comes to be seen as the motivator of all political action and discourse. Within such a schema, identification – understood as a process that is always ongoing and never successful –comes to play almost the same role that ‘interests’ does in others. For thinkers of identity, it is what politics is, why politics happens, and the object of all political striving.

A different but comparable model of modern politics is that put forward by the German political and social philosopher Axel Honneth. Honneth claims that modern social struggles are not primarily conflicts over access to physical resources, but ‘struggles for recognition’, in a concept that he derives mainly from the thought of Hegel. Put simply, Honneth’s argument is another rejection of the idea that contests over material interests can be seen as the basis of all political struggles. In place of this view, Honneth argues that such struggles are often – if not always – as much about the competing demands of different groups

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