Chantal Mouffe

The...

I think the ways Trumpism uses the people in that classic exclusionary nationalist wave that the populism literature says is probably more helpful to understand where he's coming from than how left uses the people that the Chantal Mouffe left populism peak has come and gone.

And...

If I read the DSA theorists, they are less enamored of that framing than you don't really see AOC talking about the people in that way.

It was, it was, like, Chantal-

Laclau and Mouffe.

Yeah.

And Mouffe.

Chantal Mouffe.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is on the one hand, and, and, and, and I'm having our 10 points in mind, so you're gonna have to articulate it better.

So if the framework isn't a neutral tribunal, what is the actual mechanism holding these agreements together?

Well, to explain the mechanism, Willis looks to Chantal Mouffe and her work, particularly The Democratic Paradox and agonistics.

Okay.

Mouffe argues that antagonism, this deep structural conflict between competing grammars, can never be eradicated through rational deliberation.

Because again, there is no perfectly neutral ground to stand on to deliberate in the first place.

Right.

Therefore, Mouffe concludes that any political settlement is always hegemonic.

Hegemonic.

Allerdings werden patriarchale und kapitalistische Machtstrukturen hier wie von selbst zusammengeworfen und nicht ausreichend voneinander differenziert.

Auch das zuvor erwähnte Verschwimmen gesellschaftstransformierender Prozesse, die sich von Interessen bestimmter Aktionen und Aufzeigen von Alternativen nicht trennen lassen, also das Verschwimmen eines realen politischen Antagonismus oder zumindest Agonismus, wie es beispielsweise Chantal Mouffe beschreibt, das sollten wir im Hinterkopf behalten.

[Musik]

Okay, welche toxischen Weiblichkeiten werden ausgemacht? Insgesamt bespricht Fritz fünf Geschlechterbilder: das gute Mädchen, die Powerfrau, die Mutti, das Opfer und last but not least die Bitch.

So then a word that we haven't actually talked too much about yet in this interview, the second word in your title is the word hegemony.

So what is hegemony? How are you defining it? How are you connecting your work to other writers that have talked about hegemony, such as I know you cite Chantal Mouffe in particular on this idea.

So how is hegemony playing a role here?

Yes, so I think in the simplest terms, so hegemony is essentially a form of politics in which the political contestation over resources that should take place if communities and people were pursuing their interest doesn't take place for particular reasons.

And he outlines this in a number of different ways.

Essentially, this hegemony per Gramsci's conception is all about this kind of pursuit or non-pursuit of economic interest and tying in tying in these dimensions to the historical material realities of production and industrializing society.

Now, about 50 or 60 years later, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe essentially attempted to revitalize this idea of hegemony as they saw it by making it more compatible with the kind of post-structural thinking which had become popular at the time.

So this is essentially making it more able to link to, for example, Michel Foucault and Lacan.

But probably what differentiates the work from many other works, at least in media and communication, is exactly my distancing from the Habermasian public sphere and positioning myself more in the tradition of discourse theory of Laclau and Wolff.

And for those who are not familiar with that kind of tradition, can you can you provide kind of a general introduction for what that turned to provide you that you see missing in Habermas? I mean, you've already gestured towards Habermas's neglect of the digital, the digital media context, but how? how do Laclos and Mouffe, who are also writing before that context, although they write into it, how do they offer maybe solutions or paradigms for thinking through it?

I would say paradigm, definitely.

Solutions, probably debated or debatable.