I do not think that one can envisage the nature of the agonistic struggle simply in terms of an ongoing contestation over issues or identities. One also needs to grasp the crucial role of hegemonic articulations and the necessity not only of challenging what exists but also of constructing new articulations and new institutions.
(Mouffe 11)
For me, this quote from Mouffe’s text summarizes her argument for the transformative potential, and need, of the political. Mouffe locates the potentiality for the establishment of counter-hegemonies in the hegemonic structure itself, which is always subject to “undecidability” and “contingency.” The political, then, should work to “disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony” (2). Thus, political action does not end at deconstruction, but requires the proposal of other possibilities; new “modes of visibility” to follow Rancière. I found Mouffe’s argument against consensus especially pertinent to the political situation of the Democratic Party today, which is often described as having arrived at an impasse, visualizing the “safe route” as a path to electoral victory (a strategy that is not necessarily successful, as we have seen); one only needs to recall Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s words in July’s debate when she questioned of her fellow candidates, “Why run for President just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for?”
Regarding art’s role in the political, firstly, I agreed with Mouffe’s argument for activism to take on public spaces and institutions because they are “always striated and hegemonically structured” (91); I am reminded of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s’ “Enactments of Power,” in which the Kenyan National Theater becomes a site of struggle as well as a performance space that is “never empty,” but rather a “complex interplay of the entire field of internal and external relations…in the context of time and history” (14). I also liked Mouffe’s transition from examining the “transformation of the work process” (87), new forms of production, to her argument that critical artistic practice takes as its terrain of contestation the “agonistic production of new subjectivities” (90)– Balibar enters here in his observation that politics is “change within change, or the differentiation of change” (12).
If art is able to touch us on an affective level, its power “to make us see things in a different way” (Mouffe 97), here I connect Mouffe’s agonistic politics with Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art, which operates upon a disturbance of the sensible (63). Mouffe’s argument that “every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities” (2) dialogues well with Rancière’s focus on visibility and how art can expand the field of intelligibility. For example, Rancière, citing Flaubert among others, expounds literature’s place in dismantling the representative regime’s hierarchical vision. By horizontalizing both meaning-making by leaving interpretations open, and creating new modes of visibility of who is able to be seen, literature engages in a politics that is not defined by the notion of equivalence present in the “universal exchangeability of commodities” (55); its political potential rather lies in the destabilizing of existing hierarchies of language.