Let's dive in, thrash around in the dawn of Post Irony before it disappears, and see how the New Modern might affect and ultimately effect the regimes of truth, language and the structures of power in a society of people. But before we do anything we have to enter the world of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Why? Because they are a point of focus with enviable names.
Mouffe is a Belgian Political Theorist, a world traveler, a critic of Deliberative Democracy, a contributor to the Essex School of Discourse Analysis which is a field where the post structuralist Symbolic Order figures bountiful.
Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian Political Theorist, he was a Philosopher, one of the many brave 'inventors' of Post Marxism, a field amongst many fields that attempts to recall the real through a materialist dialectic in the search for the concrete and in the process pisses a lot of hardcore Marxists off. Laclau died eleven years ago, he was 78, he was buried in Seville Spain. Mouffe is still with us, she's 82.
Mouffe's critique of Deliberative Democracy is where we start. And here there's a confusion to be mastered. An idea is an idea until it's not. Carl Schmidt might have been a nasty little man, it didn't mean that in 1933, as a well respected constitutional scholar he didn't have a point to make about the Weimer Republic having become a new constitutional creature when the leader of a minority party in a recent election was appointed Chancellor by the duly elected President of the Weimer Republic. And very true, much of Schmidt's scholarship into the constitutional use of Emergency Powers and the engineering of the Enabling Act that legitimized the Nazi takeover of the Weimer Republic has been adopted by the current US Republican Administration, but that's still not the point. The point, whether right or wrong, that Carl Schmidt wanted to make and the point that Chantal Mouffe still wants to make was that Deliberative Democracy was badly flawed, it didn't work and the question was why didn't it work.
Both Schmidt, Mouffe and possible Laclau had concluded that the Ideal of a Rational Consensus is Utopian, it's dangerous, it totally fails to account for the actual nature of politics which is Conflict and Passion. Go ahead try to suppress these two central features of politics in favor of neutral, rational, cleanly structured, beautifully comprehensible Symbolic Orders that produce constructive dialogues and see what happens to stability. Neighbors start throwing stones and stealing signs.
And you're going to love this, Mouffe would have some mean, and possibly very ironic things to say about Post Irony and the whole post-political regime of the sweet little well educated Metamodernist cottage in the country. Mouffe has an Agonistic Perspective. For those who care, and despite other possible associations on the Symbolic Order, Agonistic is at minimum an acknowledgement of a "Them" and an "Us." In the middle it's a "take it outside." At the maximum it's a "bomb the bastards."
So yes we're dealing with a rare and an unusual person, a thinker who brushes her teeth when she feels like it and to hell with the Symbolic Pecking Orders of Academia and to hell with under forty-something pundits trying to pick up pullets by writing for the New Statesman, The Atlantic and/or The Guardian.
