A people fails to emerge under both excessive difference and total equivalence

Evidence

One conclusion to be drawn from the whole of our previous analysis is that there is nothing automatic about the emergence of a ‘people’. On the contrary, it is the result of a complex construction process which can, among other possibilities, fail to achieve its aim. The reasons for this are clear: political identities are the result of the articulation (that is, tension) of the opposed logics of equivalence and difference, and the mere fact that the balance between these logics is broken by one of the two poles prevailing beyond a certain point over the other, is enough to cause the ‘people’ as a political actor to disintegrate. If institutional differentiation is too dominant, the equivalential homogenization that popular identities require as the precondition of their constitution becomes impossible. If social heterogeneity (which, as we have seen, is another form of differentiation) prevails, there is no possibility of establishing an equivalential chain in the first place. But it is also important to realize that total equivalence would also make the emergence of the ‘people’ as a collective actor impossible. An equivalence which was total would cease to be equivalence and collapse into mere identity: there would no longer be a chain but a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass. This is the only situation contemplated by early mass psychologists, to which they wrongly assimilated all forms of popular mobilization. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 392

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A people imposed homogenously from power is radical but never populist — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 414; An entirely empty signifier yields fragile popular unity held by leader love alone — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 430; Producing sameness requires creating and externalizing difference — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 20 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Producing sameness requires creating and externalizing difference #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 20
• Totalizing approaches a boundary it can never actually cross #complicates (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 775