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Subversive rearticulation between

radicalism and reform: the case of
ecologism
Benjamin Glasson

School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne,

Victoria 3010, Australia
Published online: 12 May 2015.

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To cite this article: Benjamin Glasson (2015): Subversive rearticulation between radicalism and
reform: the case of ecologism, Journal of Political Ideologies, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2015.1034463
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Journal of Political Ideologies, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2015.1034463

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Subversive rearticulation between

radicalism and reform: the case of
ecologism
BENJAMIN GLASSON
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia

ABSTRACT Ruling ideologies typically erect binaries between acceptable and

non-acceptable discourses that work to marginalize dissenting voices. Critical
political projects are then forced to choose between purity, which typically
reinforces marginality, and realism, with its ever-present danger of co-optation.
This article contends that a third option exists. The premise of subversive
rearticulation is that a single, apparently innocuous, articulation can begin the
process of undermining an exclusionary binary from within. This single
articulationto a pivot termdoes not in itself threaten an ideological edifice.
But it can underpin a signifying chain that ultimately circumvents the binary
prohibitions that reproduce dominant social orders. To demonstrate the operation
of subversive rearticulation I pursue an emerging stream of radical Green
political theory, as well as the example of the Chinese market reforms under Deng
Xiaoping. The central contribution of the article is the proposed rearticulatory
arcs, chains of signifiers that appear not to directly challenge the governing
binaries, thus guarding against immediate marginalization, while subverting the
binaries themselves. In the unique way that they bend the space of ideological
discourse, these arcs deconstruct the choice between radicalism and reformism.
I conclude that subversive rearticulation presents realistic possibilities for
political movements, but requires careful planning and strategic discipline.

Ecological modernisation (EM) is both a descriptive sociological theory1 and a

normative policy approach.2 It is based on a simple premise: that sustainability can
emerge from within capitalist modernity; radical structural or ideological change
is unnecessary.3 By decoupling ecology from economy, EM repudiates the
notion of limits and turns the tables on the zero-sum game that links development
to environmental degradation. The ugly industrial caterpillar can become the
beautiful ecological butterfly4 not through deindustrialization or socio-economic
upheaval, but by advancing further still. EM is widely seen as the leading
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benjamin glasson
governmental response to the ecological crisis and has been wholeheartedly
embraced by such environmental front runners as the Netherlands, Germany and
Sweden over the past two decades.
However, not everybody shares EMs optimism that industry, technology and
the market can be greened up to avoid the looming collision of growth-based
consumer capitalism and planetary ecology. Pessimistic accounts view EMs
primary role as reproducing capitalist social relations. The world that EM appears
intent upon pursuing is one of dangerous climate change and destabilizing political
conditions: 48C or more warming and the continued expansion of market-based
exploitative relations. More worryingly, EM indicates that future ecological
politics directed at the productive core are likely to be co-opted and assimilated
into the system. Does this mean, however, that Greens (supporters of ecologism as
a distinct political ideology5) should adopt an anti-EM strategy, seeing itas
much as capitalism itselfas the enemy? Does EMs co-optation of ecologism
cement capitalism as unassailable, sounding the death knell for real Greens? Or is
the relation between EM and ecologism more complex? In short, how should
Greens approach EM?
Several environmental political thinkers have argued for a complementary
relationship between institutionalized, reform-based environmentalism and
radical Green politics. While recognizing the formers limits, Andrew Dobson
claims that no antagonism, only a productive tension, exists between radical
ecologism and reformism.6 Similarly, Douglas Torgerson7 actually credits
institutionalization to the radical Green movements efforts staking out a green
public sphere. And John Barry invites Greens to engage positively with EM for
strategic purposes while remaining conscious of its technocratic and reformist,
business as usual approach.8 Specifically, Barry appeals to radical Greens to
replace their limits-to-growth and no-growth appeals with calls for economic
security and well-being. Growth is too dominant a term to attack directly; its evils
can only be revealed in profile, indirectly.
Radicals have long seen such compromise in Faustian terms. Yet, by resisting
such calls, they hold fast to a position of principled irrelevancy. If there is a way in
which EM might, eventually, be transformed into genuine ecologism, radicals
should take it seriously. To that end, in this article I reinterpret and extend Barrys
strategic proposal as far as possible. I utilize Laclau and Mouffes approach to
hegemonic struggle9 to draw up a discursive-strategic road map of the key
rearticulations necessary to challenge the ideology of growth, industrialism,
consumerism and nationalism from within capitalism. This allows me to locate the
main antagonisms between capitalism and ecologism, and provide a clearer
picture of how deep reformism may run.
I begin by outlining the discursive-ideological problematic EM presents to
Greens and surveying the three major Green responses: co-optive, complementary
and rearticulatory. The rearticulatory response, chiefly espoused by Barry, is dealt
with in detail. I highlight several lacunae in Barrys proposal, and argue that the
greened capitalism of EM is ideologically grounded by four binary oppositions
and one master-binary. I translate Barrys strategic proposalavoiding an anti2

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subversive rearticulation between radicalism and reform

growth position while working to subvert growthinto Laclau and Mouffes
discourse theory, which offers a robust theoretical underpinning for the
application of such a subversive rearticulation strategy against EM in general.
I select the Chinese market reforms of the Deng Era as a historical example of
subversive rearticulation. The remainder of the article fleshes out rearticulatory
strategies for the four governing binaries and master-binary of EM. I argue that,
rather than promoting ecologism against dominant ideological discourse, Greens
must constructively work on the terrain of capitalist ideology while simultaneously
refashioning that very terrain. They must subvert the established binaries that
consign ecologism to the margins. The central contribution of the article is the
rearticulatory arcs, chains of signifiers that avoid direct confrontation, guarding
against immediate marginalization, while circumventing the binaries indirectly.
It appears that ecologism can indeed enter through the back door of EM, via
subversive rearticulation.
How should Greens approach EM? Three positions
After reading Eckersley and Dobson through a Laclauian discourse approach,
Stavrakakis argues that the difference between ecologism and other ideologies that
incorporate some form of environmental concern is whether the Green
component is a nodal point or a peripheral element.10 The difference between EM
and ecologism is clear. In EMs very name, ecological is the predicate attached
to the subject modernization. It is this structural difference that solely concerns
us here, yet this is not to downplay the magnitude of the challenge. Genuine Green
politics represents an ideological challenge to the direction of capitalist society,
not merely a call to smooth over its roughest edges. How Greens understand this
structural-ideological difference will determine their strategic approach to EM in
particular and to reformism in general.
Co-optive
EM can be seen to obstruct ecologism in that it saps the social and political momentum
from the Green movementco-opting its language (green, ecological,
sustainable) and imagery and making technical improvements without challenging
the structural causes of ecological destruction. A hegemonic bloc of material and
political interests seek to reclaim political ecology for existing institutions by
incorporating it into their logics and vocabularies and defusing its critical potential.11
Eco-socialists and eco-anarchists are most likely to take such a view of EM. It echoes
Frankfurt School pessimism about capitalism as a self-regulating totality whose only
transformations occur through the operation of the systems own internal logic, thus
ensuring the continual expansion of this logic into further and further reaches of the
social and ecological world.12 As Hajer puts it (in what he calls the technocratic
project interpretation), EM is much more the repressive answer to radical
environmental discourse than its product.13 This strongly sceptical interpretation of
EM detects ideological operations quelling critique.
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By articulating green to the capitalist master-signifier, EM has succeeded in
constructing an equivalence between the Green signifier and capitalisms
established moments of liberalism, consumerism, industrialism, nationalism,
economism and growth. This has transformed the Green signifier into a vessel for
the metaphorical surplus14 of capitalism. By bringing Green signifiers into its orbit
as carriers of the capitalist (ideological) metaphorical surplus, EM deepens this
surplus and further enshrines the anti-ecological moments. EM is then seen to
simply lock in a greened version of business as usual, in which the proper
interpretation of EM is as an attempt to manage the irresolvable problems of
ecological, social and normative unsustainability. Put bluntly, it tries to sustain
the unsustainable.15 From the co-optive perspective, then, Greens should consider
EM an enemy.
Complementary
The most prominent proponent of the complementary model is Dobson, whose
assessment is that a sort of dialectic operates between ecologism and
environmentalism through ecologisms constitution of a green public sphere.16
In fact, the institutionalization and cultural suffusion of environmentalism is an
achievement to be credited to ecologism. Nevertheless, environmentalism will not
be enough. The complementary model sees environmentalism as a transitional
strategy towards ecologism. Torgerson17 makes a similar case, though this time in
relation to sustainable development discourse. The so-called sustainable
development settlement between ecology and economy is not a renewal of
progress in enlightened ecological stripes, but is precisely about the reality of limits.
By advancing a discourse of sustainability, environmentalism now provokes uncertainties
with implications for the very shape of public life . . . Central to the concern with
sustainability, after all, there remain doubts about the very possibility of maintaining the
conventional path of progress.18

Thus, despite becoming institutionalized in the form of environmental managerialism,

sustainable development bears the thumbprint ofand owes its very existence
toradical environmental critique. Far from foreclosing the possibility of institutional
and democratic reform, sustainable development constitutes an incremental
radicalism19 stimulating new forms of public participation in the previously
apolitical techno-economic sphere. When social movements and administrative and
industrialist institutions are exposed to each other, the contention between
incremental and radical approaches may be expected to have results that no single
party could predict or control.20 This last phrase echoes another remark Torgerson
makes in which he subtly accuses radical ecologism of sharing industrialisms
teleological certainty, as in the original Limits to Growth21 discourse which relied upon
debunked computer forecasting. Incremental radicalism, on the other hand,
continues to accept the responsibility of critical judgement butacknowledging the
uncertainty of the quest for sustainabilitygives up the presumptuous notion of
somehow comprehensively controlling the future.22
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Rearticulatory
The rearticulatory response retains the Green insistence on the structural
economic character of ecological destruction. While it partakes of Frankfurt
School pessimism regarding social reproduction, it refutes the Adornoian notion
of a social totality that develops according to its own inner logic. Therefore,
notwithstanding the immense co-optive abilities of capitalism, there is no essential
limit to how far reform may run. The rearticulatory model has faith that EM can
represent a first step in a long-term transition to ecologism. For Green political
strategy, much turns on the prospect of this rearticulatory model. After outlining
and analysing its specific claims, this section explores the rearticulatory moves
needed to subvert EM for ecologism. It asks, is it really possible simultaneously to
see EM as the co-opter of ecologism and nevertheless (temporarily) endorse it
while working to undermine it? Can the co-opted, that is, co-opt the co-opter?
Barry is the leading Green proponent of the rearticulatory model, which can be
said to repudiate the utopian Green position that the only way to deal with
ecological catastrophe is a complete transformation of modern society and
economy.23 Barry presents two justifications for his belief that there are strategic
advantages in seeking to build upon and radicalise ecological modernisation. The
first builds on Dryzek and colleagues conclusion that, to be accepted, Green aims
must attach themselves to one of the states core imperatives: accumulation and
legitimacy. In this context, EM allows (some) green objectives to be integrated/
translated into a policy language and framework which complements and does not
undermine the states core growth imperative.24 The second is that EM is a useful
beginning because it evades the anti-growth or limits-to-growth legacy that has, in
Barrys opinion, held back radical ecologism. The democratic adoption of Green
goals is best served by avoiding a confrontational stance against technological
innovation and current lifestyles and aspirations.25 Instead, Barry proposes that
ecological modernisation can be framed within an overarching policy approach to
sustainable development aimed at producing economic security and wellbeing rather than orthodox economic growth.26 Sustainable development, for
Barry, is the general category of which EM is the particular instantiation within
Great Britain and some other European states. It has been variously watered down
from the original, which had, he insists, explicit political bargains about limits
and global justice built in, even in its relatively conservative versions.27 At
present, EM in the UK emphasizes technological fixes, competitiveness, ecoefficiency, innovation and productivity. Any tension between sustainable
development and economic growth, industrial production and global capitalism
is excluded from government rhetoric.28
Rather than oppose growth, Greens should accept EM, for now, while working
to shift the discourse away from economic growth to economic security. Wellbeing, democracy, social and political stability, and even individual freedom have,
after all, stronger links with economic security than with economic growthat
least after a certain point that most advanced industrial nations are at or have
passed.29 Barry envisages a wider redefinition of the terms we employ.
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[A] shift away from economic growth and orthodox understandings of prosperity should
be taken as an opportunity by green theory to redefine basic political and economic concepts.
It asks us to consider the possibility that human freedom and a well-organised and wellgoverned polity does not depend, in any fundamental sense, on increasing levels of material
affluence. Indeed, there may be a trade-off between democracy and orthodox economic
growth and related government policy heavily or exclusively focused on improving material
well-being.30

Disarticulating green from capitalism

Barry makes two rearticulatory moves. First, he retains the primacy of the
economy, but replaces the emphasis on economic growth with economic security.
Second, he integrates ecological objectives with social objectives, with a social
bottom line. Let us analyse these and assess their prospects. By positively
engaging with EM, Greens may be able to steer the debate away from the false
binary of growth/anti-growth towards economic security and well-being. Thus,
Barry advocates an indirect opposition to the current model of growth: by shifting
the major articulation of economygrowthto security. This allows Greens to be
pro-economy in a way that disarticulates growth and rearticulates it to quality of
life and well-being. They can subvert growth by being pro-economy while
working on changing the meaning of the economy. Shifting the discourse onto the
territory of economic security involves elaborating such signifiers as quality of
life, well-being, democracy, freedom and political stabilityall of which
then refer back to economic security. Barry is addressing the ideological side of
the struggle, often carried out on the terrain of economics, which preoccupies the
de-growth and post-growth movements.31
The test of Barrys proposal in particular and rearticulatory strategy in general
will be whether or not it can disarticulate Green elements away from capitalist
signifiers and renew their Green ideological authority. Laclau states that in the
shift from a technical measure to ideological change it is necessary that a
particular content shows itself as more than itself.32 He cites the example of a
developing nations implementation of a nationalization policy of basic industries.
This measure would remain a technical economic device unless it incarnates
something more and different from itself: for instance, the emancipation from
foreign powers, or social justice for the excluded peoples within the nation. In our
case, the de-technicalization of Green and the recharging of its ideological
potential imply propagating the metaphorical surplus of ecologism through the
alignment of green with a range of signifiersegalitarianism, decentralization,
social justice, peace and non-violence, participatory democracy and so on.
This move effectively constructs a new frontier around the Green signifier such
that it may stand on its own ideological feet, so to speak. In fact, this is precisely
what Barry has arguedthe crucial need to articulate ecological demands with:
social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and the
conceptual (and policy) expansion of the economy to include social, informal and non-cash

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economic activity and a progressive role for the state (especially at the local/municipal level)
. . . One of the reasons for focusing on the social bottom line is to suggest that the
distinctiveness and critical relevance of a distinctly green (as opposed to environmental
or ecological) political economy will increasingly depend on developing a political agenda
around these non-environmental/resource policy areas as states, businesses and other
political parties converge around the ecological modernisation agenda of reconciling the
environmental and economic bottom lines.33

In general terms, the essence of Barrys proposal is to eschew a strategy of

resistance towards capitalism (which EM has made green a moment of) and
adopt a reformist strategy. Contrast this with the radical Green rejection of any
articulation of ecology with capitalism. Progressively, then, Barrys strategy
would construct a chain of equivalence between Green demands, demands for
economic security and demands for social justice. In this chain, all terms resonate
as metaphors for all of the others, with Green standing as the privileged element,
the master-signifier representing the field as a whole.
Further rearticulatory moves
This is all very well as a strategic subversion of the costly battle between growth
and limits-to-growth, and it may be plausible. Yet, beyond social justice and
economic security, the path from EM to ecologism contains further points of
severe tension. First is the need to transcend nation-state myopia and adopt a
global, planetary frame. Second is the problem of technoscience-led
developmentthe powerful post-war link between science and instrumentalism
must be challenged without completely undermining scientific accounts of
ecological decline. Until the link between technology and progress is overcome
it is very difficult to articulate a Green critique of industrial society. And third,
Green politics must somehow replace homo economicus, and the image of the
human as rational manager of natural resources, with a new concept of Green
subjectivity.
In summary, ecologisms marginality is enforced by four binaries which work
hegemonically to police the limits of acceptable environmental discourse. They
trap ecologism in a double bind between reformism and radicalism, realism and
purity, or inclusion and exclusion from the terms of what passes for rational
debate. So long as Green discourse remains trapped within these binary structures,
Green political and policy struggles face overwhelming resistance. The binaries,
then, are:
.
.
.
.

economic growth/no-growth;
nation-state/planet;
industrialism/precautionary development; and
consumer/Green citizen.

The double bind can only be broken by overcoming each of these binaries and,
as we will see, the master-binary capitalism/ecologism that knits them together.
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Capitalism/ecologism
Green politics, for Dobson, seeks explicitly to decentre the human being, to
question mechanistic science and its technological consequences, to refuse to
believe that the world was made for human beings.34 This suggests that Greens also
take issue with something more cosmological than the four ideological binaries,
something that goes to the core of human nature relations. We can delineate the
elements of the capitalist, or Prometheanist,35 cosmology: it is constituted by
science (we are separate from nature and can know it objectively), reinforced by
industrialism (we can control nature and direct it to our ends; we are superior) and
commodity fetishization (consumption), ideologized by humanism and the JudeoChristian mythos and teleologized by (capitalist) modernity. But, taken together,
do these elements not suggest some unspoken core, some structuring lack that the
capitalist master-signifier stands in for? Ultimately, it is this unspoken core that
must be overturned and replaced by a new core of human embeddedness in nature.
This cosmological embeddedness is not exhausted by the signifiers of the Green
discourse, just as cosmological Prometheanism is not exhausted by the signifiers of
the Modern discourse. It is the regularity of dispersal of the ideological elements,
and the crucial role of the master-signifier in maintaining this regularity, that
produces the metaphorical surplus binding the elements into an ideological field.
Whereas economism ascribes value to material throughput, ecologism assigns
inherent value to all living things, whether productive or not. Thus, an
economistic/ecological binary36 is not one binary among others but stands at the
centre of the conflict and is equivalent to the wholesale discursive-ideological shift
between capitalism and ecologism. The economy, a code word for capitalism or
market, is not an object per se but the condition of the intelligibility of all objects.
It is the master-signifier that holds in place the capitalist discourse and the
metaphorical surplus that naturalizes its significations and makes others appear
irrational or occludes them altogether.
How do Greens ultimately change this core? Do they have to contest it head on? No,
because a recursive relationship inheres between the master-signifieras structuring
principleand the terms that surround it. The master-signifier shift can obtain
retroactively when a critical mass of elements has substantively been detached from
the capitalist discourse and articulated together in a chain of equivalence. The mastersignifier acts as a pole of condensation for the metaphorical surplus of all the
individual moments, and then retroactively becomes the name of the emerging field as
such. Indeed, it is this retroactive constitution of the Green master-signifier that
justifies the strategic decision to (initially) work with EM, as well as the rearticulatory
strategy in general. As we will see in the next section, rearticulatory strategy demands
scrupulously avoiding waging this battle directly. As we already saw in relation to
growth/no-growth, the binaries that lock out Green ideology may be able to be
subverted rather than confronted, provided the appropriate rearticulatory tactics.
If they are effective enough, these tactical rearticulations can together comprise the
broader rearticulation strategy aimed at the capitalist master-signifier and capitalist
ideology itself.
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Subversive rearticulation strategy

Barrys belief that EM allows some Green goals to be translated into a framework
that does not inherently challenge capitalism is not particularly inspiring. As he
admits, consumption and growth go more or less unquestioned.37 Yet, the great
promise of a rearticulatory strategy is that it may be able to subvert seemingly
entrenched binary oppositions by deliberately not addressing them head-on.
Instead, it forges a series of articulations that describe an arc first away from the
binary before, cumulatively, changing course such that we arrive at the prohibited
term without crossing the bar of the binary directly.
In this section, I explain subversive rearticulation through a historical example.
This will be followed by a discussion of possible rearticulatory arcs between
capitalism and ecologism. First, however, I must assuage any suspicions that
discursive rearticulation is premised upon an idealist view of the social.
Disarticulation and rearticulation (as discursive or ideological struggle) are not
concerned with the transformations and recombinations of conceptual matrices
as a postmodern culturalist perspective may be. Ideas and signifiers do not
participate in discursive-historical struggle. As Marx notes, they have little or no
independent historical power in themselves.38 Rather, articulatory structures are
the contours of the field of discursive struggleof debate, deliberation, argument,
consent. It is what these ideas and signifiers enable social actors legitimately to do
that makes them so central to history. Rearticulatory strategy aims to build the
legitimacy of certain notions and decisions, and undermine the legitimacy of other
notions and decisions.
The subversion of Chinese socialism
To illustrate how a binary can be subverted by rearticulation, let us examine the
astonishing rearticulations that resuscitated capitalism from a position of radical
exclusion, and effectively brought it into the centre of Chinese communist
discourse. Until about 1920, a variety of flavours of socialist thought had
circulated in Chinese society, but from the 1920s to the 1970s socialism was
almost exclusively identified with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Maoist
ideology enshrined a firm link between the Party, communism and socialism, and a
virulent opposition to capitalism. Yet, Deng Xiaopings faction was able to
persuade the Party and gain popular support for free-market capitalist measures.
The Communist regime became the creator and protector of Chinese capitalism
such that today the enemy of the Chinese state is not capitalism but socialism.
Dengs term, socialism with Chinese characteristics signifies a form of
capitalism that is useful to the CCP.39
How was such an ideological about-face achieved while retaining the label of
communism? Deng rose to power in 1978 championing socialist democracy,
promising to revitalize the socialist goals of the Communist Revolution and to
democratize the Peoples Republic.40 Under Deng, China enacted an elaborate and
comprehensive new economic policy, embracing markets and opening itself up to
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world trade.41 In a tour of southern China seen as an attempt to stoke the fires of
economic reform, Deng argued that the criteria for judging reforms should
transcend capitalism and socialism. And Jiang Zemin claimed in 1992 that it is
baseless and incorrect for some people to argue that a larger role for the market
would mean going capitalist.42 In the Mao era, Zhou Enlai had already been
championing the modernization of industry, agriculture, science and technology,
and defence.43 Modernization itself was grounded by the emergence of the
discourse proclaiming that the real enemy was not capitalism but feudalism.
Modernization bears no allegiance either to communism or capitalism, being
espoused by both, and does not provide a direct challenge to CCP ideology. At the
same time, however, modernization can be articulated to decidedly nonCommunist concepts. From there it is not far to capitalism itself (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The agnostic pivot term modernization subverts the communism/capitalism binary,
enabling a chain of equivalence to stepwise circumvent the bar of prohibition.

In Dengs terms, this was fording the river by feeling the stones at each step
(attrib.)i.e. there was no ideological basis for market reforms and international
integration. It was made possible by Dengs control of the CCP and the Peoples
Liberation Army, but also others confidence that he stood firmly for continued
Party political dominance and commitment to some undefined minimum core of
socialist principles and objectives.44 It is this undefined minimum core, the
surplus of the master-signifier that remains even when detached from its
constitutive elements, that enables socialism with Chinese characteristics to
circumvent its own governing binaryto disarticulate communism from anticapitalism and ultimately subvert the capitalism communism binary altogether.
Importantly, this is not a dialectical transcendence of the binary in the form of
modernization, because it is too one-sidedthe little that remains of socialism is
not substantive. Nor is it a deconstruction of the binary, because it ceases at the
point of reversal, a reversal that still goes under the name of the dominant term.
We initially need a pivot term to shift the discourse away from the field
dominated by the communism/capitalism binary. The pivot term should be
neutral, agnostic; if it favours one or the other pole of the binary, the binary logic is
re-invoked. From a discourse perspective it was modernization that enabled the
Party to subvert the governing ideological binary and embrace capitalism. The
original binary remains, yet once a diagonal has been opened, a re-routing has
occurred. No longer does communism realize its identity in opposition to
capitalism, but in opposition to non-modernization, positivized as feudalism in
the Deng discourse (Figure 2).
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subversive rearticulation between radicalism and reform

Figure 2.

A more detailed schematic of the arc subverting the communism/capitalism binary.

It is via this pivot term that we are able to begin to subvert the original binary.
Communism and modernization become united in a chain of equivalence.
Modernization then takes on some of the metaphorical surplus of communist
discourse. Now, because modernization is related metonymically to economic
development, the latter enters a relation of equivalence with communism.
Propelled by the metaphorical surplus, the chain of equivalence can extend as far
as free markets, consumerism and entrepreneurialism. Ultimately, the
metaphorical surplus, the undefined minimum core of communism, explains
the miracle of a consumer capitalist modernization that is not capitalist at all. The
pivot term modernization subverts the binary and opens a passage to capitalism,
formerly the enemy of the state, without directly negating the extant socialism at
the core of Chinese state ideology. In effect, communism has become an empty
signifier that serves little function other than suturing Chinese ideological
discourse.45
Subversive rearticulation is a kind of ideological re-routing. The Maoist
discourse is structured around a communism/capitalism opposition with a
binary proscription against capitalism. For anything strongly articulated to
capitalism (such as free markets) to appear on the communist side of the binary
implies reversing the communism/capitalism opposition. It is impossible to
reverse the binary but it is possible to construct a chain of articulations to
traverse it.
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Rearticulatory arcs towards ecologism

Our endeavour is to pursue just such a subversive rearticulatory strategy for each
of the binaries that support the capitalism/ecologism master-binary. Each
discursive front requires its own specific tactics: its own pivot term and
rearticulatory arc. To clarify, the pivot term is the first term that subverts the
binary-structured field. It initiates an arc which, if extended carefully, may arrive
at the subordinate term without having directly crossed the bar governing the
binary. The master-signifier will follow its own rearticulatory arc, helping to
ensure the coherency of the overall discursive-ideological trajectory.
Clearly, EM is not a neutral term between capitalism and ecologismits
balance of articulations lay heavily on the capitalist side. Capitalism EM
ecologism does not constitute a satisfactory rearticulatory arc because the binary
between (capitalist) EM and ecologism remains. It itself must be subverted. But
what pivot term will serve this purpose? The master-signifier itself cannot be
imposed but emerges from the field itself as the term that stands in for the
systematicity of the discourse itself (and thereby partially empties itself of its own
particular content). After pursuing rearticulatory arcs for the four binaries, the
term that emerges as the most likely to serve this role, in the intervening stage
between EM and ecologism, is well-being. Not only does Barry link it to
economic security in his proposal, it is a guiding impulse in Tim Jacksons work,46
and it links together the very similar Green notions of the good life47 and of
living well.48 It is the picture of the Good Life that the political ideology of
ecologism paints for us that marks ecologism off from other political ideologies
as well as from light-green environmentalism, for Dobson.49
While most post-industrial futures revolve around high-growth, high-technology, expanding
services, greater leisure, and satisfaction conceived in material terms, ecologisms postindustrial society questions growth and technology, and suggests that the Good Life will
involve more work and fewer material objects.50

Living Well, or buen vivir, is a notion introduced at the Peoples Climate

Summit in Bolivia in 2010. It marks out a rhetorical contrast between high energy
polluting economies of the industrial North and low carbon eco-sufficient
provisioning models in the global South.51 Salleh appears to endorse its
prospects as a pivot term, subverting the politico-economic divide between Left
and Right for an ecological divide of which the defining dimension is
acceptance or rejection of EM.52 Indeed, Living Well has some existing basis
in (Australian) Green discourse. Organisations such as Rising Tide, Socialist
Alliance, and Friends of the Earth, combine sustainability with global justice, and
acknowledge the rationality of Living Well.53
The broad outline of the rearticulatory arc, then, involves four stages:
.
.
.
.
12

capitalist modernity;
EM;
well-being; and
ecologism.

subversive rearticulation between radicalism and reform

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These terms stand as the master-signifiers of each stage, enabling us to

transition between capitalist modernity, through EM, to ecologismwithout ever
having sought directly to resist either capitalist modernity or EM.
The same form is exhibited by each of the four rearticulatory arcs (Figure 3).
Thus, the overall strategy can be visualized as four such arcs operating in
parallel, with the master-arc at the centre of this arrangement. It is these four
supporting binaries and their rearticulatory arcs that I now explore in some detail.
From growth/no-growth to economic security
The minimal contribution of EM to the discourse around economic growth is to
articulate green to growth. As the Stern Report put it, we can be green and
grow. Indeed, if we are not green, we will eventually undermine growth,
however measured.54 But this is the result of bringing green into the capitalist
discourse as one element among others, and clearly subordinate to growth.
If Greens are to undermine the growth hegemony, they will not succeed by being
overtly anti-growth. How, then, are they to do it? Barry has already proposed the
first step with his suggestion that we should shift the debate from one between
economic growth and no-growth to economic security. Economic security is
agnostic about growth and no-growth, and it plays into the state imperative of
security, helping to ensure it will be admitted to the debate. Yet, the real value of
the economic security signifier is as a pivot term that can begin to subvert the
growth/no-growth binary diagonally. Economic security can itself be articulated

Figure 3. Because the diagonal shifts are incremental, they preserve the metaphorical surplus of
the dominant term, growth, and subvert the anti-growth prohibition.

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benjamin glasson
to egalitarianism, distributive justice and specific measures such as a guaranteed
minimum income. If Greens rearticulate the field such that economic security,
distributive justice and well-being line up on one side, growth finds itself isolated
in opposition to this newly forming chain of equivalence. Growth is displaced
from its dominant position but has never been directly opposed.

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From industrialism to precautionary development

As Dobson points out in relation to both socialism and capitalism, it is
undoubtedly a central feature of ecologism that it identifies the super-ideology
of industrialism as the thesis to be undermined.55 Whether the launch of a new
iPhone or the construction of an ecotourism resort in Brazil, the virtuous light
that surrounds technological development is a product of industrialisms
ideological articulations. They close off industrialism to any suggestion it may
be constitutively exploitative. Analysing industrialism reveals three central
components: science, technology and administration. The fantasy of scientific
ideology accords a metaphysical status to the scientific mastery of mechanistic
nature.56 In turn, technologization is sanctioned as the logical extension of science.
Under EM at least, this process is framed by governmental oversight, the state
maintaining monological administrative order57 within the inherently unpredictable trajectory of technoscience.
EM rearticulates unfettered industrialism to the green industrialism of clean
energy, recycling and pollution prevention pays. This green industrialism, as
one element of the system of EM, is already a first step in a rearticulatory arc away
from industrialism qua industrialism. Effectively, what it has done is articulate a
green signifier to the dominant discourse of industrialism. Industrialism remains
at the centre of this field, but now it is tinged with green. At small cost it has now
erected a new binary between a green industrialism and its Other, a
backwardness that cannot even count ecological virtue on its side. Development
is now inscribed as both industrial and ecological.
The Green challenge is to invert this relation: to articulate science, technology
and development as moments of the Green master-signifier and defuse the
ideological contents of industrialism. A direct confrontation with industrialism is
counterproductive. It tempts the charge of Luddism, and reinforces the dominance
of industrialism. Instead, subversive rearticulation offers the prospect of
overcoming industrialism through a rearticulatory arc that circumvents the
binary. Take the signifier democracy as a pivot term from which to construct a
diagonal. Democracy is, after all, a term that bears no allegiance to either
industrialism or its other. Yet, democratic development introduces a new critical
signifier into the discourse and implies that development is not an unadulterated
good. Or we could begin with social progress. Again, social is not a term that
belongs to either element of the governing binary. By initiating a new binary,
social/anti-social progress or democratic/anti-democratic development, Greens
gain a foothold from which to critique techno-industrial development in general or
particular.
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Both of these terms, democratic development and social progress, could be
bolstered by the introduction into Green discourse of a concept of vulnerability
as it destabilizes the sedimented humanistic notions of autonomy and
transcendence. Indeed, vulnerability is a key critical component of Green
discourse for, as Barry puts it, it stands directly against the sedimented notions of
individuality, autonomy and the dominant conception of the good life in Western
modernity.58 It is, then, by articulating the already-established precautionaryprinciple discourse to social progress and democratic development that Greens
may subvert industrialism while avoiding being marginalized as anti-development.
From nation-state to planet
While the planet remains invisible in all other modern political ideologies,
ecologism makes the earth as physical object the very foundation-stone of its
intellectual edifice.59 The dominant claim on social and geographical collective
identification in capitalist modernity belongs to the nation-state, but ecologism
calls for the institution of a social space coterminous with the global ecosphere.60
Even EM proceeds from the notion of national interest. EM discourse predicates
the environment as the national environment. Indeed, so naturalized is the nation
as social space that to speak from outside of a nationalist frame is to appear eerily
at odds with reality. Once again, to confront this binary directly will only further
marginalize Green ideology, and we must seek instead, through rearticulation, to
subvert it.
What pivot term might we begin with? It is not possible or even desirable to
expect the planet alone to engender a Green social space. But an intriguing
possibility is provided by a kind of ecological glocalism. Just as humans actively
form places through practical and symbolic engagement, the social, shared nature
of this engagement in turn helps construct social identity.61 When such places
(local beaches, rivers, wetlands and forests, for instance) come under threat, these
socio-ecological identities become politicized, and communities of interest are
formed. Normally, however, they are usurped by national signifiers such that the
nation-state naturalizes itself by inscribing itself upon them and appropriating
the affective investment they attract. A dual-level identification between local and
global, however, would relax the nationalist stranglehold and have the further
benefit of displacing the NIMBYism62 often plaguing local environmental
politics.
Glocalism may displace the nation-state as chief articulator of the local and
ensure that local environmental politics is conducted under the sign of the planet.
Green glocalism, however, should not try to subsume the local under the global,
detaching it from its unique, embodied sets of human and human/non-human
relations. As Ingold argues, the local and global are not commensurable and
humans are irrevocably split geographically.63 While the socio-ecological space of
planet64 will remain abstracted for many, the local socio-ecological space is a
community space in which immersed individuals trace out entangled pathways.
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Glocalism allows Green ideology to emphasize the local aspect of global issues,
drawing connections while not totalizing one level upon the other. It is crucial not
to force globalism upon those already deeply attached to national identities.
By positively embracing the local, Greens may avoid direct confrontation with the
nation/planet binary that always favours the dominant term, and allow the Earth to
enter ideologically, as it were, through the back door.

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Reinforcing rearticulationsbuilding the metaphorical surplus

Individually, for the binaries discussed so fargrowth/no-growth, industrialism/
precautionary development and nation/planetwe have proposed rearticulatory
arcs that allow us to circumvent the bar separating the two terms while avoiding a
direct challenge to the unmarked terms dominance. The essence of this move is
the metaphorical surplus that links the pivot term to the marked term through their
mutual opposition to the unmarked term.
As intended at the outset, the four (five including the master-signifiers)
rearticulatory fronts will each pass through four stages: capitalist modernity, EM,
well-being and ecologism. The relative fixity of each stage is a function of the ability
of each element to represent all othersto bear the metaphorical surplus of the system
itself and enable systematicity to emerge between the elements. This process of
knitting together is not itself systematic but depends upon the elaboration of multiple
articulatory chains between the elements themselves. Such connections are already
being established across the fronts we have canvassed so far. Let us look at two. First,
an emerging affinity between economic security discourse and planetary discourse
and, second, the affinity between the pivot term of the nation/planet rearticulatory arc
and the pivot term of the industrialist/precautionary development arc.
Economic security and the nation-state
Economic security discourse broadens economic debate from the confines of the
nations borders, and by doing so helps to transcend that political form as the
dominant construction of social space. Economic-growth discourse, according to
its most significant indicator, gross domestic product (GDP), is tied to the national
social space; the focus on GDP and on the nation reinforce and naturalize one
another. Yet, as we work to rearticulate from nation to planet, our efforts are
indirectly assisted by the shift from growth discourse to economic-security
discourse. Economic-security discourse lends itself to a global view of capitalism,
as the sources of insecurity are increasingly to be found beyond the borders of the
national economy: capital flight, volatile commodity prices, currency instability
and so on. On the one hand, the globalization of neoliberal trade and financial
regimes heightens the insecurity (job losses, industry offshoring, interest-rate
unpredictability, stock market exposure, welfare state rollback) deriving from
these factors. On the other hand, over the past three decades this insecurity has
been portrayed in economic-growth discourse as a necessary by-product of the
transition to a globally competitive, open economy, with its implicit promise of
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prosperity for all at some future point. Of course, the symptom of the official
repression of the economic insecurity of neoliberal globalization is the
displacement of economic insecurity onto cultural (ethnic, racial, national)
insecurity as manifest in the emergence of right-wing nationalist, anti-immigrant
parties and their more centrist beneficiaries. Economic security discourse promises
to subvert this official (hegemonic)/symptomatic (displaced) couplet in order to
scrutinize the actual sources of economic insecurity. These sources transcend the
borders of the nation-stateand thus economic security discourse proves
productive in helping us subvert the hegemony of nationalist identifications and in
the rearticulatory effort from nation-state to planetat least in its early stages of
rearticulating to region and then to globe.
Local communities and social development
Again here we see the synergistic effects of pursuing several rearticulatory arcs at
once. To the extent that we establish local and global social (-ecological)
communityrather than nation-state imagined communityas terms of the
discourse, these communities articulate to the pivot term social progress (and
anti-social progress), furthering our efforts to subvert the industrialist mastersignifier. The interplay between the social of social progress and the
construction of the local community initiates a metaphorical surplus linking the
termswhich is precisely how we begin to institute a new social (-ecological)
master-signifier to displace both industrialism and nationalism.
From consumerism to Green citizenship
While the aspirational politics espoused by all mainstream political parties extols
ever-increasing production and consumption, Green politics calls for reductions in
overall demand.65 We can conceptualize consumerism as the hegemony of the
consumer subject, a subject for whom commodities offer the promise of the good
life, and the consecration of the market at the centre of social life. The scale of an
anti-consumerist politics is immense; as Bauman notes, consumerism now holds
predominant claim over individuals identities.66 We can begin, however, by
analysing the elements that underpin consumerist hegemony.
If the market is the institutional infrastructure of consumerism, its hold is
sustained by four ideological components. There is commodity fetishism, which
erases any trace of the labourers hands from the product. Then there is
advertising and marketing, which constantly construct castle[s] of romantic
dreams67 channelling human desire (whether this is a desire for amusement,
physical pleasure or social esteem) to profitable commodities. The dream of the
new acquisition operates as the fantasmatic glue binding individual subjects to
the market. Third, the fantasy of consumer democracy constructs consumption
as the sovereign exercise of franchise within the marketplace.68 As
Schwarzkopf puts it, by realizing the Enlightenment aspirations of individual
liberty and increasing living standards for all, consumer sovereignty renders
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global capitalism unassailable despite the hardship it constitutes for millions.69
Finally, consumerism is sustained by cornucopianism: all demands, no matter
how extravagant, will be met. This is possible because the abstract market is
reified as the origin of commodities, mystifying their real source in the finite
ecosphere.
This powerful ideological structure stands in the way of any Green attempts to
problematize consumption, which inevitably construed as puritanism. To the
extent that consumption is seen as a private act, a moral right, and the path to
happiness and self-creation70, the anti-consumption argument is lost before it is
begun. Arguing for reduced consumption is no better, as it is likely to be
interpreted as anti-consumption. True Greens, claims Barry, do not stand for
restraint but for the rechanneling of desire away from the marketplace. Barrys call
for a politics of sustainable desire recognizes that desire and its fulfilment are
fundamentally political and ethical and their regulation is a legitimate political
objective.71 The Lacanian proposition, Mans desire is the desire of the other72,
means, in part, that the object of mans desire . . . is essentially an object desired
by someone else.73 The Green problematic is how to rechannel desire while
subverting ideologically enforced consumerism.
One natural expansion of the articulatory chain is from green consumerism to
ethical consumerism, a well-established discourse. Fair trade, food miles, and the
organic and slow-food movements open up hitherto-closed (and interlocked) fields
of discourse. They broaden the terms of debate to trade justice, factory farming
and the stripping from food practices of their community-building potential. They
appeal to the broader notion of ecological metabolism. At the very least, ethical
consumer discourse spotlights the social reality of production. At best, it punctures
the fac ade of the fetishized commodity. Ethical consumerism dovetails neatly with
the progressive master-signifier rearticulation from EM to well-being. Wellbeing does not oppose consumerism but it can easily be articulated with terms that
are non-consumerist: health (personal, public and ecological), relationships,
community and sufficiency.74 Such terms trouble the dual fantasies of the
sovereign consumer and of the fetishized commodity.
There are flourishing communities that have turned away from consumerism to
seek fulfilment in community, creativity, small-scale agriculture and intellectual
debate. Sport, despite its complicity in nationalism and commercialism, is largely
conducted at the community level. Economistic value regimes depreciate such
extra-market activities, but celebrating them is not a direct assault on
consumerism. The championing of such activities could function as a circuit
breaker, rearticulating ecologism from its marginal position into more palatable
territory and onto a more effective strategic trajectory. In the UK, Australia and the
US, around one quarter of people have already reported downshifting or
simplifyingvoluntarily reducing their consumption and working hours.75 It is by
building and propagating a discourse of well-being, quality of life and happiness
linked to such terms as family, community, sportthat Greens may begin to
disarticulate desire from the marketplace. Nevertheless, of the rearticulations
necessary to justify faith in EM as a transition stage, consumerism will likely be
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subversive rearticulation between radicalism and reform

the most difficultso integral to contemporary subject-formation and to the
global economy are the fantasies and practices of consumption. Certainly,
subverting consumerism while growth, industrialism and nationalism are
hegemonic is all but impossible. The heavy lifting in transitioning from EM
through well-being to ecologism may well have to fall to the other three arcs.

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From capitalism to ecologism

I have sketched out four rearticulatory pathways which, as indicated at the outset,
are intended to subvert the binary logic governing environmental politics at the
crucial sites of economic growth, nationalism, industrialism and consumerism.
The aim has been to avoid running into the usual argumentative obstacles that arise
when these binary structures are enforced by hegemonic capitalist discourse.
A strategic rearticulation, rather than a confrontation, involves a pivot term and
subsequently linked terms. It incrementally reorients the debatesubverting,
rather than inverting, the governing binary. Thus far, the rearticulatory arcs set out
are:
Capitalist
modernity

EM

Well-being

Green (ecologism)

Growth

Green growth

Economic security;
redistribution; equality; fairness

No-growth

Industrialism Green industrialism

Social progress; democratic

development

Precautionary
development

Consumer

Green consumer

Ethical consumer; community

member

Green citizen

Nation

National environment Local (social/ecological)

community

Planet

The premise of subversive rearticulation is that we can exploit the metaphorical

surplus of the dominant term. Equipped with this metaphorical surplus a relatively
innocuous shiftfrom, for example, economic growth to economic securitycan
initiate an arc negating economic growth without invoking no-growth or limits-togrowth discourse. How is this possible? Economic security is linked to growth
by a common difference from anti-growth; it is haunted by growths
metaphorical surplus, its undefined minimum core. Through a series of pivots,
subversive rearticulation progressively hollows out the dominant term; yet
because these pivots are diagonal, the undefined minimum core of the dominant
term appears unchallenged. The continued circulation of this metaphorical surplus
of growth is the means by which we can construct a rearticulatory arc from one
term to its negation, without negating the term directly.
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This metaphorical surplus is internal to the binaries that we are attempting to
subvert. Another metaphorical surplus circulates externally, linking each
rearticulatory arc. The privileged vehicle of this surplus is the master-signifier
that constructs unity between the arcs at each stage: capitalist modernity,
EM, well-being and ecologism. The trajectory of this surplus is from economic
growth, industrialism, consumerism and nationalism (as ideological field), to nogrowth, precautionary development, ecological subjectivity and planetary
consciousness (as ideological field), via the intervening fields under the banners
of EM and well-being. The essence of each of these ideological fields is a
logic or a principle of readingeffectively a grammar of significationthat
determines what is to be visible and intelligible. If their progression is coordinated such that they remain relatively stable fields, the four rearticulatory arcs
are the sub-components of the radical incremental transition from an
economistic logic to an ecological logic.
And yet here we must pause to consider an objection. What is to prevent the
dominant regime from seizing upon the rearticulatory strategy as soon as the pivot
term is being established, and exclude that term itself, cutting off the nascent
rearticulatory arc? I think this remains a theoretical possibility, although its
likelihood is tempered by two factors. First, the success of the pivot term rests upon
its neutrality, or agnosticism, in relation to the governing binary. The terms I have
considered (modernization, security, community, progress, development,
well-being) already enjoy considerable hegemony, even if not in the discourses
they seek to subvert. To undermine them risks alienating the subjects of other
hegemonic discourses. Second, such a campaign depends on staying one step ahead
of the challenger strategy. The only conceivable way to turn these pivot terms into
pejoratives would be a tightly targeted strategy allegedly revealing the real ends to
which these terms are deployed: a campaign linking, for example economic
security to class warfare or Green extremism. The dominant side runs the risk,
here, of positioning itself squarely against widely held values. It remains to be seen
how far such a campaign could run.
Conclusion
Prompted by Barry and Dobson, this article has tested the idea of a Green embrace of
EM as a strategic move intended eventually to usher in ecologism. Rather than
regarding EMs appropriation of Green discourse and political ideology into minor
technical measures for the purposes of social reproduction as a dead end, I have tested
a disarticulationrearticulation approach that pragmatically works with present
discourse conditions. I argued that this strategy, if conducted in a unified manner, may
eventually overturn the ideological binaries that forestall Green discourse.
To be suspicious of the co-optive logic of EM while simultaneously extending it
a strategic embrace appears contradictory. Yet, there is no contradiction between
observing a state of ideological hegemony and attempting to change that
hegemonic formation from within. Laclau and Mouffes point of departure from
classical Marxism is the notion of a social totality that develops according to an
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internal (socio-economic) logic. Far from championing liberalism, they construe
politics as the building, reproducing and contesting of hegemonies which, despite
their appearance (as in the case of capitalism), are never total. I have attempted to
show that if such a totality does not exist, it points to the potential existence of the
pivot terms that strategic rearticulation strategy relies uponi.e. terms that exist
within the field of discourse but are not presently under the yoke of dominant
ideological binaries. For Greens (or other marginalized political projects) to
undertake such a strategy, their work is in, first, identifying their pivot terms and
then constructing the rearticulatory arcs that will eventually lead these terms back
to the marginalized side of the governing binaries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes and References
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existence presupposes radical changes in relations between humans and others, and in our social and
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Barry, ibid., p. 125.
Barry, ibid., pp. 125126.
Barry, ibid., p. 117.
Barry, ibid., p. 115.
Barry, ibid., p. 113.
Barry, ibid., pp. 122123.
Barry, ibid., p. 122.
See, for instance, T. Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London/Sterling,
VA: Earthscan, 2009); P. A. Victor, Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, Advances in
Ecological Economics (Cheltenham/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2008).
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Dobson, Green Political Thought, op.cit., Ref 5, p. 7.
The belief system centred on the moral duty humans have to deploy the technological powers they have
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See P. Christoff, Ecological modernisation, ecological modernities, Environmental Politics, 5(3) (1996).
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The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 6970; see also Laclau and Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 109.
M. J. Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 19781994/Maurice
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Garnaut, ibid., p. 4, emphasis added.
What happens to communism in this sequence? Once previously capitalist terms are populated by
communism, does not it imply that communism is deconstructed? No, we do not have to go that far.
Communism is merely revealed as being split against itself. Capitalism is revealed in fact to be communism,
that which we formerly thought it owed its identity to in opposition. The One and the Other are not divided by
an easily identifiable barrier any longerthey never were, but it takes such a sequence as this, to reveal the
splitness and the contradiction at the heart of ideology in every case. Thus, the One is not communism, but
this is not to say that it is capitalism either; the One was always split against itself.
Where is the wellbeing dividend? Nature, structure and consumption inequalities, Local Environment, 13
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D. Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke
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See J. Barry, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed,
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Dobson, Green Political Thought, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 12.
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Not in My Back Yard.
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Z. Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd ed. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004),
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C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 3rd ed. (United Kingdom: Alcuin
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P. Miller and N. Rose, Mobilizing the consumer: assembling the subject of consumption, Theory, Culture
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You may even fashion yourself as radically anti-capitalist by purchasing the proper signifiers of rebellion.
Girard, cited in Barry, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability, op. cit., Ref. 58, p. 208.
J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in J.-A. Miller (Ed.), trans. A. Sheridan
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C. Hamilton and E. Mail, Downshifting in Australia: a sea-change in the pursuit of happiness, Discussion
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