I want to say something here about Kamala Harris: not only as an almost perfect example of an empty signifier in politics, but also as a perfect embodiment of what we could call POSIWIS politics – the politics of a system in which “the purpose of the system is what it says, not what it does”.
Kamala Harris is (all but) what the radical theorist Ernesto Laclau called “an empty signifier”. An empty signifier is a word which is an empty vessel: which is available for use. It is a word which can mean more or less anything. Or, if I suggest that an empty signifier could be a thing or a person, it would be a thing or person which could be made to stand for more or less anything, especially if it has an appropriate appearance: which, in this instance, because woman, because black, is something that can be aimed at the double-glass-ceiling. (Glass ceiling: another empty signifier.) At the moment, Kamala Harris is in the enviable and very unusual situation of having been a black hole which has turned supernova: dragging all the light into its apparent emptiness only to explode suddenly in a great glaring star which lights up the entire Democratic universe. And, across the Atlantic, the people who are always wrong are also transfixed at the fireworks of joy streaming across from America. It is inspiring, it is wonderful – it is absurd.
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