Sustainability as Empty Signifier: Its

Rise, Fall, and Radical Potential

Trent Brown
School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales,
Australia;
trentpbrown@gmail.com

Abstract: Until recently, the concept of sustainability appeared to occupy a central

position in the politics of many Western democracies. Following the 2008 nancial crisis,
however, sustainability has been relegated to a position of secondary or tertiary signi-
cance. This article considers the rise and fall of sustainability through the theoretical lens
of Ernesto Laclau, considering whether it may be seen as an example of an empty signi-
er. Through detailed engagement with Laclaus work, as well as both theoretical and
empirical studies of the concept of sustainability, I argue that sustainability signies the
multiple failures of dominant discourses to recognise the future as a meaningful
category. After examining the historical conditions under which sustainability was able
to operate in this way, I go on to argue that the global nancial crisis and neoliberalism
more broadly have interrupted our capacity to think about the future, undermining the
signicance of sustainability, at least temporarily.

Keywords: sustainability, empty signifiers, Ernesto Laclau, sustainable development,

the future

Introduction
In May 2014, international media reported on two new scientic reports indicating
that the Antarctic ice sheet had begun an irreversible process of disintegration. The
reports by Rignot et al. (2014) and Joughin et al. (2014) suggested that a sea-level
rise of between 3 and 4 m over the coming centuries is now inevitable, casting
doubt over the future survival prospects of humanity. Despite the magnitude of
the ndings, international media outlets reported them as just another news item
indeed, worse, they were relegated to a relatively irrelevant position, presented
only after the usual commentary on political scandals, economic growth trends
and so on. It appears that, at a very fundamental level, we are unable to signify
climate change in a way that reects the true magnitude of its implications.
It is the contention of this paper that when this inability to adequately signify our
future challenges is perceived as unacceptable, we have the origins of sustainability
politics. I argue that, when there is a collective recognition that dominant discursive
frames have failed to incorporate the future as a meaningful factor, sustainability
can behave as what Ernesto Laclau described as an empty signiera signier
that gestures towards the failure(s) of signication itself. Furthermore, where previ-
ous authors have seen sustainability as being, at best, a reformist concept and, at
worst, inherently reactionary (Swyngedouw 2010:229), I argue that in function-
ing as an empty signier, sustainability holds potential as a tool for radical politics,
expressing the need for fundamental recongurations.

Antipode Vol. 48 No. 1 2016 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 115133 doi: 10.1111/anti.12164
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116 Antipode

I begin this paper by briey examining how sustainability has been referred to as
an empty signier in previous scholarly literature. I show that this literature exam-
ined how sustainability functions as an empty signier in very specic contexts,
rather than drawing out the full set of social, historical and political implications
of empty signiers, as developed by Laclau. Thus, in the next section, I go on to
explain Laclaus concept of empty signiers in more detail. I then highlight how
the historical context under which sustainability emerged as a key organising
principle for society supports the idea that it may be considered an example of an
empty signier in the full sense of the term. In the latter part of the article, I explore
the various contexts in which sustainability has been applied and suggest that, in
many settings, sustainabilitys radicalism is subverted, as it has been hegemonised
by the narrower concept of sustainable development. Finally, I consider
whether the historical conditions under which sustainability was able to function
as an empty signier are now eroding, and consider the likelihood of its future
re-emergence as a powerful political concept.

Sustainability as Empty Signier: Previous Interpretations

To suggest that sustainability is an empty signier would appear, at rst glance, a
derogatory evaluationperhaps implying that sustainability, while appearing to
address fundamental concerns, means very little in particular: it means all things
to all people, is subject to radically diverse interpretations and, as such, prevents
anything concrete from being done. A more detailed study of Laclaus usage of
the term empty signier, however, reveals a more complex reality. Rather than
using the term empty signier purely as a means of dismissing sustainability, closer
engagement reveals that sustainability, in its function as empty signier, may open
new possibilities for political action. For while it is true that, in certain circum-
stances, an indeterminacy of meaning may be a feature of Laclaus concept of the
empty signier, this is not the only implication of the term.
In scholarly literature, sustainability has previously been referred to as an empty
signier in the context of urban planning. Gunder (2006) has argued that sustain-
ability has become the chief empty signier of planning discourse, replacing
concepts such as social justice and public good as the central goal towards
which all planners should aspire. He shows that where various ecological issues
had been raised beforehand in scattered instances within planning literature, it is
only since 2000 that these have been articulated together under a common
heading of sustainability, a term that seems to explain the common link between
them all. This, as Laclau (2005) outlines, is among the chief functions of the empty
signier: in simply being named, it retroactively groups together diverse and
ambiguous instances of concern. Davidson (2010) builds on this, by examining
the retroactive quilting function of the empty signier in planning discourse.
He stresses that, in unifying a diverse eld of phenomena, the empty signier is im-
possible to dene in concise terms. Indeed, its meaning will need to be subject to
constant revision, as the diverse phenomena that it unies will forever be slipping
out from any xed conceptual understanding of the term. In this way, due to its
lack of specic content, it is able to incorporate diverse agents within the planning

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 117

process, including traditional antagonists, under the pretence that they are all
working on issues of sustainability.
Both Gunder (2006) and Davidson (2010) are quite sceptical of the prospect that
sustainability, in its function as empty signier, will be able to create substantial
change. For Gunder (2006), the unifying function of sustainability can serve to
obscure irreducible conicts. What one group calls sustainable might be highly
inimical to the interests of other groups. He suggests that in the context of neolib-
eral hegemony, this is frequently the case. The fact that sustainability is devoid of
inherent content allows its meaning to be contested, and those who speak the heg-
emonic language are better able to temporarily x its meaning. As such, he shows
that, internationally, planners regard sustainability as, rst and foremost, providing
growth opportunities for future generations. This may involve treating certain peo-
ple in the present in an unjust manner, overwriting plannings traditional emphasis
on equitable social effects. Gunder is happy with the use of the term ecological
sustainability, which has a more precise and socially important designation, but
argues that the way in which it has been used to unify ecological, social and
economic concerns has left it open to neoliberal co-optation.
These studies provide useful insights into how sustainability functions as an
empty signier in specic institutional settings. This paper aims to go beyond this,
by providing a greater exposition of the broader conditions under which sustain-
ability has been able to emerge, develop and operate as an empty signier. This
requires a more historical analysis. Indeed, Laclaus (1996, 2005) major discussions
of empty signiers follow the Gramscian tradition of conceiving a dialectical rela-
tionship between historical conditions of emergence and ideological function. In
what follows, therefore, I explore how the contemporary societal condition allowed
sustainability to emerge as a powerful concept within the public imagination, and
why, in more recent years, it appears to have undergone a decline in relevance.

The Emergence of Empty Signiers

Laclaus (1996) denition of an empty signier is a signier without a signied.
He stresses that what is implied by such a signier is not merely noisea word
without meaningas this could hardly be described as a signier at all; nor is it that
the content of the signier is simply vague or elusive. Rather, the empty signier
concerns the possibility of signifying the limits of signication as such. This limit
refers not to a neutral, empirical boundary, as such a boundary could itself be
signied and thus incorporated into the signifying system. The limit in question is
rather what has been excluded from discourse. It is a radical limit, akin to the
Lacanian Real. Since what is outside such a limit cannot be signied except through
inclusion into the system of signication, the only way in which this limit can
appear is through the interruption or failure of the very process of signication.
In concrete social and political terms, this may occur in a situation in which
dominant discourses have failedthe conventional modes of categorisation are
no longer capable of incorporating a reality that evades them. The conditions for
the interruption by something outside a signifying system are, in this case,
contingent on what is impossible to represent from within.

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Laclau had explored similar themes in his previous writings on dislocation and
antagonism. Examining the structure of antagonistic relations, Laclau (1990) em-
phasises that antagonism per se does not emerge as a mere by-product of a logical
contradiction in the formal structure of a relationship (as in some orthodox Marxist
analyses of the wage relation). Instead, antagonism is generated by the intervention
of discourses exterior to that relationship: the agitations of a union, demands for
civil rights, and so on. Antagonism emerges when the mutual incompatibility of
two discourses becomes apparentwhen the presence of one prevents the other
from constituting itself as an objective reality. As such, Laclau (1990:16) conceptu-
alises antagonistic relations as a clash between two objectivities and a point at
which the impossibility of objectivity becomes visible. In the wage relation, for
example, the discourse of capital is unable to constitute itself as an objectivity of prot
maximisation as long as workers continue to assert the importance of other factors
within the realm of production. Likewise, the objectivity of workers rights cannot
be constituted as long as the discourse of capital has ascendency. Such a limit to ob-
jectivity indicates a failure of the signifying system, which Laclau (1996) would go on
to discuss in relation to empty signiers. Antagonism itself occurs because there is
something the discursive system is unable to grasp. The moment one discourse is able
to fully incorporate the perspective of the other, the relation ceases to be antagonistic.
The effect of an antagonistic relation is that the identity of those who constitute the
relation will be dislocated: the presence of the Other threatens their objectivity
and prevents their constitution as discursively determined entities. Yet, as we shall
see, this very threat provides the ground upon which new discourses and modes of
identication can be constructed (Laclau 1990:39).
Laclau argues that empty signiers have their conditions of possibility in the dis-
cursive effects of dislocation on the identity of signiers. Dislocation suggests a fac-
tor that cannot be incorporated within a particular system of signication. Laclau
(1996) argues that this causes the identity of all signiers to become split. On the
one hand, signiers retain their attachment to specic signieds, which implies
the differences between each signier and all others within the signifying system that
gives each their concise designation. On the other hand, these differences are col-
lapsed, insofar as they are articulated as having an equivalent relation to the
dislocating factor, which threatens to undermine the discursive closure of all signi-
ers within the system. In this way, the dislocating factor effectively denes the eld
of signication, by allowing the articulation of these equivalent relations between
all signiers. When a particular signier is so positioned that it articulates this rela-
tion of equivalence to all other signiers to the extent that its differential function
is almost inoperative, it can be said to occupy the place of empty signier, standing
in for the pure Being of the signifying system itself. In this case, the empty signier
represents the eld of positivity. The other possibility that Laclau discusses is an
empty signier standing in for pure negativitya pure expression of the threat to
discursive closure. This implies that the various factors excluded from a signifying
system, which pose a threat to its objectivity, may be articulated as equivalent from
within that system. In this case, differences are again collapsed, but under the head-
ing of an empty signier that represents the pure threat posed to the system as a
whole. It is only through reference to this generalised threat, external to the

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 119

signifying system, that it is possible for the system itself to be coherently repre-
sented as a positive order of Being.
In Laclaus framework, the selection of which signier becomes empty in this
process is assumed to be arbitrary. In determining which signier is to stand in
for the breakdown of objectivity that evades signication, Laclau (2005) reserves
primacy for the gesture of naming. There is no inner conceptual core to any
particular signier that determines that it is better equipped for this function. Every
signier within a discursive eld is equally positioned with relation to the outside,
which both threatens and constitutes the system. The specic signier that is
assigned to signify the limits of signication is therefore arbitrary; any signier could
equally stand in for the pure being of the system or the pure negativity that stands
beyond it. Furthermore, Laclau (2005) follows Lacan in arguing for the retroactive
nature of this arbitrary gesture: in being named, the empty signier gives meaning
to each of the previous moments of dislocation and, indeed, denes the system as a
coherent (though threatened and incomplete) whole. In other words, the empty
signier posits its own presuppositions (Butler et al. 2000:225230).
The arbitrariness in designating empty signiers introduces some ambiguity to
Laclaus theoretical framework. Laclaus point is that there is nothing inherent in
the structure of the signifying system that guarantees which signier will be able to
empty itself of its content and signify pure positivity/negativity. This is not to sug-
gest, however, that in historical practice the process by which empty signiers
emerge is completely random. Laclau (1996) is quite clear that the process by
which one signier comes to dominate as representative of the entire system is sub-
ject to hegemonic struggle and this within the context of a eld of uneven power re-
lations. What Laclau does not appear to state so directly is whether the grouping
function of the empty signier (the manner in which it expresses relations of equiv-
alence between diverse, threatened signiers) should also be regarded as arbitrary
in practice. Yet, if this were the case, presumably any set of instances that disrupt
the process of signication could be clustered together under an empty signier
representing threat and, equally, any group of signiers could be clustered
together in equivalent relations, constituting a system that has been threatened.
The formation of equivalent relations must be seen in the context of how disloca-
tions have been produced and what concrete problems compel signiers to be
grouped together. To argue that these processes are completely arbitrary in
historical practice would appear quite absurd: the mysteries of religious experience,
the ambiguities of sexual relationships, the exclusions of multinational capitalism,
patriarchys denial of female identity and any other instances in which reality eludes
signication could be condensed under the same heading and represent a kind of
generalised social evil. It is clear that there is some minimal similarity between the
diverse forms of dislocation that are grouped into chains of equivalence, which
provides the empty signier with its historical impetus. These can be understood
through detailed studies of the conditions under which dislocations have been
produced. This, paradoxically, provides a minimal meaning or content for empty
signiersa way of designating their specicity and how they could be
conceptualised vis--vis other empty signiers. Recognising this minimal sense in
which empty signiers are not-quite-empty will be essential to designating what

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gives sustainability its unique character as an empty signier, and why it captures
imaginations today in ways that other similarly empty signiers do not.
There is good reason to investigate the qualities of sustainability as an empty
signier, and to elaborate upon its specicity and its particular connection to
current historical conditions. From the 1970s onwards, sustainability emerged rela-
tively rapidly as a major focal point in diverse social and political contexts. To a cer-
tain degree, it cuts across particular contexts and represents a generally desirable
state towards which society should aspire. If it indeed is acting as an empty signier,
we should investigate the factors that explain its sudden emergence. It would
appear that something is ill-at-ease within contemporary societycertain forms of
dislocation have reached a point at which they are coalescing in relations of
equivalence which sustainability serves to represent. We should seek to clarify
why sustainability is able to perform this function in ways that other empty signi-
ers were evidently unable. This suggests investigating what makes sustainability
specialwhat specic forms of dislocation it serves to condense and render
coherent. The remainder of this paper will attempt to address these questions.

Sustainability in Historical Context

A brief overview of the historical development of the concept of sustainability clar-
ies its functioning as an empty signier. Two points are particularly notable. First,
sustainability has historically been dened through negation. Even in contemporary
debate, when the sustainability spotlight is turned on global capitalism, it tends to
focus on the unsustainable features of the current order, rather than the positive
features of a sustainable society (eg Hossay 2006). The idea of a sustainable society
has not been proposed simply on the basis of its own merits; rather, it has gradually
been recognised as a necessary transition society must undertake, as the unsustain-
able features of the present order have been revealed. This perspective emerges
both through concrete experiences of limits being reached and also the develop-
ment of more advanced forms of knowledge to predict the outcomes of current
trends. This is consistent with Laclaus theory of empty signiers, which do not
emerge ex nihilo, but rather through dislocations within the existing discursive
system. Second, while sustainability has intellectual roots in environmentalism, as
it develops historically, it gradually empties of its attachment to specically
environmentalist identities and develops as a signier that can represent the
concerns of diverse stakeholders.
While the term sustainable has been used in the English language for centuries,
its contemporary social and political implications only emerged relatively recently.
Brown et al. (1987) identify a precursor for the contemporary idea within the
sustained yield approach to forestry and shing, developed in the early twentieth
century in response to declining stocks. This approach highlighted the importance
of good management practices to ensure that natural regeneration occurred at a
rate faster than the rate of extraction. Sustained yield was an important precursor
to contemporary sustainability. It was the rst approach to critically analyse an
entire mode of production in terms of its biological capacity to maintain ongoing
human benets, foreshadowing the applications of sustainability in a range of

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 121

ecological and social contexts. Importantly, however, it was only a precursor. In

contemporary social and political discourse, sustainability is societal in scope, rather
than applying to only one sector. Furthermore, contemporary sustainability is
ethically normative: its claims are not merely utilitarian calculations of cost and
benet, but state the kind of society towards which we should aspire.
The contemporary version of sustainability, which is critical, society-wide in
scope and normative in orientation, emerged gradually throughout the twentieth
century. Dresner (2008) notes that some of the limitations of capitalist societies to
sustain human populations had been speculated since as early as the nineteenth
century. Economists such as Malthus, Mill and Jevons noted that growth, both of
economies and populations, could not continue indenitely, calling into question
the sustainability of economic models that depended on perpetual growth. In the
twentieth century, however, these concerns came into sharper focus, as particular
scientic disciplines developed the tools to elaborate the issues at stake. Dresner
identies an important development in the work of Aldo Leopold and other ecolo-
gists in the 1930s and 1940s, who emphasised the preservation of a diverse biotic
community as crucial to the survival of the human species (Leopold 1939). These
authors bridged a divide within the American environment movement between
conservationists, who were only interested in conserving resources of direct
economic benet to humans, and preservationists, who insisted on the inherent
value of nature. They did this by demonstrating that many of the things preserva-
tionists stood formaintaining biodiverse forests, for examplehad benets for
humans beyond their aesthetic, spiritual or inherent ethical value. In the long term,
destroying the natural environment would adversely affect human beings.
By the mid-twentieth century, real-world developments caused hypothetical
environmental limits to coincide more directly with lived social and ecological
crises. Thus, by the 1960s and 1970s, several activist-scholars wrote impassioned
pieces emphasising the immediate human consequences of environmentally de-
structive practices, such as excessive pesticide use (Carson 1962) the overexploita-
tion of natural resources (Meadows et al. 1972) and the production of industrial
waste (Commoner 1972). These critiques and the grassroots movements they rep-
resented served as major sources of dislocation for dominant models of develop-
ment and progress, highlighting that their basis in intensive resource exploitation
and endless growth would have adverse consequences for the future of humanity.
These critiques generated defensive responses from those interested in continued
economic growth. As Dresner (2008) outlines, the voices of leaders from develop-
ing countries were particularly important in this respect. Notably, Indias Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi argued that curtailing economic growth would deny poor
countries the possibility of overcoming poverty. Such claims were signicant, as
they had an ethical charge, questioning the right of scholars from the global North
to tell the global South that they could not aspire to a comparable quality of life.
Dresner (2008) argues that it was in response to such questions that the modern
concept of sustainability emerged. Through its development, the ethical and
human aspects of ecological conservation were given a more coherent articulation.
The World Council of Churches Conference on Science and Technology for Human
Development in 1974, in which Dresner (2008:32) identies the rst instance of the

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use of the term sustainability in a society-wide critique, presented these human

concerns upfront. The conference was concerned with sustaining certain qualities
of human civilisation, including standards of social stability, democracy and equity.
Sustainability as an expressed objective and goal for society, thus had a social and
political impetus from its outset, which extended beyond environmental concerns.
As the concept of sustainability progressively emptied of its original attachment
to environmentalism and began to express more generalised aspirations for social
change, it began to be applied to issues outside the strictly environmental domain.
Brown et al. (1987:716), for example, highlight the importance of social sustain-
ability, which they dene as the continued satisfaction of basic human needs.
While dening basic needs remains contentious, the concept of social sustainabil-
ity has brought concerns regarding the long-term effects of rising social inequality
to the sustainability debate. Further, there have been numerous concerns raised
regarding the economic sustainability of the current system. Debates surround-
ing peak oil, for example, have highlighted that a system overly dependent upon
a single, nite resource poses a looming threat to future prosperity and, indeed,
food supplies (Hallett and Wright 2011). Likewise, in the developing world, models
of development that promote rapid capital accumulation, yet undermine the liveli-
hood prospects of the poor majority, have also been critiqued as economically
unsustainable (Sidhu 2002). Taking a multidimensional view of sustainability
in this way has proved crucial in ensuring it operates effectively in practice. As
Tisdell (1999) notes, a model for an ecologically sustainable society is of little use
if it ultimately cannot be sustained for social, cultural or economic reasons. Like-
wise, an apparently socially and economically sustainable system cannot be
regarded as truly sustainable if it undermines its own ecological base.
This broad development of the concept of sustainability represented the discur-
sive maturation of some of the ideals of environmentalism and in many ways ex-
tended beyond them. Concerns for sustainability were not only concerns for
those who ascribed to narrowly environmentalist or green identities, nor to
those who retain very particular sets of values. They concern, to varying extents
and in complex ways, the majority of the human population. Sustainability em-
braces diverse ethical and political positions and this, indeed, is the openness that
Arias-Maldonado (2013) argues is crucial to its political success. In traversing the
traditional boundaries of environmentalist identity politics, it gives symbolic efcacy
to ecological critique, by bringing diverse ideas together under a common name.
As people develop awareness that the existing socio-economic structure cannot
be sustained on ecological, social, economic, political and moral grounds, the
experience of dislocation from existing paradigms allows the idea of a sustainable
society to develop as a meaningful alternative. However, we must ask what it is
about these multiple sources of dislocation that brings them under the heading of
sustainability, and not that of some other empty signier.

The Specicity of Sustainability: Dislocation of the Future

Sustainabilitys historical development has thus made it sufciently empty
(detached from traditional environmentalism) that its absence may be recognised

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in a diverse range of dislocations. Yet, what is the specic nature of these disloca-
tions? And why was it not possible for the failures of contemporary discourse and
practice described above to be adequately represented by other empty signiers,
such as social justice or emancipation? My core argument is that, where, for
example, emancipation can function as an empty signier in a social eld in
which there are multiple instances of repressed identity (Laclau 1996), the condi-
tions for sustainability as empty signier are to be found in multiple experiences
of our individual and collective futures being threatened and denied. The legitimacy
of the dominant discourses that guide social practice have been dislocated by other
discourses operating outside of them, which bring into sharp focus the undesirable
futures that they are producing. The key discursive condition for these dislocations
being articulated in relations of equivalence to each other (ultimately expressed by
sustainability as an empty signier) is that the discourses proliferating in the social
eld have, in multiple instances, been unable to incorporate their own future effects
and adapt accordingly. Expressing these individual discursive failures as equivalent
gives rise to a generalised sense of failure, leading to critical articulations
questioning the legitimacy of those who have been able to make these negligent
decisions about the future of humanity. Sustainability ultimately stands for a society
in which these failures have been overcomea reconciled society, which is currently
blocked by existing power structures.
The discourses and practices that are critiqued as unsustainable have a
common feature. All have been interrupted by claims that their long-term (and in
some cases, medium- and short-term) effects make them, in some sense,
unjustiable. The construction of the future that enacts this interruption may be
based upon some kind of projection, derived, for example, from scientic knowl-
edge (eg Wynne 1996). In other scenarios, it may be based on lay observations that
living conditions have diminished over time and may reasonably be expected to
decline further in the future if present practices continue.1 In either case, the
expectation is that at some point on the horizon, conditions will become intolera-
ble, and that some change is urgently called for.
Aspects of this future-oriented critique can be discerned in The World Commis-
sion on Environment and Developments report Our Common Future, in which sus-
tainability was given its rst mainstream expression. The reports formulation of
sustainable development as meet[ing] the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED
1990:87) clearly implied that humanity was failing in its ethical obligations to future
generations. As the report outlined, crises of soil degradation, desertication and
deforestation had clearly brought this sense of failure into sharp reliefand the
concern they generated was aptly reected in the title of the reports rst chapter,
A threatened future. Foster (2008) argues that the WCEDs future orientation
has been difcult to implement, particularly due to the lack of a direct relationship
between present and future generations. Any attempt by authorities to act equita-
bly in relation to future generations proves fanciful since, in the nal instance,
future generations cannot hold them accountable and there is no third party to dis-
cern whether their behaviour has been equitable. Recognising this concern, we
should state explicitly that rather than being based on any direct ethical relationship

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between present and future persons, sustainability derives its meaning entirely
through the construction of potential futures (of both future and current genera-
tions) in the present, along with the affective consequences of these constructions.
Specic constructions of the future dislocate dominant discourses insofar as those
discourses are unable to adapt to them. Discourses that are able to recognise their
own destructive effects and incorporate an adaptive locus of change cease to be an-
tagonistic. Antagonism on the basis of unsustainability is persistent when dominant
discourses project an indenite continuation of the same practices through the
exclusion of their own consequences. Typically this antagonism arises because
the discourse recognises only a limited number of variables (most commonly, eco-
nomic) as having value. The discourse is interrupted when variables outside its eld
of recognition are articulated as being equally or more valuable. The very idea of
climate change, for example, interrupts economic rationalist discourses that have
justied the continued use of fossil fuels as key to the growth of national economies.
The discourse of climate science draws attention to other priorities beyond short-
term economic growth: most notably, sustaining the conditions for life on this
planet. In line with Laclaus discussion of dislocation and antagonism, each
discourse is unable to fully determine the eld of social objectivity so long as the
other continues to assert its claims as primary. The mutual incompatibility between
the two discourses points to a gap within signication as sucha crucial condition
for the intervention of the empty signier which stands in for this gap.
To follow Laclaus approach to the end, we can expect that when various
concerns about the future are articulated as equivalent, their dislocating effects be-
come generalised and take on a universal quality. When looking at one particular
instance of critique in isolationthe critique of fossil fuels from a climate change
perspective, for examplethe nature of the concern is quite unambiguous. It relates
to a specic set of projectionsincrease in global temperature, and so onwhich
can be seen in relation to other concerns. When this concern is articulated as equiv-
alent to a host of others, however, this anxiety about the threatened future is gen-
eralised. It ceases to be about a specic set of consequences, and the future
becomes a kind of intolerable imaginarya vaguely structured mental space onto
which diverse apocalyptic visions may be projected. At its most politically effective,
this imaginary is unthinkable. It assumes a general tendency towards decline, but
thought is suspended before the elaboration of the specic future conditions that
people will have to live with. This apocalyptic imaginary supports the discourse
of sustainability: the equivalence between the various forms of dislocation
described above can only be represented by empty signiers such as disaster,
collapse and so on, which stand in for the pure threat to the continuity of society.
Sustainability, by contrast, stands in as the empty signier for the articulated
chain of equivalent concernsthe generalised aspiration for an alternative.
Although, as some authors have argued, sustainabilitys reliance on apocalyptic
imaginaries can be harnessed by elites to block debate and justify reactionary mea-
sures (Swyngedouw 2007, 2010; see below), I would add that such imaginaries
also have potential to give expression to radical politics. The unthinkable/empty
quality of this signier of a disastrous future has two immediate political effects that
can be harnessed for radical critique. First, the empty form of the signier allows for

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 125

ever-more diverse critiques to be rendered equivalent. The signiers of both

sustainability and its inverse become more versatile and able to perform the
quilting function described by Gunder (2006) and Davidson (2010), with diverse
actors recognising their concerns and aspirations within them. Thus, political unity
develops over what come to be recognised as collective concerns. Second, given
that these equivalent concerns represent a systemic failure with respect to the
future, whether or not a given practice is sustainable ceases to be a concern for
technocratic policy-makers and enters the realm of politics. Since the future in
question represents pure disaster, arguments regarding the human capacity to
adapt are rendered obscene: piecemeal solutions are inadequate; the entire system
must be changed.

Institutionalising Sustainability and the Continued

Slippage of Meaning
Despite the potentially radical application of sustainability outlined above, many
scholars have noted that, in practice, sustainability tends to operate in ways that
are decisively non-threatening to the status-quo. Swyngedouw (2007) has been
particularly vociferous on this point, arguing that rather than challenging the
power structures that produce problems of environment and justice, sustainability
actually serves to reinforce the post-political condition. This refers to a political
environment, assumed to be active throughout most of the world at present, in
which the assumptions of neoliberalism and parliamentary democracy are taken
as given and genuine political conict is eschewed in favour of bureaucratic consen-
sus. Swyngedouw argues that the sustainability debates focus on apocalyptic
futures has reinforced post-politics by articulating a world in which everyone is
equally a victim, in which there is no clear opponent and in which everyone must
accept the authority of technocratic regulators or else risk immanent disaster. In
other words, the possibility for division is denied in favour of a singular technocratic
response that leaves the capitalist system intact. In this section, I ascribe this
post-political sustainability to the co-optation of sustainabilitys radical impulse
by dominant powers and argue that by re-engaging with sustainability as empty
signier, it may be possible to reinvigorate its radical potential.
The meaning of sustainability is clearly contested. Laclau (1996, 2005) argues
that the precise content of empty signiersthat is, their translation into concrete
social and political agendasis not a simple unfolding of their inner conceptual
truth. Rather, it is determined through hegemonic struggle. In this sense, I depart
from Swyngedouw, who occasionally suggests that sustainability is inherently
reactionary (Swyngedouw 2010:229), thereby overlooking the contingency of
its meaning. Rather, I would argue that in many institutional settings, sustainability
qua empty signier has presently been hegemonised by sustainable develop-
ment. Sustainable development, essentially an attempt by dominant powers to
reconcile the need for environmental protection with the desire for endless
economic growth, has become so strongly associated with sustainability that some
writers have used the two terms interchangeably (Jacobs 1999). While perhaps not
capturing the imaginations of the entire population, sustainable development has

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126 Antipode

become the central paradigm through which environmental policy is formulated

on a global scale, by governments, transnational institutions and corporations alike.
The sustainable development response evolved within the context of dominant
capitalist institutions. The origins of the paradigm were in a series of discussions
within the UN in the 1970s regarding the means by which economic growth could
be reoriented in response to urgent resource crises. The new paradigm crystallised
in 1987 with the UNs publication, Our Common Future (WCED 1990). An underly-
ing assumption of the report was that the major causes of environmental destruc-
tion are short-sighted growth strategies, which could be remedied through use of
appropriate technology, and the desperation of poverty, which pushed people to
overexploit natural resources. The latter point was taken as evidence that overcom-
ing poverty must be a chief priority for the protection of environment. Develop-
ment, interpreted narrowly as economic growth, could not be compromised in
order to sustain the environment, or anything else.
This hegemonic version of sustainability was ultimately so tied to the logic of
dominant institutions that it was completely unable to challenge the status quo.
It is now clear that it was unable to address the fundamental issues that give
sustainability its impulse as empty signier. As numerous scholars argued, the
approach taken by the WCED presented a simplistic picture of the connection be-
tween poverty and environmental destruction and obscured the role of afuence
in the creation of both (Ll 1991). Dominant institutions had interpreted issues
of sustainability in such a way that prevented change that would compromise
powerful interests, by privileging vague denitions that everyone could recognise
as desirable, but whose concrete implementation would remain unclear (Mebratu
1998). In the decades since its formulation, the sustainable development frame-
work has largely failed to produce substantial outcomes. The vagueness of the term
and its lack of measurability allowed for many to use it as a way of justifying actions
that were substantially unsustainable (Adams 2009; Sneddon et al. 2006), while
concerns for inter-generational justice devolved into truncated, neoliberal notions
of justice as market access (Manderscheid 2012). It has, therefore, become widely
accepted that a considerable reformulation is required if sustainable development
is to deliver the outcomes necessary to sustain a liveable planet.
This contingent hegemonic articulation of sustainability has been the outcome of
a struggle on the part of existing powers to prevent the issues thrown up by
sustainability politics from destabilising their dominant position. The various forms
of environmental critique discussed above, particularly those emphasising the
biophysical limits to growth, seriously challenged mainstream discourses of devel-
opment, which had assumed economic growth was always a positive force for
social transformation. This aroused deep concerns about sustainability, promoting
recognition that the future capitalist ideologues were projecting was unrealistic and
dangerous, as it excluded the material consequences of perpetual growth from its
eld of vision. The language of sustainable development functions to acknowledge,
and thus to some extent neutralise those concerns, yet by introducing narrowly
conceptualised issues of poverty and underdevelopment, forcefully reasserts the
legitimacy of continued economic growth (Adams 2009). Consequently, all action
done within the sustainable development framework was constrained in advance,

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 127

as radical contention regarding desirable sustainable futures was excluded in favour

of a status-quo consensus which could rightly be described as post-political in the
sense Swyngedouw (2007) describes. Governments, businesses and international
nancial institutions could sign on to the sustainable development agenda, allaying
the fears of their constituents about the impacts of their activities on the future,
without having any serious demands for action placed upon them. In this way, as
Davidson (2010) argues, sustainable development operates cynically, allowing
one to speak with enthusiasm about change while in practice continuing with busi-
ness-as-usual. Thus, within dominant institutional settings, those in power leant
their support to sustainable development as the hegemonic form of sustainability.
A more contemporary example of the co-optation of sustainability by dominant
institutions can be observed in the (anti-)politics of climate change. As Wainwright
and Mann (2013) identify, global capitalist elites have gradually recognised that
their long-term interests are threatened by climate change and the public concern
it evokes. As such, through dominant institutions (particularly the United Nations)
they have constructed a response that not only overlooks the role of capital in
causing climate change, but posits capital as the central solution to the crisis. This
response, which Wainwright and Mann term Climate Leviathan, attempts to
evoke a global sovereign with a panopticon-like capacity to monitor and discipline
carbon production, consumption and exchange (2013:6). Rather than engaging
with the fundamental contradictions between capital and the global ecology,
Climate Leviathan attempts to save capital and reconstruct climate change as
an opportunity for further accumulation (through carbon trading, REDD, etc).
The fear that climate change evokes has thereby been mobilised by elites to justify
a technocratic regime for managing the climate crisis, in which democratic input is
silenced. Again, this response tends to preserve dominant interests, rather than
allowing them to be challenged (Swyngedouw 2010).
Despite the powerful vested interests supporting them, sustainable develop-
ment and other reactionary responses to sustainability politics cannot fully
determine the meaning of sustainability and the anxieties about the future it
represents. In his critique of sustainability, Swyngedouw (2007) draws on iek in
arguing for the need for alternative politics on the ecological issue that, rather than
working within the connes the status quo, should challenge the coordinates of the
possible. This is precisely what is implied in referring to sustainability as an empty
signier. For even though it may have been hegemonised and institutionalised by
sustainable development, there is still much that remains impossible to say
from within the sustainable development framework. Indeed, given the fact that
it operates cynically and does not address the fundamental issues that created the
conditions for sustainability politics in the rst place, there will always be a consid-
erable excess within the social eld that sustainable development cannot neutral-
ise. As an empty signier, sustainability represents that impossibility and the
aspiration to attain it. Clearly articulating the ways in which dominant sustainability
paradigms have further entrenched the unsustainable may be an important starting
point towards reinvigorating sustainability in that function (Blhdorn 2014).
Through the very tokenism of their responses, dominant institutions reproduce
the failure of signication on which sustainability politics is based. The empty

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128 Antipode

gestures of these institutions indicate the continued incapacity of current discourse

to take the future seriously, a fact made all the more apparent by the continued
scientic projections about looming man-made catastrophes and continuing
protests of communities directly experiencing sustainability crises. Thus, even in
the face of sustainable development and its attempts to symbolically placate
public angst about the future, a more authentic sustainability politics continues
to have its discursive conditions of possibility.
Given that state-led responses to sustainability politics seem currently unable to
move beyond dominant interests, new articulations of sustainability can only take
shape within civil society. I refer here to civil society in the Gramscian sense, as
the domain of popular intellectual activity, formally independent of state and
market, within which both consent for state activities and critique of the same
may be established. Just as Wainwright and Mann (2013) posit the possibility of a
progressive response to climate change, which they term Climate X, emerging
from the climate justice movements opposition to the capitalistic false-solutions
of Climate Leviathan, a more authentic sustainability politics may emerge from
grassroots expressions of dissent for sustainable development. While a complete
theory of how sustainability might be reinvigorated through civil society is beyond
the scope of this paper, an important starting point would be to examine the devel-
opment of a critical capacity regarding issues of sustainability amongst the general
population (see Hart 2012). To this end, some direction may be found in Parrs
(2009) concept of sustainability culture, which she staunchly opposes to state-
centric sustainable development. While the latter represents an attempt to im-
pose order in a uniform manner across a diversity of local contexts, the former is
a model of sustainability that emerges within these local contexts. This sustainability
culture is not just a set of loose principles which each actor can evade as they
please, but rather an ongoing social process by which communities recognise the
need to cooperate together and nd ways of considering the future within present
decisions.
Within the space of civil society, sustainability, as empty signier, offers a
promise, but one that cannot be articulated directly. Its political potency is de-
rived from its representing a vaguely discernible future which is, strictly speaking,
impossible within the coordinates of the currently institutionalised discursive reality.
Parr (2009:164165) states that the real political power of sustainability culture is
its quality of unimaginableness. The promise of sustainability can never be ade-
quately imagined as a form of society with a set of specic features, as its promise
represents a radical break with the existing reality through which our (current)
imaginations are constituted. As such, Parr sees sustainabilitys potential within
cultural expressions: the artistic condensation of our diverse hopes and concerns
into affect-generating forms. Parr suggests the affect that is produced through these
always inadequate representations of an elusive sustainability may generate a sense
of responsibility and commitment.
We can see aspects of these ideas represented in Laclaus (1996) argument that
empty signiers stand in for the absent fullness of the community. There are nu-
merous instances of the system being unable to incorporate the future within itself.
These separate instances have been articulated as equivalent to each other. As the

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 129

chain of equivalence is extended, it ceases to merely be the expression of the

particularities of each of those failures, and begins to represent a more generalised
failure: the general short-sightedness of the system, its inability to constitute
sustainability as a social principle. As an empty signier for what is beyond the
discursive power of the system to produce, sustainability represents the imagined
fullness of society that is (presently) absent. It signies the (im)possibility of a soci-
ety fully reconciled with its own destructive effects. Importantly, for Laclau (1996),
this state of fullness is constitutively unreachable. Were it empirically possible to
incorporate all of those exclusions that gave rise to collective anxieties about the
future, then the sustainability of the system would have been reduced to one of
its differential qualities: the function of sustainability as empty signier would have
been exhausted.

Sustainabilitys Closing Window

A common feature of post-structuralist and post-Marxist readings of the universal is
its fragility (see iek 2001). Though it may appear to be the unshakable foundation
of society, its power to instigate political action is ultimately contingent upon social
conditions that are always shifting. Sustainability is no exception to this. Indeed, it
does appear that, in some respects, the social conditions under which sustainability
can act as an empty signier are disappearing on the horizon.
Sustainability, when it occupies the commanding position of empty signier,
depends upon a social scenario in which society is at odds with its own (imagined)
future. As I have outlined, these conditions were rst articulated in the early-to-mid
twentieth century, were institutionalised in the late 1980s and continued to mature
as more prominent features of the social imaginary thereafter. Paradoxically, it
could be argued that the high points of sustainability politics were precisely the
times of great stability, at least in the advanced capitalist economies in which the
ideas were being articulated. Sustainable development, for instance, made its most
rapid strides towards institutionalisation the late 1980s and early 1990s, when
conservative thinkers such as Fukuyama (1992) were simultaneously declaring
the end of historythat neoliberalism had nally emerged globally triumphant.
Despite high growth and apparent political stability, there was also widespread
anxiety that this could not last. Particularly in the form of climate change, there
was a well articulated threat to the future of human civilisation, which unsettled
the otherwise pervasive view that everything would always carry on as it was, that
there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism (see iek 2010).
Since the global nancial crisis of 2008, sustainability has declined in prominence
as a global priority, particularly regarding environmental issues (Nordhaus and
Shellenberger 2009; Ratter et al. 2012). I would argue that the crisis and trends
in neoliberalism have undermined the discursive conditions of sustainability as
empty signier. Four key factors underlie this. First and most obviously, after the
nancial crisis, restoring the global economy eclipsed all other social and political
priorities (for an example of carbon emissions policy, see Skovgaard 2014). Second,
the sense of a neoliberal order at odds with itself began to erode, precisely because
it became apparent that things would not and could not carry on exactly as they

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130 Antipode

were. Indeed, the natural order was already interrupted. Thus, rather than having
the luxury of reimaging its own future, society entered into a kind of permanent
crisis-response mode. It was no longer a matter of a prosperous society, interrupted
by its own excluded future. Reality had intervened: the imbalance was incorporated
within the order of Being. Transience predominated over permanence in many
aspects of social and political life, ending the period of neoliberal triumphalism with
its corresponding exclusions. Third, the hope for a sustainable alternative began to
slip away, as some key gures within the environment movement began to suggest
that tipping points had already been crossed (Hamilton 2010; Lovelock 2009). De-
featism set in. Fourth, neoliberal conditions have nally undermined sustainabilitys
political imagination. As Carvounas and Ireland (2008) outline, neoliberalisms ten-
dency to make work and life ever-more precarious diminishes the individual and
collective capacity for long-term, future-oriented thinking. Thought is drawn back
to the immediate. The kind of detached spaces from which humanity can evaluate
its long-term future are fast diminishing. Decisions from the personal through to
national and international policy are made with an orientation towards the present,
not the future.
To express it in Lacanian terms, sustainability has been undermined at the level of
the imaginary (the ability to imagine the future), the symbolic (the ability to at least
gesture towards a more sustainable system) and the Real (its discursive dependence
on the exclusion of the future, most pronounced in neoliberal triumphalism). It is
worth emphasising, however, that this is unlikely to be the end of the matter. As
long as the prospect of even greater long-term disasters looms large on the
horizon, the political concept of sustainability (or something like it) will continue
to reassert itself within social and political life.

Conclusion
Despite the many attempts to provide it a denition, sustainability remains an
empty term in practice, having no precise content. This lack of precision should
certainly attract critique, particularly when it enables empty gestures on the part
of politicians and other key decision-makers. The versatility that comes with
sustainabilitys lack of xed meaning has certainly enabled elites to present it in
ways that suit their own agenda, as has clearly been the case with the sustainable
development approach. However, such critique should not blind us to the
potential of sustainability to open new social and political opportunities. Turning
attention to the conditions for the emergence of sustainability, it becomes apparent
that the current cynical and conservative articulation of sustainability as sustainable
development is the outcome of a contingent hegemonic project. Sustainable devel-
opment has provided a temporary xation point on the global stage, as a way of
abating anxieties that current trends are compromising humanitys collective
future. It is apparent, however, that insofar as sustainable development has failed
to address core issues that have given rise to the present unsustainable social,
economic, political and ecological condition, much spills out from under this
hegemonic articulation. It is ultimately unable to address the concerns that gave
rise to it, giving alternative articulations of sustainability their conditions of being.

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Sustainability as Empty Signier 131

Despite its recent decline in prominence, sustainability remains a major issue in

contemporary debate. The articulation of looming social and environmental
catastrophes have interrupted the comforting notion of a modernist project based
on economic rationalism which proceeds without hiccup into a brighter, more
advanced future. Increasingly, it is recognised that many of the practices upon
which contemporary society is founded rely on substantial exclusions, which have
now returned to haunt us. At various ruptural points, it becomes apparent that
many features of the global capitalist system cannot be sustained into the future,
and that a radically different approach is required. In acting as an empty signier,
sustainability allows these multiple ruptural points to be condensed in a
generalised concern for the future. This opens possibilities for the development of
a critical stance upon the system as a whole, overcoming the impasses of isolated,
particularistic critiques. At the current historical juncture, this kind of articulation is
most likely to occur within civil society, as states remain committed to the practices
that have produced the key dislocations in the rst place. It is in this space that we
may see sustainability come to maturity as a signier for the kind of ecologically and
socially harmonised society to which we aspire, and the multiple, creative attempts
to realise it.

Acknowledgements
The ideas contained in this article evolved over a number of years, beginning with my
Honours thesis, written at the University of Wollongong in 2008. I am deeply grateful to
my supervisor at the time, Associate Professor Richard Howson, who played a supportive role
in the formation of these ideas and who encouraged me to develop them further in the years
thereafter. I would also like to thank Utsa Mukherjee for useful comments on an earlier draft,
and the three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions greatly enriched the content of this
article and helped in further clarifying its argument.

Endnote
1
The anti-toxics movement, for example, which proliferated in the United States in the
1980s, began with dispersed communities experiencing the negative consequences of the
dumping of toxic waste and later articulated environmental toxicity as a general threat to
the future of humanity (Szasz 1994).

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