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Critical discourse analysis in Laclau and Mouffe’s
post-Marxism
El análisis crítico del discurso en el post-marxismo de
Laclau y Mouffe
Análise crítica do discurso no pós-Marxismo de
Laclau e Mouffe
Recebido em 25-11-2019
Modificado em 10-12-2019
Aceito para publicação em 15-12-2019
8
Bob Jessop
ORCID: 0000-0001-8134-3926
Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from Cambridge University in
1974, is an established state theorist inspired by Poulantzas and Gramsci, and is currently writing on cultural
political economy. E-mail: b.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe exaggerate the textual aspects of social practice in their postMarxist reflections. They developed an account of social practices and social cohesion in terms
inspired by linguistics and discourse theory. Their work saw a growing rejection of economism and
class reductionism and growing emphasis on the contested, contingent discursive construction of
society. Contingency is the precondition of hegemony – the ground in which struggles for hegemony
and the construction of populism occur. In this regard, they replace the Marxist notion of the causal
primacy of the economy with a “primacy of the political”. This leads to a discursive antifoundationalism in which it is impossible to construct a unified society because all meanings and
identities are contested, and its institutional foundations are potentially re-activated. The article
concludes by comparing this exorbitation of language with a more limited cultural political economy
approach that offers a “third way” between structuralism and idealism. It explores the conditions that
shape the variation, selection and retention of sense- and meaning-making as well structuration. This
approach seeks to explain why some discursive articulations get selected and become sedimented to be
contested later and why some properties of institutions have enduring effects at different scales of
action.
Keywords: Ernesto Laclau; Critical Discourse Analysis; The Exorbitation of Language; Hegemony;
Cultural Political Economy.
Esta obra está licenciada sob uma licença Creative Commons Atribuição – Não comercial – Sem
derivações 4.0 Internacional: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt_BR
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Introduction
Norman Fairclough, the British critical discourse analyst, emphasizes the centrality of
language to social order. This said, he cannot be charged with the exorbitation of discourse
beyond the discursive field because he stresses that “whereas all linguistic phenomena are
social, not all social phenomena are linguistic – though even those that are not just linguistic
(economic production, for instance) typically have a substantial, and often underestimated,
language element” (FAIRCLOUGH, 1989, p. 23). I also endorse Fairclough’s move from
synthesizing text-analytical techniques to engage with social theories on contemporary
economic, political, and social change (e.g., CHOULIARAKI; FAIRCLOUGH, 1999). Two
good examples of such engagement are New Labour, New Language (FAIRCLOUGH, 2000)
on Third Way discourse and his critical dissection of discourses of globalization
(FAIRCLOUGH, 2006). Thus, his discourse-theoretical approach straddles the divide
between grand theory and grounded analytics because its disciples regularly link their
analyses to changing social relations.
This essay examines the work of Ernesto Laclau and his collaboration with Chantal
Mouffe and suggests that they exaggerate the textual aspects of social practice. This
exorbitation of language can be illustrated from the following text:
By “the discursive” I understand nothing which in a narrow sense relates to texts but
the ensemble of phenomena of the societal production of meaning on which a
society as such is based. It is not a question of regarding the discursive as a plane or
dimension of the social but as having the same meaning as the social… the nondiscursive is not opposite to the discursive as if one were dealing with two different
planes because there is nothing societal that is determined outside the discursive.
History and society are therefore an unfinished text (LACLAU, 1980a, p. 87).
This “unfinished text” is produced through contingent “articulatory practices”. The
notion of articulation implies that discursivity (in other words, the social) is always
constituted relationally, always under construction, and liable to disarticulation. Articulation
is also the basis of hegemony and the construction of populism. The “raw materials” of this
social construction exist as unfixed polysemic discursive elements before they are articulated
as specific moments within particular discourses. The struggle for hegemony is re-interpreted
in terms of intervention to articulate different discursive elements into more or less discrete
ideological ensembles that serve the interests of a fundamental social force. Elements can be
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articulated to form different discourses (sic) because they have common nuclei of meaning
that lack a fully determinate denotation and can be connotatively linked to other elements to
produce the specific meanings they reveal in different discursive ensembles. The social is
thereby located uneasily between attempts at fixing meaning and the ultimate infeasibility of
these attempts. To the extent that these attempts succeed, it is because certain nodal points
(points de capiton) emerge within discourse as privileged signifiers, or key principles, that
limit the “play of meaning”. It is around these nodal points that discursive forms crystallize.
However, because these nodal points are internal to discourse, not grounded outside it, they
are inherently unstable. Because they are sedimented, i.e., their discursive origins are
forgotten, they can be challenged and re-politicized. Key principles always have what Derrida
(1988) calls a “constitutive outside”, that is, they exclude some elements in order to establish
and stabilize a boundary but, in doing so, reveal the contingency of a hegemonic or dominant
discourse.
It follows that meaning is only ever partially fixed and, given an ever-present surplus
of possible meanings, any fix is contingent. It could have been fixed differently. Discourse
therefore continually overflows the limits of any possible stabilization by nodal points
(LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 113). Paradoxically, this lack of fixity is the precondition of
hegemony. Contingency is the ground, or space, in which struggles for hegemony occur.
Thus, the greater is the contingency, the greater is the scope for hegemonic contestation. It is
an important part of Laclau’s argument that the post-war world is becoming more contingent
due to increasing globalization, democratic demands, the expansion of conflict and
antagonism, and so on.
At stake here is the relation between signifiers and signified, which, partly following
de Saussure’s general course on linguistics, Laclau and Mouffe present as occurring entirely
within discourse. It has no outside, extra-discursive referent. Indeed, having claimed that all
social practices are discursive practices, they then ignore their extra-discoursal aspects. They
conclude that an adequate social explanation must refer to signifying relations rather to any
type of physical or material causality1. In emphasizing the purely contingent discursive
articulation of the social world, they deny lawful links among events and qualities in the
1
Laclau and Mouffe totally reject the base-superstructure distinction. They take this allusive and elusive
metaphor literally and conclude that it posits total determination of the superstructure by an economic base that
is a wholly self-sufficient as its own cause (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 120-1, 142; LACLAU, 1990, pp. 614, 55; LACLAU, 2005, p. 250). They ignore alternative meanings and never consider whether it could be reinscribed into post-Marxist analysis.
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social world (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985). In short, they embrace what Mario Bunge called
an “anti-determinist acausalism” (BUNGE, 1961, p. 29). Such claims ignore the need, long
ago noted by Max Weber (1949), for explanations that are adequate at the level of causality as
well as meaning2. In contrast, Laclau and Mouffe have a contingent explanation of causality:
things could occur otherwise depending on articulation (cf. LACLAU, 2006).
The early discourse-theoretical writings
In complementary articles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mouffe and Laclau
attacked economism in the analysis of politics and ideology. This critique was stated most
clearly by Chantal Mouffe in this period in her review of the concept of hegemony in
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (MOUFFE, 1979). She outlined three phases in the movement
from economism to anti-economism in Marxist political and ideological analysis. Phase one
was the pure and classic form of economism comprising a base-superstructure model coupled
with the claim that all economic, political, and ideological subjects were at bottom class
subjects (e.g., the Second International). The second phase endowed the political and
ideological levels with their own effectivity but remained economist in tracing the origins of
political and ideological practices to wilful class subjects whose actions are determined by the
evolution of a class consciousness appropriate to their economic position (e.g., Korsch,
Lukács). And the third phase broke with this class reductionist view by treating ideological
practice as a sui generis process that constitutes subjects who are neither economically predefined nor, once constituted in and through ideologies, having a necessary class belonging
(e.g., Gramsci, Togliatti) (see MOUFFE, 1979, pp. 169-178; cf. LACLAU, 1977, pp. 141142, 158-159, 163-164; LACLAU, 1980, pp. 252-255; LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, passim).
While Mouffe and Laclau had together prepared the ground for a definite break with
economism and class reductionism in the analysis of hegemony, significant residual elements
of class reductionism remained in their initial studies (for details, see JESSOP, 1982, pp. 191202). In subsequent studies, Laclau and Mouffe attempted to overcome these problems and
developed a general theory of the discursive constitution of hegemony. They argue that all
2
While Luhmann is also suspicious of causal explanation, his operative constructionism allows a regulative role
for the real world beyond communication (LUHMANN, 1995). Laclau concedes this in his analysis of populism,
in which external reality expresses itself via negation, i.e., by providing a ‘reality check’ that limits the resonance
of alternative political projects, making some more plausible and appealing than others (LACLAU, 2005, pp. 89,
91-96, 190-1, 201).
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social relations derive their social character from their discursive constitution: that is, all
social practice constitutes itself in so far as it produces meaning (LACLAU 1980a, p. 87).
This approach has important theoretical implications for the relations between “levels” and
for the analysis of social subjectivity.
First, as the discursive is coextensive with the field of the social and, as such, all social
relations are regarded as constituted in and through discourse, Laclau and Mouffe reject
orthodox Marxist views of “base-superstructure” relations in which the so-called material
base is seen as extra-discursive and the superstructure alone is discursive. Thus, even if one
wished to retain the metaphor of “base” and “superstructure" or the topographical image of
“regions” of a social formation, then the unity of a social formation, to the extent that it exists,
depends on the contingent articulation among these discursive practices. It does not derive
from a necessary correspondence between base and superstructure. In this sense, Laclau and
Mouffe re-interpret Gramsci’s notion of “historical bloc” in discourse-theoretical terms. For
the Italian, the historical bloc shows how “material forces are the content and ideologies are
the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value” (1971,
p. 377). For the Argentinian and Belgian, the historical bloc is a purely ideological
construction (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 170, 176).
Second, their approach in this early period implies that the subjects through whom
social relations are mediated and reproduced are also constituted in and through discourse.
One can no longer privilege class subjects over popular-democratic forces nor treat class
struggle as necessarily more influential than popular-democratic struggles. Class antagonism
is not inscribed in the social relations of production considered as an extra-discursive structure
but derives from the particular discursive identification of class subjects. This suggests that
class struggle is first of all a struggle about the constitution of class subjects before it is a
struggle between class subjects. It follows from this that the field of political intervention is
extremely broad. This must have crucial implications for hegemony considered as "political,
intellectual, and moral leadership” (GRAMSCI, 1971, p. 57) as well as for the struggle for
such leadership.
Although these inter-discursive practices cannot be modelled outside specific
conjunctures, Laclau and Mouffe do identify two basic modes of hegemonic articulation. In a
discourse of difference, hegemony neutralises ideologically constituted antagonisms by reinterpreting them as differences within a national-popular collective will. For example, class
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antagonisms inscribed within the relations of production are transformed into positive-sum
differences among economic agents performing complementary functions in the division of
labour. This involves the localisation of differences that must be negotiated and compromised
within a broad consensual framework established through the dominant discourse concerning
the parameters of the “national-popular” collective will. Examples of such a discourse of
difference include the “transformist” politics of Giovanni Giolitti’s prime ministerial role in
Italy from 1892 to 1921 and the “One Nation” discourse of the nineteenth-century British
Conservative politician, Benjamin Disraeli (cf. LACLAU, 1977, p. 115; LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 130).
The second form of hegemonic discourse involves constituting a system of
equivalences among different positions and subjects. This can occur either through (1) a
common polarity that is juxtaposed in an irreducible dualism to another pole and defined as
superior to it or (2) a common antagonism to an internal and/or external enemy that must be
defeated to advance each particular position or subject. Examples of such a discourse of
equivalence would include the irreducibly dualist discourses of apartheid and the ruptural
populist discourses of Chartism in England, Jacobinism in France, Fascism in Italy, and
Maoism in China (cf. LACLAU, 2005, 2006). This friend-enemy distinction became crucial
to Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of populism.
In this period, both modes of discourse were seen to contain dangers to the dominant
class. A discourse of difference transforms negatively-charged contradictions into positively
differentiated contrarieties and creates the ideological conditions needed to integrate different
subjectivities into a system of democratic politics. But the dominant class can go too far in
absorbing and legitimating the demands of those in subordinate positions so that the latter
forces can impose their own discourse within the state apparatus during crises in ways that
undermine that class’s neutralising capacities. This can be seen in the appropriation of
democratic discourse into a socialist discourse as monopoly capital finds it increasingly hard
to maintain liberal democratic traditions and institutions. Likewise, the dominant class can
assimilate the “people” in a discourse of equivalence to its own hegemonic project, which is
particularly common during periods of crisis. Nonetheless, in doing so, it runs the risk that
populist forces will develop the anti-status quo, anti-capitalist elements in populist discourse
to the point of a radical break with the interests of the dominant class. This can be seen in the
threats posed to capital as the Nazi left drew on socialist traditions and the Italian fascist left
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drew on the Mazzinian, Garibaldian, and syndicalist traditions. Moreover, whereas the
discourse of difference tends to be integrative in so far as it disarticulates the organisation of
the various subordinate positionalities into a single “people” interpellated as the dynamic pole
of confrontation with the power bloc, the discourse of equivalence is more readily “turned” to
radical, ruptural goals by articulating the “people” to a revolutionary project rather than to a
populism of the right (LACLAU, 1977, pp. 121-122, 162-163; 1980a, pp. 90-93; 1980b, pp.
255-258; LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1980, pp. 20-22).
Although these arguments were still being developed (see LACLAU; MOUFFE,
1985), their principal implications are clear. First, if all the various “levels” or “regions” of a
social formation are constituted through discourse and are liable to transformation through
forces that are likewise constituted, we must replace the Marxist notion of the causal primacy
of the economy with a “primacy of the political” (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, p. 22). This
means that the capital relation is just as much a field of struggle as the political and
ideological regions and that its so-called “laws of motion” are not governed by an extradiscursive “capital logic”. Instead the movement of the economy depends on the contingent
hegemonic articulation in a given society (ibid.).
Second, since any given society is characterised by a vast plurality of subjects who
need not identify as class subjects, hegemony must be seen in terms of the discursive
articulation of different subjects. Thus, if the dominant class or working class are to contest
the role of “political, intellectual, and moral leadership”, this must depend on their respective
abilities to develop a political project recognised by other subjects in society as essential to
realize their own particular interests. Further, it requires an “organic ideology” that can serve
as a shared ideological frame of reference in which a plurality of subjects can redefine and
negotiate alliances to advance that project (cf. LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, pp. 21-22).
This raises the crucial distinction between “political hegemony” and “organic
ideology”. There is no doubt that political leadership is won or lost in the context of
“intellectual and moral reform”. But there is a danger that “political hegemony” and “organic
ideology” are conflated. Whilst the development of an appropriate ideological cement is the
field par excellence of the creation of shared meanings, “common” sense, etc., political
leadership works on these meanings in various ways to generate particular projects or
national-popular programmes that require specific resources, policy initiatives, forms of
mobilisation, etc. One cannot reduce Fascism or Nazism as hegemonic projects to the role of
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“corporativism” and “race” as hegemonic principles (LACLAU, 1977, pp. 120-22). They also
involved quite specific programmes of political action designed to advance specific class and
“national-popular” objectives. In addition to “intellectual and moral reform”, the fascist
movements needed to reorganise the Italian and German state apparatuses to implement their
projects of national regeneration.
Finally, a discourse-theoretical approach along these early lines raises issues about the
limits of hegemony. Although Laclau and Mouffe noted that there are specific conditions of
production and reception of discursive practices, there is no attempt to theorize these
conditions beyond the assertion that they should be considered as other discourses (LACLAU,
1980a, p. 87). The conditions of reception are almost wholly ignored. Yet, as Gramsci himself
was careful to observe, there is a world of difference between historically organic ideologies
and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed” (GRAMSCI, 1971, pp. 376-377).
Moreover, however plausible a given hegemonic project may appear in terms of its intended
articulation of class and non-class subjects and demands, it will only become “directive” to
the extent that strategically significant forces support it and likely sources of resistance are
neutralised.
Hegemony and the Logic of the Social
In their chief work, Hegemony and Socialist Politics, Laclau and Mouffe built on these
earlier remarks and concluded that the concept of “hegemony” introduced a new logic of the
social that is incompatible with the basic assumptions of traditional Marxism (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 3). More accurately, their post-Marxist account of this “logic” of the
social required them to re-think the meaning of hegemony along with some other basic
assumptions of Marxism. For they use the concept of hegemony so loosely and apply it so
widely that it is often hard to distinguish it from more inclusive concepts such as discourse,
the social and the political. The basic assumptions they claim are subverted by this new logic
are: (1) the classist privileging of the proletariat's role as an agent of fundamental change; (2)
the statist view that the state is the crucial site for implementing radical changes and that its
activities must be expanded; (3) the economist claim that a successful economic strategy will
also secure desired political effects; and (4) the argument that there must be a revolution that
concentrates power so that society can then be “rationally” reorganized (LACLAU;
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MOUFFE, 1985, p. 177). To these four assumptions they counterpose the logic of the social,
i.e., the claim that the social has an open, unsutured character and that neither its elements nor
its totality have any pre-given necessity. Their approach entails that the social has no positive
essence: it has only a “negative essence” that consists in its essential openness.
In this sense, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy starts out from the claim that social
relations can only be differentiated in terms of the specific discourses that endow them with
meaning. In this context, they nonetheless assert that discourses include more than language:
they also involve material practices. Indeed, they insist that articulation should not be reduced
to pure linguistic articulation but must penetrate the materiality of institutions, rituals and
practices through which a discursive practice is established (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p.
109). They then distinguish between the general field of the interdiscursive and specific fields
constituted by particular discursive practices. The general field of the interdiscursive is a
complex series of “elements” available for integration into specific discourses. The latter fix
the meaning of these elements in relation to an overall discursive system and thereby
transform them into relatively fixed “moments” in that discourse. But they also argue that no
discourse can totally fix the meaning of these moments – there is always polyvalence and a
surplus of meaning and thus a potential for articulation with other discourses (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985).
These general reflections have obvious implications for society. On the one hand, a
fully closed, self-identical social formation is impossible. Even if individual identities and
micro-social relations are unstable, it is hard to see how a fully sutured society could exist.
But this does not mean that society is totally impossible (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp.
110-13, 122, 127). For, given that parts are merely elements rather than fully fixed and that
they can be articulated in different ways, relations can exist among them with the result that
societies are tendentially constituted as an ensemble of totalizing effects in an open relational
complex (1985, p. 103). Indeed, without partial fixity, no differences would be possible: there
must also be nodal points or privileged points of reference for articulation. Society only exists
as attempts to realize the impossible, to produce fixity despite discursivity.
Society never manages to be identical to itself, as every nodal point is constituted
within an intertextuality that overflows it. The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in
the construction of nodal points that partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this
fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant
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overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 113).
Because neither its individual elements nor its overall articulation can provide a
founding moment for the social totality, Laclau and Mouffe insist that social identity depends
on the contingent pattern of hegemonic articulation in an unstable social system. They define
articulation as any practice that establishes a relation among elements such that their identity
is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. In turn, emptying “discourse” of its
customary linguistic connotations, they simply define it as a structured or relational totality
resulting from articulation (1985, p. 113). In this sense, it differs little from the concept of
social practice. Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe insist that articulation should not be reduced to
pure linguistic articulation but must penetrate the materiality of institutions, rituals and
practices through which a discursive practice is established (1985, p. 109). Yet they have little
to say about these institutions, rituals, and practices, except to interpret them as sedimented
discursive practices.
The link with hegemony is established through an expanded concept of the political.
For their analysis implies that politics occurs anywhere and everywhere that there is
contingency. There is no surface that is not constantly subverted by others and thus no unique,
clearly demarcated space of politics (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 179-81). Political (or
hegemonic) discourse operates on a field of relatively open elements that have not yet been so
sedimented that they can be reproduced merely through repetition rather than continuing
articulation. In this sense, it cannot be localized within the state or in any other single power
centre (or “nodal point”) but occurs across the whole field of discursivity. Some nodal points
may become the focal point of many totalizing effects but, since a unitary society is
impossible, no single hegemonic centre can emerge. Indeed, given that there is always a
plurality of power centres that coexist in specific relational and conjunctural contexts, any one
of these is always limited in its effectivity by other nodal points (1985, pp. 139, 142-3). There
is a certain ambiguity here in so far as the hegemonizing force can secure its hegemony only
through relatively distinguishing its hegemonic discourse from the discourses that are being
hegemonized. For, if its discourse was not distinctive, there would be no field of differences
to be hegemonized; if it was totally distinct, however, then hegemony would be impossible,
and the would-be hegemonic discourse would merely co-exist alongside others (1985, pp.
134-5). In this context, instability in the socially constituted frontiers that divide antagonistic
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forces are basic factors for establishing hegemony. For they provide the material on which a
hegemonic discourse can operate. In the absence of antagonism, there could perhaps be a
bureaucratic reorganization of elements – but not hegemony. But, if the resulting frontiers
were fixed, they could not be re-articulated through a hegemonic discourse. Instead they could
be connected only through a simple chain of equivalences in which different positions were
treated as equivalent in their political effects (1985, p. 136).
In arguing that society is impossible, Laclau and Mouffe do not, let us repeat, rule out
the possibility of partial, provisional “totalizing” projects. A social formation can become a
totality in so far as a hegemonic discourse can establish clear frontiers by constructing a chain
of equivalences that distinguishes what is beyond the hegemonic formation as its
(antagonistic) other (1985, pp. 143-4, 292). Since there is a multiplicity of social logics that
must be constantly re-articulated and re-negotiated, however, there is no final point at which a
balance will be definitively achieved (1985, p. 188). Society tries to construct its identity on
the basis (and in the face) of the multiplication of social spaces and the diversity of
institutions; it rests on compromise, on the precarity of every antagonism, on the opacity of all
social relations (1985, pp. 191-2).
Laclau and Mouffe argue that society is “impossible” because it can never be fully
itself, self-identical and self-closed (1985, p. 127). In developing this argument, they claim to
be moving beyond positivity, i.e., to deny that any social identity could ever be a full, selfconstituted identity. For every social identity is constituted through a difference from which it
can never fully distance or separate itself. There is no social identity “fully protected from a
discursive exterior that deforms it” (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 111). At the macro-level,
this means that society is intelligible in terms of contingent relations among its institutions,
organizational forms and agents that are the product of a hegemonic articulation that
establishes frontiers in opposition to other social relations. Thus, a social formation with a
unique determinative principle is simply impossible. Indeed, although there is a discursive
logic of the social, society itself is not (and could never be) an ultimately intelligible and
rational object (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 254).
Moreover, if the only properties that entities (apart from abstract existence) have are
the product of discursive practices, then Laclau and Mouffe could claim to have discovered
the philosopher's stone. Following their logic, one could discursively turn base metal into gold
or convince those laughing at the emperor's fine new clothes that he really was wearing them.
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Indeed, as they themselves insist in their reply to a critique by Normal Geras (1987), the
function of a stone as a projectile is clearly discursive (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 8285). One might well add, although they did not, that it is its own inherent properties (or
natural necessities) which make a stone a better projectile for some purposes than cotton
wool. Moreover, let me note that it is not just “natural” objects that have such objective
qualities. For “social” phenomena also have many emergent properties and tendencies that
give them distinctive capacities and liabilities whose existence may not be acknowledged but
which still have a powerful influence on social life. We should not allow a quite legitimate
rejection of the so-called “metaphysics of presence” to lead us down the slippery road towards
a denial that, to the extent that social phenomena exist, they can have definite properties,
powers and liabilities that are reproduced to the extent that these phenomena are reproduced.
Yet there is a Derridean “trace” even in this constructivism. For Laclau also suggests
that the real is the “ungraspable margin” that limits and distorts the discursive constitution of
the objective. And he adds that there is an insurmountable asymmetry between the real and
concept: “the real, therefore, will only show itself in the distortion of the conceptual”
(LACLAU, 1988, p. 17-18). This suggests that the properties of entities (not just entities in
abstracto) do penetrate the conceptual field. This indicates the confrontation between
theoretical and evidential propositions, the latter being produced in and through an
intervention in the real world and which, therefore, contain its imprint in ways that are not
directly knowable. Moreover, unless one accepts this view, notions such as experience and
learning could have no meaning and would be merely solipsistic and self-referential. Not even
Laclau and Mouffe want to go this far and, if they did, it would render senseless Laclau's
argument that class reductionism was plausible in Marx's time because the categories of class
and class struggle “corresponded well enough to that which was occurring in the field of his
historical and political experience” (LACLAU, 1988, p. 24). But, if we accept this
“constructivist realism”, we must consider how the real comes to be both “present” and
“absent” in discourse and what this implies for experience, learning and strategic conduct.
Indeed, Fred Mouzelis suggests, “because of their excessive fear of reifying
institutional structures, Laclau and Mouffe go to the other extreme and analyse practices in an
institutional vacuum” (MOUZELIS, 1988, p. 116). It almost seems as if they are so hesitant
about attributing reality to socially unacknowledged conditions, emergent evolutionary
properties and unanticipated consequences of discursive practices, that they prefer to focus on
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the psychodynamics of hegemonic mobilization and the discursive constitution of interests
and identities of what they themselves see as the empirical referent of society, namely,
individuals (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985).
It has also been suggested that, in dismissing the distinction between institution and
agency, Laclau and Mouffe create more problems than they solve. As Mouzelis notes, either
they must smuggle institutional complexes in without acknowledging this and so fail to
conceptualize how they both facilitate and constrain action; or they must consistently ignore
institutions and thereby fail to deal with the constitution, persistence and long-term
transformation of global social formations (MOUZELIS, 1988, p. 113). As it is, they
concentrate their critical fire on reconstructing the concept of hegemony and showing how
articulatory practices constantly construct and deconstruct self-identities, subject positions,
nodal points; social and political spaces, and so on. But the conditions of existence of which
practices are both sustained and limited by the more permanent institutional structures are
never spelt out.
The closest Laclau and Mouffe come to delineating an overall context of articulatory
practices and subject positions is in their talk of “discursive formations” and the more general
“field of discursivity”. But these notions are so vague and so inadequate to deal with the
institutional complexities of modern society that the two authors do not use them in any
serious, systematic manner. In fact, when obliged to refer to the broad features of capitalist
formations and their long-term transformations, they revert, as Norman Geras rightly pointed
out (1987), to such conventional Marxist concepts as exploitation, commodification, the
labour process, civil society, capitalist periphery, etc., and even the dreaded concept of
“society” from time to time! How are the above concepts, which Laclau and Mouffe freely
use, connected with discourse analysis? The connection is never made clear, and the gap
between the two types of concepts creates a much more glaring dualism than that found in the
Marxist texts that they so vehemently criticize (MOUZELIS, 1988, pp. 114-15).
Contrary to Laclau and Mouffe's empty realism, there is genuine scope for a
transcendental enquiry both about the real world in general (its stratification, its internal
complexity) and about specific entities (that they exist, they have specific natural properties,
they are characterized by powers and liabilities, they manifest tendencies, and so forth).
Although we have no direct access to these properties, they are both constraining and
facilitating in relation to other entities and they are indirectly accessible to knowledge. It
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sometimes seems that Laclau concedes this latter point when he appeals to experience to
explain his own political development (LACLAU, 1988, pp. 12-13) or advances the more
general claim that the plausibility of knowledge is indicated by its “verisimilitude”
(LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1987, p. 102).
Another problem posed within discourse analysis is the micro-macro linkage. Despite
its claim to be a universal analytic, discourse theory has tended to focus on subjects, identity
formation and related issues (cf. ROSENTHAL, 1988). However, as one moves from the
socially amorphous interaction among individuals in “brief encounters” through more
structured group and organizational conduct to the configuration of institutional orders and
the tendential emergence of “society effects”, one moves further and further away from social
relations that can readily be analysed in terms of individual subjectivity. In dealing with the
macro-field we must take account of new types of articulation such as the structural coupling
between co-evolving institutional orders that form part of each other's “social ecology”; the
distinctive logics of organizations; patterns of strategic selectivity; and the structural
constraints entailed in conditions of existence. This list is not exhaustive: its aim is simply to
suggest that there's more to social life than discourse or and subversive practices. Perhaps
there is nothing that inherently rules out a discourse-theoretical account of moments of the
social but hitherto they have been neglected by its principal practitioners. A significant
indicator of this is the past failure of Laclau and Mouffe to suggest any specific institutional
mechanisms or organizational forms that might underpin the sort of radical and plural
democracy which they advocate with such passion. To rely purely on the persuasive power of
an inherently unstable hegemonic discourse carries little conviction.
For both argue that the social formation is the incomplete product of contingent
articulatory practices (cf. LACLAU, 1988, p. 15). Its relative unity (if any) is not the
necessary product of a single essential principle (a “cause without cause”, i.e., an apodictic
foundation). Society results from an emergent, provisional, unstable and non-necessary
correspondence among different social elements. Laclau and Mouffe insist that this
correspondence is discursively constructed: it is neither logically necessary nor just empirical.
In focusing on discursive (i.e. meaningful) articulation, Laclau and Mouffe ignore the various
unintended, unanticipated aspects of social order. Thus, their approach is one-sided.
This one-sidedness is reflected in their account of how the social order comes to be
articulated. In effect they reduce this to the specific forms of articulation of subjects in terms
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of their identities (interpellation) and the construction of chains of equivalence among
identities and interests. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe focus on politically effective
discourse where this refers to effectivity in political mobilization. Moreover, even here they
neglect the conditions of reception of discourse in favour of the discursive mechanisms of its
production; where they do discuss issues of reception, they do so in terms of a recurrent,
insatiable psychological “lack” (cf. LACAN). Thus, the appeal of a hegemonic project is
effectively reduced to its significance for the individual psyche - its capacity to establish a
link between the logic of the social and the logic of the unconscious (LACLAU, 1987, p. 333;
cf. ŹIŹEK, 1990). This marks no real advance on Poulantzas's appeal to “class instincts”
(POULANTZAS, 1975, pp. 16-17) or Foucault's resort to “plebeian spirits” and, in so far as it
refers only to the individual psyche, offers no purchase on collective mobilization.
Discourse Theory and Cultural Political Economy
If valid, the post-Marxist approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe represents a
fundamental challenge to cultural political economy (CPE) – on which, see Sum and Jessop
(2013). Individually and together they have developed a coherent set of linguistic and
discourse-analytical tools to analyse politics and hegemony and to provide a theoretical
rationale for a radical pluralist democracy that breaks decisively with economism and class
reductionism.
Although this equation of the social and discourse is a foundational ontological claim,
it is presented as anti-foundational and anti-essentialist. This is certainly useful in critiquing
“hard political economy”, i.e., the naturalization and fetishization of economic and political
relations as objective facts of social life. This position also vastly expands historical
contingency and hence the scope for agents and strategies to make a difference. Yet this
ignores the emergent, path-dependent specificities of various institutional orders and their
forms of articulation in favour of a pan-politicist ontology that insists on the permanent
possibility of re-activation of sedimented structures. This introduces another form of
essentialism. It reduces the social to politics such that every social space is either actually
politically contested or, although “sedimented” (i.e., stabilized, naturalized), can be politically
re-activated (LACLAU, 2005, p. 154). This goes beyond a claim about the primacy of the
political (which depends on the existence of extra-political regions or spheres) to dissolve any
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ontological distinction between the political and other fields (cf. NORRIS, 2006). It does so
on the grounds that such differences are constituted semantically and that their boundaries are
inherently unstable. Presumably this also holds for any emergent, extra-discursive structuring
effects of such semantic distinctions. This ontological and epistemological antifoundationalism leads Laclau and Mouffe to abandon any critical and effective account of the
relations between semiosis and structuration in a social world beyond discourse. In this
respect, it risks becoming a “soft economic sociology” (see Table 1).
Table 1
CPE between the Constructivist Charybdis and Structuralist Scylla
Constructivist Charybdis
Structuralist Scylla
Grasps semiotic-material construction of social
relations, reveals their social embedding, and
notes the performativity of semiosis
But finds it hard to define specificity of
economic relations vis-à-vis other relations because they are all equally discursive in
character
Strong risk of idealism, defining economic
relations in terms of their manifest semiotic
content
‘Soft Economic Sociology’
Grasps the distinctiveness of specific economic
categories and their structured/structuring nature
in wider social formations
Source: Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 181)
But reifies such categories, regards economic
structures as natural, and views agents as mere
Träger (passive bearers) of economic logics
Strong risk of economic determinism, explaining
economic processes in terms of ‘iron laws’
‘Hard Political Economy’
The impact of their work depended on a specific theoretical and political conjuncture
when classical Marxism was in yet another crisis and provided a convenient foil for their postMarxist linguistic (discursive) turn. This turn was more of a thematic extension of poststructuralist linguistics into a terrain where Marxist and liberal democratic theoretical and
political discourses previously dominated. This is evidenced by the fact that most of the
concepts deployed by Laclau and Mouffe are borrowed from other theoretical currents.
“Discourse”, “discourse analysis”, “moment”, “genealogy”, “articulation” and “regulated
dispersion”
all
derive
from
Foucault.
“Floating
signifier”,
“empty
signifier”,
“overdetermination”, “suture”, and “nodal point” are taken from Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis and the work of the Slovenian psychoanalyst and political enfant terrible,
Slavoj Źiźek. “Paradigm” and “syntagm” come from Saussure; “sedimentation” from
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phenomenology; and Derrida delivers “undecidability”, “deconstruction”, “logic of
supplementation” and “never fully closed structures” (cf. ANDERSEN, 2003, p. 48-9). There
is no parallel systematic appropriation, re-articulation, and recontextualization of concepts
from political economy or critical social science more generally. Instead, where reference is
made to phenomena in these domains, they are introduced from ordinary language or lay
social scientific observations and employed in an ad hoc manner. Lest these remarks be
misunderstood, I do not oppose the appropriation and recontextualization of concepts from
other disciplines or currents of thought – this is part of the normal process of scientific
development. My criticism has two targets: first, these concepts are deprived of their external
referents; and, second, the borrowings are asymmetrical – focusing exclusively on the
semiotic rather than structural moment of social practices and their emergent effects.
Because these concepts are borrowed, it is easier to disembed them from their
discourse-centred deployment and recontextualize them in cultural political economy. Three
especially useful concepts are sedimentation, sutures, and nodal points.
▪ Sedimentation refers, in a Husserlian context (1954[1936]), to the naturalization and
institutionalization of social relations, which occurs as their origins are forgotten, so
that are reproduced through dull repetition rather than deliberate articulation
(LACLAU, 2005, p. 154; cf. TORFING, 1999, pp. 69-71; GLYNOS; HOWARTH,
2007, p. 116). This can be reversed through a new hegemonic articulation that
deconstructs, re-politicizes and re-articulates sedimented relations.
▪ The concept of suture (MILLER, 1966) refers to the inevitably temporary nature of
attempts to bind different elements and relations together, despite their differences and
distinctions. Consistent with its metaphorical connotations, a suture is a short-term fix
that is bound to dissolve. This metaphor can be applied in other ways to social,
semantic, institutional, and spatio-temporal fixes, which are key concepts in CPE.
▪ “Nodal points” are provisional and unstable centres that emerge from the primordial
flux of social relations to provide temporary points of reference for the contingent
articulation of social relations and attempts to suture them into relatively stable,
sedimented ensembles.
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Given their pan-politicism, Laclau and Mouffe insist that power cannot be localized in
the state or some other power centre but occurs across the whole field of discursivity. This
argument is, of course, familiar from Foucault’s critique of state-centred theorizing and his
emphasis on the micropolitics of power (FOUCAULT, 1980; 2008). For Laclau and Mouffe,
it follows that hegemony is “free-floating” and must be articulated everywhere and in all
directions (1985, p. 139). Moreover, because there is always a plurality of power centres, any
one of them will be limited in its effectiveness by the others (1985, pp. 139, 142-3). This
argument is important but can be extended beyond discourse to nodal apparatuses,
dispositifs,3 or points of crystallization where dominant principles of societal formation and
domination are anchored.
This generates an arbitrary account of the social world that ignores the
unacknowledged conditions of action as well as the many and varied emergent properties of
action that go un- or mis-recognized by relevant actors. It ignores struggles to transform the
conditions of action and modify emergent properties (and their feedback effects on the social
world). And it is tempted towards the voluntarist vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis,
which seem to imply that agents can will almost anything into existence in and through an
appropriately articulated discourse. What blocks this voluntarism is the existence of
competing discourses.
CPE offers a “third way” between a structuralist Scylla and a constructivist Charybdis.
It rejects the conflation of discourses and material practices and the more general “discourseimperialism” that has influenced social theory for three decades. And it explores the dialectic
of the emergent extra-semiotic features of social relations and the constitutive role of
semiosis. In particular, it applies a consistent evolutionary approach to discourse as well as
institutionalism. It explores the conditions of existence of variation, selection, and retention in
sense – and meaning-making as well structuration. It seeks to explain why some discursive
articulations get selected and become sedimented to be contested at a later date. And it also
seeks to explain why some properties of institutions have enduring effects at different scales
of action – see Sum and Jessop (2013).
3
Summarizing and seeking to inject some coherence into Foucault’s unsystematic but broadly consistent
reflections on dispositifs, I suggest the following extended (re)definition: a dispositif comprises a problemoriented, ensemble or assemblage of (1) a distributed apparatus, comprising institutions, organizations and
networks; (2) an order of discourse, with corresponding thematizations and objectivations; (3) diverse devices
and technologies involved in producing power/knowledge; and (4) subject positions and subjectivation (cf.
SUM; JESSOP, 2013, p. 208).
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One consequence of this CPE approach is that the economy cannot be adequately
conceived (let alone managed) as a “pure” economic sphere that reproduces itself in total
isolation from the non-economic and that can therefore determine non-economic spheres in a
unilateral manner. At least some of these extra-economic conditions and forces must be
integrated into economic strategies to make them feasible. The operations of the economy are
co-constituted by other systems and co-evolve with them: these include technologies, science,
education, politics, law, art, religion, and so forth. They are also articulated more generally to
what Habermas called the lifeworld. The latter comprises all those identities, interests, values
and conventions that are not directly anchored in the logic of any particular system and that
provide the substratum and background to social interaction in everyday life.
Moreover, insofar as these extra-economic mechanisms also reproduce the
contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the economic mechanisms of the capital relation,
they further expand the scope for agency, strategies and tactics to shape the course of
accumulation and the manner in which these contradictions and dilemmas are expressed. This
is why the more successful accumulation strategies are often connected to hegemonic projects
that link economic success to the national-popular (or some equivalent) interest that aims to
mobilize a broader social constituency behind the growth strategy. This extends in turn the
influence of accumulation via its modes of regulation to the overall character of social
formations.
Thus, overall, there is no single and unambiguous “logic of capital” but, rather, several
such logics with a family resemblance. Given the open nature of capitalism's overall dynamic,
each accumulation regime and/or mode of regulation imparts its own distinctive structure and
dynamic to the circuit of capital – including distinctive forms of crisis and breakdown. This in
turn requires any analysis of the improbable nature of capital accumulation to take agency
seriously. Thus, it is essential to combine critical semiotic analysis with the critique of
political economy.
On the other hand, although CPE emphasizes that all social phenomena, including the
economic, are discursively constituted and never achieve a self-reproducing closure, isolated
from other social phenomena, it also insists on the contradictory, dilemmatic, and antagonistic
nature of the capital relation. This makes soft cultural economics inadequate. To neglect these
features of social relations would be to subsume the economic under the general rubric of the
socio-cultural and thereby lose sight of the distinctive materiality and overall logic of the
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capital relation. The economy should not be dissolved back into society (or culture) as a
whole. This is the tendency in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism, which illustrates the
temptations of a constructivist Charybdis. The economy has its own specificities that derive
from the distinctive extra-discursive properties of its various forms – cf. Slater (2002), on the
key role of the commodity and property forms in differentiating the economy from other
social relations. Thus, successful economic governance depends on the co-presence of extraeconomic as well as economic forms and on extra-economic as well as economic
regularization.
Concluding Remarks
Laclau and Mouffe developed a self-proclaimed “post-Marxist” account of social
practices and social cohesion in terms inspired by linguistics and discourse theory. Although
many of their ideas are drawn from these two disciplines, they have extended the concepts of
discourse and discursive practices beyond language as such to all the ways in which social
relations are endowed with meaning and articulated to each other. In this sense, all social
relations can be considered as discourses. They justify this “exorbitation” of language on
three main grounds: first, that linguistics shows how differences are essential to understanding
entities and their limits; second, that there is no essential difference between the systems of
differential positions found in speech and the extra-linguistic or extra-discursive actions to
which they are linked; and, third, by virtue of this indifference, linguistic objects lose their
specificity and linguistic analysis can quite legitimately be extended to the whole field of
discourse as an ensemble of relational logics embracing more than language (LACLAU,
1988, pp. 25, 27).
In terms of their logic of discovery, Laclau and Mouffe rely on the somewhat
metaphorical use of linguistics to explore the field of discourse. This is justified, as we have
noted above, by appealing to the more general applicability of the logic of differential
articulation theorized in linguistics. But rather than pursue the general logic, Laclau and
Mouffe still draw almost exclusively on linguistic concepts rather than on other approaches to
articulation. Laclau and Mouffe stress that discourse is not simply the “text”, not just
“language” and “parole”, not just ideological elements: it is “the ensemble of phenomena in
and through which social production of meaning takes place” (LACLAU, 1980a, p. 87). In
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this context, it is regrettable that the discourse–theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe
slides all too easily from a general conception of discourse as the production of social
meaning to a particular focus upon ideological discourse to the exclusion of economic, legal,
military, administrative, and other discourses and then emphasises the “discourse of
discourses” involved in the production of hegemony itself. For this slippage forces them back
to the “text” and seems to reduce hegemony to an effect of various interpellative mechanisms
considered in isolation from their conditions of production or reception.
References
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Resumen
Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe exageraron los aspectos textuales de las prácticas sociales en sus
reflexiones post-marxistas. Ellos desarrollaron una conexión entre prácticas sociales y cohesión social
inspirados en algunos términos provenientes de la lingüística y de la teoría del discurso. Su trabajo
muestra un rechazo creciente al reduccionismo economicista y de clase, a la vez que enfatiza en la
construcción discursiva contingente y contestataria de la sociedad. La contingencia es la precondición
de la hegemonía, es decir, la base en la acontecen las luchas por la hegemonía y la construcción del
populismo. En ese sentido, ellos reemplazan la noción marxista de la primacía causal de la economía
por la “primacía de lo político”. Esto lleva a un anti-fundamentalismo discursivo, según el cual es
imposible construir una sociedad unificada porque todos los significados y las identidades son
contestados y sus fundaciones institucionales son potencialmente reactivadas. Este artículo concluye
comparando esa exorbitancia del lenguaje con una más limitada aproximación de economía políticocultural que ofrece una “tercera vía” entre estructuralismo e idealismo. Este enfoque explora las
condiciones que modelan la variación, selección y retención de producción y estructuración de
sentidos e significados. Con esto se busca explicar por qué algunas articulaciones discursivas son
escogidas y acaban sedimentadas, para posteriormente ser contestadas; y por qué algunas propiedades
de las instituciones tienen efectos duraderos en diferentes escalas de acción.
Palabras clave: Ernesto Laclau; Análisis Crítico del Discurso; La Exorbitancia del Lenguaje;
Hegemonía; Economía Político-Cultural.
Resumo
Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe exageram os aspectos textuais da prática social em suas reflexões
pós-Marxistas. Eles desenvolveram uma interpretação das práticas sociais e da coesão social em
termos inspirados por linguistas e pela teoria do discurso. Seu trabalho rejeitou o economicismo e o
reducionismo de classe, dando ênfase à disputa e à contingência na construção da sociedade.
Contingência é a pré-condição da hegemonia – o terreno no qual as disputas pela hegemonia e a
construção do populismo ocorrem. Neste sentido, eles substituem a noção Marxista de casualidade da
primazia da economia com a “primazia do político”. Isso leva a um discursivo anti-fundacionalista no
qual é impossível construir uma sociedade unificada porque todos os sentidos e identidades são
contestados e seus fundamentos institucionais são potencialmente re-ativados. O artigo termina por
comparar essa exorbitação da linguagem com uma abordagem cultural e política da economia mais
limitada, que oferece uma “Terceira via” entre o estruturalismo e o idealismo. Explora as condições
que moldam a variação, seleção e retenção do sentido - e da construção de sentido – tal como da
estruturação. Essa abordagem busca explicar porque algumas articulações discursivas são selecionadas
e sedimentam-se para serem contestadas posteriormente e porque algumas propriedades das
instituições têm efeitos duradouros em diferentes escalas de ação.
Palavras-chave: Ernesto Laclau; Análise Crítica do Discurso; A Exorbitação da Linguagem;
Hegemonia; Economia Político-Cultural.
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Critical discourse analysis in Laclau and Mouffe’s
post-Marxism
El análisis crítico del discurso en el post-marxismo de
Laclau y Mouffe
Análise crítica do discurso no pós-Marxismo de
Laclau e Mouffe
Recebido em 25-11-2019
Modificado em 10-12-2019
Aceito para publicação em 15-12-2019
8
Bob Jessop
ORCID: 0000-0001-8134-3926
Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from Cambridge University in
1974, is an established state theorist inspired by Poulantzas and Gramsci, and is currently writing on cultural
political economy. E-mail: b.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe exaggerate the textual aspects of social practice in their postMarxist reflections. They developed an account of social practices and social cohesion in terms
inspired by linguistics and discourse theory. Their work saw a growing rejection of economism and
class reductionism and growing emphasis on the contested, contingent discursive construction of
society. Contingency is the precondition of hegemony – the ground in which struggles for hegemony
and the construction of populism occur. In this regard, they replace the Marxist notion of the causal
primacy of the economy with a “primacy of the political”. This leads to a discursive antifoundationalism in which it is impossible to construct a unified society because all meanings and
identities are contested, and its institutional foundations are potentially re-activated. The article
concludes by comparing this exorbitation of language with a more limited cultural political economy
approach that offers a “third way” between structuralism and idealism. It explores the conditions that
shape the variation, selection and retention of sense- and meaning-making as well structuration. This
approach seeks to explain why some discursive articulations get selected and become sedimented to be
contested later and why some properties of institutions have enduring effects at different scales of
action.
Keywords: Ernesto Laclau; Critical Discourse Analysis; The Exorbitation of Language; Hegemony;
Cultural Political Economy.
Esta obra está licenciada sob uma licença Creative Commons Atribuição – Não comercial – Sem
derivações 4.0 Internacional: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt_BR
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Introduction
Norman Fairclough, the British critical discourse analyst, emphasizes the centrality of
language to social order. This said, he cannot be charged with the exorbitation of discourse
beyond the discursive field because he stresses that “whereas all linguistic phenomena are
social, not all social phenomena are linguistic – though even those that are not just linguistic
(economic production, for instance) typically have a substantial, and often underestimated,
language element” (FAIRCLOUGH, 1989, p. 23). I also endorse Fairclough’s move from
synthesizing text-analytical techniques to engage with social theories on contemporary
economic, political, and social change (e.g., CHOULIARAKI; FAIRCLOUGH, 1999). Two
good examples of such engagement are New Labour, New Language (FAIRCLOUGH, 2000)
on Third Way discourse and his critical dissection of discourses of globalization
(FAIRCLOUGH, 2006). Thus, his discourse-theoretical approach straddles the divide
between grand theory and grounded analytics because its disciples regularly link their
analyses to changing social relations.
This essay examines the work of Ernesto Laclau and his collaboration with Chantal
Mouffe and suggests that they exaggerate the textual aspects of social practice. This
exorbitation of language can be illustrated from the following text:
By “the discursive” I understand nothing which in a narrow sense relates to texts but
the ensemble of phenomena of the societal production of meaning on which a
society as such is based. It is not a question of regarding the discursive as a plane or
dimension of the social but as having the same meaning as the social… the nondiscursive is not opposite to the discursive as if one were dealing with two different
planes because there is nothing societal that is determined outside the discursive.
History and society are therefore an unfinished text (LACLAU, 1980a, p. 87).
This “unfinished text” is produced through contingent “articulatory practices”. The
notion of articulation implies that discursivity (in other words, the social) is always
constituted relationally, always under construction, and liable to disarticulation. Articulation
is also the basis of hegemony and the construction of populism. The “raw materials” of this
social construction exist as unfixed polysemic discursive elements before they are articulated
as specific moments within particular discourses. The struggle for hegemony is re-interpreted
in terms of intervention to articulate different discursive elements into more or less discrete
ideological ensembles that serve the interests of a fundamental social force. Elements can be
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articulated to form different discourses (sic) because they have common nuclei of meaning
that lack a fully determinate denotation and can be connotatively linked to other elements to
produce the specific meanings they reveal in different discursive ensembles. The social is
thereby located uneasily between attempts at fixing meaning and the ultimate infeasibility of
these attempts. To the extent that these attempts succeed, it is because certain nodal points
(points de capiton) emerge within discourse as privileged signifiers, or key principles, that
limit the “play of meaning”. It is around these nodal points that discursive forms crystallize.
However, because these nodal points are internal to discourse, not grounded outside it, they
are inherently unstable. Because they are sedimented, i.e., their discursive origins are
forgotten, they can be challenged and re-politicized. Key principles always have what Derrida
(1988) calls a “constitutive outside”, that is, they exclude some elements in order to establish
and stabilize a boundary but, in doing so, reveal the contingency of a hegemonic or dominant
discourse.
It follows that meaning is only ever partially fixed and, given an ever-present surplus
of possible meanings, any fix is contingent. It could have been fixed differently. Discourse
therefore continually overflows the limits of any possible stabilization by nodal points
(LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 113). Paradoxically, this lack of fixity is the precondition of
hegemony. Contingency is the ground, or space, in which struggles for hegemony occur.
Thus, the greater is the contingency, the greater is the scope for hegemonic contestation. It is
an important part of Laclau’s argument that the post-war world is becoming more contingent
due to increasing globalization, democratic demands, the expansion of conflict and
antagonism, and so on.
At stake here is the relation between signifiers and signified, which, partly following
de Saussure’s general course on linguistics, Laclau and Mouffe present as occurring entirely
within discourse. It has no outside, extra-discursive referent. Indeed, having claimed that all
social practices are discursive practices, they then ignore their extra-discoursal aspects. They
conclude that an adequate social explanation must refer to signifying relations rather to any
type of physical or material causality1. In emphasizing the purely contingent discursive
articulation of the social world, they deny lawful links among events and qualities in the
1
Laclau and Mouffe totally reject the base-superstructure distinction. They take this allusive and elusive
metaphor literally and conclude that it posits total determination of the superstructure by an economic base that
is a wholly self-sufficient as its own cause (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 120-1, 142; LACLAU, 1990, pp. 614, 55; LACLAU, 2005, p. 250). They ignore alternative meanings and never consider whether it could be reinscribed into post-Marxist analysis.
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social world (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985). In short, they embrace what Mario Bunge called
an “anti-determinist acausalism” (BUNGE, 1961, p. 29). Such claims ignore the need, long
ago noted by Max Weber (1949), for explanations that are adequate at the level of causality as
well as meaning2. In contrast, Laclau and Mouffe have a contingent explanation of causality:
things could occur otherwise depending on articulation (cf. LACLAU, 2006).
The early discourse-theoretical writings
In complementary articles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mouffe and Laclau
attacked economism in the analysis of politics and ideology. This critique was stated most
clearly by Chantal Mouffe in this period in her review of the concept of hegemony in
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (MOUFFE, 1979). She outlined three phases in the movement
from economism to anti-economism in Marxist political and ideological analysis. Phase one
was the pure and classic form of economism comprising a base-superstructure model coupled
with the claim that all economic, political, and ideological subjects were at bottom class
subjects (e.g., the Second International). The second phase endowed the political and
ideological levels with their own effectivity but remained economist in tracing the origins of
political and ideological practices to wilful class subjects whose actions are determined by the
evolution of a class consciousness appropriate to their economic position (e.g., Korsch,
Lukács). And the third phase broke with this class reductionist view by treating ideological
practice as a sui generis process that constitutes subjects who are neither economically predefined nor, once constituted in and through ideologies, having a necessary class belonging
(e.g., Gramsci, Togliatti) (see MOUFFE, 1979, pp. 169-178; cf. LACLAU, 1977, pp. 141142, 158-159, 163-164; LACLAU, 1980, pp. 252-255; LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, passim).
While Mouffe and Laclau had together prepared the ground for a definite break with
economism and class reductionism in the analysis of hegemony, significant residual elements
of class reductionism remained in their initial studies (for details, see JESSOP, 1982, pp. 191202). In subsequent studies, Laclau and Mouffe attempted to overcome these problems and
developed a general theory of the discursive constitution of hegemony. They argue that all
2
While Luhmann is also suspicious of causal explanation, his operative constructionism allows a regulative role
for the real world beyond communication (LUHMANN, 1995). Laclau concedes this in his analysis of populism,
in which external reality expresses itself via negation, i.e., by providing a ‘reality check’ that limits the resonance
of alternative political projects, making some more plausible and appealing than others (LACLAU, 2005, pp. 89,
91-96, 190-1, 201).
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social relations derive their social character from their discursive constitution: that is, all
social practice constitutes itself in so far as it produces meaning (LACLAU 1980a, p. 87).
This approach has important theoretical implications for the relations between “levels” and
for the analysis of social subjectivity.
First, as the discursive is coextensive with the field of the social and, as such, all social
relations are regarded as constituted in and through discourse, Laclau and Mouffe reject
orthodox Marxist views of “base-superstructure” relations in which the so-called material
base is seen as extra-discursive and the superstructure alone is discursive. Thus, even if one
wished to retain the metaphor of “base” and “superstructure" or the topographical image of
“regions” of a social formation, then the unity of a social formation, to the extent that it exists,
depends on the contingent articulation among these discursive practices. It does not derive
from a necessary correspondence between base and superstructure. In this sense, Laclau and
Mouffe re-interpret Gramsci’s notion of “historical bloc” in discourse-theoretical terms. For
the Italian, the historical bloc shows how “material forces are the content and ideologies are
the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value” (1971,
p. 377). For the Argentinian and Belgian, the historical bloc is a purely ideological
construction (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 170, 176).
Second, their approach in this early period implies that the subjects through whom
social relations are mediated and reproduced are also constituted in and through discourse.
One can no longer privilege class subjects over popular-democratic forces nor treat class
struggle as necessarily more influential than popular-democratic struggles. Class antagonism
is not inscribed in the social relations of production considered as an extra-discursive structure
but derives from the particular discursive identification of class subjects. This suggests that
class struggle is first of all a struggle about the constitution of class subjects before it is a
struggle between class subjects. It follows from this that the field of political intervention is
extremely broad. This must have crucial implications for hegemony considered as "political,
intellectual, and moral leadership” (GRAMSCI, 1971, p. 57) as well as for the struggle for
such leadership.
Although these inter-discursive practices cannot be modelled outside specific
conjunctures, Laclau and Mouffe do identify two basic modes of hegemonic articulation. In a
discourse of difference, hegemony neutralises ideologically constituted antagonisms by reinterpreting them as differences within a national-popular collective will. For example, class
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antagonisms inscribed within the relations of production are transformed into positive-sum
differences among economic agents performing complementary functions in the division of
labour. This involves the localisation of differences that must be negotiated and compromised
within a broad consensual framework established through the dominant discourse concerning
the parameters of the “national-popular” collective will. Examples of such a discourse of
difference include the “transformist” politics of Giovanni Giolitti’s prime ministerial role in
Italy from 1892 to 1921 and the “One Nation” discourse of the nineteenth-century British
Conservative politician, Benjamin Disraeli (cf. LACLAU, 1977, p. 115; LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 130).
The second form of hegemonic discourse involves constituting a system of
equivalences among different positions and subjects. This can occur either through (1) a
common polarity that is juxtaposed in an irreducible dualism to another pole and defined as
superior to it or (2) a common antagonism to an internal and/or external enemy that must be
defeated to advance each particular position or subject. Examples of such a discourse of
equivalence would include the irreducibly dualist discourses of apartheid and the ruptural
populist discourses of Chartism in England, Jacobinism in France, Fascism in Italy, and
Maoism in China (cf. LACLAU, 2005, 2006). This friend-enemy distinction became crucial
to Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of populism.
In this period, both modes of discourse were seen to contain dangers to the dominant
class. A discourse of difference transforms negatively-charged contradictions into positively
differentiated contrarieties and creates the ideological conditions needed to integrate different
subjectivities into a system of democratic politics. But the dominant class can go too far in
absorbing and legitimating the demands of those in subordinate positions so that the latter
forces can impose their own discourse within the state apparatus during crises in ways that
undermine that class’s neutralising capacities. This can be seen in the appropriation of
democratic discourse into a socialist discourse as monopoly capital finds it increasingly hard
to maintain liberal democratic traditions and institutions. Likewise, the dominant class can
assimilate the “people” in a discourse of equivalence to its own hegemonic project, which is
particularly common during periods of crisis. Nonetheless, in doing so, it runs the risk that
populist forces will develop the anti-status quo, anti-capitalist elements in populist discourse
to the point of a radical break with the interests of the dominant class. This can be seen in the
threats posed to capital as the Nazi left drew on socialist traditions and the Italian fascist left
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drew on the Mazzinian, Garibaldian, and syndicalist traditions. Moreover, whereas the
discourse of difference tends to be integrative in so far as it disarticulates the organisation of
the various subordinate positionalities into a single “people” interpellated as the dynamic pole
of confrontation with the power bloc, the discourse of equivalence is more readily “turned” to
radical, ruptural goals by articulating the “people” to a revolutionary project rather than to a
populism of the right (LACLAU, 1977, pp. 121-122, 162-163; 1980a, pp. 90-93; 1980b, pp.
255-258; LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1980, pp. 20-22).
Although these arguments were still being developed (see LACLAU; MOUFFE,
1985), their principal implications are clear. First, if all the various “levels” or “regions” of a
social formation are constituted through discourse and are liable to transformation through
forces that are likewise constituted, we must replace the Marxist notion of the causal primacy
of the economy with a “primacy of the political” (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, p. 22). This
means that the capital relation is just as much a field of struggle as the political and
ideological regions and that its so-called “laws of motion” are not governed by an extradiscursive “capital logic”. Instead the movement of the economy depends on the contingent
hegemonic articulation in a given society (ibid.).
Second, since any given society is characterised by a vast plurality of subjects who
need not identify as class subjects, hegemony must be seen in terms of the discursive
articulation of different subjects. Thus, if the dominant class or working class are to contest
the role of “political, intellectual, and moral leadership”, this must depend on their respective
abilities to develop a political project recognised by other subjects in society as essential to
realize their own particular interests. Further, it requires an “organic ideology” that can serve
as a shared ideological frame of reference in which a plurality of subjects can redefine and
negotiate alliances to advance that project (cf. LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1981, pp. 21-22).
This raises the crucial distinction between “political hegemony” and “organic
ideology”. There is no doubt that political leadership is won or lost in the context of
“intellectual and moral reform”. But there is a danger that “political hegemony” and “organic
ideology” are conflated. Whilst the development of an appropriate ideological cement is the
field par excellence of the creation of shared meanings, “common” sense, etc., political
leadership works on these meanings in various ways to generate particular projects or
national-popular programmes that require specific resources, policy initiatives, forms of
mobilisation, etc. One cannot reduce Fascism or Nazism as hegemonic projects to the role of
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“corporativism” and “race” as hegemonic principles (LACLAU, 1977, pp. 120-22). They also
involved quite specific programmes of political action designed to advance specific class and
“national-popular” objectives. In addition to “intellectual and moral reform”, the fascist
movements needed to reorganise the Italian and German state apparatuses to implement their
projects of national regeneration.
Finally, a discourse-theoretical approach along these early lines raises issues about the
limits of hegemony. Although Laclau and Mouffe noted that there are specific conditions of
production and reception of discursive practices, there is no attempt to theorize these
conditions beyond the assertion that they should be considered as other discourses (LACLAU,
1980a, p. 87). The conditions of reception are almost wholly ignored. Yet, as Gramsci himself
was careful to observe, there is a world of difference between historically organic ideologies
and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed” (GRAMSCI, 1971, pp. 376-377).
Moreover, however plausible a given hegemonic project may appear in terms of its intended
articulation of class and non-class subjects and demands, it will only become “directive” to
the extent that strategically significant forces support it and likely sources of resistance are
neutralised.
Hegemony and the Logic of the Social
In their chief work, Hegemony and Socialist Politics, Laclau and Mouffe built on these
earlier remarks and concluded that the concept of “hegemony” introduced a new logic of the
social that is incompatible with the basic assumptions of traditional Marxism (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 3). More accurately, their post-Marxist account of this “logic” of the
social required them to re-think the meaning of hegemony along with some other basic
assumptions of Marxism. For they use the concept of hegemony so loosely and apply it so
widely that it is often hard to distinguish it from more inclusive concepts such as discourse,
the social and the political. The basic assumptions they claim are subverted by this new logic
are: (1) the classist privileging of the proletariat's role as an agent of fundamental change; (2)
the statist view that the state is the crucial site for implementing radical changes and that its
activities must be expanded; (3) the economist claim that a successful economic strategy will
also secure desired political effects; and (4) the argument that there must be a revolution that
concentrates power so that society can then be “rationally” reorganized (LACLAU;
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MOUFFE, 1985, p. 177). To these four assumptions they counterpose the logic of the social,
i.e., the claim that the social has an open, unsutured character and that neither its elements nor
its totality have any pre-given necessity. Their approach entails that the social has no positive
essence: it has only a “negative essence” that consists in its essential openness.
In this sense, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy starts out from the claim that social
relations can only be differentiated in terms of the specific discourses that endow them with
meaning. In this context, they nonetheless assert that discourses include more than language:
they also involve material practices. Indeed, they insist that articulation should not be reduced
to pure linguistic articulation but must penetrate the materiality of institutions, rituals and
practices through which a discursive practice is established (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p.
109). They then distinguish between the general field of the interdiscursive and specific fields
constituted by particular discursive practices. The general field of the interdiscursive is a
complex series of “elements” available for integration into specific discourses. The latter fix
the meaning of these elements in relation to an overall discursive system and thereby
transform them into relatively fixed “moments” in that discourse. But they also argue that no
discourse can totally fix the meaning of these moments – there is always polyvalence and a
surplus of meaning and thus a potential for articulation with other discourses (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985).
These general reflections have obvious implications for society. On the one hand, a
fully closed, self-identical social formation is impossible. Even if individual identities and
micro-social relations are unstable, it is hard to see how a fully sutured society could exist.
But this does not mean that society is totally impossible (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp.
110-13, 122, 127). For, given that parts are merely elements rather than fully fixed and that
they can be articulated in different ways, relations can exist among them with the result that
societies are tendentially constituted as an ensemble of totalizing effects in an open relational
complex (1985, p. 103). Indeed, without partial fixity, no differences would be possible: there
must also be nodal points or privileged points of reference for articulation. Society only exists
as attempts to realize the impossible, to produce fixity despite discursivity.
Society never manages to be identical to itself, as every nodal point is constituted
within an intertextuality that overflows it. The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in
the construction of nodal points that partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this
fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant
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overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity (LACLAU;
MOUFFE, 1985, p. 113).
Because neither its individual elements nor its overall articulation can provide a
founding moment for the social totality, Laclau and Mouffe insist that social identity depends
on the contingent pattern of hegemonic articulation in an unstable social system. They define
articulation as any practice that establishes a relation among elements such that their identity
is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. In turn, emptying “discourse” of its
customary linguistic connotations, they simply define it as a structured or relational totality
resulting from articulation (1985, p. 113). In this sense, it differs little from the concept of
social practice. Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe insist that articulation should not be reduced to
pure linguistic articulation but must penetrate the materiality of institutions, rituals and
practices through which a discursive practice is established (1985, p. 109). Yet they have little
to say about these institutions, rituals, and practices, except to interpret them as sedimented
discursive practices.
The link with hegemony is established through an expanded concept of the political.
For their analysis implies that politics occurs anywhere and everywhere that there is
contingency. There is no surface that is not constantly subverted by others and thus no unique,
clearly demarcated space of politics (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 179-81). Political (or
hegemonic) discourse operates on a field of relatively open elements that have not yet been so
sedimented that they can be reproduced merely through repetition rather than continuing
articulation. In this sense, it cannot be localized within the state or in any other single power
centre (or “nodal point”) but occurs across the whole field of discursivity. Some nodal points
may become the focal point of many totalizing effects but, since a unitary society is
impossible, no single hegemonic centre can emerge. Indeed, given that there is always a
plurality of power centres that coexist in specific relational and conjunctural contexts, any one
of these is always limited in its effectivity by other nodal points (1985, pp. 139, 142-3). There
is a certain ambiguity here in so far as the hegemonizing force can secure its hegemony only
through relatively distinguishing its hegemonic discourse from the discourses that are being
hegemonized. For, if its discourse was not distinctive, there would be no field of differences
to be hegemonized; if it was totally distinct, however, then hegemony would be impossible,
and the would-be hegemonic discourse would merely co-exist alongside others (1985, pp.
134-5). In this context, instability in the socially constituted frontiers that divide antagonistic
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forces are basic factors for establishing hegemony. For they provide the material on which a
hegemonic discourse can operate. In the absence of antagonism, there could perhaps be a
bureaucratic reorganization of elements – but not hegemony. But, if the resulting frontiers
were fixed, they could not be re-articulated through a hegemonic discourse. Instead they could
be connected only through a simple chain of equivalences in which different positions were
treated as equivalent in their political effects (1985, p. 136).
In arguing that society is impossible, Laclau and Mouffe do not, let us repeat, rule out
the possibility of partial, provisional “totalizing” projects. A social formation can become a
totality in so far as a hegemonic discourse can establish clear frontiers by constructing a chain
of equivalences that distinguishes what is beyond the hegemonic formation as its
(antagonistic) other (1985, pp. 143-4, 292). Since there is a multiplicity of social logics that
must be constantly re-articulated and re-negotiated, however, there is no final point at which a
balance will be definitively achieved (1985, p. 188). Society tries to construct its identity on
the basis (and in the face) of the multiplication of social spaces and the diversity of
institutions; it rests on compromise, on the precarity of every antagonism, on the opacity of all
social relations (1985, pp. 191-2).
Laclau and Mouffe argue that society is “impossible” because it can never be fully
itself, self-identical and self-closed (1985, p. 127). In developing this argument, they claim to
be moving beyond positivity, i.e., to deny that any social identity could ever be a full, selfconstituted identity. For every social identity is constituted through a difference from which it
can never fully distance or separate itself. There is no social identity “fully protected from a
discursive exterior that deforms it” (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 111). At the macro-level,
this means that society is intelligible in terms of contingent relations among its institutions,
organizational forms and agents that are the product of a hegemonic articulation that
establishes frontiers in opposition to other social relations. Thus, a social formation with a
unique determinative principle is simply impossible. Indeed, although there is a discursive
logic of the social, society itself is not (and could never be) an ultimately intelligible and
rational object (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, p. 254).
Moreover, if the only properties that entities (apart from abstract existence) have are
the product of discursive practices, then Laclau and Mouffe could claim to have discovered
the philosopher's stone. Following their logic, one could discursively turn base metal into gold
or convince those laughing at the emperor's fine new clothes that he really was wearing them.
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Indeed, as they themselves insist in their reply to a critique by Normal Geras (1987), the
function of a stone as a projectile is clearly discursive (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985, pp. 8285). One might well add, although they did not, that it is its own inherent properties (or
natural necessities) which make a stone a better projectile for some purposes than cotton
wool. Moreover, let me note that it is not just “natural” objects that have such objective
qualities. For “social” phenomena also have many emergent properties and tendencies that
give them distinctive capacities and liabilities whose existence may not be acknowledged but
which still have a powerful influence on social life. We should not allow a quite legitimate
rejection of the so-called “metaphysics of presence” to lead us down the slippery road towards
a denial that, to the extent that social phenomena exist, they can have definite properties,
powers and liabilities that are reproduced to the extent that these phenomena are reproduced.
Yet there is a Derridean “trace” even in this constructivism. For Laclau also suggests
that the real is the “ungraspable margin” that limits and distorts the discursive constitution of
the objective. And he adds that there is an insurmountable asymmetry between the real and
concept: “the real, therefore, will only show itself in the distortion of the conceptual”
(LACLAU, 1988, p. 17-18). This suggests that the properties of entities (not just entities in
abstracto) do penetrate the conceptual field. This indicates the confrontation between
theoretical and evidential propositions, the latter being produced in and through an
intervention in the real world and which, therefore, contain its imprint in ways that are not
directly knowable. Moreover, unless one accepts this view, notions such as experience and
learning could have no meaning and would be merely solipsistic and self-referential. Not even
Laclau and Mouffe want to go this far and, if they did, it would render senseless Laclau's
argument that class reductionism was plausible in Marx's time because the categories of class
and class struggle “corresponded well enough to that which was occurring in the field of his
historical and political experience” (LACLAU, 1988, p. 24). But, if we accept this
“constructivist realism”, we must consider how the real comes to be both “present” and
“absent” in discourse and what this implies for experience, learning and strategic conduct.
Indeed, Fred Mouzelis suggests, “because of their excessive fear of reifying
institutional structures, Laclau and Mouffe go to the other extreme and analyse practices in an
institutional vacuum” (MOUZELIS, 1988, p. 116). It almost seems as if they are so hesitant
about attributing reality to socially unacknowledged conditions, emergent evolutionary
properties and unanticipated consequences of discursive practices, that they prefer to focus on
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the psychodynamics of hegemonic mobilization and the discursive constitution of interests
and identities of what they themselves see as the empirical referent of society, namely,
individuals (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1985).
It has also been suggested that, in dismissing the distinction between institution and
agency, Laclau and Mouffe create more problems than they solve. As Mouzelis notes, either
they must smuggle institutional complexes in without acknowledging this and so fail to
conceptualize how they both facilitate and constrain action; or they must consistently ignore
institutions and thereby fail to deal with the constitution, persistence and long-term
transformation of global social formations (MOUZELIS, 1988, p. 113). As it is, they
concentrate their critical fire on reconstructing the concept of hegemony and showing how
articulatory practices constantly construct and deconstruct self-identities, subject positions,
nodal points; social and political spaces, and so on. But the conditions of existence of which
practices are both sustained and limited by the more permanent institutional structures are
never spelt out.
The closest Laclau and Mouffe come to delineating an overall context of articulatory
practices and subject positions is in their talk of “discursive formations” and the more general
“field of discursivity”. But these notions are so vague and so inadequate to deal with the
institutional complexities of modern society that the two authors do not use them in any
serious, systematic manner. In fact, when obliged to refer to the broad features of capitalist
formations and their long-term transformations, they revert, as Norman Geras rightly pointed
out (1987), to such conventional Marxist concepts as exploitation, commodification, the
labour process, civil society, capitalist periphery, etc., and even the dreaded concept of
“society” from time to time! How are the above concepts, which Laclau and Mouffe freely
use, connected with discourse analysis? The connection is never made clear, and the gap
between the two types of concepts creates a much more glaring dualism than that found in the
Marxist texts that they so vehemently criticize (MOUZELIS, 1988, pp. 114-15).
Contrary to Laclau and Mouffe's empty realism, there is genuine scope for a
transcendental enquiry both about the real world in general (its stratification, its internal
complexity) and about specific entities (that they exist, they have specific natural properties,
they are characterized by powers and liabilities, they manifest tendencies, and so forth).
Although we have no direct access to these properties, they are both constraining and
facilitating in relation to other entities and they are indirectly accessible to knowledge. It
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sometimes seems that Laclau concedes this latter point when he appeals to experience to
explain his own political development (LACLAU, 1988, pp. 12-13) or advances the more
general claim that the plausibility of knowledge is indicated by its “verisimilitude”
(LACLAU; MOUFFE, 1987, p. 102).
Another problem posed within discourse analysis is the micro-macro linkage. Despite
its claim to be a universal analytic, discourse theory has tended to focus on subjects, identity
formation and related issues (cf. ROSENTHAL, 1988). However, as one moves from the
socially amorphous interaction among individuals in “brief encounters” through more
structured group and organizational conduct to the configuration of institutional orders and
the tendential emergence of “society effects”, one moves further and further away from social
relations that can readily be analysed in terms of individual subjectivity. In dealing with the
macro-field we must take account of new types of articulation such as the structural coupling
between co-evolving institutional orders that form part of each other's “social ecology”; the
distinctive logics of organizations; patterns of strategic selectivity; and the structural
constraints entailed in conditions of existence. This list is not exhaustive: its aim is simply to
suggest that there's more to social life than discourse or and subversive practices. Perhaps
there is nothing that inherently rules out a discourse-theoretical account of moments of the
social but hitherto they have been neglected by its principal practitioners. A significant
indicator of this is the past failure of Laclau and Mouffe to suggest any specific institutional
mechanisms or organizational forms that might underpin the sort of radical and plural
democracy which they advocate with such passion. To rely purely on the persuasive power of
an inherently unstable hegemonic discourse carries little conviction.
For both argue that the social formation is the incomplete product of contingent
articulatory practices (cf. LACLAU, 1988, p. 15). Its relative unity (if any) is not the
necessary product of a single essential principle (a “cause without cause”, i.e., an apodictic
foundation). Society results from an emergent, provisional, unstable and non-necessary
correspondence among different social elements. Laclau and Mouffe insist that this
correspondence is discursively constructed: it is neither logically necessary nor just empirical.
In focusing on discursive (i.e. meaningful) articulation, Laclau and Mouffe ignore the various
unintended, unanticipated aspects of social order. Thus, their approach is one-sided.
This one-sidedness is reflected in their account of how the social order comes to be
articulated. In effect they reduce this to the specific forms of articulation of subjects in terms
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of their identities (interpellation) and the construction of chains of equivalence among
identities and interests. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe focus on politically effective
discourse where this refers to effectivity in political mobilization. Moreover, even here they
neglect the conditions of reception of discourse in favour of the discursive mechanisms of its
production; where they do discuss issues of reception, they do so in terms of a recurrent,
insatiable psychological “lack” (cf. LACAN). Thus, the appeal of a hegemonic project is
effectively reduced to its significance for the individual psyche - its capacity to establish a
link between the logic of the social and the logic of the unconscious (LACLAU, 1987, p. 333;
cf. ŹIŹEK, 1990). This marks no real advance on Poulantzas's appeal to “class instincts”
(POULANTZAS, 1975, pp. 16-17) or Foucault's resort to “plebeian spirits” and, in so far as it
refers only to the individual psyche, offers no purchase on collective mobilization.
Discourse Theory and Cultural Political Economy
If valid, the post-Marxist approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe represents a
fundamental challenge to cultural political economy (CPE) – on which, see Sum and Jessop
(2013). Individually and together they have developed a coherent set of linguistic and
discourse-analytical tools to analyse politics and hegemony and to provide a theoretical
rationale for a radical pluralist democracy that breaks decisively with economism and class
reductionism.
Although this equation of the social and discourse is a foundational ontological claim,
it is presented as anti-foundational and anti-essentialist. This is certainly useful in critiquing
“hard political economy”, i.e., the naturalization and fetishization of economic and political
relations as objective facts of social life. This position also vastly expands historical
contingency and hence the scope for agents and strategies to make a difference. Yet this
ignores the emergent, path-dependent specificities of various institutional orders and their
forms of articulation in favour of a pan-politicist ontology that insists on the permanent
possibility of re-activation of sedimented structures. This introduces another form of
essentialism. It reduces the social to politics such that every social space is either actually
politically contested or, although “sedimented” (i.e., stabilized, naturalized), can be politically
re-activated (LACLAU, 2005, p. 154). This goes beyond a claim about the primacy of the
political (which depends on the existence of extra-political regions or spheres) to dissolve any
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ontological distinction between the political and other fields (cf. NORRIS, 2006). It does so
on the grounds that such differences are constituted semantically and that their boundaries are
inherently unstable. Presumably this also holds for any emergent, extra-discursive structuring
effects of such semantic distinctions. This ontological and epistemological antifoundationalism leads Laclau and Mouffe to abandon any critical and effective account of the
relations between semiosis and structuration in a social world beyond discourse. In this
respect, it risks becoming a “soft economic sociology” (see Table 1).
Table 1
CPE between the Constructivist Charybdis and Structuralist Scylla
Constructivist Charybdis
Structuralist Scylla
Grasps semiotic-material construction of social
relations, reveals their social embedding, and
notes the performativity of semiosis
But finds it hard to define specificity of
economic relations vis-à-vis other relations because they are all equally discursive in
character
Strong risk of idealism, defining economic
relations in terms of their manifest semiotic
content
‘Soft Economic Sociology’
Grasps the distinctiveness of specific economic
categories and their structured/structuring nature
in wider social formations
Source: Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 181)
But reifies such categories, regards economic
structures as natural, and views agents as mere
Träger (passive bearers) of economic logics
Strong risk of economic determinism, explaining
economic processes in terms of ‘iron laws’
‘Hard Political Economy’
The impact of their work depended on a specific theoretical and political conjuncture
when classical Marxism was in yet another crisis and provided a convenient foil for their postMarxist linguistic (discursive) turn. This turn was more of a thematic extension of poststructuralist linguistics into a terrain where Marxist and liberal democratic theoretical and
political discourses previously dominated. This is evidenced by the fact that most of the
concepts deployed by Laclau and Mouffe are borrowed from other theoretical currents.
“Discourse”, “discourse analysis”, “moment”, “genealogy”, “articulation” and “regulated
dispersion”
all
derive
from
Foucault.
“Floating
signifier”,
“empty
signifier”,
“overdetermination”, “suture”, and “nodal point” are taken from Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis and the work of the Slovenian psychoanalyst and political enfant terrible,
Slavoj Źiźek. “Paradigm” and “syntagm” come from Saussure; “sedimentation” from
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phenomenology; and Derrida delivers “undecidability”, “deconstruction”, “logic of
supplementation” and “never fully closed structures” (cf. ANDERSEN, 2003, p. 48-9). There
is no parallel systematic appropriation, re-articulation, and recontextualization of concepts
from political economy or critical social science more generally. Instead, where reference is
made to phenomena in these domains, they are introduced from ordinary language or lay
social scientific observations and employed in an ad hoc manner. Lest these remarks be
misunderstood, I do not oppose the appropriation and recontextualization of concepts from
other disciplines or currents of thought – this is part of the normal process of scientific
development. My criticism has two targets: first, these concepts are deprived of their external
referents; and, second, the borrowings are asymmetrical – focusing exclusively on the
semiotic rather than structural moment of social practices and their emergent effects.
Because these concepts are borrowed, it is easier to disembed them from their
discourse-centred deployment and recontextualize them in cultural political economy. Three
especially useful concepts are sedimentation, sutures, and nodal points.
▪ Sedimentation refers, in a Husserlian context (1954[1936]), to the naturalization and
institutionalization of social relations, which occurs as their origins are forgotten, so
that are reproduced through dull repetition rather than deliberate articulation
(LACLAU, 2005, p. 154; cf. TORFING, 1999, pp. 69-71; GLYNOS; HOWARTH,
2007, p. 116). This can be reversed through a new hegemonic articulation that
deconstructs, re-politicizes and re-articulates sedimented relations.
▪ The concept of suture (MILLER, 1966) refers to the inevitably temporary nature of
attempts to bind different elements and relations together, despite their differences and
distinctions. Consistent with its metaphorical connotations, a suture is a short-term fix
that is bound to dissolve. This metaphor can be applied in other ways to social,
semantic, institutional, and spatio-temporal fixes, which are key concepts in CPE.
▪ “Nodal points” are provisional and unstable centres that emerge from the primordial
flux of social relations to provide temporary points of reference for the contingent
articulation of social relations and attempts to suture them into relatively stable,
sedimented ensembles.
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Given their pan-politicism, Laclau and Mouffe insist that power cannot be localized in
the state or some other power centre but occurs across the whole field of discursivity. This
argument is, of course, familiar from Foucault’s critique of state-centred theorizing and his
emphasis on the micropolitics of power (FOUCAULT, 1980; 2008). For Laclau and Mouffe,
it follows that hegemony is “free-floating” and must be articulated everywhere and in all
directions (1985, p. 139). Moreover, because there is always a plurality of power centres, any
one of them will be limited in its effectiveness by the others (1985, pp. 139, 142-3). This
argument is important but can be extended beyond discourse to nodal apparatuses,
dispositifs,3 or points of crystallization where dominant principles of societal formation and
domination are anchored.
This generates an arbitrary account of the social world that ignores the
unacknowledged conditions of action as well as the many and varied emergent properties of
action that go un- or mis-recognized by relevant actors. It ignores struggles to transform the
conditions of action and modify emergent properties (and their feedback effects on the social
world). And it is tempted towards the voluntarist vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis,
which seem to imply that agents can will almost anything into existence in and through an
appropriately articulated discourse. What blocks this voluntarism is the existence of
competing discourses.
CPE offers a “third way” between a structuralist Scylla and a constructivist Charybdis.
It rejects the conflation of discourses and material practices and the more general “discourseimperialism” that has influenced social theory for three decades. And it explores the dialectic
of the emergent extra-semiotic features of social relations and the constitutive role of
semiosis. In particular, it applies a consistent evolutionary approach to discourse as well as
institutionalism. It explores the conditions of existence of variation, selection, and retention in
sense – and meaning-making as well structuration. It seeks to explain why some discursive
articulations get selected and become sedimented to be contested at a later date. And it also
seeks to explain why some properties of institutions have enduring effects at different scales
of action – see Sum and Jessop (2013).
3
Summarizing and seeking to inject some coherence into Foucault’s unsystematic but broadly consistent
reflections on dispositifs, I suggest the following extended (re)definition: a dispositif comprises a problemoriented, ensemble or assemblage of (1) a distributed apparatus, comprising institutions, organizations and
networks; (2) an order of discourse, with corresponding thematizations and objectivations; (3) diverse devices
and technologies involved in producing power/knowledge; and (4) subject positions and subjectivation (cf.
SUM; JESSOP, 2013, p. 208).
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One consequence of this CPE approach is that the economy cannot be adequately
conceived (let alone managed) as a “pure” economic sphere that reproduces itself in total
isolation from the non-economic and that can therefore determine non-economic spheres in a
unilateral manner. At least some of these extra-economic conditions and forces must be
integrated into economic strategies to make them feasible. The operations of the economy are
co-constituted by other systems and co-evolve with them: these include technologies, science,
education, politics, law, art, religion, and so forth. They are also articulated more generally to
what Habermas called the lifeworld. The latter comprises all those identities, interests, values
and conventions that are not directly anchored in the logic of any particular system and that
provide the substratum and background to social interaction in everyday life.
Moreover, insofar as these extra-economic mechanisms also reproduce the
contradictions and dilemmas inherent in the economic mechanisms of the capital relation,
they further expand the scope for agency, strategies and tactics to shape the course of
accumulation and the manner in which these contradictions and dilemmas are expressed. This
is why the more successful accumulation strategies are often connected to hegemonic projects
that link economic success to the national-popular (or some equivalent) interest that aims to
mobilize a broader social constituency behind the growth strategy. This extends in turn the
influence of accumulation via its modes of regulation to the overall character of social
formations.
Thus, overall, there is no single and unambiguous “logic of capital” but, rather, several
such logics with a family resemblance. Given the open nature of capitalism's overall dynamic,
each accumulation regime and/or mode of regulation imparts its own distinctive structure and
dynamic to the circuit of capital – including distinctive forms of crisis and breakdown. This in
turn requires any analysis of the improbable nature of capital accumulation to take agency
seriously. Thus, it is essential to combine critical semiotic analysis with the critique of
political economy.
On the other hand, although CPE emphasizes that all social phenomena, including the
economic, are discursively constituted and never achieve a self-reproducing closure, isolated
from other social phenomena, it also insists on the contradictory, dilemmatic, and antagonistic
nature of the capital relation. This makes soft cultural economics inadequate. To neglect these
features of social relations would be to subsume the economic under the general rubric of the
socio-cultural and thereby lose sight of the distinctive materiality and overall logic of the
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capital relation. The economy should not be dissolved back into society (or culture) as a
whole. This is the tendency in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism, which illustrates the
temptations of a constructivist Charybdis. The economy has its own specificities that derive
from the distinctive extra-discursive properties of its various forms – cf. Slater (2002), on the
key role of the commodity and property forms in differentiating the economy from other
social relations. Thus, successful economic governance depends on the co-presence of extraeconomic as well as economic forms and on extra-economic as well as economic
regularization.
Concluding Remarks
Laclau and Mouffe developed a self-proclaimed “post-Marxist” account of social
practices and social cohesion in terms inspired by linguistics and discourse theory. Although
many of their ideas are drawn from these two disciplines, they have extended the concepts of
discourse and discursive practices beyond language as such to all the ways in which social
relations are endowed with meaning and articulated to each other. In this sense, all social
relations can be considered as discourses. They justify this “exorbitation” of language on
three main grounds: first, that linguistics shows how differences are essential to understanding
entities and their limits; second, that there is no essential difference between the systems of
differential positions found in speech and the extra-linguistic or extra-discursive actions to
which they are linked; and, third, by virtue of this indifference, linguistic objects lose their
specificity and linguistic analysis can quite legitimately be extended to the whole field of
discourse as an ensemble of relational logics embracing more than language (LACLAU,
1988, pp. 25, 27).
In terms of their logic of discovery, Laclau and Mouffe rely on the somewhat
metaphorical use of linguistics to explore the field of discourse. This is justified, as we have
noted above, by appealing to the more general applicability of the logic of differential
articulation theorized in linguistics. But rather than pursue the general logic, Laclau and
Mouffe still draw almost exclusively on linguistic concepts rather than on other approaches to
articulation. Laclau and Mouffe stress that discourse is not simply the “text”, not just
“language” and “parole”, not just ideological elements: it is “the ensemble of phenomena in
and through which social production of meaning takes place” (LACLAU, 1980a, p. 87). In
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this context, it is regrettable that the discourse–theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe
slides all too easily from a general conception of discourse as the production of social
meaning to a particular focus upon ideological discourse to the exclusion of economic, legal,
military, administrative, and other discourses and then emphasises the “discourse of
discourses” involved in the production of hegemony itself. For this slippage forces them back
to the “text” and seems to reduce hegemony to an effect of various interpellative mechanisms
considered in isolation from their conditions of production or reception.
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Simbiótica, Vitória, v.6, n.2 (jul.-dez./2019)
ISSN 2316-1620
ŹIŹEK, S. (1990). “Beyond discourse-analysis”. Appendix in: E. Laclau. New Reflections on
the Revolution of our Time. London: Verso, pp. 249-260.
Resumen
Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe exageraron los aspectos textuales de las prácticas sociales en sus
reflexiones post-marxistas. Ellos desarrollaron una conexión entre prácticas sociales y cohesión social
inspirados en algunos términos provenientes de la lingüística y de la teoría del discurso. Su trabajo
muestra un rechazo creciente al reduccionismo economicista y de clase, a la vez que enfatiza en la
construcción discursiva contingente y contestataria de la sociedad. La contingencia es la precondición
de la hegemonía, es decir, la base en la acontecen las luchas por la hegemonía y la construcción del
populismo. En ese sentido, ellos reemplazan la noción marxista de la primacía causal de la economía
por la “primacía de lo político”. Esto lleva a un anti-fundamentalismo discursivo, según el cual es
imposible construir una sociedad unificada porque todos los significados y las identidades son
contestados y sus fundaciones institucionales son potencialmente reactivadas. Este artículo concluye
comparando esa exorbitancia del lenguaje con una más limitada aproximación de economía políticocultural que ofrece una “tercera vía” entre estructuralismo e idealismo. Este enfoque explora las
condiciones que modelan la variación, selección y retención de producción y estructuración de
sentidos e significados. Con esto se busca explicar por qué algunas articulaciones discursivas son
escogidas y acaban sedimentadas, para posteriormente ser contestadas; y por qué algunas propiedades
de las instituciones tienen efectos duraderos en diferentes escalas de acción.
Palabras clave: Ernesto Laclau; Análisis Crítico del Discurso; La Exorbitancia del Lenguaje;
Hegemonía; Economía Político-Cultural.
Resumo
Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe exageram os aspectos textuais da prática social em suas reflexões
pós-Marxistas. Eles desenvolveram uma interpretação das práticas sociais e da coesão social em
termos inspirados por linguistas e pela teoria do discurso. Seu trabalho rejeitou o economicismo e o
reducionismo de classe, dando ênfase à disputa e à contingência na construção da sociedade.
Contingência é a pré-condição da hegemonia – o terreno no qual as disputas pela hegemonia e a
construção do populismo ocorrem. Neste sentido, eles substituem a noção Marxista de casualidade da
primazia da economia com a “primazia do político”. Isso leva a um discursivo anti-fundacionalista no
qual é impossível construir uma sociedade unificada porque todos os sentidos e identidades são
contestados e seus fundamentos institucionais são potencialmente re-ativados. O artigo termina por
comparar essa exorbitação da linguagem com uma abordagem cultural e política da economia mais
limitada, que oferece uma “Terceira via” entre o estruturalismo e o idealismo. Explora as condições
que moldam a variação, seleção e retenção do sentido - e da construção de sentido – tal como da
estruturação. Essa abordagem busca explicar porque algumas articulações discursivas são selecionadas
e sedimentam-se para serem contestadas posteriormente e porque algumas propriedades das
instituições têm efeitos duradouros em diferentes escalas de ação.
Palavras-chave: Ernesto Laclau; Análise Crítica do Discurso; A Exorbitação da Linguagem;
Hegemonia; Economia Político-Cultural.
Bob Jessop│ Critical discourse analysis in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism │pp. 08-30
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