Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau

Author:Ernesto Laclau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Articulation and Discourse

In the context of this discussion, we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated. In order to be correctly understood, these distinctions require three main types of specification: with regard to the characteristic coherence of the discursive formation; with regard to the dimensions and extensions of the discursive; and with regard to the openness or closure exhibited by the discursive formation.

1. A discursive formation is not unified either in the logical coherence of its elements, or in the a priori of a transcendental subject, or in a meaning-giving subject à la Husserl, or in the unity of an experience. The type of coherence we attribute to a discursive formation is – with the differences we will indicate later – close to that which characterizes the concept of ‘discursive formation’ formulated by Foucault: regularity in dispersion. In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault rejects four hypotheses concerning the unifying principle of a discursive formation – reference to the same object, a common style in the production of statements, constancy of the concepts, and reference to a common theme. Instead, he makes dispersion itself the principle of unity, insofar as it is governed by rules of formation, by the complex conditions of existence of the dispersed statements.11 A remark is necessary at this point. A dispersion governed by rules may be seen from two symmetrically opposed perspectives. In the first place, as dispersion: this requires determination of the point of reference with respect to which the elements can be thought of as dispersed. (In Foucault’s case, one can evidently speak of dispersion only by reference to the type of absent unity constituted around the common object, the style, the concepts and the theme.) But the discursive formation can also be seen from the perspective of the regularity in dispersion, and be thought, in that sense, as an ensemble of differential positions. This ensemble is not the expression of any underlying principle external to itself – it cannot, for instance, be apprehended either by a hermeneutic reading or by a structuralist combinatory – but it constitutes a configuration, which in certain contexts of exteriority can be signified as a totality. Given that our principal concern is with articulatory practices, it is this second aspect which interests us in particular.

Now, in an articulated discursive totality, where every element occupies a differential position – in our terminology, where every element has been reduced to a moment of that totality – all identity is relational and all relations have a necessary character. Benveniste, for example, states with reference to Saussure’s principle of value: ‘To say that the values are “relative” means that they are relative to each other. Now,

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