Building illusory unity with Ernesto Laclau – Why ‘closure’ should not be a dirty word in planning theory

This article is directed against the critique that there is a normative defcit in theory of hegemony by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. It aims to show that this claim is ungrounded. The claim implicitly presumes that the normative foundation of the practical project of radical democratic needs to be located in the deconstructivist theory of hegemony itself. Drawing on Mouffes writings on democracy and pluralism, the article demonstrates that Mouffe is not sharing these premise. My purpose is to develop an alternative position which interprets the relation of the theory of hegemony and the practical approach of radical democracy as instrumental and pragmatic. Thereby, it can exhibit that Mouffe recourses to communitarian grounded ethico-political values. For the political implementation of these values, the theory of hegemony can offer some pragmatic implications and therefore should be understand as a useful tool for democratic practice.

Despite the fact that dispersion / heterogeneity is not thoroughly discussed in Laclau and Mouffe's earlier work on hegemony, it does indeed play a significant role. I would contend that hegemony theory is, from the outset, constructed in the particular way in which dispersion/heterogeneity is theorized. This paper attempts to demonstrate that although Laclau and Mouffe have constantly emphasized the ultimate impossibility of closure, their insistence on the necessity of antagonism and hegemonic formation has generated a seemingly inevitable effect: that dispersion/heterogeneity can only be perceived from the perspective of structure/system and deemed as its lack or deficiency. The first part of this paper discusses the notion of 'regularity of dispersion'. This will then be followed by an explication of categories of 'antagonism' and 'dislocation' and how they are related to Laclau's understanding of dispersion/heterogeneity. The third part focuses on the reformulation of the category of heterogeneity in Laclau's latest work, and will provide a preliminary reflection on its theoretical as well as political consequences.

The paper tries to shed light on the conceptual link between international crises like the one following September 11, 2001, the Asian financial crisis of 1997/1998, the end of the Cold War or major international conflicts, and processes of change in the international system. It argues that cultural structures rest on their continuous instantiation through social practices, thereby making them coterminous with process. Process is constituted by meaningful acts of social agents, and can thus only be grasped by analysing meaning. Meaning is transmitted by language. Meaningful language is never reducible to individual speakers; it is a social act. In the paper, I call this process discourse. Linking Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I will finally be able to show how hegemonic discourses serve as the nexus between crises and cultural structures and how they make cultural change possible. Der Artikel untersucht den theoretischen Zusammenhang zwischen internationalen Krisen wie der Asienkrise, dem Ende des Kalten Kriegs oder den Folgen des 11. September 2001 und Prozessen des kulturellen Wandels in der internationalen Politik. Das Ausgangsargument lautet, dass sich kulturelle Strukturen im politischen Prozess permanent neu bilden; Kultur wird durch den sozialen Interaktionsprozess konstituiert. Durch Sprache erzeugte Bedeutung verleiht dem Prozess seine sozialwissenschaftlich analysierbare Substanz. Sprache ist niemals als isolierter Akt, sondern immer als soziale Handlung zu verstehen. In dem Artikel wird dieser Zusammenhang mit dem Begriff des Diskurses beschrieben. Als Analyseraster werden Einsichten der Kritischen Diskursanalyse mit der Theorie der Hegemonie von Ernesto Laclau und Chantal Mouffe verbunden.

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology.

Prefiguring the counter-hegemony of open cooperativism: The case of Open Food Network

Orange Is the New Black self-consciously negotiates the politics of the gaze. It demonstrates how the women-in-prison genre contrives objects out of subjects, and it stages a looking back: women meet the gaze with a disdain that the audience is made to share. While it is initially a white, middle class protagonist who looks back, her privileged position is relinquished via a “Trojan horse” strategy that can be read through Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theories of hegemony and the empty signifier. In this collision of narrative structure and political strategy—challenged gaze and Trojan horse—lies a potential model for producing liberationist cinema.

In 2000 the leftist camp in Israel experienced a crisis of meaning and identity. This was the result of the failure of the 2000 Camp David Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The atmosphere that emerged amongst the Israeli left was one of despair and disillusion, a void of meaning. Recently, however, a new Zionist “national left” discourse emerged, which refutes the idea of peace and reconstructs the ideology of the Israeli left. This paper engages critically with this discourse by deploying a discourse analytical approach, as it draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony as well as semantic analysis, specifically the use of “semantic fields” and “semantic networks”. This paper looks at a variety of public texts, which are exemplary of the “national left” discourse in Israel.

Abordamos críticamente en este artículo el modo en el que el pensador norteamericano Michael Hardt, siguiendo los planteamientos del último Foucault, ha planteado el programa de una nueva militancia teórica a la altura de los tiempos biopolíticos. Asimismo, desde esta premisa, realizamos una comparación crítica con la lógica hegemónica del intelectual orgánico planteada por Antonio Gramsci en el siglo pasado y revisada en las últimas décadas por Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is traditionally understood as a militarised technology utilised in combat and counter-terror scenarios, most notably throughout the Global War on Terror. However, more recently, the UAV has undergone somewhat of a transformation in how its processes and rationalities are conceptualised, being more frequently understood as a technology and technique within humanitarian and assistive contexts. Yet this field, like the technology, is still an emergent one, and understandings of how the ‘humanitarian UAV’ is discursively constituted by a widened range of actors and rationalities is somewhat under- developed. This project seeks to examine and analyse the humanitarian UAV’s wide discursive field, the discursive meaning and logics that constitute the humanitarian UAV, and how the humanitarian UAV, through its attendant rationalities and actors, (re)constitutes and (re)produces distinct understandings of humanitarianism. In focusing on the humanitarian UAV’s wide and variegated discourse, the research draws upon the methodological framework of discourse analysis as pioneered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which does not narrowly privilege one form of data but instead de-privileges data as a whole and emphasises the importance in engaging with the broader discourse (here, of the humanitarian UAV) as it is articulated across multiple and dispersed nodal points that convey formations of meaning. This research firstly finds, through an examination of the UAV’s ‘ethical’ discursive constitution, that the UAV is increasingly legitimised as a humanitarian technology by distinct actors and bodies, and, although the meanings that their articulations carry are generally underpinned by different logics, rationalities and motivations, there is an overlap regarding certain neoliberal signifiers. The research also finds, through analysing the widely articulated notion ‘democratisation of technology’, that the humanitarian UAV (and humanitarianism more generally) is increasingly constituted by, and helps to reproduce and naturalise, neoliberal-capitalist rationalities and practices. The research finds that these rationalities also serve to negate certain –‘deepened’– understandings of ‘technological democratisation’ that are antagonistic to the logics of neoliberalism, signalling a partial closure of a number of avenues that seek to renegotiate hegemonic, and other entrenched, humanitarian, formations of power. The research also finds that, through humanitarianism’s discursive association with the biopolitical, the rationalities of neoliberalism are incorporated into a humanitarian-biopolitical nexus, facilitating corporatised forms of humanitarian governance, regulation and control. The ‘humanitarian UAV’ is thus established as that which is increasingly engaged in legitimised –though distinct– forms of ‘humanitarian’ practice via the neutralising and encompassing rationalities of neoliberal-capitalism, which further breaches and affects humanitarian practice and humanitarian populaces through its biopolitical lens. The research highlights that these rationalities, in combination with the application of the humanitarian UAV, co-constitutively sustain and reproduce their own processes and logics, thus incrementally transforming humanitarian space into humanitarian- neoliberal/corporatised-biopolitical (‘corporo-political’) arenas of control and regulation, underpinned by market concerns and the entrenching of dominant power arrangements. Overall, this research highlights how neoliberal and biopolitical rationalities increasingly constitute the humanitarian UAV, humanitarianism and humanitarian space. Furthermore, these rationalities are modified through this technology and its attendant logics and practices by virtue of its extended reach into the spaces constituted by bodies of heightened insecurity, precarity and crisis. It is understood, consequently, that this form of (humanitarian) technologisation highlights the reach, elasticity and imminence of neoliberal and biopolitical rationalities across increasingly diverse environments.

Ernesto Laclau (1939–2014) has been praised for producing challenging and multilayered theoretical work focusing mainly on three fields: discourse, hegemony, and populism. Laclau was professor of political theory in the Department of Government at the University of Essex until 2008, when he became an emeritus professor. At Essex he established and directed for many years the doctoral program in ideology and discourse analysis. From 1990 to 1997 he also served as director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His academic and political trajectory started in Argentina, where, initially as a history student and activist, he became associated with a series of leftist political formations from 1958 to 1968. In 1969, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he completed his studies and eventually started his academic career at the University of Essex. He is considered one of the founding figures of so-called post-Marxism, and his theoretical insights formed a school of thought often discussed as the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. Ernesto Laclau introduced, throughout his career—either alone or in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe—a complex and robust conceptual apparatus (comprising concepts like “articulation,” the “nodal point,” “dislocation,” the “empty signifier,” etc.) as a result of the radicalization and re-elaboration of the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony. The roots of his post-Marxism can be traced back to the Argentinean political landscape of the 1960s, as he felt the deep impact of Peronism—hence his lifelong interest in the illumination of populist politics. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, his most well-known work, coauthored with Chantal Mouffe, marks his outright passage to this terrain. The two authors radically opposed the reductionism and essentialism of orthodox Marxism, eventually turning their interest to the development of a comprehensive poststructuralist theory of discourse. The constitutive character of the discursive within a negative ontology of the limit forms the cornerstone of Laclau’s take on hegemony and the operation(s) of the political. Throughout his entire theoretical trajectory, he continued to develop and explore with great consistency this perspective through an ongoing dialogue with many traditions of thought: Marxism, semiology, deconstruction, post-analytical philosophy, the mystical tradition in theology, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and beyond.

Chantal Mouffe's political philosophy has been influential in a variety of domains, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies, law, art, literary criticism, and journalism studies. By combining Gramsci's focus on hegemony with post-structuralist theory she has developed—in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau—a sophisticated perspective on the political that intersects with all aspects of society, including the role and functioning of journalism. Her emphasis on the productive role of hegemony and conflict in society combined with her plea for a radical pluralist democracy, open a wide range of new perspectives for journalism studies. We present an overview of Mouffe's work set against a recent interview with her, in which we discuss, among other things, the potential diversity of contingent journalistic identities, ranging between being complicit with hegemonic socio-political projects, and safe-guarding or even deepening democratic institutions, including itself.

In this paper I explore some connections between two anti-essentialist approaches to democratic theory — Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's hegemonic approach and Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic approach. I argue that a central virtue of Laclau and Mouffe's hegemonic approach to democracy is that it clearly emphasizes the ethos of democracy, not simply the institutions of democracy. This shift transforms democracy, now conceived as radical democratic ethos, into a site of further research about how to make our understanding of its conditions more theoretically nuanced. In the main bulk of the paper, I explore how Slavoj Zizek's notion of an authentic political act seeks to develop this understanding.

Arguably one of the most important political theorists of our time, Ernesto Laclau has produced an extremely influential theoretical corpus involving a multitude of methodological and political implications. His contribution is mainly focused on three fields; discourse, hegemony, and populism, all of them highly connected with communication and mediation processes. In particular, Ernesto Laclau has introduced, throughout his career, a complex conceptual apparatus (comprising concepts like articulation, the nodal point, dislocation, the empty signifier, etc.) as a result of the radicalization and re-elaboration of the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony. According to this framework, elaborated for the first time in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe (first published in 1985), discourse is a social practice that performatively shapes the social world. Human reality is thus articulated through discourse and obtains its meaning precisely through this discursive mediation. All social practices are therefore understood as discursive ones. To the extent, however, that processes of articulation are never taking place in a vacuum and are bound to involve different or antagonistic political orientations, the field of discursivity comes to be seen as a field marked throughout by the primacy of the political. As a result, any hegemony will be contingent, partial, and temporary. In addition, Laclau is one of the most well known analysts of populism, to which he has (partly) devoted two of his books, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and On Populist Reason (2005). Populism, for Laclau, is designated, as expected, as discourse, as a specific way to articulate and communicate social demands as well as to form popular identities, to construct “the people.” His elaborations of populism are surely critical for the analysis of a pervasive political phenomenon of our era. All in all, the thought of Ernesto Laclau remains influential in the sphere of theory and political practice, and his theoretical arsenal will be an extremely helpful tool for academics and researchers of discourse theory and political communication.

Reviewed by: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and: The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?, and: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, and: Cosmopolitanism Christian Moraru Slavoj Zizek. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso, 2000. vi + 409 pp.; Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?. London and New York: Verso, 182 pp. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000; Cosmopolitanism. Guest eds., Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Public Culture 12..3 (Fall 2000). The Zizek industry is clearly a growth one as the three titles recently put out by Verso show. Two of them, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, came out in Wo Es War, a series edited by Zizek himself. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, the third one, features several interventions by Zizek and was published in the Phronesis series edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. All of them are part of a broader project of reinventing politics in the post-Cold War era—or the “global age”—in which, as Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge in the brief description of their series, old categories such as “Left” and “Right” seem, to many, fairly irrelevant. To paraphrase Zizek’s own marxian paraphrase in his “Introduction” to The Ticklish Subject, the specter of this age haunts Zizek and practically everybody else in these books, including, as one would expect, the contributors to Public Culture’s special topic issue, Cosmopolitanism. Regarding the latter, let me mention for now Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai” (627–651). For, it seems to me, the critic gives us here, as he has in Modernity at Large, a balanced account of globalization as driven by capital but also by cultural “particularities” that take advantage of capital flows. In other words, one thing that I admire in [End Page 205] Appadurai’s contribution—as well as in Mignolo’s “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”—is the effort to read the global, an essentially ambiguous, multifaceted phenomenon. Unlike Appadurai and despite the intricate argument developed throughout hundreds of dense pages, Zizek seems to already know what globalization is all about. This prescience is not truly surprising given the predictable paradigm within which he operates—a paradigm of predictability, too, in that, chances are, his mix of Lacanian and marxist analysis “uncovers” invariably the logic of Capital. The issues Zizek raises, though, are certainly pressing. I think he risks “misreading” them (unavoidably, perhaps? does he “know what he is doing”?) as to “identify” all over the place the long hand of Capital—an obsessing, absolute Signifier and Signified collapsed into both phenomenon and meaning thereof simultaneously. But he does a good job of underscoring the global urgency of the problems he brings to the fore. The Ticklish Subject’s objective, for instance, anachronistic as it may sound—“[t]his book thus endeavours to reassert the Cartesian subject” (2)—provides an opportunity to take not only on Hegel and Heidegger but also on Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, and Laclau, and it is through a critique of their work that Zizek distinguishes between a certain type of universality and “capitalist globalism.” What happens in Part II, however, is a “universalization” of capital—it turns out, American capital—as the agent of global society at the expense of any cultural considerations that might give us a more complicated and perhaps encouraging picture. As in the last section on the book, which takes to task risk theorists such as Beck and Giddens, this Part also develops, or rather assumes, not only a certain definition of globalism but also of postmodernism. This last one, along with “deconstruction,” “multiculturalism,” and its various struggles along gender, ethnicity, or race lines are seized as accomplices—and unwittingly so (“they do not know what they are doing”)—to globalist (read capital) expansion. Now, in his book, Zizek often refers to the unholy alliance between the extremities of the political spectrum...

O tema do presente estudo é a ideia de democracia e o lugar do conflito e do consenso nos modelos democráticos. Buscou-se confrontar os modelos democráticos deliberativos, propostos por John Rawls e Jürgen Habermas, ao modelo agonístico desenvolvido por Chantal Mouffe e Ernesto Laclau, para responder ao seguinte problema: os modelos de democracia deliberativa são sustentáveis, em face das críticas que lhes foram endereçadas por Chantal Mouffe e Ernesto Laclau na formulação de seu modelo agonístico? Para tanto, foi adotado o método de pesquisa hermenêutico, que propõe a compreensão do problema e de suas possíveis respostas, inserindo nesse processo a subjetividade do pesquisador. O objetivo foi o de responder se os modelos de democracia deliberativa se sustentam ou sucumbem às críticas agonísticas, o que enseja a opção por um dos dois modelos. Concluiu-se, após análise do tema, que a proposta democrática agonística falha em suas críticas às concepções deliberativas, por vários motivos, que iniciam com a incompreensão dessas teorias, passam por contradições internas à argumentação mesma e desembocam na possibilidade de um sistema democrático avesso às conquistas liberais.