Page 132 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

120 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

to account for the existence of actual variations in the discourse of classes.
Simply put, not everyone believes what they are supposed to believe or acts
in a way they are supposed to act, regardless of their class belonging.
Laclau rejects the usual explanations that these aberrations are either
accidents or indicative of an as yet underdeveloped mode of
production (11–12) and argues instead to replace a simple determination
by the economic with a concept of articulation.
Laclau links this political rationale with an epistemological one and
renders his own genealogy of articulation. He argues that a concept of
articulation is embedded in the western philosophical tradition but that it
requires refiguring. Using the example of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in
which the prisoners in the cave incorrectly link the voices they hear with
the shadows on the wall, Laclau explains that

Common sense discourse, doxa, is presented as a system of
misleading articulations in which concepts do not appear linked by
inherent logical relations, but are bound together simply by
connotative or evocative links which custom and opinion have
established between them. (7)

Articulations are thus the ‘links between concepts’ (7), and Plato’s goal is
to disarticulate the (misleading) links and to re-articulate their true (or
necessary) links. Articulation is at this point then linked to and defined by
the rationalist paradigm.
Laclau amends what he takes as this western philosophical move with
the insistence that (a) there are no necessary links between concepts, a
move that renders all links essentially connotative, and that (b) concepts do
not necessarily have links with all others, a move that makes it impossible
to construct the totality of a system having begun with one concept, as one
could do in a Hegelian system (10). Consequently, the analysis of any
concrete situation or phenomenon entails the exploration of complex,
multiple, and theoretically abstract non-necessary links.
In his most influential argument, in the chapter ‘Towards a theory of
populism’, Laclau theorizes articulation in relation to political practice by
bringing into focus the process by which a dominant class exerts hegemony.
Although, according to Laclau, no discourse has an essential class
connotation, the meanings within discourse are always connotatively linked
to different class interests or characters. So, for example, the discourse on
nationalism can be linked to a feudal project of maintaining traditional
hierarchy and order; or it can be linked to a communist project accusing
capitalists of betraying a nationalist cause; or it can be linked to a
bourgeois project of appealing to unity in order to neutralize class conflict,
and so on (160). In any case, the class that achieves dominance is the class
that is able to articulate non-class contradictions into its own discourse and