Page 133 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JENNIFER DARYL SLACK 121

thereby absorb the contents of the discourse of dominated classes (162).
The link between articulation and the concept of hegemony is thus made
explicit. Laclau writes that

A class is hegemonic not so much to the extent that it is able to
impose a uniform conception of the world on the rest of society, but
to the extent that it can articulate different visions of the world in
such a way that their potential antagonism is neutralized. (161)

Consequently, in the concept of articulation, Laclau brings into focus a
non-reductionist view of class, the assertion of no-necessary
correspondence among practices and the elements of ideology, the critique
of common sense as contradictory ideological structures, and a commitment
to analysing hegemony as a process of articulating practices in discourse.
Articulation, thus articulated, provided a way for, indeed compelled,
cultural theorists to rethink the problem of determination. But in theorizing
the space by highlighting the role of the discursive in the process of
articulation, Laclau foregrounds a theoretical position that has an
interesting—even ironic—backgrounding effect on the very politics that
played such a crucial role in Laclau’s work to begin with. As Hall puts it,
what ‘matters’ in Laclau’s formulation is ‘the particular ways in which
these [ideological] elements are organized together within the logic of
different discourses’ (Hall, 1980c: 174). The effect of this move, as Hall
identifies it operating in Laclau and Mouffe’s later work, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985), is

to conceptualize all practices as nothing but discourses, and all
historical agents as discursively constituted subjectivities, to talk
about positionalities but never positions, and only to look at the way
concrete individuals can be interpellated in different subject
positionalities.
(Hall, 1986b:56)

If what is at issue is the operation of the discursive, it is easy to leave
behind any notion that anything exists outside of discourse. Struggle is
reduced to struggle in discourse, where ‘there is no reason why anything is
or isn’t potentially articulatable with anything’ and society becomes ‘a
totally open discursive field’ (Hall, 1986b:56).
Laclau’s turn from reduction, which provides a basis to articulate
relations in discourse, thus also provides a basis to posit a radical non-
correspondence among discourses and practices. In effect, Laclau’s no-
necessary correspondence could be and was easily used in service of
‘necessary non-correspondence’. Laclau and Laclau and Mouffe certainly
do not intend to leave behind politics, indeed to claim that would be