Page 157 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 145

It is here that one must locate the articulating principle. But I want to think
that connection, not as one necessarily given in socio-economic structures
or positions, but precisely as the result of an articulation.
Question: Given your obviously close connection with theories of
discourse and discursive analysis—your theory of articulation seems to
suggest that the elements of a social formation be thought of as operating
like a language—I wonder how far you are willing to go into a kind of
poststructuralist position that would argue that society itself can be
analysed as a series of competing languages. I’m thinking here particularly
of Laclau and Mouffe’s latest book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and
I wonder how you would make out the similarities and differences between
their position and your own.
SH: You are absolutely right in saying that I’ve gone a very long way
along the route of rethinking practices as functioning discursively—i.e., like
languages. That metaphor has been, I think, enormously generative for me
and has powerfully penetrated my thinking. If I had to put my finger on the
one thing which constitutes the theoretical revolution of our time, I think it
lies in that metaphor—it’s gone in a thousand different directions but it has
also reorganized our theoretical universe. It is not only the discovery of the
importance of the discursive, and the utility of a particular kind of
analysis; it is also the metaphorically generated capacity to reconceptualize
other kinds of practices as operating, in some important ways, like a
language. I think, for example, it’s possible to get a long way by talking
about what is sometimes called the ‘economic’ as operating discursively.
The discursive perspective has also brought into play a very important
insight, namely, the whole dimension of subjectivity, particularly in the
ideological domain. I think marxism and structuralism had already made a
very significant break with the traditional notion of the empirical
sociological subject. And probably, they had to go by way of what has been
called the theory of ‘a history without subjects’, a language with no
speakers. But that was manifestly only a stopping point on the route to
something else. It’s just not possible to make history without subjects in
quite that absolute way. The discursive perspective has required us to think
about reintroducing, reintegrating the subjective dimension in a non-
holistic, non-unitary way. From this point of view, one cannot ignore
Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work on the constitution of political subjects
and their deconstruction of the notion that political subjectivities do flow
from the integrated ego, which is also the integrated speaker, the stable
subject of enunciation. The discursive metaphor is thus extraordinarily rich
and has massive political consequences. For instance, it enabled cultural
theorists to realize that what we call ‘the self’ is constituted out of and by
difference, and remains contradictory, and that cultural forms are,
similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or ‘sutured’.