Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
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Saussurean linguistics
Laclau and Mouffe’s subversion of essentialist identity theory is based on Saussurean linguistic theory. For the authors, Saussure provides a radical ontology precisely because of his exclusively relational theory of value (Laclau 1990a:207). Saussure rejects the referential theory of language which suggests that objects are already given to us as coherent entities. According to the referential theory, humans merely assign a name to each object or idea; different language-using communities might choose different names, but the relationship of every community to the totality of objects is basically the same. Saussure holds that a linguistic sign unites a concept and a sound-image—a signified and a signifier—rather than a thing and a name (Saussure 1966:66). The relationship between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary. The first and rather banal implication of the arbitrariness of the sign is that one signifier could easily be replaced by another signifier for the same signified. “Sister” and “sœur” both function equally well as signifiers for the concept “sister”; T H E S U B V E R S I O N O F E S S E N T I A L I S M 85 the signified in itself does not in any way suggest which combination of sounds or written marks ought to be used as its signifier. Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the sign also implies that each language system “articulates” reality (1966:10). It is through language that the objects that are meaningful for us are constructed. Each language divides up, categorizes, and makes coherent the totality of objects that is used by its corresponding language- using community. We can only grasp objects insofar as we do so through the structures that are provided for us by language. The articulation of reality is arbitrary in the sense that nothing in extra-linguistic matter motivates this process (Saussure 1966:113). There is nothing in “nature,” for example, that determines where we should place a boundary between “green” and “blue,” or “hill” and “valley.” Language therefore not only constructs contingent linkages between the signifier and the signified, it also constructs the signifieds themselves in a process that is entirely independent of the extra-linguistic. When we move from one language to another, then, we are not merely substituting new labels for the same objects, we are, in a sense, leaving the totality of objects that is proper to the first language and entering that of the second. Although there is always some degree of overlap and translatability between these language-specific worlds, every language constructs its totality of objects in a distinct manner (Culler 1986:32–3). Where Derrida and other post-structuralists claim that there is “nothing outside the text,” they are referring explicitly to these Saussurean principles (Culler 1988:148; Johnson 1987:14). Laclau and Mouffe similarly contend that the social is coextensive with the discursive, and that the extra-discursive has no constitutive effect on the world as we know it (1985:105–14). None of these theorists is denying the mere existence of extra-discursive matter; this is not a return to Berkeley’s idealism. But extra-discursive matter is formless and therefore cannot be grasped by us; we only have access to the objects that are constructed for us through the mediating articulation work of language. Individual discourses can become objects for us. We can, for example, study a discourse or we can consider a discursive formation—an ensemble of discourses that are combined together in a given context—as an object as well. We must nevertheless grasp individual discourses and discursive formations through the frameworks that are provided by other discourses. The discursive is the totality of discourses taken as a whole. The discursive, then, is not one object among many, it is the theoretical horizon that constitutes the being of objects as such (Laclau 1990a:105; Laclau and Mouffe 1990:103–4). Indeed our very attempt to delimit the totality of possible meaningful objects for us by gesturing towards an extra-discursive sphere of utterly unthinkable matter is impossible, since we are necessarily using discourse to do so (Butler 1993:31). Even our conception of “nature” is itself discursively constructed in that our knowledge of natural phenomena is given to us through historically specific theoretical discourses (Kuhn 1962; Feyerabend 1993; Haraway 1991). Following Wittgenstein’s concept of the “language game,” Laclau and Mouffe include written documents, speech, ideas, concrete practices, rituals, institutions, and empirical T H E S U B V E R S I O N O F E S S E N T I A L I S M 86 objects (insofar as they are meaningful for us in a given context) within their conception of the discursive (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:108; Wittgenstein 1958). With the principle of arbitrariness, Saussure asserts that meaning is exclusively constituted through the relational differences that obtain within a language. In one of his famous examples, Saussure considers the meaning of the pieces in a chess game. The knight piece by itself means nothing to the chess player outside the game for its value as a chess piece is constituted solely within the game; “it becomes a real, concrete element only when endowed with value and wedded to it” (1966:110). The meaning of the chess piece depends on its position on the board in relation to the other pieces, and on the rules of the game as a whole (1966:88). If a piece were lost from a set, it could be replaced by an equivalent piece from another set, or even by a bit of wood or a piece of paper. The only thing that matters in these substitutions is that “the same value is attributed to it” (1966:110). In other words, the chess piece has no positive meaning when it is considered apart from the chess game. The fact that it is made of wood, plastic or paper is irrelevant to its value in the game itself. The linguistic sign, like the chess piece, has no positivity in isolation from the linguistic system, for its meaning is constructed exclusively in terms of the differences between itself and the other signs in that system. In language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. (Saussure 1966:120) This argument does not merely amount to the claim that linguistic signs are different from one another, in the sense that no two signs are exactly the same. It implies instead that if we took a sign and subtracted all of the effects that its relations with other signs have had on its meaning, it would be purely meaningless. Saussurean linguistic analysis, then, examines the sign as it is constituted exclusively through its differential relations with other signs in a linguistic system. Saussure privileges the synchronic analysis of language—the study of a linguistic system at a single moment in time—over diachronic analysis—the study of the evolution of that system over time. This privileging, however, does not imply that Saussure’s theory is ahistorical. Culler argues, to the contrary, that Saussure developed a profoundly historical theory of language. “If there were some essential or natural connection between the signifier and signified, then the sign would have an essential core which would be unaffected by time or at least would resist change” (1986:46). The arbitrariness of the sign also does not allow for individualistic voluntarism. A language is a system of social conventions that facilitates communication between individuals. Saussure compares language to a “social bond” and to a “storehouse filled by the members of a given community T H E S U B V E R S I O N O F E S S E N T I A L I S M 87 through their active use of speaking” (1966:13). Analysis of the linguistic acts of an individual apart from a language community can only provide an incomplete and artificial conception of that language: “For the realization of language, a community of speakers [masse parlante] is necessary” (1966:14, 77). Download 0.72 Mb. 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