Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

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”;

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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

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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

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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).