Laclau and Mouffe: the impossibility of the state

The ‘discourse theory’ associated with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) represents a significant attempt to take the perspective we have discussed and apply it to political theory and analysis.

For instance, in developed economies, such as the US or the UK, we find the ‘articulation’ of capitalist production and exchange with liberal individualism and the representative form of democracy. This is not simply a coincidental alignment of three distinct phenomena (a mode of production, an ideology of personhood or identity and a political system). The theory of ‘articulation’ argues that when combined such phenomena are fundamentally modified. There is no permanent ‘essence’ to capitalism, individualism or representative democracy. Their articulation creates a distinct form: capitalist liberal democracy. It is important, then, not only to study what we imagine to be ‘the things in themselves’ but the relations between them.

Laclau and Mouffe employ Gramsci’s term ‘hegemony’ to define this process of fixing and associating elements and identities, imposing a dominant meaning on social practices in ways that limit the range of possibilities within a given structure (see Gramsci 1971). Crucially, discourse theory and analysis draws attention to what is suppressed or repressed, excluded or constituted as ‘other’ or as an enemy, in the attempt to sustain the appearance of unity. More recently, Laclau has come to understand the process of trying to attain hegemony as one in which a range of subjective identities are related to each other such that they appear to be joined to some kind of universal category (see Laclau 1996). For instance, when President George W. Bush declared ‘war on terror’, shaped policy on the basis of an ‘axis of evil’, and sought to constitute a ‘coalition of the willing’ where ‘you are either for us or against us’ states were constituted in terms of a very specific set of identities and relationships. On the one side are ‘friends’ who are for freedom and democracy, and who, despite their differences, are united under these ‘universal’ categories; on the other the ‘enemies’ associated with the universal categories of dictatorship and evil. On each side elements are shown to have ‘relations of equivalence’ all partaking of some more universal element in terms of which they are equivalent. This constitutes a political logic that orders the inter-state field in a particular and limited way and from that stark arrange­ment demands certain political actions as necessary.

Laclau and Mouffe do not have a theory of the state as a discrete or unified phenomenon. They reject attempts to theorize society from the perspective of one specific ‘region’ or centre such as the state. As Torfing (1991) indicates, the state should be conceived of as a complex ensemble of various discursively formed rationalities: law, sovereignty, various claims to ‘expertise’, information and knowledge, forms of, or skills in, communi­cation as well as institutions, departments, bureaucracies, ritualised forms of legitimation, organisations of coercion and control. Political analysis can look at how these are combined and recombined asking what effects they have upon each other. This might enable us to describe, for different states, the varying ways in which the ‘centre’ is organized. For instance, in some states the systems of law, government and military may be articulated directly with ‘the people’ whose interests they are held to express. This is a formation we call ‘totalitarian’ and contrast to the liberal democratic regime in which, increasingly, there is no ‘people’, only independent individuals who are not directly articulated to the government. Fascist parties seek to articulate the people with government and do so by defining the people in opposition to other kinds of people. Other kinds of state involve an articu­lation with religion, or God, and the ‘people’ may be conceived of in religious terms leading to a different series of relations with the law or the military. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, the state is organized according to a principle of divine sovereignty. Society, law, politics and military are articulated under the sign of this one overarching principle of unity.

Laclau and Mouffe’s is a macro-level theory concerned to identify and explore certain high-level ‘logics’ that shape social formations. For them there is no essential unifying element of statehood. The state has an evolving and unpredictable character, its policies, ministries, bureaucracies and personnel are always facing the possibility of conflict and potential disaggregation.

Weakness in the capacity to analyse particular institutions is to be expected from such a general and abstract theory as this. Laclau and Mouffe are concerned to identify general ‘logics’ rather than make specific pronounce­ments. They draw attention to the way in which the state is itself politically contested, rather than a definitive precondition of political activity. That said, such ‘post-Marxist’ theories typically attend to various types of hege­monic activity found within specific fields and take for granted that the nation-state is the terrain of hegemonic struggle (see Nash 2002). It is one thing to use such a theory to examine a specific state and a specific society or social formation. But states also exist in relation to other states. Can a poststructuralist focus on the multiple rationalities that constitute state­hood tell us anything about politics at the international level?