In this chapter, I will engage with the Essex School of discourse theory in order to spell out my ontological and epistemological assumptions and present the concepts that will guide my analysis. Some of the notions I will use are not very familiar in IR, for instance affect, logics or fantasy. Others, notably discourse, are used heavily, yet in different, often contradictory ways. Discourse can refer to anything from a mere conversation to a relational system of words, practices and objects (for overviews see Fairclough 1992, Howarth 2000). Such diversity invites confusions and misunderstandings. Therefore, and because of the importance of ontology and epistemology in my critique of the existing literatures, I will take the labour of presenting the argument in detail. At a time when there are few theoretical standards that would be shared or undisputed, thorough reflection on one’s own framework is crucial in the struggle to persuade readers, which, as I will show in this chapter, is the closest we can get to ‘truth’.
While borrowing heavily from the Essex tradition, above all from Ernesto Laclau, David Howarth, Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, my relationship to this body of work is creative and open-ended. I claim no originality regarding the broader arguments or the concepts I appropriate. But I am also not merely taking a few tools in order to apply them mechanically to my own field. Not only would that be naïve, but it is not even possible. Appropriation of a concept or argument is always an act of articulation, in which neither the concepts nor the phenomena explained through them remain unchanged. I choose the concepts which I deem useful for my own work, occasionally redeveloping and modifying them, linking them to an explanatory framework, translating them to the language of International Relations, and eventually using them to shed light on empirical phenomena. All these steps include the taking of contingent decisions. Therefore, my relationship to the Essex School is one of interpretation and creative appropriation; it provides me with the language that, hopefully, enables me to say something interesting and important.
The chapter proceeds in three steps. In the first section, I will focus on ontology and present the case for binding discourse and affect together. I will elaborate on what is meant by ‘ontology’ in the first place, following with the discussion of the key problems of discourse, power and subjectivity. The second section will focus on the concept of logics as a way of operationalising the ontological argument. After a general definition, I will move to the different logics – social, political and fantasmatic – and debate each of them in detail. The third section will address epistemological issues and situate logics as the basic units of
45 explanation within the broader post-positivist terrain. I will introduce the ‘retroductive circle’ as a distinct mode of inquiry, break it down into its different stages and relate it to the central issues of truth and critique.
Ontology: Discourse and affect together
Before I start carving out the basic concepts, it is necessary to ask what exactly is meant by ontology. The Essex School here builds upon Heidegger’s distinction between the ontical and the ontological. An ontical inquiry is one that deals with “particular types of objects and entities” that we focus on in our analyses – the “furniture of the world” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 11, 108, 160). The ontical level is thus that of the ‘actual reality’ of a particular discursive order. The question we ask is what is in the world for us to look at. The
ontological question, however, is a different one, it digs deeper and asks for the conditions of possibility, the “categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 108, Laclau 2000a: xi). The ontological question thus deals with the principles upon which discourses – including subjects, objects and practices – are constituted as such, what holds them together and what penetrates and disrupts them. As opposed to pure philosophy, social research of course deals with ontical phenomena, such as foreign policy of a nation-state in this dissertation. The trick is not to discard the ontical level, but to construct concepts which will be able to travel between both dimensions of inquiry. While looking at the behaviour of particular subjects or the structuring of specific discourses, we should also take into account the preconditions of their very constitution.
The starting point for a general ontological reflection, which covers the first part of this section, is the assumption that “any social whole results from an indissociable articulation between signifying and affective dimensions” (Laclau 2005: 111). This version of discourse theory thus builds not only on the linguistic turn, but also on the preoccupation with affects, passions, desires and emotions that has recently found its way both into poststructuralist theory and into IR (for reviews see Howarth 2013: 164-182, Bleiker and Hutchison 2014). In order to account for the interplay of the discursive and the affective, Glynos and Howarth bring the ‘post-Saussurian ontology of signification’ (discursive dimension) and the ‘Lacanian ontology of enjoyment’ (affective dimension) together into an ontology of lack, built around the central concept of radical contingency (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 14, 107- 9). While contingency points to the plain assertion that any “organizing system represents only one way of organizing social relations amongst others” (ibid.: 104), or, put bluntly, that things can be different, it is the radical that needs to be highlighted. It suggests that things can always be different, that non-necessity and indeterminacy are all-pervasive features of
46 social relations (ibid.: 109). The world ‘as it is’ is only one possible way it could be, since it is nothing but a result of previous articulations. Both the discursively constructed ‘reality’ and the equally constituted subjects are marked by this contingency. They are structurally incomplete; a lack – of a determining principle, of a centre, of a full and stable identity – is inscribed into their very core. The other side of this lack is the excess of all other possibilities that remains excluded from it.
How can we conceptualise this curious and abstract dialectics between lack and excess? Let me start from the basic argument of discursive poststructuralists that our social life is lived strictly within the symbolic order of discourse, that is within a meaningful system of relations into which we are born and socialised and which provides for our identities. This notion of discourse introduces a radically constructionist and social ontology and rejects any sort of essentialism and individualism. However, it also poses the problem of the limits of symbolisation, of that which exceeds the discursive. Think about the mundane sensory experiences of everyday life. How does it feel to cut yourself accidentally, to see your team score a goal, to mourn a dead friend? Of course, many answers are available, but they are all essentially foreign. Signifiers such as ‘painful’, ‘happy’ and ‘sad’, on which we try to hook the experience, do not belong to us; they are features of language and discourse which precedes us. Experience exceeds what can be symbolised in discourse (Stavrakakis 2007). This excess can never be fully domesticated and thus always threatens and subverts discursive order, but also makes it possible as it contains the potential for new articulations. Lacan had a name for this unfathomable excessive dimension: the real. In opposition to the discursively constructed ‘reality’ (what Lacan calls the symbolic), the real is defined negatively as “the unsymbolizable part of experience” (Stavrakakis 2007: 6), as “what does not fit into the symbolic, what escapes the logic of the signifier” (Fulka 2008: 143). The effects of the real are ambiguous: the real can both disrupt a discourse as well as support and fortify it (Žižek 1991: 29). This helps us to differentiate between two modalities of the real (Stavrakakis 2007: 71). On its negative side, the real is the disruptive limit of discourse, the lack or void that threatens and subverts discursive orders. It can be thought of as a ‘black hole’ (Žižek 1991: viii), something with a strong force whose presence can be determined only from its disruptive effects. In its positive modality, in contrast, the real manifests itself as what Laclau (following Freud) calls affect and what Lacan called enjoyment (jouissance);8
an intensive, amorphous and largely unconscious bodily intensity (Holland and Solomon 2014: 264), or a ‘quantum of libidinal energy’ that circulates through bodies (Glynos and
8 I am using both terms interchangeably, but, in line with the existing terminology in IR and social
sciences, I refer to affect more often. Importantly, enjoyment is not synonymous to pleasure, since its intense experience is painful at the same time. Enjoyment is thus best understood as unconscious “pleasure in displeasure, satisfaction in dissatisfaction” (Stavrakakis 2007: 78).
47 Stavrakakis 2008: 267). Affect/enjoyment is non-discursive itself, but it can be translated into discourse in a positive and substantive manner – for instance as emotions or fantasies.9
Discourse and affect are thus tightly related and overlapping. They are always present together and mutually contaminate one another; they are “distinct but interpenetrating fields” (Stavrakakis 2007: 96).10 Laclau (2004: 326) offers a helpful heuristic distinction between
the signifying form and the affective force of discourse.11 The relation between them is one
of mutual influencing, in which neither side is fully autonomous or privileged over the other (therefore, it is not a crude binary that would be easily vulnerable to the sort of deconstructionist critique I have deployed in the previous chapter). On the one hand, affect can certainly be seen as primary in the sense that it is the affective investment that holds discursive orders together in the first place. Without the body and affect as a key aspect of the corporeal, there would be no signification. On the other hand, however, affect is not purely physical, but rather ‘biocultural’ (Holland and Solomon 2014). Affective experiences are discursively conditioned, framed, provoked, and therefore also governed by discursive means. In other words, we are taught how to feel in a certain way in the process of socialisation. We make sense of the corporeal experience of affect by transforming it into emotions, such as ‘love’ and ‘anger’, which are already meaningful and can be dealt with. It is precisely this process of channelling the affective energy that explains the resonance and durability of discourses and identities. The successful ones are those that manage to rally affective support onto their signifying structures. The relation between discourse and affect is thus also necessarily a power relationship as it is constitutive of identities as central pillars of social orders. I will now expand on these arguments in more detail.
a) Discourse and power
In international studies, discourse is typically used either ambiguously, or in a fashion that equalises it with the linguistic dimension of social relations, broadly synonymous to “spoken or written language use” (Fairclough 1992: 62, see also Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams 2015). In contrast, Laclau and Mouffe extend the concept of discourse to comprise all aspects of ‘social reality’ as a relational play of signifying elements, be they words, actions or objects (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 107). In other words, social analysis is first of all analysis of relations and of the constitution of meaning on the level of the signifier. That is not by a reference to the ‘real thing’ of the signified (the sound ‘horse’ as somehow linked to
9 The difference between affects and emotions is that emotions are already woven into the fabric of
discourse, they are “the ‘feelings’ that signifiers ‘represent’ once we attach them to affects” (Solomon 2012: 919).
10 It is thus important not to slide towards essentialism and biological determinism in which discourse
would be reduced to mere effect of the bodily and the affective (Stavrakakis 2007: 95, Epstein 2015).
48 the creature of flesh and bones), but by its entanglement into a web of other signifiers (horse as ‘animal’ and ‘transport vehicle’ that is not a ‘dog’ and not a ‘car’ and so on). Signification, however, is not reduced to written and spoken language. Not only words, but also images, objects or practices can be analysed in terms of signification, since their identities and social meanings also result from their contingent articulations into a web of relations that constitute the broader discursive network.
Discourse is thus much more than language, it is a ‘structured totality’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 105), in which “language, actions and objects [are] intertwined” (Griggs and Howarth 2011: 219, Laclau 2005: 68). To counter the usual critique, this does not mean that the world is reducible to language and social research to textual analysis. Instead, it is a proposal to analyse the social as if reading a text: by examining the playful relations between different types of signifiers, the stability as well as ambiguity of the meanings produced and the power behind it. Once relations are at the heart of the analysis, the usual binaries between ‘words’ and ‘deeds’, or the ‘linguistic’ and the ‘material’ start to break down, because discursive orders are produced equally by what we say, what we do and the material context within which we live. To demonstrate this intertwining of language, actions and objects, Laclau and Mouffe (1990) use the Wittgensteinian example of two cooperating bricklayers. Rather than analyse the demand ‘pass me a brick’, the actual passing of the brick and the very materiality of the object separately, it makes much more sense to focus on the overall meaningful practice of building a wall to which all the three aspects contribute.
The concept of discourse thus captures different types of elements linked together in a contingent order. However, this also necessarily means that every order relies on exclusion. For signification to function (e.g. that we understand what ‘freedom’ means), there must be certain fixity in the relations between the elements of discourse. Some meanings thus always have to be excluded (e.g. the notion of ‘freedom’ as realised only within a unified
Volksgemeinschaft is excluded from a liberal democratic discourse). For this purpose, distinction needs to be drawn between particular discourses and the broader field of discursivity (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Discourses are always concrete, historically specific systems of relations and are constituted on the ontical level. In contrast, discursivity is an ontological category, capturing the general claim that “every object or any symbolic order is meaningful, that is, situated in a field of significant differences and similarities.” (Howarth 2010: 313) The field of discursivity is the theoretical horizon, highlighting that no discourse can ever succeed in exhausting all meaning within its closed system. As different options are always possible, every single discourse is inherently unstable, incomplete and vulnerable to the – possible or actual – competition of other discourses (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 113).
49 The unstable and exclusionary character of all discourses connects the discussion to the very core concept of political analysis: power. There is nothing necessary about the constitution of discourses. On the very contrary, they are contingent results of articulations, through which discourses are produced and reproduced. Articulations are always already embedded within discourses, but since these are incomplete – lacking – and unstable, each articulation is also always a decision that exercises a degree of freedom with both productive (re/creation of a discourse) and repressive effects (exclusion of other possibilities). Therefore, power and politics can be reconceptualised in terms of constructing relations between discursive elements, so that some subjectivities and policies are excluded, whereas others become possible and even ‘natural’. Such a notion of power heavily borrows from Foucault’s (1978, 1979), since it is decentred, intertwined with knowledge and representation, circulates through society and is productive of not only social relations, but also of the very subjectivities that engage in them.
Laclau’s thinking on power is condensed in the – notoriously ‘multifaceted’ (Howarth 2013: 199) – concept of hegemony, broadly defined as a strategic situation in which “a certain particularity […] assumes the role of an impossible universality” (Laclau 2005: 115). Particular meanings, relations, identities and political projects lose their partial and fragmentary character and impose themselves as universal, natural and necessary, while the contingent and political moment of their institution disappears. For Laclau, discursive relations thus oscillate between the dimensions of the social, in which discursive constructions are sedimented and taken for granted so that they “assume the form of a mere objective presence” (Laclau 1990: 34), and the political, in which orders are created, reproduced, challenged and subverted. This distinction is by no means strict and the border between the political and social is in fact political itself and constantly shifting (Laclau 1990: 35, Glynos and Howarth 2007: 117). However, the analytical differentiation allows me to separate two different dimension of hegemony: hegemony as a state of affairs and hegemony as a political process.
By the notion of hegemony as a state I refer to a situation, in which a discourse dominates the whole discursive field in particular historical, cultural or institutional contexts. Its particularity imposes itself as a ‘natural’ state of affairs, ‘common sense’ or Laclau’s ‘mere objective presence’ (Laclau 1990: 34). Mouffe’s use of hegemony is very close to the ‘static’ aspect, when she defines it as the “point of convergence – or rather mutual collapse – between objectivity and power” (2000: 99). Two important problems arise. First, how to conceptualise hegemonic states if discourses are inherently unstable and if, as Foucault (1978) put it, the exercise of power is always intertwined with practices of resistance? There are no perfect instances of wholly hegemonic discourses, but this does not hinder the utility
50 of the concept in relation to particular contexts. Hegemonic state is the ideal-typical pole on the one end of a sliding scale and the question is rather to what extent is a discourse hegemonic in a particular field. Second, what are the criteria to judge the extent to which a hegemonic state has been achieved? I take discourse as hegemonic if (1) it becomes materialised in broadly used practices, objects and institutions, and if (2) there is either lack of political contestation, or all arguments need to draw on the basic vocabulary of the discourse in order not to get marginalised (Hajer 1995: 60-61, Glynos and Howarth 2007: 14, Methmann and Rothe 2012: 325, Martilla 2013: 10-11).
Hegemony as a process, in contrast, refers to the articulatory practices whereby social orders are challenged or defended in political struggles. Hegemony is thus the political “operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification” (Laclau 2005: 70, emph. added). In processual terms, hegemony thus refers to the way how different political projects struggle over the imposition or preservation of hegemony as a state of affairs. Howarth (2013: 199-208) further splits this in two different modalities. First, hegemony is a practice of coalition-building, whereby different elements – signifiers, political demands, identities – are linked together into universalising hegemonic projects (‘hegemonising projects’ would probably be more accurate), which challenge the status quo and aspire for the imposition of a new hegemonic state. Second, hegemony also refers to the