The five arguments of Mouffe:

1. The first argument is that all forms of social practice take place against a background of historically specific discourses, which can be broadly defined as relational systems of signification. Whatever we say, think, or do is conditioned by a more or less sedimented discourse which is constantly modified and transformed by what we are saying, thinking, and doing. At an abstract level, discourse can be defined as a relational ensemble of signifying sequences that weaves together semantic aspects of language and pragmatic aspects of action. Within discourse, meaning is constructed either in terms of difference or equivalence (metonymical or metaphorical). In some situations, the logic of difference predominates, in others, the logic of equivalence prevails. Most often, meaning is constructed both through the assertion of difference and the articulation of chains of equivalence. There is no ultimate centre that is capable of invoking a totalizing discursive closure, but tendentially empty signifiers will tend to function as nodal points for the partial fixation of meaning. At a more concrete level, discourse can be analyzed as an ensemble of cognitive schemes, conceptual articulations, rhetorical strategies, pictures and images, symbolic actions (rituals), and structures (architectures), enunciative modalities, and narrative flows and rhythms. All these things should be analyzed both in terms of their ability to shape and reshape meaning and in terms of their ultimate failure to provide a homogenous space of representation.

2. The second argument is that discourse is constructed in and through hegemonic struggles that aim to establish a political and moral-intellectual leadership through the articulation of meaning and identity. This argument merely asserts that discourse is neither determined by structural pressures emanating from socioeconomic infrastructures nor a result of the dialectical unfolding of reason. Because of the ultimate undecidability of the

social world, discourse is a result of political decisions. We are not talking here about conscious decisions taken by some central decision makers on the basis of rational calculation, but rather about an endless series of de facto decisions, which result from a myriad of decentered strategic actions undertaken by political agents aiming to forge a hegemonic discourse. A discourse is forged and expanded by means of articulation, which is defined as a practice that establishes a relation among discursive elements that invokes a mutual modification of their identity. Articulations that manage to provide a credible principle upon which to read past, present, and future events, and capture people's hearts and minds, become hegemonic. Hegemonic practices of articulation that unify a discursive space around a particular set of nodal points always involve an element of ideological totalization (Laclau, 1996b). However, ideology can no longer be defined as a distorted representation of an objectively given social reality, since reality is always-already a discursive construction. However, ideology can still be defined in terms of distortion, not of how things really are, but of the undecidability of all social identity. As such, ideology constructs reality as a part of a totalizing horizon of meaning that denies the contingent, precarious, and paradoxical character of social identity. The construction of naturalizing and universalizing myths and imaginaries is a central part of the hegemonic drive towards ideological totalization.

3. The third argument is that the hegemonic articulation of meaning and identity is intrinsically linked to the construction of social antagonism, which involves the exclusion of a threatening Otherness that stabilizes the discursive system while, at the same time, preventing its ultimate closure. This argument concerns the construction of the limits and unity of a discursive system. Foucault convincingly demonstrated that the limits and unity of discourse cannot be constructed by reference to an inner essence, in terms of a particular theme, style, conceptual framework, etc. Alternatively, we have to look for something outside the discourse in order to account for its limits. If the outside is simply different from the discursive moments in the same way as these moments are different from ,each other, however, the outside will be reduced to one more difference within the

discursive system. So, what we are looking for is a constitutive outside which has no common measure with the discourse in question. Such an outside is constructed in and through social antagonism. Social antagonism involves the exclusion of a series of identities and meanings that are articulated as part of a chain of equivalence, which emphasize the 'sameness' of the excluded elements. As the chain of equivalence is extended to include still more elements, it becomes clear that the excluded elements can only have one thing in common: they pose a threat to the discursive system. Hence, social antagonism involves the construction of a threatening otherness that is incommensurable with the discursive system and therefore constructs its unity and limits. In this sense, the process of 'othering' helps to stabilize the discursive system. However, the price for this stabilization is the introduction of a radical other that threatens and problematizes the discursive system and prevents it from achieving a full closure. In a concrete analysis of discourse, social antagonism shows itself through the production of political frontiers, which often invoke a stereotyped picture of friends and enemies. However, the line separating the friendly inside from the threatening outside is not completely fixed. The struggle over what and who are included and excluded from the hegemonic discourse is a central part of politics. There are also political attempts to make antagonistic identities coexist within the same discursive space. Hence, the political construction of democratic 'rules of the game' makes it possible for political actors to agree on institutionalized norms about respect and responsiveness while disagreeing on the interpretation of such norms as well as on more substantial issues.

4. The fourth argument is that a stable hegemonic discourse become dislocated when it is confronted by new events that it cannot explain, represent, or in other ways domesticate. Most discourses are flexible and capable of integrating a lot of new events into their symbolic order. But all discourses are finite and they will eventually confront events that they fail to integrate. The failure to domesticate new events will disrupt the discursive system. This will open a terrain for hegemonic struggles about how to heal the rift in the social order.

There will be political struggles about how to define and solve the problem at hand. The political struggles lead to the articulation of a new hegemonic discourse, which is sustained through the construction of a new set of political frontiers. Dislocation shows itself through a structural or organic crisis in which there is a proliferation of floating signifiers. The hegemonic struggles that are made possible by the dislocation of the social order will aim to fix the floating signifiers by articulating them with a new set of nodal points. These will, for a large part, take the form of empty universals - in the sense of appeals to vaguely defined notions such as Revolution, Modernization, the Nation, or the People - that aim to signify the lack of a fully achieved community, which is revealed by the dislocation of the social order.

5. The final argument is that the dislocation of the discursive structure means that the subject always emerges as a split subject that might attempt to reconstruct a full identity through acts of identification. This argument is inspired by psychoanalysis and challenges the post-structuralist assertion that the subject can be reduced to an ensemble of subject positions, which are stamped upon the subject by the discursive structure in which it is located. When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure, or, as Louis Althusser phrased it: to a mere bearer of the structure. The idea that the subject simultaneously occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves. Here, the notion of dislocation provides a fruitful starting point. The recurrent dislocations of the discursive system mean that the subject cannot be conceived in terms of a collection of structurally given positions. The discursive structure is disrupted and this prevents it from fully determining the identity of the subject. This does not mean that we have to reintroduce an ahistorical subjectivity that is given outside the structure.

The subject is internal to the structure, but it has neither a complete structural identity nor a complete lack of structural identity. Rather it has a failed structural identity (Laclau, 1990). Because of dislocation, the subject emerges as a split subject, which is traumatized by its lack of fullness. The split subject might either disintegrate or try to recapture the illusion of a full identity by means of identifying itself with the promise of fullness offered by different political projects. Hence, a dislocated Russian party functionary might aim to reconstitute a full identity by identifying with the promise of Russian nationalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, or some religious movement. The split subject might identify with many different things at the same time. In this situation the hegemonic struggles will have to offer ways of articulating the different points of identification into a relatively coherent discourse. Social antagonism will play a crucial role for the attempt to unify dissimilar points of identification. The construction of a constitutive outside facilitates the displacement of responsibility for the split subject's lack onto an enemy, which is held responsible for all evil. The externalization of the subject's lack to an enemy is likely to fuel political action that will be driven by an illusionary promise: that the elimination of the other will remove the subject's original lack.

DT ESSAY :

The first concept that must be considered in the work of Laclau and Mouffe is that of discourse itself. For Laclau and Mouffe, a discourse is an attempt to fix a web of meanings within a particular domain. The constitution of a discourse involves the structuring of signifiers into certain meanings to the exclusion of other meanings. It is a reduction of possibilities, and thus can be seen as an exercise of power (Howarth & Stavrakakis, 2000). All other possible meanings excluded by a particular discourse constitute the field of discursivity. Thus: Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre (Laclau & Mouffe, [1985] 2001: 112). Since no discourse can fix a web of meanings completely or permanently, the field of discursivity makes possible the articulation of a multiplicity of competing discourses (Torfing, 1999). A signifier that is allocated a certain meaning in one discourse may be given another meaning in a different discourse, and since signs derive their meaning from their relation to one another, all other signs within the discourse will be configured differently as a result. Discourses attempt to fix webs of meaning through the constitution of nodal points. Nodal points organise the discourse around a central privileged signifier or reference point points de caption as Lacan (1977) termed them. They bind together a particular system of meanings or chain of signification, assigning meanings to other signifiers within that discourse. For example, in communist ideology and discourse, the signifier communism is a nodal point that binds together other pre-existing signifiers such as democracy, state, and freedom, rearticulating them into new meanings different from those used in competing discourses (iek, 1989, Howarth & Stavrakakis, 2000). Democracy acquires the meaning of real democracy as opposed to democracy based on class oppression, freedom is given an economic connotation, and the state acquires a new set of functions and roles. According to iek, a nodal point is not simply the richest word, the word in which is condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it quilts, *it+ is rather the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity (iek, 1989: 95). In and of itself, a nodal point possesses no density of meaning quite the opposite, it is, in ieks words, an empty signifier, a pure signifer without the signified (iek, 1989: 97). It only acquires meaning through its positioning relative to other signs. This positioning happens through articulation. Articulation is any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice, while a discourse is the structured totality resulting from this articulatory practice (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985: 105). An element in this sense is a sign within the discourse whose meaning has not yet been fixed. Through articulation, a discourse establishes a closure, a temporary halt to the fluctuations of meaning of elements. Signs that have had their meaning fixed by a discourse are called moments. This closure is, however, never permanent: the transition from the elements to the moments is never entirely fulfilled (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985: 110). Elements which are particularly open to different ascriptions of meaning are known as floating signifiers. Nodal points themselves can be thought of as floating signifiers, but, as Phillips and Jorgensen (2002: 28) explain, whereas the term nodal point refers Phillips and Jorgensen (2002) argue that the field of discursivity is too broad a concept for practical use, since no theoretical distinction is made between the exclusion of meaning from discourses directly in struggle with one another

and those that are not. For example, discourses of clinical medicine may be said to compete with discourses of alternative treatment in the terrain of health and illness; they do not, however, compete with discourses of football, though they may share certain signs. Phillips and Jorgensen advocate, therefore, the use of the term order of discourse, employed by Fairclough in a slightly different sense, to denote the limited range of discourses which struggle in the same terrain. This is a useful analytical distinction, though as Phillips and Jorgensen make clear, we must be wary of delimiting the order of discourse a priori to beginning a discursive analysis of texts. to a point of crystallisation within a specific discourse, the term floating signifier belongs to the ongoing struggle between different discourses to fix the meaning of signs. In the example they provide, the word body is a nodal point in the discourse of clinical medicine and a floating signifier in the struggle between the discourse of clinical medicine and the discourse of alternative treatment. The representation of discourse as a structuring of meaning within a particular terrain leads Laclau and Mouffe to their concept of hegemony, a concept introduced by Gramsci (1971), which has been taken up by many other researchers working within the field of discourse analysis (particularly CDA). Hegemony is, following Gramsci (1971), social consensus achieved without recourse to violence or coercion, and, like discursive closure, it is achieved through articulation. In Discourse Theory terms, we can say hegemony is the expansion of a discourse, or set of discourses, into a dominant horizon of social orientation and action by means of articulating unfixed elements into partially fixed moments in a context crisscrossed by antagonistic forces (Torfing, 1999: 101). Unlike Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe do not view society as a single field of hegemonic struggle. Hegemonic struggle takes place over and within many domains of social life, not only those of class. This opens up the concept to include struggles over a variety of social relations, such as those of gender. When discourses successfully become hegemonic, the social practices they structure can appear so natural that members of a society fail to see that they are the result of political hegemonic practices. Discourses then reach the level of common sense, in that their origins and intrinsic contingency are forgotten (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Deetz, 1992): Objectivity notwithstanding, however, no discourse is capable of completely hegemonising a field of discursivity, and thus the domination of a particular discourse is never complete or permanent. As Mouffe (2008: 4) puts it, every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices which attempt to disarticulate it in order to install another form of hegemony. Such counter-hegemonic practices may occur naturally through day-to-day communicative practices which challenge or transform existing discourses, or they may be instigated as a deliberate and strategic act by interest groups as an overt or covert struggle for discursive dominance (Grant et al, 1998: 7-8). When two or more antagonistic discourses compete for hegemony within a specific terrain, conflicting demands are made upon social identities, relationships and systems of knowledge and belief (Foucault, 1972). Antagonisms may be visible through the presence of elements that are articulated in different ways by opposing political projects. They may be resolved, albeit temporarily, through hegemonic interventions (Gramsci, 1971; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), concerted efforts to re-articulate discourses and achieve the dominance of one particular perspective, thus reconstituting unambiguity (Laclau, 1993). To do this, hegemonic projects will need to construct and stablise the nodal points that structure social orders by articulating elements i.e. floating signifiers into one unambiguous set of meanings (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).