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The Rhetoric of Skinner and Laclau: Critical Approaches to Politics
Emilia Palonen, PhD
University of Helsinki
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Acknowledgements:
Earlier versions of this paper have been discussed at the University of Essex and Finnish Doctoral School of Politics and International Relations, in 2004, and at the seminar on 'Concepts, Discourse and Rhetoric' at the Collegium Budapest and the 'Politics and Rhetoric' workshop at Manchester Workshops on Political Theory, in September 2006. I would like to thank all my colleagues for their comments on the earlier versions of this paper, in particular Mercedes Barros, Alan Finlayson, James Martin, Aletta Norval, Kari Palonen and Márton Szabó. I also must thank Alejandro Groppo for his course on rhetoric at the Essex Summer School in Discourse Theory in 2004.
The Rhetoric of Skinner and Laclau: Critical Approaches to Politics
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Submitted to: Contemporary Political Theory
Word count: 6995
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between the work of two intriguing but relatively understudied contemporary political thinkers: Ernesto Laclau and Quentin Skinner. Laclau, coming from a leftist Gramscian and Althusserian tradition, has been a major influence upon post-Marxist thought and the 'theory of hegemony'. His approach has been taken up by the 'Essex school' of ideology and discourse analysis, which draws on continental thought from Derrida to Lacan. Skinner, a contemporary of Laclau’s and a central figure within the nearby 'Cambridge school' of political thought, has reappropriated and redefined Machiavelli and Hobbes as political thinkers and generally promoted republican political thought, political rhetoric and conceptual history. The two thinkers are here located in the same post-Nietzschean tradition of political rhetoric, pointing out the similarities and compatibility between their approaches. Furthermore, looking at the rhetorical tropes they use and base their political thought upon, I will discuss the applicability of their theories in the context of empirical political praxis. This will reveal some of the crucial insights the authors offer for critical approaches to politics.
Keywords: Ernesto Laclau, Quentin Skinner, rhetoric, discourse, political theory, social forums.
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The linguistic turn in the study of politics has drawn greater attention to the workings of discourses and rhetoric (e.g. Norval 2000, Finlayson 2004). Writing on renaissance thought, Quentin Skinner has been influential in renewing critical attention to rhetorical traditions of politics – for him rhetoric has offered the way to see how things could, in fact, have turned out differently, be otherwise. He is well known for his work on early modern political philosophy, starting from the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, his work on Hobbes (1996) and Machiavelli (1981), and the concept of Liberty (1998).[1] Ernesto Laclau, developing his 'discourse theory', has shifted his emphasis from Derridian and Lacanian thought towards rhetoric – as another reiteration of his theory of hegemony (Laclau 2005). He and Chantal Mouffe authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), shaking up Western Marxism and setting an agenda for new social movements.[2] He has subsequently developed his theory in the light of the changes in South Africa and Eastern Europe in New Reflections of the Revolutions of Our Time (1990) and Emancipation(s) (1996), before turning his attention to populism in his most recent work On Populist Reason (2005).
The attempt to bring these thinkers’ work together may appear to yield an odd combination, setting the work of a post-Marxist political theorist of Argentinean origin whose focus has been upon social movements and revolutions alongside that of a British historian of political thought working on liberalism and republicanism.[3] As with any repetition and combination, this will involve a rearticulation – even to the extent that it may appear to contradict common readings of the authors’ aims. The more radical move, in the case of Laclau, is the de-universalisation of catachresis and the category of hegemony. In the case of Skinner, it means making a connection from paradiastole to catachresis and applying it to political fora beyond the conventional republican tradition.
In this, paper, rhetoric is seen as both rhetoricity and tropology rather than as mere parole, speech, writing or even symbols. This enables one to see how forms of thought and political moves being employed in the articulation of ideas. Rhetoric provides a way to understand political moves or processes. The tropes one thinks with matter. One can recognize the crux of the thought of the author by pondering on the trope he or she uses. Furthermore, each trope propose different the forms of political action. Crucially, both Skinner and Laclau have singled out their favourite tropes. Skinner is the theorist of paradiastole, i.e. the ‘crossing of the floor’ or a redescriptive political change, achieved by changing the normative content of a concept. Laclau is a theorist of catachresis, i.e. the ‘naming the unnameable’ or 'giving a name to something that did not already have a name', which may imply the transformation of the discursive field (field of relations and identifications) through an emergence of unity. The first part of this paper links the thought of the two authors, through their writings on rhetoric. The second part analyses the two tropes and discuss the differences and similarities in Laclau and Skinner’s thought, and their approach to rhetoric as political theory. The third part, contesting some preconceptions, discusses briefly the two tropes as they relate to two fora of politics: the parliament and the social forum.
Ultimately, the paper suggests that paradiastole and catachresis are complimentary in politics. Perhaps in a Skinnerian vain and as a response to Laclau’s definitions of catachresis, affording particularity to a trope rather than stressing its universality improves our understanding of what is really happening in political action and/as redescription. Crucially, as the discussion shows, paradiastole is an internal moment of catachresis and can be catachrestical, and yet also a political logic separate from catachresis.
Post-Nietzschean political thought
Crucially, both authors come from the Nietzschean tradition of rhetoric, emphasized in their anti-positivism and anti-essentialism. Here, the discovery of creative subjectivity and the realisation of the relativity of 'truths' is vital. Nietzsche (1974, 180) writes:
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after a long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions…
And continues later:
Only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphors, only by the congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only by the fact that man forgets himself as a subject, and what is more as an artistically creating subject: only by all this does he live with some repose, safety and consequence. (84)
To answer the question “why rhetoric?” for the two authors, I want to first draw attention to the main similarities between Laclau and Skinner's thought within the Nietzschean tradition, from which they derive a shared insistence upon contingency, the freedom and limits of language, performativity and relationality. Skinner (1999, 70) points out how Nietzsche was describing the method of paradiastolic redescription in his Genealogy of Morals, and its well known passage on how 'ideals are being fabricated'. Although neither of the authors started their careers as 'Nietzscheans', this is where their work can be placed. It is the first moment of combination in my paper.
Reading Laclau and Skinner's texts on rhetoric, one of the main differences between the two authors and their approach to rhetoric is that Laclau tends to emphasize the idea of rhetoric as tropology (the study of tropes, figures of thought, models of language) whereas Skinner is more interested in the performative, persuasive aspect of rhetoric. Laclau seeks to form a parallel between his theory of hegemony and the trope of catachresis, which can be seen as emphasising the form of hegemony as a constellation over its character as a process. Indeed, in his latest work, On Populist Reason (2005), Laclau emphasizes the performativity of language – and the process of naming. For Skinner the crucial work on rhetoric is Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), although perhaps the most tangibly the trope that under focus in this paper paradiastole becomes through in his the work on Machiavelli (1981). Both operate with historical examples, Skinner with intellectual history and Laclau with a collage of historical examples from political struggles.
Contingency and language
Rhetoric enables us to see the ultimate contingency of things and the power of articulation. Insisting on contingency, both Laclau (1985, 1990) and Skinner's (2002) work have rebelled against their respective intellectual traditions: Marxist and structuralist political thought and history of ideas. Terms are not necessarily tied to meanings. Concepts and discursive constructions are potentially open and they change, they argue. For Laclau there are no a priori political agents, such as 'class'. Both authors emphasize a concept of the political that focuses on articulation as a source of political changes and tool of political action. What is at stake is the process of fixing and unfixing.
The persistence of contingency, even in moments of fixity, is crucial to understanding social phenomena. For example, 'society' for Laclau (1988) cannot exist in an exhaustive form or as a 'rational and intelligible object' of enquiry. The society can only exist as an open structure: 'The only democratic society is one which permanently shows the contingency of its own foundations - in our terms, permanently keeps open the gap between the ethical moment and the normative order.' (2000, 86) The emphasis on the contingency of foundations and the impossibility of a fixed societal order is aligned with the argument Skinner makes throughout his work, especially with the concept of liberty in its contexts. The gap between normative descriptions and the world is precisely what he stresses when writing about normative evaluative concepts (2002a, I, 182). To name this commonality, both Skinner (2002b, 51-53) and Laclau take up an anti-foundationalist position.
The above implies that ultimately things are unfixed and this is a source of politics and freedom. The rhetoric approach reveals that language, while structuring thought, is also contingent: the fixations are temporary. 'Language, like other forms of social power, is of course a constraint, and it shapes us all', argues Skinner (2002a, I, 7), and continues:
however, language is also a resource, and we can use it to shape our world. […] We are of course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But those practices owe their dominance in part to the power of our normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin those practices. We may be freer than we sometimes suppose.
Laclau (2005, 109) also points to this emancipatory quality in language. Language not only forms a limit to contingency but also is limited by its own contingency. The method for contesting the limits for both Skinner and Laclau is rhetoric.
Laclau (1988, 6) sees politics as a way to articulate fixity but argues that hegemonic articulations are in turn limited by the necessary unfixity of language and social relations. Skinner (2002a, I, 6) argues for the possibility to escape fixity in articulation, in the introduction to his methodological writings, which I have focused on in this piece.
This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.
This indicates a process between structures and action – freedom and limits. It also implies that the difference between Laclau and Skinner lies in the fact that Laclau is more interested in the fixing of a new hegemonal account, while Skinner focuses on the dissolution of such fixity. Ultimately, if politics is seen as a cycle between fixing and unfixing, as the present author maintains, Laclau and Skinner are writing about two sides of the same coin.
The Artistically Creative Subject
As the Skinner quotes above indicate, to emphasize rhetoric means emphasizing performativity over fixed definitions. A similar emphasis upon performativity is present in Laclau's (2005, 97) recent work:
A discussion of whether a just society will be brought about by a fascist or by a socialist order does not proceed as a logical deduction starting from a concept of 'justice' accepted by two sides, but through a radical investment whose discursive steps are not logico-conceptual connections but attributive-performative ones.
The idea of rhetoric as a performance that has structural effects comes to the fore clearly in Skinner's work, with its focus on the role of orators and the processes of oration as accounting for change through articulation. The orators are being subjected to the constraints of language and at the same time they are Nietzschean 'artistically creating subjects'. Skinner (2002a, I, 7, 182) clearly emphasizes agency over structure and talks about rhetorical redescription emphasizing the role of the subject, the 'innovating ideologist' in the process. His view of rhetoric is centred around redescriptions by orators, which question our existing conceptions of morality and reorganize the normative-ideological terrain through the redescription of virtues into vices and vice versa.
Given his poststructuralist background, Laclau hesitates to mention agency, and the notion of subjectivity which would have value in oratorial agency is often left behind structures. Yet, these structures are contingent, the subject positions that can be adopted within the structures are pluralistic and multiple and, thus, subjectivity is not singular and predetermined (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The latent openness of the society gives room for different political formations to emerge. Laclau (2000, 78) writes about 'the social organized as a rhetorical space […] because [… it] unduly restricts the tropoi which could be constitutive of social identities.' Following Derrida, he argues that decisions are taken on an 'undecidable terrain', which finally for him makes space for the subject who is not merely a prisoner of the structures (78, 83). Most crucially it opens space for the possibility of change and innovation as articulation. Laclau (and Mouffe, 1985, 134-5) avoids any straight forward answers to his own question 'who is the articulating subject?' but argues that subjects have not been permanently fixed into a system.While elements are distinct from the plural, contingent and overlapping subject positions in discursive formations, they do not inherently belong to discourses but must be articulated. Laclau, drawing on the Gramscian tradition, has retained an appreciation for orators, not mere processes or structures, seizing the moment from Machiavelli to Lenin. This is hardly distinct from Skinner's (2002a) praise for 'innovative ideologists'.
Furthermore, Skinner, who has been seen as the theorist of agency, has revised his own theories taking on board the deconstructionist critique regarding the control the author is assumed to have over the text. 'I have become much more attentive to the genres to which the texts are couched, and the nature of the linguistic codes and conventions embodied in them' (2002b, 50) Skinner argues, stressing that to see these he had focused on classical rhetoric. Skinner, like Laclau, is a post-structuralist, in terms of going against the grain of the previous structuralist generation and realising the interplay of contingency and structures. Rather than simply focusing on the agent he is interested in the articulation of changes in a particular context. The analysis goes beyond a single, momentary speech act, to look at changes in the normative-ideological order. These are also the object of analysis for Laclau, who emphasizes 'the social' more than Skinner.
The element of persuasion in rhetoric is important for Skinner because it implies the role of an orator, the innovative ideologist in the process of political change (see also Palonen K, 2003), but also a change in the 'social world' or the 'social imaginary' (2002a, 102). Laclau (2004) strongly objects to the idea of rhetoric as (mere) persuasion, because for him rhetoric is tropology, which offers ontological logics of politics structuring of the social. In his recent work, Laclau (2005) advances an argument on the performative aspect of rhetoric, politics and language. Nevertheless, the two aspects of rhetoric – persuation and tropology – are not as distinct as one might think.