Towards webs of equivalence and the political nomad in agonistic debate

Abstract

Abstract Discourse theorists often defend their discursive stance on ‘reality’ and the material with reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s quote that, while an “earthquake or the falling of a brick…exist externally to thought,” they cannot “constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence”. While fully endorsing this statement, we argue that it does not licence discourse theorists to consider discursive formations divorced from their material context, but obliges us to account for the constraints and affordances of the material conditions on the structuring of the discursive field itself. Drawing on previous work, we argue that material conditions may render discourse systems incommensurate, such that they cannot be articulated through chains of equivalence within a radically restructured field. We suggest as a way forward the concept of the nomadic politician continually traversing between equivalential systems in order to reconfigure and renegotiate key signifiers within the materially-constrained discursive fields of each.

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