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The Rhetoric of Skinner and Laclau: Critical Approaches to Politics
Emilia Palonen, PhD
University of Helsinki
Contact details:
Email: emiliapalonen@yahoo.co.uk
Tel: 00-358-40 5077198
18 October 2006 - 1 March 2007:
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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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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 postNietzschean 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.
-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 deuniversalisation 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
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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
2
(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
3
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
4
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.
Relationality
On the whole it seems to me that the "right perception" - which would mean the
adequate expression of an object in the subject - is a nonentity full of contradictions:
for between two utterly different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no
causality, no accuracy, no expression, but at the utmost the aesthetical relation.
(Nietzsche, 1974, 184)
The final aspect of Nietzschean rhetoric to be emphasized is the idea that relationality is not
causal. This idea is integral to both Skinner and Laclau’s methods for analysing social,
political and historical phenomena. They both oppose positivism and causality. As Skinner
(2002a, I, 4) argues 'even if we agree that motives function as causes, there can nevertheless
be non-causal explanations of action.' Furthermore, for Skinner, politico-normative concepts
have neighbourly relations with others which play a role in the forming and changing their
meanings. '[M]any vices are "neighbours" of the virtues.' (184)
Drawing on Freud, Laclau's answer to causalism is 'overdetermination' through relationality.
He writes, 'if ... the unity of the social agent is the result of a plurality of social demands
coming together through equivalential (metonymic) relations of contiguity, the contingent
moment of naming has an absolutely central role'. He adds illustratively: 'It is not only that
“nationalism” can be substituted by other terms in its role as an empty signifier, but also that
its own meaning will vary depending on the chain of equivalences associated with it.' (2005:
227) The tropes of metaphor, metonomy, paradiastole, simile, and catachresis are based on
the idea of conceptual similarity and difference, substitution and combination. They imply
relationality and demonstrate how things are (being) positioned on a discursive field. Political
changes imply changes to the relations between elements and their positioning.
Tropes of paradiastole and catachresis
Rhetorical figures imply moves. The two tropes, paradiastole and catachresis imply specific
political moves. As the focus of this article is on Skinner and Laclau. I will work with the
definitions given by the two authors for their respective favourite tropes, instead of discussing
the classical rhetoricians’ perspectives towards them.
Paradiastole: the trope of normative redescription
Paradiastole is a trope of rhetorical redescription. It implies a rhetorical move, where a term is
5
substituted by another term that is generally considered contradictory, implying a change in
the normative content or usage. It has typically been the trope for turning vices to virtues,
ruthlessness to courageousness etc., or vice versa. Skinner (2002a, I, 183) writes making
references to Quintilian:
[T]he essence of the technique may thus be said to consist of replacing a given
evaluative description with a rival term that serves to picture the action no less
plausibly, but serves at the same time to place it in a contrasting moral light. You seek
to persuade your audience to accept your new description, and thereby to adopt a new
attitude towards the action concerned.
As we can see, Skinner is concerned about the performative aspect of redescription.
Therefore, what is at stake is not a claim about the arbitrariness of meanings and their
replacements as such but one about people promoting and contesting specific conceptions.
Again writing with Quintilian he adds:
[T]his means that strictly speaking we ought not to describe the technique as a case of
substituting one word for another. 'For no one supposes that the words prodigality and
liberality mean the same thing; the difference is rather that one person calls something
prodigal which another thinks of as liberality.' What we are really claiming is that the
res - the actual behaviour - possesses a different moral character from that which our
dialectical opponents may have assigned to it. (183-4).
In the above quotations the idea of an 'us' and a 'them', the situation of an orator, and that of
the proponents and opponents of this act of persuasion become clear. Paradiastole implies a
crossing of the floor, where the normative – i.e. ideological – tone of something is changed
by its renaming, and thus adopted to another conceptual setting. Skinner continues: '[A]ll
attempts to legislate about the 'correct' use of normative terms must be regarded as equally
ideological in character. Whenever such terms are employed, their application will always
reflect a wish to impose a particular moral vision of the workings of the social world.' (182) In
other words, paradiastole is the political logic that imposes a change in what is considered
normative, in the field of ideology and discursivity, through the redescription of a specific
concept. This is the same terrain upon which Laclau studies political change.
Catachresis: naming the 'unnameable'
Laclau uses catachresis in (at least) three ways, between which he does not differentiate: as
hegemony; the naming of the missing or impossible fullness (2000, 78); and as giving a name
to 'an impossible object, i.e. an object which can only exist through the act of naming (2004,
306). For Laclau,
1) catachresis is the use of a figural term where there is no literal term that can replace
it (e.g. when we speak of a leg of a chair); 2) catachresis is not, strictly speaking, a
figure, for any kind of rhetorical figure sensu stricto can become catachrestical as far
as there is no corresponding literal term […]; 3) as any rhetorical figure adds some
meaning which could not be transmitted by the direct use of a literal term, all figures
are, to some extent catachrestical. (306)
First, catachresis is seen as the synonym for 'hegemony', the most central category of Laclau's
thought. Related to this, he sees it as the naming of the impossible object, such as society,
which also creates it. Finally, in a universalizing move, it can be seen 'a dimension of the
rhetoricity itself' (306), as Laclau argues following Patricia Parker (1990). It emphasizes the
gap in language between objects and terms.
6
By moulding together aspects of catachresis, however, Laclau obscures the understanding of
catachresis as a political logic – which he himself insists it to be. The obscuring is
symptomatic of a similar universalization of the category of hegemony in Laclau's writings,
which has been subject to critique (e.g. Butler et al., 2000). My comparison of Laclau’s use of
catachresis with Skinner's use of paradiastole in this paper aims at exposing the value of
regarding catachresis as a particular and not a general logic of politics. Thereby it can be
distinguished from paradiastole and the process of hegemony. I will demonstrate it below by
connecting the two as tropes of rhetoric.
Let me elaborate on catachresis as hegemony. For Laclau hegemony, in the Gramscian
tradition, is the catachretical 'naming of the unnameable' in two ways. On the one hand,
hegemony entails the idea of a particular element taking the representation of a whole. In this
process the whole constitutes itself: a whole is represented only through its component
elements. But this constitution is not expressive but grounding: 'the name, as a highly
cathected rallying point, does not express the unity of the group, but becomes its ground.'
(Laclau, 2005, 231) The naming of the unnameable refers to the contingent relationship
between the unifying 'empty signifier' and the elements of the totality and to the artificial way
in which the link has been made. To take again the example of the society or the social, for
Laclau (and Mouffe 1985, 96) 'the social itself has no essence'. Any meanings are assigned
through a process of articulation, partial fixing, where elements of the social only exist in
relation to each other through articulatory processes.
On the other hand, Laclau develops the idea of the '"hegemonic formation" as an articulated
totality of differences', shaped by its limits, something beyond the totality itself, 'the
transformation of limits to frontiers' (143). The frontiers are unnameable because they are not
fixed but in flux and have no necessary essence. Naming them is an attempt to constitute the
totality itself. Their disappearance (to add to Laclau's claim, here we could also talk about
forgetting, unnaming) would mean the dissolution of the totality as a political unit. (144)
Laclau has universalized the logic of hegemony to account for infinite social and political
formations. This logic is, for Laclau (and Butler 2004, 334), the logic of politics. But is
catachresis the logic of politics?
Distinction and Combination: the specificity of the two tropes
Having made the connection between Laclau and Skinner’s approaches to the study of
rhetoric through their shared appreciation for the importance of contingency, performativity
and relationality, the last part of this paper studies the differences and similarities between
catachresis and paradiastole in more detail. These two political logics can be combined both
in their theoretical form and in practice. Studying them together, yet with a view to the
differences, gives us a more in-depth view of politics than the simple assumption that any of
them is the trope of politics. The first part explores their similarity by asking whether
paradiastole is in fact catachresis, as Laclau would claim. The second part shows how they
work together as interrelated but still separate logics. The aim is to find out the relationship
between these two terms.
Paradiastole as catachresis?
Is paradiastole reducible to the trope of catachresis, as Laclau (2004, 306) claims – arguing
that all tropes can be catachrestical? Skinner (2002a, III, 91) quotes Quintilian making a
distinction between paradiastole and catachresis:
7
'when an act of temerity is called courage, or when luxury is called liberality, some
writers want to say that these are instances of catachresis', as a result they treat the
device as one of the tropes. But [Quintilian] explicitly adds that he dissents from this
judgement, since it is only proper to speak of catachresis when we adapt a
neighbouring term to describe something for which no term exists at all.
Instead of two neighbouring terms catachresis implies a term and the lack of a term. But how
can we discuss neighbourliness of terms in a situation where only one term exists? The sense
of neighbourliness emphasizes a similarity or closeness of terms and objects – the logic of
difference (or combination) for Laclau. Paradiastole also plays with difference and similarity:
as the trope of renaming it both brings things together and separates them from each other, for
instance courageousness from temerity and patriotism from nationalism.
Paradiastole, which signals a change in the normative content of a term, is about renaming
something already perceived as existing – in a normative and discursive order – with a name
that derives from a different discursive camps or has different normative connotations.
Therefore it is renaming something that already has a name with something which has
already been assigned different normative content. By contrast, catachresis is the operative
trope in situations where no name would have pre-existed. Nevertheless, Laclau would argue
that paradiastole is catachrestical to the extent that the relationship between names and objects
is not fixed, or names do not inherently belong to objects, and that renaming always brings in
something new: a paradiastolic process would cause a new constellation, enough changes in
the object to be named to make it 'new'.
Beyond generalisations, there are two ways of relating paradiastole and catachresis,
neigbourliness and 'iteration' to borrow from Derrida. Like paradiastole, catachresis, as the
trope of hegemony, implies a neighbourliness between terms, closeness, transformation of
terrain and of concept. The naming of the closeness or the simultaneous contestation of
distance is a performative politico-linguistic act present in paradiastolic description. To follow
Laclau, catachresis transforms the terrain on which it emerges. It contests the situation not by
'crossing the floor' but by bringing in something 'new', something that has not yet been
recognized, or named.
Though it implies a political change and a transformation of the concepts, there is a lesser
degree of newness in paradiastolic redescription, where an already existing concept is
replaced by another already existing concept. By way of empirical example we could look at
party politics to recognize these two logics. The typical example of Laclau is a popular front
emerging and contesting the existing cleavages and dividing lines in politics. Skinner would
demonstrate with paradiastole a move of a party, policy or concept from one political camp to
another – without necessarily contesting the poles or political camps themselves.
In a Laclauian reading of the paradiastolic process, where one name is substituted by another,
the substituting terms carries with it traces of the old signified, the object it described. When
something described as nationalism is redescribed as patriotism, patriotism also ends up
changing. This resembles the idea of 'iterability' in Derrida (e.g. Norval 1997): when we
continuously describe nationalism as patriotism, the previous connotations bring traces to the
new concept that is the new configuration. For Skinner neighbourliness is tied to the
connection between vices and virtues. Paradiastole can be seen as the redescription of
something generally considered as a vice into a virtue, or vice versa. But it also creates a new
concept: it is not only that the name gained new content, but this something did not exist prior
8
to the process of naming.
In Laclauian thinking, when we bridge many concepts like this, we also end up emptying out
their particular content by overloading them with new meanings. This is what the process of
hegemony does, through one signifier taking the representation of others, whereby Laclau
calls it an 'empty signifier'. Therefore, the paradiastolic process is precisely what is at stake in
the processes marked by 'empty' (overloaded) or 'floating' (contested) signifiers, where
discursive chains are being articulated and their contents contested. Empty signifiers are
crucial for the process of hegemony and the creation of unity: this signifier becomes the name
of a constellation of elements that as yet has had no name (though, the process of naming may
establish the constellation as such).
Paradiastole within hegemony
The argument here is that paradiastole makes part of hegemony and catachresis, as the
hegemonic process is one of articulating meanings into a constellation. Throughout Laclau's
work (and especially in On Populist Reason) the important tropological relations are those of
logics of difference and equivalence, hegemony or catachresis. According to these logics,
elements relate to each other forming by links of similarity and difference, substitution, unity
and exclusion. The elements are located on a terrain marked by different relations,
antagonism and similarity, whether they are fixed or floating. Laclau (1985, 135) argues that
'hegemony should happen on a field criss-crossed by antagonism' where, however, there is a
'vast area floating elements and the possibility of their articulation to opposite camps' (136).
The articulation of an element to one camp rather than another is precisely the task of
paradiastole.
Paradiastole works within hegemony, but for Laclau, hegemony is something more: 'In order
to speak of hegemony, the articulatory moment is not sufficient.' (135) Catachresis and
hegemony refer specifically to the emergence of the constellation, the process of unification –
dealing with a plurality of objects that are made into one rather than changes in a single
element. The catachrestical naming of something that did not exist before – the unforeseen
unity and commonality (however vague and incoherent) – happens in the conditions of
contingency. Catachresis implies a moment of rupture, which transforms the discursive field
and breaks down frontiers and hegemonic structures, and creates a new object.
When investigating the process of hegemony, the analysis of political articulations is vital.
Paradiastole is a process of articulation of a particular kind: the force which 'swings' elements
from one normative-ideological camp to another by turning things to ours (virtues) or theirs
(vices) and the force contesting or maintaining the unity and frontiers, the distinction between
'us' and 'them'. It implies confrontation. As the logic of paradiastole brings things together, it
is internal to hegemony itself. However, whereas hegemony focuses on the idea of unity,
paradiastole works in the particular instances of articulation of elements, as an internal, yet
separate logic. In this sense, Skinnerian thought helps us to distinguish between the actual
processes of the creation of hegemony and frontiers, reaching beyond the idea of unity to see
how elements came together or were separated. In the next section I will explore the
consequences of making this distinction, and also of understanding the interplay between
these two political logics.
Logics of paradiastole and catachresis at work in political fora
9
Are there specific forms of politics that are particularly catachrestical or paradiastolic?
Clearly, Laclau is interested in the emergence of new (popular) forces, Skinner in the changes
in the meanings of concepts in political articulation and the contestation over signifiers in
politics. Furthermore, in contrast to Laclau's vision of larger politico-social transformations
and the formation of a theory to explain them, Skinner focuses on the actors and moments of
articulation themselves.4 The hypothesis has been that parliamentary politics are particularly
paradiastolic and social movement or revolutionary politics catachrestical. This simplifying
and essentialist thought relies on the acknowledged political traditions and preferred political
examples of the two authors. The preceding analysis nevertheless helps us to reach a different
verdict. Namely, the two logics are complimentary – and present in most political praxis. The
distinction between the two – instead of molding them together – helps us to understand
different processes in politics, different steps in political articulation. Usually, in politics and
political analysis, the two aspects are interconnected. The rest of this article accounts for this
claim, taking social forums as its main example.
Paradiastole, changing the normative meaning of a term or linking it into a different
normative setting by its usage, implies a reliance on the idea of at least two separate political
camps. Hegemony maintains the idea of a unity which, to exist, requires a frontier: an
exclusion. Both presume an ideologico-normative 'us' and 'them', and a contestable and
contested frontier, reproduced in the process of articulation. When there is no distinction
between, for example, nationalism and patriotism, these two do not constitute a political
frontier, but when they are assigned as the descriptions of specific political groupings we can
notice a political frontier. 'Crossing the floor' between the camps is a paradiastolic move:
turning patriotism to nationalism would be one of them. Hegemony implies the construction –
catachrestical naming – of one of the camps and the frontier: this may imply the naming of
the camp which as yet had no name as the nationalists or as the patriots. This may include a
processes of redescription, even of a paradiastolic nature.
These processes can be seen as taking place in a parliament, which Skinner, as a scholar of
the republican tradition, would emphasize. The crossing is visualized in most modern
parliaments, which have been arranged either in the shape of two opposing sides or a horseshoe. The political parties usually organize around two or more poles. Alliances are usually
sought between these poles by unifying particular grievances and values into policy
frameworks. Sometimes situations which radicalize the existing alliances and political
frontiers emerge. New alliances are formed under new headings. These situations can be seen
as catachrestical. Redescriptions, of which some are paradiastolic moves, however, tend to
dominate parliamentary politics. The prime moments of catachresis, illustrated through the
Gramscian notion of 'organic crisis', when a party collapses and a new one has yet to be born,
are natural but rare. Nevertheless, aspects of catachrestical naming may well be present, for
instance, in the process of coalition-building or in the naming of political problems and
demands.
Laclau has been influential in theorizing about new social movements and the unification of
their particularistic demands under larger umbrellas. An exemplary political forum of this
kind would be the social forum, which gathers different struggles, movements, NGOs and
activists under wide headings or punch-lines such as the anti-globalisation movement or
'another world is possible'. When it emerged in Porto Allegre and spread around the world,
the social forum movement was catachrestical phenomenon. It transformed the field of
politics for these activists, affording them a possibility to conduct politics in a common forum
outside parliaments. The naming of the Social Forum movement was a grounding act in itself,
10
subsuming particular struggles under the heading of 'anti/alter-globalisation', which now
signified and partially defined them. As in any catachrestic process, anti-globalisation became
partially emptied out of meaning because of it had been overloaded by the many particular
struggles it ended up signifying. The hegemonic form was ready.
With time the Social Forums (SF) in part institutionalized themselves as political fora with
clear frontiers and rules, protected by a SF charter. In the process of organizing particular SFs,
decisions were made ranging from the choice of their thematic priorities to the venues where
the forums were to be held, the groups or speakers invited or excluded, and the composition
and form of the organizing committees. In the process different groups around the forum
allied with and against each other (see e.g. Bohm 2000, 328-51). The result was a process
dominated by the different political logics described above. The hegemonic logic of exclusion
and inclusion, naming of the 'people' and the main actors, is embedded within the organising
structures of the Social Forums – even if they are supposedly open spaces. Nevertheless,
political frontiers are not acknowledged, which makes the transparency of the
inclusion/exclusion
and
crossings-of-the-floor
problematic.
As
Teivainen
(http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/dinamic.php?pagina=bib_teivo_fsm2004_in) argues,
the SFs are politicizing processes which nevertheless have depoliticising effects:
Pretending that there are no relations of power that should be made visible within the
WSF process is the most harmful of these depoliticizing elements. Even if it is often
presented as "not a locus of power", "not an organization", and "only a neutral space",
the WSF does have relations of power.
It is essential for any reflection on power and democracy in the context of the SFs to realise
how the two different but interconnected logics of paradiastole and catachresis function in the
social forum process(es).
Nevertheless, the virtue of the logic of paradiastole, rather than the catachrestical process, in
the SF process would lie in the way in which it can shift the focus from the rather fixed
constellations of 'us' (the forum people) and 'them' (the evil outside) to the elements
themselves and the process of what is being redescribed. Further, inside the process it would
highlight the emerging overlapping different positions of 'us' and 'them'. Instead of insisting
on the lack of frontiers we could acknowledge and also accommodate some of the ‘them’
within our own camp, or see the 'us' as a combination of many camps. Instead of focusing on
'our issues' it would be worth exploring how to turn vices into virtues and vice versa – to
enable ruptures in the existing hegemony and wider catachrestical changes with those we do
not already agree? Distinguishing between these two processes would reveal the multiple
overlapping unities – created through a catachrestical logic and connected by paradiastolic
moves.5
Despite its catachrestical naming, the SF has already failed in universalising its own concept.
For instance, during the European Social Forum (ESF) in London 2003, 'our' and 'their'
forums found their expression in events around the 'official' ESF: the free events at
autonomous spaces of the 'Beyond ESF' were for many participants the real Social Forum (see
e.g. ephemera, 5:2, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-2/5-2index.htm): an example of
an 'alter-hegemonic' politics grounding and giving expression to a range of things through
claiming to represent the struggle the ESF failed to fight. This constellation also contains
redescriptions: the virtuous character of the SF has been transformed into a vice and then
reappropriated, newly redescribed into one's own camp. On the other hand, acknowledgement
of its own failure – the unavoidable partiality of the object and the ultimate 'impossibility of
11
fullness' – would perhaps show the hegemonic character that Laclau emphasizes.
Taking rhetoric to the level of political fora, in the 'Beyond ESF' event we can nevertheless
recognize the drive for something that both the parliament and the SF have failed to construct:
a truly catachrestical political space that would be constantly contested and constructed. To
borrow Laclau's (2005, 222) response to the postmodern prophets of the 'end of ideology', we
could witness: 'the arrival at a fully political era, because the dissolution of the marks of
certainty does not give the political game any aprioristic necessary terrain but, rather, the
possibility of constantly redefining the terrain itself.'
From the perspectives of both the Skinnerian history of political ideas and Laclauian
discourse theory, the contexts in which the two authors find themselves may have influenced
their preferred fora of politics, their theories, tropes and choice of interesting political
processes. Laclau, coming from the Latin American context where parliamentarism had not
properly institutionalized, would have more incentives to focus on popular fronts, movements
and revolutionary politics; whereas Skinner, writing in the British and Cambridge setting,
would be more interested in political reforms in parliamentary debates than extraparliamentary politics. This does not mean that the thought, political moves and processes
they outline would not be transferable to other fora and contexts. Rather, we can say that both
authors offer theories that draw on and can be applied to political life.
Conclusion
Rhetoric supports the idea of contingency, the distance between language and the world of
actions and objects. This article has argued that rhetoric informs our outlining of political
logics, thinking or moves. We can even relate and compare the thought of two political
theorists by looking at their favourite tropes. Paradiastole and catachresis, as examples of
rhetorical tropes, are distinct logics even if they can be seen as functioning together, within
each other and simultaneously. Seeing them as distinct logics provides avenues for thinking
about political action, distinguishing between particular political articulations and
contestations. They are indispensable for the analysis of ideologies, normative structures and
political phenomena. They also inform about the way in which different political fora
function. Despite the interconnectedness of the two tropes, they are tools for comparing
different political discourses, movements, and fora – of which only few have been explored
here. Tropes are not 'mere rhetoric', in the same way as words is not 'just language'. In fact,
what this article hopes to have illustrated is that, in all their complexity, they represent
patterns of thought and action which are important as objects of political analysis and political
theory.
By discussing the two tropes of paradiastole and catachresis I have aimed to bridge the gap
between two contemporary political theorists, who otherwise seem to come from different
perspectives. By applying the tropes in a contemporary political context, I have sought to
illustrate how the thought of the two authors helps us to understand, for instance, how
political changes happen, and how difference and unity are being constructed on different fora
of politics. This shows how to move beyond the mere declarations of some crucial premises
that relate to contingency and the linguistic or rhetorical turn in politics.
Notes
12
1. A collection of revised earlier writings by Skinner is published in three volumes under the
title Visions of Politics (2002). Here I primarily draw on the first volumme of the work, titled
Regarding Method.
2. Mouffe, in her subsequent focus on democratic theory, has since been in contact with
Skinner and republican Skinnerians working on the combination republican liberalism and
socialism (see also Mouffe 1993 and for discussion Wenman 2003).
3. Laclau (1996) has been discussing Skinner in an essay.
4. The notion of 'pointillism' – which characterized Skinner's theory in contrast to the German
conceptual historian Reinhardt Koselleck for Kari Palonen – can be noted also here. (Palonen
K, 2003)
5. An example could be 'memory-work' (an account of some of the problems in the ESF
memory processes Palonen E, 2006).
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