… given the broader social context in which they operate. .. give a wider discursive context in which a culture of instrumentalist consumption and exchange dominates, it is not fanciful to suppose that key signifiers which exhibit a clearly positive valence for subjects, whether they are ‘quality’, ‘professionalism’, ‘knoledge’, ‘excellence’ or ‘freedom’, should be suitably rearticulated to better resonate with the market ethos (177).
Given a dislocation, and the drawing of a political frontier via logics of equivalence, key terms acquire the status of ‘floating signifiers’ — signifiers that for relevant subjects are no longer fixed to a particular meaning. Once detached, they begin to ‘float’, and their identity is only (partially) stabilized when they are successfully hegemonized by groups that endeavour to naturalize meaning in one way rather than another.
By criticizing universities for failing the economy throughout the 1980s, accusing academics of being snobbishly out of touch with the real world, and by painting a general picture of higher education as overly bureaucratic and inefficient in the face of an imminent and threateningly aggressive global market, ‘modernizers’ facilitate the processes by which certain key signifiers are detached from their signifieds and rearticulated to reinforce market-friendly equivalences.
Laclau’s article: Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?