Course: Applying Discourse Theory
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory
Published October 1, 2007 by Routledge, New York
Authors: Jason Glynos and David Howarth
Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s (hereafter: GH) have written a comprehensive theoretical tract outlining how one would go about investigating concrete empirical phenomena using a poststructuralist discourse analytical framework. Heavily influenced by a Lacanian inspired discourse analysis that emerged out of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist intervention Hegemony and Socialist Strategy back in 1985, GH’s intention is to illustrate how a robust, empirically grounded political analysis can be conducted using a combination of three different ‘logics’ of investigation. These three logics are, in order of application: a social logic which characterizes relevant social practices and clusters of practices or regimes. The social logic sets out to answer the query, what is the object of investigation? Next is a political logic which is a genealogical investigation that reveals why a social practice or regime became institutionalized (sedimented) in the social fabric and, alternatively, the possibility it can become ‘dislocated’ through counter-hegemonic struggles. Thirdly and to this reviewer most interestingly, there are fantasmatic logics that locate how subjects are ‘gripped’ by ideology and thus seemingly are attached to social practices that seem to work against their own interests.
So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ‘thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ‘space’ or ‘gap’ of social strucures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Morevover, as these identification are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses — some of which are excluded or repressed — and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise (79).
In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.
Glynos, Howarth 2007: 79
We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself
Glynos, Howarth 2007: 155