Isn’t it the case that poststrucuralism makes everything into discourse suffocating any chance of human agency in the process? Language refers to something out there doesn’t it? People are active subjects too eh?
Actually language is what makes reality possible for us. Social agents always find themselves ‘thrown into’ a system of meaningful practices, and these structures they’re thrown into however are ontologically incomplete.
Indeed it is in the ‘space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Moreover as these identifications 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 (Glynos, Howarth 2007: 79).