Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2004, pp. 219–234

Post-humanism and the Problem of

Theorizing Coherence
Lew Zipin

Introduction: Post-humanism and the Unfashionability of Coherence

In A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession: a Romance (1990), Roland, a British doctoral
student in literature, and Maud, a feminist literature professor, come together
through odd career convergences. Roland’s library research of unsent letter drafts by
Randolph Henry Ash, a Victorian poet on whose work Roland’s doctorate is based,
prompts him to pursue the identity of an unnamed woman to whom the letters were
intended. Fortuitous clues lead him to guess that the woman was Christabel
LaMotte, also a poet of that era. From a fellow student who once had a conference
affair with Maud, Roland learns that she is an interpreter of LaMotte’s poetry. He
makes an impromptu visit to Maud’s campus, consults her, and gains her interest in
the matter. Together, they discover some locked-away letters LaMotte had kept: an
exchange between the two poets that makes evident their clandestine affair, as yet
unknown to biographers of the poets. Searching further pieces of the delicious story,
the two scholars travel together to various scenes of the poets’ lives, until they are
surprised by their own intimate feelings. Tantalized and confused by signs of possible
romance with Maud, Roland one day recalls sentiments Ash wrote in a letter to
LaMotte:
Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate which
seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise
postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he
and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not
their plot or fate but that of those others. And it is probable that there is an element
of superstitious dread in any self-referring, self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist
mirror-game or plot coil that recognises that it has got out of hand, that connections
proliferate apparently at random, that is to say, with equal verisimilitude, apparently
in response to some ferocious ordering principle, not controlled by conscious inten-
tion, which would of course, being a good postmodernist intention, require the aleatory
or the multivalent of the ‘free’, but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to
some—to what?—end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are

Lew Zipin lectures in Sociology/Policy of Education at the University of South Australia, where he is also a
researcher at the Centre for Studies of Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures. His research interests include
the use of critical theories to analyse power in educational institutions; issues of governance and ethics in
schools and higher education; and education for social justice. Correspondence to: Dr Lew Zipin, Lecturer,
School of Education, University of South Australia, Holbrooks Road, Underdale SA 5032, Australia. E-mail:
lew.zipin@unisa.edu.au

ISSN 1030–4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)  2004 Taylor and Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1030431042000215013
220 L. Zipin
presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly
desirable. ‘Falling in love’, characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and
of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
(pp. 421–422)1

Through Roland’s thoughts, Byatt characterizes psychic and social ‘coherence’ as

products of ‘deep human desires’. She further suggests that these are ‘presently’
unfashionable in ‘postmodern’ ways of analysing psychic and social phenomena. I
read her also to suggest what I will argue in this paper: that certain influential figures
in ‘postmodernist’ thinking—e.g. Foucault (1979, 1990), Butler (1990, 1992, 1993),
and Laclau & Mouffe (1985)—make it even more unfashionable to assume a human
basis for ‘desires’ or any other constructs that signify motive forces—or, agentic
forces—which can help explain cohesive formations of social phenomena. That is,
their post-humanist refusal to found any notion of ‘agency’ in human species being
drives the conceptual tendency to emphasize the ‘free’ play of contingent and
‘multivalent’ possibilities to a point that gets ‘out of hand’. Such philosophically
vigorous post-humanism makes it terribly difficult to conceive how social space does
not become merely a structureless dispersion of ‘random tangle[s]’, but does manage
to comb into forms of ‘coherent plot’.
And yet no ‘post’ theorist allows this logic of dispersion to go unchecked. They all
reel it back ‘into hand’, presenting us, in their research and analyses, with a social
space in which events, conditions and processes do not merely ‘proliferate apparently
at random’, but do take structured formations. Often the crucial problem of
runaway dispersion is insufficiently acknowledged, and the ‘ordering principle’ only
vaguely gestured towards. However, some generative ‘post’ philosophers have ac-
knowledged the problem, and pursued theoretical ‘solutions’. Perhaps most forth-
right have been Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe in their influential book
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985).
Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical efforts rely on a concept of ‘discourse’ derived
from Foucault (1972), which I examine in what follows. I then investigate how they
apply this to theorize what they empirically recognize as a socially extensive and
historically durable form of structural power relation: i.e. female subordination in
relation to male privilege. I argue that this conceptual effort fails, and also illustrates
how a ‘discourse theory’ that seeks to reject all assumptions about humanly based
agency cannot viably theorize significant historical formations of social power. I
conclude that critical analysts thus do better to dare assume a human basis for
certain ‘agentic capacities’—minimally defined, but nonetheless crucially import-
ant—if we are to sustain viable analytic accounts of a cohesively (coherently)
structured social space. I end the paper with a brief gesture towards such a
‘neo-humanist’ (or ‘new humanist’) theory of agency, drawing from Pierre
Bourdieu’s conception of habitus (1977, 1992).

The Rejection of Humanly Based Essences

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe assert a theoretical preclusion
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 221

of anthropologically (‘humanly’) based principles that help explain given historical

emergences of power formations:

The theoretical problematic … excludes reference to any general principle or substra-

tum of an anthropological nature which, at the same time that it unified the different
subject positions, would assign a character of inevitability to resistance against the
diverse forms of subordination. There is therefore nothing inevitable or natural in the
different struggles against power, and it is necessary to explain in each case the reasons
for their emergence and the different modulations they may adopt. (p. 152)

This might be read to reject principles particular to specific forms of power

structure and struggle: i.e. no principle based in a ‘human’ substrate helps explain
the historic significance of power asymmetry along a per se gendered axis. This
might still allow anthropological principles of a non-structure-specific sort; e.g. a
human capacity, or agency, generally to produce coherence—to generate ‘unities’
across diverse and contradictory conditions for emergence of ‘different subject
positions’—without predicating any given form of (op)positional cohesion. How-
ever, Laclau and Mouffe make stronger assertions that would seem also to preclude
even such non-structure-specific human agency. Citing Foucault, they declare accord
with him in ‘breaking with the category of an “originative subject”, which continues
to creep into the very conceptions that seek to implement the rupture with it’
(p. 115). Thus:

[O]ur position is clear. Whenever we use the category of ‘subject’ … we will do so in

the sense of ‘subject positions’ within a discursive structure. Subjects cannot, therefore,
be the origin of social relations—not even in the limited sense of being endowed with
powers that render an experience possible—as all ‘experience’ depends on precise
discursive conditions of possibility. (p. 115)

This is a most vigorous post-humanist insistence. No capacities of social agents

(‘subjects’)—not even a basic capacity to ‘experience’—can be thought to inhere
originally ‘in’ those agents (as ontological essences of their species being). Any
capacities to experience and act in social practices and relations must themselves
originate only as constituted by-products of ‘discursive conditions of possibility’.
Even these culturally contingent ‘discursive’ conditions and structures, in which a
subject’s experiences and capacities are in every sense constituted, therefore must not
be understood as products of any originative capacities of subjects.

The Theoretical Problem of a One-sided Emphasis on Dispersion

Another passage suggests how such strong rejection of trans-historically ‘human
essences’ might trouble theorizations of any coherent structuring in social space:

There are not two planes, one of essences and the other of appearances … Society and
social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and
precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order.
(p. 98)
222 L. Zipin
This suggests that, since agents lack essential capacities to produce cohesive unities
across diverse conditions, events and ‘experiences’, all appearances of ‘ordered
regularity’ will be highly contingent and precariously unstable convergences. Laclau
and Mouffe forthrightly acknowledge this logical implication:
Since the affirmation of the discursive character of every subject position was linked
to the rejection of the notion of a subject as an originative founding totality, the
analytic moment that had to prevail was that of dispersion, detotalization or decentring
(p. 115).

That is, the break from ‘originative’ essences refuses not only all ‘essentialism of the
totality’, say Laclau and Mouffe, but all ‘essentialism of the elements’ (p. 116) within
a totality. It is then difficult to theorize ‘female’ and ‘male’ positions, for example,
as cohesive macro-elements in an oppositional structure, since such categories
comprise multiple and contradictory micro-contexts of gender construction. In ‘the
critique of feminist essentialism’, note Laclau and Mouffe, feminists themselves
rejected unifying principles of ‘women’s oppression’ in putting analytic focus
on locally contingent and diverse conditions in which ‘the category of “the feminine”
is constantly produced’ (p. 117). After all, women are not oppressed in every
context; and gender is not always the most salient category of oppressed experience
for given women. If subordination as female nonetheless seems widespread, it
must still be ‘denied that there is a single mechanism of women’s oppression’
(p. 117).
While Laclau and Mouffe endorse this vision of gender experience as produced in
‘the field of dispersion of subject positions’ (p. 117), they recognize how it then
becomes difficult to theorize any counterbalancing cohesion:
The difficulty … arises from the one-sided emphasis given to the moment of disper-
sion—so one-sided that we are left with only a heterogeneous set of sexual differences
constructed through practices which have no relation to one another. Now, while it is
absolutely correct to question the idea of an original sexual division represented a
posteriori in social practices, it is also necessary to recognize … a systematic effect of
sexual division. Every construction of sexual differences, whatever their multiplicity and
heterogeneity, invariably constructs the feminine as a pole subordinated to the
masculine. It is for this reason that it is possible to speak of a sex/gender system.
(pp. 117–118)

Laclau and Mouffe here indicate their empirical recognition that sex/gender differ-
ence appears as a profoundly systematic (or structural) asymmetry of relational power
across diverse sites of social practice. They say that ‘every construction of sexual
differences’—no matter how heterogeneous—‘invariably constructs the feminine
as a pole subordinated to the masculine’. Below, I will examine how Laclau and
Mouffe theorize the specifically gendered effect of an ‘invariable’ subordination of
female in relation to male; but I must first render their approach to theorizing the
formation of salient social structures in general. In the next section, I examine their
argument that, while historic structures of social relation cannot originate in whole
or part from any essentially ‘human’ capacities, they can emerge as ‘discursive’
effects.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 223

Theorizing the Discursive Articulation of Coherence

As already cited, Laclau and Mouffe characterize the break from assuming humanly
based capacities of ‘subjects’—who ‘cannot, therefore, be the origin of social
relations’—also as a shift to conceiving ‘the subject’ strictly ‘in the sense of “subject
positions” within a discursive structure’, such that both subjective (‘experiential’)
coherence, and that of social-relational structures, ‘depends on precise discursive
conditions of possibility’. What, then, is signified in the adjective discursive by which
Laclau and Mouffe stress the utterly contingent possibility of all psychic and social
coherence? By what definition does this ‘discursivity’ make possible what social
agents cannot make possible: i.e. the historic origination of sex/gender and other
profoundly structural (systemic) asymmetries of social-relational power?
To begin, Laclau and Mouffe seek to forefend accusations of ‘linguistic idealism’
by stressing a simultaneously ‘material’-cum-‘linguistic’ quality of ‘social practices’:

Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices. It
affirms … that any distinction between what are usually called the linguistic and
behaviourial [sic] aspects of a social practice is either an incorrect distinction or ought
to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning, which is
structured under the form of discursive totalities. (p. 107)

By this definition, social practices are at once materially (behaviourally) active, and
meaningfully sensible through cultural infusions of linguistic meaning. No matter
how mutely behavioural, practices are latently bound up with systems of
significatory intelligibility (i.e. discourse). Only as an interpretative device of ‘dis-
course analysis’ is it apt to abstract a ‘linguistic aspect’ so as to decode normative
rules that structure meaningful sense. But in actual practice, behavioural and
linguistic aspects are always inextricably fused in the social production of ‘subjects’
with coherent senses of ‘self’ in relation to ‘others’ as ‘structured under the form of
discursive totalities’. Hence, ‘social practices’ are always also ‘discursive practices’;
there simply are no ‘non-discursive practices’.
But here I want to press the question: how do structured forms of ‘discursive
totality’ come about in and across diverse sites of social practice? As I put it at the
beginning of this section: how does a concept of ‘discursivity’ explain originations of
psychic, social or discursive structural totalities in the practical course of historic
events?
Consider a local site of social practice. According to theory, practices of this site
are inevitably infused with certain forms of discursively intelligible structure. How-
ever, suggest Laclau and Mouffe, these practices are to be conceived as having a
free-radical indeterminacy with regard to how they (and thus the social agents who
inhabit them) may take up positions within potential discursive structures. This is
because there is no one discursive formation to which any particular site, practice or
social agent naturally belongs. We can think of ‘discursive totalities’ as broad-based
formations of power/knowledge-in-practice, which run across and incorporate many
sites and agents. However, a given site or agent may shift in and out of alignment
224 L. Zipin
with different discursive structures, and will inevitably take positions in multiple
discourses at once. Thus, given practices, and the ‘subjects’ bound up in them, are
to be conceived simultaneously as (1) always positioned in certain discursive
structures; and (2) always potentially independent of those very same discursive
totalities in their possibilities of shift and re-alignment. In the first of the above
statuses—as ‘differential positions’ which ‘appear articulated within a discourse’—
‘we will call [them] moments’, say Laclau and Mouffe; while in their simultaneous
status as ‘not discursively articulated’, ‘we will call [them] element[s]’ (p. 105).
Let me rephrase my question of how forms of social/discursive structure come
about: how do different social sites, practices and agents—in their ‘elemental’ status
as ‘not discursively articulated’—come into articulated connection as ‘moments’
within discursive totalities? How do elements not only align within already circulat-
ing forms of discursive structure but also organize in new forms of structural
coherence? That is: how do elements actively articulate in newly emergent forms of
discursive totality? Laclau and Mouffe’s answer deploys a certain concept of ‘articu-
lation’ (adapted from Gramsci, 1971):
[W]e will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that
their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality
resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. (p. 105)

This names ‘articulation’ as an active structure-generating process in the formation

of discourse. ‘Articulatory practice[s]’ modify relations among elements, resulting in
new forms of discursive structure. I recall here that, according to Laclau and Mouffe,
all practices are ‘discursive practices’. Thus, articulatory practices are also discursive
practices. Are they not, then, already ‘structured under the form of discursive
totalities’. Do Laclau and Mouffe thus offer a circular explanation of the formation
of new discursive totalities through the action of articulatory practices?
Still missing is a theoretical explanation of how ‘articulatory practices’ themselves
come to carry potentials to induce structural linkages among elements. We need a
theory that starts at the level of ‘elements’, and elaborates how they come to align as
structurally articulated ‘moments’. Taking up Laclau and Mouffe’s concept, Stuart
Hall (1986, p. 53) suggests what a ‘theory of articulation’ can help us understand:
[T]he term has a nice double meaning … ‘articulate’ means to utter, … to be articu-
late. It carries the sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an
‘articulated’ lorry … where the front … and back … can, but need not necessarily, be
connected to one another. … An articulation is thus the form of the connection that
can make a unity of … different elements, under certain conditions … [but] which is
not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under
what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? The so-called ‘unity’ of a
discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be
articulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness.’ … Thus,
a theory of articulation is … a way of understanding how … elements come, under
certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse … [W]e need to think the
contingent, the non-necessary, connection between different practices … and between
different elements within ideology, and between different social groups composing a
social movement, etc.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 225

Hall’s ‘double meaning’ confirms how articulatory practices are discursive. They
carry ‘language-ing’ power to forge intelligibly cohesive connections among ele-
ments. Hall also confirms the free-radical status by which ‘different, distinct ele-
ments … have no necessary “belongingness” ’ to any given discursive unity.
Moreover, Hall broadens the definition of ‘elements’, suggesting a sequence of
progressively more inclusive composition, beginning at the micro level of ‘different
practices’—or, different local sites of practice wherein social agents, in their enrol-
ment in ‘discursive’ (or ‘articulatory’) practices, take up ‘subject positions’ in
‘discursive structures’. A ‘theory of articulation’ thus must help us understand how
locally situated social agents come to cohere in larger ‘social group’ elements which
are in turn structurally related within broader ‘social movement’ elements, etc.—i.e.
to the macro level of historically salient relational structures (e.g. a structuring of
‘male’ and ‘female’ genders in oppositional relation whereby, say Laclau and Mouffe,
‘the feminine … pole is [invariably] subordinated to the masculine’).
But an affirmation that such macro-structural ‘unities’ are ‘not necessary, deter-
mined, absolute and essential for all time’ still does not explain how connections
among the elements ‘can … be forged or made’. Hall suggests that we can address
this question by attending to the ‘circumstances’—to ‘certain conditions’—under
which ‘elements … come to cohere together’. I read this to suggest historic circum-
stances—which we could research or imagine ‘empirically’—that facilitate a contin-
gent likelihood, but not necessity, of certain structural forms emerging in those
conditions.
However, I want to trouble any sense of the theoretical sufficiency of such
‘empirical’ answers. Are not the contingent historic ‘conditions’ which favour a given
structural convergence precisely the ‘elements’—the diverse instances of social
practice—which compose the structural formation? To say that certain convergences
actualize under certain ‘conditions of possibility’ thus does not tell us how they
actualize. More significantly, should we not expect that, over any extent of social
space and historic time, contradictions will accumulate across ‘different, distinct’
elemental instances, as conditions of precarious instability from which radical
dispersions should follow? Should we not expect any convergences of elements to be
short lived and not terribly broad based? This is, after all, the problem of ‘one-
sided … dispersion’ that Laclau and Mouffe seek to solve through a theory of
discursive ‘articulation’.
Perhaps a theory that ‘solves’ the problem of dispersion requires another kind of
enabling factor to help explain how coherent connections ‘can be forged or made’.
We may need to theorize that ‘elements’ cannot simply induce themselves to cohere
in a structural formation as ‘moments’, but require capacities of originative agency
which inhere in an other-than-discursive substrate: i.e. an ontological ‘humanness’.
We may need to theorize that only the humanness of agents who inhabit ‘elemental’
sites of practice embody the articulatory, meaning-giving capacities to originate new
forms of structurally cohesive ‘unity’. Indeed, regarding the strong refusal of an
‘originative subject’, Hall suggests that ‘the theory of “a history without subjects,” a
language with no speakers’—while a fruitful thought experiment—can ‘only [be] a
226 L. Zipin
stopping point on the route to something else. It’s just not possible to make history
without subjects in quite that absolute way’ (p. 56).
Laclau and Mouffe, however, will take no route that recuperates an ‘originative
subject’ to explain the articulated coherence of elements in a discursive structure:
[T]he characteristic coherence of … [a] discursive formation is not unified either in
the logical coherence of its elements, or in the a priori of a transcendental subject, or
in a meaning-giving subject. (p. 105)

This forecloses any possible substrate wherein a priori (original; essential) forces
inhere that can generate coherence. No ‘logical’ principle of mutual attraction
abides, to begin with, in-and-across elements of a discursive formation, magnetically
drawing them together. Nor does any ‘meaning-giving’ capacity inhere, transcenden-
tally, in agents who inhabit social practices, such that they can initiate intelligible
forgings of discursive formations across diverse practical instances. Having thus
stipulated what can not bring about discursive coherence, what might Laclau and
Mouffe suggest can induce intelligible cohesions across a dispersion of elements?
Here is their most definitive statement of how coherent formations are possible:
The type of coherence we attribute … [is] formulated by Foucault: regularity in
dispersion. … [D]ispersion itself [is] the principle of unity, insofar as it is governed by
rules of formation, by the complex conditions of existence of the dispersed [ele-
ments]. … [T]he discursive formation can … be thought, in that sense, as an ensemble
of differential positions [which] is not the expression of any underlying principle
external to itself … [but] which … can be signified as a totality. (pp. 105–106)

I must say I find this passage baffling. Having precluded any a priori ‘logical
coherence of its elements’, Laclau and Mouffe affirm ‘dispersion itself’ as ‘the
principle of unity, insofar as it is governed by rules of formation’. Any convergence
of distinct and dispersed elements in a cohesive ensemble thus seems to depend on
the existence of ‘rules’, or regulatory logics, of formation. But if these logics neither
inhere among elements a priori, nor abide in any external substrate of formational
principles or capacities, then how do ‘complex conditions … of the dispersed
[elements]’ get so far as to be ‘governed by rules’? How do rules come into form?
Where, in their theory, do Laclau and Mouffe elaborate any capacity to generate
formative rules that could articulate, or ‘signify’, discursive totalities?
In seeking to chase down such cohesion-generating agency in Laclau and Mouffe’s
theory of ‘discursive articulation’, I find it unelaborated, yet needed. It is a missing
link without which their explanations of social-structural cohesion entail a slippery
circularity. The discursive intelligibility of social practices results from the action of
‘articulatory practices’ which seem already infused with discursive intelligibility. The
‘signification’ of coherence across dispersed elements occurs by virtue of ‘rules of
formation’ which either exist, ontologically, in advance (despite stipulations to the
contrary), or are of a most mysterious origin: the product of a magical alchemy in
which ‘regularity’ spontaneously converges in-and-of ‘dispersion itself’.
If, as I argue, some force or capacity to originate coherence is theoretically
necessary, it seems a prohibitive obstacle for post-humanist projects. Laclau and
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 227

Mouffe do not demonstrate how it can be theorized without recourse to ontological

essences inhering in a ‘human’ substrate, nor to essences inhering within the
(supposedly) contingent historical-cultural ground of ‘discursive conditions of possi-
bility’. Have they perhaps fallen into a ‘discursive idealism’ (if not ‘linguistic
idealism’), in which the principles of active formation secretly inhere in some essence
of ‘discourse itself’ (which would be as objectionable as ‘humanness itself’)? Let us
see what we find in their effort to theorize the structural coherence of ‘a sex/gender
system’.

Finessed Idealism in Theorizing the ‘Discursive’ Coherence of Gender Asymmetry

As cited above, Laclau and Mouffe recognize an empirical condition in which, across
the ‘multiplicity and heterogeneity’ of practical constructions of gender relations,
‘[e]very construction of sexual differences … invariably constructs the feminine as a
pole subordinated to the masculine’. The challenge, then, is to theorize how these
multiple and dispersed constructions come to cohere in such a broad-based and
durable structural pattern of ‘female’ subordination in relation to ‘male’ dominance.
Laclau and Mouffe theorize this as follows:

The ensemble of social practices, of institutions and discourses, which produce woman
as a category, are not completely isolated but mutually reinforce and act upon one
another. This does not mean that there is a single cause of feminine subordination. It
is our view that once female sex has come to connote a feminine gender … the
‘imaginary signification’ produces concrete effects in the diverse social practices. Thus,
there is a close correlation between ‘subordination’, as a general category informing the
ensemble of significations constituting ‘femininity’, and the autonomy and uneven
development of the diverse practices which construct the concrete forms of subordina-
tion. These latter are not the expression of an immutable feminine essence; in their
construction, however, the symbolism which is linked to the feminine condition in a
given society, plays a primordial role. The diverse forms of concrete subordination
react, in turn, by contributing to the maintenance and reproduction of this symbolism.
It is therefore possible to criticize the idea of an original antagonism between men and
women, constitutive of the sexual division, without denying that in the various forms
of construction of ‘femininity’, there is a common element which has strong over-de-
termining effects in terms of the sexual division. (p. 118)

To begin, let us consider the micro-‘elements’: ‘the diverse social practices’. Laclau
and Mouffe observe an ‘autonomy and uneven development of the diverse practices’.
That is, multiple sites of gender construction are distinct in their concrete
specificities of practical conditions, thus yielding a heterogeneous variety of
‘significations constituting “femininity” ’ (in relation to ‘masculinity’). Considered as
‘elements’—i.e. not already articulated as ‘moments’ in discursive ensembles—these
diverse practical sites should yield quite divergent meanings of ‘feminine’ and
‘masculine’, with no necessary typicality of a ‘subordinated’ significance of ‘female’
in relation to ‘male’. And yet Laclau and Mouffe refer to ‘the autonomy and uneven
development of the diverse practices which construct the concrete forms of subordi-
228 L. Zipin
nation’. Why should this pervasive typicality of ‘subordination’ arise? How does it
take formation?
The theoretical ‘answer’ is that an over-arching ‘imaginary signification’ of
‘“subordination”, as a general category’, somehow comes to characterize ‘the sym-
bolism which is linked to the feminine condition in a given society’. This generalized
connotation of ‘subordinate femininity’ enters into ‘close correlation’ with the
specific sites of ‘diverse practices which construct the concrete forms’ of gender
significance. As such, it ‘plays a primordial role’, informing signifying processes
across the diverse local sites, unifying these elements in a negative feedback loop
whereby they ‘react, in turn, by contributing to the maintenance and reproduction
of this symbolism’. Hence, even as local conditions change over time, they retain and
reproduce a pan-elemental ‘common element’ which, across the dispersion, ‘has
strong over-determining effects in terms of the sexual division’. Now articulated as
‘moments’, the distinct sites ‘mutually reinforce and act upon one another’, co-relat-
ing according to a regulatory rule of subordinated ‘femininity’. We have the effect
of a discursively articulated structural ensemble.
However, the explanatory viability of an ‘over-determining’ feedback loop hinges
on the provision that such can abide ‘once female sex has come to connote a
feminine gender’ in which an ‘imaginary signification’ of ‘subordination’ is general-
ized. Thus, the explanation becomes circular. The symbolic ‘common element’,
crucial to homeostatic ‘maintenance and reproduction’ across ‘the diverse practices’
must first come into historic existence. And yet this generalized symbolism needs in
the first place to exist in order to play its ‘primordial role’ in inducing the diverse
concrete situations to contribute ‘in turn … to the maintenance and reproduction of
this symbolism’. To escape such circularity, it is necessary to elaborate how a
pervasive category of ‘subordination’ emerges as a historically contingent, yet
‘primordially’ deep-structuring, first instance. The theory must elaborate how dis-
persed conditions give historic birth to such a ‘totalizing’ symbolism.
I argue that, if all the autonomous and uneven conditions truly lack any a priori
cohesive tendency, and no ‘meaning-giving subject’ exists with agency to create
coherent connections, then we should expect what Laclau and Mouffe suggest in
their earlier-cited assertion that ‘[s]ociety and social agents lack any essence’, and
therefore any ‘regularities [will] merely consist of … precarious forms of fixation’.
Perhaps, across a limited range of sites, conditions might be sufficiently congruent
for a mutually reinforcing convergence of gender constructions. However, we should
expect any such ‘regularity’ to be small scale and epiphenomenal across social
space and historic time. The greater the extent of space/time, the more we
should expect multiplicity and contradiction radically to disrupt convergence, rather
than maintain and reproduce it. We should not expect a powerfully stable ‘over-
determining effect’ of any sort. The broad-based and durable ‘invariability’ that
Laclau and Mouffe attribute to ‘female subordination’ should not emerge as an effect
of ‘dispersion itself’; rather, radical dispersion should be the effect of ‘dispersion
itself’.
Laclau and Mouffe thus do not successfully theorize their way around the problem
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 229

they have recognized as a ‘one-sided emphasis given to the moment of dispersion’.

I argue that something essentially more than ‘dispersion itself’ must enter the
explanatory equation. I join Laclau and Mouffe in avoiding the assumption of any
structure-specific essential principles, which ‘would assign a character of inevitability’
to given ‘forms of subordination’. However, we do need to consider non-structure-
specific capacities of an ontologically human agency, such as ‘the a priori of
a … meaning-giving subject’ that Laclau and Mouffe reject.
I take up this neo-humanist consideration in the next section. I want here to argue
that, in a finessed way, Laclau and Mouffe in effect do make recourse to a
structure-specific essential principle of gender division. Since they do not explain
how ‘dispersion itself’ can give historic birth to ‘subordination’ as ‘a general
category’, we might infer that the circularity of their theory secretly relies on the
assumption of a trans-historic existence of that category. It is fair, I argue, to read
their reference to ‘the diverse practices which construct the concrete forms of
subordination’ as implying that diverse practical sites all share a tendency, to begin
with, towards constructions of ‘female’ as ‘subordinate’. That is, the ‘common
element’ always already inheres in each elemental site as a mutual principle inform-
ing the diverse ‘concrete forms of construction’ that feed into a general ‘symbol-
ism … linked to the feminine condition’. By my reading, Laclau and Mouffe thus
implicate what they explicitly say their theory must exclude: an ‘original sexual
division’ which explains why this division is ‘represented a posteriori in social
practices’ (p. 117).
Although Laclau and Mouffe’s post-humanism is motivated by vigorous rejection
of such original principles, the circularity of their theory ironically finesses just such
a principle of original structural division. If, as they insist, no such principle is to be
founded in ‘any … substratum of an anthropological nature’, then it lurks, in their
theory, in some substrate of a ‘non-human’ nature. I argue that their explanation of
gender division as an effect of ‘imaginary signification’ fetishizes a metaphysical stuff
of ‘signification’ as an ontological basis of gender essences equivalent to what they
deny in an anthropological basis. Their explanation of ‘feminine subordination’
conjures noun-like ‘symbolic’ entities which have verb-like powers to enact effects:
an ‘imaginary signification produces concrete effects’; a ‘general category inform[s]
the ensemble of significations’; a ‘symbolism … plays a primordial role’. I argue that
these entities thus assume the proportion of an Idealist metaphysic. They play no less
essentialist a role in explaining gendered power asymmetry than if the term
‘originative subject’ were to replace them all.
Laclau and Mouffe anticipate the accusation that their stress on the ‘discursivity’
of practices is Idealist: They argue: ‘The fact that every object is constituted as an
object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to
thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition’ (p. 108). It is wrong, they argue,
to read them as defining a merely ‘mental character of discourse. Against this, we will
affirm the material character of every discursive structure’ (p. 108). This makes the
same point as their claim, cited earlier, that ‘any distinction between what are usually
called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice, is … incorrect’.
230 L. Zipin
Rather, they cite Wittgenstein’s definition of a ‘language game’ as a ‘whole, consist-
ing of language and the actions into which it is woven’ (p. 108).
I agree that one can affirm a tangible materiality of worldly objects and actions,
regardless of how one thinks them, and at the same time appreciate that one always
thinks objects and actions in terms of available forms of linguistic intelligibility.
However, this answer to charges of Idealism ignores what I insist is the crucially
challenging question, i.e. by what ‘articulatory’ agency do available forms of linguistic
(or symbolic) coherence—and their wovenness into actions—come into existence?
What is the materializing capacity that, in and across diverse sites of activity, makes
certain meaningful connections?
Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical circularities avoid these questions. Mere assertions
of the historic contingency of given ‘language games’ do not address the dilemma
put by Hall (cited above) that the ‘theory of “a history without subjects” ’ is a theory
of ‘language with no speakers’. If theory stipulates that social agents have no original
capacities to ‘speak into existence’ (originate) the forms of practical coherence that
gain cultural circulation in social history, then given ‘language games’—and the
‘rules’ of those games—can only derive their ‘articulation’ from capacities of some
Idealized substrate of ‘symbolic’ power. A post-humanist stress on the ‘discursivity’
of practices cannot help but fetishize a primary stuff of ‘discursivity’ that thus
becomes more than ‘culturally contingent’, i.e. a substrate of discourse in itself, from
whence structurings of the concrete forms of ‘discursive practice’ somehow originate
into history. I thus suggest that what Pierre Bourdieu (1993, p. 179) says of Foucault
aptly applies to Laclau and Mouffe:
Foucault transfers into the ‘paradise of ideas’ … the oppositions and antagonisms
which are rooted in the relations between producers and consumers of cultural
works. … [In thus] treat[ing] cultural order, the episteme, as an autonomous and
transcendent system, … one is forbidden to account for changes which can unexpect-
edly take place in this separated universe, unless one attributes to it an immanent
capacity suddenly to transform itself through a mysterious form of Hegel’s Selbstbewe-
gung. (Like so many others, Foucault succumbs to that form of essentialism or, if one
prefers, fetishism …)

I read Bourdieu to suggest that, when theory refuses to attribute, as properties of

social agents, capacities to engage in relational struggles—and, simultaneously, to
create structural forms and cultural significances of their struggles—it inevitably
fetishizes transcendent capacities of the (supposed) ‘historically contingent’ cultural
stuff—‘discourse’, ‘power/knowledge’, etc.—named to explain what we must no
longer explain by reference to human capacities of social-historical agents. The
sense-making, coherence-(trans)forming capacities denied in ‘human being’ are
tacitly displaced to an Idealized ‘stuff’ of culture/episteme.
My argument is that, to avoid the problem of runaway dispersion—to theorize
broad-based and cohesive ‘structural’ formations and transformations in social
history—we cannot avoid philosophical investment in some substrate wherein, we
dare assume, cohesion-making capacities inhere ‘originally’, and from whence they
enter into ‘originative’ historic action. If so, an anthropologically ‘human’ substrate
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 231

is less mystical than a somehow ‘non-humanly discursive’ substrate. Moreover,

investment in ‘human species being’ gives us a better chance, theoretically, of being
carefully minimal and non-structure-specific in the ontological assumptions we draw
on or implicate to explain specific structural formations in social history.

Theorizing Structural Coherence with Minimal Recourse to a ‘Human’ Basis

No critical social analyst wants to assume that given forms of structural division and
power asymmetry have inevitable historic origins in trans-historic essences. It is an
altogether proper ambition to seek to theorize gendered and other asymmetries as
non-necessary, albeit formidable, empirical contingencies of social history. Yet, as
the problem of ‘one-sided dispersion’ indicates, to the degree that such structural
formations are seen as socially extensive and historically durable, it becomes a
formidable challenge to explain them strictly as ‘contingent’. It becomes difficult not
to lapse, subtly, into implications of structure-specific a priori principles which
tautologically explain the a posteriori appearance of given power asymmetries.
Working from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, I want briefly to consider
how careful presumptions of ontologically minimal, non-structure-specific
capacities of human agency can help us theorize specific forms of structural power
asymmetry.2
Let us dare assume what Laclau and Mouffe name (and reject) as ‘the a priori of
a … meaning-giving subject’. A non-specific capacity of social agents to make
meaningful (coherent) sense is posited by Bourdieu in his theorization of habitus as
a locus of cognitive structures embodied by social agents. These epistemological
structures are not innate, but culturally constructed in the course of social practices.
At more-or-less subconscious levels of ‘inner disposition’, a given agent internalizes
schemas for perceiving ‘self’ as a positioned agent vis-à-vis ‘others’, and meanings for
these positions, as encountered in practical social interactions. In the vein of Laclau
and Mouffe, we might say that habitus is a constituted by-product of cultural
conditions of possibility: a ‘subjective’ inhabitation of agents by the intelligible ways
of perceiving, identifying and acting which infuse the practical sites a given agent
inhabits.
However, Bourdieu’s agent is not entirely a constituted product of received forms
of practised intelligibility. S/he is also, dialectically, a constitutive producer of
epistemes which infuse practice. In the course of social practices, the agent not only
takes in the cognitive legacies of history but also (re)creates them. Says Bourdieu
(1977, p. 96):

With the Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach, [my] theory of practice as practice insists,
against positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, and against
idealist intellectualism, that the principle of this construction is practical activity
oriented toward practical functions.

Bourdieu hails the first of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1991, p. 121), which asserts
that a properly ‘materialist’ philosophy must conceive ‘the active side’—the principle
232 L. Zipin
of active construction; the materializing agency in social history—‘as sensuous human
activity, practice’. Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice as practice’ does not avoid Marx’s
suggestion of a human basis of ‘sensuous’ capacities to take in and make the forms
of intelligible sense (or ‘discursivity’, if you will) that infuse social practices. As far
as possible, Bourdieu theorizes culturally constructed derivations of the schemas, or
dispositions, through which given agents perceive and act. But in order to conceive
how received forms of practical sense can actively emerge and transform in social
history, Bourdieu endorses minimal philosophical assumptions about humanly
based agentic capacities of a meaning-giving subject. His ‘praxeology’, says Bourdieu
(1992, pp. 139–140), entails
a universal anthropology which takes into account the historicity, and thus the
relativity of cognitive structures, while recording the fact that agents universally put to
work such historical structures. … Having internalized … structure in the form of
habitus, they realize its necessity in the very spontaneous movement of their existence.
But what is necessary to reproduce the structure is still a historical action, accom-
plished by true agents. … [A]gents are the product of this structure and [dialectically]
make and remake this structure, which they may even radically transform under
definite structural conditions.

Bourdieu’s ‘true agent’ is thus more than a constituted by-product of received

cognitive structures. S/he also actively (re)makes and transforms the received forms
of meaning which inform habitus. Laclau and Mouffe define ‘agents’ (or ‘subjects’)
who, ‘lack[ing] any essences’, can act in history only as constituted by ‘discursive
structures’, and so ‘cannot … be the origin of social relations’. However, Bourdieu’s
agents are originative. They embody a universal (essential; trans-historic) capacity to
‘make and remake’ the relational structures which organize practices and identities.
It is in their humanly based (anthropological) nature that social agents have such
capacity to make coherence across dispersed social practices. Bourdieu recognizes that
diverse social life situations place any given agent in multiple and contradictory
positions, even in the relatively homogeneous conditions of early childhood, let
alone over the heterogeneous life trajectories of increasingly ‘postmodern’ biogra-
phies. Habitus thus internalizes much contradictory complexity. However, Bourdieu
(1977, p. 87) postulates a capacity of agents—which I read as biologically organic, a
priori to habitus—to organize and maintain coherence against precarious destabi-
lizations:
Springing from the encounter in an integrative organism of relatively independent
causal series … [of] social determinisms, the habitus makes coherence and necessity
out of accident and contingency: for example, the equivalences it establishes between
positions in the division of labour and positions in the divisions between the sexes are
doubtless not peculiar to societies in which the division of labour and the division
between the sexes coincide almost perfectly. … [A]ll the products of a given agent, by
an essential overdetermination, speak inseparably and simultaneously of … his [or her]
position in the social structure … and of his (or her) body—or, more precisely, all the
properties, always socially qualified, of which he or she is the bearer.

Bourdieu’s reference to ‘overdetermination’ strikes resonances with Laclau and

Mouffe’s ‘over-determining effects’. However, Bourdieu’s is an ‘essential overdeter-
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 233

mination’, i.e. the effect of a universal human agency to make ‘coherence and
necessity’ across vicissitudes of ‘accident and contingency’. The agency that induces
overdeterminations is that of an ‘integrative organism’—a capacity, as I read it, that
is biologically organic to human agents (most often at subconscious levels). I read
Bourdieu to posit both a capacity and a need to make coherence. (But he does not
posit a rigidly totalizing need for coherence. Bourdieu defines a strategically flexible
and inventive agent who improvises upon an indeterminate complexity within the
cohesive ‘closures’ of habitus; see Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 109–111.)
Moreover, Bourdieu’s organic impulse towards overdetermined coherence does
not predicate any specific structural form of coherence. This integrative capacity
entails no a priori blueprints for specific outcomes in terms of sexual division, labour
division, etc. However, this non-specific human tendency to forge integrations is at
least a key factor (it cannot, of course, be the only factor) in explaining the historic
origin and maintenance of given forms of social-structural relation, and of patterns
of ‘equivalence’ across multiple and intersecting axes of structural relation.

Conclusion: a Neo-humanist (Re)Turn to the Problem of Coherence/Dispersion

I suggest that humanist assumptions like Bourdieu’s non-specific agency to make
integrative coherence are necessary but not sufficient for explaining specific struc-
tural forms and transformations in social history. It is no simple matter to conceive
what further explanatory constructs might, in combination with ‘empirical factors’,
enable us viably to theorize the historic contingency of given forms of salient social
structure. I here leave this for later thought experiments. In bringing this paper to
a conclusion, I suggest that the non-specific agency of Bourdieu’s ‘integrative
organism’ is at least a significant start towards theorizing how, say, the power
asymmetry of a ‘sex/gender system’ could emerge and persevere historically, without
recourse to a structure-specific original principle of gendered asymmetry. It elabo-
rates the active agency missing in Laclau and Mouffe’s discussion of ‘discursive
articulations’ and ‘over-determining effects’ of given forms of structural coherence.
Critical social analysts need now to depart from what have been in many ways the
generative thought experiments of post-humanist theorists such as Laclau and
Mouffe. We cannot afford either a ‘one-sided emphasis given to the moment of
dispersion’, or a ‘discursive Idealism’ that mystifies the locus of agency, in social
history, to make coherent forms of social arrangement. We need, with Bourdieu, to
recuperate the philosophical anthropology of Marx in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. We
need, with Hall, to recognize that ‘history without subjects in quite that absolute
way’ could ‘only [be] a stopping point on the route to something else’. Let us now
move forward with neo-humanist thought experiments, to see how this might better
enable us to theorize an ‘empirically realistic’ balance between cohesive and disper-
sive tensions that structure and restructure our lifeworlds. We need philosophical
and theoretical warrants for conceptualizing structural formations in which disper-
sive volatility is indeed present—indeed theoretically desirable—but not to a degree,
as Byatt says, that ‘gets out of hand’. Our theories need, carefully, to make
234 L. Zipin
fashionable again what Byatt calls ‘deep human desires’ that help explain how
‘connections [that] proliferate apparently at random’ nonetheless do comb into
‘coherent plot[s]’.

Notes
[1] In all instances in this paper where a passage is quoted for the first time, emphases within
the quoted passage are from the original.
[2] Before undertaking this, I will note that certain ‘post’ theorists, for example Butler (1990),
and Davies (1990), have argued that such minimal agentic capacities can be theorized as
contingently constituted by-products of ‘discursive practices’, without need to postulate an
ontologically ‘human’ basis. Elsewhere (Zipin, 1998, 1999), I have argued that their
theoretical efforts fail, and slip into ‘discursive Idealism’, in ways similar to Laclau and
Mouffe’s theorizations of gender asymmetry. I do not have space here to recapitulate this
debate.

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