Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding

for Rhetorical Practice

Kevin DeLuca

The theory of articulation has become important to some of the more excit-
ing developments and debates in communication studies. In Lawrence
Grossberg's recent manifesto for cultural studies, "Cultural Studies and/in
New Worlds" (1993), he argues that "cultural studies has moved from a
practice of critical interpretation to one of articulation" (4) and that the
critical project "needs to move beyond models of oppression . . . and to-
ward a model of articulation" (8). In rhetorical theory, Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of articulation, hegemony, and dis-
course undergird Raymie McKerrow's critical rhetoric project (1989, 94-
96, 98, 103, 106). In a world without foundations, without a transcendental
signified, without given meanings, the concept of articulation is a means
to understanding the struggle to fix meaning and define reality temporarily.
To say that we live in a world without eternal truths or given meanings is
not to say that any and all possible articulations are equally likely. The
proliferation of new social movements and their struggles to rearticulate
"nature," "'black," "woman," '"progress," in other words, to rearticulate the
context of modem industrial society, testifies to the opening of reality as a
site of struggle. The setback these movements have suffered is evidence
that a postmodern world guarantees neither equality of opportunity nor
success. Laclau and Mouffe's theorization of articulation in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) suggests
a rhetoricized ontology for a postmodern world and shows how such an
orientation can be used to understand contemporary politics, particularly
the new social movements.
Importing Marxist and cultural studies' terms and concepts into rhetori-
cal studies has sometimes been jarring, since those endeavors tend not to
have discursive understandings of reality, meaning, power, and politics. In
part, articulation theory resonates in rhetorical circles because of a shared

Philosophy and Rhetoric. Vol. 32. No. 4, 1999. Copyright © 1999 The Pennsylvania State
University. University Park. PA.

334
 ARTICULATION THEORY 335

perspective on the role of discourse in the constitution of the social world,

a shared investment in the "linguistic turn" (Rorty 1979). Although there is
growing recognition among communication scholars of the centrality of
articulation theory in the present historical juncture (e.g.. Hall 1986, Makus
1990, Grossberg 1993, McKerrow 1989, Ono and Sloop 1992, Condit 1994,
and Cloud 1994), unfortunately, this recognition has been accompanied by
rather sketchy summaries of that work. With this essay, I propose a detour
through the theory of articulation followed by an exploration of its impor-
tance for rhetoric. In particular, I discuss the promise of the tum to the
terms discourse and antagonism and suggest that articulation theory pro-
vides contingent grounds for a fundamentally rhetorical understanding of
the postmodern world,'

The theory of articulation

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe move the concep-
tion of articulation from being a way of explaining contingency in the
Marxist theory of historical necessity to a way of understanding social
struggle in a postmodern world—that is, a world without guarantees and
foundational truths. They "begin by renouncing the conception of 'society'
as founding totality" (1985, 95), They argue, instead, for the openness of
the social and the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings. Discursive
structures constitute and organize social relations and are the result of an
articulatory practice (96). Articulation is "any practice establishing a rela-
tion among elements such that their identity is modified, . , , The practice
of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which
partially fix meaning and the partial character of this fixation proceeds
from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant over-
flowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity"
(105, 113), Articulation^ has two aspects: speaking forth elements and link-
ing elements. Though elements preexist articulation as floating signifiers,
the act of linking in a particular discourse modifies their character such
that they can be understood as being spoken anew. The linking of elements
into a temporary unity is not necessary, but rather is contingent and par-
ticular and is the result of a political and historical struggle. In short, an
element is not a fixed identity and does not have an essential meaning.
Articulating elements into a discourse can be understood as both at-
tempts to fix meaning within the field of discursivity and attempts to fix
336 KEVIN DELUCA

the context, "an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the
flow of differences, to construct a centre" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 112).
In other words, articulatory practices can range from the local to the glo-
bal. For example, on a local level, Stuart Hall writes of the rearticulation
of "black" in Jamaica, from its signifying dispossessed, uncivilized, and
incompetent to its signifying soul brother, beautiful, solidarity with struggles
for liberation, and the cultural essence of "Jamaican-ness" (1985). On a
global level, the discourse of Industrialism (humanity, by dominating na-
ture through the use of instrumental reason and technology, will achieve
progress) could be considered a discourse that temporarily defines the field
of discursivity. Marxism and capitalism are two competing discourses. They
are fighting over who should own the factory. Neither questions whether
the factory should be built in the first place (nor whether nature should be
conceived as a storehouse of resources). In a fundamental sense, they both
operate within the taken-for-granted context of Industrialism.

Antagonisms

Antagonisms make possible the investigation, disarticulation, and

rearticulation of a hegemonic discourse. Antagonisms point to the limit of
a discourse. An antagonism occurs at the point of the relation of the dis-
course to the surrounding life world and shows the impossibility of the
discourse constituting a permanently closed or sutured totality. It shows
the linkage of elements to be contingent, not necessary: "Antagonism as
the negation of a given order is, quite simply, the limit of that order" (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985,126). For example, during the history of the United States,
the "American Dream" has faced antagonisms (slavery, segregation, op-
pression of women, exploitation of workers) that have exposed the limits
of the "American Dream" and led to struggles (the Civil War, the civil
rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, the women's liberation
movement, the labor movement) that disarticulated and rearticulated the
"American Dream." Today, antagonisms such as global warming, ozone
depletion, toxic waste, and ptesticides in food and water provide the oppor-
tunity to question and disarticulate Industrialism.
It is important to understand that there are not original or essential an-
tagonisms, but that antagonisms emerge as limits from within the social.
As Laclau and Mouffe explain, "The limit of the social must be given within
the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to con-
stitute a full presence. Society never manages fully to be society, because
 ARTICULATION THEORY 337

everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constitut-

ing itself as an objective reality" (1985, 127),
Laclau and Mouffe take feminism as an example. Pointing to the bio-
logical difference between women and men as an original or foundational
antagonism makes the problem of sexism unanswerable. Rearticulation
becomes impossible. Linkage with other social struggles is not possible. If
feminism saw men as the problem and the civil rights movement saw white
people as the problem, there would be no common ground that would en-
able the two struggles to unite and understand how their particular oppres-
sions expose a common relation of dominance within the hegemonic dis-
course under which they are both oppressed. Antagonisms are specific, not
foundational. They are the recognition of differences as socially con-
structed—as the result of the practice of articulation. Indeed, a founda-
tional antagonism is not an antagonism as such, but just a difference. It has
always been that way and the situation will remain the same after the per-
ception of difference. The difference of sex or skin color cannot be changed.
The antagonism due to relations of domination constructed around sex or
skin color is the arena for struggle: "The political space of the feminist
struggle is constituted within the ensemble of practices and discourses which
create the different forms of the subordination of women; the space of the
anti-racist struggle, within the overdetermined ensemble of practices con-
stituting racial discrimination" (132). In summary, antagonisms are differ-
ences, limits, in a hegemonic discourse that must be articulated as antago-
nisms by groups in order to subvert or disarticulate the hegemonic dis-
course. Antagonisms are "natural" relations of subordination articulated as
socially constructed relations of oppression and domination.
There is a slippage in Laclau and Mouffe's usage, such that the linkage
of various antagonisms in a chain of equivalencies is also called an antago-
nism. For a black person in the 1950s, not being allowed to work, live,
travel, ride, or eat in the same places as whites came to be seen as equiva-
lent signs of general oppression, thus sparking the civil rights movement.
The threat of global wanning, toxic waste, pesticides in one's food, and the
specter of a nuclear holocaust may be seen as relatively equivalent—a chain
of equivalencies—insofar as they point to the hegemonic discourse of In-
dustrialism and spark a struggle to disarticulate its linkages.
On another level, the antagonisms of various social struggles retain their
particularity, but are also linked as equivalent in that they all point to the
limit of the dominant hegemonic discourse. For example, the different an-
tagonisms that give rise to workers' struggles, feminist struggles, and
antiracist struggles all make possible the disarticulation of the hegemonic
338 KEVIN DELUCA

discourse that constructs these vjirious groups in relations of oppression.

For Laclau and Mouffe, the task of the new social movements involves
"expanding the chains of equivalents between the different struggles against
oppression" (176).

Discourse, ideology, and rhetoric

Laclau and Mouffe displace the term ideology with discourse, an action
that has important implications for rhetoric. Ideology carries certain bur-
dens, as Foucault reminds us (1980, 118, 58). First, the term ideology, due
to complex historical and theoretical reasons, tends to invoke Truth as its
opposite. For equally complex historical and theoretical reasons. Truth rarely
has been a friend to rhetoric. Second, ideology calls forth the classical hu-
manist conception of a unified, essential subject, a figure justifiably viewed
with some suspicion in rhetorical circles today. Finally, ideology is often
understood as mere epiphenomena of the infrastructure, a perspective that
reifies the nonsensical materialism-idealism dichotomy, which is a divide
that both rivets and rives rhetorical theorists.
Laclau and Mouffe's deployment of discourse addresses the first prob-
lem largely by virtue of not being the term ideology. Within a regime of
Truth, ideology is too often construed as false consciousness and rhetoric
is reduced to revealing or simply transmitting Truth—an instrumentalist
notion of rhetoric. A discursive perspective suggests that the meaning of
the world is not discovered, but constructed, through rhetorical practices.
With respect to the second jwint, the tum to discourse highlights the
critique of the essentialist subject as "an originative and founding totality"
and instead offers "'subject positions' within a discursive structure" (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985, 115). A subject, however, is not simply interpellated by
one discourse; rather, a subject is constituted as the nodal point of a con-
glomeration of conflicting discourses, a position that leaves room for agency,
but not the free will of a preconstituted subject. As Mouffe expounds.

We can thus conceive the social agent as constituted by an ensetnble of 'sub-

ject positions' that can never be totally fixed in a closed system of differ-
ences, constructed by a diversity of discourses among which there is no nec-
essary relation, but rather a constant movement of overdetermination and
displacement. The 'identity' of such a multiple and contradictory subject is
therefore always contingent and precarious, temporarily fixed at the inter-
section of those subject positions. (1993, 77)
 ARTICULATION 'THEORY 339

Far from being the fully conscious source and sovereign of discourse,
then, the subject is the ongoing effect of social discourses, a product con-
stituted within the matrix of linguistic and material social practices. In this
sense, the subject is not a content, but a performance, a happening bom,
existing, and transformed in social discourses. The practices of radical en-
vironmental groups offer a glimpse of what such a subjectivity looks like
in practice. Environmental justice groups construct selves and identities
through the f)erformance of rhetorical/social practices situated in place.
This process is clear in the transformation of Lois Gibbs from house-
wife to environmentalist and founder, first, of the Love Canal Homeowners
Association and, later, of the Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes.
Gibbs is an "ordinary woman who, in response to crisis and challenge,
transcended herself and became far more than she had been" (Levine 1982,
xiv), Gibbs herself describes the process:

If I imagined a year earlier that 1 would be chasing Congressman LaFalce

with signs, well. 1 wouldn't have, that's all, I am not a sign carrier. Radicals
and students carry signs, but not average housewives. Housewives have to
care for their children and their homes. But here I was giving press inter-
views, doing radio programs, and chasing a congressman, a governor, and
the President with signs saying 1 supported him or that he was doing some-
thing wrong. Here I was literally screaming at the New York health depart-
ment or the department of transportation. (1982, 91-92)

In this transformation, Gibbs is the embodiment and enactor of multiple

discourses. While it is obvious that the discourses of environmentalism and
activism enable Gibbs to perform the role of environmental activist, Gibbs's
immersion in the discourses of mother and property owner (housewife) are
also crucial to her constitution as an environmental activist. It is her re-
sponsibility and right within these discourses to care for her children and
her home that prompt her to enact the discourse of environmental activism.
Indeed, Temma Kaplan (1997) suggests that the preponderance of women
in the international environmental justice movement is due to their position
as mothers and the rights and responsibilities that that position entails.
The construction of Gibbs's identity through rhetorical/social practices
is analogous to the construction of the identity of the Love Canal environ-
mental justice group from "blue-collar, middle-class Americans" to activ-
ists for environmental justice (Gibbs 1982, 171). As Gibbs notes, the "people
of Love Canal are quite different now than they were two or three years
a g o . . . . [They] have changed their values, their lifestyles, and their priori-
ties" (170-71).
340 KEVIN DELUCA

This construction of subjectivity has enormous implications for rheto-

ric, which too often has accepted the conscious intentions of strategizing
individuals as sufficient explanation. It is not accidental, for instance, that
the rhetorical canon is littered with speeches by the likes of Abraham Lin-
coln and Edmund Burke. As Barbara Biesecker notes, the subject in rheto-
ric "is conceived as a consciousness, an T which thinks, jjerceives and
feels, an T whose self-presence or consciousness to itself is the source of
meaning" (1989, 123),
Some may argue that, because it shifts focus to the text, the rhetorical
criticism of those who perform close textual analysis escapes the inten-
tional fallacy. Although the hermeneutic character of such analysis opens
possibilities for contextualization, I think intentionality still too often gov-
ems the scene of criticism, that close readings are often infused with a
humanist ideology that both motivates and limits the textual analyses. Es-
says by Dilip P. Gaonkar (1993) and James Jasinski (1997) suggest that
such a limitation is typical of this method of rhetorical criticism. By inter-
rogating the emerging area of the rhetoric of science as exemplary of con-
temporary rhetorical studies, Gaonkar describes a practice committed "to
an agent-centered model of intentional persuasion" that "invariably reads
the text as a manifestation of the author's conscious design" (1993, 277).
Focusing on Campbell's early essays on Darwin's The Origin of the Spe-
cies, Gaonkar concludes. "Campbell's analysis assumes that Darwin knew
exactly what he was doing and that his textual practices were intentional
and premeditated" (280). Jasinski comes to similar conclusions about the
prevalent practice of close rhetorical readings. He discems the search for
purpose (intention) as the governing principle of rhetorical criticism,
Jasinski's review of essays by Black, Leff and Mohrmann, and Lucas leads
him to summarize the assumptions of the instrumental tradition (which in-
cludes close textual analysis) as follows: "a mode of contextualization that
assumes situational stability, a sense of agency that assumes that inten-
tions are unambiguous, fully present, and capable of directing textual pro-
duction, and a sense of the text that assumes its coherence and its ability to
represent authorial intention fully and without significant distortion" (1997,
210). Such assumptions not only lead to a certain blindness in rhetorical
criticism, but also close off possibilities for the criticism of the rhetoric of
a mass-mediated public sphere.
To be clear, the decentering of the subject and intentionality that Laclau
and Mouffe suggest is not the dismissal of these concepts. Agency and
intentionality still must be accounted for, but in a manner that recognizes
how they are forged in the complex conflux of commercial, legal, prop-
 ARTICULATION THEORY 341

erty, philosophy, and literary discourses. Even if one wants to argue that
the Cartesian "I" or Lockean individual and his/her intentionality are fic-
tions, they have been (and still are) fictions with rhetorical force and effec-
tivity. The fictions of the individual, the autonomous author, originality,
and genius are legal realities institutionalized in the copyright (Rose 1993).
Let us return to the example of Lois Gibbs to explore a rhetorical criti-
cism bumped off the moorings of humanism by Laclau and Mouffe's ac-
count of subjectivity. Traditionally, a critic would read the texts of Gibbs
in conjunction with her intentions and experiences as a sovereign subject.
The question is: How did Gibbs's experience as a mother lead her to intend
to achieve certain ends and how is this manifested in her rhetoric? Laclau
and Mouffe's turn to "subject positions" suggests not that we focus on the
subject as a source of texts (and their meanings), but. instead, that we read
Gibbs as constituted and empowered through a conflux of diverse dis-
courses. The focus is not on the intentions of a fully conscious and
strategizing subject, but on the discourses that make possible a particular
form of agency. Instead of reading Gibbs's rhetoric in light of her inten-
tions, the critic would read her rhetoric in conjunction with larger social
discourses. The question becomes: How do the discourses of motherhood,
projjerty rights, environmentalism. and activism constitute the subjectivity
and contex< that enable Gibbs to contest rhetorically the waste disposal
practices of corporations?
Laclau and Mouffe's adoption ofdiscour.se addresses the third problem
with the term ideology—that it is a mere epiphenomenon of material real-
ity. Excluding the charges of heresy leveled by orthodox Marxists (Geras
1987), the major criticism of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is that the
"book thinks that the world, social practice, is language" (Hall 1986. 57).
The accusation that Laclau and Mouffe retreat into language and leave the
"real" world behind is based on an erroneous equation of discourse with
language. Laclau and Mouffe, following Wittgenstein, explicitly state that
discourse is material and includes within itself the linguistic and the
nonlinguistic (1985, 107-12). They use the term discourse to emphasize
"that every social configuration is meaningful. . . . [I]n our interchange
with the world, objects are never given to us as mere existential entities;
they are always given to us within discursive articulations.... [OJutside of
any discursive context objects do not have being; they have only exist-
ence" {Laclau 1990, 100, 103-4). Of course a tree exists, but a tree is not
just a tree. It is firewood, a god, shelter, a source of food, or artistic inspi-
ration dq>ending on the discursive context. To use an example from envi-
ronmental politics, yes, toxic waste sites exist. Their existence is not in
342 KEVIN DELUCA

question, but what they mean is the site for political struggle. Within the
hegemonic discourse of Industrialism, toxic waste sites are the normalized
cost of economic growth and the people affected need to sacrifice for the
common good. Environmental justice groups are struggling to articulate
an alternative discourse of environmental justice that contests this mean-
ing of toxic waste sites and rearticulates them as examples of class dis-
crimination, institutional racism, and corporate colonialism that exp>ose the
limits of and challenge Industrialism, thus expanding the spaces for politi-
cal struggle and resistance.
In echoing the criticism that Laclau and Mouffe and others "collapse
the distinction between discourse and the real" (Cloud 1994. 154; see also
142, 145, and 153), rhetorician Dana Cloud states, "if a bomb falls on ci-
vilians in Baghdad, and a critic is not present to see it, the bomb still did. in
reality, fall" (148). Laclau and Mouffe would not contest that bombs fell
on civilians in Baghdad. Yet they would recognize that merely announcing
the existence of this event is not enough to carry the day politically and
does not constitute critical intervention. Instead, they would argue that the
meaning of that event (accident; disaster caused by Saddam Hussein's use
of civilians as shields for military sites; evidence of the horrific costs of an
inhumane, imperialist slaughter) is the arena for struggle and that the bomb-
ing of civilians is an antagonism that opens the possibility of deconstructing
the government's articulation of the Persian Gulf War as a bloodless high-
tech operation of liberation against the demon Saddam Hussein.
Laclau and Mouffe's defmition of discourse, with its distinction between
being or meaning and existence, is useful, particularly because it lets them
get beyond the essentialist dichotomy of idealism and materialism. This
nonproductive dichotomy is itself a discursive construction, a vestige of a
simplified Cartesianism in which the idea of a purely material world stripped
of all its discursive aspects is constructed and posited as separate from an
equally constructed and pure mental world. Overall, the discursive tum
expands the possibilities and imfKjrtance of rhetoric. Within a discursive
frame, rhetoric is no longer an instrument in the service of reality, but,
rather, becomes constitutive of the meaning of the world.
In articulation theory, the term antagonism functions in place of contra-
diction in classical Marxism. This is important from a rhetorical perspec-
tive. The term contradiction implies a clash between the essential interests
of two ontologically fundamental classes. The role of the politically active
rhetorical critic, from this perspective, is to expose such contradictions in
the hopes that awareness will spark social action. Yet the contemporary
social field is rife with exposed contradictions, demonstrating that expo-
 ARTICULATION THEORY 343

sure in and of itself does not lead to social change. Laclau and Mouffe's
use of the term antagonism highlights the point that differences (contra-
dictions) must be constructed as antagonisms through rhetorical practices.
Further, these practices are performed, not by classes privileged by their
place in the mode of production, but by social formations that are them-
selves the results of rhetorical practices. Let us return to the case of toxic
waste dumps. Within the hegemonic discourse of Industrialism, a toxic waste
site is the necessary "price of progress." Only when neighbors adjacent to
a toxic waste site employ various rhetorical tactics to challenge such a
designation is the site an antagonism that makes evident the limits of In-
dustrialism and offers possibilities for change. And in practicing rhetoric,
the neighbors (housewives, lawyers, blue-collar workers, sales clerks, teach-
ers, and so on) constitute themselves both as victims of environmental
crimes and as activists for environmental justice.

Rhetoric, phronesis, and postmodern politics

In Laclau and Mouffe's later work, their rapprochement with rhetoric be-
comes explicit in their tum to phronesis. In a series of essays and inter-
views since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they individually work to
explicate and expand their theory of articulation, antagonism, hegemony,
subjectivity, discourse, and radical democracy.' In support of their anti-
essentialist and nonfoundational theoretical stand, both Laclau (1993a, 341)
and Mouffe (1993, 14-18) turn to phronesis. They claim that political ar-
gument in a social field permeated by contingency and doxa, not necessity
and universal truths (i.e., society, not as ground, but as argumentative tex-
ture), must be characterized by phronesis. Although a tum lo phronesis can
be construed as conservative, it is Aristotle's conservative definitions of
virtue, right action, and tradition that render it so (Aristotle 1962/1981. 3 -
18, 38-44, 152-73; Warnick 1989, .305-7). While there is a tradition of
exercise of power, there is also a tradition of struggle (Laclau 1993a, 341).
For example, the environmental activists of Greenpeace and Earth First!
are part of a tradition of radical direct action that can be traced back at
least as far as the Luddites (Thompson 1964; Sale 1995). if not to the Dig-
gers (Hill 1967, 1972, 1985). The characteristics of phronesis that interest
Laclau and Mouffe are its open-endedness, pragmatism, emphasis on the
particular, embeddedness in the local and historically specific, and recog-
nition of contingency (Laclau 1993a, 341; Mouffe 1993, 14-18; Warnick
344 KEVIN DELUCA

1989, 306; Charland 1991, 73). This is in contrast with the instrumental
reason of science, which emphasizes the universal, abstract, and timeless.
Phronesis, then, is the "intelligent understanding of contingency" (Charland
1991, 72) that guides praxis in an open social Held.
This tum to phronesis answers a major criticism of postmodemism in
general and Laclau and Mouffe's discursive social theory in particular: that
the tum to discourse renders impossible any coherent, progressive politics.
This charge points to a pervasive fear among social theorists that the aban-
donment of a logic of a priori necessity, essential identities, and founda-
tions (laws of History, economic determinism, universal class, etc.) will
make politics and social critique impossible (see Habermas 1987, Harvey
1989, Eagleton 1991, Hart 1994, Cloud 1994).
Laclau and Mouffe's response to this fear of a retreat from the political
is that the abandonment of ultimate foundations and the widening of the
field of undecidability expands the field of politics (Laclau 1993b. 280)
and that the subversion of structural laws by contingency creates the very
possibility of radical politics (Laclau 1990, 46). If society and history are
understood as the necessary unfolding of Reason getting to know itself
(Hegel) or the necessary development of the laws of History (Marx), poli-
tics is reduced to discovering the action of a reality extemal to itself, rhetoric
is reduced to transmitting that reality, and humans are reduced to specta-
tors or actors in a .scripted play written by Reason or History (or some
other essential ground). If, however, society is understood as groundless,
politics and rhetoric become ontological as the names of that process through
which social agents in part construct their own world (Laclau 1993a, 341;
1993b, 295). As Laclau explains.

Abandonment of the myth of foun(lation.s does not lead lo nihilism, just as

uncertainty as to how an enemy will attack does not lead to passivity. It
leads, rather, to a proliferation of discursive interventions and arguments
that are necessary, because there is no extradiscursive reality that discourse
might simply reflect. Inasmuch as argument and discourse constitute the
social, their open-ended character becomes the source of a greater activism
and a more radical libertarianism. Humankind, having always bowed to ex-
ternal forces—God, Nature, the necessary laws of History—can now, at the
threshold of postmodemity, consider itself for the first time the creator and
constructor of its own history. (1993a. 341)

In short, the discursive turn expands the (possibilities and importance of

politics and rhetoric. Within a discursive frame, rhetoric is no longer a
techne or instrument in the service of Truth (be it Platonic or Marxist);
rather, it becomes constitutive of any social or political collectivity.
 ARTICULATION THEORY 345

The ontological function of rhetoric is nowhere more apparent than in

the construction of the "new social movements," which in no way can be
construed as the coming to awareness of essential identities. If early social
movements could somehow be seen as natural, either through essential iden-
tities (race or gender) or through common material interests due to shared
positions in the mode of production (class), and this is contestable,'' con-
temporary social movements are rhetorical achievements.
As a number of sociologists (A. Touraine, A. Melucci, J. L. Cohen) note,
the new social movements differ from past social movements in funda-
mental ways. For a variety of reasons, the new social movements do not
focus on the distribution of material goods, expansion of institutional po-
litical rights, and security; rather, they thematize personal and collective
identity, contest social norms, challenge the logic governing the system,
and, in sum, deconstruct the established naming of the world. In other words,
there is a shift from economic grounds to cultural grounds or from the
domain of the state and economy to civil society, in part "because the domi-
nation which is challenged controls not only 'means of production' but the
production of symbolic goods, that is, of information and images of cul-
ture itself' (Touraine 1985, 774; see also Melucci 1985, 795-96).
The postmodem critique of essentialism and foundations not only ex-
pands the field of politics theoretically, but also recognizes both the failure
of the essentialized identity of the working class in the wake of the dislo-
cations of disorganized or late capitalism and the emergence of the new
social movements based on the dispersion of subject positions and the pro-
liferation of social struggles in the contemporary social field. The various
struggles of environmental, feminist, antiracist, and antinuclear peace
groups share the central characteristic "that an ensemble of subject posi-
tions linked through inscription in social relations, hitherto considered as
apolitical, have become loci of conflict and antagonism and have led to
political mobilization" (Mouffe 1993, 77). For such groups, identity is not
a natural assumption, but a rhetorical achievement.
To the concern of D. Harvey, Frederick Jameson, and other critics that
postmodem politics prevents the coordination of local and global struggles,
thus isolating and disem|X)wering local resistances while aiding global
corporate capitalism, Laclau and Mouffe respond that the task of the new
social movements involves expanding the links between the different
struggles against oppression and that articulation is this very practice. In
other words, the new social movements need to disavow an essentialist
identity politics that balkanizes and, instead, link the different antagonisms
that give rise to environmental struggles, workers' struggles, feminist
346 KEVIN DELUCA

Struggles, and antiracist struggles so as to make possible the disarticula-

tion of the hegemonic discourse that constructs these various groups in
relations of oppression.
Environmental justice groups have been doing this by working to estab-
lish contingent alliances directed toward political interventions in larger-
than-local discourses. Their redefinitions of environment have enabled them
to articulate links with groups concerned with race, class, and rural issues
and have resulted in a kaleidoscopic network of environmental justice
groups that works to protect thousands of communities across the United
States from potential or existing landfills and hazardous waste sites, as
well as other problems (Szasz 1994, 72-76; Dowie 1995, 131-35).
Environmental justice groups, then, recognize their common struggle
against the discourse of Industrialism while simultaneously engaging in
local struggles situated in place. In this recognition, in their rhetorical prac-
tices of constructing nature in ways that lead to linkages and networks
among disparate groups, environmental justice groups embody a possible
politics in a postmodem social field marked by fragmentation, simulation,
and diversity. In short, environmental justice groups are practicing an ar-
ticulatory politics that is a way of understanding how, in a postmodem
world with neither guarantees nor a great soul of revolt, diverse groups
practicing an array of rhetorical tactics can forge links that transform their
local stmggles into a broad-based challenge to the existing industrial sys-
tem. In such a world, rhetoric becomes ontological: the mobilization of
signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, com-
munities, publics, and cultures.

Department of Speech Communication

University of Georgia

Acknowledgment
1 would like to thank Ian Angus for providing me with an excellent introduction to the work
of Laclau and Mouffe and Michael McGee for encouraging my continued engagement with
articulation theory. The argument presented in this essay is developed and put into practice
in my forthcoming book. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New
York: Gilford Publishing, 1999).

Notes
I. Postmodem is a notoriously vague and slippery term that is also unavoidable. I think
it is best to think of it as what Raymond Williams terms a structure of feeling (1977, 128-
3S). To give a better sense of that feeling. I want to suggest that postmodemism can be
characterized in pait by the conjunction of the following elements: a decentering of the
 ARTICULATION THEORY 347

subject as origin, end. and arbiter of theory and practice: a desubilization or fragmentation
of all kinds of identity; a lack of belief in any foundation, totality, transcendental signified,
or grand narrative and a recognition of a plurality of discourses; a shift from a thematics
truth to power; a generalized awareness of limits, particularly the limits of reason (Laclau
1990. 3); a change in material conditions, including the disappearance of Nature as the great
referent that ontologically grounds Western epistemology; and the rise of both image and
micropolitics.
2. In Laclau and Mouffe's works, articulation ends up meaning both the practice and
tbe product. When articulation is meant in the latter sense, articulation, discourse, and for-
mation function as sliding signifiers. To minimize confusion, 1 prefer to use articulation to
mean the practice and discourse to mean the product.
3. These later discursive excursions and interventions are collected in three volumes.
New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990) and Emancipationist (1996) by Laclau
and The Return of the Political (1993) by Mouffe. They arepart of a series edited by Laclau
and Mouffe, which is aptly titled Phronesis.
4. For example, even the Russian revolution did not correspond to the classical model.
As Lenin noted. "[A]s a result of an extremely unique historical situation, absolutely dis-
similar currents, absolutely heterogenous class interests, absolutely contrary political and
social strivings . . . merged . . . in a strikingly harmonious" manner" (Hall 1985, 9 5 ) .

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