Why Organizational Discourse Analysis Doesn Need Ernesto Laclau t

Campbell Jones University of Leicester Management Centre University Road Leicester LE 7RH c.jones@le.ac.uk

Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Organizational Discourse, Amsterdam, 26-28 July 2006.

That objectivity called Laclau

The rejection of privileged points of rupture and the confluence of struggles into a unified political space, and the acceptance, on the contrary, of the plurality and indeterminacy of the social, seems to us to be the fundamental bases from which a new political imaginary can be constructed. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 152)

One of the central efforts in the first half of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a radical critique of the categories of objectivity and necessity. Against the tendency towards objectivism, homogenisation and determinism that they argue has characterised the Marxist tradition, Laclau and Mouffe outline the emergence of a new logic of the political and with this the need for a new analytic of the political. Thus we find in the emergence, or if you prefer the creation, of the concept of hegemony which brings with it a radical critique of all , essentialisms and in their place categories of contingency, impossibility, antagonism, overdetermination, articulation, the dissolution of the subject, difference, plurality and heterogeneity.

If this is the landscape we now inhabit, then in what sense can we speak of objectivity or necessity? These are now cast as results of hegemonic articulation, contested struggles towards temporary closure of the forever open wound that is the social. In this case, we put on hold or at the very least recognise as partial political attempts to suture or hegemonise a field any appeal to necessity. And in this paper, I propose that this also applies to Laclau and to Laclau and Mouffe. I propose to inquire into that purported objectivity and wholeness that is Ernesto Laclau, and suspect the idea that the encounter with that objectivity would impose itself upon organizational discourse analysis with the force of necessity.

One might rightly ask what agency it is that will do this inquiring and suspecting. Within the terms we inherit from Laclau, refusal does not come from a single privileged point, such as the subject or the economy. As Foucault puts it, there is no single locus of great Refusal, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary(1976: 95-96). But still we do, and we must refuse. We reject categories of thought, and just as importantly the social is caught in a multiplicity of refusals, which Laclau designates as antagonism, or later in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time as dislocation Due to the fundamental and . moreover constitutive nature of antagonism, Laclau argues that Society never manages fully to be society(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127), Society is not a valid object of discourse (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111), societyas a unitary an intelligible object which grounds its own particular processes is an impossibility(Laclau, 1990: 90).

As we will see shortly, refusal is crucially important for Laclau. But what does it mean to refuse? To refuse is to break with a fusion, to disjoin from a presumed or hoped for connection. While confusion is mistakenly joining two things together, refusal splits apart things that have been mistakenly conjoined. As will hopefully become clear, my intention here is not to refuse Laclau. It might be to shift the grounds for asking what it might mean to refuse him, or to join with him too quickly. Because I hope that we will soon be able to see that, as much as society is not a valid object of discourse, so too we will find that Laclau is not a valid object of discourse, and that, as we might put it, Laclau never fully manages to be Laclau.

To Market Perhaps the most persistent effort to bring the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau into organizational analysis can be found in the work of Hugh Willmott and his colleagues (see also the important work of Bhm, 2006, which is assessed elsewhere, see Jones, forthcoming). The claims made by Willmott on behalf of Laclau are far from modest: Laclau discourse theory s presents a rich source of inspiration and guidance for interrogating and changing social relations that are unthinkable within orthodox analyses and prescriptions for change(Willmott, 2005: 748). While other competing positions such as critical realism remain fixated with science and are guilty of dualism, one benefit of Laclau discourse s theory is that we can now, according to Willmott, refuse dualism(p. 762ff), presumably without inconsistency or contradiction. But further, Laclau discourse theory s departs radically from contemporary social science(p. 763) and offers something new and challenging an innovative approach(p. 750) which guided by a self-consciously ethicois political project(p. 753).

We find similar claims in the work of other proponents of Laclau. According to Todd Bridgman we find in Laclau insights that are freshand noveland that This approach is useful for understanding processes of identity struggles and change within organizations (2005: 17). For Alessia Contu, Laclau and Mouffe offer a political answer to the crisis of dominant, rationalistic narrative[s] of the social, and try to propose a fresh view of political struggle and social change(2002: 160-161). And Orlikowski and Yates concur that The discursive approach proposed by Bridgman and Willmott is a welcome addition to the theoretical toolkit available to organizational scholars(2006: 132).

There are particular tropes at play in this language, and if we had more time then we might unpick these line by line. This is what is required of any discourse analysis and of theoretical discourse that is attentive to the complexity of language and thinking. But we do not have time for this here today, and also in the interests of making some more general comments on organizational discourse analysis I propose a somewhat more conceptual and also more polemical set of considerations. I will organize my discussion around three themes that can be extracted from this language promoting Laclau, themes relating to tradition, resolution and messianism.

Tradition The first remark relates to the division of Laclau from tradition and from existing work. This is a common strategy in the promotion of a new theorist, as I have tried to show elsewhere in my analyses of the reception of Foucault in organizational analysis, in a way that exaggerated the distance between him and earlier writers in order to maximise the benefits of this new thinker (Jones, 2002). For this reason, before introducing his novelty, it might be important to locate Laclau within the various traditions out of which his work emerges. Obviously this is going to be difficult, first of all because of the partiality of his own efforts to locate himself and second because he locates himself differently on different occasions. Recognising the impossibility of our task, let us consider some of these attempts to locate Laclau.

To start, in the introduction to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe (2001: xi) locate their work as drawing principally on deconstruction (Derrida) and psychoanalysis (Lacan). This is later expanded, in Philosophical Roots of Discourse Theory where Laclau suggests that his work its roots in the three main philosophical , has developments with which the XXth century started(2005: 1). These all relate to a critique of

the illusion of immediacy, that is, the illusion of the referent (analytical philosophy), the phenomenon (phenomenology) and the sign (structuralism). In the movement away from these positions Laclau draws on the critique of analytical philosophy (late Wittgenstein), phenomenology (Heidegger) and structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan).

In case these positionings bring comfort, and as a third attempt at positioning Laclau, we might recall iek famous rejection of the s poststructuralistreading of Laclau and Mouffe, and his argument that:

The real achievement of Hegemony is crystallised in the concept of social antagonism: far from reducing all reality to a kind of language game, the sociosymbolic field is conceived as structured around a certain traumatic impossibility, around a certain fissure which cannot be symbolised. In short, Laclau and Mouffe have, so to speak, reinvented the Lacanian notion of the Real as impossible, they have made it useful as a tool for social and ideological analysis. Simple as it may sound, this breakthrough is of such novelty that it was usually not even perceived in most responses to Hegemony. (iek, 1990: 249).

As a final effort to locate Laclau, we might also speak of the complex and often contested relationships between Laclau and the Marxist tradition. Here we must deal with the wellknown charges of anti-Marxism and ex-Marxism put to Laclau (Geras, 1990), and on the other hand his innovative readings of Althusser and in particular Gramsci, and his own claims that analysis keeps within the field of Marxism(Laclau, 1990: 55), and that far as I our as am concerned, the deconstruction of Marxist tradition, not its mere abandonment, is what proves important(Laclau, 1990: 179).

If Laclau is set in (admittedly complex) relations with all of these strands of thinking, which run from late Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan and Marxism, then one might start to wonder how it is that all of this is somehow radically foreign to organizational analysis and in particular to organizational discourse analysis. This is not to defend organizational discourse analysis, which has of course shown an incredible negligence in dealing with theory, as is shown by the decontextualisation and superficiality of theoretical work appearing, for example, in the recent Handbook of Organizational Discourse (Grant et al., 2004). If organizational discourse analysis has failed so incredibly to take seriously the major advances in philosophical reflection on signification, has distorted structuralism and poststructuralism beyond recognition and has all but ignored Marxist thought altogether, then this might be read as a sign for the need to read Laclau. Or alternatively, it might more radically call into question the very grounds of organizational discourse analysis and its ignorances, and require not the addition of one more theorist but a wholesale reconstruction of the theoretical grounds of a project of organizational discourse analysis.

Resolution Which leads me to the second set of concerns, which relates to the casting of Laclau as one that will bring solutions or resolutions to problems. In short, will Laclau solve our problems, or will he cause them? We see the idea of resolution, for example, in the way that Willmott proposes that, following Laclau, we can refuse dualism(2005: 762ff). This apparently enables us to sidestep dualism altogether, whether this be the dualism of agency and structure (Willmott, 2005: 763), or between the physical and the social (Bridgman and Willmott, 2006: 113). On this view, discourse theory enables us to bridge the gap between the material and the meaningful, by conceiving of discourse as material practice.

Famously, and controversially, this is one of the bolder claims of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Laclau and Mouffe write that Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices(1985: 107). The famous example here is taken from Wittgenstein who conceives, at the start of the Philosophical Investigations, of a language game as whole, consisting of the language and the actions into which it is woven, the the language game (1953: 5, see also Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108).

In Willmott we face the odd idea that it might make sense to speak of refusingdualism. This is a crucial strategy in Willmott argumentation, and as we know this talk of the need to s escape dualism is widespread in organization studies (see Knights, 1997, 2001, Beech and Cairns, 2001, cf. Borgerson and Rehn, 2004). The particularly strange thing in of this talk of refusing dualism is the recurrence and reinstatement, often at a higher level, of dualism. This peculiarity is expressed in Willmott very language of refusal, of breaking with, of not being s joined with dualism. This is a difficulty that the best thinkers of dualism have been aware of, and here I am thinking of course of Derrida, who reminds us again and again of the dangers of the enclosure of dualism (and other things) but at the same time reminds us that the effort to leap out of, to refuse or to eradicate dualism (Knights, 1997), leads not to the escape from metaphysics but its reinstatement.

Relatedly, we have the other question, which is whether or not Laclau is actually able to provide a solution to the kind of difficulties that Willmott and others have. Let us take one example, relating to the ontological status of linguistic construction. In their analysis of an information and communication technologies outsourcing contract, Bridgman and Willmott are concerned to avoid the commonsense, naturalized differentiation of the materiality of

technology and the discursive field(2006: 110). In doing so, and to demonstrate the superiority of Laclau discourse theory over institutional theory, they write that s Laclau and Mouffe are anti-constructionist insofar as they understand objects to exist independently of language and thought(Bridgman and Willmott, 2006: 115). Then, six pages later we learn that discourse theoretic conceptualization of technology and institutions as discursive A structures recognizes that the material properties assigned to ICTs, whether conceived as affordances or instantiated capabilities, do not exist independently of the discursive field through which they are constituted(Bridgman and Willmott, 2006: 122).

I do not want to conclude that this is an isolated contradiction, which might be excusable or punishable in its isolation. Rather, this is not so much a failure of the effort to apply Laclau s resolution of the ideal/real division as it is a failure that recurs in Laclau. Note that Laclau has emphasised again and again that, as he puts it in the debate with Bhaskar discourse theory is opposed to various forms of ontology and epistemology, but the main philosophical approach it is opposed to is idealism(in Laclau and Bhaskar, 1998: 9). Given this opposition to idealism perhaps we should be surprised when we find, throughout his work, positions recognisable as textual and conceptual idealism. About half way through his most recent book, for example, he finds that rhetorical mechanisms, as I have asserted from the beginning of this book, constitute the anatomy of the social world(Laclau, 2005a: 110)

But why, if we accept Laclau positions on antagonism and heterogeneity, would we find s discomfort in this inconsistency between his professed anti-idealism and the recurrent textual and conceptual idealism? Why would be need to find, in this thinker of the incomplete and the impossible, a final formulae that will resolve and complete thinking? This is not to excuse these inconsistencies in Laclau work and in those who have and will apply his work in s

organizational discourse analysis. Rather, perhaps the effort to apply his work will be stronger not by glossing over these difficulties and contradictions in the Laclau text, but s rather by traversing them.

Messianism This brings me to my third and final remark, on messianism. This relates to the previous remarks on tradition and resolution, and here in the figure of the coming of the messiah who breaks with the past and brings redemption. This messianism echoes throughout the claims that Willmott makes in the name of Laclau arrival. We have heard these announcements s before, in for example the efforts to introduce Foucault into organizational analysis and to defend him, against whatever the charge (see Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994), and to want, beyond all reason, for what he says to be true (see Brown, forthcoming). If Foucault is now found wanting, or has simply passed his use-by date, then is Laclau the new messiah?

As I indicated above, one of the great ironies surrounding the celebration of Foucault is the fact that Foucault was so committed not always, but often to a thoroughgoing critique of the cult of the individual (Jones, 2002). The point here being that one of the key lessons of Foucault is that any statement (enonc) is ordered and coordinated within complex rules of discursive formation, enunciative modalities, the formation of concepts and the formation of strategies, all of which participate in producing, as much as they issue from a subject (Foucault, 1972, part II). But still there is a desire to insist on the originality of Foucault rather than the radical contexualism and socialisation of discourse that he call us to.

This setup reads as a form of messianism, in which the table is set for the arrival of the one who will redeem. This language of messianism bears the mark of the evangelism of the good

news of the predicted end of history, which in Specters of Marx Derrida notes essentially a is Christian eschatology(1994: 60). Against this language of messianism, Derrida counterpoises the image, found in Benjamin, of a weak messianic power Benjamin writes: .

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that. (Benjamin, 1968: 254)

Derrida therefore speaks of a messianicity without messianism(1994: 181). This theme is taken up in Laclau (1996) review of Specters of Marx. Here Laclau follows Derrida s s deconstruction of the objectivist, ontological, determinist and eschatological aspects of the Marxist tradition while refusing to abandon the promise of emancipation. For Derrida, What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise (1994: 59). This is the messianicity without messianism. Laclau writes:

the messianism we are speaking about is one without eschatology, without a pre-given promised land, without determinate content. It is simply the structure of promise which is inherent in all experience and whose lack of content resulting from a radical opening to the event, to the other is the very possibility of justice that gives its meaning to the democracy to come. (Laclau, 1996: 74).

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This all might make us pause at the moment that Laclaubecome the determinate content that has, or will soon, arrive. Perhaps we cannot not want this arrival, but moreover we might remind ourselves of the dangers of imagining his arrival. This is why I want to insist on a certain undecidability about the prospects of Laclau which is notably absent in the work of Willmott and colleagues. This involves the need for critical responses such as those we have just heard from Armin Beverungen (2006), although I do not imagine that Laclau would call for balanced assessment, the liberal weighing the good and the bad in his work. Rather it is a matter of recognition of the inconsistencies, flaws and failures in his work. Without this we persist in messianism. Which is perhaps unavoidable. We cannot do without promise, we cannot do without hope, but let us not think that, one fine day, once and for all, the messiah will come, will break with tradition, will bring resolution and will redeem us. The messiah will not come, but must come. But if the other as event arrives, then all will not be as was planned. In the name of absolute hospitality we must also recognise the possibility, as Derrida has reminded us, that the other as Other may wreak havoc. As Derrida writes: Without the possibility of radical evil, of perjury, and of absolute crime, there is no responsibility, no freedom, no decision(Derrida, 1997: 219).

At last, the crisis of organizational discourse analysis! In the previous paper presented in this stream, Spicer and Cederstrom (2006) spoke of the contribution that Laclau can make in responding to what they call the crisis of the organizational discourse analysis. In a way, they have a bit of explaining to do, first of all in demonstrating the existence of this crisis. There are many outward signs that suggest that organizational discourse analysis is far from crisis. We are now at the 7th International Conference of Organizational Discourse, and well attended it is. We carry under our arms a weighty Handbook of Organizational Discourse. The journals are full of organizational

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discourse analysis, and it will only be a matter of time until the launch of the journal. What will it be called: Organizational Discourse Analysis or Discourse and Organization?

Beyond these institutional signs and artefacts, there is a remarkable consistency in the language that is currently circulating in the name of organizational discourse analysis. Does this conference propose to radically change the way organizational discourse analysis is done? It will be applied to new areas this time identity, what next? but is change on the programme? One might legitimately ask: what crisis?

Let me therefore conclude somewhat polemically. Laclau is a thinker who has argued again and again against necessity. There is almost always but not always, note, Laclau is an s inconsistent and fractured text a recognition that things do not have to turn out this way or that. This is expressed in the early critique of essentialism, through to the contingency of the articulation of demands in the construction of populism. Things might be in the way we hope, but they could also turn out differently. If the title of this paper needs any explaining, then, it is in that there is something comically implausible in suggesting the need for someone who has worked so far to distance himself from the idea of necessity. Organizational discourse analysis doesn need Laclau. But it might chose to take him on. If it did then, very quickly, t what might happen to organizational discourse analysis?

First, organizational discourse analysis would definitively break with any idea of the transparency of communication, the privilege of the signifier and the ease of movement from the signifier to the signified. Second, organizational discourse analysis would embark on a thoroughgoing critique of idealism, sensing the materiality of signification, the force of the extradiscursiveand the determinations of economy. Third, it would limp away from the

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anti-theoreticism that has all but crippled it, and attempt some credibility as a project engaged with the theoretical debates of our times. As a corollary to the second and third points, it would overcome its ignorance of Marxism. Fourth, organizational discourse analysis would be called to radically revise its careless misplacement and underestimation of poststructuralism and begin to see that poststructuralism implies not the valorisation but the radical critique of, as Derrida puts it, moment when language invaded the universal the problematicand when everything became discourse(1978: 280). Fifth, and perhaps as a result, organizational discourse analysis would sense the absolute and radical limits of discourse, by which I do not mean cheap talk about polyphony or plurivocality. It would recognise that discourse is not simply a matter of exchanging signs but is shattered by the bone in the throatof impossibility of expression that Lacan designates the Real. Sixth, antagonism and political contestation would be recognised as basic and constitutive of the social, not as something that is to be done away with but as basic to the deepening and broadening of democracy.

None of this is necessary. But it certainly is possible.

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