请将“Both modes of discourse contain dangers to the dominant class. Thus, although a discourse of difference transforms negatively- charged contradictions into positively differentiated contrarieties and creates the ideological conditions necessary for the integration of different subjectivities into a system of democratic politics, the dominant class can go too far in absorbing and legitimating the demands of those in subordinate positions so that the dominated class(es) can impose their own discourse within the state apparatus during crises which undermine the neutralising capacities of the dominant class. This can be seen in the appropriation of democratic discourse into a socialist discourse as monopoly capital finds it increasingly difficult to maintain liberal democratic traditions and institutions. Likewise, although the dominant class can assimilate the ‘people’ in a discourse of equivalence to its own hegemonic project (particularly during periods of crisis), it runs the risk that populist forces will develop the anti-status quo, anti-capitalist elements in populist discourse to the point of a radical break with the interests of the dominant class. This can be seen in the threats posed by the Nazi left drawing on socialist traditions as well as the Italian fascist left drawing on the Mazzinian, Garibaldian, and syndicalist traditions. Moreover, whereas the basic tendencies of the discourse of difference are integrative in so far as it disarticulates the organisation of the various subordinate positionalities into a single ‘people’ interpellated as the dynamic pole of confrontation with the power bloc, the discourse of equivalence is more readily ‘turned’ to radical, ruptural goals through the articulation of the ‘people’ to a revolutionary project rather than to a populism of the right (Laclau, 1977, pp. 121-122, 162-163; 1980a, pp. 90-93; 1980b, pp. 255-258; Laclau and Mouffe, 1980, pp. 20-22).

Although these arguments are still in the process of development (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1982), their principal implications are clear. First, not only does a discourse-theoretical approach involve a rejection of the more or less complex forms of economism entailed in the capital-theoretical analysis of the state, it also involves a rejection of the a prion privileging of classes as social forces found in class-theoretical analyses. Instead of these positions we find an insistence that the economic region is itself constituted discursively, that social unity derives from the articulation between different discursive practices rather than from some logically necessary correspondence between an extra-discursive base and a discursive superstructure, and that class as well as non-class forces are constituted in and through discourse rather than being inscribed in extra-discursive systems of social relations and functioning as their subjective Träger or supports. Second, if all the various ‘levels’ or ‘regions’ of a social formation are constituted in and through discourse and are liable to transformation through forces which are likewise constituted, we must replace the notion of the causal primacy of the economy so long maintained among Marxists with a ‘primacy of the political’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1981, p. 22) or, better, a ‘primacy of the discursive’. This means that the economy is as much a field of struggle as the political and ideological regions and that its so-called ‘laws of motion’ are not governed by an extra-discursive capital logic’ (or its equivalent in other modes of production). Instead the movement of the economy must be explained in terms of the hegemonic articulation existing in a given society (ibid.). Third, since any given society is characterised by a vast plurality of subjects and there is no reason to privilege class subjects, hegemony must be seen in terms of the discursive articulation of different subjects. Thus, if the dominant class or the working class are to contest the role of ‘political, intellectual, and moral leadership’, this must depend on their respective abilities to develop a political project recognised by other subject as essential to the realisation of their own interests and to develop an ‘organic ideology’ which can serve as a shared ideological frame of reference in terms of which a plurality of subjects can redefine and negotiate alliances to advance that project. The centrality of a fundamental class (bourgeois or proletarian) in a hegemonic project can only be the result of effort to interpellate and unify that class around the struggle for ‘political, intellectual, and moral leadership’: there are no theoretical guarantees or extra-discursive necessities that a fundamental class will inevitably occupy such a position of leadership nor that other subjects will accept such leadership (cf. Laclau and Mouffe, 1981, pp. 2122). Finally, since hegemony is achieved through the discursive articulation of different subjects who are themselves constituted in and through discourse, we can interpret hegemony as a ‘discourse of discourses’ (to coin a phrase) and focus in the struggle to articulate subjects around a specific political forces in the struggle to articulate subjects around a specific project.

In evaluating this discourse-theoretical approach to hegemony we must first clarify some deep-seated ambiguities concerning discourse. Laclau and Mouffe stress that discourse is not simply the ‘text’, not just ‘language’ and ‘parole’, not just ideological elements: it is ‘the ensemble of phenomena in and through which social production of meaning takes place’ (Laclau, 1980, p. 87). This seems to mean that discourse is a complex practice rooted in the complex articulation of extra-discursive conditions (such as the means of production in economic discourse) and specific modes of interpellation and calculation (such as the constitution of the formally free wage-labourer and the rules of double-entry book-keeping) under the dominance of the discursive (so that the extra-discursive conditions are effective only through the discursive) and against a background of other discourses which affect its condition both of production and reception (such as legal discourse as a precondition of commodity production and fashion discourse as an influence on the marketability of commodities) (cf. Gramsci, 1971, p.377, on the unity between material forces as content and ideologies as form). However, although there is an explicit recognition that discourse involves more than ‘text’, it is ‘text’ that is placed at the centre of their work. There is little recognition in practice that extra-discursive conditions are effective not only through their prior mediation through discourse but also through post hoc empirical necessities; nor that discourse in its more inclusive sense can generate unintended structural effects or emergent properties which limit the effects of such discourse. Thus, while we may well wish to reject technological determinism as a theoretical perspective in Marxist discourse, we cannot deny the role of technical determinations in the economic, politico-military, or ideological fields. Likewise, if we wish to comprehend the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist economy or the operation of electoral systems in parliamentary democracies, we must go beyond an analysis of particular economic or political discourses to consider their interaction to generate effects which may not be intelligible within any one of these discourses. Indeed, when we refer to the effects of ‘market forces’ or to the importance of the ‘balance of politico-military forces’, we refer to emergent properties of systems of interaction which are not reducible to any one of the discourses which help to constitute those systems. In this context it is regrettable that the discourse-theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe slides all too easily from a general conception of discourse as the production of social meaning to a particular focus upon ideological discourse to the exclusion of economic, legal, military, administrative, and other discourses and then emphasises the ‘discourse of discourses’ involved in the production of hegemony itself. For this slippage forces them back to the ‘text’ and seems to reduce hegemony to an effect of various interpellative mechanisms considered in isolation from their conditions of production or reception. Thus, although there is no doubt that the success of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ strategy or that of Giolitti’s ‘trasformismo’ depended in part on a discourse of difference, it is unfortunate that Laclau and Mouffe ignore their additional dependence on specific forms of political representation and government intervention, specific forms of political organisation, specific degrees of economic manouevre, specific forms of political repression, and so on. in short, if a discourse-theoretical analysis is to avoid the charge of ‘logocentrism’ or ‘textual reductionism’, it must consider both the discursive and extra-discursive moments of discourse and do so not only in relation to the ‘discourse of discourses’ (hegemony) but also in relation to other fields of discursive practice.

A second range of problems with this approach concerns the crucial distinction between ‘political hegemony’ and ‘organic ideology’. There is no doubt that political leadership is won or lost in the context of ‘intellectual and moral reform’. But there is a danger that ‘political hegemony’ and ‘organic ideology’ are conflated. Whilst the development of an appropriate ideological cement is the field par excellence of the creation of shared meanings, ‘common’ sense, etc., political leadership works on these meanings in various ways to generate particular projects or national-popular programmes that require specific resources, policy initiatives, forms of mobilisation, etc. One cannot reduce Fascism or Nazism as hegemonic projects to the role of ‘corporativism’ and ‘race’ as hegemonic principles: they also involved quite specific programmes of political action designed to advance specific class and ‘national-popular’ objectives. In addition to ‘intellectual and moral reform’ it was necessary for the fascist movements to reorganise the Italian and German state apparatus as a precondition of implementing their projects of national regeneration.
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