Introduction: from too theoretical to not theoretical enough

One value of Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory of hegemony and discourse is that it can so readily and productively be translated into and applied or deployed in studies of all kinds of things in all kinds of academic disciplines and fields. As theorised by Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is a relational concept that enables us to conceptualise hierarchies, conventions, structures, values, norms, biases and preferences of all kinds, in terms of the interplay of relative gravities of different kinds of power and the formations and transformations of relations and kinds of influence (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Importantly, the concept of hegemony can be expanded, extracted or extrapolated from the realms of political discourse proper, and applied to show that there can often be said to be hegemonies in such things as aesthetics, styles, fashions, norms, practices, relationships, and in fact in conventions of any kind. There can be hegemony in international relations, in interpersonal relationships, in the most private ways of thinking, and of course in conventions and regimes of representation.

As such, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and hegemony enables such ideas as the otherwise oxymoronic formulation ‘cultural politics’ to come into its own. Arguably, taken to its ultimate conclusions, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and hegemony could actually be said to transform a term like ‘cultural politics’ from being an oxymoron into being a pleonasm – transforming ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ from being regarded as ostensibly discrete and different to their being regarded as inextricably intertwined, two sides of the same coin, or tied like a Gordian Knot. Arditi and Valentine (1999) called this ‘the contingency of the commonplace’, a perspective which means that, from this point of view, anything and everything is at least potentially political.

Consequently, by theorising the contingency of all practices – whether ostensibly political, cultural, social, or whatever – the theory of hegemony and/as articulation (or of hegemony as established by articulatory practices) has long been found highly useful across a range of academic disciplines and fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences.