Ontologia del sociale, teoria del discorso, ideologia: a partire dal pensiero di Ernesto Laclau

Abstract

The purpose of my Ph.D. thesis is to critically delineate the boundaries and constraints of a theory of ideology drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory. The plan of the present work is twofold: on one hand, it consists in a theoretical analysis of the presuppositions of a theory of ideology from a post-structuralist and post-foundationalist point of view; on the other hand, it involves a scrutinization of the model of ideology thus circumscribed starting from the case study of the end-of-ideology discourse of the 1950s. The theoretical foundations of this investigation lie in the interpretation of Laclau’s political ontology as an attempt to make sense of the tension between the unity and the dispersion of the social. Accordingly, the theoretical section is divided into two parts, focused respectively on the problem of “unity in dispersion” and of “unity in dispersion.” It takes as a starting point the exploration of Laclau’s conceptualization of the so-called “figures of dispersion” (that is antagonism, dislocation, and heterogeneity) before delving into the “figures of unity” (that is discourse, hegemony, and ideology). This will allow us to bring out a particular representation of the social (the one Laclau called “discursive”), whose main hallmark, according to the interpretation we uphold, lies in its post-topographic character. Here emerges the problem around which the present research revolves: what happens to ideology in a post-topographic representation of society? The solution that can be detected in post-structuralist discourse theory is the following: once the idea of the “ideological instance” as a pre-discursive (ontic) place has disappeared, it is necessary to think of ideology as a temporalized category — what the Essex school of discourse theory called a “logic of the social”. In doing so, once a definition of ideology is established, the final section of the thesis attempts to engage the case of the end-of-ideology discourse, by focusing on the way in which this ideologeme was articulated by three American sociologists: Edward Shils (1910-1995), Daniel Bell (1919-2011) and Seymour M. Lipset (1922-2006). The aim is to isolate the ideological dimension of the end-of-ideology discourse by distancing ourselves from its dominant topographic interpretation, which by contrast understands it as a mere ideological justification of Atlanticism. In light of the discursive theory of the ideological, we will try to interpret this particular discurive formation, not in terms of an intellectual justification of a more basic economic-social and military processes (i.e. the Marshall plan and the Atlantic alliance), but rather to understand it as an integral part of a ramifications of articulatory practices aimed at discursively producing the social.