Through Methodology

(Not sure whether we were to post as comments or as a separate post, so here goes!)

One way in which Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Analysis can be connected to Marx's Critique of Political Economy is through their analytic methodology. Marx's Capital is not merely a study of an economic system, but a critique of political economy, because it seeks to analyse political relations in economic terms. In doing so, it tries to understand the political system in terms of a network of relations: forces of production, modes of production, capital, circulation, commodities and so on. This lays the analytical foundation for Discourse Analysis, in which Laclau and Mouffe propose that the world can be understood in a relational manner. Discourse Analysis draws on insights from linguistics (regarding signfication, for instance), as well as from political philosophy and economics. Drawing upon all this, Discourse Analysis appears to be taking Marxian relational understanding to its logical end, in insisting that all objects have meaning and that this meaning is produced socially, through discourse. They describe the discursive as a “theoretical horizon”; this horizon, I think they've discerned using Marx's analytic method, understanding the world in terms of relations, rather than mere objects.