The politics of airport expansion in the United Kingdom

Hegemony, policy and the rhetoric of 'sustainable aviation'

Steven Griggs, David Howarth

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719076138
• eBook ISBN: 9781526112125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first in-depth analysis of the protest campaigns and policymaking practices that have marked British aviation since the construction of Heathrow Airport

1

Discourse, rhetoric and logics

The notion common to all the work that I have done since Madness and Civilization is that of problematization, though it must be said that I never isolated this notion sufficiently. But one always finds what is essential after the event; the most general things are those that appear last. It is the ransom and reward for all work in which theoretical questions are elaborated on the basis of a particular empirical field.… Problematization doesn’t mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It is the totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of the true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). (Foucault, 1988: 257; our emphasis)

We gain very little once identities are conceived as complexly articulated collective wills, by referring to them through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups, and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilisation. The really important task is to understand the logics of their constitution and dissolution, as well as the formal determination of the spaces in which they interrelate. (Laclau, 2000: 33)

A number of contemporary innovators in the field of policy studies draw sustenance from the ‘discursive turn’ in the human and social sciences, as well as the ideas of poststructuralism that often accompany this trend. The turn to discourse has focused our attention on the need for understanding, interpretation and critical evaluation in social and political analysis, rather than the search for law-like or causal explanations. Discourse analysts and interpretivists of various hues thus privilege the political construction of meanings and identities in and through the policy process, and they question the sharp separation between questions of fact and questions of value. In pursuing these ideals, they have developed notions like narratives, storylines, framing, discourse coalitions, interpretation, rhetoric and argumentation to critically explain the initiation, formulation, implementation and evaluation of public policies in various contexts and settings.

Yet the injection of poststructuralist ideas and techniques into the field of policy studies has been diverse and complex, so that discursive policy analysis assumes various shapes and sizes. It includes those who wish to break radically from positivist perspectives (Fischer, 2003), as well as those who seek mainly to supplement positivist viewpoints by treating discourses as particular systems of belief or conceptual frameworks for apprehending the world (Dryzek, 1997: 8; Weale, 1992). In this chapter, we demonstrate how one particular type of discursive policy analysis, poststructuralist policy analysis, when articulated with elements of critical discourse analysis and rhetorical political analysis, can contribute important tools and concepts for the conduct of critical policy studies. Our approach goes beyond a minimal and cognitive conception of discourse, in which discourse is reduced to simply another variable that can be subjected to empirical testing, and which often gives rise to what we might term ‘discourse-lite’ forms of explanation and interpretation (Torfing, 2005: 25). Rather, we employ a ‘thicker’ conception of discourse theory in which discourse does not just consist of an abstract cognitive system of beliefs and words, but is a constitutive dimension of social relations. It does not merely describe or make known a pre-existing or underlying reality, but serves partly to bring that reality into being for subjects (Gottweis, 2003: 251).

In expounding our approach, we begin by setting out the ontological assumptions of poststructuralist discourse theory, showing how its categories and logics can help us to analyse the politics of policy change as a hegemonic struggle, while also foregrounding the rhetorical and affective dimension of policy-making. Using the category of discourse, we thus develop a poststructuralist reading of the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and power, and we outline our understanding of the connections between discourse and rhetoric. We then employ the Lacanian logic of fantasy to focus our attention on the enjoyment subjects procure from their identifications with certain policy practices, signifiers and figures. Finally, we turn to questions of methodology and the techniques of discursive policy analysis. Those who employ a ‘thicker’, more constitutive conception of discourse have often faced charges of failing to critically reflect upon questions of method and research strategy, and of not properly attending to the normative implications of policy-making (Critchley, 2004; Torfing, 2005; Townshend, 2003). In response to such claims, we outline the steps of what we term ‘the logics of critical explanation’, focusing our attention on problematisation, social, political and fantasmatic logics, and articulation, judgement and critique (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). We start by discussing how poststructuralist policy analysis helps us to reconceptualise the study of public policy.

Poststructuralist policy analysis: questions of ontology

Poststructuralist policy analysis includes various approaches that share a series of family resemblances with one another (for further discussion, see Howarth, 2013; Howarth and Griggs, 2012). Alongside other types of interpretive policy analysis, it focuses on the role of meanings in shaping human actions and social institutions in the policy-making process. Yet it is equally (if not more) concerned with the ways in which meanings are created and contested by rival political forces in particular policy settings, and how these settings are related to wider social systems and power relations. The approach thus assumes that even the most sedimented practices, objects and categories of policy-making are ambiguous and radically contingent entities, whose meaning can be articulated in various ways by differently located social actors (see Miller, 2002, 2012; Miller and Fox, 2007). Poststructuralist policy analysts also explore the way in which subjects are formed and act in the policy-making process, as well as the wider structures of social relations within which they operate.

In this perspective, then, natural, physical and cultural phenomena acquire their meaning in specific discourses; in our jargon they are ‘discursively constructed’. Objects and things in this approach certainly ‘exist’ independently of any particular discourse, but their meaning and significance – and how they are engaged with by social actors – depends on their position within particular symbolic frameworks. Poststructuralist policy analysis thus rejects essentialist accounts of policy-making which assume that objects, human subjects or social formations have underlying and fixed essences (evident, for example, in the economic determinism and class reductionism of explanations of social and political change in Marxism, and in some versions of critical realism). By contrast, it assumes that ‘social, political, or natural phenomena and … their meanings’, which are inextricably intertwined, are ‘constantly moving, changing and shifting in various directions’ (Gottweis, 2003: 249).

Against this background, we conceptualise policy programmes such as new public management, social inclusion or sustainable development, as well as institutions like administrative systems or governance networks, as more or less sedimented systems of discourse (cf. March and Olsen, 1989; Torfing et al., 2012). As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe insist, ‘a discursive structure is not a merely “cognitive” or “contemplative” entity; it is an articulatory practice which constitutes and organises social relations’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 96). Discourses in our perspective are thus partially fixed systems of rules, norms, resources, practices and subjectivities, which are constituted politically by the construction of social antagonisms and the creation of political frontiers. They are finite and contingent constructions, whose production involves the exercise of power, as well certain forms of exclusion. This means that every discursive structure is uneven and hierarchical (Howarth, 2009: 313). Bearing this in mind, we shall say a little more about our conception of discourse, before turning to its broad implications for policy analysis.

Our understanding of discourse rests on three moves. First, we extend the scope of discourse theory beyond the analysis of ‘texts and talk in contexts’ so as to include social actions and political practices. All objects and social practices are discursive, in that their meaning and position depend upon their articulation within socially constructed systems of rules and differences (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 3; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). For example, the discourse of air transport policy is not exhausted by the talk or language of policy guidance, ministerial speeches or white papers. It also includes a diverse array of actions and practices, such as forecasting, noise measurement, planning rules and public inquiries, as well as airport regulations, air traffic management and even package holidays. In other words, language, actions and objects are intertwined in what we call ‘discourse’.

Secondly, by grounding our understanding of discourse in the work of Saussure (1983) and in structural linguistics more generally, we understand discourses as relational and differential configurations of elements that comprise agents (or subjects), words and actions. These elements are individuated and rendered intelligible within the context of a particular practice, in which each element acquires its meaning only in relation to the others (Howarth, 2009: 311–12). What we term aviation policy discourse thus establishes systems of relations between different objects and practices, including airports, airlines, noise contours, flight paths, landing patterns and so forth. It provides subject positions or roles with which actors can identify, whether these are the ‘business flyer’, the ‘leisure passenger’, ‘air traffic controllers’, or the ‘national carrier’, ‘British Airports Authority’ and so on. At the same time, the meaning and significance of such practices is acquired only within a particular historical context. For example, ‘jet-set’ appeals to the luxury of flying were possible only in the particular conjuncture of the 1930s; they lacked credibility in the era of mass aviation consumption, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s with the advent of low-cost carriers. To borrow from the work of Rein and Schön (1993: 153), discourse thereby installs a particular kind of coherence by bringing ‘things named’ into a ‘composite whole’. But, in so doing, the identities of elements are modified. This is evident, for instance, in the transformation of the understandings of ‘aviation’ and ‘sustainable development’ when they are articulated into the discourse of ‘sustainable aviation’.

Finally, drawing on poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida (1978, 1982), Michel Foucault (1972, 1981, 1984a) and Jacques Lacan (2006), we stress the radical contingency and structural undecidability of discursive structures (Howarth, 2009: 312). This arises because we assume that all systems of meaning are, in a fundamental sense, incomplete. By saying that discourses are incomplete, we do not mean that they are simply missing something, as when we say that we have not ticked all the boxes on a bureaucratic form. Incompletion in our view highlights an absence or negativity that structurally prevents the completion of a discourse, thereby indicating its limits. Discourses are thus incomplete systems of meaningful practice, because they are predicated on the exclusion of certain elements. Yet these excluded elements are required for the very identity of the discourse. Aviation policy in the UK in the aftermath of the Second World War came to rest in part on how discourses of expansion constructed antagonisms or drew political boundaries with US competitors, thereby institutionalising demands for aviation expansion and excluding alternative practices and possibilities.

Put differently, this means that any identity or order is marked by what Henry Staten (1984) and Ernesto Laclau (2005: 69–71) call a ‘constitutive outside’. This absence or negativity prevents the full constitution of a discursive structure, so that every structure is thus dislocated. Yet this ‘out-of-joint-ness’ is evident only in particular dislocations or events that show their incompletion, while the construction of social antagonisms signifies the limits of any discourse or social order, that is, its contestation by competing political forces. Discourses are thus contingent and historical constructions, which are always vulnerable to those political forces that are excluded in their production, as well as the dislocatory effects of events beyond their control (Howarth, 2000: 109).

In short, then, discourse is in one respect a kind of social practice that links together and modifies heterogeneous elements in changing historical formations (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 96). The outcomes of such practices are discursive formations, in which the linkages between the elements of these systems are relational and differential. Discursive formations are finite, uneven and incomplete.¹ Both as a practice and as an incomplete system of related moments, discourse also presupposes a world of contingent elements – linguistic and non-linguistic, social and natural – that can be linked together in various ways. Elements are best conceived as ‘floating signifiers’, which can in certain circumstances be articulated by rival political projects seeking to fix their meaning and import, whereas moments are those elements that are firmly positioned in a particular discourse. Nodal points are those privileged points of signification within a discourse that partially fix the meaning of practices and institutional configurations, while empty signifiers provide the symbolic means to represent these essentially incomplete orders. The function of the latter is to incarnate the ‘absent fullness’ of an essentially incomplete discursive system. Put differently, floating signifiers are ideological elements that are not securely fixed in a particular discourse and can thus be constructed in diverse ways, whereas empty signifiers are points of fixation that can hold together multiple and even contradictory demands in a precarious unity (Laclau, 1990, 1995). This perspective is consistent with a minimal realism that acknowledges the existence of the objects and processes that we think about, although our practices of reflection are never external to the life-worlds into which we are thrown. Indeed, it is only within such symbolic orders that we encounter such objects.

What does this mean for the study of public policy? In the first instance, it suggests that one of the primary tasks of policy analysis is to explain critically why and how a particular policy has been formulated, accepted and implemented, rather than others. It thus privileges the general concern with policy change or policy reversal, on the one hand, and policy inertia and policy sedimentation, on the other. This focus gives rise to a particular set of questions for the policy analyst. What are the conditions for particular policy discourses to become dominant or hegemonic? How do we account for the reproduction and transformation of such hegemonic policy orders and practices? How do we explain the ‘grip’ of certain policy discourses? And how are such dominant orders contested?

In addressing such questions, poststructuralist policy analysis, in our view, must situate the practices of policy-making in relation to wider social and political contexts. Policy analyses and evaluations have thus to be conducted in relation to broader societal tendencies and changes (see Fischer, 1995, 2000). Yet because policy-making emerges and operates in different social contexts, its analysis must be located at the intersection of processes operating at multiple spatial scales, be they the micro-processes of an organisation or the more macro-processes of national governme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of boxes
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Discourse, rhetoric and logics
• 2 Problematising ‘sustainable aviation’ in the UK
• 3 The post-war regime of aviation expansion
• 4 The new rhetoric of airport protest
• 5 The Future of Air Transport: the 2003 white paper
• 6 Resignifying airports and aviation
• 7 The third runway at Heathrow
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• References
• Index