If all this is to say that Laclau and Mouffe are 'still too Marxist' -- a position taken in Landry and Maclean's reading of the text ⁵³ -- it is a far cry from the usual tenor of responses to the book. Most of these have taken the form of polemical engagement with the apostasy, from a Marxist point of view, of Laclau and Mouffe's arguments. Ellen Wood, to take one of her criticisms at random, accuses them of 'not only a breathtaking misreading of Marx, but also a very substantial failure of reasoning'. ⁵⁴ Many of these debates are concerned, which I am not, with a doxological restatement of the primacy of class to Marxist theory and practice, but some issues are worth recapitulating briefly. One of these is the question of materialism, and the issue of whether Laclau and Mouffe's rejection of the discursive/nondiscursive distinction necessarily makes them 'idealist'. I have suggested earlier that it does not, and that their use of the category discourse is defensible in relation to what people like to call 'the real world': the elementary point to make is that discourse is 'real'. In their reply to a critique by Norman Geras, Laclau and Mouffe explain, with some examples, the sense in which they use the term 'discourse', which is defined in the book as the structured totality resulting from articulatory practice. First of all -- but it is a source of some misunderstanding -- they include within the category of discourse both linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena -- discourse is not a text or speech or similar. The term is principally concerned with meaning, and they give the example (which Geras finds 'patronizing' but others have found useful) of football:

If I kick a spherical object in the street or if I kick a ball in a football match, the physical fact is the same, but its meaning is different. The object is a football only to the extent that it establishes a system of relations with other objects, and these relations are not given by the mere referential materiality of the objects but are, rather, socially constructed. ⁵⁵

The example is helpful in that it answers those who think that their use of the term discourse is in some way a threat to ontological reality: they do not dispute referential materiality ('the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question') but insist that the meaning of physical objects must be understood by apprehension of their place in a system (or discourse) of socially constructed rules. What applies to footballs, we could add, applies to tanks, police horses, jails, fighter bombers, and any other material appurtenances of the suppression of the working class. Laclau and Mouffe are not 'collapsing' or 'dissolving' everything into discourse: they are insisting that we cannot apprehend or think of the

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