Page 120 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

The Colloquy Revisited 109

the soft determinisms advanced by writers such as Williams and Adorno, and
with the notion of “bias” as forwarded by Innis. Grossberg defined articula-
tion as “the production of identity on top of differences, of unities out of frag-
ments, of structures across practices,” adding that “articulation links this
practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality,
this experience to those politics; and these links are themselves articulated
34
into larger structures, etc.” More briefly, according to Grossberg, articula-
tion is “the production of the real.” 35 Likewise, Grossberg’s mentor, Stuart
Hall, has described articulation as the forging of a whole or a structure out of
parts, parts which “are related as much through their differences as through
their similarities,” adding that these parts inevitably relate to one another in
terms of dominance and subordination. 36
These declarations and definitions imply that there are few if any limita-
tions with regard to what can be joined, few or no irreversibilities, few bonds
that cannot be broken, few constraints on creating and disassembling struc-
tures. Articulation implies enormous freedom to do. The foregoing declara-
tions and definitions, then, certainly do not call attention to disparities across
sectors of society or among individuals in their relative capacities to do. Nor
do they even hint at the capacity of some to prevent others from doing. Ar-
ticulation is the joining of structures, but who or what does the joining, and
for that matter the disassembling, and why these structures, and with what
consequences? Can a merger between two companies really be equated to
combining the letters t and o to form a new structure, to? 37 Or hooking a
trailer onto a truck?
In one of his most celebrated essays, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Re-
turn of the Repressed in Media Studies,” Stuart Hall illustrated the workings
of articulation: “In the discourses of the Black movement,” he wrote, “the
denigratory connotation ‘black the despised race’ could be inverted into its
opposite: ‘black beautiful.’” This, for Hall, was an example of “an ideo-
38
logical struggle” whereby a signifier from one dominant or preferred mean-
39
ing system was “disarticulated,” and “rearticulated” within another. It is un-
derstandable then why, in the Colloquy, Garnham would allude, albeit
implicitly and critically, to this example; it is less understandable, at least
from a scholarly standpoint, why Grossberg (a former student of Hall) would
not only refrain from acknowledging the allusion, but accuse Garnham of
“glibness” in bringing it forth. 40
Regarding compatibility between articulation and the soft determinism of
Williams and Adorno and with Innisian bias, I would suggest the following:
First, to the extent that the poststructuralist notion of articulation focuses
on or derives from linguistic practice and hence presumes or implies that
the “articulation” of material structures is about as difficult as forming a new