Page 25 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ARTICULATION

surrealism. Other bioscientific advances, such as cloning, seemed to be
vying successfully with science fiction fears of genetic manipulation.
Cultural theorists such as Donna Haraway explored the human–
science–technology interface in work on the cyborg.

See also: Aesthetics

ARTICULATION

In cultural studies, articulation doesn’t carry its most familiar sense of
‘uttering clearly’. It is used in the sense you may recognise from
‘articulated truck’ – where articulation denotes the joining of two
things together. In cultural studies, what may be articulated are not
two components of a truck but large-scale social forces (especially
modes of production), in a particular configuration or formation at a
particular time, called a conjuncture, to produce the structural
determinants of any given practice, text or event. Just as an articulated
lorry has a prime mover and a trailer (where the prime mover,
although smaller and lighter, determines the movement of the trailer –
it provides motive force to the trailer), so articulation describes not
simply a combination of forces but a hierarchical relationship between
them. Forces aren’t simply joined or jointed, they are ‘structured in
dominance’.
The term derives from Marxist analysis, where it refers to the
articulation of different modes of production. The economic and
social relations of a society during a given epoch will display an
articulation of different modes of production – capitalist, feudal and
even communal, all at once – but one of these modes of production is
structured in dominance over the others or ‘overdetermines’ them and
obliges them to adapt to its needs, or integrates them into the
mechanisms of its reproduction. Hence the feudal monarchy survives
into the capitalist epoch, but is adapted to its purposes; or an industry
such as publishing retains feudal relations between author and
publisher within the overall capitalist mode of production of books;
or a social institution such as the family allows for communal modes of
production to be exploited by a capitalist economy. These are classic
articulations.
The term has been extended in use to include articulations of other
social forces. You might read, for instance, of the articulation of race
and class in an analysis of subcultural music, or of the articulation of
gender and nation in an analysis of sport.

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