Page 126 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

114 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

it becomes impossible to parse out a neatly packaged theory or a clearly
delineated method.
It seems timely to belabour this point, precisely because the popularity
and institutionalization of cultural studies has been accompanied by a
widening interest in finding out—and often finding out quickly—how to
‘do’ a cultural study and what it means to be a cultural theorist. The risk
comes in that it has become a bit too easy to separate out articulation as
the theory or method of cultural studies, to isolate it as having formal,
eminently transferable properties. This has taken the form of scholars
interested in utilizing articulation in the service of research whose
theoretical, methodological, epistemological, political and strategic
commitments are rather dramatically different from those of cultural
theorists. Although the boundaries of cultural studies are certainly
indistinct and changing, they do sometimes get unquestionably crossed.
Consequently, a certain care is in order when using the designations
theory and method. However useful it may be to think of articulation in
terms of theoretical and methodological valences, to do so is to take the
risk that theory and method will be taken too formally. Stuart Hall
recognized this in 1980 when he acknowledged that ‘articulation contains
the danger of a high formalism’ (Hall, 1980a: 69). While he wrote this at
the height of the Althusserian structuralist moment in cultural studies,
when the threat of formalism was paramount, we still need to be sensitive
to the warning today—even if for slightly different reasons.
‘Theory’ is a term that often connotes an objective, formal tool, or even
a ‘value-free’ heuristic device. Cultural studies resists thinking in terms of
the ‘application’ of theory in this sense, where theory is used to ‘let you off
the hook, providing answers which are always known in advance or
endlessly deferring any answer into the field of its endless reflections and
reflexivity’ (Grossberg, 1992:19). In place of that conception of theory,
cultural studies works with the notion of theory as a ‘detour’ to help
ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and to let that
engagement provide the ground for retheorizing. Theory is thus a practice
in a double sense: it is a formal conceptual tool as well as a practising or
‘trying out’ of a way of theorizing. In joining these two senses of practice,
we commit to working with momentarily, temporarily ‘objectified’ theories,
moments of ‘arbitrary closure’, recognizing that in the ongoing analysis of
the concrete, theory must be challenged and revised. ‘The only theory
worth having,’ Hall maintains, ‘is that which you have to fight off, not that
which you speak with profound fluency’ (Hall, 1992:280). Successful
theorizing is not measured by exact theoretical fit but by the ability to
work with our always inadequate theories to help us move understanding
‘a little further on down the road’. A commitment to ‘the process of
theorizing’ is characteristic of the project of cultural studies; it is ‘the sign of