Page 127 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JENNIFER DARYL SLACK 115

a living body of thought, capable still of engaging and grasping something
of the truth about new historical realities’ (Hall, 1983:84).
‘Method’ similarly can suggest rigid templates or practical techniques to
orchestrate research. But again, cultural studies works with a conception of
method as ‘practice’, which suggests both techniques to be used as
resources as well as the activity of practising or ‘trying out’. In this double
sense, techniques are borrowed and combined, worked with and through,
and reworked. Again, the commitment is always to be able to adapt our
methods as the new historical realities we engage keep also moving on down
the road.
Thinking of the theory and method of articulation as practice also
highlights an important political aspect of cultural studies: the recognition
that the work of cultural studies involves at a variety of levels a politics
within a—broadly understood—marxist framework. With and through
articulation, we engage the concrete in order to change it, that is, to
rearticulate it. To understand theory and method in this way shifts
perspective from the acquisition or application of an epistemology to the
creative process of articulating, of thinking relations and connections as
how we come to know and as creating what we know. Articulation is, then,
not just a thing (not just a connection) but a process of creating
connections, much in the same way that hegemony is not domination but
the process of creating and maintaining consensus or of co-ordinating
interests.
Working with that understanding of theory and method in interrogating
the role of articulation in cultural studies requires keeping in mind two
general insights. First, articulation was not ‘born’ whole nor has it ever
achieved that status. It has never been, nor should it be, delineated or used
as a completely ‘sewn-up’ theory or method. Rather, it is a complex,
unfinished phenomenon that has emerged and continues to emerge
genealogically. Second, articulation has never been configured as simply
one thing. The ways in which articulation has been developed, discussed
and used tend to foreground and background certain theoretical,
methodological, epistemological, political and strategic forces, interests and
issues. As theory and method, articulation has developed unevenly within a
changing configuration of those forces. It carries with it ‘traces’ of those
forces in which it has been constituted and which it has constituted. To
understand the role of articulation in cultural studies is thus to map that
play of forces, in other words, to track its development genealogically.
My project here is a beginning; it is surely not a genealogy but an attempt
to map some particularly profound forces and moments that contribute to
a genealogical understanding of articulation.