Page 130 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

118 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

those conditions. It could not account for the non-revolutionary culture of
the working class. And finally, it could not account for the way in which
factors other than class (gender, race and subculture, for example) entered
into what looked like far more complex relations of dominance and
subordination.
The struggle to substitute the reduction that didn’t work with…
something…pointed to the need to retheorize processes of determination.
The work of cultural theorists in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially the
work of Stuart Hall, opened up that space by drawing attention to what
reductionist conceptions rendered inexplicable. It is as though a theoretical
lacuna develops, a space struggling to be filled. It gets filled with terms like
‘productive matrix’ and ‘combination of relations’ (Hall, 1977), and
eventually ‘articulation’. The term is almost, at first, what Kuan-Hsing
Chen has called ‘a sign to avoid reduction’ (Chen, 1994). Without having
exactly theorized what articulation is and how it works, it becomes the sign
that speaks of other possibilities, of other ways of theorizing the elements of
a social formation and the relations that constitute it not simply as
relations of correspondence (that is, as reductionist and essentialist) but
also as relations of non-correspondence and contradiction, and how these
relations constitute unities that instantiate relations of dominance and
subordination. This process of siting the space as a terrain for theorizing
accounts to some extent for the difficulties and resistance—that still exist—
in pointing to what exactly articulation is. The point is that it isn’t exactly
anything.
In theorizing this space, a number of marxist theorists are drawn on:
most notably Althusser (who drew on Gramsci and Marx), Gramsci (who
drew on Marx) and, of course, Marx. Its principal architects have been
Laclau and Hall. Without wanting to sidetrack the discussion, it is
important to indicate broadly at least what in Althusser, Gramsci and
Marx is drawn on in developing conceptions of articulation. In brief, from
Althusser, the conception of a complex totality structured in dominance
figures immensely. The totality is conceived of as made up of a relationship
among levels, constituted in relations of correspondence as well as of
contradiction, rather than of relations reducible to a single essential one-to-
one correspondence. These levels come to be thought of as ‘articulated’.
One of the levels, the ideological, takes on special significance in that in it
and through it those relations are represented, produced and reproduced.
The process comes to be thought of as a process of articulation and
rearticulation (see Hall, 1980d, 1985). From Gramsci, the notions of
hegemony, articulation and ideology as common sense have been influential,
through their appropriation by Althusser as well as independently.
Hegemony, for Gramsci, is a process by which a hegemonic class
articulates (or co-ordinates) the interests of social groups such that those
groups actively ‘consent’ to their subordinated status. The vehicle of this