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subordination, its ‘cement’, so to speak, is ideology, which is conceived of
as an articulation of disparate elements, that is, common sense, and the
more coherent notion of ‘higher philosophy’. Gramsci offers a way of
understanding hegemony as the struggle to construct (articulate and re-
articulate) common sense out of an ensemble of interests, beliefs and
practices. The process of hegemony as ideological struggle is used to draw
attention to the relations of domination and subordination that articulation
always entails (see Mouffe, 1979). From Marx is drawn the conception of
a social formation as a combination of relations or levels of abstraction,
within which determination must be understood as produced within
specific conjunctures of the levels rather than as produced uniformly and
directly by the mode of production. The conjunctures come to be seen as
historically specific articulations of concrete social forces (see Hall, 1977).

AN EXPLICIT THEORY OF ARTICULATION: THE
CONTRIBUTION OF ERNESTO LACLAU

Ernesto Laclau configures these elements—and others—in an especially
forceful way in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (Laclau, 1977).
His work warrants special attention here for at least four reasons. First, his
is the initial attempt to formulate an explicit ‘theory of articulation’.
Second, Hall’s work on articulation takes Laclau’s position as a major
contribution to the theoretical ground on which and from which to engage
the concrete and retheorize. Third, Laclau’s reconstitution of the
problematic in the discursive mode, foregrounding the role of ideology,
figures significantly in a range of directions (replete with problems and
possibilities) taken by articulation after Laclau’s intervention. Fourth, the
relative absence of Laclau in the ‘histories’ of cultural studies suggests some
disturbing reconfigurations (can I now safely say, re-articulations?) of
foregrounded and backgrounded features of articulation.
In Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Laclau engages in the play of
theorizing the concrete in terms of articulation and theorizing articulation
in terms of the concrete, principally in terms of Latin American politics.
Reductionism, he argues, specifically class reductionism, failed—both
theoretically and politically. The world communist movement was divided,
the Cold War was winding down, the masses were emergent on a world
scale, and while capitalism was in the decline, it had proved to be highly
adaptable. Laclau sets out to formalize marxist categories to contribute to
a new socialist movement, one in which the ‘proletariat must abandon any
narrow class perspective and present itself as a hegemonic force to the vast
masses seeking a radical political reorientation in the epoch of the world
decline of capitalism’ (12).
Laclau develops his theory of articulation in contestation with class
reductionism. The failure of such reductionism, he argues, lies in its failure