Page 134 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

122 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

outrageous, especially given their explicit intent to develop a ‘radical
democratic politics’. But among the effects of their theorizing, that
possibility is brought into focus. So even though the idea of an ‘articulating
principle’ seems meant to insist on a mechanism with which to ensure
attention to the way in which discursive structures are always articulated to
particular class practices (Laclau, 1977:101–2,160–1; Mouffe, 1979:193–
5), the clarity of its operation is never really established and its theoretical
status is never secured.
In spite of the importance of Laclau’s formulations, he has been excluded
—as has Mouffe—from most of the popular histories of cultural studies,
such as those of Brantlinger (1990), Inglis (1993), Storey (1993), and
Turner (1990). Perhaps this is because of Laclau’s own ironic contribution
to dislodging (or re-articulating) the concept of articulation from the
political concrete—conceived of within a marxist problematic—that was the
focus of the work to begin with. In effect the political is easily
backgrounded in foregrounding attention to the theoretical debates focused
on the play of discursive possibilities.
However, the anti-reductionist turn in cultural studies, as exemplified
here by Laclau, effectively disempowered the possibility of reducing culture
to class or to the mode of production and rendered it possible and
necessary to re-theorize social forces such as gender, race and subculture as
existing in complex—articulated—relations with one other as well as with
class. (See Hall, 1980d and 1986a, on race; McRobbie, 1981, on gender
and subculture.) Furthermore, when Laclau is read without losing grip on
the ensemble of forces, by attributing to them something more like equal
weight, without privileging the discursive, the space of articulation has
greater possibilities.
Since about 1980, the proliferation of these possibilities and the
excitement generated by them has certainly contributed to the astounding
growth of interest in cultural studies. Here was a way to talk about the
power of the discursive and its role in culture, communication, politics,
economics, gender, race, class, ethnicity and technology in ways that
provided progressive-minded people sophisticated understanding as well as
mechanisms for strategic intervention. So at the same time that an
expanding cultural studies community begins to try to clarify and ‘nail
down’ the meaning of articulation, there is a corresponding expansion in
the number of theoretically possible directions within which it begins to get
thought.

ARTICULATION AS UNITY IN DIFFERENCE: THE
VOICE OF STUART HALL
Stuart Hall’s contributions to the development of articulation have been
significant for at least four reasons. First, he resists the temptation of