Page 135 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JENNIFER DARYL SLACK 123

reduction to class, mode of production, structure, as well as to
culturalism’s tendency to reduce culture to ‘experience’. Second, he elevates
the importance of articulating discourse to other social forces, without
going ‘over the brink’ of turning everything into discourse. Third, Hall’s
commitment to the strategic feature of articulation has foregrounded
cultural studies’ interventionist commitments. And fourth, Hall’s treatment
of articulation has been the most sustained and accessible. His willingness
to engage different philosophical and political traditions in theorizing
articulation has meant that his influence is quite widespread; and the
generous manner in which he engages people and arguments provides an
exceptional exemplar of articulation at work.
When Hall ‘reigns in discourse’ or ‘tames ideology’, he does so by
insisting on the Althusserian recognition that no practice exists outside of
discourse without reducing everything else to it. In a frequently cited
quotation, he claims that

It does not follow that because all practices are in ideology, or inscribed
by ideology, all practices are nothing but ideology. There is a
specificity to those practices whose principal object is to produce
ideological representations. They are different from those practices
which—meaningfully, intelligibly—produce other commodities.
Those people who work in the media are producing, reproducing and
transforming the field of ideological representation itself. They stand
in a different relationship to ideology in general from others who are
producing and reproducing the world of material commodities—
which are, nevertheless, also inscribed by ideology. (Hall, 1985:103–
4)

By insisting on the specificity of practices in different kinds of relations to
discourse, Hall contests the move that Laclau and other post-Althusserians
have taken positing the absolute, rather than relative, autonomy of
practices that is implied by the position that all practices are nothing but
ideology (Hall, 1980a: 68).
Hall pulls articulation back from the extreme, theoretically-driven logic
of ‘necessary non-correspondence’ (what he called the ‘excesses’ of theory)
to insist on thinking and theorizing practices within which unities—often
relatively stable unities—are also constituted. For Hall, articulation

has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how
specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not all
arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can
nevertheless be thought together. The structuralist paradigm thus does
—if properly developed—enable us to begin really to conceptualize
the specificity of different practices (analytically distinguished,