Page 136 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

124 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

abstracted out), without losing its grip on the ensemble which they
constitute.
(Hall, 1980a:69)

Thinking articulation thus becomes a practice of thinking ‘unity and
difference’, of ‘difference in complex unity, without becoming a hostage to
the privileging of difference as such’ (Hall, 1985:93).
Hall’s model of strategic intervention is not then limited to a kind of
theoretically-driven Derridian deconstruction of difference and the
construction of discursive possibility, but a theoretically-informed practice
of rearticulating relations among the social forces that constitute
articulated structures in specific historical conjunctures. He maintains that

The aim of a theoretically-informed political practice must surely be
to bring about or construct the articulation between social or
economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which
might lead them in practice to intervene in history in a progressive
way—an articulation which has to be constructed through practice
precisely because it is not guaranteed by how those forces are
constituted in the first place.
(Hall, 1985:95)

In practice, this has opened the way for cultural theorists to consider the role
of a range of other social forces both in their specificity and in discourse,
interrogating the ways in which they are complexly articulated in
structures of domination and subordination and considering ways that they
might be re-articulated. (See for example, Slack, 1989, on the
technological; Slack and Whitt, 1992, on the environmental; Grossberg,
1992 on the affective.)

REARTICULATING COMMUNICATION: MAPPING
THE CONTEXT

Stuart Hall’s practice of articulation can be tracked through any of a
number of sites of contestation, for example, through his work on race (for
example, Hall 1980d; 1986a), ethnicity (for example, Hall, 1991), the
popular (for example, Hall, 1980c; 1981) and so on. The site of Hall’s
engagement with the concrete that I choose to track here is his critique of
communication theory and the methods used to study communication.
This serves as a useful example for several reasons. First, this engagement
with practices of communication demonstrates the effectiveness of the
resistance to thinking the elements in articulated structures as being
‘potentially articulatable with anything’. Second, in the United States at
least, Hall’s work on communication has been particularly influential and