Page 138 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

126 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF ARTICULATION

Theorizing communication in this way suggests methodological direction
and strategic implications. Interrogating any articulated structure or
practice requires an examination of the ways in which the ‘relatively
autonomous’ social, institutional, technical, economic and political forces
are organized into unities that are effective and are relatively empowering
or disempowering. The specificity of the domain of communication, for
example, requires that we examine the way in which these forces,

at a certain moment, yield intelligible meanings, enter the circuits of
culture—the field of cultural practices—that shape the
understandings and conceptions of the world of men and women in
their ordinary everyday social calculations, construct them as
potential social subjects, and have the effect of organizing the ways in
which they come to or form consciousness of the world.
(Hall, 1989:49)

Determining when, where and how these circuits might be re-articulated is
the aim of a cultural theorist’s theoretically-informed political practice. The
examination of and participation in communication—or any practice— is
thus an ongong process of re-articulating contexts, that is, of examining
and intervening in the changing ensemble of forces (or articulations) that
create and maintain identities that have real concrete effects.
‘Understanding a practice involves,’ as Grossberg puts it, ‘theoretically and
historically (re)-constructing its context’ (Grossberg, 1992:55).
Seen from this perspective, this is what a cultural study does: map
thecontext—not in the sense of situating a phenomenon in a context, but in
mapping a context, mapping the very identity that brings the context into
focus (Slack, 1989; cf. Grossberg, 1992:55). It is possible to claim that this
is what I have done throughout this chapter, for example, in explaining
how for Laclau ‘the concept of articulation…brings into focus a
nonreductionist view of class, the assertion of no-necessary correspondence,’
etc. It isn’t as though the context for the development of articulation is
these things. Rather the articulation of these identities (in a double
articulation: both as articulated identities and in an articulated relationship
with one another) is brought into focus in and through the concept of
articulation. To put it another way, the context is not something out there,
within which practices occur or which influence the development of
practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the
very context within which they are practices, identities or effects.

GOING ON THEORIZING
There is certainly more to mapping a genealogy of articulation than I have
offered here. More pieces or forces to be articulated might include drawing