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more explicit links to structural linguistics (raised by Hall, 1980d: 327) and
postmodernism; foregrounding the status of the ‘real’ rather than the
problem of reduction (as does Grossberg, 1992); considering the role of
specific articulations such as those of gender, race, ethnicity, neo-
colonialism; foregrounding the politics of institutionalization; and finally,
considering the influence of strategic interventions practised among the
ranks of the practitioners of cultural studies.
We can certainly expect that different conceptions of cultural studies and
the development of cultural studies over time can and will be explained in
part by changing configurations of articulation. I am particularly concerned
that as cultural studies becomes more ‘domesticated’, that is, as it becomes
a more institutionally acceptable academic practice, the ‘problem’ of
articulation will be cast more as a theoretical, methodological and
epistemological one than a political and strategic one. To some extent this
is happening already. Given a dominant politics of despair and the political
and economic realities of education, this is hardly a surprise; though it is
discouraging. What I would hope, at least, is that by drawing attention to
the ways in which the re-articulation of articulation entails
changing relations among theory, method, epistemology, politics and
strategy, we might expect more of our detours through theory, not less.

Author’s Note
I would like to thank Kuan-Hsing Chen, Lawrence Grossberg, David
James Miller and Patricia Sotirin for helpful comments on earlier versions
of this chapter and generous guidance in working out some of the issues
dealt with here. Errors are, of course, my own.

REFERENCES

Brantlinger, P. (1990) Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America,
New York and London: Routledge.
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. (1994) Personal conversation, July.
Grossberg, L. (1992) We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and
Postmodern Culture, New York and London: Routledge.
———(1993) ‘Cultural studies and/in new worlds’, in Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 10, 1–22.
Hall, S. (1977) ‘Rethinking the “base-and-superstructure” metaphor’, in J.
Bloomfield (ed.) Papers on Class, Hegemony and Party, London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 43–72.
———(1980a) ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, in Media, Culture and Society 2
(1), 57–72.
———(1980b) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in S.Hall, D.Hobson, A.Lowe and P. Willis
(eds) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, 128–40.