Page 153 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 141

constituted as high art without recognizing, in the existing distribution
of educational practices, its relative divorce from the masses’ experience.
Nothing can become popular which does not negotiate the experiences, the
codes, etc., of the popular masses…
For something to become popular entails a struggle; it is never a simple
process, as Gramsci reminded us. It doesn’t just happen. And that means
there must be always some distance between the immediate practical
consciousness or common sense of ordinary people, and what it is possible
for them to become. I don’t think that history is finished and the assertion
that it is, which lies at the heart of postmodernism, betrays the inexcusable
ethnocentrism—the Eurocentrism—of its high priests. It is their cultural
dominance, in the West, across the globe, which is historically at an end.
The masses are like an irritant, a point that you have to pass through. And
I think that postmodernism has yet to go through that point; it has yet to
actually think through and engage the question of the masses. I think
Baudrillard needs to join the masses for a while, to be silent for two-thirds
of a century, just to see what it feels like. So, it is precisely at the site of the
question of the political possibilities of the masses that my political
objections to, and contestations with, postmodernism come through most
sharply.
Question: Some postmodern theorists are concerned with what they call
‘articulation’, for example, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the articulation
of desiring production. Could you describe your own theory of the
articulation of ideology and ideological struggle?
SH: I always use the word ‘articulation’, though I don’t know whether
the meaning I attribute to it is perfectly understood. In England, the term
has a nice double meaning because ‘articulate’ means to utter, to speak
forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing,
etc. But we also speak of an ‘articulated’ lorry (truck): a lorry where the
front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to
one another The two parts are connected to each other, but through a
specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the
connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain
conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and
essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a
connection be forged or made? So the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is
really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be
rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary
‘belongingness’. The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between that
articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain
historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a
theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological
elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a
discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated,