Page 154 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

142 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. Let me put that the
other way: the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its
subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable
thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology
empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or
intelligibility of their historical stituation, without reducing those forms of
intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position.
The theory of articulation, as I use it, has been developed by Ernesto
Laclau, in his book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. His argument
there is that the political connotation of ideological elements has no
necessary belongingess, and thus, we need to think the contingent, the non-
necessary, connection between different practices—between ideology and
social forces, and between different elements within ideology, and between
different social groups composing a social movement, etc. He uses the
notion of articulation to break with the necessetarian and reductionist logic
which has dogged the classical marxist theory of ideology.
For example: Religion has no necessary political connotation. Anyone
interested in the politics of contemporary culture has to recognize the
continuing force in modern life of cultural forms which have a prehistory
long predating that of our rational systems, and which sometimes
constitute the only cultural resources which human beings have to make
sense of their world. This is not to deny that, in one historical-social
formation after another, religion has been bound up in particular ways,
wired up very directly as the cultural and ideological underpinning of a
particular structure of power. That is certainly the case, historically; and in
those societies, there are powerful, immensely strong what I would call
‘lines of tendential force’ articulating that religious formation to political,
economic and ideological structures. So that, if you move into that society,
it would be idiotic to think that you could easily detach religion from its
historical embeddedness and simply put it in another place. Thus, when I
say the connections are ‘not necessary’, I don’t mean religion is free-
floating. It exists historically in a particular formation, anchored very
directly in relation to a number of different forces. Nevertheless, it has no
necessary, intrinsic, transhistorical belongingness. Its meaning—political
and ideological—comes precisely from its position within a formation. It
comes with what else it is articulated to. Since those articulations are not
inevitable, not necessary, they can potentially be transformed, so that
religion can be articulated in more than one way. I insist that, historically,
it has been inserted into particular cultures in a particular way over a long
period of time, and this constitutes the magnetic lines of tendency which
are very difficult to disrupt. To use a geographical metaphor, to struggle
around religion in that country, you need to know the ideological terrain,
the lay of the land. But that’s not to say, ‘that’s how it is, so it always will
be so’. Of course, if you are going to try to break, contest or interrupt some