Page 166 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

154 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

struggles, their adequacy judged by the purchase they give us for
understanding the complex and contradictory structure of any field of
social practices, for seeing beyond the taken-for-granted to the ongoing
struggles of domination and resistance.
At whatever level of abstraction, Hall’s fundamental commitment is to
a structuring principle of struggle, not as an abstract possibility, but as a
recognition that human activity at all levels always takes place within and
over concretely ‘contested terrain’. For example, against those who would
reduce the politics of culture to a simple economic relation of domination,
Hall (1984a) argues that
we must not confuse the practical inability to afford the fruits of
modern industry with the correct popular aspiration that modern
people know how to use and master and bend to their needs and
pleasures modern things… In part, of course, this is the product of a
massively capitalised swamp advertising campaign. But more
importantly, it is also a perfectly correct perception that this is where
modern technology is, these are languages of calculation of the
future… Not to recognize the dialectic in this is to fail to see where
real people are…

By identifying the possibilities of struggle within any field, Hall occupies
the middle ground between those who emphasize the determination of
human life by social structures and processes, and those who, emphasizing
the freedom and creativity of human activity, fail to recognize its historical
limits and conditions: a middle ground in which people constantly try to
bend what they are given to their own needs and desires, to win a bit of
space for themselves, a bit of power over their own lives and society’s
future.
Hall seeks to define a non-reductionist theory of determination and social
practices, of ideology, culture and politics. The concept of ‘articulation’
signals his attempt to rethink the dialectic of determination as struggle; it
marks his movement of this marxist problematic onto the terrain of
structuralist theory while simultaneously registering the limit he places
upon the ‘riot of deconstruction’ (1985), a movement which is determined
in part by his more recent non-humanist rereading (1986; cf. Hall et al.,
1977b) of Gramsci. Structuralism argues that the identity of a term is not
pregiven, inherent in the term itself but rather, is the product of its position
within a system of differences. Thus, as Hall himself has said, it was
structuralism (and particularly Althusser) that taught him to ‘live with
difference’. For Hall, the meaning and politics of any practice is, similarly,
the product of a particular structuring of the complex relations and
contradictions within which it exists. ‘Articulation’ refers to the complex
set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or