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structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction. It
signals the absence of guarantees, the inability to know in advance the
historical significance of particular practices. It shifts the question of
determination from origins (e.g., a practice is defined by its capitalist or
working-class genesis) to effects. It is the struggle to articulate particular
effects in history that Hall seeks to find at every level, and in every domain
of social life.

Marxism without guarantees
Although Hall is best known for his work in cultural theory and ideological
analysis, the power of the concept of ‘articulation’ is perhaps more clearly
illustrated by his ‘conjunctural theory’ of the social formation. Here, Hall’s
middle ground between ‘culturalism’ and ‘(post)structuralism’ is explicitly
theorized (1980a, 1983). What is the nature of society and of the structural
determinations operating within it? In the ‘culturalist’ position, the
coherence and totality of a particular social structure (and the nature of the
power relations within it) are already given, defined as a series of
correspondences between different levels of social experiences, cultural
practices, economic and political relations. Society is an ‘expressive
totality’ in which every practice refers back to a common origin. A chain of
equivalences is constructed: for example, a particular class=particular
experiences=particular political functions=particular cultural practices=
particular needs and interests=a particular position in the economic
relations of capital. That is, a particular social identity corresponds to
particular experiences, defines a particular set of political interests, roles
and actions, has its own ‘authentic’ cultural practices, and so on. What
determines this network of correspondences, what defines and guarantees
this system’s existence is—whether in the first or the last instance—the
economic. Culturalism is a theory of necessary correspondences in which
the meaning and politics of every action are already defined, guaranteed in
the end by its origin in the class struggle or by its stable place in the
contradictions of capital. As a theory of power, struggle and contestation
are possible only by appealing to an abstract principle of human nature:
the question of agency is necessarily transformed into one of creativity; the
subject is somehow determining but indeterminate.
On the other hand, in the ‘(post)structuralist’ position, structural unity
and identity are always deconstructed, leaving in their place the complexity,
contradictions and fragmentation implied in difference. There are no
necessary relations, no correspondences; that is guaranteed outside of any
concrete struggle. What something is (including the social formation) is
only its relations to what it is not, its existence in a nominalist field of
particular others. Any structure or organization is to be dismantled: one
can build neither theory nor struggle upon it. With any unitary nature