Page 168 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

156 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

denied, society can only be seen as a network of differences within which
power operates ‘microphysically’ (i.e., absolutely nonhierarchically).
Similarly, the identification of the historical agent with a creative subject is
broken. The actor is fragmented and its intentions ‘decentred’ from any
claim of origination/determination. Agency is nothing but the product of
the individual’s insertion into various and contradictory codes of social
practice: the speaker is always already spoken. Thus, the social totality is
dissolved into a pluralism of powers, practices, subject-positions. This is a
theory of necessary non-correspondence, in which the lack of identity and
structure is guaranteed, in which there can be no organization of power (as
either a system of domination structured by certain more fundamental
contradictions or a coherent structure of resistance). Resistance itself is
comprehensible only by appealing to an abstract principle of the
unconscious or the repressed.
At this level, the concept of ‘articulation’ marks Hall’s unwillingness to
accept the necessity of either correspondence or non-correspondence, either
the simple unity or the absolute complexity of the social formation. He
argues that correspondences are historically produced, the site of the
struggle over power. Society is, for Hall, a complex unity, always having
multiple and contradictory determinations, always historically specific.
This ‘conjunctural’ view sees the social formation as a concrete, historically
produced organization—a ‘structure-in-dominance’—of the different forms
of social relations, practices and experiences. Each form of social practice
(political, economic and cultural) has its own specificity or ‘relative
autonomy’; each has its own specific field of effects, particular
transformations that it produces and embodies. But the effects of any
concrete practice—its conjunctural identity—are always ‘overdetermined’
by the network of relations in which it is located. For Hall, the struggle is
over how particular practices are positioned, into what structures of
meaning and power, into what correspondences, they are articulated.
Hall (1983) offers a ‘marxism without guarantees’, a theory of ‘no-
necessary (non/) correspondence’, in which history is the struggle to
produce the relations within which particular practices have particular
meanings and effects, to organize practices into larger structures, to
‘inflect’ particular practices and subject-positions into relations with
political, economic and cultural structures of domination and resistance.
Hall’s marxism demands that we seek to understand the concrete practices
by which such articulations are accomplished and the contradictions
around which struggles are and can be organized. The theory of
articulation is the assertion of struggle over necessity, struggles both to
produce structures of domination and to resist them. (It is perhaps also
meant to remind the left of an important lesson: ‘pessimism of the intellect,
optimism of the will’.)