Page 209 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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term ‘articulation’ is thus a key bridging concept between two distinct
paradigms or problematics. It bridges the ‘structuralist’ and the ‘culturalist’
paradigms which Hall (1980b) has identified and since the late 1960s
sought to integrate in that it both acknowledges the constitutive role played
by (ideological!) discourses in the shaping of (historical) subjectivities and
at the same time it insists that there is somewhere outside ‘discourse’ (a
world where groups and classes differentiated by conflicting interests,
cultures, goals, aspirations; by the positions they occupy in various
hierarchies are working in and on dynamic [changing] power structures)—
a world which has in turn to be linked with, shaped, acted upon, struggled
over, intervened in: changed. In other words, the concept of ‘articulation’
itself articulates the two paradigms by linking together and expressing the
double emphasis which characterizes Gramscian cultural studies. It
performs the same metonymic function, is as homologous to and as
exemplary of Stuart Hall’s project as ‘differance’ is to Derrida’s (where the
term ‘differance’ simultaneously connotes and itself enacts the double
process of differing and deferring meaning which Derrida sees as
language’s essential operation). The reliance on the concept of articulation
suggests that the ‘social’ in Gramsci is neither a ‘beautiful’ dream nor a
dangerous abstraction, neither a contract made and remade on the ground
as it were, by the members of a ‘communicative community’ (Habermas)
nor an empirically non-existent ‘Idea in Reason’ which bears no relation
whatsoever to experience (Lyotard). It is instead a continually shifting,
mediated relation between groups and classes, a structured field and a set of
lived relations in which complex ideological formations composed of
elements derived from diverse sources have to be actively combined,
dismantled, bricolaged so that new politically effective alliances can be
secured between different fractional groupings which can themselves no
longer be returned to static, homogenous classes. In other words, we can’t
collapse the social into speech act theory or subsume its contradictory
dynamics underneath the impossible quest for universal validity claims. At
the same time, rather than dispensing with the ‘claim for simplicity’ by
equating it with barbarism, we might do better to begin by distinguishing a
claim from a demand, and by acknowledging that a demand for simplicity
exists, that such a demand has to be negotiated, that it is neither essentially
noble nor barbaric, that it is, however, complexly articulated with different
ideological fragments and social forces in the form of a range of competing
populisms.
It would be foolish to present a polar opposition between the Gramscian
lines(s) and the (heterogeneous) Posts. There is too much shared historical
and intellectual ground for such a partition to serve any valid purpose. It
was, after all, the generation of marxist intellectuals who lived through ‘68
and who took the events in Paris and the West Coast seriously who turned
in the 1970s to Gramsci. In addition, there are clear cross-Channel links