Page 225 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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power bloc. Ideology for him is simultaneously a strategy of domination
and a terrain of struggle.
His double use of the concept of articulation (both ‘speaking’ [sense 1]
and ‘linking’ [sense 2]) is central in his theorizing, and one of its most
enabling uses is to bring Gramsci and Volosinov into conversation with
Althusser, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. He develops Volosinov’s theory of
‘accent’ to argue that the contingent conditions in which language is
spoken (or articulated-1), form the speaker’s point of entry into a
particular set of social relations (or articulation-2). Giving language an
accent is articulating it fully, and until it is accented/articulated language,
like other deep cultural structures, is another closed and totalizing system.
Accenting it, therefore, makes it historically contingent and opens it up as a
terrain of struggle. The struggle for meaning, which Hall insists is integral
to the social struggle at large, can only take place in historically specific
conditions, and Hall never allows us to forget that these conditions of
struggle are determined (in his opened sense of the word) by the historically
transcendent structures theorized by Althusser, Lévi-Strauss and Saussure.
Language was central in the thinking of all these structuralists: for Saussure
it was the defining and universal human attribute, for Lévi-Strauss it
formed the model for all cultural systems, and for Althusser, as for Lacan,
language was the structuring principle of ideology and the unconscious. Hall
found in their insistence that one cannot understand social experience
without a thorough understanding of language a way to correct what he
saw as an undervaluation of the importance of language and representation
in traditional marxism, particularly in its insistence on the primacy of
economic relations. His theory of articulation brings together social and
economic relations, historical conditions, and language in a way that has
opened up some of the richest strands of work in cultural studies.
Hall found fertile soil in which to propagate his theories in the work of
Gramsci. Indeed, the theory of articulation may be seen as a direct
descendent of Gramsci’s argument that the elaborated societies of
capitalism required political struggles to be fought by bloc formation
rather than by structurally determined class relations. A bloc is an alliance
of social forces formed to promote common social interests as they can be
brought together in particular historical conditions. Like articulation, bloc
formation requires active and intentional political work, and, like
articulation also, it occurs within determining conditions but its labour can
transform, if only slightly, those conditions within which it works.
Articulation describes a form of semiotic activism that continues the more
directly political activism of bloc formation. Both Gramsci and Hall insist
on the centrality of economic or class relations in any critical analysis of
the socio-cultural world, but insisting on their importance does not, in