Page 230 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

218 OPENING THE HALLWAY

Foucault’s abstracted theory of power not to a class but to an alliance of
social interests, and in which Foucault’s centrality of the body as a site of
power and resistance might compensate for Gramsci’s (historically
contingent) failure to consider social relations where the winning of
consent has never been an issue, such as those of slavery.
There is a further point that underlies Hall’s suspicion of postmodernism.
This is his feeling that it is a simplistic model that evades engaging with the
complexities and contradictions of a late capitalist society. By denying
meaning, by denying ideology it denies the unequal distribution of power in
society, the perception of which has always been an informing perspective
in Hall’s work. Entailed by this is the notion that meanings not only exist,
but are full of the same contradictory and contesting forces as the society
which produces, circulates and consumes them.
His theory of articulation precisely addresses this sense of complexity. It
is a sophistication of his earlier ‘preferred reading’ theory which insisted on
the reader’s ability to contest and modify meanings promoted by the
dominant ideology: this contestation was socially determined so that the
relationship of the reader to the text reproduced the relationship of his/her
social location to the dominant ideology. The theory of articulation takes
this a stage further by denying a monosemic view of the dominant ideology
—ideology does not say the same things to the same people at the same time.
Rather it works through cultural forms whose meanings and political
effectivity are determined by how they are articulated with other forms. So
when MTV is articulated with the music industry its meanings are those of
advertising, and a rock video is a more or less effective commercial for the
record or group it is promoting. But when it is articulated (linked) with the
politics of pleasure it can articulate (speak) resistances to, and evasions of,
the capitalist social machine. As MTV is articulated (linked) differently to
other cultural formations of capitalism, so the capitalism inscribed in it and
the effectivity of its inscription, is differently articulated (spoken). As the
viewer’s social relations contradict those of the producers, so his/her
articulations (linkages and speech) of MTV will contradict the capitalist
ideology.
But Hall is careful to argue that an oppositional articulation of a cultural
form has no necessary connection with radical politics. A change in
cultural form (for example, MTV) or a change in social forces (for
example, Rastafarianism) need not produce changes in the political system
because their cultural domains are not necessarily articulated with that of
politics. A rock subculture or a black subculture may not find direct
political action necessary to their subcultural experience. But, on the other
hand, they may: political action is always possible, though never necessary.
Articulation does not just happen as a structural effect: it is a process of
struggle that requires active, intentional and directed engagement.