Key Terms:
Articulation
Postmodernism
End of History
Difference
Encoding/Decoding
Structuralism/Post-Structuralism
Multi-Media
Cary
The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies by Slack
1) Articulation is claimed as the prevailing conceptual tool for cultural studies: it is what divides reductionism and essentialism in cultural analyses, and what allows the cultural studies scholar the facility with which to grasp contexts.
It works at three levels: epistemological, political, strategic.
2) Theory is a practice: a conceptual tool linking concepts together, and a ‘trying out’ of a way of theorizing. Theory is active, embodied, and whim to the contradictions of every day life.
3) Articulation is a moment of arbitrary closure: Rather than unifying conceptual framework around class or economics (the two reductionist paradigms of “classical” Marxism), Hall’s early conceptualizing of articulation provided an empty space where some other paradigm would grow.
4) From Althusser, the idea of a ‘complex totality structured in dominance.’ Levels of the totality are structured in correspondence as well as contradiction—they are said to be articulated. On the level of ideology, those relations are “represented, produced, and reproduced.” On the strategic perspective, this process is the process of articulation and rearticulation.
5) Ernesto Laclau provides the full definition of articulation, from which Hall derives his own. Articulation, in the western philosophical tradition, is simply the linking of concepts.
-“the analysis of any concrete
situation or phenomenon entails the exploration of complex,
multiple,
and theoretically abstract non-necessary links” (120). Dominator classes exert hegemony
by articulating different, strategic views of the world whenever a potential antagonism
needs to be neutralized.
6) Hall’s articulation is a little tighter than Laclau’s, and so easier to apply to certain cultural mediations. In the case of communication, instead of seeing receiver/sender and other terms as unities, Hall sees them as articulations. In this way, he is able to keep open the possibility power dynamics in messaging. The fact that communication is a “relatively autonomous moment” means that there is a difference in the degree of privilege of articulations, hegemonically powered, that encourage or inhibit rearticulations.
“Seen from this perspective, this is what a cultural study does: map the context—not in the sense of situating a phenomenon in a context, but in mapping a context, mapping the very identity that brings the context into focus” (Slack 126).
On postmodernism and articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall
1) Hall begins by pondering the necessity of periodization in cultural analysis. Frustrated with Habermas’ apologia for Enlightenment/modernism and with Lyotard’s exhausted defense of postmodernism.
“Now we come to postmodernism and what I want to know is: is postmodernism a global or a ‘western’ phenomenon? Is postmodernism the word we give to the rearrangement, the new configuration, which many of the elements that went into the modernist project have now assumed? Or is it, as I think the postmodernist theorists want to suggest, a new kind of absolute rupture with the past, the beginning of a new global epoch altogether” (133).
Talks about the ‘tyranny of the new,’ and the overzealousness of western, American academia to always be trying to supersede itself.
2) Hall tracks postmodernism, as an aesthetic phenomenon, to the break-up of the stable subject symptomized in Freud, Brecht, Beckett, Joyce, and others. A feeling of the ‘end of the world,’ post-modernism as a horizon of the end of historical process, as an ideological marker, has certainly changed our relations to the world.
3) Critique of Foucault’s abandonment of ideology in terms of articulating regimes of truth within discursive formations—regimes which impose normalization, regulation, and surveillance. For Foucault, there is a resistance which precedes these. To Hall, Foucault lacks a heuristic by which to base one’s struggle in the cultural differences between regimes of truth.
4) Hall loves MTV. “Each so-called meaningless fragment seems to me rich in connotations.” In this, he quashes a lot of the elegiac, exaggerated responses to postmodernist surface-proliferation by attending to the material conditions of cultural products.
5) Articulation: as speaking, “language-ing,” and in analogy, being-articualted, like a lorry whose cab and trailer are attached by a specific link.
“A way to understand how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (144).
Aileen
Race, Articulation, Dominance
- Hall provides two “tendencies” that race could be viewed through
- These “tendencies” are paradoxical, in the way that one does not provide a full picture, but needs the other “tendency” as a missing puzzle piece
o Described as “inverted mirror images” of each other (305)
- Hall acknowledges that these “tendencies” are, to a point, flattening the nuances by grouping them together into two binary groupings; however, as a whole, there are certain trends that are able to be seen in these groupings
- The two “tendencies”
o Economic
o Sociological
- Economic tendency
o Utilizing economic theory to understand racial structures and formations; explaining racial relations and disenfranchisement as, at its core, an economic problem
o “They [theorists of economic tendency] take economic relations and structures to have an overwhelmingly determining effect on the social structures of such formations. Specifically, those social divisions which assume a distinctively racial or ethnic character can be attributed or explained principally with reference to economic structures and processes.” (306)
o Basis on either using Marxist ideology to acknowledge or pushing against Marxism as insufficient to explain the intricacies that race imposes in non-European economic societies
§ Theorists that Hall are in conversation with (Rex, Wolpe, Frank, as well as Weber as an alternative to Marx) extrapolate on the role that settler-colonialism has on economic relations
· Such as flipping the notions of a modernized/unmodernized or developed/underdeveloped country binaries into the metropolitan/satellite and imperialist/colonized binaries that highlight the causal relationship between one country’s growth and another’s exploitation
o One notable case studies used in detailing economic tendency is South Africa
§ Defined as “race [being] an articulating principle of the social, political, and ideological structures, and where the capitalist mode is sustained by drawing, simultaneously, on what has been defined as both ‘free’ and ‘forced’ labour” (309)
§ The racial stratification of South Africa’s labor force cannot be described merely as a cultural divide, but the basis of this cultural divide is economic disenfranchisement— “race is the mechanism by which this stratification is accomplished” (309)
· Therefore, classical Marxism being insufficient to explore extraneous factors rather than determining these issues are solely a class struggle
o Other case studies involves Latin America
§ Citing Latin America’s usage for European settler-colonialism since the 16th century as determining factor for Latin America’s designation as “underdeveloped”— and shifting the viewpoint away from development to mapping the dependency of “developed” countries on “underdeveloped” countries for resources
- Sociological tendency
o “Articulation” being key to understanding the ideological formations that impact racial relations
§ Articulation: The joining together of two social forces in a structured and hierarchical relationship. The term emerges in Marxist, and particularly Althusserian, analyses of the mode of production. At any given historical moment, one mode of production is dominant. It does not, however, exclude other modes, but rather forces their adaptation to its own needs. Thus, the feudal monarchy may survive in capitalism, but only in so far as it is adapted to the needs of capitalism (see Anderson 1979). The concept has been developed in analyses of race, gender and nationalism. (Edgar and Sedgwick, 20)
§ The unity of articulation leading to a “complex structure”: “a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities” (325)
o Historicization is vital to understanding ideological formation
o Hall is in conversation with theorists such as Althusser and Gramsci
o “The economic level is the necessary but not sufficient condition for explaining the operations at other levels of society” (329)
o The need to understand the specific historical contexts of slavery and settler-colonialism, divorced from possible previous or future iterations, is the key to understand the nuances that shape the result of the economy
§ “A specific historical ‘moment’” (332)
o Gramsci’s “hegemony” shapes the class struggle due to specific historical moments, transforming the battlefield from purely economic labor struggles to a “more protracted, strategic and tactical struggle” (322) of the “’non-economic’ levels of politics, civil society, and culture” (334)
§ Pushing against notion that imperialism was purely an economic feat
§ Gramsci’s divorce of ideology to only “class interests” of “class subjects” (335)
- Ends with ultimately addressing racism’s role in obfuscating the complexity between the economic and sociological factors of racial structures
o “Specifically, there is at yet no adequate theory of racism which is capable of dealing with both the economic and the superstructural features of such societies, while at the same time giving a historically-concrete and sociologically-specific account of distinctive racial aspects” (336)
Grossberg (“Articulation and Culture”)
- Main questions asked by this piece:
o What is the relationship between culture and politics?
o How do they impact each other?
o How can critics “make sense of current political change (e.g., the increasing divestment from political activity conjoined with a growing conservatism) in the light of cultural habits, and vice versa?” (37)
o What is a critic’s role in understanding the “gap” (or, difference) between a piece of pop culture, its audience, and its message?
- Key terms:
o Difference
o Articulation
o Encoding/decoding
o Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
- Popular culture as we know it had roots in mid-20th century technological innovations in mass communications (such as radio, television, and later on, computers)
- Mass communication =/= popular culture or mass consumption
o Drive for profit spurred on mass communication technology to be used for mass media purposes, rather than concentrating solely on educational, informative, or propaganda purposes
- Pop culture plays on appealing to different audiences either based on common “taste” or common demographics/experiences
o However, the relation between the text, the audience, and the audience’s reception of the text (understanding its “message”) is fraught
- Grossberg opts to respond to the Post-Structuralists in his argument for how cultural studies should be approached
o Post-Structuralism, unlike its predecessor, argues that there is no inherent meaning in a text— and this extends from the text itself. Cultural signage is equally if not more important than the actual text (or, “sign”)
o However, rejection of “the model of culture defined by the need to construct a correspondence between two parallel, intersecting planes— language and reality” (48)
§ “Also a rejection of a model of reality as a transcendental whole existing outside of history and practices” (48)
§ Basically, rejection of prescriptive practices of separating language, reality, and culture to adapt to contemporary life
- The critic must understand the impact that the quotidian has on people’s interpretation of cultural texts, since this is vital to the overall atmosphere that impact interpretation
- How one “meaning” of a cultural phenomenon impacts other cultural phenomenon
- Even though there’s not one pre-set interpretation of the text, that doesn’t make the interpretations or its after-effects less real
- “One continues to follow the path, still uncertain where it will lead, intrigued by other paths that cut across the way, by other landmarks that offer different possibilities. Somewhere else, another discovery offers new possibilities, resolutions and questions. Each new discovery not only changes the map that have already been drawn, but forces one into new directions, to search for new sorts of evidence” (63)
o “In this, the practice of reassembling and mapping historical contexts is somewhat analogous to constructing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing how many pieces are needed, if they are all present (and if the only ones present are necessary) or what the puzzle is a picture of” (64)
- Questions:
o What example could be used to demonstrate the difference between a Structuralist and Post-Structuralist reading of signage?
o Grossberg addresses the essential role that critics play in shaping cultural studies. When referring to English as a discipline, how does this impact us as literary critics? How does this impact how we teach our students, since interpretation of a text (as well as backing up interpretations with textual evidence) is an intrinsic part of the discipline? How does this possibly problematize teaching literary interpretation in the classroom?
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