From “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” by Stuart Hall
Though I have encountered articulation theory in other courses, my engagement with it has been minimal and I had never quite understood it. The readings this week have helped to develop my understanding tremendously. In Hall’s description of articulation in “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” he states, “The unity formed by this combination or articulation, is always, necessarily, a ‘complex structure’: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities” (325). In Hall’s interview with Lawrence Grossberg, Hall uses the example of a semi-truck rig and its haul to explain the kind of relationship articulation addresses; that is, a semi-truck rig and trailer need not always be connected and while their connection creates a whole entity, the related components are still technically separate. Because articulation is still relatively new to me, I am trying to think through the various other ways we could understand the concept and the ways we could apply it to make sense of the world around us. With that, here is my question:
Can we (and how might we) apply articulation to our identities as graduate students, scholars, and teachers? We are each of these things simultaneously in the course of an academic year, though we might “wear the hat” of each identity as if it is our sole identity at different times. Here is a another, related question: How might articulation help us (i.e., graduate students) better understand our multiple identities, and the various pressures that accompany those identities, even as we are constantly told that we should think of ourselves students first?
From We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, “Articulation and Culture” by Lawrence Grossberg
This and the Slack essay were probably the most helpful for me this week in starting to get a grasp on articulation (and articulation theory). Grossberg provides several helpful, and amusing (e.g., discussion of Rambo), examples to understand cultural studies, articulation, the meanings of texts, and the relationship between practices and effects, among other topics. In “Articulation and Culture,” Grossberg states, “what is important in history is what practices are available, how they are deployed or taken up and how they transform the world. It is not merely a question of what, in any instance, people do in fact do, but of the possibilities available to them: of the means available for transforming reality, as well as those actually taken up” (51). I sometimes forget (and I do not know if I am alone in this) that in studying what is done, we also need to consider what is available to be done. Here is my question:
What would be required to make more visible the structures and systems that dictate the availability of practices at various levels of society (e.g., national, local, etc.)? For this question, I am thinking in the context of a public-facing project.
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