On Stuart Hall’s “Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance.”
About halfway through this piece, Hall turns from his assessment
of the two “tendencies”—the economic, on the one hand, and sociological, on the
other—to a discussion of articulation. Hall cites Aidan Foster-Carter, who configures
articulation as a metaphor “to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity
between different levels of all sorts of things” (Foster-Carter qtd. in Hall
325). Hall then defers to Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, who “conceive of
a social formation as composed of a number of instances—each with a degree of
'relative autonomy' from one another-articulated into a (contradictory) unity”
(326). In the interview on postmodernism and articulation, Hall defines his use
of articulation as a linkage, a unity that can be broken; there is no essential
belongingness among the articulated. Articulation seems similar to the idea of conjucture;
indeed, Hall notes in one passage that “conjunctures…are the product of an
articulation of contradictions” (326). He goes on to note other configurations
of the term. But what does this make articulation in practice? Questions:
What is articulation’s relationship to conjuncture? Is articulation a configuration or a methodology?
If a methodology, what is/are its politics?
On “On postmodernism and articulation: an interview with Stuart
Hall.”
At the very end of this interview, Hall praises the institutionalization of cultural studies while resisting the projects of codification and orthodoxy. Hall quips about cultural studies’ assimilation into the American Academy as just another paradigm—"you know, there are fifteen [paradigms] around, so this time I will say that I have a cultural studies approach”—but he seems to take issue with cultural studies as a “perspective” (Hall 20). This resistance goes back to the issues of codification and orthodoxy: Hall appears to be tentative about cultural studies as a perspective, perhaps because such a phrase, “a cultural studies perspective,” foreclosures on plurality and open-endedness, the cornerstones of cultural studies? Hall goes on: “I understand why that happens [cultural studies taken up as an interpretive approach] because, in a sense, there is a perspective there, despite its eclecticism and relative openness. It has always been trying to integrate itself into a perspective” (20, emphasis original). I don’t understand these after-the-fact concessions: “I understand why that happens…in a sense, there is …despite its…”. Hall appears to resist the use of cultural studies as a perspective, for fear that its use in a single analysis will limit its expansiveness. Why? Questions: Does Hall, in his attempt to preserve the ongoing, open-endedness of cultural studies, foreclose on its usability? Said another way, is the act of “going on theorizing,” of resisting the imperfect (at times, possibly essentialist) use of cultural studies, just another brand of ossification, the delay of a debut for fear of its inability to be all things to all people?
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