Zadeh Week 6

 

Hall summarizes the study of racial formations as falling into two “broad dominant tendencies”: The first finds economic relations as determining the social structures of race. These include both neoclassical, modernization, and Marxist models. The second disagrees that you can reduce race to economic relations and finds race to be a social feature all its own. As I understand it, Hall is looking to a third way, wherein

“RACE IS THE MODALITY IN WHICH CLASS IS LIVED…the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it Is appropriated and 'fought through'” 

or race is an "articulating principle" at various moments and places, one system for organizing and preserving capitalist relations. This definition also answers the common question about race, given its ambiguous, ever-changing, 'social constructed'-ness: If race is historically-contingent, what holds race together across history? .Hall answers: “racism discovers what other ideologies have to construct; an apparently 'natural' and universal basis in nature itself.” The defining and constant feature of race is it attributes to (by making up) individuals the causal force that actually inheres in economic relations. How does this help us to analyze the changing work that race does, or the adapting of race ideology to new times? How might this help us to analyze the work which certain forms of 'anti-racism' do?

Race as an articulation system rings particularly true in Grossberg's proposal for articulation: "the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices." Its "anti-essentialism" is a theme I have been seeing more and more in my readings. I think in particular of Charles Tilly calling for a relational sociology (of "bonds not essences") and in science studies Bruno Latour urging a "sociology of associations." I am having trouble understanding what articulation adds to this, or if it just another way of explaining it.

Additionally, in the Hall piece, Rex sees capitalist class relations, as articulated in European Marxism, as one among a range of possible economic relations, but also that interests can form not only out of relationship to means of production, but out of other power relationships. I am confused what other power relationships there are that would not be related to the means of production in some way or another.