Stuart Hall 2022 Seminar

                                                     | Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies: Stuart Hall | Week 6 | Knitting In-congruency: Articulation as Theory and Method | | Presenters: Corrine Jones and Mengmeng Liu | Part I: Reading Maps Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance”   Hall’s development of articulation: Hall maps a theoretical inquiry that deals with connections instead of relevance. Hall uses the example of Marx’s interpretation of slavery: (320) Slavery can only be “formally capitalist,” because enslaved people don’t own their labor. People who “deal in slave-trading are capitalists.”  “Under capitalism the worker owns his own labour power which he sells as a commodity to the capitalist, slaveholders owned both the labour power and the slave.”  Slaveholders were both mercha...

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...

As I read these articles and interviews, one thought repeats on an endless loop in my brain: "I need to read more." Having read very little Baudrillard, a little more Gramsci, but virtually no Habermas, Lyotard, or many of the other names Hall casually cites (not drops, not invokes, but cites-- in an interview ), I spend more time reserving books to check out for context than I do reading the main text. I'm drawn to Hall's remark on the "collapse of the French Intelligentsia during the [1980s-mid-1990s]," in which he talks about how Baudrillard et al were quick to declare "when and for whom history ends, how the masses can or cannot be represented, when they are or not a real historical force," and so on, largely because of what we're witnessing in Eastern Europe vis-a-vis the USA/Russian stand-off. In 2003, as Iraq War 2: Halliburton Boogaloo jumped off, I (somewhat melodramatically) called it the "Death of America," by which I simp...

I particularly enjoyed reading “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall" this week—especially as sections of the piece were taken from conversations that took place here at the University of Iowa!  The final two pages (149-150), which examined the institutionalization and codification—Stuart Hall is keen to differentiate the two terms in his response— of cultural studies in the United States encouraged me to consider the current position of cultural studies within U.S. academia. Indeed, I drew a connection between this piece and "The Last Interview: Stuart Hall on the Politics of Cultural Studies," conducted thirty years later, in which Hall stated—perhaps with a hint of frustration—that "I think a lot of people in cultural studies think we can’t just go on producing another analysis of The Sopranos." In "On Postmodernism and Articulation" Hall states "cultural studies has to be open to external influences, for example, t...

 I must admit that I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the ways in which articulation was being articulated in the readings. Based on my confused understanding of the theory, I have two questions/ concerns. 1.  HOW ARTICULATION MAY OR MAY NOT WORK I found Hall's definition -"an articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions....the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subjects rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it" - very complex but useful to my work (141, 142). For instance, if I am drawing connections between a few cultural forms, one documentary, one drama series, and an anthology in post-1990s India, is it fair to say that I am "articulating" connections within a single discourse? What is a discourse, especially since Hall is careful not to "reduce everything else to it" (Slack 122)?   I am also wondering ...

First, I want to remark on the versatility of Hall’s writing: he does the work of translating by critically and carefully reading between opposing theories, identifying points of contradiction and synthesis to ultimately deliver a central problematic (as he does so well in “race, articulation and societies structured in dominance”). And in conversation (“On Postmodernism and Articulation”), his wit comes through in his biting criticisms (“I’d like to make you eat your words,” 57) without ever sacrificing theoretical rigor.  I appreciate how Hall makes such generative use of Althusser’s more “structuralist” framework (which can lend itself to a theorization that is not open enough to account for historical change or development) by way, principally, of Gramsci. Hall is able to mobilize a conception of articulation in order to understand the concrete, historical moments, so as to not get trapped in an unchanging structuralist paradigm that, while perhaps materialist, is not historica...

  Grossberg tells us that because audiences are so large, critics have identified ways of separating them into smaller subgroups, mainly based on shared taste and shared identity. Both of these position the audience as existing outside of their interaction with the media; audiences are already formed and bring their own resources to the interaction with media. Grossberg argues that these ways of partitioning off audiences do not consider how texts construct their own appropriate audiences. In other words, they don’t consider how audiences’ identities may be constituted during their interaction with media, not before or after it. My question is, can we think of possible strategies for how media can create appropriate audiences?   Are there examples of how media has created a specific subgroup of audience? I was interested in Hall’s characterization of communicative institutions, practices, and relations as lines of tendential force that serve as powerful barriers to the potenti...

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?

  In “On postmodernism and articulation,” Hall writes about how many theories of postmodernism are “Euro-centred” and ignore the fact that “three-quarters of the human race have not yet entered the era” that postmodernists say is already gone (132-133). White supremacy is constantly reproduced throughout cultural circles, including academia. How do we know when cultural theorists, or humanistic theorists more generally, are centering hegemonic “Western” culture vs taking a more accurate and egalitarian approach? How does the work of Hall and the CCCS fare in this question? Articulation is broadly applicable but also the lines of cultural studies “sometimes get unquestionably crossed” (Slack, 114). What type of research is a misapplication of cultural studies/articulation? What should we prioritize or not when choosing topics of study? Are there texts that truly don’t have political significance?

I am keeping my post short this week. :) 1) The first question comes directly from “Articulation and Culture” and is one I have been stewing over since reading this text. “How are critics to make sense of cultural practices, trends, and events?” As a group, we have danced around this question for the last couple of weeks, but I am wondering if we can start to pinpoint a place to start, given all of the complexity and intertextuality within a contemporary lived experience that we have discussed over recent weeks. Grossberg mentions the “cartography of daily life” (63), and I wonder what this map might even look like. I’m interested in hearing what people think! 2) My second question comes from the Hall interview, edited by Grossberg. “In what ways does Hall’s defense of modernism reflect his view that theory is an open horizon and how can his open horizon and defense of modernism move us into the future?” In education, we have a common saying, “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” mea...

I usually get exhausted half-way through 40+ page academic articles, but getting through "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance" felt SO rewarding. Stuart Hall carefully untangles the limitations of economic and sociological theoretical frameworks and insists on linking & theorizing economic, historical, social, ideological, and of course, racial structures through the process of articulation. Toward the end of the piece, Hall writes “The ideologies of racism remain contradictory structures, which can function both as the vehicles for the imposition of dominant ideologies, and as the elementary forms for the cultures of resistance” (241). I am interested in the latter part of this statement: How do ideologies of racism also create cultures of resistance? What does this resistance look like? What conditions and structures cause different non-Black ethnic groups to weaponize racist ideologies for their own benefit?  On the institutionalization of cultura...

  On page 125, Slack writes: “While working with a still- recognizable model of transmission, Hall’s encoding/decoding challenges the simple assertion of intrinsic identity by insisting that the components of the process (sender, receiver, message, meaning, etc.) are themselves articulations, without essential meanings or identities. This move compels a rethinking of the process of communication not as correspond but as articulation.” Which I, and I think a lot of comm scholars, would agree. This plays an important role in understanding communication but, importantly and especially, in emphasizing the many directions of power and/or influence that can exist within that articulated moment. In a word, an awareness of connection both to an individual and systems. I suppose my question is: shouldn’t more people have this knowledge? How do we share this beyond the academy? Why is Communication in undergrad always focused on public speaking/public relations/marketing etc rather than such...

00:00-09:20 Thanks!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JclSCsg_YoQ

I have two related questions for this week. First, I appreciate Giroux's discussion of the politics of pedagogy. In our current context, how might we engage in pedagogy that is “transgressive in its challenge to authority and power” (Giroux 144)? Does controversy over covid policies allow a space for this?   Relatedly, a recurring theme throughout the reading is the role of common sense and ideology in producing the boundaries of knowledge and education. What would we want such transgressive pedagogies to change about our current educational system in terms of these broader power structures? What would a university without neoliberal, commodified education look like?

 1) I thoroughly enjoyed working through Giroux's theorization of Hall's "public pedagogy." I am interested in many aspects of this article, but I want to focus in particular on Giroux's discussion around representations specifically. They write that "representations can be understood for the ways in which they shape and bear witness to the ethical dilemmas that animate broader debates within the dominant culture" and that "the implications of this argument suggest a cultural politics that investigates how popular texts are articulated within structures of affect and meaning mediated by networks of power and domination bound to the specific historical, social and economic conditions of their production" (355). As a media studies scholar, I often find that studies of representation sometimes skim the surface of deeper cultural issues (or even turn into the cultural scholarship that Hall negatively describes when he discusses textual analyses of ...

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma

I deeply hate to focus on merely one aspect of the incredibly rich texts we read for this week, but I stopped clearly on this paragraph from the Giroux: These are hard times for educators and advocates of democratic schooling. Beseiged by the growing forces of vocationalism and the neoconservative cultural warriors, prospective and existing classroom teachers are caught in an ideological crossfire regarding the civic and political responsibilities they assume as engaged critics and cultural theorists. Asked to define themselves either through the language of the marketplace or through a discourse of liberal objectivity and neutrality that abstracts the political from the realm of the cultural and sopcial, educators are increasingly being pressured to become either servants of corporate power or disengaged specialists wedded to the imperatives of a resurgent and debasing academic professionalism.(343) Having taught in high schools in the early-to-mid-2000s, I witnessed firsthand both...

   

 I really enjoyed the conversation in this week's readings, especially Kiang's thoughtful articulation of the dilemmas and resistance of a POC non-tenure faculty in university.  1. As an ESL student, I have some experience with the ESL program at U Iowa. I was shocked (pleasantly surprised) by Kiang's piece that the teacher of an ESL class is a POC and has an ESL background. The fact that even wrestling with the questions of power and oppression in an ESL course happened there shows how terrible Iowa and many other ESL programs in the US are. ESL classes in Iowa teach assimilation, not resistance. They are taught by white teachers who LOVE other cultures and travel in the global south. This situation is just a small reflection of how the college education in Iowa and US is a neoliberal capitalist business, promoting a tokenist and patronizing diversity, instead of serving students of color and teaching critical thinking. The story about the POC faculty on the tenure track g...

  Kiang in “C rossing Boundaries, Building Community” brings forward the complications of being a tenure track professor while also trying to challenge academia and create communities with students that engages with race, power, and culture. In this challenge, Kiang reflects on the positionality of a particular professor as they rejected being the pillar of such a movement considering their tenure track position. Examining Kiang’s example, there is an interesting dynamic between responsible modes of community building with POC students/ faculty relationships and the tokenization's of POC faculty members in the workspace by their peers and students. How can these dynamics be examined and what are the implications for higher education institutions and the environment they create?     In “ Crossing Boundaries, Building Community” Kiang describes his approach in the classroom as an adoption of Mae Tse Tung ’s basic organizing principle (unite with the advanced to win ...

Both Giroux and Kiang are critical of the corporatization of the university.  1. Kiang’s piece triggered memories that I thought I had dumped in a closet. While I appreciate his approach, he ends up centering himself so that the focus is largely on what he did right. In that context, how should educators write about pedagogy? Since teachers also end up in administrative roles, does that indicate the university’s attempt to make them more docile? While I have a lot of problems with how the Netflix series, The Chair centers the white male professor as a victim, I felt that it engages with the difficulties of being a POC tenured professor who ends up in an administrative role. Also, given the recent John Comaroff case, can we think of these hierarchies as a form of academic kinship or a kind of orientation (as Sara Ahmed theorizes) that a university employee must conform to? 2. Giroux writes – “But to acknowledge the latter, as Alan O’ Shea has recently pointed out, does not legitima...