Articulation Facilitation Handout by Corrine and Mengmeng

                                          | 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)

1. Slavery can only be “formally capitalist,” because enslaved people don’t own their labor. People who “deal in slave-trading are capitalists.” 

2. “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.” 

3. Slaveholders were both merchants within the capitalist system (enslaved people as a commodity) and slaveholders within the plantation system, which can be understood as “a specialized agricultural region, a kind of internal colony within the expanded world market.” - the capitalist system and the plantation system were interrelated. 

This, Marx describes as “an articulation between two modes of production, the one ‘capitalist’ in the true sense, the other only ‘formally’ so: the two combined through an articulating principle, mechanism or set of relations, because…’ its beneficiaries participate in a world market in which the dominant productive sectors are already capitalist.’” “This object of inquiring must be treated as a complex articulated structure” - “structured in dominance.” - social formation contains several modes of production. 

For example, Saussure argues that “language is not a reflection of the world but produces meaning through the articulation of linguistic systems upon real relations…language is the domain of articulations” (327). 

Articulation and Racism: 

Articulation understands racism as intertwined cultural, social, political, economic, and ideological aspects. 

For example, in the case study of South African social formation, “Where capitalism develops by means, in part, of its articulation with non-capitalist modes, ‘the mode of political domination and the content of legitimating ideologies assume racial, ethnic and cultural forms and for the same reasons as in the case of imperialism…political domination takes on a colonial form’ (Wolpe 1975 in Hall 322). 

Racism is in articulation with other social relations (337). Class is articulated in part through race (341). “Capital reproduces the class…structured by race” (341). Racism also existed in pre-capitalist societies. “The structures through which black labour is reproduced…labour - are not simply ‘coloured’ by race: they work through race” (340). Question: What does Hall mean by this? 

Racism works to distinguish (us/them deep in popular consciousness) and dehistorize (“translating historically-specific structures into the timeless language of nature”) (342). Question: How do you think this relates to the contemporary cultural-political war on CRT in the US?

Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall” 

Context 

This interview was drawn from conversations on postmodernism among Hall and scholars at the University of Iowa in 1985, as well as interview sessions on articulation at the University of Illinois from the same year. 

Postmodernism 

• Hall concedes that modernist projects (like Habermas) fail to fully grapple with the “deeply contradictory tendencies” of modern culture, but argues that postmodernists like Baudrillard have “gone right through the sound barrier” in revealing these changes in culture without finding any significance or problematics within them (131). 

• Asks the question, is postmodernism a global or strictly Western phenomenon?

• how can there be an implosion of “the real” when two-thirds of the world have not experienced what postmodernists call “the real”?

• Hall argues that postmodern culture and critique has been fragmentized: “Postmodern culture has become a set of dissociated specialisms.” (139)

Question: How does Hall’s conceptualization of postmodernism and its culture relate to the fragmentation of cultural studies we have discussed in previous weeks? 

Articulation

• the double-meaning of articulation in England: to articulate is to utter or to speak, but it is also to link (articulated lorry/semi) two parts that don’t necessarily need to be linked and can be broken apart again

• Religion example: “Religion has no necessary political connotation…it exists historically in a particular formation, anchored directly in relation to a number of different forces. Nevertheless, it has no necessary, intrinsic, transhistorical belongingness. Its meaning- political and ideological- comes precisely from its position within a formation. It comes with what else it is articulated to” (142).

Question: Hall uses multiple instances in popular culture (benefit concerts, Bruce Springsteen, MTV, etc.) to discuss the fragmentation of contemporary culture in general. How do these examples illuminate his understanding of postmodern culture and articulation? Has this phenomenon changed since the 1980s when Hall gave these interviews, and if so, how?

Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies” 

Slack argues that “cultural studies works with the notion of theory as a ‘detour’ to help ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and to let that engagement provide the ground for retheorizing. Theory is thus a practice in a double sense: it is a formal conceptual tool as well as a practising or ‘trying out’ of a way of theorizing” (114). 

Method can serve as “both techniques to be used as resources as well as the activity of practising or ‘trying out’” (115). 

The theory and method of articulation are to interrogate the role of articulation in cultural studies (115). 

Grossberg, “Articulation and Culture”

Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, and Communication

• Grossberg argues that the construction of mass media as the transmitter of popular culture (rather than, for example, education) occurred for two distinctly economic reasons: 

• first, to “maximize the profits of the emergent cultural industries,” and second, to “help create an economy based on mass consumption and ever-expanding demand” (38)

• However, he contends that the “massification” of popular culture did not create the issues of commodification or cultural consumption, but rather helped reorganize the processes of consumption by bringing “the masses” into the cultural arena

• His main contention is that understanding popular culture as an instance of communication has to be challenged in cultural studies, and there are two main assumptions that stem from this that have hindered attempts to analyze pop culture

Cultural Studies, the Real, and Articulation

• Grossberg wants to move away from an understanding of popular culture as a form of communication, and proposes two commitments in lieu of this model: first, “a return to the real via a materialist theory of effectivity” and second, “a principle of contextuality understood as and through the practice of articulation” (46). 

• Grossberg also argues that if we choose to question the communication model, then we must also question the assumption that a practice is always located in “a structure of necessity and guarantees its effects even before it has been enacted” (52), which leads him to articulation

• Articulation as offering a theory of “contexts,” which can be seen as a structured field or a configuration of practices where each practice is located specifically and has effects that are determined by its relations and distances within the context itself (60)

• lines of articulation vs. lines of flight (58)

Questions: Do we agree with Grossberg’s move from understanding popular culture through communication to a theory of materialist effectivity and articulation? What implications does this have for not only popular culture scholars, but cultural scholars in general?

How do his “lines of articulation” vs “lines of flight” impact our understanding of articulation? Do they clarify or confuse how Hall defines articulation?

Part II: Keywords & Definitions

Postmodernism: Postmodernism moves us from the modernist imperatives of progress, truth, and reason in order to grapple with the contradictory nature of these ideals in society; however, Hall contends that postmodernism’s collapse of “the real,” ideology, and representation does nothing but point out the changes happening in society without recognizing the significance of them (132).

Effectivity: An event’s place in a complex network of effects- its effects elsewhere on other events, as well as their effects on it; the possibilities of the event for enacting change or difference in society. Events construct a multidimensionality of real, tangible effects that are neither guaranteed or limited to one set of possibilities (Grossberg, 50).

Articulation: Articulation brings together/links two things that are seemingly different, incompatible, and opposite, thus creating a new meaning, a new way of knowing, or new knowledge production. 

Hegemony: The dominant class controls the masses through a combination of coercion and consent. This consent is through systemic manipulation of information, lack of education, and cultural hierarchy of intellectuals. The processes of coercion and consent are sites of struggle. 

Ideology: Ideologies are sites of struggle -  “the production of subjects and the articulation/disarticulation of discourses” (Hall 335). 

Interpellation: Interpellation is a process, in which we encounter our culture's values and internalize them. Interpellation explains that ideas do not exist in a vacuum, but are rooted in the dominant system/culture we live in. Everyone is susceptible to interpellation.

Part III: Media

How do feminism and gaming culture (two things that seem to be oppositional to one another) intertwine in this promoted TikTok and Feminist Frequency? Is this an example of articulation? What new meanings can be found in this combination?

https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdSMLNvo/

https://feministfrequency.com/about/