Skip to main content

Week 6 by Rajorshi

 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 if articulation works differently from queer relationality. I am thinking of how José Esteban Muñoz picks his subjects and cultural forms in Cruising Utopia which theorizes queer futurity. 


2. What is culturalism? Is "reduction" merely a critique of reducing everything to economics?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 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...

Pedagogy vs. the indulgence of regressive politics (a. darryl moton)

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...

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 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?