Keywords

Marx’s Gliederung

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as presented in On the Origin of Species in 1859, swiftly brought about a scientific revolution. It inspired Marx and his followers as the kernel of a paradigm of systematic change. This dovetails with teleological ideas of continuous social change that can be traced all the way back to classical Greek philosophy—namely, the thinking of Aristotle (see Brown 1977/1989, 130–133; 1989, 85–86). The most typical evolutionary imagery employed for society’s functioning depicts an organism that operates in keeping with its nature. It reproduces itself because of action, thus fulfilling the function of the entire system (Brown 1977/1989, 133). By applying models from the natural sciences alongside physics analogues to explain the ‘natural laws of capitalist production’, Marx sought to explicate ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’ for the general public, as he stated when writing the preface to the first volume of Capital (1867/1909).

With Capital, Marx discussed contradictions related to the capitalist mode of production, which generates wealth and prosperity but also inequality and lack of stability in the economic system. According to a well-known and frequently debated passage from the third volume of Capital, ‘the rate of profit has a tendency to fall’, and it follows that exploitation of the labour force is a necessary condition for the economic growth of the capitalist economy. The anatomical metaphors enter play here.Footnote 1 If considered literally, the economic appears as an expressive totality articulating hidden structural causes such as the law of capital accumulation taken as a model of hidden dynamics in which the capitalists and the labourers are subject to the capitalist mode of production. At the heart of the capitalist mode of production, however, is an economic system motivated by profit. To gain profits, capitalists exploit workers’ labour power as a commodity in production. In bourgeois society, capitalists hold rein over the means of production, while workers must sell their labour power for a livelihood. By analogy, the very foundation of class struggle is the capitalist appropriation of surplus value from labour. This is built on the social division of labour and its commodity form, which produces surplus value expropriated from the workers by the capitalists; that is, in the course of a work-day, workers produce more than they need for living, and the capitalist pays them less than the real value of their labour.

Marx was always context-bound when writing about the capitalist mode of production and the revolution of the proletariat. When he put pen to paper on the verge of revolution in 1848, it appeared that capitalism would collapse from the force of its contradictions. As uprisings swept the continent, Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels outlined a political programme for developing the first workers’ movement. Behind The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848/2017) lay an assumption that socialist revolution would seize centres of industrialisation and capitalist development all over Europe, yet the rise of reactionary state powers in response, so aptly described in Marx’s (1852/2012) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, repressed the uprisings for decades.

In the wake of failed revolution, Marx reflected social change in the British Museum’s Reading Room, poring over the classics addressing the political economy of the eighteenth century (particularly the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their liberalist followers).Footnote 2 One of the things he found in those classic works was a pervasive idea of gradual evolutionary change portrayed in terms of growth, progress, and historical development. A revolution of the proletariat for wresting power from the bourgeoisie in the manner portrayed in The Communist Manifesto stood in strong contrast against this. Marx and Engels had already found that the revolution could not be reduced to a functionalist and evolutionary rendering of the organic whole, and they regarded the historical change as a product of collective efforts of workers anticipating a better future for the subordinated.

In early-modern political philosophy that affected Marx’s brand of relational thinking, society is portrayed as a body where the limbs of the social system exert effects throughout the body, over all the parts that form its organic whole. Anatomical metaphors emphasise the parts and their effective organisation within the artificial social system structured as an organic whole. The obvious analogy is to living entities as members belonging to a certain body that has specific needs and functions. This is popular among metaphors for social relations, thanks to works such as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651/1928), which is one source for the metaphor of the state as a body. There, Hobbes describes the state as an ‘artificial man’ consisting of several organs and joints connecting its dispersed ‘members’, with the ‘head of the state’ being the sovereign. The sovereign is thus cast as a social organism, from the famous opening section of the book onwards (p. 1):

[L]ife is but a motion of limbs […] and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer [and art] goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural.

Early modern political philosophy expressed the idea of articulation in poetic terms that link a mechanical model to the organism. As portrayed in Leviathan, the state comes into being through a social contract drawn up by men who seek protection from ‘the state of nature’—that is, from an order without social rules, laws, or government. Rousseau’s view on this consent is visible in a passage from The Social Contract, from 1762, according to which ‘man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains’. The tie that binds the people is the society that binds them together. It also makes them able to act collectively as rational and moral human beings. Such an idea of humans’ binding chains had already been articulated in Ancient Greece. Indeed, it features in the most famous metaphor in Plato’s Republic, where the Allegory of the Cave depicts a lifelong prisoner finally managing to escape while the others remain in chains near the back of the cave in the belief that the voices outside belong merely to the shadows reflected on the walls inside. In such a setting, the task of an enlightened philosopher is to ‘disarticulate’ the chain of these sensory perceptions and then ‘rearticulate’ the links by applying reason and logical argumentation (see Laclau 1977, 7–13). In other words, the philosopher’s objective is to emancipate people from false impressions, which requires, above all else, critical self-reflection.

Unchaining people from binding ties such as class is one of the overall themes that run through the collected works of Marx and Engels, and it is in this connection that the texts of Marx use the conceptual metaphor of Gliederung for the structure, or order, of social relations. As noted above, this is derived from the German word for a limb, ‘Glied’. The question of the articulation of ‘the whole structure of society’ (i.e., Gliederung) arises if one takes as subjects not the ideas or concepts, as Hegel did, but the ‘real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live’ (Marx and Engels 1845/1970, 42). In keeping with idealism, Hegel considered the state an ideal organism of a different sort from the affairs of family and civil society. Marx found that, in this respect, Hegel’s ‘point of departure is the abstract Idea’ used as a subject, of whose development the state is a result (1843/1977, 12), Marx then set in opposition to this view ‘the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life’ (p. 36)—that is, ‘the material production of life’ (p. 53). Far from symptomatic of some inversion of Hegel’s idealism, the latter is a sign of a completely new problematic, contending with the relations of production and productive forces, with reference to the capitalist mode of production.

In accordance with the premises outlined for Theses on Feuerbach and on the first pages of The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1845/1970), Marx and Engels criticise their neo-Hegelian colleagues. In contrast to the idealism of the Young Hegelians, ‘observation must […] bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production’ (p. 46). This threefold order (economic, political, and ideological) is integral to his concept of the mode of production. That is a key to understanding the concrete ways in which people produce and reproduce the material conditions of their life. On the one hand, their active relation to nature determines the form of ‘the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals’ (p. 42)—i.e., their agency in connection with other people engaged in the material production of life. On the other hand, productive forces consisting of both labour power and the means of labour determine the relations of production, which, in turn, depend on the social division of labour and the distribution of work between labourers and non-labourers (i.e., among capitalists, land-owners, and peasants). Alongside the social relations, Marx turned his attention by means of this lens to legal issues such as the right of possession, private ownership, and the state distributing its members into the relations of production (although that work went unfinished).

For Marx, bourgeois society’s various categories are hence products of complex relations of production and offer understanding about their formation over time:

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure [Gliederung], thereby also allow insights into the structure [Gliederung] and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up.

In this passage from his introduction to Grundrisse (1857/1973, 105), Marx proposes that even though bourgeois society differs from all other social formations, it has risen from the ashes of the social formations preceding it and is built on pre-existing elements. First, that order appears to be evolutionary because of the prevailing and unfolding elements, displayed as parts of the whole. From this standpoint, society resembles an organism that evolves and keeps developing toward its final goal, or telos. In this respect, its parts articulate in an entity that seems a necessary product of growth and historical change. At the same time, however, Marx contests this image of evolutionary social change. Not until ‘the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production’ has arisen can such an understanding of historical social formations coalesce. It becomes possible in these conditions of the capitalist mode of production of bourgeois society because of the categories that ‘express its relations, the comprehension of its structure’. From this historical materialist point of view, the categories of bourgeois society have enabled addressing the past social formations ‘out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up’.

The social formation exists as a combination in the articulated whole, at least as presented in Marx’s first draft of ‘Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy’ of 1857–58 (i.e., Grundrisse). When considering production, Marx regarded bourgeois society as a ‘complex whole’ following on from what came before it. In this historic organisation, an arrangement far more complex than feudal society, the bourgeois categories of political economy expressing the relations—‘capital, wage labour and landed property’ but also others—are bound to ‘their order [Gliederung] within modern bourgeois society’ (Marx 1857/1973, 108). Moreover, this order of modern bourgeois society is fundamentally different from the pre-capitalist forms, and that difference demands a new explanation. Therefore, considerable attention right in the introduction to Grundrisse is devoted to seemingly simple categories such as labour. For classical political economy, these categories had remained abstractions. The critique by Marx, by examining them in relation to a complex whole of social structure, gave them new meaning.

In that introduction, Marx outlines his method for analysing the complex whole of bourgeois society relationally through his critique of the classical political economy of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, ‘production, distribution, exchange and consumption […] all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity’ (p. 99). For Marx, each member of this totality is, therefore, distinct. No member is identical to others, and everyone has its own internal connections and determinations. On the other hand, the unity of totality is overdetermined by production, yet ‘production in general’ (see p. 85) is an abstract and theoretical category understood only in relation to the concrete determinations connected with its other moments. In a self-subsistence economy, for example, individuals produce commodities to meet their needs. In the capitalist mode of production, commodities are distributed after labour power and the means of labour have been allocated in the markets in accordance with the order of bourgeois society, which is based on private ownership. Hence, production is a result of the preceding distribution of productive forces such as labour, which determine ‘the structure [Gliederung] of distribution’ (p. 95) along with the consumption and exchange in market-based economies.

For Hall (1974/2003), these comments in ‘Marx’s notes on method’ depict the structure (Gliederung) as a complex unity wherein the interaction, in his words, ‘takes place between the different moments’ (Marx 1857/1973, 100). With this conceptualisation, the elements of the totality—production, distribution, exchange, and consumption—are now examined ‘as different “moments” of a circuit [of the capitalist mode of production], articulated into “a unity [grasped] in terms of their differences”’ (Hall 1977, 23). Enacted in this manner, the specific relationship—i.e., a unit wherein the members of the totality connect with each other in such a way that they appear the same—is articulation (Hall 1974/2003, 127–128). The articulated whole of social structure forms through forms that are subject to social change.

Marx found merit in the concept of Gliederung for analysing the social structure and organisation of a modern bourgeois society as a complex and articulated social formation. Even though the word is often translated into English as ‘organisation’, ‘structure’, or ‘order’,Footnote 3 in the vocabulary of Hall, this anatomical notion becomes a concept of articulation:

Articulation marks the forms of the relationship through which two processes, which remain distinct—obeying their own conditions of existence—are drawn together to form a ‘complex unity’. This unity is therefore the result of ‘many determinations’, where the conditions of existence of the one does not coincide exactly with that of the other (politics to economic, circulation to production) even if the former is the ‘determinate effect’ of the latter; and that is because the former also have their own internal ‘determinations’. (Hall 1977, 48)

It follows that the image of social structure as an organic whole or a body composed of the limbs of the social system translates into an articulation conceived of as a complex unity of many determinations. Therefore, the relations of production between labourers and non-labourers, for instance, do not dissolve into mere abstractions such as ‘isolated individuals’ living in a ‘state of nature’ detached from the social structure as in the classical political economy. Marx explicitly cast aside this abstracted order, condemning approaches that operate with abstract concepts reduced to their lowest common denominator. Instead, he recommended concrete analysis of the material forces and social relations of production and their determination at a concrete politico-historical conjuncture.

Notwithstanding this laudable goal, many of his adversaries still find Marx’s explanations to be formal ones that make sense only through the abstract economic categories wherein bourgeois society stands for a totality in which the dialectical form and function of theoretical concepts gain power over their empirical content. The abstraction is of a different kind. Simple empiricist assumptions assume correspondence between abstract concepts and concrete reality, and idealism takes perceptions of transcendent Ideas as its subject, yet bourgeois society has no author other than people making their history. Marx stressed, however, that ‘they [people] do not make it [history] as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited’ (Marx 1852/2012, 32), which is a historical-materialist starting point.

Hence, in Grundrisse, Marx (1857/1973, 81) begins his critique of classical political economy with ‘individuals producing in society’, considered via scrutiny of the capitalist mode of production in relation to its determining moments in a complex unity where plain and simple bourgeois categories are rendered as more concrete concepts. Here, he famously states: ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’ (p. 265). This view accentuates social relations seen as a historical process unfolding in the course of time, which comes out in the notion of the articulated whole of society circumscribing the material relations of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. Moreover, Marx found that ‘there are no slaves and no citizens’ (p. 265) beyond the constitutive social relations of production wherein individuals reproduce themselves and the conditions of their existence as subjects. Marx’s aim with Capital was to expose the laws and mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production by tracing their appearance with regard to their historical change and development to scrutinise the social relations of dominance and exploitation relationally.Footnote 4

Althusser and the Structure Articulated in Dominance

In Hegel’s dialectics as characterised by Althusser (1974/1976, 182), society takes a universalistic and idealistic form as an abstract idea:

For Hegel, society, like history, is made up of circles within circles, of spheres within spheres. Dominating his whole conception is the idea of the expressive totality, in which all the elements are total parts, each expressing the internal unity of the totality […] which realize a simple principle—the beauty of individuality for ancient Greece, the legal spirit for Rome, etc.

These poetic words delineate a totality that forms a closed sphere in time and space with an inside and outside, which is bounded by a curved line with no beginning and no end. The idealistic notion of ‘expressive totality’ is formed on the assumption that philosophers can realise all elements of this sphere as ‘total parts’ by reconstructing their meaning around a simple unity. In nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, the structured whole of society stood in for its parts seamlessly enough and furnished them with historical meaning. Regarding this approach, Engels (1886/1976) wrote that their aim behind the manuscript in 1845–46 (i.e., The German Ideology) was ‘to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience’ (p. 5)—that is, with the neo-Hegelians. In other words, they applied critical self-reflection with the intent of dispensing with idealist philosophy characterised as ‘bourgeois’.

Marx detached himself not only from speculative philosophy but also from the classical political-economy work’s empiricism situated in opposition to it. Althusser’s essays in For Marx (1965/1969) and Reading Capital (1965/1970) concentrate on Marx’s theoretical interventions in the Hegelian dialectics of ‘a simple original unity which develops within itself by virtue of its negativity’—which Althusser called a ‘negation of the negation’ wherein the differences eventually become ‘indifferent’ (1965/1969, 197–203). Althusser argued against this totality-oriented idealist view by holding out historical materialism as a model for Marxist science that breaks with all of the preceding ideological (i.e., bourgeois) forms thence denounced as humanist or economist.

The targets of Althusser’s disdain are the speculative, abstract ideas from which ideological scientific forms appropriate their objects of knowledge; that is, he strove to scrutinise their concepts in light of Marx’s theoretical practice (see pp. 185–186). For knowledge of a given subject to flow forth, the objects are translated in this respect into an ‘articulated combination’ (Gliederung) produced in knowledge for epistemological appropriation of the ‘complex structured whole’ of bourgeois society. In light of this, Althusser (1965/1970, 64) cites the following passage from Grundrisse, adding emphasis to the final words:

It is not a matter of the connexion established historically between the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Still less of their order of succession ‘in the Idea’ (Proudhon) (a nebulous conception of historical movement). But of their articulated combination (Gliederung) within modern bourgeois society.

Althusser argued that knowledge of society is to be produced systematically with respect to scientific practice that displaces ideology as ‘the “lived” relation between men and their world’ by employing a dialectical method. He found a practical example of this method in V.I. Lenin’s theses on the Russian Revolution. In 1917, Russia was the weakest link in Europe’s capitalist chain, manifesting massive contradiction between a developed mode of production and a feudal state that allowed the proprietors to exploit the serfs. Lenin and radical elements among his followers (Mao Zedong, among others) became engaged in dialectical materialism in its practical form because of the internal contradictions’ accumulation and their eventual collapse in a revolutionary rupture. Nevertheless, the contradictions adhere to the laws of the unconscious rather than those of the economic, according to Althusser (1965/1969, 94–95).

When adopting notions such as that of overdetermination of contradictions, Althusser presented a ‘symptomatic reading’ of Marx’s texts (a notion addressed in my next chapter) in light of Lacan’s return to Freud’s psychoanalysis. In Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1971), ideological interpellations articulate people as the subjects of a bourgeois ideology. This process takes place insofar as the ideology-anchored apparatuses are able to recruit its subjects by addressing people in the manner of a voice of authority such as a police officer shouting ‘Hey, you there!’ in the street. This perlocutionary act by a representative of the law is an ideological call that hails a subject if one stops and turns round upon recognising oneself as the subject of this enunciation. In a sense, subjects of all ideology are constituted in such a manner by hailing or interpellation of them in the ideological apparatuses (see p. 173). In times of crisis, ideological elements can fuse into a ‘ruptural unity’ by means of condensation that leads to dissolution of the dominant ideological apparatus, which gives way amid the resolution process both personally and collectively. While he dealt with such matters, Althusser did not mobilise his theory for consolidating political ideology in a project to overcome the state apparatus and overturn state capitalist relations. His focus was on identifying and understanding the contradictions in conditions of their complexity.

Althusser (1965/1969, 205) suggested that the ‘principal contradiction’ between the forces and relations of production in the capitalist mode of production articulates with the others, ‘secondary contradictions’. This conjunction forms the conditions of an articulated system wherein political and ideological shifts take place. With this framework, Althusser provided new ways to understand the capitalist mode of production present by criticising the vulgar-materialist communists for reductionism in which the entire structure of society turns into a series of ideological beliefs and dogma. Rather than seeing no contradictions (as is the nature of humanism) or finding the same contradiction everywhere (i.e., engaging in economism), he found the contradictions to be uneven and overdetermined with one another. For instance, Althusser stated that the contradiction between capital and labour becomes secondary through its displacement beneath several other contradictions (pp. 211–212). The contradictions thus determine each other, and the first comes into being only through the secondary ones, which can fuse or condense to create crisis and conflict. Importantly, secondary contradictions underdetermine the primary contradiction. Because the latter does not stand out as the one ‘spectator a head taller than the others in the grandstand at the stadium’ and never manifests itself in a pure form, revolution by the proletariat does not immediately follow from the class struggle (p. 201).

Contradictions gain force through their articulation within their contexts where ‘each contradiction reflects […] the complex whole in which it exists’ (pp. 207–208). In this way, the contradiction-rife elements of the social system relate to one another through overdetermination and underdetermination, which articulate the social formation as a complex whole filled with contradictions and struggle.Footnote 5 It follows that contradictions exist in this complex whole, which has ‘the unity of a structure articulated in dominance’ (p. 202). Althusser also spoke of uneven relations among the economic, political, and ideological instances as overdetermined in relation to this complex whole (p. 207). Hence, the relations within the social formation seem neither mechanical nor expressive. Instead, the economic determines which of the other instances is dominant. Moreover, the economic instance never takes an ultimate place as the ‘last resort’, on account of the political and ideological, which have their own effects and relatively independent conditions of existence, termed by Althusser ‘the structural causality’ as an effect of this articulated whole (the Gliederung) in its parts that are understood in relation to each other.

In the public defence for earning his state doctorate (1974/1976, 177), Althusser specified this point further by elaborating on the structuralist imagery via Marx’s metaphor of the base and superstructure, thereby also defending his earlier theoretical writings:

[T]he determination in the last instance by the economic base can only be grasped within a differentiated, therefore complex and articulated whole (the ‘Gliederung’), in which the determination in the last instance fixes the real difference of the other instances, their relative autonomy and their own mode of reacting on the base itself.

In Althusserian reasoning, the social structure is a ‘complex and articulated whole’ (i.e., Gliederung) that consists of the political and ideological instances built on the economic base. The economic determines the order of other instances within the social formation, which compose its relatively autonomous superstructure. Unlike in the vulgar-materialist interpretations of this relationship, the ideological and political do not reduce to the economic, or vice versa; the economic only assigns their position in the social formation. Consequently, bourgeois society is not an expressive totality that realises some fundamental principles of the capitalist mode of production. It is conceived metaphorically as a complex structure ‘articulated in dominance’ that is made up of the relatively independent instances articulating with one another. This is not an idealistic but a materialist conception of social structure and social change, a conception addressed in the following chapters.

Marxism without Guarantees

From an economist orientation to the social relations between the base and superstructure, everything in the structured whole of the social formation articulates with the economic basis. Hall’s alternative to this ‘necessary correspondence’ is ‘no necessary correspondence’ among the ideology of a class, its politics, and its socioeconomic position (1985, 94–95). In an interview, Hall elucidated his reasons for using the concept of articulation.

An articulation is […] the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? (Grossberg 1986, 53)

Not much later in the interview, Hall elaborated on this point by saying that

it is the articulation, the non-necessary link, between a social force which is making itself, and the ideology or conceptions of the world which makes intelligible the process they are going through, which begins to bring onto the historical stage a new social position and political position, a new set of social and political subjects (p. 55).

Hall’s analyses of Thatcherite ideology provide an illustration (developed ever since his ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, from 1979). They make sense of hegemonic struggles that took place at a specific politico-historical conjuncture. All ideology is realised through practices of discourse that represent the domain of articulations by constraining and excluding other possible views and conceptions that establish ‘regimes of truth’. Consequently, ideology is not a matter of false consciousness and of people being cultural dupes but, rather, a way to think about ‘how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense […] of their historical situation’ (Hall, cited by Grossberg 1986, 53). This serves as a point of departure for ‘Marxism without guarantees’. When using the term ‘ideology’ in this connection, Hall (1986, 29) referenced ‘the mental framework […] which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of […] the way society works’. The imaginary relation to material conditions of existence in which people live out their life is real (per Althusser 1971, with discussion continuing in the next chapter), and it is a source of articulations that retain their own identity while acting together—not as an immediate unit but as connections, or links, which are not necessarily given but do require their own specific terms and conditions of existence.

This notion does not entail inversion of the former position, as in ‘necessary non-correspondence’ grasped in a discursive field of ‘floating signifiers’ wherein nothing ever connects with anything else. Hall retained the economic mode of production as a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition when explaining various forms of social relations as discursive constructions (1980, 43). Rather than, in the manner characteristic of discourse theorists’ approach, dealing with the ideological and political separately from the economic, Hall applied his notion of ‘no necessary correspondence’ among the various instances of social formation with regard to articulations.

Hall made it possible to think about the practices that structure the complex whole of social formation in cultural terms. Furthermore, with reference to articulation, specific linkages give form to various contradictions. His discussion points to the ways in which the specific practices may be related or, just as tellingly, not interface with one another:

Under the influence of Althusser, Hall […] argued that the conception of the social formation as a ‘structured totality made it possible to understand ‘how specific practices (articulated around contradictions which do not arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment), can nevertheless be brought together.’ (Dworkin 1997, 153)

The notion of the social formation being structured as ‘unity-in-difference’ is expressed with respect to the relative autonomy of social practices—that is, because of articulation. On the one hand, Hall argued against an economist reading of ‘base and superstructure’, finding that there is no necessary correspondence between the economic base and political and ideological superstructures (1985, 93–94). From this position, there is no guarantee of, for example, the ideology of the proletariat corresponding with or deviating from the subordinate position of a worker in capitalist relations of production. The social formation is a complex unity articulated out of differences, a unit that does not reduce to the class conflict between capitalists and the proletariat. On the other hand, complexity does not imply endless sliding of the signifier; however, many discourse theorists might tend to emphasise such sliding. With the assertion that ‘nothing truly connects with anything else’, it may seem that Marxists, for instance, associate everything with ‘the economic’, not only as a necessary but also as a sufficient condition for explaining all social conflicts with reference to the class struggle.

For the above-mentioned reasons, Althusser contested causal explanations by means of his structural notion of ‘difference in complex unity’. This was a new way of thinking about determination with reference to Marx. Laclau dedicated special attention to this notion, arguing that ‘ideological elements have no necessary “class belonging”’ and that class interests are contingent articulations showcasing a link ‘that is said to have “no necessary correspondence” to “the economic”’. He elaborated thus:

Let us abandon the reductionist assumption and define classes as the poles of antagonistic production relations which have no necessary form of existence at the ideological and political levels. Let us assert, at the same time, the determination in the last instance of historical processes by the relations of production, that is to say, by classes […]. It is no longer possible to think of the existence of classes, at the ideological and political levels, by way of a process of reduction. […] [Therefore] it is necessary to conclude that classes exist at the ideological and political level in a process of articulation and not of reduction. (Laclau 1977, 159–161; emphasis in original)

Making reference to this passage, Hall (as cited by Grossberg 1986, 53) stated that ‘articulation, as I use it, has been developed by Laclau’.Footnote 6 With Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Laclau put particular emphasis on political and discursive practices such as ‘articulation’ in relation to the study of populism in Latin America.Footnote 7 There, Laclau claimed that political ideologies are not populist in the same sense that they are, for instance, ‘conservatist, liberalist or socialist’; in populism, they act as the articulating principles whereby popular-democratic interpellations articulate dominated classes and portions of the dominant class as ‘the people’ against the power bloc (1977, 176, 173–174). For hegemony to take place, political ideologies require popular-democratic interpellation wherein subjects hail the people in a domain of ideological and political struggle for hegemony. Various political ideologies refer to the people in their pursuit of legitimacy and to appear democratic. This reference makes them not populist but ‘a peculiar form of articulation of the popular-democratic interpellations […] with respect to the dominant ideology’ (Laclau 1977, 172–173).

Laclau conceived of populism mainly in relation to the specific contradictions that arise by dint of the capitalist mode of production articulating its subjects with reference to class and identifying them then as the people against the power bloc. Even though classes are constituted at the level of mutually antagonistic production relations, other subject positions are overdetermined by these relations at the level of the social formation, at which the social formation is a domain of popular-democratic interpellations. For Laclau (see pp. 107–108), articulation of the principles for an ideological discourse takes place on the basis of the class contradiction, yet other contradictions cannot be reduced to such principles. Hence, all political ideologies are transformed through ideological and political struggles for hegemony, wherein their elements are articulated or disarticulated by constituting ‘the people’ with regard to social and political action. It is only when a class subject articulates the ideological elements of this discourse that hegemony emerges.

It follows that nationalism, for example (see p. 160), has no specific class connotation. It is a result of the articulation of a set of social forces, such as liberals, conservatives, or communists. They may or may not be able to articulate ideological elements such as democracy, liberty, and the state effectively in accordance with their own premises that make sense for the subjects at the present historical moment. With all ideological discourse, ideological and political struggles for hegemony take place through the processes of articulation. Accordingly, a class is hegemonic only insofar as it manages to articulate its own worldview or ideology into a dominant ideological discourse since other, antagonistic social relations have faded sufficiently into mere political and ideological disputes. At the same time, the dominated classes—such as the working class and the fragments of dominant classes—attempt to rearticulate these differences to shape them into conflicts by means of populist argumentation.

In short, populism exists in antagonistic relation to a dominant ideological discourse. For Laclau, the ideological discourse has no necessary ‘class belonging’. It occurs not because of reduction of its constituent elements to the antagonistic production relations but by way of contingent links that exhibit ‘no necessary correspondence’ with the economic. Moreover, the ideological elements taken in isolation carry no inherent class connotation, so this connotation results purely from ‘the articulation of those elements in a concrete ideological discourse’ (Laclau 1977, 99). In this respect, several contradictory elements articulate discursively, with not all of them having already become inscribed in ideology ‘as if they were political number-plates worn by social classes on their backs’ (Poulantzas 1968/1975, 202).

Alongside class, ethnicity offers its own cultural scripts in line with which various actors can become involved in battles over their positions in the structure, which are overdetermined by their sociocultural understanding of the prevailing circumstances in which they live. In Hall’s analysis of racism (1980, 33), the controversy raging at the time over what was dubbed the articulation of modes of production (addressed further in the next chapter) created an opening for a theoretical framework covering historically specific social formations wherein ‘race’ became the ‘articulating principle’ of the entire structure of society as in the cautionary example of apartheid in South Africa. For Hall as a cultural theorist, the forms of racism are always historically specific and manifested in domestic contexts. Although racism operates through racial differentiation that is related to class exploitation, this problem cannot be reduced to class struggle or antagonistic production relations alone. Hall’s analysis presents ‘race’ as a dominant articulating principle of the discursive relations between capital and labour. By approaching articulation as ‘unity-in-difference’, he emphasised the relative autonomy of these struggles and their overdetermination in time and space (Hall 1985, 68–69).

A discursive space is thus opened for the struggle for hegemony, where the outcomes of that struggle need not entail any certain result for any concrete battle pertaining to social relations (class or ethnicity, for example). This is precisely the ‘Marxism without guarantees’ referred to above. In this alternative to Marx’s stance on ideology as false consciousness (see Larrain 1991), ideology structures fragmentary and contradictory elements into an ideological discourse that exerts an effect on the masses’ common-sense conceptions. Ideological discourse operates through articulation of the signifying chains to rearticulate and disarticulate their meanings.

According to Hall, ideology weaves (or ‘quilts’) the differences into a complex unity with reference to articulation. If there is sliding of the signifier, there are also differences that can be articulated in one way or another to form meanings. In articulation, elements keep their identity while holding together not as essentially the same but as ‘distinctions within a unity’. Hall gave weight to ideology as ‘the systems of representation’ and to both those systems’ relative autonomy from the economic and their overdetermination in time and space. This framing creates room for social and political actions through which the outcome of social struggles does not fall into place in isolation from any relevant discursive field. It follows likewise that the practice of articulation has its limits regarding historical specificity. In this respect, the idea that there is no necessary correspondence points to the lack of guarantees that things are going to articulate with each other. Articulatory practices are always discursive, yet this does not mean that they are nothing but language.

Conclusion

Marx’s notion of the structure of society as a hierarchical and articulated whole (Gliederung) can be summarised via Hall’s term ‘unity-in-difference’: production, consumption, distribution, and circulation form a complex unity, structured in dominance. Moreover, the conception of ‘determination in the last instance by the economic’ expresses the economic dictating only which of the other instances of the social formation (the political or ideological) is the dominant articulating principle of the moment. This framing created a new problematic for cultural and political analyses, one that drew together the images of social structure and social change with concepts such as ideology and hegemony (see Hall 1988, 53). In Hall’s reading of Marx, the articulated, hierarchised, or systematic combination arranges the complex relations among production, circulation, exchange, and consumption—that is, ‘the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity’, in which production is dominant (Marx 1857/1973, 99). Here, the social structure is not given reductionist leanings whereby the economic gives expression to other instances of the social formation, such as politics and ideology. Very much the opposite occurs.

In relational thinking along Marxist lines, theorising about difference through the concept of articulation does not necessitate endless sliding of the signifier under the signified, as in post-Marxist discourse theory. The relational approach emphasises the absence of any inherent need for correspondence among the various instances of social formation. Discourse theorists, in their turn, took things further, approaching social formations by compassing absolute autonomy and ‘necessary non-correspondence’—i.e., through ‘a conception of difference without a conception of articulation’, in Hall’s words (1985, 53). The concept of articulation as ‘unity-in-difference’ builds instead on the notion of ‘no necessary correspondence’ among the various instances of the social formation. With reference to their relative autonomy and this lack of a need for correspondence (that is, their articulation), the social formation is not a totality expressing the economic in every instance. Neither does it manifest class contradiction all the time, even if the economic and class conflict are both important aspects of it.