Keywords

The Discursive Turn to Political Articulation

Just as metaphors serve poets in an art form that meshes unconnected words, thereby associating meanings with them by creating unexpected new links via expression, social scientists and cultural analysts use conceptual metaphors to translate abstract notions such as the social structure and social change into more concrete concepts. Articulation is especially noteworthy, in this context, for its double meaning applied for ‘a structure or linkage’ and ‘articulate verbal expression’. Recall that the Latin idea of articulus was an anatomical or biological notion used in referring to the bones and the joints, or a state of connection, and the nodes or nodal points of a plant. It has also been applied to combining elements, parts, or subdivisions, especially in speech, that appeared in ‘the domain of articulations’ (see Saussure 1916/1959, 112). In structural linguistics, ‘articulation’ developed from an anatomical term employed to link linguistic parts of language as ‘a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed’ (again see Saussure, p. 113) with their effective organisation to ‘a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas’ (p. 10).

We know from the concept’s history as probed in previous chapters that ‘articulation’ is cognate to the German term for social structure by means of which society once was grasped as a hierarchical articulated whole of the social system’s limbs. Within this conceptual metaphor, the setting of Gliederung, articulation is like a linkage between individual members of the body, with the German term being translated into English as ‘articulation’ correspondingly. Marx adopted the notion of Gliederung from Hegel but employed it to counter the reification of social relations in the form of abstract ideas (Weber 1994, 614). In contrast to the hypostasis of totality, Marx considered social structure as an articulated and hierarchically structured complex whole. Recall that, instead of philosophical idealism, the starting point for Marx’s critique in The German Ideology was the ‘real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live’. In Marx’s historical-materialist philosophy, ‘the ideality of moments’ turned into the members, the elements of the unity, an articulated whole of society.

By presenting Marx as the founder of a new science, focused on the capitalist mode of production, Althusser stressed the picture Marx’s theory painted of a complex process of contradictions and determinations besides the economic with reference to an articulated whole of particular social formations. Because it factors in the stratified nature of social reality, a conceptual metaphor of articulation that renders social structure as an articulated whole can afford depicting society as a complex, hierarchical, and articulated order rather than a self-subsistent whole akin to nature. The new economic anthropologists later refined the conceptual metaphor via evidence from developing countries. They found social formations that consist of articulations of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production, articulations wherein the capitalist mode dominates but does not necessarily destroy pre-capitalist forms such as the domestic mode of production. Hence, the modes-of-production controversy has manifested itself both in theory (typically with reference to Marx’s Capital, as in the first issues of Economy and Society; see Wolpe 1980) and empirically in connection with such anthropological fieldwork.

Althusser retained Marx’s Gliederung and elaborated on the ‘articulated whole’ conceptual metaphor for social structure. Althusser, as a member of the French Communist Party, insisted on a break from Marxist humanism. This was analogous to Marx’s eschewing of the idealism and bourgeois philosophy found in ‘German ideology’. Althusser made his case with a critical stance to Gramsci, who as a former leader of the Italian Communist Party had already taken issue with economism wherein the political and ideological instances of society merely express the fundamental class contradictions built on the economic base. Gramsci himself reconsidered the metaphor of the base and superstructure as presented in Marx’s preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process generally’, p. 160). In place of mechanical or structural causation, in which the economic determines the superstructure, Gramsci introduced the notion of hegemony in his Marxist philosophy of praxis to reclaim social change.

In the struggle for hegemony, social structure cannot stand still as an articulated whole—the connections and breaks have to be articulated in practice. The central question, then, is about the order in which to articulate ‘the limbs of the social system’. Laclau adopted the concept of articulation for his discourse theory on the basis of the ‘social action is language’ metaphor. He assumed that, in themselves, ‘ideological ‘elements […] have no necessary class connotation, and that this connotation is only the result of the articulation of those elements in a concrete ideological discourse’ (1977, 99). A rebuttal by Hall, however, points out that a specific articulation of certain ideological discourses has been held through long expanses of history. Crucially, articulations occur at a specific politico-historical conjuncture. Hall’s ideas are made clear in his analysis of Thatcherism, addressing the ideological discourse of authoritarian populism composed in ‘a contradictory juncture between the logics of the market and possessive individualism, on the one hand, and the logics of an organic conservatism, on the other hand’ (Hall 1988, 53). This led to the criticism in which Hall reasoned that ‘necessary non-correspondence’ of discursive practices, being ‘a radical dispersal of the notion of power’ to ‘everywhere’, turns into a form of reduction upward, a form evident in post-structuralist streams of relational thinking.

As characterised by Hall here, post-structuralists applied a notion of ‘difference’ without having a concept of ‘articulation’ as unity-in-difference. For that reason, post-structuralist discourse theory built only on a play of differences with regard to language used in the discursive field. The notion of articulation found in post-structuralist theories is not the same as différance, a difference that cannot be heard, only seen. In post-structuralism, the subject’s identity is not fixed and the meaning is always deferred. This view can lead to the idea of a decentred subject and the endless play of differences.

At the same time, however, the post-structuralist critique of Marxism does demand consideration. According to cultural analysts, investments in a discursive field such as those of popular culture are not only ideological but also affective; hence, they matter in different ways to different people, in line with certain ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977). For Grossberg, cultural analysis of articulations entails mapping out these interrelated vectors that point in many directions and considering numerous real-world connections (1992, 61). According to him (1986b, 72–73), anti-reductionism of the sort found in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is horizontal and multidimensional; it builds on process ontology that is not vertically aligned but flat. Critics of Althusserian structural Marxism concluded that ideology theory takes a narrow approach, homing in on mere ideological effects, while post-structuralism-inspired cultural analysts and discourse theorists take account of real-world experiences, thanks to notions such as affect and affectivity that extend beyond the collective consciousness, representation, signification, and ‘the ideological’.

Relational thinking regards ‘articulation’ as neither a substantial concept for self-subsistent wholes acting under their own rules and norms nor one to do with social interaction wherein social structure is immune to effects of individuals’ action. Rather, it proved integral to ideology theory-related controversies whereby the space for discussion of social relations came to admit hegemonic struggle. In this newly opened space, the working class was no longer a privileged and universalistic subject. This, in turn, freed a discursive space for political articulations seemingly negating the Marxist premises that the economic and class determine the political objectives or hegemonic task of a certain group of people.

Nevertheless, post-Marxist discourse theorists replaced the complex notion of society with the idea of antagonisms—that is, with negativity at the core of the social structure. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, an exclusively discursive position that negates the concept of ideology can lead to reductionism wherein society reduces to mere discussion about social phenomena. While conflating individual actors with the social structure implies a self-sufficient whole without any actors apart from classes, post-Marxist discourse theory appears to conflate structures with the struggle for hegemony.

Marxist Critique of Economism

As displayed in everyday understanding, individualism is a typical form of reductionism that social scientists criticise. For example, unemployment is both an individual-level and a structural problem, yet for individualists, it reduces to merely attributes of individuals and, therefore, is deemed an individual’s own fault. By the same token, strong opposition to individualistic explanations may lead to reductionism of its own, wherein unemployment becomes merely a product of the capitalist system. The social sciences apply ‘reductionism’ in a pejorative sense. For instance, historical materialism is accused of reducing the social consciousness of individuals to the historical and material circumstances in which people live. From this angle, Marxists betray a strong tendency to cast social relations in a manner aligned with economic determinism and class reductionism. For their adversaries, then, Marxists’ ways of portraying social relations pay no heed to actors other than the classes.

Marx’s review of classical political economy starts with a critique of individualism but is not as limited as such criticisms suggest. To counter claims made by both liberalists and anarchists, his ‘Critique of Political Economy’ presents an argument that society ‘does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’ (1857/1973, 265). Thus, Marx declared the starting point to be the relationships that cast individuals in mutually unequal social relations. Individual people positioned in this manner are not ‘masters’ or ‘slaves’ outside ‘the complex social relations that constitute them’ as subjects, he states on the same page. In other words, there is no escape from these binding ties, yet they remain subject to social change, which transforms the subjects. According to Marx’s 1857 introduction to Grundrisse, in the so-called bourgeois society, with the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and the proletarians having nothing to sell but their labour, the elements that articulate social structure are arranged in a more complex way than they were before (p. 105). When reflecting on the capitalist mode of production, Marx produced profound thoughts about the social relationships that bind people in society and change them—thoughts perhaps more radical than any of his contemporaries’.

Marx posited that although bourgeois society differs from all other social formations in history, it has risen from the ashes of previous social forms through the elements that already existed. In other words, it has a history, and that history has fundamentally changed the elements from which the capitalist relations of production are formed. This means that the most abstract theoretical categories, such as capital, wage labour, and landed property, are bound up with ‘their order within modern bourgeois society’ (p. 105). Note that it is not to be confused with civil society. For Marx, in bourgeois society, simple categories such as labour grow more complex in relation to the past, and the present is a vantage point that allows the best view of their change. In other words, the complex relations of production aid in understanding the past relations that are their elementary forms. Marx’s interest in precapitalist social formations was limited to proof that the capitalist mode of production has a history in the form of primitive accumulation of capital, which involves separation of the worker from the means of production. Marx found the forms of appropriation to be linked to the relations of production specific to each era and characteristic of it.

It was in this respect that Marx metaphorically identified the social structure of ‘bourgeois society’ as an articulated whole. Through the notion of Gliederung, he portrayed social change as an outgrowth of the social struggle between formations, such as classes. A genuinely reductionist understanding would have the economic represent the only determining structure of bourgeois society, articulating around a single line of class conflict. Instead, a capitalist social formation is like an edifice whose upper floors (i.e., politics and ideology) rest on its foundation for an economic base. The problem with the latter, more nuanced view, lies in taking the base-and-superstructure metaphor as a theoretical model wherein bourgeois society becomes a totality that expresses a hidden structure or the economic base in every instance of the social formation. While opponents of Marxism deem it guilty of precisely such economism, reductionism is also characteristic of the opposite position in ideologism.

In Soviet-style Marxism, Marxist-Leninists accused the Second International’s socialist democrats of economism (see Bottomore et al. 1991, 168–169). For Lenin (1917/1970), social change was a result of political action aimed at revolution, not of economic class struggle as it was for socialist ‘revisionists’. Gramsci, from his position within the leadership of Italy’s communist party, expanded on the criticism, stating in Prison Notebooks that economism is typical of laissez-faire liberalism and revolutionary syndicalism, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Marxist philosophy of praxis (1971/1999, 369–384). A distinction between the state and civil society, wherein economy is a part of civil society that the state should not regulate, forms the basis for the free-trade ideology. This fundamental distinction between the economic and political defines economism. In an ideological strategy such as ‘austerity’, neoliberal ‘economists’ depict the economic as a non-political instance outside politics; thereby, democratic values such as ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ can be dismissed since they do not belong to the political decision-making of the economic realm. Ideologically, this is a deliberate attempt to transform the welfare state and politics. Revolutionary syndicalism, in turn, is grounded in the economic interests of sets of people with a specific occupation who are subordinate to the ruling class and its hegemony. In the struggle for hegemony, however, ‘trade unionism’ never extends beyond strictly limited economic interests, in what Gramsci called another form of economism (pp. 369–373), which was typical for the social democrat workers’ movement, according to Lenin.

Importantly, Althusser’s anti-humanistic theory was a political response to the Marxist humanism embraced by the French communist movement. For him, social change results from ideological and political struggle, whereas both Marxist humanists and communists rejected such a premise. While economism attends to the economic in a manner that neglects ideological and political struggles, Marxist humanists did not find the contradiction between capital and labour to be the main cause of social change. Althusser (1974/1976, 86) paired humanism with economism as the opposite sides of bourgeois ideology. He had already targeted humanist members of the French Communist Party by saying that ‘the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes’ (1965/1969, 229), and he would persist vociferously regarding Marxism as distinct from such conceptions of the world. Gramsci, whom Althusser painted as having reduced Marxist philosophy to history, was seen as guilty of a theoretical collapse of the former into the latter. Philosopher André Tosel has even referred to this critique as ‘the last great theoretical debate of Marxism’ (per Thomas 2009, 8).

It is worth reviewing the theoretical battle briefly. The structural-Marxist conception of social structure as an articulated whole is organised in terms of contradiction and overdetermination. A social formation is composed of a relatively independent superstructure overdetermined by the economic ‘in the last instance’, where the relations are conceived of via the metaphor of ideological and political superstructure upon economic base. The critique of it coalesced in the Gramscian method called the philosophy of praxis, which was applied in relation to hegemonic struggles, especially in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist discourse theory. At the pole opposite of structural-Marxist critique of economism is ideologism, where an open discursive field of society grows indistinguishable from the struggle for hegemony. Table 6.1 presents a summary of both below.

Table 6.1 The discursive turn toward political articulation
Full size table

An important contribution of Laclau and Mouffe’s book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the Lacanian argument that, in a process of articulation, the quilting point or anchoring point stitches up the sliding of the signifier. In the book, they depict signifiers as floating freely in an endless flow of discursivity until they become partially fixed with meaning. In their discourse theory, a signifier obtains a meaning when it articulates into a chain of signifiers temporarily. The nodal point, where the discourse partially fixes the meaning, forms because of a political articulation that changes the identity of its elements. Notwithstanding that, the identity of elements is never complete. This points to a surplus that is open for change. In summary, articulation here is a discursive practice that ‘consists in the construction of nodal points’ around which the signifying elements come to be temporarily organised or fixed for a moment (1985/2001, 113). An alternative to this social order is a discourse without any fixed meanings.Footnote 1

Laclau and a group of his students in the Essex school of discourse theory and political analysis continued discussing the concept of articulation and applying it in their deconstruction of Marxism. According to Laclau and Mouffe, no society is a fully articulated and self-contained whole. These post-Marxists’ substitute for the positivist notions of society as antagonisms. That is, the negativity begets the social, and the symbolic differences disperse across the discursive field. Their brand of discourse theory maintains that one condition for hegemony is the expansion of a discursive space awash with floating signifiers. The expansion affords a hegemonic struggle over those elements that determine the others. Signifiers of such kinds gain different meanings in different contexts, and they articulate the signifying chains through nodal points structuring the discursive field. To become one of these points (i.e., a master-signifier), a signifier is emptied of its meaning and transforms into a signifier such as ‘society’ that does not have any meanings except in its function as a signifier.

In the articulated system of differences portrayed in structural linguistics, no space remains for ideological and political struggles or for articulatory practices that could change discursive orders. Instead, articulations take place because of dislocations or surplus to fix the meanings of the floating signifiers in a discursive field. From the political point of view, the chains of equivalence articulate around different subject positions to produce group identities out of differences (e.g., the working class vs. capitalists). The next step is an attempt to dissolve antagonisms and social divisions that resist symbolisation or categorisation. In a democratic nation-state, there is a relatively open discursive space for political and ideological struggle over hegemony. This renders a change possible. In the preface to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001, x) note that they emphasise the moments of political articulations, on which hegemony is contingent. In other words, hegemony hinges on a contingency, which is a form opposite necessity. With such declarations, the authors committed to the conception that there is ‘necessarily no correspondence’ among, for instance, the capitalist state, the property-owning classes, and bourgeois ideology, which articulate only in practice (e.g., people vs. power bloc, in a struggle for hegemony).Footnote 2

According to Hall’s ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation’ interview (Grossberg 1986a), the reduction of bourgeois society as structured totality to its economic cause is downward reductionism that relies on assuming that the economic is independent of all other instances of the social formation (such as the political and ideological). In this context, ‘articulation’ is a sign of rejecting an economism-oriented approach wherein bourgeois society is a totality expressing the economic in every instance of the capitalist social formation. In a less economistic view of bourgeois society, the economic determines which of the instances of social formation is dominant at a given time. For cultural analysts, the idea of no necessary correspondence between particular instances of the capitalist social formation points to the relations, or articulations, which do not have any guarantee, even in the ‘last instance’.

A struggle against economism can—but need not—take a form opposite ‘reductionism upward’. This had such an impact that, for Hall (cited by Grossberg 1986a, 56), the conceptual metaphor ‘society operates like a language’ constitutes the ‘theoretical revolution of our time’.Footnote 3 On the one hand, there is great power in viewing social change through a conception in which the various instances of the social formation function discursively. On the other hand, an image in which society operates in the manner of a language can be too easily distilled to the notion that ‘society is language’. Therefore, a useful conceptual metaphor for society’s manner of operating can oversimplify it thus far that society ends up a mere discussion of it. This departure from the notion of base and superstructure manifested itself in discourse theory as an inversion of economism with reference to ‘necessary non-correspondence’, and it spread from there as post-Marxist discourse theorists completed the reversal of structural Marxism by deconstructing it in terms of discourse theory.

Post-Marxist Discourse Theory and its Critique

In Marxist-Leninist ideology, the proletariat’s task was to put an end to class-linked antagonism by destroying its opponent, the bourgeoisie. With the collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat, history proved that society never reaches a totality that puts an end to the political and to all antagonism. It should not come as a surprise, then, that more recent post-Marxist relational thinkers (Laclau and Mouffe 1985/2001) have conceptualised articulation as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified’ (p. 105) rather than seeing society as some articulated whole that gives meaning to all parties involved.

In post-Marxism, the result of the articulatory practices is discourse. The discursive construction of the social formation from among distinctive elements means that the political constitutes the social structure. Only at the level of the political, Laclau reasoned, can differences articulate to the chains of equivalence in opposition to ‘the other’ in an antagonistic relationship. The aim of radical-democratic politics is to extend the social structure in an open discursive field of action and deconstruct the emancipatory project in a manner consistent with new social movements that have shifted their focus from politics and ideology to identify issues.Footnote 4

No form of political ideology can fully articulate the social structure. Nevertheless, a particular hegemonic bloc can actualise hegemony at the political level and, thereby, articulate the social order temporarily. In political struggles for hegemony, articulations are populist or popular, and they are attempts to articulate the differences between the people and the ruling bloc. This is part of their very nature and a vital concern in hegemonic struggles. Hall’s use of the concept (per Grossberg 1986b, 62), which differs from Laclau and Mouffe’s, refers to signifying practices that are cultural and ideological, not necessarily political and discursive. In Hall’s theory of ideology, articulation is an ideological practice when engaged in fixing the chains of equivalence such that people perceive them as inevitable, not social or discursive constructions of signifying practices floating in the symbolic realm.

In Hall’s reading of Althusser, ideologies form systems of representation, comprising concepts, ideas, and myths that materialise in practice. Hall insisted that people are subject to ideology throughout life (1985, 106–107). In stark contrast to Marx’s notion of ideology as false consciousness, it empowers people ‘to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation’ (Hall, cited by Grossberg 1986a, 53). This approach differs from some Althusserian formulations based on the metaphor of the base and superstructure, formulations wherein there is a ‘necessary correspondence’ between individual instances of the social formation. It also differs from post-structuralist discourse theory’s inversion of the structural-Marxist view. Hall criticised this inversion, or mirror image, for its horizontal relations between various practices that do not relate with each other outside a discursive field based on ‘necessary non-correspondence’. For Hall, in contrast, articulation offered a non-reductionist tool for thinking about these relations in a new way with reference to ‘no necessary correspondence’ (Hall 1985, 94).

Hall found it crucial that no correspondence is necessary between individual instances of a social formation in reference to articulation. When articulations do not have any a priori guarantee, one can take a non-reductionist, relational approach to society. Addressing economy, politics, and ideology as discursive practices brought a breath of fresh air into cultural analysis. At the same time, however, the overall picture of class-based society fragmented into social and political struggles that are structured in network-like discursive fields of action. Therefore, it bears reiterating Hall’s warning in that this replacement for ‘necessarily no correspondence’ between different instances permits economy and society to function ‘as if’ they were a language on their own, although they retain a structure that operates as any system of differences does. Hall wielded the concept of articulation to accentuate the crucial difference between the simile ‘x operates like y’ and its reduction to ‘x = y’ (see Grossberg 1986a, 57).

Hence, the concept of articulation has become an academic catchword in cultural studies but also a reminder to avoid reduction in both theory and practice (Slack 1996, 118). Hall did much more with articulation because it was one of the key concepts in his cultural theory (e.g., Angus 1992; Clarke 2015). His early writings link it with the idea of an articulated whole of social structure and then with political articulation as a site of ideological and political struggles. For the ‘social action is language’ metaphor, he saw articulation as a discursive practice of connecting ‘distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness”’ (Hall, per Grossberg 1986a, 53). It was in that context that Hall contested the Marxist tendency to think about actors as classes by asking ‘how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it’ (p. 53). His use of the concept of ideology sets him apart from discourse theorists, for whom a ‘discursive formation’ regulates dispersion of diverse contradictory elements (e.g., Foucault 1969/1972). Although the lens of discursive formations allows thinking about the relations of power and knowledge, it helps little with the questions of resistance and ideological dominance, which Hall cited in the Grossberg interview as his most important theoretical and political concerns.

The theoretical framework for Hall’s thinking did not come from post-Marxist discourse theory. Instead, its foundation is the metaphor ‘social structure is an articulated whole’. The concept of articulation encompassed here provided him with a way to theorise on the complex social formation consisting of different practices that stands for ‘society’. Hall supplemented his interpretation by engaging in dialogue with post-structuralists, for whom society consists of a lack of totality or an absent whole in an open discursive field of action without any rules/restrictions other than language as a play of differences. He concluded that the problem of the fully discursive position is that ‘there is nothing to practice but its discursive aspect’ (Hall, cited by Grossberg 1986a, 56). Hence, anything is articulable with anything else in the realm of floating differences. Articulating signifying elements into a discursive moment in such a manner as changes their identity is only the first moment of articulation. The second moment stems from the ways in which ‘discursive moments’ ‘do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects’ (p. 53). Some articulations can break easily, and they are subject to disarticulation. Others are stronger, as in the case of organised religions. They offer their subjects a worldview but also an opportunity to shape their religion and identity. Therefore, religions are immensely persistent in the face of social change. Still, no articulation lasts forever. None is permanent. That is, articulations are history-bound and constituted and maintained in practice.

The Jamaican-born Hall cited the illuminating example of Rastafarians rearticulating certain signifying elements from the Bible to mesh with their experiences via means of expression such as reggae music that spoke to people in their own terms. Rastafarianism is a religious ideology that allowed many detached people in the western Caribbean to make sense of their subordinate position as subjects living in exile from ‘the Promised Land’. Articulations that at first appeared completely arbitrary to the world at large were, in this context, expressive of the black diaspora. As ideological and political subjects situated, people obtained a voice, which turned into a social force and articulated many persons as subjects to a Rastafari movement. While most of them were in poverty and racially discriminated against, these circumstances do not reduce to any specific class position or cultural experience as such; however, significant categorisations such as class and race were. The articulations occurred at a specific politico-historical juncture, where they had their own ‘conditions of existence’ (Hall 1985, 113–114). Hall’s cultural analysis of politico-historical conjunctures draws, in this context, from Gramsci’s and Althusser’s works, which were fundamental for the Birmingham school of cultural studies, which built on conjunctural analyses and descriptions of the articulations between a social formation’s instances.

A particular conjuncture results from contradictions and overdetermination; this negates the idea of necessary correspondence. The notion of a conjuncture (per translator Ben Brewster, as cited by Althusser 1969, 250) has a double meaning: it refers to joining or being a joint (that is, an articulation) and to an economic juncture or crisis (see Grossberg 2006; Koivisto and Lahtinen 2012). In this context, theory-informed Marxist political practice—the purpose behind which was to analyse the capitalist mode of production for the benefit of socialist revolution—turned out to be an apt tool for assessing and intervening in hegemonic struggles instead.Footnote 5 In Hall’s own politico-historical conjuncture, a post-war hegemonic relationship between Labour and the Conservatives ruptured and spilt over into conflict between workers and employers in the mid-1970s. In Britain, Thatcherism challenged the consensus as a consequence of economic crisis, racial conflict, and syndicalist confrontation occurring in a backward and heavy industrial structure at the unstitching of the British Empire. It contested consent-based hegemony that had been built on rapid economic growth governed by the welfare state, which now had come under attack. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher started to dismantle the welfare state through cutbacks in the public sector, applying free-market ideology. She articulated her political project via ‘authoritarian populism’ that followed conservative moral codes and rules of behaviour from the Victorian era. According to Hall (1988), this articulated into a social force in terms of an ideology replete with anxiety. In that ideological expression of authoritarian populism, deliberately apolitical ways of speaking found subjects for the ideology by exhorting citizens to recognise that the state had spiralled out of control.

Thatcherism addressed upwardly aspiring middle-class people who sought a ‘proper’ identity in a time of historic change and social conflicts, when the old social fabric seemed to be tearing into tatters. Hegemony means not rule but consent out of various competing and conflicting interests articulated to a ruling bloc. Once this point is reached, fragmented and heterogeneous ideological elements can articulate to the ‘common-sense’ conception of the social world, with which many people can identify. Thatcher even stated that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’. In other words, there are only the actions of atomic men, women, and families forming the nucleus for community life, from which others are excluded as surplus people (or ‘Lumpenproletariat’). After the Conservatives, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ took a similar course, based on the ‘Third Way’ of Giddens, according to which no conflicting gender, class, and race interests remain anymore and there is only globalisation before which all people are equal (Hall 1998, 9). In this context, political actors were not only citizens or consumers but subject to law-like economic forces that seemed as unavoidable as what is found in economism, leaving less space for the political and ideological struggles for hegemony, which also formed a foundation for anti-globalisation movements.

In his use of the word ‘articulation’, Hall referred to connections or links that, rather than being necessary, require specific conditions of existence, which means that they have their own determinations. This leads to the dissolution of some articulations and the constitution of new ones in their own politico-historical conjunctures (Hall 1985, 113). For example, ‘racial’ and ethnic categories can be dominant ways of quilting ideological chains in social formations. In this process, the word ‘black’ might signify surplus meaning in a chain of equivalence that articulates both with the articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production and with racial discrimination in every instance within the social formation. Consequently, those categories can be articulated with the exploitation of, for example, black and female migrant workers operating in the service sector.

Nevertheless, racism is also an ideological discourse. It exists not just at the level of material practices. This is a social or discursive construction out of conflicting ideological elements forming an ideological discourse that influences the common sense of the people. What something is, in other words, receives its meaning in relation to others. Chains of equivalence between distinct ideological elements that differ in nature are products of articulation. In this relational view of both agency and structure, the subjects are subject to the structures yet are also able to act and fight for the structures’ change. In the language supplied by the conceptual metaphor of articulation, the elementary forms of the social structure do not articulate by themselves, and actors have to twist and bend the ‘members of the social body’ into a certain position in a struggle for hegemony such that they can exert a power of articulation.

Conclusion

In a fully articulated whole of social relations, action is epiphenomenal in relation to the structure of society, which is constitutive of actors. To avoid pulling everything downward, social scientists must acknowledge that the ideological and political do not reduce to the economic, as Gramsci and Althusser both pointed out in their readings of Marx. After all, in economism, the class conflict between capital and labour determines society in a way that leaves no discursive space for other types of contradictions, along lines such as race/ethnicity and sex/gender. Political articulation structures individuals as the subjects of ideological discourses in a manner contingent on the social relations and on forces of production that bind people together and change the ways in which they conceive of self and others. At the same time, the process is aleatory. Far from fixed, it is open to changes.

The concept of articulation contributes constraints and affordances to thinking about these relations and their formation in connection with social structures and language. For example, considering modes of production from this angle reveals that the economic modes of production can articulate as a language does without the reader falling into the reductionism of a fully discursive position (i.e., collapsing society to mere discussion of society). In other words, in the ‘articulation of modes of production’, the economic refers to a relatively independent structure articulating with other instances of the social formation in such a way that the notion of society does not evaporate. It also considers spatial connections and discursive links between differences and acts of giving expression. Therefore, it compasses the relations of both structure and action in a non-reductionist manner, and it can facilitate historical materialist analysis of social change in times of uncertainty.