Stuart Hall and the theory and practice of articulation

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the idea of articulation links three different dimensions of Stuart Hall's work: it is central to the work of cultural politics, to the work of hegemony and to his practice of embodied pedagogy. I claim that his approach to pedagogy entails the art of listening combined with the practice of theorising in the service of expanding who belongs to the public. This involves the work of translation, finding ways of addressing different audiences. I treat each of these aspects in turn, drawing out the salience of articulation for each and suggest that these three dimensions are themselves articulated by Hall's commitment to the theory and practice of articulation.

Keywords:

• articulation
• cultural politics
• hegemony
• common sense
• pedagogy

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this special issue and to the anonymous reviewer and Leslie Roman for their thoughtful and constructive suggestions on the first draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is hard to write in the aftermath of Stuart's death, not least because of the suspicion that he would never have taken himself this seriously. One specific instance of this difficulty concerns the problem of nomenclature – should he be interpellated as Stuart Hall, Stuart, Hall or SH in the context of academic convention? This question remains unresolved – at least for me.

2. I must confess to finding the ‘articulated lorry’ illustration somewhat frustrating. Articulated lorries articulate as a design feature – the cab and trailer are built with parts that are intended to conjoin. As a result, this may underestimate the work that articulation requires – whether in the ill-fitting alignments of economies and cultures in capitalist social formations or the bending of forms of commonsense into would-be hegemonic projects. If only the parts were pre-designed for self-assembly …

3. The rise of neoliberalism as a critical concept seems to have largely buried the question of the capitalist class as a fractioned, fractious, competitive and conflictual entity that cannot be relied upon to know its own ‘interests’. In contrast, Nicos Poulantzas (1973) argued that the state had to serve as the means by which ‘general interest’ of the capitalist class could be organised, while also providing the means of disorganising the subordinate classes.