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 When reading or listening to the many comments and commentaries on Stuart Hall's life and work that followed his death in February 2014, I was moved by how many paid tribute to his personal charm, his generosity in thinking and talking with others, as well as his engaging and persuasive way of speaking.1 In this brief article, I will make speculative connections between these apparently personal characteristics and his orientations to theory, politics and pedagogy.2 In this, I do not mean to suggest that the descriptions of his grace, generosity, or compelling style of thinking and speaking are trivial, incidental, or even wrong-headed. On the contrary, they consistently convey qualities that seem all too rare in the worlds of the academy and politics. The article asks what underlies this outpouring of tributes and their recurrent themes and offers an alternative reading of these 'personal qualities' and engaging style, explaining them as central to his embodied praxis of articulation. This paper will demonstrate how the concept of articulation works in three different and yet inter-related ways to organise his political, pedagogic and intellectual projects-as the work of cultural politics, the work of securing hegemony, and the attentive listening necessary to the work of embodied pedagogy. Turning to articulationThis paper will argue that Hall's engaging ways were more than merely personal, yet nor were they the result of the sort of careful calculation expressed in the contemporary academic obsessions with public engagement or the maximization of 'impact'. Rather, they were the manifestations of a uniquely historically aware and forward-looking reflection about intellectual, political, and pedagogic work within *

Stuart Hall as a criminological theorist-activist

“…Importantly, this speaks to the contingent nature of articulations in the ideological and cultural spheres-they require work to construct and to maintain; they are not given for all time, they are not 'guaranteed' to have effects and, in particular, they can be dis-and re-articulated (Clarke, 2015). 4 In his public interventions Hall is concerned with a radical focus on contextualization/ re-contextualization, combined with dis-and re-articulation.…”

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

“…One practical way forward, I suggest, lies in returning to Hall’s () critical‐empirical idea of articulation theory , named for its dual significances of articulation as expression or utterance, and as connection or linkage (see Clarke, ; cf. also Laclau & Mouffe, ).…”

Untitled

“…Thus, belonging to a social class does not necessarily lead to a discourse based on corresponding interests. Hall describes two moments of articulation: 1) the formation of a dominant block between different interests, and 2) the articulation of the discourse with sub-alternate classes through concessions allowing them to identify with the dominant block (Clarke, 2015). Along these lines, Laclau relates hegemony and articulation in proposing that a class will be hegemonic if it manages to articulate in its own discourse non contradictory elements of the other classes, eliminating the transformative potential of antagonistic positions (Slack, 1996).…”