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🪵 The Threshold

Articulation lets distinct practices with different contradictions be thought together.

Properties1
tagsja-picks, define, xref, definitional_content, trade, corroborated

3 min read

Articulation lets distinct practices with different contradictions be thought together.

Evidence

Structuralism has another strength, in its conception of “the whole.” There is a sense in which, though culturalism constantly insists on the radical particularity of its practices, its mode of conceptualizing the “totality” has something of the complex simplicity of an expressive totality behind it. Its complexity is constituted by the fluidity with which practices move into and out of one another: but this complexity is reducible, conceptually, to the “simplicity” of praxis—human activity, as such—in which the same contradictions constantly appear, homologously reflected in each. Structuralism goes too far in erecting the machine of a “Structure,” with its self-generating propensities (a “Spinozean eternity,” whose function is only the sum of its effects: a truly structuralist deviation), equipped with its distinctive instances. Yet it represents an advance over culturalism in the conception it has of the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure (overdetermination being a more successful way of thinking this complexity than the combinatory invariance of structuralist causality). Moreover, it has the conceptual ability to think of a unity which is constructed through the differences between, rather than the homology of, practices. Here, again, it has won a critical insight about Marx’s method: one thinks of the complex passages of the “1857 Introduction” to the Grundrisse where Marx demonstrates how it is possible to think of the “unity” of a social formation as constructed not out of identity but out of difference. … But the emphasis on unity-in-difference, on complex unity—Marx’s concrete as the “unity of many determinations”—can be worked in another, and ultimately more fruitful, direction: toward the problematic of relative autonomy and “overdetermination,” and the study of articulation . Again, articulation contains the danger of a high formalism. But it also has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices (articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment) can nevertheless be thought together . — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 200

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines ‘articulation’ and ‘overdetermination’ as Hall’s working concepts for thinking the unity of a social formation through difference.
  • XREF: Connects to Marx’s ‘1857 Introduction’ to the Grundrisse, and to the reader’s effort to read Hall as a contribution to economic thought. — connects to: Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions; Articulation rejects reducing one societal level to expression of another.; A conjuncture is a period fused by contradictions into crisis with no fixed outcome (+8 more)
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 200

Broader Connections

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