Articulation links different social structures through their differences, not their identities.

Evidence

Foster-Carter correctly suggests that articulation is a metaphor used “to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity between different levels of all sorts of things”—though he might have added that these things require to be linked because, though connected, they are not the same. The unity which they form is thus not that of an identity, where one structure perfectly recapitulates or reproduces or even “expresses” another; or where each is reducible to the other; or where each is defined by the same determinations or have exactly the same conditions of existence; or even where each develops according to the effectivity of the same conditions of existence; or even where each develops according to the effectivity of the same contradiction (e.g., the “principal contradiction” so beloved, as the warrant and guarantee of all arguments, by so-called “orthodox” Marxists). The unity formed by this combination or articulation is always, necessarily, a “complex structure”: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities. This requires that the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown—since no “necessary correspondence” or expressive homology can be assumed as given. It also means—since the combination is a structure (an articulated combination) and not a random association—that there will be structured relations between its parts, i.e., relations of dominance and subordination. Hence, in Althusser’s cryptic phrase, a “complex unity, structured in dominance.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 616

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core concept of articulation as a relation of linkage between dissimilar structures, opposing ‘expressive unity’.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and later cultural-studies readings; also to Hall’s own theory of articulation as racialized and gendered relations. — connects to: Conviviality’s transformative force lies in stepping beyond bounded identities, not in inhabiting them. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 27