Foucault’s endless positionalities need an articulation-into-formation moment

Evidence

I have made a critique of Foucault, which is really that I like very much the antiessentialist, the discursive way of thinking, and the historical specificity which is in Foucault. I made the critique that Foucault talks about a kind of endless proliferation of positionalities and antagonisms and never speaks about the moment when these are articulated together into a formation. Now I don’t mean by that [that] we should just go back to the old totality. Articulations are not given, they don’t last forever, and there is nothing necessary about their correspondences. But that is a very different thing from saying that nothing can ever be connected with anything. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 993

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines ‘articulation’ as contingent, non-necessary connection into a formation—core vocabulary distinguishing Hall’s cultural-studies method from Foucauldian discursive proliferation.
• XREF: Hall’s articulation concept is exactly what the Islamophobia field needs: analyzing how disparate racial/religious antagonisms get sutured into a working bloc.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that every instance is a condition for the others, with no master contradiction and no given totality, is genuinely dense—the theoretical core of Hall’s entire scaffold.

Related

• Foucault’s radical skepticism makes social formation and state unthinkable (similarity 0.82)
• Hall admired Foucault despite criticizing his underspecified account of resistance. (similarity 0.80)