Ideological elements carry no fixed political meaning by themselves

Evidence

The theory of articulation, as I use it, has been developed by Ernesto Laclau, in his book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory . His argument is that the political connotation of ideological elements has no necessary belongingness, and thus, we need to think the contingent, the non-necessary, connection between different practices—between ideology and social forces, and between different elements within ideology, and between different social groups composing a social movement. He uses the notion of articulation to break with the necessitarian and reductionist logic which has dogged the classical Marxist theory of ideology. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 737

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the theory of articulation as contested connotation between ideology and social forces.
• XREF: This is the core concept behind Hall’s notion of ideological struggle and hegemony, likely developed in Cultural Studies work like his writings on Thatcherism and ‘New Times’. — connects to: Possessing a political term does not make one a practitioner of it; No topic is inherently political or apolitical — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 139