Meaning and social relations form not sequentially but through structural articulation within a whole

Evidence

Saussure, the “founder” of this school, who argued that language is not a reflection of the world but produces meaning through the articulation of linguistic systems upon real relations, insists that meaning is no mere “correlation between signifier and signified, but perhaps more essentially an act of simultaneously cutting out two amorphous masses, two ‘floating kingdoms’ … language is the domain of articulations” (Barthes 1967). … In the same way, there seems to be a clear warning issued against any simple notion of an evolutionary sequence or succession of stages in that development: “Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society.” This last point indicates what we would want to call (in addition to those already signaled) the third premise of Marx’s method: the structural premise. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 619

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the structural premise of Marx’s method and the Saussurean provenance of ‘articulation’.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s aim of reading Hall as economic thought — grounding articulation theory in Marx’s Grundrisse 1857 Introduction. — connects to: Structure and agency interpenetrate through every discursive exchange. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 117
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: exactly how does Althusser develop Saussure’s linguistic articulation into a theory of the social formation?