Articulation

I’m in the process of writing my dissertation’s introduction, in which I am trying to describe my research methods. I have found this process to be particularly difficult because of the ongoing battle over “data” and “transparency” in American Political Science. On good days, I don’t really think about where I fit in academic circles–I don’t tend to feel really comfortable in cultural studies disciplines either, to be honest. But on bad days, I feel particularly constricted by the methodological requirements of a political science discipline that seems hellbent on disregarding or delegitimizing the work that my interpretivist fellow travelers and I engage in.

I’ve written the following paragraph that highlights the contributions that I see cultural studies offering to the study of politics. This work is inspired by others, most specifically the recent work by my thesis advisor Victoria Hattam on Political Creativity. I am trying to articulate a theory of political change as well as explain the importance of interpretive methods in political science using the notion of “Articulation,” borrowed from Stuart Hall and Laclau and Mouffe. For these thinkers, articulation refers to the process whereby phenomena and meanings acquire a singularity or unity in meaning from disparate components. This accretive process destabilizes our understanding of concepts as coherent in themselves. For my own research, I am interested in the articulation of family values as a conservative project. When did a politics of the family become inherently conservative? How can we imagine an anti-neoliberal politics of the family? I hope to answer these questions by positing a process of “rearticulation” that highlights the dialogic quality of articulation. Themes are articulated, but those articulated themes can be unwoven and re-articulated by opponents to advance their own political goals.

My use of the term articulation in this dissertation refers to meanings beyond speaking well or enunciating, although the iterative implications of these connotations are useful for thinking about rhetoric as well. Articulation as an analytical concept, as well as a political practice , is borrowed from cultural studies of power and identity and theorists such as Stuart Hall, Ernesto LaClau, and Chantal Mouffe. For these theorists, articulation refers to the analytical process of decoding the construction of meanings, themes, and concepts in time. It requires interrogating phenomena in politics and society in order to demonstrate the constructedness of perceived unities and highlighting their multiplicities. Laclau and Mouffe define articulation as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.” (105) As Laclau and Mouffe make clear, articulation as a process of social construction involves combining disparate components in such a way that not only creates new meanings but also alters the meanings of the components as well. The task for the researcher is to revisit moments of articulation to understand how social phenomena acquire relatively stable identities and how the component meanings have altered in the process. For Stuart Hall, articulation allows the researcher to confront antagonisms productively to understand social meanings in new ways; he writes that articulation “has the advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought together.” (Hall 1980 p. 69 emphasis in original) Hall argues that a structural account of society, politics, or culture has the advantage of conceiving of complexity within unity; he describes it as an “ability to think of a unity which is constructed through the differences between, rather than the homology of, practices.” (68 emphasis in original). Understanding articulation unravels the strands of component meanings and allows actors to potentially reconfigure those strands in new ways. In this way the focus on differences contained within and obscured by unity forces the researcher to confront political possibility. Articulation theory’s ability to conceptualize seeming antagonisms or contradictions in order to extract new meanings is useful for this dissertation. My methodology is attentive to changes in meaning over time, identifying what themes and concepts are rewoven–or rearticulated–in the process of making new politics.