Introduction: Power of Articulation

Abstract

I begin with a chapter that lays out the main lines of the work by discussing the uses of the concept of articulation and its travels from one realm of academic discussion to another. Previous studies have not considered the concept of articulation for its role as a conceptual metaphor in relation to the discursive turn in the imagery for social structure and social change. However, the concept of articulation holds vast potential for those hoping to make sense of its appropriations and adaptations in connection with relational views of how social structure and social change are portrayed. This chapter also outlines key discussions reflecting upon and applying the idea of articulation via a brief history of the concept that serves as a rough guide for the reader. In addition, it highlights the double meaning of ‘articulation’ and how an anatomical metaphor of articulation has given way to reference to an expressive act or a discursive practice, a reference that attests to fundamental divergence from the spatially oriented portrayal of social structure as an articulated whole.

Background and Objectives

At the core of this work is articulation. This concept, while central to the social sciences, seems largely absent from reference works describing and increasing the value of key concepts (Grundbegriffe) that capture the imagery of social structure and social change. I have found a few exceptions, however. In the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, Thomas Weber (1994) discusses Karl Marx’s idea of society structured as ‘an articulated whole’.¹ The term ‘articulation’ is clearly cognate to the German notion of Gliederung. Marx conceptualised the social structure relationally as an articulated whole, regarding the capitalist relations of production that bind people into a class society that makes them its subjects.

The notion of Gliederung was put forth initially as a conceptual metaphor conveying the idea that social structure is an articulated whole. More than a century later, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory picked up this conceptualisation, developing and criticising it. The latter work applies the word ‘articulation’ for a conceptual metaphor under which the social relations seem structured as a language. This theory’s foundation is the ‘social action is language’ metaphor, which has fundamentally reorganised the imagery for social structure and social change. In Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, articulation is a discursive practice consisting of the construction of the so-called nodal points around which the signifying elements are temporarily organised or fixed as ‘discursive moments’ (1985/2001, 113).

In the post-Marxist approach to relational thinking, the useful conceptual metaphor under which social structure operates akin to language has been condensed to ‘social action is language’. That is a radical moment of reduction if the metaphor is adopted literally (see Hall’s critique, cited by Grossberg 1986). Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985/2001) describes articulation as a practice that fixes the free-floating signifiers temporarily to form meanings. Any incompleteness of this process is alleged to arise from society’s openness, which is a consequence of the fact that the floating of the signifiers has no necessary limits. In this context, articulation is a discursive practice that enables signifying elements to connect to produce new meanings, which are essential to social and political action. It also opens a field of discourse for hegemonic struggles in which identities and meanings are relative, where all formations remain partial and temporary, and where outcomes are not fixed in advance beyond any concrete battle (pertaining to class, gender, ethnicity, and a host of other ‘intersectionalities’). For this reason, several social antagonisms together dictate the discursive limits of social structure through which the signifiers, rather than floating freely, are constrained by a discursive limit restricting their potential meanings.²

Articulation is not a ubiquitous idea woven into the fabric of social and political vocabulary in general. Rather, it is integral predominantly to academic discussions, where it has shifted from presenting the social structure of society as a complex whole to referencing a discursive field of language. On the one hand, dictionary definitions of the word are often anatomically or biologically oriented. This casting is typical in classical sociological images wherein society is portrayed as an organism or as a machine. After all, those conceptual metaphors are derived from the natural and physical sciences. On the other hand, many meanings and values of the word are bound up with speech and other means of communication. This is characteristic of the images presented in terms of language: imagery that portrays society as a discursive field of social action as manifested in language-games or a play of differences is typical in post-structuralist critiques drawing metaphors from the arts and humanities.

The analysis of this shift is anchored in images of social structure and social change, and it is decidedly two-pronged: it attends both to the Marxist line of relational thought connected with the ‘articulation’ concept and to its criticism represented by the discursive turn in the social sciences, also denoted as the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy.³ This analysis proceeds from Marxist reading that metaphorically depicts social structure as an articulated whole consisting of ‘the limbs of the social system’ (Gliederung). From there, it carries forward an interest in the ways in which articulation is a notion applicable for social structure as if it were language, as practical making and breaking of signifying chains by means of language use. It is from this angle—of relational views’ shift from social structures toward a discursive field of social change—that the book addresses the discursive turn whereby the organic, mechanical order of things has yielded to the discursive rules and norms of social action conceptualised as a language in ‘the domain of articulations’.

Quite a gap has emerged in the social sciences between natural-sciences-derived metaphors and concepts drawn from the arts and humanities. My overview of the changes in the imagery of social structure and social change is then designed to shed light on the following questions:

• 1. How have the applications, definitions, and points of reference in using the concept of articulation changed, and in what conditions and when have these shifts happened in practice?

• 2. How are these changes related to the images of social structure and social change that are distinctive of relational thinking?

• 3. What is at stake in the discussions wherein the concept of articulation has been used, discussed, and changed in both theory and practice?

The book thus tackles yet another gap in the methodology of social science. I regard it as ‘travel writing in theory’ in an empirical sense—it follows articulation along the lines of various debates to reveal the concept’s motions back and forth across academic disciplines. In doing so, this is the first book to address the ways the concept of articulation is used and how its use, definitions, and reference points have changed.

The research contribution is twofold. First, tracking the uses and travels of the concept from one discipline to another sheds light on the shifts in relational thinking. A contextually oriented conceptual-historical method proves ideal for probing the imagery of social structure and social change because the images build on the conceptual metaphors that social scientists and cultural analysts derive from one field and adapt to another. Highlighting the changes in the portrayal of social structure and social change affords tracing the shifts that the work discusses with regard to relational thinking.

Second, this outline of the concept’s applications and travels serves as a valuable case in point for those who employ the concept in their studies. Analysing and describing the usage and travels of the concept affords tracing the discursive turn from society to language in depth. These paths have never been studied to such an extent, let alone for a coherent view of the concept’s subsequent applications in structural linguistics, Marxist political philosophy, new economic anthropology, cultural studies, and post-Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular).

A Brief Survey of the Concept

To lay the groundwork before scrutinising relational thinking in terms of articulation, I must briefly outline its semantic history.⁴ Akin to words such as ‘arm’ and ‘art’, ‘articulation’ is a Latin-based term whose usage in French and many other Romance languages is similar to that in English. The first dictionary of the French language already had two entries for it (Richelet and Widerhold 1680, 44). One is for an anatomical word for a joint of two bones, and the second denotes a distinct pronunciation.⁵ In the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from the 1990s onward, the two meanings commonly linked to ‘articulation’—the anatomical or biological sense and that related to speech or expression—still prevail, yet the word has many additional definitions attached to it.⁶

Many other languages feature a similarity in the overall double meaning of ‘articulation’; however, the German use of ‘Gliederung’ for a structure or organisation seems to have been quite distinct from that set until the 1980s, when it became translated more specifically from English as ‘Artikulation’ (see Weber 1994, 613). In the most encountered dictionary entries for the noun, earlier definitions for ‘articulation’ refer first to a joint or connection that attaches body parts to a skeleton in a manner allowing their movement. Regarding this, articulation is a form or a way in which things join. In addition, it is a point of juncture at which elements are connected, or an abstract state of this interrelation. In the specialist field of phonetics, articulation is the production of speech; in the pronunciation of consonants, air moves freely through the ‘vocal tract’ until it is obstructed by the vocal organs that produce the sound. The latter still counts among the anatomical meanings of the word. In everyday speech-related language, however, the word is employed in adjectival form—an articulate speaker is someone who can ‘put things into words’ in a clear and expressive manner. This sense of the word is linked also to artistic skills: the word ‘art’, which is derived from the Latin ‘ars’ (‘artis’ in the genitive), meaning ‘a skill in joining or fitting’.⁷

According to these definitions, articulation is a joint, connection, or link and an act of fixing and coupling to put things in relation by giving expression to them. An articulation consists of different elements that connect through a specific type of linkage. It is a unit formed of distinctive parts. Again, if the elements are not articulated, they are separate and do not exist in the same field. ‘Articulation’ has a double meaning by its very definition, as a structure or linkage and as an act of rendering eloquent verbal expression. In structural linguistics, the word denotes a practice that makes it possible to enunciate utterances from a limited set of sounds with potentially unlimited meanings. In political rhetoric, articulation is a practice that allows distinct interests to connect into a group for political objectives. Hence, it seems clear that articulation refers to many distinct ‘things’: what might appear to be a single, monolithic word has various connotations and meanings, which vary with context. Unsurprisingly, then, the concept of articulation is composed of a constellation of various elements around a set of diverse ideas and practices.

Clearly, the concept has several meanings, uses, and values attached to it in academic discussions. The double meaning was evident already in Course in General Linguistics, from 1916, for which Ferdinand de Saussure defined language by means of a Latin word for a joint, ‘articulus’. This anatomical, biological term was applied in relation to spoken language. After that, Saussure gave it a semiotic meaning as ‘a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas’ (p. 10) by way of the German expression ‘gegliederte Sprache’, which one can gloss as ‘articulated speech’ and was translated for Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967/1997, 66) as ‘articulated language’ by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Employing the second definition in connection with language, Saussure opined that ‘what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language’ (1916/1959, 10). In the relevant passage, he claims that while articulated speech is characteristic of humans, the ability to create a language that consists of distinct signs in relation to distinct ideas is what distinguishes human culture from nature (i.e., nothing is signified as such in nature). For Saussure, language is not only speech but ‘a self-contained whole and a principle of classification’ (p. 9), where language is taken to be a system of differences distinct from what exists in nature. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1781/1966, also cited by Derrida 1967/1997), articulated speech was ‘the first social institution’—one must learn it before one can speak and can interact with others by means of using words.

The notion of ‘power of articulation’ comes from Derrida, who wrote that ‘Saussure, in contradiction to his phonologist thesis, recognised, we recall, that the power of articulation alone—and not spoken language—was “natural to man”’ (1967/1997, 228–229). For example, a plant develops from a seed in accordance with the laws of nature, situated as it is in an evolutionary process in producing life. For Saussure, a plant ‘does not stand for something; it is not the bearer of meaning’ in the manner of a sign—a sign has a differential function in articulated language, which is a synchronic system (per Culler 1976, 82). Hence, a sign of a plant stands for something in a symbolic order such as language, which, in turn, is a system of differences that gets used in a ‘domain of articulations’, where a distinct sign articulates a distinctive idea. In this context, ‘power of articulation’ is not a phonic substance. Instead, it is grasped relationally in like-a-language terms. Here, it means a capacity to speak and act—that is, to serve in forming, organising, and expressing thoughts and feelings with other people, and the ability to make and break the connections by articulated language.

With regard to the method of analysis, Saussure’s predecessors studied the historical evolution of linguistic forms, such as words that have an arbitrary relationship to their meaning, in a diachronic manner. In French epistemology, or the study of knowledge, concepts were set in relation to the synchronic order. Epistemologists also considered themselves to offer a critique of the history of ideas. In ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1967/1977), authorial intention is criticised as an unfaithful guide to textual analysis, misplaced from where the reader is situated. From this perspective, literary texts are produced under certain conditions that are not entirely congruent with the conditions that their authors have in mind. Meanings, rather than being products of conscious authorial deliberation, are hidden and get uttered discursively (see Macherey 1966/2006). Likewise, ‘What Is an Author?’ (Foucault 1969/1979) expresses suspicion of authorial intentions as a means of closure to the discursive space of texts’ potential meanings.

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966/1970) expands these reflections: episteme forms at the junction of many fields—among them linguistics, biology, and economics—where a specific discursive formation determines the scope and limits of knowledge. For Foucault, episteme is productive and ‘a condition of possibility’ for all knowledge. It is along these lines that Foucault’s dissertation (Folie et déraison, published in English as Madness and Civilization) depicts madness as not a mere social or discursive construction; it operates within a specific formation of knowledge with its inception in a Modern Enlightenment-era France.

Epistemology offered a starting point for many interdisciplinary research programmes that would leave a mark on the thinking of Foucault and other influential philosophers:

To work on a concept is to vary its extension and comprehension, to generalise it through the incorporation of exceptional traits, to export it beyond its region of origin, to take it as a model or inversely, to search for a model for it.⁸

While his ‘What Is an Author?’ does not address works of individual authors, Foucault did consider the discursive formations structured in a certain time and place. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969/1972) employs the notion of archive in relation to language instead of episteme in reference to knowledge. Foucault spoke of ‘discursive formations’ as a replacement for ‘scientific discipline’ in the sociology of knowledge (Sawyer 2002, 437). According to him, Marx and Sigmund Freud deserved credit as ‘founders of discursivity’ who set in place rules from which later work could proceed and established a horizon of possibility for other texts (Foucault 1969/1979). Hence, their works remain open for discussion. In this space, their followers, not to mention their adversaries, have manifested an ‘intention’ to get the last word in their theory and, thereby, crush opposing arguments, which makes their project ideological.

Without contested concepts and disagreement as to concepts’ usage, there is no new knowledge or discourse on science. Any epistemology is formed on a set of ever-shifting concepts, methods, and ideas, which exist as both a culturally shared background for its dedicated supporters and something that their opponents call into question. In a similar manner, philosophers take account of the philosophical thought stretching into their past as they strive to explicate and criticise the systems of thought prevailing in their time, as Marx did from his critique of idealism through to the critique of classical political economics. Here, one could cite Antonio Gramsci’s approach to the history of modern political thought as a challenge to the false assumption that intellectual life is simply ‘superstructural’:

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory. (Gramsci 1971/1999, 628)

To study ideas that have affected one’s own thinking, one must engage in self-reflection.⁹ Applying the term ‘a common sense’ (senso comune) for the popular ways of seeing things and of acting in line with these views that are not articulated into coherent, systematic conceptions of the world, Gramsci has charged philosophers with no more and no less than ‘the criticism of all previous philosophy’ (p. 628), insofar as what came before has come to be incorporated into their collective contemporary thinking. From this standpoint, philosophy is a material force that demands study of the historical processes that, rather than vanishing into thin air, have left material traces in all of us, in some cases even ‘collective trauma’, which can lead to ‘theoretical amnesia’ (see Žižek 1989/2008, xxiv).¹⁰

A Rough Guide for the Reader

Per Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1991/1994), the task of a philosopher is to create concepts. Concepts are stacked in the main building blocks to academic discussion that surrounds theories such as those organising our notions of social realities. As Edward Said (1983, 157) aptly stated, ‘the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity’. In this sense, theories are more than logical propositions or empirically grounded ideas, on account of concepts crossing boundaries between academic fields in the search for new ideas and practices. According to Said, there comes a point in a concept’s travels where it is articulated for the first time. After crossing this ‘threshold of articulation’—that is, once the idea has been put into words and entered academic discussion—it can travel in time and space to traverse various disciplines. Then, when its users contest it in academic debate, it can become a concept able to influence its theoretical and practical contexts. Finally, the concept is adapted to academic practice, and its users may transform it such that its background from the original discipline disappears.

The timeline depicted in Diagram 1.1 outlines the discussions that have applied, examined, and changed the lens of articulation as a conceptual metaphor. Studying the concept’s motions from one theory-anchored discussion to another helps reveal what continues happening to it as its contexts shift and how these moves bring forth changes in both theory and practice.¹¹ While the timeline refers to the output of individual authors, our focus here is not on them but on the concept and how it has gained interdisciplinary traction from the academic dialogue that followed.

Diagram 1.1

Usage and travels of the concept of articulation

The analysis begins with the theoretical and intellectual contexts encountered along the concept’s travels in time and space and in its traversing of various disciplines, from Marxist political philosophy to economic anthropology and cultural studies through structural linguistics and its critique. The concept of articulation has diffused around the world and spread in empirical studies by political and cultural analysts. This leads us to a question about the ways in which concepts travel back and forth between fields and how scholars adopt and appropriate them in their academic practices. Interdisciplinary scholarship based on the travels of concepts is a promising tool introduced, for instance, in a book by cultural analyst and artist Mieke Bal. For her, the humanities and the social sciences are founded on concepts rather than methods (Bal 2002, 5).

The concept at issue has seen its greatest development at a specific politico-historical conjuncture: a ‘return to Marx’, which came a hundred years after the first publication of Capital (1867/1909), with the new social movements and countercultural revolution of the 1960s. While such key contributions as The German Ideology and Grundrisse were not fully available in English before the 1960s–70s, Marx used the notion of Gliederung as a vital underpinning for presenting the structure of bourgeois society already in the nineteenth century. This term is derived from the German word for a limb, ‘Glied’. The English-language edition of Grundrisse, produced in 1973 from the 1939–41 German version of Marx’s 1857–58 work, translates it as organisation, structure, or order, not as articulation or an articulated whole.

It was Louis Althusser who transposed the latter concept to Marxist vocabulary and changed its range of reference by giving the term a new use. Althusser applied it for the organisation of the various instances of the social formation as ‘the articulation of the limbs of the social system’ (1965/1970, 98) with regard to the structuralist paradigm. In For Marx (Althusser 1965/1969) and Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1965/1970), he discusses such fundaments of Marxist vocabulary as ‘mode of production’ and ‘the relations of production’ alongside the contradictions, dislocations, and transitions in relation to the ‘social structure is an articulated whole’ conceptual metaphor. For Althusser, social structure emerges as a complex of numerous determinations and contradictions alongside the economic instance. In his view, the economic determines only which of the other instances, such as ideological or political instance, is dominant at any given time. In this context, articulation is ‘the site of a significant theoretical rupture (coupure) and intervention’ (Hall 1980, 37).

In the debates following this description, articulation became a core concept in the field of new economic anthropology. What became known as the modes-of-production controversy drew lines between those who emphasised the idea of a single capitalist system and those who rejected this sociological theory for neglecting ideological and political struggles and their complex articulations in pre-capitalist social formations (e.g., Berman 1984; Foster-Carter 1978; Raatgever 1985; Wolpe 1980). According to the ‘articulation school’ within new economic anthropology, social formations in the developing world (various parts of Africa, for instance) consist of the articulation of pre-capitalist modes of production under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. In new economic anthropology, exemplified by the work of Maurice Godelier, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray, and Pierre-Philippe Rey, the concept of articulation encapsulates the relationships among the capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production with respect to various contradictions and ongoing social struggles. Behind their expression ‘articulation of modes of production’ lay the conclusion that some subordinate mode(s) of production such as domestic self-subsistence economies can co-exist with capitalism over long spans of time.

For example, Rey’s presentation of ‘the stages of the articulation of modes of production’ in ‘Class Alliances’ (1973/1982) specifies division into three eras. The first involves interaction between modes of production within a given social formation; then, one mode becomes subordinated such that transition to another mode can take place; and, finally, the subordinate mode is defeated. In Rey’s work, each of these stages of articulation has a corresponding set of class alliances. His central point is that the transition from one mode of production to another is not set in advance. It is a result of class struggle that extends beyond the economic to the social formations manifested in the ideological and political instances, struggle that exerts influence on social change.

The concept of articulation diffused into the vocabulary of cultural theorists and only later to that of discourse theorists, who accentuated social relations produced via language. In cultural studies, this concept afforded a framework for analysis covering historically specific social forms such as ethnicity and gender issues, which became dominant principles alongside class struggle in articulating social orders. For example, Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation stresses the relative autonomy of ideological and political struggles (Hall 1985, 92). This view accentuates that there is no guarantee of their outcome outside any concrete battle related to gender, ethnicity, class, or other issues. In fact, it became apparent later that, in principle, anything can articulate with anything else; this gives the concept of articulation a potentially limitless range of reference (see Grossberg 1992). For connections to be made in practice, however, some links have to be broken for new ones to be created.

In the cultural theory of Lawrence Grossberg (2010, 52), cultural studies does not have a method ‘unless one thinks of articulation—the reconstruction of relations and contexts—as a method’. As theory and method both (see Slack 1996), ‘articulation’ entails contextualising the research subject to obtain a better understanding of contexts. The articulation in this process involves a commitment to contingency and anti-reductionist thinking, in addition to considering the problem of hegemony in such a manner that the structures of domination and subordination become evident in terms of consent achieved in ideological and political struggles. ‘Articulation’ can offer strategic means for intellectuals to intervene in social and political contexts, thereby enabling class, ethnicity, and gender issues and the social formations overdetermined by those relations to be contested and changed.

The last step on the journey thus far has been made by the Essex school of discourse theory and political analysis. Laclau, in particular, argued that ‘ideological elements have no necessary “class-belonging”’ and that class interests are articulations that furnish the popular democratic struggles in the ideological and political instance with meaning (1977, 159–161). Later, Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001) argued that one prerequisite for a ‘radical democratic’ hegemonic struggle is the expansion of a political space filled with signifiers that ‘float’ and have not yet fully formed the differences. Where the differences remain only partly fixed, a discursive space opens for hegemonic struggle over elements that are not essential but mutually overdetermined by means of political articulation.

As the concept of articulation has diffused and spread through empirical work by cultural theorists and political analysts all over the world, its uses have grown vague. Moreover, their ambiguity has reciprocally affected the change in use: because ‘articulation’ is sometimes used as a buzzword, its application as a catch-all phrase may escape notice, obscuring the fact that the idea behind it, and what it represents, is losing clarity. In the view of some scholars (e.g., Davis 2008), it is concepts’ very ambiguity, in the sense of vagueness and open-endedness, that makes them popular. One example is the concept of intersectionality, which publications in gender studies often employ in place of articulation. Only on rare occasions do the two appear near each other (e.g., Verloo 2006).

Work on intersectionality focuses mainly on structural inequality that is directly related to human experiences and political action with respect to social change. To advance sexual, racial, and gender equality, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced this lens in the late 1980s. From the standpoint of intersectionality, white middle-class women’s pursuit of sexual equality had turned into a struggle against men for equal rights, and black men had found that racial equality had become a struggle against police violence. In that climate, work on intersectionality challenged the politics of the feminist and general civil rights movements, which were blind to aspects of privileged identities, identities that did not consider such experiences as domestic violence perpetrated against non-white women, who were excluded from both struggles. Challenging the notion of political action as an instrumental endeavour that requires given universal subjects such as women or workingclass people at the outset, the technique of working on intersectionality became a method wherein ethnicity, class, and gender articulated with one another by all being woven into the same discussion of subordination of black/working-class/female/homosexual people under the prevailing norms of whites/the middle class/heterosexuals/men. One problem in articulating these identities with the experiences of class-, gender-, and ethnicity-based oppression, however, is that it coheres around deconstructing the categories instead of assessing the implications of the actual policies that lead to inequalities in practice.

Empirical studies have shown that the above-mentioned intersectional differences are much more complex and meaningful than some theories have suggested (e.g., studies by Farris and de Jong 2014; Verloo 2006). In, for example, policy documents on EU anti-discrimination laws, gender is a naturalised binary category based on sex, while sexual orientation has a broader spectrum (e.g., LGBT). Race is also a discursively constructed notion like ethnicity is, while class is a dichotomous social divide that cannot be deconstructed via discursive means. Moreover, these social categorisations in policy documents are products of political articulation performed by social movements and political struggle (De Leon et al. 2009, 199; Verloo 2006, 219). Class as a social category results from the struggles by workers’ movements that have brought it to the heart of the political party system, while race and ethnicity are only just reaching the political agenda, as fruit of social and discursive categorisations. In contrast, some institutionalised distinctions based on sexual orientation have been rescinded via recognition of same sex marriage. For discussion of gender as a socially constructed category, we can point to Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble is among the most cited pieces of feminist literature, one that has informed feminism in both theory and practice.¹² Although approaching ethnicity as a class-based and gendered category, or the question of sex as a racialised and heteronormative issue, is a fitting political strategy for hegemonic struggle, it can lead to a position from which differences become uniform (i.e., all of them are signs of the same oppression).

The Structure of the Book

To begin unfolding the imagery of social structure and social change, the next chapter begins by turning conceptual-historical methodology, especially to the idea of the pen as a ‘mighty sword’, expressed in relation to Quentin Skinner’s analysis of politics. It outlines a method for grasping the ‘point’ or ‘intention’ behind the concept’s function in discussions that examine and apply it in a manner that allows analysing the usage change in the context of a struggle. However, closure of the contexts and determining the historical meaning of texts constitutes an attempt to wind up the ongoing battles and suture their potential outcomes. While powerful, this approach has its limits. It can capture only the praxis or rhetorical aspect of concepts’ use, not the poetics wherein conceptual metaphors become comprehensible. For this reason, my study depends on analytical framing from elsewhere. I have drawn a framework from the ‘root metaphors of sociological thought’, thereby taking a perspective from which all knowledge is metaphorical. This is because the conceptual metaphors transfer abstract ideas and thoughts from one system of meanings or discourse to another in attempts to render them more concrete. Accordingly, metaphors are applied as a method for seeing things from the standpoint of something else, which is also a condition for new ideas and concepts materialising in practice.

The third chapter addresses the conceptual metaphor wherein social structure is an articulated whole. The discussion proceeds from Marx’s notion of Gliederung, under which the structure of modern bourgeois society is a complex whole encompassing interaction among varied forces—with the turning points of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption—that arrange the relations of production in a more complex way than before. Marx studied the capitalist mode of production in relation to this complex whole, and Althusser found this social formation to be a complex and articulated whole composed of political and ideological instances built on the economic base. The latter theorist perceived the economic instance as determining the order of the social formation but only in the last instance. In the structural-Marxist thought that follows, society is not a totality that expresses the economic but a structure made up of several relatively independent elements, such as the ideological, political, and economic, that articulate with each other in a manner such that they together form ‘unity-in-difference’.

The fourth chapter delves into the works of Althusser, whose ideology-theoretical reading of Marx gained traction on account of his teachings and writings. Althusser’s ideas persuaded various members of economic anthropology’s articulation school. French new economic anthropology criticised dependency theorists and world-system theorists for their notion of capitalism as a singular system, which became subject to controversy with respect to ‘articulation of modes of production’, before the discourse theorists arrived on the scene. The catch-all term ‘discourse’ soon entered the vocabulary of critical social scientists in a manner that disavowed class struggle. Ideology was reduced to a nearly inconsequential factor, and it became predominantly a pejorative term in the social sciences and humanities.

With the fifth chapter, I turn to the conceptual metaphor wherein social action is language and consider associated reviews regarding discourse theory, which build on a play of differences. The linguistic paradigm and its adaptation in structural linguistics spread in the form of a phonological model adopted in social anthropology and psychoanalysis. A new structuralist movement arose accordingly. It helped direct anthropological awareness toward the metaphorical aspects of systems of meanings such as marriage rules and kinship arrangements. The idea of a law-like structure that underlies all systems of relations and governs all forms of social exchange became paradigmatic for social scientists. One of the most famous passages in this context is psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s description of a ‘return to Freud’ and his claim that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. Simultaneously, with that model gaining sway, philosophers criticised Saussure’s distinction between language and speech, an idea that had already been established for half a century at that point. Instead of structures resembling language, ‘post-structuralists’ were interested in discourse theory, wherein the relations between conscious statements and unconscious enunciation are dispersed across a discursive field. This manner of thinking gave birth to the concept of political articulation, in which articulation is a discursive practice in hegemonic struggles.

The argument culminates in the discussion, which sums up but also elaborates upon the imagery applied for social structure and social change as analysed in earlier chapters. On the one hand, relational thinking in terms of articulation is a sign of breaking with a style of ‘top-down reductionism’ in which society is taken to be a uniform whole expressing hidden structural causes and economic mechanisms. On the other hand, in line with the conceptual metaphors employed, the concept of articulation can contribute to ‘reduction upward’ when society is seen as operating as language does. For someone who takes this imagery literally, in such a manner that it loses its metaphorical character, society reduces to discussion about society. Therefore, an image in which society operates analogously to language boils down to the iconic conception ‘society is language’—viz., when society is seen as nothing but discursive, the conception of social structures is lost, while a discursive space is expanded for social change that is not guaranteed outside any concrete battle.