Corey Robin asked on FB:
I realize I’m swimming in other people’s seas here, but I need a life preserver, or two, if I’m going to survive my passage through a strait in Stuart Hall’s essay, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.”
About two-thirds of the way into the essay, Hall finally starts explaining his terms, though he does so by invoking metaphors, which is something, I should confess, that always triggers me (see my many complaints about the film The Big Short: if you’re going to explain complicated financial instruments, using metaphors really doesn’t help.)
After writing that articulation “is a metaphor used ‘to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity between different levels of all sorts of things,” Hall says that “the unity formed by this combination or articulation is always, necessarily, a ‘complex structure’: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities.” And then he’s off to Althusser.
So here’s my question, and why I’m raising this point from Hall. In Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism, there is always this move, in dealing with non-capitalist forms, to say that capitalism destroys those forms, capitalism incorporates, and even exacerbates, those forms, capitalism creates those forms. Using the language of Hall, we’d say capitalism is a complex structure in which non-capitalist things are related to capitalist things as much through their differences as through their similarities.
While this all has an abstract plausibility, at the level of theory, it just takes a book like Beckert’s to see how fantastically maddening it is as history. Everything becomes part of capitalism, either by destroying what’s not capitalist, by incorporating what’s not capitalist, by creating what’s not capitalist. Find a non-capitalist entity, and it’ll either serve as a temporary refuge or resistance from capitalism, get overwhelmed and replaced by capitalism, or be incorporated into capitalism and even be exaggerated in its non-capitalistic elements, by capitalism, for capitalism.
What notion of causality is at work here? How can we evaluate whether it’s actually true? Yes, Hall cautions that “the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown—since no ‘necessary correspondence’ or expressive homology can be assumed as given.” But anyone who’s written anything in empirically informed social theory knows that it’s not terribly difficult to draw a picture in which mechanisms connecting dissimilar features are portrayed. That doesn’t make it accurate, or correct, or true.
This is really interesting, and remarkably articulate — so much so that it misses the forest for the trees, imo. The spirit of modern leftism lies precisely in its attraction to ever-more diffuse forms and relations of involvement, the intuition that there are always (more) mechanisms that we don’t understand that shape their context. The central dialectic of leftism has been and remains the struggle to articulate that ‘moreness,’ which is always relational, always N+1. That elusive quality is itself the dream that fuels the left’s ethics, and articulating it through word and deed (hence woolly words like “practices”) is how transgression becomes the norm. And that’s also the downfall of a ‘pure’ leftishness, because the results becomes increasingly incoherent. So, yeah, sure, go ahead and ask what the causal mechanism is, but understand that much of what the left has achieved over the last few centuries has been — again, precisely — to continually transform the meaning and bounds of “causality” itself.