Alparslan Nas
Adaptation note: This essay is adapted from Episode 30 of the author’s Turkish-language CultPost podcast. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, personal reflections, and critical perspective.
Is popular culture simply an instrument in the hands of dominant classes, or can audiences use it to produce alternative meanings? Does a television series, song, or advertisement merely reproduce capitalism, or can it also give expression to resistance? Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation offers a way out of this rigid opposition. It allows us to understand popular culture as a field in which dominant and oppositional meanings can be connected, contested, commercialized, and reconfigured.
This is not a question that rewards instant answers. In the Communication Theories course I teach at Marmara University, students sometimes attribute the difficulty of theoretical concepts to the fact that the course is conducted in English. I gently remind them that the intellectual challenge would not disappear if the same material were presented in Turkish. Concepts such as articulation require time, reflection, and repeated engagement.
That requirement runs against a powerful tendency within contemporary consumer culture: the desire to consume knowledge as quickly as we consume commodities. We enter a classroom—or open an essay—hoping to acquire an idea, declare that we understand it, and put it away like an item purchased from a shop. Critical theory cannot be approached in this manner. It asks us to slow down, question familiar categories, and remain with contradictions rather than resolving them prematurely.
From Marxist Cultural Critique to Cultural Studies
My own engagement with articulation goes back to my graduate education in cultural studies. I have always felt close to the intellectual tradition associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. The Centre was radically interdisciplinary, bringing together sociology, literary criticism, anthropology, history, media studies, and political theory.
Its most important contribution was to complicate Marxist approaches to culture. Earlier Marxist criticism had provided essential tools for understanding how culture could reproduce class power, ideology, and capitalist relations. Hall and his colleagues did not abandon this tradition. They carried it into the cultural sphere while challenging forms of economic reductionism that treated culture as a simple reflection of the economy. Their work developed in dialogue with the cultural materialism associated especially with Raymond Williams: culture was material and embedded in social relations, but it was also an active terrain of struggle.
Hall’s account of articulation took shape across his work in the late 1970s and 1980s, although its foundations are already visible in his 1973 paper “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Other central texts include “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” and his 1986 interview with Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation.”
To understand what Hall changed, however, we first need to consider the model of popular culture he inherited.
Popular Culture as Ideological Control
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical accounts tended to interpret popular culture—mainstream cinema, television, advertising, popular music, entertainment, and consumer practices—as a mechanism that shaped and standardized the masses. In a classical Marxist formulation, the dominant class, or bourgeoisie, used culture to reproduce its worldview and render working people politically passive.
The thinkers commonly placed within this broad tradition did not all offer the same theory. Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed the “culture industry”; Gramsci developed an account of hegemony; and Althusser examined ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Their differences matter. What they shared was an insistence that culture participates in the reproduction of power rather than existing as an innocent realm of entertainment.
This form of critique remains valuable. It helps us identify the political work performed by apparently ordinary cultural objects. In an earlier analysis of Money Heist (La Casa de Papel), for example, I considered how the series uses the conventions of global entertainment to present themes of resistance, revolution, and rebellion through a Marxist allegory. Such readings make ideology visible.
Yet if popular culture is understood only as a tool through which rulers manipulate passive audiences, the analysis becomes too closed. It leaves little room for interpretation, contradiction, or change. A Turkish example makes both the power and the limits of this position especially clear.
Arabesk and the Classical Marxist Reading
Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey experienced extensive migration from rural areas to cities. Arabesk music emerged within the cultural transformations accompanying this migration and became increasingly visible during the 1970s and 1980s. It gave expression to the experiences of working people, rural migrants, and residents of gecekondu neighborhoods—informal settlements built around rapidly expanding cities.
Arabesk was heard on commuter minibuses carrying workers to factories and other jobs. Its lyrics and emotional language addressed suffering, exclusion, poverty, frustrated desire, and the difficulties of adapting to urban life. From one perspective, it was an authentic popular form shaped by the words, emotions, and everyday experiences of people marginalized by official culture.
A classical Marxist interpretation, however, might treat arabesk as a form of manipulation. Imagine a worker returning home after a long day in a factory. On the minibus, an arabesk song gives expression to the worker’s pain and despair. It offers recognition and temporary emotional relief, yet it may not encourage an examination of the conditions producing that suffering. Instead, pain is naturalized as fate.
The listener buys the album—or perhaps a pirated cassette—and effectively pays for a cultural representation of their own alienation. The music provides comfort while inequality, insecurity, and exploitation continue unchanged. From this perspective, arabesk helps the system reproduce itself by making an intolerable condition emotionally bearable.
This reading is illuminating, but it cannot exhaust the meaning of arabesk. The same song may allow listeners to name an experience that official discourse ignores, produce solidarity among people who recognize themselves in it, or become attached to memories and identities that exceed the intentions of the music industry. The ideological effect of a cultural form cannot be established solely by analyzing how it was produced. We must also ask how it is received and what people do with it.
Advertising and the Imperative to Consume
Advertising, the field on which much of my own recent research has focused, offers an especially clear example of ideological power. Advertisements repeatedly tell us that we are first and foremost consumers. Whatever we hope to achieve must be obtained through consumption. Do you want to be happy? Consume. Do you want to be beautiful? Consume. Do you want to be recognized as a good mother or father? Consume—and demonstrate your care through what you buy.
Human experience becomes organized around commodities. This has been true throughout the development of modern consumer culture, but digital platforms and social media have intensified it during the past several decades. Shopping malls have become leisure environments in which people spend time even when they purchase nothing. Consumption becomes not merely an economic activity but a way of imagining the good life.
Capitalism can consequently distance us from values such as creativity, labor, sharing, and responsibility toward nature. Yet even here culture does not operate exclusively from the top down. Within commercial forms, people can still discover opportunities for resistance, reinterpretation, and alternative meaning. Recognizing this possibility does not cancel the critique of capitalism. It makes the cultural process more complex.
Audiences, Language, and the Instability of Meaning
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, cultural studies transformed the analysis of popular culture in two important ways. The first involved the audience. Researchers increasingly recognized that meanings encoded into films, advertisements, television programs, and songs were not always received exactly as producers intended.
Hall’s encoding/decoding model gave this insight a systematic form. Producers may encode a preferred meaning, but audiences can adopt a dominant reading, negotiate with it, or construct an oppositional interpretation. Reception research therefore asks how actual people understand cultural texts through their own histories, social positions, and everyday experiences. Ethnography and cultural anthropology become important because textual analysis alone cannot tell us how meaning operates in lived practice.
Audience activity does not mean that interpretation is completely free or that every possible meaning is equally available. Media institutions possess unequal power, dominant codes shape what appears reasonable, and people interpret culture with different resources. The crucial point is that the intended or preferred meaning can never be guaranteed.
The second transformation came from debates about language and signification. Thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida, in very different ways, challenged the idea that meaning could be fixed once and for all. A text does not arrive before its audience with a permanently completed significance. Meaning is reproduced in interpretation, transformed through context, and continually opened to further connections.
These developments complicated deterministic forms of Marxism. Certain readings of Althusser, for example, could produce a kind of cultural pessimism in which advertising, television, film, and popular music appeared to interpellate subjects so completely that transformation became almost impossible. Academics and intellectuals then seemed to occupy a privileged position above the manipulated masses, responsible for awakening everyone else.
That position risked recreating the old hierarchy between “high” and “low” culture: intellectual culture at the top, popular culture at the bottom. It also weakened Marxism’s own commitment to social transformation. Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach insists that interpreting the world is insufficient if interpretation is not connected to changing it. Paradoxically, reception theory and poststructuralist accounts of meaning helped reopen a political space that overly deterministic criticism had closed.
What Hall Means by Articulation
Hall’s concept of articulation provides the bridge between structural power and cultural openness. In ordinary English, “articulation” carries two related senses: giving expression to something and joining separate elements together. These senses overlap in Hall’s work, but the second is especially important here: articulation describes a connection that can form a provisional unity under particular conditions.
The important word is provisional. An articulation is not a natural, necessary, or eternal relationship. Two elements can become connected without losing their distinctiveness, and the connection can later be broken. Meanings, identities, interests, and political positions are joined within specific historical circumstances; they can subsequently be disarticulated and connected differently.
Popular culture is therefore neither a unified expression of ruling-class ideology nor an inherently resistant voice of “the people.” It is a network of contingent connections in which dominant, negotiated, and oppositional meanings coexist. These meanings are not randomly assembled: institutions, markets, class relations, and political power shape the conditions under which particular connections become persuasive. But no dominant articulation is secured forever.
This is where Gramsci’s influence becomes especially important. Hegemony is never simply imposed once and completed. It must be organized, renewed, and defended by connecting different interests and values into a form of common sense. Counter-hegemonic politics must likewise create new connections capable of making alternative meanings socially intelligible.
Gramsci’s famous observation—that all people possess intellectual capacities, although not everyone performs the social function of an intellectual—also challenges the image of passive mass audiences. Every individual has some capacity to interpret and transform popular culture and to leave traces within it. Hall’s approach takes that capacity seriously without romanticizing it or pretending that everyone possesses equal cultural power.
Contradiction in Global Popular Culture
Money Heist illustrates how articulation operates. Most viewers will not finish the series and announce that they have discovered Marx. Nevertheless, its opposition to powerful institutions, unjust accumulation, and systems that reproduce poverty can connect with grievances already present in everyday life. A small minority controls disproportionate wealth, while middle- and working-class people struggle to survive. The series gives spectacular form to a widely recognizable sense of injustice.
At the same time, this oppositional narrative is commercialized through Netflix, a global entertainment corporation. Money Heist is neither a pure expression of dominant ideology nor a revolutionary text standing outside capitalism. Dominant and oppositional elements are joined within the same cultural commodity. That contingent connection is an articulation.
Squid Game operates through a similar contradiction. It presents a powerful critique of class inequality by placing people devastated by debt and economic insecurity inside a deadly competition. Capitalist harm is represented through a game that transforms human suffering into spectacle. Yet the series also aestheticizes violence and converts the injuries produced by capitalism into a highly profitable global product.
Music supplies further examples. Bob Marley and reggae communicate Rastafarian culture and critiques of social injustice while also circulating as global commodities. Rap works through standardized industrial formats but repeatedly creates space for marginalized experiences and critical speech. Commercial circulation does not automatically erase these meanings, just as political content does not place a cultural form outside the market.
The influence of feminism on popular culture and advertising is equally revealing. For many years, representations of Black people in the United States were severely restricted, while women continue to encounter sexist and discriminatory portrayals across television and advertising. Oppositional cultural interventions can make underrepresented groups visible and challenge these conventions.
Today, advertisements routinely celebrate strong women and invoke gender equality. These messages may contribute to the visibility of feminist claims, but they are also strategies for selling products. Feminism, activism, and the language of social change become commercialized within capitalism. Articulation helps us recognize both dimensions at once: the message cannot be reduced entirely to emancipation, but neither is its meaning exhausted by the commercial motive.
Articulation as a Political Possibility
Hall’s concept is not confined to media texts. It also describes the construction of political alliances and discourses. If social identities and interests do not belong together naturally for all time, political work consists partly in creating connections among them.
Academics, activists, cultural producers, advertisers, and marketers may sometimes cooperate in order to make a problem visible or allow marginalized voices to be heard. Such cooperation need not become a permanent coalition, and it does not require every participant to share the same worldview. Groups that ordinarily follow different paths may form a temporary alliance around a particular issue and articulate a common discourse.
This possibility is strategically important. It suggests that social transformation does not always begin from a position of ideological purity outside popular culture. It may involve entering compromised institutions, using commercial channels, and forming limited alliances in order to expand the reach of a claim. The risks of commercialization and appropriation remain real, but so does the possibility of visibility, reinterpretation, and change.
Articulation therefore offers a critical approach without cultural fatalism. It preserves the Marxist insight that power shapes culture, while rejecting the assumption that power determines every meaning in advance. It recognizes active audiences without imagining them as completely free, and it treats popular culture as a terrain on which hegemony and resistance are continually reorganized.
Popular culture is not innocent, but neither is it politically empty. It is a site of struggle: a space in which capitalism can market dissent, audiences can reinterpret dominant messages, and unexpected alliances can produce new forms of common sense. The task is not simply to celebrate or condemn popular culture. It is to examine how its connections are made, whose interests they serve, how they are received, and under what conditions they might be articulated differently.
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