Effective political action requires temporary closure despite open-ended knowledge.

Evidence

I don’t believe knowledge is closed, but I do believe that politics is impossible without what I have called “the arbitrary closure”; without what Homi Bhabha called social agency as an arbitrary closure. That is to say, I don’t understand a practice which aims to make a difference in the world, which doesn’t have some points of difference or distinction which it has to stake out, which really matter. It is a question of positionalities. Now, it is true that those positionalities are never final, they’re never absolute. They can’t be translated intact from one conjuncture to another; they cannot be depended on to remain in the same place. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 237

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces Hall’s concept of ‘the arbitrary closure’ — that politics requires temporarily fixed positions even when knowledge remains open.
• XREF: Connects to conjunctural analysis and the reader’s interest in the politics of theory; also resonates with the paradox of committed flexibility.

Related

• Political practice requires provisional closure that fixes positions while never finalizing them (similarity 0.93)
• Open-ended projects still require closure and stakes to be political (similarity 0.80)