High-level abstractions applied directly to conjunctures lose the concrete levels of determination.

Evidence

So the project itself is not wrong. But in carrying it out, they do tend to slip from the requirement to recognize the constraints of existing historical formations. While they are very responsible—whether you agree with them or not—about recognizing that their position does have political consequences, when they come down to particular political conjunctures, they don’t reintegrate other levels of determination into the analysis. Instead, they take the abstractions which have been developed and elaborated, in a very rigorous and conceptual way at a high philosophical level, and insert them into the here and now. You don’t see them adding, adding, adding, the different levels of determination; you see them producing the concrete philosophically, and somewhere in there is, I think, the king of analytic slippage I am talking about. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Hall’s insistence on conjunctural, layered analysis recurs through his essays on race, Thatcherism, and political strategy.