Marxism’s relative autonomy model rejects the expressive totality of Geisteswissenschaft thought

Evidence

Marxism attempts to understand a social formation as a “complex unity,” composed of different levels which exhibit their own “relative autonomy” while being determinate “in the last instance.” A particular conjuncture like the seventeenth-century Revolution is the result of the accumulation of contradictions stemming from each of those levels and the overdetermination of effects between the relatively autonomous instances. It is precisely in giving to any social formation the full complexity of this articulation, and in not assuming a “given,” simple, or immediate correspondence between the levels, that Marxism breaks with the expressive totality central to—among other traditions of thought—the Geisteswissenschaft approach outlined above. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 336

Categorization

• DEFINE: Compact statement of the articulation/relative-autonomy model of determination ‘in the last instance,’ core to Hall’s whole intellectual project.
• XREF: The overdetermination formulation comes from Althusser; connects to Hall’s own essays on articulation and to his treatment of ideology in this very volume.