Marxist analysis moves from chaotic surface abstractions to concrete-in-thought via added determinations

Evidence

SH: In this essay Marx says, first of all, you can’t just reflect the empirical in order to analyze it, because if you look at society it’s full of people, so you begin with population. But people are divided into capital and labor, slave and slaveholder, and that division, that difference, is more important than just the fact that they’re people. He calls beginning with population a chaotic abstraction, and that abstractions which arise from the differences are more worked through. That accounts for why he says you need theory, not to produce more theory, excuse me, but because you can’t do without it. You need to change the scale of magnification. You have to break into the confusing fabric that “the real” apparently presents and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope, and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations. And he describes this process as depending on adding more and more levels of determination. The basic laws may be the same, but you have to add more levels of determination before you—and this is another phrase of his—produce “the concrete in thought.” … And so my notion of the conjunctural is more like that than it’s like Gramsci. I really believe that the work is done by historical specificity, by understanding what is specific about certain moments, and how those moments come together, how different tendencies fuse and form a kind of configuration—never one that’s going to last forever, hegemony never does; it always has unruly elements, and it’s always struggling to master a terrain, etc. And those forces are going to produce a shift to another conjuncture. In Britain, the late 1970s is a conjunctural shift of that kind—absolutely. What I thought was that Thatcherism was really the end of one configuration—the postwar settlement—and the beginning of something else. We’re not going to go back to what was before it, so that’s why I’m interested in thinking the values that we hold in terms of the present. But about my sense of that break, people do ask me, “How do you know of that?” I can’t tell them that. It’s not a precise methodology; it’s not something which I apply outside to it. It’s interpretive and historical. I have to feel the kind of accumulation of different things coming together to make a new moment: this is a different rhythm. We’ve lived with one configuration and this is another one. Now let us try to say what that transition means, what this new one is, what the forces in it are, what the contradictory things are. That’s the “history of the present.” So I think conjuncturally. I’m what Larry Grossberg calls a radical contextualist. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1070

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Hall’s ‘conjunctural’ as distinct from Gramsci’s use — historical specificity plus added levels of determination producing ‘the concrete in thought.’
• XREF: Connects to how the Islamophobia field will deploy conjunctural analysis of its own historical moments — same toolkit, different object.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that conjunctural shifts are felt rhythmically and interpretively rather than methodologically pinned down is dense and counterintuitive — a genuine paradigm-level point about how theory knows its objects.