Political positions claim only conjunctural validity, not correctness for all time

Evidence

My strategy is what I have just described to you. I honor the moment that I am trying to surpass. I recognize, you see, that because there is no politics that is ever correct I don’t claim for my particular version of a nonessentialist notion of race correctness for all time. I can claim for it only a certain conjunctural specificity. So I can understand the moment, historical moment, in which a strategic essentialism became absolutely germane. You know, I can understand the moment when feminism had to say to men, “Fucking shut up!” This is what I call “arbitrary,” you see. It’s arbitrary. It’s not correct, but it’s correct in the moment. It only begins to be troubling when you settle down in that position forever, when you don’t see exactly that that is a frontier position, a frontier effect of having taken that position, and then how you then have to move yourself to dismantle what it has constituted as your constitutive outside. That’s what the danger is. So I’m not afraid of positionalities. I’m afraid of taking positionalities too seriously. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1020

Categorization

• DEFINE: This clarifies the meaning of ‘conjunctural specificity’ and ‘strategic essentialism’ as Hall uses them — a pivotal concept in his anti-essentialist politics that the Islamophobia readings will operate within.
• XREF: Connects to Hall’s ‘New Ethnicities’ and post-Marxist theories of articulation/conjuncture, plus the broader critical-theory vocabulary this reader is assembling for the Islamophobia field.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between treating a position as a frontier effect requiring self-dismantling versus settling into it as an identity is dense enough to sit with — it theorizes how political essentialism functions and fails.