Political practice requires provisional closure that fixes positions while never finalizing them

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

• DEFINE: Defines ‘arbitrary closure’ as the provisional fixing of positions required for any effective political practice, distinct from claims of final truth.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and Laclau/Mouffe’s discourse theory on the necessary but contingent fixing of meaning; also echoes the reader’s prior work on how traditions like the Frankfurt School struggled with the same closed/open tension. — connects to: Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536