Social formations are complex unities structured in dominance, not determined by a single cause

Evidence

At a more fundamental level, this point is derived directly from Stuart’s commentary on Marx’s methodology, in his “Notes on the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse.” In this commentary, which is central to Stuart’s work, he is at pains to reject the notion of any abstract mode of analysis that fails to attend to the historical specificity of a particular social formation, as it has developed in empirically given circumstances. He is not interested in any all-encompassing “general model” of how the capitalist mode of production determines everything about a social formation. Rather, he is concerned with how the economic, political, legal, and ideological dimensions of a society come to form what he calls, following Althusser, a “complex unity, structured in dominance,” where what needs to be understood is how its different elements are articulated together. This was crucial to Stuart’s thought, and it was via Althusser’s rejection of the Hegelian model of a society as an expressive totality, determined by a single (economic or other) cause, that he was able to develop a more flexible mode of Marxism, mobilizing the concepts of relative autonomy, displacement, dislocation, condensation, and overdetermination. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core scaffold concept ‘complex unity, structured in dominance’ and its accompanying toolkit: relative autonomy, displacement, dislocation, condensation, overdetermination.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated purpose — this is the Althusserian articulation concept the Islamophobia field inherits; links forward to Hall’s later race/ethnicity work and to Laclau’s discourse theory. — connects to: Social division is constitutive and cannot be explained by any positive ground — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 604