Social movements and historical conjunctures generate theoretical moments rather than merely consuming them

Evidence

I want to hold to the notion, implicit in both these examples, that movements provoke theoretical moments. And historical conjunctures insist on theories: they are real moments in the evolution of theory. But here I have to stop and retrace my steps. Because I think you could hear, once again, in what I’m saying a kind of invocation of a simple-minded anti-theoretical populism, which does not respect and acknowledge the crucial importance, at each point in the moves I’m trying to renarrativize, of what I would call the necessary delay or detour through theory. I want to talk about that “necessary detour” for a moment. What decentered and dislocated the settled path of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies certainly, and British Cultural Studies to some extent in general, is what is sometimes called “the linguistic turn”: the discovery of discursivity, of textuality. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 251

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Hall’s signature ‘necessary detour through theory,’ the idea that political conjunctures demand sustained theoretical work rather than skipping straight to practice.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘the linguistic turn’ dislocated an entire research institute, as institutional history of ideas.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 251
• XREF: connects to: Social movements generate theory rather than merely applying it; Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions; Theoretical progress means gaining new problems, not resolving old ones — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 268 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Social movements generate theory rather than merely applying it #corroborates (0.90)
• Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions #expands (0.70)