Theoretical progress is non-linear and gains are always reversible

Evidence

To be quite honest about your criticism, I guess I do think that some terrain is gained, otherwise I won’t make those moves. I don’t think those gains are guaranteed, but I do think the work is better when someone understands those complexities that one wrestles to gain insight into. Sometimes, they are actually reversals; some of those gains take one into terrains where the work is too facile, very good but empty. There are lots of blind alleys. I don’t think that there’s any simple notion of linear progress in theoretical work, as I see it. But I do think that one moves from one detotalized or deconstructed problematic to the gains of another, recognizing its limitations. That, I think, is the infinite open-endedness of critical work, why critical work is always dialogical. It does have the capacity to establish some important conversations on some ground. That’s what I mean by the gain; it gains some ground where thinking can go on around a particular set of problems. It’s almost never stable; it will be punctuated and interrupted by some new thing, not necessarily by a new book or by a new theory but by some new turn of events which requires one to address a problem which shows the underside of the positive ground you’ve gained. Suddenly, it doesn’t explain that stuff, suddenly you’ve got to start again, perhaps from the bad side of the gains that you’ve made. In these ways I’m trying to describe what a critical practice is like which isn’t just circular and repetitious and which has no guaranteed advances or progress written into it but which continues to be open-ended. In these ways I’m trying to use the term “gains” without looking at an infinite series of interconnected, well-ordered theoretical progressions from position to position. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Defines ‘gains’ in a way that echoes the dialogical, open-ended understanding of intellectual work — connects to how Critical Theory frames theory as provisional and rooted in historical events. — connects to: Continuous production processes under acceleration yield exponential growth — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 231
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Hall’s ‘gains without linear progress’ model imply any criterion for judging when a move counts as a gain versus a blind alley?