Understanding requires breaking into congealed appearances via the detour through theory.

Evidence

Now, that has had profound costs on my own thought. First of all, I really am not an academic in the traditional sense at all. I mean Barry Chevannes was very kind to refer to me as a “scholar,” but I am not really in the true sense of the word a “scholar.” That is not what I am. I have lived an academic life and earned my living—not terribly well—from doing academic work. I love to teach. I wanted to teach from the earliest point that I can remember. And teaching goes on in academic worlds. I respect and defend the academy to the hilt and the capacity it gives to transmit knowledge to future generations and to pursue knowledge for its own sake. One has to defend this arena of critical thought—especially these days, when it is under such attack from so many quarters—with one’s life. But it does not mean that I want to be or think of myself as having been an academic. I would claim, I would insist on, my right to the title of having done intellectual work. I am an intellectual. … I am an intellectual in Gramsci’s sense because I believe in the power and necessity of ideas. Of course, as a sort of materialist, I do not believe ideas alone make the world go round. And I certainly do not mean that I think my task is to produce theory. I would do without theory if I could! The problem is, I cannot. You cannot. Because the world presents itself in the chaos of appearances, and the only way in which one can understand, break down, analyze, grasp, in order to do something about the present conjuncture that confronts one, is to break into that series of congealed and opaque appearances with the only tools you have: concepts, ideas, and thoughts. … To break into it and to come back to the surface of a situation or conjuncture one is trying to explain, having made “the detour through theory.” … I am talking here about a working method of Marx. I am not talking about whether one subscribes to all the theories of Marxism or not. That is a different question. And what Marx says is you begin with an obvious fact: a social system is composed of people, and this gives us our first, what he calls “chaotic,” conception—the category of “population.” How far can you take this category of population? Well, you can take it quite far. But really, you have to break with that descriptive approach at the moment when you understand that every population is always divided—it is not a homogeneous or multifarious single object. Always within that population are relations between capitalists and labor, men and women, masters and slaves. Relations of difference are what matters. … And to make the move of analyzing the population, as it were, into its particular categories, and the relations of similarity and difference between them, seems an abstract movement: the necessary moment of abstraction. However, as Marx says, you cannot stop there—which a great deal of theory does. You know, it is pleased to produce the categories and it proceeds to refine the abstractions, but, Marx says, far from it. You need to return then to the problem you really wanted to solve, but now understanding that it is the product of “many determinations,” not of one: not of a singular logic unfolding through history; not of a teleology, a deterministic circle which has its own end already inscribed in its beginning. Not Hegel’s fantasy of the “resolution of reason,” the subsumption of the real and the rational, the dialectical resolution which is some moment when Thought and the Real—theory and historical reality—could be identically the same. None of that. Instead, you return to a world of many determinations, where the attempts to explain and understand are open and never eliding—because the historical reality to be explained has no known or determined end. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1195

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Hall’s Gramscian sense of the intellectual and Marx’s method of abstraction as a working model for conjunctural analysis.
• XREF: This is the method underpinning Hall’s conjunctural analysis that Islamophobia readings assume; connects to hegemony and articulation concepts. — connects to: Intention requires a rupture with the given, illuminating being in light of non-being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1144; Expanding the interpretive horizon transforms the object of study itself. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1738; Understanding requires seeing with the mind’s eye, not just the physical eyes — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 676
• ADDENDUM: The ‘detour through theory’ and ‘many determinations’ method parallels the worldbuilding-as-infrastructure metaphor in the trees essay: both treat surface appearances as opaque structures requiring analytic breaking-in.
• DEEPTHINKING: The anti-Hegelian rejection of dialectical resolution in favor of open-ended ‘many determinations’ is a dense, paradigm-shifting orientation to how to do critical analysis at all.