Saving conjunctural analysis from itself: The value of dirty hands and concrete conditions
Written by Matt Goolding
Matt is studying his Research Master’s in Modern History & International Relations at the University of Groningen. This essay was submitted in January 2025 as part of the Theory of Modern History and International Relations course.
Saving conjunctural analysis from itself: The value of dirty hands and concrete conditions
“History moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed.” (Hall & Massey, 2010, p. 57)
This essay develops a constructive critique of conjunctural analysis. It has emerged from a sympathetic origin; my curiosity about an approach that purports to have a direct link with contemporary progressive action. Unfortunately, as I ventured further down the conjunctural rabbit hole, two realisations dawned. First, I noted the tendency of ‘conjuncturalists’ to engage in un(der)substantiated speculation and broad-sweep assessments of socio-historical phenomena. And second, I noted an overreliance on lofty, detached, language in their accounts—heavy use of terms such as forces, pressures, shifts, and senses.
In isolation, these doubts may merely be a question of academic taste. But as conjuncturalists argue, nothing happens in isolation; nothing occurs outside of its precise historical context. And the context here is that conjunctural analysis was conceived as, and is still presented as, a guide to effective social/political intervention. Having reviewed various conjunctural accounts, it is difficult to imagine how such speculative loftiness can fulfil that concrete promise.
This essay will map my reflective journey, from the enduring struggles of pinning down ‘the conjuncture’ to my frustrations with the practice of conjunctural analysis. I conclude with two initial recommendations: (i) a return to ‘dirty hands’ research, and (ii) an emphasis on grounded conditional (contextual) factors.
Struggling to pin down the conjuncture
The concept of ‘the conjuncture’ is widely understood to have originated in Marxist social theory (Grossberg, 2019). Two people in particular are associated with conjunctural thinking: Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. For Gramsci, ‘thinking conjuncturally’ offered the means to grasp the historical and geographical context behind the rise of Fascism in Italy. It was a way to identify the moment(s) when complex relations of forces—e.g., political, military, and economic—formed into a ‘distinct shape’ (Trinity Social Justice Institute, 2023). For him, a conjuncture “captures the idea of a dynamic system where certain factors combine spatiotemporally to create certain effects, for example, particular configurations of power.” (Pina-Cabral & Theodossopoulos, 2022, p. 459).
Gramsci helps us understand conjunctures as crises, which stand in contrast to the status quo (cultural) hegemony and present opportunities to “maintain or transform the established configurations of power” (Pina-Cabral & Theodossopoulos, 2022, p. 459). While Gramsci “thought the conjunctural level less significant than the organic” (i.e., the relatively permanent) (Hall & Massey, 2010, p. 57), his view of conjunctural crises as “those that appear in daily political life” (Babic, 2020, p. 772) inspired future (hyper)contextualised, historicised, and deeply-situated social analyses. In the context of Mussolini’s victory over the Italian Left, one of Gramsci’s key aims was to “understand the currents within any historical moment, and the nature of the social forces in place, and to create a leadership capable of recognising the opportunity they offered.” (Grayson & Little, 2017, p. 62).
It is little surprise, therefore, that conjunctural analysis has thrived recently in response to the surging global Right. Indeed, prominent analyses have attempted to ‘make sense’ of phenomena such as Brexit (e.g., Clarke & Newman, 2017), Trump (e.g., Hart, 2020), and global populism (e.g., Clarke, 2023). For some, this period echoes the 1920s and 1930s. This provides Gramscian theory with contemporary resonance, and partially accounts for the recent uptick in interest.
Louis Althusser helped establish “a variant of Marxism that provided the theoretical groundwork for political analysis and strategic reflection” (Gallas, 2017, p. 256). Althusser saw conjunctures as “historical-concrete alignments of political strategies of collective actors that reflect structurally inscribed tendencies, relations of forces, institutional and ideological formations, and circumstantial factors.” (Gallas, 2017, p. 257). This accommodation for the ‘political strategies of collective actors’—albeit in a structural context—is a notable and distinct element that I shall return to later in this essay. According to Tony Jefferson (2021), Althusser tended to use the term ‘conjuncture’ neutrally to describe “a meeting of circumstances or events” although “in discussing the term in relation to Lenin and the Russian revolution can be seen to be suggesting the importance of crisis to the term.” (Jefferson, 2021, p. 24). For Althusser, a conjuncture always contains a ‘structure in dominance’ (Koivisto & Lahtinen, 2012) but like Gramsci, he eschews economic determinism. As he writes in his essay, Contradiction and Overdetermination:
“If[…] a vast accumulation of ‘contradictions’ comes into play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous – of different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application – but which nevertheless ‘merge’ into a ruptural unity, we can no longer talk of the sole, unique power of the general ‘contradiction’. (Althusser, 1969, p. 62)
For Althusser, the idea of overdetermination was vital: social formations were overdetermined by varied contradictions and other factors (Koivisto & Lahtinen, 2012). For example, he saw the Russian revolution not as “the product of iron laws of history, but of the ‘accumulation and exacerbation’ of contradictions in a single country at one point in time, which created a specific, revolutionary conjuncture.” (Gallas, 2017, p. 262). At some point, as William. S. Lewis (2022) argues, Althusser abandoned Marx’s “historical materialist scientific tools” in favour of “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation”—a term borrowed from Lenin.
Althusser rejected the idea that “change happens in an orderly and predictable way” and questioned whether “scientific analysis of the present conjuncture will allow one to understand how to occasion revolutionary change.” (Lewis, 2022, p. 47). In his later works, Althusser emphasised the “absolutely arbitrary character of existence” and argued that “aleatory materialist ontology demands that we think of revolutionary politics as an art rather than as a science.” (Lewis, 2022, p. 47).
The relationship between Althusserian and Gramscian thinking is keenly debated (see Cortés, 2022; Hart, 2023). And for Althusser in particular, the importance of the conjuncture went deeper than I can describe in this short passage. Yet this outline gives us a sense for what inspired later scholars.
And so we arrive at Stuart Hall. For Hall, a conjuncture is “both a moment of danger and one of opportunity” (Bennett, 2016, p. 284). It is, according to Hall, “a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape” (Hall & Massey, 2010, p. 57). If we can grasp the shape of this moment, Hall and his peers contend that we may be able to do something about it.
As Tony Bennett (2016) notes, Hall’s conjunctural approach was actually a call to action in the intellectual, social, cultural, and political sense. (Bennett, 2016). Here we start to drift into a realm that I shall explore later in this essay: the strategic utility of the ‘conjunctural view’—and of conjunctural analyses.
But to remain for now on the foundational definition of what a conjuncture is, Hall’s exchange with James Hay (2013) is illuminating:
A conjuncture is a period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms, which are always present in different domains in a society, begin to come together. They begin to accumulate, they begin to fuse, to overlap with one another. The ideological becomes part of the economic problem and vice versa. Gramsci says that they fuse into a ruptural unity, and that’s the beginning of conjuncture. The aftermath of the fusion, how that fusion develops, its challenges to the existing historical project or social order, the efforts of the state and the people who run it, etcetera, to contain that, or the success of change and transformation—all [speaker’s emphasis] of that arc constitutes conjuncture. So it’s the accumulation and condensation of different strands of contradiction and problems. (Hay, Hall & Grossberg, 2013, p.16)
This appears quite categorical. However, in the same interview, Hall questions the temporal and spatial boundaries of a conjuncture, and acknowledges the slipperiness of the concept. He admits that amid the confusion, he cannot settle on a definitive position—despite accepting that “conjuncture should be very loosely used to describe a duration of time” (Hay, Hall & Grossberg, 2013, p. 18). The task of pinning down this concept and its associated theories to build a utilisable framework is no easy one.
Indeed, it may prove to be an exercise in futility.
And unfortunately, as I shall suggest later, this general ambiguity has provided cover for some speculative work. Most conjunctural accounts will reference Hall et al.’s pivotal book, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978) (hereafter PTC) as exemplary. Held up as a classic text for Cultural Studies (Grossberg, 2019; Hart, 2023), the book begins with a specific moment—a ‘mugging gone wrong’ in the UK—and tracks the development of ‘mugging’ as a socially constructed moral panic.
This, they show, facilitated the emergence of a new kind of ‘law and order’ state; ideal circumstances for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party to gain power in 1979 (Hart, 2023, p. 136). There is much to say about the content of PTC, yet the mission is perhaps most pertinent for this essay. The authors set out to emphasise the relational aspect between crime and the reaction to crime, rather than allowing crime (in this case, mugging) to remain as an unquestioned ‘fact’. They investigate the determining conditions for crime within the context of the specific historical conjuncture:
Crime has been cut adrift from its social roots. Something is standing in the way of these ‘conditions of existence’ being treated as part of the phenomenon. And part of what is standing in the way — producing crime, so to speak, as a simple and transparent fact — is the label ‘mugging’ itself. It cannot be allowed to stand in all its common-sense immediacy. It has to be dismantled: dismantled in terms of its wider relations to these contradictory social forces. (Hall et al., 1978, page IX).
It is useful to note that this seminal text doesn’t labour through a meticulous definition of conjuncture. Rather, our authors tend to operationalise the concept loosely, in a descriptive sense, when framing periods or moments. Likewise, while it was never the primary aim of this essay to categorically define a conjuncture, it would be disingenuous to pretend that my reflection on the literature hasn’t led to a conclusion—however partial or unsatisfactory.
Initially, it strikes me that before making the necessary association between a conjuncture and a crisis (as Gramsci and many others do), we must specify which conception of ‘crisis’ we mean. Here, I lean on Hall’s danger/opportunity duality to find a definition with room for manoeuvre. I suggest that crisis as a moment of instability, or as a “crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending.” (Merriam-Webster, 2025) is apt for our purpose—though ‘impending’ is replaced by ‘possible’ in my account. However, when defining a conjuncture, I am cautious of the term ‘instability’ because it clearly implies a fixed opposite (stability). Therefore, I choose to define a conjuncture as a historically-specific site of acute ambiguity. To deconstruct this: a conjuncture is unique in its historical specificity; it is a site in both spatial and temporal terms; it is acute in that it is urgent and active (by virtue of its agents/networks); and it is ambiguous in that outcomes (i.e., subsequent ‘state of affairs’ or ‘configurations of power’) are unknown.
But does this definition actually help us? One of the critical challenges in this area is one of delineation. Which ‘sites’ deserve the label of a conjuncture, and which do not? According to Jamie Peck (2023), conjunctural analysis targets “politically salient ‘situations’, places, and moments.” (Peck, 2023, p. 2). Instantly I note that the word ‘salient’ is doing a lot of heavy-lifting. Who decides what is salient and what is not? And how, exactly? This is not explained. Peck continues in the same vein: “there is no singular (or best) way to conceptualize conjuncture, or to pursue conjunctural analysis.’ (Peck, 2023, p. 9).
Similar themes appear in the work of Moritz Ege and Alexander Gallas (2019), who state that “there is not a single, definite analysis of any given conjuncture[…]. Both the choice of ‘entry point’ and the ways of ‘zooming out’ reflect the observers’ political priorities.” (Ege & Gallas, 2019, p. 94). The implication is clear: with no external references, we must decide for ourselves what is most convincing. In this light, my definition risks flinging the doors wide open, because one could argue that historically-specific sites of acute ambiguity are ubiquitous. And so we find ourselves back where we began. The arbitrary and subjective determination of salience. This is quite a puzzle.
Lawrence Grossberg (2019) attempts to put our mind at ease. “In the face of complexity,” he writes, “you have to start somewhere. Where one begins is something of a guess, or perhaps even an accident (determined by factors of passion, or assumed expertise, or immediate visibility).” (Grossberg, 2019, p. 42). Stuart Hall also reflected on this challenge: “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.” (Hall, 2018, as cited in Peck, 2023).
This brings us to the question of theory. Which theory, or set of theories, underpins the conjunctural approach? It is clear from the outset that conjunctural analysis “mobilizes theory in a critical and reflexive fashion” (Peck, 2023, p. 4) but what assumptions are in play? Characteristically, this is difficult to grasp. In most conjunctural accounts, we see terms such as ‘common sense’ and ‘hegemony’ appear—an ode to Gramscian thought, where material and affective forces, structures, contradictions and struggles operate across economic, political, cultural, and social levels (Grossberg, 2019).
But above all, I argue, the most important assumption reflects a particular kind of structuralism, where things called ‘social forces’ exist. These forces are rarely (if ever) defined, and the question of when/if individual or group action morphs into a force remains unaddressed. Forces tend to be described as ephemeral, fluid, and dynamic. Beyond our reach. Yet there is also a positivist flavour to most, if not all, conjunctural analyses. A stated commitment to empiricism; to building a concrete account of the current conjuncture through observation, with a view to effective intervention. The contradictions do not end there. There is a ‘realism’ and reflexive tendency to accept that one is ‘humbly offering the best contributions one can.’ (Grossberg, 2019, p. 38), and an explicit rejection of universality, yet: a) while pretending not to, many conjunctural accounts do attempt to comprehensively map the heterogeneity of any given conjunctural ‘site’ and, b) foregrounding the perpetual and power and ubiquity of ‘social forces’ sounds a lot like universalism to me.
In his 2019 dedication, Jeremy Gilbert reflected on the place of theory in Stuart Hall’s work. Seeing a ‘tendency to theoreticism’ in Cultural Studies, Gilbert writes that Hall criticised “overly abstract speculation, engaged in theoretical innovation for its own sake, rather than for any obvious analytical gain[...],” but also “decried an excessive particularism - textual analysis, descriptive ethnography - that made no effort to situate or explain its objects of study with reference to any wider set of social relations or historical tendencies.” (Gilbert, 2019, p. 5). I am sympathetic to this desire for situational context, for uncovering the ‘wider set of social relations or historical tendencies’ in our work. But I ask one key question. Must this search for the ‘wider set’ lead us to the articulation of abstract social forces, or can we understand the context of social relations and historical tendencies in more useful ways?
I suggest that in order for conjunctural analysis to fulfil its functional role (i.e., to guide intervention) we must shift from the quasi-supernatural language of forces, pressures, and shifts to the grounded language of human action and/or inaction within social frameworks, networks and systems. In so doing, we can remain focused on the concrete elements that constitute and situate a conjuncture.
Simply, any crisis or ‘turning point’ (Hart, 2020) as part of a challenge to the ‘structure in dominance’ (i.e., the hegemonic order) is driven by individual or collective action/inaction. These actions are facilitated or constrained by a multitude of ideational (psychological) and/or material conditions. While those are certainly complex and intertwined, they are accessible to us in a way that detached ‘social forces’ are not.
If our aim, for instance, is to build effective opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s influence over democratic politics, our analysis must seek to map the multiplicity of leverage, interest, strategy, (mis)interpretation, and (mis)calculation on all sides of this ‘war of positions’ (Grossberg, 2019)—within the context of the social, political, and economic networks that stakeholders operate in/between.
To give weight to ‘the balance of forces’ in our account encourages surrender rather than propelling us to progressive action.
Frustrations with the practice of conjunctural analyses
Let us revisit, for a moment, the ‘conventions’ of contemporary conjunctural analysis. Despite the influence of PTC as a foundational text, the rules of the conjunctural game remain fluid, emergent, and vulnerable—or in a more favourable sense, malleable. Indeed, the most concerted attempts at mapping conjunctural analysis as an approach were only published recently. Jamie Peck (2023) is one such example. Peck reflects on both theory and method in his work on conjunctural analysis, emphasising “deep contextualisation and situating; open, continuous, and emergent theorising; mutual/relational constitution rather than unilateral determination; thick theorising and context-rich explanation; historicisation; multiscalar analyses, etc.” (Peck, 2023, p. 9). He suggests, as I have already mentioned, that conjunctural analysis is “predisposed against universalizing or ‘centripetal’ theorizing.” He writes that it favours “disruptive methodological interventions, fashioned with ‘dirty hands’, over more formalized methods, controlled experiments, and the refinement of clean models.” (Peck, 2023, p. 8). Conjunctural analysts, Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard (2020) argue, are committed to “critically assess the status quo from an emancipatory ethno-political standpoint” (Leitner & Sheppard, 2020, p. 495).
Grossberg (2019) suggests that conjunctural analysis “is not a goal but a practice, a process, a critical analytic.” and asserts that “every attempt will at best be partial and incomplete”—and “by traditional academic standards, it will always be a failure.” (Grossberg, 2019, p. 42). For this reason, he argues, it must be collaborative; a mere contribution to the conversation, which will be either accepted or rejected. Crucially, Grossberg also writes that the conjuncture is “at a particular level of abstraction” which is “located between the specificity of the moment and the long duree of the epoch’ (Grossberg, 2019, p. 42). He claims that the analysis of ‘the moment’ “threatens the political intellectual with the chaos of the overdetermined world” (Grossberg, 2019, p. 44), labelling it overwhelmed, short-term, and intellectually ineffective. While this may be a reasonable line of argument, Grossberg does not substantiate it beyond a solitary paragraph. Upon reflection, I wonder whether there is another contradiction here. If, as Grossberg argues, conjunctural analyses—at their particular level of abstraction—must be collaborative, and are always partial and incomplete however detailed they may be, what makes them more ‘useful’ (i.e., suitable to guide action) than multiple overlapping investigations into agency-thick moments?
Taken to the extreme, could we not imagine that intense analytical collaboration around ‘overdetermined’ moments might reveal opportunities for intervention? This may initially seem like a bizarre adventure into naive idealism, because the resources that would be required for such extreme multidisciplinary cooperation are extraordinary. Furthermore, there is a bigger issue, raised by Waltz (1979) about whether we could effectively ‘add up’ the “infinite number of pieces that might be taken as parts of a problem” (Waltz, 1979, p. 4)—or in our question, whether they could ever form a comprehensive picture/narrative capable of catalysing action.
However—please forgive this brief digression—I wonder if artificial intelligence (AI) changes the scope of feasibility. Particularly if we’re engaged in ‘mapping’ the conjuncture, it is tempting to see AI as a game-changer. This is, admittedly, a foray into complex technological, not to mention ethical, terrain. Currently, however, I’m not arguing that conjunctural analysis must be shifted ‘down-funnel’ to the moment. Rather, I propose that we remain in the ‘mid-range’ between moment and epoch and maintain our commitment to context, but with less reliance on ‘forces’ in our accounts. A passage from John Clarke and Janet Newman’s (2017) conjunctural analysis of Brexit provides an adequate example to position ourselves against:
It is possible to see how different dynamics, different contradictions and dislocations, and different social forces come together to form the political-cultural conditions in which the Brexit nation might be articulated. (Clarke & Newman, 2017, p. 107)
Their article about the “heterogeneous and contradictory forces, tendencies, and pressures that enabled Brexit” (Clarke & Newman, 2017, p. 101) offers us a compelling narrative, but it is light on empirical evidence. It demonstrates, I suggest, the ‘tendency to theoreticism’ and ‘abstract speculation’ denounced by Stuart Hall (Gilbert, 2019). Upon reading our authors’ conclusion, I am at a loss about what action might be available to us. What are the next steps for those who wish to intervene?
In the absence of a ‘call to action’ we could reasonably expect a call for further research—especially in the spirit of conjunctural collaboration. Yet this is also absent. It is beyond the scope of this essay to dissect extracts from every conjunctural analysis, so I must ask readers to trust my observation that this deficiency is not uncommon. Furthermore, I should reiterate that my primary critique is targeted at one particular element: a failure to deliver on the promise to reveal “the possibilities and resources for progressive action.” (Clarke, 2014, p. 115). I do not necessarily question the quality of our authors' arguments, and I welcome the chance to explore the complex, interwoven, conditions in which ‘Brexit’ occurred. But if we’re committed to emancipatory utility, as conjunctural scholars purport to be, then we must acquire more tangible takeaways than dynamics, contradictions, dislocations, and forces.
One brief example here: solidifying ‘contradictions’ as arguments, debates, discussions, or disagreements (note: this still constitutes context) enables a grounded approach, ‘dirty hands’ research, and substantial outcomes. If conjunctural analysis is always a failure by ‘traditional’ academic standards (Grossberg, 2019), then what is its justification if we cannot identify its practical purpose?
Conclusion, with actionable suggestions
This essay is a necessary reflection on whether conjunctural analysis follows through on its promise. I have opened a discussion about the utility of this approach, chiefly because it was designed in the first instance as a route to effective intervention; a way to grasp the concrete elements of a historically specific situation. Clarke (2017) reflects on the contrast between conjunctural analysis and a ‘commodified’ culture in academic publishing, where ‘marketable’ knowledge in the form of Grand Theory is in hot demand:
The idea of conjunctural analysis involves an insistence—and I can hear Stuart saying it—that we can do better than that. Not just that we can do better, but that we must do better. Conjunctural analysis carries the promise that we can avoid the temptations of theoretical reductionism: the belief that because we have the theory, we know what the world is like and how it works. It also offers the possibility of escaping from epochal thinking: the belief that because this is late capitalism, we know what time it is. However, the promise of conjunctural analysis also brings with it a price to be paid: the hard work of actually doing it. (Clarke, 2017, p. 80)
We must indeed do better than to engage in ‘grand’ theoretical reductionism. But we must also do better in our conjunctural research if we are to inform action. We must engage in the hard work of doing it the hard way. With this in mind, my initial suggestions for the ‘next generation’ of conjuncturalists are as follows:
(i) To honour the commitment to conducting ‘dirty hands’ research, whether that is primary or secondary. This involves less ‘abstract speculation’ and more archival analysis, ethnography, and heavier utilisation of non-academic investigative work (for instance, investigations into ‘Big Oil’ interests conducted by the Climate Investigations Center or the Centre for Climate Reporting). This is how we may reveal our blind spots, which is essential for effective (re)action.
(ii) To emphasise grounded contextual factors, and refrain from outsourcing ‘wider set’ conditions to intangible, ill-defined ‘social forces’. This requires a change in language used, but also an understanding of how individual/collective agency operates within networked settings; a framework that accounts for interconnected condition-creating factors. A conjuncture, as a historically-specific (spatio-temporal) site of acute ambiguity, consists of players—but also a game and a field. Conjunctural analysts must attempt to map this concrete context.
The next step will be to put these two recommendations into action within my own research.
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