Chartbook 384: "Working the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture" - a "conversation" with Hall, Massey and Peck.

The word conjuncture derives from

… the Latin root coniugere – meaning to bind, to join, to combine, or to inflect – conjuncture denotes circumstances of combination and coexistence. (Jamie Peck 2024)

As Stuart Hall elaborates in a conversation with the great economic geographer Doreen Massey:

A conjuncture is 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…A conjuncture can be long or short: it’s not defined by time or by simple things like a change of regime – though these have their own effects. As I see it, 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, or, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’. Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given.

[…]

Gramsci, who struggled all life against ‘economism’, was very clear about this. What he says is that no crisis is only economic. It is always ‘over-determined’ from different directions. On the other hand, you can’t think about a crisis and its resolution until you deal with what he calls the economic nucleus. We can’t ignore the way the financial sector has asserted its dominance over the economy as a whole, or indeed its centrality to the new forms of global capitalism. But we must address the complexity of the crisis as a whole. This is a difficult balance, but, as you say, crises are always ‘over-determined’. Different levels of society, the economy, politics, ideology, common sense, etc, come together or ‘fuse’. Otherwise, you could get an unresolved ideological crisis which doesn’t have immediate political connotations, or which you can’t see as being directly related to a change in the economy. The definition of a conjunctural crisis is when these ‘relatively autonomous’ sites – which have different origins, are driven by different contradictions, and develop according to their own temporalities – are nevertheless ‘convened’ or condensed in the same moment. Then there is crisis, a break, a ‘ruptural fusion’.

Stuart Hall from an interview with Doreen Massey in 2010:

Teaching can open things up. Sometimes that means encountering something truly new. Sometimes it means coming back to something familiar that now speaks in a new way. That happened to me this term in teaching Stuart Hall. In reading texts, almost all of which I have read before, some of them many times, some when they originally appeared, I found in Hall’s idea of “conjunctural analysis” something that I only now understood that I need. (With more than a little help from friends. You know who you are!)

And then, having (re)found Hall’s concept, the further delight was not only to find other people finding the same concept but to read them take up ideas such as “polycrisis” and “thinking in medias res”, which I have been trying to develop in Chartbook and elsewhere, as relevant to the project of conjunctural analysis.

Economic geographer Jamie Peck in particular has productively articulated an agenda for conjunctural analysis which I find extremely compelling, notably in a recent article in Dialogues in Human Geography: “Practicing conjunctural methodologies: Engaging Chinese capitalism”. As you can imagine, both the main title and the sub-title grabbed my attention.

The following is a three-way conversation with theorists of conjunctural analysis and Hall by way of Peck’s article. I am going to quote liberally and juxtapose my own commentary. I apologize for the resulting, somewhat baroque structure, but I find it easier to engage with theoretical argument this way. I get blocked when I think about writing theory “from scratch”.

This essay is part of an extended train of thought which includes amongst other notes, a piece on “writing in medias res” (2021), the hommage to Anna Tsing (2022), and, most recently, the interview with Ding Xiongfei from the Shanghai Review of Books (2024), and Chartbook 343 : Polycrisis & the critique of capitalocentrism (2025).

So, if I were to identify what I am trying to do as an experiment in “conjunctural analysis” what would that mean?

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… conjunctural inquiries are explicitly situated in space and time. (Peck)

Examples of specifically situated enquiries would be: The 1970s crisis of the British state. The North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008. The development of Chinese party state capitalism. etc.

This may seem banal, but it in fact evokes the tense relationship between general concepts (e.g. financial crisis) and specific moments in time and specific places. Taken seriously theories of time and place involve some heavy duty metaphysics. At the even more general level what is posed is the Hegelian question of the relationship between the particular and the general.

For everyday purposes what is fundamentally put in question is any easy invocation of “the case study”.

To give one example, as is implied by my long-running polemic against thinking in terms of “hegemonic succession”, an account of the crisis of American power in the early 20th century, is better not thought of as a “case” of anything.

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Ultimately, if we locate the object of enquiry this way, it also forces us to locate ourselves as analysts/observers/actors in our own “situation” space and time, in our own conjuncture. One might say that all conjunctural analysis is, consciously or not, inter-conjunctural analysis.

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Every analysis has a location. Hall in the mid 1980s famously spoke of ‘working the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture’ Hall's (1986: 6). But beyond the “stony ground”, the work of analysis involves some kind of wager. One name for the essential wager is “theory”. As Hall remarked: ‘I would do without theory if I could! The problem is, I cannot. You cannot’. This is because, he continued,

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’. (Hall, 2018: 310)

We will come back to the significance of the phrase “breaking into” and the idea of a “detour” later in this necessarily circular set of points.

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You can’t not do theory. But, as Peck puts it, “matters of conceptualization and methodological practice tend to be subsumed, in an ‘organic’ fashion, in most extant examples of conjunctural analysis”. Quoting Doreen Massey, Peck makes this astute observation:

In Massey's case, despite exemplifying a certain style of conjunctural analysis practice, only late on in her career was she ‘convinced about the importance of thinking conjuncturally as a method’ (Clarke, 2018: 201, emphasis added). This is perhaps not surprising, since conjunctural analysis tends to present as something closer to a critical ethos or ‘craft’ practice, rather than a codified method per se.

This really rang a bell. I’ve often found myself recommended thinking about the term polycrisis less for its conceptual rewards than as a healthy daily “practice”. I think of the daily commitment to engage with reality as an ethos. Critically, this ethos entails the willingness to put our conceptual apparatus in play.

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Stress-testing or crash-testing theories.

The commitments of conjunctural analysis involve us in a circularity. Theorization is both inescapable and prior and yet it must not be procrustean. As Peck puts it:

“The chicken-and-egg problem that conjunctural inquiries confront is that they cannot begin without an explanatory map of some kind (be this some provisional ‘map’ of state-capitalist configurations, for example, or takes on the terrain of capital-labor conflicts, the architecture of corporate supply chains, or the historical geography of financial crises), even as their critical orientation requires the redrawing of these maps.” … There can be no “postponement of theorization, even though theorization itself is understood to be a necessarily incomplete, imperfect, and ongoing process. Provisional or ‘starting’ theories can provide an initial sketch of relevant axes of concern and principles of explanatory pertinence, while also highlighting apparent anomalies or points of tension. The role of theory here is akin to that of an iteratively generated ‘map’, never fully pre-given but unfolding through the analysis itself and ‘improv[ing] with use’ (cf. McMichael, 1990; Tilly, 1984: 125). Conjunctural analysis does not follow straight lines from received theory to illustrative case; it cannot be limited to the shading of pre-existing explanatory maps, coloring safely inside the lines, or the predetermined positioning of case-study sites in relation to a (fully known) world system. Exploratory in nature, conjunctural analysis aspires to the mapping out of new understandings.

The problem of how to think the radically new obsesses me. This is for me the great challenge of the current moment. Faced with this challenge, familiar theories are both indispensable and at the same time, potentially a form of escapism and snare. As Peck goes on.

But if ‘theory’ is neither to be enthroned (and rendered impervious to revision) nor postponed (to some anterior moment of freely inductive inquiry), how else is it to be constructively engaged? There are cues to be taken here from Michael Burawoy's (re)conception of the extended case method, where there is a predisposition to the actively critical – but never ambivalent – deployment of provisional theories and proto-explanations. In response to the vexing but fundamental question of where to start and where to anchor a program of inquiry, there is a compass here if not a fully formed map: research sites, cases, and problem spaces are located not in the cross-hairs of ‘preferred’ or starting theories, in the service of illustration or affirmation, but where these theories (with their associated claims and concepts) can be challenged, stretched, stress-tested, and perhaps troubled. For his part, Burawoy reserves a special place for anomalies defined against, or in tension with, theoretically informed expectations. Anomalies are defined in relation to ‘preferred’ but critical theories, with a view to their stress-testing and reconstruction via ‘crucial experiments’.¹ …. The explanatory posture here is positive, but proactively critical if not self-confrontational: ‘our stance toward theory is kamikaze [since in] our fieldwork we do not look for confirmations but refutations’ (Burawoy, 1998: 20).

In thinking about my own work I have preferred the concept of “crash-testing” to “kamikaze”, but the idea of self-sacrifice at the point of intellectual attack, evoked by references to “kamikaze” certainly adds an existential intensity.

What might be an example of this? Well imagine writing a really, really, really long economic history of Nazi Germany, NOT to stamp out THE definitive history, but with a view to finding out where conventional materialist logic fails. The aim, to the frustration of your sympathetic Marxist readers, not being precisely to pinpoint the dominant class faction driving the regime, but to explore “the sense of a vacuum” at its heart.

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Conjunctural analysis is an approach that is “(e)xploratory rather than formalized”. That is “dissatisfied with immediate, proximate, or otherwise preemptive accounts of causality. As such, these searching, exploratory inquiries will often reach backward and spiral outward, rather than being corralled within fixed explanatory horizons or predefined study sites.” (Peck)

“Preemption” is the word I like most here, encompassing the sort of gesture that says:

“Oh, if you are writing about X, you will be starting with Y, won’t you.”

Or:

“Well, obviously, since A is a case of B, it follows that it would be a mistake not to discuss C.”

Those are preemptive moves. Anticipating the subsumption of what sets out to be new under the presumption of existing knowledge.

As counter-examples to this kind of preemptive interpretation I offer:

• Treat the US financial crisis of 2008 as “European”.

• Insist on the importance of the contrasting impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the otherwise obscure sideshows of Russia and Ukraine.

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Putting all of these points together, Peck arrives at the summary that:

Conjunctural analysis engages the abstract, the structural, and the historical through the contingent, the concrete, the particular, and the real; it works through the specificity and particularity of situations in part for their own sake, as loci of concern, but also as prisms through which to read, to map, and to situate the systemic, the global, and the ‘general’. Understood as (often disruptive) interventions on an always-moving terrain, the approach does not privilege any particular entry point or moment, beyond considerations of social relevance and political salience, in due course tending routinely to exceed boundaries and stretch horizons, resisting premature foreclosure. The methodological act of ‘breaking in’ to a problem or situation is therefore always ‘midstream’, never in isolation but in medias res, in the midst of things – being duly sutured to obligations to situate and historicize (see Tooze, 2021).

From there it is a short step to locating conjunctural analysis squarely in history, or more precisely, within a particular philosophy of history:

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In contrast to the closed and controlled conditions of the laboratory, ‘open’ social systems rarely, if ever, reveal the one-to-one conjunction of cause and effect (if A, then always and everywhere B); hardly ever do conditions of singular or unmediated causation obtain; and consequently, there is ‘no reason to expect anything but contingent, conjunctural causality to apply in the social sciences’ (Steinmetz, 1998: 181). Conjunctural analysis is duly concerned to specify and ‘tease apart’ overlapping and intersecting sources of causality in their socially occurring, ‘tangled’ state(s), in situations that may be temporally or spatially proximate, but often not (see Li, 2014). Its domains of interrogation are variegated states of inconstant conjunction, engaged in social configurations that vary, significantly and constitutively, over time and space. … Conjunctural analysis rejects the idea of isolating some ‘signal’ of singular, underlying causation by tuning out the ‘noise’ of contingency; instead, it engages conditions more resonant of cacophony and fugue.

I really like the invocation of the musical analogy here. When asked to explain my approach, I often used to describe both Wages and Crashed as books that could be thought of as “remixes with the “base” (pun intended) turned up”.

More recently I’ve been thinking about causation in terms of messy bags of lego bricks - somewhere between cacophony and fugue - where certain small-scale, generic logics may be understood as repeating and perhaps even necessary, but the resulting overall structure is open and thus contingent, specific and subject to the play of history and creativity. In Peck’s words:

This is to invoke an ‘eventful’ treatment of (always messy and mediated) causation, where ‘events are caused by concatenations of multiple, intersecting forces’, expressed in heterogeneous and combinatorial social formations that are nonrepeating and nonreplicating; in other words, historically and geographically unique (Decoteau, 2018: 89; Paige, 1999; Sewell, 2004: 100–101).

My “lego bricks” would be Peck’s “multiple, intersecting forces”.

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The most ready-to-hand general framing is, therefore, one of uneven and combined development:

Conjunctural analysis and exposition, it follows, is not spare or minimalist, and neither does it yield ‘clean’ models expressed in parsimonious, ideal-typical, or logically complete terms, or in the form of internally coherent and discrete social systems. Since conditions of mediated, multiple causation and inconstant (or ‘local’) conjunction imply that there are only (and can only be) a plethora of spatiotemporally distinctive, or ‘atypical’, configurations, conjunctural inquiries inhabit spaces of specificity, predicated on ontologies of uneven development, hybridity, and disjuncture, rather than universalism, convergence, or equilibrium. … As Gillian Hart (2020: 241) has said, for example, of her distinctive approach to ‘global conjunctural analysis’, spaces of inquiry are ‘not [understood] as pre-given bounded national [or regional] units or separate “cases”, but rather as variously connected yet historically specific nodes in globally interconnected historical geographies – and as sites in the production of global processes, rather than just passive recipients of them’.

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As for capitalism … go there, if you will, just so long as you reckon with Hall’s reading of conjunctures:

as ‘complex structures’, imperfectly stitched together from a diversity of constituent parts, never in a fixed or final fashion. The crystalline makeup of conjunctural formations, it follows, is not reducible to a singular essence or discrete (pre)dominant logic; they exist, instead, as ‘articulated combinations’, in some circumstances congealing into ‘contradictory unities’ (Hall, 2021: 220). This approach resonates with relatively porous and nonreductionist readings of capitalist social formations, as unevenly developed, variegated, combinatorial, and ‘constructed’, the always-moving parts of which are not to be found in (solid) states of constant conjunction, friction free, but in heterogeneous and contradictory configurations (cf. Jessop, 2018; Peck, 2023; Sewell, 2008). The seams or ‘welds’ within this stitched-together order (or ecology of orders) will hold under some ‘instituted’ conditions, but will often fray, fracture, or ‘come apart’ in ruptural moments of crisis and accelerated transformation (Hall and Massey, 2010). In a similar vein, processes of economic ‘restructuring’ are not to be understood as singular, inexorable, or teleological, but as contradictory vectors of transformation, relationally constituted on what amounts to a shifting terrain.

Have your capitalism if you must, but don’t fall into the “capitalocentric” trap of imagining that having invoked that term, you have more than the thinnest film of actual understanding.

If capitalism is, as Sewell contends, expansive but also directionless, globalizing but polymorphous, and contingently hyper-eventful in ways that are often patterned but nonrepeating, it also follows that uneven geographical development represents ‘a specific form taken by [spatially bundled] events within capitalism, or, to put it the other way around, events are transmogrified by the logics of capital into the shape of uneven development’ (Sewell, 2008: 528). Events consequently take place, such that capitalism’s state of hypereventfulness can only be realized through uneven spatial development, even if the resulting forms are (and can only be) conjuncturally contingent. Echoing Braudel, the conjunctural production of the (regionalized) ‘settings’ through which economic lives and events are played out is a process with rhythms and patterns of its own, more than it is a mere aggregation of those lives and events, or some side-effect of the abstract laws of capitalism. Conjunctures, in this sense, are neither reducible to micro foundations, nor are they simply the epiphenomena of a pre-given macro order.

I could not read Peck at this point without thinking of Tsing. This accidental juxatposition in Peck’s bibliography made my morning.

But, I was puzzled that, to judge from Peck’s footnotes, Tsing doesn’t feature more prominently in the discussions amongst economic geographers. Do anthropologists and geographers intersect less than they might? Hard not to think of Tsing and her mushroom pickers when one reads the following from Peck:

Conjunctural analyses may be at their most dense, intense, and granular in the vicinity of their targeted sites and situations, but this does not mean that the spaces beyond and in between are rendered as unmarked, unstructured, and untheorized territory, as is often the case when cities stand in as prototypes or archetypes, when certain regional economies are presented as paradigms, or with the formal comparison of (supposedly) separate, independent, and free-standing cases. Conjunctural analysis does not conceive of (or address) places as geographical ‘isolates’, or as the proving ground of internally coherent ‘models’, but instead engages them in a fashion reminiscent of Massey's notion of ‘throwntogetherness’: heterogenous sites of interaction and articulation, shaped by constitutive relations and connections with elsewhere (see Clarke, 2018; Massey, 1999), but nevertheless hanging together in a recognizable (and not merely fleeting) fashion. Sites of conjunctural inquiry may present as junction points, nodes, or meeting places; as entanglements or ‘knots’ in networks; or as recombinant formations, all of which index the fundamental inseparability of internal characteristics and external relations. There are suggestive connections, therefore, between conjunctural analysis and relational approaches to comparison and cross-site inquiry (see Hart, 2023). … This means that the relationships between places, cases, and research sites, on the one hand, and the constitutive worlds that they inhabit, on the other, are (theory) questions from the outset, but also open ones.

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Conjunctural analysis is a troublesome business. Hall’s striking image of “working the stony ground” reminds us of this. It is undeniably tricky and uncertain. When taken seriously it also mobilizes passion and effort. As Peck puts it rather cautiously:

Conjunctural analysis is an invitation to what might be called ‘thick theorization’, in which the contextualization and conditioning of theory claims are not seen as ‘retreats’ in the direction of empiricism, inductivism, or ideographic description, but as means to hold these claims, positions, and propositions together, in generative tension. As Massey (1989: 695) once explained, ‘the aim must be to use general theory not to reject it [but this] means to use it in specific contexts – for there are no “general” ones, in that sense, to use it on’. Theorizing and contextualizing, in other words, are two sides of the same coin. This adds to the reasons why the determination of research sites, situations of concern, and moments to ‘cut in’, in medias res, cannot be pretheoretical, but instead combine the normative with the analytical. Normatively, there is an orientation to moments of crisis, contestation, and sociopolitical urgency, and to sites where new explanations are needed.

I love this pivot from the conceptual and methodological to the pragmatic. For me this is the central motivation of my efforts in conjunctural analysis: to be useful.

I’m still scratching my head about the fact that Peck ends his methodological discussion with a reference to martial arts, but perhaps that is the right place to go:

Conjunctural analysis also offers distinctive rationales for inquiry in zones of instability, contestation, or conflict, in sites of accelerated restructuring and transformation, and in liminal spaces or through limit cases defined in relation to orthodoxies both theoretical and normative. These might be characterized as jujitsu moves, methodological maneuvers that use the weight of existing theoretical explanations against those core propositions, engaging from unexpected or oblique angles in order to unbalance, reset, or to disturb centers of gravity. While this might involve the use of chokeholds or even takedowns, it need not be an offensive exercise; these maneuvers also work in self defense, reworking ‘favored’ theories, developing fresh perspectives, and building new alliances.

Conjunctural analysis as “self defense”: a fitting conclusion for our times.

And in that same spirit, why not carry around Peck’s checklist of “methodologies, orientations, commitment and rules of thumb”? Perhaps if I had had this in mind it would have taken me less long to realize the affinity between what I was doing and the conjunctural approach. In stressful situations, lists help.

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China.

The second part of Peck’s essay is taken up with the question of how to think the question of China, the CCP regime and capitalism.

What is at stake here is NOT a “case study of conjunctural analysis”. To think in those terms would be to fly in the face of everything we have said so far. China is not a “case” of anything. It is no more and no less than a strategic location for any attempt to “break into” contemporary reality, perhaps the strategic location. And the difficulty of theorizing its political economy is not incidental or a mere technical issue, but symptomatic of the crisis of our concepts faced with the radicalism of the present.

In conclusion allow me a historical speculation that goes beyond the disciplinary and methodological mission of Peck’s review. Let us locate conjunctural analysis itself in history, in the conjuncture：

Conjunctural analysis as Peck aptly summarizes it, is a distinctive product of critical philosophical traditions, of Marxism, strands of idealism, pragmatism, historicism, existentialism, to name just the most obvious. Those traditions did not float free. They were situated within and in dialogue with the Western experience of modernity, of British industrialization, Empire and imperialism, the technoscientific states of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Fordism, US hegemony, unipolarity etc. Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development, Althusser’s thinking about history, Hall’s own work, all grappled with that history. Tsing writes an entangled history of a world shaped by the rise of Japan and the crises of America after the Vietnam war.

Our own moment is massively shaped, overshadowed, marked, defined (pick your verb) by the question that Peck is wrestling with in addressing the issue of “Party State Capitalism in China”. This is as essential for us to think with and against today as British factory capitalism was for Marx, or fascism and mass culture for the Frankurt School. If one had to offer a succinct description of our world of the last quarter century, of the reality that our conjunctural analyses must wrestle with, it is this, China’s rise summarized through national consumption of coal.

Why coal? Because it drives heavy industrialism and because it determines the pace of the global climate crisis and because China’s consumption today is five times America’s peak level and ten times its consumption today. The UK which on the back of coal and coal miners pioneered the industrial revolution of the 19th century, Marx’s capitalist revolution, stopped burning coal altogether for purposes of electric power generation last year.

Of course this is not a crude claim to one-dimensional materialist determination, according to the motto: China-coal-everything.

It serves here simply to demonstrate in caricature form why in the mid 2020s the move from general talk about conjunctural analysis by way of Hall and Massey’s thinking about Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Britain, to an exploration of the Pearl River Delta is not accidental. It is why the next Chartbook newsletter will be about China’s green energy investment last year and the contradictions of its giant renewable energy megabases. It is an invitation, in the spirit of theory-testing and theory-breaking, to situated, conjunctural analysis of this improbable, astonishing history, the history that is our reality. It is a “Search for a method”, for tools and approaches that will allow us to grasp what is happening around us and what we are ourselves part of.

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