Conjunctures are periods of time, but also combinations of distinct components from the past and the present. Gramsci, the first theorist of the conjuncture, argued that the complex and contradictory historical detail characterising any social formation is rendered invisible if considered through concepts operating at a high level of abstraction, which are only appropriate for analysing epochal social change. Historical situations where different social and political forces – arising from many causes – multiply and combine unpredictably, require different forms of analysis.

Gramsci’s conjunctural theory was developed by Althusser in the 1960s, and by Stuart Hall, John Clarke and Lawrence Grossberg from the 1970s. The latter three showed how enduring practices and situations, such as racism, are adapted to new political contexts, and woven with other elements into the fabric of a new conjuncture. These structural arrangements encompass new and unusual as well as old and apparently familiar things, but, through the process of their articulation, entirely unfamiliar, unprecedented, and unrepeatable situations arise. ‘When the conjuncture shifts, everything shifts’, Hall argues.

In Hall’s account of the protracted disintegration of Britain’s post-war settlement, race and imperial nostalgia are recurring features – and transformed into novel and virulent forms when combined with different elements in new conjunctures. Clarke’s discussion of the Brexit conjuncture considers how emerging notions of a working class as exclusively ‘white’, and perceived as invisible and deprived through being white, were constructed and naturalised, and how this peculiar figure of ‘whiteness’, linked to a narrowed conception of class, became central to imagining a nation in crisis.

Conjunctural analysis does not claim objectivity through the application of a rigorous methodology. It is grounded and situated, and attempts, from within the conjuncture, to make sense of its strange originality. Althusser and Hall describe this as ‘being in’, or ‘thinking under’,  the conjuncture’, a process involving first formulating questions ‘for’ the conjuncture, then submitting to, becoming immersed in, the problems it poses.

Grossberg insists that this aspect of conjunctural analysis requires beginning ‘where people are’, recognising their ‘voices of political anger, despair and hope’. This is the approach adopted in Clarke’s analysis of Brexit, and formulated by Hall, as facing things as they exist, ‘not as you’d like them to be, not as you think they were ten years ago… but as they really are: the contradictory stony ground of the current conjuncture’.

These are strategic arguments: attempts to understand the location of blockages to politics, where sites of struggle have become obsolete, and where new ones exist. Conjunctural analysis is a claim for a type of politics which unfolds on Hall’s ‘stony ground’ of the ‘current conjuncture’.

If often conducive to pessimism, this is the terrain of the political, shaped by different forces but neither constrained nor enabled by consoling narratives of historical inevitability. Here lies the possibility of constructing something new, and, conjuncturalists will argue, it is the only place from which the new can be constructed.