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Studying the Conjuncture
So I have been thinking about the thought of Stuart Hall too, and I am telling
you what I seem to have found out! Certain habits of thinking, certain ways
of addressing a problem. If you are not interested in the disciplines, and
if your subject is not given by the discipline, what is it are you trying
to find out about? What is the object of your inquiry, what methods can
you use, and most important of all, when does your object of inquiry - and
thus the questions demanding answers — change, opening a new paradigm
moment, a new 'problem space'? David Scott has done much, especially in
his challenging new reading of C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins
to make me think about this idea of a problem space and to relate it to
what Althusser called 'a problematic' and Gramsci called 'the conjuncture'.
Does this cluster of concepts refer to aspects of the same thing. David
said that the question I am addressing is what he called the 'contingency
of the present'. Now actually, I would not quite put it that way myself,
although I understand perfectly well why he did. I would say that the object
of my intellectual work is 'the present conjuncture'. It is what Foucault
called 'the history of the present'. It is, what are the circumstances in
which we now find ourselves, how did they arise, what forces are sustaining
them and what forces are available to us to change them? The 'history of
the present', which is a kind of Foucaultian way of talking, brings together
two rather contradictory ideas: history and the present. The present sounds
as if it is very 'presentist' in its implication: right now, what is happening
to us right now. What confronts us immediately now, which is certainly what
he describes as 'dangerous and difficult times'. Yet the history of the
present commits us to thinking of its anterior conditions of existence,
what Foucault might have called its 'genealogies'. So the present, of course,
is a force we have to now transform, but in the light of the conditions
under which it came into existence: the history of the present. The question
of the contingency of the history of the present is critically important
because this is what I want to say about the present - that it is the product
of 'many determinations' but that it remains an open horizon, fundamentally
unresolved, and in that sense open to 'the play of contingency'.
Contingency and
Identity
Here I am simply going to try to identify a number of ideas or themes which
have emerged in the course of the last few days and make a few brief remarks
about them before I pass on. Why contingency? What is it that I have been
wanting to say about contingency? I do not want to say, of course, that
the world has no pattern, no structure, no determinate shape, no determinacy.
But I do want to say that its future is not already wrapped up in its past,
that it is not part of an unfolding teleological narrative, whose end is
known and given in its beginning. I do not believe, in that sense, in 'the
laws of history'. There is no closure yet written into it. And to be absolutely
honest, if you do not agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency
to every historical conjuncture, you do not believe in politics, because
you do not believe that anything can be done about it. If everything is
already given, what is the point of exercising yourself or of trying to
change it in a particular direction? This is a paradox which lies, of course,
right at the heart of classical Marxism. If the laws of history are certain
to unfold, who cares about the practice of the class struggle? Why not just
let them unfold? There are a whole series of Marxisms, which were precisely
mechanistic and reductionist in that 'scientistic' way. Let the laws of
capital unfold! Contingency does require you to say, 'of course, there are
social forces at work here'. History is not infinitely open, without structure
or pattern. The social forces at work in any particular conjuncture are
not random. They are formed up out of history. They're quite particular
and specific, and you have to understand what they are, how they work, what
their limits and possibilities are, what they can and cannot accomplish.
As Gramsci said, 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. But
what is the outcome of the struggle between those different contending relations
or forces is not 'given', known, predictable. It has everything to do with
social practice, with how a particular contest or struggle is conducted.
Even Marx, who was too inclined to subscribe to nineteenth century scientific
historical laws, thought the triumph of socialism, which was supposed to
be written in 'the logic of history', was not inevitable. He saw another
alternative — one which unfortunately seems much closer in the days
of the New World Order: 'socialism or barbarism', he predicted, 'the ruin
of the contending classes'.
My task has been to try to think what determinacy means — what I once called 'the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture' — but without falling into absolute determinacy. I do not believe history is already determined. But I do believe that all the forces at work in a particularly historical conjuncture or a situation one is trying to analyse or a phase of history or development one is trying to unravel, are determinate. They do not arise out of nowhere. They have their own specific conditions of existence. So the conceptual issue is, is there a way of thinking determinateness which is not a closed determinacy? And contingency is the sign of this effort to think determinacy without a closed form of determination. In the same way people say, 'you are a conjuncturalist. You want to analyse, not long epochal sweeps of history, but specific conjunctures'. Why the emphasis on the conjunctures? Why the emphasis on what is historically specific? Well, it has exactly to do with the conception of a conjuncture. A conjuncture is simply the fact that very dissimilar currents, some of a long duration, some of a relatively short duration, tend to fuse or condense at particular moments, into a particular configuration. It is that configuration, with its balance of forces, which is the object of one's analysis or intellectual inquiry. The important thing about thinking conjuncturally is its historical specificity. So, for example, to put it very crudely, I am not as interested in racism as a single phenomenon marching unchanged through time, but in different racisms that arise in specific historical circumstances, and their effectiveness, their ways of operation. I am less interested in capital or capitalism from the seventeenth century to now than I am in different forms of capitalism. I am interested particularly, just now, in the enormously important shift in global capitalism which occurs in the 1970s. That represents the end of what I would call one conjuncture — the conjuncture of the period of the post-war settlement dominated largely — especially in Europe — by a social democratic balance of forces and the welfare state, to the rise of neoliberalism, of global capitalism, and the dominance of 'market forces', which constitutes the contradictory ground on which new interrelationships and interdependencies are being created across the boundaries of nationhood and region, with all the forms of trans-national globalization that have come to dominate the contemporary world. This is what is stamping a new rhythm on politics, in different ways, across the face of the globe. Nation states, national cultures, national economies, remain important, but these 'differences' are being condensed into a new, contradictory 'world system', which is what the term, 'global' actually stands for. This is radically different from the world of decolonization - what David Scott has called 'the Bandung moment' — into which new nations, like Jamaica, emerged. This is a radically new historical moment, and sets us radically new questions, radically new political questions. That is all that is entailed in the move from one conjuncture to another. And the task of — as I once put it — 'Turning your face violently towards things as they really are', is what is required by 'thinking conjuncturally'.
I have also emphasized the question, 'why identity?' I am interested in identity because identity is a source of agency in action. It is impossible for people to work and move and struggle and survive without investing, something of themselves, of who they are, in their practices and activities and building some shared project with others, around which collective social identities can cohere. This is precisely because, historically, there has been an enormous waning and weakening in the given collective identities of the past — of class and tribe and race and ethnic group and so on, precisely because the world has now become more pluralistic, more open-ended, though of course those collective identities have not disappeared in any sense. So those constraints are still on any identity formation. But to me there is a relatively greater degree of openness in the balance between the 'givenness' of an identity and the capacity to construct it or make it. That is all that I was trying to register in the new work on identity. I thought the greater global interdependence and interconnectedness would undermine strongly-centred but exclusive identities and open the possibility of more complex ways of individuals and groups positioning themselves in their own narratives. And I believed that the complexities of the black and 'creole' cultures of the Caribbean and the complexities of the 'hybrid' diaspora identities emerging in the wake of global migration had a great deal to teach us about the dynamics of this new process of identity-formation. Paradoxically, you might think that the revival of fundamentalisms of all kinds runs counter to this thesis. Actually, I believe that the pull of fundamentalism and all types of exclusive identities is a reaction to being marginalizsed or left out of the process of 'vernacular modernization' - the search everywhere for all peoples to have equal access to the means of becoming 'modern persons' and to live the technological possibilities of modern life, in their own ways, to the full, as it were, 'from the inside', which I think is hesitantly, also going on across the world - in the very teeth of the struggle by global capital to master and hegemonize historically constituted differences.
However, though I wrote a lot about 'identity', I always refused the notion that a whole politics could be identified with any single identity position. I have tried to say that identity is always the product of a process of identification. It is the product of taking a position, of staking a place in a certain discourse or practice. In other words, of saying, 'This is, for the moment where I am, who I am and where I stand'. This positional notion of identity enables one then to speak from that place, to act from that place, although sometime later, in another set of conditions, one may want to modify oneself or who it is that is speaking. So in that sense, identity is not a closed book any more than history is a closed book, any more than subjectivity is a closed book, any more than culture is a closed book. It is always, as they say, in process. It is in the making. It is moving from a determinate past towards the horizon of a possible future, which is not yet fully known.