Conjunctural analysis

Last updated: Tuesday, 02 July 2024

Conjunctural analysis examines the multiple forces converging at a particular sociopolitical moment to create a distinctive set of conditions, or “conjuncture”.

Qualities of such analyses: ‘grounded, situated investigations, executed on moving terrains; contextual and reflexive theorizing, married to a disruptive ethos and commitments to politics otherwise; distrust of economism, functionalism, and parsimonious, reductive or monocausal explanation, etc.’ (Peck 2024)

It involves identifying the multiple, intersecting processes and contradictions at work in a given context or situation, and exploring how they condense or “fuse” to produce a specific configuration of power relations, cultural meanings and political possibilities.

‘Conjunctural’ denoting the more ephemeral or contingent elements of a situation?

Rather than treating history as a linear progression, conjunctural analysis sees it as moving from one conjuncture to another, with crises as drivers of change when contradictions can no longer be contained. A given conjuncture as a moment of danger and opportunity? A moment, not a slice of time. Recognisable to those who inhabit it.

My starting point is to treat a conjuncture as a distinctive configuration of time and space: it is a spatio-temporal phenomenon. Conjunctures have distinctive trajectories driven by the multiple social relations and dynamics that are compressed and condensed within their specific temporal and spatial frame. By condensed, I mean to convey the sense of being squeezed together under pressure so that they entangle and interfere with one another. Such dynamics drive a further multiplicity: the proliferation of crises, tensions, antagonisms and conflicts which give the specific conjuncture its distinctive character and trajectory. — John Clarke, The Battle for Britain: Crises, Conflicts and the Conjuncture (2023)

Conjunctural analysis pays close attention to the uneven, complex, and overdetermined character of conjunctures, recognising that different groups may be affected in different ways. At the same time, it seeks to identify the underlying “problem-space”, the core issues and antagonisms that define a conjuncture, and how they are articulated and fought out.

  • [?] How are these problem-spaces identified and articulated? What criteria are used to determine the core issues and antagonisms? How are these mapped and analysed?

Crucially, conjunctural analysis is not just descriptive, but intended as a strategic intervention, discerning the “points of least resistance” in a given social formation and informing transformative political action.

  • [?] How do the insights from conjunctural analysis translate into concrete strategies and tactics on the ground?

The aim of conjunctural analysis is always to map a social territory, in order to identify possible sites of political intervention. Such interventions need not actually be made, or be made on behalf of any particular political project or tendency, for the analysis to have validity; but its potential utility to anyone wanting to intervene in a given situation is the key criteria according to which conjunctural analyses can be judged. — Jeremy Gilbert, “This Conjuncture: For Stuart Hall” (2019)

To think across cases and contexts, sites and situations, is to theorize conjuncturally, to stress-test competing explanations and to probe alternative sources of conditioning and causation. — Jamie Peck, “Articulating conjunctural analysis” (2024)

  • [?] How might computer support change the praxis of conjunctural analysis? Could it enable new forms of collaborative, participatory or public-facing conjunctural analysis?

  • [?] What specific steps, techniques, frameworks might conjunctural analysis require?
  • [?] What determines where one conjuncture ends and another begins, both temporally and spatially?

  • [?] Can conjunctures overlap or nest?

  • [&] Compare with: hauntology? (both concerned with contextual/historical entanglements)
  • [&] See also: cognitive mapping? (both about understanding and representing complex wholes & connections from within?)
  • [&] Compare with: vital conjunctures? (large vs. small-scale)

Tags: epistemics, time