2. Conjunctural Analysis Part One: From Early Political Writings to Resistance Through Rituals

This chapter starts with an exploration of the meaning of the term ‘conjuncture’, both its everyday meaning and its take-up within Marxist theorising by Althusser and by Gramsci. This entails a consideration of its relationship to the idea of crisis and its difference from the cognate Gramscian term ‘organic’ and is followed by a summary definition. Examples from Hall’s early political writings are then deployed in order to demonstrate what is involved in conjunctural analysis. Although written before Hall consciously adopted the term, these nonetheless show Hall thinking and analysing conjuncturally. The research-based article about ‘the hippies’ is similarly analysed. Here, Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ methodology was consciously adopted, a methodology that is a form of conjunctural analysis. The chapter ends with an examination of the youth subcultures project that produced RTR. Although not conceptualised as such at the time, in retrospect it resembles a successor project to Hall’s hippies article. By this point in time, the Gramscian-inspired, conjunctural methodology had become explicit.