Time falls through the sky and is caught by nobody. This essay is a beginning. To address myself to a fairly abstract and well-traveled problem means that I will not begin to solve it in any meaningful way, and probably not even in a way that has not been tried before. My position as a writer is a necessarily humble one, since all that which I might think or write has been variously thought and written already, not less than that the objects of thought mostly resist the intrusion of writing, anyway. There is always the trouble of articulation in intellectual work, work which I might define broadly here as any thoughtful play toward knowledge, any attempt to distill something coherent or useful or productive out of natural chaos. It is something of a vain project; perhaps the post-structuralist turn was adjourned by its own nihilism but the effects have carried forward through time. One tries to do the work of thought and finds that contained within a lot of thinking is the angst of definition, noticed by Annie Dillard in her hint that “what [God] will not do is catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days”. Observed by Wittgenstein—and equally mystical—is the declaration that the inexpressible is woven into the background of the expressed: unreachable, always enigmatic, but certainly there; a reliably present, though ineffable, thread of the fabric.2
All of this is why I like Stuart Hall. His thinking with and about the field of cultural studies indicates an understanding of how tension in the domain of inaccessible semiosis is not only inevitable to the academy but necessary. Knowledge production that maintains the disagreement between theory and politics—that works from within and around it—is living knowledge: it strains for something just out of reach. Other knowledge is merely productive. Hall’s conjunctural thought was historically his chosen tool to treat the tension—a sort of history of the present, a method of thinking for “break[ing] into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently represents”, for encountering the hidden relations that fuse and form hegemonic configurations that are always specific and never permanent. Through conjunctural thinking is addressed (addressed, as in: is spoken to) the general problem to which I alluded at start; that is, the problem of the unreality and nonexistence of a true human universal—in spite of the alluring resolutions of meaning its pursuit and potential discovery would promise us. The fictive universal might go by the name of Power or cruelty or Love, or by any other name or by multiple: Hall, regardless, rejects the premise. Conjunctural thinking is thus a way of making sense of the gap between private affect—in all its paradox and specificity—and the wider socio-cultural arena in which it abides in such a way that dodges essentialist stitchings-up. In fact, it makes sense of that gap in a way that conflates and eliminates it. There is no eternal social force or political circumstance, of any articulation, that exists independent of the locality of expression. The material or affectual perplexity of a scene is braided to the twin enigma of culture and politics and they are not separable.
Nonetheless Hall’s conjuncture is most often more paradigmatic and pragmatic in tone; it has a social and political specificity to it that he prioritizes. Consider Dillard again, for the simple reason that she writes beautifully but also for a radical specificity of the material. This is what I would, if I could, marry to Hall’s socio-political:
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. We might as well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived, for the Amazon basin, which covers half a continent, and for the life that—there, like anywhere else—is always and necessarily lived in detail: on the tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade.
Maybe someone sits under some other shade, and eats some other guava, or perhaps they eat another fruit, or nurse a child, or perhaps they stand, or they sit in the sun on a bank, with feet dangling over water. These things are in many ways all the same thing. But like Gramsci’s ‘conundrums’ of the theoretical—wherein critique reveals that the scenes of modernity always poke out, in their particularities, from beneath the blanket of grand theory (Marxist or otherwise)—they are the same at a certain level only. Conjunctural thinking maintains this as a conditional point of articulation. Socially-held, self-apparent universals like economic systems or hegemonic power structures or systems of governance may be alike in the nature or character of their effects but always give way to their circumstances of enunciation. Meaning: the conjuncture is an object of the historical present, loyal to those events, trends, systems, people, geographies, and whatever else make the moment uniquely its own. It may be profitably compared to other events, systems, geographies, and maintains some level of congruence with them, but it is not them. It is always subject to the singularities of the cultural moment, and the guava-eater is subject to the singularities of their eating.
The only human thing that may in fact be universal, then, is the specificity and unrelation of the details of social life. That is to say, all that is shared between us and our worlds is non-congruence and dissociation: one point for the post-structuralists. And yet—I am not myself willing to give up that the inexpressible is indeed woven into the expressed, nor permit that there ought not be a God who might bowl us over at any moment by tossing a few cents’ worth into the mix. And so I use Hall’s conjunctural thinking, and his essay on the efficacy of cultural studies, as a lens to bear on a nascent and potentially unoriginal experiment in anthropological thinking (or at the least, in my own thinking) that treats the ‘part’ (mostly as in: a part of the truth) as the locus of the inexpressible.
This idea of the part arrives at the juncture of multiple tensions. There is one tension, from anthropologist I.C. Jarvie, that though methodology purports to lead the user along straight paths into the research, away from the shortcomings of theory, it will invariably fail. Methodology is at most only a governing set of rules promising transcendence of, while remaining subservient to, the afflicted sociality that gives rise to it. There is a related tension (Hall’s own) for the field of cultural studies that minds how an “adequate theoretical account” of cultural relations—an account that would do justice to their breadth—is by nature impossible, and yet necessary if intellectual practice is to remain a politics of relevance rather than a simple vanity. There is the seemingly ever-present tension I’ve felt in my fledgling scholastic career between the idealized human desire for the objective and the de facto circumstance of humanity’s existence in a world of meanings that they have themselves made. The social world is unfortunately only a legible one from the contaminated position of inhabitation. Too, there is the tension in my own mind between the (at the very least, linguistic) impossibility of a universal—of a ‘transcendental signified’—in the aftermath of the semiotic turn and yet the apparent prerequisite of one, if one is to believe as I do in that maxim of Wittgenstein. Would we not find that all of our intellectual work is founded on footings of belief, if we dug downwards long enough? The juncture, regardless, is a productive place to be thinking from, much as the conjuncture is a productive paradigm to be thinking with.
This idea of the part has been pollinated or impelled by certain textual encounters that track a similarity in my mind. These are: Geertz’s analogies, in which well-understood realities are employed against the ill-understood so as to “[bring them] into the circle of the known”; the ‘Appearances’ of Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo, where strings of a guitar beget golden hair and a precious stone begets a sea on which a ship sails; and the parables of the Gospels, which dangle the promise of shimmering depth just behind what is (or was once) quotidian. In these, the part contains the inexpressible whole, or inexpressible other, despite its inevitable lacks and wants and limitations of circumstance. As Geertz says, intellectual fashion is about as likely to obscure and delude as it is to enliven or enlighten, and probably the same could be said about analogy or any other language that mobilizes one thing in order to index another. And so in the tentative exploration of the same, despite the markedly cultural rather than discursive orientation of Hall, it is useful to apply both his essay Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies specifically and his conjunctural style of thinking in general. Hall has thought determinedly about what strictures make an academic inclination a living one. I wish to think with Hall about this—about how to make a type of study intellectually viable as well as relevant.
In that essay Hall wrestles with the need for arbitrary closure of the field, for a set of conceptual boundaries, so to speak. This costs him, for it is clear that he wishes to abandon any reductionist conceptions of what cultural studies is ‘about.’ But it is a boundary that he ultimately defines by the productive tension mentioned above, which is necessary to “hold” so that the field holds, and which becomes the field’s characteristic expression. “Stak[ing] out some points of distinction” is necessary for any practice that wishes to make a difference, and bounding a thing makes it more powerful and useful.
So this tension then, wherein the mythical ‘whole’ of culture can only be readily accessed by theoretical inquiries which always-already fall short, has bearing on this idea of mine of a methodology sourced in the incomplete (to what exactly that methodology would be applied is a worry that, for now, has to remain unrealized). Conjunctural thinking, for instance, while operating in the gaps left by disciplinary theory, does prefer the specificity of the part to the false unity of the whole: specificity has more truth-telling power. And that Dillard’s guava being eaten in a pattern of shade on the Rio Napo carries such a feeling of relevance-despite-irrelevance should not be surprising. Hall is convinced and committed to the idea that a good cultural critique is done in this specific, conditional way, and the essay ultimately arrives at the intersection of that critique and of ‘politics’. Crucially, what is meant here is nothing like the political in the banal sense. It is because bounded things are necessarily incomplete and because culture cannot monolithically be reconciled with other “questions that matter” that the legacies of cultural studies are ‘political’. The questions jockey with one another. Any textual practice (and cultural studies certainly is one) has to assume disparate affiliations with the world. This may sound like a non-starter for a field that has been christened ‘cultural studies’, but Hall belabors the point in order to avoid a “theoretical fluency” in the discipline which would supersede its vocational entanglements with the various profane investments of the more concretely social: classrooms, corporations, races, genders, governments, offices, and the rest. Culture works through these textualities and intertextualities and admits all sorts of irritations at their seams, and all the theory can do is try to throw some darts at the board. If it doesn’t then it has departed from its own subject.
To follow this, a theory or methodology of the part both reflects and learns from the wrangling Hall has already done. The specific, partial, or incomplete found in certain textual practices, like and beyond the few encounters I mentioned above, reflect the ontology of the ‘conjuncture’ in specificity of articulation and specificity of scope. They are tools of language that manifest and operate contextually but hint at the inexpressible. The specific, partial, or incomplete learn from, grow from, the strictures of Hall that implore their assumption of the political, though I think they lack the same sense of the paradigmatic. The specific, partial, or incomplete are, of course, subject to corruption, to power investment, to rearticulation according to interests; and any existent analogy, fable, or poem is likely ripe for the accusation of being shot through with any of the above. Nonetheless, what makes these things ‘political’ in the Hallsian sense is that they are imbued with an intertext that conditions their enunciation and knowledge-making as specifically unique and also productively incomplete, working only in certain ways and not in others, butting up against the walls of other enunciations.
It is necessary to name things. I’ve been saying that the part exceeds the whole, that deliberate incompleteness is a clue towards the complete, that radical specificity is a better register than the sweeping. It is clunky to talk always in spirals, and the contributing ideas here could perhaps be coalesced into a representative word. In my mind, the words “partiality” and “partial anthropology” diverge from my main point; they could be read as implying preference, they could be read with a temporary inflection that sees incompleteness as something in need of relief, or something that will be relieved. Maybe, for now, I offer the somewhat silly ‘partish’; I think it emphasizes the boundedness and allows the incomplete to be a legitimate, tenable foundation for a departure into the trickier metaphysical problems of the academy.
Because the partish is not holistic, it is fairly open, which could subject it to expropriative influence. But I think it also means the expropriative can all the more easily be dumped out in favor of the generative. Partish language need not ideologize, and could be wielded socially, already is being wielded socially, to “break into the confusing fabric of the real” that is otherwise knitted up with hegemony. In truth, I am not sure how partish work gets done; I just sense a mystery in the resistance of this sort of language to fictions of the human universal, and a mystery in this language’s ability to clarify, or at least indicate, the inexpressible through its intentional imperfection. Hall has here offered me an architecture, and Dillard a sort of evidence: the world, unbearably specific, can be described—in good faith—in language only when the language is partish and stakes out its position bravely, and with forgiving particularity. Against the fabrics of the social and the real, sometimes a needle is the right tool.
