What's the point of conjunctural analysis?

Abstract

With conjunctural approaches to urban research fast proliferating, along with the compounding crises they seek to study, now's the time to ask: what's the point of conjunctural analysis? Its purpose, I argue, is to offer a method for identifying points of condensation of crisis and contradiction within the social totality of planetary colonial capitalism, with a view to providing practical pointers on how to begin to exploit those moments for strategic intervention. This makes conjunctural analysis a distinctive, praxis-oriented mode of historical materialism – understood as an open, relational and holistic critical theory encompassing feminist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives, and alert to multiple social relations of domination, of exploitation and appropriation, notably gender, race and ecology as well as class. What conjunctural analysis adds to the two main methods of historical materialism – one apprehending capital's necessary form ; the other capitalism's historical formation – is a more strategic and speculative orientation to social change as this emerges through contestation at pressure points in contradictory social formations, to assist in praxis, in the rearticulation of these formations for emancipatory ends. To that end, I attempt to provide conjunctural analysis with an epistemological grounding in dialectical relations between subjectivity and objectivity, totality and particularity, thought and history, past and future – a means to understand where, how and why to look for the conjuncture. The article concludes with suggestions on what such a vision for conjunctural analysis might mean for urban research through considering urban applications of conjunctural thinking.

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