The Politics of Conjuncture: Stuart Hall, Articulation and the Commitment to Specificity

Abstract

The previous chapter described the desire to communicate empathy as a recurring feature of cultural studies. The field’s affective voices seek to convey compassion for those that have not always been the focus for academic concern, encouraging readers to recognise their own complicity in the circumstances which keep people distant from each other in multi-ethnic, class- and resource-differentiated societies. Yet generating empathy is only one way that cultural studies contributes to this task. In this chapter, I want to describe the conjunctural emphasis that has also characterised the field from its inception, drawing out the ways in which a focus on the particularities of the present adds another unique dimension to cultural studies’ analyses.