Conjuncture as Method
The conjuncture unfolds around us in a series of escalating crises. Thinking with the conjuncture is timely; we need an appropriate timescale, and what we have is confounding. We need to think the present beyond the incessant rhythm of news cycles and social media feeds, and beyond the level of tactic and even strategy.
We write and think from so-called Australia, we live on stolen land — it always was, it always will be. Indigenous sovereignty endures and constantly undoes fragile and performative colonial assertions of control. This is the fundamental, continuing crisis, but settler colonialism itself is always changing. We should account for its current conjunctural manifestations in a timely fashion.
Thinking the conjuncture can help frame the present in original and productive ways. Gramsci observed one crisis — ‘the interregnum’: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Stuart Hall’s conjunctural analysis captured another crisis: the consolidating hegemony of neoliberal discourse. The current crisis is protracted indeed, and morbid symptoms are everywhere.
We face crisis: colonial crisis, racial crisis, social crisis, environmental crisis, and a crisis of legitimacy. We need conjunctural analysis, because the current crisis is a moment of danger, but also possibility. We need conjunctural analysis because we believe, in Althusserian terms, that the conjuncture (that is, the analysis of the ‘current moment’) is a prerequisite for action.
Morbid symptoms we see around us include (we are not being systematic, this is not an exhaustive list, and these interrelated crises are not listed in order of importance):
Indigenous sovereignty produces a legitimacy crisis constantly resutured by settler nationalism. Always, the reactionary forces of settler ultranationalism / fascism lurk, and in the present moment step to centre stage. But remedial forms of liberal settler nationalism also loom, and attempt to reconcile irreconcilable contradictions. The progressive Yes campaign for the Voice to Parliament contained its own forms of reaction: a co-optation of unsurrendered Indigenous claims, and a renewed search for settler-colonial completion. Settler fascism versus reconciled settler nationhood remains a false opposition.
The environmental catastrophe forces a crisis — settler eco-fascisms lurk as a new constellation of reaction. White nationalism is a response to crisis, but so is the shameless appropriation of Indigenous relations to land. Morbid symptoms proliferate here too. The settler societies cannot respond to climate change because they are the changing climate. They rehearse exclusionary tropes, or they rehearse appropriation and the indigenisation of the settler. This is yet another false opposition, a papering over of ontological contradiction.
Even more generally: neoliberalism was always disheartening, and it always was unsustainable. Now it is manifestly failed; no one believes in its empty, still recited promises. So, neoliberalism is dead, but the new is not emerging, the ground from which it might having been thoroughly destabilised. It becomes mutated, the walking dead, the interregnum here is especially pregnant with fascist possibility, and nationalism is obsessively reasserted, like the international borders that underpin its constitutive units. Obsessive repetition suggests a loss of meaning and coherence. These are zombie nationalisms: relentless, aggressive, unthinking, contaminating.
In neoliberalism’s wake, History has returned. It had never ended, but its return is not what we expected. It is not a return to moving forward, it is forwarding returns. Geopolitics returns, explicit authoritarianism returns, autarky returns; militarisation reigns, and militarism is a settler colonial mindset, colonising the mind and perpetuating the interregnum. The ‘new’ regimes of accumulation are also a return: ‘Political capitalism’, ‘technofeudalism’ — the new is old, and the old is new, again. The crisis of identity begets identity politics, in reactionary and progressive forms. Old imperial alliances are revived; new reactionary ones emerge. TERFs and Nazis make strange bedfellows. AUKUS is a throwback, and so is the new green New Deal. Elsewhere, pan-Russian Eurasianists are fighting neo-Banderaists — morbid returns.
Worshippers of death everywhere; morbid symptoms everywhere. But Indigenous sovereignty is also everywhere. The confrontation takes bloody forms in the current nationalist race war, but as always, the triumph of settlerness remains impossible, and always at the point of collapse.