May 26, 2018:
"Conjuncture" is a key concept of Lenin's, through which one thinks the complexity of a current situation, whether in politics or theory. Similarly to the Problematic, a Conjuncture is an ensemble of relationships within a structure of dominance, where one element determines the others. For Lenin, all political strategy should be based on a "concrete analysis of the concrete situation". Althusser insists that all philosophy should be thought of as conjunctural: interventions within specific circumstances. One of his most interesting middle period texts, &qut;The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research", is an analysis of the philosophical conjuncture in France in 1966, sketching the relationships between and relative strengths of Existentialism, "sedimentary" survivals of French Medieval scholasticism, spiritualism, critical rationalism descending from Descartes, rationalist empiricism, the official Marxism of the Party, the Marxism of Sartre, and so on, concluding with a "situation" of his own project within this field — and a plea for allies. His readings in the history of philosophy attempt something similar. In its strongest form, these analyses imply that the text is engendered by the conjuncture, similar to the way Althusser sometimes says, or verges on saying, that the individual human subjects who produce the texts are themselves produced as thinking subjects by the Problematic. In this sense, the dyad Problematic/Conjuncture is the same logic at different levels of abstraction. Problematic is abstract, Conjuncture is concrete: the overdetermined articulation of multiple Problematics at a particular moment of their evolution in time.