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Karl Korsch identi es in Marx’s work what he calls “the principle of historical speci cation,” the way in which “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a de nite historical epoch.” This work is concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. With this paper I hope to show how the principle of historical speci cation has been interpreted within the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies, paying speci c attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture,” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to historical research. I argue that a conception of plural temporality is central to the mode of historical analysis associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In his 1937 essay, “Leading Principles of Marxism,” Karl Korsch identi es in Marx’s writing what he calls “the principle of historical speci cation,” describing it in this way: “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a de nite historical epoch. He criticizes all the categories of the bourgeois theorists of society in which this speci c character has been effaced.” In the current work, I am concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. In what follows, I look at the tradition of cultural studies associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at The University of Birmingham, a tendency that is notable for its emphasis on historical and contextual speci city. With this paper, then, I show how the principle of historical speci cation has been interpreted within this tradition of cultural studies and draw attention to the theoretical premises that ground this interpretation. Following the work of Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg, I argue that cultural studies not only takes historical speci cation as a kind of methodological precept, but, more fundamentally, takes historical speci city as itself the primary object of analysis. In presenting this argument, I pay speci c attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to social research. Among other things, I suggest that cultural studies ought to af rm a notion of temporal multiplicity and reject any straightforwardly historicist account of time (that is, of time as linear, homogenous, and progressive). I argue for this by suggesting that there is a nonarbitrary relation between the abstract structure of a social formation and the form of historical time that is predicated of it. In doing this, I follow Althusser’s suggestion that a materialist philosophy of history is broadly committed to the proposition that how social existence is imagined and described conditions (in some strong sense) how history and historical time are imagined and described. In one respect, then, this paper is an attempt to bring the Althusserian critique of historicism into explicit relation with cultural studies’ practice of conjunctural analysis. 1 This paper is organized in two sections. The rst addresses the place of Korsch’s “principle of historical speci cation” in the Marxian tradition, suggesting several ways in which we may recognize readings of Marx that emphasize this principle. The second section focuses directly on theoretical work within cultural studies, especially on the work of Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg. It looks in particular at how the concept of a “conjuncture” provides a theoretical foundation for the radically contextual form of social research associated with this tradition. 1. Marxism and historical speci city: an overview To foreground the principle of historical speci cation in one’s reading of Marx is, at its most basic, to assert two things: (1) Marx’s analysis is not aimed at uncovering universal laws of social development, but is —to one degree or another—limited in its historical scope. Often this limit is taken to be coterminous with the historical limits of capitalism itself—the presumption being that Marx was fundamentally concerned only with capitalism and that his analysis, therefore, cannot (unless appropriately quali ed) explain either pre or post-capitalist social formations. (2) Not only is Marx’s analysis restricted to a particular historical period, but so too are the categories he uses in developing this analysis. In other words, readings that foreground the principle of historical speci cation claim that the meanings of the basic theoretical categories with which Marx analyzes capitalism (labor, capital, value, the commodity, etc.) are historically speci c. The suggestion, then, is that these categories do not express any transhistorical content, but instead represent the particularity of social and economic forms that are operative under capitalism alone. For example, Moishe Postone argues that the category “labor” (at least as it operates in Marx’s mature analysis) does not primarily name a transhistorical practice, but instead describes a historically particular form of “social mediation.” In Postone’s reading, labor is understood as a historically speci c activity that constitutes and modulates a unique kind of social interdependence (viz. one in which labor—irrespective of its concrete attributes— functions as a means for making a claim on social wealth). The category, therefore, cannot be unproblematically applied outside of the initial context for which Marx developed it. (We may note in passing that Postone treats the category of “value” similarly: for him, “value” names the historically speci c “form of wealth” that corresponds to this function of labor under capitalism.) In his commentary on Marx’s 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse, Stuart Hall similarly af rms the historical speci city of Marx’s categories. On the category of “production” in Marx’s system, Hall writes: There is no “production-in-general”: only distinct forms of production, speci c to time and conditions. [ . . . ] Since any mode of production depends upon “determinate conditions”, there can be no guarantee that those conditions will always be ful lled, or remain constant or “the same” through time. For example: except in the most common-sense way, there is no scienti c form in which the concept, “production”, referring to the capitalist mode, and entailing as one of its required conditions, “free labour”, can be said to have an “immediate identity” (to be “essentially the same as”) production in, say, slave, clan or communal society. Hall notes that while certain categories may appear transhistorical, they do so only at a very high level of abstraction. At such a level, however, they cease to be useful for developing a rigorous analysis of any particular historical moment. For example, by 2

Marxism, Cultural Studies, and the “Principle Of Historical Specification”