My decision to separate space and time in the preceding two chapters has been both artificial and unsustainable. It proved impossible to write about the shifting arrangements and alignments of places, not least the more or less United Kingdom, without encountering their tendency to shift – as relationships, processes, imaginaries and institutions changed. And it has also been impossible to write about different temporalities without recognising that they ‘take place’ – happening in particular places and in the relationships between those places. Nevertheless, I think the separation has been useful, given that neither space nor time is simple to discuss. But then the next challenge emerges – how to think conjuncturally in ways that pay attention to both space and time.

For me, it is useful to think of these multiple relationships and dynamics as being condensed in the making of the present conjuncture. The idea of being condensed is intended to emphasise something of the effects of compression – the squeezing of this multiplicity into the confines of the ‘here and now’ brings tensions, pressures, distortions and antagonisms into being in the process. This view also implies treating the conjuncture as being simultaneously overdetermined and underdetermined. It is always overdetermined (in the Freudian/Althusserian sense) by the constitutive copresence of many heterogeneous forces, tendencies, contradictions and antagonisms: there is no singular cause or motive force that makes history move. A conjuncture is always what Hall (2003, following Marx, 1857/1973) called a ‘unity in difference’, rather than a simple or expressive totality. At the same time, it is necessarily underdetermined in its multiple lines of possibility: there are different potential resolutions of the current troubles that might be assembled into political projects and enacted by a political bloc if it can assemble sufficient support or consent. For me, it is exactly this sense of multiplicity and possibility that insists we refuse reductive or deterministic readings of a crisis or its resolution.

This leaves a further question – if conjunctures are marked by this sort of heterogeneity, how do we recognise them? How can we identify what coheres to form a conjuncture, and how do we know when a new one emerges?