This won’t be an adequate answer to your question – I’m too far away from Althusser’s text right now to provide that – apologies. But one of the things that strikes me just from the passages you’ve quoted, in light of what I’ve written above, is that they are aimed at the question of “a social formation” – the suggestion, then, is that social formations per se could be understood in the terms used above – that categories like “structured complexity” or the existence of a “structural invariant” that “is itself the precondition for the concrete variation of the contradictions that constitute it” – that these are sort of general concepts applicable to any social formation.

I realise this isn’t what you’re asking – following my reaction, rather than your question, here – but, when I talk about my approach being “backward”, this is part of what I mean: I don’t start with any particularly strong claims about what social formations are like. I start with questions, and of course claims, about what some specific social situation is like (trying, somewhere in the process, if I’m managing to be rigorous (which, usually not… but still…) to explain how that specific situation generates the apparently more general categories – like “social” – that I’m using to interrogate that situation) – and, while I’m not averse to extrapolating from that situation, to being attuned to the possibility that other situations may share common features, I try not to assume that they will (impossible to be completely consistent, but this is the basic idea).

Particularly when it comes to claims that are as specific as the ones being made in the quotations you’ve reproduced above: I’m inclined to think it’s probably somewhat weird, to have a social formation that can be described in terms that seem to map fairly well onto Hegel’s particular conceputalisation of the essence-appearance relation – where a “structural invariant, is itself the precondition for the concrete variation of the contradictions that constitute it, and therefore for their displacement, condensations and mutuations, etc., and inversely because this variation is the existence of that invariant“: this sort of formulation works pretty well for as a descriptor of a certain aspect of the reproduction of capital – and I’m willing to be convinced that it might have some use, extrapolated to other situations – but I’d need to be convinced, as on its face it looks like a very specific sort of qualitative characteristic for something to possess, if this makes sense – particularly given that, as I understand Marx, it reads to me as though he spends quite a lot of time trying to understand why the reproduction of capital possesses these sorts of characteristics, and also arguing that social formations as such need not possess them – en route to trying to establish the existence of an emancipatory potential to overcome production oriented to value…

More on point to the question you are asking: in terms of whether this sort of Hegelian essence/appearance relation is what I mean, when talking about contexts being “lumpy” – I think I take myself to be saying something very different. These formulations seem designed to capture the relation between an implicit structure or pattern, and the various explicit phenomena through whose movements that pattern is constituted and expressed. I make an argument like this – or, rather, I argue that Marx makes an argument like this – in talking about the emergent properties of the capital relation. But the strategic intention, I think, of my argument is somewhat different – or maybe it just sounds this way to me. There’s something in Althusser’s formulation that sounds (and I may just be being very unfair – much much too far away from this text, and no time to read it adequately now) as though it would make it somewhat difficult to do what I’m trying to do, which is to make an argument that it might be possible to differentiate the relation from its parts – and to explore the potential qualitative characteristics the parts might hold, outside the relation. There’s something in the vocabulary above that strikes me as though it could work against this, deflect attention from this – and it’s really this sort of “lumpiness” that I’m after, rather than the necessary interconnections between the conflictual moments in an essence-appearance sort of relation, which seems to be where the focus implicitly falls above?

Perhaps the difference is too slight, but I’m aiming for a vocabulary that makes it a bit easier to unearth the potential to break the relation apart. When Marx talks about “contradiction”, he often uses the Hegelian example of the ellipse as an example – where the contradiction between objects moving toward one another, and objects flying apart from one another, is resolved in an elliptical orbit: this isn’t the sort of “lumpiness” I’m after, where contradiction figures just as the generative moment of a lawlike pattern. There may be aspects of the reproduction of capital that do function in something like this way, and that can therefore be theorised appropriately in these terms. But what I’m after is more along the lines of how we can think something that reaches beyond this form of reproductive contradiction – how we can think about the possibility to selectively inherit from our history – to pull chunks from the context, turn them over and examine them, and then start working out what else we might be able to make with them – something else that I wouldn’t assume would necessarily have the same qualitative characteristics that, in these quotations, seem to be attributed to “structured complexity” as such.

There is a presupposition – it sounds? and I may be being deeply unfair – please hear this as a reaction to the quotations taken in isolation, and not to the work – that social formations are always a similar sort of beast. I’m not claiming that they aren’t – but I’m not clear of the basis for claiming that they are. And my sense is that Marx puts quite a lot of his effort into demonstrating the practical genesis – and therefore the historical contingency – of this specific essence-appearance structure (thus, Marx characterises value as a “social hieroglyph” because he thinks it’s constituted this way, but he argues that this sort of hieroglyph isn’t necessarily characteristic of other historical periods – whatever the other flaws those periods might possess, etc.).

Apologies if this doesn’t make any sense or is completely off point – still having difficulty adjusting to local time, and have been up all night – possibly not the best recipe for an intelligible comment. And I probably shouldn’t have commented at all without working back through the text properly.

From ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’: “Only overdetermination enables us to understand the concrete variations and mutations of a structured complexity such as a social formation… not as the accidental variations and mutations produced by external ‘conditions’ in a fixed structured whole… but as so many concrete restructurations inscribed in the essence, the ‘play’… of the articulations of the complex structure in dominance which is reflected in them.” (p. 210) “So uneveness is internal to a social formation because the structuration in dominance of the complex whole, this structural invariant, is itself the precondition for the concrete variation of the contradictions that constitute it, and therefore for their displacement, condensations and mutations, etc., and inversely because this variation is the existence of that invariant.” (p. 213).

For what it’s worth…