Decoding that Infamous Sentence

Last week, in writing about Judith Butler, I quoted a notoriously obscure sentence of hers, often invoked to show how much her work requires that the reader work in the decoding business.

I'd now like to take a crack at the decoding of that sentence myself, so here it is again:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

So ... what does this mean? I'll substitute three shorter sentences for that one ungainly one, and give it all back to you this way.

The shift from classical Marxism to Althusserian Marxism has been a positive one, and has made other good changes possible. In particular, Louis Althusser has pressed us to see how capitalist ideologies become internalized within the minds and bodies of the oppressed, deforming us into creatures who consent. But we can go beyond this, to acknowledge that the internalization isn't a static thing, it has to renew itself constantly in order to retain its force.

Don't quote me as saying anything like that, please folks! This is simply an exercise in clarifying the obscure. And my point is that the obscure generally stays obscure for good reason. It is much less interesting to a certain sort of (sophomoric) mind once decoded.

That is Althusser's image, above. I love the pipe, bruh.

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