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 ungain...
