[PEN-L:2403] Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest winners

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
>Butler:
>
>> 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.
>
>Henwood:
>
>"An older view, associated with structuralism, which held that capital
>shaped social life in a unitary and timeless way, has given way to a new
>view of power, as something dispersed, changeable, and requiring constant
>reinforcement and reassertion."
>
>Or something like that. Which leads us to performativity and citationality,
>and the lbo-talk Butler seminar, which needs a little dose of editorial
>discipline, something I'll attend to imminently.
>
>Doug

A reasonable try, but what did you do with the words and phrases:

"convergence"
"takes structural totalities as theoretical objects"
"contingent possibility of structure"

?

And then there are the deeper problems with the paragraph: power that is
dispersed and contingent ain't hegemony, and so forth...


Brad DeLong