The Warrior presents this for your entertainment:
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. --Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley
Wait, wait!! There's more!!!
Ms. Butler is also admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,”...
I thought all the Smartest People on the Planet were elected Democrats or their appointees. How did they overlook this gift from God?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
The nefarious entities re-wrote the rules to suit themselves and to fuck us.
Signed,
Judith Methane-Extraction's nemesis Saint Guggenheim
So, what she's saying is this: Once Marxists thought that capitalism always structured power in a single predictable way: towards monopoly, towards centralization, and therefore towards alienation of the masses of people (see, especially, Das Kapital). What we have sense learned is that, over time, unexpected ("contingent") new forms of power and capital can arise -- as for example when smaller firms out-compete a slower giant -- leading to unexpected changes in who has the power, and who gets the money (see, especially, Joseph Schumpeter; although she is citing Louis Althusser, the French Marxist).
It's a pretty simple point, in other words: "it turns out Marx was wrong to believe that capitalism tends always towards concentration of wealth and power."
The other thing about the piece is that it shows how far Marxism has fallen. Once they prided themselves on reaching out to the ordinary man, the working man, the proletariat, the guy on the factory floor. Now they are retrenched in minor segments of academia, and even there reduced to writing in code.
She's an award-winning professor of rhetoric? Was the award for "Best Parody"?
Post a Comment