The following passage from a short essay by Judith Butler won the 1998 prize for 'the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles"
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 there is a move from an account of x to a view of y and this was marked by a shift from z to...what?
A conception of y. But a conception is the same thing as a view. So, the move from x to y was the same as the shift from z to y. How can we be sure this is the case? Because Butler says it was 'marked' by it.
But this is like saying my move from London to Glasgow was marked by my shifting from England's largest city to Scotland's largest city. One might say this is verbose but still meaningful. What would be crazy is saying 'my move from London to London was marked by shifting from London to London'. But that is what Butler is doing. Marxian Capital is dynamic. It isn't a 'steady state' or one period economy. Structuring is an activity. It is temporal. Althusserian 'homology' just means 'similarity' with relative autonomy rather than something deterministic. Althusser says a structural totality can't be a theoretical object because of 'interpellation'. We might say the 'intension' 'structural totality' doesn't have a well-defined extension because of impredicativity. Butler may have thought there was some hiatus valde deflendum between Althusser & Gramsci- but Althusser was acknowledging his debt to Gramsci more & more before he went totally nuts & killed his own wife. Moreover a 'view of hegemony' is the same as a 'conception' of it. As for temporality, it is baked into all Marxist theories because Marx was concerned with 'laws of motion'- i.e. dynamics.
Thus Butler's sentence features both ignorance, stupidity, and bad syntax. To be fair, it featured in a short piece grandiloquently titled 'Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time'
The exchange that Ernesto Laclau
a nitwit about whom I have written elsewhere
and I conducted through e-mail last year at this time begins a conversation that I expect will continue. And I suppose I would like to use this “supplementary” reflection to think about what makes such a conversation possible,
Email. Also both Laclau & Butler had shit for brains & taught worthless shite.
and what possibilities might emerge from such a conversation.
What emerged was one of the worst sentences in the English language.
First of all, I think that I was drawn to the work of Laclau and Mouffe
not an 'Essex girl' but a founder of the even stupider 'Essex School'
when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history.
In which case saying 'Capitalism is turning into a cat' would cause it to turn into a cat. That would drive the Boss Class bananas.
The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation.
Say 'Capitalism is a cat' again and again. That way it will remain a cat. The fucking oligarchs will have kittens.
As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities.
But the Whig theory of History or the Marxist theory of History or even the Eschatological Christian or Islamist view of History is dynamic. No polity in the world thinks 'timeless totalities' exist though, no doubt, you might say Commies are stuck with a silly nineteenth century theory or that Biden or Trump are living in the past when WASP men ruled the world.
I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement.
Derrida was saying we have to use stuff we inherited but are creative bricoleurs in the say we use it. His lecture was post-structural. If a structure is temporal (i.e. has dynamics) then both repetition & 'recovery of origins' is impossible. Thus, even if the British or Japanese monarchy faithfully repeats all medieval ceremonies, the structure of medieval society won't be re-imposed. The context was the French Communist Party's losing touch with students & intellectuals back in the mid-Sixties. Rigidly deterministic 'Vulgar Marxism' was passe.
The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement
is Idealism. It isn't Dialectical Materialism. If you repeatedly reconceive yourself as a cat you don't become or remain a cat- unless you are a fucking cat.
means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance,
e.g. when you start off meaning to say 'I'm a cat' but end up saying 'I am elderly South Indian man and not a cat at all! Boo!'
that for structure, and social structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition at its basis.
If women didn't keep reconceiving themselves as women, they will turn into men- unless they become cats or cabbages.
Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its own installation.
Very true. The nuclear family appears structured. There's Mummy & there's Daddy & there's your little sister & your big brother & Woofy the dog, What nobody tells you is that this structure was installed by the fucking Phone Company! I'm actually a cat and live on Uranus.
The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).
Laclau was from Argentina. He & Mouffe were based in Essex. Spivak was from India & lived in America. They had zero political importance. Structuralism & post-structuralism may have had some significance so long as the French Communist Party could command at least 20 percent of votes. By 1983, its share fell to 15 percent & continued to fall. Then Gorby tanked the Soviet Union & only the most utterly useless of academics bothered with Marxian shite.
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.
To be fair, Laclau & Mouffe were exactly as stupid and ignorant as the above suggests.
It is, of course, impossible in this context to reconstruct the particular way in which Derrida’s work and Foucault’s work converge in the reconceptualization of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe have offered.
Because they weren't quite as stupid & ignorant as that gormless pair.
One of the points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations.
From which they have never been absent. There was a time when some believed that 'the fixed stars' represented a timeless realm. Change & decay were confined to the sublunary sphere. But that was very long ago.
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