the philosophy journal is done by a group of neo-liberal, anti-academic hacks whose institutional origins escapes me at the moment. but they have a point. as an article i have forthcoming in film criticism points out (though not very pointedly), judy's lugubrious prose moment like this is meant to do something simple: contrast an old, "bad," althusserian notion of hegemony and economic determination to a newer, spiffier, more "fluid," "convergent," "articulatory," etc. one. it's like derrida on actually existing marxism--all of sudden, all that nuance, all that attention to detail that goes into reading heidegger, schmitt and (for butler) lacan, goes out the window when it comes to althusser or chile or czech republic, and what we get is this cartoon image of the old (read: rigid, un-nuanced, totalizing, simplistic) marxism contrasted with the new (nuanced, sensitive to detail, de-totalizing, etc.) i don't buy it--in judy's case especially, it's a gesture that condenses profound professional and political anxiety. she wants to have it both ways--she's got all the symbolic authority she could imagine, and she's still on the outside, she still subversive, undermining that bad old logocentrism, which is everywhere and nowhere. whew! thank god she's still on the ramparts!
i know doug has a different take on this, cause he's had to deal with the actually existing marxists who do indeed tend to think deterministically. but i don't have a lot of patience for this kind of rhetoric, since it never addresses this little thing called actually existing determinations--complex or otherwise. judy takes the *theoretical* idea that its more "democratic" or "nuanced" to deny a final determining instance to mean that it's impossible that there are determinations at all--economic or otherwise. it might be true in some instances, but it seems to me those are historical questions, not ones that can be decided in advance.
anyway,
christian