This:
>> 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.
means that the powerful don't rule today as they did yesterday.
The structures of domination, laws, accepted beliefs, etc., are posited by Butler to be changeable, subject to "rearticulation".
Funny, this sentence is actually quite close to some things that I had been thinking on structures of control that arose from my reading of Paul Krugman's awful book *The Self-Organizing Economy* a year or so ago. My musings were tinged with physiocratic hues, because I was also reading Francois Jacob's book *The Logic of Life*, but some of the ideas are similar (structures don't necessarily remain fixed: they can shift relative to other structures, be torn down, rehabilitated, etc.). Each generation of rich and powerful rewrite the rules to some extent, but there are some which they largely don't touch, and those represent the common ground of the rich and powerful across time Some, though get trimmed away, some get taken down by the R&P because they must give a few inches to popular will, etc.
All in all, Butler does *not* strike me as one of the ten smartest people on the planet. I'll take Perelman, Henwood, hell even Honest Max, any day over someone who says in 94 words what could be said in 10.
Bill