>Here's the winning sentence, from her essay "Further Reflections on the
>Conversations of Our Time," in Diacritics:
>
> 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.
The meaning of which I take to be close to Michel Foucault's comments on the dispersed character of power relations.
I think Butler is saying that in the past, capitalism, as one social system (as analysed by Althusser), dominated in a fairly transparent way. But today, power is dispersed, throughout society. The 'contingent sites' is referring to the way that sources of authority are not set in stone. The implication being that once oppositional forces, like, say, trade unions (my example, not JBs), can become conservative.
If you followed Foucault, you would have to say that the dispersal of power means that one can no longer use the binary opposition of progressive/conservative, but only not the various power struggles.
On flaw in the Butler argument as stated above (granting that this is a single sentence out of context) is that it elides 'capital' with 'power'. By isolating capital as a distinctive and historical social relation, Marx (to whom this ultimately refers) was isolating a specific barrier to human progress.
The analysis of power, by contrast, is timeless. There have been a thousand version of the analysis of Power, which is a piece of fool's gold that has often tempted social scientists. See for example Bertrand Russell 'Power: a new Social Analysis' or Steven Lukes 'Power'.
There is a short essay by Engels that criticises Power theories of society, called The Role of Force in History, part of which is in the Anti-Duhring, and part of which was published separately. -- Jim heartfield