>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.
I think it's less a change in the nature of "power" than a change in thinking about "power" - in the bad old days, Capital dominated everything in a unitary, timeless fashion. Now we know better, and we know that power is dispersed, polycentric, local. And also something that has to be reiterated constantly, meaning there's a certain vulnerability.
Not to get too much of a jump on the Judyfest, but I think there's something useful here. Christian said:
>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.
I heard Paul Mattick Jr give a talk just last Friday in which he claimed that Marx's theoretical model is one without nations, states, finance, or, it seemed, even time. With this apparatus he purported to "explain" the Asian crisis. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is all to prevalent in Marxian political economy - and it can explain nothing other than a model that exists only inside heads like Mattick's. (For a heavy dose of this, see the value club's archive at <http://www.gre.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt/>.) The Marx I remember isn't much like this; sure he has his theoretical value model, but even Capital (the book, not the social relation) is full of factory reports, parliamentary testimony, quotes from The Economist, etc. Capitalist society reproduces itself every minute of every day, through institutions like schools, prisons, corporations (actual ones that people work for or do business with or suffer toxic emissions from, not The Corporation), not to mention domestic life.
What's useful about Butler & Foucault is they make us think about all those micromoments of reproduction (and in Butler's case, make us think about how humans are sexed, which is something Marxists have been rather bad on). What's frustrating about them is that they see no consistency across time and space among all these micromoments, how, for example, a ruling class forms and sustains itself over time - and Butler in particular shows almost no interest in money, one of our more important social institutions. And she shows almost no theoretical interest (people say she does in her personal life, but I don't know for sure) in organized politics. Her practical political comments come down to a relative handful of issues - the reappropriation of the word "queer," AIDS, gays in the military, hate speech. Not that these are unimportant by any means, but there's a lot more to politics than that. But more on this after Jan 10.
Doug