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Comment by huj123 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a winner of the World’s Worst Sentence award:

>"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."

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The funny thing is that made-up sociology prose starts to sound a lot like the prose of very complex physics papers (bundles of space-like homotopy fibers are dual to...)

Can you translate this for me? What in the hell is this about?

Usually sentences like this that are held up as bad examples actually are saying something, albeit badly, but this one really does border on nonsense. I believe it's saying that older readings of Marx (presumably by Althusser) saw capitalism as directly influencing society in a relatively uniform, unidirectional and universal way, whereas whatever new "insights" the author is writing about portray the influence of capitalism on society as being less uniform and more influenced by specific factors. So maybe that Marxist thought is less universally applicable than what was once thought? I often feel like jargon-y academic writing is given an unfair treatment when taken out of context but it truly seems like the author of this is intentionally avoiding meaning.

Edit: turns out this is by Judith Butler. I just read the piece it's from and it makes at least a little bit more sense in context. Basically she seems to be saying that older ("structuralist") Marxists saw their theories as timeless whereas more recent ones have focused on how state power and the influence of capital is dependent on historical specificities. It seems given the timing (1997) that this is pretty clearly a response to the fall of the USSR and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" stuff. But yes, it's an absolutely terrible sentence.

Good thought propositions make clear claims, so that at least experts can examine them. You seem to know all the proper nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the sentence. You know the grammar of English; You even know something about the author's style.

Despite your knowledge, you still have no clear idea of what it says.

In this case it seems intended to obscure the literal meaning of the words. If you knew what they were saying, you could just disagree.

For all you know, this could be an expanision of "Intimacies of Rock" http://csc.sagepub.com/content/16/1/75

Many publications of the social sciences are indistinguishable, by experts, from parody. This is legitimate cause for alarm.

Sure. This is actually a pretty standard summary of the shift away from structuralist social theories.

Social structures tend to be pretty stable: the same people and forces stay in power for a while. How should we think about that stability?

One way is to imagine that society is like a building: a solid structure that preserves those people and forces in power. It's stable because it's rigid, and time doesn't affect it much.

But there's a second option. Think of a standing wave in a river, like the kind that whitewater kayakers like to surf on: it's not rigid at all, but it's still "stable," welling up continually at the same spot.

So is our society structured like a building, or like a standing wave?

If we go with the standing wave idea, that brings up a lot of new questions. We start wondering about dynamics, flow and motion. We also start wondering about the river bottom: is there a big rock under there causing the wave, or does it just happen to emerge from the otherwise random arrangement of smaller rocks?

2000 years on, and we are still arguing over the Ship of Theseus

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