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Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of these philosophers are.Some continental philosophers hide bad ideas or unclear thinking with obscure prose. But some analytic philosophers impose bad ideas and hide the lack of clarity in their thinking by rejecting whole areas of reality, experience, etc. from their examination, and then pretending the simplified model them came up with is great interpretation of the real world, the corners they cut are irrelevant, and so on.
Kind like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow thing.
>but this passage (from Judith Butler), for instance, is close-to-incomprehensible to me
Took it up as a challenge, and did 3 takes, the extended, the TL;DR; and the ELI18. Please tell me whether you like it :-)
Expanded version:
Some used to say that Capital (money/rich people/economic structures) influenced social relations to function in the same form [homologous] as Capital itself functions (that is, it turned social relations once mediated by nobleness, morals, religion, custom, etc. into economic relations/exchanges). [1]
Nowadays, we see that control over society [hegemony] works through power relations (relations between people with different levels of social power), that are subject to repetition [actions like marriage repeated as custom, versions of truth perpetuated through repetition in education and official historical accounts], convergence [many power holders -e.g. school, church, state, news, etc.- aligning and forcing the same ideas and thus establishing them] and rearticulation [power holders come up with new social norms, or articulate older ideas in new ways while continuing their lording over society aka "hegemony"].
In short, we had a static structural view that "Capital changes society in its image" and we now see that "Power relations change society in a dynamic way, through repetition, convergence, and rearticulation of ideas and social norms".
Both of those views are still answers about the question how power (in the old view, the Capital through the structural influence of economy on society, in the new view, hegemony, that is those with the upper hand in power relations - not necessarily just Capitalists, but also e.g. men over women, clergy over believers, the press over the public and so on) influence/run society.
This move, from the old way of seeing how power influences society to the new way makes us see that the way social structures are imposed changes over time (and is amenable to change).
This move, thus, marks a shift from the way Althusser considered structures as fossilized theoretical objects, to a new, dynamic way of seeing power over society [as contingent], and makes us see the shaping of social structures ("hegemony") as tied to different temporary strategies and positions as it constantly re-invents itself.
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TL;DR;
Capitalism doesn't just shape how we live [social structures] in its image, by making everything an economic exchange.
Rather, those having power in various domains (the "hegemony"), influence how we live through repetition, scratching each other's back and pushing to the same direction [convergence], and by inventing new BS to convince us what we should be doing (re-articulation).
This means the shaping of how we live is more dynamic than thought (also implied that this allows for more opportunities to change it).
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ELI18
Control is not just about money and capitalists making us their bitches and only caring about money, bro. The Man controls us by overflowing us with the same BS over and over, with getting along with others with power to fuck us over, and by coming up with new shit when we don't buy his previous BS anymore.
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[1] This is similar to Conway's law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". It's also how Marx described Capital working: changing the world to its image, changing older ways people related - e.g. lord and peasant, husband and wife, etc. - to economic relations