“… I think that, in its approximation, this metaphorical expression – the ‘inversion’ of the dialectic – does not pose the problem of the nature of the objects to which a single method should be applied (the world of the Idea for [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel – the real world for [Karl] Marx), but rather the problem of the nature of the dialectic considered itself; that is, the problem of its specific structures; not the problem of the inversion of the ‘sense’ of the dialectic, but that of the transformation of its structures. It is hardly worth pointing out that, in the first case, the application of a method, the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects poses a pre-dialectical question, a question without any strict meaning for Marx. The second problem on the other hand, raises a real question to which it is hardly likely that Marx and his disciples should not have given a concrete answer in theory and practice, in theory or in practice.

“Let us say, to end this over-extended textual exposition, that if the Marxist dialectic is ‘in principle’ the opposite of the Hegelian dialectic, if it is rational and not mystical-mystified-mystificatory, this radical distinction must be manifest in its essence, that is, in its characteristic determinations and structures. To be clear, this means that basic structures of the Hegelian dialectic such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of opposites, ‘supersession,’ the transformation of quantity into quality, contradiction, etc., have for Marx (in so far as he takes them over, and he takes over by no means all of them) a structure different from the structure they have for Hegel. It also means that these structural differences can be demonstrated, described, determined and thought. And if this is possible, it is therefore necessary, I would go so far as to say vital, for Marxism. We cannot go on reiterating indefinitely approximations such as the difference between system and method, the inversion of philosophy or dialectic, the extraction of the ‘rational kernel,’ and so on, without letting these formulae think for us, that is, stop thinking ourselves and trust ourselves to the magic of a number of completely devalued words for our completion of Marx’s work. I say vital, for I am convinced that the philosophical development of Marxism currently depends on this task.”

[Louis Althusser. For Marx. Ben Brewster, translator. Paris: François Maspero. 1965. Pages 93-94.]

“In the Thesis taken from the Communist Manifesto, what is put in the front rank is no longer the exploited classes, etc., but the class struggle. This Thesis must be recognized as decisive for Marxism-Leninism. It draws a radical demarcation line between revolutionaries and reformists. Here I have to simplify things very much, but I do not think that I am betraying the essential point.

“For reformists (even if they call themselves Marxists) it is not the class struggle which is in the front rank: it is simply the classes. Let us take a simple example, and suppose that we are dealing with just two classes. For reformists these classes exist before the class struggle, a bit like two football teams exist, separately, before the match. Each class exists in its own camp, lives according to its particular conditions of existence. One class may be exploiting another, but for reformism that is not the same thing as class struggle. One day the two classes come up against one another and come into conflict. It is only then that the class struggle begins. They begin a hand-to-hand battle, the battle becomes acute, and finally the exploited class defeats its enemy (that is revolution), or loses (that is counter-revolution). However you turn the thing around, you will always find the same idea here: the classes exist before the class struggle, independently of the class struggle. The class struggle only exists afterwards.

[Louis Althusser. Essays in Self-Criticism. Grahame Lock, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1976. Page 49.]

“… the Oedipal phase is not a hidden ‘meaning’ which merely lacks consciousness or speech—it is not a structure buried in the past that can always be restructured or surpassed by ‘reactivating its meaning’; the Oedipus complex is the dramatic structure, the ‘theatrical machine’ imposed by the Law of Culture on every involuntary, conscripted candidate to humanity, a structure containing in itself not only the possibility of, but the necessity for the concrete variants in which it exists, for every individual who reaches its threshold, lives through it and survives it. In its application, in what is called its practice (the cure), psychoanalysis works on the concrete ‘effects’ of these variants, i.e., on the modality of the specific nexus in which the Oedipal transition was and is begun, completed, missed or eluded by some particular individual.” [Louis Althusser, “Prefatory Note to ‘Freud and Lacan.’” New Left Review. Series I, number 55, May–June 1969. Pages 49-65.]

“… if the Marxist dialectic is ‘in principle’ the opposite of the Hegelian dialectic, if it is rational and not mystical-mystified-mystificatory, this radical distinction must be manifest in its essence, that is, in its determinations and specific structures. To be clear, this means that fundamental structures of the Hegelian dialectic such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of opposites, ‘sublation,’ the transformation of quantity into quality, contradiction, etc, have for [Karl] Marx (in so far as he uses them, and he uses by no means all of them) a structure different from that which they have for [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel.” [Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and overdetermination.” New Left Review. Series I, number 41, January–February 1967. Pages 15-35.]

“[Karl] Marx founded a new science: the science of history. Let me use an image. The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great ‘continents.’ Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales [Ancient Greek/A̓rchaía Hellēniká, Θαλῆς, Thalē̂s]), the second by Galileo [Galilei]. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.” [Louis Althusser, “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon.” New Left Review. Series I, number 64, November–December 1970. Pages 3-11.]

“The real: it is structured as a dross of earth containing inside it a grain of pure gold, i.e., it is made of two real essences, the pure essence and the impure essence, the gold and the dross, or, if you like (Hegelian terms), the essential and the inessential. The inessential may be the form of individuality (this fruit, these particular fruits) or materiality (that which is not ‘form’ or essence), or ‘nothingness,’ or anything else; it is unimportant. The fact is that the real-object contains in it, really, two distinct real parts, the essence and the inessential.” [Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1970. Page 36.]

“… [One] condition for seriously discussing the lessons of structuralism is to realize that no unitary position was ever constituted under this name, not even in the sense of the extension of a model. Structuralism does not designate a school, then; it designates a movement, within a given intellectual conjuncture.” [Étienne Balibar, “Structure: Method or subversion of the social sciences?” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 165. January/February 2011. Pages 17-22.]

“Theory is a recurrent word in [Louis] Althusser’s work, and the title of the famous book series he ran at Éditions Maspéro for many years (‘Théorie’). But it is already a kind of maddened theory, as if Althusser’s work was bridging the gap, more or less willingly, between nineteenth-century dialectics and late-twentieth-century anti-dialectical French thought. Theory in his work is not only a superior form of historical knowledge, as when Althusser reinterprets [Karl] Marx as a theoretician (théoricien) of capital – against his then dominant readings, his socio-economic or humanistic (moralistic) interpretations – but it is also the only sustainable way to separate science from ideology, to turn dialectical materialism into a scientific demystification of ideology, to deactivate reversed representations of labour, culture and power relations, and to reveal reality as a product of ideology, or as an ‘effect of structures.’” [François Cusset, “Theory: (Madness of).” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 167, May/June 2011. Pages 24-30.]

“My aim is to show that, far from being a strictly determinist concept, structural causality was the concept through which [Louis] Althusser attempted for the first time to develop a logic capable of including contingency as a structural dimension, and that, far from asserting the timeless reproduction of the structure (i.e. of a certain mode of production), it should be read as the concept through which Althusser tried to propose a non-dialectical theory of structural change.” [Stefano Pippa, “The necessity of contingency: Rereading Althusser on structural causality.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 199, September/October 2016. Pages 15-25.]

“At strategic points in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser introduces [Baruch] Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause as the decisive concept that is absent from [Karl] Marx’s discourse. For the Althusser of 1965, Spinoza’s model of causality is the great missing link in Marx’s thought, a philosophical omission and lacuna of symptomatic force. It explains the whole detour that Marx was forced to take through [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s system of thought.” [Katja Diefenbach, “Is it simple to be a Spinozist in philosophy?: Althusser and Deleuze.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 199, September/October 2016. Pages 26-34.]

“The reading we have made of [Louis] Althusser shows that the two types of structural analysis he proposes are inadequate as a foundation for the concept of structural causality, since this concept is intended precisely to make them possible by removing the basic deadlocks that have jammed them up. Each analysis by itself admits to its own impossibility and refers to the other for the condition of its possibility. Althusser attempts to save himself by installing between the two his special concept of cause, that obscurely central point from which the whole system is supposed to become legible.” [André Glucksmann, “A Ventriloquist Structuralism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 72, March–April 1972. Pages 68-92.]

“The potential of [Louis] Althusser’s program for a structural Marxism to provide a resonant hermeneutic of early Christian literature has been demonstrated by his student, Alain Badiou, who draws upon Althusser’s theory of the relative autonomy of the practices in the superstructure and Althusser’s concept of interpellation, in order to argue that Paul’s message of the resurrection functioned as a liberating counter-ideology, with the power to extract subjects from the ‘situated void’ of death in the early Roman Empire ….” [Larry L. Welborn, “Towards Structural Marxism as a Hermeneutic of Early Christian Literature, Illustrated with Reference to Paul’s Spectacle Metaphor in 1 Corinthians 15:30-32.]

“I think that ‘true’ materialism, the materialism best suited to Marxism, is aleatory materialism, in the line of Epicurus [Ancient Greek/A̓rchaía Hellēniká, Ἐπίκουρος, E̓píkouros] and Democritus [Ancient Greek/A̓rchaía Hellēniká, Δημόκριτος, Dēmókritos]. Let me make it clear that this materialism is not a philosophy which must be elaborated in the form of a system in order to deserve the name ‘philosophy.’ There is no need to make it over into a system, even if that is not impossible. What is truly decisive about Marxism is that it represents a position in philosophy.” [Louis Althusser. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87. G. M. Goshgarian, translator. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, editors. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2006. Page 256.]

“… Epicurus postulates that the aleatory swerve, not Reason or the first Cause, is at the origin of the world. It must be understood, however, that the encounter creates nothing of the reality of the world, but endows the atoms themselves with their reality, which, without swerve and encounter, would be nothing but abstract elements lacking all consistency and existence. It is only once the world has been constituted that the reign of reason, necessity and meaning is established.” [Louis Althusser. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87. G. M. Goshgarian, translator. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, editors. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2006. Pages 260-261.]

“The theory of aleatory materialism is one of [Louis] Althusser’s posthumous surprises, not only because it was formulated in the last decade of his life when he was considered philosophically dead, but also due to the undeniably novel quality of his formulations that differed from, if not contradicted, his early works through which he was known. At the end of his lifelong effort to formulate a philosophy of and for Marxism, Althusser provides the building blocks of a materialism that is nonteleological and not trapped within a logic of necessity, a materialism that takes chance seriously, and that maintains as its ambition the radical transformation of society. As the subterranean current of philosophy that Althusser brings to our attention, aleatory materialism is a subversive and suppressed stream whose force resides in its ability not only to critique but also to intervene in politics.” [Banu Bargu, “In the Theater of Politics: Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism and Aesthetics.” Diacritics: a review of contemporary criticism. Volume 40, issue 3, fall 2012. Pages 86-111.]

“Aleatory materialism allows [Louis] Althusser to ‘read’ and de-actualize his own theory of structural causality, to pose the problem of that particular theoretical solution. The problem that structural causality resolves—and which could not be posed concurrently with it—is that of the invention of the virtual structure, its singularities and relations, itself. This problem is distinct from the incarnation of the structure, which is a problem resolved by [Karl] Marx and posed by Althusser. Althusser poses the problem of invention by articulating his theory of the aleatory encounter.” [Kyle McGee, “Aleatory Materialism and Speculative Jurisprudence (I): From Anti-Humanism to Non-Humanism.” Law Critique. Volume 23, number 2, July 2012. Pages 141-162.]

“… the aleatory materialist is conceived of on the metaphor of someone who arrives only at plain after plain, that is, areas bare of topographical determinations. Or, in terms of the other metaphor, the walker in a forest can have no confidence that, by sticking to a definite direction, he will eventually find himself out of it, for it may turn out that he is on a trail leading to a dead-end … within the forest.” [Wal Suchting, “Althusser’s Late Thinking About Materialism.” Historical Materialism. Volume 12, issue 1, 2004. Pages 3-70.]

“[Louis] Althusser begins his argument for aleatory materialism by going back to the Ancient Greeks, specifically Epicurus’ notion of atoms falling in a void. Epicurus argued that it takes only one ‘swerve’—which Althusser terms a ‘clinamen’—for one atom to hit another and it is from this chance encounter between the two atoms, the ‘deviation from a straight trajectory,’ that creates a series of subsequent random encounters that begin to form basic natural structures. Using an analogy of the formation of ice, Althusser argues that elements are continually moving and coming into contact with one another, but they only form into something new when they ‘take hold’, crystallising (which Althusser terms ‘prise’) into a new structure. And, importantly, it is only after crystallising that the new structures begin to produce effects (a point that will be returned to below). Furthermore, it is the semipermanence of these structures that produces the sense of ‘continuity’ being ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’” [Nick Hardy, “Theory From the Conjuncture: Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism and Machiavelli’s dispositif.” Décalages. Volume 1, issue 3, 2014. Pages 1-32.]

“… [The] seemingly strange concept of ‘the void’ forms an important part of [Louis] Althusser’s later work on aleatory materialism. Aleatory materialism means ‘chance’ materialism and for the present discussion it is sufficient to understand it as arguing that social structures: (a) originally form through the chance encounters of their elements; (b) have managed to endure in their form(s); and (c) overdetermine other structures, meaning the others develop in a similar form. Althusser’s interest in the void is because it signifies the possibility of aleatory change—i.e. change not expected to be produced from the forces as presently configured in the conjuncture. In aleatory materialist terms, the void is the non-space in which chance is played out and contains the possibility of both formation and of effect: that is, chances of encounter and chances of outcome. The implication/result of the void is the creation of possibilities, which is why Althusser places so much emphasis upon it.” [Nick Hardy, “Alea Capta Est: Foucault’s Dispositif and Capturing Chance.” Foucault Studies. Number 19, June 2015. Pages 191-216.]

“… it should be noted that the single most influential contemporary form of Marxism-Althusserianism – was precisely based upon dissent from Orthodox Historical materialism, with its epic tale of the forward march of the productive forces towards an ineluctable communism, on the grounds that it was a ‘materialist’ inversion of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s philosophy of history – starring the Ruse of Economic Reason – which secreted a mystical kernel within a technological shell.” [Gregory Elliott, “The Cards of Confusion: Reflections on Historical Communism and the ‘End of History.’” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 64, summer 1993. Pages 3-12.]

“Drawing on [Karl] Marx’s analysis of the labour process in Capital, [Louis] Althusser dissected ‘society’ into four main practices: economic, political, ideological and theoretical, the ensemble of which constituted the ‘complex unity of “social practice.”’ Each practice was said to have three ‘moments’ – raw material, means of production and product ….” [Gregory Elliott. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2006. Page 79.]

“… if to philosophise morally is ‘to reason on the basis of convictions’ ([Louis] Althusser), this does not warrant the conclusion that there are no good or bad reasons [for the Gulf War] that can be characterised as such.… Even if sometimes for bad reasons, the majority of the Left opposed the Gulf War; it was right to do so.” [Gregory Elliott, “A Just War?: The Left and the Moral Gulf.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 61, summer 1992. Pages 10-13.]

“Conventionally, [Louis] Althusser’s career has been periodized into three main phases, spanning the years 1960–78, from the elaboration, via the revision, to the destruction of ‘structural’ Marxism. At the very least, this requires supplementation by another two periods of reflection and production – one antecedent, the other subsequent, to the standard chronology.” [Gregory Elliott, “Fateful rendezvous: The young Althusser.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 84, July/August 1997. Pages 36-40.]

“… he [Louis Althusser] not only mounted a critique of ‘historical’ Marxism and Communism but also deployed [Karl] Marx against himself, inducing the anti-humanist and anti-historicist ‘theoretical revolution’ of the Althusserian reconstruction.” [Gregory Elliott, “Ghostlier demarcations: On the posthumous edition of Althusser’s writings.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 90, July/August 1998. Pages 20-32.]

“[Louis] Althusser’s commonest term for the advent of historical materialism and psychoanalysis alike is surgissement [MP3 audio file], with its sense of ‘sudden appearance’ or ‘springing up.’ However, this has been partially concealed from an Anglophone readership, since the word has hitherto invariably been translated as ‘emergence,’ with its more genetic-evolutionary connotations.” [Gregory Elliott, “The Necessity of Contingency: Some Notes.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. Volume 10, number 3, fall 1998. Pages 74-79.]

“In order to grasp the particularity of the oeuvre of a [Jean-Paul] Sartre or an [Louis] Althusser, they must be received ‘as they were intended …: as arguments … contributions to a specifically French political debate’ …; they should neither be abstracted from the terms of that debate, nor reduced (with it) to manifestations of underlying social processes.” [Gregory Elliott, “Contentious Commitments: French Intellectuals and Politics.” New Left Review. Series I, number 206, July–August 1994. Pages 110-124.]

“… [There] was a revolutionary practice of philosophy—simultaneously political intervention in theory and theoretical intervention in politics—to which [Louis] Althusser referred by the traditional designation of ‘dialectical materialism.’ Its role was the defence of the sciences, including historical materialism, against myriad ubiquitous ideologies.” [Gregory Elliott, “The Odyssey of Paul Hirst.” New Left Review. Series I, number 159, September–October 1986. Pages 81-105.]

“First, I could say that we are the rebel sons of [Louis] Althusser. Of course there are some women working on the sociology of labor and the welfare state using the regulation approach, but as macroeconomists, who are primarily men in France, we are the rebel sons of Marxism, of Althusserian Marxism. What does that mean?

“During the sixties there was a fantastic upsurge of Marxism in France, a very particular kind of Marxism, structural Marxism…. The main leaders in this upsurge were Althusser, [Étienne] Balibar, and [Bruno] Bettelheim in economics, and they all paid a lot of attention to the reproduction of the capitalist system. Now, the first thesis of the regulation approach is one we learned directly from the Althusserian school. Society is a network of social relations, and social relations are supposed to reproduce. But Althusserian Marxists insisted so much on this reproduction that they forgot that these relations are contradictory and that they are at any moment subject to crisis. The point is not to be émerveillé, to be astounded, by the reproduction of social relations but to be very anxious about why they are not in crisis.

“Our approach asks instead how can there be regular reproduction, given the contradictory character of social relations? In fact, that’s exactly the meaning we give to regulation. We ask how, despite and through the contradictory character of relations, a unity of relations is reproduced. Of course, we became still more interested in this question when the world crisis started in the early 1970s.”

[Alain Lipietz, “Rebel Sons: The Regulation School.” Alain Lipietz interviewed by Jane Jenson. French Politics and Society. Volume 5, number 4, September 1987. Pages 17-26.]

“In the regulation approach, a model of capitalist development permits a relatively stable path of capitalist accumulation, despite the contradictions of its social relations, for a period of time. Such a model may be analysed as follows:

[Alain Lipietz, “Fears and hopes: The crisis of the liberal productivist model and its green alternative.” Capital & Class. Volume 37, number 1, 2013. Pages 127-141.]

“The regulation theory is to be understood first as an amendment to structural approaches. But instead of stressing the permanence of structures, and evaluating their effects on the behaviour of agents, one instead questions the very stability of structures. How are structures, despite their contradictory characters, reproduced through the a priori divergent expectations, interests and actions of economic agents? The answer can be found in an analysis of the habits and institutional forms which induce or force agents to behave in ways which are not antagonistic to the reproduction of structures. This unity of ‘rules of the game’ and procedures of resolution varies, in time and space, so that structures ‘function’ in different ways, which are relatively stable between crises. This method of functioning is called ‘the regime of accumulation.’” [Georges Benko and Alain Lipietz, “From the regulation of space to the space of regulation.” GeoJournal. Volume 44, number 4, 1998. Pages 275-281.]

“What do we mean by ‘regulation’ (of social relations)? To be fair we must warn the reader: this will really be clear only when the concept is put to work. A concept is after all only a way to apprehend reality, a tool of our thought: we construct it with a specific objective in mind, with regard to problems we set ourselves. The problems posed at the beginning of our undertaking were a response to the great crisis of capitalism which burst into the open in the 1970s after a long latency period. To understand why things were no longer working required understanding of what had worked, and why. We call ‘regulation of a social relation’ the way in which this relation is reproduced despite and through its conflictual and contradictory character. Thus the notion of regulation can only be understood within a particular schema: relation–reproduction–contradiction–crisis.” [Alain Lipietz and Michel Vale, “Accumulation, Crises, and Ways Out: Some Methodological Reflections on the Concept of ‘Regulation.’” International Journal of Political Economy. Volume 18, number 2, summer 1988. Pages 10-43.]

“Regulation Theory aims, on a historicist and institutionalist basis and via a middle-range methodology, to explain capitalist development. However, both its theoretical and methodological perspectives are unfit for this purpose. Middle-range methodology prioritises superficial features of reality, fails to implement dialectical abstraction and, consequently, cannot grasp neither the deeper roots not the actual course of historical evolution. Historicism cannot grasp history’s essential determinations and institutionalism autonomises improperly institutions and politics from socio-economic relations. Therefore, Regulation’s multi-factor intermediate concepts have limited explanatory power. Instead of being able to capture both the essential unity and the formal separation of socio-economic relations, they end up with an inordinate juxtaposition of economics, politics etc. The lack of a general-theoretical framework led Regulation from an initial mild structuralism to an equally mild post-structuralism and post-modernism. This journey created further problems to its already unstable theoretical structure, exacerbated its explanatory inefficiency and led to its present crisis of identity. [Stavros D. Mavroudeas, “Regulation Theory: The Road from Creative Marxism to Post-Modern Disintegration.” Abstract. Science & Society. Volume 63, number 3, fall 1999. Pages 310-337. Retrieved on September 26th, 2015.]

“The Theory of Regulation responds to the belief, widespread today, that orthodox economics has failed to interpret satisfactorily actual patterns of development, past or contemporary, and that, in particular, its tendency to economic determinism prevents it from taking into account in systematic fashion the powerful ways in which historically developed class relations, institutional forms and, more generally, political action have shaped the evolution of capitalist economies. For their part, then, the Regulationists explicitly seek to go beyond the ahistorical verities of neoclassical economics.” [Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, “The Regulation Approach: Theory and History.” New Left Review. Series I, number 188, July–August 1991. Pages 45-119.]

“The Parisian regulation approach (PRA) is the body of theory which has most fruitfully tackled the task of explaining the dialectical relationship between capitalism’s abstract tendencies and concrete structures. As we shall explore in greater detail below, the PRA represents an effort to generate an intermediate level analysis of capitalist development that, whilst taking the methodological lead from Marx, employs discrete concepts operating at a lower level of abstraction ….” [Brett Heino, “Capitalism, regulation theory and Australian labour law: Towards a new theoretical model.” Capital & Class. Volume 39, number 3, 2015. Pages 453-472.]

“Central to the appeal of [Louis] Althusser’s French Regulation School (FRS) ‘rebel sons’ … was the implicit promise of a mid-range theory of capitalist development that could complement [Karl] Marx’s long-range account. Michel Aglietta’s original account (1979, 1982) and Alain Lipietz’s work through the ’[nineteen-]eighties … most clearly represent this Marxist connection. By the ’[nineteen-]nineties, the groundwork of a powerful mid-range theory of capitalist development was emerging from the FRS’s account of the Fordist model of development and its crisis. Since then, this research direction has lost momentum.” [David Neilson, “Remaking the Connections: Marxism and the French Regulation School.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 2, October 2011. Pages 160-177.]

“… the state as it exists today is an historical product, an historically determined form of the organization of domination, which, being historical, has its foundation in the manner of social production and reproduction which characterizes the bourgeois relation of production and in the resulting class relations. This means, however, that one cannot make statements about the way in which the state apparatus functions and about the conditions and possibilities of the political management of the system, before one has worked out consistently from the analysis of the basic laws of the social reproduction process what are the conditions for the constitution of the social form of the bourgeois state and the resulting determinants of its functions. The failure to define the social character of the state apparatus – which, however, can be understood only on the basis of an historical-materialist theory of the state leads to the illusion as to the power of the state characteristic of bourgeois political theory, and the latter’s practical failings as well as its explicitly ideological function.

“… This question of what distinguishes the bourgeois state from all previous forms of the exercise of power and domination, is a question of the specific social form of the state and not of the particular content of its activity. The ‘functions of the state’ cannot be discussed so long as there is a lack of clarity about the character and the conditions for the constitution of the specifically bourgeois form of political domination. Max Weber correctly pointed out that the ‘state’ cannot be defined from the content of its activity and that there was hardly a function ‘which had not been taken in hand at some time by some political association, and, on the other hand, also no function of which one can say that it has ever and always been exclusively performed by those associations which one designates as political or today as states’ …”

[Joachim Hirsch, “The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction: Elements of a Theory of the Bourgeois State.” State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, editors. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. 1978. Pages 57-58.]

“Along with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, which itself must be seen as a part of the crisis of ‘Global Fordism,’ the universalization of capitalist production and market structures, growing cultural linkages, and the gradual democratization of political regimes, all seem to aid in the creation of an increasingly more unified world, namely, a civilized ‘world society.’ Nonetheless, this tendency should not be regarded as a linear trajectory free from tensions and conflicts; the inherent contradictions found within the capital relation itself ensure instability. That is to say, the flexibilization of capital reinforces international competition, and, in doing so, simultaneously undermines the existing relationships of power, domination and dependency. One main effect is the end of US hegemony and the pluralization of world capitalist hegemony.” [Joachim Hirsch, “Globalization of Capital, Nation-States and Democracy.” Studies in Political Economy. Volume 54, fall 1997. Pages 39-58.]

“Joachim Hirsch’s ‘Globalization of Capital, Nation-States and Democracy’ … supplies a welcome departure from mainstream globalization orthodoxy. While his argument is not particularly unconventional, his account combines an analysis of the impact of globalization with a reconceptualization of a politics of emancipation. It is for this reason that his contribution needs to be taken seriously and its theses and arguments need to be examined in a thorough manner.” [Werner Bonefeld, “Globalization and the State: A Note on Joachim Hirsch.” Studies in Political Economy. Volume 58, spring 1999. Pages 161-175.]

“The revolution in Soviet affairs and the end of the Cold War were not brought by democracy, interdependence, or international institutions. Instead the Cold War ended exactly as structural realism led one to expect. As I wrote some years ago, the Cold War ‘is firmly rooted in the structure of postwar international politics and will last as long as that structure endures.’ So it did, and the Cold War ended only when the bipolar structure of the world disappeared.

“Structural change affects the behavior of states and the outcomes their interactions produce.…

“Worries about the future do not make cooperation and institution building among nations impossible; they do strongly condition their operation and limit their accomplishment. Liberal institutionalists were right to start their investigations with structural realism.”

[Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War.” International Security. Volume 25, number 1, summer 2000. Pages 5-41.]

“In a structural theory, states are differently placed by their power and differences in placement help to explain both their behavior and their fates. In any political system, the distribution of the unit’s capabilities is a key to explanation. The distribution of power is of special explanatory importance in self-help political systems because the units of the system are not formally differentiated with distinct functions specified as are the parts of hierarchic orders.” [Kenneth N. Waltz, “Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory.” Journal of International Affairs. Volume 33, 1990. Pages 21-38.]

“… there are a great many writers who argue with greater sincerity that, while classic in its own terms, Waltzian realism has parted company with classical realism; indeed the name ‘neorealism’ implies discontinuity, and was coined (by Richard Ashley in ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’) precisely to make exactly this point – possibly why [Kenneth N.] Waltz himself prefers the term structural realism.” [Chris Brown, “Structural realism, classical realism and human nature.” International Relations. Volume 23, number 2, 2009. Pages 257-270.]

“This chapter examines a body of realist theories that argue states care deeply about the balance of power and compete among themselves either to gain power at the expense of others or at least to make sure they do not lose power. They do so because the structure of the international system leaves them little choice if they want to survive. This competition for power makes for a dangerous world where states sometimes fight each other. There are, however, important differences among structural realists. In particular, defensive realists argue that structural factors limit how much power states can gain, which works to ameliorate security competition. Offensive realists, on the other hand, maintain that the system’s structure encourages states to maximize their share of world power, to include pursuing hegemony, which tends to intensify security competition.” [John J. Mearsheimer, “Structural Realism.” International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity. Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Page 71.]

“In particular, structural realism, which emphasizes parsimony over theoretical depth, fits constructivist criticism due to its failure to address the impact of ideas on power politics. Nevertheless, I argue that the constructivist critique (that realism ignores ideational factors by virtue of being rationalist theory) is not entirely true, because various realist theories have divergent assumptions and conceptualizations, allowing realists to escape from the strictures of rationalist theories. All realist theories cannot be placed in a single rationalist paradigm; instead, they must be placed in different paradigms, although they are all branded as realism.” [Jae-wook Jung, “Making Constructive Realism?: A Reassessment of the Role of Ideas in Realist Theory.” The Korean Journal of International Studies. Volume 11, number 1, June 2013. Pages 1-28.]

“Structural Realism … as a particular focus within realism recognizes a relative hierarchy among the objects of social reality and recognizes structures in the form of relatively durable social relations as being of a potentially higher causal order. This does not mean that structures are pre-existing to social phenomena; in fact, structures are institutionally mediated and historically as well spatially reproduced through both collective and strategic individual action. Still the conceptual nature of structures, institutions and agency is pre-informed by the theory that has analytically conceived them. This means that within a critical–realist perspective several theories referring to the same or cognate concepts should be confronted and brought into dialogue with each other. A theory privileging the analysis of structures in social reality can also serve as a meta-theoretical framework, which sets in a way the borderlines within which particular objects and their relations can be analysed.” [Frank Moulaert and Abid Mehmood, “Analysing Regional Development and Policy: A Structural–Realist Approach.” Regional Studies. Volume 44, number 1, February 2010. Pages 103-118.]

“Kenneth Waltz’s name is irrevocably associated with the term structure. Waltz’s theory of international politics, as expounded in the 1970s, is a systemic theory, and for that reason a structural theory. His systemic perspective quickly came to be known as structural realism, and Waltz has himself adopted this label. In an act of sublime flattery, one of Waltz’s most strident critics, Alexander Wendt, went so far as to describe constructivism in the field of international relations (IR) ‘as a kind of “structural idealism.”’ In this paper, I suggest that Waltz’s theory also bears describing as a kind of structural idealism, though hardly the kind that Wendt has espoused.” [Nicholas Onuf, “ Structure? What Structure?” International Relations. Volume 23, number 2, 2009. Pages 183-199.]

“… we have elaborated on theory of structural contradictions to account for the creation of law by applying it to the development of criminal law and crime control in Britain and the United States. Our theory stresses the importance of fundamental contradictions in political, economic, and social relations as the starting point for a sociological understanding of law creation. In our theory people struggle to resolve the contradictions by fighting against existing laws (laws supporting colonialism, wage discrimination, or racism, for example), while other people fight to maintain the status quo through the enforcement of existing laws and the creation of new ones. In the process, ideological justifications develop, shift, and change; these ideologies, in turn, become a force of their own, influencing the development of legal institutions which reflect the interplay between material conditions and ideology.

“Understanding consists of dividing the world into abstract units that we then use to order our observations. Too early, however, we become enamored of our observations and reify them. ‘Society’—an observation of some use in helping us to understanding what is going on—has become an entity for many otherwise perfectly intelligent social scientists. When this happens, we cease asking the right questions and become mired in abstract disputes rather than carrying on with the sine qua non of social scientific inquiry: the description and explanation of social reality.

“People lie at the root of the social scientific enterprise. Their decisions make up our data. People construct worlds, create conflicts, adjudicate disputes, and make law….

“But people do not create their reality on a clean canvas. They, like the painter, must fit their creative efforts to the shape and size of their canvas, the paints they have, and the way they have come to see the world they wish to depict. All these things, and more, result from personal experiences (things like social background, socialization in school, family, and peers), but in the long train of history they also result from larger forces that shape our lives….

“Every historical era and every economic system contain basic contradictions….

“People are agents of social change embedded in social structures through roles and ideologies.”

[William J. Chambliss, “The Creation of Criminal Law and Crime Control in Britain and America.” Making Law: The State, the Law, and Structural Contradictions. William J. Chambliss and Marjorie Sue Zatz, editors. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 1993. Pages 36-64.]

“[William J.] Chambliss’ … model of structural contradictions that envisions law creation as a process aimed at resolving conflicts and dilemmas stemming from underlying contradictions that are historically specific and inherently set in the structure of a particular political, economic, and social structure…. [L]aw evolves in a dialectical manner. As problematic issues are resolved, new issues emerge that drive new ‘solutions’ that only create new ‘contradictions.’

“Although Chambliss’ model is focused on analyzing law formation within the context of nation-states, it can be turned toward an international society that is composed of a larger political and social structure that contains its own structural contradictions. Changes in the law do not necessarily mean changes in international societal relations, just as changes in the international societal views or relations do not always lead to changes in laws. These then can also produce conflict or further contradictions. The response to conflicts is not only political it is ideological (the promotion of an international system) and structural (within the system of international law). The underlying contradictions of an international society and system of international law remain unresolved. When conflicts occur, newlaws, a newinternational system of justice, or a new international ideology is created to address these conflicts while ignoring the embedded contradictions: existing inter-state relations based on sovereignty and self-rule.”

[Dan Rothe and Christopher W. Mullins, “The International Criminal Court and United States opposition: A Structural Contradictions Model.” Crime, Law & Social Change. Volume 45, 2006. Pages 201-226.]

“[William J.] Chambliss … first proferred the theory of structural contradictions to address weaknesses in the structural Marxist perspective, suggesting that criminal justice policy formation can be better perceived through a greater appreciation of the role of the state in the process of law formation. The obligation of the state to address class conflicts within a capitalist economy is reflected in its legislative development. Capitalist and their representatives routinely urge policy enactment corresponding to their interests, while state actors attempt to mollify working class fears of nonrepresentational rule in order to maintain social order and structural stability.

“… By relating the development, implementation, and application of the guidelines to structural contradictions theory, this research corroborates the premise that business leaders, industrialists, and pro-business lobbyists strive to manipulate the process of law creation to promote their interests over those of labor, the less powerful, and the poor. The state is then obliged to intercede in the conflicts that arise from this practice by addressing and attempting to resolve inter- and intra-class dissension while ensuring that the wealthy and powerful maintain primacy over the policy formation process…. The state must maintain a certain degree of autonomy in order to take actions which may oppose the short-term interests of specific factions within the capitalist class. Thus, capitalist domination of state policy, mitigated by occasional working class victories both tangible and symbolic, assures the continuation of the capitalist economy ….”

[Laurie J. Rodriguez and David E. Barlow, “Structural contradictions and the United States Sentencing Commission.” Crime, Law and Social Change. Volume 32, number 2, 1999. Pages 169-202.]

“If I had to characterize my work in two words, that is, as is the fashion these days, to label it, I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian tradition. By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notably those we ordinarily call social classes.” [Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory. Volume 7, number 1, spring 1989. Pages 14-25.]

“… an inevitable moment in scientific knowledge – and to bring to light the theory of theory and the theory of practice inscribed (in its practical state) in this mode of knowledge, [is] that we can integrate the gains from it into an adequate science of practices. The critical break with objectivist abstraction ensuing from inquiry into the conditions of possibility, and thereby, into the limits of the objective and objectifying standpoint which grasps practices from outside, as a fait accompli [MP3 audio file, i.e., accomplished fact], instead of constructing their generative principle by situating itself within the very movement of their accomplishment, has no other aim than to make possible a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them.” [Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, translator. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Page 3.]

“The true status of kin relationships, principles of structuration of the social world which, as such, always fulfil a political function, is most clearly seen in the different uses which men and women can make of the same field of genealogical relationships, and in particular in their different ‘readings’ and ‘uses’ of genealogically ambiguous kinship ties (which are relatively frequent on account of the narrow area of matrimonial choice).” [Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, translator. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Page 41.]

“The specific potency of the explicit statement that brings subjective experiences into the reassuring unanimity of a socially approved and collectively attested sense imposes itself with the authority and necessity of a collective position adopted on data intrinsically amenable to many other structurations.” [Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, translator. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Page 167.]

“If it is true that the relation an individual maintains with the School and with the culture it transmits is more or less ‘effortless,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘natural,’ ‘laboured,’ ‘tense’ or ‘dramatic,’ according to the probability of his survival in the system, and if it is also the case that in their verdicts the School and ‘society’ take as much account of the relation to culture as of culture, then it is clear how much remains unintelligible until one goes to the principle underlying the production of the most durable academic and social differences, the habitus – the generative, unifying principle of conducts and opinions which is also their explanatory principle, since at every moment of an educational or intellectual biography it tends to reproduce the system of objective conditions of which it is the product.” [Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture. Richard Nice, translator. Newbury Park (now in Thousand Oaks), California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1990. Page 161.]

“The reading of Sentimental Education [the French-language novel, L’Éducation sentimentale, by Gustave Flaubert] is more than a simple preamble aiming to prepare the reader to enter into a sociological analysis of the social world in which it was produced and which it brings to light. It requires the interrogation of the particular social conditions which are at the origin of Flaubert’s special lucidity, and also the limits of that lucidity. Only an analysis of the genesis of the literary field in which the Flaubertian project was constituted can lead to a real understanding of both the generative formula at the core of the book and Flaubert’s craftsmanship in putting it to work [fa mettre en oeuvre], objectifying in one fell swoop this generative structure and the social structure of which it is the product.” [Pierre Bourdieu. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Susan Emanuel, translator. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1995. Pages 47-48.]

“How many times, to sum up some ‘work’ or other destined to take its place for a few weeks on the bestseller list, do you not find that all you need to know is that its roots lie in a quarrel between some petty media masters about the end of ‘structuralism,’ the return of the ‘subject’ or the threat of cultural relativism, the nth version of a challenge to the social sciences?” [Pierre Bourdieu. Political Interventions: Social science and political action. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page 192.]

“… how … is … [the] work [by Pierre Bourdieu] to be summarised? His own most recent characterisation is to describe his project as ‘genetic structuralism,’ the attempt to understand how Objective, supra-individual social reality (cultural and institutional social structure) and the internalised ‘subjective’ mental worlds of individuals as cultural beings and social actors are inextricably bound up together, each being a contributor to—and, indeed, an aspect of—the other. This is Bourdieu’s place in the debate on structure and agency.

“Another way of looking at Bourdieu’s work is to return to his roots as a philosopher. Looked at from that perspective, his research activity is ‘fieldwork in philosophy.’”

[Richard Jenkins. Pierre Bourdieu. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 8.]

“One characterisation of [Pierre] Bourdieu’s intellectual trajectory might point to his initial rejection of authoritarian Marxism and existentialism, followed by a further, longer-term move away from structuralism—although he arguably never deserted it altogether—toward his own theoretical and epistemological synthesis of [Karl] Marx, [Max] Weber, [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim, and [symbolic] interactionism. This synthesis involved a rejection of analytical models that invoked rules supposedly governing behaviour, and an exploration of the generation and pursuit of strategies.” [Richard Jenkins, “Bourdieu, Pierre.” Encyclopedia of Social Theory. George Ritzer, editor. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2005. Pages 67-72.]

“According to [Pierre] Bourdieu, sociologists must not be simply satisfied with the description of how agents’ self-understanding of their institution and society is displayed in their interaction. Rather, they must go beyond the self-understanding of the agents and should offer a critique of current practice so that the social agents can liberate themselves from the grip of the legitimated social classification. Underlying such a conception of the relationship of theory to practice is the ‘Hegelian dialectic’ in which the so-called ‘labor of the negative’ plays a pivotal role in the transformation of the practice in question.” [Kyung-Man Kim, “Can Bourdieu’s Critical Theory Liberate Us From the Symbolic Violence?” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Volume 4, number 3, 2004. Pages 362-376.]

“Pierre Bourdieu is now regarded as one of the foremost social philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in a small village in the French Pyrenees, his extraordinary academic trajectory took him to the leading academic training schools of Paris. Eventually, he was nominated as ‘Chair’ at the Collège de France, that most prestigious institution which groups together fifty-two leading French academics, philosophers and scientists.” [Michael Grenfell, “Introduction.” Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. Michael Grenfell, editor. Durham, England: Acumen. 2008. Pages 1-6.]

“I argue that [Pierre] Bourdieu’s approach highlights the objectifying relation between subjects and objects of study at the expense of bypassing knowledge and the epistemological gains its structuring may enable. In short, Bourdieu’s emphasis on the objectifying relation of knowledge contributes greatly to notions of reflexivity but comprises an objectifying reflexivity rather than an epistemic reflexivity. Thus, he highlighted something of great significance and pointed the way; what is now required is to continue his work in the direction he has shown and so fully realise its potential.” [Karl Maton, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Epistemic Conditions of Social Scientific Knowledge.” Space & Culture. Volume 6, number 1, February 2003. Pages 52-65.]

“The first theory I address is Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory, because it offers perhaps the clearest opposition to the social psychologist’s conceptualization of discrete, individual categories called attitudes that drive behavior. Bourdieu had a background in philosophy …, and this contributed to his eagerness and aptitude in stepping back from individual action to take a broader and more critical view of the human subject.” [James A. Shaw, “Reflexivity and the ‘Acting Subject’: Conceptualizing the Unit of Analysis in Qualitative Health Research.” Qualitative Health Research. Volume 26, number 13, November 2016. Pages 1735-1744.]

“But what questions did Bourdieu pose on the subject of history? Are they the same as those asked by social historians? Yes and no. I think history had a double function for him. It was, first of all, the principal tool of that ‘reflexive criticism’ through which thinkers could become aware of the specificity—not to say the subjectivity—of the viewpoint of any observer of society, and of any discipline claiming to be a ‘social science.’ Every researcher who tries to understand the social world does so on the basis of what Bourdieu calls ‘objectivist presuppositions,’ the only ones that allow us to judge the veracity of our observations, to legitimate our methodology, to justify our generalizations. These presuppositions took on a particular importance in the eyes of a sociologist like Bourdieu, for whom scientific theory ‘reveals itself only in the empirical work in which it is realized.’” [Eric Hobsbawm, “Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Sociology and Social History.” New Left Review. Series II, number 101. September–October 2016. Pages 37-47.]

“Sociology is rarely more akin to social psychoanalysis than when it confronts an object like taste, one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production. This is not only because the judgement of taste is the supreme manifestation of the discernment which, by reconciling reason and sensibility, the pedant who understands without feeling and the mondain [worldly or, in effect, mundane] who enjoys without understanding, defines the accomplished individual.…

“Here the sociologist finds himself in the area par excellence of the denial of the social. It is not sufficient to overcome the initial self-evident appearances, in other words, to relate taste, the uncreated source of all ‘creation,’ to the social conditions of which it is the product, knowing full well that the very same people who strive to repress the clear relation between taste and education, between culture as the state of that which is cultivated and culture as the ptocess of cultivating, will be amazed that anyone should expend so much effort in scientifically proving that self-evident fact. He must also question that relationship, which only appears to be self-explanatory, and unravel the paradox whereby the relationship with educational capital is just as strong in areas which the educational system does not teach. And he must do this without ever being able to appeal unconditionally to the positivistic arbitration of what are called facts.”

[Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Richard Nice, translator. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1984. Pages 11-12.]

“Nicos Poulantzas, writing from 1968 until the mid 1980s was considered as the preserver of Althusserian thought in Europe. Poulantzas soon moved into the emerging Eurocommunist tradition. By the 1980s he was writing openly reformist books and championing the Euro-Communist agenda. A brief look at the origins of Eurocommunism might help matters here. It marked the beginning of final evolution of Stalinism as a political movement into social democracy.” [Simon Hardy. Structuralist Marxism. Retrieved on August 16th, 2015.]

“… it is important to understand that Althusser was an important figure to Eurocommunism, and a vocal critic of the Left.” [Gussel Sprouts, “Communism is the Ascension of Humanity as the Subject of History: A Critique of Althusser and the Affirmation of Marx.” Unity and Struggle. July 30th, 2014. Retrieved on August 16th, 2015.]

“Syriza comprises a coalition between a Eurocommunist bloc, Synaspismos, which has roots in a breakaway from the Communist Party (KKE) in 1968, and various Maoist and Trotskyist groups.” [Richard Seymour, “The Challenge of SYRIZA.” International Socialist Group. June 7th, 2012. Retrieved on August 16th, 2015.]

“… an over-rigid epistemological position … [is] one that I shared with [Louis] Althusser at the time. By concentrating the main weight of our attack against empiricism and neo-positivism, whose condensates, in the Marxist tradition, are economism and historicism, we rightly insisted on the specificity of the theoretical process, that of the production of knowledge which, with its own specific structures, occurs in the thought process.” [Nicos Poulantzas, “The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau.” New Left Review. Series I, number 95, January–February 1976. Pages 63-83.]

“For [Karl] Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat was a notion of applied strategy, serving at most as a signpost. It referred to the class nature of the State and to the necessity of its transformation in the transition to socialism and the process of withering away of the State. Now, although the object to which it referred is still real, the notion has come to play a precise historical role: it obscures the fundamental problem of combining a transformed representative democracy with direct, rank-and-file democracy. It is for these reasons, and not because the notion eventually became identified with Stalinist totalitarianism, that its abandonment is, in my opinion, justified. Even when it took on other meanings, it always retained the historical function in question—both for [Vladimir] Lenin, at the beginning of the October Revolution, and, nearer our own time, for [Antonio] Gramsci himself.” [Nicos Poulantzas, “Towards a Democratic Socialism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 109, May–June 1978. Pages 75-87.]

“… the French Communist Party, one of the most backward of European Communist parties with respect to Eurocommunism, whose recently published theses for its up-coming congress represent, from that point of view, an actual step back from its earlier positions, has abandoned the expression ‘Marxism-Leninism’ to denote its official theory, and replaced it with the expression ‘scientific socialism.’” [Nicos Poulantzas, “Is There a Crisis in Marxism?” The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State. James Martin, editor. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Pages 377-386.]

“Two problems can be dealt with here. The less important of the two is whether the main resistance organizations of the popular masses, and the Communist Parties in particular, were correct to accept, as they all did do, an alliance with the domestic bourgeoisies, either explicitly formulated or at least de facto, with the precise and limited objective of overthrowing the dictatorships? The answer to this is an incontestable ‘yes.’ To defeat fascism, as [Leon] Trotsky well said, one must make alliance with the devil himself. In point of fact, however, the divergences that arose within the major wing of the resistance came increasingly to bear, not on whether a tactical alliance of this kind should be made, but rather on whether it could be, in other words if this was not just chasing after phantoms. Could the domestic bourgeoisie be an ally, even on this precise and limited objective? Did its interests really lead it to support the overthrow of the regime? The answer to this was very far from dear to everyone involved, but the facts have shown that, in the particular conjuncture in these countries, this was in fact the case.” [Nicos Poulantzas. The Crisis of the Dictatorships. David Fernbach, translator. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press. 1976. Pages 59-60.]

“The Eurocommunist phenomenon should be examined against the background of a wider historical process: the process of sociopolitical adaptation to environmental realities that has been developing—gradually, unevenly and in greatly varying degrees—among communist parties operating in advanced capitalist democracies over the past two decades (although its origins can be traced even further back, in the case of the Italian CP [Communist Party]). And the first and most fundamental characteristic of that gradual, uneven process was the abandonment by these Western communist parties, at first in practice and then increasingly also in theory, of revolutionary Leninism.” [Kevin Devlin, “Eurocommunism: Between East and West.” International Security. Volume 3, number 4, spring 1979. Pages 81-107.]

“Eurocommunism is [Louis] Althusser’s habitat — that jumble of massive but unorthodox Communist Parties who defy the Soviet Union, discard proletarian dictatorship as an anachronism, drop Leninism from their vocabularies, join bourgeois governments, and, in Italy, hunt down revolutionaries and jail them. From within the French CP [Communist Party] Althusser criticizes much of this, yet he not only has stayed in, but frequently has beaten theoretical retreats through self-criticism which, so far at least, has kept his party membership intact.” [Jasper Collins, “The politics of Louis Althusser: a symposium—Introduction.” Urgent Tasks. Number 4, summer 1978. Pages 8-32.]

“Focusing on the problem of class rule and the transition to socialism, I shall attempt to present a systematic analysis of the theoretical relationship between [Antonio] Gramsci and Eurocommunism. The most elementary point that I wish to establish is that this relationship is a complex one: it is neither a relationship of one-to-one correspondence, Gramsci being nothing but a precursor of Eurocommunism, nor one of complete discontinuity, Eurocommunism being the negation of Gramsci’s legacy. This complexity is in part due to the fact that Gramsci’s primary theoretical concerns are different from those of the Eurocommunists, reflecting a different historical context, and it is necessary to define these differences in a preliminary fashion in order to set the stage for the comparative analysis that will follow.” [Jonas Pontusson, “Gramsci and Eurocommunism: A Comparative Analysis of Conceptions of Class Rule and Socialist Transition.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Volume 24/25, 1980. Pages 185-248.]

Notably, several individuals to whom the moniker of “poststructuralist” is frequently attached have rejected it. Foucault, for instance, regarded his area of study as neither poststructuralism nor structuralism. Instead, and this is just a speculation, he might have preferred the designation of discourse analysis.

“… the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, [Jeremy] Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only Venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.” [Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan, translator. New York: Vintage Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 1977. Pages 201-202.]

“… I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies—even in the old Chinese society—has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures.” [Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry. Volume 8, number 4, summer 1982. Pages 777-795.]

“It is absolutely true that the analysis of the specific structures of those discourses which claim to be and are accepted as true discourse is both interesting and important. Broadly speaking, we could call the analysis of these structures an epistemological analysis. On the other hand, it seemed to me that it would be equally interesting to analyze the conditions and forms of the type of act by which the subject manifests himself when speaking the truth, by which I mean, thinks of himself and is recognized by others as speaking the truth. Rather than analyzing the forms by which a discourse is recognized as true, this would involve analyzing the form in which, in his act of telling the truth, the individual constitutes himself and is constituted by others as a subject of a discourse of truth, the form in which he presents himself to himself and to others as someone who tells the truth, the form of the subject telling the truth. In contrast with the study of epistemological structures, the analysis of this domain could be called the study of ‘alethurgic’ forms. I am using here a word which I commented on last year or two years ago. Etymologically, alethurgy would be the production of truth, the act by which truth is manifested.” [Michel Foucault. The Courage of the Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984. Frédéric Gros, editor. Graham Burchell, translator. Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2011. Pages 2-3.]

“… disciplinary mechanisms do not appear just from the eighteenth century; they are already present within the juridico-legal code. Mechanisms of security are also very old as mechanisms. Conversely, I could also say that if we take the mechanisms of security that some people are currently trying to develop, it is quite clear that this does not constitute any bracketing off or cancellation of juridico-legal structures or disciplinary mechanisms. On the contrary, still in the penal domain, look at what is currently taking place in the domain of security for example. There is an increasingly huge set of legislative measures, decrees, regulations, and circulars that permit the deployment of these mechanisms of security. In comparison, in the tradition of the Middle Ages and the Classical age, the legal code concerning theft was very simple. If you consider the body of legislation concerning not only theft, but theft by children, the penal status of children, mental responsibility, and the whole body of legislation regarding what are called, precisely, security measures, the supervision of individuals after they leave a penal institution, you can see that getting these systems of security to work involves a real inflation of the juridicolegal code. In the same way, with the establishment of these mechanisms of security there is a considerable activation and propagation of the disciplinary corpus. For in order actually to guarantee this security one has to appeal, to take just one example, to a whole series of techniques for the surveillance of individuals, the diagnosis of what they are, the classification of their mental structure, of their specific pathology, and so on; in short one has to appeal to a whole disciplinary series that proliferates under mechanisms of security and is necessary to make them work.” [Michel Foucault. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Graham Burchell, translator. New York: Picator imprint of Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. Page 22.]

“The difference between what might be called the history of the sciences and the genealogy of knowledges is that the history of sciences is essentially located on an axis that is, roughly speaking, the cognition-truth axis, or at least the axis that goes from the structure of cognition to the demand for truth. Unlike the history of the sciences, the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice-clash of power axis. Now it seems to me that if we applv it to what is for a whole host of reasons the privileged period of the eighteenth century, to this domain or this region, the genealogy of knowledge must first—before it does anything else—outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment.” [Michel Foucault. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. David Macey, translator. New York: Picator imprint of St. Martin’ Press, LLC. 2003. Page 178.]

“Spirituality postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right. Spirituality postulates that the subject as such does not have right of access to the truth and is not capable of having access to the truth. It postulates that the truth is not given to the subject by a simple act of knowledge (connaissance], which would be founded and justified simply by the fact that he is the subject and because he possesses this or that structure of subjectivity. It postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself.” [Michel Foucault. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82. Graham Burchell, translator. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’ Press, LLC. 2005. Page 15.]

“Each visibly distinct part of a plant or an animal is … describable in so far as four series of values are applicable to it. These four values affecting, and determining, any given element or organ are what botanists term its structure. ‘By the structure of a plant’s parts we mean the composition and arrangement of the pieces that make up its body.’ Structure also makes possible the description of what one sees, and this in two ways which are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. Number and magnitude can always be assigned by means of a count or a measure; they can therefore be expressed in quantitative terms. Forms and arrangements, on the other hand, must be described by other methods: either by identification with geometrical figures, or by analogies that must all be ‘of the utmost clarity.’ In this way it becomes possible to describe certain fairly complex forms on the basis of their very visible resemblance to the human body, which serves as a sort of reservoir for models of visibility, and acts as a spontaneous link between what one can see and what one can say.” [Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. A translation of Les Mots et les choses. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 146-147.]

“… it [history] intersects at certain points problems that are met with in other fields – in linguistics, ethnology, economics, literary analysis, and mythology, for example. These problems may, if one so wishes, be labelled structuralism. But only under certain conditions: they do not, of themselves, cover the entire methodological field of history, they occupy only one part of that field – a part that varies in importance with the area and level of analysis; apart from a number of relatively limited cases, they have not been imported from linguistics or ethnology (as is often the case today), but they originated in the field of history itself – more particularly, in that of economic history and as a result of the questions posed by that discipline; lastly, in no way do they authorize us to speak of a structuralism of history, or at least of an attempt to overcome a ‘conflict’ or ‘opposition’ between structure and historical development: it is a long time now since historians uncovered, described, and analysed structures, without ever having occasion to wonder whether they were not allowing the living, fragile, pulsating ‘history’ to slip through their fingers. The structure/development opposition is relevant neither to the definition of the historical field, nor, in all probability, to the definition of a structural method.” [Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. A. M. Sheridan Smith, translator. New York: Pantheon Books. 1972. Page 11.]

“… when one is reasoning only in order to use one’s reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.…

“I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”

[Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Catherine Porter, translator. The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, with Major New Unpublished Material. Paul Rabinow, editor. New York: Pantheon Books. 1984. Pages 32-50.]

“… logocentric repression is not comprehensible on the basis of the Freudian concept of repression; on the contrary, logocentric repression permits an understanding of how an original and individual repression became possible within the horizon of a culture and a historical structure of belonging.…

“The necessity of an immense labor of deconstruction of the metaphysical concepts and phrases that are condensed and sedimented within [Sigmund] Freud’s precautions. The metaphysical complications of psychoanalysis and the so-called human (or social) sciences (the concepts of presence, perception, reality, etc.). Linguistic phonologism.

“The necessity of an explicit question concerning the meaning of presence in general: a comparison of the undertakings of [Martin] Heidegger and of Freud. The epoch of presence, in the Heideggerian sense, and its central support, from [René] Descartes to [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel: presence as consciousness, self-presence conceived within the opposition of consciousness to unconsciousness. The concepts of archi-trace and of différance: why they are neither Freudian nor Heideggerian.”

[Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Alan Bass, translator. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Page 248.]

“… the intention that institutes general linguistics as a science remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics- phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow this tension between gesture and s tatement in [Ferdinand de] Saussure.” [Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Corrected edition. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translator. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997. Pages 29-30.]

“Here we have the tower of Babel: each item speaks its own idiom. Yet at the same time, through calculated differences and combinatorial variations, serial production demarcates significations, establishes a repertoire and creates a lexicon of forms and colors in which recurrent modalities of ‘speech’ can be expressed: nevertheless, is this language? This immense paradigm lacks a true syntax. It neither has the rigorous syntax of the technological level, nor the loose syntax of needs: floating from one to the other like an extensive repertoire, reduced, at the level of the quotidian, to an immense combinatorial matrix of types and models, where incoherent needs are distributed (ventiler) without any reciprocal structuration occurring. Needs disappear into products which have a greater degree of coherence.” [Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Mark Poster, editor. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pages 10-28.]

“You know the nonsense they’ve come up with now. There is structure, and there is history. The people they’ve put in the ‘structure’ category, which includes me — it wasn’t me who put me there, they put me there, just like that — supposedly spit on history. That’s absurd. There can obviously be no structure without reference to history. But first, you have to know what you are talking about when you talk about history. I will try to tell you something about it.

“It is always difficult to pin down what is going on in the field of what we are really cogitating without any misunderstandings. The words have often been surrounded by all sorts of confusion for a little too long. That is what now allows some people to use historical reduction, which has nothing to do with historical rights, so to speak, with the function of history. So they come out with questions that have to do with, not structure, but what they call structuralism.”

[Jacques Lacan. My Teaching. David Macey, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Pages 68-69.]

“… let me put forth some advice about structure, which is the subject matter of our meeting. It may happen that there will be mistakes, confusion, more and more approximative uses of this notion, and I think that soon there will be some sort of fad about this word. For me it is different because I have used this term for a very long time—since the beginning of my teaching. The reason why something about my position is not better known is that I addressed myself only to a very special audience, namely one of psychoanalysts. Here there are some very peculiar difficulties, because psychoanalysts really know something of what I was talking to them about and that this thing is a particularly difficult thing to cope with for anybody who practises psychoanalysis. The subject is not a simple thing for the psychoanalysts who have something to do with the subject proper.” [Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, editors. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1972. Pages 186-195.]

“Power is conceived [by Michel Foucault] to be relational, something that is exercised from a variety of points in the social body, rather than something that is ‘acquired, seized, or shared.’ Relations of power are not considered to be secondary to other relationships ‘(economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations) but are immanent in the latter.’ Furthermore, power is not conceived to be imposed from the apex of a social hierarchy, nor derived from a foundational binary opposition between a ruling and ruled class, rather it operates in a capillary fashion from below. Thus confrontations in the form of massive binary divisions constitute merely a temporary and exceptional state of accumulation of the multiplicity of cleavages and resistances arising from the plurality of power relations in the social body.” [Barry Smart. Michel Foucault. Revised edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Page 119.]

“Deconstruction in large part means facing the contradiction rather than trying to eliminate it. All concepts are contradictory for [Jacques] Derrida. If sentences in language are indeterminate, and therefore contradictory, then the concept of the sentence is contradictory, since the sentence must both be what conveys meaning and what cannot convey meaning. The sentence cannot be isolated as a meaning unit from its context, so that is does not exist in a stable self-identical way, as the same sentence may have different meanings in different contexts. The sentence must both be what it is and not what it is. The same applies to all aspects of meaning.” [Barry Stocker. Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Derrida on Deconstruction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 67.]

“Once binary thinking becomes dominant it is difficult to think of otherness or difference as anything other than a relation of binary opposition to what is known or similar. The linear calculation of time produces the ‘cyclical’ as no more than its binary opposition: as imaginary, phantasmal, irrational or lost rather than real. Or, to take the example of religion, the ritual practices of polytheist or ‘pagan’ religions are not opposed to monotheistic religious codes but come to seem so from the perspective of the latter. Other binary oppositions – the opposition of male and female, of good and evil, order and disorder, individual and society, workers and their labour – flow from the separation of life and death, [Jean] Baudrillard asserts. The production of the binary opposition of life and death is nothing less than the foundation of Western civilisation.” [William Pawlett. Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 56.]

“The question of the continuing value of varying kinds of materialism is central to much work in Continental philosophy today. The materialist legacy in political philosophy continues to provide a rich source for the analysis of contemporary capitalism, while Slavoj Žižek, Adrian Johnston and others are seeking to ‘materialise’ the legacy of German idealism through an attention to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, and in particular through his theory of the subject. This paper argues, through a reading of a number of early texts by Lacan, that it is only through an attention to the conceptual genesis of the category of the Real that the materialist potential of Lacanian theory may be fully realised. The Real, I argue, is to be taken not as something extra-Symbolic, but as an overdetermining function that is materialised only through the particularity of the Symbolic and Imaginary registers. Further, I argue that it is through Lacan’s complex philosophy of language, and especially through his insistence on the withdrawal of signifiers from networks of relation, that the Real becomes material, as constitutive as it is disruptive of the subject.” [Tom Eyers, “Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. Volume 7, number 1, 2011. Pages 155-166.]

“… it is not difficult to arrive at the derivatives of … [certain] romantic texts, which still delimit our horizon. From the idea of a possible formalization of literature (or of cultural productions in general) to the use of linguistic models (and a model based on the principle of the auto-structuration of language); from an analytic approach to works based on the hypothesis of auto-engendering to the aggravation of the problematic of a subject permanently rejecting subjectivism (that of inspiration, for example, or the ineffable, or the function of the author, etc.); from this problematic of the (speaking or writing) subject to a general theory of the historical or social subject; from a belief that the work’s conditions of production or fabrication are inscribed within it to the thesis of a dissolution of all processes of production in the abyss of the subject. In short, we ourselves are implicated in all that determines both literature as auto-critique and criticism as literature. Our own image comes back to us from the mirror of the literary absolute. And the massive truth flung back at us is that we have not left the era of the Subject.” [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism Intersections. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1988. Page 16.]

“Deconstruction can be seen in part as a vigilant reaction against this tendency in structuralist thought to tame and domesticate its own best insights. Some of Jacques Derrida’s most powerful essays are devoted to the task of dismantling a concept of ‘structure’ that serves to immobilize the play of meaning in a text and reduce it to a manageable compass. This process can be seen at work in the reception of a book like Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), regarded (not without reason) as a sound and authoritative guide to the complexities of structuralist thought. Culler’s volume has been widely prescribed as student reading by critics and teachers who otherwise show small sympathy with current theoretical developments. Its appeal, one may fairly conjecture, lies partly in its commonsense dealing with problems of interpretative method, and partly in its principled rejection of other, more extreme kinds of theory which would question any such method. Culler makes no secret of his aim to reconcile structuralist theory with a naturalized or intuitive approach to texts. The proper task of theory, in his view, is to provide a legitimating framework or system for insights which a ‘competent’ reader should be able to arrive at and check against her sense of relevance and fitness. Culler’s main claim for the structuralist approach is that it offers a kind of regulative matrix for perceptions that might otherwise seem merely dependent on the critic’s personal flair or virtuosity.” [Christopher Norris. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 2.]

“logocentrism (n.) In literary stylistics, a term referring to a language—or word—centred view of literature or other behaviour. The notion is associated with the structuralist approach to analysis, which focused on the study of the language of a text to the exclusion of the author’s individuality, the social context, and the historical situation. A reaction to this logocentric view in the late 1960s came to be called post-structuralism. Here, language is seen as a system whose value shifts in response to non-linguistic factors. A range of viewpoints drew attention to the multiple meanings of words, stressing the role of mental processes in interpreting linguistic relationships, and denying the possibility of objectivity in textual interpretation. In particular, the methods of deconstruction, developed by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), aimed to show the inherent contradictions and paradoxes in logocentric approaches.” [David Crystal. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Sixth edition. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 2008. Page 289.]

“The biographies [of Michel Foucault] … make much of his experience of living and working among activist students in Tunisia in the late 1960s, practising a form of passionate anti-authoritarian Marxism far removed from the dogmatic and sterile tradition of the French communist party. Such experience is understood to have sensitised Foucault to the possibility that the expression of freedom could find concrete, practical expression. Foucault evidently identified a similar popular, political spirituality among the diverse, spontaneous political movements that began to emerge in France in the late 1960s. It was thus in a particular historical context that Foucault began both to rethink his intellectual interests and ‘method,’ and to define his role and relationship, as an intellectual, to the political field.” [Edward Barratt, “Foucault and the Politics of Critical Management Studies.” Culture and Organization. Volume 10, number 3, September 2004. Pages 191-202.]

“If the abject is already a wellspring of sign for a non-object, on the edges of primal repression, one can understand its skirting the somatic symptom on the one hand and sublimation on the other. The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a nonassimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire. Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing else than the possibility of naming the prenominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal. In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being.” [Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Leon S. Roudiez, translator. New York: Columbia University Press. 1982. Page 11.]

“Let us not seek to solidify, to turn the otherness of the foreigner into a thing. Let us merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure. Simply sketching out its perpetual motion through some of its variegated aspects spread out before our eyes today, through some of its former, changing representations scattered throughout history. Let us also lighten that otherness by constantly coming back to it—but more and more swiftly. Let us escape its hatred, its burden, fleeing them not through leveling and forgetting, but through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies and spreads.” [Julia Kristeva. Strangers to Ourselves. Leon S. Roudiez, translator. New York: Columbia University Press. 1991. Page 3.]

“If the efficacy of scientific approach in ‘human’ sciences has always been challenged, it is all the more striking that such a challenge should for the first time be issued on the very level of the structures being studied – structures supposedly answerable to a logic other than scientific. What would be involved is the logic of language (and all the more so, of poetic language) that ‘writing’ has had the virtue of bringing to light. I have in mind that particular literary practice in which the elaboration of poetic meaning emerges as tangible, dynamic gram. Confronted with this situation, then, literary semiotics can either abstain and remain silent, or persist in its efforts to elaborate a model that would be isomorphic to this other logic; that is, isomorphic to the elaboration of poetic meaning, a concern of primary importance to contemporary semiotics.” [Julia Kristeva. The Kristeva Reader. Toril Moi, editor. Multiple translators. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. Page 35.]

“Poststructuralist inquiry requires we notice how the ‘signs’ of ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ function as general limits in our discourse and institutions …. Poststructuralist insights of HRD [human resource development] would thus mean unravelling the ways in which the language of HRD and dominant understandings of HRD themes produced gendered effects, and how HRD research is underpinned by masculinist constructions of knowledge. The way in which women predominantly occupy HR [human resources] and personal development may communicate strong signifiers of a feminized profession, and associated ‘lesser than’ status. Equally, preference for specific components of management curricula may reinforce gendered values and competencies.

“An important aspect of poststructuralist critique is to unveil binary hierarchies of language, which serve to position one as sexed, raced and classed …. In terms of gender themes, this involves showing how work experiences are not associated with the whole fixed self, but are formed through gender differentiated subjectivities and discourses that are available in wider society ….”

[Beverly Dawn Metcalfe, “A feminist poststructuralist analysis of HRD: why bodies, power and reflexivity matter.” Human Resource Development International. Volume 11, number 5, November 2008. Pages 447-463.]

“In the most totalizing cultural feminism, the absolute’s presence is held by an elect few (though, in keeping with its Calvinist tones, it can’t be certain who), and the project of reaching it requires constant, rational optimization of good works. One debates endlessly of what constitutes penetration what level of gender play is acceptable, how best to behave in a truly lesbian way On the other end: the sexual liberationist, proposing instead of good works, a perpetual undoing of social mores, aiming to reach or having claimed achievement of a state of nature just below the surface. Taken to its furthest extreme, the Bataillean nihilist-libertine, who realizes the impossibility of his project, and so conceives of it as a pure suicide/pure murder.…

“To abandon the Christian communion/community – the one shining future, made manifest now and dictated by the elect – without succumbing to an expedient, apathetic faux-nihilism, imagining all the world as natural, inevitable, doomed, This space, communicative and concerned with movement, internal to this world as it seeks to move beyond it, does not set out to effect a complete new world, nor is it resigned to reform or consciousness raising. A radical approach to sex ‘is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself We call [it] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,’ ([Karl] Marx [in The German Ideology,] 1845).

“As a part of this (anti)project, I try to talk about sex using the frameworks that speak most accurately to the pain, incommunicable and inconsolable, I endure within gender – marxian and poststructuralist feminism, discourse and history without referent to the prediscursive or ahistorical.”

[Mynwych Hyrryr. Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism. Baltimore, Maryland: Negatecit(y). 2012. Pages 26-27.]

“The main task of semiocapitalism is a perverse use of language, transforming all transformation processes into information. The production of value (of capital gain) stems from the recombining itself. This leads me to ask – and this is at the core of a new, emancipating education – what kind of culture needs an economic model based on transgenic single crop farming? What artist’s paradigm, what type of images does this kind of economic organization, this new policy of global food production need? One answer, not a very positive one, is that today’s neoliberalism needs a transgenic culture. But naturally there are always seeds of rebellion.” [Eduardo Molinari. Walking Archives: The Soy Childrenr. Fernando Aita, translator. Creative Commons. Brooklyn, New York: Minor Compositions imprint of Autonomedia. 2012. Page 5.]

“The opening of the 2006 DVD Anthology of Macedonian čalgija (Antologija na Makedonskata čalgija) travels through sun-saturated B-roll views of Macedonian rural landscapes, while a synthesiser plays Western European chords underneath a guitar-plucked melody. Next the camera fades into the image of a Christian church, and then blends into a shot of the old Muslim Ottoman commercial centre (čaršija). Thus begins the first documentary on čalgija [originally Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, جَالْغِيّ, ǧālġiyy, “rhythm”], a treasured yet controversial Macedonian musical genre that indexed urbanity and prestige among Muslim, Christian and Jewish town-dwellers.…

“… I claim that the re-casting of Macedonian čaršija calls for what I term a ‘critical semantics’ of the varied interpretations of čaršija, by situating musical signs within the knowledge systems that produce them per an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ critique of discourses …, thus tracing the process by which re-signification occurred.”

[Sonia Tamar Seeman, “Macedonian Čaršija: A Musical Refashioning of National Identity.” Ethnomusicology Forum. Volume 21, number 3, December 2012. Pages 295-326.]

“Neither intellectual history nor etymological analysis, the project finds its central purpose as literary criticism with words, rather than authors or works, as the primary objects of investigation. I call the approach of this book ‘critical semantics’ in tribute to the models of historical, cultural, and other kinds of semantic investigation acknowledged in my first note. Still, this work is different from such antecedents because these five words are implicated in an intellectual fabric different from that of the modern period: more pragmatic than theoretical, less homogeneous across languages, and far less certain about which words are ‘key’ and which are not.” [Roland Greene. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Page 12.]

“What I have called here critical semantics responds to a long tradition of writing about literature and language according to words. In the end, the luminous term in the phrase is not semantics, but critical. Critical semantics is a critic’s job of work, … and the emergence of digital resources makes the social role of the critic even more vital.” [Roland Greene. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Page 175.]

“It is only when they [participants in ‘modern rational mass politics’] have found a way of thinking politically about what they are doing, and of inventing a semantics of justice that can attract people into movements and legitimize their actions, that graphic designers in Toronto, game modders, fashion workers in Milan, the Philippines, India and China can build the kinds of institutions that are able to resist and moderate the impact of the logic of capital on their lives.…

“I don’t know if my notion of ‘productive publics’ will be part of such a new critical semantics.”

[Adam Arvidsson, “Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A response to Detlev Zwick.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization. Volume 13, number 2, May 2013. Pages 407-412.]

“Within ESL [English as a secondary language], interest has been growing in the pedagogical implications of poststructuralist theories of identity and in the need for gay-teaching practices. However, research on identity has largely the domain of sexual identity, and efforts to develop gay-pedagogies have not yet engaged with poststructuralism. This introduces some of the key concepts of queer theory, which draws poststructuralism, and suggests implications for teaching. The argument is that a queer theoretical framework may be more pedagogically than a lesbian and gay one because it shifts from inclusion to inquiry, that is, from including minority identities to examining how language and culture work with regard all sexual identities. This article then comments on an ESL class discussion in the United States that focused on lesbian and identities.” [Cynthia Nelson, “Sexual Identities in ESL: Queer Theory and Classroom Inquiry.” TESOL Quarterly. Volume 33, number 3, autumn 1999. Pages 371-391.]

“The purpose of this study was to investigate the discursive construction of teacher subjectivity by mapping and complicating the normative discourses that dictate the im/possibility of what counts as a ‘good teacher’ in Taiwan. This research employed the ‘new’ postmodern ethnography and various methods of data collection, including archival documents, interviews, classroom and school observations, and a researcher’s journal. Data was analyzed using critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Feminist poststructuralist theories of identity, subject formation, agency, and teachers as a discursive category were used to inform analyses about the working of regulatory discourses on teacher identity and about teachers’ negotiations. This study juxtaposed competing discourses and historicized discourses as strategies to destabilize commonsense assumptions about the good teacher. The stories about teachers’ schoolgirl days were also gathered not only because there is a dearth of such stories that cut across Taiwan’s history from martial law to democratization but also because educational biography is assumed to be reproduced in teaching.” [I-Huei Lee. Subjectivities, Discourses, and Negotiations: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis of Women Teachers in Taiwan. Ph.D. dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin. Austin, Texas. May, 2010. Pages vi-vii.]

“Engaging with current debates in postcolonial, cultural and women’s studies, this study suggests an alternative approach towards the subjectivity of the Oromo nation, which—under the umbrella of ‘articulation’—draws heavily from the eclectic but overlapping works of [Gilles] Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari and Stuart Hall. Such an approach affirms Oromo identity—Oromo cultural formation—without retreating to anti-colonial Manichean binary oppositions. Through an ethnography of musical, ritual and nationalist performances, and analysis of community and gender politics among Melbourne’s exilic community, Oromo identity is represented as a unified but diverse materially real cultural formation practised in everyday life.…

“‘Oromo Identity: Theorising subjectivity and the politics of representation’ begins with the dilemmas of setting the parameters of Oromo identity amongst a global community via the internet. The episode demonstrates the many tensions facing the worldwide Oromo ‘nation’ as Oromo seek to map out globally who they are. By sketching the landscape of contemporary academic theorising of Oromo subjectivity and the pan-Oromo national movement, the chapter situates the significance of the current study and presents the theoretical framework (called ‘articulation’) which informs it.”

[Greg Gow. The language of culture and the culture of language: Oromo identity in Melbourne, Australia. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Victoria University of Technology. Footscray, Victoria, Australia. 1999. Pages ix-x.]

“While the radical poststructuralist position asserts a kind of discursive reductionism (‘reality is linguistic’), articulation asserts that reality is constituted by the historical linkage of lived practices (differences) to form structures of effect. These discrete and localised structures of effect are then articulated to form a larger structure or cultural formation that constitutes a unity of Oromo identity. Within such a unity there exists a multiplicity of difference. This multiplicity is ever-changing, and defined, not by its abiding principle of sameness over time, but through its capacity to undergo transformations via everyday practices.” [Greg Gow. The language of culture and the culture of language: Oromo identity in Melbourne, Australia. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Victoria University of Technology. Footscray, Victoria, Australia. 1999. Page 7.]

“[Jacques] Lacan’s point is … that [Martin] Heidegger misses the properly traumatic impact of the very ‘passivity’ of being caught in language, the tension between human animal and language: there is ‘subject’ because the human animal doesn’t ‘fit’ language, the Lacanian ‘subject’ is the tortured, mutilated, subject. Insofar as the status of the Lacanian subject is real, i.e., insofar as the real Thing is ultimately (the impossible core of) the subject itself, one should apply to the subject Lacan’s definition of the Thing as ‘that /part, aspect/ of the real which suffers from the signifier’ – the most elementary dimension of the subject is not activity, but passivity, enduring.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Language, Violence and Non-Violence.” International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume 2, number 3. Pages 1-12.]

“If the Freudian name for the ‘unknown knowns’ is the Unconscious, the Freudian name for the ‘unknown unknowns’ is trauma, the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for, something the subject cannot integrate in any way. [Catherine] Malabou proposed a critical reformulation of psychoanalysis along these lines; her starting point is the delicate echoing between internal and external Real in psychoanalysis: for [Sigmund] Freud and [Jacques] Lacan, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic ‘psychic reality.’” [Slavoj Žižek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik. Volume XXIX, number 2. September. Pages 9-29.]

“Normally, we pass directly from the real to the symbolic order: a thing is either itself, self-identical in the inertia of its bare presence, or else it possesses a ‘symbolic signification’. So where does the Symbolic fit? It is necessary to introduce the crucial distinction between ‘symbolic signification’ and its own place, the empty place filled by signification: the Symbolic is above all a place, a place that was originally empty and subsequently filled with the bric-a-brac of the symbolic order. The crucial dimension of the Lacanian concept of the Symbolic is this logical priority, the precedence of the (empty) place with respect to the elements that fill it: before being a collection of ‘symbols,’ bearers of some ‘signification,’ the Symbolic is a differential network structured around an empty, traumatic place, described by Lacan as that of das Ding [the thing], the ‘sacred’ place of impossible jouissance [enjoyment].” [Slavoj Žižek. Interrogating the Real. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2005. Page 45.]

“As Jacques Lacan indicated, the lack of tragedy proper in the modern condition renders this condition even more horrifying: the fact is that, in spite of all the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust, from capitalism onwards there are no longer tragedies proper—the victims in concentration camps or the victims of the Stalinist show trials were not in a properly tragic predicament, their situation was not without comic or at least ridiculous aspects, and, for that reason, are all the more horrifying—there is a horror so deep that it can no longer be ‘sublimated’ into tragic dignity, and is, for that reason, approachable only through an eerie imitation/doubling of the parody itself.” [Slavoj Žižek, “When the Party Commits Suicide.” New Left Review. Series 1, number 238, November–December 1999. Pages 26-47.]

“Prosopopoeia [Ancient Greek/A̓rchaía Hellēniká, προσωποποιία, prosōpopoiía] is defined as ‘a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking or acting:’ The attribution of speech to an entity commonly perceived to be unable to speak (nature, the commodity, truth itself …) is for [Jacques] Lacan the condition of speech as such, not only its secondary complication. Does not Lacan’s distinction between the ‘subject of the enunciation’ and the ‘subject of the enunciated’ point in this direction?” [Slavoj Žižek. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2012. Page 515.]

“‘Psychoanalytic essentialism’ is paradoxical in so far as it is precisely psychoanalysis – at least in its Lacanian reading – which presents the real break with essentialist logic. That is to say, Lacanian psychoanalysis goes a decisive step further than the usual ‘post-Marxist’ anti-essentialism affirming the irreducible plutality of particular struggles – in other words, demonstrating how their articulation into a series of equivalences depends always on the radical contingency of the social-historical process: it enables us to grasp this plurality itself as a multitude of responses to the same impossible-real kernel.” [Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2008. Page xxvii.]

“The vulgar, egotistical bourgeois everyday life is the actuality of freedom, equality and brotherhood; freedom of free trade, formal equality in the eyes of law, etc. The illusion proper to the ‘vanishing mediators’ – Protestants, Jacobins – is precisely that of the Hegelian ‘beautiful soul.’ They refuse to acknowledge in the corrupted reality over which they lament the ultimate consequence of their own act, i.e., as Lacan would put it, their own message in its true, inverted form.” [Slavoj Žižek, “Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 58, summer 1991. Pages 3-9.]

“The key feature of metapolitics is that, to put it in the terms of Jacques Lacan’s matrix of four discourses, the place of the agent is occupied by knowledge. Marx presented his position as scientific materialism, which is to say that metapolitics is a politics that legitimizes itself by means of a direct reference to the scientific status of its knowledge. (It is this knowledge that enables metapolitics to draw a line of distinction between those immersed in politico-ideological illusions and the party, which grounds its historical intervention in knowledge of effective socioeconomic processes.)” [Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry. Volume 24, number 4, summer 1998. Pages 988-1009.]

“Maybe we can use … the Shakespearean triad of lunatic, lover and poet as a tool to propose a classification of events based on the Lacanian triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real: a lunatic dwells in the imaginary dimension, confusing reality and imagination; a lover identifies the beloved person with the absolute Thing in a symbolic short-circuit between signifier and signified which nonetheless maintains the gap that for ever separates them (the lover knows very well that, in reality, his/ her beloved is an ordinary person with all his or her failures and weaknesses); a poet makes a phenomenon emerge against the background of the void of the Real.” [Slavoj Žižek. Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept. Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“As [Jacques] Lacan pointed out apropos of his deployment of the structural homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, what if the surplus-value does not simply hijack a preexisting relational field of affects? What if what appears an obstacle is effectively a positive condition of possibility, the element that triggers and propels the explosion of affective productivity? What if, consequently, one should precisely throw out the baby with the bath water and renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity as the libidinal support of revolutionary activity?” [Slavoj Žižek, “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution.’” Critical Inquiry. Volume 30, number 2, winter 2004. Pages 292-323.]

“… [An] ideological presupposition, (i.e., the pretense that language is not a historical product of class struggle) paradoxically becomes the epistemological precondition of the constitution of linguistics as a science. Its function may be viewed as analogous to the role of the notion of ‘abstract labor’ in political economy: abstract labor, as a historically produced abstraction, is ‘factually’ true only of the labor-process in its capitalist mode, but can nevertheless be used as the key to an analysis of all social formations. Accordingly, it became the basic notion upon which classical political economy was able to establish itself as science.” [Rastko Mǒcnik, “Toward a Materialist Concept of Literature.” Cultural Critique. Number 4, autumn 1986. Pages 171-189.]

“Let us briefly recall some typical difficulties concerning the dead human body in medieval philosophy. If the rational soul is the only substantial form of the human body, then after death, that is, after the separation of body from soul, Christ’s body can no longer be called his. If, however, the dead body on the cross cannot be said to be identical with Christ’s body, then it cannot be a fit object of worship.” [Rastko Mǒcnik, “Auto-Iconicity and Its Vicissitudes: Bentham and Plato.” Helios. Volume 31, number 1–2, 2004. Pages 223-245.]

“Prisoners in the panopticon would wear masks, the grimaces of the masks expressing the gravity of their offenses: the prisoners would thus stage their own guilt. They would wear these masks on ‘the only occasion on which their eyes will have to encounter the public eye),’ that is, during the divine service attended by out side worshippers. Since on this occasion the prisoners would know that they were exposed to public gaze, this ‘perpetual pillory’ could in time harden them and render them insensitive, ultimately imped ing their rehabilitation.” [Miran Božovič, “‘An Utterly Dark Spot’: The Fiction of God in Bentham’s Panopticon.” Qui Parle. Volume 8, number 2, spring/summer 1995. Pages 83-108.]

“One of the case-studies in the famous Hippocratic Corpus, or, more precisely, the treatise entitled Airs, Waters, Places, attempts to explain an unusual malady called anandria, meaning literally unmanliness or want of manhood, which was widely spread among the Scythians, a nomadic people who lived somewhere in the surroundings of what was once Lake Maeotis, now The Sea of Azov …. The author—it cannot be determined who the author is, Hippocrates or one of his disciples—begins by stating that a great number of men among the Scythians were like eunuchs, i.e., impotent; the impotent Scythians—as a rule, only rich and never poor Scythians—were even transvestites, for they dressed as women, and behaved and talked like women. The Scythians themselves saw this disease as a divine visitation; this is because, they supposed, they had in one way or another sinned against the gods. They believed it was a disease of supernatural, divine origin.” [Miran Božovič, “The God of the Transvesites.” The American Journal of Semiotics. Volume 9 number 2–3, 1992. Pages 91-103.]

“[Slavoj] Žižek’s intervention proposes that the unconscious subject is the unruly by-product of ideological interpellation. He combines this reconstructed theory of ideology with Hegelian philosophy, to create a remarkable social theory based in ‘Lacanian dialectics’ …. At the same time, he makes strenuous efforts to escape the metaphysical implications of the historicist problematic…. Žižek’s intervention identifies the missing link in post-Althusserian theories of ideology—the unconscious subject as the unruly by-product of ideological interpellation—while making strenuous efforts to escape the gravitational field of the historicist problematic of postmarxian discourse analysis.” [Geoff Boucher. The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Lacau & Mouffe, Butler & Žižek. Open access and Creative Commons. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: re.press. 2008. Page 165.]

“Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst who controversially rewrote the ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Part of that controversy stems from the fact that Lacan’s work is a notoriously tortuous read, full of mind-bending puns, obscure allusion and slippery conceptual interplay. Indeed, it is often said, that you have to understand Lacan before you read his books. As this is just the kind of paradoxical challenge that [Slavoj] Žižek likes, he has taken it upon himself to provide that understanding to Lacanian novices. Part of the remit for many of Žižek’s books is, therefore, to explain Lacan’s theories. In doing so, Žižek has done much to popularize the particular brand of psychoanalysis practised by Lacan.” [Tony Myers. Slavoj Žižek. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 19.]

“… there is a brand of nontraditional psychoanalytic theory that is beginning to make its way into the undergraduate English curriculum: that of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Lacan’s work is rather abstract, often ambiguous, and almost always difficult to understand. In fact, he claimed that writing about the unconscious should be ambiguous and difficult to understand because the unconscious is itself ambiguous (its manifestations in our dreams, our behavior, and our artistic production, for example, usually have multiple meanings), and the unconscious is difficult to understand. Furthermore, there is a good deal of disagreement among interpreters of Lacan concerning what he actually intended by many of his statements. Finally, Lacan sometimes changed the meanings of some of his key terms over time. Despite these challenges, however, I think we need at least to take an introductory look at some of the main concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis because these concepts are beginning to show up in students’ writing, and all too often they are being used incorrectly.” [Lois Tyson. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 26.]

“Language is the key to [Jacques] Lacan, and Lacan’s basic project is to provide a linguistic version of [Sigmund] Freud. There are two major concerns for Lacan: the nature of language and its relationship to the unconscious; the way in which the individual acquires language, the model for which is the fort/da [gone/there] game alluded to earlier. For Lacan, language substitutes a sign for reality, so ‘it is the world of words that creates the world of things.’ The mechanisms involved in this substitution are precisely the same as those which Freud saw as basic to the workings of the unconscious.” [John Bird, “Jacques Lacan – the French Freud?” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 30, spring 1982. Pages 7-14.]

“We wish to make … an application of Eco-Marxism to supplement and inform an approach based on Žižekian theory. Eco-Marxist theory is provided to supply the backdrop from which a lack in nature emerges under current political and economic conditions. [Karl] Marx provides a materialist analysis that outlines a split with nature, a ‘metabolic rift’ that emerges through alienation and commodity fetishism. The potentials for confronting this rift, ‘the traumatic limit of symbolization,’ are explored through [Jacques] Lacan’s concept of the Gaze, and through sightseeing, the potential for recognition (or ignorance) of the indeterminacy of natures is revealed.” [Greg Dash and Carl Cater, “Gazing awry: Reconsidering the Tourist Gaze and natural tourism through a Lacanian–Marxist theoretical framework.” Tourist Studies. Volume 15, number 3, 2015. Pages 267-282.]

“As [Slavoj] Žižek states, ‘the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of sociotranscendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations’ …. Thus, Žižek transcodes the Marxist concepts of ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘class struggle’ into the Lacanian notion of the Real. Where the older Marxist terms have long since been confused with empirical entities like the ‘working class’ and actual commercial goods, the Lacanian Real has the benefit of emphasizing the purely formal, and therefore universal, status of capitalism and its overdetermination of the totality of social relations.” [Kirk Boyle, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume 2, number 1, 2008. Pages 1-21.]

“Through analytic discourse, the subject manifests himself in his gap, namely, in that which causes his desire. Were that not the case, I could not summarize it with a topology that does not involve the same mainspring, the same discourse, but rather a different one, one that is so much purer and that makes so much clearer the fact that there is no genesis except on the basis of discourse. Doesn’t the fact that that topology converges with our own experience, to the extent that it allows us to articulate it, justify what, in what I put forward, is lent support and or-worsened (se s’oupire) by the fact that it never resorts to any substance, never refers to any being, and breaks with everything smacking of philosophy?” [Jacques Lacan. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Bruce Fink, translator. Jacques-Alain Miller, editor. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1999. Page 11.]

“… an act of communication may give the impression at which theorists too often stop: of allowing in its transmission but a single meaning, as though the highly significant commentary into which he who understands integrates it, could, because unperceived by him who does not understand, be considered null.” [Jacques Lacan and Jeffrey Mehlman, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Yale French Studies. Number 48, 1972. Pages 39-72.]

“… [A] dimension arises when something from the imaginary structure of the fantasy is placed in communication with something that normally reaches the level of the message, i.e., the image of the other subject, in the case in which that image is my own ego. Moreover, some authors … note with great precision the necessary correlation between the feeling of the subject’s own body and the strangeness of that which arises in a certain crisis, a certain rupture, when the object as such is attained.” [Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and James Hulbert, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Yale French Studies. Number 55/56, 1977. Pages 11-52.]

“It is in concrete, intersubjective communication (‘evocation’) that man discovers his desire and the law of his being—his place in truth, as Lacan calls it. Man is born to and into language but this does not ensure that he can, or that he will, truly speak, that is to say unfold himself to an other, and discover in the return of the ‘gift’ the true nature of his original gift. The imaginary and the symbolic being close correlates, there is always a possibility of a regression in man to the imaginary mode, with its hankering after the super-real, permanent object. When this happens there is a withdrawal from the open exchange of truth in human discourse, and the word becomes the representation of a petrified thing at the service of the hallucinatory satisfaction of a primal desire.” [Jean Roussel, “Introduction to Jacques Lacan.” New Left Review. Series I, number 51, September–October 1968. Pages 63-70.]

“This paper outlines a theoretical perspective, ‘the mode of information,’ that might be useful for opening new interpretive strategies for critical social theory in relation theory to these new developments [electronic communications].…

“In this project I also hope to contribute to a reconstruction of critical social theory by bringing poststructuralist theory to bear on the phenomena of electronically mediated communication.…

“The first obstacle to the constitution of the field of the mode of information is theoretical. I refer to the tendency among social theorists to objectify meanings, to limit words to single meanings, and to treat language as a transparent for action. As an intellectual historian I trace the problem back to its origins.… Within this theoretical economy, electronic communications crease the representational power of language by reducing the spatial distancing of meaning.”

[Mark Poster, “Words without Things: The Mode of Information.” October. Volume 53, summer 1990. Pages 62-77.]

“… the mode of information initiates a rethinking of all previous forms of language. Just as for [Karl] Marx the anatomy of apes becomes intelligible only after the evolutionary development of human beings, so we can retrospectively reconstruct the ‘development’ of language from the vantage point of the mode of information. The mode of information undermines the time/space coordinates that have been employed to fix language in various contexts. It thereby opens up an understanding of language and society that has no reference in the grid of Renaissance perspective or in the mimetic realism of Enlightenment reason. Subject no longer stands opposed to object, man to nature, or essence to existence.…

“In order to make intelligible the ways mode of information generate new structures analysis must turn from the foundational liberalism and Marxism, moving instead to a Foucauldean variant of poststructuralism.”

[Mark Poster, “Foucault and Data Bases.” Discourse. Volume 12, number 2, spring–summer 1990. Pages 110-127.]

“The broad purpose of this study is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new configurations of the subject. Important limits of the study must be explicitly stated. The term ‘the mode of information’ is not intended as a totalizing or essentializing category to control or inscribe a figure of the present age. It must be understood in the first instance as multiple: there are many modes of information each with its historical particularities and there are continuities and breaks between modes of information. In this study I do not attempt to generate a formal theory of the field of modes of information. I do not delineate concepts as [Karl] Marx did with the mode of production and as [Max] Weber did with the theory of legitimate authority, in each case specifying and controlling areas of empirical investigation, or providing explanatory models to account for changes from one mode of information to another, or offering periodizing taxonomies. The reason for this theoretical modesty derives from cautions imposed by the theoretical strategies that seemed most appropriate and most suggestive to my study, theoretical strategies that are known as poststructuralist. This book then is a preliminary study that posits in a rudimentary fashion a mode of information in the current situation. It is an experiment that hopes to promote further theoretical development and empirical research.” [Mark Poster. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Contexts. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 1990. Page 23.]

“In the mode of information, electronically mediated communication has transfigured language and images in startlingly new ways. No rhetoric of realism captures the new communication situation. The sense of being there was figured through powerful framing devices that subverted realism as they enacted doubling message system if ever there were one. First, television coverage of the war gave the impression of newspeople as pants, hurriedly donning their gas masks to the effect that illusion of realism was forced into suspension. In previous World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—newspeople strove voice of the omniscient narrator or Olympian observer, removing themselves as much as possible from presenting to the their plight as that of vulnerable targets of enemy bullets, nades, and artillery fire, from presenting news gathering itself. Not in Iraq. Here the messengers were the messages.” [Mark Poster, “War in the Mode of Information.” Cultural Critique. Number 19, autumn 1991. Pages 217-222.]

“… we need to account for the role of information machines or media – what I call ‘the mode of information’ – in the process. Such a double strategy of interpretation allows ‘identity’ to emerge as a historical process, one neither naturalized nor universalized within the ideology of liberalism and its insistence on the always already given figure of identity within the individual. The innovation of identity theft as the materialization of identity appears then not as a fall from the grace of interior identity, as some malign feature of new media, but as the potential of every construction of identity, as the dangerous supplement to the positing of identity as the core of the self.” [Mark Poster, “The Secret Self: The case of identity theft.” Cultural Studies. Volume 21, number 1, January 2007. Pages 118-140.]

“The standard Western notion of machines as tools, with users as subjects and machines as objects, with a utilitarian ethic presumed for the subject and a privilege given to the subject’s intentionality or consciousness—this longstanding framework for fitting tools into culture does not do justice to the complexity of the practice of humans with information machines. Since the introduction of print, each generation has confronted the issue of media, taking as given the media that existed in its youth, and responding variously with anxiety or joy to the placement of new media in society.” [Mark Poster, “Everyday (Virtual) Life.” New Literary History. Volume 33, number 4, autumn 2002. Pages 743-760.]

“Television, print, and the Internet are institutions, in this sense, different from each other but also ons in that they construct subjects, define identities, position and configure cultural objects. True enough, media do arrangements in the manner of workshops and prisons, but fixed in space and time, at the computer, in front of the television ing or bicycling through city streets or on a subway with an mp3 player or a cell phone. I refer to this configuration tion of the subject as a ‘superpanopticon’ to indicate its modern institutions.” [Mark Poster, “The Information Empire” Comparative Literature Studies. Volume 41, number 3, 2004. Pages 317-334.]

“The purpose of this paper is not to wade into the historical power struggles and ideological divisions between the various Marxisms. One purpose is, however, to argue for a retrieval of anti-capitalist praxis in critical social theory, which at the outset entails a look at Karl Marx’s criticism of the capitalist mode of production.…

“For [Mark] Poster there has been a shift of ontological proportions from the mode of production to a mode of information, and this shift encompasses all of the political, economic, and socio-cultural changes that come from the computerization and digitization of the human condition.… I argue Poster’s mode of information thesis needlessly obliterates a focus on modern subject formation processes, suffers from a hi-technological determinism and lacks a theory of struggle.”

[Kevin Walby, “Mode of Production versus Mode of Information: Marx, Poster, and an Argument for Anti-Capitalist Praxis.” Critical Sociology. Volume 33, issue 5–6, September 2007. Pages 887-912.]

“First, it is necessary to point out that Lacanian-inspired psychoanalytic feminism does not deny the existence of socially and historically specific structures oppressive to women which are challenged through the women’s movement. What it does contest is the notion of an uncontaminated psychic space that becomes, or is, the mere repository of oppressive social relations. Such a notion casts women as pure victims of an unmediated process of social determinism, a process that renders invisible subjective agency, conflict, and fantasy ….

“Second, the alternative proposed by Lacanian-inspired feminism is not the inverse of social determinism of which it is accused. It does not propose a theory of psychic determinism that shares the same problems as the socially determined view. That is, it does not construe women as pure victims of an unmediated process of psychic determinism, precluding the concepts of subjective agency, conflict, and fantasy. Instead, what is offered is an alternative theory that considers the contribution of both psychical (transhistorical) and social (historically specific) factors to female subjectivity. ”

[Patricia Elliot, “Politics, Identity, and Social Change: Contested Grounds in Psychoanalytic Feminism.” Hypatia. Volume 10, number 2, spring 1995. Pages 41-55.]

“This article is based on the premise that post-structuralism is part of the ‘critical’ tradition in social inquiry: that is, the tradition which seeks to question, articulate and disrupt practices which repress, silence or exploit subject groups. The term (‘critical’) is intended to carry a slightly wider meaning than ‘radical’ as it does not necessarily have the same implications for fundamental critique and change. My references to the ‘critical tradition in social work’ and ‘critical social work’ are similarly broad, incorporating the social democratic as well as the more obviously ‘radical’ traditions.…

“On the side of importance lies the imperative of challenging the entire neo-liberal frame and its consequences for economically and socially subordinated groups. Social workers may find themselves increasingly caught up in this task if current trends continue and deepen. My suggestion is that critical post-structuralism assists in this struggle as it allows one to stand back, deconstruct, suggest alternatives, relativise, question and refuse.”

[Patricia Harris, “Towards a critical post-structuralism.” Social Work Education. Volume 20, number 3, June 2011. Pages 335-350.]

“… critical post-structuralism … re-opened and deepened a method of analysis which had been abandoned by the traditional Left. In particular, it sought to interrogate not the specific manifestations of culturally- and materially-produced difference, but the very nature of difference itself – its role in producing and reproducing inequality, its presumed essentialism, its pervasive deployment in social interaction as gender, as race, as sexuality …. The production of binary systems of classification and hierarchy was revealed to be a point of commonality across categories of identification and analysis which had previously been considered distinct.” [Brian Green, “Classing Identity, Identifying Class: Locating Materialist / Deconstructionist Convergence.” Critical Sociology. Volume 32, issue 4, 2006. Pages 603-616.]

“Through a critical poststructuralist lens I analyze actually existing – ‘real’ – conditions of GPE [global political economy] to reveal that neoliberal hegemony is not what it claims in theory or practice, and simultaneously generates exclusions and marginalizations that belie its purported stability, in theory and practice.…

“… the primary focus here is specifying, through a critical poststructuralist lens, actually existing conditions of today’s GPE, that is, phenomena conventionally regarded as ‘real.’ Insofar as this exposes the excesses and contradictions of neoliberalism, it undermines the latter’s claims to accurately represent reality. At the same time, it reveals the ‘costs’ of favoring this stabilization at the expense of others. The objective is to expose how thoroughly inadequate conventional accounts are, and how necessary critical poststructuralism is not only but especially at this juncture and for analyzing GPE.”

[V. Spike Peterson, “Getting Real: The Necessity of Critical Poststructuralism in Global Political Economy.” International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics. Marieke de Goede, editor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Pages 119-138.]

“In essentializing scientific geography, critics in effect relinquish responsibility for analyzing the wider constitutive context of social power that organizes the relationships between epistemological categories and disciplinary systems. This can present significant problems for critique in general, since essentialist deployments of designations such as regressive and progressive pose a severe threat to our ability to deploy them to effect. If such designations are targeted repeatedly to a stabilized system of thought, then they become empty categories that hover outside of context, revealing merely the non-reflexive character of their deployment. In an ironic twist that reverses the charge of relativism often directed toward postmodern thought, critical poststructuralism remains sensitive to the context in which and toward which such designations are launched.” [Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III, “Editorial: For a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Scientific Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 86, number 4, December 1996. Pages 767-779.]

“A recent editorial in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers … presented an entertaining deconstructive reading of scientific geography. This innovative essay, titled ‘For a Supmalifragilisticexpialidodous Scientific Geography’ demonstrates how a popular deconstructive method adapted from the humanities might be deployed to facilitate the ‘self-redemption’ of scientific geography from its constraining positivist closure, perhaps paving the way for its alignment with the open-ended and pluralistic world-view of an emerging critical poststructuralism.” [David J. Nemeth, “Extreme Geography.” California Geographer. Volume 37, 1997. Pages 11-30.]

“’The Creation of the world or globalization‘: the conjugation must be understood simultaneously and alternatively in its disjunctive, substitute, or conjunctive senses.

“According to the first sense: between the creation of the world or globalization, one must choose, since one implies the exclusion of the other.

“According to the second sense: the creation of the world, in other words globalization, the former must be understood as the latter.

“According to the third sense: the creation of the world or globalization, one or the other indifferently, leads us to a similar result (which remains to be determined).

“The combination of those three senses amounts to raising the same question: can what is called ‘globalization’ give rise to a world, or to its contrary?

“Since it is not an issue of prophesizing nor controlling the future, the question is, rather, how to give ourselves (open ourselves) in order to look ahead of ourselves, while nothing is visible, with eyes guided by those two terms whose meaning evades us—‘creation’ (up to this point limited to theological mystery), ‘world-forming’ [mondialisation] (up to this point limited to economic and technological matters, generally called ‘globalization’).”

[Jean-Luc Nancy. The Creation of the World or Globalization. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, translators. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 2007. Page 29.]

“Both the theory and praxis of critique demonstrate that, from now on, critique absolutely needs to rest on some principle other than that of the ontology of the Other and the Same: it needs an ontology of being-with-one-another, and this ontology must support both the sphere of ‘nature’ and sphere of ‘history,’ as well as both the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’; it must be an ontology for the world, for everyone—and if I can be so bold, it has to be an ontology for each and everyone and for the world ‘as a totality,’ and nothing short of the whole world, since this is all there is (but, in this way, there is all).” [Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural.” Being Singular Plural. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, translators. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pages 1-99.]

“It is not without trepidation that I am allowing this transcription to be published. It should thus only be read, it seems to me, in an attempt to hear something of its actual ‘articulation.’ This was also the result of difficulties inherent in the theme I had chosen. I had selected it because of certain philosophical interests I have tried to develop in the course of a work I have elsewhere called a ‘deconstruction of Christianity.’ But since it was out of the question to introduce this theme or this concept as such, it was necessary for me to proceed without offending the religious convictions of the children but also without giving in to any simplification (it being the case that for me ‘atheism’ and ‘theism’ are but two symmetrical and connected postulations, both based in the same metaphysical presuppositions with regard to being). A transposition into writing of something that was not at all a text and that was the result of a very particular form of address risks at each step erasing both the difficulties encountered and the precautions taken. I can do nothing but warn the reader of this here at the outset.” [Jean-Luc Nancy. God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues. Sarah Clift, translator. New York: Fordham University Press. 2011. Page 2.]

“Thinking is never concerned with anything else. If there is anything like thinking, it’s only because there’s sense, and if there’s anything like sense it’s only in the sense that sense is always given and gives itself as something to be thought. But as well as thinking there’s also intelligence or, worse, intellectuality: each of these are more than capable of devoting themselves to the job in hand as if, in the first instance and exclusively, it were not a matter of sense. This cowardice, or this laziness, is pretty common. Perhaps from the very moment that there is discourse—and there’s always discourse (always a discourse of sense, never a silent restarts, even though it’s at the limit of words, their very limit)—it’s unavoidable in every effort or inclination to think. Yet it seems that this fin de siècle [end of century or of age] has more or less its own form of cowardice and intellectual irresponsibility, carrying on precisely as if it did not remind us, if only by virtue of its symbolic value (but also because of other circumstances, other politics, technologies, aesthetics), with a certain brusqueness, of the question of sense, its chance or its concern. Won’t the century that has just come to an end [the twentieth century] have been a century of innumerable destructions of sense, innumerable deviations, derelictions, weaknesses—in short, the century of its ultimate end?” [Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Finite Thinking.” Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire, and Simon Sparks, translators. A Finite Thinking. Simon Sparks, editor. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pages 3-30.]

“To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to ‘me’ (the supposedly given subject), or to the ‘self’ of the other (the speaker, the musician, also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the relationship in self, so to speak, as it forms a ‘self’ or a ‘to itself’ in general, and if something like that ever does reach the end of its formation. Consequently, listening is passing over to the register of presence to self it being understood that the ‘self’ is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be ‘present,’ but precisely the resonance of a return [renvoi]. For this reason, listening—the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociable ‘mine’ and ‘other,’ ‘singular’ and ‘plural,’ as much as it is ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘signifying’ and ‘a-signifying.’” [Jean-Luc Nancy. Listening. Charlotte Mandell, translator. New York: Fordham University Press. 2007. Page 12.]

“Of all human nudity—and there’s no other kind of nudity—the penis is the only part that reveals more than, or something other than, nudity. It isn’t skin, or it is no longer only skin, but is as uncovered as skin. There’s nothing to push aside, neither hair nor lips, in order to expose the penis that the patch of hair presents and doesn’t hide. It’s there to be seen, not suspended between the thighs, as is it is often said to be, but in front, flanked by its fanlily jewels. Nudity here lacks any reserve of modesty. The skin is not the Iuminous transparence of the body: it is only an organ and an additional limb. In truth, the body is left behind: we are before another presence that is singular, independent and hanging out. Either the penis falls, ahmost shapeless and crumpled, an awkward pendulum, or it’s erect, swollen, huge, powerfully in action, with meaning and presence only in ejaculation.” [Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari. Being Nude: The Skin of Images. Anne O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire, translators. New York: Fordham University Press. 2014. Page 51.]

“Non-philosophy is a discipline born from reflection upon two problems whose solutions finally coincided: on the one hand, that of the One’s ontological status within philosophy, which associates it, whether explicitly or not, to Being and to the Other whilst forbidding it any measure of radical autonomy; on the other, that of philosophy’s theoretical status, insofar as philosophy is practise, affect, existence, but lacking in a rigorous knowledge of itself, a field of objective phenomena not yet subject to theoretical overview.” [François Laruelle, “A Summary of Non-Philosophy.” Ray Brassier, translator. Pli. Volume 8, 1999. Pages 138-148.]

“Non-philosophy is surprised not by Being, which has at least two faces, and is not surprised that there would be beings, but is surprised that there would be the One and that it shows itself in the subject, not at the same time that it hides within it, but while it shows itself as what will be explained ‘partially’ or by a single face.” [François Laruelle, “Principles for a Generic Ethics.” Anthony Paul Smith, translator. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 19, number 2, June 2014. Pages 13-23.]

“There is … the thesis, like the thesis within Marxism, of a non-philosophical practice, here Christian, of philosophy. Stated thus, our maxim is susceptible of innumerable equivocations to the extent that, nevertheless, a rigorous concept of Christ cannot be established apart from philosophy. We thus understand this maxim as a maxim of the non-philosophical practice of philosophy, and as an obligation to establish a Christian science that is not neutral, but rather is engaged in the practical affairs of Christianity, and thus not merely in the manner of a hermeneutic or in simply scientific terms.” [François Laruelle, “A Science of [En] Christ.” Aaron Riches, translator. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 19, number 2, June 2014. Pages 25-33.]

“Nothing can, except through illusion, substitute itself for man and for his identity. And man cannot, except through illusion, substitute himself for philosophy, for the Other, etc. Man is an inalienable reality. There is no reversibility between man and philosophy.” [François Laruelle, “Theorems on the Good News.” Alexander R. Galloway, translator. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 19, number 2, June 2014. Pages 41-43.]

“Non-philosophy is constituted under a double aspect: doctrinal, with the objective appearance of a philosophical type of thought; methodical and disciplinary, with a more theoretical than systematic will of extending its modes of argumentation and its vocabulary to all fundamental knowledges. For these two reasons, it appealed to a dictionary destined to form the pinnacle of theoretical acquisitions, to present the essentials of the technique, and to distinguish parallel, neighboring, or variant thoughts in the midst of which it has developed. In terms of dictionaries, this one has the benefits, insufficiencies, and illusions which are attached to this genre of works—nothing here is added from this order.” [François Laruelle. Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Taylor Adkins, translator. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal Publishing. 2013. Page 1.]

“Non-philosophy is regarded by philosophy either as the state of immediacy of naive and sensible opinions (the judgments of common sense), or as its other which it remains to think (sciences, technologies, politics, the arts….) that is to say as the presuppositions of philosophy itself (the innumerable ‘non-thoughts’ [impensés]) which are in turn philosophizable).” [François Laruelle. Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Taylor Adkins, translator. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal Publishing. 2013. Page 44.]

“Following François Laruelle, I concede the idea of the ‘Stranger’ is necessary for a rigorous and non-philosophical theorizing of the Self since it overcomes the dualistic split created by the dyad of the ‘Real’ and the ‘Subject.’ Here, I would propose that resurrecting the figure of the ‘Stranger’ is a necessary radicalization of the idea of human subjectivity.” [Katerina Kolozova, “The Figure of the Stranger: A Possibility for Transcendental Minimalism or Radical Subjectivity.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Volume 11, number 3, fall 2011. Pages 59-64.]

“François Laruelle’s realism is grounded in his claim that philosophy itself is the source of contemporary thought’s self-circumscription and its paralysis in addressing reality, which would fundamentally change it or at least explain it with rigor.… Laruelle’s non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy does not aspire to cancel philosophy altogether or replace it with science. The goal of non-philosophy is to rid philosophy of its dictatorship of the transcendental vis-à-vis the real, which again only leads to its narcissistic self-sufficiency. The first gesture toward this goal is the unilateral positioning of thought vis-à-vis the instance of the real. The Thought correlates with the real as the authority in the last instance rather than with a system of thought. In this way it operates with concepts that have been radicalized and that are then used non-philosophically.” [Katerina Kolozova. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. 2014. Page 3.]

“[François] Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy proffers a conceptual apparatus and the possibility for a critical positioning of thought that enables me to undertake a radical critique of the mainstream legacy of poststructuralist feminist philosophy without abandoning it as a whole.” [Katerina Kolozova. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. 2014. Page 7.]

“… a non-philosophical reconceptualization of ‘pure violence’ is the product of a ‘Vision-in-One’ which is attuned to the singularity of the event rather than to its relations to other concepts and frameworks of thought the concepts belong to and within which/in terms of which they are thought (philosophical or theoretical systems, schools of thought, doctrines). It is a concept which has been extracted from a philosophy, from a universe of thought and, thereupon, divested of its transcendental status determined within a particular framework of thought.” [Katerina Kolozova, “Violence: The Indispensable Condition of the Law (and the Political).” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 19, number 2, June 2014. Pages 99-111.]

“[François] Laruelle provides me with conceptual or methodological possibilities of producing theoretical work without adherence to any philosophical legacy in particular, and to do so without being arbitrary or voluntaristic. His non-standard philosophy enables one to take recourse to conceptual material derived from philosophy without the endorsement of the explanatory frame a philosophical school or authority creates for the concepts produced within it. Non-philosophy offers methods to rigorously think realities and discuss philosophical ideas.” [Katerina Kolozova, “Interview with Katerina Kolozova.” Figure/Ground. April 22nd, 2013. Pages 1-5.]

“… [François] Laruelle suggests that the ‘non’ in the expression ‘non-philosophy’ be understood as akin to the ‘non’ in the expression ‘non-Euclidian’ geometry: not as a negation or denial of philosophy, but as suspending a specific structure (the philosophical equivalent of Euclid’s fifth axiom concerning parallels) which Laruelle sees as constitutive of the traditional practice of philosophy. New possibilities of thought become available once that structure has been suspended and non-philosophy is an index of those philosophically unenvisageable possibilities.” [Ray Brassier, “Axiomatic heresy: The non-philosophy of François Laruelle.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 121, September/October 2003. Pages 24-35.]

“We are repeatedly enjoined by [François] Laruelle’s advocates to assess … [the] practice, what non-philosophy can do. My guiding hypothesis and question will be: it has always been possible to use philosophical materials to construct a personal philosophy or world-view, but how far does Laruelle get beyond an individual project, given the abundant solipsisms in his method? I argue that it is precisely as a practical philosophical orientation that the project is best understood, rather than through its self-presentation as a science of theoretical reason.” [Andrew McGettigan, “Fabrication defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 175, September/October 2012. Pages 33-42.]

“Casting his [François Laruelle’s] own theory against that of the thinker who informed him most, Laruelle disfigures [Jacques] Derrida in order to raise the heretical possibility that, perhaps, the global susceptibility of any given ideology, metaphysics, or text to displacement and deconstruction is itself a kind of universality—one decisional in nature. Non-philosophy can be regarded as the mature offspring of this wager.” [Andrew Resziknyk, “Wonder without Domination: An Introduction to Laruelle and Non-Philosophy.” Chiasma. Issue 1, 2014. Pages 24-53.]

“The presupposition of the adequacy of thought to the real defines philosophy as such. The presupposition is the same whether the real is defined in advance as the known or as the unknown – the latter definition merely reducing the real to the negative correlate of the philosophical concept. Thought undertaken in the absence of this presupposition is, by [François] Laruelle’s definition, ‘nonphilosophy.’ The inaugurating postulate of non-philosophy is that thought is in no way other than the real; the relation of thought and the real cannot, therefore, be understood as a relation of adequation or of inadequation. In his discourse the non-philosophical subject cannot objectify the relation (or non-relation) of reality to thought. But for Laruelle the de-objectification of knowledge does not preclude the possibility of a specifically non-philosophical way of knowing.” [Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjević, “According to the Identity of the Real: The Non-Philosophical Thought of Immanence.” Synthesis Philosophica. Volume 26, number 1, August 2011. Pages 209-227.]

“This book is informed not by discourse analysis, but rather by a strand of post-structuralist political theory known as discourse theory. A set of approaches influenced by the works of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, the emergence of theory as a political analytic was informed in particular by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe …. Discourse theory in this sense does not provide a structured methodology for social and political investigation, but rather it provides an ensemble of analytic tools which can be brought to bear on the analysis of meanings and political practices in a contingent and radically contested social terrain.

“Discourse theory posits a broader understanding of discourse than does critical discourse analysis, recognising all meaning bearing practices, customs, beliefs, and activities as reflecting a discursive logic. Discourse theory therefore rejects superficial assumptions concerning a distinction between the discursive and the extra discursive, instead concerning itself with the articulation of linguistic and non-linguistic elements in discourse …. The starting point for discourse theory is that the meanings of all social phenomena are bestowed through discourse …. This does not validate the facile rejections of anti-foundationalism (‘everything is socially constructed’), because discourse theory is not in fact based on the idea that things are constructed through language. Rather, discourse theory recognises that the only ways in which events and entities can be accessed is through the use of language ….”

[David Tyrer. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“Simply to assume ‘they are Muslims’ or to attempt to divine whether they are Muslims or members of some other, assumed primordial group, is not an analytical task but a normative one. The analytical task is actually to uncover the politics at stake in the tensions that such questions imply, the ways in which they reveal the contingency of prior namings and racialisation, how this plays out against a wider racial politics, and the different social relations and political practices that are made possible through the different ways in which the category of Muslim is constructed through Islamophobia, as well as in response to the emergence of a phenomenon increasingly organised under its naming as Islamophobia. Discourse theory is a helpful approach to the study of such phenomena precisely because it rejects essentialism.” [David Tyrer. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Kindle edition.]

Post-Marxism was informed by the structural Marxism of approaches of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Moreover, the perspective of post-Marxism (and of poststructuralism more generally) has been strongly influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Specifically, the post-Marxist perspective developed by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis combines radical democracy (a term popularized by Laclau and Mouffe) with liberal social theory and social science. According to Bowles and Gintis, some writers misinterpreted their early work as a version of “structural-functionalism.” Perhaps it was structuralist instead. All of the quotations provided here, by and about these two authors, are intended to illustate their intellectual evolutions.

“We know from [Ludwig] Wittgenstein that there is no such thing as the ‘application of a rule’ – the instance of application becomes part of the rule itself. To reread Marxist theory in the light of contemporary problems necessarily involves deconstructing the central categories of that theory. This is what has been called our ‘post-Marxism.’ We did not invent this label – it only marginally appears (not as a label) in the Introduction to our book. But since it has become generalized in characterizing our work, we can say that we do not oppose it insofar as it is properly understood: as the process of reappropriation of an intellectual tradition, as well as the process of going beyond it.

“… There is a process of mutual feedback between the incorporation of new fields of objects and the general ontological categories governing, at a certain time, what is thinkable within the general field of objectivity. The ontology implicit in Freudianism, for instance, is different and incompatible with a biologist paradigm. From this point of view, it is our conviction that in the transition from Marxism to post-Marxism, the change is not only ontic but also ontological. The problems of a globalized and information-ruled society are unthinkable within the two ontological paradigms governing the field of Marxist discursivity: first the Hegelian, and later the naturalistic.”

[Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second edition. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2001. Pages ix-x.]

“The guiding thread of our analysis has been the transformations in the concept of hegemony, considered as a discursive surface and fundamental nodal point of Marxist political theorization. Our principal conclusion is that behind the concept of ‘hegemony’ lies hidden something more than a type of political relation complementary to the basic categories of Marxist theory.” [Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second edition. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2001. Page 3.]

“Emancipation presupposes the elimination of power, the abolition of the subject/object distinction, and the management – without any opaqueness or mediation – of communitarian affairs by social agents identified with the viewpoint of social totality. It is in this sense that in Marxism, for instance, communism and the withering away of the state logically entail each other.” [Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s). New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2007. Page 1.]

“There is a rhetorical displacement whenever a literal term is substituted for a figural one.” [Ernesto Laclau. On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2005. Page 71.]

“I see the transformation today of the discourses informing both political theory and political practice (in fact, the separation between the two is largely an artificial operation). Theoretical categories which in the past were considered as bearers of a univocal sense become deeply ambiguous once that sense is seen as the actualization of only some of the possibilities opened by their internal structure.” [Ernesto Laclau, “Introduction.” The Making of Political Identities. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1994. Page 2.]

“… a revolution, conceived by [Karl] Marx as a political truth, is the affirmative revelation of the hidden laws of society: class struggle, contradictions, economic power. But it is also the destructive transgression of all these laws: collective economy, dictatorship of the proletariat. But how is it possible for a negation, above all, for a destructive one, to be also the most affirmative knowledge of the very essence of society? The question finally is: What sort of negation is involved in transgression? What sort of immanent negation is represented by the process of a truth in a world? In what sense is the distance between Event and Law thinkable in the form of negation?” [Alain Badiou, “The Three Negations.” Cardozo Law Review. Volume 29, number 5, 2008. Pages 1877-1883.]

“Admittedly, [Karl] Marx thought that proletarian revolution, under the banner of communism, would cut short, and spare us, this full unfolding of capitalism, whose horror he clearly perceived. In his view it was indeed a case of communism or barbarism. The tremendous efforts to vindicate him on this score during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century did in fact significantly check and deflect the logic of capitalism, especially after the Second World War. For around thirty years, following the collapse of the socialist states as viable alternative forms (the case of the USSR), or their subversion by a virulent state capitalism following the failure of an explicitly communist mass movement (the case of China in the years 1965-68), we have had the dubious privilege of finally witnessing the confirmation of all Marx’s predictions about the real essence of capitalism and the societies it rules. As to barbarism, we are already there, and are rapidly going to sink further into it. But it conforms, even in detail, to what Marx hoped the power of the organized proletariat would forestall.” [Alain Badiou. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Gregory Elliott, translator. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 2012. Pages 14-15.]

“… what best explains the ‘relation between racism and national oppression on the one hand and exploitation … on the other’ is poststructuralist Marxism or post-Marxism, a theory that I derive from the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and which, thanks to their extraordinary influence, has acquired philosophical, economic, historical, feminist, literary, and cultural versions.’ [Philip Goldstein. Post-Marxist Theory: An Introduction. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 2005. Page 2.]

“[Louis] Althusser’s development of a structural Marxism nevertheless played its part in encouraging the growth of post-Marxism – if against the grain of the author’s intentions…. Structural Marxism is one of the more successful attempts to create a ‘hybrid’ Marxism that can take on board recent theoretical developments, and that suggests an unfinished character to Marxist theory.” [Stuart Sim. Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Page 94.]

“… one must ask what the efficacious structures of the double articulation might be. What, in the last instance, is the motor of science (in the sense in which the class struggle is the motor of history)? Accordingly, these questions call not for a philosophy of knowledge, but a theory of structural causality, which interrogates science as a practical effect and not as a representation.” [Alain Badiou. The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, editors and translators. Melbourne, Australia: re.press. 2007. Open sccess. Page 15.]

“On the one hand, the particular cannot exist outside of the general, the general structures the nature and the essence of the particular. However, the general is also inseparable from the particular: it manifests itself through the latter, it traverses the latter, the general comprises itself through the particular, it has the particular as content. All generality seized outside of the particular is empty and not real.” [Alain Badiou. The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic. Tzuchien Tho, editor and translator. Melbourne, Australia: re.press. 2011. Open access. Page 25.]

“How might we weave a neo-Marxist and Foucauldian [Michel Foucault] analysis of technical control and the curriculum? One possibility is suggested by the poststructural Marxist Félix Guattari. He observes that ‘capitalism does not seek to exercise despotic power over all the wheels of society…. It is even crucial to its survival that it manages to arrange marginal freedoms, relative spaces for creativity.’ What gives its ability to reorder various heterogeneous activities and domains of cultural production, to maintain control not through centralization of power, but through the decentralization of power to the point of production. Control is much more invested, consequently, in microtechnologies, which Guattari refers to as ‘machines.’ He does so by way of emphasizing a poststructural concern with processes and the technologies that guide processes, rather than with structure. Schools may then be approached as sites where teachers and students use what Guattari calls ‘semiotization machines’ to decode texts and produce certain objectified and quantifiable outcomes or truths. On the other side of the dominant machines of public education today are the reform discourses and interests of transnational capitalism. These discourses are engaged, according to Guattari, in ‘de-territorializing’ economic machines and information technologies and ‘re-territorializing’ them by applying them to the reorganization of all public institutions.” [Dennis Carlson, “Are We Making Progress? Ideology and Curriculum in the Age of No Child Left Behind.” Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology of Education: Revisiting the Work of Michael Apple. Lois Weis, Greg Dimitriadis, and Cameron McCarthy, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Google Play edition.]

“Poststructural Marxism … is concerned more with hegemony and discourse and how people come to believe that capitalism is a natural way of life rather than laws or truths of history that govern capitalist development.” [Mark Balnaves, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, and Brian Shoesmith. Media Theories and Approaches: A Global Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2009. Page 105.]

“In delivering us from that task [the need for an in-depth struggle with the minute particulars of our experience], poststructural Marxism … may have canceled the possibility of genuine liberation.” [Walter Albert Davis. Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity In/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1989. Page 187.]

“A first sense of our post-Marxism thus becomes clear. It consists in a deepening of that relational moment which [Karl] Marx, thinking within a Hegelian and, in any case, nineteenth-century matrix, could only take so far. In an age when psychoanalysis has shown that the action of the unconscious makes all signification ambiguous; when the development of structural linguistics has enabled us to understand better the functioning of purely differential identities; when the transformation of thought—from [Friedrich Wilhelm] Nietzsche to [Martin] Heidegger, from pragmatism to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein—has decisively undermined philosophical essentialism, we can reformulate the materialist programme in a much more radical way than was possible for Marx.…

“We believe that, by clearly locating ourselves in a post-Marxist terrain, we not only help to clarify the meaning of contemporary social struggles but also give to Marxism its theoretical dignity, which can only proceed from recognition of its limitations and of its historicality. Only through such recognition will Marx’s work remain present in our tradition and our political culture.”

[Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies.” New Left Review. Series I, number 166, November–December 1987. Pages 79-106.]

“… an appeal to theoretical work that carries on the project of the texts in some measure can be helpful; that modern materialism was reworked by French structural and poststructural Marxism has been invaluable to me ….” [Margaret Cohen. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1993. Pages 13-14.]

“Our thinking about democracy and domination represents a fusion of three quite distinct strands of thought. One is the radical democratic tradition and its expression in the social movements of the 1960s. The second is liberal social theory and social science. The third is Marxism. Or perhaps more correctly put, out thinking has evolved through a sustained encounter between the hope and rage of the radical democratic movements of our time and the two now-dominant intellectual traditions.” [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. New York: Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 1987. Page xvii.]

“… the failure of progressive educational reforms stems from the contradictory nature of the objectives of its integrative, egalitarian and developmental functions in a society whose economic life is governed by the institutions of corporate capitalism. Both the democratic and technocratic versions of liberal education theory focus on the relationships into which individuals enter upon adulthood. In Dewey’s democratic version, political life is singled out as central, while for the technocratic version, the technical aspects of production hold the honored position. Both have been blind to—or at least treated in quite unrealistic manner—the social relationships of capitalist production. Dewey’s overall framework seems emminently correct. His error lies in characterizing the social system as democratic, whereas, in fact, the hierarchical division of labor in the capitalist enterprise is politically autocratic.

“In corporate capitalist society, the social relations of production conform, by and large, to the ‘hierarchical division of labor,’ characterized by power and control emanating from the top downward through a finely gradated bureaucratic order. The social relationships of the typically bureaucratic corporate enterprise require special attention because they are neither democratic not technical….

“Had the technocratic school looked at the social rather than the technical relations of production, it might have been more circumspect in asserting the compatibility of the integrative, egalitarian, and developmental functions of schooling. Indeed, it might have found that the way in which the school system performs its integrative function—through its production of a stratified labor force for the capitalist enterprise—is inconsistent with its performance of either developmental or egalitarian functions. Focusing on cognitive variables, it cannot even entertain the idea that the correspondence between the social relations of production and the social relations of education—the essential mechanism of the integrative function of schooling—might preclude an egalitarian or truly humanistic education….

“The educational system serves—through the correspondence of its social relations with those of economic life—to reproduce economic inequality and to distort personal development. Thus under corporate capitalism, the objectives of liberal educational reform are contradictory: It is precisely because of its role as producer of an alienated and stratified labor force that the educational system has developed its repressive and unequal structure. In the history of U.S. education, it is the integrative function which has dominated the purpose of schooling, to the detriment of the other liberal objectives.

“… When education is viewed as an aspect of the reproduction of the capitalist division of labor, the history of school reforms in the United States appears less as a story of an enlightened but sadly unsuccessful corrective and more as an integral part of the process of capitalist growth itself.”

[Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. 2011. Pages 45-48.]

“In this work I argue that relating these putatively discrete approaches [post-Marxism and cultural studies] is eminently justified and actually even called for, because both post-Marxism and cultural studies in a strong sense came into existence in response to a certain deconstructive ‘crisis’ in (and about) politics and knowledge. As will be argued, both post-Marxist theory and cultural studies as institutions initially and constitutively orientated themselves as interventional efforts, as wanting to challenge, dislodge, or at least develop, existing and often broadly Marxist models of political causality, of intervention, and of what determines the character of conjunctures, identities and objects.” [Paul Bowman. Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Page xii.]

“It follows that the hierarchical division of labor affects inequality not only through wage differentials, but also through the divergent patterns of consciousness and motivation to which it gives rise. These patterns, as we will point out, tend to be transmitted through the family and impose severe limits on the functioning of the educational system.” [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. 2011. Page 96.]

“… there are fundamental contradictions among the integrative, egalitarian, and personal development functions of education in capitalist society.” [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. 2011. Page 109.]

“Over the years Schooling in Capitalist America has received a considerable amount of critical attention, for which we are grateful. One reading of our book—that it presented a functionalist argument—is sufficiently misguided to deserve a brief comment here. A functionalist argument explains something, such as the structure of schooling, by the benefits it confers on some group, for instance, the profits accruing to employers from a well-socialized labor force, without providing any causal explanation of the manner in which these consequences account for the thing to be explained. We devoted three chapters of Schooling in Capitalist America to the history and evolution of education precisely to illuminate the process by which the correspondence principle and other aspects of the structure of schooling came about. The benefits (correctly) anticipated by employers loom large in this account. But this does not make the argument functionalist.” [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited.” Sociology of Education. Volume 75, number 1, January 2002. Pages 1-18.]

“In North America, the best-known application of Marxist functionalism in education is by [Samuel] Bowles and [Herbert] Gintis [referencing, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life] ….” [David Post, “Political Goals of Peruvian Students: The Foundations of Legitimacy in Education.” Sociology of Education. Volume 61, number 3, July 1988. Pages 178-190.]

“The prominent ‘post-Marxist’ American political economists, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis … argue that Marxist theory should not turn away from economically driven conceptions of crisis.” [Robert J. Antonio, “The Decline of the Grand Narrative in Emancipatory Modernity: Crisis or Renewal in Neo-Marxian Theory?” Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses. George Ritzer, editor. New York: Columbia University Press. 1990. Page 102.]

“The work of Michel Foucault is not easily assimilated into the concepts and fields of inquiry defined and delimited by the human sciences. Indeed, Foucault’s comments on his work, namely that he was not a Freudian, a Marxist, or a structuralist, nor concerned with elaborating a phenomenological philosophy of the subject, but rather with presenting a ‘genealogy of the modern subject as a historical and cultural reality,’ are suggestive of a significant difference in conceptualization and approach from those forms associated with the human sciences. However, to argue that Foucault’s analyses need to be differentiated from the history of ideas, philosophical inquiry, and sociological investigation is not to imply that the historian, the philosopher, and the sociologist, amongst others, will find nothing of interest or relevance in the work. Foucault most certainly was not a sociologist, but there is much of sociological relevance in his work.” [Barry Smart. Michel Foucault. Revised edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Page 8.]

“Barry Smart … makes the contentious point that Michel Foucault’s theoretical insights can be labelled as ‘neo-Marxist’ in highlighting how surveillance is a critical feature of modern education policy and schools. Whilst traditional Marxist scholarship has an awareness of economics and ideology in the context of social relationships in education; a neo-Marxist perspective grounded in Foucault’s work can illustrate how surveillance and discourses of power impact the positioning of children as educational objects of control, domination and subordination. It would be wrong to deny the impact of ‘subjectivity’ as a core concept in the process of education …. However, in offering an alternative and critical exploration of ERA we can address C.W. Wright Mills … powerful argument that sociological theorising must focus on how individual biographies are shaped by the wider social forces within a particular period in history and culture. Similarly, [Norman] Fairclough … suggests that a critical perspective opens up ‘common sense assumptions’ that lie at the heart of western culture about social institutions. Fairclough … further suggests that Foucault’s … work on ‘discourse’ has similarities with the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony.’ This assertion is evidenced by Foucault … himself, when he states, ‘Discourse in not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which there is struggle. Discourse is the power to be seized.’

“Nevertheless, there are certainly tensions between Foucault’s neo-Marxism and variants of structuralist Marxism. Foucault side-steps the binary relationship set up by the Marxist educational theory of [Samuel] Bowles and [Herbert] Gintis … for example, between true and false realities, ways of knowing and political consciousness. Foucault has the theoretical reflexivity of loosening knowledge, ideas and subject positions from categories of social totality, such as social formation, the mode of production, history, economy and society …. Thus suspended from their ostensible connections, social ideas are re-articulated in Foucault’s thought to historical and societal features ignored in Marxist models of social reality based on the labour process and modes of economic exploitation. Hence, Foucault’s neo-Marxist perspective on discourse, power and surveillance provides a rich seam of theorizing as an addition to Marxist scholarship …. Indeed, whereas Marxism has focused on the ‘macrophysics of power’ …, Foucault’s … work complements such an approach by focusing on the ‘microphysics of power’; relationships between social actors and institutions. Coupled with this, [Mark] Granovetter … stressed the importance of linked socially embedded networks as a way of theorizing relations between macrostructures and microlevels of action.”

[Jason L. Powell and Margaret Edwards, “Surveillance and Morality: Revisiting the Education Reform Act (1988) in the United Kingdom.” Surveillance & Society: The International, Interdisciplinary, Open Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal of Surveillance Studies. Volume 3, number 1. Pages 96-106. Retrieved on October 6th, 2015.]

“Faced with this problem [‘the modern will to fully know, order, and control the natural world, the individual, the social order’], a common post-Marxist response has been to reject Marxist determinism, to emphasise the limitations on what human beings can know and do, and to underscore, to greater or lesser degrees, the contingency of social life. And a common theoretical alternative to the conceptual apparatus of historical materialism has been the post-Marxist turn to culture, meaning, discourse, and language.” [Chamsy el-Ojeili, “After Post-Socialism: Social Theory, Utopia, and the Work of Castoriadis in a Global Age.” AntePodium: Online Journal of World Affairs. Victoria University. Wellington, Australia. 2011. Pages 1-33.]

“The post-Marxist approach has been used in political ecologism to reframe ecologism in ideological terms … and to challenge political subjectivity in light of ecological discourse …. In recognising the aim of post-Marxism to provide an ‘anchorage’ from which contemporary social struggles (including ecologism) are ‘thinkable in their specificity,’ I maintain that post-Marxism provides an alternative series of categories and emphases that augment extant considerations of ecological praxis ….” [John Mackenzie, “What is to be (Un)Done? Praxical Post-Marxism and Ecologism.” Dialogue. Volume 1, number 2, 2003. Pages 31-54.]

“The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And ‘Power,’ insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” [Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality—Volume I: An Introduction. Robert Hurley, translator. New York: Pantheon Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 1978. Page 93.]

“A general system of oversight and confinement penetrates all layers of society, taking forms that go from the great prisons built on the panopticon model to the charitable societies, and that find their points of application not only among the delinquents, but among abandoned children, orphans, apprentices, high school students, workers, and so on.” [Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Paul Rabinow, editor. Robert Hurley and others, translators. New York: The New Press. 1997. Page 32.]

“… he [Michel Foucault] writes ‘Power’ in scare quotes, thus taking distance from it as an analytical concept. Instead of creating an ontology of power, he suggests a nominalistic approach ….” [Pertti Alasuutari, “The nominalist turn in theorizing power.” European Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 13, number 4, 2010. Pages 403-417.]

“The post-Marxist authors’ project takes root in the idea that the Marxist theoretical system collapsed once and for all with the Berlin Wall. Although some attempts to reconstruct Marxian and Marxist thought exist, they claim that we are presently experiencing a ‘post-Marxist’ period, following the ‘Marxist’ period of the 1960s and 1970s, which were two decades of great class struggles. For Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, classical Marxist categories such as ‘class interests,’ ‘revolution’ etc., have become unsuitable for explaining the changes which have taken place in the social and political spheres of contemporary capitalist societies. Indeed, according to these authors, classical Marxist categories have become inadequate to ‘the task of understanding the radical openness of the social and the rise of new, non-class-based actors and social movements’ ….” [Hélène Samanci. The political ontology of post-Marxism. Master of Philosophy thesis. Queen Mary University of London. London, England. September, 2012. Page 8.]

“One of my overarching themes is to suggest that post-Marxist critiques of historical materialism and class analysis tend to be couched as rejections of the type of theory that Marxism is thought to represent, or as drastic temperings of its explanatory scope, rather than being outright dismissals of substantive Marxist propositions and analytic concerns. That is why the arguments for post-Marxism tend to hang more on pejorative characterizations of general conceptual effects/strategies such as Marxism’s alleged ‘reductionism,’ ‘functionalism,’ ‘essentialism,’ and ‘universalism,’ than on the denial of particular historical materialist postulates, such as the systematically capitalist nature of the modern industrial order, which few post-Marxists seriously question.” [Gregor McLennan, “Post-Marxism and the ‘Four Sins’ of Modernist Theorizing.” New Left Review. Series I, number 218, July–August 1996. Pages 53-74.]

“They [post-Marxists] encounter a mutated capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism’ with descriptive language which emphasizes their trendiness: ‘post-modernism’ is only the latest version of ‘advanced industrial society,’ ‘post-industrial society,’ or ‘post-scarcity society.’ Those among them who retain the radical political impulse lack the clear, simple sense of the whole that ‘capitalism’ gave.” [Ronald Aronson, “Historical Materialism, Answer to Marxism’s Crisis.” New Left Review. Series I, number 152, July–August 1985. Pages 74-94.]

“Despite the sense of critical engagement that the ‘post’ connotes, neo-Gramscian post-Marxism was in many ways a flight from Marxian problematics. Certainly it marked a movement from the politics of production to the politics of democracy and civil society.… Times … change, and with the current prominence of questions of globalization, commodification, the intensification of work, and the knowledge economy, the post-Marxist trajectory looks a little less secure, and a possibility seems to have arisen for a re-engagement with the Marxian problematic of production.” [Nicholas Thoburn. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 11.]

“Alain Badiou avowedly owes much of his radical philosophy to his ‘master,’ Jacques Lacan. It is puzzling, therefore, that psychoanalytical critics have painstakingly sought to defend and preserve Jacques Lacan’s thought against, rather than through, that of Badiou. In fact, by bringing these two anti-humanists together under their shared articulations of the irreducible, inassimilable real, it is possible to see how Badiou provides his contemporaries with a means of expanding and extending, rather than contracting and restricting, Lacanian theory.…

“Herein emerges the principal difference between Lacan and Badiou: whereas for Lacan, the void inhabits and founds the desiring subject, for Badiou, it constitutes being-as-being. Although Lacan’s act and Badiou’s event both involve a subject, the Badiousian subject is dialectically intertwined with the truth: the truth results from a process driven by the fidelity of the subject; yet the subject is not a given structure that pre-exists the event, but rather, as Badiou explains, ‘induced’ by the truth-process itself.”

[Lucy Bell, “Articulations of the Real: from Lacan to Badiou.” Paragraph. Volume 34, number 1, 2011. Pages 105-120.]

“The inverventions of poststructuralist Marxists into economic and political thought show a provocative, but also troubling, orientation toward play. Their thinking emphasizes the openness of possibilities; it questions restraints, and denies inherent connections between causes and effects. This approach is appealing when it sets itself against intellectual rigidity. It asks whether there might not be more possibilities than have been considered, more paths to explore than allowed for in existing theory. Yet skepticism is not a sufficient basis for radicalism, nor is playfulness. An intellectual practice so grounded will tend to sail off into the stratosphere losing any connection with actual or possible social struggles, and with the goal of egalitarian social change as a whole. Poststructuralism (whether Marxist or otherwise) is playful at its best, sectarian at worst; and the slide from one to the other can take place very quickly. Antiessentialism is hardly the only dogma to plague the left intellectual world; but it does seem to be the leading contender today. And if those who are in positions of power and influence have clear, coherent, explicit goals, while the left understands politics as a game of escalating skeptical questioning, it is not hard to figure out who is going to prevail.” [Barbara Epstein, “Interpreting the World (Without Necessarily Changing It).” New Politics. Volume 6, number 4, winter 1998. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The fundamental problem that contemporary Marxism faces, explained [Alaine] Badiou back in 1975, is not the metaphysical assertion of the transcendence of timeless truths and therefore the denial of change. Rather, philosophical revisionism’s latest strategy involves embracing Mao’s emphasis on scissional process, but with the proviso that process be thought only on the parliamentary model just invoked, as a law of formal alteration within a given reality composed of self-identical elements. For Badiou, this formalism is the latest avatar of a metaphysical invariant.” [Colin Wright. Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict. Victoria, Australia: re.press. 2013. Page 37.[

“… the allegedly post-Marxist ‘renovation’ of the theory of hegemony has much more in common with Hegelian idealism than with the Marxist tradition, and it remains to be seen how far a theory thus framed may go. Up to now, what post-Marxism has done is arbitrarily select certain themes of Gramscian thought, ‘reinterpret’ them in an idealistic key, and use them as the cornerstones of a social theory that is in the antipodes with regard to Marxism and, far from ‘superseding’ Marxism, ends up in a theoretical regression to the Hegelian concepts of the state and politics. [Ernesto] Laclau is right when he joins numerous Marxist theorists who have proposed a radical reevaluation of the crucial role of ideology and culture, factors for which vulgar Marxism has demonstrated an unjustifiable disdain. However, his attempt founders on the rocks of a ‘new reductionism’ when his criticism of the classist essentialism and the economism of the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals ends in the exaltation of the discursive as a new Hegelian deus ex machina of history. There is no such a thing as a virtuous reductionism.” [Atilio A. Boron, “Embattled Legacy ‘Post-Marxism’ and the Social and Political Theory of Karl Marx.” Latin American Perspectives. Issue 113, volume 27, number 4, July 2000. Pages 49-79.]

“What divides [Ernesto] Laclau and other post-Marxists from the revolutionary internationalism of the Marxist tradition may have less to do with theory and depend more on conditions of belief. Laclau’s project for radical democracy shows clearly, I think, that the condition of disbelief characteristic of the postdiscourses, the postmodern incredulity in the face of metanarrative, need not result in political quietism. But just as post-Marxism applies a deconstructive pressure to Marxism, it simultaneously locates its limit: namely, if its disbelief is not necessarily politically debilitating, it nonetheless cordons off a structure of feeling that has long animated the Marxist tradition—a sense of allegiance with the struggles for working-class power and a sense of responsibility to keep past struggles relevant in the present.” [John Trimbur, “The Problem of Post-Marxism: Radical Democracy and Class Struggle.” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, & Politics. Volume 19, number 2, 1999. Pages 285-291.]

“… any historical-geographical materialist worth his or her salt, must surely recognize that radically different socio-ecological circumstances imply quite different approaches to the question of what is or is not just.… [S]uch [socio-ecological and political-economic] processes are constitutive of the very standards of social justice that may be used to evaluate and modify their own operation. It is my foundational aim to provide a solid conceptual apparatus to enquire into the justness of such relations and how the sense of justice in turn gets historically and geographically constituted. Coincidentally, I also consider this work to be an enquiry into the foundational principles for an adequate historical-geographical materialism in the Marxist tradition.” [David Harvey. Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1996. Page 6.]

“My aim is to look at the current condition of global capitalism and the role that a ‘new’ imperialism might be playing within it. I do so from the perspective of the long duree and through the lens of what I call historical-geographical materialism. I seek to uncover some of the deeper transformations occurring beneath all the surface turbulence and volatility, and so open up a terrain of debate as to how we might best interpret and react to our present situation.” [David Harvey. The New Imperialism. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Page 1.]

“We can … interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. In what follows I shall argue that the second of these objectives has in practice dominated. Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal. The evidence suggests, moreover, that when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable. This in no way denies the power of ideas to act as a force for historical-geographical change. But it does point to a creative tension between the power of neoliberal ideas and the actual practices of neoliberalization that have transformed how global capitalism has been working over the last three decades.” [David Harvey. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Page 19.]

“… I want to re-emphasize the value of the geographical standpoint in understanding contemporary processes of globalization.… A well-grounded historical-geographical materialism teaches us that globalization is the product of these distinctive processes of the production of space on the ground under capitalism. The question is not, therefore, what can an understanding of globalization tell us about geography but what can an understanding of geographical principles tell us about globalization, its successes and its failures, its specific forms of creative destruction, and the political discontents and resistances to which it gives rise. Above all, a better understanding of those geographical principles can surely help bring together the vast array of oppositional movements, currently geographically fragmented as well as unevenly developed, that offer hope for and aspire to some alternative.” [David Harvey, “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix.’” Geographische Revue. Open access. Volume 3, issue 2, 2001. Pages 23-30.]

“Value internalizes the whole historical geography of innumerable labour processes set up under conditions of or in relation to capital accumulation in the space-time of the world market. Many are surprised to find that [Karl] Marx’s most fundamental concept is ‘immaterial but objective’ given the way he is usually depicted as a materialist for whom anything immaterial would be anathema. This relational definition of value, I note in passing, renders moot if not misplaced all those attempts to come up with some direct and essentialist measure of it. Social relations can only ever be measured by their effects.” [David Harvey, “Space as a Keyword.” David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006. Page 289.]

“What I really wanted to do was to take some very basic geographical concepts – space, time, place, environment – and show that they are central to any kind of historical-geographical materialist understanding of the world. In other words, that we have to think of a historical-geographical materialism, and that we need some concept of dialectics for that.” [David Harvey. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. 2001. Page 17.]

“[David] Harvey continues to argue for a revised ‘post-Marxist’ approach in human geography which remains based on Hegelian-Marxian principles of dialectical thought. This article develops a critique of that stance, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I argue that dialectical thinking, as well as Harvey’s version of ‘post-Marxism,’ has been undermined by the wide-ranging ‘post-’ critique. I suggest that Harvey has failed to appreciate the full force of this critique and the implications it has for ‘post-Marxist’ ontology and epistemology. I argue that ‘post-Marxism,’ along with much contemporary human geography, is constrained by an inflexible ontology which excessively prioritizes space in the theory produced, and which implements inflexible concepts.” [Andrew Jones, “Dialectics and difference: against Harvey’s dialectical ‘post-Marxism.’” Abstract. Progress in Human Geography. Volume 23, number 4. Pages 529-555.]

“For [Karl] Marx, the basis of historical geographical materialism resides in the ontological (foundational) view that ‘production’ is the basis of all social life and of history. ‘Production’ has to be understood here in the broadest possible sense. It refers to any human activity of formation and transformation of nature and includes physical, material, and social processes as well as the human ideas, views, and desires through which this transformation takes place. In this sense, human beings produce (change) their own lives as well as their social and physical environment.” [Erik Swyngedouw, “The Marxian Alternative: Historical-Geographical Materialism and the Political Economy of Capitalism.” A Companion to Economic Geography. Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000. Page 44.]

“It is … with great pleasure that I accompany Professor Cox … into the attic as he sets out to recover an issue that sparked considerable debate in the 1980s, namely the relationship between historical geographical materialism (HGM) and critical realist geographies. He is to be congratulated for recovering this debate and reminding us in systematic fashion of some crucial ontological and epistemological distinctions.” [Michael Samers, “Stirrings in the attic: On the distinction between historical geographical materialism and critical realism.” Dialogues in Human Geography. Volume 3, number 1, 2013. Pages 40-44.]

“… it becomes clear that, as David Harvey argues, it’s not just what we do to reproduce society, but where we do it that matters in an imperial capitalist world. Harvey laments social theory’s neglect of space and geography, and calls for a ‘historical-geographical materialism’ … in which considerations of space and place are ‘thoroughly integrated into [its] theoretical formulations’ ….” [Susan Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor.” Race, Gender & Class. Volume 15, number 1-2, 2008. Pages 42-57.]

“Drawing on the emerging literature on energy in historical–geographical materialism, I argue that the electricity system in NC [North Carolina] developed, working in conjunction with the state, by finding ways to encourage the mass consumption of electricity to match its increasing production. What emerged as a stable configuration between electric utilities, consumers, and the state began to unravel in the 1970s, and a new arrangement developed that ultimately led to higher electricity prices and high levels of debt in some Eastern NC towns. What remained, however, was an infrastructure geared towards mass production of electricity, and a group of customers whose electricity consumption had been cultivated and encouraged for many years.” [Conor Harrison, “The historical–geographical construction of power: electricity in Eastern North Carolina.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. Volume 18, number 4, 2013. Pages 469-486.]

“Local socio-ecologies were at once transformed by human labor power (itself a force of nature) and brought into sustained dialogue with each other. The historical-geographical specificity of this dialogue and this transformation, as we shall see, was decisively shaped by capitalism’s peculiar crystallization of wealth—especially the centrality of monetary accumulation—and its related town-country antagonism.” [Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History.” Organization & Environment. Volume 16, number 4, December 2003. Pages 431-458.]

“The state looms large in recent writings on globalization and geographically uneven development. From a historical materialist standpoint, one of the more interesting features of this literature has been the way in which it has secreted a particular version of the relation between the political and the economic and also a particular understanding of the world’s changing political geography. This view, however, has assumed a number of different forms.” [Kevin R. Cox, “Globalization, uneven development and capital: reflections on reading Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. Volume 1, number 3, 2008. Pages 1-22.]

“In the final part of the article, I argue that [Murray] Bookchin’s more salvageable insights, particularly his more qualified position developed in recentworks, need to be drawn into dialogue with the increasingly rich dialogue that has opened up of late between ‘historical-geographical-materialism’ and poststructuralism ….” [Damian Finbar White, “Hierarchy, Domination, Nature: Considering Bookchin’s Critical Social Theory.” Organization & Environment. Volume 16, number 1, March 2003. Pages 34-65.]

“David Harvey has established himself as one of the most insightful and politically relevant social scientists on the left. By extending Marxian political economy into new spheres of social reality – such as the urban environment and space – he has been able to make significant contributions to our understanding of the ways that capitalism shapes everyday life.” [Michael J. Thompson, “A Brief History of Neoliberalism.” Review article. Democratiya. Volume 3, winter 2005. Pages 22-27.]

“My main initial interest in social movements came from trying to rescue these kinds of studies from an economic determinism. It was important to incorporate them or to rebuild them as part of a sociology of action, in the broadest sense of the word.…

“If you consider the present day, many observers and analysts would say the main countries, the main collective actions and the main production of ideas are located around the idea of globalization. By this I mean a transformation of capitalism and not the transformation of civil society or economic society.”

[Alain Touraine, “The Importance of Social Movements.” Social Movement Studies. Volume 1, number 1, 2002. Pages 89-95.]

“We observe that social actors are no longer characterized by social or economic categories, by class, skill, level of education, by which they were defined and which were supposed to give a central meaning to their behavior.

“A growing number of sociologists recognize the radical importance of such a rupture with classical social theory. Its most dramatic result is that there is no more correspondence between social organization and personal or collective action. In a strict sense, social actors are disappearing. The only way to go out of such a purely negative definition of our situation is to introduce the idea that actors can no longer define themselves by their social situation and must do it by their relation to themselves, by their capacity to refer to themselves as subjects.”

[Alain Touraine, “The Subject Is Coming Back.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Volume 18, 2005. Pages 199-209.]

“I contend that the central problem of the various approaches to the study of racial phenomena is their lack of a structural theory of racism.… I advance a structural theory of racism based on the notion of racialized social systems.…

“Rather than viewing racism as an all-powerful ideology that explains all racial phenomena in a society, I use the term racism only to describe the racial ideology of a racialized social system. That is, racism is only part of a larger racial system.…

“… If racism, viewed as an ideology, were seen as possessing a structural foundation, its examination could be associated with racial practices rather than with mere ideas and the problem of circularity would be avoided.”

[Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review. Volume 62, number 3, June 1997. Pages 465-480.]

“… I argue that races exist as a social phenomenon wherever a racial structure is in place-that is, wherever there are social, political, and ideological practices that produce differential status between racialized social groups (races). Racial (and class or gender) consciousness is always a contingent matter in all social collectivities. Consciousness thus cannot be taken as the factor determining whether races have a social existence.”

[Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race.” American Sociological Review. Volume 64, number 6, December 1999. Pages 899-906.]

“First, if racial ideology furnishes the material that is spoken and argued, the racial grammar provides the ‘deep structure’ or the ‘logic’ and ‘rules’ for proper composition of racial statements and, more importantly, what can be seen, understood, or even felt about racial matters. Second, although we learn ‘proper grammar’ in school, grammar is truly acquired through social interaction and communication …. Accordingly, we absorb what I call ‘racial grammar’ mostly through social intercourse.” [Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in America.” Michigan Sociological Review Volume 26, fall 2012. Pages 1-15.]

“[U.S. President Barack H.] Obama eschewed the need for structural solutions to racial problems. Instead, he proposed an abstract liberal resolution to racial inequality: ‘to bind our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans—the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.’ He also challenged blacks to step up morally: ‘It means taking responsibility for our own lives by demanding more from our fathers and spending more time with our children.’” [Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Sweet Enchantment of Color-Blind Racism in Obamerica.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Volume 634, March 2011. Pages 190-206.]

“… although ‘honorary Whites’ will probably serve as a buffer for social conflict and even as agents in the reproduction of the logic of White supremacy, it is important to point out their structural vulnerability. Thus, activists must do politics with them.We must make them conscious that no matter how hard they work to be White-like, their near-Whiteness is totally dependent upon the whims of the dominant White strata. Hence, under certain conditions, this structural vulnerability can be exploited by politically savvy organizers to develop solidarity between honorary Whites and the collective Black.” [Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Where is the love?: A rejoinder by Bonilla-Silva on the Latin Americanization thesis.” Race & Society. Volume 5, 2002. Pages 103-114.]

“First, I make a strong case for shifting the paradigm for examining actors’ racial views from the individualistic framework of the prejudice paradigm to the group-based framework of the racial ideology paradigm. Second, … I propose a conceptual apparatus to explicate how we ought to conceive and study racial ideology. I anchor my theorization on a structural interpretation of ‘racism’ and the work on ideology and discourse …. Third, I illustrate the components and primary social functions of racial ideology with contemporary examples of ‘colour blind racism’ ….” [Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Racial attitudes or racial ideology?: An alternative paradigm for examining actors’ racial views.” Journal of Political Ideologies. Volume 8, number 1, 2003. Pages 63-82.]

“… imperialism and dominance will fall like dominoes when the capitalistic conditions for economic imperialism no longer obtain. According to the view we develop here, imperialism is a more general structural relationship between two collectivities, and has to be understood at a general level in order to be understood and counteracted in its more specific manifestations – just like smallpox is better understood in a context of a theory of epidemic diseases, and these diseases better understood in a context of general pathology.

“Briefly stated, imperialism is a system that splits up collectivities and relates some of the parts to each other in relations of harmony of interest, and other parts in relations of disharmony of interest, or conflict of interest.”

[Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.” Journal of Peace Research. Volume 8, number 2, 1971. Pages 81-117.]

“State organizations necessarily compete to some extent with the dominant class(es) in appropriating resources from the economy and society. And the objectives to which the resources, once appropriated, are devoted may very well be at variante with existing dominant-class interests. Resources may be used to strengthen the bulk and autonomy of the state itself—something necessarily threatening to the dominant class unless the greater state power is indispensably needed and actually used to support dominant-class interests. But the use of state power to support dominant-class interests is not inevitable. Indeed, attempts of state rulers merely to perform the state’s ‘own’ functions may create conflicts of interest with the dominant class. The state normally performs two basic sets of tasks: It maintains order, and it competes with other actual or potential states. As Marxists have pointed out, states usually do function to preserve existing economic and class structures, for that is normally the smoothest way to enforce order. Nevertheless, the state has its own distinct interests vis-à-vis subordinate classes. Although both the state and the dominant class(es) share a broad interest in keeping the subordinate classes in place in society and at work in the existing economy, the state’s own fundamental interest in maintaining sheer physical order and political peace may lead it—especially in periods of crisis—to enforce concessions to subordinate-class demands. These concessions may be at the expense of the interests of the dominant class, but not contrary to the state’s own interests in controlling the population and collecting taxes and military recruits.” [Theda Skocpol. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1979. Page 30.]

“… the recent Marxist debate on the state stops short on the problem of the autonomy of the state, since most participants in the debate tend either to treat the state in a completely functionalist manner, or to regard it as an aspect of class relations and struggle. It is unquestionably an advance to establish (or reestablish, since this surely was the classical Marxist position) that states are not simply created and manipulated by dominant classes. Nevertheless, it is still essential for Marxists to face more directly the questions of what states are in their own right, and how their structures vary and their activities develop in relation to socioeconomic structures. So far, virtually all Marxists continue simply to assume that state forms and activities vary in one-to-one correspondence with modes of production, and that state rulers cannot possibly act against the basic interests of a dominant class. Arguments remain confined to issues of how states vary with, and function for, modes of production and dominant classes, so that still hardly anyone questions this Marxist version of the enduring sociological proclivity to absorb the state into society.” [Theda Skocpol, “Old Regimes and Revolutionary Crises in France, Russia, and China.” Theory and Society. Volume 7, number 1/2, January–March 1979. Pages 7-95.]

“The central theme of this work is the argument that the subordination of the worker to the capitalist in the labour process is not imposed by capitalist technology, however much the attempt to impose such subordination is a consideration in the design of that technology, but is only imposed through a constant struggle over the subordination of the productive activity of the ‘collective labourer’ to the expanded reproduction of capital. This is not simply an ‘economic’ struggle, but is more fundamentally a social struggle, a struggle over the reproduction of the worker as a worker for capital, a struggle on the part of capital to decompose the ‘collective labourer’ as the self-consciously organised subject of the labour process and to recompose it as the object of capitalist exploitation. This struggle extends far beyond the factory, to embrace all aspects of the social reproduction of the working class. In this sense struggles around housing and urban planning, patterns of consumption, gender relations and the family, transport, leisure and the state are all aspects of the struggle over the reproduction of capitalist class relations. This generalisation of the class struggle, in the attempt to secure the subordination of the working class to capital beyond the workplace, has developed historically in response to the attempt of the working class to preserve its social autonomy, to the extent that the autonomists referred to society as the ‘social factory.’” [Simon Clarke, “The State Debate.” The State Debate. Simon Clarke, editor. Houndmills, Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd. 1991. Pages 1-108.]

“Simon Clarke moves the class struggle theory [branch of structural Marxism] even further. The raison d’être [MP3 audio file] of the state lies in class struggle.” [Raju J. Das, “State Theories: A Critical Analysis.” Science & Society. Volume 6, number 1, Spring 1996. Pages 27-57.]

“A problem of these debates on state power and structure was that its generally high level of abstraction went at the cost of historical precision and empirical operationalization. The ‘new class struggle’ approach ([of Simon] Clarke …) tried to compensate by placing class and state at different levels of abstraction, as respectively general and historical forms of domination, while holding that social democracy and the welfare state were means to fragment and demobilize class struggle.” [Guglielmo Meardi, “The strange non-retreat of the state: implications for the sociology of work.” Work, Employment & Society. Volume 30, number 4, August 2016. Pages 559-572.]

“Even as I opposed what I took to be the heterosexism at the core of sexual difference fundamentalism, I also drew from French poststructuralism to make my points. My work in Gender Trouble turned out to be on U.S. theories of gender and the political predicaments of feminism. If in some of its guises, poststructuralism appears as a formalism, aloof from questions of social context and political aim, that has not been the case with its more recent American appropriations. Indeed, my point was not to ‘apply’ poststructuralism to feminism, but to subject those theories to a specifically feminist reformulation.Whereas some defenders of poststructuralist formalism express dismay at the avowedly ‘thematic’ orientation it receives in works such as Gender Trouble, the critiques of poststructuralism within the cultural Left have expressed strong skepticism toward the claim that anything politically progressive can come of its premises. In both accounts, however, poststructuralism is considered something unified, pure, and monolithic. In recent years, however, that theory, or set of theories, has migrated into gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial and race studies. It has lost the formalism sexuality studies, postcolonial and race studies. It has lost the formalism of its earlier instance and acquired a new and transplanted life in the domain of cultural theory.” [Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. Pages viii-ix.]

“… a third wave feminist definition of femininity can be characterised as one that begins with an assumption that femininity is a set of cultural or social ideals concerning what a girl or woman should be. Femininity is not so much imposed on women or embodied by women as a result of their subordination, but instead, available to and can be embodied by anyone. This third wave definition of femininity draws on Judith Butler’s … conceptualisation of gender [in her book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity] as discursive, relational, and performative. For Butler, gender identities are a discursive construction of what women and men should be.…

“Third wave definitions of femininity acknowledge that, in a male or masculine dominant social system, most available discourses on femininity situate the feminine as subordinate to the masculine. Third wave feminist perspectives view femininity not as an outward, bodily expression of subjugation, but instead as a corporeal performance of a discursively produced and contested set of criteria for being a woman within the structural conditions of gender inequality.”

[Mimi Schippers and Erin Grayson Sapp, “Reading Pulp Fiction: Femininity and power in second and third wave feminist theory.” Feminist Theory. Volume 13, number 1, 2012. Pages 27-42.]

“In post-feminist discourse, … the fear of the feminist arises from the fact that, at some level, an identification with the feminist has in fact already been made. Thus, the tendency to think of third wave feminism as a specifically young feminism separate from the second wave could be seen as tying in with a logic of disidentification with second wave feminism which is in fact complicit with dominant post/anti-feminist discourses. In this sense, the characterization of second wave feminism as domineering, prescriptive and constraining invokes the very same mythical figure of the (hairy, dungaree-clad) feminist invoked in post/anti-feminist discourse.” [Jonathan Dean, “Who’s Afraid of Third Wave Feminism?: On the Uses of the ‘Third Wave’ in British Feminist Politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. Volume 11, number 3, September 2009. Pages 334-352.]

“… like other third wavers, I seek a way of being in the world, of being feminist in the world that allows more room for stretching and spreading my feminism. Like other third wavers, I seek to negotiate my own space in this modern, global, technology-driven, dauntingly pluralistic world. For me, that space is located somewhere between second- and third-wave feminism. For many of them, that space is located somewhere between the rock that has been second-wave feminism [‘liberal’ feminism], and the hard place that feminism and its dissidents have led us to.” [Amber E. Kinser, “Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism.” NWSA Journal (renamed in 2010 to Feminist Formations). Volume 16, number 3, autumn 2004. Pages 124-153.]

“Contrasting with the liberal ‘politics of reform’ framework, the structuralist ‘politics of revolution’ and the post-structuralist ‘politics of reinscription’ framings, have, in contrast, presented much richer, albeit varied, accounts of resistance, power and agency in explanations of women’s oppression and struggles for emancipation. In general, those falling within the politics of revolution frame view ‘woman’ as a socially and politically constructed category, the ontological basis of which lies in a set of experiences rooted in the material world. It is this shared experience of oppression that unites women and acts as the catalyst for collective action by women.…

“Rather than ringing the death knell for feminism, however, post-structuralist feminism emphasizes the importance of recognizing multiple voices.”

[Robyn Thomas, “What Have the Feminists Done for Us?: Feminist Theory and Organizational Resistance.” Organization. Volume 12, number 5, September 2005. Pages 711-740.]

“What [Michel] Foucault offers to feminism is not a humanist theory, but rather a critical method which is thoroughly historical and a set of recommendations about how to look at our theories. The motivation for a politics of difference is the desire to avoid dogmatism in our categories and politics as well as the elision of difference to which such dogmatism can lead.” [Jana Sawicki, “Foucault and Feminism: Toward a Politics of Difference.” Hypatia. Volume 1, number 2, autumn 1986. Pages 23-36.]

“Gibson Burrell sees himself as a radical structuralist. Clearly, you [Gareth Morgan] seem to have pursued a radical humanist approach. Is this the sort of magic that made those paradigms come alive in both a critical and appreciative sense?” [Albert Mills (interviewer), “Aurora Online with Gareth Morgan: Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis.” Aurora. Issue 1990 (year).]

“The radical structural paradigm takes a large-scale or macroscopic, objective, and realist view of the social world, assuming that there is a real social world in which conflict, coercion and domination predominate. … [A]ll [radical structural] approaches have in common the belief that society of characterized by fundamental social, political and economic conflicts, which have the potentiality, as they are worked through, to generate radical social change. Optimistic radical structuralists believe that if people can better understand the social structures and forces they live with, they will be better able to emancipate themselves from unfair discrimination and the influence of the powerful.” [Sally Tomlinson. The Politics of Race, Class and Special Education: The Selected Works of Sally Tomlinson. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Pages 75-76.]

“The radical structuralist paradigm has, like the functionalist paradigm, an objectivistic assumption of the social science. However, unlike the functionalist paradigm, it is concerned with man’s emancipation. The same goes for the radical humanist paradigm, which, however, has a subjectivist standpoint. Thus, researchers in this paradigm seek to emancipate through changing cognition and consciousness, while the radical structuralist paradigm seeks to change structural relations.” [Anders Örtenblad, “Organizational learning: a radical perspective.” International Journal of Management Reviews. Volume 4, issue 1. Pages 87-100.]

“The radical structuralist paradigm assumes that reality is objective and concrete. It uses scientific methods to find the order that prevails in the phenomenon. It views society as a potentially dominating force. This paradigm is based on four central notions. First, there is the notion of totality, i.e., the phenomenon as a whole. This notion emphasizes that the totality shapes and is present in all its constituent parts. Second, there is the notion of structure. The focus is upon the configurations of social relationships, called structures. The third notion is that of contradiction. Structures, or social formations, contain contradictory and antagonistic relationships within them which act as seeds of their own decay. The fourth notion is that of crisis. Contradictions within a given totality reach a point at which they can no longer be contained. The resulting political and economic crises indicate the point of transformation from one totality to another, in which one set of structures is replaced by another of a fundamentally different nature.” [Kavous Ardalan, “Globalization and Global Governance: Four Paradigmatic Views.” American Review of Political Economy. Volume 8, number 1, June 2010. Pages 6-43.]

“The reality defined by the radical structuralist paradigm is predicated upon a view of society as a potentially dominating force. However, it is tied to a materialist conception of the social world, which is defined by hard, concrete, real structures. Reality is seen as existing on its own account independently of the way in which it is perceived and reaffirmed by people in everyday activities. Emphasis is placed upon the importance of praxis as a means of transcending this domination. Each of these four paradigms defines the grounds of opposing modes of social analysis and has radically different implications for the study of organizations. Here organizations are instruments of domination and schismatic.” [Douglas K. Peterson, “Paradigms Found: Phronesis and Pragmatic Humanism for International and Domestic NGOs.” International Business Research. Volume 3, number 4, October 2010. Pages 36-42.]

“… [The radical structuralist] paradigm owes its major intellectual debt to the work of the mature [Karl] Marx, after the so-called ‘epistemological break’ in his work. It is the paradigm to which Marx turned after a decade of active political involvement and as a result of his increasing interest in Darwinian theories of evolution and in political economy. Man’s basic ideas have been subject to a wide range of interpretations in the hands of theorists who have sought to follow his lead. Among these [Friedrich] Engels, [Georgi] Plekhanov, [Vladimir] Lenin and [Nikolai] Bukharin have been particularly influential. Among the leading exponents of the radical structuralist position outside the realm of Russian social theory, the names of [Louis] Althusser, [Nicos] Poulantzas, [Lucio] Colletti and various Marxist sociologists of the New Left come to mind. Whilst the influence of Marx upon the radical structuralist paradigm is undoubtedly dominant, it is also possible to identify a strong Weberian [i.e., Max Weber] influence.” [Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan. Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 1992. Page 34.]

“A more macro focus on existing societal class or industry structures is of prime concern [in the radical structuralist paradigm]. Such structures, however, are seen as objectively real and are taken as instruments of domination … for higher members of the social hierarchy over lower ones. For radical structuralists, organizational conditions are historically specified. Societal and organizational functioning is seen as constrained by social forces stemming from existing dysfunctional structural relationships, which can only be changed through some form of conflict. Because of the asymmetry of these social forces, people are said to have lost control of the means of production (and reproduction) of the material, social, and cultural worlds ….” [Dennis A. Gioia and Evelyn Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building.” Academy of Management Review. Volume 15, number 4, 1990. Pages 584-602.]

“The paradigm of radical structuralism is concerned in, not only understanding the world, but trying to change it. Its goal is to analyze the structural conflict, the existing modes of domination, contradictions and deprivations. It emphasizes the need for destruction or transcendence of the limitations imposed on the social and organizational arrangements ….” [Cibeli Borba Machado and Nathália Helena Fernandes Laffin, “The Theory of Formal Organization from the Perspective of Burrell and Morgan’s Paradigms.” International Journal of Advances in Management and Economics. Volume 3, issue 1, January–February 2014. Pages 200-207.]

“Unlike deconstruction, critical structuralism suggests that social structures do in fact exist and determine individual behavior, both negatively and positively. Further, social structures are intelligible, social science is possible. Unlike Durkheimian structural functionalism, critical structuralism views these structures as social rather than natural, as structures rather than organisms, and as questionable and mutable rather than necessary and beneficial. Further, knowledge of social structures is problematic and political.…

“Critical structuralism is located between [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim and deconstruction. It represents a break with subjectivism – collective as well as individual – naturalism, organicism, idealism, essentialism, individualism, voluntarism, mysticism, positivism, empiricism, etc. ” in short, all of the ‘metaphysical’ ideologies of pre-structuralist theory. Yet critical structuralism does not ‘go all the way’ to become post-structuralism.

“Ontologically, critical structuralism retains the concept of structure – as relational rather than substantial, as complex and contradictory rather than expressive, as specifically social rather than natural, as differentially deleterious rather than beneficial, as mutable rather than necessary, as social structure rather than organism. Epistemologically, critical structuralism retains the concept of science – as production rather than perception, as problematic rather than automatic, as political rather than neutral or objective. Knowledge is an approximate model of structural reality. It is distinguished from ideology by a recognition of the existence of determinative structures, and a criticism of specific social structures, as opposed to either the defense of any structures which exist, or the denial of the existence of any structures.…

“… Certainly structuralism can recognize the desirability, and the possibility, of deconstructing specific structures – in texts, in reality, and in the relation between ‘texts’ and ‘reality.’ I have called this conjuncture critical structuralism. Another way of describing the conjuncture of structuralism and deconstruction, as well as the orientation of the present work, is the rubric of cultural studies.”

[Jennifer M. Lehmann. Deconstructing Durkheim: A Post-Post Structuralist Critique. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1993. Pages 5-7.]

“It is true that, in each society or nation, there are dominant social theories. It is also true that these social theories tend to be conservative and to reproduce the social structures in which they predominate. For this reason, they are canonized, institutionalized, and legitimized. However, while hegemonic, they are not exclusive. There is no dominant social theory without subordinate social theories, theoretical alternatives, and theoretical opposition. To demarcate the dominant social theory within a particular society, to identify it as the ‘sociological tradition’ in that society, can be to support its hegemony, which depends in part on the exclusion of alternative, opposing, critical, transformative social theories.” [Jennifer M. Lehmann, “A Dialectical Response to Levine’s ‘French Tradition.’” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 42, number 1, winter 2001. Pages 79-84.]

“[David ‘Émile’] Durkheim counsels that ‘woman should seek for equality in the functions which are commensurate with her nature.’ Along these lines, he establishes the fact of structural sexual difference and describes the contrasting structures of men and women. Given that men and women have different structures, and given that the nature of these structures is known, it becomes possible to specify the appropriate functions that correspond naturally to each, masculine or feminine, structure.” [Jennifer M. Lehmann, “Durkheim’s Response to Feminism: Prescriptions for Women.” Sociological Theory. Volume 8, number 2, autumn 1990. Pages 163-187.]

“In its exploration of the linkages between growth, inequality and poverty in the specific context of Latin American agricultural sectors, this paper faces up to two challenges. The first is to explore the real microeconomic linkages between distribution and growth which drive the possible reproduction of rural poverty over time. The result of this exploration is what might be termed a neostructuralist perspective which argues that actually existing laissez faire agrarian economies do not in general present a level playing field as one moves across the wealth spectrum, and that low-wealth farms face a number of disadvantages in key factor markets. Moreover, the economic importance of those disadvantages may be magnified by the underlying inequality of the land and asset distribution. As a consequence, growth may take an exclusionary form which bypasses and perhaps renders worse off the rural poor, especially in inegalitarian economies.” [Michael R. Carter and Bradford L. Barham, “Level Playing Fields and Laissez Faire: Postliberal Development Strategy in Inegalitarian Agrarian Economies.” World Development. Volume 24, number 7, 1996. Pages 1133-l149.]

“In earlier work I explored the attractions of a view called Structural Scientific Realism (hereafter: SSR). This holds that it is reasonable to believe that our successful theories are (approximately) structurally correct (and also that this is the strongest epistemic claim about them that it is reasonable to make).…

“SSR may well be more modest than many who have sought to defend some version or other of scientific realism might like. But the modesty involved in SSR is far from undue. No stronger version of scientific realism is either compatible with the facts about theory-change in science or compatible with any truly defensible epistemological view of how our best theories are likely to ‘link up with reality.’ If SSR isn’t realism then nothing defensible is.”

[John Worrall, “Miracles and Models: Why reports of the death of Structural Realism may be exaggerated.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement. Volume 61, October 2007. Pages 125-154.]

“Structural realism has been a lively research program in philosophy of science since [John] Worrall’s … revival of the idea.…

“Social scientists frequently appeal to something they call ‘social structure’ in explaining both microphenonema and macrophenomena. However, the term seems to have many meanings and often goes completely undefined. The most useful notion of social structure for my purposes is exemplified by this quotation from Karl Marx: ‘To prevent possible misunderstandings, a word. I paint the capitalist and landlord in no sense coleur de rose. But here the individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests’ …. The key idea here is that structure consists in a relation not between individuals but between positions or statuses and roles.”

[Harold Kincaid, “Structural Realism and the Social Sciences.” Philosophy of Science. Volume 75, number 5, December 2008. Pages 720-731.]

“The central question addressed in this paper is whether there is some reasonable way to have the best of both worlds: to give the argument from scientific revolutions its full weight and yet still adopt some sort of realist attitude towards presently accepted theories in physics and elsewhere. I argue that there is such a way – through structural realism, a position adopted by [Henri] Poincaré, and here elaborated and defended.” [John Worrall, “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?” Dialectica. Volume 43, number 1/2, 1989. Pages 99-124.]

“In the contemporary literature, SR [structural realism] comes in two flavours: epistemic SR, and ontic SR. Epistemic versions place a restriction on scientific knowledge; proponents hold that one can know structural aspects of reality, but nothing about the natures of those things whose relations define structures in the first place. The natures of the entities are beyond the proper grasp of our quest for knowledge. Ontic versions, more radically, do away with entities altogether; proponents hold that at best we have knowledge of structural aspects of reality, because there is in fact nothing else to know.

“I will contend that the most reasonable form of SR is both epistemic and ontic, but in ways different from what is suggested by current pro ponents of epistemic and ontic SR. In particular, the putative distinction between a knowledge of the structure of reality and a knowledge of its nature is difficult to maintain and profitably collapsed. In what follows, I will briefly review the epistemic tradition of SR en route to offering what I take to be a more promising proposal for a non-naïve or sophisticated realism. Epistemic SR faces fatal difficulties, I believe, but gives genuine insight into the promise of selective scepticism as a strategy for the realist.…

“… I will argue that the worries motivating ontic SR are insufficient to recommend it, and furthermore, these worries are better addressed in other ways. The precise metaphysics of objects, I believe, remains an open question for the realist, and the idea that they comprise a genuine ontological category is hardly moribund. And as we shall see, fending off the challenge of ontic SR is not merely a negative task, but yields something positive also.”

[Anjan Chakravartty. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Google Play edition.]

“Let me come back to my main line of thought. That structures should be considered as global structures provides us with an even stronger argument against special science OSR [ontic structural realism]. It is just highly implausible to assume that higher-level structures reflect genuinely higher-level holistic or global world features. At least, I’ve never seen arguments in favour of such a view. And notice that a structuralist about higher-level science must show that all levels and, accordingly, all special sciences must be interpreted like this: all levels must then consist of all and only structures and, in order not to collapse structuralism into a bundle view, such structures must be considered as global and holistic structures.” [Holger Lyre, “Must Structural Realism Cover the Special Sciences?” The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings: Volume 2. Friedrich Stadler, editor. New York: Springer International Publishing imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. 2013. Pages 383-390.]

“Motivated in large part by a concern to accommodate the metaphysical implications of modern physics, so-called ‘ontic’ structural realism defends the claim, as we noted in the introduction, that it is not just the case that all that we know of the world are its structural features, but that all the world is, fundamentally speaking, can be articulated in terms of these structural features ….” [Angelo Cei and Steven French, “Getting Away from Governance: A Structuralist Approach to Laws and Symmetries.” Methode: Analytic Perspectives. Issue 4. Pages 25-48.]

“… an epistemological structural realism meant to vindicate and not to revise the ontological commitments of scientific realism. On this view the objective world is composed of unobservable objects between which certain properties and relations obtain; but we can only know the properties and relations of these properties and relations, that is the structure of the objective world.” [James Ladyman, “What is Structural Realism?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Volume 29, number 3, 1998. Pages 409-424.]

“Since James Ladyman asked, ‘What is Structural Realism?’ … a doctrine known as ontic structural realism (OSR) has achieved a degree of notoriety, but many people remain confused as to what exactly the doctrine amounts.… Ladyman’s claim is that the reason that we can only know the structure of the objective world is because there is nothing else to know; the world just is a structure.” [Peter Mark Ainsworth, “What is ontic structural realism?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Volume 41, 2010. Pages 50-57.]

“Two versions of Structural Realism are defended within the contemporary literature. Epistemic Structural Realists, for example [John] Worrall …, argue that we can acquire knowledge only of structural aspects of reality, not of non-structural aspects. Ontic Structural Realists agree that we can have knowledge only of structure, but for them it is because there is nothing other than structure ….” [David Harker, “Two arguments for scientific realism unified.” Footnote. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Volume 41, 2010. Pages 192-202.]

“Whereas epistemic structural realism posits a set of entities and structures in the real world, with a set of representing objects and mirroring structures in the phenomenal realm, ontic structural realism commits only to structures existing in the real, mind-independent world. Those structures are mirrored in the perceptual world, but perceptual objects are merely heuristics, shorthand, useful ‘bookkeeping’ devices for cognizing agents such as ourselves ….” [David Brooke Struck. The Critical Stance: Ernst Cassirer and the Realist–Empiricist Dispute in the Philosophy of Science. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Philosophy, The University of Guelph. September, 2015. Retrieved on December 4th, 2015.] Page 35.]

“… Epistemic Structural Realism (ESR) and Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) both refer to informational structures as being the main instruments of knowledge acquisition. ESR implies that only through observing the informational interfaces between structures and systems can we understand reality. OSR, by the same token, states that we can only reach the essence of a given object via its informational structure. According to OSR, all structures are informational. Therefore, reality is about structure and structure is about information.” [Renata Lemos and Lucia Santaella, “Levels of Convergence.” Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion. Number 4, 2008. Pages 95-116.]

“The basic idea behind structural realism is that our experience of secondary qualities conveys only relational information to us about the world. An experience of this much warmth does not convey an absolute value of this much temperature. Rather, it conveys to us the difference in temperature between the warmth inducing stimulus and some baseline. This insight motivates a novel interpretation of some well-known phenomena. For example, if one hand is cooled while the other is warmed, then both hands are thrust into a lukewarm bucket of water, the cool hand will sense the water as warm, while the warm hand will sense the water as cool. On the account developed here, these apparently ‘contradictory’ sensations may both be veridical.” [Alistair M. C. Isaac, “Structural Realism for Secondary Qualities.” Erkenn. Volume 79, 2014. Pages 481-510.]

“… structural scientific realists are wrong when they claim that there is a kind of continuity between theories separated by a scientific revolution, i.e. that there are some links connecting together two sometimes contradictory theories. Thus I do not see how structural realism can avoid the force of pessimistic meta-induction.

“… John Worrall’s attempt to bring scientific realism back to life in the form of structural scientific realism has failed. Scientific realism is indeed dead.”

[Andrés Rivadulla, “Two Dogmas of Structural Realism. A Confirmation of Philosophical Death Foretold.” Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. Volume 42, number 124, April 2010. Pages 3-29.]

“Rather than distinguishing between the natural and social sciences on the basis of their subject matter, it is often philosophically fruitful to start with the fact that most social phenomena are not amenable to investigation by laboratory experimentation. One can, in some cases, use randomized experimental designs to investigate causal relationships between social phenomena, but ethical and practical difficulties often preclude the use of such techniques. In the absence of these two empirical approaches, two principal alternatives are often used: causal models and quasi-experimentation. I shall focus on the former here, because the techniques involved offer an interesting example of how the context of investigation can affect the structural form of mathematical models used to describe phenomena.” [Paul W. Humphreys, “Quantitative Probabilistic Causality and Structural Scientific Realism.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume 2, 1984. Pages 329-342.]

“One important feature of semirealism is that the central thesis of epistemic SR [structural realism], that one can have knowledge of structures without knowledge of the intrinsic natures of things, cannot be maintained. Epistemic SR commits to abstract structures and not the intrinsic, but semirealism rejects this prescription, for a knowledge of concrete structures contains a knowledge of intrinsic natures. Concrete structures are identified with specific relations between first-order properties of particulars, and first order properties are what make up the natures of things. So on this view, to say that two sets have the same structure is ipso facto to say something about the intrinsic natures of their members. Furthermore, concrete structures arise as a consequence of the dispositions conferred by these first-order properties. Natures are thus intimately connected to the relations into which properties and particulars enter.” [Anjan Chakravartty. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Page 40.]

“What if it could be demonstrated that some particular aspect of each theory within a succession of theories in some domain was retained throughout? The identification of such retained elements with the truth of empirically successful theories about the natural world is the proposal of semirealism. Semirealism is committed to the truth—but of a restricted subset of claims made by particular theories. This position thus defines the aim of scientific inquiry in terms of preserving and increasing truth content by way of preserving restricted truth claims, and increasing their number. This is what it means for there to be cumulative scientific progress, and for there to be continuity in the practice of scientific theorizing.” [Anjan Chakravartty, “Semirealism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Volume 29, issue 3, September 1998. Pages 391–408.]

“A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism aims to do two things. The first is to develop a viable realist position that capitalizes on insights offered by entity realism and structural realism while transgressing them. Semirealism comes out as a form of selective skepticism (or selective optimism) that restricts epistemic commitment only to those parts of theories that can be interpreted as describing aspects of the world (i.e., detection properties) with which scientists have managed to be in causal contact. The second aim is to develop a metaphysical framework proper for semirealism: a non-Humean framework based on a dispositional account of causal properties and a network of de re necessities.” [Dimitris Papayannakos and Stathis Psillos, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable.” Review article. Isis. Volume 100, number 1, 2009. Pages 204-205.]

“[Anjan] Chakravartty develops his own selectively sceptical position, ‘semirealism,’ which synthesises ‘the best insights of’ entity realism and structural realism (on the basis of mutual entailments he claims hold between them); and he argues that entity realism and structural realism both lead to semirealism when pressure is applied. The vital link is provided by ‘detection properties’: causal properties leading entity realists to believe in their entities.” [Dean Rickles, “Keeping it Semireal.” Review article. Metascience. Volume 18, 2009. Pages 261-264.]

“In A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism, Anjan Chakravartty attempts the difficult task of bringing metaphysical debates about properties, causation, and natural kinds into a meaningful engagement with epistemological debates about scientific realism. Overall, he does an excellent job, and for that reason alone, this book is worth reading.” [Toby Handfield, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable.” Review article. Mind. Volume 118, number 472, October 2009. Pages 1118-1121.]

“[Anjan] Chakravartty’s semirealism has many attractive qualities. To take one example, because his realism is ultimately about (well-detected) causal properties, his notion of natural kinds is deflationary. The concept of natural kinds, despite being a very important metaphysical foundation, is importantly conventional according to semirealism: it is we who group objects into kinds, and such groupings are helpful, to the extent that they are, only because of the way causal properties happen to be distributed (and not because such groupings track some great Order of Nature that exists completely independent of us).” [J. Michael Steiner, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable.” Review article. University of Toronto Quarterly. Volume 79, number 1, winter 2010. Pages 409-410.]

“A famous concept in the social sciences that deals with the question of fundamental social change is the concept of ‘dialectics.’ The idea of this concept is easy to grasp: contradictory social conditions set in motion forces to overcome the unsatisfactory social situation and the induced social processes (normally) lead to the overcoming of the underlying conflict and (hopefully) to social betterment, whereby the new situation ironically will breed new contradictions.…

“Structural contradictions will not unavoidably lead to far-reaching changes. Quite the opposite, they may contribute to the stabilization of the given conditions. Furthermore dialectical processes are not always processes of progress. It was Karl Marx who noticed, that societal progress is no necessity, so capitalism may not be transformed to socialism but also can fall back in barbarism.”

[Albert Martin, “Mechanisms of Dialectical Change.” Management Revue. Volume 20, number 2, 2009. Pages 149-157.]

“This article introduces a model of productive leadership structures. It is based on the idea that structures should stimulate dialectical processes which activate functional and simultaneously restrict dysfunctional behavioural tendencies of the management team. The structural dialectics are part of a more comprehensive concept called ‘tensegrity,’ which, besides the dialectic part, embraces the socio-political conditions in the leadership system which enable dialectic structures to unfold their positive energy. In the second part of the article I present the results of an empirical study conceived to test some basic hypotheses of the theoretical approach.…

“… I introduce a model of dialectical leadership structures. The core concept in this model is ‘tensegrity.’ Tensegrity is a term that is used in architecture and biology to designate self-supporting dynamic structures. Leadership structures have tensegrity if they stimulate dynamical conflicting forces on the one hand and give them direction and stability on the other. It is, in other words, the dialectical process which is driven by structures that is of interest here. Of course structures do not have the power to determine behaviour in an absolute sense. But they can stimulate and suppress behaviour and give behaviour a certain direction, (more often than not without the people involved being conscious of it). Structures are ‘action generators.’”

[Albert Martin, “Dialectical Conditions. Leadership Structures as Productive Action Generators.” Management Revue. Volume 17, number 4, 2006. Pages 420-447.]

“Over the last few decades semiotics and structuralism in the Soviet Union as in the West have lived through testing times. Of course the experiences have been different. In the Soviet Union these disciplines had to endure a period of persecutions and ideological attacks, and this was followed by a conspiracy of silence or embarrassed semi-recognition on the part of official science. In the West these disciplines endured the test of fashion. They became a craze which took them far outside the bounds of science. Yet neither persecution nor fashion, both of which seem so crucial in the eyes of the watching public, have a determining effect on the fate of scientific ideas. The decisive factor is rather the profundity of the actual ideas themselves. For the profundity and significance of scientific ideas are determined first, by their capacity to explain and marshal facts which had previously been scattered and unexplained, that is by their capacity to combine with other scientific ideas; and second, by their capacity to reveal problems needing solutions, especially in areas where earlier opinion had seen no problems. This second feature is an indication of their capacity to combine with future scientific ideas. In consequence the ideas that have a long scientific life are those which are capable, while preserving their initial premises, of going through a dynamic transformation and evolving together with the world that surrounds them.” [Yuri Lotman. Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Ann Shukman, translator. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 1990. Page 4.]

“Lotmanian structuralism …

“In his proposals, [Yuri] Lotman does much more than just combine the procedures of structural analysis with a semiotic approach. In the background we also have Marxism, which additionally played in this particular historical moment the role of the national ideology. This is why Marxist phraseology must have made its way into the preliminary parts of Lotman’s reflections, although it had no substantial influence on the quality of his theoretical findings.

“… Structuralism, like semiotics, is oriented more towards searching for general regularities, norms and conventions.… Structures are present in historical societies, but their whole impetus is oriented towards crossing and discovering new lands in various spheres of culture. They have their ‘cold’ areas (folklore, canonical art, widely understood classics), but they generally were (and still are) geared towards creating novelty. The structuralists themselves, aware of these limitations, said that ‘events’ elude their research procedures.”

[Bogusław Żyłko, “Notes on Yuri Lotman’s structuralism.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 18, number 1, 2015. Pages 27-42.]

“[Yuri] Lotman’s research on the semiosphere is almost exclusively concerned with texts and codes generated by secondary modeling systems.…

“Defined as a secondary modeling system, too much is excluded from the semiosphere that has meanwhile been discovered to be part of it. The dichotomous view of culture and nature as two opposed spheres appears to carry the burden of the heritage of a semiotic structuralism that sought to explain semiosis in terms of oppositions even where gradations and transitions between the opposites prevail, as we have learned from [Charles Sanders] Peirce’s synechistic semiotics.”

[Winfried Nöth, “Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres.” Semiotica. Volume 161, number 1/4, 2006. Pages 249-263.]

“A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeîon [σημεῖον, sēmeîon] ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.

“To determine the exact place of semiology is the task of the psychologist. The task of the linguist is to find out what makes language a special system within the mass of semiological data. This issue will be taken up again later; here I wish merely to call attention to one thing: if I have succeeded in assigning linguistics a place among the sciences, it is because I have related it to semiology.”

[Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. Wade Baskin, translator. Charles Bally and Albert Reidlinger, editors. New York: Philosophical Library. 1959. Page 16.]

“In the Course [Course in General Linguistics] Saussure predicted a new science, the science of semiology.… Saussure, who was impressed by the work of [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim in sociology, emphasized that signs must be studied from a social view-point, that language was a social institution which eluded the individual will. The linguistic system—what might nowadays be called the ‘code’—pre-existed the individual act of speech, the ‘message.’ Study of the system therefore had logical priority.” [Lee Russell, “Cinema—Code and Image.” New Left Review. Series I, number 49, May–June 1968. Pages 65-81.]

“… [The] new structuralist sensibility in organizational theory draws inspiration from a rich conceptual and methodological toolkit, energized by contemporary social theorists such as [Pierre] Bourdieu …, and is taking shape at the interface of a number of sociological subfields including research on organizations, stratification, culture and politics …. In organizational theory, this new structuralism has become most evident in the work of institutional scholars who view organizational action as fundamentally shaped by broader social and cultural processes ….

“… [The] new structuralist directions involve a shift towards richer conceptualizations of social structure and process that have taken shape at the intersection of the sociology of culture, stratification and politics, and institutional analysis …. Contemporary practice theorists reject ‘older’ structuralist lines of investigation … that suggest that discourse can be studied as a cultural phenomenon that is discrete and separate from social interaction ….”

[Michael Lounsbury and Marc Ventresca, “The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory.” Organization. Volume 10, number 3, 2003. Pages 457-480.]

“[Paul J.] DiMaggio and [Walter W.] Powell’s … essay [quoted immediately below] clarifies and makes explicit much of what has developed in the field of organizational sociology. It helps line things up. So far, so good. But DiMaggio and Powell’s essay also goes far beyond this analytical contribution. Its larger purpose and agenda are to celebrate and advocate the new structuralist perspective. Although we disagree with much of the argument in the most recent installment of DiMaggio and Powell’s journey to clarify and develop institutional theory, we strongly commend those authors for straightforwardly mapping the field and taking a position. In so doing, they have contributed to defining important issues, taking a stance, and throwing down a gauntlet that enables the field to acknowledge conflicting perspective and engage in an important debate.” [Paul M. Hirsch and Michael Lounsbury, “Ending the Family Quarrel: Toward a Reconciliation of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Institutionalisms.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 40, number 4, February 1997. Pages 406-418.]

“Although there are as many ‘new institutionalisms’ as there are social science disciplines, this book is about just one of them, the one that has made its mark on organization theory, especially that branch most closely associated with sociology. In presenting the papers assembled here, we hope to accomplish three things. First, by publishing together for the first time … four often-cited foundation works, we provide a convenient opening for readers seeking an introduction to this literature. Second, the papers that follow … advance institutionalism’s theoretical cutting edge by clarifying ambiguities in the paradigm and defining the processes through which institutions shape organizational structure and action. These papers consolidate the work of the last decade and suggest several agendas for further investigation.” [Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction.” The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 1991. Pages 1-38.]

“After presenting each segment of text, [Roland] Barthes identifies which of the codes are operative in that segment, that is, by means of which codes the reader processes the story to derive meaning from it. Barthes formulates five codes, each of which has roots in a different aspect of literary analysis. The first of these codes is the hermeneutic circle, which governs the proposing, sustaining and resolution of enigmas. Small enigmas might be solved quickly, while major enigmas, those which are integral to maintaining suspense in the text’s plot, are prolonged through various means. The semic code is the code of character. Through it, the writer unfolds the personalities of the characters of the story. The symbolic code refers to the symbolic antitheses which are so prevalent in classical literature: for example, references to life and death, hot and cold, youth and age, etc. The proairetic code is the most basic of the codes: it is the sequence of events and actions that make up the plot of story as it unfolds. Finally, the referential or cultural code governs entities of science, literature, history, and art.” [John K. Novak, “Barthes’s Narrative Codes as a Technique for the Analysis of Programmatic Music: An Analysis of Janáček’s ‘The Fiddler’s Child.’” Indiana Theory Review. Volume 18, number 1, spring 1997. Pages 25-64.]

“Sarrasine’s [referring to the title of a novella authored by Honoré de Balzac] genius is, three times over, necessary (‘credible’): according to the cultural (romantic) code, it makes Sarrasine a singular being, outside the norms; according to the dramatic rode, it exposes the wicked fate which ‘exchanges’ a great artist’s death for a castrato’s life, that is, everything for nothing; according to the narrative code, it justifies the perfection La Zambinella’s statue [i.e., the statue of de Balzac’s fictional opera star] will have, the source of the desire transmitted to the Adonis.” [Roland Barthes. S/Z. Richard Miller, translator. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 1990. Page 97.]

“I was buried in one of those profound reveries to which everybody, even a frivolous man, is subject in the midst of the most uproarious festivities. The clock on the Elysee-Bourbon had just struck midnight. Seated in a window recess and concealed behind the undulating folds of a curtain of watered silk, I was able to contemplate at my leisure the garden of the mansion at which I was passing the evening. The trees, being partly covered with snow, were outlined indistinctly against the grayish background formed by a cloudy sky, barely whitened by the moon. Seen through the medium of that strange atmosphere, they bore a vague resemblance to spectres carelessly enveloped in their shrouds, a gigantic image of the famous Dance of Death. Then, turning in the other direction, I could gaze admiringly upon the dance of the living! a magnificent salon, with walls of silver and gold, with gleaming chandeliers, and bright with the light of many candles. There the loveliest, the wealthiest women in Paris, bearers of the proudest titles, moved hither and thither, fluttered from room to room in swarms, stately and gorgeous, dazzling with diamonds; flowers on their heads and breasts, in their hair, scattered over their dresses or lying in garlands at their feet. Light quiverings of the body, voluptuous movements, made the laces and gauzes and silks swirl about their graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands.” [Honoré de Balzac. Sarrasine. Clara Bell and others, translators. Paris, France: Feedbooks. August, 2005 (originally, 1830). Page 3.]

“… for … other ‘evident truths’: they are already interpretations, for they imply a pre-existing choice of psychological or structural model; this code—for it is a code—can vary; all the objectivity of the critic will depend then, not on the choice of code, but on the rigour with which he applies the model he has chosen to the work in question. This is not a minor consideration; but since new criticism has never claimed anything else, basing the objectivity of its descriptions on their coherence, it was hardly worth the trouble of starting a war against new criticism. Critical verisimilitude usually chooses the code of literalness, which is a choice like any other. Let us see, however, what the consequences of that are.” [Roland Barthes. Criticism and Truth. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, translator. London and New York: Continuum. 2007. Page 6.]

“Difference is not what makes or sweetens conflict: it is achieved over and above conflict, it is beyond and alongside conflict. Conflict is nothing but the moral state of difference; whenever (and this is becoming frequent) conflict is not tactical (aimed at transforming a real situation), one can distinguish in it the failure-to-attain-bliss, the debacle of a perversion crushed by its own code and no longer able to invent itself: conflict is always coded, aggression is merely the most worn-out of languages. Forgoing violence, I forgo the code itself ….” [Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller, translator. New York: Hill and Wang imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1975. Page 15.]

“Portrait of Lao-tzu [Chinese, 老子, Lǎo-Zi] by himself: ‘I am as if colorless … neutral as the newborn who has not yet felt his first emotion, as if without project and without goal.’ (a) The baby without emotion? The metaphor doesn’t work today: the baby is stuffed with intense, searing emotions, but what Lao-tzu might perhaps be saying: these are not ‘cultural’ emotions, coded by the social. (b) Without and without goal = without will-to-possess.…

“… [There is] Lao-tzu’s declaration: ‘I am as though colorless and undefined…’ etc.: the thought of the Neutral is in fact a borderline on the edge of language, on the edge of color, since it’s about thinking language, the noncolor (but not the absence of color, transparency) → and the coded practices that flow from it always reframe the Neutral as my little apologue at the outset.”

[Roland Barthes, “From the Neutral: Session of March 11, 1978.” Rosalind Krauss, translator. October. Volume 112, spring 2005. Pages 3-22.]

“In the voice of the reciter come together exaggerated declaration, tremolo, overly shrill feminine tone, broken intonations, tears, paroxysms of anger, of pity, of supplication, of astonishment, indecent pathos, in short, all the cuisine of emotion, overtly elaborated on the level of this internal, visceral body for which the larynx is the mediating muscle. Still, this overflowing is expressed only through the very code of overflowing: the voice moves through some discontinuous signs of tempest; and the vocal substance, pushed out of an immobile body, triangulated by the costume, connected to a book which, from its stand, guides it, drily studded by the slightly out of phase (and by the same token, impertinent) strokes of the shamisen player, this vocal substance remains written, discontinuous, coded, submitted to an irony (if one divests the word of all caustic meaning).” [Roland Barthes, “The Dolls of Bunraku.” Diacritics. David Savran, translator. Volume 6, number 4, winter 1976. Pages 44-47.]

“Eye, object, symbol, the [Eiffel] Tower is everything man puts into it – and that everything is infinite. An observed and observing spectacle, a useless and irreplaceable edifice, a familiar world and heroic symbol, a witness to an age and an eternally new monument, an inimitable object that is endlessly reproduced, it is a pure sign, open to all weathers, to all images and all senses, unbridled metaphor; through the Tower, men exercise that great power of the imagination which sets them free, since no story, no matter how dark, can ever take it away from them.” [Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower.” AA Files. Number 64, 2012. Pages 112-131.]

“In thus contrasting the underdetermination of natural science with the indeterminacy of translation I have taken a realistic view of nature, which indeed I hold. But I have elsewhere drawn the contrast without the realism, in the following way. Natural science, we again assume, is underdetermined by all possible observation. However, suppose that we have settled for one of the many over-all theories of nature that fit all possible observation. Translation remains indeterminate, even relative to the chosen theory of nature. Thus the indeterminacy of translation is an indeterminacy additional to the underdetermination of nature.“ [W. V. Quine, “Indeterminacy of Translation Again.” The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 84, number 1, January 1987. Pages 5-10.]

“… there is an absolutism, a robust realism, that is part and parcel of my naturalism. Science itself, in a broad sense, and not some ulterior philosophy, is where judgment is properly passed, however fallibly, on questions of truth and reality. What is affirmed there, on the best available evidence, is affirmed as absolutely true.” [W. V. Quine, “Relativism and Absolutism.” The Monist. Volume 67, number 3, July 1984. Pages 293-296.]

“… naturalism would … counsel us that reality is to be grasped only through a man-made conceptual scheme, albeit any of various.

“My global structuralism should not, therefore, be seen as a structuralist ontology. To see it thus would be to rise above naturalism and revert to the sin of transcendental metaphysics. My tentative ontology continues to consist of quarks and their compounds, also classes of such things, classes of such classes, and so on, pending evidence to the contrary. My global structuralism is a naturalistic thesis about the mundane human activity, within our world of quarks, of devising theories of quarks and the like in the light of physical impacts on our physical surfaces.”

[W. V. Quine, “Structure and Nature.” The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 89, number 1, January 1992. Pages 5-9.]

“We are tempted … to dismiss the whole issue between nominalism and realism as a metaphysical pseudoproblem.… [O]n what grounds can we take issue with the nominalist? On what grounds, indeed, can we take issue with someone who even outdoes the nominalist and repudiates everything, the concrete as well as the abstract, by construing all words indiscriminately as syncategorematic expressions designating nothing? …

“… Words of the abstract or general sort, say ‘appendicitis’ or ‘horse,’ can turn up in nominalistic as well as realistic languages; but the difference is that in realistic languages such words are substituends for variables—they can replace and be replaced by variables according to the usual laws of quantification—whereas in nominalistic languages this is not the case. In realistic languages, variables admit abstract entities as values; in nominalistic languages they do not.”

[Willard V. Quine, “Designation and Existence.” The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 36, number 26, December 1939. Pages 701-709.]

“… we finally arrive at the macrostructural theory I have developed in accordance with the criteria of theorizing outlined above. My central interest is the influence of the social structure of a population on people’s life chances, not only the opportunities in their careers but also their other opportunities, such as their chances to make certain friends or marry certain spouses. Population structures are characterized by the population distributions in different dimensions, such as ethnic distributions or occupational distributions. Three generic population distributions are distinguished: heterogeneity, the distribution among nominal categories, such as ethnic affiliation; inequality, the distribution among graduated differences, such as education or income; and intersection, which is the opposite of the degree to which differences in various respects are highly correlated in a population.” [Peter M. Blau, “A Circuitous Path to Macrostructural Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology. Volume 21, 1995. Pages 1-19.]

“There are a variety of approaches to the study of social structure, and implicit in them are different ways of conceptualizing social structure. The focus may be on the class structure or value orientations, on networks of social relations or institutional integration, on the division of labor or the construction of social reality, on status sets and role sets or the ecosystem. Yet certain elemental properties of social structure are recognized by most social scientists, notwithstanding differences in approach and focus. What- ever else may be encompassed by social structure, it nearly always includes the concepts that there are differences in social positions, that there are social relations among these positions, and that people’s positions and corresponding roles influence their social relations. Typically, however, theories of social structure extend the concept beyond these elemental properties. Thus, [Karl] Marx explains the class structure and the conflicting relations between classes on the basis of the dialectical interplay of pro- ductive forces with productive relations.” [Peter M. Blau, “A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 83, number 1, July 1977. Pages 26-54.]

“The implicit assumption [in this book] is that macrosociological theory rests on the foundation of microsociological theory. This is the assumption I have come to question. My assumption now is that macrosociological and microsociological analysis involve different theoretical approaches and employ different concepts. They entail quite different perspectives on social life which, although not directly translatable into each other, are by no means contradictory or incompatible. In the foreword to this edition I shall first explain how I became interested in the exchange theory presented here; next, briefly outline the main points of the macrostructural theory I have more recently developed; and conclude by indicating the connection between the two theoretical schemes.” [Peter M. Blau. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 1986. Page viii.]

“Exchange theory takes the broader social structure within which exchange processes occur as given, and in this respect it requires supplementation by macrostructural theory. Thus, an increase in intergroup relations resulting from newly developed structural conditions alters the nature of the prevalent exchange transactions, because social exchange in intergroup relations differs from that in ingroup relations. Exchange theory would dissect the new exchange processes and compare them with the old ones, but it could not explain why the change in social relations has occurred, whereas macrosociological theory can explain it in terms of the different new structural conditions.” [Peter M. Blau. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 1986. Page xvi.]

“Objective structural contexts that govern people’s opportunities cannot be accounted for by the rational decisions of individuals. The fallacy of trying to do so can be illustrated by the assumption of classical economic theory that laissez faire will produce markets that maximize public welfare because free markets motivate rational independent sellers to try to outbid others by selling at the lowest possible price. This atomistic conception of a market of independently acting and equally informed sellers ignores the great differences in resources, market share, and power among firms and corporations, and the coalitions that rational actors form to further their economic interests by opposing competition.” [Peter M. Blau, “On Limitations of Rational Choice Theory for Sociology.” The American Sociologist. Volume 28, number 2, summer 1997. Pages 16-21.]

“Exchange theory shares some of the concerns of both consensus and confiict models. With the former it is interested in value consensus and exchange between equals; with the latter it is interested in power structures and exchange between unequals. Unfortunately, it is least articulated and elaborated at the macro level and its distinctive contributions to a synthesis are thus hidden. Furthermore, exchange theory has neglected the sources of power and the nature of social structure in its concern with exchange and social process.” [R. D. Jessop, “Exchange and Power in Structural Analysis.” The Sociological Review. Volume 17, number 3, November 1969. Pages 415-437.]

“The greatest theorist of social structure in the instrumentalist tradition, however, was [Karl] Marx. If his critique followed the general lines of [Jeremy] Bentham’s, carried the logic much further; indeed, it translated the general social-structural argument into an empirically specific theory, or examplar, which, in one form or another, would dominate this strand of structural thinking throughout the 20ᵗʰ century. Marx refuted the argument that society is the product of individual exchange.…

“… social-structural theory continues to be bound by the issues that individualistic theory has raised. Structural analysis must evolve so that its emphasis on constraint will reformulate the conditions of voluntarism, rather than completely eliminate it. This involves two different kinds of tasks. First, externality and constraint must be defined symbolically, as well as materially, for only in this way can the actor be viewed as producing social order and not just responding to it. Second, the conceptualization of these symbolic and material structures must be historically specific and, equally important, must be conceived in a manner that recognizes the continual possibility for their fundamental reformulation. These tasks should set the research program for structural analysis for years to come.”

[Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Social-Structural Analysis: Some Notes on Its History and Prospects.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 25, number 1, winter 1984. Pages 5-26.]

“… a preferential system is prescriptive when envisaged at the model level; a prescriptive system must be preferential when envisaged on the level of reality, unless it is able to relax its rule to such an extent that, if one persists in preserving its so-called prescriptiveness (instead of paying heed, rightly, to its preferential aspect, which is always apparent), it will finally mean nothing. One of two things can happen: either change the ‘giver’ group, and a former alliance will be renewed and consideration of the preferred degree will remain pertinent (e. g., the new wife will be a daughter of great-grandmother’s brother’s great-grandson, consequently of the same kind as a matrilateral cousin) or else there will be an entirely new alliance. Two cases can then arise: either this alliance foreshadows other alliances of the same type, and, by the same reasoning as above, becomes the cause of future preferences, expressible in terms of degree, or it remains short-lived, simply the result of a free and unmotivated choice. Accordingly if the system can be called prescriptive it is in so far as it is preferential first. If it is not also preferential its prescriptive aspect vanishes.” [Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, translators. Rodney Needham, editor. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. 1969. Page xxxiii.]

“Probably there is something deep in my own mind, which makes it likely that I always was what is now being called a structuralist. My mother told me that, when I was about two years old and still unable to read, of course, I claimed that actually I was able to read. And when I was asked why, I said that when I looked at the signboards on shops—for instance, boulanger (baker) or boucher (butcher)—I was able to read something because what was obviously similar, from a graphic point of view, in the writing could not mean anything other than ‘bou,’ the same first syllable of boucher and boulanger. Probably there is nothing more than that in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences.…

“Structuralism, or whatever goes under that name, has been considered as something completely new and at the time revolutionary; this, I think, is doubly false. In the first place, even in the field of the humanities, it is not new at all; we can follow very well this trend of thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century and to the present time. But it is also wrong for another reason: what we call structuralism in the field of linguistics, or anthropology, or the like, is nothing other than a very pale and faint imitation of what the ‘hard sciences,’ as I think you call them in English, have been doing all the time.”

[Claude Lévi-Strauss. Myth and Meaning. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Page 2.]

“What structuralism tries to accomplish in the wake of Rousseau, [Karl] Marx, [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim, [Ferdinand de] Saussure, and [Sigmund] Freud, is to reveal to consciousness an object other than itself; and therefore to put it in the same position with regard to human phenomena as that of the natural and physical sciences, and which, as they have demonstrated, alone allows knowledge to develop. Recognition of the fact that consciousness is not everything, nor even the most important thing, is not a reason for abandoning it, any more than the principles professed a few years ago by the Existentialist philosophers obliged them to lead a life of debauchery in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Quite the opposite, in fact, since consciousness is thus able to gauge the immensity of its task and to summon up the courage to embark upon it, with the hope at last that it will not be doomed to sterility.” [Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structuralism and Myth.” The Kenyon Review. Volume 3, number 2, spring 1981. Pages 64-88.]

“Structuralism implies that we can abstract from the individual himself. If you have a microscope with various magnifications, and you use a low-power one to look at a droplet of water, you will see little creatures feeding, copulating, growing fond of each other, hating each other, and for all of them freedom exists. If you use a higher magnification, you will no longer see the creatures themselves, but the molecules of which their bodies consist. The question of freedom then ceases to have any meaning. It only applies on another level of reality.” [Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Setting Sun.” New Left Review. Series II, number 79, January–February 2013. Pages 71-83.]

“… in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, I had chosen a domain which might appear at first sight to be characterized by incoherence and contingency, and which I tried to show could be reduced to a very small number of significant propositions. However, this first experiment was insufficient, because the constraints in the domain of kinship are not of a purely internal order. By this, I mean that it is not certain that their origin is drawn exclusively from the structure of the mind (esprit); they might arise from the exigencies of social life, and the way the latter imposes its own constraints on the exercise of thought.” [Claude Lévi-Strauss, “A Confrontation.” New Left Review. Series I, number 62, July–August 1970. Pages 57-74.]

“We conceive of the opposition between classes as a form of struggle or tension, as though the original—or ideal—situation corresponded to a resolution of these antagonisms. But here the term tension loses all meaning. There is no tension; anything which might have been tense snapped a long time ago. The ‘break’ is at the beginning, and this absence of a golden age to which one might refer, to seek its traces or to long for its return, leaves one a prey to this single conviction: all these people one passes in the street are slipping towards extinction.” [Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Crowds.” New Left Review. Series I, number 15, May–June 1962. Pages 3-6.]

“For [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, the strength of the linguistic model was to bring to light such syntactic and morphological laws. The task of anthropology, too, must be to derive from the most diverse forms of social life ‘systems of behaviour that are each a projection onto conscious, socialized thought; universal laws which govern the mind’s unconscious activity.’ The force of structural analysis rests ultimately upon the ‘presumed identity both of laws of the world, and those of thought.’ What interests the anthropologist here is unconscious laws, determining men’s behaviour without their knowledge. The goal is ‘to construct a social model whose systematic nature has hitherto been unperceived in that society,’ by penetrating the ‘conscious models’ that mask society’s fundamental structure from the collective consciousness.” [Alain Supiot, “Ontologies of Law.” New Left Review. Series II, number 13, January–February 2002. Pages 107-124.]

“… ‘alliance theory’ … gives substance to the alleged ‘social equivalence’ in the form of the ‘wife-giving’ versus ‘wife-taking’ relationship between the respective lineages as such.” [Harold W. Scheffler, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Review Article.” American Anthropologist. Volume 72, number 2, April 1970. Pages 251-268.]

“… [One] way of drawing sense from [Claude Lévi-Strauss’] Elementary Structures, then, has been to say that marriage is not ‘about’ reproduction, sexuality, or the nuclear family, but about political alliance; that the most important relationship forged by marriage is not the connection between the minimal pair (or threesome, or what have you), but between a far-flung network of in-laws; and that an accounting of the varied ways people have forged kin connections proves the irreducibility of marriage and kinship to the supposed heterosexual imperatives of biological reproduction. Back in its heyday, [Claude Lévi-Strauss’] alliance theory was … mobilized famously by Marshall Sahlins … to rebut the bioreductive, essentialist, and (in modern parlance) unmistakably heteronormative gist of sociobiology’s theory of kin selection.” [Roger N. Lancaster, “Text, Subtext, and Context: Strategies for Reading Alliance Theory.” American Ethnologist. Volume 32, number 1, February 2005. Pages 22-27.]

“It is not my intention to present here a textual analysis of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels on religion. Rather, I wish to give an example of how Marxist anthropologists can proceed to analyze religion in the precapitalist societies which are their concern.” [Maurice Godelier, “Toward a Marxist Anthropology of Religion.” Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 1, number 1, November 1975. Pages 81-85.]

“… we must pursue our researches until we can determine the specific causality of each structure or structural level. However, this requires that we first recognize the relative autonomy of each level, exploring the connection between the form and content of the structures. If we are able to show that linear organisation constitutes the general form of social relations in two (or more) types of societies characterized by different modes of production, it is of extreme importance because it demonstrates the relative autonomy of structural levels and emphasises the need to go beyond a structural analysis of forms, the kind of structural morphology used by [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, and utilise a structural theory of the functions and modes of articulation in social structures. The ultimate problem lies in determining the hierarchy of these functions within societies, the differential causal effects of each structure on other structures and on the reproduction of their functions and their interconnections.

“If a differential causality does exist, the decisive problem in the comparative theory of societies, of structures as well as their histories, is to establish the cause; the determining cause in the final analysis and, therefore, the prior one in reality, even if it is not the unique or exclusive one in these structural arrangements and their transformations.”

[Maurice Godelier. Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Pages 92-93.]

“Is it possible to analyse the relations between an event and a structure, or to explain the genesis and evolution of that structure, without being forced to abandon a structuralist viewpoint? These two questions are topical, and some have already hazarded an affirmative reply. A new situation is emerging, one of the aspects of which is the resumption of a dialogue between structuralism and Marxism. This is hardly surprising, as [Karl] Marx himself, a century ago, described the whole of social life in terms of ‘structures,’ advanced the hypothesis of the necessary existence of correspondences between infrastructures and superstructures characterizing different ‘types’ of society, and, lastly, claimed the ability to explain the ‘evolution’ of these types of society by the emergence and development of ‘contradictions’ between their structures….

“… A mode of production is the combination of two structures, irreducible to one another: the productive forces and the relations of production….

“For Marx, the scientific understanding of the capitalist system consists in the discovery of the internal structure hidden behind its visible functioning.

“Thus, for Marx, as for Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘structures’ should not be confused with visible ‘social relations’ but constitute a level of reality invisible but present behind the visible social relations. The logic of the latter, and the laws of social practice more generally, depend on the functioning of these hidden structures and the discovery of these last should allow us to ‘account for all the facts observed.’ …

“When Marx assumes that structure is not to be confused with visible relations and explains their hidden logic, he inaugurates the modern structuralist tradition. And he is fully in accord with this tradition when he proposes the priority of the study of structures over that of their genesis and evolution….

“Structure is part of reality for Lévi-Strauss as well, but not of empirical reality. A structure cannot therefore be opposed to the theoretical model built to represent it. The structure only exists in and through the human mind …, and this is a rejection equally of the idealist and of the formalist structuralisms that lay claim to Lévi-Strauss….

“… the appearance of new structures modifies the conditions of existence and role of older structures which are obliged to transform themselves. Our analysis closes with the emergence of the notion of a limit to the functional compatibility of different structures. We have once again arrived at the problem of the genesis of new structures and of Marx’s notion of contradiction….

“For [Louis] Althusser the specific difference of Marx’s dialectic is to be found in the fact that the latter’s contradictions are ‘overdetermined’ in principle. This answer does not seem to me to grasp the essential point, although it provides valuable positive elements at another level. To take up the problem from another angle, Marx describes two kinds of contradiction. One of these, within the structure of the relations of production, appears before the other which is produced little by little between the two structures of the capitalist mode of production, the relations of production and the productive forces. The first contradiction appears and disappears with the mode of production. The second appears with the development of the system as an effect of the functioning of the first contradiction, but it is this second one which creates the material conditions for the disappearance of the system; it is the fundamental contradiction. The relation between the two contradictions thus shows that the first contradiction, within the relations of production, does not contain within itself the set of conditions for its solution. The material conditions of this solution can only exist outside it as the productive forces are a reality completely distinct from the relations of production and irreducible to them, a reality which has its own internal conditions of development and its own temporality.

[Maurice Godelier, “System, Structure and Contradiction in Capital.” Ben Brewster, translator. The Socialist Register. Ralph Miliband and John Saville, editors. London: The Merlin Press. 1967. Pages 91-119.]

“The set of relations of consanguinity and alliance which serve as the means of expression of social life and serve as the terms of the symbolic language of kinship will then appear. Here kinship is both a particular content of social life and serves as the mode of appearance and expression of all other contents.

“… Everyone knows that the set of biological relations of consanguinity and alliance is not kinship, as kinship is always a particular ‘group’ of these relations within which descent and alliance are socially regulated. Because these relations are selected and ‘retained,’ real kinship is not a biological fact, but a social one.”

[Maurice Godelier, “System, Structure and Contradiction in Capital.” Ben Brewster, translator. The Socialist Register. Ralph Miliband and John Saville, editors. London: The Merlin Press. 1967. Pages 91-119.]

“To me, and this is against many Marxists, violence is not the main force in the implementation of caste and class and dominant structures. Consent is. But consent means the sharing of the same representations, even with different interpretation of the same ideas, with opposed interpretations. But if you live within the same circle of ideas, you reproduce them even with an opposite attitude, so that dialectic of opposed interpretations of the same representations is crucial to the understanding of many things in our own society, of many conflicts between genders, between classes, between groups. And so it needs a very complex theory of what is a representation and what is a sharing of representation, conscious and unconscious, so when you say unconscious sharing it’s difficult to analyze and investigate.” [Maurice Godelier interviewed in Paul Eiss and Thomas C. Wolfe, “Deconstruct to Reconstruct: An Interview with Maurice Godelier.” The Journal of the Institutional Institute. Volume 1, Issue 2, summer 1994. Online publication. No pagination.]

“What can be perceived behind … [the] identity of sociological armature and … [the] diversity of formal transformation of myths, what explains them, is a common property, a structural correspondence, an inner relationship between forms of mythical thought and forms of primitive society. For if kinship relations play the role of an organizatory schema within the mythical discourse and representation of the world, this is because in reality itself, in primitive societies, kinship relations constitute the dominant aspect of the social structure. We are dealing here with a structural correspondence which cannot be deduced from the ‘pure’ categories of savage thought or find its origin in nature, but whose basis is located in the very structure of primitive societies. But if the content of myths only consisted in these objective, transposed elements of nature or culture, it would be impossible to understand how and why myths are what they are: an illusory representation of man and the world, an inaccurate explanation of the order of things. How is it, then, that the objective materials of natural or social reality which are found transposed in the mythical discourse take on their imaginary character, are transmuted into an illusory representation of the world?” [Maurice Godelier, “Myth and History.” New Left Review. Series I, number 69, September–October 1971. Pages 93-112.]

“… there is a world of difference between ideas that sustain opposition and those which propose a radical change in social organization. To paraphrase Marx, we might say that the dominant ideas in most societies are the ideas of the dominant sex, associated and mingled with those of the dominant class. In our own societies, a struggle is now under way to abolish relations of both class and sex domination, without waiting for one to disappear first.” [Maurice Godelier, “The Origins of Male Domination.” New Left Review. Series I, number 127, May–June 1981. Pages 2-17.]

“For a Marxist, an enquiry into ideology, the conditions of its formation and transformation, its effects on the motion of societies, should apparently be an enquiry into the relation between infrastructure, superstructures and ideology. Must these realities be baptized ‘instances’ as [Louis] Althusser does? Should they be considered as ‘levels’ of social reality, as distinctions within social reality which are in some sense substantive, as institutional divides in its substance? I think not. For a society does not have a top or a bottom, or in any real sense levels at all. This is because the distinction between infrastructure and superstructures is not a distinction between institutions. It is essentially a distinction between functions.” [Maurice Godelier, “Infrastructures, Societies and History.” New Left Review. Series I, number 112, November–December 1978. Pages 84-96.]

“It is from [Karl] Marx’s pen, in Capital, that there comes the idea, not original to Marx or the Marxists for that matter, that modern industry based on the direct application of science to production had ‘torn away the veil which hid from man his own social process of production and which rendered the different branches of production which had been spontaneously divided, into so many enigmas, even for those within the production process itself.’ He pointed out in the same passage that until the 18ᵗʰ century the different trades had been considered ‘mysteries’ requiring the initiation of apprentices into the secrets of production.” [Maurice Godelier and Michael Ignatieff, “Work and Its Representations: A Research Proposal.” History Workshop. Number 10, autumn 1980. Pages 164-174.]

“[Maurice] Godelier derives the properties of primitive thought through an application of [Karl] Marx’s understanding of religious ideas and Lévi Strauss' thesis on the use of analogical representations in myth. For Marx religious ideas were the projection of human qualities onto the forces of nature which were beyond human understanding; as such they were the dominant mode of thought of primitive communities, whose level of productive forces and control over nature were rudimentary. Godelier adapts this view to picture religious ideas as the prototype of ‘ideologies,’ false conceptions of the ‘real’ which historically, in their further elaboration, serve to mask the complex and opaque realities of class domination.” [Jeffery A. Atlas, “Concepts of ‘history’ and ‘ideology’ in historical dialectics: Epistemological implications and relevance to the notion of ‘primitive mentality.’” Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 12, number 4, 1987. Pages 421-434.]

“… [Louis] Althusser’s structuralism is, like all structuralisms, a system of closure …. It fails to effect the distinction between structured process, which, while subject to determinate pressures, remains open-ended and only partially-determined, and a structured whole, within which process is encapsulated. It opts for the latter, and goes on to construct something much more splendid than a dock. We may call it Althusser’s orrery, a complex mechanism in which all the bodies in the solar system revolve around the dominant sun. But it remains a mechanism, in which, as in all such structuralisms, human practice is reified, and ‘man is in some way developed by the development of structure.’ So inexorable is this mechanism, in the relation of parts to the whole within any mode of production, that it is only by means of the most acrobatic formulations that we can envisage the possibility of transition from one mode of production to another.” [E. P. Thompson. The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press. 1995. Page 137.]

“The critique of the [Louis] Althusser texts themselves points hit home. The distinction between persistently conflated, is succinctly dealt demonstration of its inherently idealist criticism of this idealism has appeared [E. P.] Thompson will, as a matter of principle, that history need not be historicism the slow accretion of ambiguities begin to mount.” [Bill Schwartz, “The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors.” Review article. Sociology. Volume 13, number 3, September 1979. Pages 544-547.]

“In the title essay of his new book, E. P. Thompson seeks to make explicit the theoretical and methodological bases of his work, and he does this in the classic Marxist fashion, through a passionate critique of an alternative theory of history: the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser.…

“Thompson argues that history must be understood as the product of human activity. Capitalist society is not determined by the inherent logic of capital; rather it develops as people in different classes consciously seek to comprehend and shape their own lives. Ethical and political considerations cannot be separated from the analysis of these conflicts.”

[Jonathan M. Wiener, “The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors.” Review article. Social History. Volume 5, number 3, October 1980. Pages 455-458.]

“[E. P.] Thompson is by temperament too much of a dissenter, or as he might regard it, a radical, with roots deep in what he sees as the English popular tradition. Not that he is a populist, as he rightly disclaims; far from it: indeed, one of the problems facing any theory which also aspires to be a praxis is how to translate one into the other. Thompson, for all his adherence to that indigenous tradition, gives no sign, in these essays or in his other writings so far, of showing how it is to be done. His Marxism is none the less too infused with the tones of many other kinds of voices, speaking the language of poetry and imagination and personal experience as much as of politics, to become just another echo of [Karl] Marx’s or any other voice.” [Gordon Leff, “Theory or Practice?—The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors.” Review article. The Cambridge Quarterly. Volume 9, number 2, 1980. Pages 173-176.]

“For [E. P.] Thompson the political sterility of Althusserianism is a direct consequence of its ‘theoreticism.’ Characterised by empty categories rather than substantive analysis, Althusserianism is, he claims, essentially scholastic and reductionist: all knowledge is generated within the parameters of theory in a self-perpetuating circle. [Karl] Marx’s texts are stripped of their humanist-historicist significance which [Louis] Althusser sees as alien to science.… [An] inability to deal with history is the result of a basic confusion on Althusser’s part of ‘empiricism’ with ‘empirical.’” [Susan M. Easton, “The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors.” Review article. Studies in Soviet Thought. Volume 24, number 4, November 1982. Pages 318-323.]

“By the late 1960s, the excessive zeal with which certain strands in Western Marxist theory continued to dichotomize social structures into an infra/suprastructural opposition, along with Soviet misbehavior in Czechoslovakia, helped foster a Gramscian turn where concerns over cultural hegemony and counterhegemony overshadowed issues of economic determinism. Such concerns, as one observer put it, encouraged such questions as: ‘If culture was essentially that which was experienced, then a central issue was who did the experiencing and how was the experiencing in part masterminded by those who claimed a more lofty experience than others?’ …. And such concerns were soon to find their most influential expression in E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory, which sought to counter the perceived determinism of Althusserian structuralism by appealing to the subversive specificity of English working-class experience.” [Craig Ireland, “The Appeal to Experience and Its Consequences: Variations on a Persistent Thompsonian Theme.” Cultural Critique. Number 52, autumn 2002. Pages 86-107.]

“His [E. P. Thompson’s] recent attacks on Althusserian Marxism have been directed equally against what he perceives to be its theoretical deformations and against the political practice he finds inscribed in them.” [Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson.” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review. Volume 9, issue 1, 1982. Pages 45-75.]

“… the problem is that structuralism puts few empirical reins upon the observer: it is subject neither to replication nor to falsification. There can be no observation and data collection for the purpose of testing hypotheses, since … structuralists offer us no operational rules for ‘negating’ the empirical level.…

“… Equally disturbing … is the structuralists’ claim to exclusivity in the attempt to probe beneath apparent reality.…

“… structuralism’s interest in underlying realities and systemic interdependencies is shared by many other strategies, including cultural materialism.…

“… progressive science requires ‘explanations of concrete phenomena that are precise enough to be falsified’—exactly the argument of my paper and the basis of my critique of structuralism and structural Marxism.”

[Allen H. Berger in Allen H. Berger, M. E. F. Bloch, A. de Ruijter, I. C. Jarvie, John O’Neill, Ino Rossi, Marshall Sahlins, William W. Stein, and Anton C. L. Zwaan, “Structural and Eclectic Revisions of Marxist Strategy: A Cultural Materialist Critique [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology. Volume 17, number 2, June 1976. Pages 290-305.]

“… [This article] introduces the poststructuralist critique of structuralist texts and suggests that the status of the subject is now the most interesting and pressing issue for all Critical theories.…

“Poststructuralism begins in the inadequacies of structuralism.… Any particular structuralist constructed to explain the unity of diverse phenomena can deconstructed to expose the contingent nature of its claims. All is indeterminate to the poststructuralist critic. The passages from practice to theory and from theory to practice invite the critic to postulate some putative author or reader to among alternative constructions of structure or alternative interpretations of theory. Poststructuralist critique thus seems to enable return of free creativity.…

“The essence of the problem of poststructuralism is determining how to treat structuralism. One possibility is to regard structuralism as one example of the generalized form of the claim to knowledge. If explanation is to be more than the narration travels, it should reduce the vagaries of consciousness to cause.”

[Thomas C. Heller, “Structuralism and Critique.” Stanford Law Review. Volume 36, number 1/2, January 1984. Pages 127-198.]

“Where structuralist approaches, Marxist and otherwise, tend to make a great deal of the distinction between underlying or hidden structures, and the surface reality we see and experience, and thereby posit deeper ιreal’ meanings to events, experiences, politics, and practices, poststructuralists oppose this distinction for the singular meanings it strives for and produces. For historians, in my view, the poststructuralist critique of structuralism is welcome and indeed liberating: instead of having to find and fix the ‘real’ meaning of any event, period, or practice, a search which becomes ever more frantic, elusive, authoritarian, and reductive, one can instead explore a diversity of meanings and perspectives, and their complexity and inter-relationships. For historians structuralism as an analytical strategy is a confining straitjacket, a closing of possibilities, an illusory end to the analytical rainbow.” [Ann Curthoys, “Labour History and Cultural Studies.” Labour History. Number 67, November 1994. Pages 12-22.]

“… the aim of this chapter is neither a wholesale rejection nor a blind exaltation of Deconstruction, for it ought to be preserved from the fate of theoretical schools such as Marxism, psychoanalysis and Existentialism which were used unscrupulously for ideological purposes by friends and foes alike.…

“A dialectical and dialogical critique of Deconstruction will not lead to a global rejection of this theory …. A dialectical argument which in some respects relies on Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School type will attempt to distinguish the insights of the Deconstructionists from errors and difficulties which in some cases may turn out to be inevitable. For after all, even the theories of the Frankfurt School have produced moments of truth along with contradictions and aporias. Despite its critical distance, Kritische Theorie [critical theory] should recognize in Deconstruction a sometimes close, sometimes distant relative.”

[Peter V. Zima. Deconstruction and Critical Theory. London and New York: Continuum. 2002. Pages 165-166.]

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