I take it as an axiom of post-structuralist social theory that various determinations of social life – the economy, the family, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and so on – are to be considered in principle independent of one another: not just relatively autonomous, but completely autonomous from one another, with no privilege being automatically assigned to any one instance over all the others. This axiom is perhaps most evident in Foucault, who took his teacher Althusser's notion of the ‘relative autonomy’ of social determinations (politics, economics, ideology and so on) one step further to insist on their absolute autonomy from one another (Foucault 1972). But it is also evident in Derrida's insistence that the structurality of structure be understood not to harbour any centre that would privilege one structural element or instance over the others (Derrida 1972, 1994). In Deleuze and Guattari, finally, the axiom appears under the rubric of immanence: determinations are immanent within the social field they determine, without any transcendent instance determining all the others (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). But it then becomes an empirical or conjunctural question as to how these various instances intersect and interact with one another in specific circumstances, for even absolute autonomy definitely does not entail complete isolation. So if one were able to show that, let us say, familial and economic determinations under certain circumstances in fact reinforce one another, that would be an important result of examining them in relation to one another, as parts of what we might call an undetermined or non-deterministic whole.