 So, what an entry point is, is a particular kind of way that a person uses to begin to order these over-determined sites to begin to make sense of them. And of course, there are many, many, many different entry points, that is, many, many different theories deploying these different ideas to make sense of, of, of society. And these different entry points then distinguish. They identify the different ways, the different theories that we use to make sense of society. Marx uses class, that's an economic process, to begin to make sense of society. That's his particular entry point, and that's to be compared and contrasted with the other entry points that people use. So that's the first idea. Second, let me go back to, I'm gonna erase this mess, that is, society, to go back and talk about the following. We have society as this kind of site of politics, economics, culture, nature, and so forth, etc. So everything comes together to produce this, this thought, this society that we just did. All of these determinations are different. These political, economic, these cultural, and of course, these natural. They're all different. So society is the result of these different determinations, and we can use another word to capture this. Society exists in contradiction, and what contradiction refers to here is the different pushes and pulls that are present in society, resulting from all of these different processes. So the result of overdetermination, of how something exists, is the, or I should say, are the contradictions present in that particular entity, whatever it is. Let me give you a different example of this. Something that may be relevant to your lives right now. I explain the particular choices of an individual for taking one course over another at the university. Well, I'm examining now an individual, you or me, that makes a choice to take a particular course. We're pushed in the direction of taking this course as a result of all kinds of open and hidden parental pressures. So that's a set of determinations that operate on us, whether aware of them or not. It's what our parents want us to do and have wanted us to do from the time that we were born. But that's not all. Then there are cultural determinations that push us to take a particular course as a result of all kinds of ideas and experiences of what is and what is not popular in the society at any moment in time. But that's not all. The courses that we take are also a result, complex result of the rules and regulations of the university, as well as who's teaching that courses, who's a popular teacher, who's not, and so forth. Also, the economy shapes us in all kinds of ways in terms of the courses that we take because of the vague ideas we have that if we take a particular course that may help us get a job when we graduate so that we can do well in the future. But these same forces also push us in a different direction. We resist and we rebel against parental pressures. We struggle against university rules. We always are responding to our changing views and experience of what subjects seem to interest us and what subjects do not. We refuse to become prisoners of an unknowable future. In other words, we're conflicted. We take course, we make a choice, we have the desire to take a course, but at the same time, we don't want to take that particular course. And the result of all of these determinations, we exist in contradiction. And the result of those contradictory forces upon us, we take a particular action, we make a particular choice. In other words, the contradictions yield our behaviors. What we do and what we don't do. What courses we enroll in and what we don't enroll in. And you can apply this kind of logic to all of our choices over our entire lifetime. So putting it all together, the society is both a result of these different determinations, but the society also comes back and shapes all of these. So there is a mutual interaction between society and its political, economic, and cultural, and of course natural processes. Just like there's a mutual interaction between us and our parents and the professors and the courses that we take and so forth, etc. They shape us and we shape them. And again, to go back to make sure we understand, in this mutual effectivity, an entry point plays the role of beginning to try and understand, to explain this complex mutual effectivity. That's why it's so important in the theories that we deploy. Next step in this. The notion of overdetermination means that the influence of any entity upon any other is itself constituted. Let me give you just a concrete example of this because this point is rather important. I'm going to take something that's popular today. This may not be in the news when you hear these lectures, but let me just take something today. We have a, let me take three events. We have something today called the crisis in Egypt. As I talked to you today, this has been in the news for the last couple of weeks. So that's the crisis and I'll call that event C. Now, event A right now seems to be the most important cause on the crisis in Egypt, which event A is the lack of democracy in Egypt. If you hear the news, you read the papers invariably, this is the most important cause in the crisis in Egypt. And other causes which are there are thought to be secondary. Let me take B, the unequal distribution of income in that country. Now let's go back to overdetermination. Because see if we understand what it is, this is a good example to test that. Overdetermination is saying the crisis in Egypt is a site of determinations, fascinating and interesting and so forth. And from the perspective of the notion of overdetermination, those influences are infinite in character. There's no question that the lack of democracy has had an impact on that crisis. But the influence of A on C, this heavy line here from the perspective of overdetermination, is itself a complex product of B and C and a whole buttery bunch of events that have yet to be examined. In other words, this causation itself is not independent of how B impacts C. And let me take another one right over here. Let me put D. This would be the class structure in Egypt, the Moxian contribution. This, too, complexly affects A. And hence how A is constituted creates, literally, its impact upon C. So this arrow here, what we think is more important, what we think has this bigger quantitative and or qualitative impact upon C, is itself a product of how B and D and E and F and G and so forth created. So this is not independent of these other causations. By the way, nor is the class structure independent of this lack of freedom or is the income distribution a product. They mutually constitute one another. So this kind of idea, in a sense, demotes what we think is important today. Once we understand that that which is important today, that impact, that effectivity, is itself caused. So the impact of the lack of democracy on Egypt is itself caused by the unequal distribution of income, the class structure in Egypt, and a whole bunch of other kinds of cultural and natural and political processes that other theorists are going to introduce. Because that's what theory does. It's continually discovering new kinds of determinations in the world. And once we discover them, we understand that that which we thought was important today gets demoted by these new kinds of processes that the theorists introduce with their different kinds of points of entry. So the upshot of all of this is that entities, no matter what they are, in this case A, B, C, and D, are not independent of one another. That's what overdetermination means. That independent entities can't exist. Why? Because each is the site of determinations emanating from all the others. And what is true for any one is true of them all. So they only exist as they literally constitute one another. They only exist in relationship to one another. If that's the case, then they can't be causally ordered to say that one is more important or less important or of equal importance. To say that one is more or less or equal importance to the other presumes independence so that you can causally order them. If they are not independent, you can't do that. The implication of this is that there are no, from the perspective of overdetermination, there are no essences in the world. No process in the world is immune from causation. Because that's what an essence is. An essence is something, it's like a God. An essence is immune from causation. It reproduces itself. From the perspective of overdetermination, there are no essences in the world. Again, that's because things only exist in relationship to other things. Everything is both cause and effect and uneffect. So overdetermination is an anti-essentialist approach to theory, whether that theory be in epistemology or in society. We've already discussed the anti-essentialist perspective of overdetermination in terms of rationalism and empiricism. But you can see that the anti-essentialist approach is also arguing there's no ultimate, most important determining factor in a society like the crisis in Egypt. However, within Marxism, within the tradition, there is a kind of theoretical essentialism, which is very, very important, and I want to spend one moment on it because it's in your reading, and it's unfortunately in Marxist text as well. And it's called economic determinism. So let me just spend a moment on that because it's so important.