Poststructuralism emerges in the twentieth century as an intellectual movement that encompasses many of the ideas already discussed in this work and seeks to draw these materialist threads together into a coherent perspective. Poststructuralism adopts the Kantian idea that our descriptions of the world cannot address the questions of essence and remain epistemologically sound. The influence of Marx is complex and multifaceted. Marx is identified as setting the realm of social inquiry in an overtly materialist direction, but is also criticized for slips into essentialist language and historical universals. From Weber, there is the concern with rationalization in the West, and the way in which that process has set the direction of both the political order and the condition of subjectivity. This is of particular interest to Jean Baudrillard and his work on simulation. Finally, there is Friedrich Nietzsche. It would be hard to overstate Nietzsche’s influence as it shapes twentieth-century thought directly and through the incorporation of some of his ideas in the works of others.
This chapter will employ a simple strategy. I will assume the epistemological challenge to essence is already “baked in” to this line of inquiry. Therefore, the work will begin with a summary and reinterpretation of the Marxian project. This will be augmented with some challenges to Marx’s general assumptions by Louis Althusser. The critique of Marx will be used as a bridge over to the work of Jean Baudrillard and the significance of simulation as a manifestation of epistemological relativism. The focus will then shift to Jacques Derrida and the technology of dissemination. Then the chapter will move to a discussion of Michel Foucault on the construction of subjectivity and its connection to the exercise of power.
Like the preceding chapters, the last section will address the extent to which poststructuralism can be said to meet the conditions of a coherent materialist doctrine outlined in chapter 1. In order to address the extent to which poststructuralism can be construed as a materialist doctrine, several issues must be confronted. If, as poststructuralism argues, “text” is everything, how is this compatible with the general assumptions of materialism? Materialism is premised on the idea of an external reality that imposes itself on human beings. To what extent does “text” fulfill that condition?
There is also the question of domain. Is materialism a doctrine that has as its domain physics, biology, philosophy, or society more generally? Some field of discourse must be established in order to make the materialism coherent. This question can also not be separated from the questions regarding the influence of history and “context” in the discussion of materialism.
In addition, there are the issues surrounding the relationship between materialism and consciousness. What is determinant in the formation of thoughts and ideas? Materialism, generally, has been associated with the notion that consciousness is not independent of the world. Consciousness, and the ideas that constitute an understanding of reality, has its origin in the influence of external conditions. This is the case whether consciousness is viewed as the manifestation of raw sensation, the result of physical adaptation, or as the result of historical forces.
Therefore, the question of materiality is also a question of what moves history. What forces direct the behavior of human actors? There is also the question of sequence among ideas, the environment, and actions.
If we act according to the picture of reality that we consider accurate, then it is necessary to ask about the origin of that image. If idealism and all forms of transcendentalism are rejected, then the sequence must begin with experience, broadly defined. Experience of physical sensation and experience of cultural context cannot be considered either mutually exclusive or hierarchically arranged. Context provides sensation with meaning. The text on reality is both the origin and the outcome of a process of social reproduction.
Institutional power reflects and reinforces the cultural patterns, norms, and practices of any given society. Thrasymachus speaks of such a process in Plato’s Republic.[1] The text directs human activity. It has material force, even without material extension.
Such a position cannot be developed outside of a radical relativism. However, this is not the well-worn path of ethical relativism that remains part of the modernist discourse. What Thrasymachus, Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists suggest is an epistemological relativism that asserts the anthropomorphic character of knowledge itself. If this is the case, then human beings create a human-centered knowledge that is circulated in the process of historical change.
The Marxian formulation of materialism has many facets. It is a formulation of materialist doctrine that emerges in the wake of Hegelian philosophy and Darwin’s evolutionary biology. It articulates a circumscribed, yet profound, notion of socio-cultural reproduction. However, the Marxian argument also lapses, at times, into essentialist and teleological claims that violate the more materialist components of its premises.
Central to understanding this form of materialism is the significance of biology. Marx and Engels refer to Darwin and evolutionary biology as the central component in modern materialism. There is a conscious rejection of the empirical form of materialism. The movement of particles is insufficient to explain the functioning of human society. History must be understood as the product of living beings, not the random collisions of inanimate objects. Thus, biological necessity is the origin of human activity. The organism must interact with the natural environment in order to gather the necessities of material existence. Consciousness is shaped by this experience of actual life processes.[2]
From this perspective, the “material origins of consciousness” has a double meaning. The material existence of human beings is a necessary condition for the possibility of human thought and consciousness. Marx denies the epistemological basis for Hegelian idealism and other forms of transcendentalist speculation. But further, in identifying the source for the content of consciousness, Marx also asserted material origins to the thoughts and ideas of consciousness itself. Human materiality leads to biological necessity. Biological necessity drives human production. In the process of production, we generate the ideas of who and what we are in the unfolding of history. Consciousness is, therefore, a social product.[3]
If our materiality forces the interaction with nature, and this interaction is the basis of our thoughts and ideas, then it shapes both our understanding of ourselves as subjects in the world and dictates the institutional structures we create on the basis of that understanding. Ideas, social structures, institutional practices, and politics are a necessary reflection of the materiality of existence. As human interaction with nature is conditioned by experience, there can be no fixed human nature, and no fixed understanding of morality.[4] In short, human subjectivity is constructed historically.
Human history is the history of the development of human productive capacities.[5]
It is a law of history in which all impediments to the increasing productivity of labor will be broken down.[6] Production is the base on which the entire superstructure of human association is constructed. Since Marx asserts that the form of productive activity, the mode of production, determines the ideas and institutions in a given historical period, the economic sphere is given the position as the determining factor in the course and direction of historical change. In Marx’s terminology, the mode of production determines the relations of production.[7]
Revolutionary changes in human association have been tied to these material premises. Changes in the mode of production have necessitated changes in the political and social institutions that govern society. The relations of production have been altered as human beings have developed from hunter-gatherers, to agricultural producers, into the industrial mode of production. Capitalism, as a set of social arrangements, arises with the early phase of industrialization. As capital consolidates, and as monopoly production replaces competition, capitalism becomes an impediment to the further development of human productive capacities.[8] The internal logic of capitalism, the impoverishment of labor, the tension between labor and machine production, are all part of an economic logic that generates the need for a new form in the relations of production.
However, capitalism is not just an economic system to Marx. It is also a system of oppression. Capitalism is based on the extraction of surplus value from the workforce. Simply stated, surplus value is the amount of value produced by the workers beyond the amount for which they are paid. Since wages are determined by supply and demand, it is possible to produce value beyond the value that is transferred as a wage. This value, “smiles upon the capitalist with all the charms of an entity created out of nothing.”[9]
What is striking about the criticisms of Marx and Marx’s methodology is the similarity regarding the general themes in the critiques. This is the case even among those who are sympathetic to the objectives of the Marxian project and those who offer praise to Marx’s accomplishments.
Louis Althusser is an important figure in the attempt to broaden Marx’s methodological strategy. Althusser is influenced by the Marxian tradition and is often identified as a structural Marxist. He is committed to the general character of Marx’s analysis, the emphasis on a materialist understanding of history and the structures of capitalist power, but Althusser is also influenced by the critiques of metaphysics and essentialist characterization of the subject that are more reflective of poststructuralism.
For Althusser, the assertion that the economic base is always decisive in the formation of consciousness is simply too narrow and deterministic. As a result, the distinction between base and superstructure that Marx presented cannot be sustained. Base and superstructure are both part of the materiality of contextual conditions that will shape the consciousness of individuals.[10]
Another criticism is offered by Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. This has to do with Marx’s epistemological claims regarding the status of his historical analysis. As Weber puts it, all Marxian laws of history are actually “ideal-types.”[11] What Weber means by this is that Marx has presented an interpretive model of history based on selected indicators. It cannot be conceived as the truth of history itself. Baudrillard makes a similar claim, arguing that Marx made a mistake in presenting his hypothesis as a universal movement of history. To Baudrillard, such an assertion has a metaphysical character.[12] A similar point is made by Jacques Derrida in Positions, contending that Marx falsely attempts to escape charges of metaphysical speculation by resting his assertions on a teleological conception of history.[13]
Another problem stems from the essentialist foundation used to support Marx’s normative claims regarding capitalism. Marxism blends elements of biological and socio-cultural materialism, but the relativism embodied in these doctrines is undercut by the discussion of human nature that supports a normative critique of capitalist practice. In the early Marx, such as The 1844 Manuscripts, the normative critique of capitalism emerges from an essentialist ontology, which asserts a natural condition of human nature that is altered by capitalist social relations.[14] Estrangement means separation, alienation from a condition that is professed to be essential to human nature. Such an essentialist claim contradicts the historical relativity that is part of Marxian materialism.
The point here is not to bash Marx, but to echo the point made by Derrida. Marx is an opening, not an end. He provides a path rather than a finished product.[15]
Marx’s analysis of the inner logic of capitalism is quite profound. However, the economic determinism that is asserted in the relationship between base and superstructure cannot be sustained. Other forms of oppression manifest themselves in society that do not have their origins in class. Discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, national identity, and religious or non-religious sentiments have their origins in a process that can be connected to economic production only through the most thread-bare type of analysis. Prejudice in these areas must be linked to a more general consideration of social reproduction.
Within this alternative framework, a new understanding of power must be formulated. From the poststructuralist perspective, power resides in every institutional structure that has the ability to define what constitutes the content of subjectivity. This means that every institution within society must have an internal process in which it transmits and enforces the ideas and practices that underpin the institution’s existence. There is no meta-logic that animates social reproduction, but each norm must find its own equilibrium within the general processes of society. For this reason, it is possible for ideas and practices to change within one subsystem without a complete alteration of the domain of social reproduction.
Logically, materialism does not allow the process to be driven by a historical teleology or even a notion of necessary historical progress. Change is simply change. It occurs when the pattern of subjectivity has been altered in an area of identity formation. Judgments regarding the normative value of one direction over another can only be made from within the structures themselves and do not possess an external form of validation.
Ideas move history. However, this is not to make a claim associated with nineteenth-century idealism. Ideas are not the product of transcendent processes. They do not have an existence outside of the lived historical experience of human beings. Ideas have material origins in the totality of our experiences. The source of our ideas is the processes that exist for the reproduction of the conditions of our material existence, which includes our social and cultural experiences. Thus, the ideas that move history are the manifestation of the material processes of social reproduction.
Concern for the means by which people construct their identity is a major focus of the work by Louis Althusser. Althusser is influenced by Marx, thus he is concerned with capitalism and the oppressive nature of capitalist society. But Althusser’s project is animated by assumptions regarding epistemology and the nature of our reality that move him closer to the definition of materialism outlined in chapter 1.
For Althusser, what we consider to be social reality is actually a symbolic construction. This symbolic construction takes place at the level of cognition. It is based on the information we process from the totality of social conditions. Thus, we are constantly encountering symbolic messages regarding identity, normative behavior, social practices and structures that are asserted to be true or real but are, in fact, the ideas and beliefs that serve to regenerate the existing order of society. Reality is the true “ding an sich” that remains, in its essence, forever hidden from us.
In place of reality we have ideology. Ideology is the symbolic language that we absorb from our social interaction and which informs our actions. It shapes our thinking about who we are and how we should behave. It creates a set of foundational principles upon which we construct our understanding of both the material reproduction and the system by which we order and classify our knowledge about our experiences.[16] Ideology is embedded in all our practices and structures.
The materiality of ideology is in the fact that beliefs push human history. In defining human beings and the expectations of human existence, ideology represents subjectivity as a set of normative anticipations. At a societal level, these are encoded into law, constitutions, and the structure of social power. Variation from the norms would generate a negative reaction. This will take place within the institutions of power in the society, and would be legitimated by the support of the broader population that has been socialized to institutional norms. Althusser makes this point in outlining the importance of a mechanism for maintaining the legitimacy of structural hierarchies and the system of capitalist production. He calls this the ideological state apparatus.
For Althusser, capitalism requires a legitimating discourse. It has in place a system of rewards and punishments that are embedded within its institutional practices. Capital controls the military, the police, and the generation of laws and policies that support the status quo. It is Althusser’s point that capitalism also uses a complex system of social institutions that reinforce the ideological conditions that further the beliefs that make capitalist practice rational. There is an inverse relationship between systemic levels of legitimacy (as a belief in the naturalness of the institutional order) and the need for the exercise of force to maintain system stability. Both state and non-state institutions participate.
An Ideological State Apparatus is a system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practice. Realized in the institutions, organization, and practices of this system is all or part (generally speaking, a typical combination of certain elements) of the State Ideology. This ideology realized in an ISA ensures its systemic unity on the basis of an ‘anchoring” in the material functions specific to each ISA; these function are not reducible to the ideology, but serve it as “support.”[17]
The ideological state apparatus includes schools, media, publishing houses, cultural outlets, churches, and families. They create the symbolic image of what constitutes societal norms. In doing so, they construct a narrative regarding the rationality of societal power structures.
The content of the ideology is distinctive from its structures. However, Althusser makes it clear that ideological content does not form in a vacuum. He states that there is no such thing as “spontaneous content.”[18] The content will serve the existing power structure in society.
Louis Althusser is a significant figure in restructuring the underlying assumptions of Marxian epistemology. He undercuts the Marxian claims that reference “reality” and “human essence” by eliminating the concept of the real in our understanding of history and society. The real is treated as a symbolic, linguistic construction. Our cognitions are shaped by the belief we have in the real rather than the real itself. Nevertheless, Althusser remains a transitional figure, still focused heavily on production and the sovereignty of the state.
Of all the writers that generally fall under the domain of poststructuralism, none is more focused on the question of the real than Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard argues that today it is impossible to identify a true reality.[19] Our experience of the external world takes place within a cognitive framework that is a constructed abstraction. We do not experience reality, but pass our experiences through a filter that orders those raw experiences into coherence. What we then experience as real is a symbolic reality that is manifested in, and reinforced by, the processes of production and reproduction. What is real takes on the ontological characteristics of what can be generated and transmitted. What is real is what can be disseminated.
What Baudrillard is trying to explore are the mechanisms by which human beings come to understand the truth of their reality. That means that he is looking for the material causes of historical transformations in the ways in which human beings have come to see themselves and the means by which they identify the proper ordering of social life. We are born into a symbolic order, an order of values and hierarchies, that we did not create but come to reflect as parts of the historical processes that transform over time. This order creates a filter that shapes our definition of what constitutes reality.
If this filter consisted of human faculties for cognition, Baudrillard would be following the lead of Kant. However, Baudrillard is suggesting that these filters are themselves products of historical and cultural conditions. They are reflections of the material conditions of existence. In “The Orders of Simulacra,” Baudrillard outlines the historical development that have led to the disconnect between the real and our perception of it.
Baudrillard argues that in feudal times there was a connection between the real and the sign used to designate its reality. With the coming of the Renaissance this order changed. The Renaissance was characterized by a proliferation of images, signs, and symbols in which the notion of the real was increasingly represented in objects that stand in for the real. Baudrillard calls this the counterfeit stage, as the representation stood in as a symbolic referent for what it was to convey.[20] Baudrillard claims this period was exemplified by the use of stucco.
The next phase in the development of the simulacra was the industrial order. This phase in history is characterized by production and reproduction. The key factor here was the possibility of producing mass quantities of identical products. Value was generated out of those products that could be reproduced on a large scale, thus contributing to the massification of culture more generally. This includes the development of mass forms of political organizations and democracy.[21] The equality of consumption helped bring about a general sense of social equality. The prospects for liberation could be found in the contrast between the worker and the bourgeoisie.
In the twentieth century, conditions changed and society moved toward simulation proper. This stage is characterized by two phenomena: digital communication and advances in DNA. Together they constitute what Baudrillard refers to as “the code.” As he puts it, “Digitality is its metaphysic principle . . . and DNA is its prophet.”[22] Binary code is now the condition necessary for communication. DNA will be the source of our knowledge about the human subject. The code creates the illusion of foundational knowledge as it appears to close the gap between the real and the illusory. It presents itself as the real, the source of our knowledge and understanding.[23]
In his later work Baudrillard talks about a fractal stage and the idea of simulation being replaced with the idea of networks,[24] but these ideas can be understood as further refinements of the general logic of simulation. The code is the truth from which society is to be ordered. It creates a self-referencing system from which there is no escape. All human beings are brought under its power. Its logic is circular and closed. For Baudrillard this gives it a totalitarian character.[25]
What was real became symbolic, only to take the form of the real again. However, now the real is only real in relation to the symbolic order which it represents. Simulation has come full circle and folded back in on itself. Today there are no points of reference for the real.[26] There is only simulation.
Baudrillard’s work is both provocative and interesting. He provides a materialist reading of causality in history and explores the materiality of power and social change. The end of the real is part of a historical process in which complexes of factors are identified for their causal influences on the dynamics of social and political change.
It is hard to read Baudrillard and not see the influence of Nietzsche. This influence has several facets. Baudrillard gives a negative interpretation to the influences of evolutionary biology in contrast to Nietzsche’s more neutral position. But Nietzsche was less pessimistic about the influence of Darwin’s ideas. Nietzsche saw evolutionary biology as providing a new path for philosophic exploration. But to Baudrillard there is a danger. To Baudrillard, DNA is simply the vehicle for a new form of technological oppression. DNA can serve as the new foundational principle for fixed and static platforms of social stratification.
Another take on Nietzsche is found in Baudrillard’s discussion of illusion. The world is full of illusions. We operate our lives according to these illusions which are embedded and transmitted through the medium of language. For Nietzsche, Truth is a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified by usage into fixed truth.[27] In society, truth means using the usual metaphors in the language. The ability to use language is not an expression of truth. It is an expression of power.[28]
Language is always generated from a perspective, expressing the interests of those speaking. For this reason social changes like those associated with a change in values is always representative of a change in the distribution of power in society.[29] Politics is the struggle over whose metaphors will dominate. These claims by Nietzsche leads Gilles Deleuze to conclude that institutions are reactive forces, a training ground for the adaptation to the existing structure of power.[30] To put this in a more general way, the struggles to influence language over matters of race, ethnicity, religion, and class are part of a struggle to control the institutional superstructure that can impose and reinforce the structures of power.
But for Nietzsche the construction of illusion is part of the limitations of the human species and the means by which we cope with a world beyond our comprehension. It is not, therefore, fully negative. It expresses the power and processes of the human mind. It is a tool of survival.
But for Baudrillard, the end of the real is a historical condition rather than an underlying condition of cognition and consciousness. This implies that at some point human beings were connected to the real. In this regard, Nietzsche has the stronger case. We have never grasped the real. The way it is treated in Baudrillard seems to relegate the real to a time prior to cognition. Hence, Baudrillard tends to treat the real as a metaphysical category, itself an abstraction, rather than an ever-moving, ungraspable aspiration of human enterprise. It takes on the character of a rhetorical device, never fully lending itself to definition.
The influence of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the questions of knowledge and consciousness are clearly evident in the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida moves away from the metaphysical character of nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenology, from Hegel to Heidegger, to a position that is much closer to that of Nietzsche. Husserl and Heidegger are, to Derrida, still engaged in a metaphysical enterprise. Their goal is to define the essence of being. Such a project misunderstands the material origins of language and consciousness. In this sense, one way to understand Derrida’s project is to frame it in terms of Nietzsche’s. Much of Derrida’s theoretical discussion of text follows from Nietzsche’s discussion on the metaphorical nature of language. Derrida explores the significance and implications of such a claim within the context of linguistics.
The intent of Derrida’s project is to create a materialist understanding of how human beings generate and transmit their understanding of the world. In doing so, Derrida outlines a description of the means by which the embedded processes of culture found within institutional existence are transformed into elements that move history. Derrida’s work is part of the semiotic discourse on the role of the sign in the transmission of cultural patterns. What is significant about this discourse is that it takes as one of its premises the idea that the construction and usage of a sign is always a mediated process. The Kantian assertion that experience is mediated by the categories found in the human mind is now reformulated. The mediation of experience for reflection and the creation of texts is directed by the cultural structures that intervene between sensation and cognition.
Derrida claims that all of Western metaphysics is a search for a “transcendental signified.”[31] The transcendental significance connotes that something has an existence that is independent of language, but that can simultaneously be represented in language. Language assigns properties to objects as the subject confronts the objective world. As a representation in language, its domain is artificially circumscribed. Such a view is the cornerstone of the Western logocentric position, and is an important assumption underlying the empirically based doctrine of materialism.
However, there is a problem. In order to represent the object, the domain of properties assigned to the object must maintain stability. This means that the list of potential properties must be closed. If the representation is artificially closed for the purpose of ontological stability, it committed an epistemological error. The need to assign being has overridden the property of openness. The representation’s metaphysical character is secured by this process.
Further, such a process must be characterized as mediated, in the sense that the properties assigned to an object must be sorted and selected for their meaning and significance to being. What determines the selection of these traits? The significant factor is its connection to a chain of previous texts projecting back through time. Texts are linked to other texts.
If the representation of the external is mediated, both as it is experienced and as it is turned into a sign for transmission, then where is the ground upon which one can stand in order to validate it objectively? Derrida does not claim there is nothing that is real (although he is often falsely accused of that) but simply that there is no discourse that can be engaged about the real that is not metaphysical in character.[32] All objects are mediated by the act of representing. Therefore, all the texts about the real can be deconstructed to reveal their metaphysical character.
Derrida explains an alternative conception of the process of representation in his work, Dissemination. The concept of dissemination explains a material process of cultural transmission that operates outside the possibility of assigning essence to a sign. Signs cannot be divorced from the historical and ideological components that form their content.[33] Deconstruction, claims Derrida, should reveal the artificiality of closure that gives force to ideological constructions.[34] Philosophy cannot achieve closure as to the identity of its objects.[35] Words give the illusion that a stable identity has been assigned.[36] However, such claims are illusory.
Texts refer to other texts. They do not capture the ontological character of being. Therefore, culture is the material process of transmitting texts in which the biases and systemic assumptions are passed on in a process of cultural reproduction. Texts do not receive their legitimacy from correspondence to an absolute reality that they claim to have captured. Rather, legitimacy comes from the traces of previous texts found within the newly generated text. Therefore, textual generation represents a process of grafting.[37] Such a view voids the possibility of a text having a detectable beginning, raising questions about the modernist notion of assigning ownership of a text to an author. A text is always the transformation of a previous text in an endless and complex cycle of cultural reproduction.[38]
Further, since closure with regard to the identity of objects can be secured only artificially, committing an epistemological error, there must be some mechanism by which ordinary language is operationalized in the conduct of daily life. Text cannot convey the infinite richness of objects and historical processes. There are infinite possibilities and a plurality of contexts. How do we construct meaningful discourse?
Derrida’s answer is simple. We “take a cut of it.”[39] He calls this a “scission.” The scission is a cutout of the infinite possibilities for identities and contextual meanings. The text must be assigned a beginning and an end. Its fullness cannot be represented. Its space must be limited, and it must be assigned closure. Such actions give all texts a mythical character.
The graft and the scission do not have ontological status in the traditional sense. However, the graft and the scission have material force. They shape the society, not in conformity with a “natural reality,” but in conformity with the transmitted norms, structures, and expectations that make up its content.
The notion that our ideas about reality are the result of the transmission of experience and ideologies that are part of a process of cultural programming means that the discussion of this process cannot be divorced from the social distribution of power. This explains Derrida’s return to Marx in Specters of Marx. Derrida seeks to bring the materialist elements of Marx under the umbrella of deconstruction. In this framework, their common agenda is to wage a war against the representation of human essence as it is a mask to cover the interests of power and subjugation. A materialist critique can expose how the assertion of a fixed, stable identity takes the form of an imposition by the forces that control the instruments of dissemination.
However, Derrida seeks to reveal the material nature of this process without assigning determining power exclusively to the realm of economics. The content of culture was born of material premises, the existence of creatures seeking the successful material activity in the world. The texts that they create do not capture the essence of reality but are reflections of ideologies and interests. These texts are transmitted through a material process of cultural reproduction. They result in an effect on the material activity of all that are part of their historical sway.
Derrida makes it clear that he sees his conception of deconstruction as a political concept. It is an “intervention.”[40] It seeks to disrupt the transmission of the dominant text on subjectivity and reduce it to an ideological construct. It seeks to prevent the homogenizing effect that such a transmission produces. It seeks to prevent the construction of Nietzsche’s “last man,” a project viewed as the culmination of the modernity project.
From its earliest formulations, modern humanism has sought to create a universal definition of the subject that will serve as a firm foundation upon which to build the structures of institutional existence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries subjectivity was contained within explicit and implicit narratives of Western social life. By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century scientific techniques were introduced in order to bring this project into conformity with the contemporary epistemic models of knowledge.
This modernity project has been designed to produce a transcendent, universal notion of subjectivity. This model of the human being can be found in the Enlightenment Humanism that dominated much of the twentieth century. This is, in part, the point that Baudrillard is trying to make with his focus on “the code,” as the contemporary totalizing methodology.
Once this meta-narrative on subjectivity has been established political and social life can become dominated by a deductive logic. Human nature takes on the character of a foundational discourse from which the normal course of human activity can be identified. Deviation can also be discerned.
In creating a logic that underlies social and ethical prescriptions, a rationale for the exercise of power is also created. Norms are generated and enforced based on the characteristics assigned in the discourse on subjectivity. Within the discourse, the exercise of power is manifested as authority, a legitimated act of power.
The exercise of power within the discourse on subjectivity is a central concern of Michel Foucault. If we assume that Nietzsche is correct, then the world as we understand it is made up of cognitions that are human-centric in character and tied to our need to survive and thrive in a context that is historical and contingent. All our cognitions have an illusory character. There is simply no way that a totalizing discourse on the human character can be constructed. That is not to say that phenomenal statements regarding human appearances cannot be generated, such as all human beings have ten toes. However, the quest for the narrative on the subject seeks something far deeper. It wants to uncover the essence of the human being in order to create an institutional order that reflects that essence.
The poststructuralists generally share the view that institutional discourse is local, historical, and contingent. No such transcendent definition of subjectivity can be constructed. Foucault focuses on the power dimension of this nexus between subjectivity and state sovereignty. The discourse on subjectivity must always be interrogated. If power cannot serve a truth that is not there, it must be asked, “who does it serve?”[41]
This is the materialist question behind Foucault’s method of genealogy. If knowledge is constructed using the biases, ideologies, and interests that are present within the institutional structure from which it is generated, then the outcome will always reinforce the norms and practices of a given institution. Truth and power cannot be separated. Truth is in a circular relation with the system of power.[42] It does not reinforce a transcendent claim, but enhances the system of power that was its origins. In every society, discourse is controlled by the structure of power.[43]
Genealogy does not focus on subjectivity, except as an effect of the exercise of power. Genealogy is a method to study the historical exercise of power that does not rely on the existence of the transcendental subject. The subject is seen as the product of institutional practices, not their cause. In this way, Foucault can maintain a commitment to a material understanding of history and still be able to engage in a critique. Critique is carried out by deconstructing the relationship between institutional practices and the metaphysical components in the ideology that support it.
The logic of sovereignty since the time of Plato has been to create an institutional order that, as closely as possible, reflects the natural conditions of human beings. Social harmony is the result of the correspondence between the subjects and the institutional order. In Plato, it is manifested by a political hierarchy that reflects natural inequality. In Hobbes, the institutional logic results from the egoism of human nature. With Kropotkin, there is reason and gregariousness.
Foucault’s notion of genealogy reverses the order of the logical relations between subjects and institutions. Institutions are part of the contextual materiality out of which subjectivity is formed. People are born into an institutional order which they did not create. The cues for social action are embedded within the system of rewards and punishments. Therefore, there is a material process in which consciousness is shaped by the interaction between subjects and the institutional order. Subjectivity is constructed, it is not discovered by transcendental reflection. The institutions come first and produce human subjects in their image.
The circular nature of his process, coupled with the general metaphysical character of political ideologies, render this system nontransparent. It is self-referencing, in the sense referred to by Niklas Luhmann.[44] The language of institutions reflects the logic of their existence. This is true of all institutions, whether represented by the church, state, educational, penal, or other. To cite one example, the modern period is characterized by state sovereignty. The nation-state system is not just characterized by territory and domestic political legitimacy. It is also characterized by the creation of characteristics of subjectivity which would be meaningless without the system of nation-state sovereignty. These are concepts such as citizenship, patriotism, and treason. Foucault’s point is that such concepts do not have a transcendental character but are products of the particular distribution of power that exists within the historical context of modernity. All institutions create concepts that legitimate their exercise of power.
The power of institutions is manifested as the ability to define human beings as subjects. Power attaches identities to people. In turn, this process ties the individuals to the institutions.[45] By making subjects part of the structure and reinforcing that definition through a system of rewards and punishments, institutions exercise control over human beings and direct their actions in a way that reinforces the logic of the institution itself. As such, subjectivity is viewed as the material product of the contextual relations in which an individual finds itself. There can be no appeal to a transcendent truth of subjectivity from this perspective. Counter-discourses to those that seek to subjugate human beings can be constructed as part of the process in which the metaphysical character of representation is revealed.
Heterogeneity emerges as a normative position as the legitimacy of social homogenization is undermined. Difference becomes the basis for counter-narratives on the subject. In the absence of meta-narratives on subjectivity, there is plurality.
For Foucault, even institutional existence is not manifested as a singularity. There is no single institution, such as the state, that controls all aspects of social existence. Modern life is characterized by multiple domains of power, reflecting the plurality of institutional existence. Thus, today subjectivity is pulled in a variety of often competing directions. Medical definitions of the subject differ from those of churches or universities. The emergence of multiple forms of subjectivity becomes the political challenge of the contemporary postmodern order. Women, prisoners, homosexuals, and the proletariat all struggle against the particular form of power and institutions that constrain them.[46] Institutions create a discourse that legitimates the exercise of power. That power is manifested in the control of material bodies.
After constructing definitional content to subjectivity, institutions exercise a claimed right to human bodies. This may take the form of a prohibition, as the institutions of state and church have sought to control sexual practices.[47] It may take the form of institutional incarceration, such as in a prison or mental institution.[48] It may create a legal structure to provide access to the capital producing potential of bodies in the production process.[49] It may even conscript bodies in the service of state power. Each institutional right is generated out of the institution that exercises that particular power. It can never take the form of a transcendent right.
The critique presented by poststructuralist epistemology undermines the efforts that ascribe definitional power to institutions. Foucault reveals the taxonomy of the process of institutional power while denying the validity of any process that seeks to formulate rigid definitions that impose themselves by controlling human bodies. Foucault’s point is that with the inability to create an epistemologically sound universal definition of subjectivity, the human experience should be one of self-construction.[50]
What Foucault adds to the discussion of materiality by other poststructuralist authors is a discussion of the relationship between institutional power and the control of human beings. Foucault elaborates not only the arbitrary nature of historical constructions, but also how they function in relation to directing activity. Institutions create self-regenerating discourse. In doing so, they create the conditions for directing the course of human history.
The materialist threads in the continental tradition have moved away from their metaphysical predecessors. With poststructuralism, the Hegelian system’s teleology of history is reduced to a creative, yet speculative narrative regarding the nature of human social and political evolution. Reason cannot direct history if its content is, itself, a product of that history. Husserl and his followers suffer from the same problem, separating the content of consciousness from the real, concrete experiences of living in the world with the richness of sensual stimulation and social influences.
Collectively, the poststructuralist perspective moves the continental tradition toward a materialist understanding of consciousness. However, this is not a materialism that focuses on strictly the movement of atoms and their impact on the human brain. It is a material understanding of the content of consciousness and cognition. It is a materialism that does not deny the firing of the brain’s neurons as part of the materiality of bodies in the world, but one that is also interested in the material processes of experience that become part of human consciousness. These ideas then direct human activity in the world.
Human reason is central to this process, but this reason must be understood within circumscribed limits. What we call reason is subject to the same historical forces as the content of consciousness more generally. What we call reason is, therefore, socially constructed.
This explains why Althusser has difficulty accepting the essentialist element of the Marxian ontology. If the content of reason is socially constructed there is simply no place to stand outside of history and context in order to construct a fixed notion of human essence. This point is clearly articulated by Derrida.
In this sense, poststructuralism is very relativistic. There is heavy emphasis on the social and cultural influences on human consciousness in a context that is continually moving and open to change. History is dynamic and human beings are situated within the historical process.
Central to this understanding is the concept of change and its implications. There are the radical ruptures that Foucault discusses, that establish new epistemological rules that govern our understanding of the world. There is also the subtler, yet sublime, process of dissemination discussed by Derrida, in which the ideas and concepts of one generation are passed on to the next through the technology of language. The foundation of knowledge and consciousness, is therefore, its own transmission. If the link between sign and referent is severed, if texts refer only to other texts in a chain of diffusion back through history, there is nothing but text as the foundation of our thinking. There can be nothing called reason that is divorced from the context in which it arises.
For this reason, the poststructuralists reject the notion of a fixed view of human nature. They see the epistemological program in Western philosophy as one of trying to create a fixed and firm foundation for human thought and activity. Central to this project has been the attempts to create a definition of subjectivity. From Plato to Marx this project dominated political theory as such a foundation could provide the concrete platform for political prescriptions.
This provides entry into one of the poststructuralist’s most important political insights. Human beings are created, not discovered. The nature of the human character is a product of the totality of forces to which it is subject. Thus, the totality of the social environment needs to be understood as the determining factor is the structure of human beings. The individual is made in this process.
Some of these determining factors may be more important than others. Production, media, education, and institutional bureaucracies are clearly some of the most important factors when it comes to environmental factors shaping consciousness. However, what is important is always subject to change. Religious institutions still hold some influence in the West, but not to the degree they had during the middle ages. In the modern period, the nation-state has been a far more significant factor in shaping human behavior.
Thus there is a reversal of the Hegelian formulation on the relation of ideas and history. For Hegel, the idea was an autonomous teleological concept. The idea has its origins outside the world of human activity. For the poststructuralists, the idea still moves history, but it has its origins in the experiences of the historical beings that possess the capacity to hold ideas.
Therefore, the poststructuralists see our understanding of the world as interpretive. A world in which there are models of knowledge and understanding can only be open to interpretation. There must always be an opening, an alternative explanation, a differing model. The methods of genealogy and deconstruction show the historical and cultural origins of our ideas.
In this sense, poststructuralism may be better at critique than building a positive social and political platform. This criticism is often stated, and has some merit. However, such a positive nihilism, as Foucault puts it, may be the only philosophic space within the materialist understanding of history. Undermining the metaphysical foundations of essentialist ontology, and contextualizing teleological claims to historical inevitability, leaves only the past and present as empirical reference points for analysis. While such a position may be disconcerting, it is the only temporal space in which materialist analysis can be conducted.
This helps explain the significance of difference as an ethical posture. Difference is what remains when all the positive statements regarding the subject have been relativized. What is absent is infinite. It opens the possibilities of new ways of conceiving identity and representation in the most general sense.
When it comes to human subjectivity such an approach has a material limit. The empowerment of difference leads to a radical form of individualism. Each must be allowed to explore the conditions of existence and construct their own identities outside of the intrusive essentialism that has become part of institutional existence. Individualism is the default, the condition brought about in the absence of essentialist claims. What is left is the material presence of human beings trying to make sense of their experience.
The critique of essentialist, institutional discourse also creates the basis for a materialist critique of power. This is a form of power that is broader than just forcing compliance with personal or institutional will. This is the power to define the individual which is embedded within all organized social life. This is a form of power which causes individuals to alter their perceptions of self-interest. It is the power that creates common identities and missions that are at the core of social existence. There is always, therefore, some tension between the demands of institutional existence and the ethics of difference.
Nevertheless, the casting of the materiality of power within this framework is a very powerful basis for critique in the contemporary world. It is liberating in a personal as well as a political sense. It erodes the power of the concept of normalcy, allowing people new avenues of personal expression, as well as providing a means by which people and groups can speak back to the institutions of power.
To this point I have focused on areas where poststructuralism has an affinity with the materialist model outlined in chapter 1. However, there are a few areas where there is some contrast, at least in terms of focus. One area in particular stands out. This has to do with the implications of a human-centric view of knowledge. There is little doubt that the poststructuralist view of human knowledge as an exclusively human creation. Following Nietzsche, the claim is that everything we know is from a human point of view.
However, there is an element from both Nietzsche and Darwin regarding significance of this claim for survival that could use greater attention. The natural environment is not a social construction. Our interpretation of it is. Our materiality needs to be seen in the context of the living order of the world more generally. We are not the only species on the planet, and the fate of all species is linked.
The circular nature of textual grafting as a means of legitimizing societal structures and norms diminishes the significance of the natural world and its influences on our material well-being. It is so fixated on the processes of cultural reproduction that the conditions for the material reproduction of our physical presence is less in focus. A pragmatic understanding of this distinction would give poststructuralism and empiricism some common ground.
Poststructuralism is a systematic attempt to bring a materialist understanding of consciousness to the continental tradition in philosophy. It is particularly strong in explaining the processes of cultural reproduction, material expression of power, and providing a materialist understanding of the relation of history to individual thought and action. It represents a particular variant of the socio-culture form of materialism.
Poststructuralism also possesses a materialist epistemology. Knowledge is a product of activity that is material both in its premises and in its conclusions. There can be no characterization of transcendent knowledge, no teleological project, no universal construction of the subject that is not reducible to a process of adjusting new experiences within the framework of an existing context. Texts are related to other texts. They are grafts whose legitimacy is related only to their repetition. They are relative to their place and time and, therefore, to the material forces of history out of which they are generated.
These assertions necessitate a broader interpretation of the socio-cultural determinants than those found in the Marxian notion of an institutional superstructure. For the poststructuralists, institutions create their own mechanisms for generating truth claims and are, therefore, not strictly tied to production. The result is an understanding of power that is multi-dimensional in its scope and omnipresent as part of social life. Institutions manifest power as the imposition of identity, the process of circumscribing behavior, norms, and values as part of the process of institutional self-maintenance.
The goal of liberation is not removed from the agenda by the reformulated position. However, resistance to power cannot be legitimated within an ideologically constructed ontology. It is legitimated in epistemological terms. It is the struggle against the imposition of identity. Struggle takes the form of resistance to what deconstruction reveals as arbitrary and contextual. Its method is the creation of counter-discourses within a discursive field made possible by the reconstruction of materialist doctrine.
In the final analysis, the judgment of whether or not poststructuralism qualifies as a materialist doctrine will depend on what one considers the ontological status of context. If you cannot directly sense context, can it still constitute a material force in history? It is the position of the poststructuralists that context constitutes the materiality of history in its most general sense, incorporating both the materiality of our bodies and the social constructions that have evolved as part of our history. Context is a material force because it moves history, even if it evades direct sensual contact. We are the products of the complex, interrelated environment, the totality of which escapes definition. Such a context is real, even if its totality is not directly sensed by our sensing apparatus. We see its reality as a force that moves history.
Plato, “Republic,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) 588.
Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 154.
Marx, “The German Ideology,” 158.
Friedrich Engels, “On Morality,” in The Marx-Engels Reader.
Marx, “The German Ideology,” 164.
See, “Capital” volume 1 in The Marx-Engels Reader, 713; and The Grundrisse, edited by David McLellan (New York: Harper, 1972), 121.
Marx, “Preface,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1976).
Marx, The Grundrisse, 121.
Marx, Capital, 214.
Louis Althusser, “Interview.” Quoted in F. Vavarro. Filosofia y Marxismo: Entrevista a Louis Althusser (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores), 1988.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), 103.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Mirror of Production,” in Selected Writings (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114.
Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 74.
Marx, “Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 74-78.
Derrida, Positions, 63.
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Random House, 1970), 41.
Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capital (London: Verso, 2014), 77.
Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capital, 83.
Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 179.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (New York: Semiotext, 1983), 87.
Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 21.
Baudrillard, Simulations, 103.
Baudrillard, Simulations, 106.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (London: Verso, 2000).
Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, 21.
Baudrillard, The Impossible Exchange (New York: Verso, 2001), 5.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Nietzsche Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 49.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989), 26.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1967), 14.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 133.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, 20.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 200-201.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6.
Derrida, Positions, 90.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 353.
Derrida, Dissemination, 312.
Derrida, Dissemination, 355.
Derrida, Dissemination, 333.
Derrida, Dissemination, 300.
Derrida. Positions, 93.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 115.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 133.
Michel Foucault, “Orders of Discourse,” Social Science Information 10:2 (1971), 8.
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1995).
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 212.
Michel Foucault, Language Countermemory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 216.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1965).
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 125.
Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 236.