Nothing is to be gained by being a Marxist; it’s worth everything to become one.
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
The concept of scientific socialism, tarnished as this was by its association with dialectical materialism, had by the 1960s become thoroughly discredited. It might even have died a natural death but for the artificial life-support systems extended by both sides (for different reasons) during the Cold War – by adversaries because it seemed to offer an easy target, and by party stalwarts of an obdurate persuasion in the eyes and careers of whom the doctrine had, after all, stood the test of time. This latter group prominently included the staunchly orthodox leadership of the French Communist Party (PCF).
All the more surprising, then, that the 1960s witnessed a serious attempt at the rehabilitation of the concept of scientific socialism, one that proceeded from inside this same Party. Perry Anderson claims that
it was the appearance of the work of Louis Althusser, from 1960 to 1965, which signalled a decisive change in the level of intellectual debate within the PCF. For the first time, a major theoretical system was articulated within the institutional framework of French Communism,
henceforward, “the torsion between theory and party” took on a new, original form.1 Althusserian Marxism as it emerged enjoyed no official encouragement or sanction, to be sure. The PCF hierarchy saw no need for rehabilitation and was in any case preoccupied with other concerns – with the task of accommodating Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, with that of curbing the overt reformism of Roger Garaudy and others, and with the eclecticism of sympathetic but troublesome intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre. Added to these concerns, latterly, was the problem of dealing with the Party’s loss of face owing to its quiescence during the upheaval of May 1968, when, in
Althusser’s own (subsequent) words, “the Party was literally outflanked by the students”. Whether or not what then eventuated was indeed “a revolutionary defeat the like of which had not been seen since the (Paris) Commune (of 1871)”, as Althusser came (later) to claim,2 we can safely say that in May 1968 a “left-wing alternative” to “obsolete Communism”3 first arose among the student estate. In this climate, the Party leadership regarded Althusserian Marxism not as a theoretical catalyst, but as one more unwanted intellectual irritant.
Althusserian Marxism in other words appeared to a rather defensive Party leadership as a product not of the Party in any direct sense, nor yet of the workers’ movement at large, but of the academy. This assessment was not altogether inaccurate. Althusser himself, looking back in his memoirs, The Future Lasts Forever, admitted that “all those … who criticized me for being a pure philosopher, looking down with disdain from my theoretical ivory tower on the practical realities of politics, were not entirely wide of the mark”.4 Althusserian Marxism was in its origin the production of a small cercle d’Ulm, a group that formed around Althusser at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris. It emerged and flourished at first, that is to say, in the interstices of a tessellated French system of higher education. Althusserian Marxism was, as Perry Anderson has argued, a characteristic example in this and other respects of what was coming to be known as Western Marxism, which, wherever it arose, found little support among Party functionaries or the ranks of organized labour, and rather more among intellectuals.
The fact remains that Althusser was quick to nail his colours to the mast, identifying himself as a member of the PCF. Althusser in this respect was unusual among Western Marxists, who generally regarded their parteilos status almost as a badge of honour. Some of these other Western Marxists joined in a chorus of denunciation of Althusser, proceeding mostly from outside France.5 It seemed to many of Althusser’s critics that any defence of any aspect of orthodoxy that emanated from within the ranks of the “Stalinist” PCF could not but be tainted by its origins, and could only amount to a warming-over of stale Party dogma – this being an assessment that the PCF leadership, however irritated they may have been, certainly did not share.6 On Althusser’s own rather
self-aggrandizing account, he was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Party leadership, with “all the ideologues of the Party … who made no secret of their disapproval and who supported me only because they could not have me expelled (given my notoriety).” While he quite deliberately set about cultivating this “notoriety” – he was still doing so in his memoirs, the apparent candour of which is not disarming – there was in the 1960s a delicate balance to be maintained: “the leadership was quite right to suspect me of wanting to inflect the Party line, from within, in a Maoist direction”; “the Party leaders” in other words, “clearly understood my strategy”.7 All the same, Althusser “took care never to exceed the limits of (the PCF’s) tolerance”; again in his own words,
I … fulfilled my desire to take my own initiatives and to oppose fiercely the Party leadership and its apparatus, but I did so from within the Party itself, under its protection, as it were. In fact, I never took up a position from which I risked being expelled.8
notably during the events of May 1968, when the silence from the rue d’Ulm did not disrupt the weightier silence that emanated, leadenly, from PCF headquarters.
There was a price to be paid for the Party leadership’s grudging tolerance, and Althusser was more than prepared to pay it – despite or because of the fact that
no form of political intervention was possible within the Party other than a purely theoretical one; it was even necessary to take the existing accepted theory and direct it against the Party’s use of it. And since the accepted theory no longer had anything to do with Marx, being based on very dangerous absurdities derived from the Soviet, or rather Stalinist, interpretation of dialectical materialism, the only possible course of action was to go back to Marx, to a body of political thought which was fundamentally unchallenged because it was sacred, and show that Stalinist dialectical materialism, with all its theoretical, philosophical, ideological and political consequences, was a total aberration.9
Again,
by basing my argument on Marx, who was after all the founding father of the Communist Party and their official source of inspiration, I acquired a peculiar position of strength. This made me difficult to attack within the Party when I challenged their official interpretation of Marx which they
used to justify their decisions, in other words what was effectively the Party line.10
Paradoxes abound. To the non-orthodox Althusser appeared distant and orthodox; to the orthodox, who were by contrast closer to hand, he appeared distinctly heterodox – not least because he brought to bear his métier and astuteness as a philosopher to the task of re-absolutizing science during a period of time that in other respects appeared to be moving in quite another direction. If we ask how and why Althusser set himself the task of defending what he took to be the science of Marxism, however, we can see that his forays were in fact neither as eccentric nor wayward, nor yet as orthodox, as others rather too hastily made them appear. Douglas Johnson’s “Introduction” to Althusser’s memoirs holds that
there was an intellectual climate in France into which Althusser’s work could fit. Although usually isolated as an individual, the moment was right for him to appear in the company of other French thinkers. The success of Althusser was not a unique phenomenon. Just as the anthropologist (Claude) Lévi-Strauss claimed to perceive a universal mental structure existing behind a diversity of empirical facts, or as (Jacques) Lacan believed that he could understand the human psyche in general, so Althusser believed that society was a unity and a totality even if it were the unity and totality of complexity itself. Lévi-Strauss argued that he could relate the customs of particular primitive peoples to a greater structure, Lacan sought to link the therapy of individual patients to a greater human subject, and Althusser believed that a dominant structure existed in every social formation.11
These rather flat, lame observations run up against the reservations Althusser’s memoirs themselves (to name but one source) express about LéviStrauss (and, eventually, about Lacan too). Johnson wishes to indicate, rightly, that Althusserian Marxism did not operate in a vacuum. But the “intellectual climate” in which it did operate admits of another, broader interpretation. In an immediate sense, it necessarily included the Party (as we have seen) as well as the academy. Here, the stakes as Althusser saw them were political through and through (“I felt I had to get involved in philosophy for political and ideological reasons”; “I have always insisted that my aim was to intervene in politics as a philosopher and in philosophy as a politician”).12 Specifically,
[by] remaining in the Party while adopting an openly oppositional stance … I thought I would be able to prove, at least in a formal sense, that
oppositional activity within the party on a serious political and theoretical basis was possible, and thus that the Party itself could be transformed in the long term.13
In a less immediate but no less important sense, Althusser’s “intellectual climate” included broader debates about science as well as about Marxism, for it is the juncture of the two that Althusserian Marxism had in its sights, and it was their vectors that Althusser set about attempting to realign. It can readily be seen that rumblings about the meaning of science as well as about the meaning of Marxism were not restricted to purlieus like the rue d’Ulm, or, for that matter, those traversed by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Althusser, looked at in retrospect, had his place within a surprisingly broad process of questioning from within the philosophy and history of science at large, from Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos through French philosophers of science like Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem (the “two thinkers to whom I owe practically everything”, as Althusser was to characterize them)14 and Gaston Bachelard (who, as Perry Anderson points out,15 was also admired by Lefebvre, Sartre and Marcuse) and later, antifoundationalist thinkers like Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and more recently still, by “science studies” advocates such as Bruno Latour. But if we are to begin to make fuller sense of what Althusser meant when he spoke of science, as well as what we mean when we speak of science, we must stand further back than any of these and take our bearings.
Althusser’s was not a lone voice, for all his undoubted originality. It found some premonitions as well as echoes in the unlikeliest of quarters. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was first published in 1962,16 is a case in point. For all its apocalyptic-sounding vocabulary involving “paradigm”-shifts from “normal” to “revolutionary” science, Kuhn’s influential book was in many ways a characteristic product of the US academy and is mentioned here not because it made waves in France. The French were, by and large, underwhelmed by undulations from another shore with which they were already largely familiar. Kuhn proposed that the history of science cannot adequately be countenanced if science itself is regarded as a uniform process of discovery, one that reveals increasingly detailed pictures of a natural reality external to the scientific observer, “out there” and duly awaiting its registration. To the contrary
there were throughout the history of science – Kuhn described himself as an historian, not a philosopher, of science – many different ways of approaching and investigating an increasingly complex external reality, and that there is no good reason to suppose in advance that its complexities were continuously available or present to different scientists in anything like the same way. There is no good reason, in other words, to regard either external reality or the several processes of its investigation as having been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Separate processes of scientific discovery might be as irreducible one to another as are the objects they set out to investigate. To argue otherwise is to suppose a priori that all of these have something overarching in common, of which the various objects or processes of scientific investigation are but examples or manifestations – and this, as Kuhn rightly indicates, would be a very unscientific presupposition indeed. (Althusser, as we shall see, had reasons that were very much his own for coming to a broadly similar conclusion, though, as we shall also see, what he does with this conclusion – to say nothing (yet) about what he doesn’t do with it – differs radically from what Kuhn did with it.)
The fact remains that since scientific discoveries take place or are effected at different times, it is tempting to arrange them chronologically in some sort of series or sequence. But here again a degree of caution imposes itself. Separate processes of scientific discovery may appear to present themselves in sequence or seriatim, but any such sequence is in fact only a more or less convenient ordering device or construct in the mind of the historian, one that has no necessary reference to anything in natural reality. Separate processes of inquiry do not – cannot – make sense only as links in an imaginary chain. Processes do not a progression make. To regard the history of science as a unilinear series of disclosures – as nature yielding “her” secrets to “the” increasingly practiced, painstaking gaze of “the” intrepid scientist – is to import an unargued and unarguable notion of progress, and for that matter what Nietzsche and others had identified as an “ocularcentric” bias, into enterprises that stand in no need of either. It is also to presume too much about how scientific discoveries are made and how they are to be understood. What the history of science teaches us, according to Kuhn, is that newly-discovered “facts” do not in and of themselves explain the process of scientific theorizing that produce them. They are better explained with reference to the theoretical constellations that impel scientists to look at hitherto-unsuspected domains or to re-examine old domains that now admit of an improved and fuller understanding. Such constellations and domains suggest an understanding of the history of science that differs from, is irreducible to and improves upon the uncritical notion of a singular “logic” of scientific discovery, according to which science proceeds onward and upward in a linear progression. Science, Kuhn tells us in so many words, is not a demiurge but a human creation (Marxists – non-Althusserian Marxists – would say a “praxis”); scientific discoveries are discontinuous, open-ended ensembles of theories, methods and instruments of understanding.
That the foregoing summary characterization of part of Kuhn’s argument would by now seem largely unexceptionable is a tribute to his achievement. He asked questions about how scientific discoveries are made – or how science is done – rather than investigating either in detail, but The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was (perhaps for this very reason) an influential book within the confines of the Anglo-American academy, particularly among those who had shown little prior interest in the philosophy (or history) of science, social scientists in particular. Evidently, the uncoupling of science and progress made sense at a time when science seemed to portend as well as promise, and when an uncomfortable awareness of the downside of scientific accomplishment (atomic power, genetic engineering – not to mention Heidegger’s Machenschaft or the principled misgivings of the Western Marxists) was beginning to come to the fore.
Even though these misgivings had no discernible effect on him, Althusser, for all the specificity of his own itinerary, can sound remarkably like Kuhn – or like a decidedly odd mixture of Kuhn and Foucault17 – if quoted out of context, or if we overlook his largely self-incurred debt to Spinoza. Althusser wrote in Reading Capital,
[T]he path these investigations are taking and will take leads us to a revolution in the traditional concept of the history of the sciences, which today (1968) is still profoundly steeped in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, i.e., in a teleologist and therefore idealist rationalism … [T]he history of reason is neither a linear history of continuous development, nor, in its continuity, a history of the progressive manifestation or emergence into consciousness of a Reason which is completely present in germ in its origin, and which its history merely reveals to the light of day.18
A science, in the words of Lenin and Philosophy, is “a theoretical … discipline”, and “not an aggregate of empirical results”.19 But Althusser is quick to ground himself not in Kuhn but in those who were his more immediate forbearers. In France, quite unbeknown to Kuhn, Jean Cavaillès had attempted to account for the development of science through its internal epistemology of self-correction. Rather than arguing that the mind of the scientist was stimulated by an interaction with data from the world, Cavaillès saw science as proceeding entirely
within the dialectical logic of its own concept. Scientists were thus the bearers or instruments of this concept, which (as it were) criticized itself through their efforts. If this is combined with Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem’s refusal to seek guarantees of scientific truth outside the activity of science itself, then the possibility is opened up of an anti-empiricist, anti-positivist, antisubjectivist epistemology – a possibility Althusser seized on with alacrity.20 Indeed, he may have seized on it rather too hastily, as we shall see.
As far as Althusser was concerned, if scientific knowledge does not advance cumulatively and progressively, as Kuhn (along with these others who were closer to home than Kuhn) were arguing at around the same time, what is denied in the first instance is the very process of continuity-in-discontinuity that had animated Hegel and, by extension, Hegelian Marxism too. It is largely for this reason that Althusser, in Martin Jay’s well-judged words,
denounced any attempt to reduce Marx to his earlier, humanist writings, which, he claimed, were polluted by prescientific ideology. Invoking the Bachelardian concept of an “epistemological break,” a break he made even sharper by substituting coupure for (Jean) Bachelard’s rupture, (Althusser) insisted that Marx had become a true Marxist only after radically shifting his problématique.21
“(T)he moment of rupture” in Bachelard was, in Dominique Lecourt’s words, “the moment at which at one point at least, in a determinate domain, the tissue of pre-existing ideology is torn and scientificity is installed”.22 Only at this point did Marx open up what Althusser liked to call a “new continent” whose environs were hitherto off-limits to scientific enquiry, the continent of history. Hegelian Marxists since Marx had remained haplessly stranded on the other shore. Indeed, the “Hegelian Marxism” that is held by Althusser to have infected and compromised Marxism included not only the usual suspects – Lukács, Korsch and pre-Althusserian Western Marxism at large. It also – this being a point that was largely missed at the time but which is, nevertheless, altogether consonant with the arguments of the present study – prominently included orthodox dialectical materialism. As we have seen, it was precisely dialectical materialism that had warmed over and served up continuously a rather bland, anodyne version of Hegel all along. That dialectical materialism had not done this all on its own, but was in effect fortified in its endeavours by the supposed
“correctives” earnestly and innocently on offer from earlier Western Marxists (who only claimed to be bitterly antagonistic to it) was part of Althusser’s point all along. We can now see why, in Martin Jay’s words, Althusser’s “restoring Marxism’s scientific credentials … did not mean a simple return to dialectical materialist orthodoxy”. It was not for nothing that Althusser insisted that it was “not only among his opponents … but also and above all among his supporters” that Marx was so seriously misunderstood.23 Althusser’s target, as now becomes clear, was a much broader one (in some respects) than it originally appeared to be to some of his early critics.
To see this is to begin to understand how and why Althusser was as concerned as he was to defend a Marxist science without at the same time subscribing to the simplistic base-superstructure polarity of Marxist yore, and without subscribing to any version of historicism or historical inevitability either. His central concern as a philosopher was with the problem of causality in historical and socio-political analysis. What Fredric Jameson, in a prescient paraphrase of Althusser’s argument,24 termed “expressive” causality is what Althusser attempted to line up in his sights. This kind of causality is traceable back to Leibniz, but on Althusser’s account dominates Hegel, with whom it first came into its own. It supposes that the social whole be traceable back to a singular, “inner” essence, which may be variously defined (Montesquieu’s esprit général is perhaps the best example).25 Aspects of the whole then become phenomenal forms that express or “must” express this essence. The inner essence or principle is thus present at each and every point in the whole. The argument turns into an argument about representation. Some aspect, any aspect, will stand for or represent the inner essence of the whole. Each aspect will then be a pars totalis. But any such axis of representation presupposes a certain uniformity. The social or historical whole is said to have a certain kind of character or nature. If we ask how the whole or essence works on its parts or aspects or phenomena in given cases, the answers will vary. Nevertheless, the form taken by the question indicates what kind of answer will be advanced.26 This means that something gets taken for granted. At the very least, what is presupposed is the possibility of tracing out a connection between the essence and the phenomenon that is always presumed to be there. The connection may be painfully obvious, utterly
recondite, tricky to nose out, or lurking in wait. None of this matters. It is the presumption itself that Althusser cannot abide. It amounts to a kind of admission in advance that a conclusion of a certain kind will be reached. This presumption has the effect of encouraging some questions while occluding others, preventing them from even being posed. And who is to say that it is not these others that most stand in need of being answered?
The axis of inner–outer or essence–phenomenon presupposes, then, a certain kind of cause–effect relationship which we should not accept on faith, precisely because it can be accepted in no other way. The same point may be made by a slightly more roundabout route. Expressive causality, to reiterate, posits or presupposes some sort of inner essence that is said to pertain or belong to any social or historical whole. But how can we know that this inner essence is not in fact just one particular aspect of the whole that is hypostatized and transformed into what is called, arbitrarily, the ultimately determining attribute of the whole? What guarantees are on offer that it really is “ultimately determining” in the required sense? Althusser thinks there are, and can be, none. Hegelian historicism is a case in point. It rewrites historical periods as multiple expressions or emanations of certain attitudes, thought-patterns, idées maîtresses or dominant ideas. But these are only elements or parts of the wholes they are said to govern. In elevating them to the rarefied levels from which they are said to determine the character of the whole, we are unavoidably indulging ourselves in displacement or distortion. One out of many possible candidates or categories is lined up and selected and is, in effect, misappropriated – in, by and through the very fact of its selection. It becomes a kind of master-code by which everything else is henceforth to be explained. Different aspects or attributes of the social whole are in this way assimilated one to the others in the name of an ultimate unity or identity that this assimilation was designed to affirm in the first place. Not only is this a completely circular mechanism of argument; it is also one that by virtue of its circularity is “ideological” as Althusser understands the term “ideology”, as we shall see.27 At this point we can begin to see the stakes involved in Althusser’s counter-position of science to ideology. But we will come to these in due course.
It is apparent in the meantime that if Hegelianism is used as an example of the circularity Althusser has in his sights, what the entire Hegelian enterprise presupposes is that it all hangs together and makes sense in the end – a consoling, providential notion which Althusser does not shrink from calling “religious” or “spiritual”. But this is the least of it. Althusser was proposing to cast his net far wider than Hegelianism as such. What follows from the foregoing characterization is that any base-superstructure model that tells us that the superstructure expresses or is an outgrowth of the base – or is its manifestation, reflex or reflection – will be vulnerable to the kind of criticism Althusser is concerned to level at Hegelianism. Dialectical materialism as this had long been understood – “the
celebrated and spurious dialectic and its laws” – is conspicuously not exempt from it. Dialectical materialism’s “framework” is, after all, just as “allegorical” as Hegelianism’s or Hegelian Marxism’s. It is merely “allegorical” in a different sense. Only the kind of allegory differs, when we “think within the unchanging framework of dialectical materialism (giving primacy to that dreadful term ‘dialectical materialism’ over all science)”.28
It would be better by far to dispense with any essence–phenomenon causal model where the cause is always external to its effects, pushing or pulling these from outside, but standing apart from them throughout. What Althusser proffered in its stead is the interiority of the social or historical whole on or, more precisely in its elements, elements which will not be effects or manifestations or phenomena of the whole in the same sense. This substitution, if we are to believe Althusser, changes the rules of the game decisively. Cause is no longer exterior to “its” effects; effects are no longer separate from causes in the required sense. Instead the whole is (re)conceptualized as a structure that is immanent in its effects, and, indeed, is its effects. The structure has no existence apart from its elements, which constitute its medium of existence. The structure thus works in and through its elements, not on them.29 Without, however, investigating in any detail the various by-ways of Althusser’s “synchronic”, structuralist alternative to expressive causality – he was to disown the “structuralist” label in the course of time – we can nevertheless see what underlies it readily enough. This is that if (following Jean Bachelard) an epistemological break was needed to remove the stranglehold of ideological reasoning and to permit the emergence or irruption of a Marxist science, and if science itself does not progress as, say, Kuhn’s “normal” science proceeds, endlessly replicating itself in the same way that ideology (on Althusser’s understanding of ideology) replicates itself, then Marx’s Capital is certainly comprehensible as the site of a dramatic confrontation between two diametrically opposed constructions of historical causality, and as an example of the arrival of science not as a goal but as a “surprise” that will be “disconcerting” into the bargain, just as Althusser says.30 But if this is the case, it is by no means clear on Althusser’s own showing why the field of contestation should be restricted to the pages of Capital or the writings of Marx in the first place. Why should these battle-lines not also have been drawn up throughout the history of dialectical materialism, up to and including the appearance of Althusser’s Reading Capital itself? Had not Althusser himself insisted that the economic is determinant in the last instance? Had he not added, laconically if not wearily, that the lonely hour of the last instance never comes? (“In the long run,” said Keynes in similar vein, “we are all dead.”)
Althusser was repeatedly given to insist with some forcefulness that ideology – which, perhaps under the impress of Gramsci, he understood in a very expansive sense – does not simply evaporate of its own accord whenever science is brought to bear. A science, in the words of For Marx, “is not obtained by inverting an ideology. A science is obtained on condition that the domain in which ideology believes that is dealing with the real is abandoned.”31 Overcoming ideology is not a matter of simply casting confusion to the winds. Ideology is not a miasma. What has to be taken into account here is the topography of Althusser’s argument. Breaking the stranglehold of ideology is possible only where ideology has no legitimate place or field of play. It is possible, that is to say, only within the domains (or, let us remember, “continents”) occupied by science, or, more precisely, by the various sciences. To break its stranglehold here is not to supersede ideology altogether, once and for all. Ideology will continue to stake out the territory that is all its own, where it will not be out of its element as it is whenever it crosses the border into the realms of science. All in all, ideology has a vaster field of play than science does; ideology also has complex mechanisms all of its own, by virtue of which it has always had considerable purchase. Althusser, indeed, is unusual among Marxist theoreticians of any persuasion in that he had recourse to the Maoist notion of non-antagonistic contradiction – contradiction, that is, of the kind that will continue to pervade future society after the revolution. Althusser made use of this notion to indicate the prevalence and permanence not only of contradiction but also of ideology itself, which “has no history”32 because it is ever-present in its various forms.
Althusser’s argument is adamant. Science according to Bachelard “has no object outside its own activity … it is in itself, in its practice, productive of its own norms and of the criteria of its own existence as science”.33 Science, that is to say, cannot be reached or judged by ideological means, and no ideological path is ever about to lead to science, for the latter cannot be so much as identified by any ideological mechanism. The only possible test for science is that provided by science itself,34 which also and alone affords us the possibility of identifying and characterizing ideology as ideology; truth is the sign and measure both of itself and of falsehood,35 since neither is verifiable by any criterion external to truth, as Spinoza, “Marx’s only direct ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint”, had put it.36 Because “the science founded by Marx is the science of the history of social formations”, it gives “a scientific content to the concept of ideology”, in that it shows why ideologies “were accepted and
continue to be accepted as true”. Marxism-as-science accounts for the conditions of its own emergence in an alien environment.37 This is why “ideology not only lies in wait for science at each point where its rigor slackens, but also at the furthest point where an investigation currently reaches its limit”.38 Althusser goes so far as to say, again in Reading Capital, that “an epistemological vacuum” can be equated with “an ideological fullness”.39
One of the underlying reasons why Althusser was bent upon assailing “progressive” or “evolutionary” philosophies of history – be these Hegelian or Darwinian – is his no less fervent distaste for any epistemology that claimed an increasing approximation to “the truth”. This distaste must in turn be connected with Althusser’s forceful rejection of any account of society that sought its “origins” in individual or collective intentionality (which perhaps accounts for his otherwise bizarre soft spot about Auguste Comte).40 We can readily enough envisage these three targets – the historical, the epistemological and the intentional – as so many traps for the unwary and unprepared. But in so doing we should be aware that all three are targets of science in the first place if and only if we take as our point of departure a distinctive understanding of science which Althusser – rightly or wrongly – considered unprecedented and unorthodox with respect to dialectical materialist orthodoxy, as well as to the various Western Marxist alternatives that were on offer – alternatives whose alternative status was, in Althusser’s view, more apparent than real and more consoling than convincing.
What these supposedly bitter enemies had in common, from the perspective Althusser adopted, was a view of “the verification procedures that guarantee a theory’s scientificity”,41 a view that is far from unassailable. It always eventuates in the goal, connected with Vico’s verum factum principle, that we can truly know only that which we have ourselves made, that people should thus be able to recognize themselves in a world that is their own product, which they themselves in some sense will have consciously created. The project of human intentionality will then, finally, have come to fruition; the actors in history will be the authors of its text. That this goal should be the basis or the guarantor of truth claims in the meantime is an injunction that stuck in Althusser’s craw. It simply recombined the very historical and epistemological claims, along with similarly unfounded claims about the potency and promise of human intentionality that Althusser had disputed all along, as being providential, unwarranted and ideological. To see that such a nexus of claims is ideological through and through is to understand what is finally at stake in Althusser’s hard-and-fast distinction between ideology and science, a distinction that is on Althusser’s understanding of it much more fundamental and deep-rooted than either conventional dialectical materialism or Marxist humanism had ever seen fit to allow.
It is “the category of the subject (that) is the constitutional (or constitutive) category of all ideology”.42 This is to say that ideology is never reducible to mere “false consciousness”, a category that invites and can scarcely avoid invoking historicism. The reason why Althusser (at least for a while) saluted Jacques Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is the subject of a new science is that, like all true science, it exposed the subject, here the integrated ego, as “an illusion, indeed the central illusion of all ideology”.43 What Lacan had done in and to Freudian psychoanalysis bears comparison with what Marx, properly understood, had done with and to Hegelian historicism: divested it of its ideological underpinnings once and for all. Ideology with Lacan is the imaginary extending through maturity and preserving “a false sense of individual subjectivity”44 and effectivity. Such preservation – or Aufhebung – is all the more noxious in its influence because the relationship between subjectivity so conceived and ideology is constitutive and reciprocal. As Althusser famously put the matter, ideology by its very nature “hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects”.45 Ideology is best understood not as false consciousness but as unconsciousness of a kind that has real, material effects, and real, material apparatuses (appareils) that prevail palpably in the world around us. Ideology is something that Marx himself had come to recognize as being a practical concept, not an error in perception or calculation. We live out its effects in the world around us on a daily basis, and are in no position to do anything else. Ideology has to do with lived experience. It is the expression of a lived relationship between human beings and the world around them, as well as of lived relationships among human beings themselves. Ideologies are not simply reflected, presented or conceptualized. They are practical in their own right and by their very nature, so long as we continue to accept the “facts” that positivists in all innocence take on trust as the “givens” of experience. Bachelard, in Dominique Lecourt’s formulation, may be credited with “a whole theory of the fetishism of the real”.46 Althusser not only “equates ideology with a naïve faith in the immediacy of sense impression”47 here following Bachelard and Cavaillès; he also recognizes that ideology so understood is practical and constitutive into the bargain. Ideology weaves a web of false assurances, a Gordian knot that only science can cut through. Science can cut through it because of its capacity to go beyond the given, immediate “facts”, and relations that constitute our everyday lives.48 In this way, science – along with “authentic art”, a (rather Brechtian) notion that
Althusser once dangled tantalizingly before the reader49 but failed to develop – is able to penetrate and see through ideology and ideologically-based claims.
Ideology, then, was to Althusser (in the words of Perry Anderson’s paraphrase of his argument)
a set of mythical or illusory representations of reality, expressing the imaginary relationships of (individuals) to their real conditions of existence, and inherent in their immediate experience: as such, it was an unconscious system of determinations, rather than a form of consciousness as ordinarily conceived. The permanence of ideology as a lived medium of delusion was, in turn, a necessary consequence of its social function, which was to bind (people) together in society by adapting them to the objective conditions allocated them by the dominant mode of production. Ideology was thus the indispensable cement of social cohesion in every period in history … the transhistorical statute of ideology as the unconscious medium of lived experience meant that even in a classless society, its system of error and delusion would survive … (as) unseen and impermeable to the individuals within it.50
Althusser’s passionate attack on the ideological illusions of immediate experience as opposed to the scientific knowledge proper to theory alone, and on all notions of (people) or classes as conscious subjects of history, instead of involuntary “supports” (Träger) of social relations, was an exact reproduction of Spinoza’s denunciation of experientia vaga as the source of all error, and (of Spinoza’s) remorseless insistence that the archetypical delusion was (people’s) belief that they were in any way free in their volition, when in fact they were permanently governed by laws of which they were unconscious.51
Nor indeed did Spinoza’s impress end here. “The categorical distinction between ‘objects of knowledge’ and ‘real objects’” “was taken straight from Spinoza’s … separation of idea and ideatum in De Emendatio Intellectus”.52
Althusser gives this same separation of “objects of knowledge” and “real objects” a lot of work to do. The former are products of scientific theorizing, the results of the work involved in coming up with (or “discovering”) them. The latter are their referents, the referents provided by a real, material world that present themselves to the scientist. The scientist’s task is to make objects of knowledge congruent with real objects, since the coincidence of the two can in no way be assumed or taken for granted. It must, rather, be brought about; objects of knowledge and real objects must be brought into line, and it is here, at
the levels of tasks to be performed or work (“theoretical production”) to be done, that the distinction between ideology and science comes to the fore all over again. The raw material for scientific activity is provided by ideological conceptions of the world whose ideological character is, at first, concealed beneath the immediacy of sense impressions. Uncovering its ideological substrate is and can be the work of science, and of science alone, as Althusser conceives of it. Ideologies by their very nature cannot admit to or reveal their own ideological character; only science has the wherewithal to do this, since science and science alone has the capacity to go beyond the immediate relations of everyday life. Ideology by contrast fails to reflect on itself or even to identify itself as ideological. To use the Freudian language to which Althusser, under the influence of Lacan, resorts, ideologies “denegate” their own ideological character.
If ideology is, as Althusser says, “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”,53 then philosophy, for its part, “far from being the spokesman of ideology vis-à-vis the sciences” must rather “neutralize (ideology’s) discourses”54 by showing that they are out of their element within the scientific realm (or “continent”). Because “the science founded by Marx is the science of the history of social formations”, it gives “a scientific content to the concept of ideology” in that it shows why ideologies “were accepted and continue to be accepted as true”. Marxism as science accounts for “the conditions of its own ‘irruption’ in the field of (those) ideological conceptions with which it broke”.55 Here Lecourt quotes Bachelard to good effect:
The history the sciences will then appear as the most irreversible of all histories. In discovering the true, the man of science bars the way to … irrationality. Irrationalism can no doubt spring up elsewhere. But from now on there are forbidden routes. The history of the sciences is the history of the defeats of irrationalism. But the fight is without end.56
Althusser himself singles out Canghuilhem, whose career, he says in his memoirs,
gave me an astounding view for the consequences of the sciences of turning prevailing orthodoxies upside down … the so-called epistemologies to which I had appeared to pay so much attention were absurd outside the framework of the history of science … [F]ar from conforming to the logic of the Enlightenment, such a history might have implications for his discoveries on the basis of what he referred to, almost in the same terms as us, as
“scientific ideologies,” philosophical representations affecting the development of science, the generation and even the nature of scientific concepts, and often in a wholly paradoxical manner. It was from him I learnt the disconcerting historical cunning of the relationship between ideology and science.57
Science for Althusser manifestly does not mean “a correspondence between a perceptually observed object and its mental representation”.58 He insisted to the contrary in Reading Capital that “we must completely reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate knowledge, and conceive of knowledge as a production”.59 This is an idea – an arresting idea – that Althusser outlines elsewhere by connecting “the mirror myths of immediate vision” with ideology. “The structure of all ideology”, in the words of Lenin and Philosophy, “is speculary, i.e. a mirror structure, and (is) doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and enables its functioning”.60 In keeping with his use of Lacan’s critique of the unified “subject” as being at the root of all ideology, Althusser insists that it is “in the imaginary misrecognition of the ‘ego’” that the human subject “‘recognizes’ itself”.61 Althusser, that is to say, invests in the notion of Marxism as having counterposed itself in principle to either an observational or even a speculary notion of truth, as having defined itself against the “speculative” notion of the mind as a mirror in which the external world can find adequate or accurate reflection. Even the inversion involved in the celebrated “camera obscura” metaphor for ideology in The German Ideology was superseded on this reading once Marx passed from ideological to scientific reasoning, although where this might leave Lenin’s copy theory of reflection in Materialism and EmpirioCriticism is (shall we say) less clear.62 Althusser in his self-styled battle of wits with the ideologues of the PCF was, in general, disinclined to criticize Lenin on this or any other count. Althusser’s addition of Lacan to the critique of ideological “speculation” could nevertheless have an altogether intriguing effect. This is that (in Martin Jay’s paraphrase) “(w)hat we are looking for when we criticize the distortions (brought about in, and by) ideology may be present in
what we are looking at in certain manifestations of ideology itself”.63 While this is certainly a thought to conjure with, the task of developing it was, in the event, left to thinkers other than Althusser64 who were tellingly to invoke Nietzsche’s distrust of ocularity into their arguments. Nietzsche was concerned among other things with challenging the reality of any pure or direct perception of nature, of any direct, unfiltered access to the world around us, on the grounds that any such confrontation involves interpretation, not registration, and that the scientist, whether the scientist knows this or not, is in effect the theoretical technician or artisan of cut-and-groove precision and exactitude and not the instrument of pure, untrammeled “knowing” at all. Here too, perhaps, is a thought that Althusser too left others to conjure with, a line of inquiry well worth following. It cannot be said that Althusser, who certainly raises the idea of doing so, ever followed it very far himself.
And in truth there are at the end of the day many such finally undeveloped ideas in Althusser. To say this is not to conclude, on a lame note, that Althusser has left us with a good deal of work to do – for Marxism, after all, had left us all with a great deal of work to do all along, and it still does. To say this is, rather, both to pay tribute to the undoubted fertility of Althusser’s mind, and to qualify the praise involved in doing so. There are reasons why so many readers have felt short-changed by Althusser. He shatters complacent assumptions, to be sure, but the complacent assumptions he shatters, from our present point of view, have more to do with ideology than with science as its counterpart, and more to do with Marxism than with science as its (supposed) complement. Either way, it is science that is finally left high and dry throughout his successive accounts. What in the world is Althusser’s science supposed to predict? If we ask – as we surely must ask – what understanding of science, its protocols and procedures, we are left with after reading Althusser; if we ask what, in his accounts, has enhanced our understanding of these protocols and procedures, we finally draw a blank. If we ask whether, then, he has really gone beyond Engels’s questionings – which, it will be remembered, were always about the status of science, about how this thing called science is to be regarded, and never about how science is to be done; and if we ask whether there is anything in what he says about science that would help us dissipate and not confound the confusion about this topic that had bedevilled Marxism ever since Engels, we must conclude that Althusser (like so many others before him) finally has not helped us very much at all.
This point can be made more forcefully. Even if we grant for the purposes of argument that the displacement of ideology by science is, by and large, to be celebrated, it manifestly does not follow from this that the hard-and-fast distinction between the two is itself to be celebrated uncritically, as an unqualified advance. Yet this is what Althusser comes perilously close to asserting. Alex
Callinicos quite rightly observed that there is no singular, identifiable criterion of scientificity anywhere in Althusser’s writings.65 Althusser, to his credit, unlike Dominique Lecourt and others, does not often employ the hypostasized concept of “scientificity,” and never uses it to imply, erroneously, that all sciences follow much the same path. Indeed, his notion of different scientific “continents” may, in its manner, admit of separate approaches to separate areas or domains of inquiry. But “continents” may have been an ill-chosen image for other reasons. The “discovery” of any new (but presumably inhabited) continent is in the eye of the discoverer, not the discovered, who may well see something other than “advancement” or “opening up” in action. Again, discovery is one thing, and proper charting, exploration and development of what (and who) is discovered something altogether different. It is at this point that Althusser’s hard-and-fast distinction between science and ideology, and his uncritical celebration of the former over the latter, let him (and us) down. Althusser avoids, in fact wilfully disregards, the downside of scientific advance, as we have seen, even though (or precisely because) this threatening downside was coming to the fore among his contemporaries. These contemporaries included the “Hegelian Marxists” from whom Althusser wished to distinguish himself. These Hegelian Marxists were, in turn, still infected with ideological residues or contaminants that are by definition out of their element within the territory newly staked out by science. These hard-and-fast considerations may have been enough in the way of guilt-by-association for Althusser to justify the banishment of these interlopers from the realm, along with the outmoded and dangerous ideas they had brought along with them. But they are surely not enough for those of us who can see that the fast and loose strokes of Althusser’s arguments, and condemnations, are simply too broadly applied.
It is the positive value he attaches to science and the negative value he attaches to ideology that underlies Althusser’s celebrated (or notorious) “epistemological break” (coupure épistemologique), the break that he thinks defines Marxism as a science and separates it from its residual ideological traces once and for all – but had difficulty pinpointing, even as he made so much of the (needless) task of locating it within Marx’s writings. More is made to hang on this particular hook than it can reasonably be expected to bear. The distinction is strident and overdrawn, on the one hand, and lacking in precision, on the other – a sure sign that something is awry. Nor indeed is this an isolated example, one that could simply have been put right on the basis of a less uncertain Marxology than Althusser had at his command. Althusser throughout regarded science as an opportunity, not a threat, and did not in any obvious sense pursue a line of reasoning which was a characteristic product of other, earlier Western Marxist theorists, on the grounds that their thought had been tainted and compromised by “Hegelian Marxism”, as we shall see. But Althusser, in avoiding the issue of the downside of scientific and technological “advance” that Hegelian Marxists had
emphasized, conveyed the impression that he was doing so because he wished, for other reasons, to distinguish himself from Hegelian Marxism lock, stock and barrel. To forego any discussion of the downside of scientific advance – as Althusser did – seems a heavy price to pay for the theoretical – or, to use Althusser’s own locution, “theoreticist” – singularity of his own approach. Hegelian Marxists were after all by no means alone in their various perceptions of the downside of scientific and technological advance. They simply had their own way(s) of accounting for and characterizing something that was sufficiently well-marked to have been noticed by many others (including student radicals and academic philosophers of science) at the time. But it was not noticed by Althusser, from all published appearances. In view of this startling omission, the least that can be said is that Althusser, in his concern to strike against the received ideas of Hegelian Marxism in an altogether novel way, succeeds, despite himself, in casting one of them – the negative implications of unfettered scientific advance – into stark relief.
Althusser was, as we have seen, determined rigorously to distinguish his recharged Marxism from anything that could be construed as an Hegelian-Marxist residue: so much so that he consigned to theoretical limbo a series of misgivings about science and technology that were not properly or exclusively the province of Hegelian Marxists in the first place. But in having given expression to these misgivings Western Marxists had done much to separate themselves from a Soviet dialectical materialism that was, by and large, far less critical of the straightforwardly “progressive” character of technological advance than Western Marxists were. And in failing to acknowledge this important difference of principle – a difference in kind, not just of degree – between the two schools of thought, Althusser, despite his rather forced protestations to the contrary, cast in his lot, finally, with the dialectical materialists (and the leadership of the PCF). The idea that science afforded opportunities for the regrounding of Marxist theory, or for its redefinition as the practice of philosophy, not the “philosophy of praxis”, was after all an idea that the party leadership could take on board at no real cost to their own standing or to what they had long believed in. Indeed, this point could be put more strongly, in view of the Party leadership’s longstanding vested interest in the concept of “scientificity” as doctrinal ballast for its own “vanguard” status. Why, in view of this connection, should the Party leadership not have discreetly welcomed Althusser’s initiative in having regrounded “scientificity”, particularly when Althusser had used this regrounding to refine and underscore the venerable couplet of historical materialism/dialectical materialism, another long-standing source of ideological ballast?
Others of course – and I do not mean to exclude scientists themselves – might well have good reason to be rather less accommodating about the character of the transaction. Althusser, for his part, was to accuse himself in Essays in Self-Criticism, of having given in to various “theoreticist” tendencies in his earlier writings. But his uncritical espousal of the straightforwardly positive character of science, on the grounds of its sheer theoretical usefulness for him, was not one of them – even though it was, arguably, the most “theoreticist” tendency of all. His non-Party critics were, by and large, neither convinced nor disarmed by Althusser’s candour, a candour that smacked of grandstanding and posturing, and which was to smack of these all over again in The Future Lasts Forever, his memoirs.
It is, however, when we ask what lay behind such posturing that something rather more ominous than any ad hominem finger-pointing begins to emerge. This is that Althusser, for all his originality, was in one respect at least not original at all. His blind spot about the linkage of science and progress appears all too woefully familiar, all too well-rehearsed. Nor indeed was this blind spot simply a Party-induced one. Its purview is much wider. By now we have, all of us, had ample time to grow accustomed to, and to be able to assess critically, a series of broadly “Weberian” claims about modernity, most markedly the idea that the remorselessly “modern” societies we inhabit (if we inhabit them at all) are, whatever their ideological complexion, “rationalized” and “disenchanted”. Magical, superstitious validations have been cast to the winds; the Enlightenment project, no longer an empty dream, had finally come to fruition – or so it seemed, ironically enough, even as the Cold War was running its weary course. Max Weber, to whom “disenchantment” or Entzauberung is generally traced, was himself rather more critical of, and indeed rather more melancholy about this development than some of his self-styled followers were to prove: but that it was a development that really had taken place, like it or not, and that the development was well-nigh irreversible, was something that neither master nor acolyte took it upon himself to deny.
Once again, ironies abound. Althusser of all people was no Weberian acolyte. Indeed, he was in some respects a trenchant critic of the Enlightenment project at large, as we have seen. But not, I submit, in all respects. He too, astoundingly enough, gives in to its blandishments and temptations at a crucial point in his exposition – in his eagerness to resort to, in fact to trumpet and flourish “science” as the clincher to his argument. Althusser can serve, despite himself, as a timely reminder of the dangers involved in an uncritical or frankly opportunistic espousal of the “progress” involved in scientific and technological “rationalization”, but can serve also (and again despite himself) as a salutary reminder that Marxism throughout its history has had more than one face to present on this issue. It was Marx who said in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that we are “compelled to face with sober senses” the developments that capitalist modernity has brought about, however jarring and disruptive they may have been. Here Marx, too, was speaking in the idiom of disenchantment. But it was also Marx who, less obviously perhaps, was quite aware that “the abstract materialism of natural science” can itself be the stuff of enchantment or incantation if we let it enchant us. It could be argued that the “sorcerer’s apprentice” motif in the same Manifesto is designed to underline this very point.66 Let us, by all means, be done with superstition. But an underlying question will then remain. Why shouldn’t science be just as “enchanting” as anything else? Has it never been anybody’s blind spot? Was it not Engels’s? Was it not the dialectical materialists’? Did it not ensorcel Althusser himself, at the end of the day? Why must science be wheeled out as a deus ex machina or produced as a trump for every argument? It is not the least of Engels’s shortcomings, as we have seen, that his own hard-and-fast, broadly drawn distinction between socialism utopian and scientific sought to give utopia too bad a name – just like that! – and to give science too good a name, at one and the same time? Althusser was no less impatient in his counterposition of “science” to “ideology”, and in his corresponding eagerness to force the founding fathers of Marxism back into the same, familiar, Procrustean bed.
1 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London, Verso/NLB, 1976, p. 38.
2 Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, tr. Richard Veasy, New York, Norton/New Press, 1993, pp. 231, 229.
3 I am pilfering the title of Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism. The Left-Wing Alternative, tr. Arnold Pomerans, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969.
4 Althusser, The Future, p. 170.
5 The best known among these – space forbids my listing all the others – is the least typical of them, an autovindication of the historian’s craft vis-à-vis Althusser’s attacks on “empiricism”: E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978, passim. For a spirited fraternal riposte, see Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, London, Verso/NLB, 1980, passim. See also Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism. Althusser and his Influence, London, Macmillan, 1984, pp. 201–14.
6 Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality. The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, p. 394. Jay’s chapter on Althusser (pp. 385–422) may be recommended to the reader as one of the best critical treatments of Althusser in English.
7 Althusser, The Future, pp. 223, 197.
8 Althusser, The Future, pp. 199, 204.
9 Althusser, The Future, p. 196.
10 Althusser, The Future, p. 222.
11 Johnson, “Introduction” to Althusser, The Future, p. ix.
12 Althusser, The Future, pp. 182, 197.
13 Althusser, The Future, p. 235.
14 Althusser, The Future, p. 183.
15 Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, p. 58.
16 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962. For a good survey of Kuhn’s “reach”, both within the social sciences and beyond them, see Gary Gutting, ed., Paradigms and Revolutions. Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1980, passim.
17 Foucault’s well-known negative appraisal of the Enlightenment – which runs parallel to Althusser’s in some respects – has not escaped scrutiny. See Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert L. Wokler, eds, Inventing Human Science. Eighteenth Century Domains, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, passim.
18 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, tr. Ben Brewster, London, Verso/NLB, 1970, p. 44.
19 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster, London, NLB and New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 41.
20 Althusser, The Future, p. 184. On Canghuilhem, see the bibliography by Dominique Lecourt, in his Marxism and Epistemology. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault, tr. Ben Brewster, London, Verso/NLB, 1975. pp. 214–16; on Bachelard, see the bibliography by Lecourt, pp. 111–13. See also Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, Berkeley, University of California, Press, 1992, pp. 178–81.
21 Jay, Totality, p. 394; Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 205.
22 Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, p. 86; Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, tr. Grahame Lock, London, NLB, 1976, p. 114, on “rupture” and “coupure”.
23 Jay, Totality, p. 398.
24 Fredric Jameson, “The Re-Invention of Marx”, Times Literary Supplement, 3832, 22 August, 1975, pp. 942–3. See also William S. Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, London and Boulder, Lexington Books, 2005, p. 174.
25 Montesquieu, one of the few precursors Hegel mentions (approvingly) by name, arguably influenced him greatly. See Paul Thomas, “Property’s Properties: From Hegel to Locke”, Representations, 84, Fall, 2003: pp. 30–43. I would venture to add that Montesquieu was also the subject of Althusser’s best book. See Louis Althusser, Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, tr. Ben Brewster, London, NLB/Verso, 1972, pp. 13–109, passim; and Anderson, Considerations, p. 66.
26 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 17, pp. 52–3; cf. pp. 188–9; Louis Althusser, For Marx, tr. Ben Brewster, New York, Vintage, p. 205.
27 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 90n, pp. 55, 57.
28 Althusser, Future, pp. 222–3.
29 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 96–9.
30 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 45, 75. On “synchrony” vs. “diachrony”, see pp.96–7.
31 Althusser, For Marx, p. 192; Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 43; Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, p. 207.
32 Anderson, Considerations, p. 84.
33 Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, p. 26.
34 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 25.
35 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 122.
36 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 102.
37 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 155.
38 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 90n.
39 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 107.
40 Jay, Totality, p. 398.
41 Jay, Totality, p. 399.
42 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 170–1.
43 Jay, Totality, p. 402; see also Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 157n, 243–7.
44 Jay, Totality, p. 403. Althusser even compares the Freudian concept of “wish-fulfilment” (plein du désir) with “ideology-fulfilment” (plein d’idéologie). See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 143.
45 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 173.
46 Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, pp. 156, 158.
47 Jay, Totality, 401.
48 Jay, Totality, p. 404.
49 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 221–7.
50 Anderson, Considerations, pp. 84–5. See also William S. Lewis, Louis Althusser, p. 169.
51 Anderson, Considerations, p. 65.
52 Anderson, Considerations, p. 64. See also Ted Benton, Rise and Fall, p. 38.
53 Althusser,Lenin and Philosophy, p. 162.
54 Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, p. 72.
55 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, pp. 155–6; Althusser, For Marx, p. 69.
56 Georges Canguilhem, L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1951, p. 27, quoted Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, pp. 12–13.
57 Althusser, The Future…, p. 184.
58 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, p. 374; cf. Martin Jay, “Ideology and Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything Behind the Mirror’s Tarn?”, Force Fields. Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, New York, Routledge, 1993, pp. 134–146.
59 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 24.
60 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 180.
61 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 218–19.
62 See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 158; Althusser, The Future,p. 212. Althusser continued to regard Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a “permanently revolutionary manifesto for knowledge, for scientific theory.” (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 31).
63 Jay, “Ideology and Ocularcentrism”, p. 146.
64 See in particular Sarah Kofman, Camera obscura – de l’idéologie, Paris, PUF, 1973, passim. For a summary characterization, see Jay, “Ideology and Ocularcentrism”, p. 137.
65 Alex Callinicos, Althusser’s Marxism, London, Pluto Press, p. 59.
66 See Chapter 1, above; see also Paul Thomas, “Seeing is Believing: Marx’s Manifesto, Derrida’s Apparition”, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds, The Socialist Register, 1998. The Communist Manifesto Now, London, Merlin Press, 1998, pp. 205–17.