Warren Montag
For much of his professional life and for some years after his death, Althusser was known as the inventor of structural Marxism, a doctrine derived from the application of the structuralist methods used in linguistics, anthropology, and literary studies to Marxist texts (Benton 1984). While this reading of Althusser appears increasingly untenable, it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it as an error that, having been revealed, can simply be forgotten. The fact that it was possible even before the posthumous publication of works that incontestably revealed an unstructuralist, if not anti‐structuralist, Althusser, to contest this view and to do so citing the same texts that were summoned as evidence of his structuralism, does not allow us to ignore this reading as if Althusser bore no responsibility (in the causal sense) for it. He himself argued that in the case of philosophers, “it is not their intentions that count. What count are the real effects of their philosophies” (Althusser 1976: 60). If we take seriously his admonition to understand a philosophy by its effects rather than by the declared intentions of the philosopher, we are forced to acknowledge that categorizing Althusser as a structural Marxist, even if it has served to obscure and divert attention from the other, perhaps more original and more subversive, tendencies at work, particularly in For Marx and Reading Capital (both published in 1965), must in some way be grounded in what he has written. To take this position does not imply an acceptance of the widely held notion that structuralism is a superseded, even failed, mode of thought that, despite its transdisciplinary and variable forms, can simply be consigned to the distant past. To understand it, let alone to understand Althusser’s relation to it, “structuralism” must be treated as something more than an epithet. We might begin by examining the evidence used to charge Althusser with structuralism.
Perhaps the most convincing, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, was his explicit criticism of what he called historicism, the idea that history becomes intelligible only when it is conceived as a succession of distinct periods, each of which contains in embryonic form that which will succeed it. Althusser’s identification of teleology (the idea that history is a movement towards an end already implicit in its origin) as a problem meant that emphasizing process over system, or diachrony over synchrony, as Marxists tended to do in their critiques of structuralism, was not only insufficient, but represented a mere inversion of structuralist notions that left their basic concepts intact and uncriticized. For many of his critics, he had quite simply taken the side of the synchronic against the diachronic (Resch 1992: 92).
Furthermore, Althusser articulated a critique of humanism (or theoretical humanism, as he called it)—the idea that humanity is the subject, that is, agent and author, of history and that human individuals, each of whom is an expression of the nature of humanity as such, are similarly endowed with a freedom and creativity “of which only the consciousness is lacking.” His anti‐humanism was widely regarded as a derivative of the linguistic model that served as a foundation for much structuralist thought. According to this model, even the most creative of creative acts, speaking (and perhaps writing), was less an action than an (unconscious) act of submission on the part of the speaker to a great number of complex rules of which he necessarily remained unaware, as if his ignorance of the rules were the condition of his obedience to them. In this sense, the system of language already contained within itself every possible utterance, if not every possible concatenation of utterances into discourse, and human individuals were little more than the means by which the possible became the actual. To apply the linguistic model to society, as Althusser had been charged with doing by arguing that ideology was a system that governed individuals without their knowing it, was to deprive human beings of their essential freedom to think and to act, and thus to declare their subjection to the immutable order of a system or set of systems they could not easily change. In the realm of art and literature, systems and structures replaced the category of author as the originator and creator or, perhaps more accurately, reduced his role to that of a subjected being who acts only at the behest of rules and commands whose reign he cannot escape.
Against the notion that individuals see the better but do the worse because they possess a generalized false consciousness in which things appear as active agents (fetishism) and persons as mere things (reification), Althusser insisted that “ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’. They are perceived‐accepted‐suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them (Althusser 1969: 233). Ideology is thus an unconscious “system of representations” whose constraints perhaps emerge from human practice but do not originate in an intention, collective or otherwise. Althusser’s structuralism appeared as a Marxist variant of functionalism, the idea of a social order whose component parts existed for the purpose of its reproduction. The publication of his essay, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” in 1970, and thus at the moment that both the validity of structuralist approaches and the political effects of structuralism as a movement were in question, seemed to confirm this view. The essay, from which nearly every reference to social revolt and transformation had been either been removed entirely or relegated to a brief postscript, seemed to suggest that oppositional movements only appeared oppositional, an appearance that existed precisely to insure that individuals would live their subjection as freedom.
So powerful and entrenched was this interpretation of Althusser’s work as a whole, that only a new Althusser based on posthumously published works dating from the mid‐1960s to the mid‐1980s, revealed the extent to which, from the very beginning of his enterprise, he maintained a critical distance from structuralism that only grew with time. These works made unavoidably visible the strata in For Marx and Reading Capital that contained thoroughgoing critiques of structuralism.The power of these critiques consisted in the fact that they were constructed on bases different from, and opposed to, the humanism and historicism once seen as the only possible position from which structuralism could be criticized, but which had been systematically overlooked by readers. In particular, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” a text assembled from a manuscript that consisted of fragments and repeated passages by François Matheron a few years after Althusser’s death in 1990, offered a dramatic glimpse into the “underground current” of Althusser’s own thought. Drawing from Epicurus and Lucretius, Althusser proposed a materialism governed by the image of atoms raining through the void that only occasionally swerved into a collision with other atoms to become an “accrochage” or pile‐up of interlocked atoms. From such conjunctions, a world might be born, but a world whose necessity is only retroactive, as “the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies” (Althusser 2006: 191).
From this point of view, capitalism, far from existing in embryo in feudalism and thus necessarily born, “might never have happened.” Only the encounter and subsequent “taking hold” of a number of “elements” (themselves products of an accumulation) established that system or structure known as capitalism: “an accumulation of money (by the ‘owners of money’), an accumulation of the technical means of production (tools, machines, an experience of production on the part of the workers), an accumulation of the raw materials of production (nature), and an accumulation of producers (proletarians divested of all means of production). The elements do not exist in history so that a mode of production may exist, they exist in history in a ‘floating’ state prior to their ‘accumulation’ and ‘combination’, each being the product of its own history, and none being the teleological product of the others or their history” (Althusser 2006: 198). For Althusser, the aleatory or chance encounter precedes and brings into being the tendential laws that govern it.
Twenty years earlier, Althusser with different references (Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao) had offered a strikingly similar argument about revolution, specifically the Russian revolution, characterizing it as an “immense accumulation” of “entangled” contradictions. If these contradictions form a provisional unity, even a system, it is a unity of non‐unifiable elements that can coexist for a time without any reduction of their foreignness and incompatibility which, on the contrary, might be increased. Between them, from the fragile relations that temporarily allow them to conjoin, the system they form does not resemble a system as understood by linguistics or anthropology. In fact, what Althusser described in 1962 as a “unité de rupture” or ruptural unity, a unity in division, would reappear twenty years later in the description of the taking hold of the atoms or elements that conjoin in their encounter to form a singular thing as being haunted by a radical instability, a kind of permanent susceptibility to unpredictable, but total, transformation (Althusser 1969: 99). We are as far from the normalized world of a synchrony that governs diachronic change as we are from a historicism of a succession of synchronic systems submitted to the goals of history.
The extent to which Althusser’s formulations represented a conscious attempt to demarcate his theoretical project as fully as possible from structuralism is most clearly demonstrated in another posthumous publication written sometime towards the end of 1966. The brevity of “On Lévi Strauss” serves to underscore its programmatic character: in the guise of a critique of Lévi Strauss, it outlines the essential terms of Althusser’s critique of structuralism (Althusser 2003: 19–32). Here he argues that structuralism is a formalism according to which history may be understood as a formal combinatory, containing within itself every possible combination of a set of pre‐given elements. From such a perspective, knowledge consists of establishing the possibility of a specific combination within a system rather than explaining why one specific possibility rather than another becomes real and actual at a given time. This model, very close in fact to Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, appeared to Althusser grounded in theological notions whose presence went unrecognized and unaccounted for. At the same time, and perhaps as a partial answer to the problems associated with the formal combinatory, structuralism applied to social and historical phenomena commonly took the form of functionalism. If the combinatory left no place for a subject, understood as the agent or origin of action, it was perhaps because a given society itself behaved as if it were the original “rational actor,” identifying what is necessary or merely beneficial to its existence and calculating the most efficient means to satisfy its wants. In this way, the entire ideological superstructure could be understood as the means by which the economic base which assures the continued existence of a society produces the laws, religion, and culture best suited to its own reproduction: the end is the initiating cause. Interestingly, Althusser’s critique of functionalism did prevent him from regressing to a notion of the effectivity of final causes in his emphasis on reproduction as an explanatory principle in his highly influential “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” which appeared in 1970.
In fact, it was Althusser’s emphasis on what we might call the inescapability of ideology, that is, its trans‐historical or omni‐historical character, that led him to investigate the conditions of possibility of its disruption, not by means of the great struggles and crises that punctuate the histories of every society, but by the often subtle and unseen acts of resistance, intentional and unintentional, the interruptions of the everyday rituals according to which bodies move in the service of production. Similarly, words and letters that, although necessary to communication, sometimes swerve like atoms raining through the void, miss their destination and disappear into oblivion or, on the contrary, are delivered to the wrong addressee. Just as corporeal resistance makes visible the ways bodies are governed, so the disruption of the circulation of meanings leaves a hole in the density of the weave of innumerable discursive threads, revealing the rituals and liturgies that determine what we write and say, as well as where, when, and how we do so. For Althusser, works of art and literature took shape around these holes, marking them as “areas of concern,” while at the same time preventing them from closing up and disappearing into the seamless space of ideology. His metaphors in this connection are striking: ideology, whether in the form of religion, law, or philosophy, is everywhere marked by cracks, holes, gaps, fissures, and faults which together testify to the great upheavals of the past and portend catastrophes to come whose arrival is both announced and made possible by innumerable small movements and changes in pressure.
Althusser’s terminology allows us to see the way that ideology (the set of dominant ideas and the practices that work to ensure their dominance), systematically confronted with the resistances that no system can eliminate but in fact constantly—that is, systematically—generates, fails to close upon itself in a fulfillment of the conditions necessary to the reproduction of a given social order. The tear in its fabric opens a space through which all that combines to form a world of subjection can be seen and understood differently. The idea of the literary text as a totality whose every part contributes to the meaning of the whole would simply represent a suturing of the necessary gap, an attempt to conceal the fissures that disrupt the continuity of the text, as well as that of the ideological discourses of which it is woven and the rituals and apparatuses that confer upon the work of literature or art not merely a form but the location and means by which it is read and analyzed. The curtain that hides the machinery that produces the audience’s suspension of disbelief has been torn.
In this way, it is not surprising that perhaps the most ambitious of Althusser’s statements on literature, was his early essay on theater, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht. Notes on a Materialist Theater,” first published in 1963 and two years later included as the central text of For Marx, the third of five essays. It was composed prior even to his extended reflections on ideology which, indeed, plays little role in Althusser’s attempt to grasp how the play works and what it does, particularly the decentering and destabilizing effects that Althusser felt, but could not find the words and concepts to capture. Condemned as a rather uninteresting melodrama, with neither a richness of dialogue nor significant action, El nost Milan, according to Althusser, “is a play remarkable for its internal dissociation. The reader will have noted that its three acts have the same structure, and almost the same content: the coexistence of a long, slowly‐passing, empty time and a lightning‐short, full time; the coexistence of a space populated by a crowd of characters whose mutual relations are accidental or episodic—and a short space, gripped in mortal combat” (Althusser 1969: 134). The spectator is subjected to two spaces, two temporalities whose difference, if not opposition, the progress of the play does nothing to overcome or resolve. If anything, it places the opposition between the two temporalities more clearly in relief, deepening the absence of any relation between the melodramatic time of a mere chronicle in which persons and things come and go, but in which nothing happens, on the one hand, and, on the other, what Althusser calls “a dialectical time,” visible only at the edges of the stage or at the ends of acts, that arrives “after everyone has departed. How is the ‘delay’ of this dialectic to be understood? Is it delayed in the way consciousness is for Marx and Hegel? But can a dialectic be delayed? Only on condition that it is another name for consciousness” (Althusser 1969: 138). Neither character nor dialogue sustains the play which, by virtue of the forces and movements of which it is composed, decenters both consciousness and speech and compels its audience to confront the real by a discovery of what within them is radically other.
In a moment of illumination, Althusser describes El nost Milan as a movement whose subversive force surpasses even what Brecht envisioned for a materialist theater, a movement that decenters consciousness and displaces it to the margins of the play, overflowing the stage, enveloping the audience, breaching the walls of the theater, and finally pursuing in the spectator “the advent of its silent discourse,” the discourse to which Althusser’s own essay gives voice.
Most of Althusser’s reflections on art and literature, however, were concentrated in the period 1965–68, and were thus closely connected to the collective project organized around his seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in 1964–65 that produced Reading Capital. One of the participants, Pierre Macherey, working in close conjunction with Althusser, produced several essays which were incorporated into a book (A Theory of Literary Production) which appeared in Althusser’s “Théorie” collection with the prominent left‐wing publisher, Maspèro in 1966. While both Althusser and Macherey worked within the same “problematic” or framework and shared a fairly large set of assumptions and reference points, their texts retained a singular character. As Althusser would write in 1966, the “Althusser effect” and the “Macherey effect,” however allied and even coordinated they were, remained distinct (Althusser 2003: 17).
Althusser, in constant dialogue with Macherey and others, such as Etienne Balibar, produced two important texts on art and literature in this period: the “Letter to André Daspre” that appeared in Nouvelle Critique, a journal affiliated with the French Communist Party and “Cremonini: Painter of the Abstract,” an essay that still has not received the attention it deserves. But none of Althusser’s writings has so affected the way we read literature than his 1965 introduction to Reading Capital, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.” It was here, without ever mentioning a single literary work, but only the Bible and Marx’s Capital, that Althusser distinguished between different conceptions of reading and writing, introducing for the first time, the concept of “symptomatic reading” (Althusser 1970: 28). The phrase evokes Freud as it was no doubt intended to do, but perhaps only the more cautiously to introduce a figure at least as present to Althusser’s thought but whose philosophy had remained largely unintelligible to those who attempted to read him: Spinoza.
In 1966, La Nouvelle Critique published a dossier entitled “Deux lettres sur la connaissance de l’art.” The first letter, written by André Daspre, a literary scholar who taught at a lycée in Toulon, was addressed to Louis Althusser. Based on the conception of ideology Althusser had proposed in “Marxism and Humanism,” Daspre wonders whether art or what he calls la connaissance artistique (artistic knowledge) has any place in a conceptual realm divided between science and ideology and thus whether Althusser denies art any other status than that of illusion or error, that is, mere ideology. Even if the entire debate seems hopelessly dated, the question that led to an encounter between the two men was, through their intervention, reformulated in a way that has lost nothing of its urgency or interest: what is it that art gives us beyond the pleasure proper to it, a pleasure determined by its formal properties, whether coherence and closure or unresolved contradiction and incompleteness? While Althusser is drawing on Brecht’s theory and practice of theater that, as he remarked in his piece on Il Piccolo Teatro, is devoted to a destabilizing and a decentering of the spectatorial consciousness and therefore to the “lived experience” of the audience, he here broadens the discussion to art in general. Similarly, his focus is not simply what the “experience” of a given literary text or painting makes us feel (uncomfortable, perplexed, unsatisfied), but on the kind of knowledge, if, that is, knowledge is the correct term, it brings to us.
Art, he tells us, is reducible neither to ideology nor to knowledge. He also hastens to add that in speaking of art, he refers only to “authentic art, not works of an average or mediocre level,” although without specifying how we would distinguish between authentic and mediocre art, and thus leaving open the possibility that “average” art, most works of art, may not rise to a “level” beyond ideology (Althusser 1971: 222). Even an authentic work of art, however, cannot “give us a knowledge in the strict sense, it therefore does not replace knowledge (in the modern sense: scientific knowledge), but what it gives us does nevertheless maintain a certain specific relationship with knowledge” (1971: 222). What it gives us is different from but not opposed to knowledge: according to the English translation, what is specific to works of art is that they “make us see,” “make us perceive,” or “make us feel,” “something which alludes to reality” (1971: 222).
The translator signals a difficulty in this passage by including the French in brackets. What is the difficulty? Althusser uses the expression “donner à voir,” which is often understood to mean “to reveal” or “to show” without suggesting that the spectator is compelled or made to see what is shown. The literal meaning of the phrase, that art “gives us” something “to see,” “to perceive,” and so on, suggests, on the contrary, that art gives us, makes available to us, something we didn’t know was there to be given: the ideology or ideologies that pass for nature, for “the way things are,” that which we treat as a “given” until, by giving it to us, art strips away the givenness of the given, marking it as something to be known. The movement of the literary work, its movement towards an end, even the end of postponing the end and deferring it beyond the work’s own boundaries leaves it littered with the byproducts of its effort to cohere; the labor of ordering necessarily produces disorder. If literature is a mirror not of reality but of the set of givens that passes for reality, it is as Pierre Macherey suggests, in an essay cited here by Althusser, a broken mirror that distorts, fragments and disfigures what it reflects (Macherey 1978: 119–35). The things it grasps are both the same and different from what the reader expects, creating an uncanny effect that Althusser calls internal distantiation, according to which the familiar becomes strange.
But perhaps more than anything directly concerned with art, it was Althusser’s discussion of reading, that is, of what we do when we read and of what assumptions govern our understanding of the act of reading, in his introduction to Reading Capital that most profoundly affected the study of literature, art and culture. He begins with the sweeping declaration “that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading—the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their ‘absences of works’.” Of these simple acts, reading stands out as having been particularly neglected, protected by its obviousness, its protocol apparently concretized in the Holy Scriptures whose very resistance to interpretation gave rise to a new conception of reading, perhaps most comprehensively articulated in Augustine’s Of Christian Doctrine. This is what Althusser calls the religious myth of reading, according to which “the voice (the Logos) speaking in the sequences of a discourse; of the Truth that inhabits its Scripture—and of the ear that hears or the eye that reads this discourse, in order to discover in it (if they are pure) the speech of the Truth which inhabits each of its Words in person” (Althusser 1970: 17). Here, the letter is devalued as mere surface that offers an apparent meaning that both contains and conceals the spiritual truth inside.
In opposition, Althusser invokes Spinoza, “the first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing” (Althusser 1970: 16). The problem of reading Scripture according to Spinoza was not a surfeit of meaning that exceeded the signifying capacity of language, any language, but precisely the opposite. If Scripture proved resistant to interpretation it was because its meaning was indissociable from the letter, from the Hebrew words and grammatical forms of which it was composed, and therefore from the gaps and lacunae that translations attempted to cover up and the discrepancies and contradictions that, once the text was understood to be pure surface without a deeper layer, a subtext or hidden text, could not be resolved. This is what constituted the materiality of the text: its irreducibility to a meaning beyond or outside of itself. To overlook or deny the absences, gaps, and discrepancies in Scripture and even more to attempt to alter them whether through interpretation or translation was nothing less than “sacrilege” and the conversion of the text of the Holy Scriptures into a “pretext” for the introduction of doctrines foreign to the text itself. Thus, what is claimed to be the hidden truth beneath or beyond writing and therefore the very notion of a textual interior or depth is an invention added and therefore external to the text whose function is to deny the conflictuality and heterogeneity that characterizes its material existence.
In this way, the opposition of interior and exterior may be understood as the alternation of the visible and invisible that takes place on the surface of the work, what the work itself sees and does not see of what it displays, what it shows but overlooks. The work is defined by the relation between the visible and the invisible on its surface, that is, between what it shows and sees and what it shows but does not see, acknowledge or account for. In a similar way, it is defined by the relation between what it says and what it cannot say, between what it is compelled to say and what it is prevented from saying by the prohibition or prohibitions proper to it. The resulting silences, gaps, and absences are thus not signs of mysteries or meanings present but hidden, precisely because the text is without the “depth” or interior which might offer a place of refuge for a profundity that cannot endure the exposure of the text’s surface. They are symptoms, indicators of a conflict of which they are the effect, rather than a mere sign or the manifestation. The Greek term, σύμπτωμα, signifies a chance occurrence, the arrival or happening of things together (as indicated in the prefix “sym” or “syn”), rather than the temporal or spatial distance of a sign. It is a term used by Aristotle, but which interestingly never appears in the New Testament.
If we take the case of the Bible read by Spinoza, the lacunae that traverse the surface of the text are not errors, the fault of an inattentive scribe, but symptoms/effects of the contradictions that accumulate with the statements of which it is composed, contradictions that only a deliberate forgetting and denial of the surface of the text can obscure. It is at this point, where the notion of structure might appear to have been rendered meaningless, that Althusser’s singular definition becomes intelligible: a “structure immanent in its effects,” that is, borrowing from Spinoza’s notion of “immanent cause,” a structure that has no existence outside of its effects and which might just as well be called an “absent cause” in that it is never present outside of, or prior to, its effects (Althusser 1970: 188–9). This allows us to see that the “disorder” of any text is both determinate and specific to it; it is the singular essence that makes it what it is and no other. As such it can and must be explained. Structure as redefined by Althusser and Macherey is no longer the hidden order that allows us to overcome and resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies that lying at the surface are merely superficial: “structure governs the work precisely insofar as it is diverse, scattered and irregular: to see structure is to see irregularity” (Macherey 1978: 151).
Althusser undoubtedly opened the way to a new practice of reading that allows us to grasp literary and philosophical texts according to the contradictions and conflicts proper to them, displacing the fantasies of textual order, coherence, and harmony that prevent us from grasping texts as pure surface without depth, whose antagonisms remain necessarily active and unresolved. But to practice this reading it is not enough to change our ideas; as he repeatedly argued, above all after 1968, ideology has a material existence and ideas are “an ‘internal’ verbal discourse” consubstantial with material practices in turn “governed by material rituals which are themselves governed by the material ideological apparatus” (Althusser 1971: 169). From this perspective, ideas, including ideas about reading the texts that contain ideas, cannot be changed at will or by the power of truth. They are held in place by relations of force, immanent in the rituals and liturgies that prescribe the words we can and cannot say and thus the ideas we can and cannot think. Practice precedes theory: only by shifting the balance of forces and diminishing the power of the means of coercion and discipline are we enabled to think differently and, with Althusser as our guide, find our way to the entrance of a new world.