Theory for Religious Studies

William E. Deal, Timothy K. Beal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135887964
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this handy volume, two professors of religious studies provide the student of religious studies - whether the motivated undergraduate, graduate student, or professor - with a brief review of theorists' work from the perspective of religious studies. For example, in 5-10 pages, the reader will get a review of Emmanuel Levinas's work as it offers insights for scholars in religious studies, followed by a selected bibliography. In short, this is a guide for students of religious studies that will take major theoretical writers in the humanities and social sciences and explain their relevance to the study of religion.

THE THEORISTS

LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Key Concepts

• base and superstructure
• practices
• ideology
• Repressive State Apparatuses
• Ideological State Apparatuses interpellation

Louis Althusser (1918–90) was a French Marxist political philosopher. He was born in Algeria and educated in Algiers and France. He was admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1939, but World War II disrupted his studies when he was called to military duty. During the German occupation of France, Althusser was captured and placed in a German prison camp where he remained until the end of the war. Freed, he resumed his studies. In 1948 Althusser completed a master’s thesis on the German philosopher Hegel and later passed the agrégation in philosophy and was given a teaching appointment.

Althusser was a practicing Catholic for the first thirty years of his life, and during that period displayed a strong interest in Catholic monastic life and traditions. In the late 1940s, Althusser joined the Communist Party and remained a member for the remainder of his life. During the May 1968 Paris strikes, he was in a sanitarium recuperating from a bout of depression, an illness he struggled with throughout his life. Unlike some of his contemporary intellectuals, he supported the Communist Party in denying the revolutionary nature of the student movement, though he later reversed this view.

Althusser murdered his wife in 1980. Declared incompetent to stand trial, he was institutionalized but released in 1983. He subsequently lived in near isolation in Paris and died in 1990 of a heart attack. During the last years of his life, he wrote two different versions of his autobiography, both of which were published posthumously in 1992 (both are included in the 1995 edition of The Future Lasts Forever).

Althusser is especially important for the ways in which he reinterpreted Marx’s ideas and made them resonate with intellectual currents prevalent in the 1960s, including structuralist ideas. Althusser’s work is sometimes referred to as “structuralist Marxism” or “postmodern Marxism.” Regardless of labels, his rereading of Marx aimed at liberating Marxist ideas from their Soviet interpretation, as well as from humanistic interpretations. This rereading was meant to revitalize Marxist ideas and to put them back to use for revolutionary purposes.

Of Althusser’s many writings, three have been particularly influential: For Marx (first published in French in 1965), Reading Capital (first published in French in 1968), and the oft-cited long essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (written in 1969; included in “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays). Althusser’s influence has been widespread, shaping such diverse fields as cultural studies, film studies, and Marxist literary theory.

Althusser’s reassessment of Marxism included his rejection of some key Marxist assumptions about society. For instance, he argued against the version of determinism found in the classic Marxist formulation of base and superstructure. Base refers to the particular economic “mode of production” operating in a given society. Different societies are organized around different economic systems (modes of production)—for instance, agricultural, capitalist, or planned. The concept of superstructure refers to political, social, religious, and other noneconomic aspects of a society. Superstructure, then, includes the political and cultural aspects of a society, for instance, governmental, educational, religious, and other institutional structures. The traditional Marxist view was that base determines superstructure. That is, political, social, and religious spheres—the superstructure—are not autonomous but are dependent on and conditioned by the economic mode, or base. Althusser prefers to talk about the idea of social formation (that is, society) consisting of three practices: the economic, the political, and the ideological. Althusser sees base and superstructure in relationship and affords superstructure considerable autonomy, though in the end, he concedes, the economic is determinant even if it is not dominant in a particular historical moment.

The term practices has a specific meaning for Althusser, indicating processes of transformation: “By practice in general I shall mean any process of transformation of determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ‘production’)” (For Marx, p. 166). Economic practices are concerned with using human labor and other modes of production in order to transform raw materials (nature) into finished (social) products. Political practices deal with the uses of revolution to transform social relations, and ideological practices concern the uses of ideology to transform lived social relations, that is, the ways a subject relates to the lived conditions of existence. Theory is often treated as the opposite of practice, but for Althusser theory is a type of practice.

The term ideology is central to Althusser’s theoretical agenda. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser melds ideas taken from both Marxist and psychoanalytic thought in order to develop his theory of ideology and its relationship to subjectivity. Althusser’s central concern in this essay is how a capitalist society reproduces existing modes of production and how they relate to people. Why do people support this process when, according to Marxist thought, they are in effect acceding to their own domination by the ruling classes? Althusser formulates his answer through the concepts of ideology, ideological state apparatuses, and interpollation (on which see below).

The reproduction of capitalist society occurs at two levels, the repressive and the ideological. On the one hand, social control can be coerced by the exertion of repressive force through such institutions as police, armies, courts, and prisons—what Althusser calls Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs). These institutions suppress dissent and maintain the social order as envisioned by the ruling power. But application of repressive force is not the only way to guarantee assent to capitalism. In addition to RSAs, Althusser argues that ideology must also be employed to maintain the dominant social formation. Althusser refers to these ideological modes of control as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)—including education, family, religion, sports, television, newspapers, and other media—which reproduce capitalist values, standards, and assumptions. Ideological discourse produced by ISAs acts on individual subjects in such a way that they see themselves and others as standing within the dominant ideology, subject to it, and willingly supportive—consciously or unconsciously—of the replication of this ruling power. In short, ideology imposes itself on us, but at the same time we act, in effect, as willing agents of the ideological agenda.

Departing from the earlier Marxist notion that ideology is false consciousness, Althusser understands ideology as an inevitable aspect of all societies—even socialist societies where capitalist exploitation has presumably been destroyed—that serves, in part, to provide human subjects with identities. For Althusser, “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 162). Distinguishing between the imaginary and the real allows Althusser to counter the traditional Marxist notion that ideologies are false because they mask an otherwise accessible and transparent real world. In contrast to this notion of ideology as misrepresentation, Althusser views ideology as a narrative or story we tell ourselves in order to understand our relationship to modes of production. A real, objective world is not accessible to us, only its representations are.

Ideology, then, is a discourse that has marked effects on each individual subject. Althusser understands this effect through the concept of interpellation. Ideology hails and positions (“interpellates”) individual subjects—or to state it another way, gives us a subject position—within particular discourses. As Althusser puts it, “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it… ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 174). We assume our interpellated position, identify with received social meanings, locate ourselves within these meanings, and enact its goals under the guise of having freedom to make this choice in the first place. Althusser’s structuralist notion of ideology is antihumanist because it questions the centrality of the autonomous, freely choosing individual in this process. For Althusser, the subject is subjected to the ruling ideology, this mistaking ideological interpellation for the actions of a freely choosing individual.

Althusser provides an example of interpellation in action. Suppose, he says, an individual is hailed (interpellated) in the street by a policeman who says, “Hey, you there!” The individual turns around to face the policeman. Althusser states, “By this mere 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” 174). The hailing or interpellation of the individual creates a subject who is, without necessarily knowing it, acceding to the ideology of state authority, its laws, and the systems that support and generate it. Ideology transforms us into subjects that think and behave in socially acceptable ways.

Although ideology is understood to subject individuals to the needs and interests of the ruling classes, it is not, according to Althusser, fixed and unchangeable. Rather, ideology always contains contradictions and logical inconsistencies, which are discoverable. This means that the interpellated subject has at least some room to undo or destabilize the ideological process. Change or revolution is possible.

Althusser’s work has numerous implications for religious studies. In particular, it draws our attention to the ways specific religious discourses (liturgies and other rituals, preaching, scriptures) function to interpellate or “recruit” its subjects into a particular ideological framework. Consider, for example, Carol A.Newsom’s study of the first nine chapters of the Book of Proverbs (“Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom”). Newsom shows how this discourse—presented as a father speaking to a son—constructs a patriarchal ideology and locates the two of them within it, framed by the good domestic woman on the one hand and the dangerously attractive woman on the other. Newsom’s study is an excellent model for how the religion scholar might use Althusser’s concepts to analyze the power of a religious discourse (an ISA) to construct an individual’s subjectivity according to a larger ideological structure.

Further Reading

By Althusser

For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

*”Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971.

(with Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1977.

The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir. Translated by Olivier Corpet, Yann Moulier Boutang, and Richard Veasey. New York: The New Press, 1995.

About Althusser

Kaplan, E.Ann, and Michael Sprinkler, eds. The Althusserian Legacy. London, Verso, 1993.

*Montag, Warren. Louis Althusser. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Newsom, Carol A. “Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1–9.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L.Day. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

Payne, Michael. Reading Knowledge: An Introduction to Barthes, Foucault, and Althusser. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Smith, Steven B. Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Valantasis, Richard. “Constructions of Power in Asceticism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 775–821.

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

Key Concepts

• theoretism
• everyday life
• unfinalizabilty
• dialogism
• dialogic truth
• carnival

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a radical theorist of literature and language. Influenced by the writings of Karl MARX, he was particularly interested in social transformation and revolution within dominant social and intellectual structures. Born in Orel, Russia, he was educated in philology and classics at the University of Petrograd (1914–18) during World War I and the Russian Revolution. He taught in Nevel and then Vitebsk, where he married Elena Aleksandrovna and became part of an intellectual circle that also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. He moved to Leningrad in 1924 and five years later was arrested for alleged participation in the underground Russian Orthodox Church. On account of ill health due to a bone disease, his initial sentence of ten years in a Siberian labor camp was reduced to six years of internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he worked as bookkeeper on a collective farm. After his exile, he had no long-term stable employment until 1945, when he began teaching Russian and world literature at Mordovia Pedagogical Institute in Saransk, where he remained until his retirement in 1961. Indeed, his academic life was so obscure that when scholars became interested in his work in the 1950s (based mainly on Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, originally published in Russian in 1929), many were surprised to find that he was still alive. In 1969 he moved to Moscow, where he remained until his death in 1975.

In Western Europe, initial interest in Bakhtin’s work is owed primarily to Julia KRISTEVA’s famous 1969 essay, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in which she engages his theory of dialogism (see below) in order to develop her theory of intertextuality. Kristeva also wrote the introduction to the French translation of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1970.

Bakhtin worked on many topics over a half century of writing, from ethics to aesthetics. In all his work, however, there is a general concern with the relationship between ethical responsibility and creativity. Put another way, he was interested in the relation between system and change, fixation and flux, law and revolution. How is change, as creative transformation of what is established and taken for granted, possible? What are the tensions within society, and within the self, between the desire for normativity and stability on the one hand and innovation and openness on the other?

What is one’s ethical responsibility to maintain and support established social order on the one hand and to bring about social transformation on the other?

From his earliest writings, he attacked “theoretism,” that is, the reduction of human creativity to a theoretical system. Theoretism impoverishes the truth of human life by subordinating all the complexity and messiness of human subjectivity and social relations to a static intellectual system.

Resisting theoretism, Bakhtin attended to the particularities of everyday life. Such attention to the minutiae of the everyday undermines the scholarly impulse toward universal theories. By the same token, he was drawn not to the grand or catastrophic events of human history—wars, disasters, revolutions, inaugurations—but everyday life, the “prosaic” details of the lives of ordinary people, details that are in many ways most revealing of human society and how social transformation takes place in history.

Throughout his work, Bakhtin emphasized “unfinalizability,” that is, the impossibility of any final conclusion. Nothing in life has been finalized, and nothing in life can ever be finalized. As he writes in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “N...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PREDECESSORS
• THE THEORISTS