The New Materialism
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The New Materialism

Geoff Pfeifer

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The New Materialism

Geoff Pfeifer

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About This Book

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser's materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou's and Žižek's work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek's materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou's does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer's book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317605874

1
Louis Althusser and the Parti Communiste Français

Althusser was conducting a struggle against a certain hegemony which was at the same time a terrifying dogmatism or philosophical stereotypism within the Party—a struggle that seemed to me (within the limits of that context) quite necessary.
—Jacques Derrida1
The War was just over. We were brutally cast into the Party’s great political and ideological battles: We had to measure up to our choice and take the consequences … In our philosophical memory it remains a period of intellectuals in arms, hunting out error from all its hiding places; of the philosophers we were, without writings of our own, but making politics out of all writing, and slicing up the world with a single blade, arts, literatures, philosophies, sciences, with the pitiless demarcation of class—the period summed up in caricature by a single phrase, a banner flapping in the void: bourgeois science, proletarian science.
—Louis Althusser2
As noted in the introduction, what these two chapters on Althusser aim to do is to situate his work both theoretically and politically so as to get a picture of how the problem of ideology—the problem that frames the discussion of Badiou and Žižek in the latter chapters of this book—emerges in relation to both Althusser’s attempts to give a philosophical foundation to Marx’s texts and to use this philosophical foundation to combat what he saw politically, as a problematic brand of both Stalinism, and later, humanist Marxism running through the French Communist Party (the Parti Communiste Français [PCF]). As Althusser argues in many places throughout his texts (and as we will see in more detail), philosophy is not neutral, nor is it an objective, apolitical pursuit. Rather, as he puts it in one of his formulations of this view, “the philosophical fight over words is part of the political fight.”3 This is to say, that philosophy is, inherently political. In a late interview, Althusser, speaking of this fight in the context of his engagement with the PCF argues explicitly that his philosophical work, at least in part, was undertaken in order to shift the politics of the party:
I wanted to intervene in France in the French Communist Party, which I joined in 1948, in order to struggle against triumphant Stalinism and its disastrous effects on my Party’s politics. At the time, I had no choice: if I had intervened publicly in the politics of the party which had refused to publish even my philosophical writings (on Marx), deemed heretical and dangerous, I would have been, at least until 1970, immediately expelled … So there remained only one way for me to intervene politically in the party: by way of pure theory—that is, philosophy.4
In what follows in this chapter, I will look at the political and ideological landscape in which Althusser’s interventions took place. In doing so, I will both look at some of the history of the PCF’s political positions and the broader currents of Marxist thought in France just before and during Althusser’s time, as these are crucial for making sense of the political motives behind Althusser’s theoretics. To be sure, I am not aiming to give an exhaustive account of either the history of the PCF or the history of Marxism in France as this is not the goal of this book—and of course, there are others who have already done this job quite well.5 That said, what I do wish to do is focus here on one of two main elements in this history. Namely, the PCF’s Stalinist view of the split between proletarian and bourgeois science and the later battle over the theoretical foundations of the party (and its outcomes) during the period of de-Stalinization as it is around these two key moments that much of Althusser’s theoretical work of the 1960s has its political and philosophical grounding. What I will show here—and this is something that is explored less in the literature surrounding this period and Althusser’s relation to it (at least in Anglophone scholarship)—is how arguments within the PCF on cultural Zhdanovism (in the realm of art and literature) pave the way for the acceptance of the Stalinist conception of the sciences.

I.

The place in which to begin this story is with the setting up, in 1947, of the Cominform, or the Communist Information Bureau, which on the surface was, as Maxwell Adereth points out, a response to the Truman Doctrine and was an “organization of nine parties (seven European CPs which were in power plus the PCF and the PCI) for the purposes of ‘exchanging views and information’.”6 However, in practice, the Cominform was effectively an authoritative and doctrinaire arm of the Stalinist program and was led by Stalin’s head of cultural policies Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov’s charge, under the heading of what he called ‘socialist realism’ was to promote the Stalinist ‘two cultures’ view. This was, namely, the view “that there existed a Bourgeois, decadent culture whose aim was to maintain and justify the existing socio-economic order” and that there was a “proletarian culture” whose aim it was “to serve the revolution.”7 One of the goals of the Cominform under Zhdanov was thus to work to actively cultivate and unify proletarian culture and at the same time, to work to get rid of bourgeois culture. It did this, in part by setting policy that required “that artistic and literary creation had to depict the life and working conditions of workers, project the image of ‘positive heroes’ and, as a result, appeal to workers.”8
This, of course, was also the directive given to the PCF and the other European communist parties after the creation of the Cominform. The PCF, however, did not (at least initially) wholeheartedly embrace this directive. Prior to 1947, though the PCF adhered to a kind of socialist realism, it had been quite liberal in its approach to this and had, at least from about 1934 until the Cominform, begun to loosen its belief in the ‘two cultures’ approach in favor of a more nationalistic and pluralistic view of culture.9 In fact, as Guiat points out:
in the years 1944–1947, the cultural line of the PCF was one of relative tolerance which matched its global strategy of political alliance with other parties at this time, and the party encouraged open debate between its intellectuals and non-PCF ones.10
Echoing Guiat’s claims about the opening up of the PCF’s cultural politics at this time, Adereth points to the party’s 1943 role in helping organize and promote the Comité National des Escrivains (CNE), which was a group open to French writers of all political views and included both party and non-party affiliated intellectuals.11 Further, two journals existed during this time that also promoted this more pluralistic view. One was Les Lettres Française, a monthly communist journal (but one that published non-PCF affiliated work), and the other, Action, was created by writers in the resistance but was not strictly communist (it was, however, friendly to communist writers).12 So, when the Cominform was imposed, it caused a debate within the PCF as to just how far the Party was going to adhere to Zhdanovism. Roger Garaudy—who was, at the time the head of intellectuals and culture for the PCF—had recently written an article that had appeared in Les Lettres—the title of which was ‘Il n’y a pas d’esthétique communiste’ (There is no Communist Aesthetic)—in which he argues, as one would expect given the title, that there is not one aesthetic which is communist, that “communist artists should be given a certain level of artistic freedom, and that the Party should not impose socialist realism as the only model or credo to be followed.”13 In another place, Garaudy, again reiterating this stance, argues that “Marxism is not a prison. It is a tool to understand the world” and thus to impose one style on Marxist intellectuals was problematic.14
Louis Aragon led an orthodox challenge to this view arguing that the only proper aesthetic for the communist artists and intellectuals is one defined by Zhdanovism and socialist realism. In one of his responses to Garaudy, Aragon argues that Garaudy himself had been critical of other aesthetic movements, most notably that which was defined by its affiliation with existentialism: “… If all aesthetics are good, what is to be made of the fact that Garaudy had repeatedly attacked existentialism with a passion for which I could not blame him? Properly speaking, could a communist also be a surrealist?”15
Aragon goes on to argue here that even if Garaudy were to reject his own critique of existentialist aesthetics and really subscribe to a more neutral position, this would be untenable. Such neutrality would end in “escapism in art, the intangibility of art, the culture of all the poisons and ideologies of the dominant class, under the cloak of eclecticism.”16 Aragon and his followers eventually won this debate and Garaudy was removed from his position to be replaced by Laurent Casanova and Zhdanovism became official PCF policy.
So the Party’s leadership set itself the task of promoting proletarian culture, which, as Guiat argues, “… was mostly to take the form of a proletarian literature following the Russian model of rabcors, that is to say workers writing about workers and for workers about life in the factories, and so on.”17 Not only, however, did the Cominform—and the PCF—push for, and support the cultural production of proletarian art and literature, but it was also the case that all other intellectual activity became subjected to the ‘two cultures’ view. This included, as will be discussed below, scientific intellectual activity.

II.

It was around this time that Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko came to prominence in the Soviet Union and along with this, the Cominform’s (and ultimately the PCF’s) championing of the view that, as with other areas of culture, in science there are also ‘two cultures,’ one bourgeois and one proletarian, and that it is only the latter that is able to get to the truth in scientific practice. Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics was premised on the view that instead of heredity being governed by genetic material, it was the product of “a whole organism’s relationship with its host environment, reasoning that modification of the environment could effect the transformation of a living organisms and furthermore, such modifications could be bequeathed to the organisms offspring.”18 In other words, Lysenko rejected any notion that there is a fixed biological component to heredity and he argued that heredity is driven solely by environmental factors and in relation to individual organisms and their offspring (and so he rejected biological determinism in favor of environmental determinism). In addition to this, he rejected the notion of competition within members of a single species and argued that there was no proof of such competition.19 Lysenko was also quite adept at promoting himself and his views. He quickly realized that he could adapt his view to Marxism and, as Dominique Lecourt points out, Lysenko’s refutation of Mendelism “is presented as an application of categories of Marxist philosophy: dialectics, contradiction, the criterion of practice … the whole classical vocabulary of dialectical materialism was mobilized by Lysenko to arrange and unify his arguments.”20 So, for instance, as Lyle argues, according to Lysenko, to defend Mendelian genetics
… was tantamount to supporting Western Bourgeois imperialist values supposed to have been derived from a crude social Darwinism whose utility as a theoretical justification extended all the way from the ruthless competition of American capitalism to the racial and social hierarchies of Mein Kampf...

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