Louis Althusser

Luke Ferretter

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134337859
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

Best known for his theories of ideology and its impact on politics and culture, Louis Althusser revolutionized Marxist theory. His writing changed the face of literary and cultural studies, and continues to influence political modes of criticism such as feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Beginning with an introduction to the context of Marxist theory, this book goes on to explain:

* how Althusser interpreted and developed Marx's work

* the political implications of reading

* ideology and its significance for culture and criticism

* Althusser's aesthetic criticism of literature, theatre and art.

Placing Althusser's key ideas in the context of earlier Marxist thought, as well as tracing their development and impact, Luke Ferretter presents a wide-ranging yet accessible guide, ideal for those new to the work of this influential critical thinker.

1

THE CORNERSTONES:
MARX AND THE THEORY
OF CULTURE

Althusser is a Marxist philosopher. The intention that governs all his major work is that Marx's thought and practice — with all that it means for the struggle of the working class — should be rightly understood and acted upon. When asked about ‘Althusserian’ theory in 1980, his former student and co-author Étienne Balibar responded that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Althusserian theory. As he replied to his interviewer, ‘Althusser is not an “Althusserian”. He is a Marxist’ (Balibar and Macherey 1982: 46). Balibar was right. Although he underwent a journey towards Marxism in his very early work, and although he began to think outside its frame of reference in his very late work, during the period of his most influential thought (1960–80), Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. His work consisted entirely in understanding — in a situation in which he claimed it had been obscured or never properly understood in the first place — the immense theoretical revolution that had taken place in the work of Karl Marx. In order to make sense of Althusser's work, therefore, which he consistently claimed was an interpretation of Marx, we need to understand the basic elements of Marx's thought. In this chapter, I will outline these elements. We will discuss Marx's theory of human history, and his theory of the place of human discourses — that is, extended uses of language, from novels to newspapers — in society. Finally, we will deal with the question of the humanism of his early work, which is where Althusser's intervention begins.

THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

In The German Ideology (1845), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), his friend and intellectual co-worker for forty years, set out the basis of a new world-view. They called it the ‘materialist conception of history’. The German Ideology was initially intended as a critique of the Young Hegelian school of radical philosophers and theologians, with whom Marx and Engels had until then been associated. As Marx wrote later, it was intended ‘to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience’ (SW: 390). The Young Hegelians were materialist philosophers, best known for their subversive critique of religion. Most influential among them were Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and Bruno Bauer (1809–1882). Despite their apparently radical ideas, Marx and Engels argue that the Young Hegelians are in fact not radical enough, inasmuch as they think that human lives are governed by ideas. Their critique of religion, for example, was based on the premise that, once the religious misrepresentation of the world was abolished, men and women could begin to order their lives on the basis of a correct understanding of them. But however much the Young Hegelians may criticize a system of ideas, Marx and Engels object, the substitution only of another system of ideas will not in practice make the slightest difference to the real lives of the men and women they fancy themselves to be liberating. In fact, Marx and Engels write, their former comrades are ‘the staunchest conservatives’ (GI: 30), since it is not ideas at all but the material conditions in which they live from which people need liberation. Marx calls the Young Hegelians sheep in wolves' clothing, and likens them to men who believe that people drown because they have the idea of gravity in their heads. What drowning people need, of course, is not a different idea than that of gravity, but a lifebuoy.

If the Young Hegelians believe that they can change people's lives by changing their ideas, Marx and Engels begin from the opposite premise, that it is the material conditions in which people live that determine every aspect of their lives, including their ideas:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises, from which abstraction can be made only in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.

(GI: 31)

The first premise of all human history, for Marx and Engels, is the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be understood about these individuals is that they organize themselves in relation to one another and to the natural world in which they find themselves. They distinguish themselves from other animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence out of the raw materials of nature. When men and women produce their means of subsistence in this way, according to Marx and Engels, they are ‘indirectly producing their material life’. The way in which they do so is conditioned both by the form in which they have organized themselves and by the relation of this social organization to the natural environment:

What [individuals] are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.

(GI: 31–32)

What Marx and Engels are saying — and this constitutes the first premise of the Marxist world-view, which Althusser intends correctly to expound — is that the first and fundamental fact of human life is not at all human ideas, whether the idea of God, of man, of the good, or whatever. Rather it is the forces and relations of production into which men and women enter in order to maintain and develop their material lives. By ‘forces’ of production, I mean the materials and the instruments of production, and by ‘relations’ of production, the way in which the members of a society are organized in order to produce their lives with these materials and instruments.

The materialist concepts of forces and relations of production are intended to displace all forms of idealist thought, or belief that the fundamental reality governing human life is an ideal, spiritual or non-tangible reality, like the soul, the spirit, the heart, or the personality. It is a cunning and exploitative myth, materialists hold, to claim that people have certain innate qualities that belong to each and every one of us as human beings — whether dignity, rights, freedom, humanity, or responsibilities. There is no human nature, they argue — no set of qualities I have as a human being (such as personality, humanity, morality, or the like) that would remain the same if I had lived in an altogether different set of material circumstances. If I were a Guatemalan coffee-picker or an Iranian housewife, I would be an altogether different human being than the one I am as a British literary scholar. This is not a question of privileging ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’ — genetics too is a materialist science. Rather, it is a claim that the material conditions in which a person lives are more than merely the circumstances or context of her life — they determine it in every way. If I am genetically coded to be intelligent, for example, but have to work in factory twelve hours a day from the time I am six, I will not be able to develop my intelligence in the way that a member of a different class or a different society does. Despite their banality, historically based reality TV shows such as The Edwardian Country House illustrate this point about forces and relations of production. To live in an aristocratic country house at the beginning of the twentieth century is to live an unrecognizably different life than to live in a middle-class suburb at the beginning of the twenty-first. Likewise, to live above stairs as a landed aristocrat is to live an unrecognizably different life from that experienced by a servant below stairs, even if the two are contemporaries. It is a person's place in the system by which society produces the material conditions of the lives of its members — and not any innate quality like humanity or personality — which determines their life in every respect. It is plainly false, materialists argue, to say that both the Edwardian aristocrats and their servants share their common humanity, that both groups have the freedom, dignity and rights proper to this humanity. It is clear, especially to the servants, that their lives are different in every way.

Marx sums up this materialist conception of history succinctly in a well-known passage from the preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859):

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

(SW: 389)

Here Marx goes on to explain a second fundamental principle of the materialist conception of history, namely that the sum total of the forces and relations of production in a given society constitutes its ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’, which is its first and fundamental reality. Out of this economic base develops a ‘superstructure’, consisting of every other aspect of the life of that society. In the first place, the superstructure consists of the political and legal institutions according to which the society is structured — its constitution, its forms of government, its legal system, its judiciary, its defence systems and so on. In the second place, it consists of all the forms of consciousness in whose terms the members of society understand and represent themselves to each other, namely legal and political theories, philosophy, religion, art, literature, and every kind of cultural production. All these forms of consciousness comprise what Marx and Engels call ‘ideology’. Marx thinks of the economic base of a society as the set of facts that determine the form of every element of the superstructure. For him, neither political formations nor legal institutions, nor any form of consciousness such as philosophy, religion or literature, exist or develop in themselves. Rather, they are determined and conditioned by the economic base — the forces and relations of production — of the society in which they appear. You do not only live a different life according to whether you wear Nike clothes or make them, pick Starbucks coffee or drink it — you also think differently and act differently. From the perspective of literary criticism, you also write differently.

IDEOLOGY

Clearly, the literary and cultural products of a society, according to this view, are aspects of its ideology — that is, of the forms of consciousness in which its members represent their lives to one another in a way determined by that society's production relations. This is one of Marxism's major claims to significance for literary and cultural studies. According to the materialist conception of history, the meaning of literary and cultural works is to be found in their relationship to the economic base of the society that produced them. Marx and Engels make this clear in The German Ideology. They write that a systematic understanding of a society's intellectual and cultural products must be based on the understanding that these products are conditioned by the ‘mode of production’, or the sum total of the forces and relations of production, which constitutes that society's economic basis:

It is a matter of … setting out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life- process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process. … Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking.

(GI: 36–37)

Not only do men and women produce, in increasingly developed ways, their means of subsistence, for Marx and Engels, but they also produce their ideas, images and discourses. These cultural products are altogether determined by the more fundamental mode of production of means of subsistence arising from the society in which they appear.

The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson puts the materialist concept of ideology to work in his book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). As the title indicates, Jameson argues that all the aesthetic and cultural products we call postmodern — the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, the music of Philip Glass, the video art of Bill Viola, the screen prints of Andy Warhol, to name only some of the best-known genres — derive their characteristic qualities ultimately from the set of forces and relations of production which constitute the postmodern period (roughly, 1950 to the present). Analysing an example of postmodern architecture — John Portman's Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (1974–76) — Jameson argues that the experience of moving into, through and around the building is above all one of bewildered disorientation in the multiply complex environment that the building constitutes. He calls this environment ‘hyperspace’ because it explodes our ordinary perception of space. This experience of bewildered disorientation in an environment too complex for the individual to comprehend is a characteristic theme of postmodern culture — it is found in narratives of conspiracy theory, such as Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973), in cyberpunk science fiction like William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and in narratives of the Vietnam war such as Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). Indeed, postmodern media themselves — the TV set, the TV camera, the TV network, the computer, the internet — involve networks of relationship that are too complex for the ordinary consumer of the cultural products they mediate to understand. Jameson argues that this postmodern motif of the incomprehensibly complex network, which the individual can neither understand nor control, is a cultural expression of the complex global network of economic relationships that constitute world capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century:

Our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world-system of a present-day multinational capitalism.

(Jameson 1991: 37)

Postmodernism is, in Jameson's view, precisely what Marx and Engels describe as an ideology: the characteristic qualities of its aesthetic products derive from the forces and relations of production in the global, multinational, technological capitalist economy in which we live. This is what he means by describing it as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’.

Now, production relations in society have never so far been arranged so that the means of subsistence and the material resources available to a society are equitably distributed among all its members. Relations of production have always been relations of dominance and of exploitation. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto (1848), ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ (CM: 219) This means that ideology has always been determined not just by production relations but by relations of class domination. As the set of ideas, images and discourses produced by a society whose mode of production is based on the exploitation of one class of its members by another, a society's ideology, like its material resources, is controlled by the ruling class and made to function in the interests of that class. Marx and Engels write:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations … hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one.

(GI: 59)

In Marx and Engels' view, then, ideology — including all the literary and cultural products which are a part of it — is a set of discourses whose function is to justify and maintain the position ...