Query on Althusser

[Daniel Marcus]

At 05:53 PM 6/2/98 +0100, you wrote:
>
>All that Althusser does is to relativise _economic_ determination by
>introducing other determinations, ideological, political, bureaucratic
>and so on. This fraudulent subtlety is so far from being an alternative
>to economic determnism, it is its multiplication ten-fold.
>
>In the essay Ideological State Appratuses (reprouced in Slavov Zizek's
>1994 collection Mapping Ideology, for Verso), A. vulgarises Marx's
>critique of capitalist subjectivity, making it a critique of all human
>agency as nothing more than an effect of market ideology. In this way,
>A. turns Marx's rejection of the illusory freedom of the market into an
>ultra-Stalinist rejection of freedom as such. With all the pretend-
>hardness of the armchair bolshevik, Althusser pours scorn on the beleif
>that men make their own history - it is Marx's defence of the working
>class as subject that he is really attacking.


>Jim heartfield

While Althusser in many ways had a doleful influence in the 60s and 70s,
there's more to the story, in that post-structuralists in the 80s and 90s
have used the concept of overdetermination not to bury the Subject even
deeper (though some have done this, in the more pomo strains of
post-structuralism), but to avoid economic reductionism and explain the
vexed identity question (perhaps parallel to Albert and Hahnel's Unorthodox
Marxism -- haven't read it).  A good example of this use of
overdetermination to open up rather than close down the fields of struggle
-- turning Althusser on his head, so to speak -- can be found in Stuart
Hall's "Signification, Representation, Ideology" in Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 2:2, June 1985.
Cheers,
Daniel Marcus