Althusser

[Jim heartfield]

In message <199806040457.XAA41702 at mail1.doit.wisc.edu>, Daniel Marcus
<Damarcus at students.wisc.edu> writes
>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.

Doubtless I am being a puritan about this because Althusserianism was
such a priesthood when I was at college. But I still think that the
Althusserians were resolving a perceived problem of economic determinism
less well than was originally done by Marx, because he and they never
understood Marx's resolution.

Marx's critique of Capital showed that this was an alienation of human
powers, subject objectified into substance. The critique of capitalism
was to recover man's history-making potential, by revealing the
artificiality of the market system, and its openness to human
intervention. 

A. never understood that side of Marx, relegating it to an early
coquettery with Hegelianism. So when he tried to introduce an opening
for subjective action into Marx's system, he was alreay misunderstanding
it. Marx's system of critical political economy is supposed to capture a
form of social organisation that is inherently unfree. Freedom only
comes in the act its transformation. Instead A. tries to introduce room
for manouevre into the system of capital.

How does he do it? Be introducing many determinations, alongside the
'central' determination of 'the economy'. In this way the determining
instance of the economy is made relative, relative to other
determinations. The room for political action comes in playing these off
against each other, in the interstices of capital, in the Ideological
State Apparatuses. This is the theory of the 'long march through the
institutions' that led the left into the universities.

But it seems to me that A.'s concept of agency is much poorer than
Marx's reworking of Hegel's transformation of 'substance into subject'
as the 'expropriation of the expropriators'. A. sees usbjectivity as
playing off one inhuman force against another. It is a view of free will
that is closest to trading in margins, playing off commodity prices for
minute advantage.

A. should have gone not to Engels' later letters to Conrad Schmidt on
historical materialism, but to his formulation that 'freedom is the
recognition of necessity ... and the leap from necessity'. Seeing the
obstacles in your way is the precondition of overcoming them.
-- 
Jim heartfield