>- when Yoshie uses the word 'problematic' -- a concept taken from Althusser
>in his attempt to group lacanian and marxist understandings of the practice
>of reading.
Althusser was very fond of psychoanalysis, and he borrowed many of its concepts (such as symptomatic reading, overdetermination, misrecognition, etc.). His analysis of ideology, especially his explanation of interpellation, cannot exist without psychoanalysis. Using a psychoanalytic reading of Christianity, Althusser asserts that ideology works in the following fashion:
***** The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:
1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen -- '_So be it_'.
Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They 'recognize' the existing state of affairs..., that 'it really is true that it is so and not otherwise', and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt 'love thy neighbour as thyself', etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: '_Amen -- So be it_'. (Althusser, _Lenin and Philosophy_) *****
Given Althusser's conception of ideology as a hall of mirrors with No Exit (with the exception of 'bad subjects' who get quickly repressed by the State), it is no wonder that, for Althusser, the distinction between science and ideology becomes virtually useless:
***** ...[W]hat thus seems to take place outside ideology...in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical _denegation_ of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological'. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing. Which amounts to saying that ideology _has no outside_ (for itself), but at the same time _that it is nothing but outside_ (for science and reality). (Althusser, _Lenin and Philosophy_) *****
Postmodernists simply bring Althusser's paradoxical conception of ideology to its logical conclusion, which is to say, doing away with the distinction between ideology and science altogether. As with the Frankfurt School, the combination of Marx & psychoanalysis seems to lead to a defeatist attitude in theory, perhaps a kind of consolation for leftist intellectuals who have little trust in the masses of workers' ability to break the power of TINA. Psychoanalysis thus serves as an opium for disappointed intellectuals.
Now, onto the problematic business. Althusser himself says that he borrowed this concept from Jacques Martin and that of epistemological break from Gaston Bachelard. According to Althusser, borrowing "a concept in isolation (from its context) does not bind the borrower vis-a-vis the context from which he extracted it....But borrowing a systematically interrelated set of concepts, borrowing a real _problematic_, cannot be accidental, it _binds_ the borrower" (_For Marx_). He spends a good deal of his intellectual energy explaining Marx's break with the Feuerbachian problematic (a philosophy of Man based upon the simple inversion of the Hegelian dialectic). I in fact agree with Althusser that to speak of individuals as ensembles of social relations is not the same as to speak of the left-Hegelian Man. The best of Althusser (for me) appears in a tiny footnote in _For Marx_:
***** This is not the place to embark on a study of the concepts at work in the analyses of _The German Ideology_. Instead, one quotation that says everything. On 'German criticism' he says: '_The whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers, but in their very questions there was a mystification.' It could not be better said that it is not answers which make philosophy but the _questions_ posed by the philosophy, and that it is _in the question_ itself, that is, _in the way it reflects that object_ (and not in the object itself) that ideological mystification (or on the contrary an authentic relationship with the object) should be sought. *****
Here, Althusser is much more promising, but evidently he did not follow his own maxim. If he had, he would have been able to see that questions posed by psychoanalysis are ideological mystification, making us misunderstand the objects that they appear to examine.
Yoshie