[lbo-talk] "Process without a Subject or Goal(s)"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[lbo-talk] Althusser, depression, subjects
>Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com, Fri Mar 12 14:47:12 PST 2004
<snip>
>>Michael Pugliese wrote:
>>"History is a process without a subject."
>>Althusser, not a Buddhist
<snip>
>Another interesting item from that bio - is antipathy to the subject 
>another symptom of depression?

First of all, that a person disagrees with you on the philosophical 
question of the subject is no good reason for you to suggest the 
person must be mentally ill, e.g., depressed, just because Louis 
Althusser was.  Secondly, I don't know what you mean by Althusser's 
"antipathy to the subject."  English-speaking theorists, like Judith 
Butler, who have written much about the subject of ideology have 
drawn upon Althusser's work -- or rather (to their loss) _only one_ 
of his essays "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes 
towards an Investigation" (January-April 1969 and April 1970), _Lenin 
and Philosophy and Other Essays_ (Monthly Review Press, 1971) -- more 
than any other Marxist's (to their loss, again).

Althusser's first published remarks on history as "a process without 
a subject" appear in "Preface to _Capital_ Volume One" and "Lenin 
before Hegel" anthologized in _Lenin and Philosophy_: "While 
simultaneously abandoning all Hegel's influence, Marx continued to 
recognize an important debt to him: the fact that he was the first to 
conceive of history as a 'process without a subject'" ("Preface to 
_Capital. . .," p. 94); and "[H]istory is a _process without a 
subject_," i.e., "the dialectic at work in history is not the work of 
any Subject whatsoever, whether Absolute (God) or merely human, but . 
. .  the origin of history is always thrust back before history, and 
therefore . . . there is neither a philosophical origin nor a 
philosophical subject to History" ("Lenin before Hegel," p. 122).

The philosophical context is clear in Althusser's original remarks: 
Althusser sought to use what he thought of as the rational kernel of 
Hegel's philosophy against the neo-Hegelian penchant to represent 
history as the dialectical unfolding (from alienation to 
de-alienation) of the un-alienated Essence of Man at the Origin of 
history.  Althusser's point here is that there was no such 
un-alienated Essence of Man at the Origin, and as the Cause of, 
history, nor does history have as its goal the restoration of Man, or 
any goal whatsoever for that matter.  Nevertheless, his polemical 
formula occasioned a good deal of confusion, so Althusser later 
attempted to clarify what he intended to convey:

*****   In my opinion: men (plural), in the concrete sense, are 
necessarily subjects (plural) in history, because they act in history 
as subjects (plural). But there is no Subject (singular) of history. 
And I will go even further: "men" are not "the subjects" of history. 
Let me explain.

To understand these distinctions one must define the nature of the 
questions at issue. The question of the constitution of individuals 
as historical subjects, active in history, has nothing in principle 
to do with the question of the "Subject of history", or even with 
that of the "subjects of history". The first question is of a 
scientific kind: it concerns historical materialism. The second 
question is of a philosophical kind: it concerns dialectical 
materialism.

First question: scientific.

That human, i.e. social individuals are active in history -- as 
agents of the different social practices of the historical process of 
production and reproduction -- that is a fact. But, considered as 
agents, human individuals are not "free" and "constitutive" subjects 
in the philosophical sense of these terms. They work in and through 
the determinations of the forms of historical existence of the social 
relations of production and reproduction (labour process, division 
and organization of labour, process of production and reproduction, 
class struggle, etc.). But that is not all. These agents can only be 
agents if they are subjects. This I think I showed in my article on 
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". [See Lenin and 
Philosophy and other Essays, London NLB, 1971] No human, i.e. social 
individual can be the agent of a practice if he does not have the 
form of a subject. The "subject-form" is actually the form of 
historical existence of every individual, of every agent of social 
practices: because the social relations of production and 
reproduction necessarily comprise, as an integral part, what Lenin 
calls "(juridico-) ideological social relations ", which, in order to 
function, impose the subject-form on each agent-individual. The 
agent-individuals thus always act in the subject-form, as subjects. 
But the fact that they are necessarily subjects does not make the 
agents of social-historical practices into the subject or subjects of 
history (in the philosophical sense of the term: subject of). The 
subject-agents are only active in history through the determination 
of the relations of production and reproduction, and in their forms.

Second question: philosophical.

It is for precise ideological ends that bourgeois philosophy has 
taken the legal-ideological notion of the subject, made it into a 
philosophical category, its number one philosophical category, and 
posed the question of the Subject of knowledge (the ego of the 
cogito, the Kantian or Husserlian transcendental subject, etc.), of 
morality, etc., and of the Subject of history. This illusory question 
does of course have a purpose, but in its position and form it has no 
sense as far as dialectical materialism is concerned, which purely 
and simply rejects it, as it rejects (for example) the question of 
God's existence. In advancing the Thesis of a "process without a 
Subject or Goal(s)", I want simply but clearly to say this. To be 
dialectical-materialist, Marxist philosophy must break with the 
idealist category of the "Subject" as Origin, Essence and Cause, 
responsible in its internality for all the determinations of the 
external "Object",[1] of which it is said to be the internal 
"Subject". For Marxist philosophy there can be no Subject as an 
Absolute Centre, as a Radical Origin, as a Unique Cause. Nor can one, 
in order to get out of the problem, rely on a category like that of 
the "ex-Centration of the Essence" (Lucien Sève), since it is an 
illusory compromise which -- using a fraudulently "radical" term, one 
whose root is perfectly conformist (ex-centration) -- safeguards the 
umbilical cord between Essence and Centre and therefore remains a 
prisoner of idealist philosophy: since there is no Centre, every 
ex-centration is superfluous or a sham. In reality Marxist philosophy 
thinks in and according to quite different categories: determination 
in the last instance -- which is quite different from the Origin, 
Essence or Cause unes -- determination by Relations (idem), 
contradiction, process, "nodal points" (Lenin), etc.: in short, in 
quite a different configuration and according to quite different 
categories from classical idealist philosophy.

Naturally, these philosophical categories do not only concern history.

But if we restrict ourselves to history (which is what concerns us 
here), the philosophical question presents itself in the following 
terms. There is no question of contesting the gains of historical 
materialism, which says that individuals are agent-subjects in 
history under the determination of the forms of existence of the 
relations of production and reproduction. It is a question of 
something quite different: of knowing whether history can be thought 
philosophically, in its modes of determination, according to the 
idealist category of the Subject. The position of dialectical 
materialism on this question seems quite clear to me. One cannot 
seize (begreifen: conceive), that is to say, think real history (the 
process of the reproduction of social formations and their 
revolutionary transformation) as if it could be reduced to an Origin, 
an Essence, or a Cause (even Man), which would be its Subject -- a 
Subject, a "being" or "essence", held to be identifiable, that is to 
say existing in the form of the unity of an internality, and 
(theoretically and practically responsible identity, internality and 
responsibility are constitutive, among other things, of every 
subject), thus accountable, thus capable of accounting for the whole 
of the "phenomena" of history.

The matter is quite clear when we are confronted with classical 
idealism, which, within the openly stated category of liberty, takes 
Man (= the Human Race = Humanity) to be the Subject and the Goal of 
history; cf the Enlightenment, and Kant, the "purest" philosopher of 
bourgeois ideology. The matter is also clear when we are confronted 
with the philosophical petty-bourgeois communitarian anthropology of 
Feuerbach (still respected by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts), in which 
the Essence of Man is the Origin, Cause and Goal of history. . . .

These philosophical positions are of course not without their 
consequences. Not only, for example, do they imply that Marxism has 
nothing to do with the "anthropological question" ("What is man?"), 
or with a theory of the 
realization-objectification-alienation-disalienation of the Human 
Essence (as in Feuerbach and his heirs: theoreticians of 
philosophical reification and fetishism), or even with the theory of 
the "excentration of the Human Essence", which only criticizes the 
idealism of the Subject from within the limits of the idealism of the 
Subject, dressed up with the attributes of the "ensemble of social 
relations" of the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach -- but they also allow us 
to understand the sense of Marx's famous "little phrase" in the 
Eighteenth Brumaire.

This comment, in its complete form, reads as follows: "Men make their 
own history, but they do not make it out of freely chosen elements 
(aus freien Stücken), under circumstances chosen by themselves, but 
under circumstances (Umstände) directly encountered (vorgefundene), 
given by and transmitted from the past." And -- as if he had foreseen 
the exploitation of these first five words, and even these 
"circumstances" from which Sartre draws out such dazzling effects of 
the "practico-inert", that is, of liberty -- Marx, in the Preface to 
the Eighteenth Brumaire, written seventeen years later (in 1869, two 
years after Capital), set down the following lines: "I show something 
quite different (different from the ideology of Hugo and of Proudhon, 
who both hold the individual Napoleon III to be the [detestable or 
glorious] cause "responsible " for the coup d'état), namely how the 
class struggle (Marx's emphasis) in France created the circumstances 
(Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed 
(ermöglicht) a person (a subject) so mediocre and grotesque to play 
the role of a hero".

One must read one's authors closely. History really is a "process 
without a Subject or Goal(s)", where the given circumstances in which 
"men" act as subjects under the determination of social relations are 
the product of the class struggle. History therefore does not have a 
Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor: that 
very class struggle.

(Louis Althusser, "Remark on the Category: 'Process without a Subject 
or Goal(s)'" [1 May 1973], _Essays in Self-Criticism_, trans. Grahame 
Lock, 1976, pp. 95-99, <http://www.marx2mao.org/Other/ESC76i.html>) 
*****
-- 
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>