>
> Okay, I'll try to stick to his critique of ideology simply for the reason
> that I don't think it can be divorced from the rest of his project. It
> can't
> be divorced simply because he believed that he could construct a "Marxist
> science" that would step outside the bounds of ideology. In order to do
> this
> he had to break with the "humanist" and also the "Hegelian" aspects of
> Marx.
> Coming at the problem from the structuralist tradition he did this through
> linguistically "purifying" the Marxian edifice. I'll leave this aside for
> the moment in order to try and show from a different perspective why I
> believe Althusser to be extremely dogmatic.
1. This language of purification is extraneous to Althusser's project. It's something you're adding on, and it doesn't link up to the project itself. Incidentally, Althusser offer a critique of humanist marxist concepts of ideology as a mode of false consciousness, and offers an alternative analysis of ideology as tied to practices and institutions that produce forms of common sense. It is not a critique of ideology, per se. Okay, lets go to the textual analysis.
> What is important here is Althusser's conception of ideology. In his main
> paper on this concept (Ideology and State Apparatuses) he portrays
> ideology
> as absolutely all-encompassing, absolutely inescapable. Society itself
> seems
> caught in a sort of perverse eternal return of the same ("there is no
> practice except by and in an ideology").
I have to admit that this is difficult to respond to as that it doesn't make a lot of sense and doesn't relate to Althusser's text much at all. As I said before, Althusser is trying to argue that the false consciousness model doesn't contribute much to our understanding of the way that consent to modes of domination are accepted by those who live under them. Instead he looks at the ways that social institutions produce these modes of consent through social practices. He uses two examples. 1. The Catholic Church in feudalism and 2. The School and the Family under capitalism (actually the family might be involved in both... I'll have to take a look.) So ideology is eternal in two senses, 1. there will always be normative functions and forms of common sense in any society and 2. ideologies invariably are presented as ahistorical no matter how ephemeral their nature (look at the concept of 'traditional marriage' within the debates over gay marriage for instance.)
At the same time, these ideologies are never univocal. They act as modes of mediation and patchwork for internal conflicts in the society, so they also become sites of struggle. They are both the beginning of the class struggle, and a space to recognize the contradictions that mark the system. Within this context, its important that Althusser doesn't posit one ideological system, instead there is a discussion of both feudalism and capitalism (incidentally this is a question better dealt with by Foucault, who argues that Capitalism brings with it a new form of power... but that is neither here nor there) It is therefore possible to critically analyze the structure of ideological conflicts through a particular form of critical historical analysis, or what Althusser calls Marx's creation of a new science of history (keep in mind that the science being referenced here is more analogous to a rigorous type of knowledge production... not that its physics or something....)
However, for some reason -
> presumably the absolute Truth to found in Marx - Althusser is able to
> break
> this chain and expose the impoverished and wholly "unscientific" aspects
> of
> ideology. Thus due to his access to "the Truth" (religious overtones,
> anyone?) he makes widely general statements such as:
As you can see, there is no reference to a form of truth only a form of critical analysis that looks at how ideological forms are created within particular historical conjunctures. This is actually much better dealt with in A's essays in For Marx (my favorite of Althusser's text and seemingly often ignored)
> "In fact, the State and its Apparatuses *only have meaning from the point
> of
> view of the class struggle*, as an apparatus of class struggle ensuring
> class oppression and guaranteeing the conditions of exploitation and its
> reproduction." (my emphasis)
> The question that should be asked, and this is why I pointed to the
> deservedly famous Chomsky criticism of Skinner, the question is: what does
> this definition leave out? I would argue an awful lot. It means that, if I
> am to accept Althusser's argument about ideology and his "science of
> class-struggle" then I can only imbue many objects around me with meaning
> (media, the State, my university professor etc.) insofar as this meaning
> is
> related to the class-struggle. Now, I'm not saying that this aspect
> shouldn't be considered when approaching these objects, but to imbue them
> *
> strictly* with this meaning is... I would argue... completely dogmatic.
> Althusser's entire edifice, his pronunciations on humanism and historicism
> etc etc, are all based around this extremely strict and exacting dogmatic
> framework.
Actually your reading leaves out something substantial within the quote itself (I couldn't find the actual quote in the text. I'd be curious as to the edition referenced and the page number) What gets let go of is the phrase "from the point of view of the class struggle", which is to say, we come to a particular analysis if we look at these institutions from a certain perspective. It doesn't claim that it is the only mode of analysis, but it does make a claim about how a particular mode of analysis should work.
> If you want to relate this to Spinoza, and I don't think you be far off,
> the
> ideology which is all-encompassing seems similar to Spinoza's pantheistic
> God and the strict meaning (class struggle) which Althusser applies to
> these
> apparatuses seems akin to some sort of "true knowledge" of this God.
You're actually mixing up your Spinoza fairly substantially. The kind of institutional and historical knowledge would be the second type of knowledge (that is common notions in his terms). Common notions are adequate in that they look to the causes of phenomenon.... that is they are historical in nature and they recognize the complex interactions between modes as the cause of common phenomenon. (Incidentally, ideology would be the first type of knowledge, which is both inadequate to itself and prone to error) Ideological analysis would be a social but adequate form of knowledge, not the intellectual love of god, which falls out of the purview of Althusser's modes of analysis (Which primarily focus on the second book of the ethics, which is focused on epistemology and common notions.) If you want to understand the linkages better with Spinoza, it would better to look at the kind of historical textual exegesis that S. engages in the TTP.
> On another note and from a different angle, in one of his lecture courses
> (Society Must be Defended) Foucault shows quite clearly that the discourse
> of class-struggle probably was born out of the discourse of what he calls
> "race struggle". This would seem to historcise Marx's notion of
> class-struggle and not allow for the absolute "epistemological break"
> (i.e.
> completely new way of looking at things) which Marx supposedly underwent.
> It
> also calls into question the whole notion that the history of ideas can be
> looked at ahistorical or synchronically/structurally as a series of
> definitive "breaks"...
I agree that Foucault's historical analysis is much stronger. However,
Foucault's concepts developed in D+P are not actually that far off from
Althusser's. My argument would be that Althusser's analysis is still
useful from the standpoint of modern forms of power. It's also worth
noting that you are asking a short unfinished draft of a manuscript to
produce a completely finished analysis of a phenonenon that has been
discussed for many centuries. I can't really respond to the last sentence
as that it is completely disconnected from Althusser's project and shows
no real understanding for the concept of the break.
>
robert wood