>
> No, I'm sorry, Miles wrote that "morality is a product of power relations"
> and that "the moral system is always the product of the historical moment,
> not the cause." Either it is or it isn't - which is it? If morality is not
> solely determined by power relations, then the argument Miles was making is
> no longer valid. There is nothing more maddening than this marxist habit of
> justifying an assertion with some grand generalization, only to retreat at
> the slightest challenge behind meaningless qualifications about
> "contradictions," "relativity," "in the final instance."
>
> I'm glad you bring up Althusser, because while I haven't read any of his
> books, this review-essay on him by Leszek Kolakowski makes my point more
> eloquently than I could:
Althusser's long been a whipping boy and I used to have a gut reaction against him as well. But I wanted to read some Poulantzas, whose first book uses all the Athusserian terminology, so one day I sat down and read Althusser and found out that there's an awful lot of caricature about him. Like most caricatures this is not baseless, but it is way exaggerated and Althusser is nowhere near as crazy as E. P. Thompson et al paint him. (I haven't read the rest of the Kolakowski essay mainly because of a prejudice that he's a bitter anti-communist cold warrior, but that preconception comes from an E. P. Thompson essay too - also in SR - so maybe I ought to.)
I wouldn't want to defend Althusser completely or build my entire worldview around him. He is pretentious, and Kolakowski is right about his arguing by assertion or rhetorical flair at times. But he does put some things very well. The first misconception about him is that he is trying to give a fully-fledged account of society, when all he really does is lay some groundwork for how to think about social structures, which would have to be brought to a much less abstract level to be useful for real historical/social research. This kind of theory usually seems really obvious until you actually try to do it yourself, to answer 'how does society work?' - anyone will quickly fall into some kind of abstract muddle.
'Overdetermination' and determination 'in the last instance' Kolakowski paints as a 'get out of jail free' card for marxists to get away from the base-superstructure metaphor and back towards common sense, while paying lip service to Marx. But it's actually more interesting than that. It's easier to understand through example, so: Within capitalism the economic system and the state system are both essential to the reproduction of the social system as a whole. The two structures are interdependent (because, e.g., the economic sphere depends on legal relations established and enforced by the state, while the state pays its employees wages which they spend on the market, and so on) but also relatively autonomous, so that you can't read political developments off of economic ones. They develop and reproduce at quite different rhythms - and my favourite part of Reading Capital is Althusser's discussion of the different rhythms of different structures in his 'outline of a concept of historical time', which I think, contra Kolakowski, is quite profound. However, the state structure is 'overdetermined' by the economic, and vice versa, by the need for the whole social system to hold together.
The biggest problem is I think the broad brush with which Althusser usually talks about structures: three big ones - economy, state and ideology, and then rather absurdly, theory. I don't think ideology fits in with the other two structures as an equal, in fact isn't really a structure in that sense. And I think we'd want to bring in all kinds of other structures and sub-structures of different scales - but the overall way of thinking is open to that.
Other key points Althusser makes - especially the anti-humanism and anti-empiricism - are I think useful correctives to certain Anglo habits of thought, which can be taken to absurd legnths. It's unfortunate that in both cases the terms evoke stupid positions - 'anti-human' and 'anti-evidence' - which are not at all what Althusser means. Can go into those if anyone's interested.
By the way, if you don't have the stomach for the writing itself, and I don't really blame you, Gregory Elliot's book on Althusser, 'The Detour of Theory' is a great and very readable critical account, which explains and criticises fairly.
Cheers, Mike Beggs scandalum.wordpress.com