[lbo-talk] On Althusser and socialist "realism"

[Bhaskar Sunkara]

Like I said, unlike the others contributing to this discussion (or whatever
this is), I haven't read *The Poverty of Theory* or Anderson's rebuttal, so
I'm not an authority.  But from some of these posts you'd think that
Althusser was a reactionary clinging to some sort of Stalinist orthodoxy
against the revolutionary advance of the proto-Eurocommunists.  My readings
of him are limited (I did just learn how to read sometime in the mid-90s),
but I did skim some of his critiques of the "culture" of Stalinist Russia as
embodied by socialist realist art.  Breaking with the PCF norm, Althusser
launched *defenses *of the abstract that seem to contradict some of this
characaturing of him:  he broke from the formalism of "orthodox" Marxism
that condemned abstract and minimalist forms of art as serving to obsurce
social reality.  He saw the avant-garde as going hand-in-hand with his
"anti-humanism" in attempting to break down the "philosophical myth of man."

 The individual as a conscious subject.  For Althusser the function of art
was no so much to make reality visible as to make visible the myths that
govern, without knowledge or consent, the way we think about and LIVE this
reality.  How useful this is... I don't know.  It just doesn't sound as grey
and conformist to me as it does to others.