"> This doesn't quite get the measure of Althusser's relation to the PCF leadership. On a largely philosophical plain he did challenge the extant party philosophy which did claim to be 'marxist humanist'. He argued that this 'Marxist humanism' was coeval with an accomodation to bourgeois intellectuals ('you're humanists, we're Marxist humanists, sign our petition against nuclear war'). But Althusser's was a pose of intransigence. He was only trying to get the party up to speed on the latest in Franch philosophy, which was 'anti-humanist' not 'humanist'. Why bother sucking up to Sartre, when he is old hat, you ought to suck up to Foucault and Derrida instead. Insofar as it was any kind of development, it was a regressive one, and E.P. Thompson was right on this, one that led to a mechanistic and lifeless conception of history, one in which subjectivity is dismissed as an ideological effect of capitalism, which is to say a polemic against the idea that working people make their own liberation."
Look, I don't want to be driven to a full-scale defence of Althusser by your total dismissal. Sean's already said a lot of stuff better than I could - and I fully agree with him. As I said the other day, there's not much of Althusser's writing I would completely accept, and certainly not in his terms. But I find him really stimulating and far from a 'charlatan'. It's also clear a straw Althusser has been built up over the years. People hear he was a 'structuralist', and take that to mean he was a determinist. They hear he was 'anti-historicist', and assume that meant he was against the study of history. They hear he was 'anti-humanist', and take it to mean 'anti-human', and of course he practised his anti-humanism on his wife, ha ha ha.
The intellectual context Althusser wrote in is really important - he was making his theoretical arguments against what he saw to be Second and Third International vulgarisations of historical materialism - i.e., 'base and superstructure', 'forces and relations of production', economic determinism and all that stuff. He wanted a more subtle, more complex theory, and importantly, one that was not deterministic - this is the man, after all, who would eventually coin the term 'aleatory materialism'. In many ways his project resonated with the Anglo New Left critiques of vulgar marxism. Ironically, he was eventually pegged by Thompson as the opposite, the highest, theoretically consistent stage of vulgar marxism itself (or, by Thompson's definition, 'Stalinism'). This happened partly because in travelling into UK debates some of the context of his writing was lost, and words changed their meanings. If Althusser's targets had been Thompson and others in the British New Left, he would have made, or emphasised, quite different points - but his targets were other PCF philosophers.
(This, incidentally, is one of Althusser's key points in Reading Capital: theoretical and scientific writings should be understood as determined partially by context, including not only what the writer says and how they say it, but what they don't say, because it is either taken for granted or considered irrelevant, but which might actually be emphasised if the writer had been engaged by different interlocutors. So to really understand a theory - which is separable from the author - is to understand how it might take form in other contexts, not the ability to quote lengthy passages.)
Dealing with the three Althusserian bugbears:
Althusser's 'structuralism' is not the determination of reality by some essence or whole. It is actually an anti-holism, a portrayal of society as composed of structures of quite different types, which interrelate in complex ways. The structures are not seen as external to one another - for example, the economy depends on aspects of the state (e.g. property law) and vice versa - but they are 'relatively autonomous'. He didn't get much further than asserting this - he had very little to say about the form of the structures or how they interrelate (except perhaps in 'Ideological State Apparatuses'), he mainly wanted to say that society was not fully determined by the economy (except 'in the last instance', whatever that means). He did propose four basic structural ensembles: economy, state, ideology and theory - which shows the diversity of what he thought of as structures - though they are clearly pretty questionable. Personally I would work with a much greater number of structures and sub-structures.
His 'anti-historicism' is not at all 'anti-history'. It is related to the structuralism - the argument is against a unitary historical narrative, a theory of history as a whole. Different structures work in utterly different ways, and thus develop at utterly different paces. But they are interdependent, so developments in one sphere have effects (external and internal) on the other spheres. 'Contradictions' play out as tensions between or within structures, and often tensions within a structure generated by changes in other structures which it depends on. Proper history records as 'events' changes in structures and their interrelation.
His 'anti-humanism' is not 'anti-human'. Its immediate target was the 'humanist Marxism' based on the 1844 Manuscripts, etc., that portrayed history anthropologically as the unfolding of human potential (i.e. Ted's Marx), and/or emphasised 'agency' as something magically other to structures. It is not to dismiss subjectivity, but to emphasise that subjectivity itself is socially constructed. That is, not only do we make history in circumstances not of our own choosing, but we interpret society with frames of reference not of our own choosing. Structures are reproduced through human activity, but often not as the intended consequences of human agency, and society is riven by structural contradictions that do not necessarily align with individuals' conceptions.
Whew. Hope someone gets to the end of that. I should emphasise that my understanding comes entirely from 'For Marx' and 'Reading Capital', like Bhaskar I don't know the later stuff and I'm aware that one of the later books is called 'Essays in Self-Criticism'. Also that the above is no doubt a pretty loose interpretation, it's what I got out of Althusser at any rate.
Mike Beggs