Louis Althusser
(1918-1990) elevated the idea of unconscious to the status of a totality or an
origin of origins that can best interpret the world, but not change it. His critique
of the humanist deviation of Marxism (as manifested first in Lukacs and later
in Sartre, not to mention scores of others) that had nullified the idea of
class struggle ended up in an uncompleted project of investigation into the
role of ideology. As any philosopher Althusser was the product of his own time,
in his case a time of capitalist triumphalism and fragmentation of revolutionary
camp into fractions: dogmatic interpretations of Marxism, Stalinism, and scores
of idealistic vulgarisation, liquidationism, and above all a social democracy
in the guise of humanism and pacifism against a turbulent period of uprisings
in different places that included the former colonies. The Krushchevites of the
time preached a theory of peaceful co-existence and class cooperation while in
China Mao launched the fiercest onslaught on ‘revisionism’ of all colours. The
spring thunder of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution reached the streets
of Paris and invaded the campus of Sorbonne in 1968. Althusser witnessed the
rage of the youth that could change the world, not as a tragedy as in 1848 but
as a protracted people’s war of revolution. The official communist party of
France, PCF repudiated the students’ rebellion and their emulation of Mao and
moved closer to the Soviet communism. As a Bolshevist he stayed in the party
despite the large scale withering away of cadres and intellectuals from it. Yet
his confrontation with the dominant Roger Garaudy led theoreticians of
mechanical historicism was inevitable. Moreover, he had to incorporate the
psychoanalysis of Lacan (later his own therapist) into the body of Marxism.
However, the task was almost impossible because Freud was a bourgeois
intellectual of decadence for the Marxists who believed in human rationality
and a teleology of world history. Althusser wrote the essay titled “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes towards an Investigation” (1970) to
problematize the Marxist notions of history in relation with ideology for a critique
of philosophy.
Marx’s
Totality and the Inheritance of Structuralism
Althusser’s structuralist
reading of Marx targeted what was known as Western Marxism based on a
crypto-orthodox Marxist-Leninist concept of truculent objectivism. However, it
emphasised the constraining power of structures over consciousness and
initiative (Ray 388). The Bachelardian concept of an epistemological break
helped him reject any account of a society that sought its origins in
individual or collective intentionality. Jean Cavailles’ idea of science
operating through an epistemology of conceptual self-correction and Spinoza’s Deus siva natura-a single substance
which differentiated itself into various modes enabled Althusser to formulate a
whole encompassing structurality that equated itself with truth, reality, God and
other givens of philosophy. “Man is an ideological animal by nature” (Althusser, Marx 171) is the best instance of this
totality that was conceived by him through the amalgamation of Marx and Freud
via Lacan. Postulating ideology as a metasubject of history at the cost of
human will and freedom a fortiori failed the Marxist project of detotalization.
When ideology is like unconscious, without history; and history becomes a
process without subject, philosophy is straightjacketed and strangled by
fatalism. But Althusser overcame this dilemma of fate by a critique of
philosophy. Fredric Jameson writes in his introduction to Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays: “Althusser argues against a conception of philosophy as an
autonomous realm of systems that evolve in time, and rather as an intervention
into theory, and in his own case, as the intervention of class struggle and
partisanship into theory.”(viii)
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony also shares the same point
regarding superstructure or the world of ideas or signification, and it is
possible to equate both. Yet a critical approach to these ideas, as taken by
E.P Thompson and Richard Hay shows a fetishization of ideology and a move to
make it an unsurpassable abyss, at least for the followers of Althusser. The
idea of change and changeability as proposed by Marx and Engels inaugurated a
discourse of revolution and transformation in the sphere of theory. In spite of
the developments in theory Marxism is not a philosophy but as Jameson points
out “a unity-of-theory-and-practice”. But the focal point of the essay consists
of two questions, they are: How a society achieves stability over time by the
reproduction of hegemonic ideas and what conditions make social revolution
possible? For these issues Althusser relied on a model of structure intact by
outside forces. The favourite idea of an inside without outside, as cherished
by Foucault and other poststructuralists prefigured in Althusser’s ideology.
For him ideology is insulated as a singularity without any material
preconditions for its existence. In other words, it is like unconscious. If
Lacan compared unconscious to language for its structurality Althusser
advocated the power of language to objectify ideology. The task of organic
intellectuals is to concretize the ideology through the use of language and
fight the dominant ideology as part of class struggle. Althusser revised the
concept of ideology as mere world view by pointing out the materiality of
ideology. As a real or material force that derived from the production
relations in a society ideology functions through all means of communication.
Any act of communication involves social control so subtle a way that we ignore
it and we come to a false consciousness of subjectivity by obliterating the immediate
socio-economic reality that constituting us. In other words, the function of
ideology is similar to the function of language. Such a premise formulates a
theory of structure that can analyse the functions of ideology and the
structures forming it. Consequently the laws forming language reappear in this
sort of analysis and overdetermine the resultant societal structures.
Structures of Fatalism and Theory of Accidents
Althusser escaped the
trap of predestined certainties by formulating the hypothetical ‘problematic’.
In For Marx, he conceptualized
ideology as a real whole internally unified by its own problematic existing in
an inseparable unity. It is impossible to extract one element of ideology
without altering its significance. Luke Fereetter sees this internal unity as
the thinking field of every individual and this internal unity is the
constituting problematic of authorial expressions (45). But the structures of
problematic are beyond the control of subjectivities of individual actors and
collective agencies. These structures would act on the basis of purely
historical material laws of accidents disregarding the human will. Thus the
human will is neither free nor autonomous but subject to the caprices of
material historical forces and laws. In other words, history is determined by a
number of accidents, coincident and chance play more significant role than the
consciousness of humans. However, the individual recognizes himself/herself
with the power of ideology. Ideology functions like a mirror, which shows the
individual who she is. But that mirror image is deceptive because the person
who looks at it is already mediated by the existing patterns of perceptions in
a society. Even before one’s birth the ideological elements determine the
identity of individual. It means the human being is not born free, but contrary
to Rousseau’s declaration of Enlightenment born in the chains of ideology.
Conclusion
Althusser’s categories of
ISA and RSA explain the systematic way of power, or class power operating in
the world. The role of family, education, religion and other establishments of
filiation in disciplining, and manipulating thought and life of each member of
the society, the misconception of identity and misrecognition of reality
maintain the oppressive hierarchies in the society. This situation demands a
greater struggle in the field of theory for advancing class struggle. The
biggest impact of this realization is ‘the cultural turn’ in the field of
leftist politics and philosophy.
Biibliography
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
Delhi: Aakar 2006.Print.
--- For
Marx. London: Verso.2005.Print.
Callinicos, Alex.
Althusser’s Marxism. London: Pluto, 1976.PDF.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso,
1991 .Print.
Elliott, Gregory. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London:
Verso, 1987.PDF.
Ferreter, Luke. Louis Althusser. Noida: Routledge, 2007.Print.
Jay, Martin .Marxism and
Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkley: University
of California, 1984. Print.
Poster, Mark. “Althusser
on History without Man”.PoliticalTheory.Vol.2.No.4
(Nov.1974).Jsotor 18-08-2015.
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