The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 10
poststructuralism. If May ’68 had helped to confirm that radical alterna-
tives to Marxism were available, Althusser helped to show that alternative
Untitled-2 66
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
53
possibilities existed within Marxism itself. A teacher, colleague and friend to many of the poststructuralists, Althusser demonstrated that Marxism
could be detached from the humanism to which all the poststructuralists
were opposed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Althusser remained a
member of the Communist Party, though he did not accept either Stalinism
or Garaudy’s humanist alternative: he sought to challenge Party orthodoxy
from within and more generally to challenge the Hegelian-historicism of the Western Marxist tradition, reinvigorating Marxism by initiating a rereading of Marx that emphasised Marx’s novelty.
Althusser sought to distinguish Marx from his predecessors in at least
three ways. First, he tried to separate Marx from his historicist interpreters such as Lukács and Gramsci. For Althusser, Marxist theory is not simply
a product of its particular historical epoch. Instead, Althusser affirms that Marxism is a science. It is the scientific status of Marxism, Althusser argues, that distinguishes it from other, ideological forms of knowledge. Second,
Althusser claims that Marx’s work is radically distinct from the anthropologism of classical political economy: instead of beginning from the needs of a supposedly universal human subject, Marx starts from the forces and relations of production, irreducible to human relations and not reliant on any
notion of human nature. Marx, according to Althusser, has no concept of
Man in general: ‘each society has its own individuals, historically and socially determined’ (Althusser 1976: 53). Finally, for Althusser Marx’s work must
be distinguished from that of Hegel. Althusser believed that Hegelian
interpretations of Marx were simply the mirror of economistic readings:
both reduced complex, multiple and differentiated social forces to a single, fundamental contradiction. Marx’s dialectic, Althusser argues, recognises
the complexity of the social structure in a way that neither Hegelianism nor economism do. For Marx, every contradiction is ‘overdetermined’: each is
inseparable from the total structure of the whole, and in each is reflected its relations with all the other contradictions and its own conditions of existence (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970).
Althusser was constantly reworking his arguments, so these theorems
and concepts cannot necessarily be found throughout his work. They are,
however, the key ideas that he advances in his work of the 1960s: the scientific status of Marxism; its anti-humanism; and a concept of overdetermination
that is used to escape both Hegelianism and a crude economic reductionism.
Althusser’s membership of the Party marks an important distinction
between him and his poststructuralist successors. While Foucault and
Guattari had both (briefly) been members of the Party, most of the central
figures of poststructuralism were never directly affiliated to the PCF. The Untitled-2 67
16/10/2013 16:39:28
54
emergence
avant-garde journal Tel Quel, whose editorial committee included Kristeva and which published work by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray, did
enter into a pragmatic alliance with the PCF from 1967, but it broke with the Party in 1971, turning first to Maoism and then flirting with religious mysticism (ffrench 1995). However, this distance from institutional Marxism does not entail distance from Marxism per se. After 1968, a new breed of French
liberals – many of them ex-Maoists – turned on Marxism with a vengeance,
as media-friendly ‘ nouveaux philosophes’ such as Bernard-Henri Levy (1979) and Jean-Marie Benoist (1970) lined up to condemn communist ‘totalitarianism’. Despite Tel Quel’s flirtation with these thinkers, and Foucault’s occasional praise for their work (Christofferson 2004: 198–207), they cannot be aligned with the poststructuralists. (Deleuze (2006: 139–47) in particular attacked the nouveaux philosophes in scathing terms.) The poststructuralist relation to Marxism is far more subtle and interesting. Instead of repudiat-ing Marxism altogether, they took the opportunity to rethink Marxism – to
interrogate and reshape it while nonetheless continuing to use its insights, at once setting themselves against Marxism and seeking to draw from it.
Against Marxism
The key themes of the poststructuralist critique of Marxism are concisely
captured in some comments from Foucault about ideology. In an interview
given in the 1970s, Foucault (1980: 118) gives three grounds on which to
be suspicious of this concept: first, because it seems to depend upon an
opposing concept of scientific truth; second, it implies a pre-given sub-
ject; finally, it is always secondary in relation to a determinant economic infrastructure. Foucault’s remarks in this interview are brief and a little restricted, but they have wider resonance. In the first place, his suspicions tell us something about his attitude to Marxism in general. While ‘ideology’
is not an exclusively Marxist concept, it is a term that touches on a set
of concerns which, taken together, are distinctively Marxist: class interests and conflict, relations between ideas and material conditions, the mystification of social relations, and so forth. Secondly, Foucault’s reservations are typically poststructuralist; they echo similar misgivings expressed by other poststructuralists. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) ‘assemblage’ and Barthes’
(2005: 86–95) ‘ideosphere’ could both be seen as attempts to formulate an
alternative to the Marxist concept of ideology, while Derrida spends much
of Specters of Marx deconstructing the concept. Finally, Foucault’s suspicions also neatly mirror Althusser’s concerns as outlined above: the status of Marxism and its relation to science; its notion of subjectivity; and the Untitled-2 68
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
55
nature of its analyses and the place of the economic within them. Hence,
without assigning any special privilege either to Foucault or to the concept of ideology, we can generalise his doubts about this concept in order to frame the following examination of wider poststructuralist suspicions of Marxism, addressing in turn each of the issues raised by Foucault.
First, then, the status of Marxism itself. Foucault claims that the notion
of ideology requires as its opposite a notion of scientific truth. In order to understand Foucault’s claim here, we need to think about the ways in
which Marxists propose to criticise ideology. There is no agreed definition within Marxism of the concept of ideology, which has been used in a variety of ways by different Marxists. At its simplest, however, use of the concept implies that class domination cannot be sustained by force alone; though
force can always be used as a last resort, class rule must also be facilitated and legitimated by certain ideas and practices, but in such a way that ‘the very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be effective’ (Žižek 1994: 8). If we are to expose this logic – in order to escape its grasp and challenge class domination – then we need a
place outside ideology, a place from which the distortions of ideology can
be revealed and criticised and it becomes possible to disclose the true nature and functioning of society. The problem for Foucault and other poststructuralists is that this implies that we can achieve an objective, undistorted perspective on social reality and hence that social relations can attain an ultimate transparency – that we can, as Marx claims in Capital, reach a moment ‘when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man,
and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent
and rational form’ (Marx 1976: 173). For the poststructuralists, this utopian vision of unmediated access to social reality is naive.
Some Marxist thinkers have recognised that the dream of transparency
is unattainable. Althusser (1971), for example, argues that the structure of society can never be fully transparent to us: ideology is a necessary and permanent feature of human existence rather than an illusion foisted on us by
a dominant social class. This makes Althusser immune from poststructural-
ist suspicions about the transparency of social relations – yet the question remains: from where can we recognise and criticise ideology? Indeed, this
question now becomes even more pressing, because in Althusser’s theory
ideology is effectively coextensive with the social field, and hence it seems as if there can be no escape from ideology at all. Althusser’s response, as we saw above, is that one field of knowledge lies outside ideology: science marks a radical break from ideology. It is from the perspective of science that the existence and operation of ideology can be analysed.
Untitled-2 69
16/10/2013 16:39:28
56
emergence
This attempt to elevate Marxism to the status of a science troubles many
of the poststructuralists. It is not that they think truly scientific knowledge is unattainable, nor that they think Marxism is not or cannot be truly scientific; rather, they simply question why Marxism would want to be scientific in the first place. Foucault’s (1980: 85) answer is that it is an attempt to draw upon the authority that science, since medieval times, has claimed over other forms of knowledge. But to claim the authority of science in opposition to the illusions of ideology, Foucault suggests, is merely to beg the question of how the truth of science itself is verified. Rather than opposing scientific truth to ideology, for poststructuralism it is better to question how ‘truth’ is produced in the first place, and with what forms of power relations the production of truth is entwined. Foucault doubtless has Althusser in mind when he questions the
opposition between science and ideology, but the question does not apply only to Althusser: there is a long lineage of thinkers eager to establish Marxism’s scientific credentials, a lineage that begins with Marx and Engels (1998) and the distinction that they make between their own ‘scientific socialism’ and the utopian, reactionary, or conservative socialism of others.
So the poststructuralists are not anti-science, but want instead to question Marxism’s self-understanding. They are ‘against scientistic ideology that
often, in the name of Science or Theory as Science, had attempted to unify
or purify the “good” text of Marx’ (Derrida 1994: 33). The poststructuralists do not want to identify the ‘good’ text of Marx, but to draw upon Marxism
selectively. They suspect that scientistic interpretations, in contrast, offer Marxism as a comprehensive and exhaustive explanatory and analytical
worldview that can be applied to all events and actions, and that determines in advance what can be said and done. In other words, they suspect that
Marxism is being posited as what Lyotard (1984) calls a ‘grand narrative’.
Lyotard (1997) rejects grand narratives partly because they are teleological –
they posit an end to history, such as the emancipation of the proletariat – and thus they cannot account for the arrival of a future that is unexpected: they cannot account for the ‘event’, or that which cannot be predicted. Likewise, Derrida (1994) rejects Marxism’s teleological inclinations, in the name of a messianicity open to events.
These criticisms of the status that Marxism claims for itself – of its sci-
entistic, teleological and metaphysical pretensions – are in turn linked to criticisms of the specific analyses offered by Marxism: for the poststructuralists, Marxism’s metaphysics manifests itself not only in its systematic and teleological claims, but also in the analytical tools it develops. In particular, it is evident in Marxism’s conceptualisation of subjectivity. Foucault’s second objection to the concept of ideology is that it requires a particular notion Untitled-2 70
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
57
of the subject. The assumption here, Foucault (2001: 15) suggests, is that
there is a given subject whose natural relation to truth is then obscured
from without by certain political and economic conditions. For Foucault, in contrast, the subject is never given: all his work has instead been directed at examining how different subjects are produced (Foucault 2001: 326).
Foucault’s position is typical of poststructuralism in its anti-humanism –
that is to say, in its rejection of the idea of the human subject as a unity possessing certain essential and inherent properties, transparent to itself and in command of itself and its environment. This anti-humanism necessarily
affects poststructuralism’s attitude towards Marxism – not simply because
the dominant forms of Marxism in post-war France were humanist, but
also because there is a strong strain of humanism within Marx’s own work.
The whole theme of alienation – so important to Marx’s early work and
to the Marxist tradition as a whole – is dependent upon a humanist prob-
lematic: man is alienated because his essential powers and capacities have
become alien to him, and he can only be reconciled with himself if society
is transformed. The category of alienation is extremely important to certain varieties of Marxism, providing them with both a standard with which to
criticise the capitalist mode of production – condemned because it prevents man from realising his true potential – and a vision of a potential future –
wherein man’s labour is truly free and his life free from alienation: ‘the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man’ (Marx 1975: 296). By
rejecting humanism, poststructuralism effectively repudiates the notion of
alienation as well, and thus challenges much of the Marxist canon.
It is true that alienation does become a marginalised theme in Marx’s later writings, but those writings are not immune to the poststructuralist critique of humanism: it is arguable that even Marx’s later work retains a humanist
tendency, albeit displaced from the thematic of ‘alienation’. The discussion of commodity fetishism in the opening chapter of Capital, Volume One differs in important ways from the earlier critique of alienation, yet several of the central themes of commodity fetishism – the loss of man’s control, the
mystification of social relations, the dominance over man by the products
he has made – echo the earlier, more explicitly humanist critique, and Marx (1976: 165) himself makes the comparison with religious alienation. More
generally, it could be argued that the humanist subject of Marx’s earlier
work does not disappear in the later works, but is rather universalised into the collective subject of the proletariat, with the humanist themes of unity, transparency and control displaced ‘into the notion of the proletariat as the way towards total mastery and the absence of human conflict’ (Kristeva
1998: 136).
Untitled-2 71
16/10/2013 16:39:28
58
emergence
Some poststructuralists have criticised Marxism not for retaining
an essentialist notion of the subject, but for effacing the subject entirely.
Kristeva (1986: 31), for example, elsewhere claims: ‘There is no subject in the economic rationality of Marxism’. The argument is that whereas
poststructuralism analyses the (libidinal, textual and political) practices and processes that constitute the subject, Marxism in effect dissolves the subject into the (economic) structures that determine it. Marxism is thus accused
by poststructuralism of wavering between two positions: either relying on a conventional humanist subject whose capacities are determined in advance,
or reducing the subject to a secondary and almost irrelevant by-product of
an underlying economic foundation.
Suspicions about the ‘economic rationality of Marxism’ go beyond the
question of the subject to encompass the broader nature of Marxism’s analy-
ses. Foucault’s third and final objection to ideology is that it depends upon the notion of a determinant economic structure. This criticism is highly
significant, because it goes to the heart of the Marxist analysis of society. In the most programmatic presentation of his ideas, Marx claims:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material pro-
ductive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms
of social consciousness. (Marx 2000: 425)
For Foucault and the other poststructuralists, there are at least two (related) problems here. First, it implies that there is a realm of ideas, culture, sexuality, subjectivity, politics, and so on that is only ever a pallid reflection of a more real, substantial economic order. Poststructuralism will reject this kind of depth-surface model and emphasise the role of ideas, cultural practices, and so on in structuring reality itself. Second, it implies that in any situation it is always economic factors that are determinant – even if it is only a
‘determination in the last instance’, to use Althusser’s (1969: 111) phrase.
For Foucault and other poststructuralists, in contrast, it cannot be assumed in advance that the economy is the determining factor: the relative weight
