The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 14
plexion of structuralism. As French Marxists and intellectuals of the Left
came to terms with the revelations of Soviet repression and recalibrated
their positions accordingly, Althusser offered many of them an attractive
alternative to Sartre’s Marxist-humanism. This alternative was predicated,
to a large extent, on a turning away from established Marxist doctrine and
its various contingent applications in order to facilitate and focus on a return to Marx himself. Reading Capital, first published by Althusser in 1965 with contributions from his students at the École Normale Supérieure (including
Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey),
would demonstrate the full power of this ‘return’ to the writings of Marx.
As noted by his early readers (though later disputed by the author),
Althusser’s ‘reading’ of Capital was coordinate with several principle traits of structuralism: his exegesis of Marx’s writings was highly analytic, anti-humanistic, marked by its appreciation of scientificity and largely synchronic in method (in so far as Althusser’s reading of Capital was guided by ‘ the conception of the specific relations that exist between the different Untitled-2 91
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elements and the different structures of the structure of the whole’ and ‘the knowledge of the relations of dependence and articulation which make it an
organic whole, a system’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 107)). Like a structure of social kinship or a linguistic system, Althusser approached Marx’s texts as a hermetically sealed set that imbued its own logic (or in some cases several). This logic, moreover, could not be solely constructed from the readily apparent alone; if anything, the genius of Althusser’s return to Marx was
that he did not just return to what Marx said, but what Marx did not say in what he said. This way of reading Marx was derived by Althusser from none other than the very texts to which it was being applied. As Althusser
noted, Marx did not only comment on what was explicitly ‘said’ by classi-
cal political economists; he more profoundly extracted critical points that were ‘unspoken’ in their texts, thus raising problematics that had been as
yet unrecognised. An appropriate appraisal of capitalism was thus only made possible through an examination of the structural relations between the seen and the unseen, or more exactly, the blindness that lies at the heart of vision:
‘non-vision is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence has a necessary relationship with vision’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 21). In
Althusser’s terminology, such forms of examination are ‘symptomatic’ in
method: ‘A “symptomatic” reading is necessary to … identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence, which, emerging in the verbal
discourse, induces these blanks in it, blanks which are failures in its rigour, or the outer limits of its effort’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 86).
Althusser made the intellectual sources for this notion of ‘absence’ and
his ‘symptomatic’ form of reading explicit. Aside from Marx and Nietzsche,
he asserted that
only since Freud have we begun to suspect what listening, and hence what
speaking (and keeping silent), means ( veut dire); that this ‘meaning’ ( vouloir dire) of speaking and listening reveals beneath the innocence of speech and hearing the culpable depth of a second, quite different discourse, the discourse of the unconscious. (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 16)
In a footnote attached to this claim, Althusser went on to credit this reading of Freud to Lacan, and furthermore ‘our masters in reading learned works,
once Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès and now Georges Canguilhem
and Michel Foucault’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 16). Althusser thus
firmly placed himself within the same structural and philosophical nexus
as Foucault.
Despite his fraught relationship with the French Communist Party
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(of which he was a long-time member) due to his deviation from Party
orthodoxy, Althusser’s ‘symptomatic’ method of reading Marx would enjoy
great success amongst the Left. It would also considerably strengthen the
structuralist movement by adding to its ranks a significant portion of the
Marxist intelligentsia in France. By doing so, however, structuralism would never be the same: by facilitating a détente between structuralism and
Marxism within the French intellectual scene (intended or not), the ideal of an apolitical social-scientific method would be exposed as naive. But perhaps more importantly, the presentation of Marx as a founder of structuralist
thinking and reading would ultimately accentuate the growing disparities
between this fast-growing brand of structuralism and the classical image as envisioned by Lévi-Strauss and his linguistic associates.
The early 1960s also witnessed the emergence of a third discordant struc-
turalist philosopher: Jacques Derrida. Of all the thinkers associated with
structuralism, Derrida’s position was perhaps the most ambiguous. This
is because, from as early as 1963, Derrida advanced an explicit critique of structuralism that would later be labelled as poststructuralist. In a lecture presented in March of that year, titled ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Derrida subjected Foucault’s structuralist history to a scathing attack.
The crux of this critique was to ask of Foucault the following: from what
privileged position does Foucault carry out his history of silence and the
repressed? In his words:
Is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized lan-
guage, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work? Would not the
archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the
repetition, in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word, of the act perpetrated against madness – and be so at the very moment when this
act is denounced? (Derrida 1978: 41)
Derrida’s intention, in short, was to cast doubt on the grounds from which
Foucault’s analysis derived its authority. This point was simple, yet effective.
It was also applicable to the rest of the structuralist movement. In 1966,
three years after delivering his critique of Foucault’s History of Madness, Derrida took part in one of the most significant moments in the history of
structuralism: the colloquium The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, held at Johns Hopkins University. This colloquium – attended by Lacan, Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Vernant and Derrida among others
– served as a primer to French structuralism for the American academic
market. Derrida’s contribution, however, would serve as an announcement
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of the paradigm’s underside. In his lecture, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida repeated his critique of
Foucault, but this time with respect to Lévi-Strauss:
When Lévi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the Cooked that he has ‘sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible by operating from the outset at the level of signs’, the necessity, force, and legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass this opposition between the sensible
and the intelligible. (Derrida 1978: 355)
Following this remark Derrida proceeded to deconstruct Lévi-Strauss’
programme and, consequently, reinfuse his structural edifice with ‘what we
might call the play of the structure’ (Derrida 1978: 352).
Structuralism’s deconstruction therefore coincided with its arrival on the
big stage. As the structuralist image was in the process of mass exporta-
tion, Derrida attempted to destabilise its centre of gravity by raising and unravelling its metaphysical presuppositions. Far from effectuating a break with philosophy, Derrida demonstrated how many structuralists perpetuated some of the most pervasive trends in the history of philosophy, such
as the privileging of speech over writing that Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson
both indulge in (see Derrida 1976). Nevertheless, Derrida was by no means
an opponent or even outsider to the structuralist paradigm, as his involve-
ment in the Johns Hopkins colloquium indicated. Rather, in accordance
with his methodological approach, Derrida inhabited structuralism, so as to deconstruct it from within (Derrida 1976: 24). This approach was strategic
in more ways than one: irrespective of the dictates of his deconstructive
method, Derrida knew full well that structuralism at the time was on a path to glory. He was therefore quite content, like others, to be grouped under
the structuralist sign for the time being, despite the obvious discontinuities between himself and various other structuralists. As Derrida admitted at
one point: ‘Since we take nourishment from the fecundity of structuralism,
it is too soon to dispel our dream’ (Derrida 1978: 3).2 In the mid 1960s,
structuralism was yet to be fully consecrated, and poststructuralism was but a glimmer in the eye of the English-speaking world. Thus, while Derrida
pursued an internal transformation of structuralism from the early 1960s
on, the culmination and recognition of this metamorphosis would have to
wait for a more propitious external moment.
This moment arrived in May of 1968. By 1968 structuralism had
transformed itself from a marginalised method of the social sciences to a
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multifaceted movement that permeated numerous disciplines, including
stalwarts of the humanities such as philosophy and history. Structuralism
was enjoying a level of public success akin to the heyday of Sartre and de
Beauvoir, and on the back of this fervour structuralists were preparing for their anointment by academic institutions at all levels, from the Sorbonne
down to regional lycées. The uprising of May ’68 in Paris would accelerate
this process, but in doing so it would also expose the movement’s redun-
dancy and help facilitate its overcoming.
As the student occupiers of the Sorbonne made clear, the spirit of ’68
was not structuralist: ‘Structures’, read a famous slogan, ‘don’t take to the streets’ (Dosse 1997b: 116). This hostility towards structuralism exhibited by elements of the failed revolution is perhaps best explained by the
untimely nature of May ’68. If May ’68 was a profound social and political
event, it was in large part due to its inexplicable nature. Nearly everyone, including most significantly the structuralist avant-garde, did not see the uprising coming. Moreover, the uprising did not neatly correspond to the
expectations of the French Left who had been long preparing for (and bick-
ering over) the revolution: white middle-class university students were not exactly the designated revolutionary class. As such, May ’68 was in many
ways not a product of its times, but rather an untimely eruption that would only later be re-contextualised. Its participants, for the most part, were not well organised or agreed on what they hoped to achieve, other than to bring down the system. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that structuralism,
itself the eminent ‘sign of the times’, would be out of sync with this untimely rupture. The incompatibility of structuralism with the dissident mentality
of May ’68 was further emphasised by the fact that structuralism effectively promoted unitary and inescapable systems which demanded strict obedience to a method or procedure, whether that meant swearing fealty to Lacan, science or some other master principle/al; following the rules and giving
oneself over to a universal and irresistible system was not exactly a feature of the spirit of ’68.
And yet, despite this reaction against the rise of structuralism, May ’68
also offered structuralism the chance to crown its recent successes with
institutional recognition. As Lévi-Strauss and other early structuralists had long recognised, the institutions of French academia were in drastic need
of modernisation. May ’68 brought this process to immediate fulfilment. As
the epitome of modern intellectual theory and practice, structuralism was
perfectly placed to capitalise upon the academic shake-up necessitated by
May ’68 and convert its popular success into positions of institutional power.
Thus while structuralism was too conservative and stifling for many of the
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radical students that instigated the May ’68 uprising, it was sufficiently
modern-yet-respectable to satisfy the demands for institutional reform.
Among the many institutional advances that structuralists made in the
aftermath of May ’68 (such as the appointment of Foucault, and later Barthes, to the Collège de France), none were more pronounced than the creation of
the experimental university at Vincennes ( Université de Paris VIII). This institution of learning located on the outskirts of Paris was established on a structuralist mandate that May ’68 had helped make possible. Foucault, the
leading figurehead of structuralism at the time following his extraordinar-
ily successful The Order of Things (which at one point had the subtitle An Archaeology of Structuralism), was asked to form the Philosophy Department, while the structural linguist Jean Dubois was charged with establishing the university’s Linguistic Department (Dubois was in fact initially asked to be Dean of Vincennes, which he declined). Vincennes also inaugurated the first Department of Psychoanalysis, headed by Serge Leclaire – an important
disciple of Lacan.
But despite these structuralist overtones, it must be said that in reality
Vincennes was far too cutting edge to be simply structuralist – a movement
that even young students knew by that time was old-hat. Thus while it might not have been clear to university administrators, May ’68 demonstrated to
the structuralist thinkers that the game was up. In the period following May
’68, nearly all of the major structuralist thinkers embarked upon an overhaul of their work or attempted to distance themselves from the structuralist
paradigm (Kurzweil 1996: xii–xiii). To cite an example, when Foucault’s
next book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, appeared in 1969, he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was not a mere structuralist:
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few
observations. – My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge ( connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim
is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous
transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge.
It may well be that this transformation, the problems that it raises, the
tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that
it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis.
But this kind of analysis is not specifically used … In short, this book,
like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human
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being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, interest, mingle,
and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the
problem of structure arose there too. (Foucault 2002: 17–18)
Althusser, too, would be at pains around this time to clear up any such ‘misunderstandings’. On the release of the Italian edition of Reading Capital in 1968, he would take the opportunity to add the following disclaimer in a
brief preface:
Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the ‘struc-
turalist’ ideology (we said very clearly that the ‘combination’ to be found in Marx ‘has nothing to do with a combinatory’), despite the decisive
intervention of categories foreign to ‘structuralism’ (determination in
the last instance, domination, overdetermination, production process,
etc.), the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the
‘structuralist’ terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. With a very
few exceptions (some very perceptive critics have made the distinction),
our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in
homage to the current fashion, as ‘structuralist’.
We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound
tendency of our texts was not attached to the ‘structuralist’ ideology. It is our hope that the reader will be able to bear this claim in mind, to verify it and to subscribe to it. (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 7)
When Althusser and Foucault suggest that they were never really structural-
ists, even if there are resonances between their work and structuralism, we can certainly take them at their word. After all, which serious thinker that was associated with structuralism at one time or another did not have aspects of their work that were incongruous with the classical structuralist image?
