By Gordon Hull
Back in Before Times, I wrote a couple of posts beginning to make the case for a Deleuzian influence behind Foucault’s “What is an Author” (part 1, part 2). This post resumes that series… Recall that Foucault’s narrative in “Author” distinguishes between those who found a science, like Galileo, and those who are an “initiator [instaurateur]” of discourses. Examples of the latter are Marx and Freud. So let’s consider how the Foucault of the late 1960s reads Marx, given that he pretty much despises Marxism. For example, in Order of Things, he worked hard to say that Marxism was not genuinely revolutionary:
“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Though it is in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ theories of economics, and though this opposition leads it to use the project of a radical reversal of History as a weapon against them, that conflict and that project nevertheless have as their condition of possibility, not the reworking of all History, but an event that any archaeology can situate with precision, and that prescribed simultaneously, and according to the same mode, both nineteenth-century bourgeois economics and nineteenth-century revolutionary economics. Their controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool” (OT 285).
On this reading, the 19th-century project is to merge humanism and history into one larger, utopian project: “History will cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to continue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been superimposed exactly upon the human essence” (OT 286). It wasn’t until Nietzsche that this conceptual apparatus declined, as he “made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it” (OT 286).
Still, even here, Foucault’s analysis of Marx is fluid and conflicted. In the introduction to Archaeology, for example, there is a clean distinction between Marx and the 19th Century Marxism of Order. The “epistemological mutation of history,” he proposes, that includes the discussion of ruptures and structures that constitute the break from a “philosophy of history,” “can no doubt be traced back to Marx. But it took a long time to have much effect” (AK 11-12). Indeed:
“Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness” (AK 12).
This then operates “to preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism.” Thus:
“Against the decentering operated by Marx – by the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations, and the class struggle – it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search for a total history …. One is led therefore to anthropoolgize Marx, to make of him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism” (AK 12-13).
Humanism for Foucault means a focus on problems of subjectivity, not structure. He consistently says that one of the problems with Marxism is precisely its adherence to a theory of subjectivity. As he puts it in a 1974 lecture in Rio, Marxism has a:
“serious defect – basically, that of assuming that the human subject, the subject of knowledge, and forms of knowledge themselves are somehow given beforehand and definitively, and that economic, social, and political conditions of existence are merely laid or imprinted on this definitively given subject" (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power, 2).
Foucault’s comments about Marx in “Author” need to be read in this context. In a 1968 interview (“Foucault Responds to Sartre,” in Foucault Live and D&E #55), Foucault indicates the way that Marx functions outside of science, which is why Foucault in "Author" says that Marx and Freud are “instaurateurs” and not “authors.” Asked how he defines his own attitude with regard to politics and action, Foucault begins by noting the decline of the idea that “political thought is only able to be politically correct if it is scientifically rigorous” (D&E 695). This is the mark of a scientific discourse in the terms of “Author,” and it indicates a discourse that returns to an origin point in order to elaborate it, and move itself closer to the eidos it instantiates. One certainly sees this in standard approaches to Marxism, which basically take theories like base and superstructure and apply them somewhat mechanically to whatever situation is at hand. But with regard to Marx, something different is at play in the current work of some communist intellectuals, who are trying to “re-evalutate the concepts of Marx, in order to finally return to the roots, to analyze them, in order to define their uses that one is able and ought to make [of them]. It seems to me that all this effort is an effort at once political and scientific” (D&E 695).
For these thinkers, that is, the work of Marx itself is an object of analysis, and the analysis of that work changes what Marxism is. Foucault is referring to Althusser and his circle, including Reading Capital (1965). In a 1966 interview, Foucault proposes:
“To save man, to rediscover man in man, etc., that’s the goal of all these chattering enterprises, both theroetical and practical, to reconcile, for example, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin … Our task is to definitively free ourselves from humanism; it is in this sense that our work is political, in the measure where all the regimes of the east or the west have passed off their bad wares under the banner of humanism … We ought to denounce all these mystifications, as currently, inside the P.C., Althusser and his companions are courageously struggling against ‘Chardino-Marxism’” (“Entretien avec M. Chapsal,” D&E 544).
The target here is Jesuit appropriations of Marxism, which is to say that the target is an idealist rendition of Marx according to the principles of a religious humanism. I’ll return to the point about religion in a subsequent post.
If Foucault argues in Order of Things that Marxism is limited by its roots in nineteenth-century humanism, Althusser’s intervention is basically to try to cabin the humanism to the early Marx and his discussion of alieantion, while arguing that late Marx separates himself from that discourse. In making the case for such a “philosophical” reading of Marxism, Althusser also distinguishes between Marxism, which “can radiate from other spheres than the philosophical,” and “the paradoxically precarious existence of Marxist philosophy as such” (For Marx, 28).
Althusser’s introduction to For Marx is basically an apologia for his development of that distinction and of the need for a Marxist philosophy. His 1953 “On Marxism” (in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings) raises initial versions of some of the issues that will preoccupy his later work, such as the status of the early writings, but the language still very much emphasizes the “scientific” status of Marxism. There is a significant change by the essays collected in For Marx; Althusser writes in 1963 that “in 1845, Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man” and that “this rupture with every philosophical anthropology or humanism is no secondary detail; it is Marx’s scientific discovery” (227). Marx does so by showing that humanism is an ideological concept, i.e., “while it really does designate a set of existing relations … it does not provide us with a means of knowing them. In a particular (ideological) mode, it designates some existents, but it does not give us their essences” (FM 223).
Ideology, however, does not have quite its usual sense of false beliefs that we need to get rid of. Rather, ideology is constitutive, as Althusser underlines: “historical materialism cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology” because ideology is “a structure essential to the historical life of societies” (FM 232). Indeed, “Marx never believed that an ideology might be dissipated by a knowledge of it: for the knowledge of this ideology, as the knowledge of its conditions of possibility, of its structure, of its specific logic and of its practical role, within a given society, is simultaneously knowledge of the conditions of its necessity” (FM 230).
One thinks here of the constitutive role that Foucault assigns to discourse, or perhaps to an episteme, even if Althusser rejected the account in Order and the role Foucault assigned to linguistics and theories of unconsciousness (on this, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 341). Althusser is clearly going in this anti-humanist direction: ideology as a “system of representations” functions via “structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’” (FM 233).
This Marxist philosophy answers to the defect that Foucault’s Rio lecture locates in Marxism. As Althusser argues, it presents a “theoretical problematic which in putting its object to the test puts itself to the test of its object.” As such, it is:
“a theory which defines itself dialectically, not merely as a science of history (historical materialism) but also and simultaneously as a philosophy, a philosophy that is capable of accounting for the nature of theoretical formations and their history, and therefore capable of accounting for itself, by taking itself as its own object. Marxism is the only philosophy that theoretically faces up to this test” (FM 38).
There’s been a fair amount of critical attention to the relation between Foucault’s writings on power in the 1970s and Althusser’s famous writing on ideological and repressive state apparatuses (this point is pursued in several of the essays in the excellent collection Marx & Foucault: lectures, usages, confrontations (2016)). There’s been less attention to the 1960s, though. As Jean-François Bert notes in his contribution to the anthology, Foucault broke with the PCF in 1952, and was generally horrified by the institutionalization of Marxism in universities and the way its vulgarization led historians in particular to import and rigidly apply ideas like mode of production and determinsim (110). However, Althusser was an exception to this critique, precisely because he tried to rid Marxism of phenomenology and humanism. It seems to me that it’s very much in the background of Foucault’s perhaps surprising choice of Marx in “Author.”
I’ll say more next time on Althusser and how he figures Marx’s break with humanism, before returning to the Foucault.
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