By Gordon Hull
Last time, I set up the context for reading Foucault’s remarks on Marx in “Author” in the context of Althusser, as well as some of the basic contours of the Althusserian anti-humanist Marx. Here, I want to pursue that line further. Althusser writes against the growing popularity of a humanist Marx, which is derived from Marx’s early writings. Althusser (and his circle) want to read an anti-humanist Marx, which requires that the early writings be successfully contained. At stake in this project is thus both a question of the content of Marx, but, perhaps even more importantly, a strategy for reading Marx.
According to the Althusserian reading, Marx had a humanist phase that he abandoned as he reached theoretical maturity, a moment that Althusser calls – explicitly following Bachelard (For Marx, 32) – an “epistemological rupture.” The turning point, on this argument, is found in the “Theses on Feuerbach” or German Ideology. For a sense of how the argument works, consider Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital, in which Rancière says he will be tracking “the passage from the ideological discourse of the young Marx to the scientific discourse of Capital.” (1973 Maspero edition, p. 8).
Leaving aside the (problematic, on Foucauldian grounds) usage of ”scientific,” note that Rancière in that text distinguishes precisely between starting with an essence and a phenomenon. The stakes are a reversal of humanism, and a move toward showing that human essences are the product of social categories. Here are two exemplary passages. Rancière writes :
“In the [1844] Manuscripts, economic objects are treated in an amphibolic manner [the reference is to Kantian aporiae] because the theory of wealth is covered by a Feuerbachian theory of the sensible. The sensible character of objects of labor looks back to their human character, to their status as objects of a constitutive subjectivity. Here [in Capital] the objects are not taken as human-sensible. They are sensible-suprasensible. This contradiction in the mode of their appearance recalls the type of objectivity they fall under. Their character as sensible-suprasensible is the form in which they appear as manifestations of their social character” (47).
The focus on the sensible should of course also be read as an indictment of phenomenology. Rancière continues that “the union of the sensible and suprasensible expresses here the very form of appearance of value and not its speculative translation. In the Manuscript of 1843, this union is presented as an operation of speculation” (49).
Whatever one thinks of the substance of the Althusserian reading and how one understand’s Marx’s break with humanism, a few things should be clear.
First, the move is very similar to the one Foucault wants to make: we need to look at things on the surface, and discover their grammar and conditions for appearance. Rancière’s Marx does this for commodities, and Foucault attempts the same move for discourse. Althusser’s argument in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) shows the way in which this process is one of historicization and specificity of context. The target is Hegelian dialectical concepts – in particular Aufhebung, which Althusser says ends up producing only itself (see, e.g., For Marx [=FM] 115). Althusser ends up in a strange liminal position, managing to insist on both Marxist determinism and historical specificity. Commenting on base-superstructure relations, he thus retains some of the language of the determination of everything “in the last instance” by the economy, but also pulls a lot of the rug out from under it: “the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state” and “from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.” That is, “the idea of a ‘pure and simple non-overdetermined contradiction is, as Engels said of the economist turn of phrase ‘meaningless, abstract, senseless’” (FM 113). Any contradiction, then, needs a full theory of historical and other circumstances to explain why, for example, revolution happened in Russia and not elsewhere. He tries to thread the needle as follows:
“Here, then, are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History ‘asserts itself’ through the multiform world of the superstructures, from local tradition to international circumstance” (FM 112).
Second, in the terms of Foucault’s “Author,” Marxism is fundamentally changed by this activity; that it can be so changed – that it can sustain a reading simultaneously political and scientific – suggests its difference from the more purely scientific texts of a Galileo. Althusser’s engagement with Marx’s early writings convinced him that how one read them changed how one understood Marxism. Interpretation is accordingly partly in the service of politics or practice. Althusser views the effort to promote the early writings as an effort to promote an ethical version of Marx whose theory was compatible with social democracy (FM 51-2).
In a 1960 review of an anthology of papers on the young Marx, Althusser develops some of the apparatus that we see Foucault apply in “Author.” Recall that Foucault speaks of the author-function as one of the reduction in meaning, in almost Platonic form. In his review, Althusser distinguishes two strategies for reading Marx. One, which he calls “analytico-teleological” and says trades on a “naïve immediacy” (FM 56; this term will recur), depends the decomposition of Marx’s texts into elements (materialist, idealist, etc.) even at the acknowledged expense of an inability to explain what they mean as a whole. After this decomposition, the texts are then read as anticipations of the fully-developed theory to come: Marx’s early writings are understood as already-on-the-way to the late ones.
In broad outlines, the move is against what what Deleuze calls Platonism insofar as it is a move against locating social phenomena in an eidos or separating them from the “swarm” of differences in which they appear; rather, the move is to the contexts of those differences. The Marx example shows how this is a political move; as a rejection of Platonism, it shows how the Platonic move is itself political and thus why Deleuze insists on the political and moral basis for Platonism as logically prior to its epistemology.
The third strategy of reading insists on the unity of these texts, and insists further on understanding the young Marx not as the author-progenitor of (mature) Marxism, but the text’s “author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history” (FM 63). Althusser resists reading in terms of juridical authors: Marx’s “fate in the years from 1840 to 1845 was not decided by an ideal debate between characters called Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Hess, etc.” Rather, it was decided by “concrete ideological characters on whom the ideological context imposed determinate features which do not necessarily coincide with their literal historical identities” (FM 65). At the risk of deploying some terminology out of context, one might say that one is looking for a beginning that is not an “origin” in the Hegelian sense (or bourgeois: recall Marx’s own critique of the way political economy relies on a narrative of an originary state). Althusser:
“The fact is that there was a beginning, and that to work out the history of Marx’s particular thoughts their movement must be grasped at the precise instant when that concrete individal the Young Marx emerged into the thought world of his own time, to think in it in his turn, and to enter into the exchange and debate with the thoughts of his time which was to be his whole life as an ideologue” (FM 64).
We are thus looking at structures, not filiations, and the goal of identifying the author is to immerse him into those structures. One needs to understand both the “problematic” of a particular (set of) text(s) and the “ideological field” in which it “emerges and grows [surgit et se développe]” (FM 70 / Pour Marx 66). He explains:
“This interrelation of the particular problematic of the thought of the individual under consideration with the particular problematics of the thoughts belonging to the ideological field allows of a decision as to its author’s specific difference, i.e., whether a new meaning has emerged [si un sens nouveau surgit]” (FM 70)
This sense of trying to understand, in a non-eidetic way, the emergence of something is of course central to Deleuze’s undertsanding of difference and the need to attend to the “swarm” surrounding it. The language itself will also soon enough be appropriated by Foucault to make a point about the kind of emergence central to genealogical inquiry. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he proposes that “Entstehung designates emergence, the moment of arising. It is the principle and the singular law of an apparition [Entstehung désigne plutôt l'émergence, le point de surgissement. C'est le principe et la loi singulière d'une apparition]” (Foucault Reader 83, trans. revised)
Of course, this is not the same as Foucault’s emphasis on the need to understand what sort of societal structures support the political function of authorship, but insofar as it is to recognize that the social structures of Hegelianism in 1840 Germany are productive of certain kinds of subjectivity (“Young Marx” or “Feuerbach”) even among those who rebel against it… is to be a lot closer to the kinds of questions Foucault wants to ask than it is to any sort of humanism. As Foucault says in 1970 of the Nietzschean gloss on Entstehung, “emergence is always produced in a particular state of forces [dans un certain état des forces]” (Foucault Reader, 83, trans. revised).
Next time I’ll finish with the digression into Althusser.
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