Hello everyone, this is session 8 of Marx and Philosophy led by Professor Ray Brassier and I'm going to pass the mic to Brassier. Okay, thanks Victor. Okay, so this is our final session. It's the eighth of eight sessions. Today we're going to look at the work of Louis Althusser, who is obviously kind of maybe one of the two or three preeminent Marxist philosophers of the second half of the 20th century and really famous for his anti-Hegelian interpretation of Marx, or his insistence that
Marx's thought, although dialectical, is essentially anti-Hegelian. This will be the topic of today's session. So last week we looked at the thought of Lukács, who is in a way the preeminent Hegelian Marxist of the first half of the 20th century. So the contrast, I hope, you know today's session will I guess you know elaborate the stakes of a fundamental you know disputes between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian readings of Marx. So the text we're going to focus on is Contradiction and Overdetermination
published in well it's included in four marks it was written in 62 but published in 1965 with the collection for marks there's a handout the handout is quite long but what we'll do is we'll do the first six pages of the handouts which which focus on contradiction over determination, and then we'll deal with its last four or five pages, which include excerpts from Reading Capital, Part 4, Chapters 8 and 9. I didn't assign those, I didn't ask you to read those because, you know, they're kind
ancillary to the issue I want to focus on, but some of the things he says there are elaborate on the concept of overdetermination, which is really fundamental to his anti-Hegelian interpretation of Marx. So Althusser begins contradiction over determination with a question about how, in what sense Marx's materialism amounts to an inversion of Hegel's absolute idealism. So there's this famous
quotation, which I'm sure you've all heard before, from Marx's preface to the first volume of Capital, where he describes himself as extracting the rational kernel of the dialectic from its mystical shell. So Althusser wants to ask what is the, how are we to understand this metaphor, the relationship between rational kernel and mystical shell? And more, is Marx merely, is Marx's dialectical materialism merely an inversion of Hegel's dialectical idealism and Althusser is arguing that it is not and that's this is a serious
misunderstanding. So we'll begin with the this is the first extract the first quotation on the handout number one so Althusser writes the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself, that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic, for example a system, but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough therefore to disengage it from its first wrapping, the system, to free it. must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself a Gaelian in principle."
Grunelacher. Okay, so what Althusser here is doing is he's criticizing, he's rejecting familiar interpretations of the distinction between rational kernel and mystical shell. And Engels, for one, suggested that the dialectical method was the rational kernel, whereas the speculative system was the mystical shell. So one way of understanding this distinction is by distinguishing between method and system, or dialectics and speculation, and to say that the former is the rational kernel, which can be materialistically recoded,
whereas the latter is the mystical envelope, which is to be discarded. But Althusser thinks that this distinction is not possible. And he thinks that the logic of Hegelian dialectics, which is to say that the logic of determinate negation, is intrinsically idealist. So that Althusser's proposal is that Marx's theoretical revolution vis-à-vis Hegel and Hegelianism is to invent a new dialectical logic, a new logic of the dialectic.
And it's this which Althusser is concerned to elaborate in this essay. His whole account operates around a series of fundamental distinctions. First of all, the distinction between the whole and the totality. The notion of the whole, for Althusser, Hegel's idealism is bound up with the privileging of the whole, or rather with an understanding of the relationship between whole and part as being one of expression. So an idealist dialectic is a dialectic in which the whole expresses itself in the part.
By way of contrast, the materialist dialectic is a dialectic that articulates the totality and the moment or the singular. And the relationship between the totality and its singularity is non-expressive. So there's no... this also implies a rejection of what... of the metaphorics of interiority and exteriority, which Arthusser sees as operative in Hegelianism.
and in a way the whole, you know, the latent ideological privileging of organic unity, which Althusser sees as part and parcel of the ideology of idealism. so against this organicism this expressive organicism Althusser is going to kind of you know elaborate a conception of you know a non-expressive dialectic of totality and singularity and the logic of overdetermination is the logic that articulates these two terms
It's also tied, this is why Althusser will also try to kind of contrast what he calls the the causality of structure to the causality of the whole. And in the final moments of the essay, this is the key contrast or the key moment of his critical account. So, okay, so basically the whole of Althusser's paper orbits around an example, okay? He gives the example of,
in order to kind of to illuminate the logic of overdetermination he gives the example of the Russian Revolution, the October Revolution and he basically wants to say that there's in order to understand this the dynamics of this revolutionary events we have two there's two schemas for conceptualizing it we have the schema which distinguishes between primary and secondary
contradictions okay the primary contradiction this distinction Altuzer is drawing from Mao's text on contradiction. What Altuzer is doing here is he's kind of, in a way, producing a systematic theoretical elaboration of the distinctions sketched by Mao in his 1936 text. So the distinction between primary and secondary contradiction is the distinction between labor and capital as primary contradiction and the
contradictions between elements of the superstructure the superstructure being in the kind of the vulgar Marxist schema the set of juridical, legal, you know, cultural institutions which are anchored in the economic base. So if you remember the distinction between infrastructure or base and superstructure, the economy is supposed to be the base, the mode of production, and everything that's going
on in the rest of the social field is basically determined by the mechanisms governing the mode of production. So the secondary contradiction is between elements contained within the ideological superstructure. So the primary contradiction is between the base and the superstructure and secondary contradictions are enveloped within the superstructure. But it's this simplistic schema that Althusser's account of overdetermination is going to complicate. So here's an example. In section number three on the handout, Althusser
discusses the situation of Russia in 1917. That's quite a long quote but I'll read the whole of it because it's actually very illuminating for the rest of his account okay so he writes in this system of imperialist entered the weakest point the weakest link in the chain of capitalist states the Great War had of course precipitated and aggravated this weakness but it had not by itself created it already even in defeat the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia this weakness was the product of this special feature, the accumulation and exacerbation of all the
historical contradictions then possible in a single state. Contradictions of a regime of feudal exploitation at the dawn of the 20th century, attempting ever more ferociously amidst mounting threats to rule, with the aid of a deceitful priesthood over an enormous mass of ignorant peasants, circumstances which dictated a singular association of the peasant revolt with the workers revolution, contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their regions, oil fields etc., contradictions of colonial exploitation and wars imposed on whole peoples, a gigantic contradiction between the stages of development of capitalist methods of production, particularly in respect to proletarian concentration.
The largest factory in the world at the time was the Puchelov Works at Petrograd, with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries and the medieval state of the countryside. The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves, the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic militaristic police Tsarism, the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy, the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the Tsar, the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchist anarchistic leftism in short as precisely these details show the privileged situation of Russia show with respect to the possible revolution was a maturation and exacerbation of historical
contradictions that would have been incomprehensible in any country which was not as Russia was simultaneously at least a century behind the imperialist world and at the peak of its development. It was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation. Okay, so Althusser's argument here is that what we see in Russia in October 17 is an accumulation of contradictions. So Althusser lists a whole series of contradictions And the fundamental schema that all these contradictions exemplify is the opposition
between advancements and retardation. This is why Russia was the weakest link in the capitalist chain in 1917 because it is simultaneously one of the most advanced capitalist nations. It has the largest factory in the world at the time, but also the most backward. In other words, it retains a feudal aristocracy and a feudal rural peasantry. So all these contradictions, the contradiction between a kind of a progressive urban bourgeoisie
on the one hand and a reactionary feudal aristocracy, the contradiction between a peasantry you know a kind of a rural peasantry and an urban proletariat the contradiction between reformism you know bourgeois democratic reformism on the one hand and reactionary authoritarianism. On the other hand, the contradiction between increasing democratization and increasing surveillance, authoritarianism, etc. All these are examples of contradictions. But they're contradictions between the more and the less.
between the contradictions between progress and reaction and Althusser's claim is that these contradictions are huge in Russia in 1917 than in any other capitalist country so this is why it is the weakest link and it's the weakest link what the schema that's Althusser is working with here is a structuralist schema in it's it's it's kind of it's not explicitly kind of foregrounded it is in the argument of the text but it's really fundamental to understanding the
logic of his account. A structure is organized in a way and crystallized around a term which is anomalous, has an anomalous status within the structure. And this term is mystic structuralism, the kind of uh you know the uh the floating signifier you know or the supernumerary signifier in a way which anchors uh the um the structure in a way which there's a signifier which doesn't
doesn't have a determinant signified because uh the function of the signifier is to signify the the structures relationship to the order of the signified so every every structure is structured around a supernumerate term which does not itself have a determinate signification because it's it's the the signifier for the order of signification itself it's significant between signifier and signified and this term this is why this term can't be you know understood can be
situated you know on either side of the the fundamental divide between signifier and signified because it's that which actually articulates the distinction itself. Now it's also often called the vanishing mediator. In structuralist literature this kind of anomalous term is always given, can be characterized in lots of different ways but it has this you know this privilege in that it is it's an element within the structure which is not
which is both you know inside and outside the structure both of the structure and not of the structure so in a way it's a it's a contradictory element but it's contradictory this cannot be elucidated within the order of you know it's cannot be elucidated within the order of the signified which is proper to the structure this is why it's not simply a conceptual contradiction this is why it's not an ideal contradiction it's the contradiction that anchors the relationship between the ideal and the real now this is very important not only for Althusser but for
for Lacan and also for those of you who know Zizek you'll be familiar with this but this is so this is what the in a way if you know Badiou you could say that this is also the it's the evental site so Russia is the evental site in something an element which is both you know which is presented you know by the state of the situation sorry which is presented but not represented okay okay now this means then okay the second so this this is why Russia in a way
concentrates you know in a way both you know concentrates both what is in excess of the structure and what is subtracted from the structure it's both more and less it's both more and less than a regular capitalist state and it's precisely because of this Althusser will argue that it over determines the primary contradiction between capital and labor so the argument is as follows is that according to a kind of a vulgar Marxist schema all you know
All superstructural contradictions are determined by the primary contradiction between labor and capital, or between forces and relations of production. And Althusser's argument is going to be that actually the primary contradiction has no existence independently of its over-determination in this complex system of secondary contradictions. contradictions so in other words the far from the primary contradiction determining
the secondary contradictions or standing you know one standing to the other as essence to phenomenon it's actually the so-called secondary contradictions the superstructural contradictions which, as he will put it, over-determined the primary contradiction, but actually determine the primary contradiction. The primary contradiction has no existence independently of this, of its secondary over-determination. Okay, so this is, also there's arguments. So this is why he will write in immediately form, So the contrast is between, this is why the revolution happens in Russia and not in Germany,
as all good orthodox Marxists would have expected, because in Russia, the conditions, sorry, in Germany, the conditions seemed more propitious to a proletarian revolution than in Russia. But Althusser's argument is that this is precisely why, It's precisely because the predominance of the primary contradiction vis-à-vis the secondary contradictions in Germany is merely ideal that the revolution is in fact precluded from occurring. The contradiction in the German situation remains nearly ideal and not real.
This is why Altuzer writes at the final sentence in number four, the real contradiction was so much one with its circumstances in Russia that it was only discernible, identifiable, and manipulable through them and in them. okay so he writes then in number five just to kind of to elaborate on this basic claim the whole Marxist revolution experience shows that if the general contradiction it has already been specified the contradiction between forces of production relations of production essentially embodied in the contradiction which we between two antagonistic classes is sufficient to define the situation when
revolution is a task of the day it cannot of its own simple direct power induce a revolutionary situation nor a fortiori situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution if this contradiction is to become active in the strongest sense to become a ruptural principle there must be an accumulation of circumstances and currents so that whatever their origin and sense and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense or even its direct opponents they fuse into a ruptural unity so the final sentence in five is so such a situation
presupposes not only the fusion of the two basic conditions into a single national crisis but each condition considered abstractly by itself presupposes the fusion of an accumulation of contradictions. So the logic of over-determination is the fusion of a multiplicity of so-called secondary contradictions into a ruptural unity. So it's the concentration of an array of contradictions in a way that precipitates the primary contradiction and creates what Althusser calls a ruptural unity.
So in other words, in a way, this is how contradiction is actualized or becomes real. so and then he continues in in number six passage number six is him elaborating on this this idea so I'll just read out the senses in bold here this means that if the differences that constitute each of the instances in play manifested in the accumulation discussed by Lenin merge into a real unity okay the differences being these fundamental contradictions the contradictions cited in the
discussion of Russia above so if these differences merge into a real unity they are not dissipated as pure phenomena in the internal unity of a simple contradiction. This means for Althusser that this concatenation of differences, the difference between rural peasantry and urban proletariat, the difference between enlightened bourgeoisie and reactionary aristocracy, the difference between secularism and Christianity,
etc. etc. all these differences are not merely forms of appearance of the primary contradiction between labor and capital or between productive forces and relations. On the contrary, this again so-called primary contradiction is crystallized or distilled in this concatenation of contradictions or differences. So this is why they're not, these differences are not merely how the form of appearance
of the fundamental or underlying or essential, the essential contradiction is constituted in and through these differences. It's this concatenation of differences, this unstable combination of heterogeneous differences in a way which totalizes the situation and gives it its ruptural unity. Then he writes again, Althusser writes at the foot of number six, the contradiction is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found inseparable from
its formal conditions of existence and even from the instances it governs it is radically affected by them determining but also determined in one in the same movement and determined by the various levels and instances of the source it might be it might be called over determined in its principle So this is where now the contrast with what Althusser alleges is the Hegelian logic of determination by contradiction arises. Okay, so there's a there's a contrast here between essence and existence. Okay, for for I'll choose their idealism is
basically understands relationship between essence and existence as being one of expression essence expresses itself in existence. Okay essence is necessary existence is accidental okay so the it's this distinction between essence and existence is also coded in terms of the distinction between necessity and contingency or between universality and particularity what Althusser is saying here is that the essential contradiction between labor and capital is inseparable from its accidental existence in the total structure
of the social body. It's inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, from the instances it governs. So it's both these differences, all the differences once again between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, between the peasantry and the proletariat, between the town and the country, autocracy and democracy all these differences are both are not merely manifestations or the way in which the primary the essential contradiction is
realized they actually determine it thus the primary the essential contradiction is determined by what Al-Zhuzer calls the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates and so this is what he means by over-determination to the logic of over-determination is one where you don't deny the distinction between in a way essence and accidents or between the primary and the secondary contradiction but you the claim is rather that the essence is nothing but its accident station or that the you know the primary
or fundamental contradiction is nothing over and above its super structural coagulation or crystallization so this is what he means by over determination according to what the logic of over determination is materialist rather than idealist because it insists on the inseparability of essence and existence or necessity and contingency and say that what is you know the only necessity there is is the necessity of the accidental realization of the universal
or of the fundamental so now so page of the of the paper so Altsus there then develops a contrast with the Hegelian logic of expression or Hegel's expressive dialectics okay so according to altruz there for in the Higgins idealist dialectic there is you know the the whole is animated by contradiction okay but the movements the dialectical movements is from unity to rupture and
and then to the reestablishment of unity. According to Althusser, and again this is, I think, a kind of a caricature of Hegel, but it's the caricature that Althusser needs to set up in order for his contrast to be effective. So according to the authors there, Hegel's logic of contradiction presupposes an originary unity, an originary organic unity, which is then split or fissured into two opposing or contradictory moments.
Each moment has its opposite within itself. Each is contradictory because it has its own opposite within itself. But then the next stage, so each negates its own opposite by seeing its relationship to its own opposite as external as opposed to internal but then you know when it realizes that its relationship to its nothing but its relationship to its own opposite when it sees that the relationship to its opposite or to its
negative is intrinsic and constitutive for it, it internalizes this superficial exteriority and negates the negation of its opposites. So then you have the movement from negation to the negation of negation, which is what determines the contradiction. Hegel you've got you've got a moment of unity then you have a contradiction but in a way a contradiction which is not properly determined because it's a mere opposition and it's only when each term of the opposition is reflected within
each pole each antagonistic pole of this opposition that the opposition is turned into a contradiction and this is you know this is in a way the kind of the interiorization of negativity, of the negative opposition, and this is the moment which determines the contradiction. The contradiction becomes in and for itself. This is the negation of negation. But the point is that, according to Artuzer, this negation of negation reestablishes a unity, re-establishes a unity which now contains its previous moment. It contains the division, the divided moments that, you know, as in a way,
integral parts or component this is why according to so I'll to say this is a the the movement of determinate negation is governed by this privileging of organic unity so that the you know the decomposition of the whole is always only a momentary kind of hiatus which will be consummated in you know the the reinteriorization of the parts within the whole and of the whole within the part. And this, in a way, this amplifies and consolidates the integrity of the whole,
a whole which has now properly ingested or incorporated its parts. So this is Hegel's expressive or dialectic. This is why, according to Althusser, in number 7 he writes, this This is why this expressive dialectic is a circle of circles governed by consciousness. A circle of circles, consciousness has only one center which solely determines it. It would need circles with another center than itself, decentered circles, for it to be affected at its center by their effectivity, in short, for its essence to be over-determined by them. It's because the essence of consciousness is contradictory, because consciousness is
what it is not and is not what it is, according again to this vulgar characterization of Hegel. So that it's ultimately self-consciousness which externalizes itself, is alienated in its other but then is reunited with its other. But in this moment of reunification it retains this moment of internalization. It reincorporates what was previously externalized. And this This is the logic of, this is what governs the logic of history according to Hegel.
This is why in Hegel's historical schemas, every kind of sociohistorical epoch is crystallized in a figure of consciousness. So the example he gives from Hegel's philosophy of history is relationship between Rome, okay, you know, Roman history or the Roman epoch as a phase of, you know, the world spirit is crystallized in the consciousness of the Stoic or Stoic consciousness. because it's the stoic consciousness that concentrates the contradiction,
the essential contradiction that governs Rome or Roman existence. As he puts it, it's a contradiction inherent to the concept of citizenship. To be a Roman is to be a citizen, but the essence of citizenship is contradictory because it's a merely abstract or legal conception of citizenship which misses the concreteness of subjectivity.
so as he writes this is the the final sentence on number seven so all of Rome's complexity fails to over determine the contradiction in the simple Roman principle which is merely the internal essence of this infinite historical wealth so the infinite historical wealth is concentrated in the consciousness of the stoic which concentrates the the essential contradiction and this is why then he continues in number eight the simplicity of Hegelian contradiction is never more than a reflection of the simplicity of this internal principle of a people that is not its material reality but its most abstract ideology
so this logic is idealist for Althusser because artisan's contradiction is enveloped by and enveloped in consciousness. And in a way, it's the consciousness of a historical era, which embodies its contradictoriness. So in other words, contradiction is segregated within the medium of the ideal, necessarily for Hegel, because Hegel thinks that the contradiction between the real and the ideal is precisely what is to be dialectically superseded through this process of externalization and internalization.
Okay, so now, so this is the basic, according to, in Hegel, there's an essential contradiction. The essential contradiction is always expressed in a determinate figure of consciousness. So all these historical epochs are in a way specific embodiments of this primary or generic contradiction, which is intrinsic to the structure of self-consciousness, or what Hegel calls spirit.
So that means that the movement of spirits through history in each phase of spirits in a way expresses this essential contradiction, but then necessarily ushers in the succeeding phase of spirits. by, in a way, properly allowing this contradiction to develop to the point where it necessarily,
where it is necessarily superseded or negatively, determinately negated, as Hegel puts it. So the logic of determinate negation ensures in a way the internalization of between the predecessor and the successor. It's a logic of internalization, which means that the predecessor is incorporated by its successor, and therefore the successor also expresses the superseded content.
Every phase of consciousness retains and expresses its antecedent. so this is why it's the logic of determinate negation is cumulative and progressive according to our to once again no so the logic of over determination logic of over determination is not cumulative and it is non teleological this is why these ruptural unities if history in a way advances through these this crystallizations of primary contradictions the over
determination of the essential contradiction this over determination inaugurates a break or a rupture with the pre-existing situation. So this is why history then can only advance through breaks or discontinuities. And this is also why history is not governed by an essence, history is not governed by a kind of an overarching essence which expresses itself in a historical phase there are no historical phases there are merely these discontinuous history is essentially discontinuous because it
kind of it's it unfolds through these breaks okay through these these ruptures and breaks and these breaks there's no continuity or rather the continuity between the before and the after is never one of internalization which is also there will explain which this is why there can be there's never it can't be characterized as progress because there's always a kind of you know something is preserved in the break the break is never an absolute cancellation of what
came before something is preserved but it's preserved in a way which maintains the contradiction because the contradiction is not the kind of you know the cancellation the antagonism or of opposition but it merely it's you know, recrystallization in a new phase. So this is why the, you know, the logic of over-determination is not the supersession of opposition, but simply it's kind of, it's redistribution
or reorganization. Okay. Now, this is why, according to Althusser, Marx's, you know, alleged Marx's overturning of Hegel's idealist logic of contradiction isn't simply a kind of an inversion. And this is why in a way, this is why Althusser will now claim that what's wrong with vulgar Marxism or Marxist Economism is this assumption of simple inversion. Vulgar Marxism simply inverts the relationship between the primary and the secondary.
It simply claims that where Hegel's distinction between the state and civil society was in with a version of the distinction between civil society is the system of social needs and it corresponds to the dimension of the real, of material need, whereas the state corresponds to the domain of right or of the ideal. And in Hegel's famous or notorious thesis of the the cunning of reason, the state is the truth of civil society. In other words, what unfolds
at the level of material needs or of the real is itself simply a kind of an expression of the structure of the ideal or of what ought to be the case. So Autosar argues that the vulgar Marxist way of understanding Marx's correction of Hegel is simply an inversion of the relationship so that instead of civil society being subordinated to the state, the state becomes subordinated to civil society. of the ideal being said of the real being subordinated to the ideal the ideal knows merely seen as an excrescence or a kind of a manifestation of the real so
that you know yeah you know the states and the ideological superstructure is merely an expression of the economic infrastructure this is a mistake and he writes he writes a number this economism is merely the inversion of idealism so he writes a number 11 the logical destination of this temptation is the exact mirror image of the Hegelian dialectic or in number 12 he writes no actually no I'm not going to read number 12 I'll just read number 13
on the one hand determination in the last instance by the economic mode of production on the other the relative autonomy of the superstructure and their specific effectivity so the claim that the economy determines ideology in the last instance in a way is merely this is a pseudo-materialism because it's merely the inversion of idealism. And materialism for Altruzor can't simply be the inversion of idealism. It's not simply the inversion of the relationship between the real and the ideal, or between the base and the superstructure. so the logic of over determination as he writes in number 14 is inevitable and thinkable as soon
as the real existence of the forms of the soup superstructure and the national and international conjuncture has been recognized an existence largely specific and autonomous and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon so the existence of these you know the existence of the superstructure that as the existence of the oppositions and differences that compose the superstructure are not merely phenomenal manifestations of an underlying nominal essence or an underlying economic essence They have an autonomous, independent and irreducible existence. Which is why, as he puts it, the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state in history.
These instances, the superstructures, etc., are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or when the time comes. as his pure phenomena, to scatter before his majesty the economy as he strides along the royal road of the dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes. So, there is no determination. the logic of contradictory determination means understanding that the economy is not the ultimate determinant
of ideology or superstructural phenomenon on the contrary we have to think the complex the complex unity of essence and appearance of necessity and contingency, but also of the economic, of the mode, forces and relations of production, and of the ideological. And this is the goal of Artuzer's, in a way, structural Marxism, in a way to understand
the complex and antagonistic unity, the contradictory unity of base and superstructure, or of forces and relations of production on the one hand and ideological differences, ideological determinations on the other. Can I have a question? Yes. So for Althusser, what does this mean in terms of the likelihood of communism actually coming into existence in a concrete way as a new mode of production?
Like, does it turn into a little bit more of, like, a regulative ideal kind of? You know, like when it's, you know, in Marx, there's kind of this sense that, you know, the expansion of productive force ultimately requires a sort of new mode of production, and that's potentially kind of ineluctable. and this kind of seems a lot less optimistic about that. Okay, good. So the question is about, okay, so according to again I think a superficial interpretation of Marx, so Marx, as we saw last week, remember Marx Remember Marx thinks that he calls capitalism a moving contradiction.
There's a moving contradiction, the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, which is, what is this contradiction? Well, capital is compelled to extract greater and greater magnitudes of surplus value from an ever diminishing number of laborers. Capital wants to maximize profit. It wants to make more and more money from fewer and fewer workers. It wants to maximize profits while minimizing wages.
So all these are different ways of expressing the same essential contradiction. So this is why it's precipitated towards moments of crisis. But I think as Michael Heinrich rightly points out, whereas in the Grundrisse Marx, the famous passage about the moving contradictions from the Grundrisse, the Grundrisse and their march seems to kind of you know intimate that he believes that there will be that there's a there will be a kind of a you know a final kind of a terminal crisis which will usher in the kind of the transition to communism okay the capitalist mode of production is you know contradictory
and therefore will usher in the conditions, you know, the transition to communism is necessitated by this internal contradiction. Now, it's implausible to think that Marx really believed if that was the case, then we could just sit back. And we just sit back and let, you know, the iron laws of historical development unfold. So we just wait for the final crisis of capitalism to arrive, and then we act. So this is clearly, I think, not what Marx believed. He doesn't believe that there will be a kind of, there's no guarantee of a definitive crisis that will usher in communism.
There can be a definitive crisis which will simply kind of usher in barbarism. So, something has to be done in order for the transition for communism to occur. And this is why the contradiction must be determined. The primary contradiction between capital and labor must be practically determined in a revolutionary act. This is Leninism. And Althusser, you know, Lenin is the key kind of interlocutor for him here. He thinks that it's Lenin who understands in a way that the primary contradiction,
you can't just wait, sit back and wait for the primary contradiction to evolve to the point at which global proletarian revolution becomes inevitable. That moment will never arrive. you have to in a way seize the moment seize the opportunity for a revolutionary intervention within uh you know uh you know a localized you know state of affairs a localized um you know historical situation um so in a way this is why you know marx is the dialectic of theory and practice there has to be a revolutionary agent capital itself is
not a revolutionary agent it revolutionizes the means of production but only up to a point it will also forever forestall try to foresaw the definitive crisis and it will only revolutionize production and productivity to maximize to keep maximizing profits so a true you know the the appropriation of the means of production you know you know that which is you know the the real meaning of revolutionizing the means of production that in you know that's requires a revolutionary intervention you know the season you know the the
expropriation of the expropriators and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the classical schema okay these are all acts carried out by you know by revolutionaries okay for the revolutionary class so Althusser is saying Althusser is trying to defend the possibility of revolution in the wake of the disaster of actually existing socialism, in the wake of Stalinism. So in other words, he's trying to say that the Russian, the October Revolution was a revolutionary intervention, an attempt
to seize the means of production, and ultimately, but it didn't lead to communism. Okay, communism was not realized for historical reasons. So, in a way, his account is a way of defending the necessity of the October Revolution, as opposed to those who would say oh Lenin shouldn't have done it see you can if you're the kind of Marxist that Althusser is criticizing is the kind of in a way that kind of the historical determinist who will simply dismiss the Russian Revolution as being premature they'll say the time was not yet right
so therefore the reason why the Russian Revolution went wrong and why communism was not successfully realized was because the conditions were not right objectively so therefore this is why it went wrong but in order to believe that you have to believe that there is there's a moment at which the conditions for revolution are right there's an objective circumstance in which you can you know engage in revolution and be guaranteed to succeed and Altsuzer thinks that this is just nonsense, he thinks that this is ludicrous. So in a way he's trying to, he's saying that there is no objective circumstance in which revolution is bound
to succeed or bound to fail. He's saying that because it's improperly understood, Marx's account in a way leaves necessitates the structure you know the the capitalist structure is necessarily incomplete and always you know invites a subjective intervention by way this is a kind of a feature of our structures are structuralism there's a kind of a dialectic of structure and subject here the claim is that you know if you identify revolutionary subjectivation
unfolds through identifying you know not the weakest link in you know the the capitalist totality which allows you to try and transform it so the claim is that capitalism is a totality but a totality and this is very important a totality is open not closed the difference between a totality and a whole is that a whole is constantly you know recomposing its unity by integrating its parts or by integrating what is external to it. For Althusser, a totality and the
capitalist totality is necessarily incomplete and unstable. This is why it's always susceptible to transformation. But his point is only that there is no no underlying the there is no logic there is no dialectical logic that guarantees a transition from capitalism to communism because the relationship between modes of production is not one of determinate negation he that communism is not simply the determinate negation of capitalism in the hegelians and what he takes to be the Hegelian sense. Rather, communism is the overdetermination of the
contradiction which constitutes capitalism, the contradiction between forces and relations of production. But this over-determination is, doesn't in a way, it, you know, it creates a new totality which is also incomplete and unstable. So I guess what Althusser is saying is that communism is an ever-present kind of opportunity. It's not something, you know, the transition to the communist mode of production is not inscribed in the fabric of reality.
It's not guaranteed by the laws of historical development. It depends on unpredictable historical circumstances so communism is always possible you know and always impossible at the same time because the difference between the possible and the impossible can't be you know adjudicated on the basis of what we know about the world because there's always something that evades our knowledge
because the totality is necessarily incomplete and it's not all okay this is why there's always something that remains unknown, you know, there's always a kind of, there are always kind of anomalous or completely unpredictable factors which make, you know, some, a revolutionary transformation possible because the difference between the possible and the impossible cannot be adjudicated on the basis of knowledge of the whole precisely because you know the capitalism is not a whole it's it's a kind of a contradictory totality so in a way out to there is optimistic actually he's optimistic
I think he's trying to kind of his whole account is trying to explain how to rearticulate the dialectic of subject and object so that you know there is you know history is not just kind of unfolding according to this predetermined kind of teleology so that it's always there's always something that can be done and its success or failure is can only be you know retrospectively adjudicated a little bit like a regulative ideal in the content sense or
something but there's also this kind of miraculous potentiality or something sounds like in the sense of an evental site or there there being something that could happen that we just don't know quite what it is or fundamentally can't conceive of it in a situation I guess as a quick follow-up it's probably also sounds kind of like a naive question, but it sounds like the logic of overdetermination would then also not be able to say that over the course of a series of failed revolutions we're gradually growing closer to communism either. No, no, no. So no, you never know, you're never, you can't say you're
getting closer to it. There's no fixed point from which you could judge how near or how far you are from communism. And in a way that's okay and that's I think that is a problem actually. I mean I think that's you know we I see you know Althusser has this famous phrase you know history is a process without a subject. So history is you know it's not it's not a whole it's not kind of it doesn't have a kind of an organic unity which is expressed at each successive phase it's a series of you know it's a kind of a vast incomplete structure
which has whose phases are articulated through discontinuities and as he puts The fundamental concept for understanding history, or Marx's contribution to transforming our understanding of history, is the notion of a mode of production. history is the history of modes of production but modes of production can't be serially kind of narrated in other words you can't string along successive modes of production like beats on a string basically
so it's very it is close I mean I think you know bad but you gets a lot I think he gets a lot more from Althusser than is sometimes acknowledged although his what I think what he really develops what he thinks is missing and also there's a theory of the subject in other words what's in order for Althusser's account to make sense you need an account of subjectivation which Althusser doesn't never properly develop partly because he thinks that the category of subjectivity is ideological so he talks a lot about about practice of a revolutionary practice of a theoretical practice but for Althusser but there's
no but the subject of practice is left you know unelucidated in in in Althusser And that's one of the things that can have bad use trying to get the supplements. Thanks for that, Peter. Okay, actually, well, maybe I'll just say a couple of things. things and I think we could almost I think we could have a break shortly but I just want to yeah in terms of this account of you know the materials
concept of history yes this is on page okay I'm not I didn't want to I wasn't going to discuss this point specifically but on page 8 of the handout number 19 this is also altruzor credits Marx with a large deploying a truly materialist notion of history history is a fundamental concept for understanding history is the concept of mode of production but a mode of production is a complex structure okay so he writes in number 19 it's a it's a it's a structure which comprises different elements labor power workers production instruments of
production etc and he writes to obtain the different modes of production these different elements do have to be combined but by using specific modes of combination or verbindingen which are only meaningful in the peculiar nature of the result of the combinatorie this result being the real production which are property possession disposition enjoyment community etc thus Marxism is not historicism since the Marxist concept of history depends on the principle of the variation of the forms of this combination so what he's saying is that you know history is the history of modes of production but modes of
production are distinguished according to the the ways in which they combine these fundamental structural features so that there are every mode of production represents a specific you know you know combination of these factors okay maybe we should have a pause now if we have a pause now then we can continue because then I guess I want to just deal with pages 11 to 14 on the handout so maybe
if we have a kind of a five-minute break now and then we can carry on for me it's okay oh there's a question from Artem it can be argued that Alters are provided a kind of syntax theory of history than some sort of semantic theory that Orthodox Marxists do? Yes, in a way, again, he wants to say that history is a structure and it's a structure of structures and Marx's account identifies the structural elements of these structures. So Marx says that
you know a mode of production there's no such thing as production in general production in general is a methodological concept and you can you know arrive at a concept of production in general by identifying you know the structural invariance common to different modes of production and this is what one of the tasks of historical materialism um so yes it's you know Althusser would be, I mean, you could, syntactical, yeah, if you, if by syntax you mean, you know, a logic of combination, but you have to be careful here because the logic, the combinatorial, there is no kind of, there is no general logic of combination that governs all modes of production.
This is why there's no logic of history as such. so I think the analogy you propose is interesting but yes it's it's not syntax there is no invariant syntax of history or R2-0 okay but um maybe we could pause now and then stop for five minutes and then continue. Okay. Right, okay.
Okay, shall we carry on? Yeah. Okay, well I see there's a question from Victor. Okay, I'll read this out. How does Al-Tazer's account of history remain Marxist? The references and the idiom are from the Marxist tradition, but political economy becomes completely dissolved in culture, and all that remains are domination and historical breaks. This sounds much more like Foucault than like Marx.
Well, yeah, I mean, anyone who reads, there's a lot of overlap or resonances between Althusser's work in this period and Foucault's early work, or certainly Foucault's archaeological kind of period. I mean, Luke, I mean, I guess your question is, is it possible to kind of to expunge all traces of Hegel from Marx without kind of, you know,
basically dissolving Marxism altogether. And I don't think it is. And I think actually Althusser ultimately gets himself into kind of a very bad, deprives himself of all sort of indispensable conceptual resources because of his, you know, I think mistaken desire desire to present marks or to reconstruct marks without any Hegel. The concept of structure is fundamental here.
So Althusser thinks, he talks about structure constantly and he wants to, in a way, to re-articulate the relationship between so-called the base and the superstructure, but as you say, in a way which makes the critique of political economy, or which seems to kind of evacuate the specifics of Marx's critique of political economy and most notoriously the analysis of the commodity form and of the relationship between commodities, money and value.
So in order for this for Althusser's kind of anti-Hegelian reading to work, he has to ignore the most Hegelian moments of Marx's analysis, which is the opening of the first volume of Capital with the analysis of the commodity. And I think you're right that he pays a heavy price for this and it means that in a way he… yeah, I think the traction, the theoretical traction that one obtains by retaining the categories of the critique of political economy
is lost because ultimately I think Althusser's structuralism is attenuated, is ultimately like, you know, he just doesn't, he relies on a model of structure which is partly inspired by linguistics but in a way also kind of disavows its debt to linguistic structures and precisely because it claims to be materialist. So I think Marx's, Althusser's notion of structure is fatally equivocal between a linguistic paradigm which it disavows
and a kind of a socioeconomic content which it can never properly articulate. So I think that the notion of structure that Althusser is working with, and I think in reading Capital, I think it's, despite his best efforts, he can't really substantiate the different components or the different strata of the historical structures that he's talking about so I mean you'll see you know I don't have time to go through but you know in the excerpt from reading capital on the handout from
part four you know he talks a lot about well here he goes in number 22 he says we said we Marx has to construct the concept of the economic and he says to construct the concept of the economic is to define it rigorously as a level instance a region of the structure of a mode of production it is therefore to define its peculiar site its extension and its limits within that structure and then he goes on there's no correct division and therefore no correct articulation except on condition of possessing and therefore constructing it's gone he talks a lot about constructing the concept of the economic and specifying its role within the structure, but he doesn't have the resources
to do so because he doesn't want to talk about commodities, money and value. Or at least he just wants to kind of, you know, minimize the imports of that relationship between those terms in Marx's analysis. So I think that he ends up with this completely attenuated notion of the economic. He ends up with, again, ultimately the whole kind of, the whole value theoretical account drops out, and you end up with a kind of an insistence
on structural causality, where structural causality, you know, this is page 11 on the handout now, so structural causality is the causality of the totality, so you know, the causality of the totality vis-a-vis the components or the moments of the totality. and i think you know just to in a way by by discussing this we can return to victor's question and uh you know in a way you know discuss it more but um althusser then spends you know um a lot you know the remainders of his
his energies having you know he has a formalist conception of structure which means that he can't really I think properly articulate the relationships between the moments of structure so there's no engagement you know at least to the best of my knowledge there's no engagement with the kind of the logic of of valorization, you know, that we've spent a lot of time discussing. And he simply then sketches what he thinks is the contrast between two different paradigms of causality. This is on, you know, number 33 on page 12.
He distinguishes between, you know, You've got a mechanistic causality and an expressive causality. So he writes in number 33, classical philosophy, the existing theoretical, had two and only two systems of concepts with which to think effectivity. The mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity, it could not be made to think the effectivity of a whole on its elements, except at the cost of extraordinary distortions, such as those in Descartes' Psychology and Biology. But a second system was available, one could see precisely, in order to deal with the effectivity of a whole on its elements,
the Leibnizian concept of expression. This is the model that dominates all Hegel's thought. But it presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, of which the elements of the whole are then no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle of the essence being present at each point in the whole, such that at each moment it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation, such and such an element, economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc. in Hegel, equals the inner essence of the whole. Here was a model which made it possible to think the effectivity of the whole on each of its elements but if this category inner
essence outer phenomenon was to be applicable everywhere and at every moment to each of the phenomena arising in the totality in question it presupposed that the whole had a certain nature precisely the nature of a spiritual whole in which each element was expressive of the entire totality as a pars totalis. In other words, Leibniz and Hegel did have a category for the effectivity of the whole on its elements or parts, but on the absolute condition that the whole was not a structure. So the logic of overdetermination, which is Althusser's supposed materialist alternative to this expressive logic
which coordinates the whole and the part, means a structure entails that a structure, a structural totality is not a whole, so is incomplete, is necessarily incomplete. And secondly, as he writes it in number 34, implies that the structure is imminent in its effects a cause imminent in its effects in the spin is the sense of the terms that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects in short that the structure which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements is nothing outside its effect so here we have you know this is you know althusser's clearly
signaling his allegiance to Spinoza against Hegel. This is the famous choice of Spinoza against Hegel. Spinoza is supposed to be the paradigm of an imminent structural causality causality, where substance determines the relations between the modes, but substance as totality is nothing but the interaction between the modes. The modes being the elements of the substantial totality. Now the points, you know,
so over-determination here, according to Althusser, is in a way a recapitulation of the spinicist logic of imminence causality, such that substance is always supposed to be imminent to its modes. But here I think, the, okay, the, and wait, this reconnects to the discussion we've just had. I mean, the problem is that the, the problem of the you know the individuation of modes the relationship between this infinite
totality this infinite substantial totality and its finite moments its finite components the modes is under-elucidated in Spinoza. And this is part of Hegel's critique of Spinoza. Because it's not clear why an infinite totality is finitely differentiated into discreetly individuated modes. And I think a lot of the effort of French Spinozism is to come up with a you know a logic of individuation which explains how modal differences are you know articulated and you see this in Deleuze you know in a
way Deleuze not only in his book on Spinoza but in his own work as well he's trying to kind of you know as he puts it flatten substance upon the modes and and come up with a logic of difference that will explain how substance is nothing, you know, substance does not transcend its modal composition, but the logic of modal composition is non-dialectical. It's the logic of intensive difference, intensive differentiation.
In other words, so you have to, and here it seems that you have to look elsewhere than Spinoza for for the conceptual resources you need to flesh out the logic of modal determination, or modal differentiation. And ultimately someone like Deloes has to look to figures Bergson for this. But Althusser's account, again, Althusser's account doesn't really proceed beyond this kind of, basically, claiming, you know, contrasting this, you know, what
he claims is Hegel's expressive paradigm with this spinicist paradigm that he's espousing, And then, yes, using the vocabulary of combination and over-determination to explain the relationship between mode of production and specific superstructural elements. And then finally, his ultimate distinction between the real object and the object of
knowledge, he writes, and this is number 36, if the inside is the concept, the outside can only be the specification of the concept exactly as the effects of the structure of the whole can only be the existence of the structure itself so in other words once again he's relying on this account of this expressive is the counts of you know a galian idealism to say that in his according to the spin is a slot there's no inside so substance does not externalize itself in the mode it's entirely imminent to the mode it's nothing but its modal articulation or a
number 37 it's clear that this language itself revokes the distinction between inside and outside and substitutes for it for the distinction between the concept and the real or between the object of knowledge and the real object but the real objects for Althusser is you know the motor production you know the motor production on the relations of production and the paradox of Althusser's account is that we he insists on the difference between the you know what he calls the object of knowledge which is if you remember our session from a few weeks ago when we were talking about the Grundrisse this is what Marx called the
concrete in thought okay the task of Marxist theory is to you know it's object is you know the capitalist totality it has to construct the concept of this object in thoughts through theory so it has to construct the concrete in thought which corresponds to the concrete in reality or the real concrete. But the problem, I think, in Althusser's account is that the articulations, despite his insistence on the absolute difference between or the irreducibility of the real object to the object
of knowledge, it turns out that the real object is modelled on the object of knowledge. Everything that Althusser says about the capitalist totality, about the relationship between productive forces and relations, between the base and the superstructure, is simply, you know, there There seems to be a complete homology between the structure of the object of knowledge, the structure of the concrete in thought, and the structure of the concrete in reality. Which is why I think ultimately it collapses back into idealism. This whole account collapses back into idealism because the distinction between concrete in
thoughts or objective knowledge and concrete in reality or real object is is not a real difference and he can't specify the nature of this difference except to constantly invoke practice but the problem is that there is because there is no subject of practice, if the, you know, the real object is the social totality, the social totality as a system of practices, then this system of practices implies some
kind of subject, not a social subject. But this is precisely what Althusser, I think, doesn't want to talk about, because he thinks that this is a kind of a residual humanism, or this would kind of… because of his insistence on what he calls the epistemic break between the young marks of the economic and philosophical manuscripts and the mature marks of capital, you know, there's no continuity, so therefore the whole emphasis on practice and, you know, the way in which, you know, the whole analysis of the relationship between productive forces
relations in a way is anchored in an account of social practice in a way drops out of Althusser's account despite the constant reiteration of the concept of practice. Althusser talks constantly about practice but the concepts but in a way he models the concept of practice on the concept of production okay and in fact in another essay in for Marx which is called on the materialist dialectic he tries to give a
definition of practice but he but this definition is completely he claims that a practice is production okay and here his account becomes completely circular because his whole an account of production and the relationship between productive forces and and productive relations is internal to this to structure says analysis of structure you know production is you know the kind of is a moment or is a component of structure okay but then by modeling his account of practice on his account of production within a structure that means
that every practice is already inscribed within a structure and that means but I But I take it that for Marx, what makes Marx a materialist is that for Marx structures are generated by practices, by human practices. and I think that this is so you know our two-star structuralism in a way insists upon a homology between production and practice which means that there's no no way of articulating the difference between practice and production or between you know um you know social practice and you know economic production um and you know i
think this is what renders his account ultimately um you know idealist because the um the difference between the object of knowledge and the real object is despite his protests because if it is if it's articulated in terms of practice, because the concept of practice is itself internal to the object of knowledge, it turns out that everything he has to say about the real object is already derived from his account of the object of knowledge. Okay, I just want to stop. I mean, that's just, you know, the basic points I wanted to make.
So maybe I think we should have a discussion. Now, I mean I think to go back to Victor's question, this is why I think, yeah, I also think that this is why, despite Artou Zaire's talk of practice, yeah he doesn't have you know his account of practice you know refers back to his account of production okay and his account of production what is production what production can only be specified within a structure and if you
go back if you look on the handout at page Yes, on pages 10. Yes, on page, sorry, 9. On page 9, number 22, he writes, to construct the concept of the economic is to define it rigorously as a level instance or region of the structure of a mode of production okay and then again you know then he'll say no number 24 the structure of the relations of
production determines the places and functions occupied are not adopted by agents of production or then again in number or number 27 on page 11 he writes to define economic phenomena by their concept is to define them by the concept of this complexity by the concept of the global structure of the mode of production insofar as it determines the regional structure which constitutes as as economic objects in the terms of phenomena of this defined region located in a defined site in the structure of the whole. Basically, his account is formalistic. I think it's punitively formalistic. He defines the economic in terms of the mode of production,
and he defines the mode of production in terms of its function within a structure. But he never kind of breaks out of the circle to give an account of, to anchor structure in, for instance, the logic of value as explained by Marx. relationship between commodities and money and I think so and so I think this is why you know his account ends up being cute you know it has it's a
striking and one reads out to there you know it's both not extraordinarily kind of elegant but also it has a kind of ultimately it remains formal okay it It remains formal. All the distinctions he makes are formal differences. And they lack, you know, they don't have substantial content. And I think this is ultimately what led him to a kind of an impasse. So what aspects of Alcestere's position do you think are worthy of being preserved? I think there's a couple of things to say here.
One, it's important to remember, you know, there's a historical reason why he rails against Hegelianism, okay? His diatribes against Hegelian Marxism are overdetermined by his relationship to the French Communist Party in the 50s and 60s, okay? So he thinks that the French Communist Party was Stalinist and there was a kind of pseudo-Hegelian orthodoxy that aligned itself with Stalinism. So a lot of the time, whenever he's talking about Hegelianism or Hegel, he's not talking about Hegel at all.
He's talking about the French Communist Party and its relationship to Stalinism. What is, I mean, I think his attempt to, what's weird, okay, there's something I think that needs to be said about this essence. essence and so on the one hand in a way his argument his anti-hegelian argument his account of the logic of over-determination saying that essence is nothing but its contingent appearance or its phenomenal appearance well that's already a hegelian argument okay the logic of essence in in hegel's idealism hegel's famous for the phrase essence must appear
So the essence is not this kind of substance underlying appearances, but simply something that is indissociable from its appearance. And in a way, so in a way I think that Althusser's account of over-determination is Hegelian despite his protestant well it's Hegelian I think it's because he you know he he'd imbibed a lot of Hegelianism you know in his youth and it's because I think his in a way his anti-Hegelianism is you know empirically over-determined
that he's constantly making Hegelian moves or, you know, in a way kind of recoding Hegelian arguments while disavowing their Hegelianism. So, and then the idealism of his position is unsurprisingly, because if essence, if, you know, one of the things, Hegel overcomes the opposition between essence and appearance, between necessity and contingency, between the universe in particular. And once I think once one realizes how caricatural this this account of Hegel's organicism is, then one can see Althusser's own accounts
as, you know, in a way it's a kind of, it's a, you know, it's an attempt to re-Hegelianize Marx against, without taking proper stock of, you know, what's most radical in Marx's critique of Hegel. And this is, and what's most radical is in a way the divergence of essence and appearance, And ultimately, the reconciliation of the real and the rational for Hegel depends on this claim that ultimately, you know, the notion must become adequate to its appearance.
It expresses itself in its appearance through this movement of contradiction. Whereas Marx insists that there's a divergence between essence and appearance. The essence of capital is living labor or human social activity. But this is precisely what is systematically occluded in consciousness or ideology. So that, or fetishism is a transposition, you know, of relations between producers into relations between products, so that essential relations are, you know, systematically occluded or appear, you know, inverted.
So I think part of Marxism and materialism is to insist on this kind of this direction or kind of split between essence and appearance so that essence generates, you know, it's essence that appears, but the way in which it appears masks its truth or its reality. And I think this is really important for Marx's critique of Hegel. And I think that part of, because what Althusser is giving up in a way in his rejection of commodity fetishism,
is this account of the direction between essence and appearance. or this idea that what's really going on in the hidden abode of production or in the generation of value is systematically kind of hidden or kind of rubbed out at the level of ideology or the way in which capitalism represents itself. So, okay, there's another question from Artem here. Did Althusser have any connection to the phenomenological movement?
Maybe not theoretical, but did he ever address the movement? Because Myrtle Twainty seemed to insist, to even insist in the preface of phenomenology of perception that Marx's project was in a sense phenomenological. I wonder what Althusser could have responded. Well, Althusser is critical of phenomenology, and he views it as subjective. He views it as basically incompatible with Marx's crucial insights. So he's very critical of Sartre, and directly critical of Sartre, but also of Merleau-Ponty by implication. There have been, Merleau-Ponty is not, I mean, there are lots of attempts to reconcile phenomenology with Marxism.
The most important in France was Tran Duc Théo, this Vietnamese philosopher, Tran Duc Théo, who published this book, Marxism and Phenomenology, in the 1950s. It's his doctoral thesis. And then there's Enzo Paci in Italy. Those are the kind of the most notable, but there are many others. And then there's Michel Henry. Michel Henry, this Christian phenomenologist who wrote in 1976 a huge book on Marx. I actually think Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with phenomenology. Because, I think, because, and I think, so on this point I completely agree with Althusser,
because already with Marx you've got an account of the practical unconscious. In other words, what we're engaged in doing on a daily basis is precisely what we, not just what we happen not to be conscious of, but what we are necessarily not conscious of, what we cannot be conscious of. Our collective social practices are necessarily misrepresented at the level of individual consciousness. I think that that's one of Marx's most important insights, but I think this makes it impossible to reconcile Marx with phenomenology.
Of course, you can do it, but then it ends up with a metaphysical recoding of Marx. So for instance, you can do it by saying that, by thinking that Marx is interested in the phenomenology of living labor, that Marx's analysis depends on the standpoint of labor and the experience of the laboring subjects. But that's clearly incompatible, but I think that it's impossible to, you know, there are, you know, that reading is plausible, I think, you know, by looking at taking some things from the early Marx, but it seems completely implausible if you look at Capital, which is really a profoundly Hegelian work. So in other words,
consciousness and the whole, you know, Marx's whole distinction between, remember, that you're concrete and thought, what is concrete in reality is precisely not what is not either empirically accessible or Thank you.
a power cut so the connection I lost the connection sorry about that okay yeah so I think it cut out just at the bit I was just yes there's a question about you know a question about after there's a relationship to phenomenology and yes he has Althusser has an antagonistic relationship in fact he's explicitly positioning himself against it and this is one aspect I think of his work that is to which I'm very sympathetic because yeah I think that Marx's
Marx's analysis of capital is dialectical and is ultimately, I mean, you know, I think, you know, Hegelian in that it's Hegelian because it insists, it rejects the lure of false immediacy. So it insists precisely that what is concrete, what is really concrete, is precisely doesn't appear or manifest itself to the subject of perception or the subject of experience. This is why the analytical framework developed in the three volumes of capital,
although it frequently adverts to the experiences of suffering laborers, it is not constructed from the vantage points of the laborer. And I don't see how, you know, phenomenologists who insist that this is the starting point for market analysis I just don't see how they can you know plausibly maintain this so I don't know if that's yeah that was my attempt to answer Artem's question which actually
I can't see it's I can no longer see it on the sidebar Is it possible to... can I see them again? Oh yeah, if you could, yes, thanks. And in a way, okay, so Hunter asks, okay, so given all these criticisms I've been making of Alchuzer, Why is he important? Well, he's important, I mean, I think, you know, it's just an extremely, you know, I mean, I don't want to talk lightly about kind of theoretical success and failure.
I mean, very few theories can claim to succeed in any kind of satisfying sense or convincing in a definitive sense. Althusser's theory, I think, is vitiated by these fundamental problems, you know, however, it is, you know, incredibly instructive and there's a lot to be gained by studying it. You know, the structuralist paradigm, you know, the attempt to kind of come up with a dialectics of structure, okay, instead of this, you know, dialectics of over-determination in opposition to, you know, this dialectics of value or of labor.
the one hand the you know the way in which you know I mean he'd be important because he was so influential on many thinkers who are very kind of you know celebrated now obviously Badiou but even people like the Hancier although he rejects him and Balibar so you know he's he's important to study because of his huge influence and also I guess on an end because of the the attempt to turn to Spinoza against Hegel. In a way the attempt to kind of to see Spinoza as the tutelary figure for Marx as opposed to Hegel. This is a very interesting, I think
a very interesting move but also you know I think or at least in altos are not entirely convincing also his critique of humanism his critique which I didn't have I mean Humanism as an ideology is, and again, this is tied to the debates he's having with, you know, the debates in terms of the French Communist Party and the legacy of Stalinism, in the way in which humanism becomes, under the banner of humanism, you know, monstrously inhuman
activities can be kind of excused and legitimated. This is also something that makes, you know, Althusser an important... he was the first, I think, to, you know, to kind of, in a way, to insist that, you know, on a strand which is very evident in Marxism, himself, which is that Marx is not a sentimentalist. There's nothing sentimental about Marx. And I mean, there's disgust, you know, in his kind of polemical moments, there's kind of disgust, sarcasm, lots of, you know, many other kind of affects are kind of communicated in his
writing, but not sentimentality or piety. So, and he, you know, and I think Althusser takes this kind of this strand of Marx and in a way sees that it's important not to reduce Marx to to any kind of humanist sentimentalism. I think that doesn't mean, you know, or that means kind of defending or rather, you know, finding a way to kind of salvage the rational core of humanism against its kind of degeneration into a kind of platitudes or kind of moralism, basically.
And I guess, and this is important also because I think both the, both apologists and accusers of Stalinism, you know, carried out their debates using the categories, using moral categories. In other words, you know, it's important not to adjudicate the legacy of Marxism in terms of body counts, okay? Because that argument, you know, you can start saying, you know, people who want to dismiss Marx simply invoke body counts, you know, the gulags,
it's a monstrous body count, but also anti-Marxist, rather Marxists who, you know, who initially kind of, if your sole rationale for being a Marxist is a kind of revulsion against the inhumanity of capitalism, then you only need to be convinced of the inhumanity of communism to turn to switch sides, which is why lots of Marxists, it was the humanist Marxists who abandoned Marx and became apologists for the
capitalist status quo as the lesser evil. The problem is that if insofar as humanism commits you to moralism, it obliges you to choose between the lesser evil. Okay, and if you're choosing between the lesser evil, then it's quick to kind of... capitalism can easily you know, present itself as the lesser evil, and it was. And I think this is a significant factor for Althusser in his critique of humanism. any other more questions
just in relation to that it takes us a little bit away from the earlier L2Z discussion, but like what is the point of everything if you take away the humanism? Like I read the essay and everything, the humanist essay this week actually, but yeah, what is it exploitative? What's the point of getting rid of capitalism if you take the anti-humanist debt. Is it exploitation that you want to get rid of? What's the justification for what everyone's doing
once you take out the humanism? Maybe it's a simple answer. I just can't think of it. It's a very good question. I think you can't remove some basic commitment to humanism in Marx. What humanism means, I think what Marx means by humanism is tied to the legacy of German idealism and of what human beings... Marx's claims about human species being, human beings as having this capacity to transform themselves, okay, and in a way to kind of, you know,
in ways which are constrained by capitalism. I mean, that's the basic, I think that is that commitment. I think to be a Marxist you have to kind of believe that, I think. Exploitation is a structural deter. Exploitation I think is not the same as oppression. Exploitation has a very kind of specific technical meaning in market. It means extracting surplus value and extracting surplus value means extracting surplus, it means kind of, you know, it's unrenumerated wage labor. But why is that, you know, why is that wrong? Okay, part of what marks, first of all, I think that this distinction
exploitation and oppression is really important. Exploitation is not oppression and Marx in a way wants to kind of minimize the normative, you know, doesn't want a moralistic critique of capitalism, so he wants to minimize his kind of normative assumptions. The wage relation is an exchange between two free agents, On the market, the wage labor is a free agent, which simply means they have the formal freedom to sell their labor so that they can make money and then buy commodities. So they have this merely formal freedom, which obviously Marx is kind of attacking and criticizing.
something. But then the claim is that this exchange, it's completely kind of, it's irreproachable from a formal point of view, as he puts it, and when he, you know, he's saying that the, you know, the capitalist is not cheating the laborer, you know, it's a completely kind of fair exchange but because wage labor is a commodity unlike any other commodity it's the commodity that produces every other commodity but also produces the use values you know produces
the use values of every commodity from which you know use values which can also be kind of converted into exchange values so in a way um this is why kind of wage labor is you know the source of value and simply by being compelled to sell your labor power for a wage, you cannot but be exploited. You cannot but be exploited. So the exploitation is not, you know, you can't help but produce
more value than the value of your own wage labour. And that's a kind of a structural, know a structural feature of the capitalist class relation and for Marx this is well I guess what he's saying is that you know human no wage labor is a commodification of a productive capacity that is you know in a way well I was going to say it's peculiar to human beings but that's not
true because the paradox is that lots of wage labor lots lots of the things lots of forms of wage labor can and have been mechanized. So it's not as if the claim is not just that you're exploiting humans because human beings are the source, can do this special thing that nothing else can do and you know you're they're not being properly remunerated by you know creating value the claim is that they're being prevented
from doing the obligation to work the obligation to sell your wage labor creates a society in which you are systematically prevented from realizing your full potential and your full social potential. In other words, he He thinks that human beings have collected capacities which are straightjacketed by capital. And exploitation is the way in which the straightjacketing functions.
So exploitation, it's not just that it's taking something away from you, it's just that it's taking something, you know, that right, it's not taking something that rightfully belongs to you away from you, as it like robbing you would be. It's actually forcing you to do something, you know, which, you know, systematically prevents you from doing, you know, what you, you know, you could be doing. Now, whether it's what you should be doing is another, but I think ultimately, so Marx thinks that it's a kind of, it's a, capitalism is a kind of, it's, it blocks human capacity, human cognitive and practical capacity for
perverts, anti-human and anti-social ends. but he has to be careful because you know remember he says that when he talks about species being or the human he doesn't think that there's an eternal human essence the human essence for him is just this kind of you know the the totality of social relations in a given you know as coordinated by a given mode of production. This is why the human essence is itself historical. It's historically mutable. But in a way, he thinks that, in a way,
the possibilities of social being, human beings are social beings, the possibilities of social being have been kind of systematically constrained by capital and constrained with very kind of destructive consequences. And he thinks that by abolishing those constraints, you can allow human beings to realize their freedom. In other words, the freedom human beings currently enjoy is a kind of empty and entirely
nominal. And if with communism we could become free in a sense that we've never known before, I think these are substantive... To be a Marxist is to be committed to those claims, I think. So there is a humanism there, but it's saying that What characterizes human being is this untapped potentiality.
This untapped potentiality. So it's not a potentiality which is tied to a fixed essence. in a way it's a potentiality to become what is you know to to become in ways which are you know currently uninvisible but for marx that becoming can only be collectively realized it cannot be this is why i mean the stuff about kind of you know if you think about existentialism existentialism says that human beings are kind of condemned to be free and that you know existence proceeds and creates essence human existence creates and proceeds essence and in a way what marks
part of what marx is saying i think is that that can only be true at the collective level okay None of us are, because, you know, we're the social reality, social conditions completely constrain our existential possibilities. But if we, with communism, we could exist and define ourselves collectively and individually in unprecedented ways. Okay, Rachel has a question. Rachel, did you want to add something about existentialism?
Actually, no, I was just thinking and wondering when we were talking about Althusser's critique of Sartre and I know that Sartre has the unfinished project which is the existential Marxism papers a long a long manuscript that he never finished and abandoned for more you know just journalistic writings on a war and etc and I was always curious about that project but um so that was just my reaction to you bringing up the that subject matter so that's that's all on that really but yeah I think I'll leave it for I'll leave it at that for now
rather than launch into something else we should I said you know that on the syllabus for the course I guess humanism and anti-humanism was one of the does anyone want to kind of ask more about humanism and anti-humanism because I guess that was one of the talk we haven't said much about it but um does anyone want to kind of ask a question about that that was a really good discussion you just gave by the way yeah i guess in defense okay obviously i mean as i'm sure you know post-humanism is a kind of uh you know the the mode usual now, and humanism is very much something that seems to be anachronistic and
behind us. But I think that Marx's very distinctive, critical humanism is worth understanding and defending, partly because, you know, the, well, if you think, I mean, the rejection of humanism is a rejection of a Kantian, what is taking to be a kind of a, you know, the conception of subjectivity and a definition of humanity in terms of subjectivity, which which reaches, which culminates in Kant and Hegel in a way.
And in a way the rejection of Kant and Hegel and of the subjectivity as this capacity for autonomy and self-determination. So this is part of what is all being rejected along with modernity. And with post-modernity we have post-humanism. So human beings are merely kind of creatures in the world alongside other creatures in the world. Now, so there's a kind of long kind of critiques of human exceptionalism. But it seems to me, okay, but I think there's lots of things to say here.
First of all, is that, you know, one, the distinction, you know, the Kantian subjects, or the Hegelian subjects, you know, is not, you know, anthropologically characterized. Okay, so there's already, you know, it's clear that, you know, humanity, you know, in this kind of speculative sense, can be anthropologically constrained. Okay, so the human is not an anthropological object and can be reduced to a list of anthropological predicates.
So then the talk of human exceptionalism is a bit peculiar because it's not as if humanism... I mean, there's a vulgar humanism which simply says that humans are, you know... superior to all other creatures and more important than all other creatures. But for Hegel and the post-Hegelian tradition that Marx is inheriting,
It's not that human beings, the difference between the human and the non-human is not a specific difference. Okay, so it's not, it can't be recapitulated under a genus. So it's not as if you've got, so this is why already Heidegger's claim that Dasein is not, you know, can't be anthropologized. it's because the difference as which Dasein exists is precisely it can be subsumed under any genus okay this is why so Heidegger's critique of
metaphysical humanism is say it's like man is not a rational animal it's that you can't kind of specify the defining attributes of human being in terms of some existing predicate. So man is not a political animal, a rational animal, a talking animal, or a laboring animal for that matter. But I think this rejection of metaphysical anthropologism is already there, if not in Kant, then certainly in Hegel and Marx. the point about what makes humans different is that you can't specify what makes them different
which is not the same as saying that this is some kind of ineffable or transcendent difference and I think this is the key to Marx is that you know Marx's claims that human humans differentiate themselves in practice from other animals, okay, before they differentiate themselves in theory. And in terms of, you know, if you're talking about the level of practice, what humans do, you know, you can always find, you know, humans evolved from other animals, but they have they do lots of things
that animals or other animals do but how they do them can't be extrapolated from those existing animal activities so in a way the problem with reducing humanism to human exceptionalism is it assumes that how humans differ from other creatures can be specified using an existing catalogue of differences or differentiations.
And in a way Marx, I mean, it's perfectly in that sense that this kind of, you know, humanism can be reconciled, you know, can take on board the critiques of human exceptionalism, okay? You can, one can fully accept, you know, all the, you know, the bad things, the destructive things that humans do to other creatures without but you know without accepting that therefore they are just like other creatures or they are just creatures alongside other creatures because for a start what does that mean if you say
that humans are just you know what is the lowest common denominator in terms of which you identify you know what humans um you know uh you know what humans have in common with other beings and any you know any common denominator that you specify will ultimately be metaphysical so part of the critique of metaphysics is to say that um you know if you want to kind of level, if you want to say, you know, if you want to reject human exceptionalism and say human beings are just things in the world alongside other
things in the world, well the way in which you're characterizing the world, the way in which you're kind of differentiating things in the world isn't just, it's already kind of depends on cognitive resources that were, you know, made not given. So how do you know all the different ways of being there are? And if you don't know all the different ways of being there are, how can you confidently say what any two beings have in common? So the point about humanism is to say that rejecting the hierarchical subordination
of all beings to human beings, doesn't mean that you then therefore kind of level the playing field and say that there's kind of, you know, all beings are different but equal. Because both the differences and the equalities have to be legitimated. And the point is that not every difference is hierarchical. You can differentiate, you can say, the point would be to insist, is to recognize salient differences, and especially differences in, you know,
in interest in what you know practical and cognitive goals one wants to realize without you know constructing a hierarchy a hierarchy of purposes or a hierarchy of functions um partly because as mark says everything you know the way in which we classify um and you know catalog different ways of being is always going to be a kind of a reflection of you know existing social relations and the way in which we currently understand ourselves so this is why I think it's you know post-humanism is premature it's
premature because it talks as if you know it kind of proceeds as if you know we We know there was a way of... that the only way of understanding how humans might be essentially different from other beings is by saying that therefore human beings... other beings must be subordinated to human beings or must be kind of you know used and abused by human beings and I think that doesn't follow partly because you know we don't yet know what it means
to be human okay the idea that that's that that question is already settled is you know seems premature and also because whatever is wrong with the world you know is not going to be fixed by ignoring you know real differences between beings whatever kind of destructive things you know human beings have done are not going to be kind of nullified by pretending that we are, by disavowing the ways in which we differ fundamentally from other beings. That's just a general remark. The other remark,
obviously, is the kind of, I think, the danger of anthropomorphism is that there's no point, you know, anthropomorphism is a poor substitute for anthropocentrism. And if you, you know, there's no point in kind of, you know, rejecting anthropocentrism without taking account of, you know, the, again, the, you know, what it is that makes kind of, you know, what fundamentally distinguishes you know humans from other beings because if you don't do that you end up kind of treating you and you just end up generalizing human attributes and you know you know
attributing you know what are effectively kind of parochial human attributes and characteristics to all sorts of, you know, to the rest of, you know, non-human reality. And that hardly seems like a kind of, you know, a move forward. So I think this is why Marx's humanism, it insists on the, you know, the non-specific difference of the human, a difference which is a practical difference, This is what humans do. And because human beings can have this peculiar kind of,
it's both a kind of, they have a kind of productive maladaptiveness to their, it's precisely because they are out of kilter, out of sync with their environment that they can create and recreate their environment faster than their environment can shape them. And this is a remarkable capacity. If we could only understand it properly, understand the underlying dynamism properly, then we might be able to achieve extraordinary things.
And that possibility is worth defending. It shouldn't be criminalized or pathologized. Just thinking you're different means that you're going to kind of exploit and dominate and subjugate everything. That's the kind of... A lot of the... What's weird about post-humanism is its underlying moralistic kind of strain. On the one hand, humanism is all wrong, but on the other hand, humanism is kind of culpable. But culpable in what sense?
well because it's wronged non-human reality but what does that mean? Okay, what kind of, what table of values allows you to adjudicate between right and wrong at the level of the non-human? You know, these, I think these, you know, All these kind of hidden assumptions and presuppositions get smuggled in to these kind of discourses. So I think Marx is the culmination of a kind of humanism, a transformative humanism,
which in a way neither kind of, you know, it's not about revering or in a way, because it neither kind of reveres nor kind of condemns the human. it means that it's neither fearful nor contemptuous of the non-human. And when Marx talks about transforming the metabolic relation between man and nature, I think this is what he has in mind. And I think, and also, you know, the apocalyptic variant of post-humanism always sees the kind
of the non-human or the post-human as this kind of, you know, in a way, as this force that will kind of humiliate, you know, the human and in a way kind of punish it for its kind of, you know, for its hubris, which is a curiously kind of, you know, again, still completely, you know, anthropomorphic. So I think, yeah, I think Marx, you know, or at least Marx's critical discourse has, provides a lot of the resources one needs to kind of, you know, to defend, you know, defend what is philosophically most interesting about humanism and also to
kind of to point out the kind of the you know the bad you know the guilty humanism of a lot of so-called post-humanism Shall we stop? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, and just let me know about the emails. I suggested questions. If anyone wants to kind of have their own, wants to write a book of their own, just run it by me. and then we can make it out. Perfect.
OK. OK. So anything else? Thank you. No, thanks. Thanks for your patience. Thanks to everyone. Thanks for taking part. Thanks very much, Ray. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. good luck with everything okay okay thanks okay thank you