I propose that this term be permanently retired. It is more obfuscatory than clarificatory. It muddies the waters more than it points to any meaningful tendency or political trajectory. Let's leave this one in the dustbin of history.
For those who aren't familiar with the notion of "humanist Marxism" (or Marxist-humanism or whatever), here's a bit of background. The term is often associated with those who allegedly emphasize the "early Marx" (e.g. the 1844 Manuscripts, On the Jewish Question, The Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, etc.) at the expense of the "later Marx" of Capital. For some, the mere invocation of concepts from Marx's earlier writings, e.g. alienation or the quasi-Aristotelian idea of a "species being", is enough to mark one out as a "humanist". On the other hand, sometimes "humanist" Marxists are associated with an interpretation of Marx according to which Engels is a distorting influence to be cast out of the genuine Marxist tradition. Still further, there is a Polish Marxist movement that called itself "humanist" for slightly different reasons. Then there's a small sect of Marxists in the US who tack closely to the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya who call themselves "Marxist-Humanists". The imprecision with which the label is thrown around is reason enough to reject it.
The origins of the so-called "humanist" controversy really go back to the 1930s when many of Marx's early works (especially the 1844 Manuscripts) were discovered and published for the first time. Since these texts were quite obviously at odds with Stalinist orthodoxy, they were, from the very beginning, dismissed and criticized by Stalinist ideologues. As Lucio Colletti puts it in his excellent introduction to the penguin edition of the Early Writings, "the sheer rigidity of official doctrine, the rigor mortis which already gripped Marxism under Stalin, contributed in no small way to the cool reception with which the writings met with when they appeared, to the manner in which they were immediately classified and pigeon-holed."
In the 1960s and 1970s, French Marxist (and member of the Stalinist PCF) Louis Althusser ignited further controversy by penning a series of attacks on this so-called "humanism". Althusser himself defended a strange reinterpretation of Marxism grounded more in structuralist anthropology than the left-Hegelian of German philosophy. He therefore set himself against the tradition, captured and coined as such by Perry Anderson in the 1970s, of "Western Marxism" including such innovative Marxist thinkers as Gramsci, Lukacs and Korsch. One of Althusser's most contentious arguments against "humanists" involved an interpretive claim about the so-called "early" and "late" Marx. According to Althusser, there was a sharp "epistemological break" between the "early" and "late" Marx. Crudely put, the "early" Marx was still mired in the "humanist" muck of Hegelian thought, whereas the "later" Marx broke free by rejecting this "lingering bourgeois hangover" once and for all.
The meat of Althusser's argument was the following. In social theory and historiography, there is a tension between structural explanations and agential explanations. That is, it is often acknolwedged that there is a disanalogy between analyses that focus on system-level structural processes on the one hand, and, on the other, analyses that focus on the perspective of the participant in social practices, i.e. what it's like to be an agent from the inside. (In American sociology, the distinction is typically described as one between structure and agency. In the German tradition this is described in terms of the subject/object distinction, or, if you like, the distinction between the lifeworld and system). This distinction is one which Marxism (just like any other social theory) must navigate. Althusser's reductionist solution was to eliminate agency entirely. For Althusser, the "early" Marx made the mistake of leaving room for the perspective of the agent (i.e. the "subject" in Althusser's language) in his social theory. For Althusser, the perspective of social science is purely third-personal: the agent, as such, is produced by system-level processes that cannot be grasped from within the participant perspective. Thus, the innovation of the "late" Marx, according to Althusser, was that he completely rejected first-personal perspective of the participant in favor of an entirely impersonal (and, for the first time, genuinely scientific) structural perspective. Thus began the "humanist" controversy: Althusser and his followers declared themselves "anti-humanists" and railed against the "humanists" for talking seriously about actions, agency, and so forth, whereas the "humanists" criticized Althusserians for having an implausible social theory that left no space for genuine human agency whatsoever. That, in rough sketch, is the so-called humanist vs. anti-humanist distinction in the Marxist tradition.
As I said above, I think the whole distinction needs to go. It doesn't pick out anything meaningful- it only tracks a series of stipulative moves made by Althusser (and other Stalinists) in the 1960s. But Althusser's project was idiosyncratic and (in many respects) very un-Marxist, so I don't think it really makes sense to continue to use the term at all. What follows are three arguments in defense of this claim.
First, the idea of a "humanist" Marxism rests on a faulty binary between the "early" and "late" (i.e. the "immature" and "mature") Marx. I think this is basically a distinction that rests on a non-existent difference. The notion of an "epistemological break" in Marx's writings fits neatly with Althusser's overall project (as it does with the need to legitimate the mechanical, rigid Stalinist "version" of Marxism), but it has little grounding in Marx's writings. It is more a super-imposed import than a real feature of Marx's corpus. It's also worth noting that the two interpreters of Marx most influenced by this distinction (i.e. Althusser and G.A. Cohen) are famous for defending the most mechanistic versions of Marxism. (G.A. Cohen's Marxism, which places primacy on the forces of production as the source historical change, is rightly impugned as little more than "technological determinism").
Furthermore, Marx's "later" writings, just as much as his earlier works, draw heavily on Hegel. To say that Marx suddenly abandoned his Hegelian roots is preposterous. Lenin's claim that Hegel's Logic is necessary pre-reading for Capital is a bit of an exaggeration, but the basic idea is right: Marx must be read as a determinate negation of Hegel's thought. Moreover, the shifts in emphasis in Marx's writings (from more philosophical works, to historical analyses, to more political economy, etc.) track not sharp political turns in his work, but shifts in subject matter. You can't cover it all, all the time. It doesn't follow, for instance, from the fact that Marx never wrote a sustained theoretical treatise on, say, epistemology that it is irrelevant to Marxism. (The same is true of ethics and moral philosophy). The "early" vs. "late" distinction derives from the need to shield a mechanical distortion of Marxism (particularly Stalinism) from critique. The sooner it is abandoned the better.
Second, the idea of a "humanist" Marxism only makes sense on the assumption that there is a contrary, "anti-humanist" Marxism. But who is it that goes around calling themselves "anti-humanist" these days? Althusserians are (thankfully) an endangered species. To be sure, there are plenty of folks influenced by post-structuralism in the academy that would gladly claim the "anti-humanist" mantle for themselves, but they are beyond the pale of Marxism. So, if the contrary of "humanist" Marxism is so patently absurd (and irrelevant), what is the term picking out that is of use to contemporary Marxists? It seems to me that the genuine Marxist tradition has always set itself against the mechanical, deterministic distortions of Stalinism and aspects of the Althusserian project. So why not just speak of Marxism tout court, and reject the "humanist" modifier as a relic?
Third, and finally, it seems to me that the "humanist" label carries too much unnecessary baggage. It would be better to have particular views about the Marx/Engels relationship than to simply affix the label "humanist" to those who regard Engels as an ossifier rather than an innovator. It's also worth saying that simply rejecting the complete identification of Engels and Marx's thought doesn't commit one to the view that they should be completely disentangled. The debates are the complex relationship between Marx and Engels are important, and they aren't helped along by throwing around the "humanist" label. Moreover, the complex Hegel/Marx relationship is similarly maligned by the term. It can't turn out that anyone who talks about alienation, species functioning, dialectics, and so forth is therefore a "humanist". The structure/agency (or, if you like, the spontaneity/organization, or objective/subjective) problem in Marxism is a difficult one that requires a careful, dialectical treatment that does not admit of facile reductive moves. In my view, "humanism" is nothing more than a bogey put forward by those (e.g. Althusserians) who wish to reduce Marxism to an undialectical, purely third-personal functionalist theory in which human agency does not figure into the model. Let's abandon the term and get on to what matters.
Further reading: I highly recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's essay "Notes from the Moral Wilderness" on this topic. Read it here. Also, Perry Anderson's book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism does an excellent job of tracing how the "permanent oscillation" between structure and agency worked itself out in 20th Century Marxism. His view is that the lack of Marxist response to Althusser within the Francophone world primed the pumps for the rise of post-structuralism (which, like Althusser, tended to reject the notion of agency as such as a mere epiphenomenon).
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
On "Humanist" Marxism
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Cornel West on Race and Class
I'd like to examine the position set out by Cornel West in his essay "Marxist Theory and the Specificty of Afro-American Oppression".
West makes clear that his theoretical bearings in the essay are Marxist:
[My approach] attempts to shun the discursive reductionistic elements in the works of the ex-Marxist Foucault and side-step the textual idealist tendencies in the perennially playful performances of Derrida.His task is to examine what he calls the "racial problematic" from within a Marxist framework:
The racial problematic... [is] the theoretical investigation into the materiality of racist discourses, the ideological production of African discourses, the ideological production of African subjects, and the concrete effects of and counterhegemonic responses to the European (and specifically white) supremacist logics operative in Western civilization.Though West characterizes his approach as "neo-Gramscian", this short gloss on the "racial problematic" has an Althusserian feel (esp. the bit about "ideological production of subjects"). I find it puzzling that he talks about the ideological production of "African" subjects, whereas I would have thought that in the U.S. case we'd want to talk about the production of some other sort of subject, such as a devalued, white-supremacist picture of "the Negro" or something of that sort. Putting the point this way, it seems to me, enables the alternative claim to being "African" or "Black" have a subversive element to it (which it did, for many involved in the Black Power movements of the 60s). It is also more in line with the language of Black militants (e.g. Malcolm X always spoke of the "so-called Negro" and the entire language of "Blackness" arose out of Black Power). But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Though West locates his argument within the Marxist tradition of political theory and practice, he is also critical of some versions of Marxism for their tendency to understand race as a matter of "secondary" importance (presumably secondary to class). According to West, there are four basic formulations of black oppression in the Marxist tradition.
The first subsumes black oppression under the rubric of working-class exploitation. This approach entails that black people in the US are not subjected to any form of oppression distinct from the general problem of working-class exploitation. Here, West cites the socialism of Eugene Debs, who held that black oppression was solely a class problem. Needless to say, the U.S. Socialist Party had many black members and Debs himself had a record of fighting against racism. But this theoretical approach is rightly rejected by West as reductionistic. (West chalks this perspective up to the economism and determinism of Marxism of the Second International). An obvious political/strategic problem with such an approach is that it seems to foreclose any serious, independent struggle by black people against racial domination. Rather, such an approach simply says of such tactics: sit down, shut up, and wait for the revolution before you challenge white supremacy. This is not a socialist position, this is a do-nothing position vis-a-vis racial oppression. Surely the working-class politics of the Second International are not to be entirely thrown out with the bathwater, but we need to say more here before we have a political theory and practice adequate to the realities of racial oppression.
The second approach acknowledges the specificity of black oppression beyond working-class exploitation, yet defines this specificity in entirely economistic terms. This approach explains racial oppression in terms of super-exploitation. That is, certain fractions of the working class are exploited even more than the rest because of racial hierarchy. This was the position put forward by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party in the late 60s/early 70s in the US. Surely claim about super-exploitation has got to be true; the question, however, is whether this is the last word on racial oppression. It seems rather obvious that super-exploitation isn't the whole story.
This brings us to the third approach within the Marxist tradition. This approach understands black oppression in terms of colonialism, nationalism and self-determination. This was the framework adopted by the Third International (1928) by the CPUSA in its (largely commendable, though far from perfect) struggles against racism in the 30s and 40s. In effect, the position is this. Black people in the US constitute, or once constituted, an oppressed nation in the South. In the rest of US society, black people constituted an oppressed national minority. Given this analysis of the problem, the solution is simple: liberation means self-determination for black people and the formation of a black nation. Various groups have held this position, from (as mentioned earlier) the Stalinist CPUSA in the 1930s to the US Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) to Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party in the US and Amiri Baraka's US League of Revolutionary Struggle.
West argues that this position has been, by far, the most popular among black people on the Left (and on the Left generally) throughout the 20th century. The reasons for its appeal, he claims, is that it denies the reductionistic tendencies of the first two approaches and makes room for claims about cultural oppression. That is, insofar as a nation is to be understood in terms of shared culture, language and so forth, it looks as though this Black Nation approach provides an excellent means of criticizing the ways in which Black culture, language, and so on are systematically devalued and stomped out by white supremacy. West argues that the Left was forced to take the cultural dimension seriously since the Marcus Garvey movement of the early 20s. This recognition of the cultural dimension of oppression made adherents of this view "proto-Gramscians" without their knowing it.
The fourth Marxist alternative, according to West, is as follows. The struggle for Black Liberation, the line goes, is not the same as the class struggle. It is independent, yet allied with the struggle for working-class emancipation. This approach rejects the language of the "nation" or the separatist politics that have arisen at various points throughout the history of the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. (it's important to point out here, however, that separatist politics have typically been most influential at the low points of struggle when the possibilities for smashing white supremacy in the U.S. looked rather bleak).
In this picture, black oppression is not reducible to class oppression, but is entirely bound up with it insofar as black oppression arose within the context of U.S. capitalism. This is basically the position defended by Trotsky in debates with Afro-Trinidadian Marxist CLR James within the SWP in the 30s and 40s. Trotsky's position was to reject the nationalist approach staked out by the CP as mechanical and inflexible. Whether socialists should support the self-determination line is a question of whether the masses of black people are demanding it. But Trotsky wanted to walk a fine line here, he did not want to simply reject the call for self-determination out of hand. On the contrary, Trotsky sensed some latent racism amongst leftists who decried self-determination because it "distracted from class". Trotsky said of this phenomenon that "the argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation of the ideology of the white workers". "The Negro", Trotsky argued in 1939, "can be developed to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement. For Trotsky, however, the black struggle against racism should not wait for white workers to be won over to anti-racism, it had to begin immediately, and the job of all socialists was to support such struggles in whatever form they took. He thus argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever". Trotsky's politics contrast starkly with the "class first" politics of the first variant of "Marxism" above, which basically told black radicals to demobilize, and to simply wait until the racism within the white working-class disappeared (rather than challenging it head-on).
West claims that all four positions get something right, but they are all incomplete.
His first criticism is that all of these approach take their object of criticism to be "macro-structural", e.g. analysis of the basic institutions of capitalist societies, production relations, etc. His claim isn't, a la post-structuralism, that such analysis is problematic or to be avoided. On the contrary, he thinks that macro-structural analysis is essential to any serious program for liberation. Such analysis is surely an important antidote to the individualist approaches of those on the Right such as Thomas Sowell. So the problem isn't with macro-structural analysis as such, but with what it leaves out: "micropolitics".
West argues that we need to also pay attention to "local" or "microinstitutional" features of politics in addition to macro-level analysis. West's approach consists of three "moments":
1. genealogical inquiry into the discursive conditions for the possibility of hegemonic European (i.e. white) supremacist logics operative in various epochs in the West and the counter-hegemonic possibilities available.
2. a mircoinstitutional analysis of the mechanisms by which these logics inscribe themselves in the everyday lives of Africans, including the hegemonic ideological production of African subjects, the constitution of alien and degrading normative cultural life styles, aesthetic ideals, etc.
3. a macrostructural approach that accents modes of production, class exploitation and political repression of African peoples.
The aim of the first moment, according to West, is to examine modes of European domination of African peoples, the second moment to probe into the "forms of European subjugation of African peoples"; and the third to focus on types of European exploitation and repression of African peoples. West wants to understand how it is that African peoples become involved in their own continued oppression (i.e. how they become both victims of and participants in oppression).
For my part, I have a tough time understanding what West wants to get out of the first moment. He wants more than just cultural oppression, the systematic devaluation of blackness and black culture, the processes by which black culture develops (e.g. how it responds to, resists, and (at the same time) also internalizes oppression of various kinds). He wants to target the "Cartesian subject" and "Baconian" ideas of observation and evidence in methodology. I'm not sure what to make of this complaint, and I don't see its political appeal. In post-structuralism, we can make sense of these complaints insofar as post-structuralism tends to be motivated by a totalizing suspicion of the concept of truth and tends to reject all extra-linguistic referents as mere illusions. But West has already repudiated such approaches, so I'm not sure what he wants from the first "moment".
The second moment seems to me to be a serious oversight of the traditional Marxist approach. It is here that the work of so-called "Western Marxists" brings a whole additional realm of analysis that wasn't the focus of classical Marxism. This isn't to say that classical Marxism, as such, can't say anything helpful about ideology or culture; on the contrary, I want to claim that it is the best way of making sense of these matters. It's just that classical Marxists tended to focus their energies elsewhere, whereas Western Marxists tended to explore the superstructural features of capitalist societies more than previous Marxists had ever done before (I'm thinking here of Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Lukacs, Korsch, Sartre, although we could also include Williams, Eagleton, and Jameson).
But here I restate my earlier criticism about "African" subjects. Why paint with so broad a brush? Surely the experience of colonialism in Kenya is different from the oppression of African-Americans in the U.S. South, though they may be linked in crucial ways. I am also suspicious of the Althusserian line about the "ideological production of subjects". I think something about this claim is right, but I've argued elsewhere that the Althusserian attack on subjectivity as such is a mistake that leaves us with an incoherent social theory, a problematic politics, and an anemic philosophical position that is basically just an inchoate version of post-structualism.
Again, I think the third moment is right on and indispensable, though it doesn't finish out the story any comprehensive account must tell.
I think that West is basically driving at the sort of position I myself would want to defend. But I don't understand his combination of Althusserian categories (e.g. "overdetermination", "interpellation") with a so-called Gramscian approach. I much prefer the dialectical approach that Gramsci defended over the positivist, behaviorist framework taken up by Althusser. Also, I'm puzzled by his claim early in the essay that his own political position is "non-reformist", which he justifies by citing his membership in the ultra-reformist Democratic Socialists of America (whose tactical platform includes working entirely within the Democratic Party machine).
Anyway- this is more or less just a survey- I'll try to weigh-in some more on this later this week.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Badiou on Althusser: "Subjectivity without a Subject"
To complicate matters more, here is another critical account of Althusser's Marxism and the role of 'the Subject' within it. I will forgo any introduction of Alain Badiou, first of all because I feel totally unqualified to do so (I know nothing of his 'philosophy' proper, only of his concretely 'political' writings (on Sarkozy, for example) and his radical/activist personal history and his involvement with Maoist organizations). This critique of Althusser appears in Metapolitics (2006) put out in English by Verso. Don't ask me what the title of the chapter "subjectivity without a subject" is supposed to mean.
On Badiou's account, in Althusser no theory of the subject is possible, nor could there ever be one. He summarizes the point:
"For Althusser, all theory proceeds by way of concepts. But 'subject' is not a concept. This theme is developed with utmost clarity in his work. For example: the concept 'process' is scientific, the concept 'subject' is ideological. 'Subject' is not the name of a concept, but that of a notion, that is, the mark of an inexistence. There is no subject since there are only processes."For Badiou, the question we should ask of Althusser is: What does eliminating the subject from theory mean for politics?
The danger is that politics collapses into ideology, because in Althusser there is always a hard and fast distinction between science and ideology. For Althusser, (social) science is the project of parsing out ideology from objective features of political, social and economic processes. Yet this conception of science, as Badiou emphasizes, is only about 'processes', not 'subjects'. But if we're only left with analysis of the 'processes' by which economic/political structures overdetermine the social field, where does this leave the possibility of purposive political action?
Now Althusser is a self-proclaimed Marxist, that is, a radical committed to changing the world, not merely interpreting it. But what room is there for political action in the anti-humanist Althusserian framework?
Of course, Althusser doesn't want to commit himself to leaving no room for political action. He, after all, conceives of philosophy itself as only properly undertaken as part of the 'class struggle in theory'. But I'm not interested in merely what he said or in what conclusions he deigned to avoid: I'm interested here in how his theory actually functions with respect to politics.
Althusser says on many occasions that politics is neither science nor ideology. As Badiou charts it: "In 1965 Althusser distinguished political practice from scientific and ideological practice. In 1968, he explained that every process is 'in relations'... Finally Althusser posits that only the 'militants of the revolutionary class struggle' really grasp the thought of 'the process'... that is, only those engaged in political practice genuinely understand the 'processes' by which the social/political field operates."
But who are these militants? I'm not sure I understand.
For Althusser, Bourgeois ideology is characterized by "the notion of the subject whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of subjective interpellation." Thus, Badiou concludes, in Althusser's sense the subject is a function of the State (where 'State' is construed broadly to include 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (e.g. Churches, Schools, media institutions, etc.) that extend beyond of the coercive State proper).
But if subjectivity is itself a function of the state, there cannot be a political subject for Althusser, because any properly revolutionary politics ipso facto cannot be a function of the state since it consists of a commitment to the overthrowing of the State altogether.
But if there aren't any political subjects (since 'subjects' are ideological), then where does this leave politics in relation to the science/ideology distinction? Science, as we've seen, consists entirely in uncovering what is objective (the concrete functioning of ISAs, the processes by which ideology clouds the reality of the economic/social field). But politics, Althusser says, is not about objectivity; which is to say, politics is not a science. Where then, in the Althusserian universe, is politics?
Althusser uses terms like 'partisanship', 'choice', 'decision', 'revolutionary militant', etc. which all lead in the direction of subjectivity. They all presuppose or indicate that there is someone for whom 'partisanship' and 'militancy' inhere as predicates or actions. Badiou asks here, somewhat enigmatically, whether we should attempt to read Althusser as trying to 'think subjectivity without a subject'. I'm not sure I understand what that means.
Badiou ends the chapter abruptly by making some remarks indicating some of Althusser's worthwhile contributions to radical political theory while trying to salvage some of his insights. For example, Badiou argues that we read "overdetermination" in Althusser as a limitation on the politically possible. But possible for whom? I'm again unsure what to make of any of Althusser's insights at all unless we risk reinstating some conception of the subject. After all, who is it that authors texts that are purportedly scientific, that aim to show the functioning of ideology? I don't want to say that either subjects are located within ideological structures or they are completely outside them. Nonetheless, we must be careful not to close off the possibility within our theorization of ideology of explaining how it is that we, as subjects, came to theorize about it in the first place.
It seems to me to be a serious problem that Althusser's project cannot account for its own conditions of possibility. Moreover it seems obvious that the choice between homo-economicus and the ultra-functionalism of Althusser's approach are not exhaustive possibilities. Yet since Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequent 'structuralists' in social science introduced the idea of the subject, as such, as a product of determinate social processes, this problem has persisted in French thought. My limited engagement with some recent French theory suggests to me that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, such that vague invocations of 'subjectivity' or 'singularity' are taken to be obviously good.
Incorporating Althusser's theory of ideology with contemporary feminism
Inspired by T, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ISA’s (Ideological State Apparatuses), particularly about how well Althusser’s theory of ideology and its role in the creation of social subjects, which one can reasonably assume was built mostly around explaining economic phenomena, relates to contemporary feminist theory and explanations of the status quo when it comes to gender relations and hierarchy.
Just looking at the feminist blogosphere, it seems very common practice to assume culture, in particular, works like Althusser’s ISA in reaffirming gender inequalities and creating certain kinds of gendered subjects. Look no further than the large number of posts around the blogosphere on sexist advertisements during the Super Bowl. This sort of media or cultural criticism makes up a bulk of mainstream, non-academic feminist analysis (and I think one could quite easily make the argument that even most academic feminism is about culture). This criticism is done almost with the assumption that all readers understand the impact that culture has on promoting sexism (or negative experiences of gender even)—that the portrayals of gender relations and roles in commercials and on tv shows and in movies and in music contribute to the normalizing (or, reifying the status quo) of gendered hegemony.
In this sense, Althusser’s theory of ISAs seems to meld really well with mainstream feminism. But, here’s my question: why is there an inordinate amount of feminist focus on culture as an ISA, at the expense of some of the other ISAs T mentions in his post (education, the legal system, the political system)?*
Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with so far:
1-Talking about culture is easier than talking about popular economics or the education system and pedagogy or any of those other spheres.
Why is it easier? Late capitalism seems to require a certain level of consumer savvy for mere survival. People in general are trained to look at advertisements or really any representational mediums with a certain degree of scrutiny. We’re always asking, what are you trying to sell me and how are you doing it? This doesn’t only apply to actual products but to representations anywhere. We ask it even of the most inane sitcoms. What is the Debra character on Everybody Loves Raymond trying to tell me about being a wife and mother? We don’t need college degrees to feel adept to discuss culture.
2-It’s more fun to talk about culture than to talk about other ISAs. I don’t know that this requires an explanation or that I could even provide one, but on nine out of ten days I’d rather talk about sexism in the Millionaire Matchmaker than in pedagogy in our public education system.
3-It is easier to pinpoint and affect the bad guy behind advertisements than it is to address the “bad guy” behind these other ISAs. When NBC airs a series of sexist ads and runs a series of sexist shows, we know who is to blame and we know how to assign that blame. We write letters, we boycott products. It might not always be effective, but at least we have a line of attack.
Such it is amid liberal-capitalism. We have more control of products than we do of our own government. Maybe we could articulate what is going on with gender in these other ISAs, but even then, what would we do about them? Vote every couple years? I don’t think I’m alone in feeling more than a little powerless in our so-called democracy. Power is distributed throughout the state in such a way that it’s difficult to say where the abuse is originating, let alone to decide how to take it on.
I think the fact that it’s more difficult to attack other ISAs makes it more frustrating and, therefore, less pleasant to focus on.
I’m sure there are other possible explanations for focusing on culture, but, maybe more importantly, what is the effect of the dearth of analysis of other ISAs? Here’s my hypothesis:
1-We become more inclined to accept liberal state-ism, which causes problems like the acceptance of the sorts of unfreedom created by the state, which scholars like Wendy Brown have tried to take on. Instead of focusing on the underlying forces producing culture and reaffirming it as good (these other ISAs), we focus on more surface issues like Pepsi commercials and the waist sizes of the average super model. Those issues can be important to talk about too, but soon we start thinking the problems aren’t with the basic, unjust structure of our global society, but just problems with companies here and there and the way they talk about things. Not only is the state not part of the problem, but maybe it’s even part of the solution to these private instigators. Maybe we can regulate these representational problems to a certain extent? Maybe we can threaten corporations with economics and government? We start to side with the state and see it as our ally. We become pawns of the state, even if we don’t want to be. You know, the same state perpetrating violence all over the world, the same state thriving off of the prison-industrial complex, the same state that affords more rights and freedoms and support to corporations than it does to its people.
2-We attempt to analyze other ISAs with the same formulas we use for analyzing culture as an ISA. Even when we talk about sexism perpetuated by government, or say, the military, or by economists, we have a tendency to talk about representation instead of looking at the ways they institutionalize hegemony. We ask questions like, how many women senators are there? How gender neutral is the language here?
These questions might be important to ask, and they may yield productive answers. But, what aren’t we asking? It may be great that Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State, but why aren’t we talking about how little her policies have done to help young women in Palestine? What if the representation we gain with a woman heading State is actually a curse because it further embeds and normalizes violence we once associated with masculine leadership? The violence might still disproportionately affect women, but now, by praising a minor representational advancement in an institution we might otherwise consider criminal, we’ve signed up for it too. In a way, we’ve laid out our priorities.
3-We fail to realize how intricate the ties between culture and the other ISAs have become, how mutually reliant each ISA is on the other. And I don’t mean this in an abstract sense. I mean, literally, we fail to see that the executives behind NBC are pulling the strings of our legislators. We might not notice that NBC takes the cues of the State Department when it airs certain stories on its nightly news and even adds certain plots to its TV shows. We might see stories about battered Muslim women on Law and Order SVU who were liberated by noble American soldiers, only to be abused again by their families in the U.S., only to be later saved by the noble U.S. justice system. How did these storylines come to be and who stands to benefit when we accept them?
Now, I don’t think it’s that these questions are never asked in the feminist blogosphere or elsewhere, but I think it’s problematic that they seem to be rarely asked relative to the number of questions we ask about culture.
That's all I've got right now. This theory is in its baby stages. Please feel free to rip it to shreds or add to it in any way you can.
*Please feel free to argue this point with me if you don’t think there is an inordinate focus on culture in most feminist circles.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Althusser on Ideology
Ideology, as the term is understood generally in the Marxist tradition, means something quite different from the word's use in common parlance. Ordinarily, 'ideology' refers to any set of beliefs (usually political) that form some sort of coherent position that might be identified as Left, Right, etc. In the Marxist tradition, however, ideology has to do with the way in which dominant beliefs and values are conditioned and shaped by the political-economic structure of society. In classical Marxism, the economic organization (mode of production, relations of production, etc.) is the central site of analysis and critique. In contemporary society this means that capitalism (the dominant economic/social system) is at the center of analysis, and if we consider also that Marxists radically reject capitalism, it will not be difficult to see why 'ideology' is, on their view, anything but a term of praise.
It is difficult to summarize how a conception of ideology functions in Marx's work since he nowhere offers a fully developed, coherent theory. In his early writings, his critique of ideology takes the form of stripping appearances of their false necessity, thus demystifying and situating products of minded human beings back within the contingency of material life. In late works like Capital, the critique of ideology is aimed more to show how apparently autonomous social phenomena (culture, political systems/procedures) are actually only reflections of the economic base of society. Here it's necessary to invoke the somewhat hackneyed 'base/superstructure' metaphor, but a disclaimer is required first: it is merely a heuristic device (not to be taken too far as an authoritative guide) and it has been, on the whole, more abused and misread than it has been helpful.
Nonetheless, the metaphor is useful to spell out the bare bones of what ideology has come to mean in the Marxist tradition. The base refers to the fundamental economic structure of a society, that is, its mode of production, relations of production, etc. (Its worth mentioning that Marxists who've taken up the metaphor have tended to disagree about what features of the economic order constitute the base). The base is causally determinative such that what appears in the superstructure (ideas, values, political culture, system of government, etc.) as autonomous and free, is in fact largely determined by the fundamental economic structure of society.
What we're talking about here, loosely, is the relationship between ideas and the material world. Very crudely stated, Plato held something like the view that the material world is only a reflection of a transcendent realm of perfect Ideas. For Marx, this schema is totally inverted; our ideas are a kind of reflection of the way the material world is and not the other way around. What Marx means by 'material world' is of course the political and economic history of human societies.
But Marx was not interested in merely showing how certain ideas and beliefs vary according to different historical epochs and societies; Marx's critique of dominant ideas is motivated by a radical political project that submits existing societies to ruthless criticism. Different historical epochs and societies are not simply taken at face value, for Marx. He wants to uncover the ways in which political and economic struggles have shaped dominant ideas, and how these ideas are reflective of the dominant social groups and the prevailing economic order. Marx is anything but sanguine about history: the well-known line from the Communist Manifesto to recall here is, of course, that the history of all societies hitherto has been the history of class struggle. Marx's aim is to show how repressive, exploitative class societies (of which capitalism is the contemporary example) shape prevailing ideas and values and how these ideas, in turn, reinforce or help to reproduce or maintain social relations of exploitation and oppression. Demystifying these dominant ideas that may appear as natural or necessary is only undertaken by Marx to the extent that it facilitates emancipation and aims at freedom. The aim isn't merely to understand the world, but to change it.
So far this is all very surface-level and schematic. All of the really juicy details remain to be fleshed out. For example, precisely how (e.g. by what concrete proceses?) do prevailing ideas and ways of understanding the world attain dominance? Also, if dominant ideas are determined by the structure of society then isn't this also true of Marxism, that is, isn't Marx's work also simply determined by economic conditions (and presumably therefore unfree)? These questions only scratch the surface of difficulties and problems with the conception of ideology in the Marxist tradition. In Marx's writings, we find the beginnings of answers to these problems but no fully developed theory.
One attempt to try to develop this theory further is found in the work of French philosopher (and PCF theorist) Louis Althusser. His project very often took the form of polemics against other "Western Marxist" intellectuals like Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci and Sartre. Althusser's version of Marxism was very influential during the 1960s and early 70s but was eclipsed (in terms of influence and popularity... neither of which should be decisive in any assesment of Althusser's work) in his own country by less Marxist versions of 'structuralism' and the rise of what is sometimes called 'post-structuralism'.
Ideology, in Althusser’s framework, is a particular organization of signifying practices which constitute human beings as social subjects and which produce the lived relations by which such subjects are connected to the dominant relations of production in society. Ideology is bound up with our affective, unconscious relations to the world: it refers to the pre-reflective, apparently ‘spontaneous’ way in which reality ‘strikes’ us.
The first thing to note here is the, perhaps, strange thought that ideology constitutes human beings as social subjects. What could this mean? Usually we take it for granted that there are people, human beings, social subjects, selves, etc. with a stable identity that they develop freely, and so on. But in Althusser's framework, individuals are neither naturally existing nor freely autonomous choosers who adopt various identities. Rather, individuals (subjects) are produced or constituted by a particular organization of signifying practices that precedes them.
But what does Althusser mean by 'signifying practices'? This is a complicated question to answer. For the sake of simplicity we can understand it as something like 'ways of understanding the world' or 'ways of making sense out of the social field'. And of course, 'ways of understanding the world' require the deployment of concepts, which individuals do not themselves construct out of whole cloth but rather inheret from their social environment, i.e. society. It will thus be crucial to specify how social practices shape as well as prescribe (require) the acceptance of certain 'ways of making sense out of the social field' rather than others. This process is one that is, for Althusser, shaped by political and economic structure of society; thus it is not politically neutral. In general, the status-quo will tend to reproduce itself and preserve the existing distributions of economic/political power.
Now if society impacts and shapes dominant 'signifying practices', then understanding and critiquing dominant ideas must require an understanding of what society is like (politically, economically and otherwise). Here, classical Marxism has a clear answer: under conditions of capitalism, social life is dominated by the economic relations borne out of markets and the class exploitation that constitutes them. Althusser's analysis of society runs along similar lines.
Althusser, in contrast to other more Hegelian twentieth century Marxists (Marcuse and Adorno, for example), retains the base/superstructure metaphor. His reading of Marx has it that a certain 'epistemological break' occurred between his early and late work, and consequently Althusser finds only Marx's mature work (particularly Capital) of primary political/theoretical interest.
According to Althusser's approach, the social field is made up of different levels or 'instances' differentiated by their respective indicies of effectivity. Althusser only retains the metaphor insofar as he believes that despite the fact that the superstructure has a kind of relative autonomy, the social field is 'in the last instance' determined by the economic base. As he puts it "the base, in the last instance, determines the whole edifice." Nonetheless, Althusser is concerned to carve out room for both the relative autonomy of the superstructure as well as the reciprocal action of the superstructure on the base. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the social field is overdetermined (invoking a psychoanalytic metaphor) by the economic base. It is clear why Althusser would want to say that the base cannot be wholly determinative, but the interesting thing will be to see if his theory can adequately explain how the relative autonomy of the superstructure.
As already mentioned, Althusser sees individuals ('the subject') as being constituted by ideology. Thus the subject is an ideological category; it is in this sense that Althusser's Marxism is sometimes called 'anti-humanist'. Ideology tells you who you are, what your origins are, what you’re place in the world is, what your role is, and so on. Subjects are not given, they are constituted, they are 'interpellated' by the dominant social order. Interpellation, drawing on the example of the police act of shouting 'hey you!' followed by a turning around in guilt, is meant to point to the way in which individuals are forcibly called-into-being by the domaint order.
Althusser's primary target in this attack on humanism is the liberal/bourgeois conception of individuals as existing prior to all social, historical and political arrangements. According to this liberal thesis, if you strip all of the marks of society and politics away from individuals, what you're left with are neutral rational agents underneath. Bourgeois economic theory proceeds in this way, via methodological individualism, to explain all of society in terms of the ‘free choices’ of rationally self-interested agents seeking to maximize their own utility. (Think of Freakonomics, or libertarians when they say things like "well if women are oppressed, its because they freely choose to be").
In stark contrast, Althusser's social theory maintains that the individual is always already interpellated (called into being by power), always already marked by the dominant structures that organize a particular social field. It is hardly surprising that this insight has been further developed and situated within the project of many contemporary feminisms that seek to reject the categories of gender/sex as either given or pre-discursive. Explicitly Althusserian versions of feminism can be found in the work of Chela Sandoval, for example. However, the most powerful development of the way in which we are called on or interpellated as gendered/sexed subjects that I've come accross is in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.
In concrete terms, ideology functions by means of what Althusser calls "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISA's). These refer to institutions, social practices and rituals. ISAs are not identical or strictly limited to what, in liberal theory, conform to the the State proper. To quote Gramsci:“The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’”. The liberal capitalist State is neither public nor private, on the contrary, it is a condition of the public/private distinction.
ISAs include the education system (which breaks down into different public and private schools, etc), the institution of the family, the Church (in earlier epochs, this was the ISA par excellence, but it has since receded in power and efficacy due to changing economic conditions), and so on. ISA's are social institutions that tell you what your role is, how you are understand your place in society, how you are supposed to act, what 'normal' consists of, how to dress, what you should value and aspire to, etc. Think of how schools use methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to enforce some of these norms. Other ISAs of interest consist of:
-the legal system
-the political system (the relationships between different major parties, etc.)
-communications (press, radio, television, etc.)
-'culture' (sports, film, TV, literature, the arts, etc.)
For Althusser, no class or dominant group can maintain power without also exerting control over the ISAs. The role of 'Repressive State Apparatuses' (the police, army, etc.) that function by violence are clearly important to understanding the distributions of power in a society, but they are alone insufficient to understand any regime of power. By the same token, however, Althusser argues that ISAs never function wholly by ideology alone, but always also have a repressive edge (or bear some threat of repression/violence). I think considering the ways that most repressive dictatorships have functioned throughout the 20th century bears this point out well: think of how such regimes exerted tight control over media, culture and education in addition to their monopolization of repression and violence.
