Althusser Terms

Question 1

Abstract

Answer 1

The theoretical opposition between the abstract and the concrete lies wholly in the realm of theory. The abstract is the starting-point for theoretical practice, its Generality I, while the concrete is its end-point (Generality III). The common theoretical view that regards theory as abstract and reality as concrete is characteristic of the works of Feuerbach and of Marx’s own youth.

Question 2

Alienation

Answer 2

An ideological concept used by Marx in his Early Works and regarded by the partisans of these works as the key concept of Marxism. Marx derived the term from Feuerbach’s anthropology where it denoted the state of man and society where the essence of man is only present to him in the distorted form of a god, which, although man created it in the image of his essence (the species-being), appears to him as an external, pre-existing creator. Marx used the concept to criticize the State and the economy as confiscating the real self-determining labour of men in the same way. In his later works, however, the term appears very rarely, and where it does it is either used ironically, or with a different conceptual content (in Capital, for instance).

Question 3

Break, Epistemological

Answer 3

A concept introduced by Gaston Bachelard in his La Formation de l’esprit scientifique, and related to uses of the term in studies in the history of ideas by Canguilhem and Foucault (see Althusser’s Letter to the Translator). It describes the leap from the pre-scientific world of ideas to the scientific world; this leap involves a radical break with the whole pattern and frame of reference of the pre-scientific (ideological) notions, and the construction of a new pattern (problematic q.v.). Althusser applies it to Marx’s rejection of the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideology of his youth and the construction of the basic concepts of dialectical and historical materialism in his later works.

Question 4

Causality, Linear, Expressive and Structural

Answer 4

Whereas classical theories of causality have only two models, linear (transitive, mechanical) causality, which only describes the effects of one element on another, and expressive (teleological) causality, which can describe the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence, Marxist theory introduces a new concept of the effect of the whole on the parts, structural, complex causality, where the complex totality of the structure in dominance is a structure of effects with present-absent causes. The cause of the effects is the complex organization of the whole, present-absent in its economic, political, ideological and knowledge effects. Marx himself often used the theatrical analogy of the Darstellung (representation, mise en scène). Empiricist ideologies, seeing the action on the stage, the effects, believe that they are seeing a faithful copy of reality, recognizing themselves and their preconceptions in the mirror held up to them by the play. The Hegelian detects the hand of God or the Spirit writing the script and directing the play. For the Marxist, on the contrary, this is a theatre, but one which reflects neither simple reality nor any transcendental truth, a theatre without an author; the object of his science is the mechanism which produces the stage effects

Question 5

Combination / Combinatory

Answer 5

The only theory of the totality available to classical philosophy is the Leibnizian conception of an expressive totality (totalité expressive) in which each part ‘conspires’ in the essence of the totality, so that the whole can be read in each of the parts, which are total parts (partes totales) homologous with it. Modern structuralism reproduces this ideology in its concept of a combinatory, a formal pattern of relations and (arbitrarily occupied) places which recur as homologous patterns with a different content throughout the social formation and its history. Theoretically, the combinatory will produce all the possible structures of the social formation, past, present and future, which are or will be realized or not according to chance or to some kind of principle of natural selection. Marxism has an apparently similar concept, that of combination or Verbindung (Marx). The Verbindung, however, has nothing in common with the formalism of the combinatory: it is a complex structure, doubly articulated (in the mode of production, by the productive forces connection and the relations of production connection – q.v.), and one that specifies its content (its ‘supports’ – q.v.), which changes with a change in the formation or mode of production analysed.

Question 6

Concrete-in-Thought / Real-Concrete

Answer 6

In Feuerbach’s ideology, the speculative abstract, theory, is opposed to the concrete, reality. For the mature Marx, however, the theoretical abstract and concrete both exist in thought as Generalities I and III. The concrete-in-thought is produced wholly in thought, whereas the real-concrete ‘survives independently outside thought before and after’ (Marx).

Question 7

Conjuncture

Answer 7

The central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin’s ‘current moment’); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied

Question 8

Consciousness

Answer 8

A term designating the region where ideology is located (‘false consciousness’) and superseded (‘true consciousness’), contaminated by the pre-Marxist ideology of the Young Marx. In fact, Althusser argues, ideology is profoundly unconscious – it is a structure imposed involuntarily on the majority of men

Question 9

Contradiction

Answer 9

A term for the articulation of a practice into the complex whole of the social formation. Contradictions may be antagonistic or non-antagonistic according to whether their state of overdetermination is one of fusion or condensation, or one of displacement.

Question 10

Contradictions, Condensation, Displacement and Fusion of

Answer 10

Condensation and displacement were used by Freud to indicate the two ways dream-thoughts are represented in the dream-work – by the compression of a number of dream-thoughts into one image, or by transferring psychical intensity from one image to another. Althusser uses the analogy of these processes of psychical overdetermination to denote the different forms of the overdetermination of contradictions in the Marxist theory of history. In periods of stability the essential contradictions of the social formation are neutralized by displacement; in a revolutionary situation, however, they may condense or fuse into a revolutionary rupture.

Question 11

Denegation

Answer 11

Freud used the term Verneinung (normally translated into English as negation, but denegation has been used in this text because of the Hegelian ambiguity of negation) to designate an unconscious denial masked by a conscious acceptance, or vice versa (in fetishisms, for example, there is a denegation of the female’s absence of a penis). Translated into French as dénégation, it is one of a set of concepts for the place of the conscious system in the total psychic mechanism (the unconscious) which Althusser applies by analogy to the place of ideology in the social formation. The role of historical materialism is to analyse (in the strict sense) the mechanisms producing the ideological recognition of the obvious, given facts, just as psycho-analysis explains the mechanism producing the mirror-recognition of Narcissistic identification with the other. This mythical recognition structure, typical of ideology, explains the latter’s closed circular nature, its homology with wish-fulfilment (plein-du-désir) in analysis, as ideology fulfilment (plein-de-idéologie). Science and analysis, on the other hand, are open systems of concepts, because they cannot be defined by any spatial metaphor.

Question 12

Development, Uneven

Answer 12

A concept of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung: the overdetermination of all the contradictions in a social formation means that none can develop simply; the different overdeterminations in different times and places result in quite different patterns of social development.

Question 13

Dialectic of Consciousness

Answer 13

The Hegelian dialectic, or any dialectic where the various elements or moments are externalizations of a single, simple, internal principle, as Rome in Hegel’s Philosophy of History is an expression of the abstract legal personality, etc.

Question 14

Dislocation

Answer 14

Empiricist and historicist problematics assume a one-to-one correspondence (correspondence biunivoque) between the concepts of a science and its real object, and a relation of expressive homology between these objects themselves (although these correspondences may be direct or inverted – i.e., the order of emergence of the concepts in the science may follow the historical sequence, or, on the contrary, follow a reverse order). Althusser argues, on the contrary, that the relations between ideology and the other practices, between the different practices in general, between the elements in each practice, and between ideology and science, are, in principle, relations of dislocations, staggered with respect to one another: each has its own time and rhythrn of development. The totality is the theory of their articulation together, so it cannot be discovered by making an ‘essential section’ through the current of historical movement at any time one. This dislocation plays an important part in the theory of transition.

Question 15

Effectivity, Specific

Answer 15

The characteristic of Marx’s later theory: the different aspects of the social formation are not related as in Hegel’s dialectic of consciousness as phenomena and essence, each has its precise influence on the complex totality, the structure in dominance. Thus base and super-structure must not be conceived as vulgar Marxism conceives them, as essence and phenomenon, the State and ideology are not mere expressions of the economy, they are autonomous within a structured whole where one aspect is dominant, this dominance being determined in the last instance by the economy.

Question 16

Empiricism

Answer 16

Althusser uses the concept of empiricism in a very wise sense to include all ‘epistemologies’ that oppose a given subject to a given object and call knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object. Hence the knowledge of the object is part of the object itself. This remains true whatever the nature of the subject (psychological, historical, etc.) or of the object (continuous, discontinuous, mobile, immobile, etc.) in question. So as well as covering those epistemologies traditionally called ‘empiricist’, this definition includes classical idealism, and the epistemology of Feuerbach and the Young Marx.

Question 17

Fetishism

Answer 17

Fetishism is the mechanism which conceals the real functioning (the real movement – wirkliche Bewegung) of the dominant structure in the social formation, i.e., it is the constitutive dislocation between the ideological practice and the other practices. This is not a subjective mystification, but the mode of appearance of reality (Marx calls it a reality – Wirklichkeit). In the capitalist mode of production it takes the form of the fetishism of commodities, i.e., the personification of certain things (money-capital) and the ‘reification’ of a certain relationship (labour). It does not consist of a general ‘reification’ of all relationships, as some humanist interpretations of Marx argue, but only of this particular relationship. Fetishism is not absent from other modes of production, it is merely displaced onto whichever level is dominant in the social formation characterized by that mode of production.

Question 18

Formation, Social

Answer 18

The concrete complex whole comprising economic practice, political practice and ideological practice at a certain place and stage of development. Historical materialism is the science of social formations.

Question 19

Historicism

Answer 19

A currently widespread interpretation of Marxism which originated around the time of the October Revolution, and which dominates the ideas of authors as diverse as Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Della Volpe, Colletti and Sartre. It is characterized by a linear view of time susceptible to an essential section into a present at any moment. The knowledge of history is then the self-consciousness of each present. This self-consciousness of the present may take a number of forms; (different ‘mediations’ may intercede between the historian and the totality): the class consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat (Lukács), the organic ideology of the ruling (hegemonic) class (Gramsci), or the practice of human inter-subjectivity as a whole, human ‘praxis’ (Sartre). Historicisms may or may not be humanist (Sartre and Colletti respectively)

Question 20

Generalities I, II and III

Answer 20

In theoretical practice, the process of the production of knowledge, Generalities I are the abstract, part-ideological, part-scientific generalities that are the raw material of the science, Generalities III are the concrete, scientific generalities that are produced, while Generalities II are the theory of the science at a given moment, the means of production of knowledge.

Question 21

Humanism

Answer 21

Humanism is the characteristic feature of the ideological problematic from which Marx emerged, and more generally, of most modern ideology; a particularly conscious form of humanism is Feuerbach’s anthropology, which dominates Marx’s Early Works. As a science, however, historical materialism, as exposed in Marx’s later works, implies a theoretical anti-humanism. ‘Real-humanism’ characterizes the works of the break: the humanist form is retained, but usages such as ‘the ensemble of the social relations’ point forward to the concepts of historical materialism. However, the ideology of a socialist society may be a humanism, a proletarian ‘class humanism’ [an expression I obviously use in a provisional, half-critical sense. L. A.].

Question 22

Ideology

Answer 22

Ideology is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world, or a reflected form of this unconscious relation, for instance a ‘philosophy’, etc. It is distinguished from a science not by its falsity, for it can be coherent and logical (for instance, theology), but by the fact that the practico-social predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it precedes the science that is produced by making an epistemological break with it, but it survives alongside science as an essential element of every social formation, including a socialist and even a communist society.

Question 23

Knowledge

Answer 23

Knowledge is the product of theoretical practice; it is Generalities III. As such it is clearly distinct from the practical recognition (reconnaissance) of a theoretical problem.

Question 24

Materialism, Dialectical and Historical

Answer 24

Historicists, even those who claim to be Marxists, reject the classical Marxist distinction between historical and dialectical materialism since they see philosophy as the self-knowledge of the historical process, and hence identify philosophy and the science of history; at best, dialectical materialism is reduced to the historical method, while the science of history is its content. Althusser, rejecting historicism, rejects this identification. For him, historical materialism is the science of history, while dialectical materialism, Marxist philosophy, is the theory of scientific practice.

Question 25

Model

Answer 25

The theory of models is a variant of empiricism. According to this theory, Capital, for example, analyses not the real capitalist world, but the properties of an ideal, simplified model of it, which is then applied to empirical reality, which, of course, it only fits approximately. For Althusser, the theory in Capital is only ‘ideal’ in the sense that it only involves the object of knowledge, like all theory, not the real object, and the knowledge it produces is perfectly adequate to its object, not an approximation to it. Related to the general theory of models are both the view that Volume Three of Capital is a concretization, removing the simplifications of the ideal model of Volume One, and the theory of the ‘English example’ in Capital as a model for capitalist development everywhere else. For Althusser, Volume Three is as much concerned with the object of knowledge as Volume One, and England is only a source of illustrations in Capital, not a theoretical norm.

Question 26

Negation of the Negation

Answer 26

A Hegelian conception that Marx ‘flirts’ with even in his mature works. It denotes the process of destruction and resumption (supersession/Aufhebung. q.v.) whereby the Spirit moves from one stage of its development to another. For Marx, it describes the fact that capitalism, having come into being by the destruction of feudalism, is itself destined to be destroyed by the rise of socialism and communism [this description makes a metaphorical use of the notion. L. A.].

Question 27

Overdetermination

Answer 27

Freud used this term to describe (among other things) the representation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/Verschiebung-Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance at any given historical moment.

More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole, in other words its uneven development.

Question 28

Philosophy / ‘Philosophy’

Answer 28

‘Philosophy’ (in inverted commas) is used to denote the reflected forms of ideology as opposed to Theory. See Althusser’s own ‘Remarks on the Terminology Adopted’ . Philosophy (without inverted commas) is used in the later written essays to denote Marxist philosophy, i.e., dialectical materialism.

Question 29

Practice, Economic, Political, Ideological and Theoretical

Answer 29

Althusser takes up the theory introduced by Engels and much elaborated by Mao Tse-tung that economic, political and ideological practice are the three practices (processes of production or transformation) that constitute the social formation. Economic practice is the transformation of nature by human labour into social products, political practice the transformation of social relations by revolution, ideological practice the transformation of one relation to the lived world into a new relation by ideological struggle. In his concern to stress the distinction between science and ideology, Althusser insists that theory constitutes a fourth practice, theoretical practice, that transforms ideology into knowledge with theory. The determinant moment in each practice is the work of production which brings together raw materials, men and means of production – not the men who perform the work, who cannot therefore claim to be the subjects of the historical process. Subsidiary practices are also discussed by Althusser, e.g. technical practice (pratique technique).

Question 30

Problematic

Answer 30

A word or concept cannot be considered in isolation; it only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used: its problematic. A related concept can clearly be seen at work in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (but see Althusser’s Letter to the Translator).

It should be stressed that the problematic is not a world-view.

It is not the essence of the thought of an individual or epoch which can be deduced from a body of texts by an empirical, generalizing reading; it is centred on the absence of problems and concepts within the problematic as much as their presence; it can therefore only be reached by a symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale q.v.) on the model of the Freudian analyst’s reading of his patient’s utterances.

Question 31

Production / Discovery of a Knowledge

Answer 31

Engels noted the difference between Priestley’s production of oxygen without realizing the theoretical significance of the new substance, and Lavoisier’s discovery of (the concept of) oxygen, with its revolutionary consequences for the science of chemistry. He compared this with the difference between the production of the reality of surplus-value in classical economic theory and Marx’s discovery of the concept of surplus-value. The slightly pejorative use of production here should not be confused with Althusser’s insistence that knowledge is a specific mode of production.

Question 32

Production, Mode of

Answer 32

The mode of material production is the central concept of the theory of the economic practice of the social formation. It is itself a complex structure, doubly articulated by the productive forces connection and the relations of production connection, and containing three elements: the labourer, the means of production (sub-divided into object of labour and instrument of labour), and the non-labourer. The term can also be applied by analogy to any other practice or level, for they are all also doubly articulated, contain a similar set of elements, and produce a specific product

Question 33

Productive Forces / Relations of Production

Answer 33

These concepts are generally taken (even by some Marxists) to mean the machines or their productivity on the one hand, and the human relations between the members of a society on the other. For Althusser and Balibar, on the contrary, they are the two different articulations of the combination of the mode of production: they are both ‘relations’ (connections – relations) combining together labourers, means of production and non-labourers within the mode of production. The productive forces constitute the connection of real appropriation (wirkliche Aneignung) of nature, or the ‘possession’ connection, while the relations of production are the relations of expropriation of the product or the ‘property-ownership’ connection (not the corresponding ‘law of property’ which is not even an ‘expression’ of the relations of production, but a structure dislocated from them, a superstructure). This double articulation appears in every aspect of the mode of production, in the difference between use-value and exchange value, and in the difference between the technical and the social division of labour, etc. While the productive forces cannot be reduced to machines or quantifiable techniques, the relations of production can not be reduced to relations between men alone, to human relations or inter-subjectivity, as they are in the historicist ideology

Question 34

Reading

Answer 34

The problems of Marxist theory (or of any other theory) can only be solved by learning to read the texts correctly (hence the title of Althusser’s later book, Lire le Capital, ‘Reading Capital’); neither a superficial reading, collating literal references, nor a Hegelian reading, deducing the essence of a corpus by extracting the ‘true kernel from the mystified shell’, will do. Only a symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale), constructing the problematic, the unconsciousness of the text, is a reading of Marx’s work that will allow us to establish the epistemological break that makes possible historical materialism as a science.

Question 35

Reproduction

Answer 35

Simple reproduction is often regarded as simplified ‘model’ of extended reproduction, and the analysis of reproduction as the realization of production in history, the introduction of temporality into the analysis of production, in the form of the conditions of its continuation. Balibar shows, however, that simple reproduction is the concept of social production. Social production is only apparently the production of things; in reality it is the production of a social relation, i.e., the reproduction of the relations of production. Hence simple and extended reproduction are synchronic concepts of the mode of production

Question 36

Section, Essential

Answer 36

Ideological theories (empiricism, idealism, historicism) see the historical totality as analysable in a present, a contemporaneity, in which the relations between the parts can be seen and recorded. To see this present implies the possibility of cutting a section through the historical current, a section in which the essence of that current is visible. This essential section is impossible for Althusser and Balibar because there is no present for all the elements and structures at once in their conceptual system. The possibility of an essential section is one of the positive tests for an empiricist ideology of history