Althusser, Louis Pierre

« social life reflected a single informing centre.

Taken over in a Marxist framework, this totality leads to economicreductionism; everything becomes an expression of the fundamental economic contradiction, in the way that,according to Lukács, reification pervades the whole of capitalist society (see Marxism, Western §2 ).

For Marx, by contrast, each social formation is a complex, structured totality composed of a plurality of practices irreducible toone another.

The economy is 'determinant in the last instance', that is, its primacy consists not so much in itsdirectly shaping the course of historical development, as in its selecting some particular 'instance' (or practice) toplay the dominant role (politics, for example, in feudal society).

Economic causality thus operates indirectly, andalways in combination with non-economic practices.

As Althusser famously put it, 'the lonely hour of the "lastinstance" never comes' ( [1965] 1969: 113 ).

What Marx called the superstructure - politics, law and ideology - is 'relatively autonomous': each practice develops according to its own specific laws, within the limits set for it by theeconomy.

Thus major historical events, for example, the Russian Revolution of February 1917, are 'overdetermined':they are not simply expressions of an underlying contradiction between the forces and relations of production, butinvolve a combination of heterogeneous factors - economic, political, ideological - which accumulate until theyproduce a rupture.

This complexity of the social whole is one reason why Althusser does not believe that individualscan understand the history in which they are caught up.

Ideology, he believes, is a necessary feature of anysociety, including the classless communism of the future.

It serves as a factor of social cohesion, adapting humanbeings to the roles required of them as bearers of the prevailing relations of production.

The very form ofsubjectivity - individuals' conception of themselves as coherent and autonomous persons - is the means throughwhich they are subsumed under ideological social relations.

The only way out of this imaginary relationship lies inscientific theory.

The formation of a scientific problematic - for example, Marx's epistemological break - allows anescape from the repetition of a few stereotyped ideological themes into a potentially infinite process of theoreticalself-development.

Here too, however, individuals figure only as the bearers of an impersonal social process, sinceeach science develops according to the conceptual patterns specific to it.

3 Conclusion Though carried out under the slogan of a 'return to Marx', his rescue from the misinterpretations perpetrated both by orthodox Communistsand by Hegelians such as the early Lukács, Althusser's reading of Marx was on his own admission a 'guilty' one,reflecting a variety of influences.

He himself paid explicit tribute to Spinoza and Freud in particular, and the debt hisphilosophy of science owed to his teacher Bachelard is evident.

More generally, Althusser's anti-humanism bears astrong resemblance to the attack on the subject as a unified and sovereign entity which, initiated in the 1950s byLacan and Levi-Strauss, was to be radicalized in the late 1960s by Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault (see Post- structuralism §§2-4 ).

But post-structuralism derives ultimately from Nietzsche's critique of modernity, with its tendency (never fully realized in Nietzsche himself, but taken much further in his own way by Heidegger) to rejectthe Enlightenment tout court .

How could Marxism, deeply embedded in which are preoccupations with progress and emancipation, place itself in the camp of the counter-Enlightenment? More specifically, in rejecting economicallyreductionist versions of Marxism, was not Althusser in danger of developing a pluralist conception of the socialwhole in which the economy had lost any causal primacy? Again, if each 'theoretical practice' developedautonomously according to its own internal norms, how could Althusser maintain a distinction between science andideology and thereby resist Foucault's Nietzschean reduction of all knowledge to expressions of the will to power?Althusser's philosophical enterprise ultimately ran aground on these and similar difficulties.

Nevertheless, hisinsistence on a careful conceptual analysis of Marx's writings as the basis of a reconstruction of historicalmaterialism, his demonstration of the methodological gulf separating Marx and Hegel, and his sensitivity todevelopments in the philosophy of science that were ignored by the Frankfurt School, for example, make his work oflasting value.. »