Althusser's Lesson

Jacques Rancière, Emiliano Battista

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441137791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared 'dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the '60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?

CHAPTER ONE

A Lesson in Orthodoxy: M-L Teaches John Lewis That It Is the Masses Which Make History

It is just as absurd to think that workers can do
without a foreman as it is to think that kids can do
without teachers and the sick without doctors.

Georges Séguy¹

There was once a puzzled journalist, who could not understand why his desperate search for a photo of John Lewis for an article about the Reply to John Lewis had turned up nothing. This journalist, it seems safe to say, had not studied much philosophy. Otherwise he would easily have recognized in John Lewis that character – essential to every handbook in the field – who says what must not be said and, in so doing, lays the ground for philosophy to put down roots and flourish by problematizing his naïveté. In philosophy handbooks, John Lewis is generally known, quite simply, as ‘common sense’.

His interlocutor, who calls himself ‘M-L’, is more mysterious. This curious character relentlessly tracks down everything that, from near or far, might resemble a ‘subject’. And yet, he never addresses or questions his own identity; these thin initials evidently suffice on their own to preserve it. If Althusser’s method in the Reply to John Lewis is fairly simplistic, it is because he works by ranging good and bad points side by side – all the while reproaching John Lewis for doing the same. But it is also, more importantly, because these imperious initials foreclose at the outset most of the questions that could be asked of Althusser concerning the coherence of the theses he presents in the text as Marxist-Leninist ‘orthodoxy’. What do the detractors of the ‘orthodoxy’ Althusser claims to be defending usually argue? Very briefly put, they pit Marx’s historicism against Engel’s naturalism, Lenin’s democratic centralism against Stalinist terrorism, Mao’s revolution of production relations against Lenin’s insistence on the primacy of productive forces, Lenin’s libertarian reveries in The State and Revolution against the realities of Leninist power. Althusser can of course challenge the coherence of all these oppositions, but he cannot simply make them disappear by virtue of the hyphen that joins M to L. This is especially so given that Althusser is speaking from within philosophy, so that what he holds up for scrutiny are not conflicting analyses of concrete situations, but ‘orthodox’ and heterodox theses.

But let us hear the speakers themselves. What does John Lewis say? ‘It is man who makes history.’ What does ‘M-L’ say? ‘It is the masses which make history.’ As Althusser likes to say: everyone can see the difference. On one side, we have the thesis that the bourgeoisie tirelessly inculcates upon the incurable minds of the petite bourgeoisie; on the other, we have the scientific, proletarian thesis. But there is something amiss here. The two theses are different, certainly, but are they speaking about the same thing? Does ‘make history’ have the same meaning in both instances? This question takes us back to the question raised earlier concerning the subject of these statements, and the fact is that John Lewis is nothing more than a straw man, while ‘M-L’ needs a more precisely defined identity. The question we must ask, then, is: behind this dialogue between an unknown philosopher and an undefined character, who is actually speaking and what is really at stake?

Who first suggested to John Lewis that it is man who makes history? Althusser tells us: it was the growing bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, represented by the ‘great bourgeois Humanists’, and the declining petite bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and beyond, represented by Feuerbach or Sartre. In this passage, Althusser explains what the thesis meant to the bourgeoisie:

To proclaim at that time, as the great bourgeois Humanists did, that it is man who makes history, was to struggle, from the bourgeois point of view (which was then revolutionary), against the religious thesis of feudal ideology: it is God who makes history.²

Things are clear: the bourgeoisie proclaims that it is man who makes history as a reaction against feudalism and its providential ideology. The problem, though, is that the bourgeoisie proclaims nothing of the sort. It is one thing to show the progress of the human mind in history; it is quite another, however, to say that man makes history. Kant demonstrates that it is possible to describe ‘the progress of the human mind’ while working within a providential economy. As for the feudal lords attacked by the Revolution, they are very careful not to say that it is God who makes history, since that would only legitimize the revolution. What they do say, with their prophet Burke, is that society is a purely human creation, that tradition alone can give a society its justification and that natural rights and laws are a metaphysical dream. Neither Kant nor Burke, nor the ‘bourgeois Humanists’ more generally, raise the question of the subject of history, for the simple reason that this question only makes sense in light of a concept of history which they did not have. Man is not the answer to the question, Who makes history? Rather, he is himself the object of the question, What is man? Kant, whom Althusser regards as the mirror that reflects the bourgeoisie’s ideological revolution, added this fourth question to his three well-known ones: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? The question, What is man? became the foundation for the development of philosophical anthropology. The most radical bourgeois answer to the question is that of materialists like Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and it goes as follows: man is a material being prompted to think and act by the impressions materially produced upon his sensory apparatus. This answer not only splits man in half at the outset, it also joins, at the root, the twin problem of private interest and of how to produce the power effects necessary to its exercise. It brings to the fore the link between the satisfaction of the interests of the minority and the effects to be produced on the sensory apparatus of the majority. Man is a material being. Here we have, spelled out, the principle of domination – private interest – and the means of its exercise. The proper means for subjecting the sensory apparatus can be known, and so too can the distribution of times, places, objects and words that secures, for the minority, a maximum of knowledge and power over the majority. This principle can be perfectly deduced from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon:

If it were possible to find out a method of making ourselves masters of all that can happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of all that surrounds them, so as to produce on them the very impressions we wish to produce, and to determine their actions, their connexions, all the circumstances of their lives, according to a certain pre-conceived plan, there can be no doubt that such a power would be a most effectual and useful instrument in the hands of governments, and which they might apply to various objects of the highest importance.³

The man of bourgeois thought is not the grand, unified being whose figure masks exploitation. He is split in principle. Similarly, the practical ideology of the bourgeoisie, formed through the reproduction of bourgeois power relations, is not the ideology of the free person and of man as the maker of history. It is an ideology of surveillance and assistance. At its core, bourgeois man is far from being the conquering subject of humanism. He is, instead, the man of philanthropy, of the humanities, of anthropometry – he is formed, assisted, kept under surveillance and measured.⁴

The true heart of bourgeois ideology is not man as the maker of history, but sensible nature. And this implies a much more complex relationship between ‘feudalism’ and bourgeois ideology than Althusser imagines, one that is not entirely determined by the opposition between man and God. Hence Bentham’s astonishment – or that of his translator – when he hits upon what he believes to be the most adequate institutional model for the young French Republic to emulate: the Inquisition.

It is very singular that the most horrible of all institutions is in this respect an excellent model. The Inquisition in its solemn procession, its emblematic dresses, its frightful ornaments, discovered the true secret of overpowering the imagination, and speaking to the soul.⁵

Here we have a more precise idea of what we are to understand by ‘Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham’,⁶ and it is something quite different from the complicity between humanism and economism. What is reflected here, on the side of the bourgeoisie, is something that workers would repeatedly denounce in the century that followed, namely, the tendentious identification of bourgeois domination and feudalism, of wage labour and serfdom. We shall have to return to this point. For now, it is enough to note, with Marx, that the central problem of the bourgeoisie is not the subject of history, but human nature. Against this background, it is important to bring into sharp relief Marx’s real rupture with bourgeois ideology in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, where he pits a new materialism against the old.

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example).⁷

The point of view of the old materialism was that of ‘education’ and ‘circumstances’; it was the point of view of a superior class that takes in charge the surveillance and the education of individuals by reserving for itself the ability to dictate every determining circumstance: the use of time, the distribution of space, the educational planning. Bentham’s Panopticon, Owenite colonies and Fourierist phalansteries, for example, all find their models in the reformist practices of the bourgeoisie and their principles in bourgeois philosophy.⁸

This is where the decisive rupture between revolutionary thought and the hierarchical thought of the bourgeoisie is played out. Let’s compare the third of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach with the pages he devotes to eighteenth-century materialists in The Holy Family. There, Helvétius’s materialism appears as the very foundation of communism: if man depends upon circumstances and education, all that is needed to change man is to change society, ‘to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it’.⁹ In the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, however, Marx raises the singularly decisive question: Who will ‘arrange’ this world, who will educate the educators? The ‘Theses’ confront the hierarchical point of view of the educators with the revolutionary transformation of the world.

But can we at the very least attribute the thesis that ‘It is man who makes history’ to the petite bourgeoisie – exemplarily represented by Feuerbach – that Marx had to break with in order to found historical materialism?

‘The matter is also clear when we are confronted with the philosophical petty-bourgeois communitarian anthropology of Feuerbach (still respected by Marx in the Manuscripts of 1844), in which the Essence of Man is the Origin, Cause and Goal of history.’¹⁰ Clear indeed. Everybody ‘knows’ that. In fact, everybody knows it so well that no one bothers to check its accuracy. As it happens, this well-known ‘truth’ is absolutely false. Feuerbach does not say that the essence of man is the origin of history. What he says is that an alienated human essence is the origin of Hegel’s speculative history. This essence, however, is not historical. Rather, it is defined in a relationship to nature which Feuerbach conceives either in terms of a spatial coexistence designed to be the very opposite of temporal exclusivity, or in terms of a communication between self and other that is, likewise, at the opposite pole of the temporal dialectic of negation. (If there is a philosopher opposed to the ‘negation of the negation’, it is Feuerbach.) History reaches this essence through an accident of representation, but it does not constitute or shape its development. This is so clearly the case that Marx, in the Manuscripts of 1844, finds himself obliged to double the man he finds in Feuerbach’s thought. He writes, ‘Man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being.’¹¹ By himself, Feuerbach’s man is neither the cause nor the goal (fin) of any history. Marx’s critique turns essentially on the fact that Feuerbach defines the essence of man by means of an atemporal relation – whether man/object, self/other, man/woman – and on the fact that, for Feuerbach, sensible experience is not historical. Marx doesn’t object to the fact that Feuerbach’s history has a subject; he objects to the fact that his subject has no history. If history reaches this subject, closed in as he is in the contemplation and interpretation of the world, it is purely by accident. History in Feuerbach, and in the young Hegelians in general, is the history of representations.

Feuerbach’s philosophy is indeed humanistic, but his humanism does not go hand and in hand with any historicism. Marx’s method here is quite remarkable: he does not refer Feuerbach’s man to the category of the subject, even though such a move, coupled with the mediation of bourgeois rights, would have sealed the relationship between this man and bourgeois economism. Instead, Marx points out that Feuerbach’s man is German. This is far from being the ‘simplistic’ observation it is sometimes taken to be. Indeed, it tells us a few things about this humanism, notably that it is not the philosophy of the bourgeois actors of class struggle, but the philosophy of a people on the sidelines of the major developments of class struggle. In the ‘overdeveloped’ philosophy of a politically ‘underdeveloped’ country, the inegalitarian ideology of bourgeois philanthropy can be resolved in the idyll of ‘communication’. Here is a question that might reward further investigation: in general, isn’t humanism – as a theory of the realization of the human essence – a marginal ideology, the result of certain discrepancies produced by the class struggle?

That is how Marx understands it. In his critique of Feuerbach, Marx does not pit the good subject of history against the bad; rather, he pits history – with its real, active subjects – against the contemplative and interpretative subjects of German ideology. He does not defend the ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. A Lesson in Orthodoxy: M-L Teaches John Lewis That It Is the Masses Which Make History
• 2. A Lesson in Politics: Philosophers Did Not Become Kings
• 3. A Lesson in Self-Criticism: Class Struggle Rages in Theory Appendix: On Class Struggle in Texts
• 4. A Lesson in History: The Damages of Humanism
• 5. A Discourse in Its Place
• Appendix: On the Theory of Ideology: Althusser’s Politics
• Notes
• Index