Reading the Tendencies

Review of Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham: Duke UP, 2013.

Warren Montag has one of the most thankless jobs in contemporary academia. He is the Anglophone world’s best reader of Althusser, which makes him an expert on a philosopher considered at best a vanishing mediator between the oeuvre of Marx and the works of Foucault, Zizek, Badiou, et cetera, and at worst a wife-murdering charlatan. Althusser and His Contemporaries is concerned with transforming the first reading; the second is merely an ad hominem argument best left to gossips and scandal-mongers. As the title of Montag’s book suggests, the reading of Althusser proposed within focuses less on Althusser’s relationship with Marx and the oft-discussed Marxian epistemological break, than on the philosopher’s relation to his contemporaries Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, and Levi-Strauss, as well as to such twentieth-century intellectual movements as phenomenology and structuralism. Such a reading does more than situate Althusser in his context, alongside those he debated, taught, and read; it also underscores the fact that philosophy was a practice for Althusser—something that one did and within which one intervened, rather than a simple matter of positions held and maintained. For Althusser, philosophy remained first and foremost an intervention in a conjuncture.
 
Reading Althusser’s philosophy as an intervention is not simply a matter of recounting the positions that he held and maintained, of constructing a sort of play-by-play of what Althusser called the kampfplatz, “the battlefield which is philosophy” (205). The idea of philosophy as an intervention, as a line of demarcation within a philosophical conjuncture, has as its corollary the idea that any philosophical text is necessarily overdetermined and conflictual. As Montag argues, continuing a line of investigation that begins with Spinoza’s reading of scripture and continues through Althusser and Macherey, “even the most rigorously argued philosophical text was necessarily a constellation of oversights, discrepancies, and disparities, requiring a reading attuned to the symptoms of the conflicts that animated it unawares” (18). Reading philosophy as a series of interventions is not just a matter of taking the various positions of philosophers at their word—drawing out the lines of conflict separating materialists from idealists, Marxists from poststructuralists, and so on—but of tracing the boundary that divides a philosopher from him or herself, articulating divisions and disparities that are not even formulated or grasped by the philosopher in question. Every philosopher, every text, is situated in relation to conflicts and tensions that exceed it.
 
The tension between the terrain of conflict and the text it produces can be apprehended in Althusser’s work on the concept of “structural causality.” Structural causality is one of Althusser’s most well-known concepts; along with overdetermination, interpellation, and conjuncture, it forms part of an “Althusserian” lexicon—a vocabulary adopted, though not necessarily understood, by many writers in the sixties and seventies, only to be dropped later. Moreover, structural, or immanent, causality lies at the intersection between Althusser’s reading of Marx (the source of his reputation in the sixties and seventies) and his introduction of Spinoza into philosophical and theoretical discussions (the basis for much of his reputation in recent years). Althusser wrote very little about Spinoza, whose name appears only a few times in his published works. Despite this fact, two of Althusser’s students, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, have gone on to produce studies of Spinoza. Althusser has had a profound effect on the revival of Spinoza despite the paucity of his references. This scarcity does not mean that Althusser’s references to Spinoza are insignificant; one could argue that the few mentions of Spinoza, in Althusser’s discussion of ideology and structural causality, are pivotal and constitute central orientations of his thought.
 
In fact, one such reference is integral to the definition of immanent causality. Althusser differentiates between three concepts of causality: linear, expressive, and immanent. Linear causality is the mechanical causality of billiard balls much beloved by philosophers, but easily dismissed as a way of understanding economic and social relations. The real division is between expressive and immanent causality. Expressive causality is a totality that is expressed by its effects; the totality is concealed, revealed only in the effects that express it. In contrast, immanent causality exists solely in its effects. Spinoza argues that God must be thought as the immanent rather than as the transitive cause of all things—not just as the creator but as the productive power of creation, or, more famously (and poetically), as “God, that is nature” (Ethics 18). Althusser argues that this revolutionary new concept of causality can also be found in Marx’s writing, where the capitalist mode of production is neither a transitive or linear cause, affecting society from the outside in the manner of some invocations of economic determinism, nor an expressive cause in which the economy has ideological and political effects. The capitalist mode of production is a cause that exists only in its effects. These effects, the various elements of the mode of production, including the superstructure and ideology, are thus also causes, necessary for the reproduction of the mode of production. Althusser expanded on this position in his later writings on ideology and reproduction; the position thus represents a revolution in the thought of history, social relations, and politics.
 
Althusser’s break with the concepts of linear or expressive causality is not, however, without its remnants. As Montag argues:
 

Immanence (more specifically the immanence of the immanent cause) itself, however, in these concluding pages…develops in an uneven and contradictory way, simultaneously regressing toward a Neoplatonic expressionism and leaping forward toward a theory of structure as singularity, as the absent cause of the irreducible diversity of an entity. (86-7)

 
The regression hovers around two different concepts, each of which marks the point where immanent causality falls back into expressive causality. The concepts in question are that of the “whole” and that of “representation,” which, although introduced to expand the notion of immanent causality, actually smuggle in aspects of expressive causality, and with it, an idealist ontology. The intrinsic limits of these concepts are not immediately apparent, even to Althusser. Montag draws from Althusser’s correspondence with Pierre Macherey, as well as from subsequent revisions of Lire le Capital, to draw out tensions in the articulation of structural causality. In the end, the actual concept of structural causality is less an individual insight than a result of the production of a collective, or even transindividual relation, the conditions of which extend backwards to Lucretius, Spinoza, and Marx, and forwards to the debates about the nature of structuralism in the works of Deleuze and Macherey.
 
Macherey’s critique of Althusser begins with a question. Macherey writes to Althusser that he cannot understand his use of the term “structured whole.” The question of this term’s meaning hinges on the use of “whole” to mean something above and beyond the relations between the different elements of the structure. As Macherey writes, “the idea of the whole is really the spiritualist conception of structure” (qtd. Montag 74). The correspondence between Althusser and Macherey quickly turns from the question of the meaning of “structured whole” to an interrogation of any remnant of idealism. This debate turns back to Spinoza, who rigorously questioned the idealist tendencies of any assertion of “order,” demonstrating that ideas of order are often nothing more than projections of our own biases, reflecting our own presuppositions back to us. As Spinoza argues, both in terms of nature and in terms of texts (most notably scripture), every assertion of a concealed order is not only a projection of our own desires and concerns; it also overlooks the actually existing structure of relations and tensions. This is not just a matter of interpreting Spinoza; as Montag argues, this is the idea that Macherey pursues in his work on literature. In Macherey’s words, “We should question the work as to what it does not and cannot say, in those silences for which it has been made. The concealed order of the work is thus less significant than its real determinate disorder (its disarray)” (155). From the disarray of Spinoza’s, Althusser’s, and Macherey’s texts taken together, a concept of immanent causality emerges. Montag also argues that Deleuze’s reading of Lucretius is crucial to Macherey’s understanding of the Spinozist concept of nature, and thus that immanence, as “the production of the diverse,” is an “infinite sum…that does not totalize its own elements” (qtd. Montag 91). In place of an order, there is a whole, which is given only in its absence; it is thus necessary to think of immanent causal relations as acting in and through their non-totalizable effects and divisions.
 
Montag’s genealogy of immanent causality’s conflicted emergence culminates with a reading of some of the passages cut from the second edition of Lire le Capital that never made it into the work’s English translation. In these passages Althusser refers to the immanent cause as a script or play that is acted out as the whole or structure. The script suggests an order behind the scenes that is the hidden condition of everything that unfolds on the stage. That Althusser resorts to an image of the whole, or of a latent structure, at the exact moment that he is attempting to define its opposite (i.e. develop a concept of immanent causality), connects immanent causality to another of Althusser’s concepts, “symptomatic reading.” Far from being a simple critique, symptomatic reading is a practice of excavating the tensions and limits of a text. It is an examination of how a text says something both more and less than it claims to say it. Montag’s rereading of the development of immanent causality through the confrontations and contestations between Althusser, Macherey, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Lucretius (a list that could be expanded to include others in a non-totalizable totality) does not simply clarify immanent causality as a concept by examining its potential misreadings (of which there are many). It demonstrates that these misreadings are not some unfortunate deviation, but are in fact internal to the concept’s very articulation.
 
The picture of philosophy that emerges is one in which conceptual production is a difficult endeavor. Every conceptual innovation, every attempt to break with existing concepts and orientations, is burdened by the very terms it tries to escape. Theoretical production is a less a break than a transformation of a given theoretical conjuncture. As such, it carries with it elements of and tensions within that conjuncture. This production is also a necessary collective, or transindividual, process, in which the limits of one articulation can only be grasped through other attempts to make sense of it. From the perspective of this reading, the fact that one of Althusser’s major works, Lire le Capital, was a collective project, and that two of that work’s collaborators, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, have continued to work on and through some of its basic problems, is less a biographical accident than a defining characteristic. Althusser’s thought is less the product of a singular genius than a process of transformation that acts in and through the relations that define it.
 
Montag also applies his strategy of reading tensions and divisions to Althusser’s relation to two of his most famous contemporaries, Lacan and Foucault. The first is sometimes seen as Althusser’s secret source, whose concept of the imaginary is the basis for Althusser’s notion of ideology, while the second is often understood to be Althusser’s nemesis or usurper, whose ideas of power and the dispositif displace the Althusserian concepts of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Montag reads Althusser’s actual interventions to uncover a fundamentally different relation. With respect to Lacan, it is less a matter of Althusser’s wholesale adoption of the former’s ideas (or of Freud’s theses), than of a series of interventions around a set of specific problems—namely that of consciousness. As Montag demonstrates, Althusser critiques psychoanalysis’ idea of the individual unconscious. To the extent that he draws from the works of Freud and Lacan, it is to develop a concept of ideology as something other than consciousness. As Montag argues, ideology remains burdened by its association not just with ideas, but with an entire set of presuppositions regarding conviction and persuasion (140). Ideology has to be understood as something other than consciousness; it is in the service of this idea that Althusser turns to psychoanalysis. His passage through psychoanalysis is an attempt to do away with consciousness, but he does not stop there, articulating a theory of ideology based on unconscious neuroses. Instead, he moves towards an idea of ideology as a material condition and effect of practices.
 
As Montag argues, it is on this point that Althusser is closer to Foucault than is generally maintained. Alongside his use of the term “apparatus,” Althusser’s often overlooked assertion that ideology exists in practices not only brings Althusser and Foucault closer together, but, and more importantly, it defines the problem of thinking subjectivity as a material effect of conditions and practices of subjection. In place of the straight lines of descent (in the case of Lacan) and opposition (in the case of Foucault), Montag argues that it is necessary to see the outlines of a problem in the jagged intersection of their texts: a rigorously materialist account of subjectivity that would dispense with consciousness, intention, and will, in favor of forces, apparatuses, and relations. Our difficulty in seeing the commonalities and differences that go beyond the proper names Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser, stems not only from the fetish of the proper name in contemporary academia—a reduction of the kampfplatz to a battle between famous figureheads—but from where we stand with respect to the aforementioned forces.
 
Montag’s chapter on Foucault and Althusser ends with a materialist conception of knowledge and its limits. In the chapter’s final paragraph, Montag argues that though Foucault and Althusser’s interrogation of the autonomous independent subject has its antecedents in the work of Nietzsche and Spinoza, its conditions of possibility are to be found in the tumultuous events of the sixties and seventies. As Montag writes:
 

As the balance of power shifted so did the relations of knowledge. Each incursion of mass struggle, like a flare fired above the battlefield, revealed the obstacles, traps, and emplacements that blocked the way forward. The texts we have examined were sketches or diagrams of this battlefield, a battlefield we have not left even as we now, plunged in darkness, attempt to feel our way forward. (170)

 
The limitations of their particular investigations, and of our own ability to make sense of them, must then be situated not only against the order and connection of concepts, but against the relations between bodies and actions as well. With respect to this last point, we should view all of the various arguments tempted to dismiss Althusser (and Foucault, particularly his works from the seventies) as pessimistic (161). Such dismissals fail to see a certain “optimism” at work in Althusser and Foucault, one predicated less on the autonomous subject than on the forces and relations that constitute and destroy it.
 
Montag brings a penetrating vision to Althusser’s work. His reading of Althusser’s texts, their limits and constitutive tensions, redraws the lines that define not only the latter’s own scholarship, but also the practice of philosophy in general. One could ask, in the spirit of Althusser’s work, where does such an intervention stand with respect to the current philosophical and political conjuncture? As Montag argues in the closing chapters of Althusser and His Contemporaries, there has been a revival of interest in Althusser since the release of his posthumous essays and books. Starting in the mid-nineties, the publication of these texts on Marx, Machiavelli, Feuerbach, and philosophy began to alter the prevailing sense of scandal and dismissal that had characterized the reception of Althusser’s work through most of the eighties. Althusser’s most read and discussed posthumous work is the long essay titled “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” (written 1982, published 1994, translated into English in 2006). As Montag argues, this essay’s emphasis on the aleatory event is either read as a repudiation of Althusser’s thought (a point supported by its citation of such philosophers as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and even Derrida, who evade Althusser’s usual sphere of reference), or as the culmination of his work on the conjunctural and non-teleological sense of materialism (174).
 
For some, the event itself is an event in Althusser’s writing, marking the division of his thought—as he once divided Marx’s—between an early Althusser of structure and a late Althusser of aleatory events. With the help of two of Althusser’s students writing today, however, we can see a different division. Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière are by now quite famous and well-read within the English-speaking world. This has led to the translation and publication of some of their arguments with Althusser (such as Rancière’s The Lesson of Althusser) as well as of certain projects carried out under the influence of Althusser’s thought (such as Badiou’s The Concept of Model). The combined effect of the publication of Althusser’s posthumous writing on aleatory materialism and the popularity of Rancière and Badiou has produced a different Althusser, one focused on the “event” as an ontological problem. Badiou and Rancière’s shared tendency to frame politics, or truth, according to a universal, axiomatic event, takes on radically different senses in each scholar’s work, but this tendency still stands in sharp contrast to what is found the works of Balibar and Macherey. The latter have mostly written studies of other philosophers—Spinoza, Marx, Locke, et cetera—as well as a series of works that could be defined as “writing in the conjuncture.” Balibar and Macherey differ in the sense that for the former, the conjuncture is considered primarily political, defining the problems of citizenship, race, and violence, while for the latter, shifts and changes in various conceptual problems, “everyday life,” “utopia,” and the “university” have taken priority. Besides their eschewal of the systematic articulations of a philosophy, the two thinkers are linked by their understanding of conjunctures in terms of their constitutive tensions, divisions, and problematics, even those that exceed the intentions or understanding of the texts and subjects produced within them.
 
Framing the matter somewhat schematically, we could argue that what initially existed in Althusser’s writing as a division between “conjuncture” and “structure” has become a division between philosophies of the event and philosophies of the tendency. In the context of this division, the former side has become dominant; Badiou and Rancière are major intellectual figures, while Balibar and Macherey are less well-known. The reasons for this are no doubt multiple, but it is possible to conclude that the victory of a philosophy of the event over and against the tendency might have something to do with philosophy’s own self-conception, the spontaneous philosophy of philosophy. Ontologies and axiomatic claims are much more in keeping with philosophy’s self-image than collective and conflicted articulations of tendencies and their limits.
 
Montag’s reading of Althusser makes a strong case for the untapped possibilities of the latter’s philosophical practice, a practice positioned against understanding philosophy as an activity divided by tensions and problematics that both reflect the existing state of affairs and exceed the understanding of its practitioners. Althusser’s is a materialist conception of philosophy, in which philosophy must always be situated against a backdrop of forces that animate and exceed it. Such a philosophical intervention breaks with much of the spontaneous philosophy of philosophy, and Spinoza, Marx, Althusser, and Foucault, to name a few, have struggled to articulate this materialist framing of knowledge and subjectivity. Their struggle has been inflamed by the way in which the idealist categories of totality, teleology, expression, and individuality constantly reassert themselves, taking on new names and problems. Thus as Montag’s book makes clear, the materialist perspective is constantly occluded, disappearing in its specific and concrete interventions until it appears to constitute merely interpretation, or adopting the very terms of the conjuncture it attempts to elucidate and intervene in, as in the charges of Althusser’s “structuralism.” The loss and the return of Althusser’s philosophical reputation hints at the difficulty of reorienting thought towards its conditions.
 
Montag’s Althusser and His Contemporaries leaves an interesting question in its wake. How is it possible to reanimate a philosophy of immanence, of tendencies and conflicts, in the present moment? This question is not merely an academic matter of restoring Althusser’s reputation; it is, importantly, a political question. The “balance of forces” is shifting once again; part of the recent resurgence of interest in Althusser and some of his students no doubt owes to this shift in forces. Our relation to current economic and political structures is no longer self-evidently one of unproblematic consent. Althusser’s most critical question, that of the material conditions and effects of ideology, has expanded beyond the realm of academia to become part of political contestation. It is not yet clear if this change in forces will equal the change that transformed the world of practices and ideas throughout the sixties, forming the preconditions for Althusser and his contemporaries’ own theoretical revolution, but if the present change of forces is to transform current relations of knowledge, it will be necessary to make sense of the current conjuncture. Montag’s book intervenes in the current relations of knowledge by examining their history, but that history exceeds any theoretical project, any practice of philosophy, to become a question of politics. The subtitle of Montag’s book, “Philosophy’s Perpetual War,” thus changes the sense of the title; it is by seeing philosophy as a perpetual war that Althusser remains our contemporary.