Reading Althusser: The Structural Science of History (1984)

Chapter 6 of Reading Althusser.

---

Contents

• Structuralism
• Marxism and Structure
• Theoretical Anti-Humanism
• Nihilism: The Moral Intention of Structuralism
• Structuralism Appendix

Structuralism

Althusser’s main claim to our attention is based on his attempt to establish a rapproachement between Marxism and structuralism. Since structuralism can be regarded as nothing more than a word for scientific method, we can best begin to grasp its meaning by contrasting it to the existential-phenomenological method it aspires to surpass.

Althusser’s attitude toward structuralism is, curiously, the mirror image of Sartre’s toward existentialism. In the Search for a Method, Sartre began by making the claim that Marxism is the “unsurpassable” philosophy of our time, next to which existentialism is merely an ideology living on and exploiting the domain established by this philosophy. Nevertheless, existentialism can be important for Marxism as a way of “recovering” man within history. Marxism has become a largely scholastic system of concepts and categories incapable of grasping the concrete particularities of individual experience. The comprehension of experience can in turn be achieved only through the introduction of teleological concepts such as “intentionality,” which Sartre borrowed from Husserl. Thus only by grafting a new method, that of existentialism, on to the Marxist stem will it be possible to rescue the dialectic from the weight of positivist determinism and restore it as a method of historical research.

Althusser, by contrast, has claimed that Marxism is a “science” and that structuralism is a mere “ideology.” ^[1] But for him structuralism can be important for its attempt to show that the real emphasis of Marxism is not on man, not human actions which can be made intelligible through a phenomenological description of states of consciousness, but on structures which are not resolvable into the expressions of human agency and which are themselves unknown or “unconscious” to the agents whose actions they determine. These structures can in turn only be discovered through a “deconstructive” analysis, that is, one that aims not to describe the given as it appears to us through the “natural attitude” or common sense, but one that seeks to break it down into its component parts in order to disclose the basic elements or combination of elements out of which the given is constructed. What structuralism claims to have discovered — or rather recovered — is the Parmenidean dictum, not that being receives its meaning only in and through the free act of the ego, but simply that being is and as such is “subjectless.” The advantage of this insight is that, since structures are devoid of meaning and consequently value-free, they can easily be turned into a fit object for scientific investigation. The result, as Henri Lefebvre has noted, is a “neo-eleatic” approach that ranks order higher than change and which denies the thesis that it is man who makes history. ^[2]

Certain disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, Althusser’s claim has consistently been to establish a Marxist science of history along structuralist lines. Long before the linguistic analyses of Saussure or the treatment of kinship systems by Lévi-Strauss, Marx, so we are told, set out to describe the whole of social life in terms of structures and their interrelations, differentiating types of societies on the basis of assumed correspondences (or noncorrespondences) between infrastructures and superstructures and claiming to account for the rise and fall of societies by tracing the appearance and development of contradictions between these structures. It is this attempt to account for societies not in terms of men and their histories but through certain underlying structural patterns and relations that is said to have made Marx into a structuralist ante diem. The Althusserians are fond of quoting from Marx’s sixth Thesis on Feuerbach to show that he was a structuralist before the fact. “The human essence,” Marx says, “is not an abstraction inherent in each individual […] it is the ensemble of social relations.” It is the turn away from history and toward structure which Althusser claims constitutes Marx’s “immense theoretical revolution” and which set the stage for all later structuralist thought.

Structuralism may be a new word upon the intellectual scene, although if we look beyond the appearances of the word we shall discover a mode of thought that reveals a distinguished lineage going back not only to writers like Marx and Freud but even further back to Kant and Spinoza. The modern concept of structure, however, was developed by thinkers in a number of the social-science disciplines but most notably linguistics. ^[3] It has been maintained that structuralism is really about the substitution of linguistics for history. Ill-disposed critics have even been known to suggest that the cure is worse than the disease. Whether or not this is true, the obvious attraction of structuralism has been its claim to lay bare the most general features of our conceptual makeup without falling prey to historicism. In any case a few of the central methodological tenets of structural linguistics can be isolated as providing a key to the entire structuralist enterprise of which Althusser is a part.

In the first place, the newer trend in structural linguistics promised to replace the older historical philology by the study of entire linguistic systems. The study of language systems means the priority of langue over parole. These terms have no very precise English equivalents, although langue has occasionally been translated as “language system” to convey the network of grammatical regularities which underlies any natural language, while parole has been rendered as “language behavior” to indicate the actual speech acts produced by native speakers on particular occasions. In concentrating on the total system of signs that composes a language as opposed to the spoken word, structuralist linguistics was calling attention to the fact that the structure of the entire system determines the position of every element within it and that change in the meaning of any element will alter the meaning of everything else within the system. The priority of the whole over the parts is thus a central feature of all structuralist thought.

Next, the structure of language (or of any cultural artefact) was sought, not on the surface level of empirical reality, but below or behind it. What the naive observer sees is not the structure, but the evidence and product of the structure. In this respect the structure of language was considered to be “unconscious” or “invisible,” since the individual language user can consistently and constantly apply its phonological and grammatical laws in his speech without ever necessarily knowing what he is doing. Moreover, these structures are held to be the product of an innate, that is genetically rather than socially or culturally determined, reason inherent in all men. This inherent quality or capacity is so designated as to limit the possible range of language systems so that the set of all possible languages will probably be very large but finite. ^[4] Their apparent diversity should not hide the fact that behind them are certain invariant and recurring features that are subject to a method of mathematical notation whose possible permutations can not only be calculated but predicted.

Finally, we arrive at the third point, which is the attempt to study language not diachronically through temporal change but synchronically through static and ahistorical relations. These relations can be characterized as “outside time” or “given” or “perpetually present.” The belief that language possesses a certain timeless quality in spite of occasional modifications of its elements pointed out the inherent limitations of any historicist or evolutionist approach. By isolating language from its social and historical context, structural linguistics hoped to grasp the immanent laws underlying language systems which hold them together in a coherent and functional whole.

The difficulty with formulating a universally acceptable definition of structuralism or isolating a few central tenets of structural method, as I have just tried to do, is that the result is likely to be so general as to be useless for any very precise explanatory purposes. Moreover, if the concept of structuralism can be defined by reference to a host of other concepts like “system,” “relations,” “whole,” “coherence,” and “function,” then it is difficult to see why we should bother with the concept of structure at all. The fact is that there is no central core or unique essence of structuralism to which all structuralists adhere but rather a number of different aspects that some share with others but not necessarily in the same way or for the same reasons. In this sense structuralism forms a kind of family in exactly the way understood by Wittgenstein, that is, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. ^[5] What we must attempt to do, then, is to avoid definition in the sense of reduction to a set of basic assumptions shared by all structuralists and see how the term is used by Althusser and others who fall within the same family. Only then will we be able to get a better picture of what Althusser’s “structural Marxism” is all about.

Marxism and Structure

The concept of structure is used by Althusser in Capital as a way of indicating Marx’s “scientific” achievements. These achievements are purportedly based upon the analysis of capitalism not as a dynamically evolving but as a relatively fixed system of production. The mode of production is examined, accordingly, as a system or model, the structure of which determines the position of every element within the whole. Every mode of production will arise from a finite and, as it happens, small number of terms which are always and everywhere the same, the only variation being their mode of combination. As we shall see, while Marx’s starting point, the specific “object” of Capital, is the capitalist mode of production in particular, Althusser construes this analysis into a universal theory of the “basic forms of unity of historical existence,” in other words, into a theory of modes of production everywhere. Rather than providing us with any sort of phenomenological description of capitalism and the work place, Marx is said to have concerned himself with the rudimentary principles of any possible history.

The aim of Althusser’s structural Marxism is to provide a model of the social sciences based upon a combination (Verbindung) of a limited number of variables that can be mathematically manipulated. “Marx’s aim,” as Balibar says, “was to show that the distinction between different modes is necessarily and sufficiently based on a variation of the connections between a small number of elements which are always the same. The announcement of the connections and their terms constitutes the exposition of the primary theoretical concepts of historical materialism.” ^[6] And referring very probably to this passage in Balibar’s exposition, Althusser writes: “But it is clear that the theoretical nature of this concept of ‘combination’ may provide a foundation for the thesis […] that Marxism is not a historicism: since the Marxist concept of history depends on the principle of the variation of the forms of this ‘combination’.” ^[7]

The deconstruction of Marx’s achievements in Capital begins by setting out a table of “invariant” elements said to be characteristic of all modes of production. This table contains the invisible “atoms of history” which consists of a combination of three elements set into play by two relations. ^[8] Schematically, these are as follows:

1. the laborer or direct producer (work force),
2. the means of production (object and means of labor),
3. the non-laborer appropriating surplus value.

These three elements are combined by two relations:

1. relation of real appropriation,
2. property relation.

The conception of history that emerges from this deconstruction is that of an eternal recombination of a finite body of elements that provide the a priori building blocks of any possible mode of production. The idea is that while these elements remain constant their mode of combination varies so that it might be possible, at least in principle, to determine not only the types of societies that have existed but those that ideally might exist. Thus Althusser confidently asserts: “By combining or interrelating these different elements we shall reach a definition of the different modes of production which have existed and can exist in human history.” ^[9] The process of change is limited, then, to a small repertory of ideal terms. History, it appears, resembles nothing so much as the perpetual reshuffling of a fixed pack.

The most striking feature of this conception is its subordination of the historical question of how economic structures come into being and pass away to the structural question of their internal functioning. This subordination is a principle common to more or less all who consider themselves structuralists. Marx, so we are told, did not make the question of the origin or historical evolution of social relations the primary object of his science of economic forms. What he was interested in was the “order and connection” (Spinoza) of these relations within a given society, what makes them hold together and function as a society. Only after the logic or internal working of these relations is analyzed can we move on to the study of their temporal dimension. This synchronic approach to modes of production is most forcefully stated by Marx in the introduction to the Grundrisse, where he defines the order in which it is necessary to study bourgeois production relations:

It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relations to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different economic forms of society. Even less is it their sequence “in the idea” (Proudhon). Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society. ^[10]

This procedure of describing the internal functioning of a network of relations prior to their development over time can be seen even more clearly if we turn to one more example from Marx, this time from his earlier polemic against Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy. Here Marx explicitly criticizes the attempt to understand society historically, which invariably seeks to ascribe causal efficacy to those relations which exist earlier in time. Instead, what he proposes is a more functional analysis which shows how the various parts of society are logically interrelated in the present and manage to coexist simultaneously.

M. Proudhon considers economic relations as so many social phases, engendering one another, resulting one from another like the antithesis from the thesis, and realizing in their logical sequence the impersonal reason of humanity. The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations, however, he has not yet contrived to engender by means of his dialectic movement. When, after that, M. Proudhon, by means of pure reason, proceeds to give birth to those other phases, he treats them as if they were newborn babes. He forgets that they are of the same age as the first. […] The different limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations co-exist simultaneously and support one another? ^[11]

The explanation of a mode of production, in other words, must be found not in its circumstances of origin but in the persistence of its effects.

Even if it were true, as these passages seem to suggest, that Marx refused to grant priority to history over structure, it does not follow that Althusser’s conclusions are immune from criticism. The first problem arises from his pretension to determine conceptually the invariants of all modes of production. If these five elements are to be taken literally as the central features of any possible mode of production, then they can be derived legitimately only from a sort of transcendental deduction of the categories in the manner of Kant. But Althusser does no such thing. Instead of a real deduction he derives these “basic concepts of historical materialism” through a comparative analysis of only three modes of production which have existed in history: Asiatic, feudal, and capitalist. Yet it would seem that to jump from these five factors, based on a simple inductive generalization from only three actual cases to a theory of modes of production in general, is a very large jump indeed. Assimilating them to the Kantian categories, Althusser wants to show that these five elements exist as a priori constitutive features of the economic which can be used for sorting out and organizing empirical evidence, but his comparative method is incapable of establishing this.

There is the further difficulty of actually having to account for all possible modes of production by means of these five elements. It is highly doubtful whether these five terms are sufficient to determine all the possible modes of production without introducing other implicit differentiating principles. The problem is that these categories are purely formal in nature so, when it comes down to actual cases, can tell us little about the actual content of history much less account for particular events.

More significantly, the structural analysis of modes of production works well so long as society is functioning smoothly and where all the relations continue to support one another. It breaks down, or at least becomes severely strained, when having to account for historical change, the problem of structural displacement or transformation. Althusser admits as much when he says: “Just as we can say that we possess only the outline of a Marxist theory of modes of production […] we must say that Marx did not give us any theory of the transition from one mode of production to another.” ^[12] Instead, therefore, of focusing on major structural changes between different modes of production, Althusser locates the strength of Marx’s analysis in his concentration on the inner “consistency” of structures, their continued production and reproduction over time. “The capitalist production process,” Marx writes, “considered in its inner-connexion (Zusammenhang) or as reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and eternalizes the social relation between the capitalist and the wage-earner.” ^[13] The capital-labor relation is seen as the element of the economic structure which remains constant whatever other variations might occur. The discovery and definition of this logical constant which “eternalizes” capitalist production relations has given Althusserian Marxism a conservative cast which it shares with much of the recent structural-functionalist sociology.

Of course, Althusser does not wish to deny change altogether. Were it otherwise, his ideas could scarcely merit our attention. Rather the question is whether he regards the states of relative permanence as primary and those of periodic crisis as secondary or the other way round. His answer is clear. Just as Parmenides and his school found it difficult if not impossible to conceive of motion, so have Althusser and the structuralist camp found it increasingly difficult to conceptualize historical change. From the fact that history, the eternal stream of becoming, cannot be apprehended, it follows that it can only be grasped as a series of static cross-sections which can be isolated and compared to one another as well as to earlier and later configurations of the same object whether this be an economic system, a language group, or a game. Each can only be studied as a discrete system with a set of internally imposed limitations on its number of permutations and combinations which have no necessary or genetic links to other systems.

If history presents itself as nothing more than a series of discontinuous possibilities, it follows further that we can no longer speak of a linear succession or evolution of societies toward some final culmination or end. To use these terms presupposes some type of meaningful or “teleological” purpose at work giving history an inner unity or purpose. But having rejected any type of teleological or progressivist historicism, Althusser is forced to argue that what unity history possesses is only the sum total of all its possible structural permutations. Consequently, he leaves himself open to the charge of moral relativism or indifference to the question of whether one mode of combination is in any sense better than any other. Socialism could not be adjudged as any more rational than capitalism or earlier economic forms, but only as one of a small and in principle determinable combination of a quasi-Kantian set of invariants.

Althusser’s inability to account for the problem of transformation might be attributed to the conception of economic structure with which he operates. Rather than regarding structures as a type of ideal order that the scientist introduces in order to reduce the multiform flux of phenomena to simplified images, he endows them with an objectivity independent of the conceptual models used for explaining them. Thus while structures cannot be “seen” they can at least be inferred through their effects or manifestations which are empirically observable. In contrast to the conceptual empiricism of classical economics, Althusser writes: “The relations of production are structures—-and the ordinary economist may scrutinize economic ‘facts’: prices, exchanges, wages, profits, rents, etc., all those ‘measurable’ facts, as much as he likes; he will no more ‘see’ any structure at that level than the pre-Lavoisierian chemist could ‘see’ oxygen in ‘dephlogisticated’ air.” ^[14] Structure has in this sense the same status for Althusser that the concept of the “unconscious” had for Freud: neither is open to direct observation but can only be deduced from certain outward forms of behavior.

It is arguable that Althusser is unable to account for transitions because he is operating with an essentially “objectifying” or “reifying” conception of structure. By reification I mean exactly what Marx meant by that term, that is, conceiving a relationship between human agents as a relationship between things. Roger Garaudy, for one, complains that Althusser’s reifying conception of structure is due to a rudimentary linguistic confusion:

Unfortunately this is because the word “structure” is a substantive instead of a verb. When we use a substantive we are always inclined to look behind it for something substantial. We end by treating structure as a thing and not as providing information about an action which has no existence apart from the men who perform them, or their writings, the structure of myth in their conduct or their beliefs. In short, it is important not to sacrifice the producer and his acts of production to the product. This is one of the major teachings of Marx’s Capital when he warns against the illusion of “commodity fetishism.” ^[15]

For Garaudy, the concept of structure is useful but only as a conceptual shorthand or “model” not unlike a Weberian ideal type that allows the scientist to capture the distinct and characteristic features of a given class of phenomena. Marx, he says,

never turned structuralism into a philosophy as if structure were the only reality. His own dialectical conception of structure in the social sciences first of all never forgets that structure is a human artifact as is every scientific “model,” every product and every institution, every cultural phenomenon; consequently, he never separates abstractly, metaphysically, structures from the fundamental social practices which engender them or from the concrete, lived individual practices which these structures inform. ^[16]

Garaudy and other critics of structuralism are correct in one respect. Althusser does operate with a “metaphysical” or more properly ontological conception of structure as a subjacent reality distinct from ordinary empirical social relations. The exclusive concentration on ordered processes as distinct from the human practices that produce them has led to a political immobilism which amounts to a repudiation of both classical Marxism and history. There is, however, one important respect in which this criticism of Althusser is deficient. Without some idea of structure, it is difficult to see how history, which is otherwise composed of a multiplicity of conflicting aims and “projects,” can result in ordered processes rather than an “arbitrary destructured log-jam” (to use Perry Anderson’s apt phrase). ^[17] Althusser has had no difficulty in showing that his critics have invariably fallen back upon some notion of a preestablished harmony or an Hegelian “cunning of reason” to explain the apparent discrepancy between subjective intentions and objective outcomes. By concentrating on structures, he could at least claim to show that there is an institutional order that is distinct from and even opaque to the conscious intentions and volitions of the social subjects who occupy its places.

What both parties to the debate fail to do is to come up with a means of synthesizing both diachrony and synchrony within a single system. Of the two, however, Althusser comes closer to furnishing a satisfactory solution. His description of the “historical fact” as one which “causes a mutation in the existing structural relations” is clearly an attempt to reunite the twin processes of stability and change. ^[18] Even this, though, is not quite sufficient for his purposes. The restriction of historical research to what brings about structural changes simply eliminates through an apparently arbitrary piece of legislation a great deal of what historians and ethnologists ordinarily do. Likewise the definition of a fact as what “causes” structural changes eliminates from consideration those events which do not so much induce but merely assist in maintaining social equilibrium. The difficulty Althusser runs into here can, I believe, ultimately be traced back to his choice of words — “mutation” — a concept borrowed not from structuralism but from the older evolutionary paradigm which it was attempting to replace. The result indicates a gradual process of adaptation rather than moments of revolutionary “displacement.

A more promising attempt to account for the relationship between diachrony and synchrony is suggested through Althusser’s use of the term “structural causality.” The question he seeks to answer is how the subjacent synchronic world of economic structure is related to the diachronic world of human behavior, or, put another way, how the structure of a mode of production is related to actual economic transactions in the marketplace. Insofar, Althusser tells us, as Marx was aware of the need for a concept to describe this relationship, it exists in his work only “in the practical state.” If we are to find a concept capable of thinking through this problem with all the rigor it deserves, we must go back beyond Marx to Spinoza, “the only theoretician who had the unprecedented daring to pose this problem and outline a first solution to it.” ^[19] Only in Spinoza do we find a concept capable of accounting for the relationship between a structure which is a “hidden” or “absent” cause and its effects. This concept is called structural causality.

What Althusser calls a structural cause is a literal transposition of what Spinoza termed an “immanent cause” (causa immanens). In the Ethics, Book I, Proposition XVIII, Spinoza remarks that God is the immanent and enduring, not the transient, cause of all things. In this cryptic passage which contains the germ of Spinoza’s critique of scriptural theology, he is rejecting a conception of causality which sees God as the creator who set the world in motion by a unique act or set of acts which occurred at some specifiable point in the past and then ceased altogether. This popular conception of the diety as a sort of divine artificer seemed to Spinoza to be a fiction of the imagination, for when analyzed logically it could be shown to contain self-contradiction. The most obvious contradiction is that, if God is conceived as a first cause distinguishable from the objects he creates, then by definition he cannot be infinite and all-powerful since there exists something outside of him that limits his power and perfection. When God is viewed as the immanent cause and not the transient cause of the world, this problem vanishes. To say that God is the immanent cause is not to locate him outside the natural whole, but to pinpoint his activity squarely within the order of nature to which everything must be referred as the ground of its explanation. Nothing, on this account, can be conceived outside the natural order of things, which is nothing other than God since this would be to introduce some unique and miraculous act or event. Following Spinoza’s logic, we arrive at the position that everything must be conceived as determined by certain necessary causes, the chain of which extends back to infinity, and this vast theatre of causes and effects he calls God or nature.

Althusser’s notion of structural causality is merely a secularized version of Spinoza’s immanent cause once the transposition from God to the mode of production is carried out. The mode of production is the immanent, not the transient, cause of all things.

This implies […] that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects. ^[20]

To make sense of this passage, it is necessary to understand first what Althusser is arguing against. The “transient” or “linear’ view of causality would approximate something like the fundamentalist version of base and superstructure relations discussed in the last chapter. On this account, what goes on in the economic base “determines” what goes on in the noneconomic superstructure, making any relation between them one of external association or adjacency. This type of causal model fits well the Humean and positivist thesis according to which we should in principle be able to describe the antecedents and consequents of a causal chain in complete independence of one another. There must be no essential reference to the consequent in describing the antecedent since this would imply some sort of closer internal relationship between them. By emphasizing, on the contrary, that the mode of production is a structural and not a transient cause, Althusser wants to suggest a more homogeneous view of the social whole, not as analyzable into discrete units but as a set of functionally interrelated parts. The economic structure is not a transient cause separable from its effects (like the God of scriptural theology) but a structural cause which can be seen working only in and through its effects.

Althusser uses the concept of structural causality to show how the mode of production functions as the “absent cause” or what Marx called the “hidden mystery” behind the appearance of the commodity on the marketplace. What deeply fascinated Marx was why in capitalist society the object of labor is represented as a commodity, that is, why the amount of labor time expended in the production of a thing should become embodied as an expression of its value. This is the “hieroglyph” that previous political economists had simply failed to “decipher.” “Political economy,” Marx states, “has never once asked the question: why this content adopts this form, why labour is represented (sich darstellt) by value?” ^[21]

The real cause of the appearance of the commodity on the marketplace was not present in ordinary economic transactions, but absent, and like the Freudian unconscious, could only be inferred through its effects. It was systematically concealed by the visible processes of circulation, exchange, and consumption. This is not to suggest that these processes are merely illusory or are in some sense less than real. Rather they give rise to certain illusions which in turn work to conceal rather than to reveal the true cause, the production process, whose effects they are. As Marx says: “These imaginary expressions arise […] from the relations of production themselves.” ^[22] This is to suggest that no amount of ordinary empirical or phenomenological description of the worker or the work place will reveal the mode of production, the “absent cause,” which is nowhere visible but which is everywhere present in its effects. What Marx tells us is that society in general, but capitalist society in particular, is characterized by a certain degree of opacity which, so to speak, creates the necessity for a method which will penetrate to the reality behind the appearance and then by a reverse process explain why this reality should take on the specific appearance that it does.

Althusser’s account of the structural causality of the mode of production is at the same time both too strong and too weak. It is too weak inasmuch as it fails to show how the mode of production actually exerts its determinant influence. It does not so much determine actual economic behavior as it does the form or appearance of the behavior. In this sense, structural causation means something like “circumscribes” or “sets limits to” the types of productive relations one is likely to find in a society. It is too strong, inasmuch as it is asserted as some sort of unequivocal principle of explanation. What we usually mean when we say that something is the cause of something else is that there is a certain observed pattern of regularity or uniformity between one event or series of events and some subsequent event or series of events. Such explanations are usually held to be either verifiable or falsifiable through some set of empirical procedures. But by removing the concept of structural causality from such empirical contexts, in which it could be usefully employed, and elevating it to the level of an “absent cause” capable of explaining not one particular class of things but “the development of things in general.” Althusser once more exhibits that tendency to turn economic structures into a metaphysical entity removed from the conditions of human praxis and subjectivity. ^[23]

Althusser’s identification of the mode of production as an “absent cause” by no means casts doubt upon the enterprise of metaphysics. It is merely to call attention to the fact that when the concept of cause is extended to account not for particular types of things but the existence of things “in general,” the totality of things, the result is to evacuate the term of all explanatory power since what is used indifferently to explain everything must in the end explain nothing. Because the concept of the mode of production claims to explain so much, it must, like the God of Spinoza, be left out of any particular account precisely because it affords no rational explanation of any one thing. At best the structural causality of the mode of production must be seen not as providing the sort of empirical matter-of-fact explanations that scientists and historians are accustomed to look for, but rather as providing the overall metaphysical framework within which these sorts of explanations can take place. But this, it must be borne in mind, is not an explanation of anything. This is not a “science” but a kind of meta-science, or to call it by its proper name, metaphysics.

Whatever may be the difficulties with the concept of structural causality, Althusser’s intention can be seen to be in keeping with that of Spinoza as well as many of the great metaphysical thinkers of the past who have tried to provide a complete and comprehensive account of the whole, of everything that is. This attempt to explain the whole, or at least all forms of historical existence, in terms of one overriding cause, whether it be God or the mode of production, is the link that unites traditional metaphysics with Althusser’s brand of structural Marxism. At some point within this account of the whole, however, it becomes necessary to explain the existence of man and where he stands in relation to it. This brings us to question the moral intention of Althusserian structuralism summed up in the statement that Marxism is a “theoretical anti-humanism.”

Theoretical Anti-Humanism

The most controversial and in some respects the most telling feature of Althusser’s structural Marxism is its claim to be a “theoretical anti-humanism.” Althusser announces this anti-humanism in the boldest possible language:

Strictly in respect to theory, therefore, one can and must speak openly of Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism, and see in this theoretical anti-humanism the absolute (negative) precondition of the (positive) knowledge of the human world itself, and of its practical transformation. It is impossible to know anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the philosophical (theoretical myth of man is reduced to ashes. So any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoretical anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes, theoretically. ^[24]

Theoretical anti-humanism becomes for Althusser the Marxist pendant to the structuralist motto that “man is dead” or, as he puts it, that any philosophy of the “subject” must be henceforth repudiated as an intrusion of ideology. “For the corollary of theoretical Marxist anti-humanism is the recognition and knowledge of humanism itself: as an ideology […] Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism […] recognizes a necessity for humanism as an ideology.” ^[25]

This theoretical anti-humanism or the “decentering” of the subject is not something that structuralism alone has initiated but has been central to every modern discipline aspiring to scientific status. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud observed that in the past few centuries the “naive self-love” of man has been progressively humbled by advances in science. ^[26] The first blow came when Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe but a tiny speck within a cosmic system of almost infinite vastness. The second blow fell when Darwin dislodged the human species from its supposedly privileged place within the animal kingdom, showing man to be just one in a long line of evolutionary forms. The third blow came when Freudian psychoanalysis showed that the ego is not even “master in its own house” but subject to deeper unconscious drives and motivations of which the mind may be only dimly aware. Finally, in our own day this process of “decentering” continues with Althusser, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss, who have tried to eliminate the influence of man altogether from their historical and ethnographic research.

Althusser’s claim to decenter the subject is intended as a radical denial of “humanism” in the social sciences. Humanism is understood very generally to be the doctrine according to which man is a being of a special kind endowed with a privileged position in the world. Humanism is the name for the doctrine which seeks to draw social and political inferences from some purported “essence of man” or “‘human nature.” ^[27] If the “human’ is to be in any sense a term of distinction, it is only intelligible because man is seen as a being possessed of certain capacities which distinguish him from the rest of nature. Chief among these capacities is often considered to be choice, that is, the ability to initiate free and responsible actions to which judgments of praise and blame can be afixed. Beings governed by necessity alone cannot be truly human in the fullest sense of the term, since what is human depends upon the ability to choose one course of action over another. However, what Althusser and the structuralists contend is that man, who was previously considered to be the author of his own actions, can, when submitted to scientific analysis, be shown to be subject to the same causal laws as everything else in nature. This is to deny that man, the human subject, is in any way free in his volitions since his choices are themselves the outcome of this all-embracing network of causes. Man appears merely as a support for certain impersonal forces at work which determine his activity in a variety of ways of which he may be only dimly aware.

Althusser’s own brand of anti-humanism begins with a denial that man or even groups of men form the primary unit of Marxian analysis. Marx, he says, was not interested in man as such, but in certain “ever-pre-given” relations of production which mechanically distribute the roles and functions that agents play out in their daily lives. Indeed, he quotes from Marx’s last work, the Randglossen zu Adolph Wagners “Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie” (1882) to show that by the end of his life Marx had left the vestiges of his earlier humanism far behind. “My analytical method,” Marx says here, “does not start from man but from the economically given social period.” ^[28] Not our lived subjective experience, what the phenomenologists call “le vécu,” but the various structures — economic, political, and ideological — which constitute the social formation are the real “subjects” of history.

Within Capital, Althusser finds warrant for his theoretical anti-humanism in Marx’s use of the term Träger. Träger is a fairly commonplace German word which means literally “bearer” or “support.” Althusser uses it to show that the true subjects of history are certain relations of production and that men are never anything more than the bearers/supports of them. Before going into this in more detail, however, it should be kept in mind that Althusser does not merely bring this concept with him in order to give his reading of Marx a fashionable structuralist flavor. Rather it is a concept which Marx uses regularly throughout Capital to show the way in which men are simply “personifications” of the social relations of production. At one point we read: “In the course of our investigations we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage are but the personifications [Träger] of the economic relations that exist between them.” ^[29] And in another passage Marx says:

As the conscious representative [Träger] of this movement the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person or rather his pocket is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of the value, which is the objective basis or mainspring of the circulation $M-C-M$, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will. ^[30]

Althusser uses the Träger concept explicitly as a polemical weapon against the humanist thesis that would make man into the unique subject or creator of his own history. For Althusser, it is not man who is at the center of the historical stage, but certain relations of production which distribute the roles and positions which men simply act out. There are only a limited number of places within the system which an individual can occupy and these places are continually reproduced and continually develop what they demand of their occupants. Men cannot, therefore, be regarded as active agents of this process. They are simply its bearers/supports. “The structure of the relations of production,” Althusser says,

determines the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production, who are never anything more than the occupants of these places, insofar as they are the “supports” [Träger] of these functions. The true “subjects” (in the sense of constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries, are not, despite all appearance, the “obviousness” of the “given” of naive anthropology, “concrete individuals” “real men” — but the definition and distribution of these places and functions. The true “subjects” are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations). ^[31]

What this passage is polemicizing against is the claim put forward most forcefully by Sartre and other members of the existential-phenomenological school that all important human behavior is the outcome of conscious human choice and deliberation. On the existentialist or “humanist” account we are what we are by virtue of the choices we have made. This is intended to apply not only to those areas of our lives that are manifestly the result of reflective decision, but to those we ordinarily consider to be prereflective or the result of reflex response. Such things as emotions, feelings, and instincts, which we are often thought to suffer, are said to be in some sense the product of choice, a selective response to a situation. To ascribe conduct to social forces, to inalterable laws of nature including human nature, is to misdescribe reality. It is also, so Sartre and his followers would say, ethically repulsive since it is an evasion of personal responsibility. Indeed, such an evasion is for them itself a type of choice although a particularly craven one since our options are always at least two: to do or not to do. In this respect we are always what we make ourselves to be.

One need not go quite so far as Althusser to argue that this position conflicts with some quite undeniable features of human behavior. There are, for example, as Freud is famous for pointing out, some significant areas of human activity where we commonly do not know what we are trying to do or are unaware of the tendencies of our actions, and which cannot be understood by reference to concepts like choice, intention, and decision. A neurotic, as described by Freud, is a man who is not aware of and is consequently not fully responsible for his own actions and who constantly finds his actual accomplishments at odds with his sincerely professed intentions. As he has made clear, we frequently mistake or misdescribe the real import of our actions and thereby deceive ourselves into thinking we are doing one thing when in fact we are really doing something very different. It is because the agent does not know what he is “really” doing that he can be said to be governed by causal necessity, which it is the promise of psychotherapy to put under rational human control.

Similarly, Althusser has argued in the passage quoted above that in the most profound sense human behavior is determined by the “places and functions” occupied by the agents within the social structure. These places or roles overlap so that there is no unified center, whether spiritual or material, from which our behavior emanates. We are in this sense “decentered.” One is, for instance, a professor, a husband, a member of a political organization, a sports enthusiast, and so on without any one of these areas of our lives determining exclusively who or what we are. Each of these areas overlaps to such an extent that the whole can truly be said to be “overdetermined” in precisely the way we have seen Althusser (following Freud) use that term. Here Althusser is quite right to point out the multiple sources of the determination of our behavior rather than reducing it to material interests, libidinal drives, or some other central point from which everything can be explained. But Althusser goes too far in suggesting that everything we do is so conditioned by the various roles and positions that we occupy. This cannot account for the work of judgment, appraisal, and argument that goes on both in the mind and between agents effecting and altering our conduct. It may be, of course, that all Althusser really wishes to say is that within the broad set of constraints imposed upon the individual by the mode of production he is still free to do and act as he chooses. This would be a way of capturing a degree of freedom and self-determination within an overall system of structural causality. In this respect, too, Althusser would give a new twist to the Spinozist dictum that freedom is the recognition of necessity. But Althusser does not actually say this and, as the Träger concept indicates, goes so far as to imply that we are largely passive beings determined by structural vectors over which we exert no control. In this sense, then, Althusserian determinism is the reverse side of Sartrean decisionism. Neither adequately sets out the way in which choices, reasons, and decisions are constrained by external conditions, on the one hand, but without ceasing to function as choices, reasons, and decisions, on the other.

The aim of the Träger concept is a means of denying the phenomenological notion of intentionality or the specifically Marxist version of this that man makes history. Taking his repudiation of intentional behavior to its logical limits, Althusser maintains that the production and reproduction of social life is not something carried out by intelligent agents in full awareness of what it is they are doing, but takes place, so to speak, behind the backs of men who are never anything more than Träger or supports of the system within which they find themselves. There is no action within the Althusserian universe understood as behavior consciously directed toward the pursuit of some freely chosen end or purpose. There is only a set of reactive responses determined “in the last instance” by the needs of the production process. The stage, Althusser says, is set and players merely perform according to scripts already written out for them in advance:

Now we can recall that highly symptomatic term “Darstellung,” compare it with this “machinery” and take it literally, as the very existence of this machinery in its effects: the mode of existence of the stage direction (mise en scène) of the theatre which is simultaneously its own stage, its own script, its own actors, the theatre whose spectators can on occasion, be spectators only because they are first of all forced to be its actors, caught by the constraints of a script and parts whose authors they cannot be, since it is in essence an authorless theatre. ^[32]

One point needs to be re-emphasized here. No matter how much like a theatre, a machine, or an artificial construction a society may appear, we must not lose sight of the fact that this is still an analogy which on inspection does not hold. This analogy assumes rather than proves that societies are like self-compensating mechanisms in which the individual parts are adjudged by their contribution to the overall working or efficiency of the whole. But to insist that what human beings do (or refrain from doing), they do because of their place within the social whole is to fall into the same objectivism criticized above. Althusser is so concerned to deny the individualist or voluntarist theory of action that he overlooks the fact that the production and reproduction of social life is above all a skilled performace, sustained and made to happen by intelligent social actors. All the world may indeed be a stage, as Althusser’s theatrical metaphor suggests, in which we are all merely actors playing a part, but even given this constraint we still feel it necessary to draw a distinction between the performance of an Olivier and that of an untrained novice. Seen in this light, individuals are never simply “representatives” of a set of prescribed social roles-no matter what Althusserian or Goffmanesque sociology claims. Nor can human action be explained solely in causal or functional terms, that is, in terms of how it keeps the system going. Social actors must be understood at least in part as intentional subjects acting in response to an understood situation and whose actions must also be seen in terms of its symbolic or meaningful character for them. It is the meaningful side of human behavior that in the last instance Althusserian structuralism cannot understand.

To sum up: Althusser’s “objectifying” conception of production relations as distinct from the social agents who constitute them is the basis for his claim that Marxism is a “theoretical antihumanism.” This anti-humanism amounts to a denial of the role of individual will or agency in history. Since to be an agent means to be capable of framing intentional aims and projects by the light of an independent intelligence, to eliminate agency is to eliminate man and any teleological conception of human nature. The elimination of any substantive ground for free action constitutes the core of the doctrine of scientific structuralism. This brings us, at long last, to the final teaching of the Althusserian project: nihilism.

Nihilism: The Moral Intention of Structuralism

Nihilism, as Nietzsche defines it, is the situation which obtains when “everything is permitted.” Everything is permitted when the distinction between reason and unreason, or, put another way, between speech and silence, is taken to be arbitrary or indifferent. Such indifference to reason or speech is only possible when the very concept of man, traditionally understood as the rational animal par excellence, has lost its meaning as a term of distinction and consequently where the thesis of a human nature with an objective hierarchy of needs has been reduced to the status of “myth.” The conviction that “man is dead” defines the nihilism of Althusser’s Marxism and provides the basis for his positive thesis that history is a “process without a subject.”

According to Althusser, in Capital, Marx “exploded” the myth of a subject-centered history, that is, a conception of history as the progressive realization of human capacities for freedom, equality, rationality, or whatever. In its place Marx found it necessary to adopt the conception of history as a “process without a subject” in which “the dialectic at work in history is not the work of any subject whatsoever, whether absolute (God) or merely human, but that the origin of history is always already thrust back before history, and therefore that there is neither a philosophical origin nor a philosophical subject to history.” ^[33] The conclusion we reach is that the teleological historicism of the last century, whether that of Comte, Hegel, or the young Marx, must be replaced by the “scientific” conception of history as a “process” without origin or end, without meaning or purpose. What this means is explained by reference to a footnote in Capital to be found, moreover, only in the French edition:

The word “procès” […] which expresses a development considered in the totality of its real conditions has long been part of scientific language throughout Europe. In France it was first introduced slightly shamefacedly in its Latin form — processus. Then, stripped of this pedantic disguise, it slipped into books on chemistry, physics, physiology, etc., and into works of metaphysics. In the end it will obtain a certificate of complete naturalization. ^[34]

The positive legacy of Marx is this idea of history as a process, but a process evacuated of all notions of rationality or intelligibility. In place of the idea of a rational history leading men progressively toward some final end state, Althusser has suggested that history is opaque in its essence, unilluminated by any intelligible necessity or some transcendent absolute. History is instead a “process without a subject.”

Once one is prepared to consider just for a moment that the whole Hegelian teleology is contained in the expressions […] of alienation, or in what constitutes the master structure of the category of the dialectic (the negation of the negation), and once one accepts, if that is possible, to abstract from what represents the teleology in these expressions, then there remains the formulation: history is a process without a subject. I think I can affirm: this category of a process without a subject, which must of course be torn from the grip of the Hegelian teleology, undoubtedly represents the greatest theoretical debt linking Marx to Hegel. ^[35]

It is the teleological structure of the Hegelian dialectic to which Althusser finally objects and which renders it unfit for appropriation by Marxism:

Of course we can now begin to say, what irremediably disfigures the Hegelian conception of History as a dialectical process is its teleological concept of the dialectic, inscribed in the very structures of the Hegelian dialectic at an extremely precise point: the Aufhebung (transcendence-preserving-the-transcended-as-the-internalized-transcended), directly expressed in the Hegelian category of the negation of the negation (or negativity). ^[36]

What are we to make of this? First, these passages express a darker, more pessimistic side of Althusserian Marxism than we have seen up to now. His attempt to expel the subject from history (and from knowledge) is part of a broader counter movement now under way in the humanities and the social sciences whose outcome has been declared under the slogan “the death of man.” ^[37] This opposition, which encompasses not only structuralism but various forms of systems theory, literary criticism, and even religious historiography, has registered discontent with the pervasive humanistic conception of man as a self-centered and self-directing agent. The “anti-humanist” leanings of these schools have also been part of a widespread discontent with the politics of liberal individualism and the conception of man as a “possessive individualist” on which it rests.

The spiritual essence of this movement may be characterized by a sort of moral billiousness in the face of the destruction of even historical reason. If history as a process with meaning or purpose is found to be insupportable, then the confident optimism that bolstered the belief in progress must also be rejected as groundless. But then we must face the question: how do we live in the face of this groundlessness or this perception of the transient worthlessness of all values? Nietzsche thought that he had an answer to this horrible truth in his special interpretation of human creativity or his doctrine of the will to power, the will to “overcome” everything including history itself. If an overabundance or “hypertrophy” of history is the source of our malaise, only by turning away from history to nature or to the will to power can the problem of history be solved. The will to power is often understood as a call to radical freedom or radical subjectivity. It is a call to create ex nihilo or to destroy everything that stands in the way of the creative urge. The will to destroy is the first step toward the will to create.

Althusser takes this creative call to creativity one step further. If literally everything can be overcome, then man himself, “the beast with red cheeks,” can be overcome also. Man himself is to be “decentered” or deprived of any position of privilege if Marxism is to become a fully objective or “scientific” doctrine. This objective or scientific doctrine, which teaches that history itself is limited by a finite number of forms or structures, must put severe restraints upon the creative power of the will. History comes more to embody the fatalism inherent in Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” than the activism implicit in his theory of the will. In any case, the moral intention of structuralism must now be clear. It is an attempt not to replace man by superman, as Nietzsche had hoped, but to dissolve man altogether, to eliminate even the human as merely another prejudice or myth of Western ideology. The dissolution of history becomes the first step in the direction of the dissolution of man. ^[38]

The most prominent spokesman for this tendency has been Althusser’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who has become famous for his attempt to trace the dissolution of the subject in the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and philology. Throughout his researches into the history and philosophy of these disciplines, Foucault’s aim has been to elicit “the fundamental codes of a culture” which delineate the way the world is defined and perceived. What Foucault believed himself to have discovered is that underlying the thought of any period was a certain “episteme” or “archive’ which like the Althusserian problematic is unconscious and yet defines the system of signs and regularities for what is to be included and excluded from the domain of knowledge. His starting point, as he states it in the Preface to Les mots et les choses, is a text from Borges which deserves to be quoted in full not only for itself but for what it reveals about the structuralist enterprise. This passage quotes “a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetra, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” ^[39] It is, he says, from the sense of wonderment that we feel when we confront seriously this classification — “the stark impossibility of thinking that” — that Foucault has called into question the possible arbitrariness underlying all knowledge.

Foucault’s point is to study the system of rules that governs the cycle of knowledge. Since these norms are deeply sedimented, constituting as they do the limits of the intellectual world, they are not easy to disclose. In the Renaissance, for instance, the basic conception of knowledge was founded upon the notion of resemblance. Relations of similitude and analogy were believed to link together the microcosm and the macrocosm, the book of nature and the book of the world. All this changed, however, during the Classical period, when the idea of representation replaced that of resemblance and the world was seen not in terms of qualitative symbolic correspondences (the Great Chain of Being), but in quantifiable identities and differences. It was only, Foucault maintains, at the end of this period or in the age of Enlightenment, with its attempt to mathematize and idealize nature, that the concept of man came into common currency. Prior to that time, the “subject” simply did not exist.

Foucault associates the appearance of man, the human subject, with the demise of ancient metaphysics, with its belief in a transcendent absolute that sustained it. Once the classical metaphysics fell into disrepute, a new humanist and historicist perspective arose to take its place. “Before the end of the eighteenth century,” Foucault asserts, “man did not exist — any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language; he is quite a recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago.” And he goes on to say: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” ^[40]

In direct opposition, then, to the “human sciences,” a counter movement growing out of the new disciplines of psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics has developed placing relatively greater emphasis not on the subject but on the structural conditions which lie outside the reach of human intentionality and design. These structural sciences, like Freudian analysis and Saussurean linguistics, sought to disclose not the products of human doing but the principles presupposed in all human doings. To reverse the order of Hegelian priorities, structuralism sought to reveal substance not as subject but as structure. Foucault declares that Nietzsche gave the lead to this movement by declaring the death of God, which one hundred years later has been followed by the pronouncement on the death of man. “In our own day and once again,” Foucault writes, “Nietzsche indicated the turning point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man.” This is not, of course, to suggest the absurd hypothesis that human beings as a species, homo sapiens, are bound to disappear. It is only to remind us that without some transcendental basis upon which to ground humanism, man himself begins to appear increasingly problematic. “Rather than the death of God or rather, in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it — what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man.” ^[41]

This dissolution of man into these a priori structures of knowledge (Foucault) or production relations (Althusser) is no mere misanthropy or rhetorical exaggeration on the part of this counter movement. It is rather the final aim of their program designed to dethrone the privileged status accorded to the subject by modern philosophers from Descartes to Sartre. Structuralism, as the cases of Althusser and Foucault have indicated, is avowedly anti-humanistic because it refuses to grant man any unique place in the hierarchy of nature but sees him as determined in his outcomes by structural causes of which he may be completely unaware. Anti-humanism does not amount to a denial that there are individual men who observe, think, write, and so on; nor does it deny that there are more or less cohesive cultural groups with their own systems of signs and symbols. What it does deny is the theoretical basis for humanism which seeks to attribute a unique essence such as freedom, volition, or choice to man or to see these attributes as in any sense meaningful. As Foucault maintains:

We can see that what manifests this peculiar property of the human sciences is not that privileged and singularly blurred object which is man. For the good reason that it is not man who constitutes them and provides them with a specific domain; it is the general arrangement of the episteme that provides them with a site, summons them, and establishes them-thus enabling them to constitute man as their object. We shall say, therefore, that a “human science” exists, not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis-within the dimension proper to the unconscious of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and content. ^[42]

Lévi-Strauss argues essentially the same thesis in a passage from The Savage Mind. Here he remarks that the goal of ethnographic research is “not to constitute, but to dissolve man.”

The pre-eminent value of anthropology is that it represents the first step in a procedure which involves others. Ethnographic analysis tries to arrive at invariants beyond the empirical diversity of human societies. […] However, it would not be enough to reabsorb particular humanities into a general one. The first enterprise opens the way for others […] which are incumbent on the exact natural sciences: the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico-chemical conditions. ^[43]

This should, once more, not be understood as a prophecy of doom. The dissolution of man or the “reintegration” of culture into nature does not mean that the species man will disappear. What will disappear is the search for some substantive embodiment of the human subject in terms of qualities or attributes like spirit, soul, or consciousness. Whether this more substantive embodiment of the self takes the form of the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian “I think” or the Husserlian transcendental ego makes little difference. It is the search for something more basic and permanent to man that is destined to disappear, as Foucault has poetically put it, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” ^[44]

The same generally gloomy and pessimistic vision pervades Althusser’s “anti-humanism” as well. In his attempt to refute the humanist thesis that it is man who makes history or makes himself, Althusser has been led to explain history without men or without reference to their conscious intentions and purposes, which have meaning for them but frequently result in unintended consequences. History becomes a “process without a subject” in which one combination of structures transforms itself into another independently of the individuals who inhabit them. Only by detaching history from the standpoint or perspective of any “constitutive subject” can we avoid systematic “misrecognition.” Yet to aim at this type of impersonality in history, I would suggest, is to produce something which is not history at all. Take away the human perspective and there is nothing intelligible left any more than there would be anything visible if we sought to look at a physical object but from no particular point of view. To attempt to judge man in the light of these unconscious structures is to understand the human in the light of the subhuman and is, therefore, to fail to see what is distinctively human in man.

I can only note in conclusion how far removed Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism” is from the revolutionary humanism of classical Marxism. Marx’s optimism concerning the eventual outcome of history is based ultimately on the belief in a continual expansion of human productive powers and consequently upon man’s ever-increasing ability to subjugate nature for his own ends and purposes. Althusser is correct in one respect. Marx did not identify the subject of history with Man or with the realization of some abstractly conceived human essence. This view, he is right to see, is a Feuerbachian conception which Marx abandoned some time during or shortly after the composition of the German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. In place of Man, however, Marx locates the center of historical gravity with the productive forces of society, whose ability to expand remains the one historical constant over time, giving history a progressive and linear direction. Thus Althusser’s description of history as a “process without a subject” founders upon the evidence.

This is not to deny to Althusser whatever merit his intellectual tour de force might have. His is free to reject much of Marx — nay all of Marx — if he sees fit. But why then insist on calling the finished product Marxism? The fact remains that throughout his work Marx retained a fundamentally teleological conception of history whereby the relatively simple forms of social life were seen as containing in nuce the more highly developed stages of society. Therefore, it is patently untrue to say that what Marx rejected was the teleological structure of the dialectic and its “master category,” the negation of the negation. Two passages, both from his mature work, should suffice to make this clear. The first occurs in the introduction to the Grundrisse, in which we read:

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. ^[45]

The second passage occurs toward the end of Capital, volume one, in a discussion of the “historical tendency” of capitalist accumulation. Here Marx comes closest to a dialectical teleology reminiscent of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in attempting to depict the historical nature of socialism as an illustration of the concept of the negation of the negation:

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature [mit der Notwendigkeit eines Naturprocesses], its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. ^[46]

This picture whereby history represents a dialectical progression of stages linking primitive communism, via slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, to the mature communism of the future bears witness to the unshakeable hold of Hegelian teleology on even Marx’s most mature reflections.

As we have seen, this optimistic picture of history as leading inexorably toward a secular millennium has come under increasing attack from some of the most advanced thinkers of our age. Expressing the general lack of confidence and faith in the future, the latent pessimism of Althusserian analysis has been ascribed to the very structure of history itself. Even communist society, which for Marx represented the “end” of history in which all the “riddles” which had puzzled human existence would at last be solved, remains for Althusser just one of a number of ways in which the problem of social order and function is achieved. It will remain “in the last instance” forever opaque to those occupying its “places and functions” deceiving them perpetually with an illusion of their own freedom. Knowledge, in the final resort, is not “power,” as Enlightenment optimists from Bacon to Marx had assumed. It ends rather in impotence and an awareness of the limitations of the will and on the power of practical activity. In this respect Althusser’s structural Marxism corresponds to a type of conservative realism based, no doubt in part, upon the defeat of Marx’s original proposals.

By contrast to the Enlightenment belief (that in fact extends back to Protagoras) that “man is the measure of all things,” the Althusserian critique of humanism stresses the insurmountable limitations imposed upon man by these nonhuman or extrahuman structures of production. Man is no longer conceived as the active creator of his world, but rather as a supporting agent in a complex web of relationships whose axis revolves around the relations of production. Like Spinoza’s Substance or Heidegger’s Dasein, these relations denote the pre-existing world, which is not the product of either individual or intersubjective design and which cannot be either wished or spirited away in practical deliberations. It is this deepened appreciation of the “realm of necessity,” which both defines and determines the “realm of freedom” within practical life, that may constitute the highest teaching of Althusserian Marxism. To invert the phrase of Descartes’, we are no longer “the masters and possessors of nature” but its servants. At the deepest level, Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism” teaches the inevitable triumph not of man over history, but of structure over man. ^[47]

Structuralism Appendix

Works of general interest on structuralism include

• Jean-Marie Auzias, Clefs pour le structuralisme (Paris: Seghers, 1967)
• Raymond Boudon, The Uses of Structuralism (London: Heinemann, 1971)
• Richard T. and Fernande de George, eds., The Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss (New York: Doubleday, 1972)
• J. B. Fages, Comprendre le structuralisme (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1968)
• Michael Lane, ed., Structuralism: A Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1970)
• David Roby, ed., Structuralism: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)
• François Wahl, ed., Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968).

For journals with special issues on the subject see

• “Problèmes de structuralisme,” Les Temps Modernes, 246 (1966)
• “Structuralisme: Idéologie et méthode,” Esprit, 360 (1967)
• “Structuralisme et marxisme,” La Pensée, 135 (1967).