| Althusser & ISA ~ Atheism and Anti-Humanism Pushed To Their Most Desolate Extremes |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|02:02 pm] |
 NB: this double "currently" is one more proof of the fact that ideology is "eternal", since these two "currentlys" are separatedly by an indefinite interval; I am writing these lines on April 6, 1969, you may read them at any subsequent time.
- Louis Althusser, footnote to "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
I'm reading Althusser now and savoring every single word. Forreals. I must say, his essay on ideology is justifiably considered a dazzlingly beautiful and savagely brutal masterpiece of critical theory. Like Mozart's Requiem, which to the uninitiated might also seem redundant, this essay will leave the prepared reader thunderstruck. Though of course this will be the case only for those who have read the essay with great care and curiosity, and done all the necessary prior labor. The rest will just shrug and say what has always been said in the presence of great and challenging art: "Too many notes; but, whatever, to each his own." No truer words.
Nevertheless, I understand that for a number of reasons - including your newness to the text and also the fact that you guys, unlike me, have lives outside theory - you probably won't end up reading it as closely and successfully as I. No problem. Just be aware that though the introductory sections are important, they are indeed repetitive. Also, we've already discussed many of the issues Althusser is discussing there back when we read Gramsci, who Althusser himself invokes by name. So, you can skim those sections.
However, do pay close attention when you hit pg. 1496, "Ideology Has No History". This is the part of the text that strikes me as most interesting and "revolutionary" - though many of Althusser's opponents would harshly attack these same statements for being utterly counter-revolutionary. If you have been following my posts on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, you will not fail to recognize that Althusser's discussion of the "eternality" of ideology derives directly from those seminal writers (as well as the notorious psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom we'll read for Thursday). Hence the fact that Althusser is labeled a Structuralist. (If you haven't been following my posts, cool, you've probably got a life.) Also, this particular section in Althusser's essay is the place where his writing works most closely in concert with the brilliant and controversial essay by Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture In The Expanded Field".
Now, below is a letter I wrote not long ago to a friend, on the subject of what contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls "White Mythologies". I'm posting it here because of its relation to you. Not all of you will care to read this, I know. But perhaps at least one or two of you will.
Dear Z,
I'm glad you're still teaching Althusser. I won't even go so far as to say that he was unjustly maligned, but I nevertheless think he has much to offer, if only because he's doing something different. As you've seen, right now I teach medieval theology, and certainly the medieval Church has much not to be proud of. And yet each day I'm finding myself more and more impressed with the love of learning, as well as the disregard for popularity, and indifference to danger, evinced by the writers we're examining.
I think we're pretty much in agreement on the function of the compromise third-term as a performing a naturalizing function. My class has examined this, though not necessarily from the perspective of critique, in the writing of Augustine: his attempt to invalidate heretical readings of the Scripture, as either too literal (Cyprian and Origen) or too capricious and symbolic (Tychonius) or too base (The Gnostics).
It seems that the Augustinian compromise formation results from a necessary ground operation: liberating the text from any necessary tie to history: i.e., from any “motivation”. Literality in Augustine (and of course this is merely my reading of him) means not what actually happened, but rather what the book, once the text has been properly established, actually says. 
Augustine carries us from readings to Reading. I believe you can see how this shift from the literal to Literality, from the text to Textuality, from the many to the one; is tied up with an entire ideological project based in the narcissistic moment of recognizing oneself as a soul, as Human.
Once a “Human” middle term has been established as "natural" one then is at liberty to wander into allegorical readings, or to speculate as to the historical veracity of certain Old Testament narratives. But these relative freedoms are always based upon the possibility of returning to the normalcy and security of the Letter. (Or as Lacan would say, L'Etre.)
And I think it is preciesly this almost inescapably seductive ecstacy, or euphoria, of the Self recognizing itself in the Word, i.e., finding itself in the Field of the Other, which is the main target of Althusser's devastating critique of Marxist Humanism. I admire Althusser because his work allows me to see how ideological apparatuses operate at the most elementary (phonological) levels of everyday life, turning the mundane practice of reading (even the newspaper or the tabloids) into the Moral Act of Reading (and it's this sense of the quotidian as morally uplifting which I think is everywhere attacked in the Mythologies of Barthes).
From a purely critical perspective, it's nauseating to witness the self-satisfied and self-congratulatory middle-brow smugness I associate with consumers of the History-Channel and other equally banal mass-media representations provided by the Ideological State Apparatus. Yet perhaps, from time to time, we have to admire, and even envy, the childlike joy of the new convert. Perhaps, at times, this simplicity almost seems preferable to the generalized apathy by which we’re surrounded. Perhaps it might be tempting to hope for some moment of conversion of one’s own, to willfully cling to a naïve belief that not every initial burst of joy must soon give way to a banal happiness; a happiness which in turn gives way to a malaise whose only cure is to be found in converting one's neighbor (preferably an exotic one) specifically so that the Self can enjoy the comforting/scandalizing spectacle of watching it's own conception and birth re-staged for it by another.
As for Althusser, I think he is taught so little because, like the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, or, even moreso, the Dominican Meister Eckhart, he utterly shatters our narcissism, reopens the wound sutured by our ego.
Your friend,
BK
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