READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION
by
Philip Edmond Olsen
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of
The Wilkes Honors College
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences
with a Concentration in Philosophy
Wilkes Honors College of
Florida Atlantic University
Jupiter, Florida
May 2014
READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION
by
Philip Edmond Olsen
This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.
SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:
______
Dr. Daniel White
______
Dr. Michael Harrawood
______
Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College
______
Date
ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, for his insight, conversation, and encouragement.
I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Harrawood for giving me a lot of books and talking about philosophy with me. Finally, I would like to thank Calvin Bankert, John Carney, Alexa Robinson, Janeen
Smith, and Daniel Zengotita for talking to me about things. It all helped.
iii ABSTRACT
Author: Philip Edmond Olsen
Title: Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution
Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Daniel White
Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences
Concentration: Philosophy
Year: 2014
In the 1960s, the French Communist thinker Louis Althusser undertook to reorient capitalistic societies toward realizing socialist ideals. However, Althusser envisioned a self-sustaining capitalist state placing, through ideological state apparatuses, seemingly insurmountable limitations on constituents’ ideas and actions. In brief, his characterization of social phenomena as revealing a constructed ideology favoring the state, itself supporting the economy, seems to have contradicted his revolutionary goal. This thesis argues that communication theory, as explicated by the Canadian theorist Anthony Wilden, provides a framework capable of rectifying Althusser’s theory of the state to meet his goal of creating a society whose citizens are free from state control. Althusser thought undoing ideological apparatuses began with their identification, proceeded through their disruption, and concluded with their transformation. Wilden’s theory of morphogenic systems, conceptualizing “resistance” to ideological structures as “noise” in the “signal” of the state apparatus, shows that generating noise permits political actors to foster morphogenesis in a
“repressive” state.
iv CONTENTS
Introduction: The Revolutionary Mind ...... 1
Chapter One: The Problem Posed by Capitalistic Ideology ...... 5
Chapter Two: Ideology and Marxism ...... 18
Chapter Three: Prion Logic: Reconciling Althusser and Wilden ...... 36
Chapter Four: Governance, Aberration, Revolution ...... 49
Conclusion: Reading the World, Writing the Mind ...... 61
Works Cited ...... 67
v Introduction: The Revolutionary Mind
All discussions about philosophy are inevitably discussions about history, but in the interest of concision I am not going to be able fully to contextualize my research in this short document. I hope that readers will take my philosophical analysis as indicating one aspect of a broader critical perspective that I have tried to adopt in all my research.
My thesis is on ideology, revolution, and the way that change takes place in different kinds of systems. My thesis is in part on the philosopher Louis Althusser. During the 1960s he put a lot of time into thinking the most radical thoughts he could. Althusser was a member of the French Communist Party, and was dedicated to revolutionizing both society and the field of philosophical discourse. (He would have argued, by the way, that society and philosophy are two fields that inform, reflect, and change each other, and that they are pretty much inseparable.)
Althusser had a schematization of the way that philosophy and society are constantly working to preserve the same state, and it is not a state toward which Althusser was particularly sympathetic. Do you remember hearing about the cultural revolution in China? This is the kind of problem that Althusser thought and wrote about. The Russian Revolution showed political philosophers that a complete sociopolitical reorganization was impossible if the party in power did not manage to create some change in the minds of the people. It would have to be a radical change!
Suppose you are a communist. I know, it’s hard to actually get into the shoes of the communist for us. I walk around in my Pumas® while drinking Starbucks® coffee, myself. But if you are a communist you want a complete reorganization of the socioeconomic structure. This involves a radical redistribution of wealth, and a shift in legal terminology respecting the proprietorship of the means of production. What else would it involve? The Maoists in China realized that a real “revolution” would have to entail a complete reorganization in the way that people confronted the world: a complete change in the way that they punctuated, or introduced boundaries into, experience! Think about it. If you can force or convince (let’s suppose for a minute that it doesn’t matter which) people not just to behave in a certain way that prioritizes the good of the community over that of the self, but to internalize that belief system, that would constitute a real revolution. How hard would it be for us in our society not to think of ourselves as ourselves, but as being primarily constituents of a larger social or environmental system, and only secondarily as isolated bodies and minds?
1 Okay, this is getting out of control. Let’s talk about some understandable, concrete things. Let’s talk about contemporary capitalistic societies. Althusser had this idea that capitalist societies have a certain structure that prevents change from taking place. Specifically, Althusser says that these structures work to reproduce the relations of production in the state . You have to look at things from a specific perspective in order to understand what Althusser was getting at. For Althusser everything he observed spoke to the supplementation of a certain way of life, which was tied up with, although not definitively, capitalism. This way of life privileges the notion of control over everything else.
Althusser perceived the structure of capitalist control as having two main forms. The first one is something that he calls the Repressive State Apparatus. It is embodied by things like the military, the police force, and the prison system. These are institutions in the capitalist state that literally and physically exert control over the actions of transgressive people. The second kind of structure is the Ideological State
Apparatus. Althusser claimed that ideological state apparatuses share the goal of reproducing the relations of capitalism by exerting control on the way that people think, which is evident in the way that they act.
Institutions like the church, the schools, the news media, and the law all contribute to a delimitative process on the thinking of the constituents of capitalistic societies––in Althusser’s terms, they prevent the formation of a truly communistic thought. By exposing ourselves to and embodying the doctrines of selfishness and accumulativeness expounded by the ideological state apparatuses, Althusser thought, we subject ourselves to the control of the capitalistic ideology.
Since I like to think like a communist sometimes, if only as an intellectual exercise, I am a little perplexed by the problem Althusser’s model poses. Althusser phrases it in no uncertain terms: all of the institutions that you and I can identify are parts of the ideological state apparatus. All our news sources are the ideological state apparatus. Florida Atlantic University is the ideological state apparatus. The churches we attend all share in the ideological state apparatus. The ideological state apparatus is bad! If it seems like we can learn at educational institutions, how is it that the state exerts its control so invisibly? Can we escape the confines imposed on our imaginations by an institution that conceives of knowledge as being comprised of cutting things up into little bits, whether conceptually or physically? If we are good communists, I think the answer is yes. I wonder what we are.
My thesis examines one particular thinker, Anthony Wilden, whose work in the 1970s joined together the field of communication, which had been abstracted from the mid-20th century
2 experimentations with robotics and cybernetics, and the perspectives provided by the newly minted field of deep ecology. Wilden and Althusser shared the same idea that the capitalistic state contains in its structure certain apparatuses that limit the extent to which people can freely think, and that orient them in the direction of preserving capitalism. However, Wilden had the idea that maybe the boundaries presented by ideological institutions were not so rigid after all. Here we have to try to get into Wilden’s perspective a little bit. The truth is that Wilden probably walked around all the time feeling like he was in The Matrix
(1999), seeing ones and zeroes everywhere. His work System and Structure (1972) discusses what Wilden perceives to be a problematic tendency toward the digital in human thinking.
Wilden’s idea of digital is sort of different from what we might think of it as being now, given that he was writing in the early 1970s. Wilden thought of digitalization as an artificial process taking place in a fundamentally analog world. Digitalization involves the introduction of boundaries, the separation into components––analysis, cutting things up, enclosure in early modern England. The analog world of real experience is, instead, one of difference––one of gradient, where things vary along a continuum. Wilden thought that capitalistic society’s tendency to think digitally is where its problems lie.
Digitalism evinces itself in the scientific discourse, which conceives of the world as being fundamentally knowable and containable within our limited system of knowledge. It envisions reality as being cut-uppable, divided into constituent parts and potentially brought into the forefront of knowledge.
Capitalism is about the digital too, according to Wilden. It wants you to think in a certain way. It wants you to think all the time about the absolute divide between you and the rest of the world, so that you do not care about other people any more. It wants you to think about the easily digitalized concept of money. It wants you to obsess over counting your money and your capital, and thinking about the exchangeability of money with capital, the fact that abstract numbers are the standard by which experience ought to be evaluated.
Fortunately, according to Wilden, digitalization represents a faulty way of thinking whose pernicious effects can be ameliorated. We only have to look at the way that boundaries exist in nature. In animal cells, for example, the membrane appears the be the site of a digital distinction, between the cell and its environment. If we look closely at the cell, though, we can see that its membrane is the place where exchange takes place across gradients of difference. Apparent boundaries always speak to sites of interchange. The structure of the membrane of the cell itself is apparently able to change, whether via an
3 alteration in the genetic code or via literal molecular substitutions as the “structure” in a single cell replenishes itself against the degrading effect of entropy.
Let us return to Althusser. Isn’t his way of thinking problematic? He identifies some true things, which are that the capitalistic state works in a very comprehensive way. Indeed, whatever we may tell ourselves about having freedom in our society, we are not complicit in this system because of our freely choosing to be so. In almost all of our actions, thoughts, and words we embody the kind of worker that the capitalistic state wants us to be. What about those digital distinctions, though? Althusser’s model is certainly guilty of introducing them. How is he supposed to be subverting the digitalistic logic of capitalism by bringing up a model itself guilty of the same presuppositions of divisibility, nameability, and isolability?
All this delineation––ideology, apparatuses, church, school––seems to introduce indelible structures into a reality that, as Wilden would have it, is actually analog.
Maybe herein lies our solution to the problem of revolution. Perhaps, as I argue, Althusser’s work is intended to demonstrate to the reader the paradoxical logic governing all discourse around capitalism, even that which tries to engage with it on a critical level. The capitalistic state already contains the structures that delimit the thoughts and actions of people, but on Wilden’s model, can we not think of the structures themselves as permeable or changeable? Maybe the church does not have to be the site of dogmatic indoctrination. Maybe the school can be something other than a source of inculcation of competitiveness, self-isolation, prestige-orientedness, and contempt for the less-privileged, but can instead invite meaningful discourse around unconventional subjects. Maybe some of that discourse, as it takes its place in the main stream of our language, would end up making something happen that is right now, to us, unimaginable! Would you be able to recognize it? Can you name the kind of change you want to take place in the world? What would it mean for you to be able fully to verbalize that change?
My thesis concludes that Wilden’s idea of digitalization as an artificial process occurring in a fundamentally analog world provides a way of understanding how to effect radical political, social, and economic change from within the existing structures of the capitalistic state.
4 Chapter One: The Problem Posed by Capitalistic Ideology
“The NSA has been making efforts to be seen as more transparent.”––BBC News Online, 16 December
2013
The first half of the twentieth century saw the development of an apparently novel way of evaluating social phenomena––by applying certain organizing elements of Ferdinand Saussure’s theory of structural linguistics, a new group of scholars including Jean Piaget, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-
Strauss constructed new theories of the dynamics of social relations which had broad implications for subsequent psychological and anthropological scholarship. The impact of structuralism was felt throughout the twentieth century in the social sciences and in the humanities as scholars attempted to evaluate the feasibility of delineating verifiable organizing principles dictating the relations constitutive of the social world.
Contemporary scholars identify Louis Althusser, born in Algeria in 1918 and for much of his life a professor at the École normale supérieure, as the leading scholar and most controversial thinker in structuralist Marxism. Unfortunately for Althusser’s reputation, he has (unjustly) been attacked for the radicalism of his thought and for what critics have perceived to be too closely-felt a relationship with dogmatic structuralism.
The field of Marxist critical theory and social science was not the only branch of scholarship that felt structuralism’s influence in the second half of the twentieth century. Cybernetics––a field brought about by the need for a interdisciplinary approach to schematizing, engineering, and optimizing electrical control networks and self-sustaining automated systems––was adapted and expanded by thinkers in the social sciences, such as Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden. Originally implemented to describe the mechanical operations of inanimate systems, cybernetics became, for Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of
Mind (1972) and Wilden in the 1980 edition of his System and Structure in particular, a viable method for evaluating the dynamics exhibited by goal-seeking homeostatic systems like cells, organisms, ecosystems, and certain phenomena of animal (including human) behavior. “The following essays”, writes Wilden,
“seek their basis in the transdisciplinary study of ongoing adaptive systems. . . . Distinct from the general systems of physical theory, and unlike the mechanics of general systems, these adaptive systems are time- dependent, memory-bound, and reproductive. Thus they are open both to matter-energy and to the variety it bears” (SS xix). Gregory Bateson, to whom Wilden’s work is dedicated, states in Steps to an Ecology of
5 Mind, “Within the body of fundamentals, that half which deals with form has been dramatically enriched in the last thirty years by the discoveries of cybernetics and systems theory. This book is concerned with building a bridge between the facts of life and behavior and what we know today of the nature of pattern and order” (SEM xxv-xxvi).
In his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser similarly implements the language of structuralism to posit the existence of governing apparatuses that guide the direction of the social body and encourage net homeostasis amongst the human elements comprising it. He is careful to articulate his break with structural theory, though, by repeating throughout the essay that his remarks are intended to be nothing more than a “very schematic outline” and that if they “illuminate certain aspects of the functioning of the Superstructure and its mode of intervention in the Infrastructure”, they are still not comprehensively applicable (16, 57, emphasis mine). Althusser’s most provocative essay, writes Gregory
Elliott in The Detour of Theory (1987), describes a “reworked theory of ideology still dependent on
Lacan . . . whose functionalism undermine[s] its likely maoisant [Maoist] ambition theoretically” (Elliott
231).
Althusser’s essay defines the bodies that ensure the reproduction of the relations of production as
Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses. The former are made up of those state institutions that ensure the preservation of the capitalist society by violence: “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the
Police, the Courts, [and] the Prisons” (LP 164). The latter, ISAs, however, encompass a more complex set of social phenomena than literal state institutions, however, and to define these the essay distances itself from the demonstrability-oriented analytic processes of early structuralism by appealing to the reader’s intuition to justify its validity. For Althusser the Ideological State Apparatus is “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (LP
164). His thesis that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” means that the ISAs -- encompassing the religious, educational, family, legal, and media apparatuses -- exert a material influence over the individuals subject to them (LP 36). Ideology, claims
Althusser, has a material existence and is created by the individual members of a society for themselves. It is “a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence” (LP 34).
Because ideology’s essence is material, the act of identifying it, on Althusser’s reading, repositions it as a
6 materially grounded representation; thus, “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (LP 36). By identifying ideology as the material product of material processes, he is able to make the radical conclusion that “there is no practice except by and in an ideology” (LP 44).
As we shall see, Althusser’s position on ideology was met with much opposition, but the rest of his body of work, particularly For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1965), provides a rationale that is not explicitly stated in the 1970 essay. Althusser’s primary concern in these texts is to interpret properly Marx’s work; his main topic is economics, and Reading Capital elucidates the source of his suspicion of the idea that individual identities are autonomous from the social and economic structures they inhabit: “The fundamental criticism Marx makes of the whole of Classical Economics in texts from The Poverty of
Philosophy to Capital is that it had an ahistorical, eternal, fixed and abstract conception of the economic categories of capitalism”, he writes (RC 102). Althusser’s ties to the conceptual vocabulary typical of early manifestations of structuralism are evident in his claim that “the Marxist whole . . . is constituted by a certain type of complexity, the unity of a structured whole containing what can be called levels or instances which are distinct and ‘relatively autonomous’” (RC 108). But he is careful not to describe his “structured whole” as being ahistorical and thus incapable of evolution, as does Classical Economics. For Althusser,
“science . . . may well arise from an ideology, detach itself from its field in order to constitute itself as a science, but precisely this detachment, this ‘break’, inaugurates a new form of historical existence and temporality which together save science . . . from the common fate of a single history” (RC 148). Althusser maintains that conventional scientific discourse is guilty of cultivating a false image of objectivity, while his own reinterpretation of Marx’s science is the inevitable result of the historicity of scientific inquiry.
Importantly, for Althusser, the scientific discourse as an entity that serves a specific purpose in a society is distinct from his own method of inquiry. While both methodologies employ empiricism to achieve their ends, Althusser’s method maintains a self-awareness of its own presence in history.
Althusser’s For Marx collects essays he wrote in the first half of the 1960s and provides insight into Althusser’s own reasoning regarding the apparent inconsistency of his thought. Writing in the introduction, he states that the book’s essays “are marked by their date of birth, even in their inconsistencies, which I have decided not to correct”. He adds as well, “I have struck out a few passages of unduly personal polemic” (FM 21). The work also provides a succinct statement of Althusser’s intellectual
7 goal and a rationale for his apparently radical stance: “The Marxist theoretical concepts in which the reality of theoretical formations in general . . . can be considered must be applied to Marx himself. Without a theory of the history of theoretical formations it would be impossible to grasp and indicate the specific difference that distinguishes two different theoretical formations” (FM 32). Althusser was thus aware of the need for a reevaluation of Marx’s thought on a metatheoretical level––one that took into account the history of the development of Marx’s theory of value.
Within the Marxist community, Althusser’s works led to largely hostile and sometimes vitriolic responses. Althusser’s work, after all, was to a certain extent always directed toward the Parti communiste français, and for him “the Party’s transformation was a precondition for the realization of the aspirations borne by the Resistance” (Elliott 22). But, as Elliott notes, many of those thinkers allied with the party bore him no good will -- he writes of the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, who in 1968 “excoriated Althusser’s philosophy as an idealism, his social theory as bourgeois ideology, his politics as Stalinist” (Elliott 3-4). At any rate, Althusser’s reception in the Marxist community was chilly, and even theorists sympathetic to the outlines of his thought were ready before he had died to relegate him to the status of historical curiosity.
“This fate affords an opportunity”, writes Elliott, four years before Althusser’s death, to resurrect
“Althusser’s intellectual and political career as history” (Elliott 7). Elliott’s project makes it clear that the reaction within the Marxist community was so severe that they apparently adopted nothing from Althusser.
Outside of the Marxist community, Althusser’s thought was met with a reception whose objections were of a much broader nature than those charges brought against Althusser from what were ostensibly more sympathetic members of the PCF. Gregory Elliott’s text traces the development of objections from thinkers outside the insular French Marxist sphere, and contends that the responses to Althusser’s thought during his most prolific period prevented a thorough and objective analysis of his work from taking place:
“One advantage of Althusser’s disappearance from the scene is that it makes possible a reassessment which advances beyond the adulation (Althusserianism, meridian of Marxism) and anathemas (Althusserianism, apotheosis of Stalinism -- or ‘grand theory for little minds’)” (Elliott 7). Warren Montag’s study Althusser and His Contemporaries (2013) notes right away the “impressive range of public intellectuals and specialists [who] even now feel compelled to demonstrate that Althusser’s work is without life or meaning” (Montag 1).
8 Other texts engaged with Althusser’s thought in a more limited or tangential manner. Anthony
Wilden’s System and Structure (1972) concerns itself with the same manifest influences of political reality on the production of knowledge, stating that “in reality and as we know, what has always constrained the expressed epistemology of the scientific (the academic) discourse is the dominant ideology of the social discourse, itself constrained by socioeconomic reality” (SS xxiii). For a thinker plainly sympathetic to the
Marxist political tradition, Wilden’s decision only occasionally to address his contemporary is curious.
Wilden’s engagement with Althusser’s text is conspicuously limited––in the few instances in which he directly references the troublesome questions raised by Althusser’s thought he brusquely dismisses the possibility of a logically consistent model of social causality characterized by apparent absence: “the logical contradiction involved in the conception of a cause which is absent, but which is still a cause, arises from that aspect of much of ‘structuralist’ thinking which is still bound, without realizing it, by energy-entity or closed-system explanation” (337). No doubt the limited nature of Wilden’s dialogue with Althusser is due to the breadth and ambition of the rest of the task he sets for himself in System and
Structure, but his objection to the model of ideology proposed by Althusser is not that it is demonstrably false, but rather that it lacks the conceptual grounding that his own framework incorporates. Namely,
Wilden objects that Althusser’s version of social development is semantically inconsistent or obsolete but not that it would be invalid if it implemented a methodological account that in some manner acknowledged the system-theoretical properties of social systems. In an attempt to re-situate Althusser’s work in a new context independent of contemporary Marxist and conventional scholars, I propose a turn to Wilden’s perspective on the emergence, development, and morphogenesis of stable systems. His theory of communication and exchange––one that provides a framework for both self-preserving entities and radical change from within their encoded systemic relations to be expressed––allows, as I shall try to show, a perspective in terms of which the potential for Althusser’s thought to provide a self-consistent and critical social theory which departs from, as it acknowledges and makes use of, structuralism and traditional
Marxism can be realized.
Wilden’s work is concerned with an ecosystemic and metasystemic reading of social progress and phenomena. Distinguishing between systems (whose properties are determined by the relations of their individual elements to one another) and structures (whose features are determined by the constitutive makeup of their component parts), he claims that construing humanity’s relationship to its surroundings in
9 terms of (eco)systemic exchanges points to an alternative to the discourse of the contemporary scientific apparatus and its “ideology of pure or objective knowledge”, which Wilden calls “an absolutist, non- contextual, atemporal morality akin to that of a fundamentalist religion” (SS xxx).
One of the primary ideas in Wilden’s text is that humans’ neglect of their roles as constituent parts of a global ecosystem has detrimental effects on the stability and integrity of philosophical and scientific discourse: “In so far as the predominance of the Imaginary in our culture results in a reification of the natural and ecosystemic relations between human beings . . . the Imaginary order does not fulfill its function as an instrument of the Symbolic, it subverts and subjugates it” (SS 25). Wilden’s terminology borrows from the theory of psychoanalysis propounded by Jacques Lacan, wherein the Imaginary refers to that ordering of mind which develops as a result of the development of the ego through identification with the image of another, and the Symbolic refers to the product of a later period in Lacan’s thought that perceives a mediating influence of language on human identity.
Wilden posits the definition of an ecosystem as the context from which scientific discourse imposes boundaries in the isolation and delineation of concepts. He relies, in justifying his definition, on notions of “open systems” and “metasystems”. The former, he maintains, necessarily lead to the latter: “An open system is such that its relationship to a supersystem (which may be referred to methodologically as its
‘environment’ or as its ‘context’) is indispensable to its survival” (SS 203). The physical laws that govern the organizations of different kinds of structures, Wilden maintains, give rise to certain characteristics of goalseeking systems that entail the development of metasystems. In other words, a structure possessing the properties of also being a system and goalseeking will inevitably lead to an increase in complexity in the development of that system or its evolution in relation to its environment: “The teleonomy of goalseeking adaptive systems, coupled with selective processes, results in a tendency towards more and more complex levels of organization in evolution and in history. The synchrony of such systems manifests a tendency towards what can be called homeostasis” (SS 204). Wilden significantly uses the word “teleonomy” in describing the behavior of the systems he is concerned with; on his view, the apparent self-directing or goal-oriented behaviors of systems ought to be distinguished from “teleology”. Teleonomy is distinguished from teleology, by Ernst Mayr, in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, as being confined to describing
“systems operating on the basis of a program of coded information” that demonstrate goal-seeking behavior but whose behavior does not necessarily bespeak an indebtedness to Aristotelian logic with its overtones of
10 divine intelligent purpose (Mayr 42). One of the most important aspects of Wilden’s thought, the above passage on teleonomy substantiates his broader claim that negative entropy works to organize previously inert structures into living structures, and that the same process (moving in a direction opposite from the second law of thermodynamics) is characteristic of all complex systems.
The source of the emergence of metasystems and order from disorder, according to Wilden, lies in random variation, which, accounted for as an accumulative entity, can be characterized accurately as what appears from within the system to be “noise”. Writing specifically of organisms, he states, “Novel structures can be conceived of as the result of the interference of noise in the transmission of the genetic information. If selected to survive, then the result of this noise incorporates the noise as information in its own reproduction. There are two ways for a structure or system to maintain its stability in the face of noise.
It may either protect itself by massive redundancy . . . or it may maintain itself by changing” (SS 331).
Thus, the negentropic structure at work in organizing new systems is itself the result of the incorporation of random variation (noise) into the code that dictates the relative positions and interrelations of the constituent elements of a system. Metasystemic emergence, it should be noted, does not simply occur in the presence of random variation -- it happens only when randomness intersects with the present structure of a system, providing the stimulus that provokes a response in the form of the emergence of a system of a higher order of complexity.
It becomes clear, then, that Wilden relies in part on an organismic metaphor to convey his explanation of the existence of various identifiable structures, just as it is clear that his organismic model comes to account for an increase in complexity through the incorporation of free energy. He claims that
“living organisms may be . . . described as metastable, with the peculiarity that they use the negentropy of other forms of ‘unstable equilibrium’ (food, fuel) in order to maintain their own” (SS 364). For Wilden, the goal of the metastable system is to maintain a state of homeostasis (that is, internal stability) with respect to its environment. Because to draw any boundary between the ordered (the body) and the disordered (the environment) would be arbitrarily to introduce boundary distinctions between two entities that infiltrate each other’s essence via cellular reactions to environmental stimuli, Wilden argues that noise and order are apparently differentiable manifestations of the same process. Any disorder observable in an environment is as much an indicator of its potential for increasing systemic organization as it is a metonymic representation of the disorderedness to which all bound energy must eventually return.
11 Wilden’s objection to the scientific discourse is that it draws arbitrary boundaries in order to preserve its status as a purely objective method of inquiry. “The discourse of science . . . describes the habitual and deeply programmed projections of current socioeconomic categories and stereotypes into the scientific discourse” (SS 417). His suspicion of the scientific discourse’s reliability in describing the dynamics of social systems and ecosystems derives from his claim that the history of the development of the scientific method cannot be separated from its practical implementation. He explicitly rejects “the specular ideal of a discourse ‘objectively’ isolated from both the social discourse and reality itself” (SS xxiii). Thus his view that socioeconomic reality, not curiosity, dictates the constructing of the scientific apparatus’ body of knowledge, and compromises the until recently unquestionable legitimacy of scientifically sanctioned knowledge.
Wilden is not afraid to make explicit the political implications of his theory of the emergence of order: he links the goalseeking homeostatic organismic system to a societal model, and indicates a novel method of evaluating the viability of social systems (all of which, he writes, seek to maintain the existing relations of production inherent in them): “There is nothing essentially inherent in [the] self-reproducing system which can overcome the contradiction between capital and labor. The negative feedback of the appropriation of surplus value . . . is maintained by the accumulated power of capital” (392). Wilden’s work attacks the discourse of science for its limiting and politically expedient characteristics, but his criticism of contemporary society goes beyond addressing the body most responsible for producing knowledge. By circumventing traditional methods of engaging in scientific inquiry, Wilden articulates a model of systemic development that successfully supplies the vocabulary for a critique of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary capitalist societies. He lays a foundation for rethinking such concepts as reification and, particularly important for Althusser’s work, ideology. What Wilden’s work offers that Althusser’s does not is a comprehensive and precise theoretical account of how the social and economic structures embedded in working scientists and thinkers impose boundaries on phenomena and so constitute them mediately in terms of their relative identities as objects in the scientific system of power and knowledge. The result of
Wilden’s thought is a thorough critique and reformulation, using the conceptual framework provided by communication theory, of reification and ideology, which provide an account both of the emergence of
Althusser’s thought and of the apparent communicational apparatuses that govern the exchange, cultivation, dissemination, and processing of knowledge.
12 The primary significance of reevaluating and placing the works of Althusser and Wilden into dialogue lies in their status as contemporary texts dealing with related subject matter––Marxist political critique. Elliott, writing of Althusser’s motivation for publishing his first essays in radical Marxist theory, states that “the context of Althusser’s intervention . . . was simultaneously theoretical and political” (Elliott
16). Wilden makes explicit his own political awareness in the introduction to the second edition of his book: “since the logic of capitalism requires it to expand in every possible way in order to maintain its
(temporary) stability, . . . provided our species does not become extinct, the socioeconomic system which eventually survives in the limited planetary environment will not be a capitalist one” (SS lxi). Bearing in mind that the first edition of Wilden’s System and Structure was published in 1972 and that Althusser’s
“intervention” began with the publication of the papers that would make up 1965’s For Marx, and considering each thinker’s concern with the emergence and dynamics of the systems that govern social bodies, there exists ample reason to believe that a study of these two related thinkers is long overdue. Its implications, detailed in the last paragraph, include an important innovation in Marxian theory achieved through a combination of cybernetics and structuralist ideas.
There also exists the possibility that Wilden’s foundation in the then-burgeoning field of communication theory and cybernetics afforded him a conceptual vocabulary and methodology that
Althusser lacked. Rereading the latter’s work (particularly, I think, his essay on Ideological State
Apparatuses and Reading Capital) in light of the vocabulary provided by Wilden to describe systemic phenomena will provide, as suggested above, reasonable grounds for a vindication of Althusser’s theory of ideology and the state from its reputation as either too extreme or at odds with reason. (Althusser would not likely make a distinction between the two condemnations.) Both thinkers conceive of regulatory metasystems as being inevitable outgrowths of any system, but Wilden’s language makes use of conceptual signifiers that allow him to attain a degree of concision not found in Althusser’s work. An exemplary sentence from Wilden’s essay on analog and digital communication reads: “The teleonomy of goalseeking adaptive systems, coupled with selective processes, results in a tendency towards more and more complex levels of organization in evolution and in history. The synchrony of such systems manifests a tendency towards what can be called homeostasis” (SS 204, emphasis mine). Althusser’s theory of ideology is frequently accused of rendering humanism obsolete in its proposal that subjects are always-already interpellated by the metasystemic constraints that govern them. On Althusser’s theory, “ideology ‘acts’ or
13 ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or
‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which [he calls] interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (48). Individual entities, distinguishable by their boundaries from other bodies, emerge on Althusser’s account from mutually acknowledged interactions.
Althusser’s term interpellation is applied to a communicative act, in which ‘to hail’ is to open communication between homeostatic systems. Given the fact that Wilden’s conceptual framework allows him to construct a consistent theory of the emergence of difference and change as the result of interacting homeostatic systems, reading Althusser’s work might allow us to apply Wilden’s model of inevitably emerging goal-seeking systems in a way that troubles reductive notions of Althusser’s writing without doing violence to his theory.
Both Althusser’s and Wilden’s arguments have their shortcomings, and a close reading of them in juxtaposition with one another will permit some amelioration of the inconsistencies that are bound to occur in projects of such ambition as theirs. Althusser’s work suffers from its schematic nature; even Reading
Capital, which attains a significant length, was abandoned by him and left to his student, Étienne Balibar, to realize. The criticism that has been directed toward him (especially by Elliott) makes much of the inconsistencies, as though Althusser were ever anything but explicit about the sketched-out property of his arguments. Wilden, by comparison, is careful to register that his essays are not meant to be read as containing “objective” knowledge, as he states that one pattern of error in analysis is “the use of the terms
‘subjective’ and ‘objective’”, since “in the dominant discourse these two terms form an Imaginary opposition in which each is the mirror-image of the other”. After all, according to Wilden, “objectivity really exists only in theology, in the timelessness and spacelessness of God; subjectivity certainly exists, but so much of our experience is collective that no one’s view of reality is simply subjective” (SS 521).
Wilden’s lack of commitment to a presentation of his writings as objective facts of subjective speculations fosters an impression that he, while maintaining his claim of the validity of his impressions on the common properties of systems, by no means wishes to suggest that his work is comprehensive. Perhaps Althusser’s theory of interpellation can yield some insight into how Wilden’s conception of the collapse of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity affects interpretation of his text. Similarly, as mentioned above, Wilden’s notes on homeostatic systems and the emergence of metasystems offer an explanation of
14 social systems that leaves room for Althusser’s framework of the state as a self-preserving entity but also allows for a viable theory of both gradual and radical social change to be introduced.
The present work’s primary goal is to offer preliminary notes toward a comprehensive comparative study of Althusser’s theory of ideology and the state and Wilden’s theory of communication and emergent metasystems. What I discuss in this work is the fact that Wilden’s book provides a framework with which to reevaluate Althusser’s body of literature. Althusser is correct, I maintain, in discerning various bodies governing the dissemination and content of information in the present social structure. These can be identified, loosely, as comprising the ideological state apparatus. Wilden’s theory accounts for the products of Althusser’s scientific exploration. Despite his enmity toward conventional scientific institutions, Althusser claims to be performing a comparatively “scientific” analysis informed by a different governing principle: Marxism. It stands to reason, then, considering Wilden’s claim that the scientific discourse in which one writes determines to a large extent the patterns one detects as occurring in nature, that Althusser would detect in social systems certain structures heavily influencing, if not totally governing, the behavior of their constituent citizens. It also stands to reason, on Wilden’s analysis, that Althusser’s argument is not totally incorrect, since he does correctly identify certain ideological presuppositions as inhering in the discourse of the school, the church, and the family. Althusser’s response to a totalizing, paradoxical scientific discourse that attempts to impose order and delineation on what Wilden calls characteristically open systems is to conceive of and map out his own totalizing, paradoxical “scientific” discourse that both exposes the profound influence of the contemporary scientific apparatus knowledge and demonstrates in its rhetoric the perverse logic that informs the production of its various items of knowledge.
The present work makes use of a variety of sources, each of which sheds light either on the historical moment in which Althusser and Wilden wrote their seminal texts or on those aspects of metasystemic and cybernetic thinking whose application to the present comparative reading might yield paths to conciliation. My emphasis will be on consulting primary sources initially, in an attempt simultaneously to give the reader necessary background into each’s publications and to isolate those elements the two thinkers’ works have in common. In particular, I first examine Althusser’s Reading
Capital (1965), For Marx (1965), and Lenin and Philosophy (1968) to develop a reading of his work that situates Althusser as a writer particularly concerned with the apparatuses that work to maintain the
15 continued functioning of a certain type of socioeconomic system, but not one necessarily pessimistic about the feasibility of meaningful social change taking place. Following my analysis of Althusser’s texts, I analyze Wilden’s magnum opus System and Structure (1972) and draw parallels between its conception of emergent metasystems and Althusser’s own version of the homeostatic society.
After the portion of my analysis in which I directly compare primary texts, I examine contemporary readings of Althusser’s work in order to show the political environment in which he was working. Because part of the task of this study is to vindicate Althusser’s theory from accusations of being nothing more than a “temporary detour” in critical theory––or worse––it is necessary carefully to examine polemics both from within the PCF and without in order to demonstrate the outright and disproportionate hostility with which Althusser’s remarks were met. Because Althusser’s thought and theory of ideology’s material reality were labeled almost immediately as being too explicitly indebted to structuralism, a reductive reading was forced upon them and they were relegated to the status, even before their author’s death, of “archaic” or “historical” texts. My contention, though, is that Althusser’s apparent outright dismissal from critical discourse was as much due to his contemporaries’ political allegiances as it was to the radical nature of his own books.
The works on Marxism consulted herein lend credence to Althusser’s claim of a super-organized state, while books like Humberto Maturana’s Autopoiesis and Cognition (1979) will provide valuable conceptual frameworks with which to encounter the juncture between structure in Althusser’s work and boundaries in Wilden’s work. Finally, I look at several “retrospective” texts on critical theory -- in particular, Seyla Benhabib’s Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986) and Jürgen Habermas’ Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (1985). These two works provide a historical background on the various currents of thought underlying critical theory that in part determined the topics covered by Althusser and Wilden. Both works present themselves as dedicated to tracing the development of the discourse of twentieth century critical theory, but, curiously, neither mentions Althusser or Wilden. Althusser played an important role in shaping the development of Marxist critico-theoretical thought (if only by acting antagonistically toward those ideological policies eventually developed by the PCF) and so his absence is conspicuous. Wilden’s first book-length publication was as a translator of Lacan’s work called The Language of the Self: The
Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (1981), and his attempt to synthesize communication theory with elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis is a significant bridge between anglophone and francophone areas of
16 philosophy. Like Althusser, though, Wilden never enjoyed mainstream popularity in France, and so is not included in summaries of the significant developments in the history of critical theory. By reexamining these texts in light of our newly developed comparative study of Althusser and Wilden, we will be able effectively to determine that Benhabib’s and Habermas’ texts share the shortcoming of (rather optimistically) overlooking the role of the self-interested socioeconomic entity that governs so much of our ideology and actions. Benhabib and Habermas, I maintain, avoidably mischaracterize the development of the philosophical discourse of the twentieth century by neglecting fully to address their status as observer- participants in a discursive body they historicize and objectify.
17 Chapter Two: Ideology and Marxism
While he was living in Brussels between 1845 and 1847, Marx published two works, The German
Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, which contain the original kernels of thought on ideology that he later made most succinct in The Communist Manifesto. Because of Althusser’s repeated emphasis in locating in Marx’s writing the locus of his break with conventional wisdom, it is necessary to trace the theory of ideology, as it is conceived by the Marxist school, back to its origins, bearing in mind that, as
Sperber writes, “a straight line certainly can be drawn through Marx’s Brussels writings, but only by neglecting a substantial majority of their actual content, which encompassed a meandering mass of polemics” (Marx 161). Because Marx’s theory of ideology is, as I argue, the product of the processes of a conceptual ecology, his early works provide the greatest insight into the transposition of conceptual categories Althusser detects.
Marx, it appears in The German Ideology, is acutely aware of the conceptual limitations of contemporary theory resulting from its direct indebtedness to religion. The discourse of religion, for Marx, defines the boundaries of inquiry even for secular theoreticians, as is evident from the fact that “the entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. The critics started from real religion and theology proper” (Marx 29), Marx writes, and then created philosophical schemata in some cases antithetical to, but in no case independent from, religion. The reason that philosophers were previously compelled to justify their works in relation to the old socioreligious framework he holds to be that “each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (Marx 60). Because religious discourse offers a framework of conceptual stasis, philosophers, working to protect the interests of the ruling class, take as an example the religious discourse and model their own “secular” frameworks on it.
Marx’s commitment to distancing his own methodology from that practiced by his contemporaries has as its starting point, instead of a critique of religion, a perspective explicitly aware of its limited applicability. Marx’s break from contemporary theoreticians, as he sees it, lies in the fact that “the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their
18 life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” (Marx 31). By locating a fixed principle in materiality, Marx is able to circumvent conventional relations of conceptual frameworks to theological dogmas. Marx’s theory of economic and ideological development is not literally and strictly materialist, but instead proposes an ontology where physical materiality and the relations constitutive of difference between material things determine the morphogenesis of social and economic phenomena. Rather than having an immaterial existence first and foremost, “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men -- the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, and mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux of their material behavior” (Marx 36). The unity of the conceptual frameworks proffered by the ruling classes, though, Marx maintains, is illusory, and the reality of its disintegrability is soon to be apparent, because, as he completes his work, “once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relations which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas ‘the Ideas’, the thought, etc. as the dominant force in history” (Marx 61). Significantly, here Marx articulates what amounts to the beginnings of a theory of ideology that preserves his own materialist framework of analysis.
Marx inaugurates a mode of thinking that I want to call conceptual ecology, an approach which views the concepts that make up the elemental parts of philosophical and critical discourse are themselves constantly undergoing change as a result of their exchange and interpenetration with other concepts.
Arguing that materiality and ideality jointly contribute to the formation of ideologies allows Marx to posit a novel form of mind evinced in the ideological practices of individuals. In starting the conceptual-ecological project, Marx anticipates the work of Gregory Bateson, which argues for a reorientation within the natural sciences toward a conciliatory attitude respecting the dialogue between informatics and physical sciences.
Decrying the scientific community’s strict materialism in the 1950s, Bateson states that “It is difficult to see how the dichotomy between substance and form could be arrived at by inductive argument”, given that “no man . . . has ever seen or experienced formless and unsorted matter; just as no man has ever seen or experienced a ‘random’ event” (Bateson xxv). The distinction between ideas and matter can only be one that is forced violently onto the world, and not one derived from experience, since to abstract matter from form is to abstract substance from the context in which it is experienced. Bateson’s idea of radical
19 contextualization of physical processes provides the framework for what this thesis attempts to accomplish with reference to conceptual ecologies. The processes of causality that together contribute to the formation, sustenance, morphogenesis, and eventual disintegration of a concept have to be invisible to rigorous theoretico-critical discourse because scientific logic’s insistence on an identifiable cause makes (from its vantage point) conceptual ecology incomprehensible. The way that imagination works allows people to think of a cause that is not: “zero is different from one, and because zero is different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the world of communication” (Bateson 452). That is, for Bateson, causality does not have to be located in an identifiable and differentiable entity, but rather exists in relation to difference. Causality, for Bateson, must be conceptualized both as something with a definable termination point and as something that works along an interconnected network of communicative exchange that is apparently not subject to the influence of entropy. Bateson argues that “the individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system” (Bateson 461).
Bateson’s idea of mind lays the proper groundwork for what I perceive to be a new, Marxist ecology of ideas. Given Marx’s idea of the mode of production being comprised of the material means and the social relations of productions, an ecology made up of the material and informatic components of society does not depart in any serious way from Marx’s analysis but provides a more detailed analysis of the mechanism by which the capitalist state sustains itself. The Mind of the capitalistic state inscribes itself both on the land to which it lays claim, on the physical actions of the individuals comprising its population, and on the imaginary processes that work in sorting their perceptual experiences. Given the tendency toward mutability of the discrete components that comprise its discursive mode of self-justification, to what extent can it be said that the capitalistic Mind contains in itself what it needs for self-sustenance? What if all the bricks that comprise its facade suddenly become made of another material? What if they all spontaneously shatter? And finally, given the new conceptual ecology I propose, does the Mind’s inscription onto the face of the Earth (in terms of environmental degradation) contribute to such a fixity in that communicative network (between human bodies and their environments) that any strictly conceptual revolution would simply create a newly schizoid Mind whose discursive system was powerless to correct the course of self-destruction it unleash on the living things of our planet to begin with?
20 Marx’s break with contemporary philosophers, I argue, lies not in his privileging of the material over the ideal, but in his attempt to dissolve the boundary between the material and the ideal. For Marx, material relations evidence themselves in the ecology of ideas; after all, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx 63). Marx here reiterates the co-creative capacities of strict materiality and the relations between individual things. Significantly, Marx’s application of the term “ideology” does not constrain the scope of its influence to the unconscious. Some actors of the state work, apparently consciously, to determine the thoughts of individual members of societies, since “individuals have always proceeded from themselves, but of course from themselves within their given historical conditions and relations, not from the ‘pure’ individual in the sense of the ideologists” (Marx 78). Those “ideologists” represent a dual nature of ideology. It both works unconsciously in the individual and is consciously manipulated by those in power.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx’s conception of ideology changes little but, significantly, is more explicitly articulated in relation to the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whom Marx and Engels had hoped to enlist in a sort of alliance of socialists earlier in the decade. Marx’s goal in The Poverty of
Philosophy is to attempt to subject Proudhon’s methodology to a sort of meta-analysis; that is, he confronts
Proudhon’s work on its own terms. Again, he posits that the problem with economism is that its practitioners are unaware of the history of their own tools of analysis, that they “express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labor, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories.”
Among the economists who act as though labor’s divisibility was a concept that had fallen from the sky he identifies “M. Proudhon, who has these ready-made categories before him, [and] wants to explain to us the act of formation, the genesis of these categories, principles, laws, ideas, thoughts” (Marx 162). Marx’s conclusion is that Proudhon’s effort is ultimately misguided. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx tries to use Proudhon’s text as a launching point for the analysis of a project analogous to Proudhon’s own, but he instead tries to trace the development of the sort of cultural and ideological chauvinism that confines, without Proudhon’s being aware of it, the extent and scope of his analysis.
Proudhon’s transgression lies in his overeager application of Hegelian notions of historical determinism and progression. Hegel’s dialectical reasoning provides, on Marx’s reading, a framework by which anything might be construed as the product of inevitable historical processes. “Apply [the Hegelian]
21 method to the categories of political economy”, Marx writes, “and you have the logic and the metaphysics of political economy, or, in other words, you have the economic categories that everybody knows translated into a little-known language which makes them look as if they had newly blossomed forth in an intellect of pure reason” (Marx 165). Marx’s analysis is keen in its application of the principles of historical materialism not just to Proudhon’s own conclusions but also to Hegel’s. Because Hegel’s model of historical progress is itself, as Marx argues, the product of ideology, Proudhon can easily think “he is constructing the world by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically and classifying by the absolute method the thoughts which are in the minds of all” (Marx 165). Significantly, in this work Marx foreshadows an organism-based interpretation of historical materialism with his sensitivity to the specific problems presented to the construction of cogent conceptual accounts of society’s working by anthropocentric reasoning. He notes that “M. Proudhon personifies society; he turns it into a person- society -- a society which is not by any means a society of persons, since it has its laws apart, which have nothing in common with the persons of which society is composed, and its ‘own intelligence’, which is not the intelligence of common men, but an intelligence devoid of common sense” (Marx 153). Again, Marx’s analysis of a specific point of Proudhon’s writing -- here his unwitting imposition of an anthropocentric vocabulary onto a system that resists anthropomorphization -- points to a broader, tacit point about
Proudhon’s ignorance of the historical foundations of his own thoughts. He makes his thought explicit later on in the text, with his claim that “economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production. . . . These ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products” (Marx 166). Here, Marx distances himself further from materialistic determinism by reinforcing his claim that it is the relations between things, emergent out of and limited by materiality, that shapes the course of human history. Far from being an economic determinist, Marx conceives of strict materiality as providing a delimitating factor in morphogenesis, but stops short from claiming that the material basis of reality in any significant way determines conceptual ecologies or social change. The changeable nature of ideology in turn constitutes the very property which allows ideology to become, for Marx, the locus of revolution.
The Poverty of Philosophy is, finally, particularly significant in Marx’s oeuvre for its articulate awareness of the necessity of engaging in the field of ideology in order to effect radical change within social systems. With his analysis of the theoretical genealogy of Proudhon’s work, Marx appears to jettison
22 any notion of working to effect change from a point of objectivity outside the sphere of social relations. He states, “Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and the Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. . . . [T]hese theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science” (Marx 177). Marx here precludes from sustainability any dogmatic future theoretical accounting of class struggle; he radically proposes shaping theory to meet definable goals instead of contending his own economic principles are eternally valid. The route to bringing about radical social change, he suggests, consists in dissolving the ideological conceptions that make the division of labor (and attendant class divisions) an essential element of all working societies. “An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side” (Marx 211). Effecting a change in the conceptual foundations governing individuals’ awareness of their place in societies will necessarily provide the impetus for a material disintegration of the class system.
In the twentieth century, structuralism offered a new approach to conceptualizing the governing dynamics influencing human behavior. Where Marx posited ideology as the symptomatic, material manifestations of an internalized attitude, the structuralists took the process of delineation one step further and envisioned the unconscious, too, as having a discernible structure whose logic shapes and, to an extent, determines the actions of individuals. Structuralists’ propensity to devote their efforts to schematizing the relations defining phenomena that appear to behave systemically can be exemplified with André Martinet’s assertion, in his essay “Structure and Language”, that “there is a basic function -- communication -- which determines what will be called the structure of language” (Martinet 3). Martinet’s teleological interpretation of language is consistent with the heritage of the French intellectual tradition, and he uses an appeal to empirical validatibility to justify an argument for language’s innate structural analogousness to reality, writing that “the linearity of speech is not the only constituent feature of [linguistic] structure; the reality of the object, the language, is to be found in the speaker” (Martinet 8). One of structuralism’s greatest propensities, and one of its most fruitful contributions to the human sciences, is to find resonances and similarities amongst diverse human activities. The same eagerness to impose ordered rationalistic logic
23 onto systems not of human design, though, sometimes results in an over-reductive interpretation of systems whose elements might fill various roles in different meta-systemic arrangements. For example, Arthur L.
Stinchcombe’s claim in “The Deep Structure of Moral Categories” that “in every society there are some categories into which people can be classified that pervade their whole lives” holds true, but his all-too- brief attempt to create a list of those roles––“child-adult; male-female; citizen-alien; black-white; crazy- sane”––necessarily falls short of capturing the totality of human behavior (Stinchcombe 19). Whatever the limitations of structuralist methodology, its language provides an expedient, if not strictly comprehensive, way to conceptualize the limitations of individual autonomy.
Structuralism’s most visible proponent in the field of anthropology was Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his theory of social composition has received much attention, as it demonstrates the inadequacy of structuralism fully to account for interpersonal phenomena. Objections to Lévi-Strauss’ brand of hard structuralism are perhaps best voiced by Philip Pettit in The Concept of Structuralism, where he insists that
“Lévi-Strauss’s reductionist philosophy puts the case for a determinism of a structuralist variety. He believes that the human mind . . . is determined in its expressions by the unconscious laws of the semiological systems it puts into operation” (Pettit 77). It is not without difficulty that Lévi-Strauss’ deterministic conception of society aligns him with a certain interpretation of ideology -- namely, that ideology works to determine the behavior of humans, that its structure governs and exists before the human, and is not the product of the compulsive human tendency to theorize. Lévi-Strauss’ theory does violence to logical analysis by presuming the truth of its own premises to justify its conclusions. That is, it affirms its own ahistoricity by appealing to a tautology. “The method, to offer a rough account of it, is hypothetico- deductive rather than inductive; this, in line with most scientific procedures. . . . It is only in the light of a preconceived hypothesis that such structure can become visible” (Pettit 87). Lévi-Strauss’ frequent association with structuralism certainly does not make him its sole spokesperson, though, and in the writings of Jacques Lacan there emerges a version of structuralism which accedes to the ostensible determinate nature of the unconscious, but at the same time interrogates the extent to which the language of determinism can be used properly to explain the processes governing human behavior. Malcolm Bowie writes in his essay on Lacan that Lacan’s dedication to reading Freud yielded the interpretation that
“Freud’s essential insight was not -- clearly not -- that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure, that this structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do, and that in thus betraying itself it becomes
24 accessibly to analysis” (Bowie 118). Lacan himself insinuates the restrictive effect language’s structure has on the mind of the individual with his statement in “The insistence of the letter in the unconscious” that
“the speaking subject, if he seems to be a slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment of which he finds himself at birth, even if only by dint of his proper name” (Bowie 104).
Though Lacan, in this essay at least, mentions ideology by name only once, it is nonetheless apparent that he articulates, albeit using a syntactical framework distinct from that employed by Marx, an anxiety about humans’ ability to extricate their thoughts from and free themselves from the confining elements of discourse.
Even an intellectual tradition that seeks to verbalize its own ideological heritage can do little to separate itself from the boundaries defining the limitations of meta-conceptualization; as Lacan writes, “the very society which wished to restore . . . the causal hierarchy of the relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, has none the less failed to give birth to an esperanto in which the relations of language to socialist realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible” (Bowie 104). Althusser makes explicit, in his writings, the ideological implications of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, but what is important for this section is the fact that, in the course of its period of popularity, structuralism’s adherents’ conception of its tenability began to change; the language of structuralism offered a convenient framework with which to organize discourse about ideology, but, finally, as Lacan states, “these structures reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which, even unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language” (Bowie 104).
Althusser’s first major work published in English to deal extensively with ideology, For Marx, contains Althusser’s first steps toward creating his own theory of ideology. The majority of For Marx treats ideology as an object of interpretation solely in terms of its relation to the writing and publication of Marx’s works. Of Marx’s early writings he claims that to satisfy their internal logic “every ideology must be regarded as a real whole, internally unified by its own problematic, so that it is impossible to extract one element without altering its meaning” (FM 62). That Althusser’s characterization of Marx’s theory does not establish ideology as a closed system is apparent in his observation that what he calls science can alter the properties of an ideology, claiming that after Marx’s thought had come to fruition, “philosophy was certainly at an end, but it survived none the less as an evanescent critical consciousness for just long enough to project the positive essence of science on to the threatening ideology, and to destroy the enemy’s
25 ideological phantasms, before returning to its place amongst its allies” (FM 29). Althusser’s conception of
Marx’s version of ideology correctly identifies two features of ideology that make it a potential locus of change, which are its changeability and its potential for disintegration.
The complexity of Althusser’s thought regarding ideology is already evident in his earliest writing as he detaches the word’s meaning from its relation to philosophy and places it alongside other concepts, demonstrating the flexibility of its applicability. For Althusser, a philosophical concept is “the result of a complex process of elaboration which involves several distinct concrete practices on different levels, empirical, technical and ideological” (FM 191). While philosophy can have an influence on and play a role in deconstructing ideological presuppositions, its own maxims are, in part, the result of an ideology that played a role in shaping its constitution. Thus, for Althusser, ideology is not a burden a people can throw off themselves, but must play a crucial role in shaping the social conditions of any community.
The problem of the dominant ideology of the present, Althusser identifies, going beyond Marx, is its tendency artificially to erect boundaries that work together to shape and delimit human experience.
Ideology, being construed broadly as the active manifestations of the internalized logics governing individual’s behaviors, insinuates itself and its premises into human consciousness as early as play develops; as Wilden describes, a child’s compulsion to name a toy as “here” or “gone” belies an internalization of the digitalizing logic of language and, by extension, ideology. The apparatus wherein resistance to that totalizing logic is located, a science, “is not obtained by inverting an ideology. A science is obtained on condition that the domain in which ideology believes that it is dealing with the real is abandoned, that is, by abandoning its ideological problematic” (FM 192-3). Althusser’s radical materialism and anti-humanism are evident from this passage, but I maintain that his anti-humanism is syntactical, or perhaps lexical. Because he defines ideology as being the medium in which the individual consciousness thinks, to preserve the integrity of the conceptual framework his theory proposes he is constrained to abandon individual autonomy in favor of a broader conception of ideological development.
Althusser’s theory of ideology is in opposition to institutional humanism by virtue of its decentering the ontological supposition of the primacy of the efficacy of individual will, but preserves the theoretical feasibility of meaningful social (ideological) change as taking place on an integrated and conditioned scale. The adaptability and flexibility of ideology to political purposes is evident, maintains
Althusser, from the fact that, “in ideology, we see the themes of class humanism give way before the
26 themes of a socialist humanism of the person” (FM 222). In other words, an ideology predicated on the idea of individual empowerment resulting from social status is replaced, on Althusser’s reading, by a new version of ideology that attempts to marry the concepts of socialism and humanism. To Althusser, though,
“socialist humanism” is a contradiction in terms; to concede the socialistic aspect of human existence is to negate the vitality of free will in the governance of the social body, while to advocate for a “humanistic” epistemology is to argue for the indefatigability of individual will. Both versions of the ideology, according to Althusser, lack the validity that would be granted both of them by scientific legitimacy, since the ideology posits existing relations of the individual to the world as the basis for that individual’s understanding of himself, instead of leaving room for validation or disputation. Undermining the validity of the socialist humanistic position, Althusser states that “When I say that the concept of humanism is an ideological concept (not a scientific one), I mean that while it really does designate a set of existing relations, unlike a scientific concept, it does not provide us with a means of knowing them” (FM 223). He does not anticipate, though, a total replacement of ideology with science, because he perceives limitations in both concepts. Humanism might work to explain the apparent existence of individual autonomy, but does nothing to tease out the way that autonomy effects itself and is altered by the world around it.
Althusser’s conclusion in For Marx regarding ideology is that it is a necessary constituent part of any society, that “human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life. Only an ideological world outlook could have imagined societies without ideology (not just one of its historical forms) would disappear without trace, to be replaced by science” (FM 232). Ideology is, as much as any other sphere affected by the political, a locus of class struggle, and for Althusser becomes “not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of History: [but] a structure essential to the historical life of societies” (FM 232).
With Reading Capital, Althusser once again foregrounds the importance of reinterpreting Marx’s work with an eye to revolutionizing the terrain of the theory of ideology constructed in its wake. Although
Althusser was unable to complete the project and left the second part of the book to his student, Etienne
Balibar, to complete, Reading Capital shows Althusser’s thought maturing as he starts to conceive of a theory of ideology without reference to ideological concepts. Althusser recognizes the difficulty in extracting theory from the saturated field of everyday ideology. A science, for Althusser, “can only pose problems in the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theoretical structure, its problematic, which
27 constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility, and hence the absolute determination of the forms in which all problems must be posed, at any given moment in the science” (RC 26). Althusser’s science is not to be confused with what he would identify as the findings of agents associated with the scientific apparatus. The empiricist scientific community’s findings are suspect because of their hidden ideological allegiance; indeed, “the unknown of a science is not what empiricist ideology thinks: its
‘residue’, what it leaves out, what it cannot conceive or resolve; but par excellence what it contains that is fragile despite its apparently unquestionable ‘obviousness’, certain silences in its discourse, certain conceptual omissions and lapses in its rigour” (RC 31). Here Althusser draws attention to the apparent discord between a “science” and empiricism. He emphasizes the political necessity of ridding the theory of history of the ideological preconceptions of determinism that accompany empiricism by indicating its indebtedness to “the ideological concept of time which underlies and overlies it, or with the ideological idea that the theory of history, as theory, could be subject to the ‘concrete’ determinations of ‘historical time’ on the pretext that this ‘historical time’ might constitute its subject” (RC 117). Despite Althusser’s clear dedication to preserving Marx’s method of materialistic interpretation, the concept of ideology for him in Reading Capital is still not explicitly material, but rather resides in the imaginary.
The influence ideology has on the actions of individuals, reasons Althusser, must take place in the mind of the individual and exert its influence from within, which means that “every imaginary (ideological) posing of a problem (which may be imaginary, too) in fact carries it in a determinate problematic, which defines both the possibility and the form of the posing of this problem” (RC 129). Ideology’s role is to limit the field in which a person can think, both to constrain the creativity and the lexical command of the thinker. Significantly, though, despite the apparent pessimism of Althusser’s version of ideology, at the end of the first section he remarks, as if in passing, upon science’s nascence resulting from its constitution out of the field of ideology. “As for science”, he states, “it may well arise from an ideology, detach itself from its field in order to constitute itself as a science, but precisely this detachment, this ‘break’, inaugurates a new form of historical existence and temporality which together save science . . . from the common fate of a single history” (RC 148). Althusser’s own writings, continually engaged in the act of drawing the reader’s attention to their own constructed nature and to the process of their creation, themselves manifest a transition in their author’s thinking, a dedication to interpretation and re-interpretation.
28 Reading Capital represents Althusser’s attempt to refine his theory of ideology by foregrounding the process of interpretation in arriving at theory. His theory of ideology, he insinuates again and again, is not one “handed down” from a priori maxims, but is proudly and honestly the product of close reading and interpretation. I maintain that, respecting his theory of ideology, he attempted to enact a “break” of a similar order to the one Marx made in the process of his career, a “break” he accomplished in Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.
With his later writings, Althusser demonstrates a commitment to sketching out the beginnings of a theory of ideology, borrowing as always from Marx’s own interpretations of the concept. In Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses, he posits the radical theses that, first, “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (LP 109), and, second, that “ideology has a material existence” (LP 112). His indebtedness to Marx is clear with his assertion that material reproduction of the conditions of production underlies ideology’s characteristics. The capitalistic society’s fundamental properties lie in the materiality of the historical relations contributing to its nascence and continued existence, and so relies, according to Althusser, on all versions of the state to ensure epistemological stability. Ideology’s function, in Althusser’s essay, renders it the ahistorical conceptualization of a historical pattern of what Wilden calls “communication and exchange” common to all stable societies, as “the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable” (LP 109). While Wilden locates the communicative aspects of social and economic life as central to structural morphogenesis, Althusser deploys analogous terms to indicate the same thing. For Althusser, it is the social relations that allow for the continued reproduction of a social body whose actions are constrained by ideology that unite all self-regulating social bodies. The modern capitalist state, in its effort to ensure its continued existence, requires of its labor force “not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression” (LP 89). Its influence in cultivating the proper conditions for the reproduction of social conditions is manifold, and Althusser identifies in the essay a number of “ideological state apparatuses” that he maintains work in tandem to reaffirm the tenets of the dominant ideology. These apparatuses are
29 listed as the religious, the educational, the family, the legal, the political, the trade union, the communications, and the cultural apparatuses, all of which interoperate with one another to contribute to a cumulative ideological enclosure of concrete individuals’ thoughts. The apparatuses, according to
Althusser, are not to be expected to operate seamlessly or without aberration in the content of their messages, but despite their individual characteristics, “the unity of the different Ideological State
Apparatuses is secured, usually in contradictory forms, by the ruling ideology, the ideology of the ruling class” (LP 100). Here, Althusser tacitly demonstrates an awareness of the metacommunicative levels on which ideology effects itself, anticipating Wilden’s claim of metasystemic emergence. The ruling class’ interests, unsurprisingly, run toward keeping themselves in their position of dominance. Althusser’s analysis of ideology moves past Marx’s, though, by identifying a new dominant ISA operating in contemporary society.
While Marx’s The German Ideology maintained that religious discourse constrained and organized philosophical thinking, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses places the educational apparatus at the head of ensuring the reproduction of the conditions of production. Althusser writes that, either surreptitiously or overtly, the educational apparatus inculcates “a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy)” (LP 105). The medium through which ideology operates is ultimately, for Althusser, not as important as the fact that ideology works to constitute individual subjects in the social discourse, that individual humans are never thinking outside of ideology.
Crucially, the process of interpellation is a communicative act; it depends on mutual recognition from all parties involved of a certain type of exchange taking place. The interpellation that renders a concrete individual always-already the subject of the dominant ideology means that all communicative acts take place, at least partially, within the field of ideology and within its lexical domain.
Althusser perceives the required mutual recognition of the interpellated individual and the interpellator to have the added effect of making all modes of communication, in his model, potentially susceptible to corruption via ideology. Therefore, “those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’” (LP 118). Althusser’s mature conception of ideology assigns a role of social governance to institutions of varying cohesion, supplying
30 him with conceptual framework properly to articulate a theory of resistance to ideology by operating from within the field of social relations dominated by ideology. His solution to the problem of ideology is not to find a way to speak or write outside of it, but to advocate for a radicalization of the ideological field by drawing attention to its manipulability and multiformity
The first edition of Wilden’s System and Structure limits its analysis of ideology to a single chapter on the scientific discourse as propaganda. Wilden’s case study in the chapter is Jean Piaget, whose epistemological foundations he denounces as “atomist, intellectualist, rationalist, individualistic”. For
Wilden, Piaget represents the intrinsic limitations of unthinkingly implementing empiricist methodology with no thought for foundational origin. The empiricist tendency is to construe the world as comprised of entities readily isolable for analysis, but, according to Wilden, “such foundations generate Imaginary barriers within the ecosystem being studied, and it becomes necessary to invent a special kind of ‘action- oriented’, ‘intentional’ construct to get over the obstacles that the epistemology has put in the way” (SS
325). The constructed organizing principle that allows empiricism effectively to be enacted is what Wilden calls “the myth of scientism”, which “like all myths . . . serves a precise political and organizational function in our culture” (SS 320). In a culture whose continued functioning necessitates the perpetual reaffirmation of the empiricist methodology, the “myth” that the style of thinking embraced by Piaget is the only effective means by which to gain knowledge weaves itself into the fabric of ontological discourse.
Wilden proposes alternative methodologies to scientistic empiricism, including cybernetics, which he presents as a fundamentally mathematical description of self-directing systems. Like Althusser, though,
Wilden rejects the tenability of setting out to construct a theory purporting to divorce its findings from ideology. “What we cannot fail to see in this definition of cybernetics via mathematics, is an ethical, aesthetic, and ideological hypothesis that perfection and reversibility -- in other words, the impossibility of certain kinds of change, or of development, or of evolution -- are or should be equivalent to each other” (SS
317). Curiously, in the first edition of System and Structure, Wilden follows the late Althusser in construing ideology in terms of its potential to be subjected to a kind of conscious governance directing it. His concern is not with finding a way to speak objectively about ideology; he rather implicitly expresses an understanding of ideology in terms of its interplay with other conceptual categories, like ethics and aesthetics. Ideology is not constitutive, on this analysis, of individual’s actions, but is rather one organizing principle among many for epistemologically- and ontologically-based action. For Wilden in the first
31 edition, as for Marx and Althusser, ideology is not something to be overcome, but is something inevitably to be used to effect social change.
In the second edition to his book, Wilden’s theory of ideology appears to have changed, as he outlines the potential for epistemological revolution he perceives to be present in social discourse. In the newly written preface to the work, Wilden’s focus is turned not to ideology’s use as a medium for unifying epistemological frameworks, but to its detrimental effects in delimiting the scope of inquiry, especially so- called “scientific” inquiry. He claims that “what has always constrained the expressed epistemology of the scientific (the academic) discourse is the dominant ideology of the social discourse, itself constrained by socioeconomic reality” (SS xxiii). Wilden’s reading of ideology takes on a distinctly materialistic tone when he invokes Marx’s dictum that socioeconomic realities determine ideology, and ideology in turn creates boundaries outside of which discourse normally cannot operate. Althusser’s invocation of “ideological state apparatuses” anticipates, in part, Wilden’s move to define ideology not as a specific set of identifiable patterns of behavior or thought, but as symptomatic of a parametrization of organizing human experience.
Wilden’s tacit assertion is that his work, though it is itself the product of the institutions that ascribe to the ideological tenets of the scientific discourse, provides a map for epistemological and, as a result, socioeconomic and ideological revolution. Curiously, though, the version of ideology Wilden lays out in his introduction departs in ways from the conception of ideology as a symptomatic manifestation of socioeconomic reality. For Wilden, ideology has an explicit purpose, and “given that the function of ideology is to explain the past, present, and possible futures of a real live system, we would obviously expect that academia -- whose goals are not significantly different -- would be a repository of the dominant ideology in the abstract as well as in the Real” (SS xxiii). While for Marx ideology is what materially works to indicate oppression and alienation, for Wilden ideology is not just the result of the capitalistic social order, but also works to contribute to a state of homeostasis in social relations. It is one governing structure that works communicatively not to determine individual actions, one at a time, on the part of individual humans, but to delimit and determine the boundaries in which an individual can act and speak. While
Althusser calls ideology the imaginary relation of an individual to the real, material conditions of their existence, Wilden takes the analysis a step further by noting the communicative nature of ideology. Humans project their imaginary relation to their material conditions by steeping their own discourse in ideology, but
32 ideology works at the same time to lock individuals into a feedback loop wherein all thought must be in and of ideology.
The capitalistic ideological structures, Wilden intimates, are particularly surreptitious, because of ideology’s adaptability and universal applicability; they “metacommunicate at many levels, and in capitalist society one of their metacommunicative functions is to attempt to deny the ideological function of dominant discourses like the fiction of science, the academic discourse” (SS xxiii). The metacommunicative property of ideology is so effective, according to Wilden, that it in turn shapes and limits scientific discourse, and works simultaneously to make invisible the artificial threads, the strands of ideology, comprising the paradoxical epistemological framework on which scientific inquiry stands. A lack of skepticism about the extent to which ideology insinuates itself into discourse is the cause of the assumption, all too common, that “(critical) science, social and physical, signifies a non-ideological or equivalently
‘value-free’ state of affairs”. For Wilden, “given the awesome power of the dominant ideology and the dominant forms of communication in our society, the sources of this somewhat romantic belief are readily understandable” (SS xxvii). Ideology’s effects on confining the scientific discourse, though, are not entirely invisible, and consist partially in the fact that, for example, “the exchanges in academia are alienated in the sense that they are commonly treated as being quite separate from their real environments, and even from the persons that profess them. They are reified in the sense that knowledge in academia is generally treated as if it were a collection of objects . . . and moreover as objects of possession” (SS xlvi). One of the fundamental flaws underlying the foundations of the dominant ideological discourse is its insistence that observers and objects can be abstracted from their environment, that entities are isolable and separable from the material conditions and relations of exchange surrounding them. Such an epistemology neglects, according to Wilden, properly to take into account the interrelatedness of observable entities, whether they are living things or inert objects.
Ideology adapts, though, and takes on even more metacommunicative aspects as its history unfolds. Wilden notes a historical adaptation of ideology as, in reaction to the aporias created by conventional scientistic reasoning, ideology works to maintain social homeostasis by stultifying academic discourse with a refusal to privilege any sort of epistemological basis for investigation over another: “the liberal aspects of the dominant ideology, in one of its classic contradictions, tell us that all ideas (and therefore all punctuations) are equal in value -- which is manifestly false” (SS xlviii). Significantly, on
33 Wilden’s view ideology is not handed down from the ruling class to the other classes for consumption and direction; rather, it is the result of communicative interactions amongst humans and the media and technologies they use to disseminate information. Though ideology always claims its own autonomy to itself, System and Structure demonstrates that its form only becomes apparent as a result of interactions.
Ideologists will always remain convinced of their own autonomy and control over the “ideological state apparatus”, but Wilden anticipates a level of governance occurring on a meta-systemic emergence that in turn delimits the behaviors of the actors influencing the development of ideology. For Wilden, ideology both works on and is worked upon by the individual; the most significant way in which his analysis departs from that of Marx, the structuralists, and Althusser, is his observation of the numerous levels of communication on which ideology works to cement the reproducibility of current social relations. Wilden’s goal to create a map of the patterns of relationship that occur throughout the natural and discursive world runs into trouble, though, as some of System and Structure’s properties are its status as commodity and discursive product of the faculty member of an academic institution.
The essays, notes Wilden, are not intended to articulate a scientific discourse apart from ideology, but rather to avoid the pitfalls associated with a science’s failure to recognize its own ideological underpinnings. Indeed, “since all human commitments are also ideological and epistemological commitments, then no project of research or teaching that is unprepared or unable to investigate its ideological and epistemological foundations can ever do more than masquerade as a science” (SS xxvi).
What Wilden calls for, then, is a revolution in the ideological foundations of scientific knowledge, one grounded in an understanding of the common ground between, not fundamental dissimilarity inherent to, science and myth. On Wilden’s analysis, human communications share a common property in that “before providing guidance or legitimation to any particular activity, the task of science and myth, in so far as they are useful to society-as-a-whole, is that of illuminating and teaching new generations about crucial patterns of relationship in the organic, the inorganic, and the social universes” (SS xxvi, emphasis in original). By examining the relations governing various communicative messages, Wilden proposes to provide a guide to a liberation from, or at least increased awareness of and so enhanced control over, ideology’s grasp on the individual and collective consciousness.
In this chapter I have traced the evolution of the concept of ideology, from its use in Marx’s early writings, to its adaptation by the structuralists, to its eventual reexamination by Althusser and Wilden.
34 What, I hope, has become apparent through the course of this chapter is that conceptual evolution and morphogenesis takes place on two readily observable levels. First, any individual’s conception of ideology must necessarily be the product of the ideological apparatuses governing his or her experience and, depending on whether criticisms of ideology ought to be called ideological, the conceptual ecologies that have shaped the evolution of the word’s definition. Conceptual ecology becomes, in turn, the explanatory model in terms of which ideologies and their morphogenetic processes can be understood and critically considered, even if they cannot be escaped. “Ideology” changes in the long-term, as groups of thinkers pick out the concept, turn it over, talk about it, and disagree with each other about what it means. Its own conceptual essence’s mutability is demonstrated by the conversation taking place about it––surely the ideology of Marx is distinct from the ideology, with its distinctly communicative aspects, of Wilden.
Similarly, conceptual morphogenesis takes place on the level of individual minds. “Ideology” as defined by
Marx shifts from being a symptom of the ruling class’ methods of oppression to a real, material field in which the class struggle can be realized. Althusser’s contention in For Marx that a consciously erected science can alter the field and direction of ideology gives way, in his later career, to a version of ideology that is as ineluctable as it is capable of disruption.
Finally, Wilden’s System and Structure demonstrates an evolution in its author’s thinking; the author shifts from an acknowledgement of the political expedience of manipulating ideology to a mature understanding of the metacommunicative levels on which the ideological effects itself. Althusser’s problem of finding a place to think outside of ideology, I think, lies in the process of reading. By engaging in the act of interpretation and forging a dialogue with other thinkers who have contributed to the conceptual ecology around “ideology”, individuals can both synthesize novel conceptual structurings of ideology and contribute to the dynamic process of shaping. Individuals cannot effect change from the outside of ideology, but they can act, while preserving their autonomy, to effect limited changes in the field of ideology and, in the process of interpreting diverse ideological frameworks, can fundamentally alter the scope of ideology’s influence.
35 Chapter Three: Prion Logic: Reconciling Althusser and Wilden
“Prion: An abnormally folded, protease-resistant protein which forms aggregates in the brain in the spongiform encephalopathies and certain other neurodegenerative disorders, can be transmitted between individuals, and is thought to propagate itself by inducing the abnormal conformation in a normal form of the protein.” -- Oxford English
Dictionary, emphasis added
Althusser’s body of work contains several features that resist incorporation into conventional philosophical discourse. These are, namely, his apparently reductive structuralism and concomitant denunciation of members of academic communities; his methodological idiosyncrasies, including numerous self-contradictions and no pretension to objective knowledge; and his radical skepticism, which presents itself on one level as so comprehensive that it threatens to overthrow its author’s whole project.
What his work presents initially as an erratic conception of social governance, though, offers with its thematization of its own shortcomings, inconsistencies, and lacunae an activist and subjectivistic philosophical methodology that escapes the self-delimiting deleteriousness of contemporaneous philosophical discourse, from which Althusser is attempting to make a break.
Another aspect of Althusser’s radicalism that I want to argue inspires reactive accusations of structuralism and (somewhat confusingly) incoherence is his implicit accusation of representatives of bourgeois institutions of higher education as perpetuators of the ideological stability of the state. Not only does he have no interest in discounting himself from membership in this group, but his theory of the multiplicity and variform nature of ideological state apparatuses implicates the majority of contributors to conventional philosophical discourse in a process of repeated capitulation to the confines imposed on communication by the meta-epistemological and meta-ontological premises of contemporary, capitalistic ideology. “The Ideological State Apparatuses are multiple, distinct, ‘relatively autonomous’ and capable of providing an objective field to contradictions which express, in forms which may be limited or extreme, the effects of the clashes between the capitalist class struggle and the proletarian class struggle” (LP 100). The opposition between capitalists and proletarians, Althusser maintains, is observable in concrete, material struggles, but also in the rhetorical self-representation of ideological state apparatuses. Althusser’s contention, in a vein of analysis that draws much from Lacan’s methodology, is that ideological state apparatuses are symptomatic of the delusive self-negation constitutive of the material capitalistic enterprise.
Their symptomaticity (that is, their shared orientation around a common cause of which none are the direct
36 manifestation) derives from their common contribution to an identifiable effect: “all ideological State apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (LP 104). Althusser’s conviction that all communicative efforts by representatives of ideological state apparatuses are automatically suspect because of their association with an interested, oppressive party leads him to claim that even the most basic premises of contemporary philosophical inquiry bespeak the underlying ideology of capitalistic economism. Because the real conditions of their existence, unmediated by the Imaginary’s semiological impositions, are inaccessible to human beings, “it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there” (LP 111). Althusser’s notion that institutionally-supported philosophical discourse necessarily contributes to the continued functioning of the capitalistic political structure makes clear its inability to be reconciled with much of the philosophical discourse that gains currency in academic communities.
Certain formal aspects of Althusser’s work contribute to a persistent misunderstanding of his methodology; namely, apparent logical inconsistencies, self-contradictions, and his body of work’s fragmentary nature. Wilden sums up the main objection to Althusser’s conceptual foundations neatly with his criticism of Althusser’s “absenting” the cause of social homeostasis. Althusser’s idea is that the effects observable in social systems are precipitated by an invisible, absent “cause”. Wilden’s objection assumes
Althusser’s indebtedness to a school of thought that claims a culture’s ideas are the products of static structures; he claims that “the logical contradiction involved in [Althusser’s] conception of a cause which is absent, but which is still a cause, arises from that aspect of much of ‘structuralist’ thinking which is still bound, without realizing it, by energy-entity or closed-system explanation” (SS 337). Wilden’s work offers an alternative explanation for the functioning of the apparently static structures ensuring the continued reproduction of the conditions allowing for the capitalistic state’s continuance. Wilden argues that the homeostatic mechanisms of capitalistic state apparatuses (formulated as systemic rules or algorithms) work to impose constraints on fundamentally analog modes of communication, ensuring the continued functioning of the capitalist state even if control is not exerted on the specific discursive components comprising the diverse apparatuses. According to Wilden, the contemporary capitalistic state maintains itself by artificially limiting the extent to which difference can be articulated in the epistemologies and
37 ontologies of contemporary society. Wilden’s assumption that Althusser’s thought is wholly informed by strict structuralist principles is surprising given the two thinker’s shared interest in the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan. Lacan similarly poses a causal agent of the movement immanent to a linguistic structure that, because of its externality to the phonologically-founded units of language systems, must remain out of reach of the verbalizable. His conception of meta-systemic governance shares much with
Wilden’s ontological descriptions, and Lacan certainly was at pains to distance himself in his writings from strictly structuralistic thinking. Making the cause formally invisible does not make Althusser’s investigation unrigorous; on the contrary, it points toward an implicit conceptualization of the process of interpretation and interpersonal communication as agents of revolutionary thought and conceptual breaks from ideological fetters.
Althusser’s argument for the materiality of ideology does not mean that he exempts philosophical discourse from inclusion in the category of material substance. Borrowing a methodological solution from
Lacan, Althusser acknowledges his works’ communicative intention (it is directed toward, primarily, other members of the philosophical community) as precluding its ability to name the agent of social causality.
Still, Althusser’s reluctance to enter into discourse about ideological causation is symptomatic of, I argue, an implicit methodological approach, wherein his attention to the numerous contradictions underlying his own self-positioning as an authority constitutes a revolutionary break from contemporary philosophical discourse in thematizing and symbolizing its own fallibility and incompleteness. Bearing this in mind it is not surprising that Althusser takes care to draw attention to the apparent instability of his own argument by claiming that “if the ISAs ‘function’ massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’” (LP 98). Here Althusser apparently undermines his own position by reconceptualizing it as nothing more than one of a few dissonant notes in the contrived symphony of ideology. Such frequent concession to the inconsistencies to his own approach, I argue, is not evidence of a sloppy thinker, but rather a calculated attempt to frustrate the basic discursive rules that invisibly govern nearly every effort at genuine philosophical inquiry. While Althusser and Wilden share a critical concern with the conceptual consistency of their own immanent critiques of conventional reason, Althusser’s refusal to provide even a gesture toward a theoretical justification for his own immanent critique suggests that the aporia engendered by his
38 critique is a formal aspect of his philosophical thought and not an incidental lacuna. The emphasis
Althusser places on articulating an aberration within the field of ideology that draws out the field of ideology’s paradoxical logic of self-governance makes his attempt to institute a revolution in the theoretico- ideological field more successful than Wilden’s.
Althusser’s work also poses the problem of an apparently radical skepticism whose premises preclude meaningful dialogue with other voices in the contemporary philosophical tradition. With his claim in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses that “there is no practice except by and in an ideology; there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects” (LP 115), Althusser provides the theoretical grounds justifying his antagonism toward the philosophical and political establishment. Since ideology works and is constituted by its interpellation of subjects, all the individuals comprising a society are compelled to speak through the medium of ideology, and so the validity of philosophical or critical systems that pretend to objectivity is called into question.
Althusser continues apparently to undermine the tenability of his own argument by making it clear that he does not consider his immanent critique to lead to a transcendental understanding of discursive causality. In spite of his essay’s analytical rhetorical foundations, Althusser claims that the text’s properties are fundamentally ideological, and that “both he who is writing these lines and the reader who reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects (a tautological proposition), i.e. that the author and the reader of these lines both live ‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideology in the sense in which I have said” (LP 116). Althusser’s statement only holds true, though, in a world in which the content of thought is determined solely in terms of its origination in a single person; Althusser envisions the individual ideological situations of individuals as being inescapable but appears to pose interpersonal communication as a means by which to gain perspective on the delimitations ideology imposes on thought. One of the difficulties stemming from interpretation of Althusser’s body of work with an eye to filling lacunae and identifying a unified theoretical approach as informing each essay is the author’s verbalized doubt about his own efficacy in posing the questions requisite for a meaningful epistemological and social break from the principles and kinds of knowledge legitimated by the capitalistic state.
Althusser claims that ideological state apparatuses are part of the structure of capitalism, but if
“the transition from one mode of production to another, e.g., from capitalism to socialism, cannot consist of the transformation of the structure by its functioning itself, i.e., of any transition of quantity into
39 quality” (RC 307), he leaves little room in his theory for recourse to meaningful sociopolitical change.
Subjects’ speech in and through ideology constitutes them as contributors to the process of the reproduction of the conditions of production, and since every subject speaks through ideology, Althusser’s work appears to represent itself as a paradoxical affirmation of the capitalistic enterprise. Althusser’s work represents, on my reading, a radical and revolutionary work of criticism whose uniqueness lies in its thematization of the process of reading and textual interpretation as a means by which to bring about conceptual (and social) revolution, and its author’s omission of a justification of its glaring unconventionality is best understood in light of Wilden’s efforts to recontextualize cybernetic theory’s emphasis on code and programmability in terms of a critical-theoretical ecological perspective (as described above) that provides a lexical framework with which to approach the interpenetrability of various self-enclosing systems. For Althusser, escaping the reach of the capitalist state’s ideology ultimately means leaving unsaid the methodological justification for fragmentary inquiry, but Wilden’s conceptualization of meta-systemic emergence, including the potential for revolutionary transformation implied by Bateson’s idea of a tertiary level of learning, provides a language with which to analyze the working of a certain order of social governance without contributing to its perpetuation.
Wilden’s essays in System and Structure focus on the epistemological implications of adopting a philosophical perspective imbued with a recognition of the limited distinction between closed and open systems. Basically, closed systems are those in which entropic degradation of organized information results in the eventual heat death of the system, while open systems, participating in communicative exchanges with other informational sources, retain a potential for self-sustenance over time. Specifically, though, the entity with which an open system engages in interaction is not structurally congruent or similar, but is organized according to a higher level of complexity. The various scales at which supersystems effect themselves leads Wilden to borrow from the conceptual vocabularies of biology and literary theory to analogize his claim: “An open system is such that its relationship to a supersystem (which may be referred to methodologically as its ‘environment’ or as its ‘context’) is indispensable to its survival. There is an ongoing exchange of matter-energy and information between them” (SS 203, emphasis mine). Wilden envisions his essays to be indicative of a revolutionary methodological procedure that transcends disciplinary boundaries and provides a unifying conceptual framework for understanding change and stasis in systems.
40 Wilden’s characterization of open systems is complicated by his contention that communicatively- based open systems partake in discursive activities that contribute to a progressive self-conception (by the elements comprising the communicative system) as a closed system. That is, Wilden identifies the distinction between digital and analog communication as underlying the delirium of Western society.
Digital communication, with its imposition of boundaries and reliance upon binary logic, represents a communicative framework the users of which are convinced by the apparent coherence, determinability, self-sufficiency, knowability, and manipulability of the system in and by which they are constructed.
Analog communication, by contrast, represents for Wilden communication that takes place across spectra and various levels of implementation. For instance, interpersonal communication often involves speech accompanied by hand gestures and facial expressions. The cordoning off of certain aspects of interpersonal communication represents for Wilden inconsistent axiomatic foundations. “The socioeconomic reorganization expressed symptomatically in the discourse of science at this period can probably be best described, from a macroscopic perspective, as the digitalization of the (fundamentally) analog relationships of the social universe and the social discourse” (SS 216). The scientistic abstraction of metaphorical (a form of analogical) representations of separate aspects of communication, Wilden maintains, contributes to a progressive reduction of the scope of communicative interactions by positing a fundamentally flawed ontological view of the life-world -- namely, the idea that differentiation of communicative acts does not do violence to an understanding of communication as a comprehensive whole.
One of the reasons that the progressive digitalization of communication has a deleterious effect on social discourse, according to Wilden, is that a digital understanding of communication assumes the integrability of any given communicative act into a series of different discursive frameworks (or subroutines) that offer a causal explanation of the act. In this sense, no communicative act can be said, on the digital model of communication, to incorporate random variation, or noise, in its content; noise (in the respect that it is an absence of pattern) resists expression in terms of the digital. This inexpressibility is so because digital systems are necessarily organized hierarchically, constrained by rules (algorithms) themselves constrained by metasystemic interests that seem always to be at least partially invisible. If there are metasystemic interests governing behaviors, they might be identifiable as imposing constraints on certain types of action, but the systemic relations of those interests, being themselves founded on a higher level of complexity, could not be cognized from consciousnesses situated within the governed system. The
41 rules encoded in the digitalized system of knowledge function as the systems “premises” and form the stable structures of scientific theory. A change in the foundational rules of a theory––in the verbalizations of the laws of thermodynamics, for example––would be perceived as “noise” by the system and by individuals situated within the system. A revision at this level of the theory would necessarily be divorced from conventional “logic” and rely on creativity and error not set within the theoretical system being altered. The shift would require a change to an analogical, metaphorical, artistic, imaginative mode of communication that is typically excluded from scientific praxis and education.
Any methodological approach which neglects to take into account analog communication in favor of a strictly digital framework will preclude its own adaptability to inevitable revolutionary restructuring.
Wilden contends that “random variation . . . produces novel reorganizations or structures, of which a minuscule number prove to have survival value. . . . If selected to survive, then the product of this noise incorporates the noise as information in its own reproduction” (SS 331). Wilden borrows a biological metaphor in critically describing and hence contributing to the revision of the idea of a genetic “code” of various systems; his conceptualization draws attention to the inevitable presence of noise as a result of analogical relations’ underlying digital communicative systems. “There are two ways for a structure or system to maintain its stability in the face of noise. It may either protect itself by massive redundancy . . . or it may maintain itself by changing” (SS 331). In the sense of social systems, an ideologically-founded epistemology, representing itself (digitally, via written language and logic) as a closed system with privileged access to total knowledge, attempts to preserve itself by ignoring the various inputs of “noise” that resist incorporation into its systemic logic. Similarly, it neglects to recognize its own foundation upon open-systemic relations. Wilden thus accounts for the apparent stability of ideologically-based knowledges and, more importantly, their function in reproducing the relations of capitalism, at least insofar as they are not destabilized by their encounter with transdisciplinary critical-ecological theory.
Contemporary academic discourse’s self-conception of enjoying a certain superiority over marginalized ways of knowing represents a delusional effort, accordingly, because its postures of self- referentiality and self-consistency do not counter the fact that “a communications system . . . is to be methodologically viewed as an open system, which we can continue to define provisionally as a system involving or simulating life or mind” (SS 353). Wilden’s reading of communications systems provides a way of understanding the goals underlying social discourse without assigning a conscious agent of
42 discursive structuring. Indeed, what defines an open system is its relationship with an exterior environment; while one of its traits is inevitably a degree of interior consistency, its identity depends on its fundamental difference from some sort of context. “The paradox of the goal of homeostasis in open systems”, he writes,
“is that they depend on self-regulation and self-stability and yet their ecosystemic relationship to an environment or to levels of the environment is such that ‘one of the stable products of self-regulation is variability itself’ (Emerson, 1956: 149)” (SS 390). That is, the stable open system not only requires internal governance, but also a mechanism of governance with respect to a recognition and incorporation of noise; that is, that which is conceived of on one level as being antithetical to systemic processes operates on another as an integral part of the maintenance of real-world open systems.
Wilden’s explanation of the relationship between open and closed systems, I argue, provides a framework with which to approach Althusser’s body of text. Althusser conceives of himself as speaking from within an academic discursive apparatus, and so evinces a pessimism about the efficacy of his own approach by representing himself as a confounded, fragmentary thinker whose attempts to extricate himself from strictly academic discourse inevitably end in aporia. What he attempts to illustrate, though, is the paradoxical notions underlying a communicational system (the philosophical discursive system) that represents itself as being limited, closed, and structured when in fact it depends on its penetrability and on its own incorporation of new, unorganized quanta of information.
Althusser’s thematization of reading constitutes a political effort to effect a radical epistemological reorientation in the reader’s mind, wherein philosophical discourse’s self-representation as being closed off to interpretation is refuted by evidence of the process of intersubjective communication manifested by reading. Philosophical discourse is, on Althusser’s reading, one interlocutor amongst many in a conversation; individual readers’ disparate applications and interpretations of concepts and ideas contribute to the instability of the ideological pretensions of scientistic thinking. Althusser claims that ideology has no history, but that individual ideologies do. This distinction places emphasis on the locality of ideology, and its situatedness in the material individual. That is, ideology effects itself in every individual, but given the disparate circumstances surrounding each individual, the exact constitution of that ideology may vary, as long as it provides a conceptual structuring of experience that delimits the actions of the individual in conformity with social and economic imperatives. Althusser’s vision of a philosophical break, therefore, depends on the process of communication as embodied in the act of interpretive reading; individual readers
43 with individually rendered ideologies, in entering into a dialogue with a text, become the points at which conceptual evolution occurs. His claim that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” can retain its integrity even in the face of a recognition of his works’ implicit assumption that a complicating or destabilization of ideology can occur as a result of communication (LP 109). Wilden’s theory of open systems, this work argues, provides a broader communicative framework that extricates Althusser’s theory from its apparently pessimistic self-enclosure within the confines of the epistemic “reading” subject (which is itself constructed within and with reference to an ideological apparatus) and optimistically articulates a way toward an ontological rather than simply an epistemological revision -- evolution or revolution -- or ideological structures.
Wilden’s and Althusser’s models of ideology are the same but take different interpretive approaches to the subject by way of Lacan. Althusser’s thematization of reading in his body of work, I maintain, contains an implicit advocacy of placing works and conceptual structures in dialogue with each other via the process of reading and textual interpretation. By reading Marx and formally recognizing the material reality of his interpretive method, Althusser effects a dissolution of the boundaries cordoning off apparently self-consistent, “closed-systemic” theories of social reality. By placing Marx in dialogue with his various successors, Lacan, and an intentionally overt authorial voice, Althusser demonstrates the possibility of disrupting the homeostatically-inclined reproduction of conceptual structuring, violating the order of governance imposed by interested economic and political agents, and staging a revolution of concepts. Reading Lacan and Marx limits and is the means by which Althusser’s and Wilden’s respective theories are developed. Their works’ respective communicative contents might be different from each other principally, as I have argued above, in that Wilden’s theory provides not only for an epistemological but also for an ontological transformation of ideological structures, but their disparity is limited in certain respects by each thinker’s drawing from overlapping sets of conceptual structures.
Althusser’s approach to Lacan indicates his methodological indebtedness to the psychoanalyst, but the immanence of Lacan in Althusser’s investigational method is evident in his claim in Reading Capital that he owes his recognition of novel interpretations of Freud’s oeuvre, “which has revolutionized our reading of Freud[,] to Jacques Lacan’s intransigent and lucid -- and for many years isolated -- theoretical effort” (RC 16, n. 1). This footnote’s incidental appearance belies a significant thematic move in
44 Althusser’s work, wherein the process of reading is conceptualized as a communicative act constitutive of morphogenesis.
Althusser looks to Lacan as a point of methodological reference, and he situates himself in dialogue with the psychoanalyst’s exploratory and speculative readings of Freud. His definition of ideology as representing the imaginary relationships of the individuals of to their real conditions of existence takes on added significance when considered in light of his reading of Lacan’s work as obtaining the conclusion in “Freud and Lacan” that “even the moment of the imaginary, which, for clarity’s sake, I have just presented as preceding the symbolic, as distinct from it -- hence as the first moment in which the child lives its immediate intercourse with a human being (its mother) without recognizing it practically as the symbolic intercourse it is (i.e. as the intercourse of a small human child with a human mother) -- is marked and structured in its dialectic by the dialectic of the Symbolic Order itself” (LP 143). Here, Althusser maintains that an individual’s existence as a communicating subject in the world is always mediated by imaginary representations (or, in Wilden’s terms, analogical relations) of real existence even in spite of that subject’s lack of awareness of its constitution in the imaginary subjective discourse.
Wilden’s more skeptical evaluation of Lacan’s work also holds the key to beginning to interpret
Althusser’s formal idiosyncrasies in terms of the recurring motif of intersubjectivity that runs throughout
Lacan’s thought. While Althusser’s assessment of Lacan’s significance focuses on its revolutionary aspects,
Wilden’s reading finds Lacan guilty of using biomechanistic metaphors to substantiate his claims. He writes that “Lacan takes bits and pieces from everywhere and anywhere and jumbles them up -- like the text of a dream -- playing on ambiguities, etymologies, puns, analogies, poetic metaphors -- again like the text of a dream -- as well as on the reader’s benevolent desire to understand” (SS 15). Wilden ultimately attempts to surpass Lacan’s theory by creating a schematization of communicative systemic processes, while Althusser’s more sympathetic interpretation is that “since he has to teach the theory of the unconscious to doctors, analysts or analysands, in the rhetoric of his speech Lacan provides them with a dumb show equivalent of the language of the unconscious” (LP 139). Significantly, Wilden’s disagreement with Lacan stems from his disapproval of Lacan’s methodology and not from a departure from what he perceives to be the essential principles informing the psychoanalyst’s thought. His goal is not to supersede
Lacan’s theory by negating its validity as much as it is to articulate the intersubjective communicative
45 framework posed by Lacan in a broader context. This is precisely the kind of revision of Althusser’s work in terms of Wilden that I am attempting to accomplish with the present work.
In articulating his stance with respect to Lacan, though, Wilden conveniently provides an interpretive strategy for reading Althusser’s work. In his characterization of Lacan’s work he states that the psychoanalyst’s “definition of the process of an analysis is that of a passage from the ‘empty words’ of an
Imaginary discourse to the ‘full words’ of a Symbolic discourse, in which the analyst himself is equally and entirely involved” (SS 21). Althusser’s writing, I argue, represents an analogous attempt to effect an extrication from the imaginary confines of ideology by the author’s involving himself in the paradoxes inherent to the structures governing language and logic. Rather than providing the reader with a “dumb show equivalent” of unconsciousness, Althusser intends to provide, with his methodology and his conceptual thinking, readers with an analogous demonstration of radical, revolutionary thought, which necessarily is recast in conventional discourse as antithetical to rational, sensible mainstream ideology. In terms of Wilden’s communication theory, Althusser’s reading praxis would generate “noise” in the
“signal”––the digitalized ideological structure––of academic and scientific discourse. Wilden’s contention that “only in an individualistic and phallocentric culture of primarily digital communication and accumulation does the Lacanian analysis fully apply” speaks to his conviction that digitalization is responsible for increasing communicative limitations and delusions, and it is no great leap to suppose that the “master codes” governing the implicit rules structuring the manufacture, advertisement, and distribution of, including the construction of consumers to consume, goods in our increasingly digitally world economy might accurately be given the label, using Althusser’s model, of ideological state apparatuses (SS 265).
Wilden’s model of conceptual ecologies provides a means by which to re-evaluate the significance of Althusser’s works in light of a vocabulary which the French thinker either did not possess or did not care to use in his writings. Wilden’s divergence from Althusser and Lacan is the result of his familiarity with the lexicon of cybernetics and the distinction between closed and open systems. Lacan’s contention that structural limitations to language provides justificatory evidence for claims of universally unconscious symbolic structure neglects to take into account language’s dual status as a closed system and an open system. Language must represent itself as a closed system whose meaning is fixed and self-consistent, or its pragmatic function is negated. At the same time, language’s mutability establishes it as an open system that takes in new information from its environment, which necessarily must be external to language in that it
46 can take part in a communicative exchange with language. Wilden notes that “determined as it is by its code and by its syntax, language is perhaps the most semiotically free of all representational and communicational systems -- and it is not ruled by causality, but by possibility, constraints, and by its pragmatic-semantic function, that of the transmission and reproduction of variety in the system” (SS 35).
His claim that language’s evolvability establishes it as the locus of revolutionary thought provides the reader with an articulable analytic methodology with which to interpret the elisions and lacunae of
Althusser’s work as lapses intended to demonstrate the ultimately absurd policies of philosophical and logical discourse.
Significantly, Althusser’s extension of imaginary discourse to entities that have not as yet, on
Lacan’s analysis of human development, attained full personhood (not yet having entered the mirror stage of self-recognition) opens the door for a radical reconceptualization of intersubjectivity, since Althusser uses his reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud as a theoretical justification for a disintegration of the boundaries separating humans from the objects and biological entities surrounding them. Althusser’s reading provides the theoretical justification for a reinterpretation of his works that places them in dialogue with cybernetics and systems theory-oriented critical discourse, since he appears, with his reading of Lacan, to exhaust the lexical capacity of Marxism and structuralism to account for the mechanisms of social governance he identifies as being at work. For Althusser, ideology not only acts on babies who have not yet learned to self-identify, but it also acts variously on the biological and ecological systems surrounding and defining human existence.
The following chapter draws from this section’s demonstration of the permeability of discursive systems that represent themselves as complete to evaluate the accuracy of claims made by two purportedly
“retrospective” works on critical theory, Seyla Benhabib’s Critique, Norm, and Utopia, and Jürgen
Habermas’ Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Benhabib and Habermas, significantly, omit Althusser from their historical summaries of critical theory, and share a conviction that philosophical discourse’s mutability and properties are confined by specific types of interpersonal communicative acts. Althusser’s theory poses the same danger as Wilden’s to these conceptual representations of social organization in that it demonstrates the impossibility of strictly interpersonally-based communicative systems in which the agent of social progress will permanently remain invisible. While Althusser’s writings are designed to thematize the eventual paradoxes of conventional philosophical discourse, Wilden’s demonstrate that the
47 problem of epistemological and ontological systems that represent themselves as being determined by human interactions can be ameliorated by reference to ecological, natural-systemic exchange and communication. Because communication can occur at various levels of exchange, supposedly inviolable and complete conceptual structures are themselves part of increasingly larger-scale conceptual ecologies.
Encountering the “noise” of imaginary or analogical critical reading in the context of the wider circle of communicative ecology creates the opening, via Wilden’s work, for a revolutionary eco-social communicative practice that enacts newly cognizant and mindful morphogenesis in biosocial systems.
Althusser’s theory of ISAs can account for the works’ self-conception of self-containment, but
Wilden’s idea of open systems invites a new approach to critical theory in permitting an expansion of the
“life-world” envisioned by Habermas to include biological complex systems, on their various levels of iteration. Similarly, as the metaphor of ideology is detached from its purported fixed location in philosophical discourse and reimagined instead as the continually changing product of manifold communicative interactions amongst the disparate communities and individuals comprising the world- social system, Althusser’s personal political activism, his advocacy of textual interpretation as a revolutionary act, and his emphasis on “fragmentary” critical thinking take on a new, theoretically buttressed consistency of timbre and philosophical intent. Althusser does not want ideology to conform to the same logic of the prion: the natural by-product of a self-correcting homeostatic system whose arrangement permits for variation in the code and structural morphogenesis. The prion is the antithesis of the self-correcting, stable system: it is pure structure, converting malleable proteins into its own image and causing the eventual cessation of the life processes of the organism. The prion is the system’s narcissism overtaking every other aspect of the system. The prion is the system’s death. Althusser engages himself in the struggle to reconceptualize ideology as a structure that permits change.
48 Chapter Four: Governance, Aberration, Revolution
“‘Our security apparatus includes a number of measures, both seen and unseen, informed by the latest intelligence and as always DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] continues to adjust security measures to fit an ever evolving threat environment.’”––The United States Department of Homeland Security, in “a statement” quoted by “Homeland
Security Warns Airlines of New Threat.” The Washington Post, 19 February 2014.
Arguing for the primacy of concrete structure is necessary for Althusser’s theory of ideology not to violate its allegiance to Marxist materialism. His concession to the invisibility of ideology, though, still appears to contradict the implicit claim running throughout his body of work that he has access to some privileged knowledge about social governance. Althusser’s own knowledge of social structure, though, he admits to be the product of a uniquely situated realm of experiences and interactions, whose absolute idiosyncrasy precludes its communicability. His decision to sketch out a diagram of various apparatuses contributing to the capitalist state’s continued vitality, then, represents an attempt neither to compile an exhaustive list nor even to suggest that these “apparatuses” are, in fact, separable in any other respect than conceptually. Schematizing social governance in a self-consciously incomplete fashion permits Althusser not to contradict his argument elsewhere for the invisibility of ideology. He states that the (strictly) material structure “which controls the concrete existence of men, i.e. which informs the lived ideology of the relations between men and objects and between objects and men . . . can never be depicted by its presence, in person positively, in relief, but only by traces and effects, negatively, by indices of absence, in intaglio
(en creux)” (LP 162). Althusser contends that the materiality of the structure that governs human identity does not preclude the potential for systems, characterized by their relations or their communicative functions, also to influence human activities.
Because the material, finite structure of the economic lifeworld operates in so many dimensions it cannot be fully accounted for, the invisibility of its totality is a requisite condition, but, as will be seen,
Althusser’s idea of an “absence,” with its specific denotative allegiance to a fundamentally analogical aspect of communication, does not preclude the viability of a critical study of social governance with reference to a systems-theoretical perspective. For Althusser, absence is not the negation of presence, but is rather a degree of presence that tends toward imperceptibility. Ideology, on Althusser’s account, relies on a paradoxically self-affirming speculary action. It relies on all the components constituting a society to
49 sustain each other through mutual regard, apparently violating rules of entropy and positing the existence of mirrors that can reflect each other and nothing but each other.
When Althusser makes the claim of ideology’s paradoxical method of self-preservation, though, he is demonstrating the untenability of the mechanism of action by which ideology works, instead of trying to affirm its viability and the cogency of its logic. Ideology’s imaginary positioning of an absolute Subject is not a necessary structuring of reality, and is in fact a component of a system that reaffirms itself by means of a narcissistic self-regard and a willful ignorance of multi- or transdisciplinary interests, whose structure
(from the inside) appears to violate the laws of entropy in its nullification and absorption of aberrations and variations within the context. Given the fact that “all ideology is centered”, Althusser believes we can conclude “that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Center, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connection such that it subjects the subjects to the
Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him” (LP 122). The Absolute Subject, in its place as the supreme narcissist, represents the compulsive and delusional desire for annihilation of difference informing what Althusser would characterize as contemporary capitalistic societies. By reaffirming a paradoxical logic of self-contemplation, the system effectively nullifies critical aberration by incorporating it into the imaginary structure of ideology, which cannot articulate or conceive of a difference existing truly in opposition to or outside of the system. For Althusser, the system’s ability to incorporate numerous forms of discourse into its perverse logic inaugurates the need for extreme skepticism:
“What . . . seems to take place outside ideology . . . in reality takes place in ideology. . . .That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology” (LP 118). By drawing attention to the tendency ideology has to place limitations on the boundaries in which individuals are permitted to act and still remain “themselves,” Althusser’s argument here stages itself as a way to describe ideology as the mechanism of social programming of the “selves” of subjects of the state (including supposed intellectuals and experts) for purposes of political economy. Here again Althusser underlines the imaginary significance of his argument; rather than advancing a transcendental critique of ideology, he is launching an immanent critique that dwells on the paradoxical language governing contemporary ideology’s perpetuation to point out its shortcomings and indicate a direction for intellectual resistance. The ethological repercussions of his
50 argument might indicate a reason for his lifelong and posthumous alienation from the university-based philosophical community, all of whose members rely on funding either from state or private sources and so are implicated in the perpetuation of the capitalistic enterprise.
The kind of revolutionary activity that Althusser has in mind demands a kind of learning process of a level analogous to that described as “Learning III” by Gregory Bateson. Althusser and Bateson share the view that individual actions are delimitated and confined, but not determined, by certain rules.
Bateson’s model distinguishes amongst three (plus a hypothetical fourth) levels of learning, in which the most basic, “Learning I,” are just “the cases in which an entity gives at Time 2 a different response from what it gave at Time 1” (Bateson 287). Implementing a mathematical metaphor characterizing learning as being analytically differentiable allows Bateson to expand the process of learning to include broader delimitations of individual behavior. In Learning I, “error” is not random but is simply code for varying behaviors that are not identifiable responses to specific stimuli. Learning I demands that an actor introduce artificial punctuations into the passage of time. A person who experiences Learning I divides fundamentally analog experience into “things that might be categorized as a stimulus” and “things that might be categorized as responses.” Just as the processes underlying Learning I permit for variation just as they work to cement certain habitual actions, “Learning II is change in the process of Learning I, e.g., a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated” (Bateson 293). Learning II is different from Learning I, and approaches what
Althusser has in mind with his revolutionary “break,” in that it operates at a higher level and entails more abstract constraints on individual action. Learning II demands a reorganizational procedure that provides the individual actor with a perspective that construes experience as consisting of certain arbitrarily defined sets of alternatives from which that individual can choose in organizing her action.
The final process of learning that Bateson describes, and the one Althusser envisions as characterizing the epistemological break perpetrated by Marx and his inheritors, is that of Learning III, which is “change in the process of Learning II, e.g., a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made” (Bateson 293). Learning III involves total epistemological reorientation, wherein sets of alternatives (that is, the various epistemologies that present themselves as mutually exclusive and at odds with each other) reveal themselves as indicating and speaking to each other, as
51 artificial knowledges engaged in the process of introducing digital distinctions into the analog realm of immediate experience.
When Wilden criticizes Althusser for his assertion that “structural causality” is behind the whole of socioeconomic patterns, his note that “for Althusser, this seems to be an essentially homeostatic conception” (SS 336) bespeaks a reductive reading of the Marxist thinker that neglects to take into account the formal characteristics that constitute Althusser’s work as an effort to convey a message with its form as well as with its content. Specifically, the fragmentary nature of Althusser’s work contradicts the authoritative stance he takes in his essay on ideology, and suggests a mature understanding of ideology as a filter through which language must pass––a semipermeable membrane whose effect is the continuance of the apparatus of control and whose structural limitations can be demonstrated by articulating its
(ideology’s) mutability, finitude, and inevitability.
Althusser’s structural causality is not, of course, essentially homeostatic. It works primarily to preserve the functioning of a certain aspect of social conditions -- but those conditions are oriented toward the increased production of capital. If anything, structural causality, as Althusser articulates it, contributes to a progressive material and social metastasis whose accumulative mass certainly poses a threat to the system’s future ability to complete the processes of homeostasis. Althusser represents a radical offshoot of structuralist thought that, with its thematization of the compulsion to integrate perceptual experience into an
Imaginary framework, demonstrates the shortcomings of its logic.
Althusser’s works, reevaluated in light of their similarities to cybernetics- and systems-theory- oriented thinking, provide a method of interpreting social governance in terms of the interrelatedness and interpenetrability of its systemic and structural aspects. Althusser’s work, I maintain, intentionally leaves interpretative lacunae (e.g., with their conspicuous and repetitive denial of comprehensiveness) to demonstrate the inability of the formal characteristics typical of capitalistic discourse to facilitate the communication of epistemologically revolutionary ideas. Interestingly, Wilden provides the best link between Althusser and systems theory with his claim that “digital distinctions introduce gaps into continuums . . ., whereas analog differences, such as presence and absence, fill continuums”. The digital distinctions in Althusser’s work might be read as those underlying the most fundamental of his contradictions: for instance, the implicit idea in For Marx that Marx initiated and accomplished an epistemological “break” and the later claim in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” that there is no
52 way to think outside of ideology. The discontinuity or dissonance represented by these two apparently fundamentally contradictory notions represents, on my reading, not a lack of rigor, but rather an attempt at tacitly reaffirming the necessity of analog communication by enlisting the reader in a process of conciliatory, sympathetic reading that, irrespective of its ultimate conclusions, situates the reader in a position of analog communication with Althusser (that transcends the codified language of his essays).
Thus the reader is situated metonymically adjacent to the authorial persona of the text, engaged not in an analytical process of differentiation but instead a sympathetic process of shared sensation and intuition.
Althusser’s oeuvre is a radical political communicative tool that posits the act of continually engaging in the process of reading and entering into a dialogue with text as a means by which to introduce potentially revolutionary informational aberrations into the mechanistic functioning of the dominant social system. In this sense, his theory is one which shares much with contemporaneous cybernetic theory, which thematized, as Andrew Pickering writes in The Cybernetic Brain, “systems -- human, nonhuman, or both -- that staged their own performative dances of agency, that foregrounded performance rather than treating it as some forgettable background to knowledge. This is the primary sense in which one can read cybernetics as ontological theater -- as forcibly reminding us of the domain of practice and performance and bringing that to the fore” (Pickering 381). Althusser’s delineation of the structured aspects of social governance does not place it in the category of arguments that preclude their own verifiability; rather, they foreground individual agency by thematizing the process of interpretation as indicative of personal autonomy.
The problem that cyberneticists have in providing a digitalized code of organisms stems, borrowing from Althusser’s terminology, from subjects’ inability to conceive, in the realm of the ideological, of representing the components of experience that precede, or at least defy assimilation into, the Imaginary ideological structuring constitutive of the contemporary capitalistic social world; as Bateson writes, “the cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the ‘screen’ of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose” (Bateson 445).
Similarly, Althusser’s claim that ideology’s materiality means its primary existence is manifested in the actions of the people who live in it, that the things people do in the real world in turn shape the material constructs that govern their consciousnesses, resonates with Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s summary of the advances of systems theory that “man is not a passive receiver of stimuli coming from an external world, but in a very concrete sense creates his universe” (von Bertalanffy 194). Furthermore, his awareness of the
53 multiplicity of the functions performed by various ideological state apparatuses and the impossibility of compiling a list of each’s role is analogous to Kaneko’s claim in his Life: An Introduction to Complex
Systems Biology that “the clearest picture [of organic systems] would emerge if each molecule plays a single role and each role is carried out chiefly by one molecule; . . . [h]owever, in fact such one-to-one relationships among molecules and functions are exceptional in living systems” (Kaneko 10). Althusser is limited to noting his inability not to assign imaginary significance to the social structures he can observe, but is careful, as are cyberneticians, not to make any claims to transcendental knowledge, since he recognizes himself as a subordinate element in a larger social system. He does, though, unlike most cyberneticians, propose a method for radicalizing the terms of social governance, by foregrounding the act of interpretation as an exercise of individual autonomy and institution of political revolution through its inevitable introduction of analogical communication into discourse.
The fact that Althusser is at pains to maintain the primacy (at least, the methodological primacy) of materialism in his discursive analyses suggests a reality that, while governed by superstructures, situates individual humans at different ideological nodes, and that unique personal experience, as it crosses from immediate perception into assimilated imaginary impression, is at once the delimitating factor and the strongest impetus for radical social change. From biologically-centered ontologies we know that “structure conditions the course of [an organism’s] interactions and restricts the structural changes that the interactions may trigger in it”, and that an organism is “born in a particular place, in a medium that constitutes the ambience in which it emerges and in which it interacts” (Maturana 95). Althusser’s version of social governance borrows from a conceptual vocabulary that lends itself equally well to organismic metaphors for structure. The social “structure” he theorizes permits aberration in the sense that individuals are constituted both in an immediate real and a mediate imaginary world, and that the noise inevitably surfacing in the ideological structure is the product of real, immediate perceptual experiences’ individuality and unrepeatability necessitating the existence of social difference.
Wilden’s work, especially when placed in dialogue with other cybernetics-informed texts, provides a rigorous theoretical justification for an intuitive idea hit upon by Baudrillard and Bataille, that of imperceptible change in ideology, particularly when its function ensuring the reproduction of conditions conducive to homeostasis is considered. The occurrence of material and imaginary morphogenesis makes change in ideology both inevitable and invisible, except obliquely, peripherally, when theories of ideology
54 themselves are placed in a trialogue. Morphogenesis within the field of ideology takes place as a result of its structure evincing itself when dissimilarities between conceptualizations of ideology are placed in juxtaposition within the mind of a reader or interpreter. The individual acting as arbitrator of the validity of different claims about “what constitutes ideology” is inevitably enlisted in the act of critiquing ideology and contributing to its perpetual erosion and reconstitution.
Jean Baudrillard, in The Mirror of Production, maintains that the textual communications of social scientists (particularly Marxist social scientists), by participating in the unceasing imaginary exchange of concepts, neglect, in their dignifying structuralist concepts enough to contradict them, to extricate their own discourse from the fetters of ideology. In this sense, Baudrillard conceives of an epistemological break as being nearly impossible to achieve, since “materialist logic, seeing only the contradictions that are accessible to dialectical or structural schemas, perhaps sees only the symptoms, at the interior of the system, of that rupture which founds the system itself” (Baudrillard 108-9). The “rupture” Baudrillard perceives is surmountable, significantly, through recourse to the comparative process of textual interpretation.
Placing conceptualizations of social governance that issue from the governing social body in direct juxtaposition with one another, noting their divergences and mutual contradictions, and demonstrating the play in the meaning of a word, even one as conceptually heavy as “ideology”, provide a vision of the rupture which, as soon as it is articulated using the terminology it tries to critique, negates its own validity.
In fact, Baudrillard is so wary of the idea of articulating a theory of ideology that he attests to verbalization’s influence upon the imaginary discourses individuals internalize and then enact upon the material world. “As if by chance, the reality of the mode of production enters the scene at the moment when someone is discovered who invents the theory of it” (Baudrillard 113). Theorization provides a means for permanently extending the deleterious effect of what Baudrillard terms “political economy,” whose homeostatic function makes it similar to Althusser’s version of ideology. By positioning certain discursive elements as sharing an ahistorical, eternal existence, the theorizer perpetuates the notion of eternality and conceptual invariability definitive of contemporaneous social delirium. Thereby the individual’s idea of herself or himself as “the intellectual” becomes complicit in the text s/he interprets, including the social text of the dominant political economy.
Baudrillard’s condemnation of theorization presents without reference to a remedy, but Althusser’s methodology might properly be explained when Lacan’s vision of self-extrication from ideology is taken
55 into account: “If man comes to think about the symbolic order, it is because he is first caught in it in his being. The illusion that he has formed this order through his consciousness stems from the fact that it is through the pathway of a specific gap in his imaginary relationship with his semblable that he has been able to enter into this order as a subject” (Lacan 40). The lacunae and inconsistencies characteristic of various ideological representations of ideology provide a reader with access to the Lacanian symbolic order because they represent, in the cognition of the reader, points at which the justificatory language of ideology discloses its own circularity. The absolute finality, i.e. the critical awareness that the authorial “self” implicit in the text and the critical “self” evaluating it are both ideological constructs that may be transcended through dialogical communication between them through the process of critical reading. The reader’s communication with ideological representations of ideology act to disrupt both interior and exterior order; the interior order’s disruption functions metonymically in the present work to describe the imbalance brought upon social superstructures by the process of disillusioning reading, “. . . regression being but the bringing into the present into the subject’s discourse of the fantasmatic relations discharged by an ego at each stage in the decomposition of its structure” (Lacan 209). The demonstration of the imaginary structure of the ego results in its decomposition, and takes place, significantly, in a dialogue; similarly, Althusser, as a reader of Lacan, demonstrates the imaginary structure of the capitalistic “ego,” by using the imaginary concepts of its own ontology and epistemology to construct schematizations whose implications for communicative freedom appear to preclude the possibility of an action taking place outside the field of ideology and the possibility of an epistemological reorientation from within the field of ideology. In other words, Althusser attempts to dismantle arguments for the effectiveness of immanent and transcendental critiques. The implicit result of his efforts is a dialectical-communicative model of critical exchange conceived as an open system unbounded by an insular, indelible, permanent self––a closed system.
Like Lacan, Althusser poses the cybernetically-inclined question of the viability of a fundamentally open system that convinces itself it is closed. The conceptual vocabulary Althusser uses, specialized and technical, does not permit him to stage a comprehensive accounting of social governance.
Still, “even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony” (Lacan 209). Althusser’s lacunae are intended to stand in for the interpersonally
56 communicative element of speech; his own works function as a demonstration of a conceptualization procedure antithetical to the one posited by contemporary “scientific” thinking, which might be able to conceptualize open physical systems but cannot entertain the idea that the logic governing its own operations might itself represent a system that was open to internal and external aberrations. Language, the field in which scientific thinking takes place, “normally” represents itself as centered and stable––at least in discourses concerned with establishing claims about knowledge. The meaning of words can alter as they are used in different ways in the real world as different circumstances, life experiences, and ideological orientations can influence the way that people use words. Also, new words are introduced into languages continually, just as old ones fall into disuse -- so the systemic (semiological) and structural (lexical) aspects of language are themselves subject to error.
As if in an effort to enact the understanding of language’s semiotic instability and constant dialectical interplay in systems of exchange, Althusser’s ‘reading’ Marx thematizes the same trialogue envisioned by Lacan amongst the psychoanalyst, the absolute Subject, and the patient. The books written by Althusser are intended to incite radical political action because they enlist people in the act of creating aberrations in ideology (“noise”) through their entering into a conversation with it. The authorial voice
Althusser adopts is that of the earnestly inquiring reader. The voice foregrounds its uncertainties by continually calling attention to the “necessarily schematic” nature of its remarks. Althusser is trying to make a move in the same vein of Lacan’s idea of the establishment of intersubjectivity that demonstrates the interchangeability of Lacan’s subjective parties. He wants to establish intersubjective communication with the reader to situate himself as what Lacan would call the “voice that is supposed to know,” and, by involving the reader in his process of simultaneous authoritative declarations of social structurality and the incoherence of his own claims, to demonstrate the reality of the imaginary relations governing individual behavior. Althusser’s work engenders the communicative process without, it is important to note, putting its demonstration of ideology into language, but by discursively tracing the contours of a method that escapes what Wilden calls the pernicious effects of the digitalization of language).
Althusser intends the demonstration to be accompanied by a disintegration of the imaginary structuring of the reader’s ego because the reader is necessarily engaged in a dialogical interaction with the text, in a way that would not be the case with a didactical work. By either dismissing or reacting favorably to the work, readers of Althusser are assimilating its conceptual and methodological lacunae into their own
57 framework of ideas about how things happen in the world. He envisions the same thing taking place in the space occupied by politics and philosophy that Lacan wanted to happen in psychology -- a reorientation toward the acknowledgment of the historicity of certain agreed-upon concepts, and a recognition of their mutability and political reality. Of the present tendency of the psychoanalytic trade to reaffirm certain ideologically-based presuppositions Lacan says that “when we consider the literature that this activity produces for its own nourishment . . . the impression is often that of a curious closed circuit in which ignorance of the origin of terms generates problems in reconciling them, and in which the effort to solve these problems reinforces the original ignorance” (Lacan 203). Althusser’s work, with its overtly evolvable structural imaginings, draws the reader’s attention to the fact that individual concepts undergo morphogenesis both in the mind of the individual reader and in the collective discursive “mind” of an intellectual community reading over old books. Althusser claims that Marx’s work represents a radical break in the history of philosophy, and that Marx’s thought underwent numerous radical breaks itself.
Althusser’s own work, self-doubting and self-consciously incomplete, poses each incursion into new territory as mapping the space for a new break. Althusser wants the reader to be able to achieve a total epistemological and ontological reorientation by placing Althusser’s work, which thematizes the continually-recurring evolution of conceptuality, in mental juxtaposition with other texts affirming the validity of truth-claims about delimitations to communicational morphogenesis. Althusser wants the reader, by engaging in the same process of “reading” he imagines for Marx and thematizes in his own writings, to embody the sort of conceptual evolution Wilden perceives to be inevitable in open systems -- to be the unsaid locus of the absence, and to arrive at an understanding of conceptual evolution.
One of the most powerful repercussions of the present study for the field of critical theory is its clearing of the way for a theoretical understanding of the critical theorist as a participant in numerous levels of biosocial systemic processes. This is not to propose a radical subjectivity in discourse whose result, as the criticism often goes, is the stultification of the pursuit of knowledge. It is, however, to propose a radical epistemological and ontological reorientation that, while apparently placing an overwhelming amount of responsibility on the thinker that would undertake to describe society, is nonetheless necessary in the process of resisting the totalizing logic of the globalized capitalistic social system.
The present section undertakes briefly to examine two recent texts, Seyla Benhabib’s Critique,
Norm, Utopia and Jurgen Habermas’ Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, that share the intention of
58 describing the history of different kinds of conceptualizations. My intent is to sketch the outlines of a larger critique of their works in light of a synthetic approach that fuses the radically skeptical Marxism of
Althusser with the communication theory-buttressed ecosocialism of Wilden. Benhabib and Habermas similarly limit the scope of their own argumentation to a strictly social “life-world,” which exempts them from the responsibility of linking their claims to the biological or ecological sciences. Their joint disciplinary inability to acknowledge the fundamental interconnectedness of biological and social systems results in the imposition of theories of conceptual evolution and exchange whose mechanisms indicate a system that works on ontological premises irreconcilable with the basic systems-theory premises adopted by complex systems biology and ecology. They neglect to take into account the fact that different models of systems demonstrate that the noise generated by necessarily external parts of the system can disrupt homeostasis-ensuring processes and initiate radical change in the system. This is true of any system the regulates itself.
Benhabib’s claim is that individual desires preexist the enlistments of social ideologies, and that communication is a way of expressing and those desires. She writes that “by acting and speaking as cultural, social, and linguistic beings we . . . first become subjects, that is, beings capable of initiating meaningful utterances, of acting and interacting; beings capable of revealing themselves, their intentions, purposes, desires, feelings, and moods” (Benhabib 63). Benhabib is at pains in her introduction to articulate her skepticism toward theories that neglect to include emotion in their investigations, but she seems simply to place emotion in the position of the “black box” of individual motivation. Because certain emotional states are correlative with changes in biochemical balances, though, the imaginary mutual exclusivity of a
“lifeworld” constituted by interpersonally communicative actions and the literal biological world might not be so realistic after all.
Habermas, with his book, uses the idea of communicative rationality to justify the claim that “the lifeworld in which human existence is embedded is . . . suspended, as it were, in the structures of linguistic intersubjectivity and is maintained in the same medium in which subjects capable of speech and action come to a mutual understanding about something in the world” (Habermas 149). The limitation to
Habermas’ conception of discursive evolution stems from his decision not to extend his idea of intersubjectivity to the biosocial world. By limiting his discussion of subjectivity to ostensibly human actors, Habermas contributes further to a collective social understanding of the human subject as being
59 exempt from the rules governing other systemic bodies. A truly radical theory of intersubjectivity, like that envisioned by Althusser or Wilden, takes into account the fact that the characteristics constitutive of
“subjectivity” -- assimilation and organization of information, goal-oriented behavior, homeostatic self- regulation -- do not limit themselves in their applicability to systems solely comprised of humans. Rather, the characteristics of self-regulation that seem so determinative of human behavior have reverberations throughout every “field of study” and make social and discursive morphogenesis simultaneously the product of physical biochemical processes and the circulation of linguistic signs.
By envisioning the philosophical/critical “system” as a closed one that refers only to itself, that is limited by its disciplinarity and its obligation not to include physical or biological systems in its accounting of human social existence, Benhabib and Habermas situate themselves firmly in the camp of what
Althusser would call the Ideological State Apparatus. They accomplish this by making claims to objective knowledge about the way communication works. Specifically, they think that communication can only take place in certain ways and that it can be understood as a fundamentally social occurrence. Without understanding the way that entropy functions in the exchange of information they cannot account for the way that societies change; they have to reaffirm the conservative line that society is progressing in a certain determined way that careful analysis of available texts will make apparent. What Althusser provides by way of a departure from this style of thinking is the inclusion of intentional lacunae in his writing. In contrast to
Benhabib and Habermas, Althusser self-consciously undermines the consistency of his own work in order to subvert the sociopolitical system that incorporates apparently dissenting voices into its ideological fabric.
Althusser resists by making his claims deliberately self-contradictory and fragmentary, so that their form renders them unacceptable to a philosophical accounting that would have even competing discourses unified around a central point of debate. After all, the kind of coherence that Althusser intentionally avoids is, from his perspective, a feature of the analytic-philosophic apparatus of capitalistic political economy. He is not incidentally, after all, passed over in Critique, Norm, Utopia and The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity.
60 Conclusion: Reading the World, Writing the Mind
The intent of this work has been to provide, by examining the writings of a select few thinkers, notes toward a conceptual history of ideology. Ideology, on Marx’s and Althusser’s interpretations, evinces itself in the actions of individuals as they subject themselves to state control. Its function in repressing actions that threaten instability to the state means that it constitutes itself in terms of its delimitating effect on thought and action. Ideology, then, we may define as the structure that provides boundaries within which thought can appropriately take place. Its mutability over the course of time as the object of different thinkers’ discourse, though, establishes it as demonstrative of the permeability of the boundary separating system from structure. Ideology is the framework in which thought takes place; it delimits and structures of experience, and diverse thoughts and actions can take place within this structure that, though apparently mutually contradictory, in fact share the trait of only having existence with reference to the structure.
Ideology is also itself a systemic component of some larger ecology of concepts–– its evolvability is evident from the variability with which it is conceptualized by diverse thinkers, even those who claim a shared intellectual (“Marxist”) heritage. It is at once the insurmountable Subject governing and shaping all our actions and the very context in which morphogenesis (and, by extension, revolution) takes place. By drawing attention to the way that ideology’s denotation depends on the time period in which it is being talked about, the period of the author’s work in which it is being talked about, and the author’s own idiosyncratic approach to the topic, this work should have indicated that statements about ideology are always going to define ideology in terms of an imaginary framework consistent with the thinker’s own ideology.
Althusser wanted to contribute to the creation of a classless society whose citizens enjoy freedom from state control. His works problematize his own goal by envisioning a capitalistic society whose mechanisms of control are so effective that they appear to impose limitations on every action and thought of the constituents. Althusser’s goal was to provide methodological notes toward interpreting experience in a way that frees it from ideological complicity with capitalism. In his works he attempts to initiate an epistemological and ontological revolution by showing that fundamental scientistic notions about human behavior and social identity themselves work to delimit the ability of people to conceptualize their own selves. An example of the sort of assumptions Althusser tried to overturn might illustrate the delicacy and intricacy with which he has to argue his points.
61 In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin published an article in the American peer-reviewed academic journal Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which argued that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (1244). Drawing from an example given by the economist William Forster Lloyd, Hardin claims that resources held in common will invariably be exploited to the point of exhaustion. This phenomenon, he argues, is the result of humanity’s innate tendency toward the satisfaction of self-interested goals. Hardin perceives his pessimism about human nature to pose itself as an intervention in global society’s progression toward self-destruction: “Some would say that this [sentiment] is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial” (1244). Hardin’s argument exemplifies the scientistic ideology Althusser decries in declaring as fact a statement about original human behavior. Hardin’s presumption that, in the evolutionary long-term, self- interestedness overrides communitarian goals does not correspond to any empirical claims but rather relies on his relegation of the problem of causality to one of Bateson’s “black boxes” par excellence: natural selection. His presumption of universal self-interest as more involved in determining human behavior than altruism bespeaks an ideology complicit with the operation of capitalistic enterprises, which rely on ideas of individual property and the fundamentality of competition (and exploitation) to human existence.
Curiously, Hardin proposes that the best method to correct the course of a global society that has gone off in the wrong direction is to impose more mechanisms of control: “The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed” (1248). A capitalistic enterprise, characterized by its institution of apparatuses of social control and its drive to convert natural resources into controllable energy, ought to use more severe forms of control to fix its problems! Hardin’s claim is legitimated by its publication in Science, which prints articles by scientists that are reviewed by other scientists, guaranteeing every piece’s complicity with the scientifically sanctioned capitalistic enterprise of economic and ecological exploitation, control, and annihilation.
Althusser wanted a society that is not victim to the tragedy of the commons and whose constituent knowledge givers (“scientists”) would not presume the self-interestedness of all humans and relegate its causal explanation to a black box like “natural selection”. He wants to find a way to direct readers toward the realization of a society wherein the people coming up with solutions to problems like overpopulation do not contribute, with their hidden ontological presuppositions, to the continuance of a doctrine of control, delimitation, and exploitation as the only means to survival in the world. Althusser wants readers to begin
62 to construct a society wherein the behavior of individual behavior may be self-interested, but where the conceptual basis on which behavior is interpreted construes intersubjectivity as preceding individuality in human identity.
The idea that emerges from the present work is that ideology’s representation of itself must necessarily put it in the position of an element within a self-consistent, closed system, and that this representation is necessarily fallacious, since Wilden has shown that open systems predominate in the natural and social worlds (not that that distinction is necessarily a meaningful one). Still, this work must include its own interpretation of ideology’s “center,” and my suggestion of its primary role in interpersonal exchange must be left for the reader’s own evaluation. Ideology, as I have argued, evolves as the result of a communicative exchange between readers and texts. Althusser, Wilden, and Lacan thematize the process of reading and interpretation as crucial to the process of theoretization. Finally, though, any investigation of the history of the field of ideology poses problems that are difficult even to address, since to talk about ideology is apparently to alter the field of ideology itself and its definition within the field of language.
Althusser’s apparent radicalism alienates him from contemporary philosophical discourse because of his apparent disregard for meticulousness and systematicity. The fact that he leaves unsaid so many of the formally radical elements of his body of work, on my reading, leads Wilden hastily to categorize him as a derivative reader of Lacan who unsuccessfully tries to transfer the psychoanalyst’s concepts to critical
Marxist theory. Althusser is careful, recall, not to make claims of objectivity or of self-consistency, so his characterization in one passage of absence as filling one role in social governance does not necessarily hold true for his entire body of work.
It is the two authors’ (Wilden’s and Althusser’s) shared attempts to read Lacan and situate his work in a more explicitly theoretico-critically-oriented framework that provides the point of conjuncture between their respective modes of thinking: both thematize Lacan’s declaration that “absence” is a factor in human behavior in order to justify their respective claims; Althusser tacitly situates absence as the central element of the ideological body, while Wilden claims that absence’s position on an analogical scale of presence accounts for conceptual and ecological morphogenesis. It is here that Wilden’s pretensions to mutual exclusivity appear to fall apart because it is clear that both he and Althusser, with their varying ideas respecting “absence,” corresponding to an attempt to situate that concept consistently into their own conceptual frameworks about social governance, both contribute to a disjoining of the definition of
63 “absence” in Lacanian discourse, and thus both enter into a dialogue with one another wherein the similarities between the two theoretical frameworks become apparent as their constituent elements analogously align respecting the element of absence.
Althusser’s work provides, with its silences and its self-doubt, the framework for an attempt to move toward a new theory of conceptual morphogenesis. His theory’s own self-doubt frees it from what he perceives to be immanent critiques’ tendency to collapse into inconsistency. Althusser envisions knowledge systems whose codes do not permit the expansion and revision of even the most fundamental axioms to lend themselves readily to incorporation into the state’s ideology. Recognizing that for a knowledge system to have mechanisms for revising its axioms would require an infinitely regressive number of instruments of control (for what meta-regulatory mechanisms would supervise the process of revising axioms?), Althusser provides the vocabulary for articulating a skepticism even toward cybernetic ontology by pointing toward a methodologically justified critical theoretically-oriented social thought that is divested of at least some of the biases that come with claims to absolute knowledge. Cybernetics’s characterization and theorization of the mechanisms of control observable in the natural world and artificially reproducible is analogous to
Althusser’s description (from within) of the logic of the contemporary capitalistic state. By construing knowledge as drawing from a closed system of information and referring to a closed system of facts about the world, the capitalistic state and its associated ideological apparatuses represents knowledge and human behavior as being controllable if only the proper inputs of information into the system can be controlled.
What systems theory makes explicit, and what Althusser hides away in the formal structure of the entirety of his work, is that conceiving of reality as being solely defined in terms of the imposition of control upon disparate wayward elements is a delusional one that neglects to take into account the necessity of the apparently random, unpredictable, or noisy in the sustenance of homeostatic systems. A social system that construes itself in terms of its organization and that attempts to neutralize agents of difference or bodies that resist incorporation into the social system’s own strict definitions of selfhood places itself in jeopardy by ignoring the reality of noise’s interchangeability with pattern, of the interpenetrability of the boundaries that separate the self from the other or the system from chaos. A reading of Althusser’s work that would have it speak to a single consistent theory about social reality is a reading that demonstrates the digitalized understanding of a fundamentally analog communicative act so unfortunately characteristic of our contemporary capitalistic society.
64 What is Althusser’s goal, then, if it is definitely not to construct a self-consistent theory of social governance? My argument is that looking to the formal characteristics of Althusser’s writing provides the best indication of what Althusser’s intellectual project is. Althusser enlists the reader in a form of critical reading characterized by its focus on the idea of control by the textual production of ideological state apparatuses. Every thinker discussed engages in reading practices that determine the extent of the field of ideology but whose consideration opens up questions about even that: the limits of the discussion of ideology. Thus critical reading becomes the source of a trialogue among the “author” Althusser, his readers, and the structure of ideological state apparatuses that makes ideology’s mechanics detectible. Althusser, through his critical writing praxis, wants to encourage readers to read the world, as it were, in a manner analogous to the way that they read his texts -- that is, he wishes his texts to point toward an approach to the real wherein its fundamental resistance to incorporation into imaginary frameworks is always foregrounded in consciousness, as is the awareness that not to incorporate reality into an imaginary framework would be to perform the impossible act, or to behave outside of the boundaries defining the characteristically human.
Althusser understands that reading is essentially a communicative act, that interpretation is the inevitable result of the human impulse to fill lacunae in the author’s reasoning or explanation. Were interpretation unnecessary, the mode of communication would be perfect, which would ensure the perfect transmission of information -- a circumstance that points directly toward the sort of world-controllability envisioned by cybernetics’ most fascistic advocates. By foregrounding the necessity of individual interpretation in constructing theories of ideology and effecting change within the field of ideology,
Althusser invites the reader to construe the world outside the text in terms of its open-systemic properties.
Althusser’s works have to resist incorporation into the structure of contemporary academic discourse on critical theory because they insist on a final interpretation that reads critical theory as open and permeable, having no real date of inception or expiration. His resistance complicates the study of ideology greatly and is probably finally responsible for the conspicuous silence in the Anglophone world respecting his philosophy.
The immense wealth of material available on the subjects of Marxist critical theory, communications theory, systems theory, and cybernetics prevented this study from being a comprehensive one, and its most obvious flaw––its tendency toward imprecision––results from an inability properly to
65 address the arguments put forward by every thinker introduced above. Future research inclined toward thoroughly schematizing biologically-oriented conceptual evolution (conceptual evolution occurring on an analogical scale involving the maintenance and permeability of boundaries) would no doubt provide an important link between the apparently dissimilar ontological foundations of scientistic and contemporary critico-theoretical thinking. Another opportunity for continued research presents itself with respect to
Critique, Norm, Utopia and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: the texts’ conceptualizations of communication make their arguments incapable of addressing Althusser’s texts without revealing a fundamental gap in their own reasoning, but if Althusser were placed directly into dialogue with Benhabib and Habermas it is likely that a conciliatory reading of the disparate thinkers could signify a transitional ontology of communication occurring on analogical scales amongst various levels of informational exchange.
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