Instead of births, Althusser seeks unforeseen and stupefying eruptions. Autobiography becomes a kind of science fiction. Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up these memoirs without memory, without genesis or origin. More than a philosopher’s account of his life, replicants with mnemonic implants come to mind – as do the vertiginous temporalities that provide the framework for novels such as Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. This conception of temporality extending from the future to the past – where the origin amounts to either a lure or an agent of chaos – evokes Dick’s theories, according to which the commonplace understanding of History is only a fiction, and the world we inhabit just one version of reality among others.
Even though Althusser’s narrative is the confession of a murderer enlisting all the arguments at his disposal to make the reader understand the reasons for the ‘drama’ in which his life culminated – and then pardon him – an implacable clinical tableau doubles it. One element in particular warrants attention. At the end of the book, in chapter XXIII, when Althusser seems to have exhausted all his rhetorical tricks, a singular character takes the stage: an ‘old doctor friend’ appears, reviews the facts, and offers conclusions of his own. This party remarks ‘an extraordinary set of events some of which were purely accidental, others not’; at any rate, ‘the whole configuration could in no way have been foreseen’.18 A doctor? Needless to say, such a figure signifies authorized, scientific opinion. In all likelihood, this ‘old doctor friend’ never existed.19 Here, too, the reader is drawn into a strange screenplay …
Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects comes to mind. The film tells the story in a long flashback. The disabled protagonist – the only one to escape the explosion that concludes the story – is being interrogated by a police inspector. Played by Kevin Spacey, the protagonist-narrator recounts the events he witnessed and presents himself as the plaything of circumstances orchestrated by a mysterious and terrifying gangster, a certain ‘Keyzer Söze’. As the film draws to a close and the suspect is released – having delivered an account that seems to clear him – the inspector looks around his office; he realizes that more or less all the names the suspect has mentioned surround him: on the poster pinned up behind him, a coffee mug, a mat on the desk … The crafty witness has used all the signifiers at hand to devise a plausible story without any connection to the actual facts. In the final sequence, we see him limping down the street; his step gradually becomes steadier until he reaches a limousine and a chauffeur opens the door. We understand that the man pretending to be crippled is none other than Keyzer Söze himself – whatever his ‘true’ identity may be. This could well be the point of Althusser’s confession: to requisition all available signifiers – from Marxism to psychoanalysis, from Spinoza to Derrida – in order to concoct a plea before the tribunal of History; acquitted, he would leave his invalid condition behind and stride down the high road of philosophy.
How did relations between ‘unreason’ and culture evolve from the 1960s on? Significantly, two of the great French maîtres à penser, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, were frequently described as mad. The latter, of course, presented a few guarantees: he was literally psychotic. Lacan, on the other hand, was a professional psychoanalyst. But that did not keep the media then – just as it doesn’t prevent conservative intellectuals now – from speaking of him as an eccentric guru and a megalomaniac. There are thousands of rumours about the founder of the École Freudienne: his habit of pulling wads of bills out of his office desk, his compulsive behaviour, odd attire, and obstinate refusal to stop for red lights, etc. Althusser, for his part, has come right out and told us that he was a kleptomaniac, that he tried to steal a nuclear submarine from the Toulon harbour, and that he staged a ‘first-rate non-violent hold-up in the Bank of Paris and the Netherlands’.20 Mao Zedong wanted to meet him, he claims; he also sent letters to the president of the United States and demanded an audience with the pope. What warrants our attention is not the relationship between thought and ‘madness’ in general, but a more specific question: how to think with madness. How does theoretical discourse negotiate with nervous illness? The question is acute in Althusser’s case, and proves all the more insistent because he never resolved the matter. Instead, he attempted to address the issue within a singular dispositive; the combination of psychoanalytic concepts and philosophy (the ‘symptomatic reading’ he applied to Marx) with his abiding claim to being an analysand produced unprecedented effects.
A third personage is also necessary for understanding the philosophical scene: Michel Foucault. In 1946, shortly before Althusser took up his teaching duties, the two met at the École Normale Supérieure. At the time, Foucault’s peers believed that ‘his psychological balance was, to say the least, fragile’: ‘one day, someone teaching at the ENS found him lying on the floor of a room where he had just sliced up his chest with a razor’.21 There can be no doubt that such borderline behaviour stemmed from Foucault’s experience of shame and pain in being homosexual – as, alas, was often the case in France at the time. All the same, ‘when Histoire de la folie came out, everyone who knew him saw immediately that it was connected to his personal history’.22 But if Foucault constantly skirted madness, he managed to escape it – unlike Althusser. Their friendship weathered a few storms, which stemmed from Foucault’s vigorous criticism of Marxism, starting with The Order of Things. All the same, it lasted until Foucault’s death in 1984. Ultimately, both thinkers trained their philosophical weapons at the same adversary: subjugation. The ‘ideological state apparatuses’ Althusser analyzed include the hospital and the prison. The institutional critiques Foucault pursued – although less ‘massive’ and more focused on the dispositives through which knowledge and power are articulated - concern how certain discourses are filtered, excluded and discredited, which is what Althusser’s writings do too.
Althusser refers to Foucault frequently when evoking his psychiatric woes. On the one hand, he does so because of the nature of his friend’s works: Althusser had hailed Histoire de la folie with genuine philosophical enthusiasm. What is more, Foucault’s publication of the confessions of Pierre Rivière – a case of parricidal dementia – appears to have provided an (unacknowledged) model for The Future Lasts Forever. ‘I am neither alive nor dead and, though I have not been buried’, Althusser writes, ‘I am “bodiless”. I am simply missing, which was Foucault’s splendid definition of madness.’23 At the end of his life, Althusser considered himself to number among the ‘missing’; claiming that he was now ‘bodiless’, he could finally assume his disguise (imposture). By his own account, he had hardly read Marx and knew only a few passages from Spinoza. Over the course of his autobiography, Althusser takes the stage as an ingenious usurper, cannily elaborating philosophical concepts based on whatever spare excerpts happen to lie within reach.
Announcing his own bricolage and non-savoir, Althusser in fact enunciates the fundamental imposture of philosophy in general: upon reflection, all discourse signals its alienated condition; for him, this alienation has assumed the specific traits of madness. An ingenious forger, Althusser even attributes an array of hilarious false quotes to his psychoanalyst René Diatkine, which introduce ‘Transference and Countertransference’. Althusserian thinking, to employ Eric Marty’s apt phrase, qualifies as ‘carnivalesque’. It pronounces the absolute singularity of the event in the madman’s discourse, an eruption troubling borders and systems. Its point of departure lies in the ‘great confinement’ Foucault described as the ideological signature of the classical age: the separation of Madness and Reason, the inauguration of an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. Nor should one forget that this point – more precisely, the Cartesian cogito – is precisely where Jacques Derrida begins his withering critique of Foucault: thought, even if it is mad, founds the subject.
Might History, which Althusser always defined as a ‘process without subject’, be a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’? His writings on psychoanalysis insist that the unconscious a
nalyzes itself – which amounts to saying that no outside exists. That means there is no waste, either – no remainder. Analysis occurs as autophagy, an autarchic moment. As the social unconscious, or, rather, a repressive superego – a fixative destined to thwart individuation – ideology comprises an array of imaginary representations that reflect, in dazzling array, the tasks and positions of human beings in the social sphere. It has no outside, either. Instead, it addresses us from behind: the way the psychoanalyst speaks to the patient on the couch. ‘You must never judge someone on the basis of his own self-conscious image but on the basis of the whole process which, behind this consciousness, produces it.’24 Ideology, like the unconscious, occupies a position ‘behind our backs’.
‘Not to indulge in storytelling’, Althusser writes, ‘remains for me the one and only definition of materialism.’25 Telling oneself tales means maintaining an illusion, or a bundle of illusions, that only serve to legitimate or explain our actions. This is what ideology does: it assures social cohesion by assigning individuals predetermined places, telling the ‘story’ (histoire) everyone is duty-bound to believe. But ‘not to indulge in storytelling’ means more than just changing the course of the narrative: it means breaking the mould where the truth is fabricated – cognizance of the fact that these ‘stories’ amount to circumstantial fictions, an ensemble of a posteriori justifications; that is, they cannot constitute an ‘origin’ in which a people or an individual might find support.
Dick pursued a similar objective in his novels when he expanded the contestation of ‘reality’ to time. Time, he explains, is not linear; it is ‘orthogonal’ and moves in different directions on a single axis, thereby producing multiple realities. It ‘contains … as a simultaneous plane or extension, everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played’.26 We do not inhabit the universe just like that; rather, we live in a ‘multiverse’ prone to ‘time-slips’. And they really do happen, Dick assures us. If we fail to notice such slips, it is because ‘our brains automatically generate false memory-systems to obscure them’.27 Time is energy invested in the infinite production of veils (dokos) assuring the coherence of reality and ‘[hiding] the ontological reality beneath its flow’.28 Individuals, in turn, are nothing but ‘stations’ within ‘a vast network’.29
As we know, the delirious discourse of the paranoiac approaches philosophical reflection – and to such an extent that the one can sometimes be mistaken for the other. ‘Maybe’, Dick observes, ‘all systems – that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about – are manifestations of paranoia.’30 Inasmuch as any quest for insight may count as paranoid delirium, only the plausibility (vraisemblance) of its object allows us to distinguish between paranoia and philosophy, at least on an initial level. What do philosophers and paranoiacs say? In equal measure, they affirm that the disorder of life hides meaning. In either case, it is a matter of revealing order underlying the chaos of reality. The paranoiac is unmasked by the fact that he thinks the order is conspiratorial and directed against him. If the madman adopted Althusser’s theory of history – the premise that it constitutes a ‘process without subject’ (that it is ‘nothing personal’, in other words) – wouldn’t he turn into a full-blooded philosopher?
In discussing Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek speaks of a ‘deceptive layer’ that covers the real. This notion, which connects with the concept of alienation, underlies philosophical idealism: true life is elsewhere; actual reality is somewhere beyond appearances. As Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter demonstrate in Nation of Rebels,31 the ideology of conspiracy fuelled 1960s counterculture. Such gnosticism attests to impotence, too: what can one do against a secret plot other than offer resistance in silence? Althusserian materialism rests on the certitude that reality has no double: everything is right there, before our eyes. The struggles are concrete, the forces at work stand in clear array, and the powers of illusion (i.e., ideology) are present inasmuch as institutions (ideological state apparatuses) materialize them. The decision ‘not to indulge in storytelling’ means the precise opposite of paranoia: reality is no longer divided into infinite paths leading towards a hidden truth. Clément Rosset, whom Althusser also taught, traces the matter to its source when he declares war on metaphysics – the search for a meaning beyond ‘appearances’. The real is idiotic, he writes: ‘that is, without doubling, existing in itself only’; ‘idiotes means simple, particular, unique’.32 Metaphysical idealism such as one finds in conspiracy theories and films like The Matrix may be decoded as follows: ‘its function is to protect the real; its structure is not a matter of refusing to perceive the real, but of doubling it; and its failure is to recognize only too late, in the protective double, the very real meant to be kept at bay [dont on croyait s’être gardé]’.33 In other words, Althusser and Rosset position themselves at the opposite end of Philip K. Dick’s ‘multiverse’: ideology represents the very source of metaphysics; and their philosophical praxis involves lifting the scales from our eyes. The idiot and the madman join the philosopher in daring to declare that the emperor has no clothes …
The ‘Mass Line’ and Cultural Studies
Unsurprisingly, key figures in cultural studies such as Stuart Hall have stressed Althusser’s ‘impact’ on the theories developed at the University of Birmingham during the 1960s and ‘70s. It is too readily forgotten that the theory of ‘class struggle in philosophy’, born of Althusser’s exchanges with his Maoist students, paved the way for the study of popular culture. Among Althusserian concepts, Hall points to ‘ideology as practices rather than as systems of ideas’, and, moreover, to ‘the ways in which Althusser … reshaped the central issue of the relationship between ideologies/culture and class formations’.34 In effect – and in contradistinction to the tenets of classical Marxist thought – Althusser did not view relations between social groups and ideologies in terms of automatism. The one need not follow from the other, and ‘class struggle in philosophy’ pervades all discourses circulating in the social field. Most of all, Hall observes, Althusser advanced ‘the argument that classes were not simple “economic” structures but formations constituted by all the different practices – economic, political, and ideological – and their effects on each other’.35 In other words, and applied to the cultural sphere: the choice of a given sign of belonging does not make one the member of a given community; modalities of cultural production and consumption do not determine us; rather, the (system of) relations we establish between our practices and our choices assign us a ‘position’. Here, in nucleo, lies the theoretical programme that presided over the genesis of cultural studies, the inaugural legitimation of the choice its practitioners made: to treat television programmes, comic books and popular singers with the same level of attention and seriousness as works of art belonging to the sphere of ‘high culture’ (or, as it was more commonly known at the time, ‘bourgeois culture’). Among the founders of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, Raymond Williams affirmed that ‘cultural materialism’ provided the basis for his critical project: ‘comfort’, entertainment and public opinion (or ideology) should receive as much attention as other phenomena – automobiles, say, or clothing.36
In the crucible of radical movements in the late 1960s, the Maoists of the UJC (Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes) elaborated the theory of the ‘mass line in philosophy’. Their leader, Robert Linhart, had been Althusser’s pupil at the École Normale Supérieure. Mao Zedong codified the definition of the mass line as follows: take the ideas of the masses and interpret them in light of Marxism-Leninism, then bring them back to the masses. This cultural reading of the working class, the principle that the productions of the people prevail over all others, gave rise to a kind of inverted elitism. On the one hand, a given work was to be judged in terms of the interest the proletar
iat would show for it. On the other hand, every cultural expression of the working class should become the object of a painstaking decoding, in order to find the ‘correct’ interpretation of Marxist thought and better understand the people’s message. As such, the ‘mass line’ represented a double hermeneutic: a theological disputatio in perpetuity, whereby ‘the People’ replaced ‘God’ in offering an ambiguous discourse with hidden intentions to be explored.
As such, what makes cultural studies and its artistic derivates the paradigm for contemporary thinking comes from remainders of Benjaminian messianism transfigured by Maoism and Althusserism. The metaphysical quest borne by revolutionary radicalism took refuge in the erudite deciphering of popular culture; by this means, the ‘historical rescue’ Benjamin once envisioned was supposed to occur. Since then, the ‘masses’ have transformed into consumer crowds, and Maoism has turned into postmodernist theory. For all that, the methods and the theoretical presuppositions prove astonishingly similar. ‘Viewing knowledge in terms of the masses’, as French Maoists urged, means affirming that the first criterion for judging a cultural production is its producer’s status: membership in one social group or another legitimates, in fine, the content and the value of the production. Postcolonial theory, by way of cultural studies, directly inherited this ‘ mass line’, which holds that the origin of a given production trumps all other considerations. Such is the grand, postmodern question: where are you from? To what social, ethnic, religious, sexual group do you belong? That said, for the French Maoists, the proletariat represented much more than an origin: it embodied the march of History, and there could be no doubt it would not remain minoritarian. ‘At the starting-point of Maoist discourse’, Jean-Claude Milner observes, ‘one finds massiveness. It was a matter of starting with enormous entities: the People, the People’s Cause, Proletarian Revolution, History. Then – and most often without any transition – came the details. Such-and-such an action, declaration, or circumstance.’37
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