Marx and Althusser’s Ideologies

Observation:

Based on this week’s readings from Marx and Althusser (put in relation, of course, with previous readings for this class), I reached the conclusion that a shift/transfer to metaphysics in one form or another at a certain point in the arguments is necessary for the consistency and satisfactory operation of the (arguably “cultural”) theories put forth (by the thinkers under scrutiny).

Interrogations:
In continuation to my observation above – serving as an introduction to my response, I will structure my post as a series of interrogations:

1) Does Marx’s project consist in the recuperation of the centrality and uniqueness of the use-value within a necessarily modified society (and a transformed infrastructure, perhaps)? What is at stake in the denunciation of the naturalization of the process of exchange?

2) The reference to “the magic of money” as well as the inversion in causal relation that Marx posits in the conclusion of his chapter on “Commodities” in The Capital is particularly intriguing, in my view: “What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all the other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money.” (Marx, 187).
On account of this, money is – to use Althusser’s formulation – “always already”, just like Althusser’s ideology and condition of subject(ivity), or like Foucault’s “p(/P)ower”. Even though an avowedly social construct in Marx’s theory of the commodities, money becomes, I would argue, a metaphysical concept that holds the argument together. It is at this point (in his account of money), I believe, that Marx makes the – unacknowledged – move to metaphysics in this chapter (just as Althusser makes the move to metaphysics when he claims that “individuals are always-already subjects” – 176, that the existence of ideology precedes all existence).

3) It strikes me that both Marx and Althusser – in contrast to structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers – appear to leave the concept of reality intact (though hardly ever accessible). This assumption gets complicated, however, (at least in Althusser), when he (Althusser) asserts “the effective presence of a new reality: ideology” (133). If ideology becomes “reality”/ “obviousness” – and is experienced as such – then what is the point in denouncing it as a fake/fraud? However fascinating I find Althusser’s argument to be (just like Spinoza’s about human freedom – which I believe Althusser’s theory is a version of and about which I asked myself the same question), I cannot help asking what is the point in the denunciation of ideology as a sort of fake. At the point of conversion in “obviousness”, ideology becomes ontology, in my view.

4) For Freud, the unconscious is endowed with a structure; for Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language. For Althusser, ideology is “exactly like the unconscious” (Althusser, 161) in that it is “eternal”. Does this mean that ideology is structured as a language? (it appears to me that it does).

5) Prof. Doane referred in her lecture to Althusser’s strategy of introducing the discursive realm of “s(/S)cience” in opposition to ideology as a means of giving consistency to his theory about Ideology and the State. If Althusser’s theory is supposed to belong to science, is this also true of Marx’s philosophy that Althusser re-reads or does (“vulgar”) Marxism – in the final analysis – belong to Ideology?

Moreover, Althusser puts forth a new theory of t(/T)heory, on account of which he calls for the “supersession” of the descriptive theory of the State that Marxism proposes (138). To what extent is this “supersession” also a suppression (of Marxism to make room for the Althusserian theory)?