Text and Subject Position after Althusser

Althusser's achievement is that he redefined Marxism. He reconceptualizes history and totality in terms of different times, construes knowledge as the outcome of a process of construction, and interprets subjectivity as an effect of ideology and unconscious processes. Unfortunately, Althusser's functionalist view of ideology claims that the subject recognizes itself as a subject because it duplicates— reflects—an absolute subject. However, Lacan's notion of the mirror stage remedies this fault. Lacan's subject always misrecognizes itself in a process of contradiction that threatens the stability of any given social order. Moreover, unlike Foucault's subject, which is limited in that subjectivity is folded back into a vaguely expanded notion of "power," this revised Althusserian subject allows careful reading of texts. The critic does not simply read against the grain; he or she exposes the multiple points of identification offered the reader. For example, Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" installs the reader in multiple positions: a devotee of high culture and the national canon, a lover of the verbal signifier and its play, a consumer of confessional discourse, and a masculine "I" desiring a laboring, singing woman. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/9 Text and Subject Position after Althusser Antony Easthope Manchester Metropolitan University "a bare subject without a world never `is' proximally, nor is it ever given." Heidegger After the British hostage, Terry Waite, came back to England from five years in solitary confinement he spoke live on television and made a very revealing verbal slip. Recounting his suffering in Beirut he told how one day he was allowed a single postcard. This had a picture of John Bunyan on the front. Then, said Waite, "turning over the car," he read a message of encouragement on the back. What had brought his unconscious thoughts so close to death? Was it the physical deprivation only or was it rather the way a normal human identity had been denied to him by the others around, who had treated him as though he hardly existed at all? Perhaps we might now see that a major weakness of classic Marxism was its anthropology: its determination to define the human in terms ofa single instinct, and that instinct as biological survival rather than the desire for recognition. Arguably, then, it has been the achievement of Althusser's writing to turn Marxism away from questions of production and survival towards the issues of reproduction and identity. To read Althusser this way is to treat certain aspects of his project as residual, particularly (1) a willingness to retain a privileging of economic practice via the notion that the social formation is ("ultimately") a structure in dominance, and (2) the assumption associated with this privileging, that a knowledge of the real is available to science and its "theoretical practitioners" but not to the rest of us who are irredeemably sunk in ideology. It was no accident, as we used to say, that in the United States the otherwise admirably comprehensive poststructuralist reading lists went straight from Adorno to Barthes, missing Althusser, and it is entirely to be welcomed that serious attempts are being undertaken to make good that lack. Althusser earns the right to go on being read (or to be read for the first time) in the 1990s because of three conceptual interventions, each of which depends on the others. (1) Althusser reconceptualizes history and totality in terms of "different times," in fact of time as multidimensional, a swerving bundle of uneven temporalities (Althusser and Balibar 94-100). I have 1 Easthope: Text and Subject Position after Althusser Published by New Prairie Press 84 STCL, Vol. 18, No. I (Winter, 1994) found myself frequently citing and attempting to amplify this insight (Easthope, British 16-19 and Literary 182-88), and am glad to note that Robert Young in White Mythologies (1990) gives a warm endorsement to Althusser's conception of a totality which "is never totalisable because it is decentred and displaced in time" (White 58). (2) Since Althusser rejects the Hegelian and (early) Marxist account of totality as an expressive unity and since that conception of an object presupposes correspondingly a notion of Man as humanist subject, Althusser must replace any form of epistemology that presumes the real to yield knowledge of itself with one in which knowledge is emphatically the outcome of production, a process of the construction of knowledge (to say this is not to deny certain problems with his own epistemological stance) (3). Since, again, Althusser is working with (and working through) a rethinking of totality as decentered, it is not merely the subject of knowledge who has to be thought of as situated in relation to a specific form of discourse-it is subjectivity in general. I would persist in claiming that Althusser's most important contribution, presaged in his earlier work but becoming explicit in the essay on ideology of 1969, is to rethink subjectivity as an effect of both ideology and the process of the unconscious. From this basis in a concern with the subject, my paper will be directed at several topics. It will first take the essay on ideology and try to update some of our readings of that text. Then it will turn to review the way the essay's implications were developed into a particular form of analysis in what I would want to call "British post-structuralism," at this point offering a comment on the comparative limitations of what you can do in the same mode by drawing on the work of Foucault. Third, with a poem as illustration and with a more positive intention, I shall enter an expansion and defence of the Althusserian notion of the subject as afforded a position and point(s) of identification in and by the text. All of this briefly, and for the purposes of discussion. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser's essay argues that for an economy to survive it must not merely produce but also reproduce itself. This entails the reproduction of labour-power and so of a workforce submissive to the rules of the established order. Effected by state apparatuses (institutions), submission is secured by ideology which operates to reproduce subjects, to turn "concrete individuals" (newborn babies) into speaking subjects. It does so by "interpellating" or hailing subjects, constructing us so that we come to think of ourselves as free, conscious, choosing selves (thus, 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, ol. 8, Iss. 1 [1994], Art. 9 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/9 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1341