Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Social Theory: A Comparison of Althusser and Foucault Author(s): Robert Paul Resch Reviewed work(s): Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 511-549 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772903 . Accessed: 12/04/2012 14:41
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and Modernism,Postmodernism, Social Theory:A Comparisonof and Foucault Althusser

Robert Paul Resch
History, Texas A&M

In this essay* I will inquire into the theoretical positions of two major figures in postwar French and European intellectual history, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, in light of current debates over the "crisis of modernism" and the much-heralded supersession of the latter by a still amorphous entity known as postmodernism. I will argue that Althusser's work and the structural Marxist school which derives from it represent a modernist approach to social theory, which, far from being a symptom of the exhaustion of modernism (or Marxism), demonstrates the potential of Marxist modernism. Of course, the influence of Althusser on contemporary debates in social theory has diminished dramatically in recent years, but I take this to be a problem requiring an explanation rather than the "natural"outcome of the internal development of social theory. By providing an interpretation of Althusser as a modernist, I hope to problematize the eclipse of both modernism and Marxism and lift the cloak of legitimacy from what is rapidly becoming a postmodernist anti-Marxist orthodoxy.
*Defending Althusser means never having to look very far for an argument. I would like to thank MartyJay, Doug Kellner, and Larry Hickman for their rigorous readings of earlier drafts, as well as my colleagues in the Interdisciplinary Group for Historical Literary Study at Texas A&M University for their stimulating comments on certain of the arguments put forward here. For remaining errors and my continued obtuseness I have, alas, only myself to blame. Poetics Today 10:3 (Fall 1989). Copyright ? 1989 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/89/$2.50.

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My reading of Althusser necessarily entails a defense of a modernist form of historical knowledge. Universally deprecated by postmodernist thinkers, historical thinking has also been the target of much modernist criticism, particularly from the major figures of French structuralism, including both Althusser and Foucault.' Until the late sixties, Althusser and Foucault shared a similar modernist critique of traditional historicism influenced by structuralism and by the French philosophy of science associated with the names of Bachelard and Canguilhem. Both rejected linear continuity, autonomous or unified human agency, homogeneous historical context, the evolution-realization of a historical or transhistorical subject, the existence of any direct or reductive form of causality or totality, and the idea that historical knowledge is self-evidently true or complete. For Althusser, however, the objective of this critique was to revive Marxism and historical thinking, to establish the scientificity of history within an original reworking of the ideas of science and historical discourse, and to elaborate a form of historical causality which would do justice to the complexity of social formations and human subjectivity within a nonreductive framework of economic determination. Foucault, on the other hand, was deeply suspicious of history as a methodological strategy capable of transcending the devastating criticisms structuralist modernism had leveled against it. Foucault was never convinced by Althusser's attempt to overcome the limitations of classical Marxism as a totalizing, teleological, and reductive discourse. Foucault's project, influenced by the irrationalist anti-aesthetic of Artaud and Bataille, was to investigate the exclusionary conceptual and institutional structures of human knowledge without recourse to any "repressive" formal theory of history or meaning.2 The fundamental tension between modernism and postmodernism parallels the contrast between critique and renewal in the thought of Althusser and Foucault. Modernism, to construct a concept appropriate to phenomena as diverse as cubism, Saussurian linguistics, relativity, Freudian psychoanalysis, Ulysses,the theater of Brecht, and
1. Narrowly defined, that is, confined to those whose work derives its inspiration

directly from the linguistics of Saussure, the term structuralism would exclude both

Foucault and Althusser. Such a narrow definition seems wrong-headed to me, however, since it obscures the central fact that what was going on in France in the sixties was nothing less than a modernist revolution in philosophy and the social sciences. Broadly defined, in terms of a general emphasis on abstract structural
determinations

adequately to describe the major intellectual currents of the period. 2. For Foucault'srelation to the tradition which runs from Sade through Bataille, see Stoekl 1985. See also Allan Megill's(1985) fine treatment of Foucault'saestheticism.

and an antipositivist epistemology, structuralism serves more or less

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the films of Eisenstein, is an attitude towards knowledge, representation, and experience marked by a double tension. As it emerged in the early twentieth century, modernism emphasized a new awareness of the structured complexity of the object, a complexity that rendered the object world more abstract and disturbingly less familiar than it had been to the nineteenth-century mind. At the same time, the modernist thinker, artist, or writer evinced an increased consciousness of the formal structures which shaped his or her perception and representation of the object, as well as the limitations and potentials which resulted from methodological self-awareness.3 This first tension, between the structured object and the perceptual apparatus of the subject, was inscribed in a second, social tension between a new and seemingly inexhaustible growth of technology and productive capacity, and social relations of class inequality and escalating tensions between imperialist powers, both outcomes of the rapid internal and international expansion of capitalism during the nineteenth century. Modernism was decisively influenced by the manifest contradictions and irrational development of bourgeois Europe; its critical attitude hardened into outright opposition as the result of World War I. From this historical perspective, I would like to foreground two important characteristics of modernism. First, the modernist had no doubt that the world existed and that, however complicated it had become, knowledge of it was not only possible, it was being produced at
3. My use of the term modernism attempts to distinguish elements which, if not absolutely new, were at least newly dominant. One can, of course, always find precedents for what I define as modern, in Kantian philosophy, Copernican science, or wherever abstract-structural determination is posited in conjunction with intense epistemological reorganization. Nor can one deny that elements of what I define as modernism, for example, abstraction, may be employed for purposes, for example, religious mysticism in abstract art, that are antithetical to my usage. I would not assert that my usage of the term modernismcircumscribes everything that happens in art, literature, or social theory after 1890, although I would argue that other elements are less original and less significant than they are usually depicted; for example, the affirmation of the absurd seems to me little more than bohemian epater le bourgeois imbuing romantic irrationalism with a fatalistic sense of humor. My emphasis on abstraction in relation to the object, specifically, on abstract structural determination and the limits and complexity of representation, that is, scientific knowledge of social structures, is thus a provisional attempt to sharpen the concept of modernism. I am following in the path of John Berger (1985: 159-88), who argues brilliantly in "The Moment of Cubism" that cubism represents the truly revolutionary component of modernism and a new "syntax" for the modern experience. (Berger's inability to see structural Marxism as anything but mechanistic reflectionism is an unfortunate [and rare] misunderstanding; see his review of Hadjinicolaou in Berger 1985: 197-204.) My conceptualization of modernism is, I hope, more useful than definitions so eclectic as to render the term almost meaningless for analytical purposes. For an encyclopedic panorama of "modernity," see Calinescu 1987.

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a dizzying pace. Second, the modernist felt that with this knowledge it was possible to criticize the existing state of affairs and change it for the better, to eliminate systematic and unnecessary exploitation of the lower classes, and to expand the material and cultural benefits of society until they were available to all classes. Modernism was socially as well as intellectually progressive. Seeing modernism as constructive rather than destructive, as producing knowledge rather than denying its possibility, clarifies a basic difference between the modernist and the postmodernist sensibilities too often obscured by their common antipathy toward nineteenth-century positivism. Modernism is antipositivistic, but it retains a deep underlying continuity with the optimistic tradition of rationality, realism, and materialism. Despite its parasitic appropriation of modernism, postmodernism's roots lie elsewhere, in the ultimately pessimistic tradition of irrationalism, vitalism, and extreme subjectivity, which has been "post" modern throughout its long life but only very recently valorized as such by the very "modern" which it purports to reject. What is at issue between modernism and postmodernism, Althusser and Foucault, extends beyond the merely theoretical into the political sphere (as the massive presence of Marx and Nietzsche in the debates suggests). The works of Althusser and Foucault had a strong political charge and polemical overtone in the febrile intellectual atmosphere of France from the Marxist-structuralist sixties, the apogee of Althusser's influence, to the Nietzschean-poststructuralist seventies, dominated by an anti-Marxist Left which included Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and such self-styled nouveauxphilosophes as Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy (see Descombes 1980; Callinicos 1982). The Nietzschean Left was a postmodernism avant la lettre (see Lash 1985); but before we proceed to a comparison of the theoretical positions of Althusser and Foucault, we must define postmodernism more precisely, situate it historically, and thereby clarify the political stakes in the theoretical confrontation between postmodernism and modernism. Content and Context Postmodernism: refers back to modernAs its form suggests, the term postmodernism ism in a gesture of negation and transcendence (see Jameson 1984a, 1984b, 1987; cf. Eagleton 1986; Foster 1983; Huyssen 1986; Krauss 1985; McHale 1987; Owens 1980). It defines itself in opposition to both the sterile, apolitical "high modernism" of the fifties (abstract expressionism in painting, the international style in architecture, the films of the great auteurs, the "great tradition" of literary modernism taught in literature departments, etc.) and the politicized avant-gardes of the twenties and thirties-both of the Left, movements which at-

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tempted to integrate art and technology into an egalitarian alternative to capitalist society (Weimar culture, Russian constructivism), and of the Right, movements which sought to blend technology and irrationalist vitalism into a new spiritual-material elitism of either an individualist or a nationalist character (vorticism, Italian futurism). Indeed, the repression of the politicized avant-garde by the cold war and the related triumph of high modernism constitute the cultural conditions of existence for postmodernism.4 Defenders of postmodernism emphasize the progressive nature of their rejection of the elitist formalism of high modernism and its "ethic of contamination," and the political wisdom of rejecting utopian and/or totalitarian (the latter term equates authoritarian capitalism and authoritarian socialism in opposition to freedom, which becomes, by default, identified with liberal capitalism) tendencies inherent in the avant-garde position (Lyotard 1984: 60-67; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985: 93-100; Huyssen 1986: 175ff.). I do not wish to contest the necessity of formulating a feasible (as opposed to utopian) socialism or to defend the ponderous and authoritarian bureaucracy inherent in the project of an overly centralized planned economy of the Stalinist type. Nor do I advocate socialist realism as an aesthetic or dialectical materialism as a unified science of nature. However, I am attempting to demonstrate that rejecting such positions does not necessarily mean accepting postmodernism as the only remaining progressive alternative to the status quo. I wish to contest postmodernism's claim to provide a useful method for analyzing modern capitalist societies, as well as its claim to promote the realization of progressive, let alone socialist, goals. Postmodernism's account of its own genealogy willfully obscures differences between (realist and egalitarian) Left avant-garde movements and their (irrationalist and elitist) Right counterparts, as well as differences between the Left avant-garde and the elitist, apolitical mandarins of high modernism (who were, after all, the products and symbols of America's cultural cold war). Postmodernism is not wrong to remind us of the failure of the historical avant-garde; it is wrong, however, to blame the victim for his own demise and thereby ignore the social origin and determination of the failure of modernism. Postmodernism defines itself in relation to the failure of modernism in order to divert attention from its own irrationalist and politically dubious ancestry, and perhaps to mask its ongoing negative dependency upon modernism as well. I would like
4. On this point see Serge Guilbaut's (1983) assessment of the New York and Paris art scenes; see also Allen 1983. For the concept of the avant-garde as the politicized antithesis of modernist formalism, see Burger 1984; for the history of its rise and fall throughout Europe, Willett 1978. For right-wing modernism see Jameson 1979, Kaplan 1986, and Herf 1984.

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to contest such self-serving distinctions by focusing upon the method and content rather than the professed objectives of postmodernism. From the perspective of its method and its content, postmodernism is much less original (and much less appealing) than generally realized. Postmodernism may be defined as a synthesis of epistemological relativism, ontological irrationalism, ethical nihilism, aesthetic populism, and political pessimism.5 Different individuals and works demonstrate considerable variation in the quality and intensity of these elements, of course, but the general character of the postmodern sensibility is clear enough and remarkably consistent. It is the condensation of these five elements which makes intelligible the postmodern "anti-aesthetic," its commitment to the destruction of form and formal distinctions from art and advertising to philosophy and fiction, as well as its "ethic of liberation," the valorization and reification of individual desire, instinct, and creative energy, and, more radically, the vitalist ontologizing of a primal "difference," of which the human individual is merely one manifestation. Of the five elements constituting the postmodern synthesis, political pessimism seems to me the most fundamental yet least recognized. It is ideological pessimism which organizes postmodernism into two distinct political attitudes or modes: ironic-cynical passivity and nihilisticlibertarian dissidence. In its passive mode (from Warhol and pop art to Diva, from Sontag and Barthes to Derrida), postmodernism manifests a progressive erosion of substantive criticism of the status quo. The links between the production of art, language, meaning, and the structure of society and its social relations of production are severed, and with them the theoretical possibility of any contestatory dimension or practice. From its most ironic intellectual, literary, and philosophical masterpieces to its most self-parodic affirmation of kitsch and camp, postmodernism works to dissolve the distinction between critique and affirmation until, explicitly or implicitly, by design or default, we are an inability to faced with a new consensus, forged-negatively-from either a vapid formulate and defend alternate positions. By affirming neoliberal pluralism (the "paralogy" of Lyotard) or a more profound dissolution of the boundaries between discourses (Derridean deconstruction), postmodernism imposes upon itself an "analytical depthlessness" (to borrow Fredric Jameson's apt characterization) and an anti-ideological ideology which translate into political passivity.
5. Brian McHale's (1987: 3-25) attempt to contrast modernism and postmodernism in terms of a "change of dominant" within an epistemological-ontological couplet, that is, from an epistemological dominant (modernism) to an ontological dominant (postmodernism), obscures the fact that what is actually occurring is a much more radical shift from a realist to an irrationalist problematic. For another attempt to justify irrationalism in historical practice, see Hutcheon 1987.

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Deconstruction is, of course, the paradigmatic (as well as the most self-conscious and rigorous) form of postmodern passivity. Contrary to Derrida's (1979: 94-95) own opinion regarding the subversive character of "critical vanguardism" inherent in deconstruction-that existing institutions "cannot bear . .. for anyone to tamper with language," that they can "bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of 'content,' if only that content does not touch the borders of language"-a historical perspective seems to indicate the contrary. It is precisely those aesthetic and philosophical positions which have no other purpose than to problematize meaning and representation that are most readily coopted by a culture that functions, above all else, on the accelerated transformation and formal manipulation of language.6 Deconstructionists may well adopt a political position, they may choose to turn their techniques on reactionary or exploitive discourses, but their practice itself is apolitical. There are only two possible strategies within a deconstructionist problematic: first, a series of increasingly monotonous and mechanical critiques of the discourse of others, critiques whose outcomes are known in advance; second, a series of virtuosic finger exercises whose raison d'etre is an equally parasitic violation, reversal, disruption, or whatever, of existing practices. In neither case does deconstruction produce or defend a political position. Whatever political position deconstruction may acquire, it acquires elsewhere, from some political illusion of presence, some theory of social practice, which can exist only outside the problematic of deconstruction as its mythologized unthought. Deconstruction, for all its claims to radical theoreticism, is simply the cynical obverse of positivism.7 In apparent contrast to its passive fraternal twin, dissident postmodernism (Lecourt 1978), within which we would have to situate Foucault, appears to have retained the political obstreperousness of mod6. Derrida (1981: 526ff.) has, however, refused to participate in the Nietzschean anti-Marxist wave and has been critical of some American appropriations of his work which reinforce rather than undermine dominant political and economic interests. For the political vicissitudes of the practitioners of deconstruction, see Fraser 1984. 7. For an attempt to politicize deconstruction (by ignoring the resolutely ahistorical, desubjectivized, and linguistically bound character of Derrida's thought almost to the point of caricature), see Ryan 1982. For a more faithful, dissident postmodern appropriation of Derrida, see Ulmer 1985. I do not wish to give the impression that Derrida's work should not be taken extremely seriously (as my reading of Althusser will demonstrate); I am only making the point that this work cannot be the basis of any political position, and that the task of a modernist social theory is to deconstruct Derrida by recovering history and knowledge on the other side of deconstruction. For this task, and for the most profound philosophical comprehension of Derrida, see Gasche 1986.

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ernist avant-garde; in fact, it seems to have taken it to new extremes. Forcefully attacking the ossified, elitist, and decadent high modernism as well as the homogenizing, normalizing forms of domination embedded in mass culture and the bureaucratic state, dissident postmodernism appears to be a form of radicalism appropriate to so-called postindustrial social formations. However, appearances are deceiving. Dissident postmodernism, as we shall see in our analysis of Foucault, purchases its critique at a high cost-abandonment of any rational grounding of its own position, selective restriction of the scope of its analysis to the particular, the fragmentary, or the regional-thereby avoiding "totalitarian" global analysis and the responsibility of providing a "utopian" alternative to what it condemns. Given its postmodern assumptions, the new dissidence cannot help but mythologize what it critiques (the Moloch normalizing the power of postindustrial society) as well as what it defends (an equally one-dimensional, ahistorical individual). Dissident postmodernism is deeply related to postindustrial society-not as its critique but as its effect. It is a kind of permanent rebellion with roots in a familiar historical tradition, that of Sade, Holderlin, Stirner, Sorel, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, and Bataille. The ethical nihilistic revolt against instrumental rationality is hardly original in postmodernism. It has a seductively pseudoradical appearance, insofar as it rails against dominant discourses and social practices in the name of difference, desire, liberty, pluralism, and so forth, but in effect, because of its own irrationality and extreme egoism, dissident postmodernism forecloses any positive outcome to its revolt against the status quo. Ultimately, such dissidence collapses into either automutilation or self-parody, counterrevolutionary "pragmatism" or pessimistic withdrawal. In the end, dissident postmodernism is congruent with its passive counterpart; "Criticize everything" is merely the flip side of "Anything goes." If everything is bad, it is not long before bad begins to look, if not good, at least inevitable. Indeed, the debilitating effect of postmodern negativity on postmodern dissidence is the dominant motif of the eighties, of which the shift of Lyotard and Foucault from gauchisme to "Americanism" are only the most glaring cases in point. The progressive domestication of dissident postmodernism in the eighties substantiates Fredric Jameson's contention that postmodernism is the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. It also suggests that the relative predominance of dissident postmodernism during the seventies was something of an aberration that deserves further study. I would like to suggest provisionally that dissident postmodernism has served as the "loyal opposition" during the birth pangs of the new multinational capitalist culture, and that in this respect it has been the

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Left analogue of the New Right. The anti-Marxist or "post-Marxist" rhetoric of postmodern dissidence is absolutely crucial in this regard. Dissident postmodernism was born of the seemingly unlimited bounty of consumer capitalism and the accommodating facade of the Fordist state8 in the form of the New Left and the radical humanist liberation movements of the sixties and early seventies, movements which were already premised, to a significant degree, upon an irrationalist neo-anarchism, the rejection of economic determinism, and a lack of concern for political power. The white, male, capitalist Establishment was vilified, protested, ridiculed, but ultimately ignored, left to regroup with its considerable resources intact. Dissident postmodernism survived the crushing defeat of the New Left primarily by blaming it on the vestiges of Marxism still at work within the radical movements, and by participating fully in the wave of anti-Marxism which attended the New Right's manipulation of the economic crisis of the mid-seventies and the middle-class anxieties it produced.9 By diverting attention from capitalism's new accumulation crisis and the revival of authoritarian politics, dissident postmodernism has indirectly facilitated the swift and merciless restructuring of capitalist relations of production since the mid-seventies. By attacking certain secondary mechanisms of consumer capitalism-normalization techniques, bureaucracy, militarization, the culture industry, and so onas well as the continued oppression of groups peripheral to the central mechanisms of Fordism (diverting attention from the fact that these were being rapidly dismantled), the new dissidence managed even to increase its prestige to the (admittedly disintegrating) Left. The less it talked about economics, classes, and class struggle, the more influential it became. The atavistic rhetoric of the fifties, mobilized by the
8. Fordism, a term derived from Gramsci's description of Henry Ford's revolutionary system of coordinating the intensive production of affordable mass-produced goods and wage rates sufficient to pay for them, is employed by the so-called regulation school of French political economy, whose major practitioners, Michel Aglietta (1979) and Alain Lipietz (1987), among others, emerged from structural Marxism. The regulation school emphasizes "regimes of accumulation," which are structures that reproduce social production and allocate it between consumption and accumulation, and "modes of regulation," the internalized rules and interpellated social characteristics which guarantee that agents conform, more or less, to the existing regime of accumulation in their day-to-day lives and struggles. Of course, these structures cannot be conceptualized without their contradictions and varying degrees of stability. 9. However, one must be careful to distinguish post-Marxism from postmodernism: All postmodernisms are post-Marxist but not vice versa. Representative post-Marxist critiques of the "overly" Marxist New Left include Hirsh 1981 and Balbus 1982. More specialized post-Althusserian post-Marxisms (works which do qualify as postmodernist) include Laclau and Mouffe 1985 and Cutler et al. 1977, 1978. For a vigorous critique of post-Marxism, see Wood 1986.

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New Right, had its counterpart in the anachronistic bohemianism of dissident postmodernism. The radical individualism and irrationalist vitalism of dissident postmodernism continue to exist (as they have since Sade) in a symbiotic relationship of negative integration with economic individualism and social Darwinism. Their common antiMarxism circumscribes their pseudo-opposition and facilitates their eventual reconciliation. The shift from dissidence to passivity, marked by discursive moves from a rhetoric of power to one of pluralism, from the rebellion against domination to the valorization of liberalism, signals the capitulation of dissidence to capital. The historical circumstances attending the emergence of postmodernism varies, of course, from country to country. The French case differs from the English, the American, and the German primarily as a result of a decade of popular-front political activity during the seventies, culminating in the electoral victory of a reformist Socialist party in the elections of 1981.10 Within the French Left, the most pressing political-intellectual issue was the rivalry between the Socialist (PS) and Communist (PCF) parties. The rise of the reformist PS, which blended an ideology of technocratic modernism and social democracy in the workplace and parlayed them into a middle-class-based electoral coalition with strong working-class support and the overwhelming sympathy of intellectuals of the Nietzschean Left, was spectacular. The PCF, by contrast, was the primary victim of the success of the Socialist party. During the sixties the PCF had begun to make its longoverdue and painful confrontation with its own Stalinist organization and its excessive subservience to the dictates of the Soviet Union. Its cautious participation in the events of May 1968 (overly cautious in the minds of most Sixty-eighters) occasioned a decisive shift towards a Eurocommunist strategy of national and democratic social transformation during the seventies. Unfortunately for the PCF, it made this move after the reformist platform (with a "modernizing" plank) had already been monopolized by Mitterand and the Socialists, and at the very time when a national reformist strategy was being taken off the historical agenda by the international economic system.
10. For an excellent account of French developments during the seventies, see Ross 1982. Debates within the PCF are surveyed in Kelly 1982 and Molina and Vargas 1978. For the PS see the collection of essays in Telos 1983. For the Mitterand government see Ambler 1985 and Cerny and Schain 1985. For Eurocommunism see the comprehensive bibliographical survey Bernstein and Lawrence 1980. My own position most resembles that of Mandel (1978): that the current reorganization of capitalism requires an internationalization of the Left, that is, a reversal of decades of Fordist "negative integration" (or, at the very least, a demand for its extension-a global Fordism). Obversely, the current capitalization of the communist world simply reveals the truth of Marx's remarks (in The German Ideology) that there can be no socialism in one country.

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The decisiveness of the PCF's defeat must not be permitted to obscure the intensity or significance of the debates which attended these events or to magnify the "correctness" of the winners. These debates had a decisive effect on Althusser, a revolutionary Eurocommunist within the PCF, and Foucault, an anti-Marxist gauchiste, and they also illuminate the larger context of the birth of postmodernism throughout the first world. Althusser and his collaborators viewed their theoretical practice as an attempt to combat the theoretical sclerosis within the PCF (its wooden economism and the stranglehold of the party bureaucracy on its membership); at the same time, they adamantly opposed what they took to be a facile and reformist "Marxist humanism" which was being articulated on the Left both within the Party and outside it (see Althusser 1977, 1978a, 1978b; Balibar 1977; Poulantzas 1978, 1980; Elliott 1987; Hirsh 1981). For better or worse, Althusser's ideas became linked, in the minds of many of his radical students, not only with the antiauthoritarian reform and revolutionary revival of the PCF (an outcome he certainly desired), but also, through the political activities of these same students, with the student movement and thus to the events of May, both of which he had relatively little hope for (see Althusser 1969a, 1973). The results of May 1968 were disappointing on all counts and to all parties. The PCF had used the largest general strike in French history for purely economic concessions and the student movement, refusing to face up to its own political incoherence, cried betrayal. The major oppositional forces could not work out a common front and the revolution collapsed. During the seventies the PCF moved steadily in the direction of reformism, without altering its bureaucratic authoritarianism. Althusser's attempt to renew Marxism from within the PCF was condemned by the non- or anti-Marxist Left, as well as by such ex-students as Jacques Ranciere, Andre Glucksmann, and BernardHenri Levy, who denounced Althusser's "fetishism of theory" within a larger condemnation of "science" as a repressive product of bourgeois society. Glucksmann and Levy founded a self-styled nouvelle philosophie, which identified Marxism with the Soviet Gulag and rediscovered the cold war libertarian rhetoric of the 1950s. The "New Philosophy" became an instant media sensation in 1975, a symptom of the (distressingly smooth) shift of intellectual fashion in Paris to a virulently anti-Marxist poste-gauchisme which has had such a strong influence on American postmodernism. The anti-Althusserian, anti-Marxist reaction was also decisively influenced by the electoral strategy of the PCF (which progressively marginalized the Althusserians) and the steady growth of the power of the PS within the electoral coalition. As the decade progressed, technocrats triumphed over gauchistes within the PS, while anti-Soviet

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polemics papered over the tensions and, more important, reassured middle-class voters of the respectability of the Socialists. The dissident postmodernism of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Baudrillard ruled the Parisian stage by the mid-seventies, lending credibility to the intellectually impoverished New Philosophy (see Dews 1985; Lecourt 1978) while laundering the theoretical currency of many ex-Sixty-eighters who wished to move from the black market of cultural revolution into legitimate growth industries, such as religion, literary experimentation, and the new cold war (see Callinicos 1982; Dews 1979). The point to be emphasized here is the transitory nature of dissident postmodernism, its functioning within French politics during the dislocations of the seventies, and its rapid disappearance with the solidification of France's position within the new multinational capitalist order. The transformation of Mitterand's government into a benign variation of Reaganism seems to have inaugurated the era of passive postmodernism in France, bringing that country more or less into line with developments in the U.S., England, and West Germany. The stability of this new stage of multinational capitalism and the durability of its new cultural logic remain in question. With this in mind, let us turn to a comparison of the theoretical frameworks of Althusser and Foucault and a preliminary sounding of postmodernist social theory. Althusserand MarxistModernism It is not possible to provide more than a schematic outline of the features of the thought of Althusser and Foucault most relevant to the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. I would like to begin by introducing the three most significant modernist moments of structural Marxism: (1) Althusser's conception of structural causality and the methodological implications of "differential" history; (2) the distinctions among science, ideology, and philosophy as they evolve in Althusser's thinking and in the work of his followers; (3) the concepts of ideological interpellation and ideological apparatuses. These three aspects of Althusser's thought demarcate, albeit in an evolutionary manner marked by inconsistencies, false starts, and often unproductive political gestures, a modernist critique of various traditional aspects of historical theory and practice. At the same time, I would argue, Althusser's views, as developed in For Marx (French edition 1965, containing essays published from 1960 to 1964), Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar; French edition 1965), Philosophieet philosophie spontanee des savants (lectures given in 1967 but published in 1974), Lenin and Philosophy (containing essays published in 1968-69), and Essays in Self-Criticism (containing material published between 1973 and 1975), maintain the prospect of history as a scientific practice

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and constitute a formidable beginning to a new critical modernist historical materialism. I should note in passing that the development of structural Marxism has been a collective effort; many problems not dealt with by Althusser, or dealt with only in a cursory, narrow, even incorrect manner by him, have been developed and corrected by others, sometimes independently from Althusser himself. About these developments, in anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and political theory, I must necessarily be silent (but see Benton 1984; Resch forthcoming). Structural and Causality Differential History It is astonishing that Althusser's concepts of structural causality and differential history, introduced in For Marx and Reading Capital over twenty years ago, have yet to be assimilated by the secondary literature on structural Marxism. Critics have adroitly pointed out the central tensions within these texts-between the concepts of totality and relative autonomy, between the concepts of science and ideology, between conceptual systems about the "real world" and the real world itselfand have used these apparently antithetical oppositions to reject the structural Marxist project." Only a few commentators have noticed that these tensions may not need to be resolved, that they have never been resolved by anyone, or that structural Marxism has managed to incorporate these oppositions in a startlingly original and productive manner (see Gordy 1983; O'Hagan 1982). In short, Althusser has yet to be interpreted as a modernist, and no one has recognized structural Marxism as a theoretical position which has advanced beyond both poststructuralism and postmodernism toward the production of knowledge on a new basis. I wish to defend such a reading and, reversing received opinion on these matters, point out how Althusser's work fastens on precisely those discursive repressions, exclusions, differences, and supplements upon which poststructuralism and postmodernism constitute themselves as discourses (I am speaking of the possibility of positive knowledge about society, the existence of the social formation as a structured whole, and political practice and re11. The literature on Althusser is large and uneven. Among the best surveys are Callinicos 1976 (excellent on structural causality, weak on and hostile to Althusser's concepts of philosophy, science, and ideology), Karsz 1974 (excellent for placing the whole range of Althusser's writings in the context of his later emphasis on class struggle), and Elliott 1987 (excellent compilation of contextual information, especially with regard to Althusser's politics, but dismissive of and superficial on Althusser's thought; reduces Althusser's theory to his politics). Among the critiques, Ranciere 1974 remains worth reading, as do Hirst 1979 and Glucksmann 1977 [1967]. Thompson 1978 is as uninformed as it is hostile, but it has achieved something of a cult status and thus a life of its own. See also Vincent et al. 1974.

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sponsibility based upon scientific knowledge of the current conjuncture). It is understood well enough that for Althusser the theoretical object of historical investigation is the social formation, conceptualized (I will take up the relation between concepts and reality in a moment) as a structured totality, a "structure of structures," whose whole existence consists of the structured effects of its elements or instances (political, economic, and ideological structures). The social formation is an "absent cause," since it is present only through its effects. Althusser and Balibar (1970: 193) attempt to express this relationship by means of a modernist metaphor of montage or Darstellung, the mise en scene of an "authorless" theater. (The obvious link is to Brecht; see Althusser 1969b: 142ff. Althusser's admiration for Brecht marks a significant contrast to Foucault's admiration for Artaud and Bataille.) Whereas "transitive" causality (the linear cause and effect of autonomous elements) sees the actors and effects on the stage as independent subjects and realities, and whereas "expressive" causality (a simple essence expressed by each element) sees these as manifestations of the director of the play and the playwright, structural causality sees all of this as a theater without author or subjects; the primary object is neither a multiplicity of independent elements nor a single immanent essence, but the structured mechanisms which produce the stage effects. Causality, in other words, is the structural effect of the interrelationships of structured elements. This structural effect is therefore a structured whole, not a transitive tautology (where everything causes everything else) or an expressive totality (where all the elements express a single immanent principle). Structured elements have different and unequal effectivities and therefore exist in relations of dominance and hierarchy. The structured whole is a "structure in dominance"; one of the structures will always be dominant, with economic structures determinant "in the last instance." Structures are social relations; they are manifested only as relations between people and things, between people and other people, or, more precisely, between classes of people. But they are also functional relationships, and functionality is an important key to understanding Althusser's concepts of structure in dominance and determination in the last instance by the economy. "The economy," Althusser (ibid.: 255) insists, "determines for the non-economic elements their respective degrees of specific effectivity. It can determine itself as dominant or not-dominant at any particular time, and in the latter case determines which of the elements is to be dominant." Maurice Godelier (1977), an anthropologist working within a structural Marxist framework, provides a useful example of the concept of economic determination in the last instance in the context of primitive societies

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dominated by kinship.12 In primitive society, Godelier acknowledges, kinship appears as both determining and dominant, a fact which has been used to discredit the Marxist idea of economic determination. Godelier contends, however, that it is not the concept of economic determination that is at fault, but rather the tendency of its critics to confuse functional distinctions (economic, political, family relations) with distinct physical institutions. Looking for a separate base and superstructure in primitive societies yields productive "forces" (hunting, fishing, breeding, etc.) but no "relations of production" other than kinship. It is kinship that determines the rights of an individual to land and its products, his obligations in relation to the productive activities of the community, and even authority in political and religious matters. Godelier contends that kinship relations are both infrastructure and superstructure in such societies, functioning not only as family relations but as relations of production, political relations, and ideological "socialization" as well. In other words, kinship is the dominant social structure; but is it determining as well? Godelier (ibid.: 123) says no, that the dominant, multifunctional nature of kinship is in actuality "determined by the low level of the productive forces, a low level of development which imposes the sexual division of labor and the cooperation of both sexes in order to subsist and reproduce their way of life." Godelier cautions us not to mistake a unity of several functions for a confusion of functions. Accepting that a given structure may act as the support for a unity of several functions does not justify confusing the different structural effectivities of these functions. Structural causality posits a hierarchy of functional distinctions and structural effectivities "without in any way prejudicing the nature of the structures, which in every case performs these functions (kinship, politics, religion . . . ), nor the number of functions which a structure may support" (ibid.: 2). A "non-economic" structure, in this case kinship, is dominant because it
12. Godelier is perhaps the best known of an important group of structural Marxist anthropologists in France during the 1960s and 1970s. They have done much to develop the structural Marxist concept of modes of production in relation to primitive societies, in relation to the transition from kinship to state and class societies, and in relation to the articulation of capitalist and indigenous modes of production in the third world. Major works include Godelier 1977, 1986; Terray 1972; Meillassoux 1981; Rey 1971, 1973; Taylor 1979. See also the important collection of articles Seddon 1978. The concept of modes of production, developed initially by Etienne Balibar, refers to the economic instance as well as the noneconomic social structures that the reproduction of the existing relations of production requires (see Althusser and Balibar 1970: 209ff.). Thus it occupies an analytical level of complexity between the concept of the social formation as a whole and the economic forces and relations of production (the labor process and property rights over the means of production).

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performs economic functions and reproduces economic relationships, but its dominance is determined, in the last instance, by the level of the productive forces. However, and here we enter controversial territory within Althusser's thought, at the theoretical level of the structured whole, the economic, political, and ideological structures/relations are "always already there," making it impossible for us to isolate structures theoretically in order to "prove" causal priorities (see Althusser 1969b: 87ff., 161ff.; Althusser and Balibar 1970: 182ff.). This implies that the concept of the structured whole can only be one theoretical space or level among others, that is, the theoretical ground for one particular level of historical analysis, the totality. Causal assertions, which cannot be experimentally isolated and demonstrated (empiricism) or logically proven (rationalism), become heuristic rather than absolute principles. That the "lonely hour of the last instance never arrives," as Althusser's striking image puts it, indicates both an awareness of the existence and limitations of what Derrida calls "illusions of presence" within conceptual discourses, and an affirmation of the necessity and validity of concepts made possible (as well as impossible) by these very illusions of presence (Althusser 1969b: 113; see also Althusser and Balibar 1970: 98-99). It is precisely this positive moment, the production of positive knowledge effects upon the necessarily absent structure of presence, that is absent from Derrida and all the lesser postmodernisms that stem from deconstruction. The structured whole is, of course, composed of instances or structures which Althusser insists are "relatively autonomous," that is, conceptually irreducible to the effects of other instances, including the economy, or to the effects of the structured whole. This means that the possibility of a reductionist conceptualization-of the political or ideological in terms of the economic, for example-is effectively foreclosed. At any given level of analysis, individual structures or "instances" are conceptualized by Althusser as "dislocated" or unevenly developed with respect to each other; they have no common origin with other structures, no theoretical ground zero which would reduce them to a single, homogeneous theoretical space (ibid.: 94ff.). Similarly, any given structure is "contradictory," since it is always capable of being conceptualized, at a lower level of analysis, as two or more unevenly developed "sub-structures." The result is a conceptual structure that is decentered and differential, perpetually open to the play of ineradicable differences. In other words, for Althusser the structured social formation does not have a single, monolithic or homogeneous history in which all of its elements may be subordinated to the same process or even time. Each structure within the structure of structures has its own "differential" history, and there are an indefinite num-

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ber of such histories (which is not to say that, for a particular level of analysis, one explanation is as good as another). The problem remaining is the relationship of the differential histories to each other. If they cannot be related, as Foucault and the postmodernists hold, then Althusser's project for a modernist historical materialism will have failed. Indeed, it is here that Althusser himself reaches something of an internal crisis within his "early" thought (i.e., For Marx and Reading Capital). In certain places Althusser (1969b: 11Ilff.) tries to dismiss the difficulty by means of a metaphor of a chain connecting two ends, one of which is relative autonomy and the other structure in dominance. Such a solution, however, is inconsistent with the discontinuities within theoretical discourse that he establishes with the concept of differential history. To his credit, Althusser does not seek simply to eliminate the discontinuities between different levels of structural analysis by repressing either the concept of the whole (the project of totalizing) or the concept of relative autonomy (the project of detotalizing). What he tries to do, albeit without a completely clear grasp of the problem or a rigorous theoretical strategy, is to accept the tension and make it productive rather than destructive. It is in light of this endeavor that Althusser's highly original appropriation of Freud's concept of overdetermination must be understood. Overdetermination has two meanings, both of which Althusser employs to link discontinuous levels of analysis: first, that the dream (or a structural "conjuncture") is conceptualized as the result of a fusion of several causes, not any single cause, and that the causes and their determinative priorities cannot be disentangled except heuristically; second, that the multiplicity of causes may be conceptualized in different meaningful sequences, different angles, so to speak, without a complete or definitive sequence ever being conceptually possible.'3
13. I am relying on Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 292-94. I do not wish to overstate Althusser's consistency with regard to the gaps between differential levels of analysis. There is an undeniable tension between claims made at the level of totality and claims made at the level of the instances. This is especially apparent in Balibar's attempt (see Althusser and Balibar 1970: 273-308) to deal with the problem of diachronic "totalization" by means of the concept of a "transitional" mode of production. For the most part, however, Balibar is consistent (and correct) in his refusal to impose linear evolution (the evolution of an essence) on relatively autonomous, dislocated "diachronic" levels of analysis (periods defined by a dominant mode of production). Structural Marxism rejects the idea that the essence of change can be grasped (a move which always relies upon expressive causality). Instead, change must be grasped comparatively, that is, on the basis of two or more conjunctures, their tendencies and contradictions. Thus the analysis of historical transformation, as Balibar clearly grasps, is always, in the last instance, a problem of periodization. On the diachronic axis, as on the synchronic axis, my general

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What restrains or limits the confusion of causalities, on the one hand, and the dispersion of explanatory sequences, on the other, in psychoanalysis as in historical science, is the common body of concepts, facts, and discursive and methodological protocols employed in the observation and explanation of each particular sequence. Althusser's answer, in other words, is to accept what Derrida calls "supplementarity" as a limit of historical discourse, that is, to accept the incompleteness of every level of analysis (which is always theoretically open to a higher synthesis and a lower division) without rejecting the pertinence of every level with respect to every other or the validity of each level for analytical purposes. The brilliant result, implicit throughout Althusser's use of the term I overdetermination, would liken to the indeterminacy principle in physics. This indeterminacy principle accepts multiple levels of incomplete analysis, as well as horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) discontinuities between differential histories, but also recognizes that different theoretical objects (differential histories) are related to each other within a common historical "problematic," the common concepts and conventions through which we produce them all. These common concepts put the differential histories in a certain relationship with each other. Differential histories are conditions of existence for each other; while they can never become a single continuous history (which would mean losing their relative autonomy, their differential specificity), they can never be antithetical or independent histories, either (which would preclude us from accepting one or the other). At the level of a given structured whole, we have a structure in dominance. But when we examine any structure within this whole, it becomes autonomous in relation to the whole. Different levels of analysis are conditions of existence for each other, but they cannot be deduced or read off one from another. Structural causality and differential history are part of a totalizing discourse, the anathema of postmodernism, but one which is also capable of radical detotalization. Such a framework is modernist in formal rigor and complexity, in refusing to posit a subject, an origin, or a goal for history, yet it remains productive from the point of view of science, providing a powerful methodological framework or research program capable of silencing criticisms directed against reductionist (the realization of an essence) and atomistic (the juxtaposition of unrelated phenomena) histories. It permits historical analysis at any
argument against a postmodernist abolition of the structured whole still applies. I would defend the utility of period concepts such as capitalism since the Industrial Revolution, as well as more precise periodization concepts of, for example, monopoly capitalism and multinational capitalism (Resch forthcoming).

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synchronic or diachronic level-the French Revolution in Paris, the Vendee, or Europe, in 1789, from 1789 to 1799, or from 1789 to 1814. All may be pursued as distinct theoretical objects (although they cannot be conflated with or collapsed into one another), yet they may also be conceptualized in relation to each other at a higher, more totalized level of analysis, the articulation of feudal and capitalist modes of production. The general (the French Revolution) and the particular (the Vendee in March 1793) cannot be conceptualized "simultaneously" in the same theoretical time and in the same theoretical space, but they are not unrelated. Narrative techniques, the stories historians tell with facts, obscure these relationships by their exclusions, supplements, and rhetorical strategies (as postmodernists never tire of demonstrating), but their shortcomings do not vitiate the existence of positive historical knowledge (as postmodernists too frequently assume). and Science, Philosophy, Ideology The next set of questions to be addressed are those regarding Althusser's claims to the scientificity of his historical problematic. Why should we believe Althusser's version any more than anyone else's? How does Althusser hope to prove the truth of what he says? How does his conceptual system relate to the real world of the referent? As a modernist thinker, Althusser does not attempt to provide any absolute proof, for he does not accept philosophical proof as absolute or possible. History's "truth," Althusser claims, is, in a fundamental sense, irrelevant to the production of historical knowledge (see Althusser and Balibar 1970: 43-63). Here the historian's (Marxist or other) hackles begin to rise. Of course history is true-it is based upon facts and upon archival evidence! If we throw out facts and evidence, then the postmodernists are right-one historical narrative is as good as another. Althusser's critique of traditional historicism is, of course, situated within a broader modernist investigation of meaning, which extends beyond history to the portals of "hard science." It may be some comfort to historians that the philosophers of science cannot resolve such controversies, either (for example, controversies over theoretical versus observational statements, i.e., whether or not there is such a thing as an objective experiment or objective science)! 14 Althusser (and Foucault, for that matter) comes out of a conventional school of French philosophy of science associated with Bachelard, Cavailles, and Canguilhem (see Lecourt 1975; Balibar 1978;
14. For a useful overview see Newton-Smith 1981, and for Marxist debates see Callinicos 1983, Ruben 1979, and Bhaskar 1978, 1979. Bhaskar's works are of particular interest because of the Althusserian influence upon his attempt philosophically to defend scientific realism and critical naturalism by transcendental rather than empiricist or rationalist means.

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Brewster 1971). Althusser understands science as a conceptual discourse that specifies and produces knowledge of a precise theoretical object; there is no knowledge outside of (innocent of) a "problematic," which thus determines what can and cannot be thought, what is or is not legitimate, and so forth (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 24-26, 59ff.). Epistemology, the attempt objectively to prove the truth of any scientific method, inevitably involves premises which are themselves arbitrary and historical. This again is a modernist position, one which eliminates the objective proof of scientific discourse (and which dissolves the hard-and-fast distinction between the "science" of physics and the "art"of history). But does this modernist critique imply a radical nihilism? Postmodernists like Foucault and Feyerabend tend to say yes, Althusser no-without, however, relying on any epistemological guarantee. Simply put, Althusser's position, the modernist critique of epistemology notwithstanding, is that we may still defend realism and materialism philosophically with the results of historical knowledge. Let me clarify. For Althusser, science is an object-centered discourse which emerges from ideology, or subject-centered discourse, while remaining in a symbiotic tension with it. Science has no absolute truth, but it does have a truth relative to the ideological discursive practices from which it has emerged and within which it "swims" (Althusser 1976: 112-14, 119-25). Without this link to ideology, science could not exist as a practice of subjects (scientists who have what Althusser calls a "spontaneous philosophy of science"), nor could there be any argument or debate over the knowledge effects a science produces, for there could be no shared discursive field within which such a discussion could occur (Althusser 1974: 98ff.; see also Pecheux 1982: 133ff.). Historical materialism, which defends the specificity of theoretical practice, the distinction between concepts of things and things themselves, is based upon what Althusser calls the "materialist thesis," the "primacy of the real over thought about the real" (Althusser 1976: 193; Althusser and Balibar 1970: 87, 156ff.).15 While concepts of things are not and cannot be the things themselves, and while our knowledge of things cannot ever escape the limitations of our conceptual framework, Althusser insists that, in the last instance, our conceptual framework is constrained by the real world about which it provides knowledge. Althusser's conventionalism, in other words, is englobed
15. Althusser had maintained this position even in his early works, although without establishing a plausible connection between the materialist thesis and the distinction between the real and thought about the real; see Althusser and Balibar 1970: 87ff. Glucksmann (1977 [1967]) pounced upon this problem. Althusser's resolution of the problem, by means of a new conception of philosophy, was first presented in the October-November 1967 lectures published later as Philosophie et philosophie spontanee des savants (Althusser 1974).

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by his realism. "The principle of all existence is materiality," Althusser (1976: 54) insists, "and all existence is objective,that is 'prior' to the 'subjectivity' which knows it and independent of that subjectivity." Science, whose discourse is defined functionally by Althusser as the absence of practical (i.e., subject-centered or ideological) interest, may therefore be seen as having a more objective correspondence to the real world by virtue of its break with ideology, but only if we accept, as Althusser does, the materialist thesis that the real world is there. Having a realist and materialist concept of ideology, in other words, provides Althusser with the philosophical ground for a general, if circular, defense of materialism (without, of course, providing any rationalist proof of it). His position appears to be very close to the "transcendental realism" elaborated by Roy Bhaskar (1978), who maintains that realism can be philosophically defended if one begins with the practice of science itself and its effects and "transcendentally" deduces the material conditions for such a practice and such effects to exist. For Althusser (1974: 63-64) the truth of history, like the truth of any science, is a function of the knowledge effects produced by its own internal problematic and the explanatory power of these effects, but such truth is mediated by discursive practices within the arena of philosophy that "decide" the truth by accepting the knowledge effects (as science) or rejecting them (as ideology). History presents its case, or, as Althusser puts it, "takes a position within philosophy," by demonstrating the explanatory power of its own knowledge effects and offering it as proof of the validity of its realist and materialist assumptions, and the superiority of the latter in comparison to irrationalist and idealist alternatives. Of course, in For Marx and Reading Capital Althusser did attempt to square the philosophical circle by establishing Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism) as the independent arbiter and guarantor of the scientific nature of Marxist historical practice (historical materialism). That is to say, he tried to create something like an epistemology, a general philosophical criterion for science and ideology, that is, objective pronouncements which inevitably implied "speculative-rationalist" pronouncements about truth and error (see Althusser 1969b: 168ff.). This effort, which Althusser rejected in 1967, frankly conflated the concept of philosophy with that of science. While Althusser (1976: 58 n. 18; 124 n. 19) never retracted his modernist conception of science, he completely relocated it by eliminating the confusion of philosophy with science and thereby excluding epistemological problems from the scientific domain: "Philosophy is not Absolute Knowledge: it is neither the Science of Sciences, nor the Science of Practices. Which means: it does not possess the Absolute Truth, either about any science or about any practice."

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Beginning with his 1967 lectures, Althusser dismissed epistemology as a sterile discourse or debate over already existing knowledge (for or against it) rather than as a scientific discourse productive of knowledge itself. Philosophy, no longer the arbiter of the sciences, became an intermediate discursive field between ideology (the realm of subjectcentered discourse) and science (the realm of object-centered discourse). Philosophy became more significant politically as a result of this reformulation. Given the highly charged, disruptive effect a science may have on the legitimation and reproduction of existing social relations, Althusser (1971: 23-70) began, in 1967, to refer to philosophy as "class struggle in theory." Rather than an "epistemological Marxism," Althusser (1976: 148-50, 155-56) defends a Marxist concept of epistemology: that science is a social practice, that each science has its own internal epistemological criteria, and that these two propositions are elaborated from within historical materialism, that is, from within a problematic that corresponds to a realist position in philosophy. Althusser defends science, materialism, and realism, not because he can prove them (any more than their opponents can disprove them), but because historical science compels him to do so. Althusser's materialist hypothesis marks another essential distinction between his own Marxist modernism and postmodernism. Althusser (ibid.: 116-17, 119ff.) acknowledges that we have no direct access to history, that facts are underdetermined by data, etc., but he will not abandon the real world (a position he labels "theoreticism," in reference to his own early fling with epistemology). By affirming, from a modernist perspective, historical knowledge of a world outside discourse, Althusser clarifies the relationship between concepts of things and things themselves that was obscure in For Marx and Reading Capital. His final position is neither a "ventriloquist" structuralism, letting epistemology in the back door through a Spinozistic homology between the "production" of concepts and other social productions,16 nor
16. This charge stems from Glucksmann 1977 [1967] and has been dutifully reproduced in almost every commentary on Althusser, including Elliott 1987. What is too often forgotten about Althusser's "Spinozism"is what he rejected in Spinoza's thought, that is, the philosophical rationalism which permitted Spinoza to demonstrate that an adequate idea was necessarily a true idea, that the order of ideas was identical to the order of extension: "Never for an instant do we set foot beyond the absolutely impassable frontier which separates the 'development' or the specification of the concept from the development and particularity of things -and for a very good reason: this frontier is impassable in principle because it cannot be a frontier, because there is no common homogeneous space (spirit or real) between the abstract of the concept of a thing and the empirical concrete of the thing which could justify the use of the concept of a frontier" (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 190). In his concepts of science and ideology Althusser is indebted to Spinoza's concept of adequate knowledge, but he rejected Spinoza'sdeductive-

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forever condemned to transcendental ruminations, as is the case with Derrida, for whom discursive practices are the sole reality and positive knowledges are restricted to the realm of critique. At the same time, in contrast to Foucault and the Nietzschean Left, Althusser's separation of concepts of things from things themselves is not "transcended" by a pseudomaterialist ontologizing of the play of differences within discourse-a projection of difference upon the phenomenological world as its essence.
Ideology and Ideological Interpellation

A final modernist position adopted by Althusser is "theoretical antihumanism," a decentering or displacement of the human being as the subject of history. In this regard, Althusser's concepts of ideology, interpellation, and ideological apparatuses have generated fierce polemics and much misunderstanding (not all of it unintentional). Critical opinion has ranged from moral condemnation, in which interpellation is seen as the logical outcome of Althusser's early structuralist "totalitarianism," to uncritical exultation in the eradication of structuralist "formalism" from Althusser's thought in favor of "class struggle." 17My own position is that each of these interpretations is seriously misleading, for at issue is neither "totalitarianism" nor "class struggle," but scientific knowledge about social structures. Althusser's concepts of interpellation and ideological apparatuses are not only consistent with his early work, in my opinion, but essential to the modernist positions regarding historical knowledge and the concepts of science and philosophy established in For Marx and Reading Capital. They are also,
rationalist assumption that the laws of logic were infallible guides to the laws of nature, and that philosophy could be something like a unified science. Althusser thus rejected the possibility of a homology of the type asserted by Glucksmann: "Wemust recognize that there is no practice in general, but only distinct practices . . . there can be no scientific conception of practice without a precise distinction between the distinct practices" (ibid.: 58). Spinoza's was rationalist materialism, whose rationalist shell Althusser discarded even as he appropriated its materialist kernel. See Althusser 1976: 105, 132-41, and 187-93; see also Macherey 1979. 17. The best-known and perhaps the most scurrilous(although there is much comcriticism is Thompson 1978; petition in this regard) example of the "totalitarian" the most coherent attack is Ranciere 1974. See also Vincent 1974 and Gerratana 1977; for a defense of Althusser see Mepham 1985 and Lock 1976. The "elimination of structuralism" argument derives from the Althusserians themselves: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey,and Eagleton all begin to invoke "classstruggle" as a global correction for "theoreticism."I take issue with the lack of specificity of their ritualistic use of the term (Resch forthcoming), but it remains a not altogether inappropriate response to the identificationof structuralMarxism with anti-Marxist variants of structuralism or so-called post-Althusserian post-Marxism, and with the Parisian anti-Marxist wave of the seventies. See Althusser 1969b: 227ff.; 1971: 127-86; 1976: 46ff. and 195ff.

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as we shall see, indicative of the superiority of Althusser's modernist framework over that of Foucault with respect to the problem of social subjectivity. I would argue that, far from eliminating human agency from history (the achievement of Derrida, Foucault, and postmodernism, not Althusser), Althusser's concept of ideology provides the basis for a new understanding of the relationship between theory and practice with its new theory of practice or social subjectivity. Althusser uses the term ideologyin different ways for different purposes, and this has been the source of much interpretive misunderstanding. In his early work, Althusser used ideologyto denote (1) social subjectivity-the domain of social subjects, their constitution as subjects, their practice or action as social agents (including the semantic aspect of language); (2) the other of a science-either absolutely false (a premodernist position discarded along with epistemology) or, as a body of ideas, concepts, and problems, declared erroneous by a science as part of its constitution as a science; and (3) the specific other of historical materialism-those ideas, concepts, and problems that Marxism rejects as erroneous. In his later work, Althusser begins, again with considerable hesitation and lack of clarity, to differentiate among these three uses. Ideology in the third sense becomes a philosophical "category," a position to be defended, to be sure (i.e., one must defend a materialist, realist position, without which the category of "science" disappears, as it does for postmodernists), but one that lies outside the production of historical knowledge. Ideology in the second sense becomes a concept for a history of science with no relevance to absolute truth or falsehood. Ideology in the first (or "strong") sense, however, remains unchanged: It is the basic, general concept from which the others are derived and one of the fundamental social practices which, along with economics and politics, constitute human social formations. Ideology in this basic sense refers, as Althusser puts it, to the "lived relation of human subjects to the conditions of their existence." As such, ideology is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false; it is only necessarily subjective (see Althusser 1969b: 231-36). In an important essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Althusser (1971) likened the production of subjectivity to a process of "hailing" or interpellation, where society says, "Hey you!" and we turn around, a process embedded in material practices and institutions, to which he refers as ideological state apparatuses. Althusser's initial formulation stressed the functioning of ideological apparatuses as normalizing devices for reproducing existing relations of production and therefore, following Gramsci, their function as de facto state apparatuses, but he also noted that such ideological apparatuses were the site of real class struggles as well as class subjugation, and that

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ideological interpellation could never be completely successful. Others (Macherey 1978; Therborn 1978, 1980; Renee Balibar 1974; Pecheux 1982; Hadjinicolaou 1978; Eagleton 1976; Edelman 1979; Laclau 1977; Jameson 1981; Poulantzas 1975, 1978; Bourdieu 1977, 1984) have taken Althusser's concept of ideology in a number of interesting directions, developing and elaborating upon (1) the social contradictions between the enabling power of ideology (the subject as qualified social agent) and its normalizing power (the subject as subjugated to existing social relations); (2) a materialist theory of semantics and discursive practice; (3) the relationships between the interpellated subject, class relations, and political practice; (4) aesthetic production and reception as ideological practices and the significance of this for criticism and history. (Laclau, we should note, is now a staunch defender of post-Marxist, neoliberal irrationalism; Bourdieu does not explicitly acknowledge the influence of Althusser, despite his heavy reliance upon structural Marxist terminology and the remarkable affinity between his own concepts [habitus, social space, symbolic capital, etc.] and Althusser's concept of ideology.) Far from denigrating human subjectivity, structural Marxism attempts to understand both the positive and negative aspects of its production. Althusser has decentered the human subject and in doing so taken an uncompromisingly modernist position, but he does not, as he is so often accused, thereby remove the subject from the field of power or practice. If he insists that there is no subject behind or beyond the mechanisms of interpellation (no "end of ideology"), he also insists that there is no practice (including science) except through subjects, that subjectification is the precondition of all power and any practice (Althusser 1971: 170ff.; 1976: 95).18 Goran Therborn (1980) demon18. Post-Althusserians of the Hindess and Hirst group have effectively isolated theory and practice into a rationalist theoreticism, on the one hand, and a political voluntarism, on the other. Hindess and Hirst reject the materialist thesis and with it any link between theory and reality, as well as any concept of totality. Hirst (1979) contends therefore that Althusser's concept of ideology must be rejected because it cannot live up to its claims of conceptual autonomy. Hindess, Hirst, and others want to separate concepts from empirical reality and, within this rationalisttheoreticist dimension, achieve absolute logical purity. There are only two paths to such certainty, either absolutely subordinating social concepts to one level (totality, where ideology is absolutely determined and therefore reflects social relations) or absolutely fragmenting them into discrete levels (autonomy, where ideology is absolutely free of determinations). They follow the latter path, using this antirealist rationalism to justify an absolutely autonomous political pragmatism which has moved, over the years, from dissident postmodernism to neoliberalism. Their paths merge, ironically enough, with the historical humanism of their arch-enemy E. P. Thompson. Thompson and the post-Althusserians are truly opponents en taille, but their debates have progressively less and less to do with structural Marxism.

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strates how Althusser's concept of ideology allows us to conceptualize the contradictions between the different ways we are all interpellated as members of society, as well as the tensions between the forces of submission, inherent in our conformity to the roles which we are assigned by society, and the enabling power which comes from our qualification as social subjects through these same roles. Pierre Bourdieu (1977), operating from an independent theoretical position with obvious similarities to Althusser's, shows how a social agent is not a mindless robot but a decision-making player within a rule-bound yet open-ended interactive system of dispositions, discourses, and interests which he calls the social "habitus." Habitus, a brilliant development of the concept of interpellation, is thus a historically specific and class-based, "generating-enabling" ideological structure whose complexity cannot be reduced to either the free will of man or the mechanistic reflection of the relations of production. If structural Marxists have emphasized the hegemonic dimensions of ideology in capitalist (and state socialist) societies, they have not gone nearly so far in asserting the monolithic nature and pervasive power of normalization as many postmodernists have, including Foucault, to whom they are often unfavorably compared in this respect. A correct understanding of Althusser (and the others) on this point is to recognize that the subject is a contradictory bearer of social qualifications and subjugations too often acting as if he or she were free of such determinations. Looking backward, as historians are wont to do, the subject appears as a complex determined production. Looking forward, however, analysts of the possible outcomes of the present conjuncture must recognize not only the progressive contradictions within the habitus and the ideological apparatuses themselves (overdetermined by economic and political relations), but also the interpellative effects of knowledge (or the denial of knowledge). Unlike Foucault, Althusser can specify the gap between ideology and science, the space for critical knowledge, avoiding the reduction of science to ideology, as well as the gap between ideological interpellation and normalizing domination, the space for political practice, avoiding the reduction of interpellation to domination. Foucaultand Postmodernism The postmodernism of Foucault is particularly interesting, since prior to 1968 he seemed to be engaged in a project not dissimilar to that of Althusser, despite Foucault's non-Marxist orientation.19 Althusser
19. Foucault'snegative dependence upon Althusserianconcepts (see Lecourt 1975: 187ff.) is surely the best-kept secret among Foucault enthusiasts in the United States. In the "authorized"commentary on Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983,

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admired Foucault's books and Foucault was for a time a student of Althusser. In his earlier books, Madness and Civilization (French edition 1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (French edition 1963), Foucault investigated the discourses of psychiatry and medicine and the ways in which these discourses produced, perceived, and regulated their objects, "sanity" and "health." Foucault sought to show that the distinctions basic to these discourses, distinctions between madness and sanity, sickness and health, were arbitrary distinctions related not to the progress of knowledge but to new or changing social forces of exclusion and integration embedded in institutional frameworks, like asylums and clinics, whose functions were social control-normalization and administration, not science or humanitarianism. Small wonder that Althusser approved of these works and saw them as recognizable offspring of his own ideas. However, in his next two works, The Orderof Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (French edition 1966) and The Archaeologyof Knowledge (French edition 1969), Foucault (1972: 205ff.) shifted his perspective to the internal structural constraints of discourse and to a new antimaterialist methodological strategy, which he called "archaeology." The first of these books is an erudite survey of the dominant structures of discourse (epistemes) in the human-centered discourses on life (biology), labor (society), and language (culture) from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The second is a theoretical tract in which Foucault tried to justify his methodological assumptions. It is a particularly disappointing attempt to out-Althusser Althusser by constructing what is, at best, a reactive negative image of differential history. Foucault failed to resolve the tensions between the social and the internal determinants of discourse and failed to provide a coherent epistemological position for himself. More than this, he rejected the idea that he needed to do so. His archaeologies are radically decentered "dispersions" that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a "scattering" that is not related to any axis of reference. This is a more extreme, postmodern position than that implied by Althusser's concept of differential history, because Foucault absolutely refuses the possibility of any conception of the structured whole. At the same time, Foucault refuses the problem of meaning. Like Althusser, he denies the existence of a philosophical guarantee of objective truth, but unlike Althusser, he refuses to address the consequences for
Althusser is never mentioned. Alan Sheridan (1980: 214ff.), translator of many of Foucault's works, acknowledges the charge but angrily (yet feebily) rejects it by repeating Foucault's own disclaimers. Merquior (1985) makes repeated reference to the connection but does not elaborate on it. For a thoughtful comparison of Althusser, Pecheux, Hindess and Hirst, and Foucault, see Macdonell 1986.

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his own theoretical practice. In short, unlike Althusser, Foucault cannot or will not conceptualize the relationship among different structures and discourses or defend his own theoretical practices.20This is not, as we might expect, an embarrassment to Foucault; rather, it is, in his eyes, somehow a (no doubt heroic) leap beyond the modern condition. Rather than grapple with the consequences of modernism, as Althusser attempts to do, Foucault willfully ignores them, pursuing an oxymoronic discourse that rejects "totalizing" discourse while insisting upon the truth of what it says about "little" structures. In the aftermath of May 1968, Foucault made his "Nietzschean turn," a move heavily influenced by the works of Gilles Deleuze in the late sixties (Callinicos 1982).21The move was extremely successful in terms of the Foucault persona. An important figure in the age of high structuralism, Foucault became a superstar of poststructuralist anti-Marxism both in France and in the United States. He assumed a position in the seventies equivalent to that of Althusser in the sixties. At the heart of Foucault's shift was a radical resolution of the determinative tension between the normalizing social forces which impinge upon the production of knowledge and the internal, systematic rules which determine what can and cannot be said. Foucault had never been able to conceptualize these two factors except in one-dimensional terms (since he refused a totalizing discourse which might articulate their causal relations to each other); now he simply conflated the two. Instead of knowledge and power, Foucault (1977: 135ff., 209ff.; 1980b: 113) now spoke of a unitary, monolithic knowledge/power. In the published summary of his 1971-72 course on penal institutions, Foucault (cited in Sheridan 1980: 131) summarized his position this way: Power relations (with the strugglesthat traversethem and the institutions that maintain them) do not play with respect to knowledge a facilitating or obstructiverole; they are not content merely to encourage or stimulate, to distort or limit it, power and knowledgeare not linked together solely by the play of interests or ideologies; the problem is not therefore that
20. Foucault (1972: 121-22) attempts to escape this difficulty by cribbing from For Marx: "The field of statements is . . . a practical domain that is autonomous (although dependent), and which can be described at its own level (although it must be articulated on something other than itself)." To avoid the task of describing this "something other than itself," and his own epistemological position, Foucault (ibid.: 109) disingenuously labels himself a positivist. 21. Allan Megill (1985) situates Foucault in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but he is relatively insensitive to the uniqueness of the French Nietzsche represented by Deleuze. Deleuze's influence is nowhere mentioned by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983). Merquior's (1985: 141ff.) discussion of Foucault as a "neoanarchist" is very much to the point.

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of determining how power subjugatesknowledge and makes it serve its ends, or how it imprintsits mark on knowledge,imposes on it ideological contents and limits. No body of knowledgecan be formed withouta system of communications,records, accumulationand displacementwhich is in itself a form of power and which is linked, in its existence and functioning, no to other forms of power.Conversely, powercan be exercisedwithoutthe extraction, appropriation,distributionor retention of knowledge. On this level, there is not knowledge on the one side and society on the other, or science and the state, but only the fundamentalformsof knowledge/power. This move, again a fairly obvious reaction to Althusser's well-publicized redefinition of philosophy and shift towards the material apparatuses of ideology and the process of interpellation, is not without its important truth. Rather than deny the validity of Foucault's insight, I would simply like to point out its weaknesses vis-a-vis Althusser's framework, weaknesses which are, in turn, symptomatic of the weaknesses of postmodernism. First, concealed within the conceptual transition from episteme to power/knowledge (which has a positive heuristic value; knowledge is embedded in ideological apparatuses) is an ominous shift in Foucault's attitude toward the content of discourse. Knowledge effects had never been connected to the real world by Foucault (there is no materialist thesis in his work); they were either neutral things (The Archaeologyof Knowledge)or effects of exterior "bad" things (Madness and Civilization). Now knowledge became in itself a bad thing, an explicitly oppressive form of domination (Dews 1979; Poulantzas 1978). Foucault's insight that the production of knowledge is also a process of interpellation is inscribed within a simplistic, undifferentiated negativity that distinguishes Foucault's term "knowledge/ power" from Althusser's more nuanced and sophisticated concepts of science, philosophy, ideology, and ideological apparatus. The reduction of knowledge to power in Foucault is part of a postmodernist rejection of critical thinking and a misplaced hostility towards distinctions between rational and irrational, knowledge and ideology, and so forth. The unfortunate but not unexpected result is an irrationalist, mythologized, ahistorical ontology of power equally incapable of explaining (rather than describing) the mechanisms of power and formulating any contradictions within its effects. Secondly, far from overcoming the methodological and epistemological contradictions of archaeology, Foucault's new "genealogical" method reproduces them in an intensified form. Aside from his focus upon knowledge as an ideological apparatus (admittedly, and far from innocently, undeveloped by structural Marxism), all the positive, historical, and materialist attributes of Foucault's books on prisons and sexuality derive from the recognition of subjectivity as a social production-an insight taken over completely from Althusser and then

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impregnated with a Nietzschean vitalism. Subtracting those materialist elements it borrows from structural Marxism, genealogy is little more than a rhetorical posture, oscillating between didacticism and dada, that is, between a peculiarly negative teleological form of historicism and a strident, postmodernist automutilation of historical analysis. In his 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault (1977) elaborates on the strengths of the genealogical method. First among these is the fact that genealogy, like archaeology, continues to reject historical meaning, reducing all historical phenomena to arbitrary epiphenomena of a primal, ontological "difference" (which he will later call power). Genealogy, in contrast to history, has no use for totality, but only for limited and localized "beginnings" to phenomena which are somehow of interest to the genealogist who traces their "descent." Foucault (ibid.: 146) tells us, "Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species .... On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to things that continue to exist." Genealogy, Foucault seems to be saying, is the method of knowing real history ("proper dispersion"), the antiteleological teleology of things ("identify the accidents . . . that gave birth to things"), a kind of antipositivistic positivism which permits the discovery of the true untruth of being. I stress all of this, not simply because it is taken so seriously in American academic circles, but also because Foucault himself does not take it at all seriously. At the same time that the genealogist has privileged access to history, he must reject any claims to the truth of that access. Foucault (ibid.: 231) says, "Reject all theory and all forms of general discourse. This need for theory is still part of the system we reject." His fear of totalizing discourse, rooted in his own reduction of knowledge to power, leads to a postmodern manipulative aestheticism. Foucault (1980b: 193) denies that he has ever written anything but fictions: "One fictions history starting from a political reality that renders it true, one 'fictions' a politics that does not yet exist starting from a historical truth." The commendable causes which Foucault has supported must not blind us to the irrationality and frankly manipulative quality of his approach: "Writing," Foucault (cited in Megill 1985: 243) tells us, "only interests me insofar as it enlists itself into the reality of a contest, as an instrument of tactics, of illumination. I would like my books to be as it were, lancets, or Molotov cocktails, or minefields; I would like them to self-destruct after use, like fireworks." Where the coin of reason has been devalued, the counterfeit of manipulation will have to serve, and with it comes the inevitable inflation of rhetoric and voluntarism.

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However, and this is my third and final point, Foucault's postmodernism of resistance runs aground on his negative ontology of power. In his major books of the seventies, Disciplineand Punish (French edition 1975) and The History of Sexuality(French edition 1976), Foucault dramatically asserts the dominating essence of discourses pertaining to human beings and their social nature and organization. For Foucault, expanding our scientific knowledge of human beings is only the ideologically foregrounded side of a process of disciplining (dressage) the body, the creation of a normalizing "bio-power" by means of a relentless subdivision and subjugation of human beings. Unlike the Althusserian concept of ideological apparatuses, such a view is wholly negative, lacking contradiction as well as complexity. Given his self-imposed rejection of totalizing discourse, Foucault is unable or unwilling to provide a general structure of social determinations within which the machinations of bio-power might be located and explained. Instead he presents us with an undifferentiated, homogeneous field of power within which a monolithic strategy of domination is impersonally and relentlessly enacted. The persuasiveness of this strategy turns on avoiding distinctionsamong different types, degrees, and relations of power. Power becomes a "black box," a simple essence which exists prior to society but is somehow implicated in it, the antithesis of human freedom yet somehow an essential attribute of human nature. For structural Marxists, on the other hand, there are no essences. Human freedom is a product of ideological interpellation not prior to it, and interpellations are both contradictory (enabling as well as disabling) and socially determined (part of the open-ended but rulebound habitus). Foucault frequently hints at the relationship between normalization and capitalism, but he does not wish to push very far in this direction.22 Structural Marxists insist upon the limiting effects imposed upon relatively autonomous cultural practices by the forces and relations of production (and the structures necessary for their reproduction). The monolithic and negative character of knowledge/power and bio-power, and his refusal to ground power in society (and thus hazard a general theory of society: power for what purpose, for the benefit of whom, etc.), leaves Foucault without the ability to conceptualize resistance to power. Structural Marxist critics like Poulantzas, Lecourt, and Dews have all fastened on this point. Foucault (1980a: 92-96) resorts to a spontaneous generation of resistance out of power, an
22. For example, see Foucault 1980: 140-41, where bio-power is linked to capitalism but also held to precede and exceed all social transformations, with the result that the entire picture loses recognizable shape. The attitude that "everything causes everything else" leads more or less directly to political and theoretical passivity.

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immaculate resistance if you like, one untainted by the dirty hands of historical determination. Resistances, like power, are everywhere, but as Poulantzas (1978: 150ff.) has pointed out, this is "impossibly natural." If power is the source of resistance, that is, if power alone is constitutive, how can resistance be anything other than a form of power? If, given its existence, resistance is always resistance to power, what happens if resistance succeeds? Once power has been defeated, is not resistance left as a new form of power and oppression? (ibid.; see also Dews 1979: 164ff.). Resistances blend into the power from which Foucault tries to distinguish them, and the ultimate consequences can only be pessimism and passivity. The postmodern dialectic of reaction and resistance seems to put everything in question, but, given the omnipresence of power, the outcome is always known in advance. The ultimate message of this line of thought is clear enough: Things can only get worse, not better, so let's accept the status quo as the lesser of two evils. In his final, posthumously published works, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (French editions 1984), Foucault abruptly abandoned dissident postmodernism and (with considerable assistance from American academics) refashioned himself into, of all things, a liberal humanist-albeit of a peculiar postmodern variety. Typically, Foucault reacted to the shortcomings of his previous work not by correcting them but by striking out in a different direction altogether, abandoning the genealogies of knowledge and power for a new project, a genealogy of ethics. Using Greek and Roman culture as historical foils, Foucault embarked upon a subject-centered meditation on "practices of the self" organized around the social structures of sexuality. Sexuality remains a structured phenomenon (composed of three elements: acts, pleasures, and desires; organized in terms of four ethical categories: an ethical substance, the human attribute to be acted upon; a mode of subjection, the ways people are socially encouraged to recognize moral obligations; an ascetic, the practices of the self by which morality is attained; and a telos, the ideal or model being sought), but its structure is no longer a dominating, oppressive form of bio-power or power/knowledge. Instead the structures of sexuality are merely fields of "problematization," no more than a social background for the personal choices of the subject. Ethics, for Foucault, is understood "as the elaboration of a form of relation to self that enables an individual to fashion himself into a subject of ethical conduct" (1985: 251). Always a quick study, Foucault may well have been reacting (again with negative dependence) to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (French edition 1979) and the latter's conception of ideological self-determination in relation to a habitus and the class struggle over

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symbolic capital which constitutes the field of status. In any case, the theme of "self-fashioning" is suddenly predominant for Foucault. Foucault has, of course, many interesting and original things to say about Greek, Roman, and Christian sexuality. However, his genealogical method remains essentially unchanged. History for Foucault remains a disconnected series of phenomena whose only interest is to reveal past forms of behavior that might be "reactivated" for present political purposes. Since Greek sexuality, with its "aesthetics of experience," is not grounded in or determined by specific social conditions, there is no reason, for postmodern historicism at any rate, why it cannot be simply recreated in contemporary capitalist societies. The self-fashioning Nietzschean subject of history does fit more comfortably with the voluntarism of Foucault's politics, but this new methodological move begs rather than revolves the question of power raised by Foucault in the seventies. Power simply disappears from the field of ethics altogether. Foucault's new attention to the subject, coupled with his fragmentation of social structures into autonomous spheres, provides a new, more coherent defense of liberal micropolitics but no analysis of the complexity of issues or the obstacles to be overcome. Partial changes can be achieved because changes in one domain, for example sexuality, do not imply disruptions and confrontations in other domains ("We have to get rid of this idea of an analytically necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures," Foucault [1983: 236] has stated in an interview on his new genealogy of ethics). Far from signaling an advance of social theory, a "New Historicism," as it is now called, such methodological "sophistication" signifies nothing more than the capitulation of postmodern dissidence to the political status quo. The real path of progress in social theory, as I have tried to demonstrate, is not to liberalize postmodernism but to recognize it for what it is: a symptom of a massive socioeconomic transformation that it reflects but cannot understand. The world is considerably more complex as a result of the current restructuring of capitalism, but it is not incomprehensible for all of its complexity. Critical modernism-social theory that is realist, materialist, and historical without being reductionist-remains the only path leading to knowledge of the current conjuncture. Fictionalizing or "textualizing" history simply creates new ideological masks for the structures of power and exploitation which are coherent as well as contradictory. In his modernist conceptualization of ideology Althusser takes a position from which he is capable of identifying power, defining exploitation, and defending his views on both theoretical and political grounds. Foucault (and postmodernism generally) "distrust" the term ideologyand thereby ab-

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dicate their responsibility to identify, define, and defend (see Foucault 1980b: 118ff.; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985: 93-100). In its passive posture postmodernist "pluralism" is a refusal to question, in its dissident form a refusal to answer. Insofar as it is passive, postmodernist cultural logic is no more meaningful than the aestheticist formalism of high modernism, no more liberating than the cooptive "individualism" of the culture industry; it is merely their lowest common denominator. Insofar as it is dissident, postmodernism is a willfully incoherent extrapolation between certain aspects of critical modernism and Left political theory, one which dulls the cutting edge of each of its sources. References
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Foucault, Michel 1967 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: New American Library). 1972 The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon). 1973 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage). 1975 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage). 1977 Language, Countermemory,Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). 1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage). 1980a The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage). 1980b Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon). 1983 "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 229-52. 1985 The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage). 1986 The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage). Fraser, Nancy 1984 "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?" New German Critique 33: 127-54. Gasche, Rudolphe 1986 The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Gerratana, Valentino 1977 "Althusser and Stalinism," New Left Review 101-2: 110-22. Glucksmann, Andre Marxism: A Critical Reader, 1977 [1967] "A Ventriloquist Structuralism," in Western 273-314 (London: Verso). Godelier, Maurice 1977 Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1986 The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy and Society (London: Verso). Gordy, Michael 1983 "Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole," History and Theory 22: 1-21. Guilbaut, Serge 1983 How New YorkStole the Idea of Modern Art: AbstractExpressionism,Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hadjinicolaou, Nicos 1978 Art History and Class Struggle (London: Pluto). Herf, Jeffrey 1984 Reactionary Modernism: Technology,Culture and Politics in Weimarand the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hirsh, Arthur 1981 The French New Left: An Intellectual Historyfrom Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End Press). Hirst, Paul 1979 On Law and Ideology (London: Macmillan). Hutcheon, Linda 1987 "Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism," Textual Practice 1: 10-31.

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