Page 120 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 111

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

except as knowledge of an object produced by a subject external
to it, which was precisely the positivist, and structuralist, position.

Althusser’s Marxism
We have referred to Althusser, Foucault’s onetime teacher, as also
having been tangentially involved in the moment of high struc-
turalism. At the time, this would have seemed a strange
judgement, since Althusser was a member of the French Commu-
nist Party and quite probably France’s best-known Marxist
intellectual. But it is clear in retrospect that his distinctive contri-
bution had been to reread Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ as a
structuralism. For Althusser, Marxism was a science, sharply
distinguished from, and counterposed to, ideology, both by its
own defining ‘knowledge function’ and by the ‘epistemological
break’ by which it had been founded (Althusser, 1977). This
science was characterised by a new mode of explanation, in which
‘structural causality’ was substituted for mechanical and expres-
sive. Culture was thus neither superstructural effect nor an
expression of the truth of the social whole, but rather a relatively
autonomous structure, with its own specific effectivity, situated
within a wider structure of structures. Each level of this structure
was subject to ‘determination of the elements of a structure . . . by the
effectivity of that structure . . . (and) determination of a subordinate
structure by a dominant structure’ (Althusser & Balibar, 1970, p. 186).
Clearly, the transparent structuralism of the model was more than
a matter of mere semantics.
In a much-quoted essay on ‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses’, Althusser argued that ideology was necessarily
embedded in institutions, or ‘ideological state apparatuses’, as he
termed them; that its central social function was the reproduc-
tion of structured social inequality, or the ‘relations of production’;
that it functioned by constituting biological individuals as social
‘subjects’; and that it thereby represented the imaginary relation
of individuals to their real conditions of existence (Althusser,
1971). This was very obviously a reworking of Gramsci’s theory
of hegemony, but one that repressed the notion of agency in
favour of structural determination. And since art, though not itself

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