Page 121 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

ideology, according to Althusser, alluded to ideology (p. 122), it
became possible to read culture ‘ideologically’. Althusser had also
developed a theory of symptomatic reading, which sought to
reconstruct the ‘problematic’ of the text (Althusser & Balibar,
1970), the structure of determinate absences and presences that
occasion it. For Althusser the object of this symptomatic reading
had been Marx’s ‘scientific’ discoveries. But for Althusserian
cultural criticism, as represented most importantly by Pierre
Macherey in France (Macherey, 1978) and the young Terry
Eagleton in England (Eagleton, 1976), such readings could be
directed both at art and at popular culture, with a view to
exposing ideology itself as their real object. Althusserianism exer-
cised a considerable fascination for radical critics, both socialist
and feminist, during the 1970s, but fell very rapidly out of favour
after 1980, when Althusser killed his wife, Hélène, in what
appeared to have been a fit of madness.

From structuralism to post-structuralism
But quite apart from the personal tragedy of the Althussers, struc-
turalism seemed already to have run its course. Where
structuralism had displayed a recurrent aspiration to scientificity,
post-structuralism would betray this aspiration through its
equally recurrent insistence that meaning can never be pinned
down, not even by semiology itself. At the end of The Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge, Foucault confesses, uncomfortably, that his
discourse was ‘avoiding the ground on which it could find
support’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 205). The embarrassment was
distinctive; the problem was not. For Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss,
Saussure and Barthes, as for Foucault, the central repressed
problem had always been how to guarantee the scientificity of a
knowledge that was itself, according to the logics of their own
argument, either social or intra-discursive. No solution to this
problem seemed possible from within structuralism itself. Hence
the move by both Barthes and Foucault, during the 1970s, towards
different versions of post-structuralism. Hence, too, the meteoric
rise to intellectual pre-eminence, during the same period, of
Jacques Derrida.

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