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72 Chapter 4 Marxisms

ways we represent these conditions to ourselves and to others. This applies to both
dominant and subordinate classes; ideologies do not just convince oppressed groups
that all is well with the world, they also convince ruling groups that exploitation and
oppression are really something quite different, acts of universal necessity. Only a
‘scientific’ discourse (Althusser’s Marxism) can see through ideology to the real condi-
tions of existence.
Because ideology is for Althusser a closed system, it can only ever set itself such
problems as it can answer; that is, to remain within its boundaries (a mythic realm
without contradictions), it must stay silent on questions which threaten to take it
beyond these boundaries. This formulation leads Althusser to the concept of the ‘prob-
lematic’. He first uses the concept to explain the ‘epistemological break’, which he
claims occurs in Marx’s work in 1845. Marx’s problematic, ‘the objective internal refer-
ence system . . . the system of questions commanding the answers given’ (67), deter-
mines not only the questions and answers he is able to bring into play, but also the
absence of problems and concepts in his work.
According to Althusser a problematic consists of the assumptions, motivations,
underlying ideas, etc., from which a text (say, an advert) is made. In this way, it is
argued, a text is structured as much by what is absent (what is not said) as by what is
present (what is said). Althusser argues that if we are to fully understand the meaning
of a text, we have to be aware of not only what is in a text but also the assumptions
which inform it (and which may not appear in the text itself in any straightforward way
but exist only in the text’s problematic). One way in which a text’s problematic is sup-
posedly revealed is in the way a text may appear to answer questions which it has not
formally posed. Such questions, it is argued, have been posed in the text’s problematic.
The task of an Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the text to reveal the prob-
lematic. To do this is to perform what Althusser calls a ‘symptomatic reading’.
In Reading Capital, Althusser characterizes Marx’s method of reading the work of
Adam Smith as ‘symptomatic’ in that

it divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement
relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. Like his first
reading, Marx’s second reading presupposes the existence of two texts, and the
measurement of the first against the second. But what distinguishes this new read-
ing from the old is the fact that in the new one the second text is articulated with
the lapses in the first text (Althusser and Balibar, 1979: 67).

By a symptomatic reading of Smith, Marx is able to construct for analysis ‘the prob-
lematic initially visible in his writings against the invisible problematic contained in
the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any question posed’ (28). Marx
(1951) himself says this of Smith, ‘Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance
because they contain problems which it is true he does not solve, but which he reveals
by contradicting himself’ (146).
To read a text symptomatically, therefore, is to perform a double reading: reading
first the manifest text, and then, through the lapses, distortions, silences and absences