Page 91 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Althusserianism 75

This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription of an
otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which
it is not, that which happens at its margins. To explain the work is to show that,
contrary to appearances, it is not independent, but bears in its material substance
the imprint of a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identity. The
book is furrowed by the allusive presence of those other books against which it is
elaborated; it circles about the absence of that which it cannot say, haunted by the
absence of certain repressed words which make their return. The book is not the
extension of a meaning; it is generated from the incompatibility of several mean-
ings, the strongest bond by which it is attached to reality, in a tense and ever
renewed confrontation (79–80; my italics).

It is this conflict of several meanings that structures a text: it displays this conflict but
cannot speak it – its determinate absence. Traditionally, criticism has seen its role as
making explicit what is implicit in the text, to make audible that which is merely a
whisper (i.e. a single meaning). For Macherey, it is not a question of making what is
there speak with more clarity so as to be finally sure of the text’s meaning. Because a
text’s meanings are ‘both interior and absent’ (78), to simply repeat the text’s self-
knowledge is to fail to really explain the text. The task of a fully competent critical prac-
tice is not to make a whisper audible, nor to complete what the text leaves unsaid, but
to produce a new knowledge of the text: one that explains the ideological necessity of
its silences, its absences, its structuring incompleteness – the staging of that which it
cannot speak.

The act of knowing is not like listening to a discourse already constituted, a mere
fiction which we have simply to translate. It is rather the elaboration of a new dis-
course, the articulation of a silence. Knowledge is not the discovery or reconstruc-
tion of a latent meaning, forgotten or concealed. It is something newly raised up,
an addition to the reality from which it begins (6).

Borrowing from Freud’s work on dreams (see Chapter 5), Macherey contends that
in order for something to be said, other things must be left unsaid. It is the reason(s)
for these absences, these silences, within a text that must be interrogated. ‘What is
important in the work is what it does not say’ (87). Again, as with Freud, who believed
that the meanings of his patients’ problems were not hidden in their conscious
discourse, but repressed in the turbulent discourse of the unconscious, necessitating a
subtle form of analysis acute to the difference between what is said and what is shown,
Macherey’s approach dances between the different nuances of telling and showing. This
leads him to the claim that there is a ‘gap’, an ‘internal distanciation’, between what a
text wants to say and what a text actually says. To explain a text it is necessary to go
beyond it, to understand what it ‘is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to
say’ (94). It is here that the text’s ‘unconscious’ is constituted (Macherey’s term for the
Althusser’s problematic). And it is in a text’s unconscious that its relationship to the
ideological and historical conditions of its existence is revealed. It is in the absent