Page 191 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

180 IDEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

work is absolutely central if the Chinese experience is to be learned from. For the
implications of this attitude for analyses of social structures are very clear: any
analysis that is ‘characterized by the breach between the subjective and the
objective’ is inadequate to the political tasks it sets itself. It remains hardly more
than a destructive exercise unless completed by an analysis of the mass
psychology involved: the psychological processes by which individuals are
subjected to the social structures, the drives whose repression these social
structures accomplish only to have to deal with their (partial) return.
We see the beginning of the exploration of this process in Althusser’s Lenin
4
and Philosophy. At least until the late sixties he had been very aware of the
importance of Mao’s work, and in ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’
he begins his notes for an investigation by developing Mao’s emphasis on the
5
crucial role of ideology in the reproduction of the relations of production. The
essay then goes on to deal with the external aspects of this reproduction, without
however dealing with the internal aspects. The questions often asked of this
essay are: ‘what is a subject?’; what constitutes this point (carefully not called
person, individual) at which the active production on a day-to-day basis of the
structure-in-dominance actually takes place? The answers are not given in this
piece but in a very divergent (and in many ways inadequate) essay ‘Freud and
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Lacan’, which he was ‘correcting’ whilst writing about ideology. In Althusser,
the reconciliation of the discoveries of Marx and Freud does not take place: they
are marked as parallel, both oriented around a ‘decentredness’. His timidity
comes, perhaps, from the outcast nature of psychoanalysis, which he describes at
the beginning of the essay. The work which deals with the subject in ideology is
to be found elsewhere, in the developments from formal semiology that have
taken place since 1966 in Paris. The work has met with exactly the
misrepresentation and/or rejection that Althusser describes. In order to explain it,
I will use Kristeva’s examination of the sensitive point in Marxist theory, the
concept of practice. 7
Kristeva begins by pointing out that Mao’s emphasis in his essay ‘On practice’
is that practice is personal and concerned with direct experience. In this light she
then examines the process of generation of new concepts: ‘a sudden change
(leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition’. Common sense
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describes this as ‘It all fell into place’, ‘It suddenly dawned on me’. But a
dialectical materialist understanding of the process has to begin from a different
point. It is precisely the contradiction between the superstructure and the forces
and relations of production that creates the conditions in which this can happen.
But the presence of the objective conditions is no guarantee that anything will
happen: an account of the subjective moment is needed. However, Marxism does
not usually examine this moment, assuming a subject which is unified and outside
the objective process. To think the objective without the subjective is to leave the
subjective free to reproduce the same old orientations. But the concept of
practice that Kristeva is explaining, a conception which pays attention to the
‘leap of understanding’, can only be grasped by using the Freudian notion of the