Page 31 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

20 INTRODUCTION

There is, despite all their radical differences, a common starting-point here
between Durkheim and Marx—in Marx’s insistence that we must start with
relations, and Durkheim’s insistence that the object of social science is ‘the social
sui generis’. On the irreducibility of a ‘structure’ to the conscious intentions of
its individual elements both agree—at least as to this necessary level of
abstraction. There the salient compatibilities end. For where Durkheim isolated
‘the social’ (as Lévi-Strauss, following him, abstracted ‘the cultural’), Marx
insisted on the relations between material relations—thinking of ‘societies’ as
ensembles. And where Lévi-Strauss centred his analysis on the ‘rule’, the codes
and formal oppositions, Marx worked from relations and contradictions.
Nevertheless, the manner in which Althusser attempted to rethink structuralism
on Marxist foundations owed much more to Lévi-Strauss (and through him,
inevitably, to Durkheim) than he or his followers have been willing to
acknowledge.
Althusser’s impact is harder to detail satisfactorily. Here one can only select
certain key themes. The first is the break (powerfully established in the early For
Marx essays) with expressive and totalizing ways of thinking about the
relationships between different practices in a social formation. It is well known
that there are more ways than one in which this rethinking appears in his work.
There is the notion of societies as necessarily complex, unevenly determining
and determinate practices, caught in his concepts of ‘relative autonomy’ and
‘overdetermination’. There is the full-blown ‘structural causality’ of Reading
Capital, where each practice is only the condensed effect of the structure as a
whole. The differences between these positions cannot be commented on further
here. Crudely, the important innovation was the attempt to think the ‘unity’ of a
social formation in terms of an articulation. This posed the issues of the ‘relative
autonomy’ of the cultural-ideological level and a new concept of social totality:
totalities as complex structures.
Second, but closely related, was Althusser’s attempt to reformulate the
problem of determination in a non-reductionist way (or ways). Third, there were
the varied, sometimes internally inconsistent, ways in which he defined ideology.
This work on ideology was of special relevance to Cultural Studies. It revived two
earlier stresses and added two new ones. It reasserted the conception of
ideologies as practices rather than as systems of ideas. It defined ideologies as
providing the frameworks of understanding through which men interpret, make
sense of, experience and ‘live’ the material conditions in which they find
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themselves. This second emphasis was very close to the ‘culture’ of Lévi-
Strauss; but it employed a more Marxist connotation, stressing the degrees of
mis-recognition involved in these framings and classifications of social
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existence. Thus, for Althusser, ideologies were those images, representations,
categories through which men ‘live’, in an imaginary way, their real relation to
their conditions of existence. To these, Althusser added two further, more
controversial, propositions. Ideologies were materially located and were
therefore best examined, in their practico-social effect, in the institutional sites