Page 32 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 21

80
and apparatuses (the ISAs) which elaborated them. But also ideologies worked
by constituting or interpellating ‘subjects’. The ‘I’, the seat of consciousness and
the foundation of ideological discourses, was not the integral Cartesian centre of
thought but a contradictory discursive category constituted by ideological
discourse itself. Here Althusser, whose borrowings from Freud were already
strategic (for example, the concept of ‘over-determination’), now ambiguously
made another, more tactical, ‘loan’ from the psychoanalytic work of Lacan. 81
The problems with the Althusserean formulations on these key theoretical
issues (and on the related epistemological questions concerning the relation
between science and ideology, knowledge and the ‘real’) are well rehearsed and
cannot be resumed here. We must include in any such account a substantive
82
critique made from within the Centre itself. Basically, the concepts of ‘relative
autonomy’ and ‘over-determination’ proved fruitful and have been developed—
even though they are by no means theoretically secure (what is relative? how
autonomous is ‘autonomy’?). ‘Structuralist causality’ has been amply shown to
be just another, larger, self-sufficient and self-generating ‘expressive totality’: all
its effects are given in the structure which is itself the sum of all the practices—
even if this is a totality of a Spinozean rather than a Hegelian variety. Ultimately,
it proved both formalist and functionalist in character, giving a basis for
Thompson’s subsequent caricature of Althusser’s ‘structure’ as a sort of self-
generating machine. Althusser’s later work—critical of both the formalism and
the theoreticism of his earlier efforts— returns us to more acceptable positions,
but these are descriptively rather than theoretically established. 83
In its integral form, then, ‘Althussereanism’ remained an internally
inconsistent position. In its fully orthodox form it never really existed for the
Centre. Few people swallowed Reading Capital whole—though elsewhere it did,
for a time, acquire doctrinal status. But again the impact was not a matter of
mere subscription. Althusser interrupted certain previous lines of thinking in a
decisive way. Those who have gone on to further developments nevertheless
continue to work and think in his shadow, after his ‘break’. Many who have
definitively criticized him are still standing on his shoulders.
One last aspect of his influence must be noted. This concerns the ways in
which Althusser himself, and those influenced by him, reshaped the central issue
of the relationship between ideologies/culture and class formations. Cultures as
the lived practices of social groups in definite societies produced, inevitably, a
focus on the major social formations of industrial capitalist societies: class
formations. In many ways the earlier Marxist tradition—Lukács and Goldmann
are good exemplifications here—conducted the analysis of specific cultural
formations largely by conceiving them as the products or expressions, at the
cultural-ideological level, of the ‘world outlooks’ or visions du monde of
particular classes. Class structures, class domination and class contradictions also
constituted, at the level of cultures and ideologies, parallel formations—class
ideologies. Althusser not only challenged any attempt to reduce the specificity of
the ‘ideological instance’ to the simple effect of the economic base (hence, ‘over-