Author: barb howe

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Althusser king of infinite space

Althusser’s essay on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is an attempt to answer the question of how the conditions of production reproduce themselves within a capitalist society. In classical Marxism the forces of production are the basic units of the system: labor power + capital, and these two mutually regenerating forces affect the social relationships amongst everyone in the system. But it requires more than just new workers being born as old ones die off, new materials (capital) being added etc. There’s something else required to insure the system continues to reproduce itself. So how does that happen? That is the question Althusser is seeking to answer in this famous essay.
This blog post is not a complete summary of Althusser’s entire argument in that essay but it does summarize and comment on some of the key points Althusser makes in regards to his theory of interpellation, which is what Althusser is most remembered for today.
In classical Marxism the concept of the State is seen only as a repressive power of force, but Althusser has two things to say about this. First, he says it’s important to distinguish between State power and State apparatus.  State apparatuses are the specific institutions or manifestations of State power and these can change during revolutions and regime changes while State power (the ruling class) still persists. Second, Althusser says the State apparatuses themselves have two parts: there are Repressive State apparatuses (like prisons and militaries) that predominantly use force and then there are Ideological State Apparatuses that predominantly use ideology. Both of these apparatuses are needed to get people to behave in the desired ways (in reality both use a bit of each, but this is a minor point). Althusser says the way the superstructure reproduces itself is via Ideological State Apparatuses.
The most important ISA  is the educational ideological apparatus. Makes sense. We learn a lot about the society we live in from going to school. Not just the lessons but the social skills we gain there teach us how to behave in society and instill within us the predominant ideological beliefs of our society.
 
So far so good, right? But what is ideology exactly? The second part of Althusser’s essay tries to answer that question. Althusser says Marx said “ideology has no history.” Personally I don’t remember that particular assertion in Marx but I guess this is a reference to Marx’s materialist ontology (as opposed to Hegel’s idealism). As Althusser puts it, “ideology, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage).” This is just a fancy way of saying ideas don’t have material existence so therefore they do not exist, i.e. they are imaginary, but Althusser sorta rejects this. He (Althusser) asserts that ideas/ideology do have a material basis in the actions and practices that people undertake because of their ideological beliefs. Example: Jason believes in God, and this belief is manifest via Jason’s actions. Jason goes to church, performs the sign of the cross, kneels etc. All of these things are the material manifestation of Jason’s ideological belief in God.
Since he is a Marxist Althusser doesn’t like to talk about ideas (he says that word is “disappeared”). Instead he talks about the material manifestation of ideas in actions and behavior.  Ideological apparatuses are the everyday practices and rituals of ideological belief.
He writes, “Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus“
Now we get to the concept of interpellation!
Althusser continues directly after the sentence above: “It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted [upon] by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus [e.g. the Church], prescribing material practices [e.g. tithing, genuflecting] governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.” (brackets inserted by me for clarification purposes)
The central concept here is the notion of the subject. Althusser links ideology to the creation of subjects, by which he means something like our social identities, how others categorize us, our role in society. Ideology gives us our identities as social creatures and that is the entire purpose of ideology: to tell us who we are within society but it’s not a one way endowment. It is instead a sorta collaborative process. We are called or hailed as X, and we ourselves respond to this call and that’s how ideology works. It’s called interpellation. Both the call and our response. This, Althusser says, is how social identities are created, how ideology works to reproduce the system.
It’s very important to realize this is not society saying to us YOU ARE X and therefore we are X. It requires the response by us. Althusser uses the word “recruit;” he says ideology “recruits” subjects among individuals and the way it does this is via interpellation or hailing. He gives an example of the beat cop on the street who shouts out “Hey you there!” at someone and then someone turns around (responds) to that call. That’s interpellation. Ideology hails the individual; and we as individuals answer that call and become subjects.
There is no point in time in which we exist before this process. We are all always already interpellated as subjects from birth.
One final point, Althusser says this small-s subject requires or implies the existence of a large S-Subject. If we are called, that means there is a caller. In the religious ideology this Subject is also called God. These two, subject and Subject, are mirrors of each other. You can’t have one without the other. They need each other. He calls this the mirror structure of all ideology.
And that is Althusser’s essay in a nutshell.
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Liberalism against itself

I’ve been following this conversation about liberalism that has developed over the past few years because, like many people, I was caught off guard by the rise of far right populism and extremist politics. Freedom House has documented an overall decline in democracy around the world for the past 18 years now and this trend is confirmed by other metrics such as those of the V-Dem project and the polity scores. Why is the world giving up on liberalism/liberal democracy? I wanted to know (still want to know) so I read Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and various academic articles that spin off on all sorts of different aspects of the problem from the rise of social media to the question of post-truth and plain old propaganda. Many of these things were very helpful in understanding why this trend is happening and they are maybe more helpful than books like this that try to take the big picture view and talk about liberalism as a whole theoretical tradition. As much as I enjoy that stuff, I think it could reasonably be argued that once we zoom out that far, it’s actually less helpful to understanding what’s going on because it becomes just a philosophical debate. Most people are not thinking deeply about the tenants of liberalism or neoliberalism and all the different variations therein and then deciding to vote or not vote or vote for a populist demagogue accordingly. It really does all come down to things like social media, narratives, and propaganda.

That said, I appreciate this book for reminding us about this whole school of thought, or theoretical tradition that comes down to us from the Enlightenment –liberalism. It’s such an old tradition that we’ve lived with so long it’s like an old t-shirt that’s been washed and stretched out so many times it barely resembles its original shape. The term has been so used and abused over the years until now it seems to encompass almost everything and almost nothing. Does it mean democracy or capitalism? Yes! Does it mean freedom or regulation? Yes! Freedom for individuals or freedom for markets? Yes! The book is helpful for explaining a bit about how liberalism evolved over the years. i.e. why “neoliberalism” a thing that seems so contrary to everything else in liberalism is a thing.

I appreciate Moyn’s overall argument in this book —that liberalism has gotten away from what it once meant. G. John Ikenberry made a similar argument in a 2018 article called “The end of the liberal international order?” Ikenberry called for a return to the embedded economy of the New Deal –the idea that the market should work for society and human needs should come first, not the other way around. (In other words: anti-neoliberalism). Moyn’s book is less specific on the recommendations part but that’s okay with me because, like I said, its value lies in its explanation of how the concept of liberalism evolved during the second half of the 20th century.

The book got me curious to read Judith Shklar, since Moyn said she’s kind of his guide for the book. Indeed, now that I’ve read Shklar’s After Utopia I can see how this book by Moyn is kind of newer version of it. Shklar’s book was written back in 1956. I wasn’t familiar with things like “Christian fatalism,” that she references, but I did understand what she meant by “the romantics” –anti-intellectualism, a preference for emotion-rather-than-reason, a rejection of standardization and “the mass society” etc. That’s plenty familiar to us now, but back in the mid-1950s Shklar had yet to meet the first hippie. I bet she wasn’t at all surprised by the 1960s counter-culture. We seem to be entering a similar era now: people are suspicious of science and any and all authority figures. Politicos use micro-targeted ads to appeal to the emotions of individuals rather than to reason and no one but no one is talking anymore about what’s best for the community overall. People think politics is all about what benefits them personally rather than what would make society as a whole better off. So it’s no wonder people are bemoaning the end of liberalism and wanting to understand why this is happening.

This class of people that Moyn calls “Cold War liberals” are people who, like Shklar, were writing about liberalism during the Cold War. Of the ones Moyn talks about I’ve read Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. I liked and appreciated both Popper’s and Berlin’s arguments, Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Berlin’s famous essay from the 1950s on the two kinds of freedom (positive and negative). I think for their time, both were useful criticisms about the dangers of totalitarianism. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Soviet version of the Great Terror were recent history and Mao’s Cultural Revolution that left millions dead was just around the corner. There was something extremely repressive in these regimes that *claimed* to be based upon Marx’s ideas but Shklar argues that criticisms that blame such engineered humanitarian disasters on the ideas/ideologies in whose name they were committed is a form of “intellectual determinism.” She all but mocks those who, in the 1930s, drew a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler(!)… or even Jacobinism. But so what? Can the ideas of liberalism be perverted to nefarious ends by power hungry people? Sure, but that doesn’t make those ideas any less valid. Corrupt humans can corrupt any idea for nefarious ends but this is not the main argument of the book.

The main argument of both books is that something crucial in liberalism has been lost and we need to get it back. What is this thing? For Shklar, and I think for Moyn too, when they talk about the loss of liberalism, the thing they are lamenting is the loss of a sense of collective agency to create a better world. That’s what Shklar means anyway when she talks about the end of political theory. Liberals no longer sit around dreaming about how to create the ideal society anymore. Moyn means something like increasing equality and liberty for an ever-wider number of people (i.e. progressive politics that favors socially progressive policies). Fair enough. I can buy both arguments.

What I said earlier about Moyn essentially re-writing Shklar’s book was not exactly true. The two books are very different; it’s just that you can see a lot of Shklar in Moyn but Shklar’s book is a critique of theoretical approaches or states of mind (romanticism and Christian fatalism) whereas Moyn’s book is more like critiques of specific liberals of the 20th century. It’s not the same critique for everyone though. Take his critique of Hannah Arendt, for example. He doesn’t accuse Arendt of blaming liberalism for totalitarianism. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism will always remain classics because they show us how easily dictatorships can form in the modern world. There’s nothing in them that blames liberalism for totalitarianism. Instead Moyn makes a post-colonial critique of her later works “On violence” and “On Revolution” in which she denounces the violent overthrow of colonialist powers in the third world by various independence movements. I haven’t read those particular books by Arendt but I imagine this criticism is likely spot-on.

Overall I liked this book by Samuel Moyn and think it is worth your time. It’s a great contribution to the on-going debate about whether liberalism is dead or not.

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The hell of living inside our own heads

One of the most common themes in literature and philosophy is the importance of shedding our preconceived notions. This requires being curious about the world and observing it with the beginner’s mind as the Buddhists like to say. Not sleepwalking through life! It also means questioning the wisdom of conventional external authorities (the prevailing ideas in the larger society around us) and interrogating ourselves, which is much more difficult to do.

This is the main idea of Claire Messaud’s excellent introduction to the new edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s also a common theme in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. In the opening of Arendt’s book The Human Condition she implores us to stop and “think what we are doing.”

Lolita is a story about a man who does not do that. Humbert Humbert is a solipsist who uses other people as objects of manipulation in his own fantasy world. Solipsism is the theory that only oneself exists; everything else out there in the so-called “world” is just a figment of our own imaginations. There is nothing larger than the self.  The resulting hell this point of view creates is a particularly painful and tragic one. I have some experience with it.

After my brother died, my father’s grief became so all encompassing that soon his grief was the only thing he could see. He never recovered from the loss of his son and he lived in this hell for the rest of his life. It impacted all his personal relationships and impeded his ability to love and be loved. The only thing that existed for him was his grief. He was unable to see anything else, even the humanity of his own family members. The story of my father is a sad and tragic one.

By chance, I also re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” last night and realized this story, too, is another version of the idea that living too much inside your own head is a tragic truncation of human life. In the story, a young man walks out into the woods with this figure the reader comes to recognize as the devil. In the woods the man sees everyone he recognizes from his village, from the local priest to his young new wife, as the most debauched of sinners. He leaves the wood and goes on about his life but what he saw there forever changed him. Whether it was all just a dream doesn’t matter. Young Goodman Brown is forever changed by the experience. He becomes “a stern, sad… distrustful… man” who dies in “gloom” just like what happened to my father. In high school, we learned that this was a story about the cultural zeitgeist of late 17th century New England Puritan society, but reading it alongside Claire Messaud’s introduction to Lolita, I see it now as also a warning to all of us against the dangers of living too much inside our own heads and seeing around us only our own fantasies or worst nightmares.

I think a lot of people go through the world just this way. Whether on the right or the left, one of the effects of political polarization is an inability to see other people as they really are. We only see, and respond to, our own caricatures of other people. Such a solipsistic view of the world leaves us alienated not only from each other but also from ourselves. Is it any wonder then that we are also experiencing an epidemic of loneliness? The social consequences of such a way of living ripple throughout society. It’s easy for someone living in a world of their own making to make the decision to take up a gun and shoot a few other people before taking their own lives. The murder-suicide, I think is, in their eyes, is just suicide. They lost the ability to see other people as other people.

It’s worth it to take Arendt’s advice and stop a minute to “think what we are doing.” Are we sleepwalking through life or are we open to experiencing the world and other people as they really are, not as extensions of ourselves? It’s a hard task to undertake but I think there’s nothing more important than this. It’s the only way to avoid a hell of our own making.

 

 

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On Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

I recently re-read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I think I read it in high school but while I remembered the beginning vividly, I couldn’t remember the end. It came up during a recent conversation with a fellow enthusiast of 19th century literature so I spent a couple of days ensconced in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and I learned some surprising things, mainly, that it’s not primarily a love story! Only in the most superficial sense is it about the love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Most of the novel is about Heathcliff’s revenge on those who wronged him as a child. I can certainly identify with what it feels like to be a child brought into a home where it isn’t wanted and how the resentments of other family members can warp those relationships for life, but I was never  fixated on revenge. One of the joys and purposes of fiction is to allow us to explore what if scenarios. What if I had been obsessed with revenge as Heathcliff is? How might that have gone? Short answer: not well! Heathcliff’s is not a happy ending and, when you finish the novel you realize his love for Cathy is completely overshadowed by his all-consuming hatred of everyone around him. It even extends to Cathy herself in their last encounter. This is not a love story; it’s a hate story!

Bronte does an excellent job of capturing the naiveté of youth. Other characters grow out of theirs, but not Heathcliff. Isabella, for instance, has a great quote when she’s talking with Hindley, another target of Heathcliff’s wrath, about how “treachery, and violence, are spears pointed at both ends –they wound those who resort to them, worth than their enemies.” Heathcliff never gains this much maturity and in this, I don’t think he’s unusual. Lots of people remain emotionally stunted their entire lives. I’ve known old men who have the same level of emotional maturity as fourteen-year-olds. Think of Donald Trump, another example of a petulant child in a grown man’s body, harboring petty jealousies and throwing temper tantrums. When such men are given power over others the amount of damage they can inflict on the world can be immeasurable.

But you know what? –spoiler alert!– in the end, it didn’t matter. The kids were alright. Catherine and Hareton, Nelly tells us “contrived in the end to reach it” –the point of loving and holding one another in esteem.  Heathcliff did manage to inherit everything. But that’s all he got and, in the end, I think he found out the money was worthless. He had no love.

It reminded me of what the goddess Philosophy says about how we call things by the wrong names. In The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius writes “we give the wrong names to things, and if you examine carefully what each thing is in itself then you find that the label is false. Wealth is not really wealth, and power is not really power, just as honor turns out not to really be honor.” (Boethius was a great fan of ancient Greek philosophers and Socrates makes this argument in more than one of Plato’s dialogues.) Heathcliff did manage to take his vengeance out on those who wronged him. He was “successful” in that respect. But was he really? The final picture of Heathcliff is one of despair and madness. This is not vengeance. This is not success. And Wuthering Heights is no love story. It’s a story about the futility of revenge and how much damage small, petty men can do to those around them when they are given power.

It’s a good book to read when one such man sits in the White House.

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How do you get a room full of political science majors to focus on something else the day after election day?

By talking to them about truth and politics, which is the title of a 1967 essay we are reading by Hannah Arendt.  I started class by reminding students of something we encountered in Plato and in Hannah Arendt which is the counter-intuitive idea (heretical for a poli-sci major!) that politics isn’t actually everything.

Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us to keep things in perspective and we really need that right now, not only for our own mental health but for the health of our country as a whole. When politics become framed in existential terms of life or death, that’s when political violence can erupt.

Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us remember that there is a world outside of the political realm and even more importantly, that is actually where truth resides, two kinds of truth specifically: rational truths (such as 2+ 2 = 4 as Plato shows us through the Socratic dialogues) and FACTUAL truths (as Hannah Arendt shows us in her 1967 article Truth and Politics).

Let me walk you through Arendt’s argument if you haven’t read it. It’s true, she says that facts are the most vulnerable kind of truths because they are contingent (they always could have been otherwise). What she means is that there is nothing self-evident about a factual truth. Either Germany did or did not invade Belgium in August 1914 or maybe it was Belgium that invaded Germany. We can’t know which of these statements is true without seeking external validation in the form of witnesses or other documentation of the events. It’s their contingent nature that makes such factual truths vulnerable to manipulation by the political powers-that-be.

We also know that unwelcome facts can be very threatening to the political status quo, more threatening even than disagreeing with official state ideology or the official state religion. It was more dangerous in Nazi Germany, she says, to talk about the existence of the concentration camps (which everyone knew existed) than it was to disbelieve Nazi ideology or antisemitism. Political power is threatened most by factual truths because factual truths form the basis of political life, the “life of the city” as Plato puts it.

But here is where Arendt’s essay turns to make a really important point about the role of truth in politics. Arendt says that facts are also somehow, despite all the above, incredibly resilient. Even a totalitarian regime like Stalin’s could not erase the fact that a man by the name of Leon Trotsky existed even though he was wiped out of all the history books.  (Leon Trotsky was part of the Bolshevik leadership after the Russian Revolution and had a falling out with Stalin and subsequently went into exile. His existence was written out of official history books and denied by the totalitarian state under Stalin and yet we still know who Trotsky was today and we didn’t even have to wait until the USSR collapsed in 1991 to find out! We know because factual truths always involve other people. There were people who saw Trotsky, met him, knew him. His existence was a factual truth that the state tried to suppress. Arendt’s point is that no political regime is powerful enough to suppress factual truths forever, not even a totalitarian regime of one of the world’s most powerful countries.

So ultimately Arendt’s message is a hopeful one that we should remember as we go through these next few years of official state-sanctioned lying (propaganda). People who have lived under totalitarian regimes can describe how odd it feels when the official state-sanctioned truth is a known lie. It can be very disorientating. We’re going to experience a lot of that over the next few years given Trump’s track record with telling falsehoods. We will feel sick at being gaslighted with all the lies and we may even start to feel like there is no truth at all, no ground beneath our feet and then we will be falling like Alice slowly down through the rabbit-hole. But if you remember Arendt’s point in this article you can keep your head: factual truths, she says, are real. They do exist and political power cannot erase them. They are the sky that stretches above us and the ground beneath our feet.