Marxism as a General Not a Total History

It is appropriate to conclude the present chapter by returning once again to the creative tension in Althusser's thought between the structured whole and the uneven development of its component structures. In For Marx , Althusser clearly states the problem that, more than any other, dominates all his work: "Marx has at least given us the 'two ends of the chain,' and has told us to find out what goes on between them: on the one hand, determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode of production ; on the other, the relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity " (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 111). In attempting to connect the two ends of the chain, Althusser proceeds by means of a penetrating critique of transitive and expressive causality and by means of concepts developed in the course of a searching dialogue with materialist thought from Spinoza through Montesquieu to Marx. The result of the process is a conceptual synthesis of startling originality, a powerful attempt to rethink the idea of historical causality in terms of the matrix effect of a structured whole on its elements and the irreducible particularity of the elements whose distinct and unequal effectivities are simultaneously at work in a given conjunc-

ture. Althusser, we have seen, asserts the principle of economic determination in an indirect rather than a direct manner. Economic determination, the primacy of the economic function within the social whole, is always already there within each and every element and its relative autonomy because the social whole is the historical matrix of each and every element and has thus assigned to each and every element its place and function.

We will return to the problem of economic determination in relation to the relative autonomies of the economic, ideological, and political instances in the course of later chapters. Here I want to call attention to another aspect of Althusser's problematic, the introduction of epistemological limits and discontinuities within the production of historical knowledge itself, that is, within the science of history and the concepts of social structure and historical process. In challenging the explanatory power of historical discourses based on either expressive or transitive causalities—and by replacing them with differential history, a more complex and more powerful historical discourse based on structural causality—Althusser has abandoned all claims for a science of history that is or can ever be finished or complete. Michel Foucault, a former student of Althusser, aptly captures the significance of Althusser's move in terms of a contrast between "total" and "general" history in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1972).

Total history, according to Foucault, "seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the material or spiritual principle, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion" (Foucault 1972, 9). In a straightforward essentialist manner, total history implies that the same form of historicity operates on economic, social, political, and religious beliefs and practices, subjecting them to essentially the same type of transformations. In contrast, general history (Foucault's appropriation of Althusser's concept of differential history) speaks of series, segmentations, limits, differences of level, time lags, anachronistic survivals, and different possible types of relations. Whereas a total history tends to draw all phenomena around a single center, a general history attempts to determine what forms of relation may be made between them.

The problem that now presents itself—and which defines the task of general history—is to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical systems are they capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dominance exist between them; what may be the effects of shifts, different temporalities, and various rehan-

dlings; in what distinct totalities certain elements may figure simultaneously; in short, not only what series, but also what "series of series" . . . it is possible to draw up. (Foucault 1972, 10)

It is, of course, misleading to extend further the parallels between the ideas of Foucault and those of Althusser. In defending the principles of economic determination, class struggle, and scientific realism, Althusser is defending a totalizing movement within historical knowledge unacceptable to Foucault. Foucault, as we shall see, will move from his concept of general history toward a postmodernist position characterized by a playful, relativistic "fictionalizing" of history and by ever more fragmentary and rigidly circumscribed "micro-analyses" of social structures. Ultimately, Foucault will deny the very possibility of a concept of a structured whole capable of situating the concepts of particular structures in a meaningful relation to each other—a position that amounts to an arbitrary denial of our ability to know the interconnections of things and an equally arbitrary restriction of scientific knowledge to the classification, arrangement, and summarizing of the coexistence and sequence of phenomena. This positivist conception soon links up with a kind of instrumentalist pragmatism: science conceived as arbitrarily chosen formulas that, by some mysterious means, allow people to handle phenomena effectively in practice.

Althusser, by contrast, remains committed to a modernist concept of general history: he insists on our capacity to produce knowledge of the complex unity of social formations as well as the diversity and autonomy of particular social structures and our ability to do so within a framework that remains realist despite its complexity. According to Althusser, we can think backwardness, forwardness, survivals, and uneven development only in the specific unity of the complex structure of the whole—as co-existence in the real historical present of the conjuncture. Obviously the concept of a general history—a history adequate in relation to the conjuncture—cannot be realized simply as a juxtaposition of independent histories—economic, political, and so on—or simply as a search for suggestive analogies or correspondences between them. A Marxist and modernist concept of general history, in other words, must be capable of totalization as well as de-totalization.

As a modernist general history, Structural Marxism is conscious of the real complexity of history: "the truth of history," Althusser points out, "cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures" (Al-

thusser and Balibar 1970, 17). Moreover, it is conscious also of the internal limits to our conceptual knowledge of that complexity. The point I wish to make with respect to these latter, internal limits is that in elaborating concepts of the two ends of the chain—a concept of the social whole and concepts of the economic, political, and ideological instances—Althusser has discovered that within the theoretical field of the concepts themselves, the metaphor of a chain is inadequate and must be discarded. As we attempt to move conceptually from either end of this chain toward the other, we find that links are missing, that in fact there are distinct chains that cannot be forged into a single, continuous concatenation. Instead, we are forced to confront the irreducible presence of multiple levels of analysis, structures of structures, whose vertical and horizontal displacements cannot be eliminated or reconciled at any one level. For any given structural whole, the question of its specific effectivity—that is, its place within a larger structure—always poses a "higher" or englobing level of conceptualization, while the question of the specific effectivities of its unevenly developed elements necessarily poses a "lower" or regional level of analysis.

Bounded by the reality of the world about which knowledge is being produced and limited by concepts never perfectly adequate to the reality about which they provide knowledge, historical science is also overdetermined by a restless dialectical movement from one level of analysis to another—from one structure (and its relative autonomy) to the interrelationships between this and other structures (and the effectivities generated at these levels and by these interrelationships). Structural causality and relative autonomy are not concepts of continuity across a homogeneous theoretical space because, while the theoretical spaces coexist, they do not ever meet. The true complexity of the Structural Marxist dialectic does not exist simply as a category of concrete history; it also exists as a category of our knowledge of that history. Within the domain of its own theoretical practice, Structural Marxism functions as the effect or outcome of an open-ended interrelationship between coherent, meaningful, yet distinct levels of explanation whose necessary reciprocity is, paradoxically, guaranteed by the ultimate impossibility of their convergence.