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| Rubén Weinsteiner |
We might think of the work of Althusser as defining, in the sense that its take-up for the first time placed the study of human subjectivity centre stage in a Marxist project of radical political transformation. A frequently used approach from what became known as economistic Marxism was exemplified by Braverman (1974) in Labour and Monopoly Capital, who argued that, for example, schools provided workers for the economy along the lines of a sausage factory – you put in children and get out workers. This means that what happens in the school is not worth engaging with – it is the output of workers that matters. Althusser's famous ISA's essay (Althusser, 1971) completely stood that idea on its head. He argued that it was effectively what happened within the institution that was crucial and that in fact, the economy only mattered “in the last instance”, an instance that, in fact, never comes.
He argued that, if we continue the school analogy, ideological state apparatuses (Althusser cited the army and the church as well as the school) create subjects by producing identities. They do this by a process of interpellation or hailing. That is, they hail a school student as, for example, an A or a C, having learning difficulties, etc. It is this process of interpellation that, Althusser argued, creates subjects and it is this that is the ideological work, which is, in the end, more important than the last instance of the economy. Thus economic determinism was seen as over-simplistic and failing to take account of ideological processes in the making of subjects. In addition to this, Althusser turned to Lacan to support his theory of interpellation by referring to Lacan's account of the mirror stage. This had considerable importance in the re-awakening of interest in psychoanalysis, with many coming to psychoanalysis for the first time not through Freud but through Lacan (e.g. Lacan, 2002) – not the easiest or most obvious of sources!
What is significant here is that this led not only to the central importance of ideology but to what became known as the need for a Theory of the Subject. Note here the singular theory and singular subject, who could be understood through structural Marxism on the one hand and an account of the psychoanalytic formation of the subject on the other. The use of Lacan also paved the way for the centrality of a non-biologistic subject – one rather created through signs – and for the central importance of psychoanalysis for the study of ideological processes. For example, the journal Screen for a period devoted itself to a psychoanalytic reading of cinema through an account of spectatorship. In this analysis, the subject was created as a position or an interpellation and so, in order to get away from a pre-existing subject who determined what was understood, it was the semiotic, psychic and ideological processes themselves that created the subject – discursively and psychoanalytically.
This account of the discursive creation of ideological positions as the way of studying subjectivity and ideology was considered by some to be overly passive. In some ways this is a misreading of the activity of the unconscious but it is definitely the case that, for example, in cinema studies, it was as though a subject was produced simply and only through the relations of desire in the film. That the film was watched by people with pre-existing processes of subjection was not really considered at this point, although clearly it was made more complex later.
But the reason for stating this is that we want to contrast it with the use of another account of ideology, that of Antonio Gramsci (1971). Gramsci's work was taken up by Stuart Hall and was central to the founding of cultural studies. Gramsci's concept of hegemony became crucial for the development of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s. In particular, some cultural theorists argued that the Althusserian and Lacanian account was too static and did not allow for an active subject. For this reason they concentrated on the cultural processes of active resistance to dominant ideologies. Perhaps best known are Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1989), in which Hall and Jefferson argued that young men used youth culture as a way of resisting the dominant culture and codes of masculinity, thus creating the possibility for radical action, and hence this was understood as less determinist than Althusser's position. Or Dick Hebdige's Subculture: the meaning of style (1979), which used semiotics to analyse resistant style, mostly the punk use of the safety pin. By subverting the meaning of the safety pin, the punks, he argued, were making a radical and transformative act.
What links these two approaches is the turn to language, signs and discourse as the site through which subjects are formed. This relates to a move away from biology on the one hand and the economy on the other. It is this work that profoundly shaped radical work across the humanities and social sciences for the next 30 years, which founded a new field, Cultural Studies, and which, in many ways, helped sow the seeds of the intellectual death knell of Marxism. It is this period and these debates that, more than anything else, in Europe and North America at least, produced a climate in which the word “subjectivity” became central.
Rubén Weinsteiner
