Just when existential Marxism emerged there was an abrupt shift in the French intellectual mood toward structuralism. In this chapter I will examine structuralism to see where it challenges and where it supplements the positions of Sartre and the Arguments group.  Taking the viewpoint of existential Marxism, I will test the possibility of a synthesis with structuralism.  The discussion will be limited to four major figures (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser) who were broadly associated with the new tendency while varying considerably in their interests and concepts.  For structuralism was a diffuse tendency, not a neatly consistent doctrine.  The unifying thread of the chapter will be the problem of reconciling the two theories about the role of the subject in social thought.

1.  Sartre and Structuralism

     a. Language and Society

Repeating the success of existentialism in the Post-War years, the wave of structuralism splashed loudly on Paris in the early 1960s.[1] The man who brought structuralism from the quiet halls of linguistic faculties to the cacophony of the philoso-

  1 The following journals devoted special numbers to structuralism: "La Pensée sauvage et le structuralism," Esprit, 31:322 (Nov., 1963) on Lévi-Strauss; L'Arc, 26 (1965) on Sartre; Les Temps Modernes, 21:240 (May, 1966) on Althusser; "Le Structuralisme," Aléthéia, 4 (May, 1966); "Problèmes de structuralisme," Les Temps Modernes, 22:246 (Nov., 1966); "Structuralisme: Ideologie et méthode," Esprit, 35: 360 (May, 1967); "Structuralisme et marxisme," La Pensée,

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phical marketplace was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.  To insure the victory of structuralism, he felt compelled to challenge Sartre.  The final chapter of The Savage Mind (1962) forcefully attacked Sartre's existential Marxism and initiated a new era of controversy that did not abate until May, 1968.

A contemporary of Sartre, Lévi-Strauss attended the Ecole Normale Superieure and taught in Paris Lycées with Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.  Their destinies began to divide in the mid-1930s: while Sartre traveled to study Husserl and Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss went to the Amazon to do ethnographic research.  Like Sartre's, the career of Lévi-Strauss was shaped by the war.  A Jew, he left France for America, where he met one of the masters of structuralism.  His meeting with Roman Jakobson, the phonologist, at the New School in New York, fixed his future tasks: to apply the insights of structural linguistics to the study of society, specifically to the kinship systems and Mythologies of the primitives.  While the force of history impressed itself on Sartre in war-tom Europe, Lévi-Strauss immersed himself in the contemplation of timeless structures.

To Lévi-Strauss the new linguistics promised to raise anthropology and the human sciences in general to scientific status.  The study of man and culture must become as objective and as certain as the study of nature.  The immaturity of the humanistic disciplines, plagued by subjective self-indulgence and cultural myopia, would be replaced by a method that was as cool and precise as mathematics.  In linguistics an epistemological break had occurred before World War I, when Ferdinand de Saussure replaced historical philology with the study of language structures.  His Course in Gen-
 
 

135 (Oct., 1967); "Structuralisme et marxisme," Raison présente (1967-1968) fascinating articles and debates reprinted in book form; "Dialectique marxiste et pensée structurale," Cahiers du centre d'études socialistes, 76-81 (1968).

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eral Linguistics, compiled from student notes and published after his death, [2] presented a new level of intellegibility of language.  Saussure studied la langue, not la parole, not the spoken word but the system of signs.  He studied these signs not diachronically in their temporal shifts, but synchronically in their static interrelations and permutations.  After the fin de siècle, the heyday of evolutionism was over and many intellectuals strove for ahistorical forms of knowledge.  The shift away from the primacy of history was undoubtedly related to the collapse of the belief in progress that had given metaphysical force to the historical study.  Isolating the timeless quality of language structure, Saussure ignored the other alternative open at that time--Marxist dialectical history--with great consequences for French structuralism in the 1960s.[3]

Saussure developed the principal traits of synchrony: signifiers (roughly, words) were opposed to signifieds (corresponding mental images).  Previous language theory concerned itself with the signified, conceiving of language as an expression of thought.[4]  Saussure switched the level of concern to the signifier, which could be analyzed formally.  Signifiers were intelligible only within their total system: the signifier "cool" is meaningless without the signifier "hot." Hence language was above all a system, or structure, in which the component was secondary to the totality.  Meaning was located not in the thoughts of the enunciator but in the system of signs itself. Jakobson, with his distinction between phonemes (the small units of sound) and morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning) further showed that the phonological building blocks of language were an unconscious, "meaningless" substructure.  Later, Hjelmslev developed the formaliza-

 2 Trans.  Wade Baskin (N.Y., 1966).
  3 Lucien Sève.  "Méthode structural et methode dialectique," La Pensée 135 (Oct., 1967) 90-91.
  4 Oswald Ducrot, "Le Structuralisme en linguistique," in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris, 1968) 37.

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tion of language through primary emphasis on the "combinatory," the rules for combining or relating elements of a system in opposition and correlation.  Benveniste's analysis of pronouns revealed that the speaking subject could not be identified with the Cartesian, individualist concept of the "I." For every "I" invoked the whole system of language, starting with the implied, reciprocal "you." In short, structural linguistics made its object intelligible without reference to the subject, the intentional individual.

Sartre viewed language in the older way, as a tool for expressing states of consciousness or ideas.  What troubled him about language was that it never translated thoughts into words perfectly.[5] Sartre's fascination with words, as documented in his autobiography, [6] turned on his unending struggle to narrow the gap between intention and language.  For structural linguistics, Sartre's perspective was futile and incorrect.  The intelligibility of language from the perspective of the speaker was entirely secondary to that of its systematic coherence.  In contrast to Sartre, language was for Lévi-Strauss not an obstacle to truth but a mechanism that was its own truth.  The human mind was manifest, not in its intentional statements, but in the hidden structure, the system of binary oppositions that were present to the speaker in his unconsciousness of them.  Sartre's all-too-human concern to express himself in language was a laughable inversion of the situation since language expressed itself through Sartre.  The intelligible structure of language was located in a totally unconscious structure: "Linguistics ? presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will.  Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing." [7] While Sartre wrestled with articulating his meaning in words, Lévi-Strauss adopted

  5 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 57-59; "L'Ecrivain et sa langue," Situations, 9 (Paris, 1972) 40, 53.
 6 The Words, trans.  B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1964).
 7 The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966) 252.

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the scientific advance of linguistics as the unintelligibility of intentionality.  In the "phonological revolution . . . meaning is always the result of a combination of elements which are not themselves significant . . . in my perspective meaning is never the primary phenomenon behind all meaning there is a non-meaning . . . "[8] It was this "non-meaning" that Lévi-Strauss called "structure."

All that Lévi-Strauss needed to do to translate linguistics into the study of society was to take the phenomena of society as a system of messages.  Language was not the only means of exchanging information: all social interactions were exchanges of messages, as Mauss foresaw, [9] which were amenable to structural analysis.  In 1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship appeared in which Lévi-Strauss uncovered, at a hitherto unprobed depth, the structures through which women were exchanged in traditional society.  He showed that all social phenomena brought individuals together and separated them in fixed relations while at the same time separating and relating man to nature.  Society began with the universal prohibition of incest, distinguishing the natural system of biological reproduction from a social system in which small groups had to go outside their own group for mates, a theoretically unnecessary rule but one that was the foundation of the human world.[10] With incest banned, men entered into complex relations of exclusion and inclusion; women were exchanged between groups in patterns that were more or less restrictive.  Unlike structuralists and functionalists in Britain and the U.S., Lévi-Strauss was not concerned with the observable, empirical facts of the exchanges or with the structure of these facts. 11 To the chagrin of Anglo-American anthropologists, he reduced the kinship system to a structure of messages that was not

  8 "A Confrontation," New Left Review, 62 (July-Aug., 1970) 64.
  9 The Gift, trans. I. Cunnison (N.Y., 1967).
  10 D. Sperber, "Le Structuralisme en anthropologie," in "Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme;, op. cit., 173.
  11 Structural Anthropology, trans. by Jacobson and Schoepf (N.Y., 1967) 271.

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located in the everyday life of society but was the product of scientific labor: "A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals.  It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation." [12] Anthropology became a science when it established the structure of human activities, material and spiritual, as systems of symbolic communication, disregarding the content of the activity and the intentionality of the participants.  Everything that men did or said consisted of signs, organized into structures, into logical relations, that were totally distinct from lived experience.  Meaning appeared in the play of signifiers not in social subjects.  Society was hence decentered from the whirl of human subjectivity and shifted to the objectivity of structure.  Ultimately, the complex interactions of men in society were unconscious projections of the brain's binary logic.

When Lévi-Strauss began his ambitious enterprise of classifying myths with The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, he applied the same principles used in the study of kinship.  The fantastic stories that so engrossed European visitors of traditional societies were reduced to mathematical formulas.  The elements of myths, like the part of a story in which a culture-hero kills his father, were organized into patterns, patterns that were apparent only to the scientist.  With seeming randomness, Lévi-Strauss wove an intricate tapestry out of shreds of myths.  One day, when the fundamental structural elements of all myths were known, the scientist would have in his computer nothing less than the human mind, the fixed, atemporal structure of human consciousness.  The humble study of structures led to the grand revelation of the universal mind of man, dispelling forever  Western arrogance about the pre-logicality of the primitives.

 12 Ibid., 49.

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The popularity of Lévi-Strauss in France began not with The Elementary Structures of Kinship but with the poetic, autobiographical, travel-and-voyage report, Tristes Tropiques (1955).  The bard scientist who wanted to systematize knowledge on punch cards, [13] presented himself there as a romantic, a Rousseauian, escaping the horrors of civilization to the tranquil artlessness of the savages.  Yet, the popular success of Tristes Tropiques was nothing compared with the intellectual success of The Savage Mind in 1962, an event marking the beginning of the era of structuralism.  The rapid spread of structuralism as a general intellectual orientation has been explained in relation to the failure of existential Marxism adequately to account for what Sartre called the "practico-inert," and what was henceforth to be known as "structure."[14] At first glance, structuralism might have complemented existential Marxism, rather than emerging as a competing doctrine.  Sartre's comments in his Critique about Lévi-Strauss suggested that structural anthropology fit well with the progressive-regressive method.[15] Such harmony was not to be.

The problem was that the analogy Lévi-Strauss drew between language and other social structures was made, in Sartre's view, too easily and was extended too far.  It might well be the case that many social phenomena could be made intelligible through structural analysis.  In addition to the work of Lévi-Strauss on kinship and myth, Barthes applied it to the world of fashion, Foucault to epistemologies, Lacan to the unconscious, Althusser to economic structures, and countless literary critics to novels and poems.  But could structural analysis be applied to social classes in industrial societies, or to politics?  More significantly, structural anthropology was unashamedly reductionist, eliminating from consideration all aspects of lived experience and conceding no value to other per-

 13 The Savage Mind, 89.
 14 Lucien Sève, Marxisme et la théorie de la personnalité (Paris, 1969) 482.
 15 CRD, 487-493.

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spectives.  Yet many fuzzy traits of structures were not clarified: for example, to the degree that language formed a structure of signifiers, just how far could it be likened to the very different fact of kinship or, worse, to phenomena like cities whose origin was well known?  Furthermore, how did the fact that structuralists made us aware of structures change their unconscious epistemological status?

Before exploring the theoretical controversy, we must mention the use of structural linguistics by Roland Barthes, the literary critic.  An early editor of Arguments, Barthes had connections with existential Marxism, and his use of structuralism to analyze everyday life was akin to that of Henri Lefebvre.  Mythologies, which probably influenced Lefebvre, appeared in 1957 before The Savage Mind.  Barthes analyzed ordinary experience like films, wrestling matches, striptease shows, advertisements, and propaganda, making subtle use of structuralist concepts.  All social experiences could be taken as signs, thus introducing a general science of signs, or semiology, which had been Saussure's dream.  In advanced capitalist society, communications increasingly took on a mythic semiological structure.  To schematize Barthes' position, myth dehistoricized and depoliticized signs, making them appear as natural objects.[16] The picture of a black man in French military uniform on the cover of Paris-Match transmitted immediately the mythic information that French imperialism thrived.  Enveloped by the image, the reader received this information in a haze, semi-consciously but powerfully.  Semiology would disclose this mythic structure for what it was: a deliberate distortion.  Thus, structuralism need not oppose and contradict Marxism.  Not only was structuralism compatible with Marxism, but the major structuralist figures, Lévi-Strauss included, considered themselves Marxists, [17] and one

  16 Mythologies, Trans.  A. Wavers (N.Y., 1972) 129.
 17 J.  M. Domenach, "Le Système et la personnel" Esprit, 35: 360(May, 1967) 775; for Lévi-

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of the major  Communist theorists of the 1960s, Louis Althusser, was, broadly speaking, a structuralist.

     b. Structure and the Unconscious

Under the banner of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss vigorously opposed existentialism and phenomenology for their unscientific subjectivism: lived experience provided no insight into Being.

As for the trend of thought which was to find fulfillment in existentialism,
it seemed to, me to be the exact opposite of true thought, by reason of its
indulgent attitude toward the illusions of subjectivity.  To promote private
preoccupations to the rank of philosophical problems is dangerous, and may
end in a kind of shop-girl's philosophy--excusable as an element in teaching
procedure, but perilous in the extreme if it leads the philosopher to turn
back on his mission.  That mission (he holds it only until science is strong
enough to take over from philosophy) is to understand Being in relation to itself,
and not in relation to oneself.  Phenomenology and existentialism did not
abolish metaphysics: they merely introduced new ways of finding alibis for
metaphysics.[18]

Strauss see Tristes Tropiques, trans J. Russel (N.Y., 1965) 61; Savage Mind, 130-131, 246; Structural Anthropology, 332-333.
 18 Tristes Tropiques, 62.  Emphasis added.

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Esprit group phenomenologists.[19] But the-self-proclaimed Kantian ethnologist discovered the absolute categories of mind only from the base of a finite, empirical, scientific subjectivity.  On the other hand, his position against existentialism on the ground that the immediate certainties of experience were an inadequate avenue to truth forgot that phenomenologists refused the naive statements of natural consciousness, distinguishing them from reflective consciousness.

Structural anthropology differed from existentialism at heart over the intelligibility of subjective reality and over the relation of knowledge to action.  Finally, after all the data about society or mind has been processed by the computer, one must still decide what to do with it; to Sartre and to Marxists it was still knowledge for man.  To the important phenomenologist, Mikel Dufrenne, "In whatever element it moves, the thought of man always encounters the exhausting task of returning thought to the thinker; whatever is said of man, it is a man who says it . . . " [20]   If structuralism was to mount a challenge against phenomenology and existentialism, it would have to be on the ground that consciousness was not an intelligible object.

The commitment of Lévi-Strauss to science was profound.  The passion of this singularly un-savage mind was to mathematize the knowledge of society.  "Starting from ethnographic experience, I have always aimed at drawing up an inventor of mental patterns . . . when the mind is left to commune with itself and no longer has to come to terms with objects, it is in a sense reduced to imitating itself as object?it shows itself to be of the nature of a thing among things."[21]  Paradoxically, Lévi-Strauss' dream of total knowledge, in which the mind confronted itself in perfect reciprocity with its object, led

 19 "A Confrontation," op. cit., 59.
 20 "La Philosophie du néo-positivisme," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 783.
 21 The Raw and the Cooked, trans.  J. and D. Weightman (N.Y., 1969) 10.

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him to explore the social object in search of the mind that was not there, the mind that was the essence of society without being empirically given.  This perfect object was structure.  In order to arrive at it, it was necessary for him to deny to empirical consciousness the dignity of meaning.  Hence the notorious structuralist inversion: "I claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." 22 The real was the rational, but without the savages knowing it-a final insult to the primitives from the colonialists.

In good faith, Lévi-Strauss could invoke the support of Marx, Freud, and even Sartre: "Marx and Freud . . . taught us that man has meaning only on the condition that he view himself as meaningful.  So far I agree with Sartre.  But it must be added that this meaning is never the right one: superstructures are faulty acts which have 'made it' socially.  Hence it is vain to go to historical consciousness for the truest meaning." [23] Surely Sartre would agree: distorted consciousness prevailed everywhere over transparent truth.  But, from the Hegelian base, existential Marxism posited an evolution, a dialectical movement, of consciousness through nature and society and through various forms of systematic distortion, toward the possibility of a greater elimination of "faulty" constructions of meaning. Existentialism claimed that man created his own meanings; existential Marxism, with the concept of scarcity, added that there was a meaning to the history of the meanings man created.  Most adamantly, Lévi-Strauss and structuralism denied this: the meanings (sens) man made for himself were non-meanings (non-sens). [24]

The  phenomenologist  Paul  Ricocur  was  displeased  by  the  exclusiveness  of  Lévi-

 22 Ibid., 12.
 23 The Savage Mind, 253-254.
 24 Cf. Merleau-Ponty's sympathetic treatment of structuralism: "From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss," in Signs, op. cit., 114-125.

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Strauss' position : [25] did not socio-cultural phenomena have many levels of signification beyond that of structure?  Did not hermeneutics, the recovery of the meaning of the subject, have a role in the human sciences?  For example, to Lévi-Strauss totemism was nothing more than a system of signs that separated clans and related them: "natural species are classed in pairs of opposites" with some analogy from the species to the social group.[26] A totem was nothing more than a name.  The fact that the totem animal was experienced as sacred, that rituals and myths pivoted around it-these aspects of the conscious experience of the totem by the native carried no scientific meaning.  Yet the phenomenologist exulted in the sacred quality of the totem, marveling at the richness of meaning embodied in it. Conversely, the sole interest of Lévi-Strauss was in uncovering the binary pattern of signs in the social custom, attributing them to an underlying mental logic and ultimately to the brain.

Structuralists had indeed brought to light a new level of meaning, but they concluded from this that structure was necessarily opposed to the subject.  They shifted attention away from any reconciliation of object and subject toward a programmatic examination of the systematic incongruities between structure and subject, without accepting the need for concrete studies to determine if human beings could self-consciously design structures.

The structuralists appear to have relied upon certain aspects of the contemporary Lebenswelt.  With the unchecked growth of bureaucratic structures in advanced industrial society (structures that were ruled by no one), with the dissolution of historical consciousness (the sense that the future was not in the hands of the people), it should not be too surprising that a theory developed in which society was composed of

  25 "Structure et herméneutique," Esprit, 31:322 (Nov., 1963) 596-627.
  26 Le T'otémisme aujourd'hui (Paris, 1962) trans.  R. Needham as Totemism (Boston, 1963) 87-88.

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agentless structures. [27] Generalizing from the distinction between the subject and his language to posit a fixed disjuncture between social beings and institutions that effectively excluded liberating action, was not only unproved but worked into the hands of the ruling class.  If Lévi-Strauss was right that no social agent could be attributed to the origin of language, could the same be said of the absolute state?  When Louis XIV invented the syntax of daily life at Versailles, he, and for that matter the Duc de Saint-Simon, knew perfectly well what was happening.  The semiology of Louis' morning habits was an etiquette fatefully damaging to the nobility.  His nods and signs of recognition were part of an orchestrated system of political dominance.  If some structures rose and fell by themselves, others were the products of social action.  The pertinent question--could alienating structures be dismantled by social action?--was not answered by Lévi-Strauss.  On the other hand, Marxism assumed too quickly, not that the ego was the absolute center of its own experience, but that it was centered enough to choose effective, revolutionary action.

c. From Subject to Structure

The aim of "decentering" human experience, of eliminating the egoistic illusion of man's location at the metaphysical center of things, was not new with structuralism.  Copernicus "decentered" man and his planet from a privileged place in the universe; Darwin "decentered" the human species, placing it in an evolutionary chain of biological forms; Freud "decentered" the moral concept of the ego as the autonomous agent of the personality.  Continuing in the line of man's detractors, structuralism decentered man from his own meanings; the conscious subject was displaced from the center of social activity.

 27 Henri Lefebvre, "Claude Lévi-Strauss ou le nouvel éleatisme," L'Homme et la société, 1-2 (1966) and Lucien Goldmann, "Structuralisme, marxisme, existentialisme," L'Homme et la société, 2 (1966).

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With Hegel, thought moved from substance to subject; with Lévi-Strauss, it went from subject to structure.  What Lévi-Strauss drummed into the civilized, "domesticated" mentality was that structure is unconscious: " . . . we are led to conceive of social structures as entities independent of men's consciousness of them (although in fact they govern men' s existence.) . . . "[28] The emphasis fell on the distance between structure and consciousness, rather than on the complete unawareness of structure.[29] At times, he was willing to grant that the complex patterns of kinship that he developed could be sketched by the native, rare as this was.  But generally in lived experience the structure was beneath consciousness.  The "subject is the one who speaks . . . his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws." [30] From this the scientist concluded that the ego was not the center of social reality and that science must take drastic measures: " . . . I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute but to dissolve man." [31] The dissolution of man, the battle cry of structuralism, would leave the scientist the task of taking "an inventory of mental enclosures" such that the underlying logical structure of the mind, which was the same everywhere, would be known.  For Lévi-Strauss, the foundation of structure was no longer man but Being.  In sum, structural anthropology would displace the subject in two ways: the focus of intelligibility shifted from the subject to the structure, and then, within the structure, it looked not for the expression of meaning (signifieds) but for the pattern of elements (signifiers).

The task of decentering the subject was carried further by the Freudian, Jacques Lacan,

  28 Structural Anthropology, 117, also 23; The Savage Mind, 251; The Raw and the Cooked, 11.
  29 Agreeing on the unconsciousness of structure for the ego, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan were worlds apart on its nature.  For the anthropologist, the unconscious was a sterile realm of repetition, whereas for Lacan, following Freud, it has the intentional quality of desire or eros, a teleological, meaningful structure.
 30 The Savage Mind, 252.
31 Ibid., 247.

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the second major structuralist figure, whose abstruse discourse applied structuralism to the psyche.  A contemporary of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan had practiced and theorized about psychoanalysis since the 1930s but was unknown to social theorists until Althusser introduced him at the Ecole Normal Superieure in the early 1960s.  He directed his "subversion" of the ego as much against Freudians as against existentialists and Marxists. [32] The Freudians had developed an ego-psychology that gave the ego more autonomy, more unity, than had Freud.  As for the existentialists and Marxists, Lacan actually negated the same bourgeois concept of the ego that they had: Marx berating individualism in The Jewish Question, and Sartre's early positions against the calculating self.  Lacan, however, conceptualized the decentering far more than -they.  The picture of the ego as an autonomous, unified, captain of the soul, or the hope that it should be so, was Lacan's chief target. [33] Following Lévi-Strauss, Lacan introduced linguistic theory in his fight against egoism, redefining the therapeutic process as a talking cure with new prominence given to the role of language. [34]

To Lacan, linguistics decentered the subject since the signifier represented a subject "not for another subject but for another signifier." [35]  The spoken I could never enunciate the actual I. Hence: "I am not in what I say;  I am not where I think; I do not think where I am."  [36] The level of language was so distinct from the level of the subject that the media-

  32 Lacan criticized Sartre's Being and Nothingness in "The Mirror Phase," New Left Review, 51 (Sept.-Oct., 1968) 76 originally published in 1949.
 33 "Some Reflections on the Ego," international journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953) 12.
  34 "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud," trans.  J. Miel in Yale French Studies, 36-37 (1966) 112-147. First given in 1957.
  35 "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed.  Macksey and Donato, trans.  A. Wilden (Baltimore, 1971) 194.
  36  Domenach, op. cit., 778.

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tion of speaking did not unify the two.  Worse still, there was a second level of structure, a second language: the unconscious was itself structured, enunciating the language of desire. 37 In the new structuralist Freud, the ego was decentered between two levels: the language of culture and of desire.  Freud had introduced the concept of unconsciousness to explain the absence of the self in the words of the subject: free association, dream analysis, slips, jokes, hypnosis--these methods circumvented the ego, moving from the language of culture to that of desire.  To attain a substantial unity of the self, the ego had to be disunified.  Such concepts as the "total personality" of the Gestaltists and the unified intentionality of the phenomenologists were pure fictions to Lacan.  Systematic misunderstanding (méconnaissance) characterized the ego's relation to itself.

Life goes down the river, from time to time touching a bank, staving for
while here and there, without understanding anything--and it is the principle
of analysis that nobody understands anything of what happens.  The idea of
the unifying unity of the human condition has always had on me the effect of a
scandalous lie.[38]

Freudian structuralism subverted the ego both synchronically and diachronically: synchronically, the ego was immersed in otherness; diachronically, it was lost in the unconscious structure of desire, "fading" and slipping from its phantasm of an object that was its illusory foundation.  In the "mirror stage" of his development, the child identified with the image of the other.[39] Before it had the capability of distinguishing itself from another person, the child perceived the other as himself, as in a mirror. In this

  37 M. Safouan, "De La Structure en psychanalyse," in 'Qu'est-ce que le structuralism (Paris, 1968) 241.
  38 Ecrits, II (Paris, 1971) 190.
  39 "The Mirror-Phase," op. cit., 71-77 and A. Wilden, The Language of the Self (Baltimore, 1968).

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first constitution of the individual's identity there was a radical misrecognition.  From then on, the ego would name itself while actually referring to the imaginary other.  The self was a composite of false introjections, hardly a unified personality.  Ego and other were inextricably confused in the language of the self.  The second permanent, structural distortion of the ego was that of unconscious desire.  Like Hegel with his concept of desire as the "law of the heart," Lacan viewed the ego's desire as an ungratifiable quest for the desire of the other.  In each demand, each need could be satisfied, but never the desire that moved the ego toward its unattainable lost object.

With these difficult concepts of otherness and desire, Lacan dismantled the centered subject.  The pleasant sense of coherence that the individual might enjoy was shown by Lacan to be nothing more than an illusion.  This suggestive if heterodox reading of Freud went further than the master in displacing the secondary processes of the ego toward the primary processes of desire.  Freud's program for psychoanalysis, "where the id was, the ego shall be," provided for an ultimate reintegration of the ego.  Lacan reinterpreted the program to coincide with his subversion: "The ego (of the analyst no doubt) must dislodge the Id (of the patient )." [40] Lacan would not allow psychoanalysis to serve the autonomous ego.  Yet he did allow for an authentic ego in genuine "interpersonal communication," as in therapeutic situations.  Here Lacan envisioned a socialized ego, a bit like Sartre's individual in the group-in-fusion, that accepted the otherness of its identity.  Still, the decentering was open to the criticism made of Freud by Paul Ricoeur, that it did not account for unifying processes like sublimation. [41] If Lacan destroyed enlightenment liberalism, it is difficult to say how much his theories were a threat to ex-

 40 Ecrits, II, 208.  Cf. 160-161 and 229 for other revisions.
  41 Freud and Philosophy: Essay on Interpretation, trans.  D. Savage (Connecticut, 1970) 255.

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istential Marxism, even though many regarded them as such.  In Sartre's Critique, the individual was centered only through reciprocity, through totalization, and through all the concrete mediations that constituted his historical being-in-the-world.  Even then, centering was always distorted by scarcity, by objectification, and by alienation.  It was not all clear that structural psychoanalysis was antithetical to existential Marxism.

     d. Savage and Dialectical Minds

Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists raised once again the old bogey against Sartre [42] and existential Marxism: the charge of the cogito.  By the 1960s, the Marxists had lowered their guns, granting that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, though they relied on some form of phenomenology to account for the subjective nature of human experience, were far from the idealism of Husserl, with his transcendental ego, his concept of the ego as the absolute foundation of experience and truth, which indeed had Cartesian resonances.[43] Yet, in The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss did ascribe the cogito to Sartre's thought:

  42 For the controversy between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, cf.: Jean Pouillon, "Sartre et Lévi-Strauss," L'Arc, 26 (1966) 55-60, who takes a conciliatory stance; Lawrence Rosen, "Language, History, and the Logic of Inquiry in Lévi-Strauss and Sartre," History and Theory, 10:3 (1971) 269-294, an excellent discussion; Lionel Abel, "Sartre vs. Lévi-Strauss," in Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, eds.  E. N. Hayes and T. Hayes (Cambridge, 1970) 235-246, who is more concerned to comment on Third World violence and American youth than to examine the question at hand;  David Levin, "On Lévi-Strauss and Existentialism," The American Scholar, 38 (Winter, 1968) 69-82, a weak article that takes the concept of structure as "expressions of freedom." On the relation of structure and history see, A. J. Greimas, "Structure et histoire," Les Temps Modernes, 22:246 (Nov., 1966) 815-827 and Marc Gaboriau, "Structural Anthropology and History," in M. Lane ed., Structuralism (London, 1970) 156-169, trans.  N. Court from L'Esprit, 31: 322 (Nov. 1966); Henri Lefebvre, "Reflexions sur le structuralisme et l'histoire," Cahiers internationux de  sociologie, 35 (July-Dec., 1963), reprinted in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971) 195-219.
 43 Jean Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis (Paris, 1963) 133.

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He who begins by steeping himself in the allegedly self-evident truths
of introspection never emerges from them. . . . Sartre in fact becomes the
prisoner of his Cogito: Descartes made it possible to attain universality,
but conditionally on remaining psychological and individual; by socio-
logizing the Cogito, Sartre merely exchanges one prison for another.[44]

The prosecuting structuralists were better off in conceding the count of the cogito and staying with their basic charge that no form of philosophy of consciousness could account for unseen structures.  It was here that the structuralists would win their verdict and even contribute to the development of existential Marxism.  Sartre's dialectical reason was a method of comprehending the visible intentionality of the social field, whether that intentionality originated from individuals, groups, or processed matter.  All "presences" could be woven into dialectical cloth; but structures made their effects through their "absences," through their invisibility.  The linguistic structure was absent from discourse as the speaker focused on the content of his discourse.  So too with social structures: one is aware of buying this object in the store, not of the structure of commodities.

The structuralists also accused Sartre of humanism, again deriving this flaw from the original sin of the cogito.  The decentering of the ego implied to them that the popular forms of humanism--existentialism., Marxism, Christian personalism, Freudianism, and

 44 The Savage Mind, 249.
45 Ibid., 256.

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Phenomenology --would have to be abandoned.  The battle over humanism was fierce, but the issue, it seems, was one of emphasis, not of principle.  To Lévi-Strauss, knowledge could not begin with a statement about man: ".  . . that a properly appointed humanism cannot begin of its own accord but must place the world before life, life before man . . .  " [46] Too often humanist doctrines assumed that man acted on the model of the artist, deliberately shaping objects with full consciousness.  It was this focus on the individual at the point of creation that perturbed the structuralists.  Marx was guilty of "humanism" when he adopted Feuerbach's notion of man as self-conscious action.  Sartre too leaned this way when he posited freedom as the self-creation of man.  Yet neither Marx nor Sartre spoke of society as the simple sum of autonomous, individual actions; Marx always mediated individual action through social structures and Sartre postulated that the choices the individual made were pre-reflective.

In the final analysis, Lévi-Strauss' argument against humanism concerned the prominence of history and historical knowledge in human affairs.  Humanism argued that man created history, that the praxis of the subject was the ground of social structures, while structuralists maintained that structures had no agents and did not become intelligible through the study of agents.  The locus classicus of the encounter was in Lévi-Strauss' chapter devoted to Sartre in The Savage Mind and in Sartre's replies.

Lévi-Strauss agreed that both structuralism and existential Marxism were totalizing conceptions, finding basic unities at the level of the totality, with the individual (element) in a subordinate position to the larger structure.  In these respects, both were anti-liberal.  Lévi-Strauss could not agree with Sartre's definition of dialectical reason, preferring to call his own method dialectical.  What was outrageous to Lévi-Strauss in Sartre's  Critique,  however, was  that  he labeled his own project a "structural anthropo-

 46 Cited in E. Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (N.Y., 1970) 35.

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-logy," without having the slightest understanding of structures.  Sartre reduced structures to "pure seriality," giving them a vague, "natural" mode of existence.  For Sartre, with his notion of the total antimony between man and nature, all objectivity was anti-human "naturalness." The opposition between man and nature led to Sartre's "disordered and lawless form of humanism . . . [in which] man, lord and master of nature, exists on one side, on the other side, there is nature entirely exterior to him.  That makes nature no more than a thing, an object, an instrument." [47] The inadequate concept of social structure as seriality was said to be symptomatic of all Sartre's errors.

Behind the opposition of man and nature lay Sartre's vision of history as the arena in which man conquered nature.  Lévi-Strauss was not completely opposed to the value of history in general, although he distinguished it sharply from anthropology and placed it in a second rank.  "History organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining unconscious foundations," [48] a distinction with which many historians would not agree.  The unconscious "imposed forms," and these forms were theoretically prior to patterns of change.  History could not be to Lévi-Strauss a story of human control over nature; instead, it was a succession of structures, each of which was essentially atemporal in the sense that it had no "origin" and therefore no rise and development.  If historians took these structures as their object of investigation, "events" in the traditional sense would have only secondary importance.

Missing the structural core of society, historians invented a code, a series of dates that constituted an irreversible sequence of befores and afters.  The function of the code was to establish continuity when, in fact, social structures demarcated pure discontinuity be-

 47 Psychology Today, (May, 1972) 80.
 48 Structural Anthropology, 19.

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tween different levels and different structures: " . . .  history seems to restore to us not separate states, but the passage from one state to another in a continuous form . . . it appears to reestablish our connection, outside ourselves, with the very essence of change." [49] Here was the core of the structuralist's position: history was the historian's method of transforming objective reality into a placid, recognizable home for himself, a way of erasing the strange and the unfamiliar, a way of making everything understandable in terms of himself, of relating the entirety of experience to his own little world without recognizing that he was doing so.  History projected the "totalizing continuity of the self' into the world.  This description is familiar: history is seen as myth-making.

Lévi-Strauss complained that Sartre, in his Critique, excluded all traditional societies from knowledge by limiting the efficacy of dialectical reason to those societies that had interiorized history, or, in Sartre's words, that had consciously taken on the project of struggling against scarcity.  Lévi-Strauss' limitation to traditional society was supposedly not theoretically significant.  The opposition here was between Sartre, who studied historical societies and claimed the primacy of history, and Lévi-Strauss, who studied ahistorical societies, claiming the primacy of atemporal structures.  Lévi-Strauss acknowledged that his own studies of primitive societies were not a fruitful ground for the historical approach since there was no documentation.  He did insist that all societies were historical, that all changed, and he granted that there was a fundamental rupture between primitive and industrial worlds: "In fact, every human society has a history. . . . But whereas so-called primitive societies are surrounded by the substance of history and try to remain impervious to it, modern societies interiorize history, as it were, and turn it into the motive power of their development." [50] There was, I suggest, a curious double

 49 The Savage Mind, 256.

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bind in Lévi-Strauss' position.  Primitive societies, "impervious" to history, did away with change only by creating myths that camouflaged the temporal as atemporal.  Historical societies, having "interiorized" history, also created myths except these were in the form of history.  Either way one lost because myths were "inauthentic" forms of knowledge.

Myth is the most fundamental form of inauthenticity.  I define
authenticity as the concrete nature of the knowledge people have
of each other and, contrary to what might seem to be the case, there is
nothing more abstract than myth.  Myths depend on propositions which,
when we try to analyze them, force us to resort to symbolic logic.[51]

To Lévi-Strauss, Sartre too was guilty of myth-making.  His group-in-fusion invoked the "Myth of the French Revolution," in which there was indeed a maximum "congruency between practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation."52 The revolutionaries knew what they were doing in establishing new institutions.  So their myth was the "truest" but it was still a myth, one that "men of the Left" cling to" as "the golden age of historical consciousness."

Lévi-Strauss granted a certain necessity to myth-making:

The question is to know whether what we are trying to attain is what is
true in and of the consciousness we have of it or outside this consciousness.
I believe it is perfectly legitimate to look inside, by a recovery of meaning,

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except that this recovery of meaning, except that this recovery,
this interpretation philosophers or historians give of their own
mythology, I treat simply as a variant of that mythology itself.[53]

. . . something which can be true when we look at it from inside a culture
is no longer true when we try to consider it from the outside.  Therefore I
am in full agreement with Marx, and even with Sartre, when they say that
for a member of modern contemporary civilization things appear this way.
History has a meaning and should have, because this is the only way to give
a wider meaning to civilization itself.  I can perfectly well claim, at the
same time, that while this is true inside the society of the observer, it ceases
to be true when we try to reflect a broader point of view and look at it from
the outside.[54]

  53 "A Confrontation," op. cit., 268.
  54 George Steiner, "A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss," Encounter, 26 (April, 1966) 34.  Also, The Savage Mind, 257.

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subjective existence was to deny the vital bond between theory and action.  At times the connection would be made too easily, as in the case of Stalinism, with the consequence of myth-making.  But Lévi-Strauss moved to the other extreme of positivism, with the result that the actual connection he finally drew between scientific knowledge and practice was purely utopian.

Lévi-Strauss violently denied the Hegelian effort to locate the unity of mankind through a stadial concept of history.  There was no "succession" or evolution of societies: the primitives were not lower in some evolutionary scale than the moderns.  With history discarded, where could the unity of mankind, if there was any, be located?  For Lévi-Strauss such unity existed only as a possibility in the sum of all structural combinations.  Through this implicit unity, different societies could be located atemporally and without any hierarchy, as having chosen, unconsciously of course, one particular combination.  Structural anthropology radically excluded the search for origins and for ends, preserving the discontinuity of social formations against any theme -- progressist, eschatological, cyclic -- that arrayed them in an evolutionary order.

Yet there was temporal movement for Lévi-Strauss which he called "structural history," without being able to give this notion much coherence.  Structural history concerned the diachronic transformation of structures.  Structures were always changing because a disparity existed between rules and the signs representing them, each of which was an integrated system.  In addition to this internal contradiction, there were "external" factors such as environmental modifications.  Structural history would comprise the changes in the combination of any system in temporal sequence.  Lévi-Strauss' concept of history denied man's creative capacity by reducing novelty to shifting mixtures of the same elements.  If one wanted to refute the charge by Lefebvre that Lévi-Strauss was a technocrat, no better testimony could be marshaled than his con-

330
 

cept of history.  It undercut not only the utopian aspects of existential Marxism, but the technocratic faith in productivity, growth, and technical mastery of nature.  In so far as structuralism broke through those faiths and allowed room for ecological criticism of unbridled scientific development, it served a beneficent function.  The trouble was that Lévi-Strauss' own utopianism, a weird combination of scientific knowledge and pastoral calm, a kind of inversion of Teilhard de Chardin, was hardly better.  For Lévi-Strauss, man's only hope lay in ending the conquest of nature, de-historicizing Europe, completing technological development, and then imitating the primitives:

. . . history would make itself by itself.  Society, placed outside and above
history, would be able to exhibit once again that regular and, as it were,
crystalline structure which the best-preserved of primitive societies
teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition.  In this perspective,
utopian as it might seem, social anthropology would find its highest
justification, since the forms of life and thought which it studies would
no longer have a purely historical or comparative interest.  They would
correspond to a permanent hope for mankind over which social anthro-
pology, particularly in the most troubled times, would have a mission to
keep watch.[55]

Sartre's replies [56] to Lévi-Strauss were often more defensive and harsh than pertinent

  55 The Scope of Anthropology, trans. from Lecture inaugurale of 1960 (London, 1967) 49.
  56 "J.  P. Sartre répond," L'Arc, 30 ( 1966) 87-96 trans. in Telos, 9 (Fall, 1971) 110-115; "L'Ecrivain et sa langue," Revue d'esthétique, 18 (1965) 306-334; "Entretien sur l'anthropologie," Cahiers de philosophie, 2-3 (1966) 3-12; "Determinisme et liberté," op. cit.; "Itinerary of a Thought

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He could not answer the charge that he misconstrued nature as a thing, opposing man to it in a stance of conquest.  In this respect, structuralism "de-constructed" the obsolete antimony of man and nature better than existential Marxism.  Nor could Sartre detract from the advantages that Lévi-Strauss' approach to structures had over his own concept of the practico-inert.  He insisted, however, that the structure, whatever its internal system of coherence, was a product of human praxis: "I am in complete agreement that social facts have their own structure and laws that dominate individuals, but I see in this the reply of worked matter to the agents who work it. . . . Structures are created by activity which has no structure, but suffers its results as a structure." [57] The failure to relate structures to their anterior, constituting activity would lead inevitably to a mechanical view of society and to a determinist assumption about man.  In Sartre's eyes, omission of the place of creative praxis in the formation of structures also distorted the role of history.  Although historical knowledge was man-centered and oriented toward a future that was not fixed, thereby preparing for that future in the manner of myths, the structuralist concept of society excluded the future completely:

For structuralism, history is an internal product of the system.  There
are as many histories as structured societies: each society produces its
temporality.  Progress is the development of order.  This historical pluralism
subordinates history . . . to structural order.  The future remains anticipated,
but at the interior of well-defined limits, in a positivist sense.  In this way, it
is viewed as already in the past.  It will be understood as anterior future, it
will realize for the social agent that it produces and that it conditions, the

332
 

future being that is implicitly present in its past.  In other words, it is
not to be made, but to be predicted.  Praxis is here eliminated in favor
of process.[58]

The incompatibility of Sartre and structuralism was slightly reduced during the 1960s.  In 1966 Sartre objected too strongly to the structuralist decentering of man.  He overly restricted the lack of presence of the ego to "neurosis," although he rightly called for empirical proof of the degree of decentering in specific cases: "The real question . . . is knowing how the subject, or subjectivity, constitutes itself by a perpetual process of integration and reintegration on a base prior to it." [60] Or, in dialectical formulation, "What is essential is not that man is made, but that he makes that which made him." [61] By 1969, Sartre, while still positing the man-made nature of structures, accounted for the decentered subject by replacing his former concept of consciousness with a more ambig-

 58 "Determinisme et liberté," Ecrits de Sartre, op. cit., 743.
 59 "Replies to Structuralism," op. cit., 111.
 60  Ibid., 113.
61 Ibid., 115.

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uous notion of lived experience.  This concept permitted a large degree of unconsciousness while preserving the final freedom of the subject.  Lived experience was neither consciousness nor unconsciousness but "the terrain in which the individual is perpetually overflowed by himself and his riches and consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness."[62]  In lived experience the subject is absent, distorted by numerous forms of alienation and neurosis; yet he is also present, present enough to reappropriate his absence so that, acting collectively, he can remove the distortions of the structure without eliminating its necessary features as a vehicle of communication and reciprocity.

A skeptical interviewer pressed Sartre on this point: how could individual acts possibly result in ordered structures?  It was here that many concepts of history went astray, relying either on pre-established harmonies or the cunning of reason.  Sartre was manifestly hard-pressed for an answer.  He replied by outlining his projected second volume of the Critique, where he planned to show that "there is an institutional order which is necessarily?the product of masses of men constituting a social unity and which at the same time is radically distinct from all of them."[63] The next task for existential Marxism would be to integrate structuralism by showing how the order and decenteredness of structures cohabited the social field with subjects acting in dispersed, unconscious groups.

     e.   Foucault's Science without Scientists

The enfant terrible of structuralism was Michel Foucault.  More than anyone else, Foucault evoked passionate protests: he was the enemy of man, reason, democracy, a danger to order; he was a wild irrationalist, a nihilistic misanthrope who gloated in the destruction of humanity. [64]  In  truth, he,  more than anyone else,  defined  the  limits of

62 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 48.     63 Ibid., 60.
64 Olivier Révault d'Allonnes, "Foucault: les mots contre les choses," in Structuralisme et

334
 

structuralism and prepared for its possible integration with existential Marxism.

The theme of decentering man was extended by Foucault with dramatic force.  The future of man would not be a final triumph but a humbling dissolution: " . . . man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." [65] The Nietzschean wish for the death of God was applied to man with an anger equal to the anchorite's: "Rather than the death of God . . . what Nietzsche's thought heralded is the, end of his murderer . . . man is in the process of dissolution." [66] With a sharpness calculated to irritate his opponents, Foucault aimed his daggers carefully and threw them swiftly at that bundle of illusions so despised by structuralism: humanism, historicism, philosophical anthropology, philosophies of consciousness.

For Foucault, it was Hegel's Phenomenology that initiated false humanism.  Drawing upon the resources of structural linguistics, he enunciated the major trend of modern thought as the expansion of man's domain over the world: "?modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the Same as himself." [67] The impulse of modernity was to project human finitude as an absolute principle over the whole of creation.  The great minds of the past century, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the new list of saints, pushed back the limits of the unknown and of the unconscious:  ".  . . the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought--of reflecting the contents of the In-Itself in the form of the For-Itself, of ending man's alienation by reconciling him with his own essence . . . of lifting the veil of
 

marxisme (Paris, 1970) 37 and Roger Garaudy, "Structuralisme et la mort de l'homme," La Pensée, 135 (Oct., 1967) 110, 118.
  65 The Order of Things (N.Y., 1970) 387, a trans. of Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966).
 66 Ibid., 385.                 
67 Ibid., 322-323.

335
 

the unconscious . . ." [68] Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud strove for a new unity, with the awareness that it was absent.  These great ones "decentered" man by pointing to structures that were not deliberately created by man." [69]

In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault unveiled yet another hidden structure, the epistème, which was totally unconscious, like kinship, myth, and desire.  The epistème worked at the level of knowledge, limiting the way objects were defined and perceived.  Relations of words and things were governed by unconscious rules that delimited the boundaries of discourse.  What Foucault stressed was the discontinuity between successive epistèmes, the principle that they were not the product of intentional creativity, that consciousness was not sovereign even in its own home of knowledge.  Furthermore, the specific epistème in which man, consciousness, ego, or subject was elevated to the center of reality was only of very recent origin.  It was a transitory structure that was bound for imminent disappearance.

. . . it is not men who constitute [the human sciences] and provide them
with a specific domain; it is the general arrangement of the epistème  that pro-
vides them with a site, summons them, and establishes them--and thus
enabling them to constitute man as their object . . . a "human science" exists
not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis--within the
dimension proper to the unconscious--of norms, rules, and signifying total-
ities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents.[70]

 68 Ibid., 327.
 69 The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A. M. S. Smith (N.Y., 1972) 13 from L'Archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969).
 70 The Order of Things, 364.

336
 

campaign was fought with no amenities of civilization; he wrote articles in prominent journals with titles like "Is Man Dead?" [71]

Sartre and others were irritated by Foucault's apparent challenge to Marxism: the lesson of the epistème was that man did not make his own history; instead, the epistème made man.  It was one thing for Lévi-Strauss to demonstrate that the primitives did not make their own kinship structures, for Lacan to show that the ego was immersed in unconscious desire; but it was outrageous to assert that the most self-conscious activity of human experience was beyond human control.  Perhaps social structures bore the quality of blindness; this could be corrected in the future.  However, if man did not fashion the structure of knowledge, it would be theoretically impossible for man to shape history.  Yet there was a weak spot in Les Mots et les choses which was pounced upon by Sartre and others.  It was Foucault's failure to account for the succession of epistèmes. [72]

The dismal import of Foucault's thesis was chanted sonorously by Bertherat, writing in Esprit:

What man discovers beyond his representation, his interiority, is . . . a
question without a subject, coming from this mute region where language
arises, from this dead space where life is repeated, from this object, always lost,
that obsesses desire.  The modern age is the age of separation, of limits and if
there is a humanism . . . and a science of man, it is to the degree that the unity
of man, the world and words is defeated.73

 71 "L'homme est-il mort?" Arts, 38 (June, 1966).  On p. 6 he argued that structuralism was incompatible with humanism.
 72 Sartre, "Replies to Structuralism," op. cit., 110.
 73 Yves Bertherat, "La Pensée folle," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 876.

337
 

the end of man.  Long ago, Roman Jakobson suggested that structuralism was not the end of humanity but of private property.  Structuralism maintained that communication of language was inherently social, and that any phenomenon that was withdrawn from the social system, like private property, must be doomed.[74] The implications of structuralism were suddenly the same as those of existential Marxism.  In their effort to clear a space for their ideas, the structuralists had exaggerated their attack upon the dominant intellectual trends, while their opponents defensively overreacted in response.

The chance of theoretical complementarity between existential Marxism and structuralism was nowhere more clearly stated than by that arch-enemy of man, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge of 1969.  Foucault made it clear that history was not the continuous, linear evolution of events assumed by humanists.  Discontinuity, ruptures, the dispersion of the subject, uncentered anonymity--these were the true qualities of history, as historians themselves were beginning to show.  Unconsciousness was a fact, not an ideological belief.  What he found in history were discourses without agents, and structures without subjects.  However, once the "inhumanness" of history was acknowledged, it was then possible "to recover in the second degree . . . what we have lost over the last half-century . . . it seemed to me that, for the moment, the essential task was to free the history of thought from is subjection to transcendence." [75]  The raging battle over structuralism could now he viewed with some perspective: its task was now accomplished:

My aim was to analyze this history, in the discontinuity that no teleology
would reduce in advance; to locate it in a dispersion that no pre-established
horizon would embrace; or allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which

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no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject; to
open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn.
My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism . . . . [76]

The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood
as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of
individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they
constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice
is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or
totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified.
These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of sub-
jects as the field in which that initiative is articulated . . . rules that it puts into
operation . . . relations that provide it with a support. . . . I have not denied--far
from it--the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of
the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it. [78]

. . . what the students are trying to do . . . and what I myself am trying
to accomplish . . . is basically the same thing . . . What I am trying to do is

339
 

grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behavior
without our knowing it.  I am trying to find their origin, to show their form-
ation, the constraint they impose upon us; I am therefore trying to place
myself at a distance from them and to show how one could escape.[79]

2. Althusser's Revolution Without Rebels

When Marxists began translating Marx into structuralist language, the CP was dominated theoretically by Roger Garaudy and his effort of dialogue and reconciliation with humanists, existentialists, socialists, and Christians.  Garaudy magnanimously but facilely integrated the young Marx into CP orthodoxy.[80]  Everyone was welcome aboard the Marxist ship, which was repainted in the bright colors of humanism.  Garaudy's oecumenical campaign merited skepticism because it manifested the sheen of surface de-Stalinization in a party that was becoming integrated in the Gaullist regime.  Even with its new paint, the CP vessel would not disturb the flotilla of France on its way to the shores of advanced capitalism.  Marxist humanism went hand-in-hand with the revised Soviet strategy of co-existence.  The more Garaudy pontificated on alienation and dehumanization, the more the French workers were directed to support De Gaulle's glorious France.  Against this open-handed strategy of Marxist humanism came the "theoretical anti-humanism" of Louis Althusser, [81] a CP member himself and a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.  Along with Maurice Godelier and Lucien

 79 J. Simon, "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Partisan Review, 2 (1971) 201.
 80 E.g., Perspectives de 1'hornme (Paris, 1959).
 81 For the controversy over Althusser, cf.: attacks by CP theorists on early articles; Guy Besse, "Deux questions sur un article de Louis Althusser," La Pensée, 107 (Feb., 1963) 52-62;

340
 

Sebag, [82] two young anthropologists, Althusser prepared a structuralist reading of Marx.

Althusser's intellectual pilgrimage in the 1960s contained distinct phases, but was basically unified in a single direction.  His early articles sharply attacked all forms of Marxist humanism, the reading of Marx that relied heavily on the 1844 Manuscripts.  At the same time, he denounced the economism of diamat.  Althusser must not be seen as a regression to Stalinism, as many contend, but as a new departure in Marxist thought.[83] Dismissing the philosophical anthropology of Marxist humanism based on the concept of alienation, Althusser redefined dialectical materialism and historical materialism based on different epistemological premises.  Far from being a Stalinist, Althusser lacked direct political orientation.  Throughout the 1960s his theoretical anti-humanism remain-
 

Althusser," La Pensée, 107 (Feb., 1963) 52-62; Roger Garaudy, "Les Manuscrits de 1844," op. cit.; Gilbert Mury, "Matérialisme et hyperempiricisme," La Pensée, 108 (April, 1963) 38-51.  In one issue, Les Temps Modernes printed a favorable review by Nicos Poulantzas, "Vers une théorie marxiste," 21:240 (May, 1966) 1952-1982, followed by an attack, Rbt. Paris, "En déça du marxisme," 1983-2002, concluded by a commentary by Jean Pouillon, "Du coté de chez Marx," 2003-2012.  Two excellent articles then appeared, one in favor, Alain Badiou of the Cercle d'épistémologie, "Le (Re) Commencement du materialisme dialectique," Critique, 240 (May, 1967) 438-467; and one against, André Glucksmann, "Un structuralisme ventriloque," Les Temps Modernes, 22:250 (March, 1967) trans. in New Left Review, 72 (March-April, 1972) 68-92.  Aron was hostile in D'Une Sainte famille à l'autre., op. cit.  A good summary was presented by Jean Claude Forquin, "Lecture d'Althusser" Les Cahiers du centre d'études socialistes, op. cit., 7-31.  A biting review of Lenin and Philosophy appeared by François George, "Lire Althusser," Les Temps Modernes, 24:275 (May, 1969) 1921-1962, trans. in Telos, 7 (Spring, 1971) 73-98.  Also Emile Bottigelli, the translator of Marx, "En lisant Althusser," in Structuralisme et marxisme (Paris, 1970) 39-65.
 82 Sebag's excellent and unpolemical Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris, 1964) traveled along parallel lines with the efforts of Althusser and Godelier.  For reasons of space, Sebag will not be given individual treatment.
 83 For Marx, trans. by B. Brewster (N.Y., 1970) 9-15 from Pour Marx (Paris, 1965), where Althusser situated his own thought against the over-reaction of anti-Stalinism.

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ed a scholastic enterprise of reinterpreting Marx's texts, calling for an extreme separation of theoretical practice and political practice and suggesting if anything a political struggle within the CP between the functionaries and the intellectuals.  The political import of Althusserianism worked to assert the autonomy of the CP intellectual against the dominance of the politicians, the same principle that Sartre bad advocated since 1946.

To Althusser dialectical materialism was not a set of laws derived from nature, but a philosophical enterprise, an autonomous heoretical practice.  Unlike Sartre he turned to Capital to examine Marx's theoretical practice.  Borrowing aspects of Gaston Bachelard's concept of an epistemological break, [84] he claimed that in Capital Marx established historical materialism as a science but that he did not conceptualize the epistemological novelty of his advance.  This was the "absence" in Marx's text that Althusser's reading would discover.  The goal of Althusser's thought was to redefine dialectical materialism, or the "philosophy" of Marxism, [85] a task first articulated by the existential Marxists.  This striking resemblance in problematics between the structural and existential Marxism puts their animosity in a different light.

His new Marxist epistemology opposed what Althusser termed "empiricism," especially in its historical variant.  The vital distinction, obscured by empiricism, between the object of thought and the real object had to be guarded scrupulously.  Ideas did not co-mingle with the objects they sought to represent.  Marxist science had to strain to generate concepts (knowledge-objects) that enabled society

  84 Cf.  Dominique Lecourt, L'Epistémologie historique de G. Bachelard (Paris, 1969) partially trans. in Theoretical Practice, 13-4 (Fall, 1971) 13-24.
  85 Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1970) 31 from the second edition, which omitted the contributions of Macheray, Rancière, and Establet and included changes in Althusser's text from the original Lire le capital (Paris, 1965) 2 vols.

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and history to be known.  Althusser's thought was here strongly neo-Kantian: concepts actively created by thinkers were the preconditions for the knowledge of any experience.  The strength of scientific Marxism for Althusser was that at the moment of the production of concepts the scientist was disinterested, beyond all attachment to or interest in the objects of the social world.  To Althusser ideologies were those theories that failed to observe this distinction.

Both empiricism and humanism were ideologies, since the former conflated theoretical objects with real objects and the latter erased the distinction between theory and practice.  For Althusser, Hegel, the young Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci, and Sartre were all guilty of some form of ideology.  In the recent debate between official Marxists and humanist Marxists, Althusser found both camps in error.  Neither could account theoretically for the crucial difference between the political economy of the bourgeoisie and the socialism of the proletariat.  Marxist epistemology had floundered on the problem of accounting for its own thought as a theory that was qualitatively distinct from past ideologies.  For official Marxists theory merely "reflected" the economic position of the thinker, rendering all theories equally ideological since truth was reduced to the social interests of the theorist.  The humanists, for Althusser, did not overcome this difficulty.  Lukacs, for example, replied to the reflection theory that the truth value of Marxism derived from the unique position of the proletariat in society, through which it alone could grasp the totality.  The proletariat's knowledge was therefore universal, as distinct from the particular knowledge of the bourgeoisie.  Yet, to Althusser, Lukacs' position was just as ideological as his opponent's, since thought was still dependent on social interests.  Hence Lukacs was a historicist who was more concerned with socialism than with establishing a scientific social theory.  It should be noted that Sartre's position was closer to Althusser's than was Lukacs' because for Sartre dialectics had an independent truth value to the degree that it made the social

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field intelligible, not simply because it led to revolution.  But Althusser did not carefully discriminate among his enemies.  To the structural Marxist, the criterion of ideology was clear: "Indeed, it is a peculiarity of every ideological conception . . . that it is governed by 'interests' beyond the necessity of knowledge alone." [86] Religious, ethical, and political interests had to be abandoned if thought was to become scientific.  Ideologies merely expressed the relation of the "lived experience of men to their world," and were without scientific value.  Althusser's dangerous conclusion was that human interests and scientific interests were completely separate and perhaps opposed.  Logically, his revised philosophy of Marxism had to be totally divorced from any leaning toward socialism.  Science could have nothing to do with revolutionary action.

It is apparent that Althusser's definition of ideology was in some ways in contradiction with Marx's.  For Marx, ideology was a false representation of man and the world because it took the given situation as natural, dehistoricizing and thereby mystifying the present social formation.  In relation to society, ideologies were part of the superstructure, serving to reinforce the substructure.  Ideologies were theories that legitimated economic and social relations, and hence were weapons of class rule.  Marx did not criticize theories as ideological because they fostered certain human interests but because they solidified class society.  To Marx, the theory of the proletariat de-legitimated existing class rule and hence was different from ideology.  This difference, to Althusser, was not enough to establish Marxism as a science.  What made Marxism a science for him was not that it led to revolution but that it did not conceptualize society from the point of view or from the situated presence of any of its members.  The theoretical advance of Marx came from the purely theoretical production of concepts

  86 Ibid., 141.  Sebag agreed with Althusser on the nature of ideology, except for him Marxism, which was at bottom a subjectivist doctrine of the recovery of man's alienated essence, was itself ideological. Op. cit., 181, 243.

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that revealed the hidden structure of capitalism.  On purely theoretical grounds Althusser presented, as Marx bad failed to do, a theory that showed why Marxism was a science.

To the Marxist humanists, however, Marx was able to advance his theory of capitalism only on his prior commitment to the working class.  Once be took the point of view of the working class, he was able to theorize the social formation without the errors of ideology.  In the 1844 Manuscripts, [87] they argued, Marx advanced toward socialism only through an anthropological conception of man's reappropriation of his powers that were lost under capitalism.  None of Marx's later works were intelligible except through this early commitment.  From this point of view, Althusser's distinction between science and ideology threw out the baby with the bath water: in order to defend the autonomous power of theory, the vital link between theory and practice was cut.  Before carrying the debate between Althusser and the humanist Marxists further, we must look at the structuralist reading of Capital.

In the collective work, Reading Capital, Althusserian structuralism presented an attitude of scientific indifference toward its object.  Due to the peculiar mode of presence of the social object it could be known only through the scientific attitude. For example, in

  87 The debate over Marxist humanism, affecting the political composition of the Party, raged fiercely in Communist journals.  Cahiers du Communisme devoted an issue to it in May-June, 1966, entitled "Les Problèmes ideologiques et culturelles." Garaudy's forces predominated.  La Nouvelle Critique contained a continuing debate on humanism throughout the mid- and late-1960s.  Michel Simon's articles, "Marxisme et humanisme," La Nouvelle Critique  165 (1965) 96-132 and "Progrès, raison, histoire," La Nouvelle Critique, 176 (1966) 66-78, represented a tempered Althusserianism.  One could argue the anti-humanist position by calling it a philosophy of the concept as opposed to the humanist philosophy of the subject or consciousness.  The best statement of the position came from Georges Canguilhem, "Mort de l'homme ou épuisement du cogito?" Critique, 242 (July, 1967) 599-618, a review of Foucault's Les Mots et les choses.  The problem here was, as Glucksmann, op. cit., pointed out, that one ended in Kantianism.

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tific attitude.  For example, in Reading Capital, Rancière [88] argued that Marx's analysis of the commodity switched from an anthropological method that grasped it as created by the labor subject, to a structuralist method that grasped the commodity as an illusory appearance that concealed its structure.  He quoted Marx: "Value does not carry what it is written on its forehead." [89] Value, the sensuous activity of the laborer embodied in the commodity, was absent in the appearance of the commodity in the market.  Hence if we view the commodity from the worker's perspective and interest, we fail to attain any knowledge of its structure.  Only if we detach the commodity from any "constitutive subject" can we overcome systematic "misrecognition." Therefore, scientific Marxism had to be limited to Marx's mature writings, where Feuerbachian anthropology and Hegelian historicism were allegedly eliminated.

In capitalist society, labor was "represented" in the cornmodity as value, except that this value was not manifest in the commodity phenomenon.  The real "cause" of the existence of the commodity on the market was not present but absent in its appearance.  It was systematically hidden by the structural processes of circulation.  No knowledge could be gained from a phenomenology of the worker, the industrialist, or the merchant because they viewed the commodity from the perspective of their own interests.  Since we were looking for an "absent cause" or a "hidden structure" we had to adopt, as Marx did, scientific structuralism.  In Rancière's words: "We are no longer concerned with a text calling for a reading which will give its underlying meaning, but with a hieroglyph which has to be deciphered.  This deciphering is the work of science.  The structure which excludes the possibility of critical reading is the structure which opens the dimen-

  88 Rancière's recent defection from the Althusserian camp does not detract from the pertinence of his contribution to Lire le Capital.
  89 "The Concept of 'Critique' and the 'Critique of Political Economy,' " Theoretical Practice, 2 (April, 1971) 39, a trans. from Lire le Capital (Paris, 1966) Vol, 1, 123-154.

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sion of science." [90] Rancière's decipherment rendered the structure of the economy intelligible not in its inertness but in its articulated complexity.  Against Sartre's view of the practico-inert as an almost unintelligible mechanism, the structuralist revealed its opaqueness to the social subject, and lucidly exposed the degree to which it was impossible for the subject to transform the structure.

Further achievements of structuralist Marxism [91] came in works devoted to specific structures, like Nicos Poulantzas' Pouvoir politique et classes sociales (1971) and Althusser's study of ideology. [92] In the latter work, Althusser went so far as to abandon Marx's distinction between base and superstructure.  The state, traditionally viewed as a mere superstructure, maintained an ideological apparatus in addition to its coercive power and its bureaucracy, which was central to the socialization of workers.  For Marx, ideologies were mere illusions; but for Althusser, ideologies, with a history of their own, were a systematic element of every society and would have to be combatted independently, in the same way that the bourgeoisie had fought the church.  These ideological state apparatuses, functioning in diverse locations--like the church, the family, the schools, and the media --were, at the present conjuncture, a central target for political activity.  Althusser, like Lefebvre and Sartre, rejected an exclusive concern with the economy.  However, his lucid analysis of ideological apparatuses came only after 1968, when the action of the students against the university put its sinister functions on glaring public display.  Still, the rigor and penetration of Althusser's method exceeded the capability of Sartre's concept of the practico-inert in articulating unconscious structures.  However, the scientific epistemology that made the knowledge possible also

 90 Ibid., 39.
  91Althusser had refused grouping with structuralism, which he considered an ideology, but he did acknowledge debts to Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Foucault.
  92 Trans. in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by B. Brewster (London, 1971).

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also cut it off from effective praxis.  Marx's injunctions against merely interpreting the world came back to the structuralists as the "absent cause" of their own theory.  The science of the unconscious would have to be joined with an historical anthropology that conceptualized the subjects who were to act upon the knowledge.  In Sartre's terms, knowledge of the anti-dialectic, or analytical reason, would have to be inserted into dialectical reason.

Structural Marxism legitimately grasped the structure-in-itself, more precisely, structure-for-science; but the structures, in their absence, have a level of existence for-their-"bearers," for the people who inhabit them.  Part of the structure of the structure is its existence for the subject. These subjects constitute the structures but not fully consciously since they are also constituted by the structures.  The unconsciousness of structures could be known from the subject's side, through categories like alienation and bad faith.  To save structuralism from reifying the concept of structure one would have to combine it with Sartre's dialectical reason and then situate the observer in his own world.  Althusser's original escape from ideology into science can be only a provisory, temporary procedure for the constitution of the scientific subject, valid for limited kinds of study.  In the end, the scientific subject must erase his own bracketing, must re-bridge his own epistemological coupure, and return from withdrawal to the full reality of his subjectivity, acknowledging that the place of return is not a heaven of absolute transparency.  In sum, the controversy over structuralism solidified for the French the final lack of a Hegelian absolute subject, forcing the recognition of a duality or even a multiplicity of partial subjects--one scientific, one existential--whose unity in the present situation could be found, if at all, only in action.  Such a decentered, multiple subject, was the vision of the Arguments group with its concept of "fragmentary thought." It probably goes back to Nietzsche: the death of God must proceed through the dissolution

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of Man (God's object) to arrive at the birth of men and women.

After providing dialectical materialism with an epistemology, Althusser turned to the problem of historical materialism.  This topic will be treated under three headings: (1) the division of Marx's texts into the Hegelian and the scientific, (2) the structuralist definition of the concepts of totality and contradiction, and (3) the structuralist concept of history.

Althusser's wrath fell on those who relied upon the 1844 Manuscripts to present a Hegelian Marxism burdened with humanism, historicism, anthropologism, and empiricism.  Against all evidence to the contrary, Althusser maintained that there was a "break" in Marx's thought by which Marx totally rejected his youthful concern with man and located a new object for knowledge, the mode of production.  With this "immense theoretical revolution" Marx founded the science of history.  Logically, all of Marx's writings before the rupture, which occurred in 1845 and was fully developed after 1857, were fruitless. [93]  The persistence of Marx's early concerns into the Grundrisse of 1857-1858 and even into Capital eventually compelled Althusser to retract his absolute division and restrict the "true" Marx even further to The Gotha Program and to the obscure Marginal Notes on Wagner: "When Capital Volume One appeared (1867), traces of the Hegelian influence still remained.  Only later did they disappear completely: the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) as well as the Marginal Notes on Wagner's 'Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie' (1882) are totally and definitively exempt from any trace of Hegelian influence." [94] One anti-Althusserian wit, François George, surmised that Marx must have remained young almost until the end of his life.

 93 For Marx, 155-160.
  94 Lenin and Philosophy, 90.  For a translation of the latter, cf. Theoretical Practice, 5 (Spring, 1972) 40-64.

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There was clearly, as Althusser maintained, a change in Marx's writings when he studied capitalism closely as a fixed system.  Yet this absolute rejection of certain texts seems more tendentious than realistic.  It would at least be better to say that Marx complemented the earlier dialectic of alienation with a later structuralist analysis, without being able to resolve the differences between the two approaches.  Allowing the opposite tendencies in Marx's texts to emerge without imposing a false unity on them is actually more in keeping with structuralist principles of interpretation than Althusser's bifurcation.

A more serious contribution by Althusser came with his critique of the Hegelian concepts of totality and contradiction.  Before Hegel, social causation was seen mechanically, with isolated elements at one point in society effecting isolated elements at another point.  Dissatisfied with this, Hegel accounted for the effects of the totality on each element, but he did so, Althusser warned, by reducing the totality to an essence that was "expressed" in every level, [95] as in the Philosophy of History, where the world spirit permeated whole civilizations.  It is not clear to me, however, that Hegel did this in the Phenomenology, which was the main interest of the existential Marxists.  In Althusser's opinion, Marx rejected Hegel's concept of totality and arrived at a "structuralist" concept in which the priority of the totality over the elements was kept and the relative autonomy of each level was asserted.

Hegel's concept of contradiction was in similar need of revision.  Contradiction was the inner motor of history, the source of tension that led to change.  In Althusser's view, Hegel had misplaced the concept of contradiction by associating it with the Idea.  Ultimately the cause of contradictions in society was the failure of men to realize the Idea.  This left Hegel with an Idealist notion of causation.  For Marx, however, causation was fixed within structures as their interiority.  Effect and cause were not distinct but in-

  95 Reading Capital, 186-187.

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inseparable aspects of the presence of structures.  In Althusser s view of Marx:

. . . the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object,
element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the
contrary . . . the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short . . .
the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements,
is nothing outside its effects.[96]

To Althusser, however, Lévi-Strauss' concept of structure was finally inadequate because it regarded each level as equal in force, whereas Marxists had to account for the dominance of the economy.  For this purpose Althusser spun out a distinction between "the determination in the last instance" of the economy and "the dominant role" of any level at a given conjuncture.  This distinction was included to account for the "dominance" of kinship in primitive society and of politics in feudal Europe.  In order to reproduce itself as a structure, feudalism had to use political means to insure economic activity.  In feudal society politics was visibly the dominant structure.  Yet the dominant role of politics was possible only because, in the final analysis, work had to be done.  The economic level was the "absent cause" of the dominant role of politics; in other words, the structural effects of the economy were present through their absence.

By redefining the nature of contradiction and totality, Althusser transformed the dia-

 96 Ibid., 189.

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lectical method into a structural method.  All that was preserved of dialectics was the primacy of the whole over the parts and a focus on the relations of the parts.  Gone from the Hegelian dialectic was the intelligibility of the signified and the role of men in the process of negation.  Structures were now totally objective and men were merely its bearers (Träger, support). [97] The "ahumanity" of structures defied bourgeois common sense, in which, for example, the individual labored to make money and to spend it.  If we look at the structure as a whole to define its rules of operation, money actually used man to maintain itself, not the reverse.  Human intentions, in this case self-interest, were present but structurally of secondary importance.  Money operated as a system in expansion or contraction through well-defined rules, rules that were obscure from the perspective of a person in search of gain.  Althusser's concept of men as bearers of structures made the structures intelligible but de-emphasized the role of man in changing the structures.  As a total theory of society, structural Marxism proposed to explain history without resort to human agents.

We must now turn to Althusser's theory of history.  It must be stressed that, in the structuralist controversy, the concept of historicism had a specific meaning.  To structuralists, historical research places man as an active subject, affecting reality through projects that have meaning even though they might lead to unintended results.  Denying this assumption, Althusser underlined Marx's achievement as the understanding of capitalism as "processes without subjects." [98] If history dealt with structures, it could no longer view change as linear and homogenous.  In its present evolutionist form, history systematically over-centered the social field by locating meaning in the subject as an "absolute reference." [99]

 97 Reading Capital, 252.
 98 Lenin and Philosophy, 201.
99 Sebag, op. cit., 155.
 
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Given the concept of structural contradiction, it was plain that concepts of history as homogenous, continuous succession would be inadequate.  On the contrary, to Althusser, each level of the structure had its own temporality and its own history.  Multi-temporality was not to imply pluralism because the whole was bound together through the "structure in dominance." Historians had to be reminded that their habit of periodizing was a theoretical practice that was distinct from the flow of events.  Historians produced temporality and that production would be scientific only if it demarcated the diachrony of structures, not the intentional acts of individuals or groups.  In the history of structures, discontinuity and differential temporality prevailed.

From the structualist perspective, Sartre's Critique was a stunning case of historicism.  Sartre could never articulate the structure of the practico-inert because it was referred back, for its intelligibility, to the social agent who constituted it.  On the contrary, the unity of social structure, its systematic coherence, went beyond the agent's totalization.  For Althusser, Sartre's concept of the practico-inert led to voluntarism.  Sartre reduced structures too quickly to the historical action of totalizing individuals, without capturing the interior complexity and intricate play of structural unity.  But Althusser went too far if he meant that Sartre was guilty of speculative historicism.  For Sartre did not reduce the structure to a Hegelian externalization of the Idea.  Further, Sartre's historical subjects were not contemplative but active, already immersed in the practico-inert.  And, unlike Lukacs, his history was not absorbed in a subject-object reconciliation.  By lumping Sartre with all other Hegelian Marxists, Althusser missed the crucial distinction: Sartre's historicism did not preclude structural analysis and was open for revision in that direction.[100]

  100 My argument that structuralism must be understood as complementary to existential Marxism is not, hopefully, eclecticism.  The foremost critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, a philosopher at the Ecole Normale, has repeatedly taken the position that structuralism cannot

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In his polemic against historicism and humanism in the 1960s Althusser never confronted Sartre directly.  When be finally did so, in 1972, the results were not at all impressive.  Sartre was dismissed as a humanist and an idealist, a bourgeois philosopher of freedom, a "pre-Marxist and pre-Freudian ideologue," who made the mistake of believing that history is made by man."[1Ol] This effort by Althusser to criticize Sartre's existential Marxism confronts only the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and not the Sartre of the Critique.

speak out against the metaphysical nature of philosophies of consciousness without taking into account the rebounding influences of the rejected doctrine on itself.  By defining itself against philosophies of consciousness, structuralism inevitably shapes itself in relation to those philosophies and can never succeed in simply surpassing them.  In Derrida's words, "The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing.  The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction." (From "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Structuralist Controversy, op. cit., 251.) Derrida's statement reminds the structuralists of their dialectical dependence on a phenomenological metaphysics of subjective meaning.  The intelligibility of the signifier appears only in relation to the doctrine of the intelligibility of the signified.

Yet Derrida appears to regard this unconsciousness within structuralism as an unwanted situation that can be done away with, whereas it is my position that the dependence of structuralism on existential Marxism, or other philosophies of the subject, is necessary and desirable.  The structuralist reduction of the field of the intelligible to the signifier would so impoverish the human sciences that the project of doing structuralism would recede into the absurd.  It is only against the philosophy of the subject, and as a necessary corrective to it, that the project of structuralism takes on significance.  That is why structuralism can never escape existential Marxism and that is why structuralism can fulfill its possibilities within the human sciences only by deliberately embracing its antithesis in a relation of attraction-repulsion.  The meaning appropriated by philosophies of consciousness is overrich and must be thinned out or decentered by structuralism.  By the same token, structuralism must refer itself to existential Marxism as the Other of its project.  It is in the sense of this double movement that I see the possibility of reciprocity between the two positions.
  101 Althusser, Réponse à John Lewis (Paris, 1973) 21-22, 43-44, 73-75.

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Even then, Althusser's Arguments do not have the weight of the early objections by Lefebvre, Mougin, and Lukacs.

For their own concept of history, the structuralists formalized what they regarded as Marx's achievement in Capital.  Taking over for Althusser, Balibar was left with the Herculean task of presenting Marx as a structural historian.  Balibar asserted that, in Capital, Marx produced a table of invariant elements of the means of production, thereby avoiding historicism.  In this "combination" there were three elements (workers, means of production, and non-laboring appropriators) and two rules of combination (property connection and appropriation connection). [102] The combination presented the economic structure of any society.  It differed from the equally atemporal "combinatory" of Lévi-Strauss, which indicated that "the places of the factors and their relations change, but not their nature." [103] We will leave aside the problem of the alleged universality of Balibar's concept of combination.  What is important is that Balibar defined his concept of history as changes in the combination.  Structural change consisted not in the dissolution of one structure and the constitution ex nihilo of a new one, but in "the transformation of one, structure into another." [104] The rules of transformation followed Freud's concept of the process of displacement, in which one element takes the place of another even though the former has no logical connection with the latter.

In the formation of capitalism, for example, structural change meant a "displacement" within the means of production.  Both the "object of labor" (the product) and the means of labor" (the tools) were "separated" from the laborer in two ways: in the property relation, the worker owned nothing; in the appropriation relation, the worker lost the skills to make the product.  In each of the relations of the worker to the means of production, there was a homology of separation that was unique to capitalism.  Capital-

 102 Reading Capital, 215, also 177.
 103 Ibid., 216.
104 Ibid., 242.

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ism thus began with the introduction of the "machine-tool," since, from that point on, all structures were adjusted to the new combination: the worker was separated both from the product and from the tool.  The process occurred without a subject, without anyone willing the new combination.  Also, capitalism arose out of the structural contradictions of the previous transitional form (manufacturing).  The recombination of the same elements took the form of a displacement.  More precisely, within the manufacturing or handicraft system a unity existed between the tools and the worker, whereas under fully developed capitalism the place of the unity shifted to the relation between the product and the tools.  Under industrial capitalism, the tool was structured to produce the product; under earlier methods, the tool was structured to the human body.  Capitalism maximized the separation of the worker and the means of production, not simply by private ownership of property but also by the use of machines which maximized output, disregarding the structure of the body (or the mind) of the worker.  Contradiction plagued the new structure since its effects were both stabilizing and disruptive.  The more absolute the separation between the worker and the means of production, the more perfect became the structure and the closer it came to dissolution.

In this way, structural history traced displacements in the combination without reference to human action.  In detail, the process of change went as follows.[105] Structures were formed out of bits of existing structures.  The dissolution of a structure, like feudalism, took place without apocalyptic drama.  The structure was simply less able to integrate its subordinate levels, which floated, so to speak, in the social field.  The loose elements gradually combined through a process of bricolage, a concept developed by Lévi-Strauss. This bricolage, which had no human bricoleur, [106]  assembled sections from

 105 Badiou, op. cit., gives an excellent account of this.

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the junk heap of the previous structure, like a tinkerer in his workshop filled with used remnants.  Gradually but discontinuously, a new structure emerged, containing contradictions or imperfections since it was not designed ahead of time by a perfect planner using appropriate materials and proceeding systematically, but rather through fits and starts, with materials suited for a different social machine.  To Balibar, Marx's description of the primitive accumulation of capital fit the structuralist model of history.

Hence, the science of historical materialism could demonstrate apodictically that capitalism could not endure forever; it was not a frictionless machine.  Moreover, its contradictions led to a combination in which the means of production would be socialized, uniting the separated workers with their tools and their products.  Yet if Althusser's claim for the universality of his model is taken seriously, it is hard to see what would become of the appropriators, the third element, under socialism.

In Althusser's concept of history, as we have seen, social change came about regardless of the deliberate action of human groups.  And so, cosmic fatalism crept into his anti-humanism: all action seems futile both because structures move autonomously and because praxis is always inspired by ideological interests which distort it.  Conilh, writing in Esprit, captured Althusser's vision by relating it to the change from the post-war era to a technological world.

No doubt we can measure here the contemporary malaise, our malaise.
The existential anguish born from the war, in the night of the occupation,
is no longer apparent; it is muted by a huge stupor before the fullness of
our knowledge and our unlimited powers.  This knowledge surrounds us
completely, it penetrates us to our deepest intimacy.  It is our mode of being
and doing, our ineluctable presence in the world.  Nothing can escape it and

declamations against science are merely laughable hypocrisy.[107]

From a Sartrean viewpoint, Althusser's discourse was characterized by a refusal to accept the risk of finitude, that is, the dependence of science on action by the scientist.  The existential commitments of the scientist were "structurally" an element of his theoretical practice.  The Hegel controversy had proved at least that science must accept its involvement in history and therefore its incompleteness.  Anthropology could not be

 107 "Lecture de Althusser," Esprit, 35:360 (May, 1967) 899.
 108 Badiou, op. cit., 443.

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totally eliminated from science; human interests, as Habermas argued in Knowledge and Human Interests, were not separable from scientific ones.

The absoluteness of Althusser's position and his polemical style necessitate defining the limits of his achievements.  His radical denial of the intelligibility of the subject led him into a cul de sac where the concept of praxis was lost.[109] Because he called into question all doctrines of praxis, it was not enough to say that he had not yet dealt with the question himself.  The notion of processes without subjects, of history without men, could be accepted as no more than a partial truth.

The impact of Althusser and structuralism turned attention away from existential Marxism.  Students of Marxism flocked to Althusser, somehow finding Maoist inspiration in his teaching.[110] A band of Althusser's students, known as the cercle d'Ulm, set themselves up within the UEC, the CP student organization, in 1964.  After the Party sided with Garaudy and against Althusser, the young structuralist Marxists spoke out openly against the Party, and by 1966 they were excluded from it.  By holding back his own criticisms Althusser was able to avoid the censure of the Party while it enjoyed the prestige of his intellectual success.  The Communist Party, bathing in Althusser's theoretical sunshine, found itself in the midst of an intellectual renewal.  Things were going so well that Tel Quel, an avant-garde literary journal, associated itself with the CP in the late 1960s, aping the surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s and the existentalists of the 1940s and 1950s.The theoretical organs of the CP hummed with excitement and sales

  109 "Sur le travail théorique," La Pensée, 132 (Mar.-April, 1967) 3-22 for a weak effort at a concept of praxis.
  110 For a discussion of Althusser's Maoism, cf.  Alain Lipietz, "D'Althusser à Mao?," Les Temps Modernes (Nov., 1973) 749-787.  Philippe Sollers, in Sur le matérialisme (Paris, 1974) 135-136 notes the similarity of Mao's concept of the dialectic in On Contradiction with that of Althusser.  They are both anti-Hegelian concepts that do not reduce the dialectic to an "original organic totality."

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steadily rose after 1968.  Whether the increased subscriptions to La Pensée and La Nouvelle Critique were due to Althusser, as has been suggested,[111] or to the events of May, 1968, or even to the growing independence of the CP from Moscow, was not at all clear.  By the early 1970s, however, the intellectual force of structuralism began to abate.  Althusser's project seemed to have run its course, and students no longer rushed so quickly to his classes.  Generally speaking, structuralism had become more of a middle-brow fashion than an intellectually heuristic theory.  In fact, for the moment, the future direction of French social theory seems uncertain and impossible to predict.  After three decades of intense theoretical ferment a moment of relative quiet has emerged.  In some places, however, one can detect efforts to combine existential Marxism and structuralism in the manner suggested in this chapter.

 111 Pradeep Bandyopadhyay, "The Many Faces of French Marxism," Science and Society, 36:2   (Summer, 1972) 145.
  112 I am thinking specifically of Jean Baudrillard in Le Système des objects (Paris, 1968), Pour une Critique de 1'économie politique du signe (Paris, 1972), and Le Miroir de la production (Paris, 1973). He uses Lefebvre's concept of daily life and carries further his critique of language, employing a structuralist kind of binary opposition with a Sartrean phenomenology to show the new importance of consumerism, its active quality, and the autonomy of the language code connected with consumer objects.  Cf. also Jeremy Shapiro, "One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience," in Paul Breines, ed. Critical Interruptions (N.Y., 1970), 136-186.

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