blinkandwheeze posted:what i mean is that his "confession" to academic fraudulence was really obviously delusional ramblings and it's absurd to take it seriously. I don't care about his work that much so i will abstain from the reading psycho wife murderers debate.
he also claims to have never read capital in that confession, but if u read his works, especially "Reading Capital" that's pretty much impossible...
aerdil posted:it occurred after a painful surgery, that caused a depressive episode, for which doctors overprescribed him niamid causing further mental instability and debilitating effects, all within the context of a life-long battle with severe manic-depressive episodes. from what i've read about it, i think the french authorities were right to declare him mentally incompetent to stand trial and confine him to a psychiatric hospital.
he may well have been incompetent to stand trial if he had a psychotic break by that point but i'm troubled by the implication that being very sad and on antidepressants makes it understandable to kill your wife.
wife killing aside, (catchphrase) can anyone tell me in simple terms what is the nature of his contribution to marxism? i have a vague understanding of some of the topics he discussed but no idea what of that was original and vital, if anything. this is a serious question
babyhueypnewton posted:Althusser was supposed to be dead and buried decades ago. Yet he keeps getting revived while those who buried him have been forgotten or became such pathetic liberals that they should be forgotten. The recurrent attacks on his character have come with revival of interest in his work on the essential subjects: the scientific character of Marxism, the philosophy of Maoism, and the world historic significance of both. These were too supposed to be buried along with any other "metanarrative" or sincere commitment to Communism with a capital C but the masses refuse to listen to the petty-bourgeois academics. I'll keep promoting Althusser because for whatever reason his thought can't be assimilated into liberalism in the way Gramsci, Sartre, or Lukacs were. Though many have tried. If you want ideology without the Marxism, science, or politics that's basically Zizek's whole career.
Lol good look heward.
Petrol posted:aerdil posted:it occurred after a painful surgery, that caused a depressive episode, for which doctors overprescribed him niamid causing further mental instability and debilitating effects, all within the context of a life-long battle with severe manic-depressive episodes. from what i've read about it, i think the french authorities were right to declare him mentally incompetent to stand trial and confine him to a psychiatric hospital.
he may well have been incompetent to stand trial if he had a psychotic break by that point but i'm troubled by the implication that being very sad and on antidepressants makes it understandable to kill your wife.
wife killing aside, (catchphrase) can anyone tell me in simple terms what is the nature of his contribution to marxism? i have a vague understanding of some of the topics he discussed but no idea what of that was original and vital, if anything. this is a serious question
1. Before Althusser there really was nothing discussing the scientific character of Marxism. There was scientific application of Marxism to concrete questions and there were discussions of Marx's philosophical method in his study of political economy and history but Althusser developed a general philosophy of science for Marxism which laid out the structure of how Marxism was relevant to all scientific knowledge. I still link people to his discussion of Engels' writing on Lavoisier:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm
because ideas like science is paradigmatic, science is determined by what social struggle has made comprehensible rather than independent or prior to it, science has its own structure which corresponds to reality but is not identical to it, philosophy emerges from science but is necessary to its advancement, and Marxism is the most advanced form of scientific knowledge yet achieved (something which is implicitly understood by the fact that economics no longer even bothers with reality or anything resembling science but is still unspeakable in such stark terms) are all sort of casually known these days but were not in Althusser's time and are still not given rigor within a Marxist philosophical framework but lazily used by postmodernists (the bastard children of Althusser failure to develop a complete system of thought unfortunately and probably born of the incompleteness of Marx's own thought - the simple motivation behind the unnecessarily controversial hypothetical separation of a 'Young Marx' and 'Mature Marx') to scavenge from the corpse of science.
2. This led to the concept of the mode of production as determinant "in the last instance," meaning basically that while there was autonomy for different social phenomenon, the mode of production was the structure that gave them their shape and their path. Obviously that doesn't mean much without elaboration, for the best example of what this actually looks like read Perry Anderson, the Marxist analysis of history as a series of mode of production with their own internal structure and laws of motion was the peak of history as a science and those kind of studies which attempt to draw out general scientific laws from history no longer exists, again because knowledge has stagnated in the face of the objective superiority of Marxism into partial and blind disciplines.
This matters because science matters, in order to change the world you have to understand it and in order to do that you have to be able to predict and explain rather than just describe. This causes controversy because science demands aggregate unity out of individual chaos based on simple laws of motion, something petty-bourgeois scholars don't mind when the object is the unity of individual electrons into predictable orbits or individual animals into environments but they get real pissed off when the object of study is the human being and his individual decisions. I remember someone posting in this thread that they were bored reading EP Thomson and that's what you're supposed to feel: no matter how much empirical data and rich detail about people's lives you give, without an overarching theory or scientific model none of it matters, it's just description.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch03.htm
3. Althusser went beyond this though and also described the role of ideology as the force that mediates between the aggregate and the individual (basically the site of the political). This really pissed people off because academics don't like to be told they're not as free thinking as they think but it never struck me as particularly outrageous. But yeah, the idea of 'false consciousness' was still big in those days (and really still is but in other terms, just look at how marginal settlers is because of what it implies about white working class consiousness) and is a complete political and theoretical dead end. This went along with his anti-humanism but really its about the same thing which we think about on this forum all the time: is the history of communism one of third world revolution, first world reformism, and revisionism under socialism a story of consciousnesses and propaganda? Or is it one of material reality? We take for granted on this forum the latter is obviously the Marxist answer but we are a tiny minority even among (first world) Marxists. Though the seeds of Zizekianism/Badiouism are already there and were probably inevitable because of Althusser's heavy reliance on Lacan but Althusser was always insistent that ideology was:
ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief
if his attempts were imperfect, we should improve them instead of abandoning the whole enterprise as impossible under the fractured world of neoliberalism and give into subjectivism or idealism.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
4. Althusser was also part of a particular historical moment when this struggle was going on: was revisionism in the USSR a good thing because Stalin didn't respect freedom and human individuality or whatever? Althusser wanted to go the opposite way and say Stalin wasn't committed to science enough and had been too humanistic (or in that historical moment, revived pre-Lenin second international philosophy against Lenin's radical philosophy of the primacy of the struggle of classes in all things). Avoiding the term class struggle because it doesn't make it as clear that classes have their own emergent properties which are separate from the actions of individual members of classes. To make it clear, every philosopher of Marx at the time basically did the opposite and attempted a more humanistic Marx: Lukacs, Benjamin, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch, Lefebvre, Sartre not to mention all the ones who came after who abandoned any pretense of Marxism as a science. There are a couple of exceptions I can think of but for Althusser to go against this, remain a member of the communist party, and turn to China and other non-white people as the future of human advancement was a big deal.
5. Finally, he attempted to be the philosopher of Maoism and turn it into a rigorous system. If you think Maoism is the 'highest level of Marxism' or whatever this is a big deal but even if you don't you can hopefully understand why this is a big deal for third worldists in the first world who want to emulate the methods of bourgeois intellectual revolutionary suicide.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/lenin-philosophy.htm
I also think of Jameson's Postmodernism as an application of Althusserianism to concrete questions and I think that work and its predecessor The Political Unconscious saved theoretical Marxism against the reactionary tide of "post-structuralist" academia. But that's probably a bias on my part, Jameson has his own ideas and his own problems.
e: if there are minor contradictions between the hard science of Althusser and the insistence of the primacy of class struggle that's because this is not fully resolved in Althusser himself. I put both ideas in but my basic feeling is that Althusser was only the start of something which was abandoned for decades of stagnation in philosophy and we are only now starting to recover from as the result of interest in third world communist movements as the source of general scientific principles (naturally leading to a renewed interest in Althusser) and the renewed faith in the objective laws of motion of society as the result of the economic crisis.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
babyhueypnewton posted:
that's pretty cool. i've had the sense that the marxist perspective in the philosophy of science endured a disjuncture in the second half of the 20th century -- maybe the result of marxists being purged from academia? maybe Gibbonstrength or someone can set me straight on that. but my own understanding of the sorts of topics you raise, like determination in the last instance (esp. as a characteristic of emergent properties), grew mostly out of reading "Critical Realist" authors, who were basically trying to smuggle dialectical materialism in through a different door to avoid the metal detectors. to this day, i still recommend the CR intro book to folks just getting started on the topic, which i found more enjoyable on the whole than politzer
i eventually supplemented my readings with more explicitly marxist authors like John Somerville and Erwin Marquit, but finding good modern writers in that vein felt a bit like stumbling upon treasure at the beach; a spot of luck in an otherwise meandering course. given what you've laid out, Althusser seems like he'd be a "trunk" figure for Marxists in exactly the sort of obvious lineage that one can point to in other schools. (hence, i guess, why Bhaskar and other CR authors have drawn upon him)
Edited by Constantignoble ()
Constantignoble posted:babyhueypnewton posted:that's pretty cool. i've had the sense that the marxist perspective in the philosophy of science endured a disjuncture in the second half of the 20th century -- maybe the result of marxists being purged from academia? maybe Gibbonstrength or someone can set me straight on that. but my own understanding of the sorts of topics you raise, like determination in the last instance (esp. as a characteristic of emergent properties), grew mostly out of reading "Critical Realist" authors, who were basically trying to smuggle dialectical materialism in through a different door to avoid the metal detectors. to this day, i still recommend the CR intro book to folks just getting started on the topic, which i found more enjoyable on the whole than politzer
i eventually supplemented my readings with more explicitly marxist authors like John Somerville and Erwin Marquit, but finding good modern writers in that vein felt a bit like stumbling upon treasure at the beach; a spot of luck in an otherwise meandering course. given what you've laid out, Althusser seems like he'd be a "trunk" figure for Marxists in exactly the sort of obvious lineage that one can point to in other schools. (hence, i guess, why Bhaskar and other CR authors have drawn upon him)
I'll check that out. I used to use more Althusserian language to talk about this stuff but I picked up the stuff about emergent properties from Anwar Shaikh who does a great job explaining the properties of micro and macro structurally.
Petrol posted:aerdil posted:it occurred after a painful surgery, that caused a depressive episode, for which doctors overprescribed him niamid causing further mental instability and debilitating effects, all within the context of a life-long battle with severe manic-depressive episodes. from what i've read about it, i think the french authorities were right to declare him mentally incompetent to stand trial and confine him to a psychiatric hospital.
he may well have been incompetent to stand trial if he had a psychotic break by that point but i'm troubled by the implication that being very sad and on antidepressants makes it understandable to kill your wife.
a dissociative episode is more than just being sad and on antidepressants anyway no one is claiming it was "understandable" that he killed his wife. thats kinda the point actually.
Edited by c_man ()
aerdil posted:Petrol posted:aerdil posted:it occurred after a painful surgery, that caused a depressive episode, for which doctors overprescribed him niamid causing further mental instability and debilitating effects, all within the context of a life-long battle with severe manic-depressive episodes. from what i've read about it, i think the french authorities were right to declare him mentally incompetent to stand trial and confine him to a psychiatric hospital.
he may well have been incompetent to stand trial if he had a psychotic break by that point but i'm troubled by the implication that being very sad and on antidepressants makes it understandable to kill your wife.
a dissociative episode is more than just being sad and on antidepressants anyway no one is claiming it was "understandable" that he killed his wife. thats kinda the point actually.
yes i understand what a dissociative episode is, my point is there's no evidence he had such an episode until after the murder, a la Lost Highway. up until that point it sounds like he was simply hypomanic. but we shall never know i suppose.
babyhueypnewton posted:Petrol posted:can anyone tell me in simple terms what is the nature of his contribution to marxism? i have a vague understanding of some of the topics he discussed but no idea what of that was original and vital, if anything. this is a serious question
1. Before Althusser there really was nothing discussing the scientific character of Marxism...
thanks for this, exactly what i was looking for.
tears posted:i solemnly swear to read everyones opinions on althusser. this is my promise to you all
i regret making this promise, but will not break it
The Crash of International Finance-Capital and its Implications for the Third World was first published in 1989 in response to the financial crisis of 1987. Professor Nabudere's analysis of the causes of that crisis has extraordinary parallels with the contemporary financial and economic meltdown that has caused panic in the West and devastated the lives of millions in the Third World. Nabudere traces the historical evolution of money and finance-capital and demonstrates the inevitability of periodic crashes of finance-capital.
Although the first edition was published before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the analysis of the causes of the periodic crisis of capitalism is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. In this second edition, Professor Nabudere provides an updated analysis of the crash of international finance-capital of 2007-08 and draws out the likely implications for the Third World, a perspective that has received little attention elsewhere.
This book is a damning critique of a system that has paid trillions of dollars to bail out international banks and financial institutions, the very institutions that were responsible tor creating the crash, while the rest of humanity - especially the majority in the Third World - suffers its devastating consequences. Capitalism, Nabudere argues, has lost all moral and ethical claims to be a means for progress; it is, he believes, an indefensible system.
its got a forward by yash tandon and it reminded me one of my greatest regrets/embarrasments is that I met him a couple of years ago and had no idea who he was, we chatted about marxism-leninism for a bit and then when I went home I realised id been chatting to one of the founding members of the Uganda National Liberation Front and didnt even know it :embarrased:
Constantignoble posted:babyhueypnewton posted:that's pretty cool. i've had the sense that the marxist perspective in the philosophy of science endured a disjuncture in the second half of the 20th century -- maybe the result of marxists being purged from academia? maybe Gibbonstrength or someone can set me straight on that. but my own understanding of the sorts of topics you raise, like determination in the last instance (esp. as a characteristic of emergent properties), grew mostly out of reading "Critical Realist" authors, who were basically trying to smuggle dialectical materialism in through a different door to avoid the metal detectors. to this day, i still recommend the CR intro book to folks just getting started on the topic, which i found more enjoyable on the whole than politzer
i eventually supplemented my readings with more explicitly marxist authors like John Somerville and Erwin Marquit, but finding good modern writers in that vein felt a bit like stumbling upon treasure at the beach; a spot of luck in an otherwise meandering course. given what you've laid out, Althusser seems like he'd be a "trunk" figure for Marxists in exactly the sort of obvious lineage that one can point to in other schools. (hence, i guess, why Bhaskar and other CR authors have drawn upon him)
This isnt an area i know a huge amount about, but ill try to share what I know. Marxist-inspired science definitely got dismissed or ignored. In overt ways occasionally - there were biologists like Novikof in the US who were blacklisted in academia whose writing about science was emphatic about the dialectics of nature and so on. In developmental psychology for instance Vygotsky took a very Marxist approach to science which made him anathema to western psychological science. I'm not sure if its a coincidence that, once the USSR collapsed his work from the 30s suddenly became an overnight success in the west and dominated developmental psychology (or some currents of it) from then til the present day. Something ive wondered about.
the philosophy of science definitely took a big turn around the 70s til now towards a mechanistic view of nature and scientific explanation, replacing the old "laws of nature" style of explanation that was previously dominant. Mechanist philosophy of science is almost totally implicit and universal these days, even amongst dissidents in systems biology and systems neuroscience.
I think that this trend is deeply ideologically driven, in just the way Althusser describes. There's a close relationship between the development of capitalism and mechanistic philosophy of science, of whom Descartes is the original theorist. The world as totally rational mechanism made of parts and wholes is a very liberal/rational/capitalist formulation. It's so dominant that at present theres not a language outside a Cartesian, mechanistic view of science and so addressing the dynamical aspects of nature has to be done in mechanistic terms. Critics of mechanism coming from dynamical cognitive science are still obliged to talk about parts and wholes, mechanisms and components etc. This also parallels the development of a philosophy of mind which views minds as computers that are mechanistic (again something being railed against by proponents of embodied and enactive cognition, which are very non-mechanistic).
Process ontology (developed by Whitehead, and theres a good book on it by Rescher) is a dissident current within philosophy of science that takes a view much more amenable to a Marxist philosophy of science. While its been popular with a lot of big names in philosophy its never quite caught on. There are some heavyweights in philosophy of science who have made some movements to rehabilitate and build a new account of process. But we're also in the middle of a big neo-mechanist "revival" too.
I might write something more concrete about the development of capitalism and the features of mechanistic philosophy of science, since it seems an obvious and important link but one that hasnt been written about much (outside some allusions in the Dialectical Biologist)
They're starting a new job as a research team leader. They'll be great at it! How the fuck indeed.
shriekingviolet posted:is althusser the new hip incarnation of the beat up used copy of hegel's phenomenology of spirit that proudly sits on all our bookshelves unread
no.
shriekingviolet posted:A friend in the sciences told me the other day that after years working at multiple research labs, watching people frantically scramble to turn experimental data that didn't go the way they expected (every time) into something useful so that they can keep justifying their funding, they can confidently ask "how the fuck do we even know anything?"
They're starting a new job as a research team leader. They'll be great at it! How the fuck indeed.
the profit motive in science and medicine is the reason why if the ussr was still around they'd probably have cured cancer and set up a mars colony by now
