*
The events which began in Łódź on 2 May 1892 shook the city, which,
at that time, was the largest industrial center in Russian-ruled Poland
with a population of nearly 150,000. The factory workers who numbered
around 40,000 halted their work and went on strike in ‘the leading
fortress of our capitalism’—in the words of Julian Marchlewski, one of
the leaders of the Polish labor movement. Soon, this protest turned into
a general strike. As declared by Konstanty Miller, the governor of the
Piotrków province, ‘the workers stopped working and gathered in the city
in large numbers’.(1)
The strike of the Łódź proletariat was its first mass protest. It was
referred to by the tsarist authorities as a bunt (‘revolt’) and it is
known as such among historians. It was not a coincidental occurrence.
*
Louis Althusser (1962)
The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to
financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and
of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made war inevitable.
But this same war, which dragged vast masses, even colonial peoples
from whom troops were drawn, into limitless suffering, drove its
cannon-fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere
the experience, the horrors of war, were a revelation and confirmation
of a whole century’s protest against capitalist exploitation; a
focusing-point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went
the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt
throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe (revolution
in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy,
the Turin soviets), only in Russia, precisely the ‘most backward’ country in Europe, did it produce a triumphant revolution.
Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason: in the ‘system
of imperialist states’ Russia represented the weakest point. The Great
War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it
had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905
Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia.
This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single State.
*
Fredric Jameson (1991)
....the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology
as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship
to his or her Real conditions of existence.
...
Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of
the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make
two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows
us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic
issues in terms of social space – in terms, for example, of social
class and national or international context, in terms of the ways
in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual
social relationship to local, national, and international class
realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also
to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping
which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global
space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been
under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues;
they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident
from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially
(or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial
society” from which traditional production has disappeared
and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist
– a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.
The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings
of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological
enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilises an older and
henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology
that is not without value for us even today. The existential
– the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of
daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world
to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted
– is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of
abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never
positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather
by that structural void called
le sujet supposé savoir
(the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge.
What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its
totality in some abstract or “scientific” way. Marxian
“science” provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising
the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s
great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global
world system, of which it has never been said here that it was
unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a
very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words,
designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific
knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing
a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each
other. What a historicist view of this definition would want
to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning
and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations,
and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which
it is not possible at all – and this would seem to be our situation
in the current crisis.
But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the
Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond
only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the
Real, respectively.
Posts
