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Teaching Reading: The Case of Marx in FranceLire le Capital, Chapter III by Jacques Ranciere; "Mode d'emploi pour une réédition de Lire leCapital" by Jacques Ranciere; La Leçon D'Althusser by Jacques RanciereReview by: Jeffrey MehlmanDiacritics, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter, 1976), pp. 10-18Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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i These comments were delivered atthe Diacritics colloquium of 1976 on

Teaching Reading.Markedas they are

by the circumstances of that sym-posium, they appear here in the formin which they were presented inIthaca.

T[ACHING RIpADIINO

T H i C S IO

M A I X N

FR NCE

Jeffrey Mehlman

JACQUESRANCIERELIRELE CAPITAL, CHAPTER III.Paris:Petite CollectionMaspero,1973

JACQUESRANCIERE"Mode d'emploi pourune reeditionde LIRELE CAPITAL"

LESTEMPSMODERNES,November1973.

JACQUESRANCIERE

LALE(ON D'ALTHUSSERParis:Gallimard,1974

The modesty implicit in the rubricTeaching Reading is, I suspect, as appro-

priate as it is false.' Forto entertain the proposition that the "professorof literature"

has today become a "teacher of reading" is first of all to acknowledge an extension

of the field of our endeavors so great as to render it virtually impossible to con-

ceive of a context which would englobe or even escape our special activity. The

French, in recent years, have managed to turn Valery's suggestion that philosophyitself be regarded as a literary genre into a principle orienting efforts so diverse

that it is now, after a series of readings of Freud,Marx,Nietzsche, et al, a reason-

able hypothesis that every significant work-in whatever domain-has an implicit

and often perverse poetics, and that a precondition of any understanding of thatwork is a coming to terms with the conditions of its readability. So that reading,in our title, has, I would suggest, all the modesty of ... let us say, a term like beingin Heidegger.

Now given this situation one might well imagine a development on the sub-

ject of teaching reading in which that phrase would graduallybe made to buckle.The specific trickiness and instability of reading would come to unsettle the

putative mastery of teaching. In the sentimental mode, this might take the form

of the teacher unexpectedly learning from his student. But in a stronger and un-

canny mode, the learning experience itself would be caught up in and dissolved

by a bracing and exhilaratingsense of disorientation born of the perversityof that

general medium we acceed to by reading. For such would be the scenario de-manded by a particularlypowerful tradition of inquiry: the privilege of teaching

decisively disrupted by the constitutive instabilityof reading. I would suggest thata number of the more enterprisingcritics in the United States are currentlyattempt-

ing to write themselves into that tradition or, a least, to situate themselves interms of it. With admitted crudeness, we may conveniently label that tendencywith the name "Derrida."

But supposing we were to imagine a different interpretationof our title, in

which the commanding term were not reading but teaching. By which, it would be

suggested that the difficult dimension for analysis would be the politics implicit inthe discursive relation called teaching. And that the cult of reading and misreadingwas precisely primed to sustain and consolidate the pedagogical institution at a

specific historical juncture. In thal case, the triumph of reading referred to above,its ability to call the mastery of the teacher into question, would be the subtlest

JEFFREYMEHLMAN, who teaches at Johns Hopkins, is the author of A Structural

Study of Autobiography. His translation of Laplanche's Life and Death in Psycho-analysis was recently published by the Johns Hopkins Press.

10

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ruse of teaching, its way of preventing any analysis of the discursive politics throughwhich its institutional reality is perpetuated. This second perspective, opening onto what might be called a political history--or archeology--of speech acts, has, onthe whole, attracted few adherents in this country. In France, it is associated aboveall with the name of Michel Foucault.

Let me hasten to assure [the reader] that my intention here is not to set upthe subject of this colloquium as a battleground between two monstres sacr6s. Ishall, in fact, refer only in passing, later on, to the appendix to L'Histoirede la folie(1972 edition) in which the Derrida-Foucault debate flared up with greatest in-tensity. I speak rather out of the disquieting sense that many of us who havetaken Derrida's writings seriously have of the enormous convenience afforded usby the immense and exhilarating difficulties posed by his texts. In recent yearsthat alarming convenience has grown; the rudiments of an orthodoxy have begunto congeal and to be celebrated in terms alternately pious and cynical; and theprice-which is calculable not simply in blandness-that many are currently pay-ing for not having had to pay more dearly their access to a certain style of inquiryis increasingly manifest. To pose the problem in terms of blandness and intensityis no doubt to bracket what is perhaps most regrettablyand apolitically convenientin that problematic at its most intense, but it may render more understandablethe pressures some of us feel to emerge from what might crudely be called ageneral economy of textuality into a region which might comprehend it. I knowof no one who has succeeded in this effort and yet I believe I have located aseries of writings that have crucial importance in that general endeavor and turnspecifically on a confrontation between the two interpretations of our topic-teaching reading-evoked above: the alleged mastery of "teaching" eroded bythe constitutive instability of "reading," or the cult of "reading" seen as a rusedictated

bythe discursive demands of the

politicalrelation called

"teaching."That

confrontation takes place far from the arena of literary criticism, in the analysesof Jacques Ranciere, to which I now shall turn.

First, a few bibliographical notes, to situate our subject. Ranciere was themost brilliantstudent of LouisAlthusser, and the author of the third volume of thecollective work, Lire le Capital. That scrupulous reading of Marx's major work,

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diacritics/Winter1976 11







2Theessay is includedas an appen-dix in La

Lemon'Althusser.

published in 1965, was central to Althusser's effort to demonstrate that Marxwasneither a German idealist (neither Hegel nor Feuerbach), nor an Anglo-Saxonempiricist (Ricardo),but a French structuralist. To say as much is tantamount to

claiming that through Althusser, Capital was becoming as intellectually exciting awork as Franceat the time could imagine, and the quality of that excitement wasno where more intense than in Ranciere's reading of it, entitled: "Le concept de

critique et la critique de I'6conomie politique des Manuscritsde 1844 au Capital."We shall return to that contribution shortly.

May 1968 shocked Ranciere into an awareness of what he regarded as thenefarious political role played by the Althusserian reading of Marx,and he begana polemical critique of Althusser's politics in an article on the theory of ideologyfirst

publishedin 1970 in Buenos Aires.2 In

1973,for a reedition of the

completeversion of Lire le Capital, he wrote for inclusion in that volume a brief polemicalessay, "Mode d'emploi pour une

rm6ditionde Lire le Capital."His purpose in that

self-criticism: to call the bluff of Althusser's own self-criticism, by beginning todemonstrate that the Althusserianproject was not insufficienly political, theoriciste,in the official phrase, but rather that its "theoricisme" was remarkablyeffective in

fulfilling a specific political function. The editor refused to publish Ranciere's

"auto-critique pirate,"which eventually appeared in Les Temps modernes. In 1974,Ranciere published a full-length volume entitled, La

Lemond'Althusser, a "geneal-

ogy" of Althusser's discourse, an attempt less to refute his reading of Marx,whichhad also been Ranciere's,of course, than to study "the positivityof its functioning"[p. 11]: "a mise en scene attempting to disrupt (der6gler)the functioning of a cer-tain scholarly Marxist discourse (un de ces discours marxistes savants) presentlyoccupying our theoretical scene or space, in order to render readable, within thediscourse of revolution, the consecration of the existing order" [p. 226].

There are, then, two Rancieres, apparently separated by the crucial year of1968: the first, the student of his teacher, the Althusserian collaborator in Lire leCapital; the second, intent above all on elaborating the genealogy of the errorassumed by the first, aggressivelyanti-Althusserian.Now, no sooner are we temptedto read Ranciere'sdilemma in terms of an Oedipal anxiety of, say, influence, thanwe come upon a particularly instructive impasse. For if we summarily reduceFreud's Oedipus to its core of greatest intensity, the concept of "castration,"we

may assert that the break between Ranciere I and Ranciere II is nothing so muchas a break away from the model of "castration,"and consequently cannot in itselfbe understood in terms of that model. Within Althusser (and Ranciere I), the placeof "castration" s occupied by a concept imported from Bachelard, he epistemolog-ical break [la coupure 6pistemologique], the decisive breach separatingthe "young"Marx, Feuerbachian and "ideological" in his anthropological critique of Hegel,from the "mature" Marx of the science of Capital. For the heart of Althusser'seffort was, of course, to superimpose Bachelard's concept on Marx's declaration

that in The GermanIdeology he had settled his account with his "formerphilosoph-ical consciousness." Thus we are faced with two different breaks or coupures. Thebreak between what we might be called the "young Ranciere" and the "laterRanciere"is one between, on the one hand, an ideologue of the (epistemological)break between a "young Marx"and a "later Marx,"and, on the other, a thinkerwho has broken with the model of the "break." One of our tasks should be toelaborate the specific difference between those two forms of difference.

It will perhaps be objected that any attempt to assimilate the thought ofDerrida to that of Althusser is destined to fail. Moreover, it should fail precisely tothe extent that our superimposition of the concepts of "epistemological break" and"castration"would succeed. Lacan,after all, and not Derrida is the implicit pointof reference in Althusser, and if Althusser has grounded his reading of Marx in anaffirmation of the break, Derrida has taken his distances from both Freud and

Lacanthrough a calculated undermining of the concept of "castration." And yetI would maintain that Derrida's break with the model of the break ("coupure" or"castration") is minor in relation to the political genealogy of it elaborated byRanciere in his recent work in the context of a series of questions posed by Fou-cault. At the present juncture, however, a discussion of that minor break will serveas our best introductionto the specific excellence of the Rancibreof Lire le CapitalIII.

The achievement of Derrida, after all, has been in teaching us to negotiaterigorously in textual differences which, paradoxically, are both constitutive andundecidable. It is for that reason that, although the medium in which his readingsmove is one of crucial discontinuity, a major target-or casualty--of deconstruc-tion has been "criticism"itself insofar as that concept entails a capacity to decide.Now the difficulities of maintaining both the discontinuity and the undecidability

12







simultaneously alive in one's discourse are such that periodically there will be fail-ures-of intensity-in which the first will win out over the second in the affirmationof an absolute break. Derrida's dismantling of "castration" in Freud and Lacanstrikes me as an effort to break up just such a local pocket of inertia within ashared problematic or field of inquiry. And to the extent that a Bachelardian"break" between the "ideological youth" and the "scientific maturity" of Marxfunctions in a manner homologous to Freud'sconcept of castration, we may affirmthat the Althusser of Lirele Capital and the "break"is, to all intents and purposes,a somewhat sclerotic version of Derrida.

In opposition to the break, we might then posit or imagine undecidabilityre-emergent in a fine Derridean art of double inscription, the project of constitut-

ing a text as a polemical field in which two different conceptual schemes may be

seen to be struggling to invest a single terminological apparatus.Such is the stun-ning achievement of Ranciere in Lire le Capital III, in which two discontinuous"theoretical spaces (espaces theoriques)," at times undecidably, make use of anidentical vocabulary. Let us turn now to Ranciere'sanalysis to see how impressivea theory of reading it is.

The "young" Marx of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsof 1844was intent, in this reading, on locating the principal contradictions of politicaleconomy and promoting them, through a process of Vermenschlichungor "human-ization" to their most general form. These contradictions invariablytake the formof a human subject alienating the predicates constitutive of its essence in an ex-ternal object. That object itself, moreover, eventually poses itself, in sovereign ab-straction, as a subject positing man as its object. Marx'scritical effort would consistin

analytically counteringthat

processof abstraction

perpetrated by speculativediscourse. Itwould restore to the constitutive subject its alienated essence by trans-lating the various contradictions into their archetypal form, in which the productof human labor is seen to confront its producer as a power independent of him.What political economy, which is a stage in the self-consciousness of humanity, hasfailed to realize is that the wealth in which it recognizes the essence of man is, in

fact, his alienated essence. The critical discourse of Marx in 1844 would elaboratethe conditions of the end of that alienation.

Now Ranciere's critique of this position focuses on the crucial point thatMarx's analysis here is structurally identical to that of Feuerbach's anthropology.Marx'sruse has been to substitute for the sentence: man-produces-God, in Feuer-bach's critique of religious alienation, the sentence: the-worker-produces-an-object.A series of conceptual slippages allows for the positing of an essentially anthro-

pological thesis in economic guise to function as the ground of Marx'scritique, forthe implicit assertion is that the worker would produce his object and estrange

his essence therein in the same manner that Feuerbachian man would alienatethe predicates of his essence in the God he would produce. Ultimately, Ranciere's

argument reads, the concept that will block the series of slippages and shatter the

problematic of 1844 will be that of "relations of production," the central categoryof Capital. It will effect that blockage through a desubjectivization of economic

categories.We shall encounter this early problematic again, but at this juncture we shall

make a detour, perhaps a leap, to the other side of the alleged break, Capital.Needless to say, we shall not exhaust Ranciere'sreading of Capital,but offer ratherthe questions around which that reading is structured. For Ranciere, what dis-

tinguishes Marx from Ricardo-and classical economy in general-is that whereasRicardosought to reduce the various phenomenal forms of wealth to their hiddenessence-congealed labor-the problem posed by Marx was that of the specificform of manifestation (Erscheinungsform) f value. The point of inception of Capitalis, of course, the commodity form, the logical scandal through which the natural

form of commodity A can serve as the representative or equivalent of the exchangevalue of commodity B. It is that contradiction at the level of appearances that leadsMarxto what, in a letter to Engels (8 January1868), he calls the "whole secret of[his] critical conception": the dual nature of labor, at once "concrete" and "ab-stract," generative simultaneously of use value and exchange value. That duplicityin turn leads us to the social relations of production as constitutive of the com-modity form precisely to the extent that they are eclipsed in the form of its mani-festation.

What Capital thus becomes in this reading is the science of the specific dis-tortion with which the relations of production simultaneously mask and manifestthemselves-in inverse form-in the realm of Wirklichkeit or reality. For themechanism of capital is endlessly generative of the wherewithal for deluded ex-planations. Indeed, what Marxcalls "vulgar economy" is nothing so much as the

CJOCriticsWinter 1976 13







systematization of those intuitions, which are, moreover, the practical wisdom of

every successful businessman. Thus profit, for example, is the specific form of mani-festation of surplus-value, and consequently the form in which it dictates a "law"of economic competition in which the law of surplus-value is realized in inverseform. Similarly,the appearance that salary pays for labor is the form assumed bythe resistance to any awareness that wages in fact pay for labor-power and conse-

quently the means through which that payment is most efficiently effected. What

Capitalwould thus be offering us, in Ranciere'sreading, would be a general theoryof the necessary delusions of capitalist subjectivity.

This point may perhaps be clarified by comparing Marx, Ricardo,and Smith.Once one admits that the realm of phenomenal reality-Wirklichkeit-contradictsthe law of value, one would

appearto have two

options.The first would be to

abandon the law. Such is the solution adopted by "vulgareconomy" and, ultimately,by Adam Smith, who relegates the effectiveness of the law to what Marxcalls "pre-Adamic times." The second solution would be Ricardo's;it consists in maintainingthe law by subjecting resistant phenomena to what Ranciere calls a coup de force

obliging them to conform to the law. Phenomenal reality is thus reduced to ahidden essence and its apparent deviation from that essence is thematized as acci-dental, metaphorized as a kind of friction. As for Marx,Ranciere discusses his dif-ference from Ricardo as follows: "Ricardo remains with a classical conception ofabstraction which would in fact be much more in accord with the theory of 'fric-tion (frottement)' that others would like to apply to Marx. Having failed to studysurplus-value in its pure form, Ricardo cannot recognize that the apparent per-turbations of surplus-valueare in fact modes of existence of surplus-value,modes ofrealization of surplus-value in the form of its contrary. He is thus obliged to denythose perturbationsand to affirman identity where there is contradiction and re-

versal, to posit the apparent movement, the contradiction of the real movement, asits unmediated confirmation"(p. 92). Thus whereas Ricardowould posit the form ofthe manifestation of value as accidentally erroneous, Marx would consider thaterror as so crucial that his interpreter Ranciere can affirm that Capital is nothingso much as the science of the systematicity and the necessity of that error.

Now within Capital the name of that error is fetishism. So much so thatRanciere can maintain that Ricardo'serror was in attempting to exorcise fetishism

through his coup de force rather than to understand it. Fetishismwould be the most

perfect manifestation, the most complete "exteriorization"or Verauisserlichung f

capitalism. For in it, the capitalist process would vanish totally in its result. Thus,outside the process of production, capital, land, and labor would themselves appearto be generative respectively of profit, rent, and salary. Interest-bearing capitalwould appear autonomous, "subjectivized," in Marx'sphrase, cut off, in Ranciere'sfrom any "memory (souvenir)"of its origin in a form of production. A multiplicityof local and thoroughly imaginaryorigins (Ursprung)-in capital, land, and labor-

would blind one to the "source (Quelle)" in relations of production.Capital, in this reading, is thus a theory of phenomenal reality-or Wirklich-

keit-constituted through and as a fundamental "forgetting" or repression of the

grounding function of relations of production. At the same time, Ranciere's ruseconsists in viewing the "political economy" explicitly criticized in its a-historical

anthropological dimension in Capital as being in substantial continuity with the

anthropology of the Feuerbachianproblematic of 1844. Thus for Marx to criticize

political economy is simultaneously to reaffirmthe break, to dismantle an anthro-

pology which had been his own as well.Consider now the problematic of "fetishism," which is, for Ranciare, the

specific problematic of Capital, in its relation with the structure of the argument inthe Manuscriptsof 1844. Whereas the earlier text posited a constitutive subjectivityalienating the predicates of is essence in an object which then confronts the sub-ject, mirror-like,as an autonomous subject for which the constitutive subject is now

an object, Capitalaffirms the disappearance or estrangement of a constitutive rela-tion of production in commodities which then appear to behave independently,autonomously, as they realize the law of surplus-value in inverse form. In 1844,the process of alienation is articulated in terms of an Entaisserung or Entfremdung;the mirrorreversal is a Verkehrung.In Capitalthe movement of dissimulation, mani-festation, exteriorization of the "internal relation" is a Veraiisserlichungor Entfrem-dung; the inversion through which the law of value is realized as its opposite isa Verkehrung.Which is to say that an all but identical vocabularyis made to articu-late two very different problematics. And if the second may be regarded as im-plicitly dismantling (the anthropology of) the first, the tools of that analysis wouldbe indistinguishable in their verbal reality from the elements they would analyze.in this double inscription of the crucial terms of Marx, a certain undecidabilitywould begin to contaminate the absoluteness of the break and undermine the verypossibility of a metalanguage.







Lire le Capital IIIthus presents us with a theory of incontrovertible error, ofa "devoir ne pas voir" [p. 120]. It may be regarded as "structuralist" o the extentthat the accent falls on the break, "post-structuralist," perhaps, to the extentthat the reinscriptionof identical terms on either side of the break tends to debili-tate the absoluteness of the break. It is preeminently a theory of reading-of read-

ing Marx as an unwitting theorist of reading (the inevitable errors of political econ-

omy). It should be recognized that in its ability to elaborate a constitutive and

systematic weakness of Marx'stext, to conquer afresh within Capital, shall we say,the Freudianproblematic at its most potent, it is as strong a model of reading asis currentlyavailable to us. It is the very model of reading that a number of us, inBaltimore, Ithaca, New Haven, and elsewhere, have attempted to put into practice,though rarelywith the subtlety of Ranciere.

And then he junked it. The documents, or rather, instruments of that liquida-tion are, first, the self-criticism of the guide to rereading Lire le Capital in 1973,and then, in substantialcontinuity with it, the polemical volume, LaLecon d'Althus-ser. To say that Ranciere's second position is the result of a politicization is tomiss the point of his argument, which is that the Althusserian problematic of Lirele Capital is essentially, and not accidentally or insufficiently,political, and that hisown analysis is an effort to come to terms with the remarkable "positivity" oreffectiveness of its functioning. In the course of Ranciere'sgenealogy of his earlier

position, the principles of a very different style of reading emerge and traverseMarx's ext in several key points. In the present forum, it is on that intersection, i.e.,specifically on Marx as guide to a theory of the discursive politics of Althusser'sroleas theorist and pedagogue of Marx'stext that I shall focus. In anticipation, I would

suggest that the break between the two "Rancieres" is super-imposable on a po-lemical split between styles of inquirywe may associate with the names "Derrida"and "Foucault."I do so in order to complicate the situation of those of us, includingmyself, for whom Derridahas constituted the horizon within which serious intellec-tual endeavor is imaginable. Forwhat is at stake here is no battle between intellec-tual superstars,but an intellectual and political choice made by Ranciereat the ex-

pense of an impressive series of concerns which were his, which continue--buthow long will they continue?-to be ours.

A convenient entry into the new problematic will be to see the vicissitudesof the category of fetishism in the "Mode d'emploi." For it will be recalled how

hermetically sealed a reading of that concept Lire le Capital offered: a theory of

generalized error (meconnaissance) which was itself electively available to misread-

ing as a continuation of the young-Marxiantheory of alienation-reification. In theface of the closure, or rather, self-consumption of the theory, Ranciere quotes, inan effort to drive a wedge into it, the incredibly humanist paragraphin the chap-

ter on "Fetishism" in which Marx offers, among others, the following division oflabor time, in opposition to the division prevalent under capitalism: "Let us now

picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carryingon their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor-powerof all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor-powerof the community. All the characteristicsof Robinson's labor are here repeated, butwith this difference, that they are social, instead of individual[ ...] The social rela-

tions of the individual producers, with regard both to their labor and to its prod-ucts, are in this case perfectly simple and transparent, and that with regard not

only to production but also to distribution. i...] The religious reflex of the realworld can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations ofevery-day life offer to man none but perfectly transparentand reasonable relationswith regard to his fellowmen and to Nature." Ranciere's reaction, eloquent in itsaggressive irony: "Freely associated men, transparency of social relations [...] allthat ideology on the frontispiece of science [tant d'iddologie au frontispice de la

science]" [p. 803]. There then follow a series of assertions which, in their willfulness,bring into focus the orientation of the analysis. The discussion of fetishism inCapital, informed by this "humanist"vision, is less a general theory of ideology orerror than the theoretical representative of the specific aspirations of the prole-tarianstruggle: the association of free producers.That is, fetishism represents withinthe register of theory the energies mobilized by the dream of an absolute visibilityof relations of production that render the invisible constructs of science conceiv-able. In brief, fetishism is more the emblem of a science than the concept of itsobject.

Thus Rancibre'sreading adds a new stratum to the text, in this example whichis emblematic as well of the direction of his analysis. That stratum traffics less inconcepts than in politico-discursive energy. Whereas the Communist Partyrevision-ists swore by Engels' adage--How-absurd-to-take-one's-own-impatience-for-a-

dlacritics/winter 1976 15







theory -Ranciere seemed to be offering as a principle for a new style of readingthe willingness to see in every theory the articulation of a certain impatience."Knowledge" and "power" might then be seen not as opposed, essentially, as"science" and "ideology," but ratherarticulated in something of the order of whatFoucault would call elsewhere an epistemologico-juridical formation.

But the example of fetishism, suggestive as an indication of how one mightread Marx,is above all emblematic of how one must read Althusser. For Ranciere's

analysis is only incidentally a refutation of or complement to an interpretationof

Marx,and essentially a genealogy of the local historico-discursivecontext in whichthe need to interpret Marx should loom so centrally. Thus we must consider the

reading of Althusser,and with him, implicitly,of an entire school of interpretation,

represented,at its most

distinguished, byRanciere himself.

La Lecon d'Althusser responds most immediately to Althusser's brief text of1972, Reponse a John Lewis. John Lewis is a theorist of the BritishC.P. who haddiscussed and attacked Lire le Capital and Pour Marx in MarxismToday. Thus thedebate emerges directly from the issues raised in the major Althusserian effort.Lewis's position is that of a somewhat diluted Sartre,so diluted, in fact, that Ran-cire is no doubt right in suggesting that his is the voice of common sense itself."JohnLewis' 'or Anglo-Saxoncommon sense: no doubt everyone at this colloquiumhas a favorite literarycritic who can stand in for him. It should be noted that by1972, the Althusserian technique had increased in rigidity: the fine art of rein-

scribing terms functioning differentially on opposite sides of the break had hard-ened into a contrasting of theses embodying the "ideological" and the "scientific"

phases of the Marxianproblematic. At its worst, this degenerated into a conceptualpolice or what Ranciere calls a "paranoid fairy tale" in which the evil words ofthe bourgeoisie assail the class positions of the proletariatdans le text. For those

who have seen a certain style of textual analysis degenerate into that special formof terrorismthat one's graduate students exercise against one's less hip colleagues,this situation should not be altogether alien either, Within the context of the French

left, Rancieredubs it nicely: "le jdanovisme speculatif" [p. 146].Still, the response to Lewis is in substantial continuity with "l'althusserisme"

at its most intense, say, in Lire e CapitalIII.Its point of departure consists in coun-

tering John Lewis'sthesis with a Marxist-Leninisthesis. Thus J.L.:"Man is the agentof history"vs. M.L.:"The masses are the agents of history." Now with man as the

agent of history, we seem to encounter that constitutive subjectivity or humanessence implicit in the argument of the "young" Marxof the Manuscriptsof 1844.And indeed Althusserwill dub Lewis a misguided bearer of the ideology par excel-

lence of the rising bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, as transmitted by such

exemplars of the declining petite bourgeoisie of the nineteenth as Feuerbach or,

later, Sartre. It is here that Ranciereintervenes decisively to claim that for the bour-

geoisie of the eighteenth century the subject man is the answer not at all to the

question, who is the agent of history?, but ratherto the question, posed in exem-plaryfashion by Kant:what is man? The most radicalversion of the answer to that

question was offered by the eighteenth-century materialists,such as Helvetius, forwhom man is a materialbeing, inclined to think and act in accord with impressionsmaterially produced on his sensibility. Therein are joined the questions of privateinterest and of the production of effects of power necessary for its exercise, and

specifically the link between the realization of the interests of a minority and theeffects to be produced on the sensibility of the majority.Gradually, he text movestoward an evocation of Bentham's Panopticon, a central tower allowing for sur-veillance. It was, of course, a model for an entire series of disciplinary institutions,

prisons, factories, schools, asylums, and happened only incidentally to become themodel for the prison. It is for that reason that Foucault's genealogy of modernmorals has begun with a study of prisons, as though they were the exemplaryinstitutions in an age-modernity-of intensifying surveillance [Surveilleret punir:

Naissance de ia prison (Paris:Gallimard),1975]. Man then is essentially the achieve-ment of the disciplinary apparatus,the product of the epistemologico-juridical ma-

chine Foucault calls "le panoptisme." Which is to say that the practical ideologyof the bourgeoisie, elaborated in the reproduction of bourgeois relations of power,is not an ideology of the free individual and man as creator of history, but ratherone of surveillance and welfare (assistance). In Ranci~re's erms (which are alreadyrich with the analyses Foucaultwas to publish a year later): "Bourgeois man is not

fundamentallythe conquering subject of humanism. He is the man of philanthropy,the humanities, and anthropometrics (I'anthropombtrie):man who is formed, as-sisted, measured, an object of surveillance" [p. 22]. Translated into more locallyfamiliarterms, bourgeois man is the man born of influence.

It is here that a problematic which was shortly to emerge at volume lengthas Foucault's,meets up, in Rancibre'stext, with a certain Marx, the author of thethird Thesis on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of cir-







cumstances and upbringingand that, therefore, changed men are products of othercircumstances and different upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed pre-cisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated (dass der Erzieherselbst erzogen werden muss). Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividingsociety into two parts, of which one towers above society (in Robert Owen, for

example)." In LaLemon

'Althusser,that thesis figures as the quintessentially Marxiantext. It is oriented polemically against the horrendously productive regime that a"hitherto existent materialism"was unable to break with.3 Marx calls that regimeone of Erziehung,education, upbringing. Its most impressive genealogist is the ag-gressively anti-MarxianFoucault, to the extent that he has been able to elaboratean epistemologico-juridical history of our age marked essentially by the jointemergence of the "disciplines" of academic study and of a host of institutions of

surveillance.What is new, then, in the Marx of the third Thesis on Feuerbach is the at-

tack on the model of Erziehung,education, or influence from above as a model for

political change. As late as 1843, in The Holy Family, he was still presenting thedoctrines of Helvetius as the basis of communism. The problem of political actionis there thematized in continuity with the eighteenth-century materialist doctrineof "influence": "it is a question of so arranging the empirical world that man

experiences the truly human in it, that he becomes accustomed to experiencinghimself as a human being." Whereupon the decisive break, in the form of the

question: who will educate the educators? In the context of our subject, "teachingreading," and of Ranciere'sproduction as well, consider how different a move this

reading constitutes. Whereas in Lire le Capital III, the specific newness ofMarx was in being, however unwittingly, as profound a philosopher of reading-and of inevitable misreading--as one might encounter, the originality of the Marx

of La Lemond'Althusser lay in calling into question the political and discursiveutopia from which the educator would exercise his influence, and, ultimately, the

position of the "teacher" itself. One senses, in this second reading, an attempt to

conquer within Marx's text the tools for a political genealogy of Althusser's ped-agogical effort, and we shall broach that dimension of the analysis shortly.

But at this juncture, we should take note of Ranciere'sreading of the alleged-ly Marxist-Leninist hesis that Althusseropposes to John Lewis's thesis that it is manwho is the agent of history, namely: it is the masses who are the agents of history.The principle point made by Ranciere is that this thesis is not at all a timeless truthof the Marxist-Leninist"tradition," but was elaborated by Mao-Tse-Tung, in lan-

guage, no doubt, too Hegelian for Althusser'scomfort, in the specific historicalsitua-tion of 1945. Its illocutionaryintent is to affirmthe special understandingemergentfrom oppression, and the ability of the oppressed to forge the weapons of their

struggle out of that understanding. It thus asserts the military superiority of theChinese masses to the armies of feudalism and imperialism, and simultaneously

that of the peasants, workers, and students of China to those specialists who wouldeducate them in the exercise of the class struggle. In this second dimension, thethesis is directed against the Kautskyist radition viewing the masses, in their in-

ability to raise their awareness beyond the level achieved in a struggle for salaryincrease, as needing "theoretical" guidance imported from above. Which is to saythat the Maoist thesis joins up with the third Thesis on Feuerbach in once againcalling into question the very place from which the political educator would speak.

Consider now how far the sentence "the masses are the agents of history"has moved from its position in Althusser's problematic. Whereas Althusser, by op-posing "masses" to "man," constitutes Mao's slogan as a response to the questionof the subject of history, by reinstatingthat phrase in the political struggle by whichit was borne, Rancibre s able to demonstrate its focus to be the competence of themasses. The Althusserian split opposes two theses, allegedly "scientific" and"ideological," as opposed to each other as knowledge is to power. The questionof "man," then of the "masses," has led Rancibre,however, to an entirely differentopposition: on the one hand, a kind of intelligence which is inherently political,the special understanding born of oppression; but on the other hand, that vastepistemologico-juridical regime of "pouvoir-savoir" that Foucault calls "le pan-optisme." it is the hierarchical world of what Marx calls the "hitherto existentmaterialism,"and is sustained, in its benign, reformistversion, by the maintenanceof the unquestioned position from which the pedagogue-educator would representthe interests of those in need of enlightenment.

In brief, Rancibre'sMarx would be oriented much less against the contentsof Althusser's arguments than against the "philosophical" position from which hepretended to speak. The refutations in La

Lemond'Althusser seem almost incidental

in relation to a delineation of the remarkable trivialization to which Althusser's

position as Communist intellectual, at a specific historical juncture, condemnedhim. For the role of the Party pedagogue-at least in the French C.P.-is less to

dikcritics/winter 1976 17







teach than to contribute, by his presence, to the belief that his role is necessary,since as long as there are party educators, there must evidently be a need foreducation. Now since education is the necessary prerequisite for successful politicalaction, the presence of the educator means it is not yet time to act. Such was therole that Althusser played in May, 1968, and the crucial point is that it was a roledictated by his position in a party which is a major force for conservatism inFrance. He need not, of course, undergo the humiliation of approving the politicalpositions of the Communist Party.He need only maintain that until the adequatetheory was elaborated, one could neither approve nor disapprove those positions.In brief, the Communists of the Ecole Normale would leave politics to the Party,and the Partywould leave epistemology to them.

It is in this context that theimportation

into the Althusserianproblematicof Bachelard and Lacan may be considered, specifically in terms of their political

effect. For by introducing a distinction between "scientific truth" and "political-ideological error," through Bachelard, and then by apolitically generalizing that

error, through Lacan, into the form of a universal imaginaire afflicting oppressorsand oppressed alike, Althusser simultaneously posited the proletarian need fortheoretical guidance from above, and, in the person of the epistemologist, situatedthat guidance in a utopian position that begins on the far side of "ideology," that

is, of political reality. The Communist intellectual becomes a professional of thebreak, who can resist local outbreaks of "ideology" within scientific discourse withall the aplomb of the Russian army protecting the socialist republic of Czecho-slovakia from bourgeois relapses. In brief Althusser as Communist intellectual re-instates the reformist incarnation of what Marx called the "hitherto existent ma-

terialism," this time as farce.For a number of years, the Althusserianeffort had remarkablepower on the

French Left. Or rather, the political impotence of Althusser's analyses seemed in-versely related to his power in the French University. If Ranciere is right, this is ameasure of the success of that effort to the extent that it was essentially a meansof perpetuating the power of the discursive institution which allowed it to flourish,the French University.That is, Althusserianismwas fundamentally political, thoughits aim was not to promote revolution in society, but to prevent change in themore local context of French education.

How do these questions concern the present forum? In considering the case of

Ranciere, we initially encountered a particularlysubtle exercise in textual analysis.The discourse of the break was refined into a remarkableart of double inscription,and Marxemerged an unwitting philosopher of misreading. The constitutive insta-

bility of the text played havoc with the authorityof its pronouncements, and tex-

tuality itself seemed the medium in which the subject was dislocated. Neither here

nor there, subjectivity in the Althusserian problematic became utopian.With the political break of 1968 came the growing suspicion that the entire

enterprise was a mystification.The context of that realization concerned the micro-

political insight, born of a number of local struggles, that the specific form of in-

justice in greatest need of dismantling issues from those hierarchies through whichthe mechanism of representation is perpetuated. Now to dissolve or dislocatethe subject in a (de)constitutive textuality is precisely to affirm the possibility ofthat representation to the extent that the specificity of one's insertion in a politico-discursive practice is denied. Thus Ranciereon Althusser: "A discourse that autho-rizes one to speak for others; to deny (annuler)the place and the subject of one's

speech (parole)" [p. 224]. Simultaneously,the intellectual task par excellence wouldbe the elaboration of a political history of speech acts. Whence LaLegon d'Althus-ser, an examination of what it means to speak a Marxistlanguage in Francetoday,when the discourse of order is obliged to make use of the language of subversion.

Indiscussing

LireleCapital ll,

weposited

a kind ofprimal duplicity

of themedium of reading as corrosive of the alleged mastery of teaching. In confrontingLa Legon d'Althusser, teaching emerged as the commanding term, dictating a cultof reading and misreadingas the subtlest ruse through which its institutionalpowermight be perpetuated. The two interpretationsof our title are polemically opposedand have clashed with exemplary clarity in the case of Rancibre.Lest it be thoughtthat this debate is minor, I would suggest that Rancibre'sself-criticism in his guideto rereading Reading Capital be confronted with Foucault'scritique of Derrida onDescartes. The issues are substantiallythe same. That in the case of the one Frenchintellectual who has managed to think insightfully within the fields of inquiryopened up by both interpretationsof our title, the political history of speech actswas considered a means of comprehending the mystifications of a degenerateproblematic of textuality should be a subject of disquiet for many of us.

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