warren montag, "rancière’s lost object: a review of althusser’s lesson"

7/28/2019 Warren Montag, "Rancires Lost Object: a review of Althussers Lesson"

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Cultural Critiques commitment to cultural and intellectual debateand discussion is bolstered by the regular inclusion of book reviewsof both new and not-so-new books. Generally, books reviewed willhave appeared within the past three years, although reviews of olderbooks that are emerging or reemerging in intellectual debates are alsowelcome. As an academic publication, Cultural Critique sees itself ashaving a responsibility to devote space to authors whose work maynot be otherwise reviewed. For Cultural Critiques special issues, bookreviews should share the issues thematic focus. Cultural Critiquesbook review editors solicit writers, books, and ideas for future con-tributions to this section of the journal. Please contact the book re-view editors at [email protected] or Cultural Critique, Department ofCultural Studies and Comparative Literature, 216 Pillsbury DriveS.E., 235 Nicholson Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

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Cultural Critique 83Winter 2013Copyright 2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota

RANCIRES LOST OBJECT

ALTHUSSERS LESSON

BY JACQUES RANCIREContinuum, 2011

Warren Montag

Althusser was troubled by Lacans assertion that a letter always arrivesat its destination, an assertion that seemed to him to be based on themost classical notions of destiny and Wnality (1996, 9192). AlthusserWnally responded not by merely inverting the assertion to say that aletter never arrives at its destination, but rather with the qualiWcationthat it may arrive that a letter does not arrive at its destination (92),as if the letter (and not simply an epistle but the typographical mark)were diverted by an originary swerve at odds with, to use the lan-guage of Lucretius, the decree of destiny and the logic of destination.

Such a swerve or clinamen could not absolutely prevent the letterfrom reaching its destination but, in disrupting the straight line of itsmovement, rendered that reaching of its destination nothing morethan one possible encounter among others.

A lesson, like a letter, is delivered to someone, to a recipient orrecipients (in French, a destinataire) in a speciWc time and place and,in written form, may like a letter be delayed, so delayed in fact that itmisses the addressee. I refer here not to the lesson that Jacques Ran-cire attributes to Althusser but to his own lesson on that lesson. Thereis something strange about this text, now nearly forty years old, clearlyintended for an audience other than that which will receive it, an audi-

ence that in an important sense no longer exists in that it was insepa-rable from a context that has long since vanished. Rancires lessontherefore risks not only being misread (which, after all, could mean be-ing read in a new way), but proving in a fundamental sense illegible,



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a letter/lesson from an exchange to which its present recipients werenot privy, as if it were sent to the wrong address: a dead letter.

But the diversion of the letter from its proper destination, asAlthusser invoking Derrida against Lacan without mentioning hisname reminds us, is essential to the letter itself: it was already a deadletter not only because the audience to which it was addressed andthe context that conferred such urgency on the task of criticizingAlthusser from Rancires perspective were in full decompositioneven in 1974, but also in the sense that, as a text, it contained its owndeviation (in both the Lucretian and Leninist senses), a deviation fromitself. It represents Rancire not as he would become, that is, as he isnow in 2013 and has been for at least three decades, but a Ranciresuspended in time between a Cultural Revolution Maoism clearly no

longer sure of itself, or of its theoretico-political framework and ref-erence points, on the one side, and a virulent anticommunism focusedon the tyrannical pedagogy of Master Thinkers, on the other. To besure, these tendencies did not easily coexist, and their antagonismconfers on the text ofAlthussers Lesson the disorder proper to it. Ran-cire would over the next few years disentangle himself from this con-tradiction,Wnally rejecting both of its terms, but perhaps not withoutincurring a certain theoretical and political cost and certainly notwithout a struggle, which I would argue continues to be constitutiveof his work as a whole, against the inXuence as powerful as it is insid-

ious of Althusser. This does not mean that Rancires corpus pos-sesses an underlying unity that its development would graduallyreveal. On the contrary, the struggle against Althussers inXuence, andeven the struggle to contain the urge to continue this struggle, marksnearly everything he has written since, whether or not the nameAlthusser appears. Far more than a proper name in Rancires texts,Althusser designates that phantom presence (or presences: is therea uniWed entity corresponding to the name?), against which other-wise obscure polemics are directed, but which also appears in formu-lations that are distinctly Althusserian, as if Althusser were turnedagainst himself, beginning with Rancires declaration that he will read

Althussers work according to its political effects.Rancire warns us at the outset not to readAlthussers Lesson as a

personal settling of scores, responding in part to the tendency inFrance to read this as a family, if not an oedipal, drama of rivalry and

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the struggle for individuation, but also anticipating the Anglophonereaders assumption that because he was once Althussers student and,

if not exactly in his inner circle, close enough to have participated inthe seminar the produced Reading Capital and to have contributed hispresentation to the published version of 1965, his polemic is to a greaterextent than those of Althussers other critics motivated by personalrather than philosophical and political factors, as if Rancire wereunable to free himself from the need to denigrate and diminish pub-licly and at great length a once idealized paternal Wgure. To heed hiswarning, and I believe we should, is not easy, however, and not sim-ply because of the circumstantial evidence to the contrary. The textitself imposes such a reading upon us, above all through the use atcertain precise points of the Wrst person plural, the referent or refer-

ents of which are never speciWed: The Marxism we had learned atAlthussers school was a philosophy of order whose every principleserved to distance us from the uprisings that were then shaking thebourgeois order (Rancire 2011, xix). Although Rancire appears hereto associate the we with a great many intellectuals of my genera-tion (xix), the pronouns referent is constitutively unstable in the textas a whole, little more than a chain of displacements: from the mem-bership of the Union des tudiants Communistes to its Maoist fac-tion, the normaliens of the Cercle dUlm, the subset of the latter whobroke away to form the Union des Jeunesses Communistes (marxistes-

leninistes) (UJC m-l) and Wnally to the subset of the subset who par-ticipated in Althussers seminars, who more or less directly workedwith him and were thus more than anyone misled by him. The con-fusion arises not from a subjective lack of precision on Rancirespart, but from a blurring of the internal conXicts that haunted each ofthese groups, a blurring necessary to the demonstration that the pri-mary contradiction set Althusser against all the others, as if he were thepersoniWcation of the struggle of counterrevolution against revolutionin a theater of the abstract that resembles precisely what Rancire con-demns in Althussers Reply to John Lewis. The autobiographical referencealso inescapably implied by the pronoun is essential to his argument:

it gives his testimony an air of authenticity, as well as authority. Unlikemany of those who are taken with Althusser, he himself was an eye-witness to, if not the victim of, the philosophy of order that Althusserwith great cunning attempted to pass off as Marxist theory (and it may

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be, Rancire has here begun to suspect, that Marxist theory itself is aphilosophy of order) with such disastrous effects on the political prac-

tice of his students.But this very fact also raises some serious questions: the we to

which Rancire refers, we who were duped, misled, and mistaken,never includes Althusser himself. His errors (if indeed they can bedescribed as such) are his and his alone, separate from and inXictedupon us, an us whose primary error was not our own sectari-anism or total misreading of the conjuncture, but to have listened toAlthusser, to have been seduced and enchanted by him and thereforewithout any responsibility for the counterrevolutionary Althusseri-anism that he actively imposed upon us, his passive and docile stu-dents. Indeed, for Rancire error is not the right word to explain

Althussers reversals and detours: it suggests that Althusser honestlymisread not only certain philosophical texts, but aspects of the theo-retical and political conjuncture, admitted that he had misread them,and accordingly changed his strategic and tactical orientation. Instead,because Althussers every principle served the preservation of thebourgeois order, it is more accurate to speak of the ruses and decep-tions he made use of to defeat the revolutionary movement by meansof a philosophy that was profoundly reactive in every sense of theword. The fact that some of Althussers other students did not imag-ine themselves to have been his dupes even when in retrospect they

judged themselves to have been wrong in both pract ice and theory,and experienced their time with Althusser as a genuine sharing ofideas, and a collective taking of positions for which they were as re -sponsible as he, a fact amply demonstrated in his correspondence,simply makes them in Rancires eyes his accomplices. In contrast,Rancire cannot see himself as part of a collectivity that includedAlthusser and whose errors, inevitable in the in the initial momentsof the uprising of May 1968 (when, it should be noted, Rancire wastwenty-eight years old and thus presumably no longer an impres-sionable adolescent), were collectively shared. The attribution of everyerror to Althusser except that of listening to him is important not

because it is a moral failing or a neurotic symptom, but because of itseffects on Rancires entire trajectory.

I said earlier that Althussers Lesson risks becoming or perhapsalready is a dead letter, at least in one important sense: it is of interest

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to Rancires readers, especially those who seek to understand how helived his own theoretical itinerary, but those who work on Althusser

and who thus are the current recipients of his lesson will have a greatdeal of trouble reconciling Rancires Althusser with the body of work(including his correspondence with students and friends) with whichthey are familiar. This doesnt mean of course thatAlthussers Lessonis uninteresting or even irrelevant, as if it were a period piece con-taining little beyond the remains of sectarian quarrels from long ago.Indeed, Rancire exhibits some awareness of this potential difWcultyand warns the reader of today not to be surprised that the very the-ory for which Althusser is best known, indeed a theory expressed inhis most widely read and cited text, Ideology and the Ideological StateApparatuses, plays no role (Rancire 2011, xiii) inAlthussers Lesson

despite the fact (which Rancire nowhere acknowledges) that his bookappeared four years after the publication of the Ideological State Appa-ratuses (ISAs) essay and Wve years after Althusser wrote the manu-script from which it was extracted and, as was his custom, circulatedit among friends and colleagues. Assuming that it is in fact the case thatthe ISAs essay plays no role in his critique of Althusser (it does), afairly serious problem arises: why would or should Rancires readersbe interested in a theory of ideology that Althusser himself had alreadyrejected and crit icized in the mid-sixties (and isnt this fact signiWcant?)(Althusser 2003), rather than his most comprehensive and Wnal word

on the subject? Similarly, Rancire reminds us that we should not ex-pect to Wnd anything about the aleatory materialism of Althusserslate texts in a book written in 1974 (2011, xiii). But does the concept,as opposed to the word (aleatory), belong exclusively to the lateAlthusser? We now know that he used the phrase theory of theencounter as early as 1966, as evidenced by a document widely cir-culated among his former students, including presumably Rancirehimself (Althusser 2012). Even more importantly, doesnt the lateAlthusser cast a new light on the early and middle phases, identify-ing the aleatory element in an essay like Contradiction and Over-determination (1962) and ultimately calling into question any strict

periodization of Althussers work by making visible the undergroundcurrent that runs through his entire oeuvre (Goshgarian; Ipola)?

If Rancires Althusser seems so unfamiliar, even unrecogniz-able, it is not simply because he did not want to write a monograph

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explaining a thinkers ideas (Rancire 2011, xiii) and could thereforeexcuse himself from the rigors of a comprehensive and precise read-

ing of what Althusser actually said. Nor, to take issue with Ranciresown explanation of his work, is it strictly speaking an examination ofthe political effects of Althussers texts from 1963 to 1968, skippingover the immensely inXuential ISAs essay and resuming with the nownearly forgotten Reply to John Lewis (1972). In fact, Rancires object isnot Althusser at all, but Althusserianism, a collage of fragments ofAlthussers works, fragments presumably selected by the conjunc-ture, as Althusser had said of Marx in the overture to Reading Capital,on the basis of their political effects, together with the interpretationsplausible, implausible, or frankly abusive that the conjuncture had

attached to these fragments. In Althusserianism as assembled by Ran-cire, systematically overlooked and forgotten texts such as StudentProblems (1964), are rescued from oblivion and given prominence asif the more familiar works, fromFor Marx to Reading Capital and theISAs essay, concealed or obscured the meaning, perhaps the true mean-ing, of Althussers entire project these neglected texts offered.1

What then was the conjuncture in which Rancires version (whichwas far from the only one) of Althusserianism took shape and couldassume the form of the absolute enemy, a philosophy of order andcounterrevolution operating undercover, as if Althusser were a philo-sophical double agent? It was certainly not the time of a great Althus-serian revival, although it was the time of a renewed and generalizedassault on Althusser, more extensive and intensive than in the sixt ies,in which Rancire was but one participant.Althussers Lesson was notthe only or even most widely cited book against Althusser publishedin French in 1974. Contre Althusser, a collection also arising from thefar Left, although Trotskyist rather than Maoist, appeared the sameyear, containing essays by Daniel Bensaid, Michael Lwy, and AlainBrossat. A few years later and undoubtedly guided by somewhat,although not totally, different imperatives, E. P. Thompson publishedThe Poverty of Theory which in its own idiom, cultural as well as lin-

guistic, converged on many essential points with Rancires critiqueof Althusser (Thompson acknowledges Althussers Lesson, which heoffers no evidence of having read, only long enough to dismiss it as aMaoist freak-out).

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What explains the attack on Althusser from all quarters at a timewhen his productivity appeared to be in decline, the time of his self-

criticism when he behind the scenes struggled to reorient himself,turning to the study of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Epicurus, and Lucretius?By 197374 the revolution for which 1968 was said to be the dressrehearsal no longer appeared imminent and the level and forms ofagitation appropriate to a prerevolutionary situation could not besustained. The new situation was particularly difWcult for groups likeRancires own organization, La Gauche Proltarienne (GP), whoseentire identity and structure were predicated on the immediate prox-imity of revolutionary transformation, as expressed in a succession oftracts in its four short years of existence, from 1969s call to arms,Vers la guerre civile, to 1973s apocalyptic La nouvelle Jacquerie. As

the balance of forces shifted toward capitalist order, so, absolutelypredictably, shifted the balance of forces in theory and politics. TheGP dissolved at the end of 1973, some of its members turning to thestrategy of armed resistance (we are the new partisans), othersseeking refuge in the larger organizations of the left, especially theParti communiste franais, the PCF (these are the particular targets ofRancires wrath). In this precise context, Althusser, from Ranciresperspective, using the prestige he still enjoyed, succeeded in attract-ing former revolutionaries to the PCF by paying lip service to the roleof masses in history and with militant sounding slogans like philos-

ophy is class struggle in theory, slogans that in fact served to divertattention from the workers struggle in the factories and to buttressthe capitalist division of labor. At the same time, a signiWcant partof the former leadership of the GP had moved from a denunciation ofthe social fascism of the USSR to the view that it, rather than theimperialist powers, was the main adversary of global mass movements,one giant Gulag seeking to impose itself on the world. Increasingly,for this current, the communist part ies such as the PCF, once accusedof defending the order they claimed to oppose, became agents ofSoviet totalitarianism and as such could be considered as, if not more,dangerous than the traditional parties of the Center and the Right.

Althussers Lesson captures and embodies all the contradictoryimpulses of this moment: Rancire contends that the level of masscombativity had not declined at all but was intensifying. It was theLeft, even the Maoist Left, that was in decline as history revealed its

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inability to keep pace with the masses, insisting on seeing in newforms of struggle (Rancire cites the Lip factory occupation of 1973

and the farmers movement at Larzac) nothing but a repetit ion of theold. Cut off from the creativity of the masses, the Left was wither-ing, or worse, petrifying, and in its petriWed state a functioning partof the established order, attracting and containing potentially oppo-sitional forces. The antiauthoritarian and anticapitalist movementsonce thought to be indissolubly united were now in open conXict.The conjunctural shift that requires from any organization seeking tochange things a reevaluation of strategy in order to pursue the strug-gle requires what Rancire calls with great disdain a science of theconjuncture, that is, in the simplest terms, an estimation of what ispossible and impossible at a given moment, as well as what precise

actions and points of application are necessary to shift the balance offorces in favor of the working class and its allies. Rancires disdainarises from the fact that such an analysis will inevitably be carried outby experts, designated as such by the division of labor and then deliv-ered to the masses thereby reduced to passive consumers of specialistsknowledge. The very notions of strategy and tactics (highly suspectterms for Rancire) allow intellectuals to condemn certain forms ofstruggle given the conjuncture as adventurist or even simply provo-cations likely to move the state to violent repression and thereby todemobilize the very masses they feel competent to lead. Rancire must

remind his readers of Maos dictum that it is not the oppressors butthe oppressed who are intelligent and the weapons of their liberationwill emerge from their intelligence (2011, 14). If there is crisis, then,it is that of the intellectuals and their organizations, understood to be,and this is critical to Rancires subsequent development, external tothe working class, their histories, differences, and debates largely irrel-evant to the masses (the exception, but not for long, is Maoism).

Such a position could only be defended with great difWculty andwith ever-intensifying contradictions. In France above all, it was ex-tremely difWcult to Wnd mass struggle without deep and longstand-ing connections to the Left (including above all the PCF) and to the

trade unions. The Lip factory was a perfect example of this: the PartiSocialiste UniW (PSU) and the Confdration franaise dmocratiquedu travail (CFDT) played a leadership role (and its emphasis on self-management decisively inXuenced the direction of the struggle), while

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perhaps a dozen other Left organizations had members or sympathiz-ers among the workers, including the Trotskyist Ligue communiste

rvolutionaire (LCR) as well as the GP. For Rancire to acknowledgethis would be not only to displace the the Maoiststhat is, theGPfrom their place at the imaginary center of revolutionary strug-gle and to admit that there cannot be nor has there ever been such astruggle without a united front of tendencies that, irrespective of theirdifferences, are objective and indispensable allies. It would also be tosee in the masses not the pure subject of politics endowed with anintelligence and a will (as in the slogan the masses are always right),a pure subject fundamentally separate from those Rancire very im-precisely designates as intellectuals, but an irreducibly complex andconXicting unbounded and thus indeWnable whole, whose complex-

ity never resolves into unity but is consubstantial with the diversityof the revolutionary movement itself. The unacknowledged loss ofthe former, the masses as pure subject without (need of) intellectuals,constitutes the veritable splitting of Rancires political theory: it isthe lost object that was never found, the object always already lost, ofRancires discourse. At the time ofAlthussers Lesson the rejection ofthe constitutive heterogeneity and conXictuality of the masses (whoseinternal conXict could never be reduced to the simplicity of a two-line struggle, between genuine proletarians and capitalist roaders)not only led to a sectarian rejection of all other tendencies on the Left

as counterrevolutionary, that is, extrinsic and opposed to the work-ing class, but even more to a Xight forward in theory toward an ever-receding and ever-evasive pure referent: from the masses to the poorto those who have no part. Thus, we can see even today the effectsof the pursuit of this disavowed ideal object in Rancires denial thatracism only comes from above and never from below, that is, a denialthat the people can be the site of a struggle between absolutelyimmanent racist and antiracist tendencies at the same time not sepa-rable from the cold racism of the state, which may well seek sup-port in popular racisms and even be preceded by them. This is todaythe meaning of his critique of Left critiques of populism.

With this in mind, we can understand Rancires rather surpris-ing defense of the category of the uniWed subject inAlthussers Lessonand his insistence (which brings him very close to Thompsons cri-tique of Althusser) that academic philosophy has for centuries been

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occupied not with the invention and fortiWcation of the idea of theindividual subject as center of initiatives that was thought to be from

Descartes on one of its preoccupations, but instead concerned withattempting to do away with this very subject. And of all the philo-sophical assaults on the subject, Althussers is undoubtedly the mostdangerous: to denounce the subject not simply as a bourgeois illusionbut as a material reality interpellated or constituted through the pro-cesses of subjection from which the concept of subject can never beseparated is quite simply to call into question the agency of the masses.Of course, Rancire would move quickly from some of these positions,but only after confronting their political effects, notably in his 1975review of Glucksmanns La cuisinre et le mangeur dhomme (Rancire1976), which might well be regarded as a critical reXection on the con-

junctural effects of the orientation that produced Althussers Lesson.Today, there is perhaps no more devastating response to Rancirescritique of Althussers arguments concerning humanism and the cat-egory of the subject than his own Who Is the Subject of the Rightsof Man? which very clearly lays out the political stakes of Althus-sers analysis, although, it goes without saying, without any mentionof Althusser.

The conjuncture thus exposed the fundamental aporia in Ran-cires thought, the point of heresy in Foucaults sense that will leadhim in the name of the masses and their struggle to renounce Marxism,

communism, and Wnally the very notion of revolution. Only whenrevolution is imminent, when objectively anything is possible (andthus only cowardice or dishonesty prevents its realizat ion), when nostrategy other than the will to revolution is necessary is a genuineantiauthoritarian politics in Rancires sense possible. When it is nolonger possible to imagine that such a time has arrived or persists,revolution itself can only become the calculated objective of expertsand philosophers who contemptuously point to the limitations of spon-taneous revolt. To defend this absolutely idealized object that by deW-nition remains unexamined and unknowable to social scientists, aswell as philosophers, to keep the intellectuals always ready with their

theories from claiming the right to represent or speak of and for themasses whose discourse they claim not to hear, it is no longer enough toinsist that intellectuals have no other function than that of inhibitingthe creative intelligence of the people whose production of knowledge

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takes place only in the factories, Welds, villages, and neighborhoods. Tobreak with the despotic Wgure of the intellectual/scientist (savant)

whose oppression of the popular masses emerges in Rancires text asequivalent to that of the capitalist class, he must have done with Marx-ism and its philosophical legacy. In search of laboring masses withoutneed of or perhaps more pertinently not (yet) contaminated by sci-entiWc doctrines dreamed up and imposed upon them by intellectu-als such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Rancire will soon attempt tocapture the working class in its purity before the philosophical defor-mation of 1848 and after, the forgotten truth that communism claimsto represent but in fact conceals.

But this process is not without its contradictions, particularlyregarding the main enemy of this book. If the name Althusser serves

Rancire as the personiWcation not simply of counterrevolution but ofthe division of labor and its defense, a rhetorical strategy that wouldappear to require a general denunciation of everything Althusser hasdone leads him to talk about the very text that he claims not to talkabout, the ISAs essay. While Rancire uses select phrases from someof Althussers early texts to argue that for Althusser (who serves hereas a stand-in for the entire Marxist tradition) that ideology is false con-sciousness, deception, or an illusion, a contemptuous dismissal of massbeliefs (Christianity is Rancires primary example, quite in contrastto the Cultural Revolutions campaign against the Four Olds) that

can only be dispelled by a Marxist science wielded by experts alonecapable of seeing the reality outside of the lived experience of theproletariat, his very hostility leads him with a symptomatic determi-nation to hold up as a critique of this hegemonic view, precisely thenotion of the ideological apparatus. Althusser is very clear aboutthe theoretical and political signiWcance of this phrase: An ideologyalways exists in an apparatus and its practice or practices. This exis-tence is material (2001, 112). If this is not clear enough, he will add:An individuals ideas are his material acts inserted in practices. Andwe will note that these practices are governed by the rituals in whichthese practices are inscribed (114). Althusser himself calls attention

to the frequent repetition of the adjective material in this section ofthis essay, a repetition that is in a certain sense intrusive and disrup-tive, a rhetorical (and perhaps theoretical) infelicity that serves, like theblows of a hammer, to interrupt our thought and to prevent us from

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assuming that the theory of ideology he presents here has anything todo with that with which we are familiar. If ideology only exists in the

material form of the apparatus, then it cannot be dispelled, disproven,or refuted in the name of science or truth. Ideas would change onlyto the extent that the practices and rituals that constitute the ideo-logical apparatus are disrupted and displaced by an equally materialcounterforce. Here mind, consciousness, and ideas disappear into aworld of bodies and forces, a world of collectivities in which sepa-rated, interpellated individuals are nothing more than the effects ofa strategy to break up and cellularize mass phenomena: power with-out the Prince, struggle without a strategist, strategy immanent inrelations of force.

But does not something common to nearly all previous theory of

ideology survive this theoretical assault? Does not Althusser, as Ran-cire points out, use the term imaginary? Leaving aside the ques-tion of whether in the history of the concept of the imaginary (forexample, in philosophers as opposed as Spinoza and Sartre) the termis synonymous with illusion or falsity, Althussers argument, again, isexplicit: if ideology represents the imaginary relation of individualsto their real conditions of existence . . . we will say that this imaginaryrelation is itself endowed with a material existence (2001, 111), thatis, precisely an existence that prevents it from being dispelled by atruth produced and communicated by experts. In fact, if we take only

what I have just cited, it is clear that intellectuals, philosophers, andso forth can think differently, even in a revolutionary way, only if andto the extent that struggle, mass struggle, changes the very consis-tency and order of these apparatuses.

SigniWcantly, Rancire neither ignores nor denies the above; indeed,it is perhaps the one grudging acknowledgement of Althussers powerand originality as anything other than a cunning deceiver. The con-cept of ideological apparatus has a strange status in Althussersotherwise consistent theory of ideology: it is one in which the bour-geoisies ideological domination was not the result of a social imagi-nary wherein individuals spontaneously reXected their conditions of

existence, but instead the result of a system of material power rela-tions reproduced by different apparatuses (Rancire 2011, 74). In thecase of the school, Rancire argues, it is not a matter of ideologicalindoctrination, but of the concatenation of the forms of selection,

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transmission, control and use of knowledges (74), a formulation thatperhaps does not completely capture the practices and above all the

rituals that characterize the material existence of the apparatuses.Above all, what is striking here is that Rancire nearly alone, or withfew other companions besides Foucault, who similarly developed crit-ical elements from the ISAs essay while denying that the essay con-tained these elements, has genuinely understood exactly what is atstake in Althussers introduction into Marxist theory of the notion ofideological apparatus.

To avoid attributing any useful theoretico-political innovation toAlthusser, however, a maneuver that the nature of the book demands,Rancire employs his own sleight of hand, but one whose conse-quences for the theoretical orientation ofAlthussers Lesson are seri-

ous indeed. The question of authorship arises, as it must for a workthat ties a lesson, albeit a very long, complicated, and subtle lesson,to the individual, Louis Althusser. Who exactly is the author of Ide-ology and the Ideological State Apparatuses, if not of the text in itsentirety, at least those parts that break with previously existing con-cepts of ideology? Rancire is very clear: it is not, nor could it havebeen, Althusser. It was instead, the mass movement of May 1968 ex-pressing in a practical state that which the leftist critique of Althus-ser had started to systematize. Of course, one might be tempted atthis point to remind Rancire that this is an absolutely Leninist for-

mulation, not the Kautskyist Lenin of 1902s What Is to be Donebutthe Lenin of the period between the February and October Revolutionsof 1917 who had come to prize the power and knowledge immanentin proletarian self-organization. Far more relevant to the claims ofAlthussers Lesson, however, is the recognition, however denied and splitoff from the body of Rancires lesson, that there exists no abyss thatseparates texts as difWcult as those of Althusser from reality of massaction, which increases the power to think to the very same degree itincreases the power to act, and which in its practice displaces thelimit of the possible and with it the relation between the visible andthe invisible, the thinkable and the unthinkable. In fact, the most cre-

ative moments of mass struggle are marked by a necessary convergenceof philosophy and (mass) politics, not in the sense that philosopherscapture or represent the class struggle in their texts, but that oftenagainst their will and in ways they dont ever completely understand,

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the struggle outside explodes within philosophy in complex ways irre-ducible to any tidy notion of the bourgeois division of labor or even

of a clear distinction between bourgeois and proletarian, dominantand dominated, or mass and elites. Deleuze like Althusser (and theformer fares as poorly in Rancires text as the latter) recognized thisin the work of that most difWcult of philosophers, Spinoza. Far fromAlthussers notion of ideological apparatuses marking a rupture withthe notion of class struggle in theory (Rancire 2011, 74), it insteadconfronts us with the mutual immanence of theory and practice in themateriality of the apparatuses, the site and stake of class struggle.

Rancire, however, can only contemplate this displacement of lim-its in struggle, this calling into question of that form of property

called authorship (whose penal and punitive character Foucault hadalready indicated in his 1969 essay, What Is an Author) negatively.The theoretical lesson of the ISAs essay is not Althussers, but be-longs to the mass movement of May 68 (Rancire 2011, 78) (noteRancires use of the singular, otherwise rare in this text, as if to con-fer upon the mass movement the character of an individual, one capa-ble of being the proprietor of what it possesses). Rancire chargesAlthusser with nothing less than theoretical theft and fraud as if, byspeaking in the Wrst person (I believe that I am justiWed) (74), he hasappropriated (or expropriated) what was in fact created by the massmovement (a theory or even a problematic), which as a collectiveindividual remains its rightful owner: a capitalist in philosophy. Althus-sers well-known fascination with what he called the theoretical soli-tude of Marx and Freud, as well as Machiavelli and Spinoza, becomesnothing more than a projection of his own status as the absolute sub-ject of his discourse, a status only based on the denial of the claims ofothers. Is this the theoretical consequence of Rancires reassertion ofthe subject (often understood as proprietorif only of itself)? Per-haps, but more important at least from a political point of view is hisinsistence on separating the masses from the intellectuals not only todistinguish what is proper to and the property of each, but to retain

the very scheme of a division of labor at precisely the moment it, inthe roles and functions it assigns, has been called into question.

Rancire concludes his discussion of this strange text, which inits presence/absence hauntsAlthussers Lesson from beginning to end,

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with the striking charge that for Althusser, May 68 did not exist.Instead of recognizing in the May events the opening of an irrevers-

ible crisis, a shattering of the modes of coercion and constraint thatimpelled the masses into action, leaving the Left scrambling to adapt tounforeseen forms of struggle and revolt, Ideology and the IdeologicalState Apparatuses, written less than a year later, seemed rather to pro-ject for itself the task of explaining the failure of May. For Althusser, therather rapid reconsolidation of order could not be explained only by thebetrayal or cowardice of the PCF, the sectarian errors of the far Left, orthe chaotic eclecticism of the broader movement. Indeed, the impor-tance of May for political practice was not that it had ushered in the endtimes of capitalism, but that with every offensive it had revealed, that

is, made visible and knowable, the defenses or fortiW

cations of the cap-italist order that only an assault of such magnitude could draw outinto the open to become objects of theoretical and practical interven-tion. It was precisely the May revolt and its aftermath the compelledboth Althusser and Foucault to develop new concepts of ideology andpower absolutely irreducible to their prior meaning and function inorder to account for the durability of subjection even in the face of arevolutionary offense waged by millions. Theirs was the sobering dis-covery of the necessary rarity of a great transformation that could onlyarise from the immense accumulation of contradictions that Althussercalled overdetermination in his early but prescient critique of historyas the anticipation of a communist destiny that would require onlythe Wdelity to the event to hasten its arrival. For Rancire in 1974, thepower of the ISAs essay could only be read as the inversion of Maosslogan: it is wrong to rebel, not because to do so would be unjust, butbecause rebellion could never succeed in overturning the world ofsubjection whose outline Althusser had sketched. But, for Rancire,the conviction of revolutions inevitability (the basis of the simulta-neous attraction and repulsion that the ISAs essay produced in him)would soon become the conviction of its impossibility in a double sense:it is not possible to overturn the existing order of subjection, and to

appear to do so is merely another of its ruses. Althusser, for whose pru-dence Rancire had so little patience, never really accepted theWrst andaccordingly was never constrained to embrace the second. The notionof the encounter was drawing him far away from such certitudes.

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There remains one Wnal, perhaps unavoidable, question: whywould Rancire republish this book, which appeared this year not only

in English translation but also in French? Its understandable that hewould want to call attention to his critique of Althusser given the lat-ters continuing importance, but is the critique contained inAlthussersLesson the same critique that Rancire would offer today, that is, onthe same grounds and invoking the same assumptions? It would seemthat a new crit ique would be in order, a new critique of Althusser ondifferent grounds that would of necessity contain a critique of Ran-cires own earlier critique or at least of those elements he has sincerejected. Instead, we are confronted with a strange gesture by whichRancire in republishing his Wrst book distances himself not only fromAlthusser but from his own history, into which he introduces a break.

I propose another, perhaps perverse or deviant, hypothesis, ahypothesis concerning Rancires deviation: is it not possible to see inthe republication of Althussers Lesson precisely Rancires homageto Althusser, an attempt by means of criticism and even devaluationto hold on to something that was slipping away even as he wrote, pre-cisely that time of struggle with its victories and its defeats, that brieftime when perhaps it was possible after all, as it sometimes is, to trans-form the world, a time when Althusser gestured toward a thresholdthrough which he himself could not pass and which too soon disap-peared into the solid wall that stands before us now, a time whose

very conXicts, as violent as they may have been, can only now be re-called with exhilaration, as if they were explosions that illuminatedall that now so often appears buried in impenetrable darkness. Some-times a letter does reach its destination.

Warren Montag is professor of English and Comparative Literature atOccidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent book,Althusser andHis Contemporaries: Philosophys Perpetual Warwill be published by DukeUniversity Press in 2013. He is also editor of Dcalages: A Journal ofAlthusser Studies.

Note

1. I have discussed the context of Student Problems and Rancires insis-tence on its importance in understanding Althussers work as a whole in Montag.

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Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. 1996. The Discovery of Dr. Freud. Writings on Psychoanalysis:Freud and Lacan. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 2001. Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and Philos-ophy and Other Essays, 12786. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.

. 2003 Three Notes towards a Theory of Discourse. The Humanist Contro-versy and Other Essays, 3384. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Verso: London. (Orig.pub. 1966.)

. 2012. On Genesis. Trans. Jason E. Smith. Dcalages 1, no. 2: article 11.http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss2/11/.

Goshgarian, G. M. 2006. Translators Introduction. Louis Althusser, Philosophyof the Encounter: Later Writings, 197887, xiiixlix. Verso: London.

Ipola, Emilio de. 2002.Althusser: El inWnito adios. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Montag, Warren. 2011. Introduction to Student Problems. Radical Philosophy 176(NovemberDecember): 810.

Rancire, Jacques. 1976. La bergre au goulag. Les Revoltes Logiques 1 (Winter):96111.

. 2011.Althussers Lesson. Trans. Emiliano Battista. London: Continuum.Thompson, E. P. 1979. The Poverty of Theory: An Orrery of Errors. New York: Monthly

Review Press.

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Toward the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. MichelGondry, 2004), Joel and Clementine come to learn that by falling inlove they are about to repeat their earlier relationship. When that rela-tionship went sour, they decided to literally erase each other from theirmemories. Now, knowing but not actively remembering their shared,traumatic past, they are confronted with a dilemma: should theyavoid the risk of retreading their own painful footsteps, or confront ithead-on? They choose the latter option, the Wlm thus leaving its view-ers with a romantic union that is already stained by the seed of future

failure that is the repetition of a traumatic past. As Todd McGowanargues in Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema, through this unfold-ing Eternal Sunshine challenges the structure of cinematic spectator-ship: In asking us to abandon the new, [the Wlm] asks us to forsakethe dream of escaping the trauma of the past. . . . It is only in embrac-ing repetition that we can escape being strangled by it (109).

Eternal Sunshine is one of the Wlms McGowan considers exemplaryof what he coins atemporal cinema: a relatively new genre that is char-acterized by a narrative structure that deWes a linear chronology ofevents, and without that the diegesis necessarily demands such tempo-ral distortions.1 According to McGowan, through its nonlinear narra-

tives atemporal cinema makes visible the traumatic loss foundationalto the subject. Whereas traditional, forward-moving narratives areruled by a logic of desire, atemporal cinema expresses the more fun-damental logic of the death drive, or simply the drive. Rather than

Niels Niessen

CINEMA AND THE DRIVE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

OUT OF TIME: DESIRE IN ATEMPORAL CINEMA

BY TODD MCGOWANUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2011

Cultural Critique 83Winter 2013Copyright 2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota



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being oriented toward the successful attainment of the lost object, thesubject of the drive inWnitely repeats the failed encounter with that

object, thus embracing loss. This repetition of the drive is the collisionbetween the temporal Xow of biological life and the synchronic socialstructure attempting to arrest this Xow. For the subject to accept hisor her unacceptable loss and to emerge as a subject of the drive is thevery aim of psychoanalysis, McGowan explains. Rather than contin-uing to buy into the lure of the ameliorative powers of time, as doesthe subject of desire, the subject of the drive confronts the fact thatbiological life will never be fully compatible with the order of the sig-niWer: For the subject of the drive, time perpetuates its wounds ratherthan healing them (221). Atemporal cinema, in its movement awayfrom time and toward repetition, represents, McGowan argues, an

ethical landmark in the history of the medium: One treats othersand oneself ethically only when one is out of time and contemporaryatemporal cinema works to place us in this position (16).

As did The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007), Out of Timeinterweaves expositions of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy withclose analysis. And as did McGowans earlier work, Out of Time doesso in lucid, admirably accessible prose. The introduction is followedby eight chapters, each of which centers around aWlm representing aspeciWc dimension of atemporal cinema. The order of the chaptersrepresents an increasing investment in the embrace of trauma (34).

So the book moves from Tarantinos Pulp Fiction (1994), which standsat the border between traditional and atemporal cinema, to Irrver-sible/Irreversible (dir. Gaspar No, 2002), which makes the immediacyof trauma felt in such a poignant way that it is almost impossibleto imagine teaching the Wlm in a college classroom (207). (And forthose willing to take up this challenge I would recommend doing soin conjunction with this chapter, as the texts astute analysis of Nosshocking visualization of trauma, including its alleged homophobictendencies, is among Out of Times highlights). In addition to thosealready mentioned, the other Wlms that occupy a central position inthe structure ofOut of Time are The ButterXy Effect (dir. Eric Bress and

J. Mackye Gruber, 2004), The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Meirelles,2005), 21 Grams (dir. Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, 2003), 2046 (dir.Wong Kar-wai, 2004), Bakha Satang/Peppermint Candy (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 1999), andMemento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000).

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The crux of McGowans argument is that atemporal cinema is adirect product of the digital era. Digital technologies, he reasons, com-

plete the spatialization of time, that is, the transformation of time bymeasuring it in terms of space. This spatalization of time was inau-gurated by the Wrst clock and is fundamental to the capitalist mode ofproduction. With digital technologies such as the Internet and virtualreality, all temporal limits have become spatialized. By consequence,all information and knowledge is instantly available all the time.McGowan sees a great emancipatory potential in this development,as in his eyes it holds the possibility of eliminating the barriers betweensubject and object. Digital technologies may thereby come to the aidof the analyst, in that they help the desiring subject to recognize him-or herself as the subject of the drive. McGowan writes: The instant

access of the digital era allows for the expansion of [the] psychoana-lytic dynamic well beyond the clinic. Even those who cant afford orwould never enter psychoanalysis can experience the illusory statusof every object of desire (29).

McGowans embrace of digital technologies is refreshing in a timethat these technologies have often been theorized as detrimental tothe medium of cinema. Simultaneously, one may wonder whether hisstatement that the digital turn completes the spatialization of time isnot a little too optimistic. While eliminating some temporal limits,digital technologies also extend the possibilities to create new objects

of desire, whether online or ofXine, and to increasingly personalizethese objects. Google+ or Amazons recommendations for you cometo mind. Moreover, however large our databases have grown to be, andhowever vast the bodies of knowledge that have become instantlyaccessible, for now that one missing piece that is the objet a is still call-ing from the seemingly near yet deceptively far future.

Given this persistence of analog desire in our digital era, it alsoseems justiWed to ask to what extent atemporal cinema, being the prod-uct of the digital era, constitutes a rupture with earlier, less complexmodes of narrative cinema. Though it is true that in terms of plot,atemporal cinema deWes, or at least reverts or jumbles, a linear tem-

porality, it still allows the viewer to construct, or to reconstruct inretrospect, a coherent diegesis that leaves little to no room for loosethreads or remaining puzzle pieces. In other words, despite the factthat in atemporal cinema plot reaches a relatively high degree of

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independence, this independence does not prevent the viewer fromplacing the events shown in a more or less linear order.

Partly, this continuity between traditional narrative cinema andatemporal cinema is explained through one of the central and mostconvincing themes ofOut of Time, namely the difference between atem-poral cinema and Gilles Deleuzes idea of the time-image. The conceptof atemporal cinema challenges that of the time-image and therebyDeleuzes theory of cinema, which is a theory of subjectivity as such.McGowan writes: If the time-image is, as Deleuze suggests, the hid-den essence of the cinema, Wlms that embrace the logic of the drivebetray this essence as a result of their interaction with the demandsof the thoroughly spatialized time of digital capitalism. The atempo-ral movements betrayal of the essence of the cinema sets out a path

on which the cinema can remain a culturally vital and politically sig-niWcant medium today (33). For example, in McGowans opinion, aWlm like Eternal Sunshine, in its afWrmation of repetition, opposes theBergsonian understanding of time as the continual emergence of thenew that informs Deleuzes notion of the time-image.

Here McGowan indeed touches upon one of the weak spots in theCinemabooks. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983), Deleuze statesthat even though the greatest commercial successes continue to fol-low the narrative, forward-driven logic according to which everyaction immediately leads to a new situation and vice versa, the soul

of the cinema no longer does (210). Deleuze never explicitly deWnesthe contours of this post-movement image soul. Yet through his inces-sant circling in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) around the work ofdirectors such as Antonioni, Resnais, Rivette, and Wenders, this soulis implicitly presented as a predominantly European, modernist soul.Moreover, in creating such a watershed between the cinematic Pleiadeson the one hand, and more popular, narrative-driven productionsthat were made after the turn from movement to time (around 1948,Italy; about 1958 France; about 1968 Germany [Deleuze, 215]) on theother, Deleuzes taxonomy fails to account for recent modes of cin-ema that cross such a divide. This last observation holds especially

true for modes of cinema that emerged during the last two decades,and thus after the appearance of the Cinema books. Besides atem-poral cinema, another such mode would be the mind-game Wlm, acategory that is deWned by Thomas Elsaesser as a body ofWlms that

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implicate the spectator in ways that can no longer be accounted forby classical theories of identiWcation (Elsaesser and Hagener, 155;

see also Elsaesser). In fact many of the Wlms that McGowan discussesas belonging to atemporal cinema, Elsaesser refers to as mind-gameWlms. Examples includeMemento, 2046, and Eternal Sunshine,but alsoDonnie Darko (dir. Richard Kelly, 2001), Code inconnu/Code Unknown(dir. Michael Haneke, 2000), andMulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch, 2001)(though this last Wlm is a borderline case for McGowan, because onecould argue that the atemporal discourse in this Wlm is diegeticallyjustiWed).

At the same time, and in defense of Deleuze, I would like to placetwo qualiWcations on McGowans critique of the Cinemabooks. First,from the point of view of Deleuzes classiWcation of cinematic images,

one could argue that many, if not all, of the above-mentioned exam-ples to at least some degree pertain to the category of the mentalimage, which stands at the junction of cinemas transition from move-ment to time and takes as its object relations, symbolic acts, intellec-tual feelings (Deleuze, 203). The director Deleuze sees as paradigmaticfor the mental image is Hitchcock, and a Wlm like Dial M for Murder(1954), much like Eternal Sunshine, constitutes the spectators act ofviewing as an integrating part of the Wlm (206). Moreover, in spiteofVertigos (1958) linear unfolding, does not Scotties ultimate abilityto repeat and thereby deal with the loss that constitutes him as a male

subject/protagonist reveal him, at least to the viewer, as a subject ofthe drive?Second, in the same digital era in which atemporal cinema has

emerged, there has also been a reemergence of what Mark Betz, fol-lowing David Bordwell, calls parametric cinema, a mode of cinemain which style appears as unmotivated by the plot and instead assumesan importance in its own right (Betz, 40). According to Betz, the re -vival of the parametric tradition is especially visible beyond Europeand becomes apparent in the work of directors such as Carlos Rey-gadas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wong Kar-wai, the last two of whom are discussed in Out of Time. Arguably, many

of these directors Wlms could be brought into relation with one of themany manifestations of the Deleuzian time-image (crystal, dream, etc.).This connection Wnds support in Betzs link between WongsFa yeungnin wa/In the Mood for Love (2000) and Alain Resnaiss dispassionately

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parametric (44) LAnne dernire Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad(1961), which given its frequent appearance in Cinema 2 appears to be

the time-image Wlm par excellence. McGowan mentions Resnaiss Wlmonly brieXy, calling its breakdown of linear time an isolated exceptionwithin a history of cinema that, up until the 1990s, was dominated bytemporal linearity (3031).

Within this network of cinematic modes and trajectories, atem-poral cinema as characterized by Out of Time constitutes a signiWcantturn that cinema has taken in and arguably also as a result of the dig-ital era. McGowans theorization of this turn challenges our under-standing of the relation between cinema and time, as well the conceptof time as such. His claim, however, that the mediums encounter withthe digital eras complete spatialization of time has the opportunity

to save [cinema] (33) is slightly too optimistic about new technolo-gies innovatory impact on the seventh art, and slightly too pessi-mistic about the existence of other lifelines that keep that art aXoat.What matters most is that McGowan urges his readers to keep think-ing of cinema as a living art, and that Out of Time helps both Wlm the-orists and students to rethink the intimate relationship between thecinema and psychoanalysis (ix) in much-needed new ways.

Niels Niessen is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Minnesota. His work has appeared in Screen, Discourse,

Cinmas, Cinema Journal, andFilm-Philosophy. His dissertation is enti-tled A North Wind: The New Realism of the French-Walloon Cinmadu Nord.

Note

1. This deWnition also has close afWnity to Allan Camerons deWnition ofmodular narratives.

Works Cited

Betz, Mark. 2010. Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence. In Global ArtCinema: New Theories and Histories. Ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover,4147. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cameron, Allan. 2006. Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 GramsandIrrversible. The Velvet Light Trap 58:6578.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbera Habberjam. London: Continuum.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. The Mind-Game Film. In Puzzle Films: Complex Story-telling in Contemporary Cinema. Ed. Warren Buckland, 1341. Oxford: Blackwell.

Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010.Film Theory: An Introduction throughthe Senses. New York: Routledge.

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warren montag, "rancière’s lost object: a review of althusser’s lesson"

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