What in the hell …

The Tronti symposium has started at Long Sunday. Jon’s contribution has started a bit of discussion on what Tronti means by the term ‘intellectual’. That’s actually one of the terms I planned to use this blog to get my head clearer on when I initially set this thing up. Haven’t done so yet.

For future thinking on this, some bits…

Foucault bit.

Gramsci bit.

Bit recommended by Craig.

And some bits of Ranciere on Althusser at the time of his saying fuck you to his former teacher, typed out in response to a request by somebody over at Chez Chabert, after I made a half remembered reference.

I’ve got no real gripe with Althusser, I don’t know his work very well and several people whose intellectual work and political judgement I respect implicitly make a lot of use Althusser, particularly Althusser post-Ranciere’s break with him. I’m also told that Ranciere’s comments are more accurate with regard to Ranciere’s Althusserianism than Althusser. In any case, I think there’s a lot here that does apply to some stuff.

The quotes here are from “On The Theory of Ideology: Althusser’s Politics” in the collection Ideology edited by Terry Eagleton.

This essay is at the time of Ranciere’s break from Althusser, and, I believe, is what his book La Lecon d’Althusser (or something like that) grew from. I’ve not read that book. R says his break from A was prompted by the May ‘68 events, which “posed to all of us the question of our ultimate political significance, of our revolutionary or counter-revolutionary character. In this conjuncture, the political significance of Althusserianism was shown to be quite different from what we had thought. Not only did the Althusserian theoretical presuppositions prevent us from understanding the political meaning of the revolt, but further, within a year we saw Althusserianism serving the hacks of revisionism in a theoretical justification for the ‘anti-leftist’ offensive and the defense of academic knowledge.” [p141-142]

In a way which sheds some interesting light on The Ignorant Schoolmaster, R accuses Althusser of “justifying the teachers, the possessors and purveyors of bourgeois knowledge (knowledge which includes academic Marxism. Speaking in their name, defending their authority, Althusser quite naturally adopts the class position express in revisionist ideology - that of the labour aristocracy and the cadress […] [T]he Althusserian theory of ideology functions as the theory of an imaginary class struggle to the profit of a real class collaboration, that of revisionism. The transformation of Marxism into opportunism is complete.” [p156-157]

and

“Althusser’s casual treatment of Plato or Descartes seems quite pardonable compared with his nonchalant endorsement of the official histort of the labour movement (both social-democratic and revisionist), which adds the weight of its falsifications to the firing squads and prison sentences of the bourgeoisie.” ([p161, note 26]