“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” is a piece in the Philosophy of the Encounter culled from a longer unfinished manuscript of Althusser’s. (POE 163-207) The underground current of the materialism of the encounter is a sensibility or philosophical position which Althusser sees as taking place throughout the history of philosophy without calling itself by that name until Althusser’s naming of it (it is in a sense then something akin to autonomist marxism). Another name for it is ‘aleatory materialism.’ I’ve detailed more of the specifics of what I understand Althusser to mean by ‘encounter’ and so forth previously here and speculated a bit on some of the places I’d like to follow this line through to here.
Halfway through this piece Althusser writes that the first half is all “historical remarks” - on the history of philosophy - and is “just a prelude” to what he is interested in discussing in Marx. (188.) This suggests that the apparatus of void, atoms, and so forth, functions as a mechanism to acquire a certain sensibility, rather than as a set of beliefs or claims about ontology. If this is so, then the historical remarks themselves are needed only insofar as they accomplish the acquisition of this sensibility. Anything that gives - or rather, anything which one can use to acquire - this same sensibility, then, should be considered of roughly equal value, judged in terms of achieving an aleatory materialist approach. Further, the use of the term “materialism” in naming this sensibility is “only for the sake of convenience” since “we need, after all, some word to designate the thing.” (171.) Aleatory materialism “has been christened ‘materialism’ only provisionally.” (189.) To quibble just a bit, Althusser’s “thing” is a less than satisfactory word choice. “Thing” can imply stasis, object-hood, while aleatory materialism is more of an activity, a theoretical practice.
Central to aleatory materialism is an abandonment or bracketing out of philosophical themes of origins, final ends, and ultimate causes. (192.) This can be taken to suggest that the search for underlying causes and originating circumstances does little philosophical or other practical work: knowing where capitalism came from does not tell one how to respond to capitalism, nor does it determine a definite and determinable end to capitalism. On the other hand, if this is so, then the story of the atoms is further relativized. The series void-atoms-swerve-encounter is itself an origin story. If origin does little work, then the same must be said of the origin of worlds via collisions of atoms within some void. This suggests that the story of the encounter of the atoms is, so to speak, a negligible origin story, the purpose of which is to render origins (origin functions?) negligible. This origin story is thus something like a ladder in the sense in which Wittgenstein characterized his own ideas: having climbed up it to a new locale, one no longer needs the old ladder.
Put differently, Althusser’s atomist origin story has succeeded when it makes hearers become indifferent to origin stories, and to a search for definite outcomes based on a present state of affair. This indifference means that one must act: outcomes result from interventions, not the inertial following out of an already existing trajectory. Furthermore, outcomes are only identifiable after the fact, “by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction.” (193.) It is my view that this point can be expanded to include Althusser’s aleatory materialism as a whole. Aleatory materialism’s content is largely negative and its salutary function is to help one shed bad habits of theoretical practice picked up elsewhere.
It is ironic to polemicize against origins while at the same time invoking Marx’s remarks on the origins of capitalism in primitive accumulation. The point, however, is that the origin of capitalism is only identifiable after the fact. More strongly, the origin of capitalism is only the origin after the fact (actually a rather Hegelian thesis, in a sense), in that the result is not contained in the initial moment but may well have been averted.
Althusser himself is in tension with aleatory materialism. (This tension is consistent with Althusser’s description, which sounds rather like the dialectics of hegelian marxists I have known and liked, of every philosophy containing its opposite due to the polemical occupation of positions. See notes on “Letters to Fernanda Navarro” in this post.) Althusser writes that the encounter constitutive of capitalism, the encounter in the market between owners of labor power and owners of money, “occurred several times in history before taking hold in the West, but, for lack of an element or a suitable arrangement of the elements, failed to ‘take’.” (198.) This lack must not be thought of as a condition wherein capitalism could not possible have come about. To think that would reintroduce idealism within aleatory materialism. The conditions at the beginning of capitalism were more or less present at some different occasions when and where capitalism did not begin, but the point is simply that capitalism did not begin prior to its beginning. Little else can be said on this (we must pass over the rest in silence, to paraphrase Wittgenstein) without positing a certain determining causal factor which would fly in the face of Althusser’s protestations against origins and final causes and which would, in doing so, become a variant of the philosophy of history Althusser finds and opposes in Marx.