ABSTRACT
Commentators were writing books and articles on the demise of Althusserian Marxism years before the current, muchpublicized ‘crisis’ of Marxist thinking in general. Their diagnosis often took the line that Althusser’s project was doomed from the outset on account of its high theoretical pretensions, its adherence to an outworn ‘enlightenment’ paradigm, and its presumed point of departure in that structuralist ‘revolution’ of the human sciences whose moment had now passed into the history of obsolete or discredited ideas. As structuralism gave way to other, less grandiose forms of intellectual endeavourpostmodernist, Foucauldian, New Historicist and the like-so it became de rigueur among up-to-the-minute observers of the scene to treat the Althusserian episode with a mixture of wry nostalgia and chastened realism. After all, had not Althusser, as a leading CP theoretician, not only failed to predict the events of 1968 but shown himself sadly incapable of responding when those events demanded something more than a retreat to established philosophical positions? And didn’t this demonstrate all too plainly how mistaken it was for self-styled ‘vanguard’ intellectuals to set themselves up as the theoretical conscience of the masses, claiming-like Althusser-a ‘scientific’ knowledge of those ideological mechanisms by which other, less privileged individuals were ‘interpellated’ or ‘recruited’ into the service of existing power-relations? Much better-so it seemed-to
acknowledge the lessons of history, among them the inherently error-prone nature of all theoretical discourse, the overweening character of Marxist ‘meta-narratives’, the absence of all transcendental guarantees in matters of historical understanding, and the way that events were always liable to confute any form of presumptive dialectical reason.
