Part II - Divergences of subjectivity and totality

Chapter 3: Differentiation, complexity and the exhaustion of totality

The social totality

Lukács is well known for placing the concept of totality at the heart of Marx’s system. For Lukács, orthodox Marxism was characterised not by any one of Marx’s own conclusions, but by the centrality of the concept of totality in method. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács argued that totality was the crucial form of the revolutionary class subject’s objective identity with historical progress; for Lukács, class was the subject and object of knowledge. His concern for holistic modes of thinking however dates back to well before his engagement with Marxism. In 1909 Lukács wrote to Thomas Mann, the renowned German novelist, praising him for showing the objective interconnectedness of things. Lukács was a peculiar modern inheritor of this German literature in the idealist metaphysical tradition, one that emphasised the unity of soul and body and subject and object. His aesthetic concerns arise from here too, from the particular literary expression given to these metaphysics and the special progressive character of art contained within it.[281] However, there are also strong polemics that discuss how things merge into one, and how the very nature of life defeats the attempt to know it as a total whole. Moreover, the themes of loss of and longing for unity that has been seen in the idealist dialectic, appears here again in the early Lukács’. Indeed in theory of the novel, philosophy, to quote Novalis, “is really nostalgia…the desire to be at home everywhere’. Lukács says, philosophy as Lebensform is always symptomatic of a rift between the interior and the exterior, a sign of the essential difference of the ego and the world, the incongruity of the soul and the deed’.[282] Here too can be seen some convergence with psychoanalytical themes of Freud which though sharing little of Lukács politics operate on the same dialectics of interior and exterior.[283]

As Martin Jay has pointed out, Lukács is on the face of it wrong to distinguish Marxism from Bourgeois thought by its adoption of point of view of totality because non-Marxian non-radical holistic theories have been developed such as the functionalist theories within sociology.[284] As the defining feature of Marxian thought, the totality failed to bear up to scrutiny. Totality could be recuperated for non-radical ends. Bourgeois and proletarian science are not so easily distinguished. The two supposedly different epistemic standpoints do not exist in reality as they do ideally.[285] This is a serious problem for a critique that had as its underlying premise “the belief that in Marx’s theory and method the true method by which to understand society and history has finally been discovered.”[286] The particular union between history, class experience and objective knowledge that Lukács seeks to perfect underlies his particular formulation that the ‘pre-eminent aim’ of Marxist method is ‘knowledge of the present.’[287] It is important to hold on to this critical definition of Marxism and its modern derivations, although for a different set of reasons to Lukács. Suffice to say that Lukács’ work is an example of the strong identification of totality and subjectivity, and embodies exactly that fusion of political project, social unity and the whole that is often much less explicit but none the less present in the other theories analysed here.

Lukács had a large influence upon the development of critical western thought and political movements for which the category of totality was an essential ingredient, remaining one of the cornerstones of historical, humanist and Hegelian Marxisms and interpretations of Marx that have become familiar to us in the C20th Western world.[288] Because of this it is worthwhile dwelling on the preliminary remarks Lukács makes in his 1922 Preface concerning Marx’s relation to Hegel. He quotes Marx’s correspondence with Engels on the bad treatment of Hegel as a dead dog, and of the failure of serious thinkers to engage with Hegel. He also however quotes Marx’s last comment on the role of the Hegelian dialectic in Das Kapital,[289] i.e. Marx’s ‘flirtation’ with Hegel’s mode of expression. For Lukács:

“This has frequently misled people into believing that for Marx the dialectic was no more than a superficial stylistic ornament”….”they failed to notice that a whole series of categories of central importance and in constant use stem directly from Hegel’s logic.”[290]

The mentioned categories here are those of mediation and immediacy. Lukács approving quotes Lenin that “all good Marxists should form…a kind of society of the materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic”. After this Lukács goes on to make a series of curious statements; Marx’s system being coherent must be preserved. Being the reverse of this, the Hegelian system cannot be maintained in its total integrity and thus belongs to the past. Lukács seeks to rescue Hegel’s ‘vital intellectual force’ yet the ‘dead architecture of the system’ must be demolished in order to ‘release the modern sides of his thought’ and resuscitate them as an ‘effective force for the present’.

What then is this vital force? Clearly it is the force of dialectic itself; it is a form of understanding that belongs to but is distinct from the order of things and desires to return to it. However this return cannot be only an intellectual accomplishment, it must be achieved practically in a real form of historical subjectivity. In the theorisation of the universality of the proletariat, the quasi Hegelian unity between history and consciousness is rediscovered. This passage is worth quoting at length:

“The dialectical method is distinguished from bourgeois thought not only by the fact that it alone can lead to knowledge of totality; it is also significant that such knowledge is only attainable because the relationship between parts and whole has become fundamentally different from what it is in thought based on the categories of reflection. In brief, from this point of view, the essence of the dialectical method lies in the fact that in every aspect correctly grasped by the dialectic the whole totality is comprehended and that the whole method can be unravelled from every single aspect. It is has often been claimed – and not without a certain justification – that the famous chapter in Hegel’s Logic treating of Being, Non-Being and Becoming contains the whole of his philosophy. It might be claimed with perhaps equal justification that the chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist society (and of the societies that preceded it).”

This form of perspectivism or standpoint theory believes that knowledge can reach and comprehend totality because it is situated within a necessary, socially conditioned political universality. Thought here is intrinsic to the alliance and objectivity of political forces. In short what needs to be drawn out from Lukács is, using his own terms, the bourgeois nature of his metaphysics of politics. The universalism of class (which was always a potential universal based upon the homogenisation of experience and interests) gives a standpoint in knowledge and practice, which, when mediated through the political party, can reach totality which can ultimately be taken to mean a reconciliation of truth and being in the overcoming of the loss suffered in the alienation of man. The normative value given to totality as a utopian political unity, the analytical disposition to totality and the notion that social processes, such as the totalisation of the commodity form, have actual existence as totalities can, in this Marxian Hegelianism, come together with an incredibly powerful sense of logical and political synthesis. This explains part of the persistent power of Lukács’ Hegelianism for the self-understanding of political movements. There is an inner coherence to this point of view that makes it difficult to deconstruct other than to make an over-used criticism that it is fundamentally a belief structure inimical to a religion.

Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being tries to bridge the divide between historicity and social laws in a discussion of Marx’s ontology of social being.[291] By speaking in terms of ontology Lukács attempts to show that historicity is the immanent nature of mankind’s social being in such a way that even economic activity is historical and thus subject to accident. And yet economic laws, as causal relations in history work themselves out as tendencies, because their form allows for the most adverse variations that, presumably, ultimately cancel out their differential effects. Thus Lukács concludes that dialectics are only approximate to the totality they describe, they do not offer an exact science, but a suitable one to a whole reality that can never be fully represented.[292]

Lukács deals with the question of the historicity of the categories of Marxian analysis. In his opinion, they can never be reduced to logical necessity, as the knowledge is post-festum, developed after the historical maturity of forms into established systems. Thus Lukács makes much of Marx’s various comments about how certain forms like money and labour, can develop as partial totalities long before capitalism, though to understand their developed form they must be understood in their integument with all of the other corresponding necessities.

Although Lukács is at pains to show that whilst the general law and its particular aberration can be analytically separated, he claims that they are ontologically indissoluble.[293] Marx’s particular skill was in describing the unity of these dimensions in their concatenation. Lukács inveighs against those who deny the historical aspect and over-emphasise the role of the concept. Superficially, Lukács is right. He is correct to diagnose the dialectic as an approximation to its object, and this follows what we have so far advanced as the ontological difference between the real object and the formation of its adequate concept. Where Lukács goes wrong, one could argue, is in inscribing ‘rationality’ into economic laws.

“What we are concerned with at this point is the general rationality of scientific laws, and how constraining and concrete implications can be drawn from these for individual cases, how social being in its totality, and in detail, can be erected into a closed rational system.”[294] 

Where Lukács reaches irresolvable difficulties is in seeking to maintain the rationality of economic laws as intelligible results of human activity, whilst at the same time critiquing enlightenment rationalism that tries to develop encyclopaedic totalities of all that exists under the pretences of universal laws. At some point Lukács quotes Kant to the effect that hitherto knowledge was made to conform to the object, yet with modern critical philosophy the object is made to conform to thought. Lukács states that in one way or another the whole of modern philosophy has as its central strand, “the idea that the object of cognition can be known to us for the reason that, and to the degree in which, it has been created by ourselves.”[295] Lukács goes on to state that rationalisms have taken different forms yet,

“what is novel about modern rationalism is increasingly insistent claim that it has discovered the principle which connects up all phenomena which in nature and society are found to confront mankind. Compared with this, every previous type of rationalism in no more than a partial system.”[296]

Social being is heterogeneous, always complex and dynamic and conditioned by historical factors,[297] yet the ‘correct ontological conception of being must…grasp the ‘compulsory character of their intimate and penetrating correlation in every concrete and historical social totality.[298] It is only in the embodied universalism of the standpoint of the proletariat that the theoretical difficulty of the ontology of social being can be resolved.  E.P.Thompson takes this further, helpfully reminding us that the logic of political economy can not account for human experience and thus Das Kapital is not the totality. He also begins to accuse Marx of idealism (in the sense of the development of a concept out of itself).[299]

A variant of this argument can be found in the work of Gillian Rose who denies any speculative dimension to Marx’s Das Kapital. The specific claims of the order of expression in exposing the meaning of the capital relation cannot be seen by Kantian critique. This is because the inner nature of capital as a system of separation ostensibly involves both an inherent mystification - an objective form of illusion that requires deconstructive critique – and a contradiction or non- correspondence between seemingly formal identities. An example of this latter would be the actual inequality that lies in the real formal equal contract.[300] In contrast to Rose’s claims, there is a speculative dimension in Das Kapital: propositions of identity are used which are then broken through fragmentation and synthesis. Yet this is an operation of knowledge, which though supposedly inhering in the thing, is one of a number of possible forms of presentation. The speculative Vorstellung is a theft from Hegel, but the rational kernel is methodological. As has been shown, this formal method of presentation perplexes even the best commentators, for it is not clear why Marx would use this speculative method if he did not see it as an inner structure of the content itself, unless it was a way of making the various aspects of a totality adequately relate to one another. More recent thought in the work of Deleuze, Althusser, and Baudrillard has shied away from the Lukácsian idea that the intelligibility of an object is inscribed within it and that the way something is to be known is by representing the totality of its social relations, accomplished through a meeting of the particular with the general. Having begun with origins in both Marxian and Hegelian types of dialectics, sociological thought throughout the 20^th century has in general begun to distance itself from such foundations. This demise is paralleled by the internal break up of these modes of thought.

Bataille on Loss

Bataille’s philosophy presented a fusion of a general theory of economy, vitalism and holism. His attempt to build a sociology using the Hegelian moment of negativity implicitly provides a powerful critique of modernity. Bataille demonstrates that each posited unity could equally be seen to be conditioned through the experience of a loss. If Spinoza’s totality was the positive aggregation of singular determining beings in agreement with one another, Bataille philosophises the breakdown and flight from the discontinuity of human life. Bataille is critiquing systems such as Hegel’s that have knowledge for their end. As has been shown Hegel attempts this by reducing man to knowledge, whereby with the completion of knowledge one arrives at the completion of man. But when knowledge forms this totality it does not find real satisfaction: the circle closes in on itself, nothing new is actually known and the totality becomes in effect ‘definitive non-knowledge’.

“To know means: to relate to the known, to grasp that an unknown thing is the same as another thing known.”[301]

For Bataille it is dogmatic presuppositions within knowledge that have provided experience with undue limits. Far from the totalising act bringing all of the determinations to the fore, here the totality is seen to act as something of a limit on the possibility of inner experience. One who already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon.[302] Through a sense of heterogeneity that anticipates the ontological claims of Deleuze, far from sharing the intellectual ambit of Hegelian negativity, as Derrida claims, Bataille offers a more or less explicit challenge to it. The focus on systemic necessity is replaced with an insistence on the irreducibility of desire to a system of needs. This reflects the importance placed by Bataille and Caillois, over and above surrealism’s encounters with the marvellous, on understanding the role of the sacred in human society and the implications of the very absence of this kind of myth in the modern world.[303]

“Considering my conception” – the loss from which I exist (I exist, which does not simply mean that my being exists, but that it is clearly distinct), I notice the precariousness of the being within me. Not that classical precariousness founded in the necessity of dying, but a new and more profound one, founded on the small possibility I had of existing (that there was only my originating being and not some other).”[304]

Bataille is important because of his radical critique of Hegel,[305] but also because he too in his sociological writings builds up conceptions of totality based around simple totalities, which for him are represented on the molecular and cellular level. From our current perspective it is important to inquire just how different is Bataille’s sacred sociology from Durkheim’s rules of sociological method. Bataille says that society is not an organism, but he uses biological metaphors and conducts the analysis on a general terrain of inquiry (something that must be said is conscious and deliberate.)[306] One cannot but be struck at how unabashed Bataille can suggest a ‘scale of being’ where society is the end of the sequence of “atom, molecule, micelle, cell, simple organism, linear organism.”[307] What is astonishing about it is not so much the naivety of the complexity of the process of development, but the persistence of the idea that in order to get to the depths of the nature of social being, its origins must be established in this manner. Not surprisingly, Bataille’s programme, which aims to form a ‘moral community’ of sociological investigation of the ‘vital elements of society’, bases itself on the agreement to ‘carry the possible questioning as regards life to the bitter end.’[308]

In Bataille one finds a strong collision of our theme of subjectivity and totality. He conjoins a conception of the social totality to subjectivity in a meta- theory that in its notions of general economy is powerfully anti-individualist. Moreover Bataille, in his complex political aspirations, is profoundly concerned with collective experience, the unity given through the sacred, and the discovery of the authentic experience of communality.[309] For Bataille, capitalism subverts the paradigm of expenditure as pure loss,[310] it further privatises the collective experience of sacrifice - unproductive loss - that creates social union.[311] This latter is most explicit in the sexual act where a profound communication occurs that produces though precariously and temporally a new being and yet ‘each unity must lose itself in some other that exceeds it.’[312] For Bataille, man’s theoretical achievement is to have arrived at the absence of unity of a person; ‘the individual is only an incomplete aggregate.’ It is Bataille’s theoretical achievement to have demonstrated that each union is a sacrifice, a loss of integral being for communal being, he takes it as a law that “human beings are never united with each other except through tears or wounds.”[313] Furthermore in Bataille one finds a reconciliation of the dynamic negativity of Hegelian dialectics with Durkheimian sociology.[314] For all three thinkers, the totality is more than the sum of its parts. For Bataille there is an, ‘overall movement’, a ‘something other’ external to the will of the individual.[315] And yet this overall movement disappears in death so there is the suggestion that its objectivity is subjective. What Bataille tries to achieve in sacred sociology is the reunification of the notion that “society {is} different from the sum of elements that compose it” whilst at the same time seeing society as a ‘compound being’ i.e. made up of those factors that it is more than.[316]

If Bataille’s importance does not lie in his use of negativity, or indeed in his sociology of the sacred, it lies in the unique way that he communicates the modern experience of loss as the symptom of the absence of myth. Emerging too alongside the inter-war crisis of the C20th this contemporary of Lukács expresses a general symptom of the crisis of ideology that provides the context for totality to re-emerge in the language of politics, in social critique and in political philosophy. Emerging out of the systematic refusal of Dada and the bold irreverence of surrealism, Bataille’s philosophy launches an assault on the foundations of meaning:

“It is only if I remain attached to the order of things that the separation [of beings] is real”[317]

It is not difficult to see the common supra-individualism that these theories of complexity share in debunking the horizon of the simple totality. The very ideal of the social totality is bound up with projects where men and women have a stake in that totality. Thus Hayek’s attempt to debunk ‘methodological collectivism’ specifically targets ‘the tendency to treat ‘wholes’ like ‘society’ or the ‘economy’, ‘capitalism’ (as a given historical ‘phase’) or a particular industry or ‘class’ or ‘country’ as definitely given objects about which we can discover laws by observing their nature as wholes.”[318] This cynical criticism made during the Second World War has a pretty contemporary edge to it when placed alongside post-modern criticisms that appear to claim the same.

Though powerful in its simplicity, Lukács’ account is so fraught with problems it is easy to see how it gave birth to both internal and external critique, in respect to the work of the Frankfurt school and structuralism in general (and the structuralist critique of humanism in particular).  

The extent to which these themes were entrenched in the actual outlook of left movements is exposed by the virulence with which any questioning of their foundations are received. However, no matter the extent that the structuralist camp was responsible for the degeneration of the namely idealist, or simple complex totality, so too was this form of thought broken up from within. The structuralist/ humanist debate provides a unique view of the process of the internal and external breakdown in this epistemological/political unity.

Social Differentiation , Integration and the irreducibility of Desire

The whole-scale attack on the use of the concept of totality that characterises post-modern thought does not just have its origins in the internal crisis of Marxian theory, they also lie in the in the broader institutional settings of knowledge production about society in the West. What serves for Lyotard as a description of post-modernity, namely incredulity to meta-narratives, is present too in more mainstream social science. Dissatisfaction with grand theory and total systems of explanation have led to a general scepticism about the possibility of a general theoretical sociology. This can be witnessed in the rise of ethnography and ethno-methodology, and is a position held by many that oppose the all encompassing explanations offered by theoretical Marxism.[319] Moreover there is the viewpoint already pointed out, that there is something intrinsic to the category of totality and general theory that informs all systems that use it. Typically, Holmwood claims that, “the problems of any particular version of synthetic, general theory are intrinsic to the categories common to all attempts.”[320]

In this account only substantive empirical sociology can provide any explanation, the theoretical analysis of social forms bears no fruit. Following the exaggerated crisis of the totality, born out of the critique of Marxism, and by the gradual dissolution within Marxism of the utility of the concept, social theory and philosophy adopt different practices of investigation which privilege the analysis of the partial, the local and the singular as is characteristic of the work of Derrida, Deleuze and Adorno. Whereas for Hegel, the particular was to be understood in and through the universal, modern critical theory has abjured this attempt at synthetic a priori constructions of the truth and arrived at something like the opposite position, summed up appositely by Adorno’s refutation of Hegel to the effect that, ‘the whole is the untrue’.[321] But if grand theory is impossible or undesirable, how can theory account for generality and general social forms such as money, concepts of right and the possibility of social equality?

Simmel’s sociology implicitly critiques formal sociology through an emphasis on totality. Simmel critiques the attempts of isolating the pure forms of relations of sociation. Herein conflict is a relation like any other that can similarly be demarcated in various sub-divisions. Abstractions here have no intrinsic connection with their subject matter; they are part of a scientific procedure with rules established prior to their content. In a dialectical sense complexity must remain the complexity of the result of an inner necessity. Complexity must be ontological not merely descriptive. But in the discussion of Marx’s Das Kapital it was seen that such complexity could only be derived by accepting the division of the content from social form in order for the form to express the content more clearly. For Simmel content should be understood through its social form, but social form cannot be detached from its content and studied in isolation.[322]

“To separate, by scientific abstraction, these two factors of form and content which are in reality inseparably united; to detach by analysis the forms of interaction or sociation (sic) from their contents (through which alone these forms become social forms); and to bring them together under a consistent scientific viewpoint – this seems to me the basis for the only, as well as the entire, possibility of a special science of society as such. Only such a science can actually treat the facts that go under the name of socio-historical reality upon the plane of the purely social.”[323]

For Simmel, society exists when individuals enter into interaction and in so doing create mutual influences. It forms a cognisable unity: “the whole world could not be called one if each of its parts did not somehow influence every other part, or, if at any one point the reciprocity of effects, however indirect it may be, were cut off.”[324]

In any social formation, social content and form ‘constitute one reality”. The forms of association may vary, and have pre –social or extra social causes. The type of interaction determines the nature of the society, but society itself is not the proper object of sociological investigation. It is not an organic whole and because its inner groups are in fact the result of the multiple independent forces of association, Simmel sees the study of this interaction as having the most explanatory power.[325] Whereas Marx presented a strongly negative view of the ontology of society in the interiorisation of the worker into command relation premised on the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, Simmel presents the origin of the social bond in positive association. Money is less of a weapon in forcing people into relations with one another not of their choosing, but the neutral means by which the individual can exercise his choice.

Simmel provides one of the clearest examples of the use of the simple original and undifferentiated state from which social differentiation and individuation proceed. This he understands almost like a natural law of society:[326] “Individuality in being and action generally increases to the degree that the social circle encompassing the individual expands.”[327] This is also inextricably linked with the rise of commercial enterprise.[328] Levine reads this differentiation from an original simple totality to be the ‘dominant developmental pattern’ in Simmel’s thought, and also points out that Simmel often explains common place dualisms by use of this device (such as the division between knowing subject and known object).[329] In the writings on social differentiation and the individual Simmel draws strongly but not explicitly on the idea of a balance within a social formation. Less differentiated societies, though having less freedom for the individual, have a stronger social ethos of their own in contrast to societies where individuality is more differentiated and which have less of a common identity. If Bataille’s sociology focused on the absence of myth in modern societies whereby the sacred union of the discontinuous with the absolute continuity represented by death could be worked out, this is reflected in the development of sociology based upon positive association and the concept of solidarity. Both Durkheim and Parsons develop the sociological import of notions of solidarity in a functionalist manner and in so far as they do so through consideration of the division of labour, their theories tacitly introduce a political conception of consent into the formation of the social.

System solidarity

In Durkheim, social solidarity, which is a moral phenomenon, has its origin in the realm where things are linked only by virtue of the fact that they are ‘distinct’. This separation or the ‘specialisation of tasks’[330] is the ‘principal source that cements ‘solidary’ and ‘equilibrium’. For Durkheim the origin of solidarity is the bounding that goes along with differentiation, so he is fundamentally concerned with the cohesion of the social body through its inner differentiation of roles. The inquiry that pre-empted the publication of The Division of Labour in Society is that of how an individuals’ increase in autonomy makes him more dependent on society, i.e., “how can he be at once more individual and more solidary?”[331] There are clear correspondences between Durkheim’s inquiry here and what has been analysed as one of the central motifs of Marx’s auto- genetic delineation of the abstract universal of value, but there are important differences too.[332] Durkheim is interesting in that his procedure, at least in the Division of Labour in Society, is to adopt what he describes as the ‘speculative’ standpoint. This is counterpoised to two different types of reduction; firstly to the simple emergence of the same moral idea, which is opposed by the materialist reasoning that ideas are determined and limited by the social structures that allow them to be, and secondly to the simple positivist substitution of categories from natural science, especially biology, for use in the observation of social phenomena.[333] The tendency to a biological science of general economy reduces the division of labour to a quasi fact of nature and thus refuses the specificity of its social origins.[334] This latter conception is complicated as Durkheim claims to proceed speculatively[335] by attacking these theorists that do not adopt a priori’s that are specifically relevant to the accumulation of facts that represent the social world. Durkheim differs from Simmel in that he sees the concept of totality is central to the unitary notion of society:

“The concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society: it is the whole which includes all things, the supreme class which embraces all other classes.”[336]

Durkheim does not think of the social as merely an, ‘extension of individual being.’ Rather it is an exterior force, the ‘pressure which the totality exerts on the individual.’ That the whole is not identical with the sum of its parts, but something more than it, shows a residue of the speculative treatment of the totality. However, there is a notion of the individual as a kind of antecedent fact existing prior to socialisation that shares more in common with the sociological assumptions present in the liberal political tradition. In fact, Durkheim believes that ‘the ultimate explanation of collective life will show how it emanates from human nature in general.’ Whilst this offers a different orientation to that where a totality is explained entirely in terms of its totality i.e. where it makes itself its own ground, it results in an anachronistic judgement whereby ‘only individuals could have existed before society.’ Hence in Durkheim the theorisation concerns the uncompleted process of differentiation or totalisation.[337] In The Elementary Forms of Religious life it is clear that Durkheim attempts to derive what is essential to complex societies by studying primitive societies.[338] Such an approach ultimately reinforces the idea of a differentiation from an original simplicity whilst deferring the task of science from the role of understanding complexity in and of itself.

The hypostasis of equilibrium

Parsons, a meta-theorist concerned with issues of explanation with a strong emphasis on synthetic general theory, believed that in order for society to function it must have a systematic basis. All societies have certain functions that must be fulfilled. The systematic understanding of society generalises away from particular social forms and invokes a general totality.[339] This gives rise to a scientism and a need for judgments about the necessity of the social that are distanced from social events and political struggles. Through his functionalist approach, Parsons looks for the long term social equilibrium brought about by the ‘strains to consistency’ of the integrative effects of its subsystems. His concern is with the overall stability or continuity of a society that allows it to be defined as such. Parsons attempts to bridge the divide between past theorisations of structure and action. The classics of sociology had been predominantly concerned with the first type: like the orders imposed upon the agent described by Durkheim. Described as ‘the midwife of modern sociology,’[340] in Parsons’s general outline of a system of action, social action comprises one of four subsystems, the others being culture, personality, and behaviour. Previous action centred theory was also faulty, being as Parsons understood it, marred by idealism (which he understood to mean subjective meanings of the agents involved). In the critique of this one-sidedness Parsons attempts to integrate values, power, structure and action in a single frame of reference.[341] Needless to say the gap between these two explanations was never successfully bridged, though his work was committed to the refinement and further elaboration of the theoretical artifice, which correspondingly was pushed to higher and higher stages of abstraction.

Despite being popular in the 50’s and 60’s in the American sociology, this form of sociological analysis did not initially attract any wider  interest.[342] Indeed Parsons’s concerns were regarded as relatively common place, indeed in the Sociological Imagination Mills sends up Parsons’s verbose and convoluted style, concluding that ‘one could translate the 555 pages of the Social system into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.” Despite this, one prominent camp of sociologists headed by Jeffery Alexander maintain that many of the fundamental categories developed by Parsons can be reinvented to form the basis of a neo-functionalist social science.

The concern for social stability and equilibrium in Parsons’s work and functionalism in particular renders the system ill disposed to understand social change. As Benton has argued, under functionalism, social change is impossible to identify, as it conflates ‘questions of genesis with questions of system integration’ and leads to the idea that social realities are eternally self-producing.[343] Seen by other sociologists as simply a way of classifying and developing terms for what is already known, Parsons’s work can be strongly contrasted to Marx’s attempt in Das Kapital to demonstrate necessary tendencies towards fundamental social change within a totality of interiority.

Cooperation and solidarity

There are many comparisons to be made here with are common critiques of structuralism. Most notable is the critique that such systems are unable to account for the intentional, norm and value based motives of human action. Parsons’s work was an attempt to accommodate them but, for the same reasons that functionalism is disposed to looking for the basis of social equilibrium, it is likewise disposed to see normative, constitutive social action orientated to solidarity.

“Process in any social system is subject to four independent functional imperatives or ‘problems’ which must be met adequately if equilibrium and/ or continuing existence of the system is to be maintained”[344]

These functional imperatives are Goal attainment, Adaptation, Integration and Latency. The first two constitute the ‘task-orientation area’ of ‘instrumental activity’ and Integration and Latency problems constitute the ‘social emotion area’ of ‘expressive activity.’[345] Particular social processes exist for the maintenance of the system itself, though these are not necessarily the same as task orientated action. But personal gratification (cumulative of task orientation and expressive activity) is the ultimate justification of all social activity.

An organisation is thus a system of “cooperative relationships”. Yet cooperative relationships only occur where the members see themselves as part of the same body. Otherwise competition – as in exchange relationships - is the key. But how can this work where exchange is generalised to be the mechanism of social organisation amongst all members. The divisions lose all affectivity. Capitalism makes nonsense of the attempt to show antagonism and competition as something external to the constitution of human social being, or as something that occurs on the borders of societies or pre-established unities, no matter how much this relation to the outside may have been its historical origin.

Parsons is aware of coercion, where people are forced into involuntary cooperation – the requirement of this is an unbalance of power. But what happens to the model when we look at the totality from the point of view of political and social power. Parsons points out a lot that cooperative, competitive and coercive elements are always coexistent and occur in differences of degree. Yet:

“Even the workman who gives his eight hours a day for five days a week in return for the general assurance of a pay envelope on Friday is showing a degree of solidarity with his employer; and the fact that he is willing to accept money, which in itself is value-less, is evidence of a solidarity relationship to the money-issuing authority and the society from which that authority derives.”[346]

The difference with this, where instrumental activity is the key between individual psychology and social behaviour, with structuralist thought is that whereas the former attempts to provide a substantive account of human actions in defence of an ideological model of integration the latter is only concerned with the relations themselves.[347]

Functionalism, Sociology and Marxism

In functionalist theories the general view is that the mutual interdependence of parts is the foundation of a scientific understanding of society. A comparison of the functionalist sociological totality and Marxist totalities is instructive as this is one clear instance where if an identity could plausibly be established it would support the reduction of types of totality to simple strictures that govern the conception of totality itself. The aim here is not to perform a decisive separation. This is because both the epistemic sites of production and the content of theoretical productions are in real terms combined and interdependent.[348] Rather because both types of totality have been assimilated to one another or criticised in the same way in the various theories, it is an existing theoretical reduction that can be analysed.

For a number of reasons Althusser’s work has been singled out for these purposes. Elements of his work appear strongly functionalist, notably the work on Ideological State Apparatuses. He was institutionally attached to the same university where Durkheim developed his ideas and he tried to elaborate a working idea of scientific practice as a production of knowledge. Whether seen as a fellow traveller of positivist functional sociology or an evil cousin, negatively or favourably, Althusser has been very much a point of reference for contemporary manifestations of the tradition.[349]

A certain reading of Althusser can be fuel to Giddens’s argument that the Marxist totality is essentially functionalist.[350] This reduction of the Marxian totality to the functionalist one is misplaced and misleading, both in the case of Althusser and Marxism more generally.[351] This criticism often comes about where there is a lackadaisical institutional cooption of a sociological reading of Marx which, to speak broadly, has the tendency to engage only with the aspects of Marx that favour or can be integrated into the project of sociology reading.

As a sociological discipline, functionalism is not so easily reconciled with Marxism. However it shares with Marxism the importance of ‘totality’ and the corresponding view that scientific inquiry is based upon the interdependence of parts within a whole.[352] It is important to distinguish why the Marxian use of the totality differs significantly from functionalist systems. Primarily this involves the Marxian emphasis on the contradictory character of the whole and the treatment of the social totality from the perspective of its conflicts. Functionalism in contrast views society generally as a stable system and looks for the mechanisms that give it harmony – it thus seeks to reduce conflict to a residual element of the system, or (as Simmel was to do) to only view conflict from the perspective of its maintenance of the social system. Functionalism is thus concerned with social equilibrium.[353] It has also been strongly criticised for being simply descriptive and classificatory, thus not explaining society or social change but merely giving names to these social phenomena. W.W.Isajiw tries to exonerate functionalism from this charge by explaining functionalism in terms of tele-causality, here functionalism is defended as the method of arranging data and comprehending it in relation to other interdependent features of the system. As a method however, this approach in anthropology and structuralism pertained well to early societies but faced with the complexity of modern society fails to register its nuances. It is for this reason that the structuralism of Levi-Strauss developed in opposition to functionalism, even though the two approaches are time and time again assimilated to one another.[354] For Levi-Strauss, functionalism, as in the work of Malinowski, performed a reduction of social and cultural phenomenal to the singular determination of the state of economic need, in much a similar way as that which is criticised in ‘vulgar’-Marxism.[355] And yet the inspiration behind classical sociology, at least for Durkheim and Comte, was to show the origins of the social in the differentiation inherent in the division of labour. Post-Durkheim however, in the work of Parsons, this organic link between the theoretical edifice and its social content is lost.

Functionalism has correspondences with Marxism partly because it took off as an alternative to the explanatory power of Marxism.[356] Characteristically, functionalist analysis de-politicises the content of social systems, not least by construing a generic method of cognition of the social in general. Behind much functionalist scientism in social thought lie often fundamentally conservative agendas that are concerned with order, stability and system reproduction.

In Parsons’s later work there is an attempt to update the functionalist project in the light of some of these criticisms. Hence conflict and pattern maintenance and aberrations in the system have a renewed focus, where the stability of the system is both the product of institutionalised pattern maintenance and of conflicting pattern tendencies. Isajaw suggests that for Parsons a perfect working system without conflict was unattainable. Despite these retorts it is clear that functionalism is disposed to analyse social phenomena that perform repetitive patterns of behaviour and has not real room for anomalies, antinomy and contradiction, especially not in terms of the role they perform in Marxian systems, where they are seen to be the very basis of social reality itself.

Functionalism also reacts to the Marxist critique. Parsons’s theory of social action was itself a response to the idea that the conventional positivist explanations could not account for subjective practice within the totality or as an origin of it. In the attempt to give a unitary theory of action for the social sciences, values are seen by Parsons as symbolic elements that serve as the criteria for selection of possible alternatives in each situation. Social actors have meaning attached to their action that is derived partially by the behaviour of others. David Binns claims that Parsons arrives at an essentially Weberian notion of action where “all social action is normatively oriented.” Moreover, despite the earlier concern with stability, Parsons later claimed he does not see harmony in any social formation, ‘shot through’ as it is with conflict. Thus more political dimensions are introduced into the later work of Parsons through criticisms and external pressures. But the normative dimensions perform the major criticism of Marx by Parsons, suggesting without substantiation that this sphere is more important than class conflicts and changes in the mode of production.

Neo-Functionalism

Parsons’s functionalism is embedded within the positivist tradition that leads to the substantial kinship with other sciences, particularly biology, that do not conventionally allow for conscious intention – nor, unless infected with theological postulates, values.[357] Such an approach is ill disposed to perceiving historical change and Parsons’s work is one of the more obvious examples of the process whereby features specific to capitalist society are generalised to features of society as such. Indeed, overall Parsons is remarkably uncritical of received prejudices about contemporary society. In the work of Jeffery Alexander, a contemporary theorist of Parsonian neo-functionalism, functionalism is directly distinguished from the Hegelian totality, though note, not from the Marxist totality. Indeed Alexander draws on Althusser’s work in an attempt to show the superiority of the functionalist totality over the Hegelian totality. In this view, neo-functionalism 

“Models society as an intelligible system. It views society as composed of elements whose interaction forms a pattern that can be clearly differentiated from some surrounding environment. These parts are symbiotically connected to one another and interact without an a priori direction from a governing force. This understanding of system and/or ‘totality’ must, as Althusser has forcefully argued, be sharply distinguished from the Hegelian, Marxist one. The Hegelian system resembles the functionalist, but it posits an ‘expressive totality’ in which all of a society’s or culture’s parts are seen as representing variations on some ‘really’ determining, fundamental system. Functionalism suggests, by contrast, open-ended and pluralistic rather than mono-causal determinism.”[358]       

In another one of many similar attempts, Erik Olin Wright ‘reconstructs’ Marxism as a scientistic combination of functionalism and intentionalism.[359] In turn, these theorists draw on Giddens’ claims that there are functionalist tendencies in Marxist explanation whereby agents are only treated as products of social structures or of ‘goal-achieving impersonal social forces.”[360] Within this rediscovery of subjectivity in functionalist sociological thought, in its broad claim of a return to the actor they argue that the functional totality only makes sense when inscribed with the intentions of social agents. The result of their analysis is that the claims of Marxism to be a unitary theory can no longer hold water.[361] And yet it is seen that out of the merging of Giddens’s critique of the Marxist and Parsonian functionalist totality[362] a neo-functionalism can reintroduce constitutive activity into the system as if out of the blue. The theoretical concern of Alexander’s work becomes: which of the two - Parsons or Althusser – provides the best general applicability of the schema.

To reduce two theories with different theoretical objects in this manner is the kind of operation normally attributed to post-modern thought. It fails to recognise the importance of the ongoing critique of the spontaneous and visible representations of social life that draw the attention of so-called structuralism to the unrepresented and non-colonised areas of human life. Equally it fails to account for the actual role that functionalist sociological analysis has in adding scientific credence to, and thus perpetuating, what are in fact actually contested authorities, divisions and role assignments within social life. It could be described as ideological in the sense that it is part of the reflexive process of reflection on society but purports to occupy a scientific place outside of it not determined by a political outlook. Adorno’s criticism of empirical sociology simultaneously invoked what was to become a strong element of his internal critique of Marxism,

“The interpretation of facts is directed towards the totality, without the interpretation itself being a fact…to this extent totality is what is most real. Since it is the sum of individuals social relations which screen themselves off from individuals, it is also an illusion – ideology.”[363]

Ranciere describes Althusser as having raised a question against every idea of the transparency of the relation of men to men.[364] It would be a mistake to read his theory of interpellation as a functionalist account of ideology just because it claims to say something about what ideology does. Rather by understanding ideology as a lived practice and a production it brings it back into view as something contestable rather than absolute. In this Spinozian sense, ideology is not imposed from outside of lived experience but is enacted within it. It is the same spirit or desire (for the un-presentable) that manifests itself in Lyotard’s injunction that we present the un-presentable, and which tries to fly away from the face of power, and radicalise those elements, the margins and dispossessed that are denied the name. Similarly Baudrillard finds the potential for subversion in those elements that are not homogenised into ordered economic life. Jameson is right that debates about the totality in this sense are mostly political.[365]

Despite an apparent concern with the breakdown of order Parsons’s functionalism seems naturally disposed to looking for the sources of stability – i.e. the stabilisation of role behaviour is seen as one necessary element of ‘continued system functioning.’[366] This seems to be the most immediate and obvious difference between Parsons’s functionalism and Marxist forms of complex totality. In the latter the social totality is based upon forced separations, contradictions, and domination that require a fundament political change to be reconciled. In functionalism the overall concern is to treat the existing system itself as an organic and inwardly harmoniousbody.[367] This has little in common with the dialectical structuration of internal contradictions – historically and analytically – in Marxian understanding. A superficial similarity exists with Parsons’s belief (and false reading of this notion in Weber)[368] that all social action has a normative value dimension and his concern for seeing politics as predominantly consensual  (despite later writings attempting to incorporate domination and conflict, with Marxian attempts to analyse the perpetuation of the capitalist social system through the category of ideology e.g. Meszaros. Yet in the latter case ideology functions as a means to attenuate deeper conflicts, whereas in functionalism the order of the system is seen as its essence. Clearly again, although Weber (with his political sociology and concern to analyse the legitimate sources of authority and domination) was clearly part of Parsons’s intellectual heritage, he parts company on exactly this point. We could extend the critique further to point out that the sociology of Parsons, given its tendency to universalise specific features of capitalist society (e.g. money as mediation and sale of labour power), as necessary conditions of advanced society in general, that Parsons’s theory is ideological itself and part of the overall project to stabilise a society whose conflicts reside far more intrinsically within the operation of the system than Parsons perceives, the latter only conceding that conflict exists between different value systems rather than determined interests existing at the level of society’s economic organisation.

A similar criticism is levied at a more recent neo-functionalism, that is the system differentiation theory of Luhmann. For Luhmann we 'require an all encompassing concept of society' for sociology as a discipline or a unified separate domain of research 'can be justified only be means of the unity of its own object of research'. And yet society is a differentiated unity driven by the differentiation of its parts. Totality then, is and yet is not, as 'the unity of the system finds no place within the system'.

"The representation of the system within itself must specify both its necessary position in it and its types of operations and, at the same time, make clear that it is not identical with what it represents...the introduction of the system within itself is therefore a differentiation itself.”[369]

This position questions speculative types of totality where the whole is more than its parts. The basic problem or paradox for Luhmann is the generality of the system and the particular actions within that generality not directly reducible to it. Luhmann’s main argument is that the ‘principal achievement of systems theory is to view the system as different from its environment as opposed to other approaches that collapse the two. Although Luhmann believes that systems grow ‘by internal disjunction’ he is utmost concerned with finding complex formulas for understanding complex societies.

System differentiation is a 'structural technique for solving the temporal problems of complex systems situated in complex environments.'[370] As such his theory could be seen as an attempt to address a latent problem within functionalism’s ability to account for social change.[371] It is attractive also because through the method of system differentiation, Luhmann attempts to integrate into the development of social complexity the forms of reflection on the system that accompany them.[372] As such the mode of development of system differentiation applies to knowledge about the system too, so reflections on the system form a moment of differentiation. However, despite his recognition that for differentiated unity to occur (as in Durkheim and Parsons) it 'requires relatively simple forms that abstract from details and reduce the complexity accompanying differentiation,[373] and his attempt to find 'a complexity…to compensate for the increase of complexity that accompanies increased differentiation,’[374] Luhmann falls back on an empirical evolutionary perspective that draws on a development, through internal differentiation, from the simple to the complex. These follow from the initial stage of segmentary societies, which arguably cannot strictly be described as ‘differentiated’, as at no point can we posit a mythical or social force of combination (like human civilisation) nor any necessary rapport between the segments from which they could be differentiated. Social evolution follows from this state through societies with a centre and a periphery, to those with stratified difference, resulting in highly differentiated complex societies wherein each subsystem has a functional purpose that is stronger than those that determine it.

Although the more complex formations allow for inequality to emerge between subsystems, the difficulty is that the functional orientation privileges the autonomy of the subsystem and by giving each system is own internal environment it can not account for the co-existence over several different environments acting on several systems (that are in turn acting on each other) at any one point in time. Luhmann argues that 'the evolution of differentiation means that each of the subsystems is guided primarily by its own function and thereby more clearly distinguished from others' which is of 'decisive importance for the constitution of complexity.'[375] Here Luhmann attributes a power to the function that could only ever be described in terms of its effects on other systems and environments. This is witnessed, but not dealt with and rather this form of complexity is eschewed in favour of a focus on the inner division of the subsystem within itself and in and through its systemic reflection. This repeats a mistake of the earlier versions of functional analysis,[376] and is in fact a return to the simple totality of sorts, as by isolating an environment for each subsystem, it illegitimately separates out a field that is always over-determined by subjects that occupy a number of social positions at once. The more that is given over to the action centred and value based notion of substantive rationality in life-worlds, the more it is taken back by the systemic necessity of differentiation.

This account moves from equality to inequality and on to higher differentiations. It is an attempt to give a unitary model of the system itself through the notion that system formation is essentially system differentiation. But the exercise of the model turns to haunt its very premises. Stating from the presupposition of the unity of the object of research, reflection within modern societies increasingly finds itself having to turn an indeterminate horizon into its ground. In the unity of the entire society, as the unity of the totality of all systems environments, differences within the system slip from view.[377] The very strength of the functional analysis was ostensibly to be found in that the system evolution had no teleology nor followed a ‘total plan’ and could thus accommodate accident and chance.[378] And yet the very dynamic element of the system, its separation from the environment, has a trajectory of its own, into the increased proliferation of subsystems, but with no clear account of what can emerge that can block its way and prevent the disintegration into ‘greater differentiation, without any end in sight.’ By adopting differentiation as the motor of system formation, both of the social system and our systems of reflection on it, the only way that is apparently available to Luhmann to defend the ultimately unitary nature of his object is to say that the ‘formation of subsystems reconstructs the whole system within systems...thus, every subsystem of society, together with its internal social environment is the whole society.’[379] From within those subsystems, for it is here that reflections on the system are generated, develops a force of dissolution wherein 'the continuum of rationality combining being, thought, and action, the unity of religious grounded morality, and the unity of the hierarchical order of social positions promotes the dissolution of the old order."[380] Functionalist analysis can thus accommodate change, but change is still seen as the result of unities brought into focus at the boundaries of functional systems which provokes crisis or what appears to be a crisis.

Although system differentiation provides functional analysis with a dynamic element, the more this method is applied in a formal and systematic way, the less explanation it offers on anything other than the general form of system differentiation itself, which once carried further out is less and less possible due to the differentiated subsystems in which those reflections are carried out. It might very well be that the subsystems together form the whole of society, but given that there is no one systemic point of view there is no one in the position to perform the synthetic account, especially given the differential temporal and ideational modalities in which the subsystems must operate. At best, and Jameson shares this view, the problem with Luhmann’s theory of complexity is the same as the problem with earlier functionalism, even if it adds a historical and conflictual dimension, it results in purely formal description.[381] At worst, with its theory of the autonomy of the political and economic systems, it amounts to an ideological rhetoric for the free-market.[382] Like Giddens, Luhmann presents a theory of modernity wherein our contemporary society offers high variation and choice.[383] It is possible that the attempt to account for social complexity through differentiation does not dispose itself well to a unitary model of the systems it reflects and in fact the stronger the dynamic principle of the model is, the more possible it should be to entertain a notion of a state of differentiation that did not subvert its own origins within the system. This ambiguity that Luhmann merely arrives at, is the conditions of possibility that is the point of departure for theories of the post-modern, born as they are out of the dissolution of the totality.[384] In Luhmann’s words:

"For highly differentiated societies...the world can be meaningful only as an indeterminate horizon for further elaboration. It cannot be conceived as a finite and bounded set of things and events" (in the classical sense of a universitas rerum or aggregatio corporum).[385]

The system dynamics of differentiation and separation and the possibility of autonomy inform the work of Luhmann and Habermas. Although this is most important to the debates concerning the autonomy of the political it is important to demonstrate the continuing disposition of Luhmann to describe the specificity of complex systems through their differentiation from simple societies.[386] Furthermore, the neo-functionalism of Habermas, and in particular the theory of inter-subjectivity has definite similarities with the concept of over-determination in Althusser. Moreover, in Habermas we can witness the same systematic attempt to counterbalance what he calls the ‘totality of a higher level subject’, or ‘macro-subject’  - that is the conventional identity (between reflective knowledge and realisation of interests) that allows for ‘system steering’ – which is in short the Hegelian Marxian totality, with a counter discourse of modernity that refuses the reduction into simply identity and makes complexity (ultimately à la Durkheim) in interrelation its grounding and constitutive principle.[387]

Althusser and the exhaustion of totality

There are structuralist and functionalist elements in Althusser’s work.[388] Most notable is the functionalist account of ideology for which he is best known and for which he has received the most strident criticisms.[389] For Althusser ideology is a total but differentiated system of representation that functions as a social cement in the service of maintaining class society.[390] He sharply distinguishes it from science that must be devised by the intellectual and imported from outside of the immediate lived experience of exploitation.[391] However it would be misleading to assess Althusser’s contribution to the critique of totality as simply a functionalist argument just because on the face of it he questions the obviousness of ‘man’ as an origin of the epistemological approach to the categories of the social. The method of questioning the obviousness and immediacy of experience in order to situate the superior power of the dialectic is as old as Socrates himself and has been shown to be used amply by Hegel and Marx. If the worst elements of Althusser’s drastic political judgements about theory can be endured then the more formative elements of his analysis of the nature of thought totalities can come to the fore. These elements of his critical work are important.

·          The critique of simple contradiction in Hegel and the impossibility of the inversion of the idealist dialectic

·          The critique of origins and the category of the subject

·          The distinction, if at times incorrect, of different theoretical positions in Marx’s life, and a reading of the early Marx that took it contemporaneously and did not import the latter elements of his work into the early elements as if all of Marx’s work was leading up to its mature expressions. That is to say he introduces the question of discontinuities into Marx’s writings that dispels the religious evocation of it as a sutured continuous and consistent point of view.

·          The use of the concept of over-determination – in so far as a response to simple contradiction and simple totality in Hegel and interpretations of Marx.

·          The resurrection of Spinoza as a thinker of the interiority of power and effect

Was Althusser’s critique of the subject a denial of subjectivity? Thompson like many English socialist historian critiques of Althusser would think it is: Althusser ‘…evicts human agency from history, which then becomes a ‘process without a subject.’[392] This is indicative of a typical misreading of the theoretical anti-humanism which is repelled with some irony by recourse to the work of Vico, which though undoubtedly historical, actually sees history as issuing forth from a mind that is superior to the particular ends men have set themselves.

It is important to note however that later thinkers like Negri, who take much from the type of anti-Hegelian materialism of the Althusserian circles, echoes this familiar criticism of Althusser: “…the science of the revolutionary process refuses to render itself as the science of the revolutionary subject.’[393] Even though Negri recognises the importance of the theoretical attack on the category of the Subject, which is completely lost in Thompson’s polemic. As we have seen, Althusser’s critique of Hegel adds critical ingredients to the understanding of the nature of Marx’s critique in Das Kapital, although at the same time his attempt to draw out of this a positive science is a mistaken project. There is no eviction of human agency in Althusser although there is very little treatment of subjectivity in political terms, a project that has since then been taken up by others. Rather Althusser, rightly in his reading of Marx, picks up an understanding of the internal structural forms that govern the production of the generalised conditions of life when considered in the particular confrontation of capital and labour. That is to say, Marx is theorising subjectivity within the general and not within the particular (where it is only ever exhibited in abstract condition, e.g. the figures of the personified capitalist and worker). The reading of Marx in substantial, materialist and ontological terms is a peculiar but necessary reading. Peculiar because the results are paradoxical the further the fidelity and orthodoxy the more the limitations of its utility, the narrowing of its objects of enquiry. Yet at the same time, it draws attention to the question of what was Marx’s object (of inquiry) in Das Kapital and how he approached it.

The strange result of this inquiry into ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ has been an important aspect of thinking through this research. It has not been helped by the secondary literature on Althusser that with a few exceptions is full of curse and slander. The worst of these criticisms accuse Althusser of the now rather nebulous error of Stalinism mostly because he did not kowtow to what he believed were right-wing critiques of the Soviet Union.[394] But serious engagement is also confounded by ignorance. An example of this is Paul Hirst’s comments that;

“He [Althusser] conceives social relations as totalities, as a whole governed by a single determinative principle. This whole must be consistent with itself and must subject all agents and relationships within its purview to its effects. I, on the other hand, consider social relations as aggregates of institutions, forms of organisations, practices and agents which do not answer to any single causal principle or logic of consistency, which can and do differ in form and which are not all essential to one another.”[395]

Not only is this a misreading of Althusser, what he ascribes as his own position is actually much closer to that of Althusser than he recognises. It is exactly Althusser’s construal of the totality as a complex, structurally differentiated whole that makes possible the fundamental weakening of the ontological claims for totality. That is to say, Althusser’s position in his critique of philosophical idealism, the attempt to make philosophy the master of ceremonies at its own funeral, is utterly dependent on his critique of the possibility of there being ‘a single determinative principle’ to the totality. Thompson takes a different tack, but his criticism is no less misplaced:

“Movement can only take place within the closed field of the system or structure, that is however complex and mutually reciprocating the notions of the parts, this movement is enclosed within the overall limits and determinations of the pre-given structure. For both these reasons, history as process, as open-ended and indeterminate eventuation – but not for that reason devoid of rational logic or of determining pressures – in which categories are defined in particular contexts but are continuously undergoing historical redefinition, and whose structure is not pre-given but protean, continually changing in form and in articulation – all this (the basis of Marxist dialectics) must be denied.”

In fact all it is saying is that the conditions of possibility for development must be rooted, materially, in the conditions of the present i.e. socially pre-given; it does not outlaw development as such but extraneous development, development that comes ostensibly from outside of the totality. Maybe this is an overly generous reading of Althusser, but it seems that the latter does not believe structures exist outside of practice but are part and parcel of social practice. In so far as action is understood within the limitations and possibilities of ‘what is’, where what is, is a constituted result and ongoing lived practice of the production of social life, Thompson’s criticism does not hold true. Thompson goes on to defend ‘history’ as if it were that was under attack. But Thompson is closer to Althusser than he believes when he argues that ‘history’ may only be theorised in terms of its own properties’ and that what requires “interrogating and theorising, is historical knowledge.[396]

Jameson reads structuralism as a type of formalism and though both he and Negri treat Althusserian ‘structuralism’ as a modernist project, there are some differences in this analysis.[397] It seems that Jameson borrows mainly from the theorisation of ideology, which equally informs what Negri takes from the later Althusser, the sensitivity to rupture, crisis and dereliction: the thinking of the new, "the continuous theoretical definition of the possible'[398] when ‘ideology has massively extended its domination over the whole of the real.’[399] For Jameson, modernism drives towards the disavowal of substance, where content is introduced only in order to allow for a particular form. Our reading of Negri, and what we see him take from the Spinozian side of Althusserian thought, is the understanding of effects as interior to the structural whole.[400] Far from being a reaction to substantialist thinking[401] this is a way of seeing both cause and result in the immanent and inner structure of relations themselves.  What Hegelianism rightly needs to posit a subject emanating out of itself, as developing through its own contradictions falls in the Althusserian schema because it tends towards the centring of the dialectic to a singular locus of social being - whether the proletariat as subject (Lukács, Debord) or to capital itself. The simple contradiction, the conflict between inside and outside, has no real validity when social subjectivity is manufactured in diffuse ways, without a fundamental point to where it can be reduced. This is not a pluralisation of subjectivity in contradistinction to economic life, but a fundamentally different conception of its formation, never predetermined and most importantly, singular, individual and polyvalent i.e. constructions that are ‘adequate’, in the Spinozian sense, to their content.

Althusser’s theoretical project was limited and contains many claims about science and ideology that could only be seen as reactionary today. However the criticisms made of it are often quite misplaced and based on misunderstandings. For instance, Thompson argues that the theory of over-determination is just a rearrangement of vocabulary and neologisms, ‘the reorganisation has taken place, not in substantive analysis, theory interacting with enquiry, but in the vocabulary alone’. Furthermore, the categories are always static, which is why Althusser represents structuralist modes of analysis common to Smelser and Parsons. What is not seen is the enduring attempt within Althusser to keep fidelity to Marx, to in fact recreate a more scientifically acceptable orthodox Marx. For that reason Althusser by a treatment of Marx’s theoretical object actually had before him a very different object to history. Unlike Thompson, Althusser did not think that ideas were insubstantial nor that only history is material. Nor does he allow the theoretical object to be uncritically assimilated to the real object. The result of this is that he arrives at the idea of the inherent complexity of the totality through a deconstruction of a prevailing discourse (the humanist Hegelianism of Garaudy), not from an ontological treatment of the reality that complexity was an inherent expression of. Arguably this was as much a result of a negativity, or as is preferred in France critique, as Adorno’s own negative dialectics, for the latter took as its point of departure a Hegelian premise of the identity of the structure of thought with reality which resulted in the positing of non-identity. At any rate Althusser was in fact both for and against Marx because of discrepancy between what Marx in fact said and Althusser’s symptomatic reading of what he ideally should have said, or could not say, increasingly narrowed down what could actually be said about ‘Marx’s object’. Althusser distanced himself from Marx by having a different theoretical object to Marx, but this is by no means the same as not having conducted enquiry, as Thompson imagines, into observing what Marx’s theoretical object in fact was. In fact Althusser’s enquiry was into something Thompson takes for granted, that is humanism as a point of orientation for the intellectual understanding of society. However, by observing that the whole can not have a simple point of origin and concluding that ‘difference is the very existence of the whole’ Althusser performed a kind of secondary critique on a primary relation, where Marx provides the correct content, and Althusser’s exegesis performs the task in philosophy of the content reflected onto itself as concept.[402] It is for this reason that Althusser is never able to formulate a conception of the totality of the social in more concrete terms than this:

‘Secondary contradictions are essential even to the existence of the principle contradiction, that they really constitute its condition of existence, just as the principle contradiction constitutes their condition of existence.” [403]

Despite its vague character this has kept many post-Marxists like Laclau and Mouffe amused but at the same time it fails completely to ground this complex totality from within this complex totality. It seems the totality is exhausted when it ceases to have a role of its own, when in fact it ceases to have any purpose and sovereign function. Hence this result is completely opposite to the account articulated in Laclau and Mouffe. Totality is not finished by what it disguises as an essentialism, which in fact is a tautological claim, it is finished because it inevitably begins to suffer a distancing from its essence – or rather its compulsion to find its essence in itself. That is when its speculative generation meets its own productions and battles them so much that the war zone is fled from – decentred – in all directions like a scattered army full of desertions and confusion.

The new forms of total critique that Hegelian philosophy engendered have very often come from within its general intellectual ambit, rather than external reflections that did not appreciate its critical and vital force. Thus thinking within Hegelianism resulted in an inner conflict within the whole edifice of the idealist fortress of totality that could not be recuperated within its walls. In the work of Bataille the negativity of thought must continue to orientate itself to the unknown and other. The ethical totality itself is seen to work on the creation and exclusion of the other. Anti-totality emerges when truth becomes a form of unknowing because consciousness forces a separation from itself. Without the positive moment of synthesis the dynamic of negativity becomes nothing more than the fracturing of its own project.

Postmodernism in Sociology and Marxism

Whereas talk of the post-modern was earlier restricted to the arts and the critique of the modern movement, it was only really in the 1970s that it begins to spreading to social and political theory. As Huyssen has noted the post-modern gained prestige in the 60s and 70s as a critical tool in reaction to high modernism that characterized the 40s and 50s.[404] Since the late 70s and throughout the eighties, the post-modern became used more and more as an affirmative description of the general social consciousness of western societies. Periodization has been important in the theory of the post-modern to tie what is often understood to be the indeterminacy of social life to actual historical conditions. One important element however that is rarely considered is the particular generational experience that brought post-modernism into being. For this reason there has always been some confusion over post-modernism as an aesthetic reflection within modernity and post-modernity as a qualitatively new social order.[405]

The most important determining influence upon the development of the awareness of a qualitatively new social reality through the critical methods of an emboldened sceptical theory has been the internal critique of orthodox Marxism, although this is not singularly determinate. Although it has substantial roots here, post-modern theory is not reducible to the critique of Marxism and has become a broader point of reference for the understanding of modern societies. As such the two parallel trends of the demise of the category of the social in classical sociology and the proliferation of Marxian theory have reached new points of convergence in the theory of the post-modern. Many though not all post-modern writers are erstwhile Marxist theorists and it is impossible to contextualise the tour de force of post-modern theory without emphasising the power of this critical moment.  Lyotard’s much cited work, The Postmodern condition, left little doubt that Hegelian Marxism was the criminal mastermind behind ‘master-narratives’; grand teleologies of a singular imposing logic that privileges a certain subject or a certain contradiction as the driving force of historical change.

For Scott Lash, in his Sociology of Post-modernism the post-modern is not a ‘condition’ of society in the manner that post-industrialism is. Whereas post-industrialism concerns a socio- economic reality, the post-modern is largely restricted to culture; it is primarily a cultural concept.[406] It is the latter use of the post-modern (post-modernity as epochal societal state) that really concerns us here but it is highly doubtful whether what characterises it can be described as a cultural turn. Lash rightly draws upon the origins of the post-modern in the irrepressibility of desire and in the loosening of strict rules over cultural conduct, but this view of de-differentiation tends to understate the type of formative resistances to separation that gave rise to the expansion of cultural life. It should be noted that what is taken to be a cultural phenomenon has its roots in a politics of desire, from movements that tried to defy the totality at all levels of social life. In another respect the linkage of the post-modern to the avant-garde has, in the work of Huyssen at least, tended to diminish the struggle over desire to a merely utopian impulse as opposed to the result of embedded practices of resistance to the everyday. 

The origins of the use of the post-modern are very different from what it means today though some similarities remain. Perhaps most important is the critical challenge to high culture and the apparent levelling down or equalization of low and high art. Here the origins could be found in the Marcusian idea of the artistic realm as the Great Refusal that enjoys a separation from the ‘order of the day’ but which in turn becomes re-incorporated into the democratic domination of society.[407]

Because of the ambivalent nature of subjectivity in post-modern theory, many of its attempts to theorise the nature of the social system and capitalism today, whether theorised as late or disorganised capitalism, post- Fordist or post-Industrial society, post- Taylorism, have been treated by orthodox Marxists simply as ideologies rather than analyses of the prevailing state of affairs. Paradoxically this critique at the level of ideas, in seeking to morally disparage theorists of the postmodern, is drawn to a social explanation of postmodern thought. Looked at closely the social explanation reveals a sensitivity in postmodern thought to the status that knowledge production has within its social context and a high degree of reflexive interiority to the possibility of its claims. In elaborating a conception of modernity drawn from the ‘discontinuist’ theory of modern social development, derived from Marxian tradition, Giddens claims,

“The post-modern outlook sees a plurality of heterogeneous claims to knowledge, in which science does not have a privileged place.”[408]

It could be argued however that it is witness to a differentiation in what we understand as scientific practice and a more specifically an offensive against positivist explanation that demands the same modalities of knowing for different objects. The development of interiorities in subjective space is not some much an issue of standpoint and identity but of modes of being that are exercises of a general capacity of being. Such interiorities must develop different horizons of knowing and social experience if they are to be understood as differentiated. What is often seen as an assault on science or a degradation of culture, is in fact, arguably, the general acknowledgement of the distancing of the horizon of where it was supposed that particular knowledges could converge on the same plane of scientific inquiry. With the dispersal of the radical critique of society in Marxism that promised something like that synthesis through a political practice, the softer approach in sociology was to suffer too.

Arguably the very appeal of a periodisation such as modernity lay in its ability to generalise a certain spirit whereby scientific claims could be seen to belong to general principles, dynamics and relations within society, politics and culture that were grounded in definite forms of economic practice. As such the claims for science were backed up so to speak by the idea of a rationality in history, a view shared, with qualifications, by Marxism and sociology alike. It appears that in so far as this identity was an established one in social consciousness the failure of one paradigm of explanation would exert a critical affect on the other. What is perhaps most revealing about the fall of these twin towers is that a new periodisation has been ushered in. Though having the kind of scope suggested by Scott Lash’s word ‘de-differentiated’, it is a periodisation that must eschew the possibility of totality in thought whilst simultaneously, in seeking to overcome that horizon, positing a new one through a retrospective historicisation of what has been surpassed. The force of post-modern critique is perhaps to have produced not the totality of the post-modern but of the modern, characterised by a total crisis of system legitimation and a generalisation of  conscious practices of system critique.

In recent years the epistemological claims of post-modern theory have been supported by growing claims that the possibility of moving out of economy based explanations of the political is predicated on changes within the economic! Thus even though post-modern epistemology and theory tries to transcend the notion of totality when it comes to the grounding its own conditions of possibility it, either negatively or positively affirms a certain type of total change. This reason is the criticism of many critiques of the post-modern from Marxist quarters such as the claim by Eagleton to the effect that post-modern theory has only a selective disdain for totalities.

‘Not looking for totality is just code for not looking at capitalism. But a scepticism of totalities, left or right, is usually fairly bogus. It generally turns out to mean a suspicion of certain kinds of totality and an enthusiastic endorsement of others.’ [409]