It can be argued that the entire cannon of modern socioeconomic theory has emerged either to support or reject the works of Karl Marx. Indeed, his statement that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” has become a mantra for leftist thinkers and an anathema for more conservative theorists. To a great extent, Marx intended such controversy. His theory is centred upon the concept of an economic base (the production of the basic necessities for a society) which underlies a superstructure (religion, politics, law). It is the interaction and conflicting interests between individuals within this dual structure which gives rise to ideology. Such ideology originates in the socioeconomic status of the individuals which produce it. Generally, the expression of ideology within a society is limited to the dominant class; historically, art and religion exemplify such theory. The oppositions and disparities inherent in the economic base do manifest themselves in a society’s ideological complex, however. History therefore becomes the study of opposing ideologies: conflicting economic interests between the ideologies of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie gives rise to a third ideology which surmounts the initial opposition and itself becomes the dominant ideology. In artistic terms, Marx’s dialectic materialism demands that art both supports and rejects – that it is a function for and a critic of – the dominant ideology. An artistic creation, or more broadly any creation of the superstructure, cannot therefore arise in a society which has a differing ideology than that in which it does arise.
There have been numerous reinterpretations of Marxist thought, yet few have had the influence that the works of Louis Althusser have had. He reinterpreted Marxism to focus on the works of the more mature Marx, which he believed did not correspond with simple dialectic materialism. In his rereading, economy is not the originator of ideology. While the dominant class imposes its ideology upon individuals of the lesser classes, the dominant ideology originates in the means of production and the relations between the classes. Termed in a more Althusserian manner, the Subject controls the subject, but is itself a reflection of the Subject-subject relationship. Particular ideologies were indeed based on material conditions, yet they also had an imaginary aspect: Althusser reads in the later Marx that individuals have an imaginary relation to their means of existence. Ideology does however express itself in materialistic terms: a policeman’s shout, a prayer. Most radically, Althusser challenged the notion of the binary relationship between base and superstructure, which he believed was in fact a simplistic reading of Marx. In between these two categories lies a third concept, the ‘problematic’, which is the unconscious ideology which dictates the forms and content of a discourse. The problematic is the function of both the base and the superstructure. Within this framework, history becomes the study of the subconscious within texts. That which is concealed by the author is of equal importance as the text itself; thoughts cannot arise which are incompatible with the dominant apparatus of ideology.
Juliet Mitchell provides a more concrete example for Althusserian belief. In Femininity, narrative, and psychoanalysis she applies the historical process of Marx-Althusser to a specific definition of history, that of the novel. She describes the novel as primarily the domain of women, beginning with autobiographical works. Novels become for women a definition of and a reaction to their existence within bourgeois society. Through writing, women establish themselves as (Althusserian) subjects, as ‘hysterical’, simultaneously accepting and rejecting “sexuality under patriarchal capitalism” (p. 151). One does get a sense in Mitchell’s work of a parallel with Marx and Althusser, in that women could not think outside of the context of the ideological state apparatuses. In this regard, Mitchell argues that there is no distinct form of women’s writing. Alternately, female novelists are reflections of their repressed existence within a patriarchal society; the very language itself is phallocentric. Thus, in Althusserian terms, women novelists became subject (with the latent double-meaning of the word) to the Subject. Working within the terms of patriarchal capitalism, women nevertheless were able to provide an alternate history for themselves by the very act of writing. They therefore became manifestations of Althusser’s concept of Subject-subject reflection, they became in a sense bisexual.
While Marx’s original maxim can be validly interpreted as it stands, there have been numerous reappraisal of its validity. The consequence of Althusser’s work is the complication of Marx’s original precept to include “subconsciousness as determined by life”. Mitchell subsequently limits the general concepts of Marx and Althusser to a specific example and ideology, that of women novelists writing under early modern patriarchal capitalism. At its most fundamental level however, Marx’s statement remains pertinent.
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