Overdetermination: Althusser versus Resnick and Wolff

Abstract

This paper is a critical investigation of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's theory of overdetermination. I demonstrate the overall structure of Louis Althusser's original theory of overdetermination through a close examination of his major works and compare it to Resnick and Wolff's reformulation. My main interest in this task lies not so much in revealing the difference between the two as it does in questioning Resnick and Wolff's understanding of Althusser as not antiessentialist enough, leaving some “essentialist moments” in his works. I show that, as with his major concepts such as “determination in the last instance” and “structure in dominance,” Althusser was so serious and consistent that Resnick and Wolff's allegation of inconsistency is unfair. Furthermore, I argue that these allegedly “essentialist” concepts are not something that can be removed from the overall structure of Althusser's theory of overdetermination as suggested by Resnick and Wolff.

Keywords:

• Louis Althusser
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Overdetermination
• Dialectics
• Contradiction

Notes

¹It was not easy to find any work tackling this issue.

This article was written before our unfortunate and sorrowful loss of Steve. Even though I raise objections to his theory of overdetermination in what follows, my respect for Steve as a radical scholar and a passionate teacher is never undermined.

²They are numbered for later use in the last section.

³In both Althusser's and Resnick and Wolff's terminology, sphere and practice could safely be used interchangeably as a constituting element of (social) totality.

⁴Brackets indicate the year of the original French publication.

⁵One of the few new concepts in his later works is the concept of “process without a subject,” which we will deal with below.

⁶This categorization is mine.

⁷Althusser quotes Mao ([1965] 1969, 194): “A simple process contains only a single pair of opposites, while a complex process contains more.”

⁸“[E]very concrete difference featured in the Hegelian totality, including the ‘spheres’ visible in this totality (civil society, the State, religion, philosophy, etc.), all these differences are negated as soon as they are affirmed: for they are no more than ‘moments’ of the simple internal principle of the totality, which fulfills itself by negating the alienated difference that it posed” (Althusser [1965] 1969, 203).

⁹As Althusser ([1965] 1969, 194) writes, “the complexity of the process is a plurality of contradictions, one of which is dominant.”

¹⁰For another interesting quote, right after mentioning the unfixed character of principal/secondary roles, Althusser ([1965] 1969, 209) warns: “But we must add that, while no longer univocal, it has not for all that become ‘equivocal’ the product of the first-comer among empirical pluralities, at the mercy of circumstances and ‘chance,’ their pure reflection, as the soul of some poet is merely that passing cloud. Quite the contrary, once it has ceased to be univocal and hence determined once and for all, standing to attention in its role and essence, it reveals itself as determined by the structured complexity that assigns it to its role, as—if you will forgive me the astonishing expression—complexly-structurally-unevenly determined.”

¹¹“That one contradiction dominates the others presupposes that the complexity in which it features is a structured unity, and that this structure implies the indicated domination-subordination relations between the contradictions” (Althusser [1965] 1969, 201).

¹²As opposed to Hegelian totality with the center, the glossary of Reading Capital defines Marxist totality as “decentred structure in dominance” (Althusser and Balibar [1965] 1970, 322).

¹³“Domination is not just an indifferent fact, it is a fact essential to the complexity itself. That is why complexity implies domination as one of its essentials: it is inscribed in its structure” (Althusser [1965] 1969, 201).

¹⁴This phrase appears in the chapter on “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx, to which we will come back shortly.

¹⁵Althusser, following Lenin, uses the phrase “general” contradiction in the sense of “principal” or “dominant” contradiction.

¹⁶“This overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognized—an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon” (Althusser [1965] 1969, 113).

¹⁷See Althusser and Balibar (1965, 197, 58, 97, 98–9, 106, 111, etc.).

¹⁸This concept particularly captures the attention since Resnick and Wolff make an argument that it shows that Althusser in his later years changed his view from that presented in For Marx and Reading Capital and that their overdetermination is informed by this concept. Their argument to this effect was quoted above in Q4.

¹⁹“In reality Marxist philosophy thinks in and according to quite different categories: determination in the last instance—which is quite different from the Origin, Essence or Cause” (Althusser [1974] 1976, 96).