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CHAPTER 1
The Althusserian Definition of "Theory"
ALAIN BADIOU
What does Althusser have in mind when he uses the word theory? This word, in some sense, in Reading Capital, is what I would call a "master-word." The exact intention of Louis Althusser is to formulate a proof that Capital is, I quote, "the absolute beginning of the history of a science" (RCC 13). And the provisional definition of "science," the absolute beginning of which he speaks, is the "theory of history." So, the problem is to give a proof that, reading Capital, we can identify the absolute beginning of the theory of history. And so, we find the word theory present at the very beginning of Althusser's investigation, as he summarizes the intellectual strategy of Reading Capital. But, immediately, we run into difficulties ...
First, what exactly constitutes the absolute beginning of a science? The absolute beginning of a science is not the same thing as the pure apparition of something of theoretical value. Why? Because the birth of a theory is very often, perhaps always, the revolution of a preexistent theory: a theory comes, in general, not in the void but by revolution, as the transformation of an old or preexistent theory. Engels explains this point in the preface of the second volume of Capital, which is a very important reference for Althusser himself: a new theory is not the creation ex nihilo of a new theoretical dimension. In the best case, it is a complete revolution of an old theory ... that is, in the case of Capital, a complete revolution of classical economic theory. So, and this is my first point, theory is not the name of newness as such; it is not pure invention. Its value is a differential one. It is the distance — the écart — between two different theories. This point will be a constance, a sort of fixed point in Reading Capital. All beginnings and also all contradictions must be reduced to differences. All that really exists is an articulated complex of differences. This is the principal idea of the end of Althusser's introduction, at the beginning of Reading Capital ... the text that announces the passage from Capital to Marx's philosophy.
Any theory possesses its discursive order, and thus the effective existence of a theory is always the immanent organization of concepts in the system. This is the last word of Althusser's text, "system," and we shall see much more systématicité of the system in the chapters that follow (RCC 72). But of what system does Althusser speak? Of the system of thinking as a totalité, of the thinking of totalité. So, theory, as a word, becomes in the end what Althusser names quite precisely the systematicité of the system. Theory thus occurs alongside other words like totalité, thinking, and concept, while system, as systematicité, is dissolved in a complex of differences. The word theory is not a stable word, and the history of the word in Althusser's text is much more the history of a sort of vanishing, of its décomposition. So, my argument here will be something like the story of the vanishing of theory; the theoretical vanishing of theory.
Theory cannot be understood, in the context of the Althusserian text, from the point of view of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. This is a significant change from the Marxist tradition. In a common Marxist tradition, the relation between theory and practice is a very important one. Althusser is constantly attempting, in fact, to destroy this opposition between theory and practice. Why is this point so important? Why is it so important for Althusser to explain that the word theory cannot be understood from the point of view of its relationship to practice? I think it is because this constitutes the definition of the immanent materialism of Althusser, its general definition. Althusser always wants to replace the guarantee of relation by the real of production: this is the crux of Althusser's intervention. And if, after all, a dialectical relationship is a relation, it is not by itself a production. So we cannot understand clearly what constitutes a theory only by its dialectical relationship to practice. We must observe and determine to what extent that theory must also be a production, and must be by itself a production, and not in an external relationship to its opposite.
Althusser affirms a new form of materialism by the destruction of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice: not a materialism of relations but a materialism of production. And this is a very important point. Consequently, we also have the impossibility of determining theory, not only as the opposite term of practice, but as a result of practices, as something which is the abstract result of concrete practices. In a common vision of therelationship between practices and theory, theory is a sort of abstract synthesis, the origin of which is practice. For Althusser, we encounter what he named "pragmatism." Pragmatism is precisely defined by the idea that the verification of the truth of a theory lies in practice. Althusser affirms that a true understanding of theory must be the discovery of an immanent guarantee of truth, and not its external guarantee verified in the field of practices. Althusser is truly an immanentist thinker, at every level of its determination. A truth of a theory — if truth exists, if there is something like truth — lies purely within the theoretical process, inside the process of scientific theory and not in the form of an external guarantee. And this, naturally, introduces the question of theory as production and not as an expression, a theory which is not a result of some complex of social or historical practices. And this leads finally to the question, which will be my final question, as it is in the text of Althusser himself: the question of the productive mechanism, the productive apparatus, the materiality of production itself in the case of theory.
Althusser refuses any dialectical vision of the pair theory-practice. Theory cannot be understood by its relationship with practice; not only can theory not be verified by its application in practice, but we must, in fact, destroy the very correlation between theory and practice. This is certainly a very important point of all Althusserian constructions. It constitutes not the refusal of the dialecticité of the relationship between theory and practice but the destruction of the dialectical couple itself. What then are the means of this destruction?
This destruction of the dialectical pair theory-practice occurs via the affirmation that theory is a name for some particular practices. So the very opposition of the two terms is destroyed by the affirmation that theory itself must be understood as a practice. "Theory is, in the strict sense of the term, a practice, a scientific or theoretical practice" (RCC 61). It is clear that when you say that theory is a practice, you destroy the classical relationship between theory and practice, but when you say that, as a sort of verbal definition of theory, theory is a theoretical practice, this is hardly very interesting or novel. So the point is thus to understand, not the noun "theory," but the adjective "theoretical." And I think that Althusser's text orchestrates a movement, the transition from the noun "theory" to the adjective "theoretical." And this passage is also in some sense materialist. It is materialist because it is founded by a radical assertion, which can be formulated as the statement: "Only practices really exist." So Althusser's idea is that the relationship of theory to practice by dialectical opposition is not really radical from the point of view of materialism. The only radical solution to this problem is to affirm that theory itself is a practice; because in a materialist vision we must assume that what exists is always so in some form of practice. And it is also an anti-dialectical passage — from the noun to the adjective — because if all that exists, exists in the form of practices, the question becomes that of the differential multiplicity of practices; and this differential multiplicity of practices, the difference between all forms of practice is practically summarized by a certain number of adjectives: for example, "theoretical practices," "technical practices," or "scientific practices." So the nominal field of materialism is really the demand to transform certain nouns into adjectives. This is truly a materialist necessity, from the point of view of Althusser himself and from the point of view of the destruction of the dialectical relationship between abstraction and concrete. This is so because if you maintain the dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the form of an opposition, you naturally sustain the opposition between something concrete (the practice) and something abstract (the theory). At the same time, this opposition is not a materialist one: what is materialist is to affirm that only practices exist. But if there exist a multiplicity of different practices, we return to the idea of a complex of different differences, if you will, and theory must also be one form of practice. And so, the provisional name for this is, precisely, "theoretical practices."
This whole materialist vision is opposed to the idea that the Marxist theory of history is or proposes something like a hypothesis. The reason why is clear: if the Marxist theory of history proposes a hypothesis, we are in the field of pragmatism. Hypotheses must be verified by historical practices. If we don't accept that sort of pragmatism, we also refuse to say that the Marxist theory of history occurs in the form of a hypothesis. Hypothesis is, in fact, a pragmatist vision of theory; hypotheses must be verified by the concrete realization of history itself, by the concretization of history. And in some sense, history is also of a dialectical nature because it opens the field of the possibility of negation, the falsity of the hypothesis and, in some sense, the struggle between the possibility of the validity of the hypothesis and the possibility of its negation. All that is perfectly clear and explicit in Althusser's text: Althusser writes that it is impossible to understand the Marxist theory of history as form of hypothesis.
I have written a small book under the title The Communist Hypothesis, and it puts forward a radical point of opposition to the Althusserian vision. I just want to say, in my defensive position, that the word communism, in the Communist Hypothesis, is not taken here as a category of the Marxist theory of history. It is not the signification of the word communism that is in question concerning the communist hypothesis. Rather, it is what I name an "idea," the "idea" of communism. An idea is not a concept: so "communist" here is not a scientific concept in the field of the Marxist theory of history. This then reminds me of an intense moment in my personal relationship with Althusser. It was in the brief sequence between 1967 and 1969, with 1968 just in the middle. Before and after, things were not exactly the same in regard to my relationship to Althusser. This was also the moment of existence of the Groupe Spinoza. The Groupe Spinoza was a group composed by Althusser, with some friends of Althusser, all precisely reading Capital practically, engaged in the project to write a sort of synthesis of our epistemological convictions. The idea was to produce a fundamental book concerning theory: concerning what theory is, what constitutes an epistemological rupture and so on; to propose something like an educational book concerning all these sorts of themes. All that was destroyed by 1968 and, after that, by very strong political differences and struggles.
But in discussions with Althusser at the time, I proposed — it was a part of my contribution to this inexistent book — to distinguish "concept," "notion," and "category." And there is an echo of that in my work concerning the concept of "model." The idea was to reserve the use of "concept" for scientific discourse. So, the semantic unities of a scientific construction would be named "concept," in order to reserve the use of "notion" for ideological discourse. So we would have scientific concepts and ideological notions. And, finally, I proposed to reserve "category" for philosophical unities. And so my conclusion concerning the "communist hypothesis" is that, in this expression, "communism" cannot be a concept but "communism" can be a category. And, in fact, it remains to be shown that the word communism is and must be all at once a concept, a notion, and a category and this is in fact the case: communism is a concept as possible category of history; it is a notion because it has a very strong ideological value, a subjective value; and finally, it is a category in its more general and abstract philosophical meaning.
I agree with Althusser's critique of the idea of the Marxist theory of history as a hypothesis, while I maintain in contrast that we can speak of a communist hypothesis. Allow me then to return to the passage from theory to theoretical practices, or to the "adjectivization" of the question of theory. Naturally, we have many theoretical practices. This adjectivization is also a pluralization, it is also the affirmation of the multiplicity of differences as such, which is substituted for the pair theory-practice. Finally, all that is absorbed in the field of the multiplicity of different practices. Is this affirmation, this adjectivization in the form of the recognition of existence of a multiplicity of theoretical practices, the disappearance of a unified use of the word theory? And finally, is theory, as a concept, a possible concept, a name, a word, a category completely dissolved in the pure multiplicity of different practices? I think this is not exactly the case. And my reading of this text that is Reading Capital is to observe that this materialist movement, which is in fact the practical pluralization of the word theory, this "materialist gesture," is not absolutely the disparition (disappearance) or destruction of some form of unity in the word theory. There is a trace of the vanishing of the word theory in the multiplicity of theoretical practices. This trace is the apparition and the use, in Althusser's text, of many classical terms of an epistemological nature.
A sort of retour du refoulé (return of the repressed), the disparition of the unity of the word of the "theory" is paid for by the appearance of many words that lie within the vocabulary of the philosophy of science. And the most important of these appearances is that of "knowledge." "Knowledge" appears as the name of what is produced by theoretical practice: because, naturally, if you have the transformation of the opposition theory/practice into "theoretical practice," you must name the specific production of theoretical practice, and the specific production of theoretical practice is knowledge of some sort. So, finally, the definition of a "theoretical practice" is that it is the production, or rather the field of production, of knowledge: "The production of knowledge is the hallmark of theoretical practice." The characteristic activity of theoretical practice is the production of knowledge. But to completely understand knowledge, we find the more surprising return of "thinking." After the disparition of theory, we have the appearance of knowledge, and with the appearance of knowledge, we have the appearance of thinking, and thinking is the name for the element or the space of the process of the production of knowledge. It is the topological nature of the process of the production of knowledge.
Where do we encounter this process of production, the production of knowledge? The answer is: this production of knowledge occurs in thinking. Thinking is, in some sense, the common characteristic of all theoretical practices, the common element, the common place. I quote: "The production of knowledge ... [the production of knowledge is, in fact, the materialist definition of theoretical practice; a theoretical practice is, in fact, a production of knowledge] constitutes a process [naturally, a 'process' and not an 'entity'] that takes place entirely in thought" (RCC 42, emphasis in original).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Concept in Crisis"
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