Structural Causality and Darstellung

In contrast to transitive causality, expressive causality does have a category for the effectivity of the social whole on its elements, but Althus-

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ser maintains that this category is "premised on the absolute condition that the whole is not conceived as a structure." In fact, neither transitive nor expressive causality is capable of thinking the structural unity of distinct elements. "If the whole is posited as structured, i.e., as possessing a type of unity quite different from the type of unity of the spiritual whole . . . not only does it become impossible to think the determination of the elements by the structure in the categories of . . . transitive causality, it also becomes impossible to think it in the category of the global expressive causality of a universal inner essence immanent in its phenomenon" (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 187). The proposal to think the determination of the elements of a whole by the structure of the whole poses a different problem altogether, one first recognized, Althusser contends, by Spinoza, then buried in darkness until finally rediscovered by Marx.

According to this third notion of causality, which Althusser calls structural causality , relations between elements of the whole are not exterior to the whole, as is the case with transitive causality, nor are they expressions of its immanent principle, as with expressive causality. Instead, the whole is nothing less than the reciprocal effectivities of its elements, at the same time as these elements are determined by the whole, that is, by their interrelationship with all the other elements within the whole. The cause of the effects is the "complex organization of the whole" while the latter is precisely "the sum of the effects and their interrelationships." The structure of the whole is "immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that is the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects , in short [it] is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements [and] is nothing outside its effects" (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 188-89). The whole becomes what Althusser calls an "absent cause" because it is present only in and through the reciprocal effectivity of its elements, and Althusser uses Marx's term Darstellung (representation, mise-en-scène) to express this idea. Althusser describes the gradual development of a concept of causality by which Marx was able to break definitively with metaphors of interiority and exteriority, a concept of causality that designated the existence of a structure in its effects:

In every case, the ordinary distinctions between outside and inside disappear, along with the "intimate" links within the phenomena as opposed to their visible disorder: we find a different image, a new quasi-concept, definitely freed from the empiricist antinomies of phenomenal subjectivity and essential interiority; we find an objective system governed in its most con-

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crete determinations by laws of its erection (montage) and machinery , by the specifications of its concept. Now we can recall that highly symptomatic term "Darstellung ," compare it with this "machinery" and take it literally, as the very existence of this machinery in its effects: the mode of existence of the stage direction (mise en scène ) on the theater which is simultaneously its own stage, its own script, its own actors, the theater whose spectators can, on occasion, be spectators only because they are first of all forced to be its actors, caught by constraints of a script and parts whose authors they cannot be, since it is in essence an authorless theater . (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 193)

Ben Brewster, Althusser's translator and compiler of the glossaries to For Marx and Reading Capital , provides a helpful explanation of Althusser's analogy: "Empiricist ideologies, seeing the action on the stage, the effects, believe that they are seeing a faithful copy of reality, recognizing themselves and their preconceptions in the mirror held up to them by the play. . . . The Hegelian detects the hand of God or the Spirit writing the script and directing the play. For the Marxist, on the contrary, this is a theater, but one which reflects neither simple reality nor any transcendental truth, a theater without an author; the object of his science is the mechanism which produces the stage effects (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 310).

Structural causality conceptualizes the social whole as a parallelogram of forces each bearing within itself the imprint of its conditions of existence, the social whole. Althusser's insistence that the whole and the parts are inseparable and that the whole is present in the relation of its effects forces us to think causal relationships as complex rather than simple phenomena. In the first place, structural causality makes us think of causality as a relation. "What Althusser is trying to hammer home to us," Alex Callinicos points out, "is the shift from treating a cause as a thing, a substance, a distinct, separately identifiable entity to treating it as a relation, from something that can be immediately or ultimately pointed to, grasped hold of, to treating it as the displacements effected by the structure of a whole upon its elements. . . . [R]eality is not something underlying these appearances, it is the structured relation of these appearances" (Callinicos 1976, 52). More profoundly, the concept of structural causality forces us to recognize that social structures must be conceptualized along two dimensions, one that stresses the structured whole as the reciprocal effectivity of its elements, but also a second that investigates the structure of the elements themselves with the intention of discovering their particular effectivity. These dimensions do not, of course, exist in isolation. Rather, they

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form a kind of dialectic that forces us to move ceaselessly from one level of analysis to another: from a given level of generality to a more specific one and from a given level of specificity to a more general one. Furthermore, as if things were not complicated enough, we must realize that we are as yet dealing with only a single theoretical moment, what Althusser calls a "conjuncture," and that we have yet to pose the problem of prior conjunctures and the problems of transition and periodization.

Before moving on, we might pause to consider once again the distance that separates Althusser's concept of structural causality from Spinoza's rationalist metaphysics. Spinoza envisages a kind of unified and complete science that would enable every natural change to be shown as a completely determined effect within a single system of causes; that is, everything would be adequately explicable within a single theory. Althusser would not disagree that such a conclusion follows logically from Spinoza's concept of God or Nature, which does not permit inadequacy or uneven development. Althusser might even accept this proposition as an ultimate conclusion of a realist and materialist position within philosophy. However, Althusser would insist that such a "speculative-rationalist" philosophical conclusion is of little use to scientific practice. Spinoza maintains that insofar as we reflect on our ideas—that is, insofar as we remain within the realm of pure logic—we participate in the same relationship of adequacy/certainty as God, although at an infinitely lower level. For Althusser, by contrast, we cannot be apodictically certain of even this degree of adequacy. For Althusser, as much as for Wittgenstein or Derrida, theoretical practice is internally marked by differential dislocations or gaps that cannot be eliminated precisely because human reason cannot meaningfully approximate the godlike relationship of adequacy/certainty that Spinoza believes to be attainable by means of deduction from self-evident or logically indubitable propositions.