Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 05:45:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: E.P. THOMPSON VS. LOUIS ALTHUSSER


I love E.P. Thompson, though I have read little of his work to
date.  During my recent trip to Cambridge/Boston, I managed to
locate his hard-to-find book THE POVERTY OF THEORY, the first 210
pages of which is a rip-roaring polemic against Louis Althusser.
What a style Thompson has: elegant, sarcastic, anti-academic -- in
short, very worthy of me.  His analysis is blistering.   Later in
the essay he attacks Althusser's Stalinism, but he begins with
philosophical considerations.  Then he describes the category of
human experience and investigates the subject-object relation.
Then he expounds upon the logic of history and defends historical
research as a field of study (pp. 38ff).  Then he launches into an
investigation of the working methods of Marx and Engels (pp.
52ff).  And I am only up to page 64.  But I would like to share
with you some pearls of Thompson's prose:

"I will argue the following propositions, and examine them in
sequence.  1) Althusser's epistemology is derivative from a
limited kind of academic learning-process, and has no general
validity; 2) As a result he has no category (or way of handling)
'experience' (or social being's impingement upon social
consciousness); hence he falsifies the 'dialogue' with empirical
evidence inherent in knowledge production, and in Marx's own
practice, and thereby falls continually into modes of thought
designated in the Marxist tradition as 'idealist'; 3) In
particular he confuses the necessary empirical dialogue with
_empiricism_, and consistently misrepresents (in the most naive
ways) the practice of historical materialism (including Marx's own
practice); 4) The resultant critique of 'historicism' is at
certain points _identical_ to the specifically anti-Marxist
critique of historicism (as represented by Popper), although the
authors derive from this opposite conclusions.

"This argument will take us some way on our road.  I will then
propose: 5) Althusser's structuralism is a structuralism of
_stasis_, departing from Marx's own historical method; 6) Hence
Althusser's conceptual universe has no adequate categories to
explain contradiction or change -- or class struggle; These
critical weaknesses explain why Althusser must be silent (or
evasive) as to other important categories, among them 'economic'
and 'needs'; 8) From which it follows that Althusser (and his
progeny) find themselves unable to handle, except in the most
abstract and theoretic way, questions of value, culture -- and
political theory."  [pp. 4-5]

"In the old days (one supposes), when the philosopher, labouring
by lamp-light in his study, came to this point in his argument, he
set down his pen, and looked around for an object in the real
world to interrogate.  Very commonly that object was the nearest
one to hand: his writing-table.  'Table', he said, 'how do I know
that you exist, and, if you do, how do I know that my concept,
table, represents your real existence?'  The table would look back
without blinking, and interrogate the philosopher in its turn.  It
was an exacting exchange, and according to which one was the
victor in the confrontation, the philosopher would inscribe
himself as idealist or a materialist.  Or so one must suppose from
the frequency with which tables appear.  Today the philosopher
interrogates instead the word: a pre-given linguistic artefact,
with an indistinct social genesis and _with a history_."  [pp.
6-7]

"These stirrings, these events, if they are within 'social being'
seem often to impinge upon, thrust into, break against, existent
social consciousness.  They propose new problems, and, above all,
they continually give rise to _experience_ -- a category which,
however imperfect it may be, is indispensable to the historian,
since it comprises the mental and emotional response, whether of
an individual or of a social group, to many inter-related events
or to many repetitions of the same kind of event.

"It may perhaps be argued that experience is a very low level of
mentation indeed: that it can produce no more than the grossest
'common sense', ideologically-contaminated 'raw material',
scarcely qualifying to enter the laboratory of Generalities I.  I
don't think that this is so; on the contrary, I consider that the
supposition that this is so is a very characteristic delusion of
intellectuals, who suppose that ordinary mortals are stupid.  In
my own view, the truth is more nuanced: the farmer 'knows' his
seasons, the sailor 'knows' his seas, but both may remain
mystified about kingship and cosmology."  [p. 7]

"Experience, then, does not arrive obediently in the way Althusser
proposes.... He has offered to us less an epistemology which takes
into account the actual formative motions of consciousness than a
description of certain procedures of academic life.  He has
abandoned the lamp-lit study and broken off the dialogue with an
exhausted table: he is now within the emplacements of the Ecole
Normale Superieur.  The data have arrived, obediently processed by
graduates and research assistants at a rather low level of
conceptual development (G I), they have been interrogated and
sorted into categories by a rigorous seminar of aspirant
professors (G II), and the G III is about to ascend the rostrum
and propound the conclusions of concrete knowledge.

"But outside of the university precincts another kind of
knowledge-production is going on all the time.  I will agree that
it is not always rigorous...."  [p. 8]

-- from Thompson, E.P.  THE POVERTY OF THEORY & OTHER ESSAYS.
London: Merlin, 1981.


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