Overdetermination

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Althusser is often referred to as the leading proponent of the scientific strand of structuralist Marxism. Two of his collections of essays, Pour Marx (1965) and Lire de Capital (1965), deeply affected Marxist thought throughout France and elsewhere. Emerging in the postwar years and rising in prominence between 1965 and 1975, the structuralist branch of Marxism opposes the purported Hegelian and Feuerbachian humanism of the early works of Karl Marx. Althusser argued that young Marx was forced to contend with a language and an epistemological framework that engaged humanism and classical political economy; these themes necessarily animated his early writings. Perhaps more important, Althusser also argued that Marx's body of work contains an epistemological rupture, a shift in the underlying theoretical problematic. Instead of being concerned with the essence of man, his species-being, as may be evident in his work throughout the 1840s, during the period from 1857 to 1863 Marx's work was decidedly different in its focus. Marx became concerned with the economic or material infrastructure and ideological superstructure of the capitalist mode of production, with revealing the historical logic of capitalism.

Central to this rupture, then, was a rejection of the classical economist's idea that the material needs of the individual give way to a particular economic system in a given historical moment, that individual needs are the basis for economic organization and thus a theory of society. Marx (and Althusser) emphasized instead the determining (or dominant) role of the mode of production in the formation of the social structure; the mode of production emerged as central to the evolution of social systems and key to Marx's historical materialism. For Althusser, this rupture also led to the emergence of a complex, multifaceted, and structural model of causality.

Counter to classical Marxism, a social formation or social system is not simply a reflection of the economic infrastructure; instead, the economic, politico-legal, and ideological systems each have their own deep structures and logics that operate over and above the individual constituting the prevailing social formation. Because of asymmetry, or the law of uneven development, any element of the social formation may come into dominance at any one time. Each system is relatively autonomous. Still, the economic, politico-legal and ideological systems are imbricative and cannot be considered absolutely autonomous. Ideology, for example, constitutes and is constituted by the conditions of existence. It legitimates the existing social order, mediating the contradictions of the economic sphere or system while also being materially embodied in the relations of production. Furthermore, each sphere is not equal in its causality. The economic system, as Althusser reveals, constitutes “in the last instance” a structure in dominance.

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