The concept of the concrete carries a lot of weight in critical theory. Travelling as it has from Hegel through Marx to Adorno’s derision of those who would arbitrarily divide the concrete and the abstract. But despite his noted value iconoclasm, it was Althusser who wrote in his infamous Preface to Capital Volume I of what it meant to study capital, an abstract object with a reality ‘infinitely more concrete’ than anything one can touch or see (Althusser 2001, 49). Reflecting on theory and practice in Marx, Althusser’s comments point to the imbrication of scientific abstraction with the concrete reality of abstract concepts (2001, 48). This is not simply a methodological problem but a real one. As Althusser often observed, concrete reality and the production of knowledge about that reality are always overdetermined by abstract relations. Put together, these observations urge a certain caution when reducing the concrete to a methodological concern synonymous with what is practical and particular.
William S. Lewis’s Concrete Critical Theory is constructed around a series of previously published articles that approach various ‘concrete’ concerns by staging a series of encounters between Althusser and contemporary Anglo-American liberal political and moral philosophers. Framed as a means for addressing contemporary debates on class, race, gender, and democracy, the book is mediated by a vision of critical theory that for Lewis can align Althusser with the philosophy of social science. Before moving to its core arguments, the book opens with a strangely analytic discussion around the ethics of studying Althusser despite the tragic killing of his wife. From Chapter Three, Lewis then makes a case for the continuity in Althusser’s ‘scientism’ from the early ‘theoreticist’ texts of the 1960s, For Marx and Reading Capital, to writings from the mid-1970s onwards where it is claimed by some that Althusser abandoned any pretence to science for a return to philosophy. The theme of ‘scientism’ is then related in Chapter Four to an attempted synthesis of American-style pragmatism with a sketch of the titular concrete critical theory as it derives from Althusser’s reworking of Lenin’s injunction to perform a ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ (47). The rest of the book is largely concerned with applying this framework to the debates above with reference to the concrete as a practical concern.
Although Althusser could sometimes be loose with how he used the term ‘concrete’, we still might expect an invocation of Lenin’s formula to elicit some reflection on the concept itself, not least on how it relates to the abstract relations of capital. Alas, such a discussion is entirely absent from this book. Instead, Lewis makes a claim we are expected to take at face value, that there exists an affinity between Althusser’s deployment of the phrase ‘concrete analysis’ and John Dewey’s use of the term ‘concrete’ (10). If the connection is only made superficially, it is even more dubious for Dewey’s well-known anti-communism. Nonetheless, Lewis takes this as license to consider the concrete in verifiable and practical terms, wagering that a detailed account of ‘concrete analysis’ from Althusser’s unpublished 1976 ‘self-interview’, Les Vaches noirs, can be reconstructed in a more practical way as pragmatic social science. The tools for this reconstruction are gleaned from a critique of critical theory offered by a theoretical descendent of Dewey’s, the late James Bohman. But this is where the question the concrete gets lost. Althusser’s vision of ‘concrete analysis’ can no more be isolated from his concerns with the concrete reality of abstract relations than it can be detached from the specificity of his politics. Whereas Bohman explicitly disavows any political ground for theory or analysis (90), focusing instead on pragmatic concerns that can be validated via a kind of consensus that leaves no room for conceptualising the abstract materialism of capital.
Part of the problem here is the position of philosophy. Among other things, Les Vaches noirs was imagined as a confrontation with the French Communist Party (PCF) on abandoning ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. While Lewis offers some discussion of ‘the dictatorship’, he bypasses the thrust of Althusser’s contention that it consists in a ‘new practice of philosophy’ (Althusser 2017, 139 ff). It is hard to overstate the importance of this. Without grasping the concept of ‘dictatorship’ as a counter-philosophical position outside the state, we are left within the ideological unity of a social formation that sets the terms for how the class struggle plays out. For Althusser, without its transformation, philosophy can only be produced in a hegemonic form, that is, in the form of philosophy. Practiced in this way, philosophy can only produce instrumental knowledge within the existing ideological unity. Unfortunately, Lewis’s proposal for a pluralist, pragmatic and analytic vision of ‘concrete analysis’ does little to dispel the sense it would come from within such a unity.
It is also hard to see how Lewis’s contention holds that Bohman developed a theory ‘designed to function politically much like Althusser’s concrete analysis’ (86) when Althusser so forcefully declaimed pragmatism as among a set of spontaneous bourgeois ideologies including ‘empiricism, evolutionism, humanism’ (Althusser 1990, 65). Lewis sees Bohman’s work as a corrective to ‘the more obvious holes and contradictions in Althusser’s method’ (89). But one wonders how Althusser’s politics can be reconciled here when Bohman dismisses Marxism and historical materialism tout court as a deterministic meta-narrative (90-91). Although Lewis attempts a defence of Althusser’s historical materialism against Bohman’s caricature, having already reduced it to a relativist ‘form of standpoint theory’ (86), he is left within a paradigm of philosophy that negates the transformation Althusser so desired.
Curiously, Lewis begins the book by recounting a missed encounter between Althusser and the Frankfurt School despite Horkheimer’s brutal appraisal of pragmatism as the reduction of reason ‘to a mere instrument’ (Horkheimer 2004, 37). This captures the problem nicely. Lewis wants to employ Althusser to instrumental ends by locating him within a tradition whose liquidation of philosophy is produced in the form of a philosophy. A further issue for Lewis is that Althusser’s scientism is founded on an attempt to theorise the science of philosophy from a specifically communist position, which for him meant establishing the reciprocity of theory and practice. It is a political practice of the science of philosophy that for Althusser formulates the place of a Marxist in philosophy. No matter how you look at the continuity or otherwise of Althusser’s thought, neither philosophy nor politics are effaceable in his work. They are always freighted together. Admittedly, Lewis does not dismiss either philosophy or politics, but he manages to evacuate the specific politico-philosophical content of a thinker who, as his comrade, collaborator and friend Étienne Balibar remarked upon his death, was always at once a Marxist, a communist and a philosopher.
While Concrete Critical Theory is nominally ‘a book of Marxist political theory’ (147), it is attenuated throughout by an epistemological thread that overlooks this question of philosophy’s form. Denominated in different moments as pluralist, pragmatic or democratic, this thread is carried into the book’s conceptualisation of critical theory by a figure that we should recognise as the liberal political subject. This is most legible in a normative perspective that relativises any notion of emancipation, an approach inherited in one way or another from the book’s key interlocutors. From Bohman to figures like the liberal socialist Erik Olin Wright, analytic feminist scholar Mari Mikkola, an acknowledged debt to Rahel Jaeggi, and critical appraisals of Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Even where they have offered a critique of political liberalism, one way of another the spectre of its subject still haunts the work of all these academics. Crucially, it is this very same figurative grounding that has informed the neo-Kantian colonisation of critical theory after Habermas, a tradition that hangs like a shadow over this book, but which bears little resemblance to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, let alone to Althusser.
What surprises me about the attempt to enlist Althusser here is how this subjective form is undone by some of his more incisive work. In two of the texts discussed by Lewis, the posthumously published ‘manuals’, How to be a Marxist in philosophy and Philosophy for Non-philosophers, Althusser offers important insights into the conjunction of abstraction and the dominant ideology of both philosophy and its subject. In both texts, Althusser addresses the question of philosophy’s entanglement inter alia, with a determinant bourgeois juridical ideology. The very ideology that bequeaths its categories of judgement, validity and so on to the paradigmatic subject of modern philosophy after Kant. It is this figure that lurks behind a confrontation with philosophical anthropology which is reflected in Althusser’s much discussed anti-humanism.
Lewis is clearly aware of Althusser’s critique of philosophical anthropology, but he somehow overlooks its consequences where it comes to pragmatism, an intellectual tradition founded on philosophical anthropology. In my view, this is clearest in how Althusser’s communism is displaced to allow for a pragmatic and utilitarian approach to politics. The most depressing articulation being Lewis’s claim of pragmatism’s adequation to Althusser’s ‘mature understanding of history and ideology’ (88), which supposedly aligns with his apparent abandonment of ‘the dream of full human freedom’ (ibid). Such a disavowal licenses the ‘more modest measure’ (88) that for Lewis chimes with his reconstruction of Althusser’s ‘concrete analysis’. But, if Lewis has not completely evacuated politics from Althusser’s work, he has found a way of superimposing onto it a kind of politics antithetical to the project itself. This is especially evident in Chapter Seven, that poses among problems for ‘deliberative democracy’, issues of coercion, consent, and autonomy, but leaves untouched the question of how liberal democracy and capital have forged such a conducive coupling. Even in more critical moments, like the final chapter criticising cosmopolitanism, Lewis acknowledges the problem of ‘the particular structuring reality of the capitalist system’ (175) without properly exploring its implications.
Numerous moments stand out for an intentionally ‘thin’ (11) approach to critical theory that has little to say about capital. To highlight one, in an apparent effort to ward off charges of economic reductionism, Chapter Five buries itself so deep in particulars as to obviate any economic determination of class composition whatsoever in favour of identity traits that might tell us whether an individual belongs to one class or another. Naturally, this includes ‘the style, and image choice’ of tattoos (125). Even setting aside Althusser’s warnings about vulgar sociology, one wonders if we are supposed to imagine solidarity mapped to the sub-dermal placement of either anchors, skulls, or lotus flowers. What is striking is that in a book with so few examples, the few included, like this one, do more to undermine the arguments than to advance them.
I would struggle to call this an Althusserian book. We might consider it an attempt to fashion a pragmatic theory For Althusser, but ultimately it obtains more in the other direction, as an exercise in using Althusser to sharpen tools he would never have used. It is not that an investigation of what Althusser calls ‘concrete analysis’ is unwarranted or unwelcome, or that applying such a theory to gender, race, class or any other form of domination might be useful. Rather, it is that here concrete analysis largely becomes a methodological concern that leads outside the political program from which it was derived. A political program whose object remains invisible to any index of concrete particulars. An object that must be thought where it cannot be seen. That terrible concrete reality of capital.
Concrete Critical Theory is a strange book. Each chapter is laid out carefully, clearly argued and painstakingly signposted, but too often Lewis says what he is doing without doing it. Lewis is a noted Althusser scholar, but his meticulous research is elided by an emptying out of Althusser’s philosophical and political commitments. Important concepts appear briefly or not at all, and often when they do their wider consequences are overlooked. Critical encounters are teased only to be summarily dismissed; a paradigm example being the decision to bypass a warranted critique of Critical Realism in relation to Althusser’s work (86). Whereas, affirmative positions, like the one taken on the tumidly named ‘pragmatic critical social theory’ (ibid) are advanced by matter of opinion as ‘pretty much right’ (89). Meanwhile, the premise of applying the continuity of Althusser’s scientism from the 1960s onwards to a method of analysis is dropped in the final chapter for an analogy drawn from an obscure Marxist-Christian text from 1946.
In the end, it is hard to escape the sense of an attempt to force the most awkward of espousals by speed dating Althusser with a cast of contemporary thinkers with whom he would have had no common cause. In the final instance, however, I suspect if Althusser were to reply, it would be on the matter of the concrete.
Reviewed by Jai Bentley-Payne