Reading Transdisciplinarily: Sartre and Althusser

Abstract

This article considers transdisciplinarity from the standpoint of reading and readers, rather than as a collection of texts, concepts or proper names. It argues that the humanism and anti-humanism debates of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly understood through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, was above all a debate about the politics of reading. Understanding transdisciplinarity to relate to a projected model of post-disciplinarity, the article suggests that transdisciplinarity needs to supplement its conceptual and political remit with a theory of reading, such that reading across disciplines simultaneously becomes a question of reading beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Keywords

Althusser Barthes disciplines Marx post-disciplinarity reading Sartre transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinarity has been variously described as ‘a kind of operator or problematizing device’, a series of attempts that will ‘of necessity spring of some specific discipline(s) while not remaining confined within them, and not allowing them to remain confined within themselves’ and as having ‘a privileged relationship to the philosophical tradition, even if it is primarily one of negation’ (Osborne, 2011a: 15; Sandford, 2011: 23). A particular series of key concepts – structure, sex, subject, rhizome, networks, and so on – have been identified as possessing transdisciplinary qualities. That is to say, they cut across different disciplinary fields and destabilize the field(s) from which they apparently ‘come’. A particular series of texts that address questions – social, political, conceptual – in a transdisciplinary way have also been tentatively suggested, amongst which, according to Osborne, we find in mid- to late-20th-century France: Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, Foucault’s The Order of Things, Lacan’s Ecrits, and Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Osborne, 2011a: 15). What could be tentatively described as transdisciplinary texts also appear earlier, in the German critical tradition, in the wake of Marx’s movement through and beyond philosophy. Marx’s texts can themselves be seen as exemplarily transdisciplinary, moving between economics, politics, sociology, philosophy and history in an acute and yet often irreverent way – irreverent in the sense of crossing boundaries between disciplines and between languages.

So, we have a movement, (anti)-traditions of thought, some key texts, and some important names. Transdisciplinary concepts may originally circle around particular disciplines, perhaps overwhelmingly philosophy itself – although what ‘philosophy’ is remains in serious dispute, it is often tempting to agree with Badiou that as a discipline it remains ‘empty’, merely a kind of shelter for truths generated by other disciplines or conditions (2008: 11) – but these concepts in any case undermine any ‘disciplinary monopoly’, as Sandford puts it (2011: 23). Philosophy has, then, a privileged role in the formation of any conceptualization of transdisciplinarity, but it is a role characterized by emptiness, or at least a certain vanishing. As Cunningham puts it in this issue:

philosophy cannot … be considered as simply one discipline among others. The resultant complexity may thus be situated, up to a point, within the far broader problematic of the disciplinary autonomy of philosophy itself since the early 19th century – one in which it finds itself increasingly put ‘on a stage that it does not govern’ (Derrida, 1981 [1972b]: 50), and in which it is thereby opened up to other discourses as a condition of its ongoing (im)possibility. (2015, 82)

Philosophers are not, of course, necessarily ‘transdisciplinary’ thinkers any more than Philosophy as an institutionalized discourse and set of conceptual objects necessarily lends itself to the kind of problematizing insights that the idea of transdisciplinarity hopes to capture; though it is interesting in this regard to note the fear that Philosophy tends to invoke in the minds of rationalizing bureaucrats who worry about all aspects of its ‘measurability’.

If tentative transdisciplinauts are potentially and perhaps gleefully bereft of a disciplinary home, whether institutionally or otherwise, what stance can operate as a marker of an explicitly transdiciplinary approach without engaging in the repetitive erection of new metadisciplines or falling into a black hole of boundarylessness? Oddly, we could cite here Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, where by ‘boundarylessness’ he means the elimination of boundaries within an organization to create universal ownership of the organization’s overall mission – the philosophical equivalent perhaps being the creation of concepts so general and so purportedly ‘universal’ that they perversely reinforce the need for disciplines. ‘Universality’ itself could indeed be one of these concepts.

Given these indeterminacies, it seems that we are reliant, in the last instance, on texts (as opposed to schools, authors, methods) as the bearers or indicators of transdisciplinary qualities. But is it enough to merely state that there are certain transdisciplinary texts and presume that we will all read them in the same way, even assuming we are able and willing to leave our disciplines behind, or at least keep them hanging in the balance? Who is the reading public that these transdisciplinary texts are directed towards? Do these transdisciplinary texts construct a different kind of reading public to the model bourgeois isolated reader? Do transdisciplinary texts actively create their readers by virtue of writing towards a new kind of addressee? What then of the collective address of these texts? Are we forever in isolated, unchartered territory as readers or can we move forward together as the communal reader of transdisciplinary texts – does post-discipline equal post-atomization? Overall, I want to defend a model of reading that is post-disciplinary but that also comes before the separation into disciplines, of the categorization of texts and their corresponding readers. It is in the issues raised by an earlier debate about reading in the context of the humanism-antihumanism discussions of the 1950s and ’60s that we find some of the problems with imagining a contemporary or future transdisciplinary practice of reading: how to avoid minimizing, fetishizing or over-determining the reader’s response? My imagined transdisciplinary reader reads as if already collective – post-individual, post-disciplinary and post the imagined publics of both Sartre and Althusser, as discussed below.

The destabilizing and boundary-crossing qualities of Sartre’s sprawling and unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason, for example, which touches upon political theory, philosophy, sociology, history, without ever being reducible to any or all of these disciplines, poses questions at the level of both form and content: how are we supposed to read and understand this text as a transdisciplinary object? It strikes me that much as the identification of texts, concepts, anti-traditions and so on are important, what really is being called for is a way of reading that is itself transdisciplinary. What this means is that it should be possible to construct a way of understanding texts identifiable as ‘transdisciplinary’ in their very transdisciplinarity (in Marx and Osborne’s sense that disciplines – Philosophy in particular in Marx’s case – are only realized and surpassed ‘outside of themselves’). This would require an exploration of reading that no longer saw itself as the mirror of writing (dominated by the conceptual and disciplinary world imposed by the writer), or as the delayed response to texts which, however transdisciplinary they might appear to be, become reinscribed as the bearers of new structures and architectures of thought. A transdisciplinary theory of reading, or a paying attention to reading as itself a transdisciplinary practice, could avoid the reduction of transdisciplinarity to a new canon, and instead inaugurate news ways of approaching texts prior to their one-sided take-up by specific disciplines. What would it mean, to take a historical example, to read Leibniz and Descartes as philosophers, mathematicians and scientists all at once without shearing off elements of their work into tidy predigestible fragments appropriate to predetermined modes of thinking? As Osborne has put it with reference to the image of a post-‘Theory’ world:

‘theory after Theory’ will be the element of conceptual construction in a transdisciplinary philosophizing – a philosophizing without disciplinary limits, but precisely not, thereby, without limits, since this opens philosophy up to the test of experience. What would a philosophically self-conscious theorizing of this kind be like? (Osborne, 2011b: 26)

If part of the ambition of transdisciplinarity is to avoid thought being reduced to bureaucratic tick-boxes (along the lines of the definitions of inter- and multidisciplinarity established by funding bodies), then some kind of hypothetical futural structural fantasy – namely, that there will one day be no disciplines to operate as constraints on thought and action – ought to be pursued, at least in outline: this is not the same as the ‘boundarylessness’ mentioned above, but rather a kind of postdisciplinary holism that would take into account the divisions of disciplines as well as overturning them. This would be a kind of radical openness to the possibility and problems of disciplinarity as such, as a formal question as well as a practical acceptance of the content of transdisciplinary writing. Why must we always read as philosophers, scientists, artists instead of as philosophers and scientists and artists all at once? This raises the question of what it would mean to read in a transdisciplinary way, whether we be reading explicitly designated ‘transdisciplinary’ texts or otherwise. It also returns us to the centrality of the transdisciplinary reader and its possible collective existence.

This proposal for a transdisciplinary approach to reading runs alongside Cunningham’s call in this issue to interrogate further the relationship between writing and transdiciplinarity. As he puts it with reference to Derrida in particular:

The obvious question is then: how does a thought of, say, writing – the ‘object’ of a grammatology, which must not be ‘just one regional science among others’ (Derrida, 1976 [1967a]: 83) – relate itself to a disciplinary field or topology in this sense, given what Derrida routinely describes as its own (ultimately ‘limitless’) ‘generalization’? If it is not, as Derrida insists, a general ‘theoreticism’ of its own, in what sense is writing a transdisciplinary concept, no longer contained by that ‘topological perspective’ which, for Kant, it was the task of philosophy to govern? And, if it is, how precisely does it relate to the form of generality of the philosophical concept itself?

While these large questions hover in the background, it is evident that the question ‘in what sense is writing a transdisciplinary concept?’ needs to be matched by asking the same question of reading.

The call for a transdisciplinary theory of reading is in keeping with the radical possibilities opened up by the core desires and demands of trandisciplinarity as they currently stand. However, this attempt at outlining a transdisciplinary mode of reading should not be understood as primarily destructive or deconstructive, insofar as it is not looking for the abolition of disciplinarity as such, nor for codes and poles that subtend texts, but rather trying to think through the mode of reading that would operate in the situation – albeit not without its parodic and literary qualities – that Marx famously outlines in The German Ideology, such that:

in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels, 1970: 54)

The division of labour that Marx identifies as separating the ‘particular and the common interest’, the ‘fixation of social activity’ and the ‘sphere of activity’ has significant overlap with the model of disciplinarity that dominates contemporary life. This ‘consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 54) maps on well to the restrictions and productive constraints not only of academic work, but of existence in general. A model of reading that is not related to a particular discipline in advance but breaks down the spheres of action (or, perhaps, in the speculative attempt at hand here, at least the spheres of thought) would be a notion of social reading, of reading as a collective practice – as practically absurd as this may sound, used as we are to conceiving reading as a wholly serial, atomized, even bourgeois activity, though it is interesting to note the perennial existence of book clubs at all levels of society.

What would it mean to read as if from the standpoint of a communism to come? Is transdisciplinarity, in this sense, a call for a kind of postdisciplinarity that would dialectically complicate the relationship between disciplines in such a way that their interlinked structural hierarchies and competitions would be overturned? The disciplinary divisions and inequalities of status that operate in the contemporary academy and in broader social and cultural life must be, in part, the critical object of any transdisciplinary project, even if this way of reading/thinking ultimately focuses in the first place on philosophy, above all, as a spectre-like metadiscipline, despite the many historical and political attempts to displace it.

The attempt here to start to work through this question of ‘reading transdisciplinarily’ cuts across the humanism/antihumanism ‘controversy’ of the 1950s and ’60s, not only because ‘reading’ was a central problematic within the debate, but also because it combines the question of what philosophy is and does with the question of what a text is, how it works and who it is for – questions central to the political and practical (non-bureaucratic) aspects of transdisciplinarity as a whole. While there are other important 20th-century thinkers to draw upon for a reconceptualization of reading, particularly with reference to semiotics (Eco, Barthes), I have chosen to focus on Sartre and Althusser here because the political stakes in their conceptions of reading are more to the fore. For each of these two of the 20th century’s most divergent, though temporally proximate, philosophical and political thinkers, a quite specific notion of ‘reading’ in each case forms an explicit backdrop to the stage upon which they are more commonly seen to fight. A transdisciplinary notion of reading that could potentially be extracted from this debate would cover much of the same ground that continues to inform and, arguably, misinform much of contemporary political and philosophical thought today. In the attempt, then, to delineate the main characteristics of, first, a Sartrean and, second, an Althusserian conception of reading – taken from Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1967 [1948]) and various essays and longer works by Althusser, in particular Reading Capital (1979 [1965]) – I shall be putting into play some of the broader problematics of what Althusser terms ‘the humanist controversy’. What role do the conceptions of reading in Sartre and Althusser play in their understandings of the category of humanism, as a defence or as a polemical attack thereupon? How do the humanist and antihumanist modes of reading suggested by each writer, respectively, help us to think about what a transdisciplinary concept of reading might entail?

Sartre

Let me begin with two quotations from Sartre’s What Is Literature?:

If I appeal to my readers so that we may carry the enterprise that I have begun to a successful conclusion, it is self-evident that I consider him as a pure freedom, as an unconditional activity; thus, in no case can I address myself to his passiveness, that is, try to affect him. (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 34)

And:

One cannot write without a public and without a myth – without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like every human project, simultaneously enclose, specify, and surpass this situation. (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 111–12)

Here, in these two quotations, we have more or less a summation of the Sartrean-existentialist conception of reading, understood from both the perspective of the situation of the writer and that of the reader. It would be easy here to criticize Sartre for adopting a didactic tone, for imagining a readymade readership, mutely awaiting dictates from on high (from Sartre himself, or someone like him), before any understanding of this ‘specific situation’, whatever that might be, can be reached. However, Sartre’s imagined readership is undoubtedly more complex. Rather than understanding reading in terms of its affectivity, i.e. the direct action of the text on a passive student, the reader is in no way merely a blank recipient for Sartre. The end to which the book aims is not to bludgeon its reader to death with didacticism, but to appeal, quite simply, to his or her freedom; one’s capacity, in other words, to transcend one’s situation. The Sartrean-existentialist conception of reading we find here is thus fairly consistent with the more general notion of freedom at the heart of Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Humanism: the active choosing of choice itself, that which characterizes nothing other than the being, or equally, the nothingness of man. It is in this way that the reader can be described as an ‘unconditional activity’, the one who has the potential to act, to choose: he/she is, in the language of Being and Nothingness, condemned to be free.

However, what distinguishes the community of readers in What Is Literature? from their isolation as atomized individuals is precisely that: their community. Referring to Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ in which it is now the reading of texts that constitutes the ideality of the kingdom, Sartre describes how each reader reads as if on behalf of everyone else, i.e. universally. Ideally, he states, one writes for the universal reader, for all: ‘actual literature can only realise its full essence in a classless society’ (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 137). This imagined community of egalitarian readers – imagined because their existence must remain closed off to one another – creates a kind of virtual ‘group in fusion’, an idea that prefigures some of the attempts to discuss the possibility of political group formations that so concerns Sartre in his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason. And not only this, but the community of readers also testifies to, and indeed completes, the creation of the author:

It is the joint effort of author and reader that brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others … Reading seems … to be the synthesis of perception and creation … Reading is directed creation. (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 30–31)

Thus, the author writes in order to address himself or herself to the freedom of readers. But this freedom, unlike the more extreme pronouncements upon ‘freedom’ in Being and Nothingness, is a conditioned one. The more we as readers recognize our freedom as readers, by encountering the author’s text, the more is demanded of us. This is where the power of literature lies for Sartre, in the dialectical dependence of reader and author. The content of the prose is here the contingent element of the relationship, strangely: this is what Sartre intends by that which is specific to the situation, that which is concrete, which is ‘useful’. It follows that literature – any literature – has a finite period of efficacy. Sartre is clearly unsubtle here in seeing a direct continuity between socio-political constraints, the epoch and the ‘commitment’ literature is thus supposed to manifest in the face of whatsoever concrete situation. There is an existentializing of the book itself, and hence of the book’s efficacy for the reader. Yet the implications here for a transdisciplinary concept of reading are intriguing: reading is directed creation, a kind of pact between writer and reader, and ideally finds its telos in a ‘classless society’. Hypothetically replacing ‘class’ with ‘discipline’ we could say that Sartre’s existentialist concept of reading opens up the possibility of a surpassing of the closed worlds of self-isolated and isolating readerships, where limited situations hypothetically burst open into unlimited horizons in which writer, text and reader form an expansive relationship.

However, Sartre concludes What is Literature? with the claim: ‘We stand for an ethics and an art of the finite’ (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 238). Sartre’s emphatic utilitarianism of the dialectic of reading and writing renders prose flatly propositional, and it is no surprise that he must restrict his discussion to prose alone, and block off, with a nod to Plato, all that he calls ‘poetic’. ‘The empire of signs is prose’, he writes, ‘poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music’ (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 4). Interestingly, Sartre makes no attempt to distinguish, within the category of prose, fiction from non-fiction, and any possible separation of fiction and factual writing is obfuscated from the start: ‘The work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men’ (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 45). Here we see quite clearly in what Sartre’s humanism consists: its dependency upon the human freedom, and on the freedom of a certain reading public. This humanism leads Sartre to imagine a kind of ‘principle of freedom’, by which ‘the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of … man’ (Sartre, 1967 [1948]: 46). The reading public can thus only be democratic and libertarian in nature, to a greater or lesser degree, no matter what the concrete circumstances are, or the nature of the text.

In sum, the Sartrean conception of reading can be characterized by four main traits:

Its insistence on the active element of the reader’s situation, which reveals the universal element of his or her capacity: ‘in the age of fatalism, we must reveal to the reader his power’ (Sartre, 1967: 216).

The continuity between a specific socio-political situation and the relevance of the prose together with the concomitant refusal of the possibility of the usefulness of poetry to achieve this end.

The existential-experiential quality of reading. Sartre claims: ‘Reading should not be mystical communion any more than it should be masturbation, but rather a companionship’ (Sartre, 1967: 203). It remains idealist: ‘The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy’. The author writes, says Sartre, with the following question perpetually in mind: ‘what would happen if everybody read what I wrote?’ (Sartre, 1967: 14).

The transitory relevance of literature to the age in which it appears: a text may sometimes ‘outrun’ the death of its author, like the courier of Marathon, who dies an hour before reaching Athens but nevertheless carries on running to deliver his message, but, for Sartre, the text can only ever ‘make sense’ within a given historical time. As he put it: ‘Books that are handed down from age to age are dead fruit’ (Sartre, 1967: 236). Similarly: ‘There is no guarantee that literature is immortal’ (Sartre, 1967: 220).

We can identify several problems with this understanding of reading for any attempt to mobilize Sartre in the name of transdisciplinarity. We can see that Sartre’s discussion of literature in What Is Literature? seems to consist of a series of explicit and implicit slippages between different registers and regions of experience, of the experience of literature and of the historical situatedness of literature. Literature is that which necessarily maintains a direct relation between the reader, the author and the work: this relation to a reading public is, however, nothing other than a ‘certain myth’. There is no account of why, or indeed how, ‘literature’ can ever direct the political action of its readers, other than purely formally, by revealing to them their freedom as readers. There seems to be an incommensurable gulf between the formal, politically democratic, experience of reading and the concrete situatedness that Sartre argues literature must reveal. Sartre is simply too quick to see a direct and transparent link between socio-political conditions and a certain responsibility of prose. The openness hinted at in the discussion of a ‘classless society’ is quickly shut down by a moralizing of the situation, in Sartre’s sense of situation. We counter by saying that disciplines exist, and thus we are bound by them and the responsibilities that remaining faithful to disciplinary conditions entail: a moralism of disciplinarity, perhaps.

Furthermore, the slippages between the dialectic of the reader-author relation and the phenomenology of the reading experience can only mean that history and the epochal nature of texts remain confused. When exactly does the reading of a certain text become useless, and what does this mean for any account of the experience of reading? Is there not a residual didacticism at work in Sartre’s humanist account of reading, despite his privileging of the reader’s freedom? We are still dealing with the language of essence, of the myth of an ideal readership. There is in Sartre’s work, arguably, the assumption that the writer himself will always be a certain kind of person, but only the readership will change, or, indeed, vanish. ‘We no longer know’, he remarks of his situation in 1948, ‘for whom to write’ (Sartre, 1967: 178). It is hard to escape the impression that this ‘we’ to which Sartre refers remains the bourgeois writer, no longer writing for the bourgeoisie alone, as Sartre characterizes the situation of the 17th-century writer, but nevertheless: ‘We were born into the bourgeoisie’ (Sartre, 1967: 205).

Worst still, there is a despondency that characterizes Sartrean reading: ‘we do not have the crazy ambition of influencing the State Department, but rather the slightly less crazy one of acting upon the opinion of our fellow citizens’ (Sartre, 1967: 212). It remains a question of telling the reader what to think, what to opine, and the only activity that reading elicits is that of the reading itself. For all his discussions of freedom, for the Sartre of What Is Literature? reading and writing remain restricted to the world of literary affect: ‘The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain’ (Sartre, 1967: 233). Sartre’s complex humanism retains, albeit negativity, the implicit constraints of genre, of the bourgeois forms of literature, and it gives them an existential spin. The deflationist aspect of the efficacy of writing may make it a recognizably post-Enlightenment project, but the promise of collective reading quickly turns into ‘companionship’, a rather more familiar model of reading where the mythical public reader devolves once again into the domestic, isolated individual.

In this reiteration of the classical relation of author-text-reader, despite radical elements, Sartre’s description of reading remains less politically useful than that of Barthes, in particular. Barthes’ claim breaks open the concept of the reader in a way that Sartre ultimately blocks off:

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (Barthes, 1977: 148)

The anonymity and generic quality of Barthes’ reader allows the reader to more radically democratically take over, or really overturn, the function of the author in the name of a non-moralistic, non-humanistic concept of the social, which is why Barthes is so scathing about ‘a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights’ (Barthes, 1977: 148). To mobilize Barthes in a transdisciplinary notion of reading, however, would require a revisiting of his concept of writing, along the lines identified by Cunningham above – which exceeds our compass here. It is, rather, Althusser against whom Sartre’s conception stands out most starkly.

Althusser

The difference between Sartre’s and Althusser’s approaches to reading may be initially summed up in the following way: on the one side, a quasi-Marxist, humanist attempt to describe the experience of reading; on the other, an anti- or a-humanist attempt to read Marx. Whilst Althusser’s proclamations about reading must be taken in the specific context of his work on Marx, it is quite clear that Althusser also tries to instigate an entirely new approach to the understanding of reading more generally. He argues that in Marx ‘we note that not only in what he says but in what he does we can grasp the transition from an earlier idea and practice of reading to a new practice of reading, and to a theory of history capable of providing us with a new theory of reading’ (Althusser, 1979 [1965]: 18). Arguably, this is precisely what Sartre attempted to do, without, however, managing to escape from the language of the ‘essence’ of the text, of a certain kind of ‘myth’, of literature and of a hypothetical community of readers. How then does Althusser attempt to describe his understanding of this new theory of reading? What must we escape before we can understand in what it might consist? How does Althusser’s model help us to think in a more dynamically transdisciplinary way about reading? Althusser replies:

To break with the religious myth of reading: with Marx this theoretical necessity took precisely the form of a rupture with the Hegelian conception of the whole as a ‘spiritual’ totality, to be precise, as an expressive totality. It is no accident that when we turn the thin sheet of the theory of reading, we discover beneath it a theory of expression, and that we discover this theory of expressive totality … to be the theory which, in Hegel, for the last time and on the terrain of history itself, assembled all the complementary religious myths of the voice (the Logos) speaking in the sequences of a discourse; of a Truth that inhabits its Scripture. (Althusser, 1979 [1965]: 17)

Rather than endeavouring to trace the effects of a text on a reader, whether passive or active, what Althusser describes as ‘symptomatic reading’, attempts to read the text against itself, to discern within it that which might constitute its hidden problematic, the one that would not be visible if the text was to be read as already ‘full’. Althusser argues against transparency, against the idea of an initial transparency of the true, and also against epiphany and parousia – the presence, the revelatory illumination of thought. The possibilities of extracting a transdisciplinary account of reading from Althusser’s insights seem initially promising, even if the text is modelled on the unconscious, rather than the passages between different disciplines. We could make connections between the problematizing qualities of a transdisciplinary account of reading and Althusser’s criticism of ‘religious’ reading, for example, given the scholasticism and dogmatism of an image of disciplines as kinds of ‘schools’ with their own internal heresies, deliberate blindspots and acolytes. Indeed, we could go further and suggest that transdisciplinarity must in fact pay great attention to the unconscious of the text in order to see and make connections that would otherwise be parcelled and sold off to specific pre-existing disciplines. In this way, Althusser provides us with important elements of the antihumanist aspect of transdisciplinary reading.

On the Althusserian model, both Hegelian and empiricist readings (and Sartre arguably fits somewhere between the two) attempt to understand reading as direct communication, rather than paying attention to the unconscious of the text, to the very unspoken and initially unclear conditions for the very possibility of its content to emerge. It is the complex relation between the sights – vues – of the texts and its constitutive oversights – bévues – that characterize symptomatic reading for Althusser: a reading that is never the first reading, never the initial impression of a text. It is a machinic, rather than organicist, conception of reading, an attempt to draw out the technical structures that silently shape a text and indicate its real significance for thought. Interestingly, whilst arguing that it is Marx who introduced the question of what it might mean to read into contemporary thought, it is to Spinoza that Althusser turns as the historical precursor for this symptomatic, materialist reading:

The first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last instance this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading. (Althusser, 1979 [1965]: 16–17)

The dissolution of the religious myth of reading is the necessary precondition of the dissolution of what Spinoza calls ‘knowledge of the first kind’, and what Althusser calls ideology. All that, in effect, forms an epistemic obstacle, to borrow a Bachelardian lexicon, as Althusser so often does, to a reading of a text that pays attention to that which is of key importance.

As an aside, we may note that Althusser’s use of a Spinozist conception of reading is ultimately quite far from Deleuze and Guattari’s own use of Spinoza in their discussions of literature, and here I am thinking of their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus where they too speak of books in machinic terms: ‘A book itself is a little machine’, it exists ‘only through the outside and on the outside’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 4). However, Deleuze and Guattari’s refusal of the concept of ideology – ‘there is no ideology and never has been’ – arguably entails a necessarily expressive (though non-Hegelian) account of the affectivity of literature; the very expression and transmission of intensities that Althusser argues against, as we saw above, also on the basis of a Spinozist understanding of reading.

Because for Althusser there is necessary opacity to one’s first reading of a text, an incomplete and illusory ‘first kind of knowledge’, there can be no recourse to the language of immediacy, intensity or expressionism, however undead, that is, ‘rhizomatic’ and ‘machinic’. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of reading remains too empiricist to be properly attentive to the productive, yet not immediately apparent, force of a text: its political/psychoanalytic dimension. Reading Capital explicitly addresses this question of production:

It is therefore a question of producing, in the precise sense of the word, which seems to signify making manifest what is latent, but which really means transforming … something which in a certain sense already exists. This production … is the production of a knowledge. (Althusser, 1979 [1965]: 34)

To the Hegelian-religious notion of reading there corresponds an empiricist theory of knowledge as vision, as the extraction of an object from the real of vision. To a symptomatic reading there corresponds an idea of knowledge as production. However, somewhat critically, there seems to be a sense in which Althusser’s characterization of this Hegelian-religious notion of reading hides a deeper flaw in his own conception. He may well claim that ‘there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of’ and make provision for his particular account of it by arguing that: ‘It is therefore a special reading which exculpates itself as a reading by posing every guilty reading the very question that unmasks its innocence, the mere question of its innocence: what is to be read?’ (Althusser, 1979 [1965]: 14–15). Nevertheless, as Jacques Rancière points out:

The religious-speculative myth of the immediate presence of sense in writing is, for Althusser, what implicitly sustains the naiveties of that empiricism which identifies the words in a book with the concepts of science and the concepts of science with the objects one holds in one’s hand. (Rancière, 2004: 130)

In other words, is Althusser too hasty, too wilfully keen to simply elide the ‘religious myth’ of reading with a kind of naïve empiricism, even if the former must by definition depend upon a conception of transcendence that is constitutively unavailable to the latter? As Rancière further argues:

One readily sees the obvious advantage provided by this handy identification of the religion of the book with the parousia in the book, by coupling from the start religious speculation with naïve empiricism it guarantees the entire chain of identifications in which the economist and the humanist, the opportunist and the leftist will be wisely aligned, the perverse couples symmetrically aligned together and tainted by the same sin. (Rancière, 2004: 130)

Althusser is thus guilty of characterizing a conception of reading that is not the one held even by those who adhere to a ‘religious myth of reading’ or to a naïve empiricism. In effect, the only person who really understands reading in the way that Althusser negatively depicts it, halfway between empiricism and transcendence, is Sartre, the old enemy, the Marxist who owes more to Hegel and Kierkegaard than he does to Capital. The vexed question of ‘reading’ is thus nothing other than one strand of the larger question of humanism and its overturning. In this sense, then, while Althusser provides one crucial aspect of a possible transdisciplinary model of reading – namely the attention paid to the unconscious of the text – he ultimately subsumes ‘reading’ in the quest for a thoroughgoing destructive takedown of humanism as such, rather than in the name of criticizing a humanist model of reading more specifically. A transdisciplinary notion of reading will need to be shaped by a political problematic, but it must avoid overdetermining what its ‘post-disciplinary’ method will be, instead paying attention to the form and content (as well as the ‘unconscious’) of particular texts.

Coda

Althusser’s understanding of symptomatic reading allows us to appreciate the necessity of reading that in a text which is (literally) not there to be read. Not that which does not exist, but that which forms, as he would say, borrowing openly from Lacan, the unconscious of the text. It is a technique picked up most obviously by Foucault, but also by Rancière – which makes his critique of Althusserian reading on Althusserian grounds perhaps most revealing of all. In the wake of Althusser’s definition of reading in terms of problematics, epistemic obstacles and opacity, we can no longer believe that a direct, cursory, revelatory impression of a text will suffice for us to understand the conditions of the production of its content. If we are to read carefully, it is because much is at stake. Marx himself read Smith, Ricardo and Hegel symptomatically, Althusser claims at one point, which is precisely why he was able to open up a new ‘continent’ of thought, namely that of history, understood in an altogether new and polemical way. Of course, there is little discussion in Althusser of who readers – symptomatic or otherwise – might be, or what a reading community might look like; precisely those questions that Sartre was so concerned to understand. Althusser is quite forbidden to pose these questions in this way, as they owe much to a kind of low-level empiricism, or humanist phenomenology, as we saw in Sartre. Nevertheless, should one not extend Althusser’s analysis, to address the question of the unconscious and the opacities of the reader, above and beyond the unconscious of the text? If the answer to this question is affirmative, then Sartre’s question of the reading community and Althusser’s concept of symptomatic reading could perhaps be dialectically combined and transformed into a further project: the project of transdisciplinary reading, in which a collective notion of post-disciplinary reading would be understood materially, addressing the ‘problematics, epistemic obstacles’ and so on, not only at the level of the text itself, but also by looking at the problematics and epistemic obstacles between the text and the disciplines that want to possess or expel it.

If Sartre’s conception of reading remains wedded to a humanist-Hegelian or even Kantian framework, it nevertheless attempts to think what an active conception of reading might be – one that would have revolutionary ramifications in the present. If Sartre fails, it is because there is too much dependency on the transparency of the relations between the author and the reader, and between the reader and the text. Althusser’s conception of reading destroys this Sartrean scenario, which clearly does depend upon both the transcendence of the reader in his or her free activity and on a simple conception of writing that would be necessarily relevant to its epoch, albeit for a finite amount of time. If the discussion of the ‘religious myth of reading’ in Althusser had a target, it was undoubtedly Sartre, as without destroying the whole edifice of myth and essentialism that accompanies Sartre’s description of writing in What Is Literature? there would be no way of mounting an alternative account of reading. Such an alternative account is one that seeks to indicate the possibility of a truly innovative understanding of a text in all its philosophical and political radicality, not only from within, but also from without, moving across texts and disciplines in a way that raises the possibility of a truly transdisciplinary, collective mode of reading in general.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

This paper is from the RCUK-funded project: Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts (AH/I004378/1).

Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton. This article is from a double Special Issue on ‘Transdisciplinary Problematics’ (Theory, Culture & Society, 32.5–6, Sept–Nov 2015), edited by Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford and Éric Alliez.

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