Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Introduction to Pecheux Dosssiers. Décalages, vol. I, n° 4

Abstract

http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss4/8/

Key takeaways

  • It was in the Three Notes, composed of Althusser's contributions to a discussion of "the theory of discourses" that included Balibar, Macherey, Badiou and, although his name does not figure in the editorial preface, Michel Pêcheux, that Althusser first used the term "interpellation" in a systematic way.
  • Both the possibility of a subject-less discourse and the re-definition of consciousness as existing in the materiality of discourse were crucial elements of Althusser's recasting of the concept of ideology: Pêcheux was one of the few to "dare" to address the questions congealed in these formulations in a systematic manner and to heed Althusser when he warned (as if he were speaking of his own earlier "flirtation" with discourse theory) that "Linguists and those who appeal to linguistics for various purposes often run up against difficulties which arise because they ignore the action of the ideological effects in all discourses -including even scientific discourses."
  • Given the fact that the trajectory imposed on Pêcheux by the the conflicts proper to the ISAs essay paradoxically deprived his work of interest to the essay's ever-increasing Anglophone readership for whom the term "discourse" became a sign of the idealist excesses of French philosophy ("there is nothing outside of discourse"), it is imperative to understand that Althusser's abandonment of "discourse" derived from positions not only distinct from, but diametrically opposed to, those based on the Anglo-American rejection of "the linguistic turn."
  • It was thus left to Pêcheux to develop not simply a materialist theory of discourse, but perhaps even more importantly a theory of the materiality of discourse and of the forms of causality immanent in discourse.
  • In effect, Pêcheux complicated Althusser's model by recognizing different forms of ideological interpellation, including that which is peculiar to neoliberalism.