because not all metaphors are appropriate: that of ‘organ’ involves the second
abstraction) to the individual who is the seat of the ‘faculty’ isolated by the
concept. This false concretisation is, as we have seen, simply a further degree
of abstraction: an example of fetishism.
Chomsky’s science of language is thus heavily dependent on various
philosophical theses, which explains why it combines, in a way that is hardly
unexpected, materialism (of the mental organ) and idealism (of the monad).
Behind Chomsky’s science, and supporting it as the rope does the hanged
man, lies what Althusser calls a ‘spontaneous philosophy of scientists’.
In his philosophy course for scientists,^19 Althusser proposes a theory of
philosophy, a theory of science, a theory of ideology in general, and a theory
of what he calls the spontaneous philosophy of scientists (SPS). Philosophy
is not science: it has no object, operates by means of categories rather than
concepts, and its function is to intervene in a scientific conjuncture (a state
of relations between science and ideology) to trace lines of demarcation. Its
characteristic mode of expression is the formulation of theses, which compose
a system. The most important aspect of this theory of philosophy is the
distinction between the correct and the true. Contrary to tradition, Althusser
maintains that the theses of philosophy aim not at the true but at the correct:
a correct philosophical thesis is one that enables adjustment to the conjuncture,
which, in the last instance, is always the conjuncture of the class struggle.
From this theory of philosophy we can draw, a contrario, a theory of science:
a science has an object, concepts, and a method, but is exposed to ideology
in the form of practical ideologies (formations of notions, representations and
images in behaviour, conduct, attitudes, gestures: the set functions as a practical
norm governing attitudes to real objects – I am paraphrasing Althusser’s
Thesis 19)^20 and SPS. Ideology, according to Thesis 9, is composed of propo-
sitions and ‘[a]n ideological proposition is a proposition that, while it is the
symptom of a reality other than that of which it speaks, is a false proposition
to the extent that it concerns the object of which it speaks’.^21 Readers will
have recognised the celebrated Althusserian definition of ideology as a mixture
of illusion and allusion. As for the SPS, the specific form of existence of
ideology within science, it is the site of a contradiction between two elements:
40 • Chapter Two
(^19) See Althusser 1990.
(^20) See Althusser 1990, p. 83.
(^21) Althusser 1990, p. 79.