no history,”^37 which is to say that there is no ideal, primitive, natural, human
prehistory where structural opposition is lacking and no end state where
structural opposition might be resolved. People dream about the resolution
of social antagonisms, and they develop accounts–ideologies–of how this
might be done. But these accounts are only standing fantasies, not recipes
that can be effectively followed in such a way that all could live freely.
Structural oppositions persist, as“the future lasts a long time.”^38 Given the
manifold agonies of social history, it is difficult to evade this thought.
The consequences of Althusser’s views of art and criticism as forms of social
practice are, as I have argued,“immediate and powerful.”^39 The visions of
blending social actuality with the ideal that are put forward by writers,
painters, composers, filmmakers, and so on in the form of exemplary gestures
are, if they are coherent and well plotted, now readily seen as pieces of ideology
that involve repressions of the interest of some disfavored group (atheists, or
workers, or women, or the urban underclass, etc., as may be). Less coherent,
more circumstantial and fragmentary works (the later films of Godard?) may
seem more interesting in being closer to the texture of always unresolved
antagonisms in daily life. Critical interpretation turns away from appreciative
elucidation and toward the investigation of the use of the work in a social
context by a maker seeking a reputation and an audience wishing for
reinforcement, all within the terms of one or another form of struggle. It
comes to seem hopeless and naïve to try to evaluate works objectively in terms
of artistic achievement: all that is left are opposed uses and preferences.^40
Numbers of important theorists and critics of the various disciplines of art
have done powerful critical and theoretical work along these generally Althus-
serian lines: Fredric Jameson on Joseph Conrad, T. J. Clark on Edouard Manet,(^37) Louis Althusser,“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,”trans. Ben Brewster,
reprinted inCritical Theory Since 1965, ed. Adams and Searle, pp. 239–50 at p. 239B.
(^38) The title of Althusser’s 1992 memoir:L’Avenir dure longtemps. Althusser,The Future Lasts
Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: New Press, 1993). For a full account of
Althusser’s structural Marxism, constrasted with classical, teleological Marxism, see
Eldridge,“Althusser and Ideological Criticism of the Arts.”Pages 166–82 outline Althus-
ser’s views and their relations to the views of Marx, Freud, and Lacan.
(^39) Eldridge,“Althusser and Ideological Criticism of the Arts,”p. 182. In the remainder of
this paragraph I summarize pp. 182–88 of this essay.
(^40) See the discussion in Chapter 7 above of the views of Herrnstein Smith and Bourdieu.
266 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art