Articles
Malignant Self Love -
Narcissism Revisited
Althusser - a Critique:
Competing Interpolations
page 3
And this is where Althusser fails, trapped by dogmatism and more than a
touch of paranoia. He neglects to treat two all-important questions (his
problematic may have not allowed it):
- What do ideologies look for? Why do they engage in their practice? What is
the ultimate goal?
- What happens in a pluralistic environment rich in competing ideologies?
Althusser stipulates the existence of two texts, manifest and hidden. The
latter co-exists with the former, very much as a black figure defines its white
background. The background is also a figure and it is only arbitrarily - the
result of historical conditioning - that we bestow a preferred status upon the
one. The latent text can be extracted from the manifest one by listening to the
absences, the lapses and the silences in the manifest text.
But: what dictates the laws of extraction? how do we know that the latent
text thus exposed is THE right one? Surely, there must exist a procedure of
comparison, authentication and verification of the latent text?
A comparison of the resulting latent text to the manifest text from which it
was extracted would be futile because it would be recursive. This is not even a
process of iteration. It is teutological. There must exist a THIRD,
"master-text", a privileged text, historically invariant, reliable,
unequivocal (indifferent to interpretation-frameworks), universally accessible,
atemporal and non-spatial. This third text is COMPLETE in the sense that it
includes both the manifest and the latent. Actually, it should include all the
possible texts (a LIBRARY function). The historical moment will determine which
of them will be manifest and which latent, according to the needs of the mode
of production and the various practices. Not all these texts will be conscious
and accessible to the individual but such a text would embody and dictate the
rules of comparison between the manifest text and ITSELF (the Third Text) ,
being the COMPLETE text.
Only through a comparison between a partial text and a complete text can the
deficiencies of the partial text be exposed. A comparison between partial texts
will yield no certain results and a comparison between the text and itself (as
Althusser suggests) is absolutely meaningless.
This Third Text is the human psyche. We constantly compare texts that we
read to this Third Text, a copy of which we all carry with us. We are unaware
of most of the texts incorporated in this master text of ours. When faced with
a manifest text which is new to us, we first "download" the
"rules of comparison (engagement)". We sift through the manifest
text. We compare it to our COMPLETE master text and see which parts are
missing. These constitute the latent text. The manifest text serves as a
trigger which brings to our consciousness appropriate and relevant portions of
the Third Text. It also generates the latent text in us.
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