Although the 1980s are perhaps not given the historical weight accorded to the 1960s and 1970s as “cultural” decades, they might be legitimately considered one of the most important historical periods for the destiny of Marxist theory in the hundred and twenty years to that point since the founding of the First International. A moment of intense crises and change, from the sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy’s disastrous Afghani adventure under Yuri Andropov, the predations of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Augusto Pinochet against the trade unions and even the concept society as such, to the election of François Mitterand in France and its retrospectively enormous effects on the culture and politics of the French left, the 1980s constituted a decade of retreat and reflection for Marxism as a system of thought and guide to political action.

Among the dominant theoretical interventions within the Marxist camp, Louis Althusser’s work of the 1960s and 1970s in particular had traversed the world, linked inextricably to questions of imperialism and decolonization since Althusser was one of the few figures of European Marxist theory whose work became a key point of reference in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This is due to numerous factors: the position of Althusser’s Théorie series at Maspero, a kind of clearinghouse for Marxist, anti-imperialist, and Third-Worldist literature within French publishing, but also the deep links Althusserianism established with the Latin American conjuncture, ripe for new creative developments of Marxist theory beyond the Soviet orthodoxy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It would be hard to overstate the role played by figures like Marta Harnecker, who had studied with Althusser, and her 1969 Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico in winning over to Marxist positions an entire generation of Latin American youth, whose formation therefore was deeply marked by the mid-1960s discussions of Althusser’s circle in the rue d’Ulm in Paris. In turn, the Parisian climate in which Althusser’s ideas circulated was profoundly connected to disciplinary formations that have today largely disappeared: semiotics, on the one hand, and structural anthropology, on the other. The latter, linked to the African situation (and notably to francophone Africa) in thinkers such as Pierre-Philippe Rey, Maurice Godelier, and Claude Meillassoux, was directly influenced by the Althusserian discussions of the transition between—and the articulations of—modes of production. This constituted a key turning point in the historical discourse on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the subject of a long-running debate within Marxist theory, particularly since the postwar period. Althusser’s thought, in this sense, shifted the debate on this transition from one concerned with the historical foundations of capitalism’s emergence to one centered on how to understand the volatile amalgam of modes of production in Third World, colonized societies and therefore on the dynamics of imperialism and neoimperialism. This shift, in turn, later, would constitute a foundational ground for Althusserianism to play the role of silent partner in the new discourses on the articulation of race and class that would emerge in the 1970s and 1980s with the developments of cultural studies.

Within Althusser’s work, the term that had come to be most associated with its direct political application was precisely the term articulation. Articulation provided a vocabulary to speak about the unstable combination of elements that obtained in the Third World countryside, attempting to theorize how the concept of mode of production in Marx could be understood in conditions divergent from those of the classical studies of England, Prussia, and France. Articulation therefore named an effect of capital itself, an effect of the economic structure and social formation that volatilely amalgamated elements of the existing conjuncture, traditional forms of the social order—existing habits, customs, rituals, and practices—that could be overcoded, as it were, by the capital relation so as to make the uneven conjuncture function as a hinge or pivot of world capitalism as a whole.

Articulation also had a separate destiny within the texts that make up the iconic volume Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. One of the key elements of this volume as a whole, and in the long intellectual-historical view, was its consideration of how in the 1980s the so-called new social movements in North America and Western Europe—that is, the women’s movement, gay liberation, and particularly racial struggles: the movements of black liberation, Chicano liberation, and Asian liberation—could be articulated with the remnants of the traditional left in the forms of the workers’ movement, the trade union movement, and the socialist organizations (in this sense, it is important, I think, to read the volume in relation to texts of the time such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy).

Étienne Balibar’s contribution to the volume functioned to provide a divergent theoretical perspective and one that was even potentially antithetical to the others, written from a position in Europe after the crisis of May 1968 and its aftermath and, more importantly, after the crisis within the French Communist Party in the early 1980s around the election of Mitterand, along with Balibar’s own expulsion from the party as a function of the party’s racism and hostility to the immigrant question (expressed in the notorious Vitry affair). Balibar’s text in fact exhibits key features that call into question or express a crucial contradiction particularly with Stuart Hall’s contribution to the conference, in its expanded sense—a series of preparatory lectures given in the teaching institute that led up to the 1983 conference from which the volume would be compiled. It must be noted that Balibar was not one of the participants in the teaching institute. In fact, part of what makes Balibar’s contribution to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture somewhat enigmatic is the fact that, although the text now, for posterity, is positioned within the context of the teaching institute, conference, and volume, it was, strictly speaking, written for another conjuncture entirely: that of the post-Eurocommunist, post-Althusserian moment in political philosophy, in which the lines of fracture between the historical inheritance of the European workers’ movement and the immediate tasks of Marxist theory were expanding rapidly. How should we think, therefore, about the relation between this moment in the European context (and in the space of a long-developed Marxist theoretical culture in a context linked to historic communist organizations) and its own articulation with the Anglo-American juncture between cultural studies and a certain expanded Marxism, a “messy, uneven, and contested” history that had yet to be written (Grossberg and Slack ix)?

Balibar’s text has a long and complex history, with its component parts published in various locations in French, English, and Italian and its final version eventually included in the 1997 collection La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx, published by Galilée. Three intellectual-historical aspects of the texts are crucial to note.

First, the text as presented in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture is a translation of parts 1, 2, and 4 of the integral text of “The Vacillation of Ideology within Marxism”—and we must note that the title in French is precisely “La vacillation de l’idéologie dans le marxisme,” while the English version shortens this to “The Vacillation of Ideology,” a seemingly minor point, but one that has consequences for its presentation within the text of the book. After all, the vacillations and slippages of the ideological process as a whole do not constitute the same object of analysis as the vacillation of the concept ideology within the Marxist theoretical register. At the furthest interpretive extent, these are even two antithetical or at least two nonconcurrent analytical moments.

Second, the crucial third section, “Le prolétariat insaisissable” (“The Elusive Proletariat,” or perhaps “imperceptible”—literally “unseizable”) is not included in the version of “Vacillation” published in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. This third section, which constitutes an essential argumentative link in the original text, therefore operates as a kind of absent hinge, or indeed a form of articulation, between two different aspects of the concept of the “absent proletariat”: one, echoing Hall’s discussions, pertains to the fading of the active agency of the working class in the post-1968 moment and in the face of the new social movements of the time; the other, however—and this is the aspect missing from Balibar’s contribution to the book—is an intervention within Marxism itself to remind the reader of Marx’s work that the category of the proletariat, in its absence from Capital, operates at a different level of analysis from either the empirical working class or the figure who, in the dramatis personae of the logical narrative of capital’s becoming, brings labor-power to the sphere of market exchange and who must therefore encounter the owner of the means of production and the possessor of money, from whom the capacity to purchase means of subsistence can be gained. For Balibar, it is this ambiguity of the concept of the proletariat, suspended permanently between the register of “science” (the proletariat as a product of the structure of capital’s logic, variable capital itself) and the register of revolution (the proletariat as the bearer of the open, hazardous, contingent field of class struggle), that indicates a fundamental dilemma or aporia for Marxism, “permanently oscillating between statist and anarchist tendencies” (“What” 408). It is a crucial part of Balibar’s argument, and the text itself remains of such importance to his thought that Balibar continues to cite it himself as recently as 2024, when he notes, “I have described this antinomy in my essay from 1984 ‘Le proletariat insaisissable’ which was later incorporated into the volume La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx published in 1997” (“What” 409n8).

Third, there is the fact of where Balibar’s intervention originally took place: it was not written for the 1983 conference, but rather it stemmed partly from the discussions many important figures within French philosophy and Marxist theory had in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (Center for Philosophical Research on the Political), a context that also generated, for instance, Alain Badiou’s 1985 Peut-on penser la politique?. Balibar’s intervention, therefore, is deeply conditioned not only by the aftermath of 1968 and the 1970s discourse on the “crisis of Marxism” (in which Balibar was a direct participant) but also by the conjuncture of the early 1980s faced by the French left, in which three factors are important to keep in mind: the startling contradiction of the intensifying racist and anti-immigrant character of the discourse of social patriotism of the French Communist Party, which was ostensibly devoted to the emancipation of the working class and the overturning of all social injustice; the state-political conjuncture of the election of Mitterand in 1981 to the presidency, in which the Communist Party participated, effectively liquidating an independent position into the broader center-left; and the early-to-mid-1980s specificities of the expanded Althusserianism that had developed particularly in the anglophone and hispanophone worlds in the wake of the 1970s.

Althusser in 1977 had referred to the “crisis” of Marxism, following the remarks of Rossana Rossanda in relation to the Italian Communist Party, as precisely a failure of Marxism to integrate its latest political experiences into its own theoretical-political history and thereby to generate a unified destiny for Marxism. This conception of crisis held that another Marxism—not of the smooth integration of parties, concepts, states, revolutions, political actors, political problems, and so forth, but rather of disruption, rupture, breaks, new orientations, unanticipated political figures, and an elevation of new elements over old ones, with a major space ceded to the dimension of culture—had to be produced. Balibar points out that this dimension had long been present in Althusser’s work, implicit in his identification of the central antinomies of a system of thought that must at once justify itself by means of historical causality and presuppose an unresolved struggle whose outcome could never be determined in advance, constituting what Balibar describes as the anticipatory character of Althusser’s work vis-à-vis the “crisis of Marxism” (“Vacillation” 209n58).

The moment of Balibar’s essay is thus subtended by not only the “crisis of Marxism” (which truthfully reached its apex in the late 1970s) but also a crisis of Althusserianism, one of the master discourses across the humanities and social sciences of the late 1960s to early 1980s. The role of Althusser’s thought in the constitution of contemporary theory in the broadest sense has often been minimized or treated as an isolated question solely of the role of ideology, interpellation, and the force of institutional norms in the governing of subjects, largely as a result of the canonization of the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in critical and cultural theory. But Althusser’s work can be seen as a kind of master discourse behind many other critical figures of postwar French thought, from close collaborators such as Balibar to less obvious figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

“The Vacillation of Ideology” is above all concerned with this question of the tension within Marxism of the pursuit of a unified theoretical form that would be dialectically linked to the warp and woof of the historical process, its forms of causation and necessity, while also remaining a philosophy of combat, a partisan conceptual realm of the class struggle. For Balibar, it is this tension of two antithetical conceptions held alongside each other in Marxism’s endless forms of “doubling,” “inversion,” or “partitioning”—forms that push the conceptual apparatus “toward a lateral object (Nebenobjekt)” (literally, an “object alongside” another), thereby “deflect[ing] practice toward a fictive end, a Nebenzweck,” a kind of parallel or alternative conclusion—whereby politics always remains without guarantees, distanced from the volatility of this tension of the system of thought (“Vacillation” 195). It is in this sense that “the idea of a theory of ideology has always functioned as an ideal means of completing historical materialism, of ‘filling up a hole’ in its representation of the social totality, and thus as a means of constituting historical materialism in totality, as a system of explication that is generically consistent, at least according to its laws” (202). But this conception confers on ideology a kind of magical role by which it would “formulate once and for all” the Marxian representation of the social as a closed circuit with a predictable outcome, effecting what Balibar refers to here as “the return of teleology to Marxism” (203). “One could even suggest,” he notes, that since the concept of ideology in fact covers over or bypasses a fundamental problem (161), “[t]he theory of ideology would then be symptomatic of the permanent unrest” characteristic of Marxism’s fundamental tension (203). Thus, he writes:

Here is the essential point: that even within capital’s logic, in which it represents the social to itself as an enclosed totality, capital must tarry with its exterior—not only the extramaterial but that which lies outside its grasp and cannot be placed in its interior.

But how can this theoretical point be understood in practical terms in the Marxian text? This is where the problem of the exclusion of the section on “the elusive proletariat”—where Balibar addresses, in his own elliptical way, the set of problems that might be posed by the articulation of race and class—appears most consequential. I quote at some length from this absent third section:

Contrary to the commonly held notions of capital as an alien force and of the human being as originary, capital, as a social relation and not a thing, is composed by us. After all, we ourselves are not simply noncapital but what Marx called the “selbstbewußten Produktionsinstrumente” (“self-conscious instruments of production”; Das Kapital 599; Capital 573): the individual microlaboratories in which we nurture the labor power that will become, in the labor market, the inputs of variable capital for the production process. The human being, in this sense, is a part of capital—never wholly, but a component part of its total makeup. The social is composed by a series of outsides—labor power, land, nation, race, gender, sexuality—that, paradoxically, capital must rely on, and from which it can never be severed, in order to coquet as pure interiority. Capital acts as if it constituted a wholly internal, endlessly repeating circuit of production and circulation, with inputs that can be presupposed for the eternal repetition of this cycle. But the reality is that capital itself cannot produce or even regulate numerous aspects of the social world that it has no choice but to overlap with, being in the end itself only a social relation of ourselves, who have the cosmological misfortune of being included as a compositional element in precisely the semiautonomous structure that dominates us. That we could be coerced fully into the interior of the logical motion of capital is strictly impossible—human beings cannot be directly generated by capital itself. And yet, this basic social relation smoothly and cyclically repeats almost as if it were possible, circulating our labor power throughout capital’s surface as if it were an endless resource. In the end, what are these cyclical encounters of capital with its various outsides except “a ferment in [capital’s] dissolution” and “the emblems of its limitations,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse (Pre-capitalist Economic Formations 103)? In this sense, as Balibar notes, the question of the crisis of Marxism, its limitations and possibilities, is itself “étroitement lié à la représentation de la force de travail comme marchandise” (“closely linked to the representation of labor-power as a commodity”; “Le prolétariat” 246; my trans.).

If Balibar upholds the older Althusserian conception of articulation as precisely an effect of the structure—following Althusser’s nod to Jacques-Alain Miller in Reading Capital (see Althusser and Balibar 188)—then Hall, in lecture 8 of Cultural Studies, 1983, transforms this effect of the structure into a subjective comportment of an affirmative character. Taking the example of Rastafarianism in Jamaica as his guiding case, Hall writes, “[T]hey had to turn the text upside down to get a meaning which fit their experience. But in turning the text upside down, they remade themselves; they positioned themselves differently as new political subjects,” using “the new means of articulation and production to make a new music, with a new message” (144). He continues:

The Althusserian concept of articulation is thus repurposed by Hall to make a point closer in tone to the prestructuralist moment of E. P. Thompson; there is here, one might say, a conception of articulation as the given human subject’s capacity for imagination, ingenuity, self-creation, and expression. Hall’s use of the concept is very far, then, from Miller’s foundational maxim, cited by Althusser and Balibar in Reading Capital: “Structure donc: ce qui met en place une expérience pour le sujet qu’elle inclut” (“The structure, then, is what puts into place an experience for the subject it includes”; Miller 95; my trans.). Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson introduce Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture by noting that

Intersecting around the infinite spread of this vocabulary of articulation, Balibar and Hall, with many of the same theoretical tools, verge on discourses that go beyond competing to be perhaps fundamentally incompatible, despite appearances.

Necessarily there is much more to say about this gap between these two thinkers than is possible to develop in the present essay, but I simply want to note that if Hall’s lectures in the teaching institute, which would later be published as Cultural Studies, 1983, constitute one possible answer to this dilemma, Balibar’s contribution provides another, from a very different point of view. In fact, we might legitimately suggest that the conclusions reached around the category of articulation by Hall and Balibar are not only divergent but founded on radically different epistemological (and potentially political) grounds. For Balibar, the crisis of articulation was one that centered on the relatively ungraspable character of the proletariat in the logical system proposed in Capital, and in this sense it was predominantly a crisis of the structure, a crisis of ways of understanding the category of the subject within the orbit of Marxist theory. In contrast, Hall’s deployment of this expanded Althusserianism in the form of his inaugural lectures transformed the category of articulation from a gesture enacted by the social structure itself toward one of an acting practice of the subject on him or herself, a transformation that also in a certain sense became emblematic of a theoretical gap between the place from which Balibar wrote, the European crisis of Marxism in the wake of Eurocommunism, and the perspective of Hall and the Anglo-American space of theory in which he was intervening. One can see in Hall’s repurposing of the category of articulation a certain gesture toward a liberal individualism, even a humanism, and a vexation with the demands of theory that did not characterize Balibar’s contribution. In this sense, Balibar’s contribution offers to this day a relatively ungrasped potential in a national situation still uncomfortable with theory as such; it registered not only the conjuncture of the 1980s with its crisis of politics—the rise of the right and the destruction of the workers’ movement—but also the theoretical crisis within Marxism of a much more profound and foundational character. The category of articulation was formulated in the Althusserian paradigm as a way of understanding the crucial question for the critical analysis of capitalist production of the transition between modes of production, a question that linked historical determinations to allegories of political strategies; thus, when one reads the later repurposing of the category of articulation, it is crucial to remember that it already stood in for a metabolized version of an unresolved historical and analytical conflict within a more historiographically inclined Marxist theoretical field.

In the long historical view, we ought to ask whether Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture marked a period for the reinvention and innovation of Marxism or whether its impasses and divisions signaled a chronic crisis for the relation of Marxism to the field of thought in general, a pathology within which we are still living. After all, as Althusser’s former student Michel Pêcheux wrote in his enigmatic contribution to the book, one of the last texts he wrote in a life cut tragically short:

Perhaps the entire field of thought associated with the Althusserian paradigm today needs to be revisited precisely in order to deliver to us some of the “surprises” it still holds when it comes to the supposed “end of Marxism” in our era.