Reading Capital: Part I Continued (Final Approach To The Question)

Althusser again poses the question (what is the mechanism by which the production of the KO produces the grasp of the RO?) and says he can only sharpen the question, not answer it. (Does it not demand an answer?)

A genealogical account or an empirical history of knowledge-production sidesteps the main issue: what Althusser calls the “knowledge effect,” or the specific mechanism that produces knowledge qua knowledge.

We must not look at the knowledge-effect as an echo of an original unity of knowledge and object (Husserlian ‘idealization,’ or psychological series of abstractions). This is the naivete of empiricism. In that case, theoretically developed knowledge would be less accurate, because more distant from the object, than rudimentary experience or ill-informed description. Furthermore, there would always be a gap, no matter how small, between the RO and the KO, and this gap still needs to be explained.

We cannot refer the knowledge of knowledge back to an origin, since it is only the present mode of knowledge-production that can give us a result. Similarly, we must understand the present—the capitalist mode of production—as the result of a genesis, but also as a system which must be understood apart from genesis—as a society.

Marx, in Capital, seeks to explain the “society effect”—the mechanisms by which capitalism upholds and reproduces itself as a society, which cannot be explained by genesis. Historical genesis cannot account for capitalist society as a society, i.e. as a mutually related system of self-perpetuating effects. Only the capitalist structure can explain capitalist events and behaviors, but only capitalist practices can maintain capitalist society. The mutually reinforcing relation between structure and practice is the social body of capitalism.

The society effect names the way society appropriates the real world as a living society, not as knowledge, aesthetics, ethics, etc., each of which has its own effect. The society effect differs with different modes of production—hence it cannot be accounted for by genesis without effacing this difference.

The knowledge effect (KE) is a generic object which includes (at least) two subobjects: the ideological KE and the scientific KE. Only the scientific KE will be considered.

To ask about the mechanism that produces knowledge as knowledge, we have to ask about knowledge distinct from its genesis. Every form of knowing (like every society) has its own normative structure. It is of the nature of a normative structure that it cannot be interrogated in terms of genesis without placing it under another normative structure.