Reading Capital: Part I Continued (Epistemology)

There are two conceptions of knowledge Althusser wants to combat: the “religious” or “expressive” and the “empiricist.” The religious-expressive conception, as we have already seen, holds that the essence of the object of knowledge shines through the translucent integument of its existence. The idiosyncratically termed “empiricist” conception holds that the essence can be abstracted from the inessential, and that both are real parts of the real object. Thus, empiricist knowledge effaces its own operation, finding it already in the structure of the object itself. Like Augustine, who held that sin is nothing in itself, just a movement away from one real thing and toward another real thing, the empiricist holds that the operation of knowledge is nothing, or at least almost nothing, just a separation of one real from another. Thus, the empiricist problematic is characterized by “The investment of knowledge, conceived as a real part of the real object, in the real structure of the real object…”(38)
But, in designating the essence as the object of knowledge, empiricism admits something important—the distinction between the object of knowledge and the real object which, after all, includes the inessential. This tacit distinction—between object of knowledge and real object—must be developed.

For Althusser, the central, if tacit, concept in Marx is the effectivity of a structure upon its elements. This concept is to save Marx from a methodological Hegelianism which sees the empirical as the arena of the progressive self-explication of the notion. Between this and an ad hoc materialism that sees only contingency and random collisions, Marx would then stake a middle ground by attaining a view of history that recognizes the importance of the pre-human configuration of possibilities that structures events. But in insisting on the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge, has Althusser stumbled into the classic epistemological tar pit? What sort of relation holds between the two? Thus, the questions I outlined in my last post come into play.