Reading Capital: Part I Continued (Knowledge as Real, Relatively Autonomous Structure)

Althusser wants to insist on a distinction he finds in Marx: between the object of knowledge (in “the head”) and the real object (bizarrely, he also finds this distinction in Spinoza). The real object (RO) is produced by a real, historical genesis, whereas the genesis of the knowledge object (KO) is entirely within knowledge.

Althusser says that Marx is not falling into idealism by placing the genesis of knowledge within knowledge (or in the “head,” in thought). Thought is not the faculty of a transcendental subject constituting knowledge out of the raw material of formless matter, imposing categories on the world. Nor is thought the faculty of a psychological subject. Rather, thought arises out of real conditions as a historically constituted apparatus. It is structured as follows: it combines (1) the object or raw material on which it labors, (2) the theoretical means of production historically available to it (theory, method, concept of the object) and (3) the historical relations in which it produces. These are the conditions which assign the individual thinking subject its place in the production of knowledge (closely paraphrased from p. 41-2).

Thought or knowledge is thus one real structure among others. It conditions the possibilities of thinking individuals just as relations of production condition the possibilities of working individuals (and just as these structures mutually condition each other, presumably with relations of production having the more determinative role “in the last instance”). This is an example, then, of the effectivity of a structure on its elements.

Thus, to say that knowledge-production takes place entirely in thought is not to say that thought is hermetically sealed from other relations. Thought is a structure among (mutually conditioning) structures. The latter, “taken together, constitute the global structure of a social formation belonging to a determinate mode of production” (42).

Finally, the “raw material” is not the real object; it has always already been “worked up,” so to speak. Knowledge has always already made its incursion upon the real.