“Althusser finds materialist elements in Marx’s workalongside, in tension with, these idealist elements. He claims, for example, that there are two ‘absolutely unrelated conceptions of the mode of production in Marx’ (Althusser, 2006: 197). On the one hand, there is a teleological-essentialist conception that conceives the mode of production in terms of an essential structure that precedes its elements: these elements – in the case of capitalism, owners of money and workers separated from the means of production – are posited in terms of necessity, as if they were destined to come together. Yet there is also another conception of the mode of production: a historico-aleatory one. In particular, this conception is found at the end of Capital, in the chapters on primitive accumulation that Althusser names ‘the true heart of the book’ (199). Here there are the same elements – owners of money, ‘free workers’ with only labour-power to sell – but they exist as independent, floating elements with their own separate histories, which come together in an aleatory encounter that might never have happened. The impoverished, expropriated masses may then be reproduced by capitalism, once the encounter has occurred, but they were not produced by capitalism in the first place: they were not created with capitalism in mind, but came to form an element of capitalism only through their aleatory encounter with the owners of money.
This second concept of the mode of production is an example of what Althusser calls a materialist philosophy of the encounter, or aleatory materialism. These terms are developed in Althusser’s work from the 1980s, as part of a renewed attempt to posit a materialism that is not simply an inverted idealism: a materialism that will escape all questions of Cause, Origin, and End. They offer a way of thinking singularity without teleology, a thinking of history that recognizes that ‘[e]very conjuncture is a singular case, as are all historical individualities, as is everything that exists’ (Althusser, 2006: 264). This emphasis on singular cases, as Warren Montag (1998: 69) has pointed out, continues the work done twenty years earlier. The earlier concept of overdetermination targeted the same enemies that aleatory materialism deals with: essentialist, teleological conceptions of the whole in which the elements of that whole are only the expression of a pre-established inner essence, a deeper unity. Antonio Negri suggests that Althusser’s turn towards aleatory materialism proposes ‘the destruction of every teleological horizon – therefore, the positive assertion of the logic of the event’ (Negri, 1996: 61). Althusser’s own claims confirm this suggestion: against idealist teleologies, aleatory materialism is ‘required to think the openness of the world towards the event, the as-yet-unimaginable, and also all living practice, politics included’ (Althusser, 2006: 264).
This is the nature of Althusser’s materialism, then: attentive to the concrete singularity of the immediate situation, it rejects dependence on the concept of a deeper reality, a hinterworld beneath phenomena, some true Being which, though it may presently be repressed or alienated or lost, will one day be restored. The materialist philosopher ‘always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (goal)’ (Althusser, 2006: 290). Materialism does away with Origins and Ends: it does not bind all to a predetermined end but is sensitive to contingent events. It does not stand back to uncover the Truth of the world, but recognizes its own conditions and actively intervenes in a political struggle. This is the materialism Althusser wishes to extract from Marx.”
-Simon Choat, ‘Marx Through Post-Structuralism – Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze’
