Overdetermination

Origins of the term

The term did not originate in Marxist theory. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud held that many dream features are 'overdetermined', caused by multiple factors from the 'residue of the day' to deeply repressed traumas and unconscious wishes, and he favoured interpretations that accounted for such features many times over. Althusser himself noted in his 1962 essay that he had borrowed the term 'from other disciplines', and used it as an index of why the Marxist contradiction differs from the Hegelian one.

Althusser's problem: the weakest link

Althusser imported the concept from Freud, and drew as well on Mao Zedong, in order to think the multiple, often opposed forces active at once in any political situation without reducing them to a simple 'contradictory' schema. The essay's central illustration is Lenin's 'weakest link': why revolution was possible in the Russia that was simultaneously the most backward and the most advanced nation. For Althusser this was because Russia had accumulated and exacerbated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible, and the uneven development of capitalism led via the 1914-18 war to the revolutionary rupture.

Althusser's key argument is that the general contradiction, forces against relations of production, cannot by its own simple, direct power bring about a revolutionary situation. A ruptural unity requires an accumulation of heterogeneous 'circumstances' and 'currents', including determinations from the superstructures and the international conjuncture, that 'fuse' into one. He wrote that the revolutionary situation in Russia was precisely a result of the intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction, and that an 'overdetermined contradiction' may be overdetermined either in the direction of a historical inhibition, a real 'block' such as Wilhelmine Germany, or in the direction of revolutionary rupture, as in Russia in 1917, and is never found in the 'pure' state.

Distinction from the Hegelian contradiction

A Hegelian contradiction is never really overdetermined, even though it frequently appears so; its complexity is a 'cumulative internalisation' and not an effective overdetermination. Where consciousness is 'a circle of circles' with one centre, overdetermination would require 'decentred circles' affecting it at its centre. Hegel can reduce a whole society and epoch, its institutions, customs, art, religion, philosophy, even wars and defeats, to a single internal principle only by treating concrete life as the externalisation-alienation of a spiritual principle, that is, the epoch's ideology; the simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction merely reflects that ideology.

Against economism

The temptation the argument opposes is the reduction of the dialectic of history to the dialectic generating the successive modes of production, for which Althusser names economism and even technologism. Marx did not simply retain and invert the Hegelian terms, civil society and State, economy and politics-ideology, but substituted other, only distantly related terms and overhauled their relation. Determination in the last instance by the economic mode of production therefore coexists with the relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity.

Place in Althusser's system

Overdetermination sits with structural causality, contradiction, uneven development and the 'structure in dominance', the element that tends to organize all other practices: in much of the contemporary world commodity production and consumption, but in other eras religious belief and practice. Its complement is the rejection of economism and of any philosophy of history with a subject or a goal. For Althusser history is a process without a subject, and transformations occur only when the contradictions and levels of development inherent in a mode of production allow for them.

Extension beyond Marxism

Overdetermination is also used beyond Marxism. Classical Greek history and literature could deploy a 'double determination' allowing both divine intervention and human action: Herodotus, and the Messenger in the Persae attributing Xerxes' tactics at Salamis to Greek cunning and simultaneously to divine phthonos. The New Critic I. A. Richards appealed to Freud's idea of overdetermination to argue that all discourse outside the technicalities of science is over-determined, 'having multiplicity of meaning'. In contemporary analytic philosophy an event or state of affairs is overdetermined if it has two or more distinct, sufficient causes, as in the firing-squad case or the case of Billy and Suzy each throwing a rock, which raises problems of causal redundancy for counterfactual theories of causation.

Bibliography

The essay was first published as 'Contradiction et surdétermination (Notes pour une recherche)', La Pensée 106 (1962), and translated by Ben Brewster as 'Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation' in For Marx. Ben Brewster's glossary definition in Reading Capital is the formulation the definition sentences above follow.