“Aren’t encyclopedias those things that we don’t need
anymore because the internet?”
-My friend, Jimmy
I just sent editors a draft of an encyclopedia entry that I
volunteered to write because a) it addresses a topic (well, a person) that I am
writing about anyway and, therefore, I can turn it into b) the almighty “c.v. line” - a succinct indication
that there exists tangible evidence that I have produced a thing. This entry
is on Louis Althusser – a thinker that I have lectured on and assigned for
years but is always problematic because he strangled his wife, Helene Rytman,
to death.
Unsurprisingly, this causes a [possibly
insurmountable] tension when discussing Althusser between his ideas/influence and the circumstances of his
life (a tension characteristic to many
canonized authors/historical figures). There’s also the fact that Marxist thought, and philosophy more generally,
has moved away from Althusser’s moment in the sun, but a/the central
problematic is reconciling the fact that he was an influential thinker and murderer.
Which brings me to this encyclopedia entry. Ignoring for a
moment that Wikipedia is a thing, a print encyclopedia represents the end of
several processes taken to be authoritative – the editors are well-trained in
whichever field the work addresses and so their decisions on
inclusion/exclusion carry the authority of their training; the publisher has
determined that there is a market for such a product so the invisible hand of
the economy is giving a big thumbs up; the authors of entries have been vetted,
and the entries themselves have been subjected to review. All of this
authority-production leads to the appearance of a necessary work with a
coherent purpose.
This appearance of necessity and coherence cloaked in scholarly authority often goes hand
in hand with objectivity – encyclopedias present a collection of information.
Just facts. No more. No less. But facts are tricky. In the interest of brevity, I’ll list two
problematic treatments of Althusser: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about him
(free, online, why did I try to re-invent the wheel…*I can’t hear you, la la la
la la*) and a posthumous review of Althusser’s autobiography, L’avenir Dure Longtemps (Althusser’s
autobiography opens with a brief firsthand account of Helene’s murder).
The Stanford Encyclopedia, in my opinion, inadequately
treats the murder, stating that Althusser was able to focus on metaphysics in his
later works after being “freed by his ignoble status” from political
obligations (this type of wording is present elsewhere in secondary literature
as well). Surely there’s a better way to
address the murder of Helene than to state that Althusser was freed from
political leadership and therefore better suited to elaborate a metaphysical
system…but facts are facts: he did write about metaphysics in the decade
between her death and his, but these writings can be presented as the
unencumbered thought of a well-known philosopher or the final writings of a
murderer spending his last years in solitude or institutionalized after being
declared mentally unfit for trial. Facts
are facts, but they require interpretation.
Secondly, The Independent’s review states that works by thinkers
like Althusser who take social constructionism very seriously are undercut by
revelations about their personal life.
All this is to say that
encyclopedia entries, biographies, authoritative accounts of a life are never
value-free or objective. They stake a claim (probably many claims, usually not
explicitly stated) about how a particular person or idea ought to be understood
and, and more generally, how one ought to conceive of people, history, canons,
authority, agency, contingency, and society. When presented in an authoritative
fashion, all of these claims may subtly shift from the result of many contingent
processes to natural, objective fact.
We should certainly pay attention
to facts, but also to their production.
Thanks for reading.
