Althusser on Artistic Practice

From time immemorial, human beings have produced strange objects, which had the
particularity of having no material usefulness, responding to no vital needs of humanity: the
needs for food, sex, etc. These objects were originally always endowed with a social, for
example, a religious significance, but not with a directly practical significance. They had the
property of being appreciated for their uselessness, provided that they gave pleasure to those who
consumed them by sight, touch, hearing, etc. One finds in these singular objects the first
evidence of what would become objects of art. But from the beginning one also finds in them the
double characteristic that was to mark them. These objects were useless, of course, but they were
social: in order to be beautiful objects, they had to be recognized as such by the social group. But
the social group saw in them not only the beauty of the forms or sounds, it also discovered,
through this universal recognition, the recognition of a common essence, its own, that of its own
social unity. And yet this unity was already assured by other relations and functions: social
objects of art added to them the functionapparently necessary to the human communityof
being useless and beautiful, therefore, laden with pleasure.
The result of this singular attribution produces a new form of abstraction. All objects of
art are materially produced by a labor that transforms a certain primary material, just as all others
are produced. But the result of this material transformation is not the production of a useful
object capable of satisfying the vital needs of human beings but of an object capable of obtaining
a special pleasure for them, a gratuitous pleasure without danger, a fictive triumph (Freud),
produced by their visual, auditory, and other forms of consumption. In short, the abstraction of
the production of objects of art appears under the paradoxical form of production (exhibition,
presentation, representation) of a certain seemingly raw matter (stone, wood, noise) covered with
a form. Abstraction thus appears in the form of a concrete object, in which matter is, so to speak,
presented entirely bare, in the aesthetic form that envelops it. The necessary abstract exists under
the form of a useless concrete.
But the nature of this concrete, of this work of artsculpture, painting, music, etc.is to
give pleasure, even when it represents to the spectator the horrors of a tragedy. Why do works of
art move us? Marx said of ancient tragedies: because they are the infancy of humanity and human
beings take pleasure in their infancy. Aristotle, more profoundly, said that a spectacle is like a
release, which imaginatively delivers human beings from their terrors and carries them along to
experience before what is horrible the pleasure of a relief that delivers them from the action they
can see and so no longer have to perform. It is entirely beneficial: they desire a forbidden or
impossible action, and it unfolds before their eyes without any danger.
Taking up this intuition again, Freud sees in the work of art the realization of a desire,
just as in a dream, an imaginary realization and therefore objectively without effect, but
subjectively agreeable to contemplate. That human beings feel the need to live as an imaginary
pleasure the satisfaction of a desire they cannot realize (either the conditions of its realization are,
as in utopia, not met, or else social censure forbids their realization), seems to be a fact that is
both incontestable and indispensable to the functioning of social relations. Just as in every mode
of production, there exist incidentals of production, products that help to produce certain effects
but which by themselves are useless, so too it seems that in the reproduction of social relations
there are aesthetic incidentals that help to produce other effects, but which by themselves are
uselessexcept to produce an imaginary pleasure.
What indeed can this imaginary pleasure help to do? Undoubtedly, to shore up existing
practices and ideologies. It is a fact that in the pleasure of games, infants engage in a veritable
apprenticeship, which will make them capable of either practices of production or social relations.
It is a fact that public games and spectacles, festivals, etc. reinforce the social bond, by bringing
human beings together in the same place and allowing them to consume the same object of
pleasure, which extols social relations and values or else plays with their prohibitions. As a

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result, works of artwhich are not purely ideological, because they are objects composed of a
matter and form directly falling under the sensesenter into the movement of ideology and take
their place within the great political division of ideological confrontation.
Works of art take their place within this confrontation in all the equivocation we know,
since ultimately ideology is ordered in relation to the State: either in the service of the dominant
ideology, or in the service of the values for which the dominated class struggles. And the
history of aesthetic forms doubtless always concerns the matter worked on by the artist, which is
offered to be seen or to be heard; this history, weighted with materiality, doubtless depends on the
objective possibilities of this matter, whether it be marble, wood, soft materials, colors and
sounds, or subjects of the theater and the novel. But the choices of these possibilities, and their
combination in properly aesthetic forms, arises no less from ideology and the struggle that
separates ideology from itself. This paradoxical condition explains both the illusion of artists,
who believe that they only do the work of artists, and the illusion of consumers, who believe that
they only perform an act of aesthetic consumption, whereas what is essential happens behind
their backs (Hegel): in the ideological confrontation that tends forever to put works of art in the
service of its cause.
One will conclude that just as in other practices, aesthetic practice, far from being a pure
creative act of beauty, unfolds under abstract social relations, which are not only norms that
define beauty, but also ideological relations of the class struggle. One will also conclude that
since ideology is what it is and always presents things falsely, art can, beside the marvelous
pleasures it obtains for human beings, encourage the ideology of purity, beauty, and the absolute
autonomy that serves as an alibi for intellectuals of the dominant class. This is why traditionally
idealist philosophers have always been fascinated by art and the beautiful, just as they have been
fascinated by ideas above the fray of ideas, and have been likely to persuade human beings that
art is, in every way, a solution to social conflicts: in culture and in beauty, where all could
communicate.
This headlong rush into the ideology of art, the leitmotif of all spiritualist or idealist
philosophies, can in our days be observed in a country that calls itself socialist, such as the USSR.
There is perhaps not a country in the world that devotes so many philosophical works and so
much philosophical instruction to aesthetics (despite the sad poverty of aesthetic productions). A
professor of aesthetics in Leningrad once provided me with a disarming explanation, telling me:
the workers who grumble at work are offered the possibility of making more money by
piecework. That doesnt interest them, because they cannot do anything with their money. After
personal interest, socialist morality is brought in: they are told that it is necessary to work more
out of duty for the socialist society. That doesnt interest them, either . . . Then the final argument
is delivered: you should work more, because your labor is not simply labor, it is a work of art, and
you are artists. They still dont listen. But to sustain this discourse, positions for aestheticians are
multiplied, and one tries to awaken a taste for the fine arts among the people. An escape into art
can also be the equivalent of an escape into religion: to find in art an imaginary solution to the
real difficulties that society encounters. Even if art really obtains pleasure for human beings, it is
also too often an escape into art, this singular abstraction that exists in the materiality of a
concrete object, which is then only a bad abstraction.

(Translated by Ted Stolze and excerpted from Louis Althusser, Initiation la philosophie pour les
non-philosophes [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014], pp. 305-11)