June 3, 2018:
A "Symptomatic Reading" constructs the problematics operating within a text, dragging them to visibility by demonstrating their effects. For Althusser, the text is not simple, not a false ideological "unity", but a conflictual unity of constitutive problematics. It's necessary to work on a text to make its latent relationships manifest, as by analogy dream analysis for Freud. Althusser frequently speaks of "setting the text to work against itself"; "making the text speak"; identifying its "silences", "empty places", conflicts and self-contradictions: the antagonisms that "haunt" a text. One of Althusser's most beautiful passages poses the question: What does it mean to read?:
"However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest' acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading — the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their ‘absences of works'. And contrary to all today's reigning appearances, we do not owe these staggering knowledges to psychology, which is built on the absence of a concept of them, but to a few men: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud."
His answer is that critical reading requires protocols. The answers you get depend on the questions you ask: what questions will you ask? Althusser reads Capital not as an economist might, or a sociologist or historian, but as a philosopher, asking, What is Marx's theoretical object, and, What is the text's relation to that object?
What symptoms does one look for when reading symptomatically? Here are three:
Metaphor is frequently an index of the lack of a concept. The author's trying to define something, but instead is forced to describe it poetically: because the concept's missing. Marx uses the famous base/superstructure topographical metaphor; Althusser frequently uses spatial metaphors; I used the analogy with tectonics earlier. Marx lacks the concept he's trying to think; what about Althusser and me? I'll leave you the question. It's not necessarily illegitimate to write metaphorically: there's no reason not to illustrate with literary devices which help to make meaning comprehensible. But, interrogate the metaphors to determine their status. Are they substituting for absent concepts?
Elision — Althusser sometimes calls this "slide" [glissement] — can indicate that the author is actually trying to think something different than the thing she thinks she's trying to think. If she says, "I'm going to examine X", but instead discusses Y, you need to use your symptomatic reading to suss the problematics determining her text to understand why that happened. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels frequently talks about empiricism when he says he's talking about materialism. What's up with that?
Absences, or silences. Logically you'd expect to find something which you don't. Marx's concept of Social Formation is entirely absent from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where Mode of Production has a different meaning than in Capital: more or less the same as the epochs of the world spirit in Hegel. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is informed by the neo-Hegelian problematic of Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where the motor of history is the self-unfolding of a simple binary contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, from which the revolutionary bursting forth of the forces of production from their "fetters" causes the birth of a succeeding mode of production which was already incipient inside the contradiction itself.
The notion of a reading as a noun may be Althusser's most widely known contribution, although Althusser's role in developing it might not be so generally remembered. Nowadays everybody knows what a reading is: it's part of general intellectual culture. Althusser and his circle were largely responsible.