Althusser read mature Marx as employing structural not sequential causality

Evidence

Each level or practice is, thus, conceived, not as autonomous but as part of a “complex, structured whole, structured in dominance.” Determinacy consists in the combination or articulation (the Darstellung) of instances and effects in and through this complex structure. “The fact that each of these times and each of these histories is relatively autonomous does not make them so many domains which are independent of the whole; the specificity of each of these times and each of these histories—in other words, their relative autonomy and independence—is based on a certain type of dependence with respect to the whole” (Reading Capital ). This is a conception of “determination” rigorously reinterpreted in the form of what Althusser calls a “structural” rather than a sequential causality. The whole point of Reading Capital is indeed to establish, via a “symptomatic reading” of Marx’s work, that this is indeed the form of “causality” which the mature Marx employed. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 535

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces structural causality and Darstellung/articulation as Althusser’s redefinition of how determination operates.
• XREF: The structural vs. sequential causality distinction parallels broader debates about systemic vs. linear causation in other fields Hall draws on.