Althusser rejected the Hegelian ‘expressive totality’ conception of society

Evidence

Many of the classic themes of the Althusserian intervention are resumed in and through his various uses of this term: for example, his argument that Marx’s “unity” is not the essentialist “expressive unity” to be found in Hegel, and that, therefore, Marx’s dialectic is not merely an inversion, but a theoretical advance over Hegel. … Marx’s “complex unity,” Althusser argues, is neither that in which everything perfectly expresses or corresponds to everything else; nor that in which everything is reducible to an expression of “the Economic.” It operates, instead, on the terrain of articulation. … Such conjunctures are not so much “determined” as overdetermined, i.e., they are the product of an articulation of contradictions, not directly reduced to one another. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 617

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines overdetermination and articulation-the-terrain as Althusser’s via media between expressive totality and economic reductionism.
• XREF: Plausibly connects to classic intellectual-history accounts of post-1968 Western Marxism (Anderson, et al.) and to Hall’s own later hegemony/articulation work. — connects to: Althusser’s framework remains more functionalist than he intends; Articulation rejects reducing one societal level to expression of another.; Althusser framed the core problem of base and superstructure as unresolved by Engels (+6 more)
• ADDENDUM: The concept of articulation as a non-reductionist analytical terrain parallels the infrastructure/metaphor work in the trees essay.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 617

Broader Connections

• Articulation rejects reducing one societal level to expression of another. #corroborates (0.80)
• Althusser framed the core problem of base and superstructure as unresolved by Engels #expands (0.60)
• Althusser’s framework remains more functionalist than he intends #qualifies (0.40)