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How is it that the subject becomes an individual?

I've been perplexed lately, wondering about the strange link between the individual and the subject. I use a couple of slogans to designate the problem. One is an inversion of Althusser: the subject is interpellated as an individual. The other comes from reading Federici (although she doesn't put it exactly this way): the individual is a form of enclosure.

It's clear enough that psychoanalysis is the study of failure, the specific failure of the individual form. The object of its discourse is nothing but this failure. Hence, the scandal of Lacan is to place nothing at all at the heart of the subject, to recognize that 'subject' names nothing but a gap or lack. Every component of the psychic apparatus, evey arrangement of the economies of desire and drive, every discourse that constitutes a social link works around, over, and through this emptiness, investing it with a charge or intensity such that it always seems more than itself.

And, why not, Marx and Nietzsche also give rise to the two other primary studies of failure inextricable from the waning of European modernity: the failure of capitalism and the failure of morality (Corey Robin is pursuing an exciting project that makes the operative term here "value," as he notes the convergence between the ungrounding of value in Hayek and in Nietzsche). In this vein, what becomes postmodernity or late-modernity is resignation, complacency, acquiescence, compromise, and melancholia. No grand narratives, no utopia, no ideals. Even that political form said to be the best, democracy, is acknowledged as unworkable, not so good, only viable because everything else is worse. Political maturity, political realism, is accepting this sorry state with good humor and irony.

The happy story left behind was one of modernity as a kind of triumph, the liberation of reason from dogma, of the individual from the collective, of creativity from stultification and determination within a realm of traditional culture that confined individuals within pregiven roles. And even as our discourses of failure have taught us, rightly, to critique and reject the happy story, how is it that its terms and suppositions persist? More specifically, how is it that some kind of individual free from the collective is so frequently turned to and invoked, the limit of any political project as if struggle were only and ever liberal? 

How is it that the subject remains reduced to the individual, as if there were an individual who is subjected rather than a collective, exercising the power of its own self-determination, that becomes fragmented and desubjectified, pacified as it is divided up into ever smaller portions? 

If we can think of such a prior collective subject, and Freud's discussion of the unconscious as a crowd suggests that we can, then the gap Lacan notes suggests the form that remains once it is emptied of the crowd, once everyone leaves, like an arena that one can never fill alone. Perhaps a better metaphor would be a field where the grass is left broken and flat after everyone is gone. Or perhaps an empty street or public square, the strewn paper and broken glass traces of the many who had been. Subject is gap in the structure not in the sense that subject designates a site of individual freedom, decision, or choice, and not in the sense of unconscious fantasies that fill in and direct the never complete structure, and not even in the sense of the twist or torsion of the real, but rather in the sense that structure becomes subject as collective. The collective body is the subject form of the structure, the gap that makes it not fully itself, or the gap between the ways it is active and the way it is passive.

How is it that subject and individual seem blurred and even equated in contemporary thought? I wonder if we might blame critiques of the transcendental subject that tried to give it a body in order to critique this body for its exclusions? I wonder as well about the effects of forty years of neoliberalism where the emphasis on the unique and creative individual is so incessant, so unavoidable, that we fall into it, unaware. And then I wonder, well, maybe it's just me, maybe it's just my mistake, my misunderstanding. Does this actually enact the very problem I'm trying to address? I personalize and individualize it, eliminating what is common before it can appear?

The Psychic Life of Power opens clearly enough: the paradox of subjection Butler investigates via Freud, Foucault, and Althusser is a formal problem, the problem of the subject form.  She writes:

"The subject" is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with "the person" or "the individual." The geneaology of the subject as a critical category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a 'site'), and to enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language. The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency. No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or undergoing subjectivation . . . It makes little sense to treat 'the individual' as an intelligible term if individuals are said to acquire their intelligibility by becoming subjects. Paradoxically, no intelligible reference to individuals or their becoming can take place without a prior reference to their status as subjects. The story by which subjection is told is, inevitably, circular, presupposing the very subject for which it seeks to give an account. On the one hand, the subject can refer to its own genesis only by taking a third-person perspective on itself, that is by dispossessing its own perspective in the act of narrating its genesis. On the other hand, the narration of how the subject is constituted presupposes that the constitution has already taken place, and thus arrives after the fact. 10-11

Can more than one individual occupy the place of the subject at the same time? If the function of the category subject is to hold a place, then it would seem absolutely necessary that more than one individual occupies the place. Individual is a specific occupation of the subject. And, that would mean that as a subject, the individual can't be individuated. It's just an occupant among other occupants. Subject designates what they are in common, their commonality. For Butler this occupation is subjection, a kind of repression and discipline that involves a relation to law, an attachment to law. As the individual is subjectified, it sacrificies something of itself. To be a subject is to be, in a way, bereft.

But in what way? It seems at times that Butler thinks that the subject is bereft of freedom, where freedom is a kind of authenticity, a freedom to love and desire as she chooses or as she could choose were she not beholden to a norm to which she is subjected. But I wonder if we might understand this differently. When the individual occupies the place of the subject, the individual is bereft of others, of the crowd, of the collective. The individual tries to do and be alone what she can only do and be with others. The place of the subject is a place for us, not for me. It's a crowded place.

It sometimes seems to me as if Butler presumes a link between individual and subject, as if individual preexisted subject and were separate from it, even if its separate pre-existence is inchoate, even abject. When she refers to subject as the condition for the individual's agency, it seems to me that she says this sadly or critically. For her, it's a problem that the individual has to be subjected to have agency. 

But if subject is collective, then we recognize that agency can only be collective; it is always and only the agency of a group (and theorists like Jane Bennett encourage, even enjoin, us to note the multiple objects that must be part of this group). There is no agency by an individual, so it's no wonder that the subject is a condition for agency. This is simply another way of pointing to the fact of collectivity. It would make more sense, then, to say that no individual can become subject, which, it seems to me, is the insight of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as Lacan.

And of the problem of narration? If subject refers to a collective (mass, class, party), then any telling of its story will be partial. It's story will always be open and in process. But this is not because of a dispossession (which Butler considers because she presumes the link between individual and subject) but because of plurality. The subject's story of itself doesn't present a paradox because there isn't a whole or complete story to tell.

The Freudian Subject: crowd

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen reads the primary issues of 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' as arising out of the problematic of the relation between self and other. On the one hand, this problematic is a trick: it presupposes the subject as a self, that is, as already constituted and separate from the other such that relation (in the strict Freudian sense) cannot arise; on the other, this very questioning preserves and protects the subject insofar as it posits it, is premised on it. Shouldn't we think, rather, of a primary sociality that precedes the ego as well as the other--"a mass-ego, a primordial crowd" (133)?

Freud has already implied as much when he observes, in the close of "On Narcissism," that the ego ideal has a social side: "the common ideal of a family, a class, or a nation." Yet we know that insofar as he continued to presuppose an ego, even one that could form itself, he displaced the problem of the group elsewhere (even as it continued to distort his analysis). He returns openly to it in "Group Psychology." Since Freud is heavily indebted to LeBon--quoting pages and pages of his The Crowd, B-J begins with LeBon.

B-J describes LeBon in terms that make clear the proximity between LeBon and Freud. First, both read symptoms as pathological returns to a previous state (so, origins are revealed in symptoms). Second, the crowd is the buried truth (symptom of the social/political): "beind 'people' there lurks the crowd and 'primitive communism' (135). Third, the crowd reveals the 'unconscious substratam' that all its members have in common (something like a racial unconscious, although I think this is better understood simply as belonging: the crowd displays our fundamental nature as belonging. This common basis enables Freud to appropriate LeBon (blurring their respective terminologies);

the crowd is impervious to contradiction, to logical argumentation; credulous, it knows neither doubt nor degrees of conviction; it cannot be restrained, for it tolerates no lapse between desire and its realization, to the point of being careless about its own preservation; the only reality it recognizes is psychic reality (image, illusion, the 'magic word) . . . It seems, then, that at the end of the enumeration the matter is settled: crowd psychology is nothing but the psychology of the unconscious ... The unconscious, in other words, is the archaic group, sociality or collectivity. (And the only question left is in what sense the unconscious is [the] collective. 137

So, it is collective in the sense of common to individuals (and so still within an individual psychology) or is communal or trans, exceding the boundaries of 'individual', or is it prior to this very boundness? And, if we are talking here about prior collectivity than in what sense can we say it: this only repeats for us the problem of the subject or ego; we presuppose a unity.

The crowd, though, is not a unity; it has no identity of its own. B-J notes that LeBon insists that a crowd 'is based not on a common ground but on the absence of any 'subjectal' ground.' Crowds are accumulations from different causes (even if this accumulation is underneath or prior to his odious 'racial soul'). They have, then, a set of new characteristics: sentiment of invincible power, mental contagion, suggestibility. We should note that these are strange characteristics, clearly of disanalogous types--a feeling, a process, an attribute. Also, B-J observes that the latter two disrupt any thing of the crowd as some kind of closed entity in that contagion could designate a process that flows through the crowd, that produces a crowd, or that comes into the crowd from without. Suggestibility is similar: it could designate internal as well as extrnal processes (suggestions from another source).

The crowd does not have an unconscious (an inherited, archaic unconscious), simply because it is not a subject or an aggregate of subjects. At the very most, the crowd may be said to be the unconscious "itself," the crowd-unconscious or the mass unconsious: neither substratumr nor substructure, but rather a soft, malleable, plastic, infinitely receptive material without will or desire or any specific instinct of its own. A matrical mass: the group as a womb. 139

I am going to look for ways to avoid this maternalization of the crowd, particularly as it evokes the idiocy of aborption in jouissance, an imaginary unity, etc. For even if LeBon (or even Freud) may admit of such a reading, later work on crowds (Rude, specifically) provide strong evidence of the rational will of crowds. Even LeBon and Freud, though, reject 'infinite receptivity,' in that they note that the crowd can resist, object, and insist. The crowd acts more like a subject that B-J wants to acknowledge. But, this is likely because his interest is less in the crowd than in the Freudian subject.

B-J's basic point regarding LeBon, then, is that LeBon's crowd is indistinguishable from the unconscious because the unconscious is for me "indissolubly nonsubjectal and 'social," members of the crowd are just "mediums" controlled by suggestion. The model here is hypnosis (totally trendy at the time). The primordial crowd lies at the origin of society and the individual. Every specific crowd is a reappearance. There's a problem in LeBon's account, though, because the crowd doesn't seem capable of giving rise to or originating anything. They depend on suggestibility, on something coming from outside them, which means, again, that they can't be an origin.

The reactionary LeBon takes another path, the way of the Leader. B-J quotes LeBon: "Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack."  They have no will. What makes a leader the leader is the fact that he does (the feminity of the crowd and masculinity of the leader, the phallic logic at work here, is pretty crude). The leader gives form to the inchoate mass. B-J suggests that the form the leader provides it the political form as the Subject-form --and vice versa, establishing the complicity between the political form and the Subject-form: "There would be no body politic if there were not individual at the outset; and if this is so, it is because the body-politic is defined as a supra-indvidual" (145). The leader provides the crowd with its will.

What is Freud's response? He fully accepts the leader but rejects LeBon's account of suggestion. B-J summarizes Freud's critique of hypnosis: it is too violent and intrustive, too directive. Rather than allowing the unconscious to express itself by freeing it of its internal obstacles (as occurs in free association) hypnosis imprints it from without. But there's a problem: suggestibility didn't vanish from psychoanalysis. It's present under a different name: transference.

In an organicist explanation, Freud considers the nature of the tie holding members of the crowd together as Eros rendered as a combining or clustering tendency: society as a multicellular organism (Eros will ultimately be rendered as the love of each member for the leader). But doesn't this clash with the impulse underlying his critique of hypnosis? For B-J, the answer is yes. And this very tension indicates that we are dealing with the logic of the Subject.

For when Freud rises up against the tyrrany of suggestion, he is of course militating in favor of the autonomy of the individual subject. But when, like LeBon and many others, he conceives of society as an organism, he is likewise militating in favor of a collective subject or Subject-State . . . That body which is society requires a head; the organism requires a center of organization. And the group cannot set itself up as Subject except by setting  up, and setting itself up as, the figure of an independent, autonomous subject taking its authority from iutself alone--hence of an authoritarian leader . . .The politics outlined here is a narcissistic politics. 157

B-J, tracing Freud's "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," doesn't turn directly to the problem of this Subject, this narcissistic politics. Instead he deconstructs the opposition between binding and unbinding. Ties among group members--narcissists all--are libidinal and nonlibidinal, possible and impossible, detached and attached all at once.

He also returns to identification, pulling out tensions in Freud's discussion of identification in the text. A first issue concerns the anteriority of identification to the ego--but how is identification without a model possible (part of the problem in the essay on narcissism). "The difficulty involving the formation of the ego or the birth of the subject" is  "impossible to resolve within the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis." It's impossible to say which comes first--identification or object bond.

A way out: a prehistory in which the two are not yet separate, where hate-identification and object love are one and the same, "devouring identification as process of ego-formation:" "but we are not win a prehistory of the ego, in a sociality or a collectivity that precedes all individual history" 180. B-J traces this out to argue for a kind of maternal-womb, identificatory devouring. He then introduces two other kinds of identification in the text. The purpose is to show a range of options open to Freud, who himself always chooses the "Oedipal" option, which means he bypasses certain problems (particularly of origination) and undertakes various conflations and elisions. To what end? According to B-J, to preserve the Subject and Politics, 191.

The preemptory installation of Oedipus complex at the origin of the history of the individual subject is a way of short-circuiting the investigation of the subject's genesis in a pre-individual identification with the other. In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that the Oedipal hypothesis intervenes to protect the autarchy of the subject--or, in what amounts to the same thing, the propriety of its desire (its 'feelings,' its affects, and so on)--in order to protect it against the possibility of an altration (which particularly does not mean an alienation) constitutive of its identity, its most proper 'being.' 192

The result: the subject's exemption from the question of its being (like) the other, of its being-social. As B-J points out, the wild and unexpected move in the chapter on identification is the way that social psychology appears at the heart of individual psychology. "The group is thus at the origin (without origin) of the individual." Freud, though, conceals this in the Oedipus complex. B-J's argument is thus that the Oedipus complex is a political myth of an individual subject not permeated by violence 'of a relation without relation to the other,' but instead lovingly closed in on itself.

To be sure, the Oedipal complex itself denotes a crisis "and a violent one at that." Again, B-J notes the opposition and oscillation between identification and object choice: when violence is eliminated on one side, it shifts to the other. How can hate give way to love? How does love become hate? How does rivalrous identification become sympathetic identification? 

Freud takes this up in chapter 9 of "Group Psychology." The chapter rejects the herd instinct proposed by Trotter. Sociality is not natural--hostility and jealousy are. Identification, in the sense of sympathy, is necessary to put an end to rivalry. Here again, the problem: before, identification was the source of jealousy, "feeling like the other, in the place of the other, from the place of the other" 200. Now it turns into its opposite, giving rise to love, justice, a social conscience, a sense of duty. "Identification is thus both the locus of the problem and the site of its resolution" 202.

At this point, B-J turns to the leader, the relationship to which constitutes the founding bond of society. It won't be surprising to learn that Freud's account stumbles because the leader can't be understood via identification or libidinal ties (even though Freud tries to employ the Oedipal frame). Hence, Freud reintroduces narcissism to try to account for followers love for themselves in the leader. B-J asks whether, if the founding bond of the social is narcissistic, it makes sense to distinguish between narcissistic mental acts and social mental acts (as Freud does in the essay on narcissism. This suggests to me the instability of the individual, its blurring into the social. Rather than narcissism at the root of the social, the social is at the root of narcissism. Narcissism is a desperate failure at an impossible individuation.

If the leader is loved (and Freud discusses being in love in this context) this means that the ego is impoverished to the benefit of the object, which absorbs it. If the leader is identified with, this means that the object is introjected into the ego, which absorbs it. So, which is it? Freud's attempt to distinguish them in effect undermine the difference between them. One of the reasons this matters is that there has to be a difference between the bond between members and the bond between a member and the leader (without a difference, the leader is not a leader). 

Freud defines the group as "a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" 212. For B-J, the problem is that Freud doesn't explain the sort of bond with object put in place. Thus, B-J constructs the following possibility. "Putting the object in the place of the ego ideal means putting it in that identificatory place where the ego would like to be, but where it cannot or must not be itself". The kind of identification at work is one that is incomplete in that the other remains other; the other is inassimilable ("inimitable and uneatable"); imitation of the inimitable. The example here is the Church, where the faithful are to be like Christ (the ideal) even as they are really to put themselves in Christ's place (which would be crazy).

B-J says that the same logic is at work "The Ego and the Id" (written three years after Group Psych). The point at stake involves identification in the Oedipal complex: if the boy child identifies with his father, that would maintain his rivalry with him. How, then, can the boy child have a love bond with his father that ends the rivalry? How can the child be like but not be like his father? There is, B-J, says "an antimimetic interdiction" that forms the heart of morality:

not to identify with the other (more precisely, not to identify the other with oneself) is the only way of respecting the other as other, without doing him violence. The Law is the of the Other. It is thus, by the same token, a Law of the Subject. "Do not be like me": this is understood, positively, prescriptively, as "Be yourself," "Be original," "Be a subject." The origin of morality is simultaneously the origin of the subject, in the sense that there is no subject (identifying itself as ego through difference from the other) except a moral subject, morally instituted. The Law assigns the subject, assigns it to being. Thus would emerge from the Oedipal chaos, where all is in all and the ego in the other, a subject finally identified, identifiable, capable of entering into normal, normed, regulated relations with others/ That, at least, is what could be said if this very "subject" did not have to identify itself in order to be a subject. 217

The law can't take the form of an interdiction because there isn't yet a subject. "The law, the double law that assigns the subject, is thus stated as follows: 'Identify without identifying.' Or, more simply still: 'Identify yourself as a subject.' (I am reminded b0th of Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals and Hegel in the Philosophy of Right: be a person and respect others as persons. Why would there need to be an injunction to be a person?)

For B-J the issue is that of the insane core of Oedipal law, the double bind instituting the subject at the site where it submits to a law by transgressing it (and this is why the subject is always guilty). The Oedipal law "binds twice over: it bonds and unbonds the subject" 218. 

B-J's writing at this point is wondrously, deliriously over-the-top, fullying enjoying the paradox of guilt, destruction, guilt, punishment, birth, and identification. Identifying in order not to identify, a veritable Escher-esque Oedipal complex where the exit is no different from the entrance. And yet I wonder if his enjoyment here may also be a kind of relief from the problem of Group Psychology --after all, he is discussing "The Ego and the Id." So the ego has a kind of separate obviousness that it lacks in Group Psychology. When he returns to Group Psychology, he does so rather flatly and simply, saying that the Father-Leader represents the ideal of crowd members, a point so obvious in the text that all the paradoxical delirium seems unnecessary, a distraction.

At this point, the chapter is almost over. Yet it feels strange and unsatisfying, moving quickly to hypnosis and then back to LeBon. The strangeness, to me, results from the disconnect between the Oedipal discussion and the return to 'the collective prehistory of humanity.' What's at stake here is the collective unconscious or the 'unconscious-as-collective' (235). "The first psychology of humanity (ours, even now) was collective" and "this 'psychology,' this thought, belonged to no subject. Being common to all (communing them), it belonged to no one."

And then: the story of the primal horde and Father-leader, killed by the sons yet narrated by the poet/genius who puts himself in the role of the Father-subject-creative genius. Who to be unique must imitate. For B-J, this is the story of Freud's egoistic dream, and ours as well. For me, it's a story of psychoanalysis as the failure of individuation, the impossibility of the individual. 

Why does he not ask whether the crowd, group, collective is Subject? Here Subject would be multiple, heterogeneous, conflictual, and incomplete even as active, creative, and willful. Hypnotist-Leader-Father would be contingent, tempting, and dangerous. Guilt is falling for the lure, pretending to the image of a separateness that is not separate. Do not identify, do not be like me means do not separate, do not put the image (ego) where we are and have  been. 

The Freudian Subject: ego

A key line of argumentation in The Freudian Subject attempts to de-sexualize psychoanalytic theory. I appropriate the idea as follows: Freud treats the unconscious as the unconscious of a subject. This leads him to individualize it, to contain it within the individual, as we might say, an ego unconscious. But much of what he discovers can't be contained within the individual. It points to an unconscious that cannot be trapped in a scene or point, an unconscious that moves and shifts. Why is the unconscious this way? I want to argue that it's because the unconscious is a crowd; it's plural, multiple (and so the question remains: is it a still the unconscious of a subject, now understood as a collective subject? or, is it collective but not a subject?) . Freud tries various ways to repress his knowledge of this crowd. One way is with his emphasis on sexuality, which also immediately ties the subject back to others, although in a more singular way, that is, a way delimited by Oedipus. Sex is too limiting (or, in the famous line from Sid and Nancy: sex is boring). 

How does Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen develop his argument? In the second section, he reads Freud's discussion of narcissism together with Freud's correspondence (Jung, Fleiss). A key issue: Freud's emphasis on sexuality, particularly in the eliding of the autoerotic body with narcissism that occurs in the correspondence with Jung. This elision is a problem. The autoerotic body is anarchic, ruptured, conflicting (70); this body doesn't merge easily into a narcissism that associates a whole, unified body with an individual, which makes the body into my own body. There is uneasiness and confusion here.

B-J argues that Freud insists on sexuality as a way to give body to narcissism. And, also, as a way to differentiate his view from Jung's even as it had blended and overlapped in a "communism of thought-sharing" in their correspondence. The emphasis on sexuality was, according to B-J, also a (re)institutionalization of "intellectual private property." The explanation of narcissism was a product of a narcissism caught up in mimetic rivalry.

B-J makes a similar argument as he reads Freud's "Psycho-Analytic Notes" together with the Freud-Jung correspondence on the topic of paranoia and homosexuality. For B-J, the issues at stake are much more those of rivalry than sexuality; Freud, however, emphasizes sexuality in the context of his own rivalrous identification with Jung. B-J's argumentation considers the "archesociality" of homosexuality in Freud's account, as well as the tension this causes for Freud's discussion of homosexuality as a threat to sociality. The discussion is intricate. For now, I want to jump to one of the conclusions:

So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would recede sociality (or--and it is the same thing--a sociality that would relate already-constituted subjects to each other. This would be to theorize with delusion, to speculate in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (myself) as the mimetic double . . .desire is mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong into  a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it.

It follow that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblances, all mimesis. To recognize that I resemble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire, would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that double who enrages me.

It follows, finally, that narcissicism is violence, and that the ego ...is a gloomy tyrant . . . Narcissism is in profound collusion with power--by which we mean tyrannical power, or put another way, political madness--by virtue of its mimetic, rivalrous, (a)social origin . . . 93-94

Affirmation of the ego is violent because it is a wrenching of the ego out of the crowd, the collective, the group of which it is a part. Or, the ego is nothing else but this wrenching, this assertion of self. And it's an assertion doomed to frustration because it depends on the very others it needs to annihilate. The horror of the ego: I am not myself. 

B-J says that the violence of the ego is also present at the collective level: "the totalitarianism and imperialism of the 'we' are never anything but the supreme phase of the absolution of the ego, the "I," and they are implied in even the most solitary, most pacific meditations on the ego cogtito."

This does not mean that any collective is totalitarian, only that it risks totalitarianism insofar as they are 'the supreme phase' of the absolution of the ego. But, even in this somewhat watered down version, I wonder if B-J jumps to quickly to make the 'we' nothing but the ego bigger. That, I think, is too fast, particularly given his focus already on the dilemmas of sociality.

I've been reading this in order to get at the primacy of collectivity and a sense of collective desire. At this point, I am afraid that one of the costs of this direction is that the desire at work is violent. The violence, though, I think is the violence of the assertion of the ego. It's a product of mimesis, the operation that let's desire be as the desire of a subject even as it undermines the subject itself; or, desire insofar as creates and threatens an ego. 

 Fortunately, I think, the chapter ends in a way I need it to: primary narcissism is a myth, present only as already crossed out (101). Or, in my language, it's a symptom of the problems Freud is having enclosing the unconscious or accounting for the emergence of a subject as an ego.

That the subject emerges in and through a primordial fiction is what Freud has been saying from the outset, from the moment he declared ... that 'something' has to form the ego. This has to mean that the ego is nothing--not even amorphous matter, not even a 'fragmented body'--prior to such a formation, prior to such a 'creation.' Thus we have no business speculating about the nature of the ego, the subject, the Narcissus complex, any more than we may presuppose any sort of property or subjective identity. Such identity will always be apocryphal and fictious (but its falseness can no longer be truthfully expressed), inasmuch as there can be no subject except one that is initially modeled on or modeled by (here we have no way of distinguishing activity from passivity, spontaneity from receptivity) something that 'precedes' it. 116

In the beginning were others. We weren't among the others; I wasn't one among them. I emerge from and out of them and the I that emerges will always be to an extent false, fictious, imaginary (B-J, though rejects Lacan's account of the imaginary because 'in the beginning there is no one to see anything at all;' this doesn't seem to me to be necessary because I think they are talking about different stages).

And can we apply this to thinking about a political subject? Perhaps when we note the blurring of active and passive, spontaneous and receptive.

Back to B-J: his point is that Freud's early arguments presuppose the ego and the arguments in the narcissism essay attempt to solve this problem but fail (resulting in an essay that is unreadable). His very language breaks down.

if the ego is not 'present from the outset,' if it is nothing prior to accepting in (and as) 'itself' a form that comes 'from without,' it follows not only that the relation to the object (to the other, to the 'non-ego') is primary, but also and especially that this first relation cannot have been a specular relation, nor even, ultimately, a relation at all.  

The ego can't emerge by looking because that assumes that there is something that is looking; it can't emerge via an object relation, because that assumes a separate ego that can be in this relation.

Where the ego forms itself in the image of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of 'form' or 'image,' either of 'self' or 'other.' Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the 'I" arrives. And the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenomenality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage becomes a beyond-stage, a fore-stage of the primary mimesis. 118

Freud's attempts to explain the ego ideal and ideal ego, whether via introjection and internalization or projection flounder on the same problem: positing an ego before the one the origins of which he is trying to describe. Freud only 'solves' the problem by shifting it to another level.

How are we to explain that an ego (fragment) assimilates (itself) (to) the other and thereby forms itself? That it begins by incarnating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That it emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That t emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) the other, the object? These are inevitable, and inevitably hopeless, questions, as long as continue to posit a preformed, ready-made ego. For it is not clear why such an ego would need to identify itself, even "partially," with an ideal imposed from without, or why it would desire to submit to the law that imposed imitation. If the subject is "at the beginning," why would it subject itself? 124

As B-J explains, this the problematic of the second topography Freud introduces in the 1920s:

How can we conceive of that strange figure of an ego that forms its ideal in its own image and forms itself in the image of its ideal, that projects itself in the ideal and introjects the ideal, that identifies the ideal with itself and itself with the ideal? 125

I think the answer has to turn on the crowd. And, the final chapter of the book thus focuses on the primal band.

The Freudian Subject: desire

As part of my ongoing inquiry into collective desire, I've been reading Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject. It has not gotten the attention it deserves. Borch-Jacobsen, in a work informed by Lacan and Girard, asks about the "it" that thinks, exceeding consciousness (self-presence), language, signifier, and structure. Who thinks in the unconscious? Who is the subject of desire? Who is the subject of the unconscious, this intimate otherness?

B-J's bold claim: the unconscious is multiple, unnameable, unverifiable. It is unidentifiable because it is plural. The book is a close reading of Freud. My comments try to give a schematic of the argument; they don't repeat B-J's own close engagements with the texts.

Desire

B-J does not accept the Lacanian idea that desire depends on lack, that it is necessarily unsatisfied. Rather, he thinks that desire is satisfied through identification (even as identification is not the object of desire).  Indentification sets up a scenario "in which the wish is presented as fulfilled: on this basis, identification is indeed the satisfaction of the desire as such" (16-17). He writes:

saying that wishes are fulfilled fantasmatically and that enjoyment is based on identification amounts to saying the same thing. This is what accounts for the fact that the subject's place in fantasy is always the place of another.

Or in Lacanese, desire is the desire of the Other (a point to which B-J returns more than once). Even with respect to the lack, B-J seems to me to be more compatible with Lacan than he acknowledges. Why? Because B-J's discussion is about fantasy, enjoying in fantasy, using fantasy to stage desire. Enjoyment is indirect. It has to take a detour (and now we get into the weird fuzziness of the it that enjoys or enjoyment as its own force or, possibly, something else, something more primordial). Identification is that detour (and, as Zizek will remind us, there are at least two possibilities here, with an ideal ego or an ego ideal). And wish fufillment is always in another place.

Enjoyment is fantasmatic (the wish is fufilled in a fantasy). The fantasy stages desire. But whose? It is only present to the subject insofar as the subject identifies with another; it is never directly manifest as the subject's desire but as the desire of another. But why? 

B-J answers this by connecting desire first with mimesis (not with interdiction or the Law ala Lacan; this seems to me like a good move, especially for us now in a setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency). Invoking Girard, he claims that desire had no object before a mediator intervenes to tell us what is desireable (this is also compatible with Zizek, whether with respect to his discussion of the ego ideal, his discussion of the theft of enjoyment, or his discussion of ideology as a matrix of desire; in each instance, desire depends on the other; desire is the desire of the other). Desire for an object, then, is induced. It is secondary to  imitation, mimesis, that is, to the desire of others. For B-J, this means that there is a prior desire to imitate. And, since mimesis informs desire, desire is indissolubly bound to rivalry, hatred, and violence: I want what the other has; I want it in his place. "What triggers desires is mimetic assmilation, identification with a model of desire" 28.

The repercussion of this is that the aim of desire is to be, not to have. And, to be, for B-J, means to be like. Identification is what enables the desire to be. B-J notes that not only does this mimetic account of desire displace the centrality of sexuality (and the centrality of the object), but that it priotizes a different set of passions, the passions connected with being replaced and being equated: rivalry, jealousy, envy, ambition. Note the fundamental ambivalence involved in identification with another (32). So, for B-J desire is not first about obtaining pleasure (object oriented), it is first about identification. No wonder desire may involve pain and death.

That desire is mimetic raises particular questions with respect to fantasy: in what way does fantasy stage desire? If the scene stages desire, the subject is in the position of the spectator. If the scene is one in which the subject acts out desire, then the subject is an actor within  the scene.

Thus the subject either plays a part in the spectacle or is a spectator; either he merely sees or he sees himself, by presenting himself to himself, confronting himself, in the objectivity of the Vor-stellung; either he is in representation, here and now, in the scene on stage, or he is representing himself there, on the stage. This dilemma is implacable, insurmountable. The lack of distinction between self and other--the mimesis--has to be acted out; yet no sooner is it represented to the subject in the specular mode than it is betrayed. At that very moment the image in the mirror, the spectacle will have already opened up the space of adversity (note that I am not saying of alterity): hence the instanteous rage that overcomes the child when she sees the other in her place ... And no doubt the other will be at that moment scarcely different from me mylsef (almost myself); but this self, myself, being specular, will already be an adverse, adversary self, an enemy (almost another). 40.

A difference, a cleavage, between the stage on which one is playing and the stage one sees. One cannot occupy both positions at the same time (although we can list efforts to do so: plays within plays; Being John Malkovich). Thus, "mimesis is unrepresentable for the subject in the mode of Vorstellung. Remaining unspecularized, it remains ungraspable. It is in this sense that fatnasy remains unconscious--not that it is assigned to a place or subject, but that it cannot be assigned. Or, as I will add, that it remains plural.

I wonder if the analysis of mimesis here provides a way for thinking about opposition to the party: it's like at the moment when our political energies and efforts are assigned to an agency compromised of us even as it stands outside of us, people become anxious, angry, concerned. The other (that is us) is in our place. We can't occupy both the position of spectators and of actors at the same time. This also makes me wonder about a lot of anger I recently heard expressed toward 'so many cameras' in Occupy. The cameras were seen as in the way, non active, merely spectators, even as they were right in the middle of the scene, part of the crowd.

Desire does not come first. (47). There is no desiring subject prior to identification. "Identification brings the desiring subject into being." There is  'primordial tendency' to identification; it gives rise to desire, and this desire is "from the outset, a (mimetic, rivalrous) desire to oust the incommodious other from the place the pseudo-subject already occupies in fantasy."

It's not yet clear to me why, exactly, there is a primoridal tendency to identification. B-J is emphatic that it's not a matter of a primary repression (to think in this direction is to presume a pre-existing subject--which also makes me think of Butler's discussion of passionate attachments). He also wants to avoid 'the ineradicable megalomania of desire.

The so-called subject of desire has no identity of its own prior to the identification that brings it, blindly, to occupy the point of otherness, the place of the other (who is thus not an other): an original alienation (which is thus not an alienation); and an original lure (which is thus not a lure, either).

Does this tell us why there is a tendency to identification? My idea is that this tendency is the problem of individuation and embodiment. That it designates the problem of self-consciousness as something apart from being originally a part, from being a part of a collective or a crowd or a group. And that insofar as we are originally parts, we remain inextricably interconnected--every attempt to be apart involve connection at another point. Hence, original alienation is not alienation at all, but the immediacy of connection (which should not be mistaken for absorption). 

 

Freud: group and transference

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud concerns himself with man as a member, man in his belonging to: how is that that to which man belongs, belongs to him?

We should note that the German title refers to Massenpsychologie. The English "group" could have been translated as mass or as crowd. I consider the book in some detail for several reasons: first, because of the way the group is enclosed in the individual; second, because of the link between transference and the group; third, because many of the elements of Freud's account reappear in later writers' discussions of crowds. What is crucial in this text is the primacy of the group to the individual. Group psychology--belonging, connection, will--comes first. The individual ego develops out of it in a process that is unstable and incomplete.

Group psychology, Freud tells us, is concerned with the simultaneous influence of a large number of people, generally strangers, on the individual. It thus concerns man as a member of a race, nation, caste, profession, institution, or crowd organized at a particular time for a specific purpose. What's interesting to Freud is that man's insertion into a group leads to thoughts, feelings, and actions that are unexpected. He wants to understand the nature of the mental change effected by groups.

I have italicized insertion into a group because in some ways Freud's account actually seems to be inverted, an account of the group's insertion into the man or, differently put, the enclosure of the group in the individual. Perhaps it makes sense to say that there is an ambiguity here as to what is incorporating what: does the group incorporate the man or does the man incorporate, internalize, introject the group? Is it possible that there is a reciprocal, albeit uneven and not without remainder, incorporating? And might this unsteady, unstable site of overlap be the space of the subject such that subject is necessarily collective? 

Freud develops his account by quoting extensively from Gustave LeBon's The Crowd. There are two significant elements in the first passage from LeBon that he lifts: the fact that individuals in a group are in the possession of a kind of 'collective mind that makes feel, think, and act in manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation' and the idea that the psychological group is a 'provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements.' Neither of these points interests Freud. He basically assumes that LeBon's ideas are in keeping with his. What he wants to know is what it is that unites individuals into a group, but LeBon isn't telling.

Instead, LeBon is talking about things like a racial unconscious, an 'unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences.' This substratum is similar in everyone. Individual characteristics are a kind of superstructure of difference built on this common base. This suggests that the base is common, that it consists in the group. The group is again incorporated in the individual. As I see it, the problem with this sort of claim, one manifest in its racism, is an assumption of substantial content. It is insufficiently formal. So a similarity is implied and inserted into what is formally the press and presence of many, of the crowd. Similarity is assumed when all that can be assumed is commonality.

One might expect the argument to be that this unconscious is what manifests itself in the crowd. Somewhat surprisingly--at least Freud is surprised--LeBon's argument is instead that new characteristics, characteristics not previously possessed, are displayed. The first is a sense of invincibility that accompanies a loss of a sense of responsibility. Freud writes this off as not surprising--of course our deepest selves lack responsibility; the crowd enables the individual to 'throw off repressions.' Note, insofar as the repressions that mark the individual are thrown off, it's the crowd that returns. More interesting is the second: contagion. It is kin to hypnosis. The third is suggestibility. I should add that nearly everyone who writes about crowds describes crowds in terms of contagion and suggestibility. We see the language of contagion, for instance, in discussions of the movements of 2011 as well as in networked media.

Freud's next two pages consist almost entirely of long passages from LeBon on contagion and hypnosis. He notes that there is an assymetry in LeBon's account. Contagion refers to members effects on each other. Suggestibility, particularly when understood in terms of hypnosis, suggests something else entirely. Who is the hypnotist?

Before investigating this problem, Freud includes another long quote from LeBon:

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian -- that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.

Freud approves, finding this helpful for understanding the individual in the group. Again, he seems to me to invert his point since the passage seems to describe the primitive group within the individual, sedimented as the hereditary components of the unconscious.

Freud next turns to the group per se and repeats various elements of LeBon's description, saying that the group is changeable, irritable, impulsive, credulous, incapable of perseverence, desirous, intolerant of delays in the satisfaction of its desire, open to influence, and that it thinks in images. The group is inclined to extremes, obedient to authority, respectful of force, it goes to extremes. It has a thirst for obedience: it is an 'obedient herd.'  "It wants to be ruled by force and to fear its masters." At the same time, because it is not ruled by personal interests groups may be devoted to ideals. In short, in groups extremes exist side by side.

Finally, Freud notes that LeBon's discussion of leaders is rather minimal. What he likes in it, though, is LeBon's account of a mysterious power, 'prestige,' as a kind of domination exerted by an individual or idea that paralyzes our critical faculty and fills us with astonishment and respect. Prestige, Freud says, arouses a feeling like that of fascination in hypnosis.

Freud is preoccupied with the leader because he wants to know what it is that ties the group together--the main thing he thinks is missing from LeBon's discussion. His hypothesis is that the answer is love, or emotional relationships. Love holds the group together. The individual gives up his distinctiveness to the group because he wants to be in harmony with its members. 

Before I continue we should keep in mind a few things at this point. First, we are talking about groups that range from race, to caste, to nation, to profession, to institution, to crowd. Second, these groups are all considered to be psychological groups. Whether an individual is physically in the group--in the crowd or in an institution--is no different from whether the individual is imagining or feeling himself to be in it--as with the nation or race. There is no difference between whether the individual is in the group or the group is within the individual. Third, the description of the group's behavior comes primarily from LeBon, who takes his description from Taine's account of the French revolution, that is, from descriptions of revolutionary masses.

It would be too easy simply to reject Freud at this point. Better, I think, is to try to get at what's compelling so far. Why, in other words, it might not be completely wrong to compare a professional organization, with one's membership in the imaginary community of the nation, with the experience of being in a crowd. When one thinks of oneself as a member of any group, one is occupying the position of that group towards a specific issue or question. One isn't thinking from one's own personal interests, but from a collective interest. Personal interest is subsumed in the collective. [Incidentally, the problem of the US--which might be the same as the problem of liberal democracy as well as any form of libertarianism--is that the collective is subsumed by the individual; the individual is prioritized.] This is a rather cognitivist illustration. What about something more affective? Here as an example we might think of nationalist responses to the burning of a state flag or perhaps to the invocation of threats. Or, with regard to professional organizations we might think of the way we apply certain standards of 'professional excellence' when we assess matters that we might approach differently under other circumstance ("well, I like X's work, but X is not right for this job"). 

Are we far removed from suggestibility and contagion? Not if we recall the mysterious 'prestige.' In professional situations we often respond to the fact of another's prestige--which is one of the reasons for double blind peer review. We also often find ourselves rather automatically repeating terms, phrases, ideas that have been suggested to us. I wonder if our often overstated critiques of others' work are reactive attempts to shake ourselves loose from these kinds of attachments. There could be, then, habits of mind that are not fully our own, that inhabit us in ways rather too much like the enthusiasm of the crowd at a football match. 

So Freud has accepted LeBon but wants to look further at what it is that ties together members of a group. He has suggested that the ties are emotional--love. To explore this further he turns to the church and the army. What is the intervening step? He says that what is really worthy of attention is the distinction between leaderless groups and groups with leaders. And, 'in complete opposition to the usual practice,' he will begin not with simple groups but with highly organized, lasting, artificial groups, again, church an army -- two groups, incidentally, not mentioned in his summary of LeBon.

According to Freud, church and army are groups that people don't typically choose to enter and that they leave only at high personal costs such as punishment or persecution. Each are headed by an individual (Christ, commander) "who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love." This illusion of equal love is absolutely essential, Freud tells us. Everything depends on it. Christ stands in relation to the individuals in the church as a kind of elder brother or 'father surrogate.' In fact, because of the equality of members (each shares equally in Christ's love), the church is like a family. Members call each other brothers (and sisters). 'The tie which unites each individual to Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another." The army is basically the same, with the fundamental difference being that this familial structure is repeated in a hierarchical fashion (sections, units, squadrons, etc). What matters here to Freud is the double nature of the libidinal tie of the group: individual to leader, individual to individual. 

The tie to the group is libidinal, strong enough to limit one's narcissism. So, what kind of libidinal tie is it? Answering this question takes Freud to a discussion of the differences between identification and object choice. "Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person." Additionally, from the very first identification is ambivalent; tenderness can become hostility. Freud's example (a nice convergence of identification and incorporation) is the cannibal who only devours those of whom he is fond.

The repercussion of the discussion of identification for Freud's account of the church and the army is that he oedipalize them, that is, present the group as ultimately no different from the family. 

The discussion of identification is detailed, detailed in a way that Freud notes has left the riddle of group ties untouched, shifting it over to the riddle of hypnosis. He got to hypnosis via 'being in love.' He explains that hypnosis is not actually a good object to compare with group formation because it is 'identical with it,' isolating 'the behavior of the individual to the leader.' In a group, the individuals have all substituted the same object for their ego ideal and  'have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.' (Because Freud is interested in the leader, he addresses the ego ideal and its relation to the ego in some detail; I might have to take this up in a subsequent post. For now, I am leaving it to the side because I am more interested in the group, not in the somersaults Freud does to try to discuss groups in terms of a leader.)

Freud wonders whether it would have been simpler just to talk about a herd instinct (he invokes Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, 1916). But, he says no. What's really at work is the more complex structure he already outlined, the one where multiple individuals identify with one another in their love for the same object (his example is that of 'the troop of women and girls ... who crowd around a singer or pianist after his performance'). Trotter's problem, and the reason the herd instinct doesn't explain groups, is that it leaves out the leader. There isn't a herd instinct. There's a horde instinct. Man is a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.

And so, the primal horde, the originary form that the group revives. Recall the basic characteristics of the group: the dwindling of conscious, individual personality, the predominance of the emotions and the unconscious metal life, the focus of feelings in a common direction, the tendency to immediacy--"all this corresponds to a set of regression to a primitive mental activity." His note regarding the primal horde is even more telling: "The will of the individual was too weak; he did not venture upon action. No impulses whatever came into play except collective ones; there was only a common will, there were no single ones." He concludes that the oldest psychology is the group psychology; individual psychology has only come into prominence from it gradually and in a way that is still incomplete.

Then Freud forces himself to make a distinction and make individual and group psychology co-equally primary. Why? Because of the leader. Yet this reintroduces the problem of individual psychology at another level: how does one who is a member of a group become a leader or how is that after the leader dies there is another who can take his place: "there must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology." Freud's answer is nearly nonsensical--he explains how the primal father forced his individual sons into group psychology (denial of sexual access to women; restriction of libidinal ties redirects them toward group). That is, he inverts what he said he was going to explain. 

At any rate, Freud argues that the leader of the group is the same as the primal father, which is why the group wants to be dominated or led, why--and he quotes Le Bon here--the group has a thirst for obedience.

The mental differentiation part of the psychic development of the individual involves a separating from the group, but this separating is also an internalization (formation of ego ideal out of which the ego separates). The process is none to stable and liable to shock. Freud notes that it is conceivable that this separation can't be born for long and has to be temporarily undone (festivals). (To be clear, the primary direction of Freud's discussion involves the separation between the ego and ego ideal; I am trying to read it as the separation of the individual from the group. I think that this is fair insofar as the ego ideal is a figure of the group.) 

In his closing remarks, Freud returns to the myth of the primal horde: father feared and loved, killed by band of sons, sons fight among themselves for power, gynocracy installed during this period, "some individual is moved to take over the father's part and free himself from the group" -- he was the first epic poet who invents the heroic myth, the myth of the hero who slays the father. The hero claims to act alone -- but folklore reminds us that he is always accompanied by a crowd, like small animals, bees, and ants.

"The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology."

He also schematizes being in love, hypnosis, and the group. In the latter two, sexual tendencies are inhibited in their aims; the object is substituted for the ego ideal, with the extra element of identification with others in the case of the group.

We are unconscious

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud engages Gustav Le Bon's account of the crowd. LeBon writes, "The substitution of the unconscious actions of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age" (4). Drawing from LeBon, Freud, too, links the crowd, group, or mass (the terms are interchangeable) to the unconscious. I think I can put the point more strongly. For Freud, the unconscious is the group. 

This seems to be the case in at least two senses. One is the way that the unconscious is the sedmented and repressed product of history, whether that of a species or a family as it impresses itself within the individual as one of its singular sites.  A second is the way the unconscious is described in terms of the features of the group or the mass. It's this second sense that interests me insofar as Freud ascribes to the unconscious the features LeBon ascribes to the group.

LeBon writes, "Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength." It's as if there is a kind of inversion or exchange: LeBon views crowds as unconscious and Freud views the unconscious as crowds. This is exchange is possible because LeBon thinks of groups or crowds as psychological. They are not limited to the mass of bodies in the streets but extend to a wide array of imaginary communities and identities, myriad sites of belonging. The unconscious is that to which the individual belongs. 

Because the unconscious is that to which the individual belongs, the site of its belonging, the unconscious exacts certain qualifications from the individual: it subjects the individual to dictates of belonging, making it act in a certain way insofar as it is a member of a group. Anxiety about this subjection is a characteristic of over a century of inquiry into the mass or crowd, from Durkheim, through Mill, through twentieth century American sociology's emphases on the mass and conformity.

Overall, what is the payoff of this inquiry into the connection between the unconscious and the group? Why is it worth considering? It might help us understand the problem of collective desire, of the difficulty of formulating a positive conception of collective desire. First, the unconscious is the repository of impulses and instincts figured as so wild and primitive that civilization is itself the direct product of their repression. Second, the enclosure of the unconscious in the person is like a triumph of the individual over the group; the individual becomes primary, the ally of civilization against the primal forces and urges of the group. At the same time, psychoanalysis as a field is possible because the structures it investigates are already collective, are already the properties of a group. The subject is common, generic, a form or container. Yet this containing or enclosing makes the group unconscious in another sense--we are perpetually thwarted in our attempts to access it, to get to it, to comprehend it as more than just a quantitative expansion of individual subjects. It's one rather than the more than one. 

Going through the text: 

Freud begins by noting that the distinction between individual and group psychology is actually not a very sharp one--individuals are related to others. He observes that typically group psychology focuses on man as a member of a race, nation, profession, caste, institution, or crowd. "Natural continuity" is severed in favor of an emphasis on this large group, sometimes in the name of some kind of her instinct or group mind. Freud finds it implausible that number would itself arouse a new instinct. So, he considers two other possibilities: the social instinct isn't primitive; it may emerge out of the family.

He also approaches the problem from a different direction: surprise. An individual that one understands as an individual can act in a totally unexpected way when he is inserted into 'a collection of people which as acquired the characteristic of a psychological group.'

This introduces the 3 questions group psychology is supposed to answer: what is a group, how does it acquire the capacity for exercising a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it forces on the individual?

Freud draws heavily on Gustav LeBon for answers to these questions. Individuals transformed into a group possess a collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act differently from the way that they would act alone. Certain ideas and feelings only come into being, only transform themselves into acts when individuals form a group. As Freud quotes LeBon,

Whoever be the individuals that compose it . . . the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel,think, and act in a matter quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being ... (7)

Now Freud is concerned with the bond that unites members, what it is that forms them into a group. He suspects that this bond is 'precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group.' LeBon, though, proceeds differently, addressing the alteration of the individual.

Freud quotes LeBon: "Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind mainly by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we are ourselves are ignorant."

Freud explains that Le Bon thinks that the particular characteristics of individuals become obliterated in a group; the racial unconscious emerges. Individuality is the 'mental superstructure' to the unconscious base of the group.

But there is more. Individuals in a group also display new characteristics, such as a feeling of invincible power, a sentiment that LeBon associates with a loss of a sense of responsibility.

Freud doesn't think the characteristics are new. He thinks that the group enables the individual to 'throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses.' Far from new, the characteristic the individual displays are mainfestations of the unconscious.

Back to the Party (again, with Zizek and Badiou)

Zizek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the "proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel." Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn't know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin's paraphrase--and revision--of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here:  where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its 'true political identity' and 'its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices' (8). He writes: "the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion ... This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space" (9). And, "the bourgeoisie makes a subject" (42); "the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people" (42).

 Zizek writes: "'external' intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its 'mission'--this insight has to be mediated through an external element." This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the 'external intellectuals.' As we know from "What is to be Done?" Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to 'substitute' these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party "gives form" to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat's own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: "it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously--the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity." He continues, "in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject's desire."

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud's self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud's dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose--rather, we are who we are because, in  a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.] 

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked "to a collective political subject." The Party doesn't know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat. 

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

"What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our 'I' in the "we" of the Party's collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line--just don't do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan's formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party's knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth."

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It's necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification. 

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of 'convergence of struggles.'

You may 'coordinate' them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of 'convergence' must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek's definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I've already made in Zizek's Politics and The Communist Horizon.  Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next--the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I'll take this up in subsequent posts.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I ventured from my small declining city in farmland to the cheerless suburbs for some Christmas shopping. I wasn't immune to the consumerist spirit of Barnes and Noble. Items that I would typically ignore or mock were oddly appealing. They were potential gifts. As gifts they promised  a momentary escape from profit and loss, supply and demand. Even though they lied, I couldn't help but believe them. The day after Christmas, they will have lost their potential as gifts. Sinking back down into the swamp of over-production, they will have become bargains. So much extra and unwanted stuff, they will slide into overstock and only a week or two after the New Year turn into trash.

One series of such items features the motto from WWII Britain, "Keep calm and carry on." There is a "keep calm" calendar. There are mugs, tshirts, shopping bags, refrigerator magnents, and mobile phone cases repeating the injunction. Why are we so enjoined?

To say that the slogan traveled from the UK where it was an ironic and affectionate nod to the Queen and British resolve mistakes geneaology for explanation. Lots of things travel through communicative capitalism's meme flows. Not all of them get their own mugs and calendars.

I think the call to "keep calm" is everywhere because we are in a crisis, over the edge, living the end and one step from total panic and chaos (for a slightly different demographic the analogous meme is YOLO). It repeats a British slogan because the British handled their decline much better than we are. They offered a kind of social welfare--national health, housing, education--that eased the pain a bit. 

I started thinking about the demand for calm down during my yoga class today. The instructor mentioned the Connecticutt shootings and then told people to focus on the positive. She advised the class not to turn on the news and to be mindful of our breathing.

I don't think the instructor is an idiot, bless her heart. She's just repeating what she's heard over and over and over again for a decade, since the world ended and instead of joining the rest of the world as one of many facing common problems the US suffered a psychotic break.

For some, this psychosis manifests itself via an intransigent attachment to the power the country no longer has, except for its nuclear arsenal which gives it its remaining power, the power to destroy. For others it manifests itself via the delusion that we can go back, become Keynesians again, return to the social democratic road we didn't take. For still others it's in the desperate hope that they can seize enough--money, weapons, things--to keep the rest of us so far away that we can't do any damage (I talk more systematically about US psychosis in the last chapter of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies). 

The mistake of zombie movies and Mayan calender fans is that they think of the apocalypse as happening relatively quickly -- although it's worth noting that a zombie apocalypse takes longer than an asteroid, so maybe there is some cultural learning here. The apocalypse isn't fast --it's slow, perpetually and momentarily displaced like so many chemo treatments or anti-aging creams, Snow Crash not Omega Man, Feed not Dr. Strangeglove, Super Sad Really True Love Story not 2012.

Do we really expect the areas of New York demolished by hurricane Sandy to be rebuilt in a way that can provide something like a quality of life for poor and working class people, for people who were living in public housing or other low income areas? Or is it more likely that the city will use the disaster as an opportunity to continue its steady banishment of low net worth individuals in the name of development? If we keep calm, they will keep on, keep on expropriating and exploiting because nothing is stopping them.

Do we accept that the families of those slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school will recover, will come back stronger and better than ever? I don't and I think that suggestions of healing and recovery and celebration and moving on and requiring a waiting period for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons perpetuate the fantasy that everything is basically okay, that the system is sound, that if we remain calm and soldier on we will get through this thing together. That's the biggest lie of all because we are not together and we have not been together. We persist in a lie that violence is freedom and inequality is freedom and the unrestrained exercise of financial power is freedom. We even have a motto for this persistence.

Keep calm and carry on.

Foucault: The Mesh of Power (previously untranslated)

(this is an excerpt from a previously untranslated essay by Foucault)

We will attempt to proceed towards an analysis of the concept of power.¹ I am not the first, far from it, to attempt to skirt around the Freudian schema that pits instinct against suppression [répression], instinct against culture.² Many decades ago, an entire school of psychoanalysts tried to modify and develop this Freudian schema of instinct versus culture, and of instinct versus suppression – I am referring to psychoanalysts in the English as well as the French language, like Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, who have tried to show that suppression, far from being a secondary, ulterior, or later mechanism, which would attempts to control a given or natural play of instinct, constitutes a part of the mechanism of instinct, or, more or less, of the process through which the sexual instinct [l’instinct sexuel] is developed, unfolded and constituted as drive [pulsion].

The Freudian concept of Trieb³need not be interpreted as a simple natural given, a natural biological mechanism upon which suppression would come to posit its law of prohibition, but rather, according to the psychoanalysts, as something which is already profoundly penetrated by suppression. Need, castration, lack, prohibition and the law are already elements through which desire has been constituted as sexual desire, and this implies a transformation of the original notion of sexual instinct, such as Freud had conceived of it at the end of the 19th century. It is then necessary to think instinct not as a natural given, but as already a development, as already being a complex play between the body and the law, between the body and the cultural mechanisms that assure the control of persons.

I therefore believe that the psychoanalysts have considerably displaced the point in question, by bringing to light a new idea of instinct, or, in any case, a new conception of instinct, drive and desire. Nevertheless, what troubles me, or at least what seems insufficient to me, is that, in this revision proposed by psychoanalysts, they have perhaps altered the concept of desire, but they have in no way altered our concept of power.

In their work, they still continue to regard the signified of power, the central point, that in which power consists, as prohibition, law, the act of saying no, and above all, the figure or expression: “You must not.” Power is essentially those who say, “You must not.” It appears to me that this is a totally insufficient conceptualization – and I will speak about this later – a juridical idea, a formal idea of power, and it is necessary to elaborate a different idea of power that will, no doubt, permit us to better understand the relations established between power and sexuality in our Western societies.

via viewpointmag.com

Interpellating the subject as an individual

One of the famous lines from Althusser's discussion of ideology and ideological state apparatuses refers to the interpellation of the individual as a subject. In my preliminary discussion of communist desire in The Communist Horizon, in the context of a critique of individualism, I reverse the passage, noting that the subject is interpellated as an individual.

This idea has strong historical grounding.The dynamic of the reformation is to hail those who are subjects before God as individual souls responsible for their own salvation. Likewise, the bourgeois revolutions and corresponding declarations of rights, with their emphases on consent as the basis of legitimate authority, do just this: they hail subjects as individuals, calling to them to see themselves as unique and particular sources of authority. Subjects, particularly English subjects, also had rights.

There is, nonetheless, a more complex story, one that links the move from subject to individual with some of Anna Kornbluh's observations that I discuss in my previous post. I want to try to pull out this story by drawing from Edmund S. Morgan's Inventing the People.

Morgan describes the way the divine right of kings subjected the English monarch to his subjects, particularly the House of Commons. He writes: "As subjects, they were obliged to regard government as something other, something with which it was possible, however respectfully, to disagree and contend." What interests Morgan are the terms of this otherness. These result from two basic premises: as God's lieutenant the king could do no wrong; everyone else was a subject. The result was a constriction of the king's power and an elevation of the power of the people.

How does this work? With respect to the House of Commons, Morgan explains that in the 17th century, most of those in the Commons were the gentry, the younger brothers of men in the House of Lords. At the same time, they claimed to represent all other subjects. They thus had to speak in universal terms: "The Commons' assertions of univeral rights were thus in a maner dictated by the premises from which they started. The fiction of their own status as representatives and the fiction of the king's status as God's lieutenant required them to speak in univerals if they were to speak at all."

The symbolic order mattered. Through it, the House of Commons enjoyed a power capable of constraining the authority of the king. "Divine authority must be inalienable authority, and the Commons made themselves the guardians of it against any subject who might arrogate a part of it." The Commons attributed to the king an inalienable wisdom and power "denied to anyone who calimed to be acting in his name."

Morgan describes various incidents in which the Commons inserted themselves as the proper interpreters of the king's desire. The Commons, "did not say to themselves, 'The king is wise and good. Therefore let us do what he wants.' Instead, they said, 'The king is wise and good. Therefore he must want what we want.' ... The Commons thus presumed to know what the king wanted better than his appointed officials did, better even than the king himself did." (30)

I find this passage remarkable for its inversion of the relationship Zizek attributes to the people and the Leader or Party. Figuring the Leader/Party as analogous to the analyst, he says it is necessary because the people doesn't know what it wants. Necessarily split and ruptured, the people can't know their own desire. Neither can the king. As the divine right of kings expressed itself in England, the Commons is there because the king can know what he, as king wants. The desire of the king can't be that of the king as a man. It has to be that of the king as God's lieutenant. His is a divine desire. (To be sure--and I need to come back to this--it's not the case that the Party knows it, to be sure, but it functions as that transferential object that marks this non-knowledge and returns it to the people.) 

 Morgan writes, "the king in his body politics always wanted what was best for his subjects, all his subjects, and surely no subject could no better what that was than the combined representatives of all his subjects." The Commons functioned as the subject supposed to know, the subject supposed to know the desire of the king, a desire which could only, because it was infallible, be a desire for the good of the people. The good of the people--this is Common knowledge.

Since it was Common knowledge that the king could only desire the good of his people, actual actions of actual kings that conflicted with this good had to be disavowed. This disavowal took two forms--the Commons "either refused to believe it ... or they placed all the blame on those who carried out the act." In effect, they had a knowledge of the king's desire unknown even to king himself (31).

Morgan notes that the Commons isolated "the king in his majesty." They fenced in "divine right by keeping all subjects in their proper place--in the place, that is, of subjects." Not surprisingly, this "fencing in" came up against its own strains; the king reached too far for the fiction of divinity to be maintained; the Commons reached too far for the fiction of subjection to be maintained. "By elevating the king they prepared his destruction; and by humbling mighty subjects they made way for the rise of the humble."

 The fiction of the king's two bodies--the divine body and the earthly one--provided a mechanism for constraining the actions of any given king. The ideal could be used to rein in the actual. The ideal, which contained the object of the king's desire, namely, the good of the people, demanded a certain conformity from the king. The crumbling of this fiction ushered in a new problems. Where could be located the good of the people? Or, differently put, who spoke for the people? (Morgan notes that "it was widely acknowledged that the people could not speak for themsleve--there were too many of them." 82).

This dilemma was inherent in new ideas regarding the sovereignty of the people--did it reside in Parliament (or did Parliament represent it?) did it reside in the army (or did the army just defend it?).  Morgan writes, "When Parliament or the army claimed to be the people, it left no room for any higher expression of their will. And when the people became sovereign they seemingly ceased to be subjects and so could no longer claim the rights of subjects against themselves." The repercussion (argues Morgan) was that popular sovereignty--"in the absence of any higher expression of the popular will"--opened up possibilities of new forms of tyranny. The solution--"a division that would protect the people as subject from the people as rulers, a division between the power to govern and the power to determine the form and limit of government" (83).

This solution appears in the idea of constituent power as the people's power to create and limit government--Locke would provide an elaboration of this view. Even as any given constitution effectively treats the results of a particular group of people in a particular time and place as the universal expression of the people (as happened in the US), it puts to work the fiction or fantasy of the people's sovereignty over a particular government. Differently put, treating this particular as universal creates the universal needed to rein in or discipline any other particular.  

Morgan attends to the ways that the fiction of popular sovereignty was maintained. To be clear, the problem was that the actual people were more vocal, more active, more unruly than those who spoke in their name wished them to be. How, then, could popular sovereignty be simultaneously cultivated and constrained? Just as the sovereignty of the king was -- through exaltation. Exaltation would both recognize popular power as real and attempt to direct and control it at the same time. He gives three examples--the yeoman farmer, the voters in elections, and the instructions of constituents to their chosen representatives.

The problem is this: "the people are never visible as such." Morgan continues, "Before we ascribe sovereignty to the people we have to imagine that there is such a thing, something we personify as though it were a single body, capable of thinking, of acting, of making decisions and carrying them out, something quite apart from government, superior to government, and able to alter or remove a government at will, a collective entity more powerful and less fallible that a king or than any individual within it or than any group of individuals it singles out to govern it" 153. 

Before I go on I want to note some assumptions that may not necessary: we may not need to assume a single body--why not a fragmented and distributed sovereignty that involves multiple bodies; why assume thinking rather than expressing and willing? why assume infallibility? That the people are sovereign does not require that they are infallible--the assumption that it does seems an unnecessary slippage from the divine to the earthly. 

Back to Morgan: the yeoman farmer was celebrated in a way clearly at odds with everyday conceptions of farmers and soldiers. Morgan thus interprets the glorification of the yeoman as farmer "as an expression of solidarity among landowners, large and small, against the changing but continuous threats to the security of their property" 167. In England and America the threat was conceived as coming from both a finanical class (allied with powers in the government) and from the poor, carriers of all the unattractive features associated with the people.

Elections (the second mechanism whereby the people were simultaneously exalted and directed)--Morgan notes the ways elections excited more than the electorate; the prevalence of whiskey, bribery, festivities, riots, and mobs "could draw in the mass of people in a community." He continues, "It could also split a whole community topsy-turvy. It enabled like-minded persons of all ranks to oppose, denounce, and even attack persons of all ranks on the other side. And it exerted a temporary equalizing influence within the ranks of each side. It gave a boost to the ego, a possibility of hobnobbing with the great, that anyone might enjoy simply by espousing one side or the other ... An election was a time when ordinary men found themselves the center of attention" 197.

Might this be an instance of interpellating the subject as an individual? And might it also be an instance of the incitement of some sorts of libidinal energies within the people? (I am not trying to suggest that these two go together; I expect that they might, perhaps along the lines of the ways that the polymorphous perversity of the infant gets reconfigured into genital sexuality -- that is, I don't think it is necessary that desire gets enclosed in individuals; rather, I think it likely that bourgeois democracy is a form for this enclosure).

Morgan writes: "It was considered an insult for a candidate or one of his close associates not to meet individually with each voter and ask for his vote." Candidates were supposed to behave as if every voter were their social equal (197-198). The election hails subjects as individuals. In so doing, it reverses social roles, requiring the one who would be powerful to eat with the people, drink with the people, listen to the people--or at least feign to do so, a feigning which itself required the candidate to demean himself.

Instructions of the people or the people's voice--Morgan situates the idea of constituents giving instructions to their represents in the myth and practice of the people out of doors, that is, the fiction that originally the king met together with the people and were it not for the increase in the number of people, and the difficulty in assembling them, this practice would continue. It's a fiction, in other words, that the people could act on their own. This fiction, Morgan notes, "helped to give verisimilitude to the transfer of powers to representatives in elections and thus helped to sustain the authority of the few" 211.

(I need to wrap this up -- time to make dinner and, really, the details of Morgan's history aren't my primary concern here). Overall, Morgan makes clear the effects of the fiction of the sovereignty of the people. On the one hand, it enabled those who argued for it (never actually the people themselves) to assert their authority against their opponents. On the other, this way of arguing unleashed its own effects, effects that disciplined and constrained those who spoke in its terms and, perhaps more importantly, effects that actually circulated through and incited the people in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. The equality of subjects (already present in the divine right of kings) reasserted itself continually.

Although this is beyond the current post, my next suggestion would be that communicative capitalism has found a new way of incorporating, circumscribing, and constraining that equality. Each is equal has to his or her opinion. Each has the right and opportunity to express it. Equality is realized--in the sphere or terrain created for its realization, namely, the internet. Safely removed to this sphere, opinions can circulate and the powerful can continue to dominate in our name, now safe from any who might constrain them by showing how they fail.