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.

Comments

[Elisabeth Szanto/Tom Canel]

I think that part of a Lacanian answer would lie in this: the subject's self-identification as an individual self is firstly based on the imaginary misrecognition inherent in the mirror phase, while identification of the subject with a collective entity would first of all be symbolically grounded. The mirror phase occurs before immersion into the symbolic; so individual identification (narcissism of the ego if you like) tends to feel more primordial and deeply rooted than identifications as a collective. This does not preclude the individual being interpreted symbolically as being a social individual, with claims on, and obligations to collective entities. But that would probably not satifsy true communists.
Cheers,
Tom
bligblug.blogspot.com

ps. Thanks Jodi for your really interesting writings. I learn so much from them, even if I sometimes disagree.

[Alain]

I think this is a very challenging discussion. But I wonder if you risk losing something important in dismissing the "happy story of modernity" to quickly? Specifically, one of the true accomplishments of modernity is the emphasis on individual autonomy, that one is not determined by tradition or one's place in society. Of course Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are among the "masters of suspicion" who have complicated this narrative, but they do not do away with it. It seems to me that a communism worthy of our allegiance is one that incorporates individual autonomy with a collective sense of a common good. And that this tension is not easily overcome by recognizing that neoliberalism over-emphasizes individual freedom.

Is there a sense in which the subject is both individual and collective?

[Jodi Dean]

Tom--I don't think that collective is less primordial. On the contrary, if we follow Freud (Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) the group comes first. Narcissism is a weird kind of problem, which should be read as an account of the failure of individuation. Lacan takes separation to be a challenge, a problem insofar as the infant first experiences a primary unity with the mother.

Alain--that's what modernity says its achievement is (autonomy, non determination). But is that true? Or is a story of the desubjectification of the group, its fragmentation, the separation of people so that they are thrown up as independent sources of exploitable labor? I doesn't make sense to me to think that any one of us is autonomous in the sense of being able to determine our lives; everything is outside our control. Collectively, though, we can determine our conditions.

[Alain]

It seems to me that we only have a consciousness of what self determination might be because of the values of modernity. That this constellation also offers us up as exploitable labor is also true. That is in fact the paradox of being modern - the promise of autonomy inextricably linked to the reality of wage slavery. But I disagree that exploitable labor precludes the promise of freedom. In fact it is a prerequisite for the consciousness of real freedom. And it seems that communism has to address both individual liberty and our collective ability to determine the conditions for freedom. Ignoring individual liberty doesn't make any less essential.

[Jodi Dean]

Alain--the question is whether individual autonomy is the measure of freedom. It seems to me that anything that makes us want to balance individual and collective or reconcile individual and collective continues to think in terms of an opposition. This opposition is premised on the sense that something like individuality or individual personhood is clear, makes sense, doesn't rely on a fantasy. It's not the same, then, as beginning from a position where there are open collectivities with mobile and differentiated components.

[Alain]

I guess I don't assume that personhood or individuality is clear. In fact I think the individual is a contested concept just as the collective or the commons is contested. Whether it is a fantasy in the ordinary sense or a psychoanalytic sense - I don't know. But since we do not start from a position of multiple collectivities, at least as I understand the contemporary situation in the United States, I don't how you ignore the notion of an autonomous individual when engaging in politics, either theoretically or politically. I have read a great deal of your commentary on the Occupy movement, and among your criticisms is that its notion of consensus relied on a fetishizing of the individual. My experience with it confirms this. But it still doesn't makes sense that because the neoliberal suject is largely a fiction that you would dismiss the notion we have of ourselves as individuals, in this time and place. Its funny that we are having this disagreement at this moment. I really admire what your recent work has tried to sketch out - how to think communism at this moment, with all the risks and barriers it entails. I just don't think dismissing the fantasy of the autonomous subject eliminates the problem. Even from a strategic point of view, how do you convince people who conceive of themselves in this way to join or sympathize with a movement that tells them their sense of autonomy is a fiction. While it is obvious to everyone that we have no freedom in terms of the decisions that really matter in our economic lives, most of us (myself included) still believe that individual freedom is an essential part of our self consciousness. Even if this self understanding ends up being transitional, you can't ignore its reality. If you do I don't see how you can work toward anything that has an effect in the world.

As always, thanks for your willingness to engage.

[Jodi Dean]

Hi Alain -- I appreciate the exchange (it's very helpful as I work this out). We do begin from multiple collectivities--families, neighborhoods, religious groups, races, sexes, ethnicities, classes, professions, fan groups, states, etc. I'm not ignoring the autonomous individual: I'm trying to break the grip of the idea of one, to remind people of the way that we already experience it as fictitious, unstable, a failure, a blindspot that hinders us from acknowledging the way we are never complete or individuated but always deeply connected. So, I'm not dismissing the fantasy, I'm actually occupying it -- and pushing this line of argument is how I'm trying to break the hold of the fantasy on people's ways of thinking. It's not hard to realize how unfree any individual actually is.