Crowds and Party · 第 51 页

What’s at stake here is less MacPherson’s reading of Hobbes and Locke (which is contestable), than his highlighting of liberalism’s mutual constitution of individual and owner. Ownership relies on and is produced through a series of separations and enclosures. Capacities are separate from others as well as separate from a self, which encloses these capacities within its person. Instead of entailing collective reproduction for common good, training—whether moral or technical—is work on and for the self. Cut off from the settings that produce and enable them and enclosed within the individual, capacities are objects of individual concern, so many objects available for exchange and, as capitalism expands, for investment, stylization, and branding.

Although liberal theory treats the individual as an owner and therefore a locus of freedom, the codependence of the commodity form and the individual form works in another direction as well, one that enables elision between commodity and individual. In his gripping account of the antebellum slave trade in the United States, Walter Johnson describes the importance of individuation in the dismantling of slave families and the categorizing and fashioning of slaves for the market. Johnson writes, “On the one hand, they were to be transformed into exemplars of the category to which they had been assigned; but once the categories of comparison had been established and embodied, the slaves were supposed to once again become visible as individuals.”⁴ To be priced, slaves had to be comparable. To be sold, they had to be distinctive enough, individuated enough, to stand out from the crowd. The individuality of the marketed slave was produced for purchase.

The elision between commodity and individual evidenced in the slave trade demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily or essentially liberating about the individual form. As I consider below, it emerges historically as an ideological mechanism for the de-subjectification of collectives. The individual—and, as we shall see, not only in its liberal, possessive variety—is a form of capture.

The Subject Is Interpellated as an Individual

Louis Althusser’s reworking of the Marxian notion of ideology presents the category of the subject as constitutive of ideology. It is constitutive of ideology because the function of ideology is “‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”⁵ This function, Althusser argues, is a characteristic of ideology in general; ideology “transforms” individuals into subjects. He names the operation at work in this transformation “interpellation.” Presenting interpellation as a “hail” or call, Althusser illustrates it with a policeman shouting “hey, you there!” and a person turning around in response. With this turn-inresponse, the individual becomes a subject: “he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”⁶ Interpellation, then, is a process of subjection. Becoming subject, the individual both takes on and comes under ideology’s structure of beliefs and expectations.

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