Crowds and Party · 第 52 页

Althusser’s account of interpellation does not imply that there are individuals “out there” prior to interpellation. Invoking Freud and the rituals and expectations accompanying the birth of a child, “that happy event,” he insists that an “an individual is always-already a subject, even before she is born.”⁷ A child is born into a structure that has already subjected it, a structure that gives it a name, a sex, and a place and expects it to fill this place, be this sex, and carry this name to become the subject it already is.

The example of the hail notwithstanding, ideological interpellation is not a singular event. It is constant and ongoing, embedded in material practices of recognition and misrecognition “which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, unmistakable and, naturally, irreplaceable subjects.”⁸ As Elizabeth Wingrove writes, Althusser’s theory of ideology thus explains how actors’ “subjectivity—which is to say, their awareness of themselves as unique, (relatively independent), and capable of making choices—is achieved and sustained by virtue of their subjection to the rules, practices, and relations of the multiple apparatuses within a given social formation.”⁹ Subjectivity—or individuality, which in Althusser’s discussion is the same thing—is an effect of the larger ideological material structure.

One of the most influential of Althusser’s contributions, the idea of ideological interpellation has come under significant criticism.¹⁰ Paul Hirst points out that “Althusser’s concept of subject supposes that subjects and individuals correspond; that the subject is the unitary ‘identity’ of the individual, that the subject effect corresponds to the classic philosophical conception of consciousness.”¹¹ Judith Butler highlights the “unelaborated doctrine of conscience” underpinning Althusser’s description of the individual’s turn in response to the hail, finding there “a guilty embrace of the law.”¹² And Jacques Rancière criticizes the Althusserian theory of ideology for its exclusion of class struggle, its positing of a function for ideology independent of the existence of classes.¹³ He charges Althusser with missing what was already clear to Marx: ideological forms “are the forms in which a struggle is fought out.”¹⁴

Approaching Althusser from the perspective of psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar challenges yet another line of critique, one which faults Althusser for positing a “clean cut,” a sudden passage from the individual—“a pre-ideological entity, a sort of material prima”—to the subject.¹⁵ This critique misses its mark, Dolar argues, because the real problem with Althusser’s version of subjectivization is that the subject’s illusory belief in its own autonomy is never as total as Althusser implies. Interpellation itself produces a remainder for which Althusser cannot account. Psychoanalysis proceeds from this remainder, the flaw at the heart of the individual subject. Dolar writes, “For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails. The illusion of autonomy may well be necessary, but so is its failure; the cover-up never holds fast.”¹⁶ As Slavoj Žižek emphasizes, the difference between the Althusserian and psychoanalytic views of the subject is that psychoanalysis emphasizes the ineliminable gap between ideology and individual. It does so not to naturalize an individual specificity perpetually out of ideology’s reach but to treat the subject itself as nothing but this gap.¹⁷

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