Crowds and Party · 第 53 页

My wager is that Althusser got it backwards. Ideological interpellation makes more sense as a theory of individuation than as a theory of subjection (which would account for the identity of subject and individual that remained a thorny problem in Althusser’s different theorizations of ideology).¹⁸ Warren Montag provides support for this inversion. He highlights Althusser’s claim that ideology “recruits” its bearers: “individuals are picked from an undifferentiated mass, singled out, removed from it and endowed with a unique identity, as if such a singling out or separation of individuals were necessary to the functioning of the economy.”¹⁹ Confronting a crowd or mass, the ideological hail fragments it into singular elements. Montag notes the specific resonance of Althusser’s use of the term “interpellate” in the context of the protests and demonstrations of the 1960s. One would be stopped by the police “and therefore singled out from the crowd or singularized in relation to a background.”²⁰ What was a crowd becomes so many separable individuals.

Rather than following Althusser’s emphasis on ideology in general, inverting his claim to attend to the interpellation of the subject as an individual narrows the focus to bourgeois ideology (and thereby returns class conflict to the theory of ideology). I use “bourgeois ideology” to refer to the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The Protestant Reformation exemplifies bourgeois ideology’s interpellation of the subject as an individual. Breaking with the communality of Catholicism, Protestant theologies hail believers as singular souls responsible for their own salvation. Effects of the interpellation of the subject as an individual include the reduction of agency to individual capacity, freedom to individual condition, and property to individual possession. They include as well the supposition that aggregates groups, tribes, collectivities, and crowds—are unavoidably primitive, barbaric, irrational, and atavistic.

The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not preconstrained to the individual form, a form that psychoanalysis teaches is always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. With this reversal, the individual form itself becomes a problem, the coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives.²¹

Althusser’s claim that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” should be reread with the emphasis on individuals. What is imaginary is that the conditions ideology organizes relate primarily to an individual. The individual is itself an imaginary figure, as we learn from Lacan. 22

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