Crowds and Party · 第 56 页

Federici affiliates these developments with the rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes. She attributes the popularity of Cartesianism among middle- and upper-class Europeans to its provision of a model of self-management crucial for capitalism’s need for a reliable, predictable, and calculable workforce. Cartesianism provides “a new model of the person,” where the self works on its self, training, controlling, and stylizing its body, now configured as something other, something possessed. “The product of this alienation from the body,” Federici writes, “was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as ‘otherness’ from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it.” As she concludes, this emergence of an alter ego represents “the birth of the individual in capitalist society.”³⁷ Rather than belonging to the world, the world exists in order to belong to it.

Foucault’s and Federici’s explorations into the disciplinary production of the individual supply ample reason to replace the idea of the individual’s interpellation as a subject with that of the subject’s interpellation as an individual. The individual is a product of European modernity, the form through which collective economic force is politically secured so as to facilitate the processes of its own exploitation. Bourgeois ideology, manifest in the disciplinary techniques that make individuals, hails the collective subject, the mass of workers, vagabonds, soldiers, and students, as individuals (even as the capacity of the common people for individuated self-discipline in the service of capital accumulation and liberal order will persist as a problem). It singles out and separates, producing the very individuals it extracts.

Nonetheless, Foucault cannot explain how disciplinary techniques and processes subjectify or de-subjectify the individuated.³⁸ Where is the gap of subjectivity in the web of its determinations? We gain an understanding of bourgeois ideology’s regime of individuation at the cost of the foreclosed collective. Federici takes a step toward such an explanation when she gestures to an emergent alter ego—an incomplete individuation or individual that remains somehow plural. Psychoanalysis, built around the failures of the individual form, helps carry the explanation further. “For psychoanalysis there is no such thing as an individual,” Dolar writes. “The individual only makes sense as a knot of social ties, a network of relations to others, to the always already social Other, the Other being ultimately but a shorthand for the social instance as such.”³⁹ Below, I turn to Freud’s discussion of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as a resource for a psychoanalytically attuned inquiry into political subjectivization, excavating from his

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