{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":50,"pdf_page":49,"physical_index":49,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1f3b3f16f14f14c35e35e0dbff84348dc533178394f81e9c1d1f6cf9646fc536"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Enclosing the Subject\n\n“Subject” is a concept that continues to trouble political theory. Does “subject” direct us toward initiative and autonomy or subjugation and constraint? Efforts to decenter the subject—whether targeting Cartesianism, Hegelianism, Marxism, or humanism— grapple with the challenge of accounting for order and initiative, submission and resistance, freedom and determination. Theorists and activities inspired by other traditions get roped into these debates when they construe politics in terms of the thoughts, actions, or feelings of individuals. Not only is agency privileged over structure but the presumption that agents are individuals formats the alternative of autonomy or subjugation as an opposition between individual and collective. Collectivity comes to be associated with constraint, with preventing rather than enabling creativity and initiative. Liberal political theorists explicitly construe political agency as an individual capacity. Others take the individuality of the subject of politics for granted. I argue that the problem of the subject is a problem of this persistent individual form, a form that encloses collective political subjectivity into the singular figure of the individual.\n\nThe first part of the chapter sets up the idea of enclosure via an inversion of Louis Althusser’s famous claim that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.<sup>1</sup> The point of this inversion is less to critique Althusser than it is to provide a heuristic that can loosen the hold of the individual form on conceptions of political subjectivity. I demonstrate this point by putting the inverted formula, “the subject is interpellated as an individual,” in conversation with work in post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory. The second part of the chapter tracks the enclosing of the subject in the individual form as it appears in the encounter between psychoanalysis and crowd theory, more specifically, in Sigmund Freud’s appropriation of the notorious Gustave Le Bon. Continuing the argument from chapter one, my goal is to break free from the individualizing assumptions that hinder understanding the political subject as a collective subject. The individual form encloses collective bodies, ideas, affects, and sensations into a singular, bounded body. The link between individuality and political subjectivity, however, is neither necessary nor natural. It is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge in bourgeois modernity.\n\nJust as the commodity is a form for value, so is the individual a form for subjectivity. It is a form that impedes collective political subjectivity by separating it into and containing it within individuated bodies and psyches. C. B. MacPherson’s presentation of seventeenth-century liberalism is one of the clearest expositions of this vision of the individual. MacPherson argues that at the heart of liberal theory is a “possessive individual” conceived as “the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”<sup>2</sup> He uses Thomas Hobbes and John Locke as his examples. In MacPherson’s reading, for Hobbes and Locke the essence of being human is “freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.”<sup>3</sup> They understand the individual neither primarily as a part or member, nor as fundamentally and irrevocably dependent on relations with others, human and nonhuman. Rather, the individual is in essence one who owns himself and his capacities.\n\n2\n\n50","previous_page":49,"next_page":51}