{"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":54,"pdf_page":53,"physical_index":53,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"91b774bc1809dde3f598dcfbb11c5b8f2435c952319eb3de93f1f0824b31697d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Bourgeois ideology treats conditions that are collective and social—embedded in histories of violence and systems of exploitation—as if they were relationships specific to an individual, as if states arose through individual consent, as if politics were a matter of individual choice, and as if desires and capacities, affects and will naturally originate from and reside in an individual form. But just as collective experience of antagonism—the “social substance”—underlies what Marx calls the “phantom-like objectivity” of the commodity, so too does it underlie the phantom-like subjectivity of the individual.\n\nEnclosing the Common\n\nInverting Althusser helps us conceive the individual as a form of enclosure. As Marx describes in Capital, enclosure is an operation through which what is common is seized and put into service for capitalism. Judith Butler’s account of the constitution of the subject in language, an account that itself draws from Althusser, provides a way to access this operation insofar as the linguistic category of the subject designates a condition ofcommon belonging.<sup>23</sup>\n\nButler writes,\n\nThe genealogy of the subject as a critical category … suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject … The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency.<sup>24</sup>\n\nThat individuals come to occupy the place of the subject implies that more than one necessarily occupies this place at the same time. Because “subject” is the linguistic condition for intelligibility and its function is to hold open a place, the utterly singular and unique would have no place. The utterly singular would be illegible within the available terms of existence and agency. “Individual” thus designates a specific occupation of the subject understood as a common place. As a subject, the individual can only be one occupant among many. The singularity of its subject-status is purely imaginary. “Subject” is a condition for agency because the individuality of agency is a fantasy occluding the material and collective conditions for action, contracting them into an imaginary ego.\n\nButler associates the individual’s occupation of the position of the subject, its subjection, with foreclosure.<sup>25</sup> As the individual is subjectified, it loses something of itself (even if this is something it never had). To be a subject is to be, in a way, bereft. Butler suggests that the subject is a condition of freedom at the cost of freedom, where this lost or sacrificed freedom is a kind of authenticity or potential for love and desire that would be available to the subject were it not for the law to which the subject is beholden: “One cannot criticize too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured.”<sup>26</sup> Understanding the subject as interpellated as an individual, however, opens up another possibility. The bereavement accompanying interpellation arises from the loss of others. The individual is the one cut off from, cut out of, the collective. Caught in the isolation of the imaginary ego, the individual tries to do and be alone what she can only do and be with others.\n\n54","previous_page":53,"next_page":55}