{"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":57,"pdf_page":56,"physical_index":56,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cc78e8b7d029606adbedbf8634f9edaf313c3bc7b58d2af7de166a2fef22bc6d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The Subject Is the Gap in the Structure\n\nBefore I turn to Freud, however, I want to mention an additional advantage to rethinking ideology as the interpellation of the subject as an individual, namely, making political sense out of the idea from Dolar and Žižek that the subject is nothing but the gap in the structure. Because Althusser takes as his problem the compliance of individuals with a system that oppresses them, he has trouble conceiving the system as itself a social product (or product of conflict). Institutions are external to the subjects they produce. Dolar and Žižek, in presenting the limits of interpellation as the subject, could be seen as making the problem worse in that they have to posit the continuity of interpellating institutions that always fail. After all, they suggest that the subject as such is hysterical, resisting the interpellative hail, perpetually refusing the identity offered to her. How, though, would an institution continue if its hail were persistently resisted?\n\nOne possible answer would be that the subject is rare, the unique individual (or individual in the moment of uniqueness), the heroine capable of going to the limit, doing the impossible. Institutions would then be understood as persisting because most of the time they work, but this working is not through the successful production of subjects; it’s through the production of objects. Another answer would shift registers altogether, reconceptualizing the problem in terms of the concept of subjectivity: if for Althusser subjectivity consists in the identity that emerges in response to the hail, for Dolar and Žižek subjectivity consists in the gap produced and occluded by answering the hail. These two options of unique or void, unconditioned or ineliminable, are politically unsatisfying.<sup>40</sup> Politics diminishes into waiting for the impossible arrival of one who cannot make much of a difference anyway.<sup>41</sup> Fortunately, these are not the only options.\n\nReversing Althusser’s formulation so as to understand ideology as interpellating the subject as an individual provides another option: the subject emerges where ideology fails because the subject is collective. When bourgeois ideology fails, individuation fails and the fact of collectivity impresses itself. A problem faced by one becomes a condition shared by many. Correspondingly, the subject is a gap in the structure because the people are the subject of politics. “Subject” is therefore not primarily a linguistic site of individual freedom, decision, or choice. Nor does it index the unconscious fantasies that fill in and direct the never complete structure. Rather, subject is a gap in three other intertwined senses: structure’s inability to ground or posit itself, its dependence on something external to it, and the torsion of the Real in the excess of its self-relation.<sup>42</sup>\n\nIn their self-relating, the people always come up against themselves. They encounter the practical, material limits of their association, the psychic and affective pressures of their commonality, and the effects of histories of conflict and conquest. The excess of their reflective relation to themselves as the people is the torsion of politics. Politics takes place in the non-identity, gap, or torsion between people and their selfgovernance.<sup>43</sup> Political subjectivization involves forcing this non-identity, making it felt as an effect of a subject. As Bruno Bosteels puts it in a discussion of Alain Badiou, “subject consists in the coherence of a forced lack.”<sup>44</sup> But not just any gap is that of the subject. Subject appears through the active occupation of the constitutive lack in the people.\n\naccount the collectivity enclosed in the individual.\n\n57","previous_page":56,"next_page":58}