ABSTRACT
In a famous passage of what has been his most influential essay, Louis Althusser (1971a) writes: “Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects” (p. 160). That is, the function of ideology in Althusser’s account is the positioning of the subject who is called upon (“hey, you there!”) and who, in responding, cannot but occupy a space that has already been relationally defined. Etymologically, a subject is that which has been thrown under. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson draws upon an array of authorities to define the active verb, “to subject”: “to put under (Pope)”; “to reduce to submission (Dryden),” “to enslave; to make obnoxious (Locke)”; “to make subservient (Milton).” And for the substantive, “the subject,” Johnson’s first definition is “one who lives under the dominion of another: opposed to governour (Shakespeare).” Within the extensive philosophical and psychoanalytical meditations upon the subject, it is usual to think of the subject within the subject/object dyad. What Althusser emphasizes, like Dr. Johnson, is the political trajectory of the word. To be a subject is to be subjected, to be under the dominion of a governor. For Johnson, both for historical and cultural reasons, such subjection is normal. His own dictionary suggests the hesitancy with which the bourgeois notion of the free political individual would challenge the monarchical subject. In Britain, that challenge has never been more than half-hearted. In France, as in the U.S., one is a citizen; in Britain, to my shame and anger, one is still a subject (see P. Smith, 1988, pp. xxxiii–xxxv). The rhetorical force of Althusser’s formulation depends, of course, upon his insistence that “the individual,” the imagined center of free consciousness and independent judgment, is still subjected, positioned within relations of domination and subordination. Yet Althusser’s synchronic formulation masks a curious diachronic reversal. It would surely be more exact to say that within a capitalist mode of production, ideology interpellated, not the individual as a subject, but the subject as an individual. For the individual is not the simple given of bourgeois social formations. On the contrary, he/she is a laborious construction in the political defeat of absolutism, when political freedom is gained at the expense of the occlusion of economic dependence. To put it crudely: historically the subject precedes the individual.
