Notes on and critique of Chapter 4 in 'The Psychic Life of Power' - Althusser's Subjection

(Althusser Reading)

The author presents here her take on Althusser's theory of subjection, and what I find most appealing is its conception of interpellation, not merely as the identification of oneself in a call, but the staging of a call, or perhaps better understood as a social scene. Yet, there is a punitive dimension here - in the example and in the appropriation of guilt required to be identified in the call. I would however like to present the author's account of how the call arrives, or rather the failures noticed in the form of its arrival, or should I say mode of presentation - "Clearly we might say that the call arrives severally and in implicit and unspoken ways, that the scene is never quite as dyadic as Althusser claims, but these objections have been rehearsed, and 'interpellation' as a doctrine continues to survive its critique. If we accept that the scene is exemplary and allegorical, then it never needs to happen for its effectivity to be presumed."

Allegoricity, or should I say layers of interpretation - act as a protective screen and should be recognized as such. The veneer of another kind of reading, if nothing else - reminds the addressee of another symbolic order in operation; and here beyond or perhaps beneath the question of supersedence or dominance are possibilities of exchange and learning.  An exception to this, is marked by the author as accounted for by Walter Benjamin. When an allegory is literalized, we are told - it will exceed the narrativizability of events. Or, rather the process literalized by the allegory is precisely what resists narration. I think this is a beautiful line, for it offers an account of when the possibility of what permits for an allegory, the multiplicity of reading, or vantage points is terminated - we no longer address the other in our symbolic order which then remains foreclosed. A gesture perhaps not unlike a dismissal or the passing of a conviction, or perhaps the adjournment of a case. 

Yet, why does the author suggest that this is a call which is made by an officer of 'The Law' - left in its ambiguous and capitalized sense? Which law may be invoked here beyond that of mere recognition, which would actually hold in a hailing that may be instantiated on a street for example, as Althusser's example presents? Further, why is the call singular and speaking? 

Interpellation is an identification, yet if we have gathered anything from the prior three chapters is the efforts made in the text, by the author to secure for the subject the possibility of a certain kind of self-determinacy in interpellation. Even for instance for the subject to be producing interpellations that require a certain relation to power. Agency if you notice is really what the author is wrestling with. An agency that seeks to apprehend the sociality of its own identification, so as to perhaps posit the principle via which it would seek to be identified, not unlike the insistence for the recognition of rights for religious and sexual minorities which much of Foucault's work has been mobilized towards. 

The other assertion which would appeal to a broad spectrum of interpellations is the issue of guilt. The 'I'  is formed upon the assumption of guilt before the law, in submission to its call for uniformity. And, in the possibility of an advantage - why would such a subject turn towards the law, 'unless it knew by some experience that there was something to be gained by such a turn?' An ambiguous terrain indeed, yet there seems to be a kind of interpretative pleasure, perhaps a hermeneutics which the author seeks to highlight - "How and why does the subject turn (...), anticipating the conferral of identity through self-ascription of guilt?" An idea of the conscience is represented which is required to critically interpret the law even as it 'figures the subject's uncritical relation to the law as a condition of subjection.'

The author also seems to posit a certain kind of prefiguration that may be required in the subject, an assumption of something akin to what piety might have been in a more religious register - that may be needed by the subject in their turn before the law prior to presenting any critical questions. Indeed - we may notice here, that the law if it may be spoken of as a position, would then have the opportunity to learn as to why or perhaps what prompted this turn, and in many ways, this is how institutions in the public sphere garner an understanding of the demands of their office. 

Interpellation, however, with its Althusserian roots remains a hailing. 'Who is speaking? Why should I turn around? Why should I accept the terms by which I am hailed?' are here, existential considerations in which a selfhood is constructed.  Moments of vulnerability for sure, for if you notice - this hailing, like the symbolic order which perhaps seeks to address it, can only arise from the other. In this measure, it marks a vulnerability that an opening hails me by. 

I would however point out, that while such a presentation of interpellation is indeed appealing in terms of how a subject may recognize themselves in their relation to a call for conformity as seen in the law, the origins of the concept are not legalistic. Sartre and Althusser sought to depict via it a model for the way an individual constitutes themselves in relation to a social milieu, amidst bonds - perhaps legal, and commitments that were perhaps not. Indeed, in its most readily recognized form - such as in 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', it has been used to present a critique of the state. 

I would ask a reader to bear this in mind, when they read the lines - "...exemplified in the turn towards the law, in anticipation of culling an identity in identifying with the one who has broken the law." If as children, our first introduction to the symbolic order was through what Lacan refers to as the Name of the Father, or that authority by which we designate - not merely right or wrong, but what these words mean in the first place; in our use of language in society, we are compelled at distinct moments, to re-invent how we use them. Laws however, are admittedly not always legal, inasmuch as the force of custom can carry a weight that is severe - and this is perhaps a reading that may supplement our notion of what may have prompted a turn, by what recognition or cause, and of course in violation of which law, not to mention in complicity with whom. 

There does appear, however, to be another origin which the author would like to trace for this concept, in Nietzsche and in On the Geneology of Morals, where the assumption or rather the price of guilt is assumed to secure a purchase on identity. This turning can even be towards a call of God, arising from God, in an act of nomination which one turns to in assuming the conferral of an identity, a highly religious assumption to be sure. Indeed, this call raising the need to constitute a law is left unclear in the aspect of whether this need is an imperative, or injunction from God, or a demand presented as it were by a subject. 

In presenting this religiously charged scene, as it were - the author notices that such reification if I may, would impede the ability of the subject to critically intervene in the law, a procedure which is necessary for the law to proceed. Also, the author does press that despite its formal reservations, ideology and its corresponding interpellations cannot be thought but through the 'metaphorics of religious authority', and to be fair there is textual support for this in Althusser himself, who takes up the example of the Christian religious ideology. 

Indeed, the author does identify the power of giving a name with its divinatory function of nomination, an act embedded in religious customs, not unlike Baptism for instance - yet with a crucial difference. Interpellation is not an act which is bestowed upon me as a child. "This cannot be accomplished without a certain readiness or anticipatory desire on the part of the subject. To the extent that the naming is an address, there is an addressee prior to the address; but given that the address is a name which creates what it names, there appears to be no 'Peter' without the name 'Peter'. " 

Were one to assess the scenario presented, it would be hard not to see that the subject would perhaps have to be predisposed towards the interpellation in question, or as presented by the author 'a readiness to be compelled by the authoritative interpellation, a readiness which suggests that one is already in relation to the voice before the response, already implicated in the terms of the animating misrecognition by an authority to which one subsequently yields.' - Here, it would be necessary to guard against the weakening of our senses amidst such inclinations for this readiness to be compelled by an authorotative interpellation can very well be an example of hegemony or perhaps a variation of the cult of the charasmatic leader. Judgement is called into question, for were one to presume a relation to the voice before the response, we may miss what the response itself constituted. 

The installation of a conscience in the subject is said to be one of the functions of ideology as concieved by Althusser. The author herself, earlier in the text mentions an ego-ideal whose correspondence with the supergo is productive of the anchors which produce a sense of self, and perhaps later manifestations in a drive for instance. And while the sense of reflexivity which these formations within the psyche entail for the conception of one's selfhood are worth appraising - they may be beyond the scope of the review I have in mind. 

The author does seem to present an insistence on the cultivation of the ability to speak properly to be a precondition of conscience as it were. And, it must be said that any sophisticated interpellative mechanism would require a faculty of expression, of using words well, verbally. However there may perhaps be a case made of such a faculty itself being - maybe even a necessary but insufficient cause of conscience, and indeed I think one of the author's influences - Derrida seeks to present a critique of the reduction of interpellation to a rhetorical effect of speech, in his priveledging of the written word. 

Interpellation however is yet treated here as a linguistic effect - and most formalised divisions of labour today do depend on the transmisibility of instruction to function properly. The aquisition of linguistic skills then marks something of a necessary training which workers would be required to acquire and managers to issue. It also is however, speaking well that is - a way in which respect is 'proferred or witheld.'

It may be observed, that a consistency of effort may be traced in the work of the author in question, which perhaps may be stated as an attempt to secure for the subject the ability to submit, on being called to a symbolic order - and this is what has been construed as interpellation. However, it begins by presenting the scene in a manner in which precisely such a submission, or better yet - to use terms closer to those of the author's such an identification has not already taken place. Indeed, interpellation is not the same as our learning of the fact that there are symbolic orders, or many for that matter. Indeed, it is the act of an acknowledgement of our position in one, and this is not the same as an option which I may choose to identify with. Why is this so? Because any symbolic order would present an opening to the other, and interpellation, or the call on the street by the officer of the law to use the example presented by Althusser, among many other possibilities, is perhaps a way to express this opening. 

The recognition of oneself within an order of belonging if I may, is never merely a choice - it is also a charge which is bourne by the subject, the author reminds us. In the admission of our guilt before a religious orthodoxy for example, it is not simply a question of obsequience before an order but a task of having to prove one's innocense, even if that is the charge to uphold the innocense of the accused before law unless proven otherwise. In other words it is a matter of having to uphold one's charge. 

Judith Butler however would like to emphasize the tenuousness of this rare innocense, which has to be repeatedly proved as it were - and guilt is made into a seductive association of sorts with whom complicity is solicited, an associational aristocracy in whose midst innocesence becomes a charge to be repeatedly vindicated, even as an act of fidelity to the association in question, guilty as it is. 

Our prior emphasis on the primacy of practice, if you were to pardon my Maoist idiom - seems well guided as the text does seem to acknowledge the multifacetedness which interpellation may entail, beyond a moment of recognition, identification or the assumption of an identity.  - "To master a set of skills is not simply to accept a set of skills, but to reproduce them in and as one's own activity. This is not simply to act according to a set of rules, but to embody rules in a course of action and to reproduce those rules in embodied rituals of action." 

In keeping with the religious metaphorics the author notices in Althusser earlier, we see recourse to the invocation of ritual as a category - the performance of a ritual is said to spawn, or perhaps produce a belief, which is then retroactively incorporated into the performance itself, yet prior to any performace the aquital is necessary. 

Here, we do see a very interesting section for Judith Butler, the American theorist - seems to directly acknowledge the Slovenian School - for the first time. She acknowledges that Mladen Dollar sought to posit a separate domain of the psyche apart from ritual, though here we are not provided with a clear citation. 

Where I think the argument leads astray or becomes difficult to follow is in the section interpreting Althusser's representation or rather his failure of presenting the psyche as a separate dimension, a critique levelled by Mladen Dollar. While a citation is provided, it leads merely to the first couple of pages in The Sublime Object of Ideology, a text which may well have the moorings for such an argument, which yet remains uncited in the text under consideration. 

Yet, what we still should note is the recount of the Dollarian notion of the subject of psychoanalysis, from the essay - also quoted, Beyond Interpellation. To quote directly - "...there is a part of the individual that cannot pass into the subject...there is a part of external materiality that cannot be succesfully integreted into the interior." If interpellation, even when considered as for instance in a leap of faith, is completed - the psychoanalytic position is here to add a moment of rest, or rather to study the mode of rest occupied by the subject. "The psychoanalytic operation is to study the rest produced by the operation, its necessary incompleteness. It does not deny the cut, it only adds a rest.  The clean cut is always unclean, it cannot produce a flawless interiority of an autonomous subject, and the psychoanalytic subject is coextensive to that very flaw in the interiority... To put it in a short formula, the subject is always the failure to become the subject." A forceful formulation indeed, and you will notice one which is conducive to accomodation by many different orientations. 

In persisting with a comparisson via which a critique is posited between the Dollarian and the Althusserian conception of the subject, we see for instance an allegation that in Althusser, subjectivity has no place, except perhaps as a critique to subjectivism. 'The remainder left by subjectivation' - which is referred to by Dollar, may be gleaned in some measure by the theorists own set of interests - such as indeed the voice, which even in the case of a silent voice, such as when reading - acts as a lever of thought as it were, to use one of the authors owns phrases. Infact, which of us would fail at recalling the addressal of a voice, such as for instance a father or protective caregiver - and our memories or rather associations of love to the voice itself. Such an analogy operates well even with the gaze, and such partial objects if I may do form a body of study in psychoanalysis, perhaps not too far a stretch from the study of slips of tongue in its investigation into the unconscious. And, if you were to recall - the author herself seems to carry a genuine and scholastically inflected interest in 'stubborn and bodily attachments' as the subtitles of her first two chapters indicate.

Perhaps of more immeadiate and formal philosophical interest is the critique of the mimetic relation between grammar and ontology, a direction which any supposition regarding a willing or volitional subject, a trope emphasized earlier - seems to posit. In seeking an association with a particular congregation for example, the intallation of the interpellative moment is already prefigured if not realized. A circularity if you will which seems to diminish the idea of the retroactive recognition of oneself in the moment of interpellation as that which is recognized in oneself, or perhaps better yet - our narrative. 

One way of thinking the subject, which is utilised in literary analysis extensively is simply as point of view. In the above sentence regarding the subject seeking an association we do see the conditions as it were for the subject, and their formation as well were they to assume such a position; would this mean that grammar mimes or is the same an ontology? Itself perhaps a reiteration of the now worn idiom of truth being a stylistic effect of language?

The primacy of the plot is emphasized which in any narrative would serve as a requirement for the grammar, or to be more precise - the subject of a sentence, grammatically conceived. Here - the anticipations of grammar would be what arrives necessarily after the fact, once the sentence is written, itself perhaps a function of the narrative in question. Perhaps a textual presentation of the Althusserian maxim of history being a process without a subject, yet a subject which yet emmerges - perhaps in narrative, as that which resists it. Here, I should mention that one of my early teachers, Dr. Nilofer Kaul would like to emphasize what she called a narratorial unconscious operative in a text. 

I must state that I find that I would not have much to add to hazy paragraphs which emphasize an immaterial logic which may serve as a precondition to ritual, which is itself material - and the question which we are presented is how is the re-enactment of the ritual itself distinguished from that of symbolic automatism? I think a strong corollary may be gleaned in recognizing the ritual as supported, indeed financed by a symbolic automatism, perhaps enshrined in the form of a contract via which a subject may place a demand. Of course this may not be the only interpretation but it is perhaps the most common one. Yet the struggle to distinguish such a symbolic automatism from the 'immaterial logic' serving as a precondition to ritual can only be answered to my mind in one of two terms - as an effect of sexuality, or as a resonance to a cultural trope. The ties between these two registers being principally what has constituted the bind of ritual and its relation to a congregation. 

Amidst these questions of interpellation per se, and before we enter anything like a poetics of a congregation - an interesting diagonal should be noted in comparing the study of interpellation here with a question that seems to approach the conundrum from the other direction. That is, not as a plaintiff seeking aquital or acceptance, or as a suplicant before the alter. "How are we to understand desire to be a constitutive desire?" And, indeed is this not the very slipery cube apon which such fetishism of the instant has been recognized? Petulance, peevishness, perversion, mockery and the stray insult all seem to have their place here, and yet - the author would invoke Spinoza, Nietzsche and Agamben as figures who have used the tightness of this minimal turn as it were to showcase not an interpellation per se but perhaps what the later Deleuze might have put simply as a becoming, in his singular grammatical modification placing nouns as adjectives before that verb. And so we may have a becoming monk to describe the work of a writer for instance who is exiled and polishes lenses as the story of Spinoza's life goes. 

I must admit that the argument in the later section of the chapter provided very little foothold in seeking to present for instance a very fine differentiation between conscience and interpellation by positing a strong attachment as what enables the former at the expense of the latter, even as it allows the later to work. Echoes of the managerial subject from earlier in the text perhaps, but in any case metaphysics for me.

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At this point in the study, I would have to state that I do not see much potential in investigating the formations of melancholy in refused gender identifications which is what the subtitle of the next chapter is so I shall lay this book asside for now. And while sexuality is undeniably a latent and exuberant core that constitutes the subject, at least in any psychoanalytic sense, I think a requirement to appraise what impels the subject rather than merely constitutes them may be the order of the hour, which is what will lead me to take up Alenka Zupancic's study of this in her 'Ethics of the Real'.