'He shall (freely) accept his subjection'
Nietzsche, Althusser and psychoanalysis on subjectivity
In the second essay of Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche has a fable about the atrociously violent fabrication of the human being. According to Nietzsche, there was once a ‘wild, free, untamed, savage’ beast whose instinct of cruelty was unleashed upon ‘external enemies’; this beast tore its opponents to shreds, drenching in blood and littering with viscera the wilderness it roamed (GM, 71). For the beast, this was an experience of rapture — venting its instinct of cruelty outward was nothing less than supreme ecstasy. For the humanity of this brutish animal to be violently constituted, a certain ‘race of conquerors’ had to descend upon it — the terrible punitive machinery of the most primeval state was how these conquerors, drunk on their ‘terrible artist-egoism’, shaped this creature into a human being, the eventual champion of reason and morals (GM, 70-71). To come into existence, this man had to be forcibly ruptured from his animal prehistory — and so, his instinctual will to cruelty was deprived of exterior, ‘more natural’ expression (GM, 72). But the ‘demand’ to inflict suffering, to be cruel, did not simply evaporate into a mist of higher and nobler things (GM, 70). Instead, this instinct was ‘forced back, repressed and imprisoned’ within itself (GM, 71). As Butler remarks, Nietzsche’s ‘misnomer’ for this scene of instinctual contortion — which he describes as ‘the fact of animal ego turning against itself [and] taking part against itself’ — is bad conscience (GM, 73; PLP, 63).
This is a will ‘turned back on itself’, a will that exists as a closed circuit, ‘composed’ of an incarcerated instinct of cruelty — all without the presupposition of a subject that is ontologically prior to this instinctual contortion (PLP, 70, 74). Subjectivity is instituted only after this scene is staged; in fact, psychical interiority, that whole ‘inner world’ of ideal ‘dimension, depth, breadth and height’, is the invention of the bad conscience, of the will before the subject (GM, 70). This will duplicates on ‘a smaller, pettier scale' the artistic violence that the conquering race unleashed, becoming ‘the true fountainhead of idealism and imagination’ by taking itself as 'a piece of refractory, anguished material’ (GM, 74). The interiority of the subject is, in Butler’s words, ‘a primarily artistic accomplishment, the fabrication of an ideal’, or, more exactly, ‘what a certain violent artistry produces when it takes itself as its own object’ (PLP, 74, 76). The bad conscience is internally motivated to artistically fabricate subjectivity precisely to lacerate and mutilate it — the cruel instinct, imprisoned inside itself by the state, thus achieves gratification ‘in new and, as it were, subterranean ways’ (GM, 70, 74). The ‘persecuted subject does not exist outside the orbit of that persecution’ (Butler again) (PLP, 75). Or, rather, it is impossible to locate in subjectivity a pristine, eternal core that is ontologically independent from its historically organised scarring.
But Nietzsche complexifies this torturous situation by introducing a third term that exists between the will turned against itself and the subjectivity that this will cruelly lacerates, pitilessly mutilates. As Nietzsche describes, the bad conscience 'arms' and 'intertwines' itself with God to bring the endless torture that is the subject's psychic life to its ‘most fearful and sublime zenith’ (GM, 77-78). Christianity’s God is (like everything) an artefact of history. Nietzsche asserts that the ancient tribesman was terrified by the towering figure of the ancestor; this terror stemmed from a gnawing anxiety that his sacrifices and his festivals were woefully inadequate tributes to what the ancestor left in his wake, the amassed power his death handed over. For Nietzsche, the ancestors of the ‘most powerful’ tribesmen must have been so abominably terrifying that they were ‘ultimately transfigured into gods’; Nietzsche maintains that the apotheosis of this terror was the God of Christianity, the ‘most powerful god ever conceived’ (GM, 75-76). The bad conscience, the artistic violence that travels under this name, turns this God into an abominable ‘ideal’ — it makes Him ‘holy’, ‘judge’, ‘hangman’, ‘transcendent’, ‘eternity’, ‘unending torment’, ‘hell’ and ‘unimaginably vast punishment’ (GM, 78-79). An infinite, maddened and excruciating 'guilt' to God sinks into the subject, stranding it beyond any and all absolution (GM, 79). The bad conscience’s satisfaction, its obscene luxury, is the guilty subject it constitutes — legible in the scars of subjectivity is infinite guilt, eternal damnation.
But in the contemporary — the world in which God has been reduced to a faded shadow on the crumbling wall — the historical coordinates of Nietzsche’s scene of instinctual contortion and mutilated subjectivity have dramatically shifted. Which is to say, there is a new third term between will and subject. I think Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is illuminating here. In his essay, Althusser famously stages this ‘theoretical scene’ to visualise the precise operation of ideological power: in some secluded, dark alley, there is a police officer who yells ‘Hey, you there!’, and the addressee of the ‘hail’ which echoes down this backstreet — a man whose back was facing the cop — turns himself around (ISSA, 264-65). This addressee, precisely in ‘recognising that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing’, is thereby constituted as a subject (ISSA, 264). For Dolar, the decisive metaphor of Althusser’s famous scene is the ‘clean cut’, ‘a sharp edge’ that slices (BI, 76-77). As Dolar renders it, this ideological ‘interpellation’, this hail, cleaves in a single stroke — in ‘a sudden and abrupt transition’, a certain formless, oozing substance, a man-thing, is transformed into the subject (BI, 76). But the recognition that fabricates the subject has a peculiar reality: it is the (chimerical) recognition that the subject was ‘always-already’ there, long before the police officer’s hail (ISSA, 263-65). What happens in Althusser’s little drama of the alley is that subject — cleaved into existence — speciously, necessarily and teleologically stretches itself backwards, reaching into the past: condemned to efface all evidence of its social production, this subject is imprisoned by and in its own freedom and transparency.
The roar of the police officer, on Althusser’s account, exemplifies the countless ‘rituals of ideological recognition’ in which we are perpetually enmeshed; it represents, in other words, how ideology fundamentally works (ISSA, 263). The most immediate point to make is this: in the alley, the police officer does not cave in a head with his baton or his boot. Ideology, as a slice, is not violence that destroys; unlike raw repression, the violence of ideology — precisely as an address, or an injunction, that imposes a recognition — is constitutive, making something from the pre-ideological substance against which its violence is directed. The decisive Nietzschean point, however, is that the imposition through which ideology functions relies upon a turning towards the hail, a movement that is exterior to the ideological machinery of society. In the alley, a pre-ideological substance, that trickling man-thing, propels itself towards the hail of the police officer — there is an assumption prior to the cut of his subjectivation that the cop is assailing him specifically with hostile, suspicious, inquisitorial attention, that he must have done something wrong to deserve this harassment. Crucially, I think we can discern here a certain energy that assumes the pain of guilt for some supposed wrongdoing and, in doing so, propels the constitution of a (suffering) subjectivity. There is, in other words, a force that wants a guilty subject. (At some level, Althusser himself actually seems to recognise this in his vague gesture towards the ‘guilt feelings’ operative in the alley (ISSA, 265).) In this sense, it is possible to postulate that the key representation of ideology Althusser stages is parasitical upon Nietzsche’s drama of the bad conscience, what was drilled into man when he was dragged screaming into history — the ideological rituals of society have displaced God as the third term in the primordial Nietzschean scene. The subjectivity constituted in the alley is, ultimately, contingent upon the instinct of cruelty incarcerated within itself; Althusser merely describes the historically specific factor that — having colonised the instinctual life that was gruesomely contorted in the bloody transition of animal to human — is the source of the subject’s guilt, the mechanism of its scarring.
But Althusser’s intervention — while partial as description — nonetheless reveals what is implied politically in the fabrication of the subject by the bad conscience infused with ideological power. To clarify the political implications of subjectivity, Althusser moves from the secluded alley to the wider ‘topography’ that was Marx’s monumental scientific discovery (ISSA, 236). As Althusser recalls, what Marxism fundamentally maps out is this: atop the economic base — the ‘infrastructure’ that consists in the coordination of productive forces and productive relations — lies the ‘superstructure’ (ISSA, 236). In stark contrast to the base's monolithic ‘unity’, Althusser internally differentiates what is scaffolded upon it into two separate ‘floors’: this elevated substrate is comprised of Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses (ISSA, 243). Both these apparatuses articulate the powers of ideology and repression — the specific ‘practices’, rituals, in which these apparatuses consist are the material realities of their simultaneous dominations (ISSA, 256).1 The crucial point of institutional distinction, however, is that ISAs ‘function massively and predominately by ideology’, whereas RSAs are primarily agencies of brute coercion, with their power only secondarily ideological (ISSA, 244). In the Althusserian universe, then, the interpellated subject derives its ontological status from the rituals of ideological and repressive state apparatuses alike — it is simply that this social production, this constitutive slicing, is the primary institutional task of the ISAs.
The police and the army, the prisons and the courts, are Althusser’s decisive examples of repressive state apparatuses — the crushing of a skull with a baton or boot that is pointedly not happening in the alley, or a soldier scorching flesh to the bone with a blast of napalm, most directly represent their power. By contrast, school, church, media and family are taken by Althusser to exemplify ideological state apparatuses — the violence of these institutions lurks behind the teacher, the priest, the journalist and the father, the obscene and the obscure shadow of their calls, their hails.2 For Althusser, the ‘great theoretical advantage’ of the topography mapped out by Marx is that it exposes that the powers (or ‘determining force’) of apparatuses both ideological and repressive — as the two inner territories of the superstructure — are themselves determined by the economic base on which they lie (ISSA, 238). As Althusser observes, capitalism must endlessly reconstitute its own ‘means of production’ to perpetuate itself — including the ‘labour-power’ of the worker (ISSA, 233-35). This labour-power is what capitalism engorges itself upon, infinitely devours — the labour of the body from which blood and sweat pours, the suffering matter that is torn apart, piece by piece. The wage that is re-examined by Marxism as a small sliver of the ‘value produced by the expenditure of labour-power’ — the devoured labour, the dead labour that is entombed in capital itself, is the ‘surplus’ that does not return in the wage — is primarily how the reproduction of labour-power is secured (ISSA, 234). If the starving worker did not himself have his scraps to eat, then there would be no feast for capital. The specific intervention made by the superstructure of ideological and repressive state apparatuses, however, is the enforcement of these murderous ‘relations of production’ (ISSA, 246). The apparatuses that are the two floors of the superstructure function to extract from the worker his ‘submission’ to, his prostration before, the fundamental ‘rules of the established order’ that feeds on him — the ‘reality’, the ‘determinant force’, of the ISAs and the RSAs is the enslavement of the working-class (ISSA, 236, 238). As repressive powers, these apparatuses simply crush the stirrings of revolution with brute force: smashed heads and smoking bones. But — in a sense, far more diabolically — they also slash into existence subjects that, detained in their freedom and transparency, voluntarily submit themselves to the relations of production, to their subjection.3
Ultimately, the social order of capitalism, as the union of existing productive relations and existing productive forces, cannot survive without its upper layers of Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses — not merely as monsters of violence, but as the secret stages for the political production of subjectivity. With all of this established, I think it is now clear that the third term today intervening in Nietzsche’s archaic drama of the bad conscience is not merely the rituals of ideological power — it is, more precisely, the entire capitalist social order that these rituals enforce. In other words, capitalism has an existence, a reality, that is literally between will and subject. Of course, an obvious merit of Althusser's update of Nietzsche is that it displaces a certain outmoded, fundamentally naive, image of ideology as a screen whose glimmer distorts the epistemological relationship of an eternal subject to reality, to Truth — ideology is not simply a veil, a shining layer of mystification, that glosses over the barbarities of the social order, the brutal facts of how things really are. Emptying the subject’s consciousness of ideas that forbid realisation of his objective unfreedom, that he is in shackles, is not the political task imposed by ideological reality; putting it even more strongly, restoring the proper reign of Truth in some pure subjectivity is a simple fantasy. Despite this undeniable achievement, Althusser — as updater of Nietzsche — still appears to make everything impossible in his specification of what the political function of subjectivity. We are doomed to exploitation, our world is destined to remain a killing field stretching to every horizon, by the immensity of history — not merely the (relatively recent) social order of capitalism as the term between will and subject, but the primordial constitution of man as the gruesome configuration of the torturous relationship in which capitalism is now situated.
In this apparent doom, however, psychoanalysis intervenes. In Althusser’s essential visualisation of interpellation, the cop yells down the alley — his ideological power is articulated in the horizon of our language, in the Symbolic texture of the social order, or the capitalist social relations that are bounded by the bad conscience and our scarred subjectivity. The power of interpellation ‘ultimately fails’ because there is an indestructible Real — a disturbing, traumatic excess against which our words thrash — that simply 'cannot be integrated' into the universe of the Symbolic (IR, 242). In different contexts, Dolar, Žižek and Zupančič all (more or less) polemically transform Althusser's theory of interpellation into an elaborate operation to avoid this irreducible 'remainder', this unyielding 'leftover' (BI, 77; IR, 242). This is despite the fact that Althusser, in his essay Freud and Lacan, weds his theory of subject formation to psychoanalytic science. On Althusser's account, psychoanalysis 'de-centred' subjectivity by founding the science of the unconscious, of the waste product left in the wake of the brutal transformation — the ‘undeclared war’ that humanity wages against its helpless ‘offspring’, a war with no marching-bands, monuments or memorials — of tiny ‘mammalian larvae’ into human beings, boys and girls, Man and Woman (FL, 23, 26). Almost directly evoking Lacan's famous theory of the ‘mirror stage', wherein the little infant suffering from severe 'motor helplessness and insufficiency' gratifies itself by gazing upon its unifying, 'coherent' reflection in a mirror, Althusser posits that psychoanalysis demonstrates that the subject — that is, the ego — exists only in its ‘recognition’ of itself in the ‘ideological formations’ of society (J, 41-42; FL, 31).
But the really decisive point for Dolar, Žižek and Zupančič — and what Althusser misses in unifying interpellation and psychoanalysis — is that the haunting material ‘remaining after’ the cut of ideology, a Real residue of the pre-ideological substance that oozes through the dark alley, is ‘introjected’ into the subject at the exact moment of its eruption into the world (ER, 40-41; BI, 77-78). This remainder, this leftover, is wedged ‘in the very inner kernel’ of subjectivity precisely as exteriority; this pre-ideological residue deprives the subject of a ‘flawless interior’, permanently fracturing it (BI, 78-81). From the psychoanalytic point of view, our psychic life — with all of its tortures — is an extended elaboration of the fundamental ontological inconsistency of the subject. This can be most directly localised in the painful ‘break-down’ of meaning that is the symptom, the apparently senseless malfunction in psychic — and potentially somatic — life where Dr. Freud commenced the ‘entire psychoanalytic apparatus’ (BI, 78). But, beyond this 'most striking manifestation', the fundamental ‘subjective structures’ dissected in the psychoanalytic clinic — those of the neurotic, the psychotic and the pervert — are also testimonies to irreversible fracture; these structural organisations of the subject are all attempts to cope with a constitutive division (BI, 79). However, what is truly decisive politically about the fact that the power of ideology, or the Symbolic order of capitalist society, inevitably denies, refuses, the subject a perfect consistency with itself is this: the unspoiled autonomy that this would imply is
essentially impossible. The subject of ideology cannot totally submit, because it cannot be pure freedom. Psychoanalysis locates itself at the failure of the social to seamlessly slot us into place — the subject, despite its abject subordination in the tripartite relationship it forms with the bad conscience and a devouring capitalism, provides a basis for politics precisely because of the rift internal to it. In this way, the apparently weakest term is actually the most powerful. Indeed, the proper political question is: at the fracture where Freud and Lacan operate — the negativity at the heart of the divided subject, the jagged rock against which all identity shatters—what possibilities exist for becoming something other than what we have been made to be, something that social power cannot prefigure, cannot determine? In this way, we might surpass our history — and make the world anew.
Thanks to Serene and George for their help.
The decisive theoretical motif of Foucault’s most Nietzschean book, Discipline and Punish, is that the human body as the fundamental target of political power. Indeed, the premise of Foucault’s genealogy of discipline — operative in the texts of Nietzsche, the books that Foucault democratises — is that power relations have an ‘immediate hold upon’ the profoundly malleable yet persistently rebellious materiality of the flesh: ‘they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (DP, 25). For Foucault, the body’s sculpting and slicing by power is constitutive of its particular, historically-situated ‘political anatomy’ (DP, 29). This is the text in which the genealogist in the tradition of Foucault (and Nietzsche) reads history as a destructive ‘inscription’, interprets the domination and the violence that is the social order’s historical being (NGH, 85-86). But for Foucault, this bodily destruction is also the birth of subjectivity — his calculus is that, as Butler neatly captures, 'the subject appears at the expense of the body, an appearance conditioned in inverse relation to the disappearance of the body’ (PLP, 91-92). In Foucault's universe, then, ‘we are nothing but our history’ of corporeal destruction (to adapt a line in the classic Dreyfus and Rabinow volume on Foucault) (MF, 122). The interesting theoretical point is that, in Foucault’s Nietzschean materialism, the articulation of subject-forming power directly upon and in bodily flesh bypasses — or perhaps works under — the level of recognition investigated by Althusser in his competing Marxist materialism.
While RSAs are all unambiguously state institutions, ISAs are the distributed on both sides of the public-private divide. Nonetheless, Althusser assimilates even the nominally private ISAs to the state by recalling that the distinction of public and private is a fiction that hardens into Truth only under the particular state that is — as the Marxist tradition elaborates — the instrument of the capitalist class.
In his monolithic phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness, Sartre transforms freedom into the fundamental structure of human existence. And this structure, though we can flee from the anguished responsibility it imposes, is immutable: ‘man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all’ (BN, 441). Which is to say, Sartrean freedom totally resists annihilation by chain and whip, or the barbed wire of the concentration camp; Sartre himself asserts that the bleeding slave, and indeed the emaciated inmate of the Lager, are irrevocably free to ‘break out’ of their subjugation (BN, 550). For many, this immediately provokes a certain visceral revulsion: the notion that slave and inmate are as free as their murderers appears to be pure mystification, a total confusion of the ethical and the political stakes of these situations of extreme inhumanity. But there is, I think, another line to take here. From an Althusserian — and actually Nietzschean — perspective, the fact that Sartre’s existential vision of human freedom emerges from the vast metaphysical edifice of his phenomenological ontology obscures the historical determination of freedom as a mode of enslavement. This is, in a way, the fundamental discovery of Althusser’s dissection of ideology in capitalist society, as presented in this article. For his part, Nietzsche considers freedom — thought of as the distinction, ‘petrified’ in language itself, between ‘deer and doer’, as the linguistically reified ‘will as cause’ — to be a node through which the mastery of the herd, and of its priest, is cunningly imposed (GM, 32-33; TI, 47-48). The phantasmic freedom of the subject is exploited to render him morally culpable for his actions — and thus legitimate his punishment and damnation. For me, this all represents an extremely interesting point of convergence between Althusser and Nietzsche, one that may repay further elaboration.
An excellent piece as always Rory. the vocabulary is evocative and striking –
there are metaphors that bring to mind fabric or flesh: veils, cutting, cleaving, fabrication, laceration, enmeshing, slicing, slashing, tearing;
sometimes the vocabulary is solidly geological or geographical: mapping, topography, territory, sediment, fracture, rift, petrifying, drilling;
at other points the terms are a bit more liquid or gaseous: residue, oozing, mist, evaporation, dripping, eruption, smoking
all of them apt for the processes of subjectivation and social domination you describe