Author: Anvita Budhraja
Space, real and imaginary, materializes the subject as a social identity. The subject acquires a social identity, according to Althusser, as it is hailed into a category that assigns it the place it occupies in the given socioeconomic order. The subject may be hailed into numerous such spaces at once physical and imaginary, material and constructed, resulting conflicts within their inner world, or subjectivity. The modern novel unfolds a narrative composed of such spaces so that readers can imagine how a protagonist finds a social identity, or place within the given social order, and in the process internalizes a conflict central the cultural classification system where he or she must find a place, condemning the protagonist to oscillate between the subject who strives to fill a ready-made place in society and the restless subject who strives to become someone else, which entails actively seeking a space elsewhere and not yet specified. The vocabulary of becoming and belonging that modify one’s identity take the form of movement through space, as the subject resists one identity and goes looking for another. In what is arguably the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe rejects the security of the pursuit of law, the position his father chose for him, and goes to sea. By contrast, Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway lives in Westminster, an affluent London neighborhood; her character, her experiences, and her movements across the city are determined by her position as hostess of a dwindling elite society, as indicated by her address. Insofar as not only hers but each character’s identity is given a precisely spatial location, the subject of the novel is a spatialized subject. It propels a narrative that distributes characters within an imagined spatial order.
Thinking in these terms, I can see much the same spatialized distribution of identity emerge in structuralist theories of the novel that also see the modern subject tossed between the dilemma of special capture and mobility, being and becoming someone. As I suggested above, the concept of interpellation that Althusser spells out in On the Reproduction of Capital makes use of spatial metaphors to explain how specific state apparatuses like the church or education form “the concrete subject,” a category that he considers both the destination of ideology and “constitutive of all ideology” (188). In his view, there can be no ideology if there is no attempt to classify individuals as subjects. Each time it fixes an individual to a position in a social classification system, ideology materializes as that system. Thinking of identity as a form of spatial capture, he endows the subject of ideology with a capacity for spatial thinking, or cognitive mapping. He further emphasizes that ideology would be nothing without its material functioning (the interpellated subject), which inextricably links his key concept of interpellation to a subject that materializes in space. Rather than see the process of acquiring an identity simply as a succession of moments of self-recognition, Althusser depends on a vocabulary of spatial terms to show his reader how to imagine the process of interpellation as stepping into a space with a name. As he proceeds to demonstrate in three iterations of this process, the interpellated subject is a spatialized subject (189).
In his first illustration, Althusser asks us to think about a friend on the other side of our door (189). The figure of crossing a threshold explains not only how an individual steps into the category to which he imagines belonging, but also how cultures offer categories to which their subjects may feel that they belong. In both cases, movement is key. To recognize the term “friend” means that one already belongs to that category, or at least recognizes that he or she does. One’s location within a social classification system predisposes the individual to belong to one category or another and is key to the process by which that individual materializes the ideology that produces a particular system of identities. To refuse to be a friend is not to situate oneself elsewhere but to situate oneself in relation to the category of friend. Either movement across that threshold or the option not so to move cements forms the identity of the individual within a hierarchical system of such identities. Althusser offers two other examples of this principle, both of which occur on the street and ask us to imagine the individual stopping, say, if a policeman hails him, thereby confirming the spatial thinking that informs his concept of ideology.
In the first of these examples, he asks to imagine that we recognize a friend on the street by calling out to that individual and shaking his or her hand. I find it significant that Althusser adds this layer of ritual to the call of recognition from across the street (189). Although there is no explicit movement through space on the part of the subject so hailed, we must infer that the manner of hailing arrests the individual in place so that the handshaking ritual might “take place.” In the second and most frequently referenced of Althusser’s examples, a person is hailed by the police on the street and turns around, recognizing that he or she as the one being hailed and, in that act of turning, becomes a subject (190). The turning around, which Althusser calls a “180-degree physical conversion,” is an action that arrests the individual in space and fixes him to the spot where he/she was hailed (191). That Althusser describes this turning toward the one who hails as a physical conversion makes the point that interpellation is not only a speech act, but also the means of arresting the individual body in a designated space: this turns the individual itself into a concrete subject. The process of interpellation in this respect encapsulates the operations of ideology that compel us to interpellate ourselves. There is consequently a psychological dimension to this process that Althusser calls to our attention by placing the police behind the individual’s back as he or she moves down the street (190-191). This staging of interpellation has the individual recognizing him or herself in the hailing without actually knowing the police are doing the hailing or whom they have in mind.
Before exploring this psychological dimension of interpellation, I want to pause and consider the connotations of the French verb “interpeller,” a legal term for questioning a person who has been detained, a capture that presupposes the prior arrest of someone’s movement sanctioned by the law. The translator’s gloss on “interpeller” suggests a meaning of the word beyond Althusser’s sense of a hail, namely, the conversational use of “interpeller” to mean” ‘to shake up,’ ‘to really get to’” (188 n17). The suggestion that hailing disrupts rather than making order more so than spatial capture is necessary to acquiring an identity.
Insofar as we interpellate ourselves by turning, argues Althusser, one might say we are always already interpellated. The difference between the individual sauntering down a street and the subject who turns around to acknowledge that he or she is the one being hailed of hailing transfers the spatial metaphor from the street into the mind (191). That inner, or imagined, space is already there as category into which one steps even to reject being so classified. As a result, the identity is always reinforced, and through repeated hailing, becomes second nature. Althusser the simple reflex of turning around not only to reveal the unconscious dimension of subjectification that makes us perform it without realizing that we are doing so, but also to conceal the significant transformation of this inner space that occurs in the process of turning around. If, on the street, interpellation manifests as a spatial placement, then in the inner space, interpellation performs a spatial displacement. For the person to recognize itself as “the subject” of interpellation, there must be movement, or change, in the way that individual has already discerned itself as a “subject.” To use Althusser’s term, the person “recruits” him/herself as “the subject” (190), a psychological gesture that implies a distance from which the individual can view the self he/she is recruiting. A version of the self must be put out of place in order to be so regarded. The recruited self, viewed from outside, becomes an object in relation to the self who only then becomes the subject. The inner displacement lies in such self-objectification.
The word “recruit” also suggests the form of self-surveillance implied by interpellation and necessary to the operation of ideology. Althusser asks if the person turns and recognizes himself as the subject merely because of a guilty conscience or if something stranger is at play: Ideology hails people into the categories and identities, a placement that leads to a displacement, which in turn constitutes ideology. We step into a space and acquire a social category (a woman, an immigrant); we are subjects, but we are subjected to ideology’s categories. Using Althusser’s example, this inner process of displacement operates in an analogous manner to the recognition of a friend on the other side of the door. The self-as-subject recognizes the social position or identity of the self-as-object displaced by that recognition to the other side of a threshold.
The subject requires a place to locate its self and view the world of objects. Changes in this location necessarily change the subject-object relationship. If positioning in a set of such imaginary spaces makes one a subject, then changing that position will also change our place within ideology but not the fact that we are in it and hence our status as subjects. Althusser’s spatial metaphor leads us inevitably to pose the question: How can we be outside of ideology if ideology provides the categories of our identities (191); to leave one is to cross the threshold into another that materializes as we occupy it. Althusser asks us to imagine ideology as an expanding circle with no point of exit.
If we understand interpellation as a simultaneous placement and displacement of the self, then a sense of movement and its lack as key to this process. Each shift of identity to another spatial location within ideology produces a disruption and/or expansion of self, despite the fact that such movement achieves quite the opposite result of fixing, or subject, the subject to a social category that consequently appears to pre-exist that subject. It is in this sense that, as Althusser says, “the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing” (191).
The character of Septimus Warren Smith, a tragic figure that haunts post WWI London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, is no stranger to this circular logic. Recruited to fight in the war, Septimus returns to London having lost all sense of the national community for which he has fought. He is stuck in the War in Europe along with his dead squadron. Septimis enters the novel near the beginning of the novel, as an important-looking black limosine backfires, arresting the movement of people in the streets in reflexive response to the sound of an explosion. The importance of the street for both Woolf, as for Althusser, is evident here. The street is the space where people as a group interact most directly with each other and the state that requires their orderly interaction. Most importantly, the city street puts the population in movement from one location in the city to some other, a process during which they must still belong to their respective subject-positions. In this respect, an event that arrests the normal movement on the street will reveal the relation between the street and those imagined spaces.
Septimus, lost in his thoughts, sees the motor car as the center of his world, only then to imagine: “It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?” Septimus is a locatable subject, one who has indeed fixed himself in a space where he is visible to others, a place where traffic has stopped. Before his brief moment of introspection, Woolf made it clear that “everyone looked at the motor car” and “the crowd [was] staring at the motor car” (111-112). Only Septimus sees himself, as if from outside, as the object at which everyone is staring because he is responsible for stopping the car. This displacement is mirrored in the narrative as it picks up Septimus’ thoughts, as they move from the third-person impersonal (“it”) to the first person (Septimus as subject) in the statement “it is I,” and from “I” to the third person “he,” in the next statement, “was he not being looked at” (where Septimus becomes an object to himself). Septimus’ cognitive distance from himself is evident even in the sentence that introduces him: “Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him” (Woolf 110). The articulation “found himself unable to pass” produces an inner split, that dislocates Septimus from the self-as-object he observes that seems rooted to the spot. The irony here is that this moment of self-recognition fixes him as a subject in the category of a disruption of rather than a participant in the flow of ordinary London life.
Damned by an inability to feel (when his officer dies, when he marries Lucrezia), Septimus tragically confirms Althusser’s claim that no one is outside ideology. To recognize his failure to occupy the position he is expected himself to fill in relation to his fellow soldier, he already occupies that category. When in an ultimate act of spatial displacement, he throws himself from the window in the conclusion of the novel, he raises this question: Does Septimus jump in order to escape his identity as a citizen and married man, or does he jump because he is arrested by his still unfulfilled responsibility on the battlefront and is hailed by his dead officer to fulfill it by dying with his fellow soldiers? It is impossible to say whether, in jumping, Septimus escapes the classification soldier or whether the atemporality of that identity confirms his present position is a disruption to normal society. The announcement of his death hails him into Clarissa’s party as a question mark and, for her, as a dark space and point of exit from that world she called together at that party.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G) developed their figure of “the rhizome” to model a way of thinking that can travel across seemingly incompatible social spaces and levels of ontology, in the process calling into question Althusser’s claim that the subject only expands ideology’s domain by imagining alternative spaces. D&G’s rhizome is a form in motion, a process, that move through rather than occupying space. In this respect, it allows us to reconfigure the spatial locations that constitute identity as we have understood them so far. The sense of motion with which D&G endow the rhizome is inherent their definition of the term “multiplicity”: “Multiplicities are defined by the outside […] by the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities” (D&G 9). Their deterritorialization is related to Althusser’s notion of subject formation as a chain of displacements in which one is always on the way to becoming someone else. The rhizome provides those points or hubs where multiplicities form the connections that allow them to move from one to others, a process that entails a simultaneous deterritorialization and reterritorialization of both, as each is transformed by its incorporation in the other.
Where the figure of “hailing” places the emphasis on what exists on either side of the encounter, the rhizome stresses the encounter itself as the convergence or crossing of lines of development that disrupt the process of becoming someone or something by opening up the possibility of becoming many other things. Perhaps the most memorable model of this principle, in an essay composed of a multiplicity of such models, is drawn from Darwin’s memorable instance of co-evolution, the mutually deterritorializing relation between various species of orchid and their insect pollinators. Here, the hermaphroditic orchid develops specialized petals that simulate the fuzzy back and markings of a female wasp, luring the male of the pollinator species into a position where he inadvertently picks up pollen sacks and carries them on to another orchid. This elaborate simulation of the mating of wasps facilitates the cross-pollination of orchids, as both wasp and orchid are deterritorialized from their own species and reterritorialized as part of a wasp-orchid rhizome (D&G 10).
There is neither recognition, nor imitation, nor incorporation in D&G’s revision of Althusser’s process of hailing, to the contrary, they ask us to think of the wasp-orchid encounter as the “exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying” (D&G 10). In so escaping the grasp of language, I would guess, D&G meant to expose the structuralist mechanics of inner displacement as a process that produces only imitations of some type of norm—selves, as I have argued, that already exist prior to the moment of encounter that reshapes them. In their view, imitation (D&G call it a tracing) observes the binary relation of imitation to original. When a tracing is superimposed on the map of which it is an image, neither tracing nor map can change that binary logic. Insofar as it observes a similar logic (performance-model or norm), interpellation reproduces only what presumably already exists rather than some genuinely new form of life. Deterritorialization, on the other hand, assumes that it is in the very nature of living beings to evade categorical confinement and the trap of becoming some thing. If interpellation-displacement observes a circular logic with no point of exit, then deterritorialization-displacement conjugates the flows of deterritorialized subjectivities that expand the map into unknown territory (D&G 11). How might we read the behavior of Woolf’s shell-shocked veteran, Septimus Smith, differently from this perspective?
If Septimus is unable to participate in the life of society as someone with his identity (war veteran) is supposed to, Woolf suggests, that is because the categories in which he is placed are just not the same as those in which he compulsively places himself, thanks to his liminal position in the trenches. In his case, the vocabulary of placement—recognizing, arresting and detaining that understands identity as being fixed to a place—proves only too literal, detaining him in a position that no longer historically exists except for the dead. Urged to assume the place of husband beside his wife in the postwar world, Septimus is doomed to be always outside himself. Confronting a space divided into discreet identities in which the individual steps out of the flow, Althusser’s individual is in one spot or another, in one category or another, either behind a closed door or opening another. D&G provide a contrastingly fluid concept of the subject, as one (more like the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway) in constant movement across a social forcefield and most itself when it is in between the positions that it momentarily occupies. Her identification of life with the subject in motion argues against the arrested movement on the street that produces such stable characters as Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread.
Deterritorialization allows Septimus to live within the bounds of English society while remaining attached to his vanished life on the battlefields of Europe. In doing so, D&G would stress, Septimus challenges English society to integrate that other space within a day in postwar London. Resolutely amnesiac, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw fail to meet that challenge in lieu of the authority they gain by relegating Septimus to the category of the abnormal. Sir William Bradshaw’s diagnosis of Septimus is appropriately spatial—a lack of “proportion” (Woolf 221). One can almost imagine Sir William dividing the mind into categories that could be arranged in a tree structure with commonsense and devotion to home restored to a position of command. Woolf, on the other hand, makes it clear that the man who loved poetry and Shakespeare has been de- and reterritorialized by the experience of actual horrors, eliminating the difference between metaphor and actuality, memory and present experience. In this way, Mrs. Dalloway, like To the Lighthouse, brings an end to realism.
To conclude, let me return to the moment at the beginning of the novel when Lucrezia and Septimus sit on a park bench together and Lucrezia asks him to look up at the advertisement in the sky. Although Septimus answers her call and looks, he and does not see. The sight of a plane in the sky over London and the population looking upward transports him elsewhere, to a place in time where the trees talk to him and Lucrezia cannot engage but only interrupt him (Woolf 119-124). Dr Holmes enjoins Septimus to look, just as Lucrezia “implores” him, at the real things surrounding him, establishing an opposition between the factual and fictional, that is to say, between the world Holmes inhabits and the one in which Septimus is trapped, between a social cure and exclusion. The insidiousness of this binary logic lies in the heartbreaking resolution that Sir William Bradshaw, the champion of the normal, finds it necessary to separate Septimus from his wife, until he wants to join her within the space of normative ideology. If anyone needs a line of flight beyond these relentless binaries, they do. In the moments before Septimus’ suicide, Woolf perhaps offers a glimpse of this possibility, in a moment of a wasp-orchid meeting of minds between Septimus and Clarissa Dalloway.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “On Ideology.” On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. New York: Verso, 2014: 171–207.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
“displacement;” “territorialize.” Oxford English Dictionary. Web.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
