Author: Muyun Zhou
In the realm of novels, “the subject” is not a ready-made “thing” to be named but rather a processual “voice” that acquires being in the process of speaking. Although we tend to imagine such a voice issuing from a source prior to the process of speaking itself, we cannot grasp it through some act of discovering its origin, intact and pure. For one thing, the speech act that generates a novel in not a single voice. There is of course the grammatically active voice that “subjectivates” as in this statement: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This voice speaks what it desires, and in doing so, it manages to escape the given categories of being in the world and transforms the world into its own object of desire (Deleuze 345).[2] But this voice implies a grammatically passive voice that is always already “subjected,” or fixed to a place in society. Thus when Robinson Crusoe explains, “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull,” his voice acknowledged the dominion of categories into which he has been born and reveal the hold of their grammatical articulation on his consciousness by the restrictions thereby placed on his voice (Althusser 199).[3] In order to grasp the subject of the novel, then, we must ask how these seemingly incompatible voices interact as a single process of becoming.
Althusser’s concept of interpellation provides a working model for the interaction of these opposing principles—”subjection” and “subjectivation”—in the process of becoming what he calls “the concrete subject.” The event of interpellation is triggered by “a hail.” When a person is called by a name, even so vague as “Hey, you!,” that person is subjected to that name at the moment he/she acknowledges that he/she has been so named. Thus when a woman walks down the street and someone whistles at her, catcalling her a “girl,” that woman already occupies that category as she turns her head in recognition. Hearing that whistle, she not only already acknowledges her status as the object of someone else’s desire, but also steps into that position. In doing so, she becomes such an object to herself.
How does this everyday instance of interpellation resemble Althusser’s grandiose example of Moses’s interpellation by God (Althusser 195)?[4] As Althusser tells the story, once Moses recognizes God’s voice naming him as His servant — “Moses!” — he cannot become anything other than what he already is: the servant of God. Althusser uses the story of Moses to demonstrate that ‘the subject’ is not a fixed concept, but rather a process of simultaneous subjection and subjectivation. Subjection occurs as Moses becomes who he already by virtue of the fact that he believes in God, and subjectivation occurs as Moses changes his servitude by making it his own and the very thing he desires.[5] For interpellation to succeed in producing the concrete subject, the two processes must not only take place simultaneously but also repeat this performance over time. Why?
First of all, subjectivation needs subjection: it is not that Moses cannot imagine anything other than what God calls him to be, or even that he lacks the potential to become something else. Rather, it is the case that Moses does not desire himself to become anything other than what God calls on him to be. Because he has internalized the idea that he is nothing if not God’s servant, Moses has already chosen at the moment of hailing to be God’s servant. At the moment of subjectivation and subjection are as one, any alternative seems excessive. God’s servant is who he is.
Looking at this process from the other side of this equation, we find that subjection is equally dependent on subjectivation: Moses recognizes that becoming God’s servant is the highest position to which a human being can aspire, precisely because God is “the Subject par excellence,” the form of subjection that is greater than any alternative subjectivation. To serve men in name of God, he is himself a God, a preferable position to that of an exile and shepherd, which he occupied the moment before he hear God’s voice. So long as Moses can see himself in “His mirrors, His reflections” (197), his subjectivation can never, by definition, exceed the category to which he willingly subjects himself.
In Althusser’s model, a name is an ideological category. Hence, by naming, the process of interpellation locates the individual within ideology, where a succession of names limit his or her possibilities of subjectivation, eliminating the possibility of the subject getting outside of ideology. Nonetheless, the logic of Althusser’s ideology is undergirded by a Christian imperative: the subject must be embodied, because the logos, which asserts its authority in the names of “God,” “Subject,” and “Ideology,” emerge and fashion, at the same time, a body and a subject bound at once to the body and to God.
The subject of the novel, by contrast, is a subject in writing and fictional writing at that. Under these conditions, is “the subject” necessarily and embodied subject? Can the novel imagine 1) the body without a subject, or 2) the subject without a body? To address this question is to open up the possibility of a human body without a human subject, as well as a human subject without a human body. To open up these possibilities is automatically to question the ideology that undergirds both the concept of the liberal subject and the Christian concept of the incarnation, potentially freeing the subject to form other relations with the biological body, including the possibility of a subject that formulates itself outside of ideology.
In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we indeed confront this possibility in the figure of the cannibal. Although this figure is that of a human being, the figure is not in fact human because it cannot be interpellated within a modern society. In devouring human bodies, the cannibal nullifies the subject that defines those bodies as human rather than as food. Crusoe confronts this limit on two occasions, once when he names Friday as a “friend,” in effect rescues his potential humanity, and again when he similarly rescues Friday’s father, a gesture that makes his friend symbolically human by birth. On both occasions, the cannibal’s captives do little or nothing to rescue their own humanity, as Crusoe is quick to observe:
While I was thus looking on them, I perceived, by my perspective, two miserable wretches dragged from the boats, where, it seems, they were laid by, and were now brought out for the slaughter. I perceived one of them immediately fall; being knocked down, I suppose, with a club or wooden sword, for that was their way; and two or three others were at work immediately, cutting him open for their cookery, while the other victim was left standing by himself, till they should be ready for him. (Chapter XIV)
Within an Althusserian framework, the two captured cannibals have effectively been classified as food. In that they do not resist that classification in the name of their humanity tells Crusoe that are not in fact human. One might argue for an exception when the second cannibal has a spasm of subjectivity and attempts to flee from his captors. Still, even after this brief exercise of agency on behalf of the self, that cannibal willingly submits to Crusoe’s naming him Friday and making him a slave. As such, he does not understand himself as subject, in some small way a reflection of his rescuer, but rather as the object possessed by the subject who owns the labor of the slave’s body. Even in this exceptional case, the cannibal represents the limit of the human body without a subject.
Having confronted the cannibal and effectively hailed two such non-subjects into the position of friends, Crusoe proceeds to explore the opposing limit—the possibility of becoming (like Moses’s God) the subject without a body—as he uses his voice to constitute a government for the island. Before other English men wash up on his shores, Crusoe has plans to leave the island in the hands of a Spaniard whom he rescues from the cannibals on their second visit to the island. Soon thereafter he encounters an English captain abandoned on the island by a mutinous crew, though, he confronts the problem of dealing with the mutineers, or bad subjects, who have forcibility tried to remove their captain from a position superior to them. By means of a process that emphasizes subjection—or the spatial disposition of the body—rather than its multiple capacity to become, Crusoe uses his voice to name and detain these subjects in isolation, ventriloquizing an invisible governor who speaks with the voice of the law:
“Well,” says I, “my conditions are but two; first, that while you stay in this island with me, you will not pretend to any authority here; and if I put arms in your hands, you will, upon all occasions, give them up to me, and do no prejudice to me or mine upon this island, and in the meantime be governed by my orders; secondly, that if the ship is or may be recovered, you will carry me and my man to England passage free.” (Chapter XVII)
Here, one can see where how Crusoe fulfills the story of a secular Moses, whereby he, as the servant of the Law, takes on the sovereign power to speak with the voice of the law in a perfect convergence of subjection and subjectivation. The laws are those of British colonialism and would blanket whole territories of the world outside Europe, virtually anywhere that no such body of law existed, alongside the mission of the church. This historically specific form of interpellation fragments the body of British subject. From the moment he arrived on the island, Crusoe was already two subjects, one housed in an experiential body that explores the island and records its sensations; the other expresses itself through the written voice of a narrator who recalls and analyzes that experience. As other men arrive on the island, we see Crusoe split again between the disembodied voice of the law and the agent of interpellation who hails the hostages into the social categories protected by the law. In this role, he is “the person” whom he, in the role of “the governor[,] had ordered to look after them.” (Chapter XVIII). The true subject that, like god, hails Crusoe into these categories,” is the Law itself, a subject without a body.
The body without a subject and a subject without a body define the opposing limits within which he must oscilate between in becoming the subject of the novel, as are both possible, if not entirely “human,” in a fictional realm governed by the ideology of modern individualism. The space between these two outer limits allows a range of possibilities for becoming the novel’s subject. In this respect, we can say that the subject of the novel destabilizes the process of becoming the concrete subject in Althusser’s model of the process whereby Christian ideology sutures the subject to the body as essential to subject formation (Jameson 37).[6]
In becoming the protagonist of the novel, as I have explained, Crusoe oscillates between the limits defined by the cannibals on the one hand and the bodiless voice of the Law, on the other. The discovery of the single human footprint on what he thought was a deserted beach provides the pivot where Crusoe confronts the question of how to become an embodied subject that can neither be incorporated in any other body without becoming food nor removed from his one and only body without becoming the disembodied voice of narrating the journal that he keeps. In triggering the fictional alternatives of a subjectless body and its opposite, the bodiless subject, the footprint challenges the first premise of “interpellation”—the human being as embodied consciousness. The episode begins with Crusoe’s encounter with the footprint, and his failure to put his physical response into words: “I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.” The fact that he cannot translate this experience into conscious understanding turns his body into something that Crusoe does not know, no longer integral to the self.
After this initial moment of shock that separates Crusoe’s the subject from his body as object, a drive to remap the entire island emerges. Because the footprint signifies the presence of other people on the island, whom he must assume are enemies out to render him an object rather than friends with whom he could socialize. Leaving his refuge in the cave, Crusoe first tests the hypothesis that the footprint is the imprint of a human body with a consciousness compatible with his own. When that effort is shown to be false, he proceeds to divide the island into separate territories for himself and for the other from whom he must keep himself apart for fear of losing his identity. He assumes that self and other belong to mutually hostile categories. Without secular institutions in place, Crusoe falls back on theology: “I considered that this was the station of life the infinitely wise and good providence of God had determined for me” (Chapter XI). Here the novel shows us what Althusser does not, namely, how the theological apparatus continues to work even after secular Law comes into conflict with and displaces the commandments of God through Moses.
Crusoe renames and divides himself as he switches his name from “the governor,” to “the governor’s men,” and then to an English man of property, or citizen. In doing so, as the progression of names suggest, he indeed avoids becoming subject to no higher authority than himself. In becoming the voice of law—the Subject that simultaneously subjectivates and subjects the embodied subject—he cannot be fully embodied in either one. At the same time, though simultaneous, the processes of subjection and subjectivation are fundamentally opposed and cannot be harmonized. In becoming the disembodied subject, Crusoe mitigates the risk of becoming a subjectless body. As he negotiates the perplexed relationship between himself as experiential body in the world and the consciousness that deals with that experience in the name of humanity, Crusoe becomes the protagonist of a novel. But who is the subject of the novel?
In order for us to be reading this account, there must be a subject who speaks to the reader in and through writing, specifically through writing that came to be recognized as a novel. This subject cannot be the first-person “I” of the novel, who is, in this case, that vocal component of the protagonist we call the narrator, the one in a position to give us a firsthand report of how the protagonist negotiated the conflict between the self as subject and the self as object. The subject of writing can neither one inasmuch as it is the process that makes itself known to us as something about to come into being elsewhere and in the future. For example, when I say “I,” I am calling a second person, “you,” into being as my listener or reader and presuming that person the conversation will recognize and respond to me at some future time (Benveniste).[7] In Robinson Crusoe, the adventures of the individual named Robinson Crusoe is written up in his journals, the act of writing which is interspersed throughout Daniel Defoe’s novel. The future of the experiential time of the protagonist is, first of all, the time of narration in which the consciousness of journal writing emerges to recall/acknowledge the circumstances, impulses, hesitations, and decisions of the protagonist. If the future of the protagonist is the narrator who records his adventures, then the future of narration rests on the reader of the journal, which requires the protagonist to return to England with his story intact. Who or what coordinates the relation between the time of Crusoe’s experiences and the time of the writing “I” (Deleuze 345)?[8]
The process of writing ‘calls out’ a writing subject. To be recognized as an author, the person who holds the pen has subjected him or herself to a whole constellation of rules and becomes an author only as s/he carries them out in writing. These rules are not those as stated by Crusoe the journal writer: “As I have troubled you with none of my sea journals, so I shall trouble you now with none of my land journals; but some adventures that happened to us in this tedious and difficult journey I must not omit.’ (Chapter XIX). The rules that Defoe observed were invisible laws that the governed the relation between that narrator and his experiential counterpart, the protagonist. Since he went to the trouble to create a fictional character who was the only person available to describe his experience on an initially deserted island, we know that Defoe is neither one. We also know that neither one is responsible for the curious experiment in writing that entertained the possibility of a subjectless body, on the one hand, and the disembodied subject on the other. We might see the experiment to come as the subject of the novel, and the novel as the material body of this writing subject. To conclude: the subject is a complex process of becoming that encloses itself within the circular logic of subjectivation and subjection.
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[2] Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif,” 345: “This going beyond the line of force is what happens when it bends back, starts meandering, goes underground or rather when force, instead of entering into a linear relationship with another force, turns back on itself, acts on itself or affects itself. This dimension of the Self is not a preexisting determination that can be found ready-made. Here again, a line of subjectivation is a process, a production of subjectivity in an apparatus: it must be made to the extent that the apparatus allows it or makes it possible. It is a line of flight. It escapes the previous lines; it escapes from them. The Self is not knowledge or power. It is a process of individuation that effects groups or people and eludes both established lines of force and constituted knowledge. It is a kind of surplus value. Not every apparatus necessarily has it.”
[3] Althusser, “On Ideology,” 199: “It remains to show, using a few concrete examples, how this whole extraordinary (and simple) machinery functions in its actual, concrete complexity.
Why ‘simple’? Because the principle of the ideology effect is simple: recognition, subjection, guarantee – the whole centred on subjection. Ideology makes individuals who are always-already subjects (that is, you and me) ‘go’.
Why ‘complex’? Because each subject (you and I) is subjected to several ideologies that are relatively independent, albeit unified under the unity of the State Ideology. For there exist, as we have seen, several Ideo logical State Apparatuses. Hence each subject (you and I) lives in and under several ideologies at once. Their subjection-effects are ‘combined’ in each subject’s own acts, which are inscribed in practices, regulated by rituals, and so on.”
[4] Althusser, “On Ideology,” 195: “And Moses, interpellated-called by [appele] his name, having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes – yes indeed! – recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God’s, a subject subjected to God, a subject by the Subject and subjected to the Subject.”
[5] While I stick to these names of action, it is alarming to see that ‘subjectivation’ is not really part of Althusser’s vocabulary for subject formation. The reason is Althusser believes what subjectivation can achieve is always implied and limited within process of subjection.
[6] Jameson, on “affect,” from Antinomies of Realism, 37: “So in reality, it is not existence and meaning which are incompatible here, …it is allegory and the body which repel one another and fail to mix.”
[7] Benveniste, from Problems in General Linguistics: “…by introducing the situation of ‘address,’ we obtain a symmetrical definition for you as ‘the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance of you.’ These definitions refer to I and you as a category of language and are related to their position in language.”
[8] The novel’s process of forming the subject is comparable to “the archive,” which Deleuze uses to describe Foucault’s process of subjectivation. The written journal and novel provide themselves as archives, subject to the consciousness at a given time. Deleuze, “What is Dispositif?” 345: “History is the archive, the design of what we are and cease being while the current is the sketch of what we will become. Thus history or the archive is also what separates us from ourselves, while the current is the Other with which we already coincide.”
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.
Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, 1919. Project Gutenburg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/521/521-h/521-h.htm.
Deleuze, Gilles. “What Is a Dispositif?” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006: 343-352.
Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013.
