Higher School of Economics

The Political Subject

and Political Change

Filip Lazarevic
10/15/2017
Contents
Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 2
The Horizons of the Subject ...................................................................................................................... 3
The Ontological Nature of the Subject and its Relation to the Social....................................................... 4
The Political Subject .................................................................................................................................. 5
Questioning the Political Subject How does change occur? .................................................................. 6
Forming a Hypothesis ............................................................................................................................... 9
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 10
Bibliography ............................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Introduction
With the Descartesian notion of thought and extension, as the primary distinction between the life-in-
the-mind and of the corporal life, the gap was opened which will define modern philosophical thought
on the subject-object relations1. The subject-object question evolved through the following period with
Kant, Hegel, Marx, and boomed with the Frankfurt School and its descendants in the continental
philosophy all adding and proposing different interpretations of this relation. The primary concern of
this essay will be to:

i. Pinpoint the what the subject is, and to define its horizons,
ii. Establish a relationship between the subject and the overall field in which it operates,
iii. Find a distinction of the subject, and the political subject

Finally, the political subject will be scrutinized, to test its logical validity in terms of political and social
reproduction and ruptures (socio-political stability and change), with a goal to:

iv. Develop a hypothesis on political change in relation to the political subject

The approach will take certain assumptions and axiomatic stances. Namely, the possibility of an eternal,
immaterial soul as the source of human subjectivity will be disregarded, primarily on positivist grounds
if there is an eternal immaterial soul exists, we cannot really grasp it as a concept of study. As such, a
materialist approach will be utilized at the axiomatic level.

Building upon the materialist base, the primary concern of the essay regards relationships (subject-
object, intersubjectivity, social fabric-subject, etc.), and as such, a generally structural / post-structural
approach will be taken to better understand these relations, while other methods will be utilized in a
secondary manner.

The objective of this essay is to pinpoint concepts of the subject, the social, and the political, and to
explore the relationships between these concept, with a hope to be able to argument that such an
approach is useful for understanding political change in society.

1
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4391/pg4391-images.html
The Horizons of the Subject
The mind body problem is an essential pre-requisite of any discussion on the subject-object relation.
First, given that there is a subjectively definable subject, this subject can be aware of itself and its
surroundings. This subjectively definable subject can be defined as the I, in Descartes famous I think,
therefore I am (which ironically does not work in the original Latin, due to the lack of pronouns), and
will be referred to simply as subject in this initial phase of the discussion.

The subject, by the Descartesian maxim, is therefore an entity which can think, and has some form of
boundary, limiting it from the rest of the universe. Nonetheless, this simple definition, regarded as
irreducible, faces serious issues whenever we try to define it precisely. What constitutes thinking, being,
and where are the boundaries of I? Looking at our understanding of biology, the thinking can be said
to be a bio-chemical process of the brain. Yet, many animals have a brain, but are not able to
conceptualize an I. The I is an abstract concept, which can only be seen through this lens of
abstraction. As such, it can be postulated it is precisely the ability of abstraction which is the key
facilitator of the process of being, in the distinctly human sense. But, this does not answer what the
mind is, only sets the process of how the mind works.

As a thought experiment, let us try to reduce the I to some form which can constitute the minimum of
the thinking subject which is still able to perceive itself as an subject. To do so, we will accept the
biological and physical nature of the mind and body as axiomatic, disregarding the soul a mind created
outside of the realm of the physical world.

A person with a physical lack in the extremities, such as a hand, can nonetheless be regarded as a
conscious subject. The lack of a hand, does not diminish the subject-ness of the person in any way. The
person thinks, and therefore is. Going further, a blind person can just as easily be said to be a thinking
subject, despite the fact that for most people the visual field seems inseparable from the subjective
sense of being. Persons who suffer from a stroke, or other forms of brain damage, lead us to the
ambiguous areas of subjectivity. Nevertheless, we know that many people do retain a sense of being
after such brain damage has occurred. The most drastic of such examples are hemispherectomy
patients, i.e. persons whose one hemisphere of the brain was removed. According to one study,
Regardless of etiology [the pre-existing condition], most patients showed only moderate change in
cognitive performance at follow-up.2 As such, it can be said that one horizon of the subject is the brain
itself.

The second horizon can be understood as the social horizon. Particularly interesting is the case of ferile
children. According to OBrien:

Studies of feral childrenchildren raised in isolation, who are often assumed to be

developmentally disabledsuggest [] the capacity for abstract thought may be innate,
but in order to develop this capacity, the child must be exposed to language-based social
interaction. When the child lacks such access, he or she is effectively denied access to the

2
The cognitive outcome of hemispherectomy in 71 children. Pulsifer MB, Brandt J, Salorio CF, Vining EP,
Carson BS, Freeman JM.; Epilepsia. 2004 Mar;45(3):243-54.
 switch (language-based interaction) and the software (a specific language) through
which conceptual thought develops. The implication is that humans require social
stimulation and exposure to abstract symbol systemslanguagein order to embark
upon the conceptual thought processes that characterize our species. Thus, human
experience is given meaning and is organized through language, and the ability to form
complex strings of words and to communicate verbally is innate. But the source of the
meaning assigned to the words is social.3

As such, the subject perceives its visual, tactile, and other sensory fields as the domain of reality, yet to
construct reality, only language seems to be irreducible element. However, the last sentence in the
above quote opens up an ambiguity how can there be a meaning which can be assigned to the
words? The only logical conclusion is this social meaning of words is the only meaning that exists. The
social represents the realm of human reality, and it is linguistic in nature. The outside world is not
graspable at all, except as a constructed meaning, based on social interactions. In other words, the
human subject is by definition a social subject.

While looking for, e.g., neural pathways of the human brain is an admirable venue for developing a
better understanding of the human biology which was described as the minimal condition for the
subject to exist, the philosophical interest in what the subject is, lies somewhere between this biological
minimum, and the horizons of the social (as the maximum).

The Ontological Nature of the Subject and its Relation to the Social
Introduce the as such, the subject can be seen only as the linguistic subject. Language, the system of
symbols and their relations, defines the subject. At this point, the discussion comes back to the subject-
object relationship. The object, is to be understood as a social phenomenon in itself. If an entity of
reality cannot be grasped through the social lens, it does not come into play as an object. This does not
mean that those things which are not known do not exist, as radiation could kill humans before
radiation was discovered, but rather as the totality of existence (the universe), which affects the subject
only through the social lens. In other words, radiation could always kill the human-animal, but it only
became object to the human-subject, when it was discovered, named, and a set of social relations were
built around it. As such, there is a space-time of the social in which the subject is necessarily embedded,
and can come to be a subject only insofar as it embeds itself.

Emile Durkheim proposed that a social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on
the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given
society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations4. A
social fact, as seen by Durkheim, can be said to be those forces which precede an individual, and are not
dependent on any given individual, but place constraints or rules of behavior of any given individual. I
would like to argue, however, that the social fact is a useful tool of classification in sociology, but

3
The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction, Jodi O'Brien - Pine Forge Press, Oct 28, 2010
4
https://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/Durkheim_Emile_The_Rules_of_Sociological_Method_1982.pdf The Rules of
Sociological Method, Emile Durkheim The Free Press [p.59]
inadequate in understanding the subject for one simple reason there are no other kinds of facts. The
entirety of subject is defined by the ultimate social fact of the space of the social.

This argument can be further juxtaposed to Durkheims claim that on the collective consciousness: The
totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate
system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness."5. It is clear that
Durkheim sees the collective concourses as an emergent fact of individual beliefs and sentiments, and as
such, it is an emergent property of the individual consciousness. It follows that this collective
consciousness is emergent from individuals, has a life of its own, and continues existing as long as there
are individuals to fuel it. However, this perspective is not (easily) reconcilable with the definition of the
subject. That is, as it was postulated above, the subject comes into existence under the condition of the
social. Abstractly speaking, there cannot be any subject without the social, and not the other way
around, as Durkheim postulates.

Therefore, the social is not so much an emergent property of individuals in society, as it is the very
negative space which subjects fills, as it comes into existence. To visualize this postulation, we need to
question Durkheims proposition that the social exists as a result of the collective individual
consciousnesss. If we imagine an almost-apocalypse, in which all people die out, except for one
newborn, will this mean that the collective consciousness will disappear? If we take Durkheims
definition, the emergent collective consciousness does die out, as there is no collective to sustain it.
However, if the newborn is exposed to agents of socialization, to borrow the sociological term, such as
language in the form of a TV channel, a responsive intelligent personal assistant6, books, and other non-
human social artifacts, the collective consciousness can be said to have survived. As such, the collective
consciousness should rather be looked at as social space-time, i.e. the very fabric in which the subject is
embedded, rather than as an entity emergent from individuals in society.

The Political Subject

The work of Althusser on the relationship between the subject and ideology is crucial to further this
analysis, as it can be used as a tool for understanding the modern notion of the subject. For Althusser,
the category of the subject and ideology are inseparable elements of the social - "in so far as all ideology
has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects"7. In his discourse on
ideology, Althusser sees the totality of ideology and its discourse as being directly linked to the subject-
form, the category of the subject. However, he goes further to argue that the subject pre-exists the
concrete individual. In other words, the subject exists as an empty slot, defined more or less in its
totality, before an individual biologivcal human. This biological human is then inserted into the empty
slot left by the ideology for him/her allowing her/him to become social subject. Therefore, the ideology
acts through the category of the subject on the concrete individual 8 . As such, we can see

5
http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/TheoryNotes/Durk_DOL.htm
6
A virtual assistant is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual, usually being
responsive to linguistic commands, such as the iOS Siri.
7
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3n39n8x3&chunk.id=d0e3259&toc.depth=100&brand=u
cpress
8
ibid
interchangeability between Althusser ideology, and the social space-time described above. The terms
should be seen, for the purpose of this argument, only as distinguished in perspective, with the first
being useful to describe the relationship between the subject and the political, and the latter to describe
the relations of the subject to the social. The social, and the political, can be seen as being the same
concept, merely observed from different angles.

Althusser goes on to propose that the ideology is ethernal9 i.e. that while individual ideologies can
be traced through their individual histories, the general overarching ideology does not have a history, in
the same way that the social space-time lacks a particular history. In this sense, the mental experiment
with the newborn in the post-apocalyptic world is still subjected to the social time-space, and/or
ideology.

Therefore, for Althusser, the subject exists as an ideological phenomenon - ideology inaugurates the
human into her role of a subject. This relationship can be seen as the key element of social
reproduction. The social, as an eternal entity, creates voids which need to be filled by the subjects. But
not any kind of subject particular traits, so to speak, are needed. The social time-space creates the
preferential characteristics which need to be filled. These voids, much like holes in childrens toys where
only one particular shape can fit one particular hole, are the determinants of the subject. The shapes of
the voids were well observed by Durkheim, when explaining the social facts as oppressive measures by
society. These norms and taboos are nothing more than the voids in the fabric of the social. In
Althussers work, ideology has intentionality as it intends to maintain and elevate its idealized subject
and to define the category of the subject itself and this precisely is the notion of the reproduction of
the social.

Questioning the Political Subject How does change occur?

Based on the arguments above, the political subject is forming a specific shape, albeit a negative shape.
This shape, as left open for the subject by the social fabric, is filled by a discrete subject. However,
neither the social fabric nor the subject, are fixed concepts. The inter-subjectivity of different subjects
reshapes the social fabric, which in turn exerts pressure on each subject. This complicated grid of social
interactions has, nevertheless, an overarching logic or narrative, which can be seen as the Althusserian
ideology. The question arises here, how we can define a subject as a political subject? The political
subject would have to possess a minimum of agency to act, and a minimum of power to enact, a political
change. Do such subjects exist?

A simple argument for the existence of the political subject can be that we have seen epochs of different
political structures, with different ideologies, such as ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Each
transition between the epochs was marked by revolutionary turmoil. In each case, some individuals
were marked as the leaders of this change. However, keeping in mind the primacy of the social fabric,
we could argue that cumulative changes in the means and forces of production, of social relations, etc.
have bent the social fabric to a point where it redefined the subject in such a way that a revolution was
inevitable.

9
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~carlos/607/readings/althusser.pdf
Analogous to this can be found in the historical materialism of Karl Marx particularly summarized in
the letter to P. V. Annenkov:

Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive forcesupon which his whole
history is basedfor every productive force is an acquired force, the product of previous
activity. Thus the productive forces are the result of man's practical energy, but that
energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the
productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which
he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.10

Marx, talking of the forces of production, sets an interesting parallel to a more generalized philosophy of
the subject relations to the social. Just the same way as the humans are not free to choose the
productive forces, humans are neither free to choose the social fabric in which they will become the
subject. In this process, Marx sees forces of production as the unifying factor of humanity:

The simple fact that every succeeding generation finds productive forces acquired by
the preceding generation and which serve it as the raw material of further production,
engenders a relatedness in the history of man, engenders a history of mankind, which is
all the more a history of mankind as man's productive forces, and hence his social
relations, have expanded.11

The dependence of the future generations on the past, creates the continuum of social relations. And it
is precisely here that the wider image of the relations between the subject and the social fabric can be
seen as the continuum of the concept of humanity. As each subject is dependent, for its becoming, to
the social fabric, which was shaped and reshaped by all subjects, past and present, the continuation of
such a thing as humanity is possible.

This relation of subject to the idea of humanity, mediated through the social fabric, is precisely the point
of the start of the political subject. The political subject, in envisaging a different definition of what
humanity is, engages in the process of redefining the change. By the very act of re-imaging the social
fabric, the potential for such a change is born. This proposition, however, is only an abstraction. The
subject, dependent on the ideology to exist, cannot individually redefine the definition of the social
fabric. Nor, on the other hand, can the individual subject exert concrete force to change the definition of
humanity. Rather, all which is possible as a form of agency of the subject, is the change in the inter-
relation between the subjects. In other words, the subject is too dependent of the ocean of the social
fabric, and particularly the ideology, to enact any change as a single subject, but through the change in
the qualities and quantities of relations, the social fabric is affected and political change can occur.

This said, the social fabric is by its constitution a conservative entity. As with the example of the post-
apocalyptic newborn, the social fabric can outlive the change of any individual subject, including the
ultimate change death. This ability to sustain itself allows the social fabric to resist change. At the

10
http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.html Karl Marx, Letter to P. V. Annenkov, 1846
11
ibid
same time, the social fabrics most essential function is to ensure the reproduction of the subjects, and
hence of itself. This can be metaphorically concretized as the biblical passage of God creating Adam in
his own image, except, ironically, that both Adam and God create each other in their respective images,
which do not yet exist. As the social fabric reproduces subjects, it reproduces them based on the ideal
image of the subject. This only adds to the conservative nature of the social fabric, as the subject
materializes into the logic and through the logic of the exiting social fabric.

This only goes further to say that change at the level of the subject is both meaningless and/or
impossible. The only way to change the social fabric is through the change of the relations between the
subjects, i.e. through redefining intersubjective relations. In the analysis of Marxs ideas on human
nature, Althusser laid down the groundwork for such an approach.

Following Althusser's view, Marx sees the a priori human (human nature), to be the primary mask of the
ideology. In the same line of argument, we cannot accept any a priory human nature, as this very nature
in nothing but the result of the relations between the social fabric, and the subjects emended in it. Any
change in the social fabric, or the subject, necessitates as change of the human nature. Althusser reads
Marxs idea on human nature as a process of abandoning the idea that any concrete theory on human
nature can be produced, without a theory about what forces in society have led them come to be that
way.

If Marx does not start with man, if he refuses to derive society and history theoretically
from the concept of man, it is in order to break with this mystification which only
expresses an ideological relation of force, based in the capitalist production relation.
Marx therefore starts out from the structural cause producing this effect of bourgeois
ideology which maintains the illusion that you should start with man: Marx starts with
the given economic formation, and in the particular case of Capital, with the capitalist
production relation, and the relations which it determines in the last instance in the
superstructure. And each time he shows that these relations determine and brand men,
and how they brand them in their concrete life, and how, through the system of class
struggles, living men are determined by the system of these relations.12

And it is this idea which need to be taken to its logical end: Marx is correct in asserting that human
nature is a product, not the source material / the origin of a social analysis. Furthermore, Althusser
contributes significantly by emphasizing the idea that it is relations that determine humans and that
these relations are not simply inter-personal relations, but also relations to things:

Marx shows that this relation is not a relation between men, a relation between
persons, nor an intersubjective or psychological or anthropological relation, but a double

12
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ESC76ii.html#s3 Is It Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy - Althusser, L.,
(1975) in Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), [p205]
 relation: a relation between groups of men concerning the relation between these
groups of men and things, the means of production13

Yet it is here that we must logically go further, and, based on the definition of the subject described in
the introductory paragraphs, state that the very relation of the subject with the things (means of
production), is only another form of the subject interacting with a subjectively formed concept of the
thing. The thing does not exist outside of the realm of the social fabric. As such, these two types of
relationships which Althusser sees in Marx, are reducible to one the intersubjective relationship.

Forming a Hypothesis
This can then be transposed as to form a hypothesis: Every substantial change in the social fabric, within
the realm of subjective agency, must at a minimum and non-reducible level involve a proportional
change in primary and/or secondary intersubjective relations.

Substantial change can be seen as a change in the qualitative values of the reproduction of
the social fabric, with reference to a proportional change in intersubjective relations. Also, it
is important to delineate the realm of subjective agency, and the outside realm, that is
phenomena that could be said to be outside any relationship with the subjects (a randomly
appearing black hole? Divine apocalypse?). Intersubjective relations can be defined as
primary, when they involve the direct relations of two or more subject (e.g. sociological
institutions of family, religion, gender, etc.), or secondary, when there is an intermediary
object present (liberal democracy - voting, private property means of production and
money relations, etc.)

13
Ibid [p201]
Conclusion
The argumentative flow of the essay follows a loosely chronological pattern in the history of the subject.
The subject is introduced in the Descartesian definition as the structure which emerges from the human
animal, and goes on to present it as an metaphysically independent structure from the human animal,
that is as a structure only definable in the ontological sense, and through its relation to the social fabric.
The social fabric, on the other hand, represents a emergent, yet independent structure in relation to the
individual subject. Based on Durkheims view, the idea that any one subject can be removed from the
social, and the social will not change, was pushed to the limit, and it was concluded that all subjects can
be removed, but one, and the social fabric would still persist.

With the definition of all elements in place, the question arises how any change is then possible, if the
social fabric is so resilient? The argument was shifted to account for socio-political change, and to show
how it is possible to change the social fabric, despite its conservative nature. This is done not by
changing the individual subject but by changing the intersubjective relations. The primary argument was
based on Althussers reading of Marx, and it was concluded that the subjects nature is dependent on
the intersubjective relations, and their impact on the social fabric, and as such, changing the nature of
the subject is nonsensical in that it is the product, and not the source of the social fabric.

Given these arguments, a hypothesis was developed, and presented in the final chapter, not to serve as
an conclusive maxim, but precisely to serve as a hypothesis from which further debate can start. The
essay thus questions some of the fundamental ideas on social change, political theory, sociology, and
many other fields. Particularly, it questions some core principles of the conception of changing the
world by starting with ones inner self, and other notions of self-improvement as political practices, and
shifts the focus on the changes of primary and secondary intersubjective relations.