The Death of the Subject in Art – Part II: The Modern Dialectic of Creation and Self
Genealogy of the Concept “Subject”
Basis of the Claim
This chapter—besides offering a deterministic survey of the concept “subject” and an etymological overview of the word—also lays out a concise preview of arguments I expand later. I note this up front because the writing here is slightly more spontaneous than the strictly academic sections that follow.
From the dawn of philosophical thought (both scientific and transcendental), the human being—the one who experiences—has sought to ground his superiority over his objects and over “reality.” At the same time, from the same need, he has tried to conceptualize the primordial basis (the first given—the subject) on which the world rests and from which it emerges. Both the grounding and the conceptualization proceed through metaphysical and anthropocentric categories. Out of the dialectical controversy of this perhaps-impossible search, there slowly crystallizes a powerful “problem”: the problem of the subject. At least in its early treatments, this problem does not arise from the individual’s suffering or meaninglessness, but from the frustration that human thought cannot produce a homogeneous conceptualization of the workings of the mind and of the subject (“in what sense is the individual a subject?”). Any definition of the subject tends to contain its own opposite—passivity and activity together.
In Hebrew, “subject” is noseh, the grammatical subject of a sentence; with minor shifts, this function appears across other languages (Subject, Soggetto, Sujet, Subjekt). The subject is the theme of the sentence—the element that points to the rest: “Dana searched for the meaning of the word.” The subject (Dana) acts toward its object (“the word”) and forms the predicate (“searched”) out of its being. The subject is therefore the primary, necessary component of the sentence—the principal operator of semiotic thought, and arguably of thought in general. In the Western philosophical determinism of ideas, the grammatical “subject” undergoes a metamorphosis until it begins to represent the human being’s immanent and epistemic “subjects,” and later the world and its spirits as well.
In the German–French discussion (Gegenstand–Sujet) the subject signifies a point of view (an individual), while the constitutive, hermeneutic subject is in German Erkenntnissubjekt—“the subject of knowledge” (the one who comes-to-know). Erkenntnis is knowledge; subject is the “one set under” in contrast to objectivity (Heller 1990). The individual’s presence and participation as a subject in society—as one of the main components of the objective world—produce the reverse move: the constitutive subject is declared an object of the objective order. (The subject is not the sole principal. Abstract ideas—“subjective”—through the force of utility, science, and purposiveness [interest, demagogy, belief] become real and inscribe doctrines that, through history, help assemble objectivity itself.) Thus, for example, juridical and political doctrine extracts the individual as the object of law. The “political subject” or “ideological subject” (discussed later) continues the Latin subiectus: “to lie beneath,” “to be thrown under”—an adverbial sense of “below.” In the modern French genealogical link, the term can denote one under control or sovereignty (subordination, bourgeoisie, proletariat, state, citizen, freedom, etc.). This is another shade of English “subject”: “He subject this man” means “he subordinated this man”—he bent him to his will. If that man is “subject to God,” he is also subjugated to his deity—this is, in a sense, the Cartesian subject.
On the other hand, what “lies beneath” can also denote a basis. Returning to the Latin subjectum in its logical use, the term functions as the basis of predication—the “fundamental thing.” This translates the Greek ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon), rendered in Latin as substratum. In Aristotle’s Physics the hypokeimenon relates to genesis: the beginning of things—the archē sought by the Presocratics, through Socrates, and up to Plato. Here it is what persists through change and preserves genesis. In the Metaphysics, by contrast, it is that which can ground predicates while itself not being predicated of anything else. In the Hebrew translation of Essays on Nature (Hannah and Haim Rosen), hypokeimenon is “the given,” fourth among the modes of being (after “individual substance,” “species,” and “the universal”): “The given is that of which other things are said, while it is not said of anything else…” The substratum is stripped of formal qualities and remains a bare, programmatic being—the first given, “that which is not predicated of anything else but of which everything else is predicated.” For Aristotle, the world’s first act is the coming-to-be of substance; it is never born out of something else. Aristotle thus sets the tradition that will understand the subject as a possible “substance” from which sense and thought proceed. Spinoza, for example, writes: “By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing.” On the far side of this insight’s fence, for Hegel the primordial, the first given of reality, cannot be defined as “substance,” since the “Nothing” from which becoming begins is undefined: “Nothing is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something must proceed… Being is already contained in it… the beginning is the unity of Being and Nothing, or a non-being that is at once being and non-being.” (Here I gloss Being as “being-in-the-world.”) Human existence, identity, Dasein: these are the first thoughts thought by pure (unconditioned) reason, not “substance.” From here it is easy to see the foundation for linking the “subject” to Being (or to Hegel’s and Heidegger’s being-there). The rest of intellectual history develops doctrines—sociological, political, artistic, philosophical, scientific, psychological—that tie the subject to the “I,” the “self” (moi), the “soul,” the “ego,” “personality,” “consciousness,” “reflexivity,” and so on—in short, to the inner, personal estate.
SELF. Both moi and soi are often translated as “self.” Soi names the self in its broadest sense and, as a neuter third-person pronoun, implies an impersonality at the basis of the self. Moi is narrower: the me as the subject of enunciation for the I (je) as the subject of the statement. It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.
In a more ideal register, the original French sujet, unlike subiectus, is not under or within but above—the subject stands over its objects. Its ideality is its objectivity. With Marxist currents, the subject takes on a collective, social form; this may result from a recurrent shift from sujet back to subiectus, or from the subject’s passage from passivity to activity (Power 2007). Marx’s subject becomes concrete, active (revolutionary), social, productive—the subject is the proletariat. Although situated within the objective conditions of production, this subject is not enslaved to that totality; it draws collective subjectivity only as a mediating power. Earlier we already found non-private subjects: Kant’s transcendental subject (addressed shortly), a spiritual/mental or historical/universal subject, a divine subject (e.g., for Hegel, reality as Absolute Spirit reflecting upon itself is thus a subject), or any subject parallel to the “absolute” or “the whole.” From here modern notions of a collective, conscious, universal subject also develop.
A note before proceeding: not all philosophical traditions treat “subject” as the grammatical “subject.” The term houses many definitions and traits; throughout this chapter and the essay overall, “subject” may also appear under terms such as “human/freedom,” “being,” “immanence,” “entity,” “given,” “substance,” or “soul.” None of these exhausts the subject (nor does the word “subject” itself), but each marks a major attempt to define it—different angles of approach.
“Soul—what Descartes grasps as substance, what Leibniz turns into monad, what Plato posits as the soul that contemplates Ideas, what Spinoza thinks as a mode of thought—is described phenomenologically as face. Without that phenomenology we are forced to grasp the soul as substance.”
“The subject as an authentic entity is not a concept but a site—the ‘name’ in which Being, from within itself, constitutes an epoch.”
But “substance” in the sense of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Descartes—at its psycho-physiological rank—is not “subject”; it is “all and above all” (as Judaism says of its God), pure being qua being (as Hellenistic metaphysics maintains). From this vantage, every account, claim, and cognition is conditioned by, and subsumed under, substance; even the dual division between logical subjectivity (which predicates) and physical subjectivity (which presents the world’s phenomena) is carried out within substance.
Moreover, any discourse on the subject implicates subjectivity, subjectivism, and the subjective—including “subjective rights” (Heller 1990). The human subject perceives and experiences the entity or object before him; thus the grammatical “subject” doubles as a central term in human autonomy and in the structure of the self. If we think simply about “subject” as such, along the etymological–grammatical line, it appears as a rational, human basis that not only points to itself but also to what is built around it (subject–predicate–object). Under anthropocentrism (with humanity as the first given) this concept links human being to its world. From that link we may say that the subject (as the bearer of human being) represents not only the human’s physical, positive existence but the totality of cognition, understanding, and outlook (the nature of the self): a primordial spirit/entity that sustains a unified consciousness and appropriates the multiplicity of reality (images, thoughts, objects, language, affect). The point of these attempts, it seems, is to grasp how the subject (as human interiority) “exceeds” itself into empirical impressions (lived sensation).
Accordingly—and throughout this study—“subject” will denote a distinctive mode of existence and experience, internal yet always in dialogue with an external existence: the “I.” The “I,” as that which constitutes being (shaping reality—reality as a process of thinking) through a basic act of creative freedom and metaphysical intuition (the primacy of spirit), is born with the idealist thought of the Enlightenment—not Plato’s idealism. This idealism unifies object (substance) and subject (spirit) within thought as the absolute (against Descartes’ rational dualism of subject/object, and against Spinoza’s in-itself; here the object exists through human cognition), together with its transcendental frame (a grasp of nature through a priori metaphysical categories). These ideals of the “I” begin to dissipate almost at inception. Looking from above at economic/political processes of utility and property, at positivist empiricism, and at the historical process whose essence is nothing other than the advance of materiality, they evaporate. For Hegel himself (an idealist), once subjectivity is discussed it becomes a fragment of Objective Spirit—as if it were a determination of culture. If the human subject can unify itself only through a reflective relation to the absolute subject (Objective Spirit), then it is subordinated—“lying under.” Even Kant’s subject is first of all a citizen in the world: before Descartes’ “I think,” before it differentiates itself from its objects, the subject is a moral–political being: “the pure respect for the practical law and therefore for the maxim that demands obedience to this law even against all my inclinations.” In modern thought the Cartesian subject (“I” as subjectum—lying under and acting, thinking) splits into an active self—creative—and a passive political subject—receptive; likewise the relation subject/object and a reversal between subject and predicate. Two brief remarks on the “dissipation of the subject”: (1) the ideals do not vanish entirely. They dwell in art for a long time and return as a kind of cogito in mid-20th-century continental philosophy (Husserl restores the introspective as the subject itself—the transcendental, cognitive subjectivism against social objectivization; from here Heidegger and Sartre route this subjectivism through human being and the freedom of individual existence). (2) One might blame politics for the reduction of the subject’s boundless power, yet in its enlightened garb it opens possibilities of liberty against religious and intellectual dogma. Indeed, the ideal dissipates into Schopenhauer’s will and irrationality, into Nietzsche’s and Freud’s death of God (metaphysics) and the id, and above all into the alienated subject—into Marx’s dialectical materialism (what interests human beings is not their subject but their life: daily existence, society, labor, ideology).
Thus far we learn: both the “rational subject” and the “ideal subject” seek to escape a subjectivity that merely represents the external object, to the universal—and thereby to secure an objective warrant for that subjectivity itself. All sought a path by which some “pure I/primordial given/a priori” could rebel against the quotidian dogmas of the outside world. In succession, historicism and naturalist psychology search for an inner unity—social, cultural, spiritual—each as data of an external praxis (the appearance of a fixed whole with singular meaning—and, simultaneously, an appearance of skeptical critique of that whole as extreme subjectivism). In “new phenomenology” (20th century) the interest pivots to the necessary, true, external object.
The critical and political thought of the 19th century, continuing the liberal discourse framed by figures like Rousseau, gradually replaces the metaphysical world in which the subject floats with a positive world in which the individual stands. Freud makes a parallel move by emphasizing private identity as the product of an inner, earthly unconscious. Neo-Marxism and 20th-century post-structuralism will treat what once was “subject” as the human representation of a social structure; for these currents, the old first given is irrelevant (Heartfield 2002).
From all this we already see the subject’s refusal to be univocal or fixed. (Hence Nietzschean perspectivism, if we analogize subject to truth; hence also a return—paradoxically—of metaphysical/ideal subject talk within postmodern thought, e.g., Levinas.) It may be that the “problem of the subject” (the very difficulty of definition) arises as a problem of philosophically defining human reflection: a sharp artistic–dialectical debate over the anthropological structure of the human. Philosophy consecrated the human as subject before it deprived him of it; it constitutes and simultaneously indicts ideology and politics for narrowing subjectivity; and in order to negate unattainable human ideals it sometimes reduces the subject, in its materialism, into the predicate—the predicate becomes the subject’s truth (Feuerbach, Marx).
In philosophical discourse—before it became purely political critique (and if we search the earliest philosophers we always find politics there, but always beside metaphysics)—the subject is transcendental and reflective, the event of subject–object relations, inside–outside, and intersubjectivity. Reflection (self-reflexivity), out of these relations, is the condition of the political subject; the ideal of free reflection returns as a sensory ideology, constituting ideological and representational bonds between ideas and practices. No conception of the subject can be free without uniting itself to some cognition that itself believes it is free (Power 2007). Yes, there is a politicization of the subject at every stage of its attempted definition, yet it always fights with the sword of its inner, individual thought—by the very fact that it is a self that thinks itself.
From the survey above we can mark the principal meanings—logical/grammatical, material/ontological, transcendental, and political—gathered under “subject.” Hence three main senses in calling the human a “subject”:
(1) The human is a subject insofar as he fulfills the demand for inner life.
(2) The human is a subject by being the source of action (as the grammatical subject is in a sentence).
(3) The human is a subject as the object of doctrines and ideologies acting upon him.
Across all three, the subject undergoes a determinism of thought: first identical with the object, then absolutely separated from it—as if it could live by itself, pure and absolute—then discovering the mistake: without its objects it does not feel itself; it needs its physical body for breath, calls it back into awareness, and recognizes that too much time was wasted on self-definition. From here it simply wants to live.
To establish a shared basis for what follows, I now sketch the conceptual dialectic of the “subject”: I trace the shifts the notion undergoes across the development (and regress) of Western philosophy and, by cautious induction, draw out—with a light, permanent brush stroke—some of the social and cultural (artistic) consequences carried by the idea of the subject.