JB reads Althussers ISA article, which poses a police officer “hailing” a person on the street with a “hey you!”. Why do we turn around? What do we recognize in that call? JB comments as follows:
Is this founding submission a kind of yielding prior to any question of psychological motivation? How are we to understand the psychic disposition at work at the moment in which the pedestrian responds to the law? What conditions and informs the response? Why would the person on the street respond to “Hey you there!” by turning around? (Psychic Life of Power 1997: 112)
JB continues on page 118:
To become a “subject” is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incesantly reproduced, to become a “subject” is to be continuously in the process of acquiting oneself of the accusation of guilt. It is to have become an emblem of lawfulness, a citizen in good standing, but one for whom that status is tenuous, indeed, one who has known — somehow, somewhere — what it is not to have that standing and hence to have been cast out as guilty. Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced.
Here one might usefully conjecture that the reason there are so few references to “bad subjects” in Althusser is that the term tends toward the oxymoronic. To be “bad” is not yet to be a subject, not yet to have acquitted oneself of the allegation of guilt.