The Subjectivity of the Soldier

Thomas Hippler

Paper for the seminar “Rewriting History”

22/11/1999

The Subjectivity of the Soldier

In order to justify a methodological approach that involves both, “social” and “intellectual” history, Almuth Höfert, in her paper for this seminar, challenges the separation of these two spheres: “Conflict has arisen between scholars of social history or histoire totale and those working in the field of Ideengeschichte, with each side blaming the other for a narrow minded approach towards history. The incompatibility of the tow approaches [...] can hamper a comprehensive understanding of a topic that is concerned with both” (p. 3).

One page further, she explains the term “objectivation” as a key-concept for the understanding of the formation of an ethnographic knowledge: the transformation of the “other” into an object of knowledge and of political action, i.e. of conquest. However, “in our century, this dogma [the idea of an objective reality and an absolute truth] has been profoundly challenged and has been debated in the humanities and some sciences to the extent that the formerly self-evident link between les mots et les choses is no longer secure.” (p. 4) Since the invention of “eurocentrism” as a critical category, scientific “objectivation” itself became problematic.

If, on the one hand, the link between les mots et les choses, between words and objects, is perceived to be no longer clear, but if, on the other, a “comprehensive” historical understanding should precisely involve both, “ideas” and “material”, political and social reality, than we have to ask ourselves, how the missing link between these tow poles may be apprehended. I want to argue in this paper that the category of “subjectivity” may be able so provide answers to some of the aspects of the question.

In this paper I shall first explain my use of the concept of subjectivity by reference to two texts by Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. In a second step, I shall link this theoretical framework to my research topic, i.e. the history of conscription in Germany and France after the French Revolution. Finally, I shall develop some of my points in a brief analysis of the nexus between state-construction, revolutionary warship, and citizenship in the period 1789-1798 in France.

Theories of Subjectivity

“Subjectivity” is a paradoxical category: being a “subject” obviously means two contradicting things. First, being under someone else’s control or power; second it is the precondition for any autonomous action.

I shall explain my use of the concept by reference to two texts. The theoretical framework, which is strongly committed to 17th century theories of “passions”[1] has been formulated as such by Louis Althusser as theory of the “ideological state apparatuses”.[2] Michel Foucault has applied this approach in his historical works of the 1970s and 1980s.[3] Althusser’s general question is how the reproduction of the conditions of production works in capitalist societies. His answer is that the state apparatus is twofold: on the one hand, it works as a “repressive” machine, i.e. by the use or the threat of violence, on the other, it diffuses “ideology”.[4] This means challenging the classical distinction between “state” and “civil society” by claiming that the “apparatus” involves both, state power and “ideology”. There is a relation of mutual dependence between these two: on the one hand, power can only work if it is supported by an appropriated set of beliefs, on the other hand, these beliefs do not exist “spiritually”, but only inside of a “material practice” i.e. in an “apparatus”.[5] But this means also denying all “transparence” in social relations: Althusser, too, understands society as an “imaginary institution”.[6] The basis function, however, of this conceptual framework is to explain the category of the “subject”: “the category of the ‘subject’ is constitutive for all ideology as the function of all ideology is to ‘constitute’ concrete individuals as subjects”. Subject, in this respect, means nothing else than to be involved in a social practice, to be involved in its rituals and to be recognized and to recognize oneself as being part of this practice. At the same time, this means sharing its set of beliefs, i.e. as Althusser puts it, its “ideology”.

I would argue that the conceptual framework Foucault employs in his history of the systems of punishment is almost exactly the same.[7] Foucault states that “a corpus of knowledge, techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish” (p. 23). Accordingly it should be looked for a “common matrix” for the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences. For Foucault, too, institutional processes and their “ideology” (to put it in Althusser’s words) do not work one without another. But Foucault would not speak of “apparatuses” and “ideology” but rather of power/knowledge complexes:

Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge [...] that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (p. 27)

Foucault thus translates Althusser’s “apparatus” into “power” and “ideology” into “knowledge”, but the framework remains the same. Then, in a next step, Foucault asks how this power/knowledge is concretely applied in the practice of punishment. On the one hand, he states that the power relation works upon the body of those who are punished,[8] but on the other hand, the prison – in contrast to earlier means of punishment – “no longer addresses itself to the body” (p. 16). This means that the power relation of the prison “invests” the body, but only as a means to reach the prisoner’s “soul”

“The history of this ‘micro-physics’ of the punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’ [...] It would be wrong to say that the soul in an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, is has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished [...] This real, non-corporal soul [...] is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.” p. 29

In both cases, in Foucault’s text as well as in Althusser’s, we have a theoretical triangle: 1° there is “power”, “discipline”, “material practices” or “rituals”; 2° there is “knowledge”, “ideology”, “ideas” or “beliefs”; and 3° there is “subjectivity” or a “soul” that emerges between these two. It appears that this theoretical framework fits perfectly to the implications of military service and the construction of the relationship between the individual and the state. The triangle is than formed between the conscript, the state, and the nation.[9]

Military service involves thus three poles: the individual soldier, the state and the nation. For the individual, military service means a relation of personal belonging and service to the nation-state that involves paradoxically the possession of certain political rights. The conscript is subject to military discipline, which means that his basic civic rights are denied as long as he is in the army. But the conscript is also a citoyen, which means that he is – together with all the other citizens – the sovereign.

For the state, military service is basically the political answer to the problem of the French Revolution, i.e. the “nation in arms”, which meant popular armament. As a state exists only if it effectively controls the use of violence on its territory, military service was the means to do both – to maintain the idea of the nation armée and to preserve its existence as a state.

The nation, finally, is the necessary link between these two: on the one hand, the nation-state is constructed as the expression of a collective will, and on the other, the control of the central state function lies in the hands of the collectivity of the citizens.

From there on, three levels of the analysis of the processes of subjectivation should be distinguished. First there is discipline, i.e. the production of a “social body”. As well as the army produces a unified “fighting body”, on the scale of society as a whole, a unified “social body” is the purpose of these processes of discipline. In this respect, it can be said that the individual’s body is not only “socialized” but also “nationalized”. Exactly in the same way as Pascal described the production of religious faith, military discipline produces political, social, and national “belongings” as a kind of “bodily knowledge”, i.e. in the form of a socially organized “imagination” by bodily submission.

The second level is the one of subjection (in contrast to subjectivation). The questions on this level turn around the possibilities of autonomous action. How can it be explained that military service, with its discipline and devotion to the state, originates in popular armed uprisings during the French Revolution? And more generally: what does political autonomy mean? It is my working hypothesis that the determinate factor for subjection is the identification with a community. Community, in this sense can cover many historical realities: in the first stage of the French Revolution, for example, reference was made to the community of all human beings as such. However, the historical impact of the national community, of class or local communities can not be overestimated.

I propose to call the third level the “teleology of political subjectivation” in the modern state. This teleology implies the destruction—integration of belongings to local communities and the construction of “national” and “social” forms of integration to the state. Military service represents a means to achieve a greater national synthesis, in which regional, social and other differences are overcome. In this very respect, military service has been called the “school of the nation”, it is the place where Rousseau’s “total alienation, of each associate, with all his rights, to the community as a whole”[10] takes materially place.

Conscription

In contrast to other institutions which were developed or generalized at the turn of the 18th and the 19th century – at the beginning of the period which we usually call “contemporary history” – military service establishes an existential relationship between the state and the individual, i.e. a relationship that involves the possibility of the individual’s death for the sake of the state. On the other hand, military service, especially in the French understanding, is one of the most important characteristics of modern citoyenneté. If we accept Max Weber’s definition of state power as the monopoly of use of legitimate violence[11], this link between military service and citizenship becomes clear. The modern state power does not rely on others than of the whole of its “subjects”, i.e. its citizens.

From there on, the interpretation that stresses the “democratic character” of the institution of military service becomes understandable. But it should not be forgotten, that military service has been one of the means of promotion of an aggressive nationalism and militarism in the population. In my perspective, military service has to be analyzed as both, as an issue of citizenship as well as for subjectivation.

The theoretical “dilemma” of military service is thus its ambiguity between two characteristics. On the one hand, the institution is the expression of citizenship, i.e. one does military service because one is a citizens, which means that the basic function of the state, the legitimate use of violence, is exercised by no one else than by the whole of the citizens. Military service, in this understanding is a civic duty, moreover, a civic right. On the other hand, however, military service implies the denial of the very essence of citizenship, i.e. the institutional guarantee of some basic political rights and liberties. Military service as an institution of social discipline, or, as a French anti-militaristic writer put it, a “school of servility”. It is my methodological conviction that this ambiguity, moreover: this dichotomy, should not be reduced. It has to be clearly affirmed that military service involves both, citizenship and subjectivation, civic rights and their denial, discipline and political autonomy.

In addition to this, however, there is a historical movement that should be noted. In the period between the French Revolution and World War I, we see a “shift” concerning the institution from a political invention that was strongly assimilated to the revolutionary experience towards a means of aggressive nationalism and militarism. It is along these two, partly contradicting lines of arguments – the constitutive ambiguity on the one hand, and the historical shift from one pole to the other – that the history of this institution should be apprehended.

As military service is an institution that “integrates” the individual directly into the sphere of political “power circulation” it provides a field for a “nominalistical” analysis of the construction of state-power and national identities in 19th century France and Germany, i.e. an analysis that takes into account the experiences, feelings and thought in which the individuals problematized their relationship to the state. As the construction of states in Europe historically means construction of nation-states, and as the relationship between the state and the individual is thus inextricable from the relation between the individual and the “nation”, we have, therefore, to consider a triple relationship, between the individual, the state-power, and the nation.