Bourgeois ideology fragments classes into possessive individual subjects.

Evidence

The second general effect, then, is that of fragmentation or separation. The unity of the different spheres of the state are dispersed into the theory of the “separation of powers” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”). The collective interests of the working classes are fragmented into the internal oppositions between different strata of the class. The value which is collectively created is individually and privately appropriated. The “needs” of producers are represented as the “wants” of consumers—the two so separate that they can, in fact, be set against one another. In most of the dominant regions of this ideological field, the constituting category is what Poulantzas calls “individuals-persons.” The moral, juridical, representational, and psychological lexicons of the dominant system of practices, values, and meanings could literally not be constituted at all without this thoroughly bourgeois category of “possessive individuals.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out Poulantzas’s three ideological effects (masking, fragmentation, imaginary unity) with the ‘possessive individuals’ category as load-bearing.
• XREF: The ‘possessive individuals’ category connects to C.B. Macpherson’s political theory and to Althusser’s interpellation concept; also the labor-vs-consumer split anticipates contemporary worker-consumer conflicts. — connects to: Formalist language, emptied of content, gives rise to nominalism as bourgeois thought — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 66; Bourgeois ethics inherits Enlightenment’s truth-postulate as the demand to be oneself.; Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 267 (+7 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘needs vs wants’ split as the ideological matrix for modern labor disputes — e.g. gig workers framed simultaneously as entrepreneurs (producers) and happy consumers of flexible work.