The concept of “interpellation” is familiar to anyone who’s taken a course in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century Marxism, postmodernity, etc. Most accounts of the word’s currency trace it back to Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970). I want to ask, how does the concept of interpellation, as currently understood, interpellate the reader? What kind of subject does it shape us into being?
In Marxist theory, interpellation—the process by which we encounter a culture’s or ideology’s values and internalize them—is an important concept regarding the notion of ideology. It is associated in particular with the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser.[1] According to Althusser, every society is made up of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) which are instrumental to constant reproduction of the relations to the production of that given society. While ISAs belong to the private domain and refer to private institutions (family, church but also the media and politics), the RSA is one public institution (police/military) controlled by the government. Consequently, ‘interpellation’ describes the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs), constitutes the very nature of individual subjects‘ identities through the process of “hailing” them in social interactions. (Wikipedia)
Interpellation is the constitutive process where individuals acknowledge and respond to ideologies, thereby recognizing themselves as subjects. … Althusser emphasizes the ubiquity of ideology and interpellation by noting how subjects are consistently constituted by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as the family, educational institutions, and media such as literature, radio and television. (Cindy Nguyen, for The Chicago School of Media Theory)
The term interpellation was an idea introduced by Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to explain the way in which ideas get into our heads and have an effect on our lives, so much so that cultural ideas have such a hold on us that we believe they are our own. Interpellation is a process, a process in which we encounter our culture’s values and internalize them. … Ideologies, therefore, play a crucial role first in constructing our identities and then giving us a particular place in society. (Christopher McGee, Longwood University)
Inasmuch as a person does so and embraces the practices associated with those institutions, she has been successfully “hailed” or “interpellated” and recognized herself as that subject who does those kinds of things. As the effect of these recognitions is to continue existing social relations, Althusser argued that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary so that Ideological State Apparatuses productive of the bourgeois subject can be replaced with those productive of proletarian or communist subjects. (William Louis in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Louis Althusser,” 4.2)
(Reiteration, the crudest form of word-magic, does a lot of the arguing in the examples I’ve clipped above.)
Anyway, you get the idea. Interpellation is supposed to turn the hearer into the object that it designates. The word “constitutive” does some not-negligible ideological work here. As in the theology that was Althusser’s first taste of philosophy, the God who created you of course has all authority to tell you what to do or be. If you have freedom in such a theological world, it is just freedom to fall, in other words, to become a bad example of the thing you were interpellated to be. But did nobody ever laugh at the pretensions of word magic? Popularizations of the theory of interpellation present it as something that constitutively cannot fail.
And apparently, it works, even on a higher level: The theory of interpellation, being itself a kind of interpellation, is supposed to turn the reader into the sort of person who cedes to authority the power to create and manage human subjects. Note the insistence on “we” and “our lives” in the above descriptions of the ensorcellment. Congratulations! You have been interpellated by yet another institution that counts on your passive acquiescence.
I think it can fail, but you’re on your own to figure out how.