Interpellation
So semiotics is the study of relations, including the relational formation of the distribution between the knowing subject and the object that is known. Or, if you prefer the language, between the constitution of the personal, and the knowledges that we have of the world. Michel Foucault was there, a semiotician, but so too was Louis Althusser. And now I want to borrow a term from Althusser: the term interpellation.17 Althusser tells a story about ideological state apparatuses.18 Talking of ideology, he says that there are moments of recognition, moments when we recognize ourselves because we have been addressed, called out to, in a particular way. At those moments we become, as he puts it, subjects because we are subjected to an authority, a Subject with a capital S. We are located, in relation to that Subject, as biddable small s subjects precisely because we recognize ourselves and (this is crucial) because we have no choice. We are turned into biddable subjects because it becomes instantly obvious to us that we are that way and that we know that way.
Althusser links this relational semiotics with ideology and its operation through ideological state apparatuses. And, though I want to talk about interpellation, I will have to abandon much of Althusser’s project. For instance, his play between Subject and subject: the idea that we are turned into little knowing subjects because we are interpellated by, and mirror, a great Subject. This rests upon the idea that in the last instance there is a kind of ideological coherence, some kind of God eye. Well maybe, but if we take seriously the notion of an established disorder, maybe not. At any rate, this isn’t something I want to build into my version of interpellation. I also want to avoid the idea that there are real relations of production that can be distinguished from ideology, that there are, indeed, firm foundations. This, another version of the God eye, makes me uneasy too because, to say it briefly, it’s another division that separates appearances too much from reality, the performance of storytelling from what it tells about. To say this is not to say that we will necessarily avoid resuscitating something of this kind that does work. But even so, in a nonfoundational world, Althusser’s particular version of the distinction between truth and ideology too will have to go.
But I still want to talk of interpellation because it involves two commitments. First, it is committed to embodiment. Perhaps Althusser doesn’t go into this as deeply as Foucault, but even so, it is crucial. For (or so it seems) his sense of interpellation draws from and performs itself through the body of the ex-Catholic. And the ex-Catholic (is there such a thing as an ex-Catholic?) knows that he came to believe because he first kneeled and prayed, because he participated in ritual. He also knows that all this happened long before he had any sense of faith, explicit or otherwise. Thus embodiment preceded subjectivity, subjugation to the Subject. We are, says Althusser, interpellated as knowing subjects precisely because we are embodiments, embodiments of relations and gestures.
Second, I want to hang on to Althusser’s insistence on obviousness. For me this is the fulcrum of interpellation: the subject instantly recognizes itself when it is addressed. Note that: the subject instantly recognizes itself and is constituted as a knowing subject when it is spoken to. Indeed (and he is equally insistent on this) the constitution of the subject precedes the words spoken, the fact of being addressed. So interpellation has nothing to do with ‘‘deciding.’’ All the apparatus of ‘‘rational decision making’’ (assuming we believe in the existence of such a beast in the first place) is bypassed. Instead there is instant recognition and location.
Perhaps Althusser was thinking of words, words and bodies. Perhaps he was imagining the words of the priest, the schoolteacher, the politician, or the bourgeois political economist, the effect of all these words on the body of the subject. But there is no reason to restrict interpellation to words. Indeed, the emphasis on embodiment suggests that words are at best only the beginning.
Interpellated
Now I want to narrate a story that joins the personal to that which is not ephemeral, the subject of study with the object of study. This is because I don’t think that the personal is ‘‘personal’’ when it is put in this way. But we’ve needed Alpers, Elias, Foucault, and finally Althusser to reach the point where it is possible to theorize the personal in a way that resists its designation in those terms.