Interpellation
Encyclopedia
Interpellation is a concept discussed by Marxists
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 in reference to ideology. Marxist classics refer to this as the state apparatus. However, it was philosopher Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....

 who first used the term Interpellation see (Althusser Louis, 1970, Essays on Ideology, Page 11, Verso) to describe the process by which ideology addresses the (abstract) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing him or her as subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...

 proper. Henceforth, Althusser goes against the classical definition of the subject as cause and substance
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....

: in other words, the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject, which precisely as subject is "always-already interpellated". Althusser's argument here strongly draws from Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...

's concept of the Mirror stage
Mirror stage
The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Philosopher Raymond Tallis describes the mirror stage as "the cornerstone of Lacan’s oeuvre."...

. Althusser's concept has been roundly confused over the last decades with concepts and thinking associated with Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

, in part because both thinkers manifest an antihumanist insistence on the secondary status of the subject as mere effect of social relations and not vice versa. Another source of this confusion, as elaborated in an article by Keith Sawyer (2002) is the shared use of the word but different concepts of discourse. Interpellation, Althusser's idea based on Lacan, specifically involves the moment and process of recognition of interaction with the ideology at hand. Foucault eschews the notion of ideology and his quasi-structuralist analytics are quite antithetical to Lacanian notions of Real, Symbolic, Imaginary.
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