Interpellation
This is the first entry in an ongoing series of important, “wonderful,” significant ideas in childhood, culture, teaching and learning. “Interpellation” is a fundamental idea in the solicitude of children that is not widely understood. First introduced by Althusser in relation to the formation of the subject, or how a person becomes recognized and recognizes him or herself in society, interpellation describes the process through which the infant is “hailed,” called, named, addressed, acknowledged, ordered, positioned and imprinted by “its” caretakers, society and the social/symbolic order.
That’s a mouthful so let’s try again. A baby is born. A doctor, nurse, midwife declares “it’s a girl,” or “it’s a boy!” The infant has no idea of the “gender trouble” this initial declaration sets in motion. This process, which Judith Butler aptly describes as the “girling of the girl” or the “boying of the boy,” is made up of all the iterations, all the instances, where the infant is addressed by these gendered terms and how the infant responds to them in everyday life. When my first child was born we didn’t get to the hospital and my wife gave birth to the baby in the bathtub, in an apartment, at 199 Avenue A, New York City. We were both so caught up in the moment that for a moment, for several moments, we didn’t think to “check,” didn’t “notice,” whether the baby was a “boy” or a “girl.” This is not to invoke some utopian moment before or beyond gender (well frankly it is), but to suggest that there is always a gap, a place, an interval, an event that both demands and defers interpellation, delimits and opens up who we are and who we are to become.
The reason why we are all in denial about the centrality of interpellation in education, childhood and culture is that we don’t want to deal with the symbolic violence inherent in growing up. We tend to think that whatever dominant social norms and forms of life that make up “our society” are natural and the way things ought to be. We buy into the dominant ideology and “agree” to play by the rules of the game. Or we magically put ourselves outside this dominant ideology and make pronouncements on the “false consciousness” of others. What I want us to think about is how children are forced into grooves that are very difficult to contest or act against because the rules are invisible. They are just the way things are. Think about it this way. All the words we get to express our innermost feelings, are innermost selves, come from others. “Infant” means without language. Long before I have any kind of mastery over language, I have a name, I am a boy, I am a white boy, I come from a particular economic class, with a certain amount of cultural capital. And these are just some of the cultural categories that precede me as I make my way into the world. So by highlighting “interpellation” as the basic means by which culture reproduces itself, I want to give us more space to develop critical and creative wiggle room. Interpellation is the symbolic means whereby we usher children into the sexual, psychological, and social orders that make up culture.
Gentle reader, you who would persuade rather than force and teach rather than order, I would beg of you, ask, no demand, force you to remember: remember the “blood, torture, and sacrifices … the systems of cruelty,” that “wage war in the nursery,” in the schools, and on the street in the name of civilization, humanity, and the “well composed, presentable self.” What is the measure of violence in this “civilizing process” that Nietzsche calls Einverseelung, ensouling? Think about poverty, war, sexism, racism, homophobia, environmental degradation and over consumption. Think about the names, the slights, the inexplicable privileges and arbitrary exclusions, the orders, promises and punishments, the cultivated indifference, the visibility and invisibility of each child, the enticements, entreaties, exhortations and invitations that organize the child’s day. And also think about and remember the kindness and lively conscience of Langston Hughes, the “montage of a dream deferred,” the American dream of equality and freedom, and what Walt Whitman calls “democratic adhesiveness”—and don’t dis-remember the “one handful of dream dust not for sale.” How is the history of white racism in particular, and racial fantasies and circumstances in general, both structured and structuring in relation to what Althusser calls “the long march” to adulthood? And conversely how has the civil rights movement, the “black is beautiful” and the Black Arts movement, algebra as a civil right, and pro Black radical activism informed and reshaped the cultural landscapes within which different children move and negotiate their cultural identities? How are these snubs invitations, exclusions and inclusions, love and hate, all the variegated ways that children are interpellated by their elders, both a necessary condition and an inevitable supplement to the child’s “natural” development?
As teachers, parents, “grown ups,” we are all involved in this process of interpellating children into the material, economic, psychological, social and symbolic orders that we as adults are part of. A huge part of being conscious, “woke,” awake, having a conscience, is to acknowledge, investigate and take responsibility for how we are interpellated and how we interpellate others. Interpellation is at the heart of the production and reproduction of culture. Different individuals and groups use and are used by culture and language, understood as a structure and a series of material speech acts, to excite, induce, repress and coalesce the unorganized qualities and powers of the inarticulate baby around certain embodied desires, practices and identities. Following Althusser, interpellation is that process whereby the subject is being constituted by language (and other sign systems), and specifically the language of address—becoming called out and (mis)recognized with language and culture. This notion of address cannot be limited to the inter subjective exchange of names, invitations and responses because as Althusser points out, interpellation begins before the baby is born. A family name is prepared in advance, a gender is assigned that reaches beyond the anatomy of the child. Names, attributes and values are applied to children to which they must learn how to respond in a language that comes from someone else, from somewhere else, from elsewhere. Interpellation is how you, as a person, are brought into a cultural network of meanings, demands and objects of desire that are impossible not to deal with. Through interpellation, as it occurs in homes, schools, streets, playgrounds, tv, movies, the internet, social institutions, in the woods, and down by the river, children learn what goes without saying, what is obvious and self-evident, what is remarkable or worth exploring. They learn skills that help them get around in the world embedded in a morality/immorality about how these skills are to be enacted. They learn who they are in the world. They learn that they are not yet adults. They learn that they are “older” and “younger,” “smart” or “dumb,” “valued” or “immaterial,” that they are on the way to somewhere called “being grown up,” and become involved in the ongoing process of linking and distinguishing self and other. Thus interpellation as the cultural movements and symbolic acts that usher children into adulthood must simultaneously refuse and promise access to this promised land. When Althusser call this process “the long forced march to adulthood,” he successfully emphasizes the coercive and disciplinary dimension of being interpellated by the adult world. He does not do justice to how children desire adulthood and seek out activities and signifiers of the adult world.
Interpellation is ongoing, overdetermined but not deterministic, and has a multiplicity of origins. As much as some father or mother, teacher or priest would love to have the child’s ear all to him or herself (LISTEN TO ME), children are subjected to and available to a multiplicity of conflicting and overlapping calls, names, addresses, interpellations. Even as the univocal power of interpellation is a jealously cultivated and guarded “right,” it is the multiple scenes of learning and instruction, the calling to task and the garden path, the interrupted signals and accidental transmissions, the divided loyalties and secret assignations, and the multiple intentions that crowd even a single utterance, that inform and shape each person’s identity. Each effort to call, name and norm, to order and acknowledge, to entice and discourage, speaks in a crowd of utterances. Each child is interpellated across a variety of cultural spaces: home, school, street, playground, etc, and by a variety of people who are both individuals and representatives of other groups. I will leave for another time how children and groups of people develop the rhetorical resources to respond to these interpellations and move from being the objects of other people’s words to being subjects who can name themselves. For now, lets acknowledge interpellation as critical in the process of the child becoming an adult.
Kenneth Burke famously said, “the so called “I” is really a group of conflicting “we’s.” You are not an individual that enters into relationships with others, rather you become the individual you are in a complex web of relationships with others. My challenge, or suggestion, to parents, teachers, grown ups who are involved with taking care of and educating children, is to explore how you are interpellating the children under your care. How is this child being interpellated by the culture at large? How are you consciously and unconsciously participating in forms of interpellation that you find seductive, problematic, abhorrent? How are you interpellated? So for instance given the “Me Too” Movement, how are the girls and the boys under our care being interpellated in ways that continue to contribute to girls being sexually exploited and assaulted, and in what ways can boys and girls be addressed that might contribute to significant changes in how men and women interact in the workplace, at school and in the home? Or in what ways do we interpellate children so that they learn to love the environment and be active, knowledgeable stewards of the earth? How do we understand “freedom” in relation to our children and “other people’s” children? These are big questions, big problems, that require specific interventions, strategies, collaborations and educational movements. Let’s get moving!
Bibliography
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Attitudes Toward History by Kenneth Burke
Images
“Hey ,you there” https://edge.ua.edu/tag/interpellation/
McDonald’s Baby Bun ad https://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/mcdonalds-baby-bun-4983155/
“We have Nothing to lose but our Chains” image http://scientificsoul.squarespace.com/newblackartsmovement/
I’m Not Polite, I’m Proactive” slide http://static1.squarespace.com/static/506244cbe4b04a9612dcaaa3/54c1d1e5e4b04884b35df3fa/56830f7a1115e07a0569073b/1451429762590/INTERPELLATION.jpg
Image “Money can buy you Love” by Barbara Kruger, 1985 http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html