Unpacking Interpellation and Its Role in the Maintenance of Ideology

Introduction

In any pattern of exploitation, such as domestic violence, an abusive work environment, or even a political relationship between conflicting groups, outside observers often gravitate toward the same line of questioning:  why do people willingly and continuously engage in relationships that ultimately hurt them?  Millions of Americans pay for therapy to help answer the same question:  why do I continue to make self-destructive choices?  In politics, this can be especially jarring because we are talking about groups that make up hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals.  How can so many people, who are in the quantitative majority, buy into, participate in, and even defend a hierarchical arrangement that ultimately undermines their human potential? In this post, I will explain how individuals come to internalize the ideologies that support capitalist hierarchy, leading to their passive consent to accept and even perpetuate a socio-economic structure that depends on exploitation.  First, I will cover why an ideological superstructure inevitably emerges as a necessity for the reproduction of society.  I’ll focus on two broad needs that generate this inevitability: one is the reproduction of the conditions of production-the types of material structures that need to be supported to ensure the smooth flow of capital.  The other is the reproduction of the relations of production-the social relationships necessary to maintain capitalist production. That consent creates the need for an ideological superstructure. Second, I will discuss the types of institutions engaged in these forms of reproduction, repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs).  While both contribute to reproducing conditions and relations of production, RSAs are generally used to ensure the material survival of institutions, while ISAs generate the necessary ideological buy-in to get individuals to engage in the social relationships of production.  Third, I will show how these institutions get individuals to internalize ideologies. This rests on the theory of interpellation- the ways that individuals are addressed by social structures. Ideology, normalization, and naturalization are all processes that build over time, as individuals come to align their own subjectivity with the needs of the material structures that orient their lives. This phenomenon is called interpellation. Finally, I will analyze the prospects and mechanisms of resistance often articulated under these theories.  While this post won’t have citations, I am drawing on a variety of readings, namely the works of Louis Althusser, specifically his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).

The Necessary Emergence of Ideology

Why is ideology a necessity in a given social order?  Many of the answers are revealed as we review some of the core purposes of ideology.  Ideology allows individuals to coherently interpret the world and their place within it.  It’s a part of sense-making, and helping individuals and groups reduce uncertainty.  Ideology also allows people to reconcile the inevitable contradictions that emerge in society.  These contradictions are primary contributors to the uncertainty people seek to avoid, because they are also the drivers of change in any given order.  If there were never conflict, opposition, antagonism, or other contradictory forces, change in society would not be necessary. Society would manifest as a stable equilibrium, a continuous harmony with no counteracting forces. Capitalism rests on a set of antagonisms that perpetually reproduce contradictions and instability, namely the capitalist/labor antagonism that generates inequality and competing needs and wants. Though change is inevitable, it must also be limited. Too much change would result in deterioration and instability, and people would be lost in the chaos of uncertainty. To ensure the continuation of society a certain baseline level of stability must be maintained.  For society to function from one generation to the next, the base and superstructure need to be reproduced.  Just as reproduction as a biological concept allows a species to survive through time, reproduction as a social and economic concept allows a society to survive through time.  We need the next generation to not only understand how society works, but to accept it and participate in it. 

In Western liberal societies, there is a strongly held belief in the power of idealism-that ideas in the mind are constructed and then enacted upon the material world. Individuals are viewed and addressed as abstract agents, with the power to subjectively interpret the world, and enact upon it accordingly.  The critique of ideology rejects this centering of idealism.  Instead, it embraces a materialist view- that material realities place constraints on our ideas and push them in specific directions.  Idealism is a core component of maintaining capitalist ideological hegemony.  It teaches individuals to believe that the world, their place within it, and its moral ordering are all just matters of feeling or experiencing things in the “right way.” Materialism inverts this, and compels an understanding of the role that resource distribution (in all its forms) plays in generating the conditions that provide constraints on and opportunities for the generation of new ideas. In examining the economic base of social relations, we come to the first type of reproduction:  the reproduction of the conditions of production. In a capitalist society, a limited number of individuals own the means of production, while the majority of individuals can only offer their labor power (time) to sell.  Reproducing these conditions means ensuring their continuation through things like protecting markets and providing a stable environment from which they operate, and ensuring access to the resources needed to facilitate exchange.  This could involve things like police, military, and other arms of government whose explicit mission is to protect and maintain the economic forces that capitalism depends on.

These material goals are, in themselves, not enough.  The economic structures in place can be protected, but they also require a specific set of relationships between different classes of society. This is known as the reproduction of the relations of production.  The emphasis on relations calls us to stay attuned to the social aspects of capitalism.  The economic structure of capitalist/laborer is also relational- each side can affect the other, and for the economic process to work there needs to be a somewhat stable understanding of the relationships and roles individuals engage in.  Every exchange in a marketplace is also a relationship between consumer, capitalist, and laborer (though the role of labor is intentionally abstracted and obscured).  Each individual needs to play their role correctly to ensure markets ‘properly’ distribute resources. Here we begin to see how capitalism requires the reproduction of things beyond the realm of the base and into the realm of the superstructure. There needs to be a way to ensure that individuals willingly engage in these economic relationships, including a moral and ethical acceptance of things like the wage structure, a hierarchical work place, inequality, and the pervasive exploitation of the labor of others in order to ensure our own access to consumer products.  Beyond that, individuals need to feel an affirmation about their place in the world.  People can’t contribute to the reproduction of societal structures if they believe they live in a fractured, incoherent, uninterpretable reality. These requirements generate the realm of the superstructure- apparatuses that emerge as a consequence of the need to maintain the material economic structures of capitalism.

The base/superstructure relationship as dialectical.  Neither can act in total autonomy.  This is especially evident when examining a capitalist economy.  Capitalism generates inequality, instability, and often requires direct and indirect violence to maintain its order. I have covered in multiple posts how antagonisms are inevitable in any Political structure and especially stark under a capitalist economy.  At the same time, capitalism requires a baseline level of stability to function properly-this is the essence of one of the many contradictions generated by capitalism.  The circuits of capital depend on a continuous exchange of money-for-commodity that depends on predictability, uninterrupted flow, and a variety of private actors working in concert to deliver goods to market.  Capitalist economies could not survive if they were in an openly repressive and antagonistic relationship with the entire population. The superstructure emerges as a vital component in maintaining the base itself.  Any analysis of one will fail without understanding the way it acts upon and is acted upon by the other.

RSAs and ISAs

To ensure the reproduction of both conditions and relations of production under capitalism, two types of apparatuses emerge:  repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses.  Both types have roles in reproducing the conditions and relations of production, but RSAs more closely correspond with the maintenance of conditions of production, while ISAs correspond more with the maintenance of relations of production.  RSAs gain acquiescence through force, or the threat of force.  For example, the military industrial complex and intelligence apparatuses maintain the stability necessary for routine use of trade routes.  The police are another example- they ensure that there is law and order necessary to generate the safety and predictability needed for businesses to operate.  Indeed, much of the role of RSAs is in enforcing property rights that allow capitalist forms of resource distribution to operate freely.  These are all repressive because they do not rely on the open consent of the population; if necessary, these arms of the state will intervene to enforce the political and economic order.

ISAs operate to generate passive acceptance, or consent, to the given order.  These apparatuses are things like the church, school, family, media, and even the broad category of culture (literature, arts, sports, etc).  There is no direct threat of force involved.  Instead, these apparatuses condition participants to view and think about the world in a certain way.  These are the apparatuses that work hardest to naturalize, historicize, and eternalize our socio-economic order.  Schools imbue children with the technical (math, science, organization) skills to become productive laborers for capitalists.  Schools teach students the important socialized behaviors necessary to be a compliant and productive worker.  They teach students to focus on work for a third of the day, follow a schedule dictated to them by a superior, and to respect hierarchical authority in ordering their day-to-day lives.  Mainstream media presents violence as primarily interpersonal and exceptional, with no regard to the structural violence occurring all around us.  Media outlets present information as though they are objective observers with no material interests at stake, even as the talking heads on television all represent the upper-classes (literally, they make six or seven figure salaries). Media companies never discuss the deeper incentives they have to placate corporate advertisers, and rile up the public to push more viewership.  Cultural artifacts like film increasingly present stories reaffirming violence as a solution to global problems.  These background factors must remain unseen through naturalization because they are Political antagonisms- they generate conflicting interests in material needs.

Here we return again to the centering of materialism.  These apparatuses all push similar objectives and stories, but do so in a way that is presented as fact-based and spontaneous.  To be clear, I am not suggesting there is a concerted conspiracy among leaders in all these fields.  My sections above should provide insight into how these moves are inevitable outgrowths of the material relationships that undergird these apparatuses.  The cable news networks don’t wake up and say “I sure do like promoting violence”; they need viewers and need to sell advertising, so they generate a product to help them do so.  Teachers don’t get into education to indoctrinate students, but schools need to manage millions of students each day and prepare them for the work force, so they generate a structure to help them do so.  Colleges need more private donations to endow professorships and build new buildings, so they cater their offerings to appeal to corporations (a new business center!  A new program just for innovation!).  There is no direct conspiracy, but there is a pervasive incentive that pushes the emergence of ISAs as part of the superstructure. Remember, ideology is found at the level of what we take as common sense, so these outcomes manifest as logical, rational choices, not conspiratorial power-grabs.

Interpellation, Socialization, and Identification

How do the apparatuses that make up the superstructure gain the consent of individuals to engage in an economic system rooted in inequality and exploitation?  How is this possible under conditions of extreme and increasing inequality, often along lines of race, class, gender, and even location? Materialism gets us to the motivations, because individuals and organizations have incentives to maintain their access to material resources, or to increase their access in order to improve their lives.  But materialism alone can’t explain it because of the existence of gross inequality - we know that there are billions of people who don’t benefit from capitalism, and who gain very little materially from participating in it.  How does the state gain the consent of so many despite this? Althusser introduces us to the idea of interpellation- a process of hailing individuals as specific subjects with specific roles.  RSAs may depend on the sporadic display of spectacles of violence to gain their authority to repress, but ISAs depend on the acquiescence and consent of the people.  Instead of spectacle, they depend on a process that slowly builds over time.  To get people to view something as natural, they must transition from seeing it as exceptional to seeing it as pervasive (this is why the concept of crisis, which is always presented as exceptional, is so vital to maintaining ideological hegemony).

To internalize an ideology, an individual can’t just view the concept, idea, or scheme as natural- they also have to view their relationship to it as natural.  Since the primary concern for most individuals is coherence, certainty, and stability, they have to see a place for themselves within any given order.  If individuals see a social order, but do not think they belong or fit into it, they are much less likely to passively accept it.  Interpellation can be seen as the mechanism used to slowly get individuals to internalize ideology.  This is the difference between ideology and pure cynicism.  Ideology means we believe what we say and say what we believe, while cynicism involves a distancing between the subject and the world around them (I know we have to do this, but it’s really all bullshit).  Interpellation can also be thought as a way to get subjects to identify as subjects within a given structure.

When we are young, social authority addresses us as a student.  What does this identification or naming do?  It invokes a relationship between our individual identities and a social structure we find ourselves in.  As an identity, student carries with it a load of assumptions.  First, we assume there must be a teacher.  Second, it implies we have an obligation to bend to the will of another figure.  Third, it confines our agency and authority into a more limited sphere by discouraging certain behaviors.  We cannot be good students if we don’t do our homework, etc. Interpellation means you are expected to fill a specific role or identity within an organization or structure, and that engaging in behaviors, expressions, or in any way challenging that role is discouraged.

Over time, as individuals are continually addressed in this way, and see others around them doing the same, they learn to internalize the identification, along with all the expectations of behavior that it entails.  Interpellation here becomes a long-term process of socialization.  The distance between the needs of the structure and the needs of the individual slowly closes.  Eventually, engrained as logic and common sense, the individual sees their personal needs as inextricably dependent upon the needs of the structure.  My hope is that providing these differing angles on interpellation- that it creates an identity, uses socialization, and ultimately gets us to internalize ideology as part of who we are- shows how broad and fluid this concept can be.

The process fully takes advantage of the need of people to feel as though they belong, feel affirmed, and feel as though the world is a coherent and reliable place.  It also shows how ISAs encourage what is at heart a very nihilistic view of the subject (perhaps a drawback of materialism as the focus of inquiry).  We are not makers of our own will and world- we are instead called to as specific types of people with specific roles to fill in any given ISA.  Student, child, soldier, teacher, writer, etc- these are revealed to be methods of interpellation, to get us to only relate to social authority through a specific conception of ourselves, and how we should behave in order to be ourselves. Interpellation closes the gap by taking socially constructed beliefs and transforming them into laws of nature that we must follow to be. Without them, we have no identification- we are subjects devoid of any substantive content. It’s hard to overstate how powerful of a force this is.  Individuals need to belong.  Ideology offers them an easy way to do so.

As a dialectic relationship, ISAs and RSAs are never fully separable.  In fact, one of the primary purposes of RSAs is to step in and use violence/coercion/repression to discipline individuals who step too far out of the identities they are interpellated as.  Think here of the school to prison pipeline.  Many schools in the US have police officers on campus at all times.  If students engage in fights, theft, or other disciplinary infractions, they can be processed as juvenile criminals.  The RSA is necessary because the ISA can’t possibly catch everyone.  In any given social order, but especially in a capitalist one, there will be individuals pushed to the margins that subsequently cannot be made to feel affirmed, valuable, or part of something larger and important.  When interpellation fails to get these individuals to consent, RSAs loom in the background, using violence to gain compliance.

Conclusion

With RSAs as enforcers, and ISAs as sites providing material and idealistic incentives for individuals to internalize ideology, where is there space for resistance?  Here we can return to the core relationship between ideology and depoliticization. Spaces that are actually socially constructed results of Political antagonisms are instead presented as neutral spaces where belief systems and relationships naturally emerge.  Resistance can never be pure in these spaces, as there will always be a limit to what level of subversion is acceptable.  If one rebels against their role in social structures too much, they will meet the violent and repressive arms of the state through the police, courts, military, etc. On closer examination, even the use of these violent arms often depend on a certain level of depoliticization for their legitimacy.  The state can use these violent apparatuses because they are seen not as subjective Political forces, but as logical necessities, rendering them uncontestable.  Re-politicization in itself is one form of resistance because it undermines the supposed neutrality of a given terrain and instead illuminates the Political antagonisms at work.  Since ideology is found precisely at the point something transitions from the exceptional to the given or normal, rearticulation of the Political opens up a renegotiation wherein the natural is revealed as one socially constructed possibility among many.

This rearticulation can not be enacted as an event.  It must meet ideology at the level of process and socialization.  Every moment in which “common sense” appears is at its core an ideological moment.  The long road to transition an idea, belief, or order from the exceptional to the natural has to be countered with critical re-politicization as a process, or a form of logic that itself becomes embedded.  This processing is a prerequisite to any meaningful Political challenge; if critical re-politicization was seen as an event, it would be a matter of politics (day-to-day technical management of affairs) and not truly Political (a manifestation of antagonistic forces in tension of the distribution of resources). In many ways, this is similar to calls for critical awareness or critical pedagogy.  Indeed, one of the biggest threats to any hegemonic ideology is a space for robust critical thinking and engagement.  These are only some initial thoughts.  Resistance and a path forward are topics I hope to further develop in future posts, as we delve into the more psychoanalytic and intrapsychic processes at work in ideology.