City A Lesson in Interpellation
posted by on August 11 at 11:47 AM
This morning, booming from a police car: “You in the green Honda! Pay attention to what you are doing. If you’re going to make a right turn, make a right turn. Get your act together and stay focused.”
Through the PA system, the booming voice of the state. It filled the street below my window. The state called a subject out of the order of the ordinary morning. It made an exception of him/her. “You in the green Honda!” It was not me being called (I was in bed). The state did not say: “You in the big bed.” My place in the ordinary was undisturbed. The wanted (disrupted, ruptured) person was in the green Honda. He/she heard the state and said: “Wait! It’s really me the state is calling. Me! The state really, really wants me. And I happen to be me! I’m a me! I’m the me the state is hailing.”
This call of the state not only disrupts the subject but also reinforces their situation in the state formation. Not to recognize the call (Hey! You there!) is not to be a subject of the state. You must be from somewhere else; from another social assemblage that can call you out of itself, its order, its constitutive parts and rhythms, for the purpose of stating and reinforcing your place in that order.
I wish I could throw my drink in your face.
Hey you! In the deluded haze of self-importance! Nobody cares!
x's and o's,
The state
Oh my holy fucking god.
Con Air was a sweet movie too. And you know what the best part about that one was? I never heard anyone try to use nick cage as a metaphor for the state of the world. I never had to hear about how important the critic felt in his big comfy bed the morning before he wrote the review. I didn't have to imagine that critic walking into his office with a giant boner for his shit ideas.
Why?
Because nobody. Nobody. Fucking Cares.
I wish I could watch the cops arrest Mr. Poe for throwing his tea in your face.
Hey, you there, windbag! On behalf of those who read and enjoy the continental philosophy on which you seem to base these ridiculous posts: Get Off Our Side.
What makes you think that the officer calling out the green Honda driver was anything more than ordinary? That sounds like a very ordinary occurrence to me.
I thought you would be overjoyed in hearing this, as this event would be commonplace in an ideal communist society.
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I'm going to ignore this post, therefor you don't exist now charles.
I was going to not comment, and in so not doing I would reinforce your non-individuality.
But then I decided that this was a special case requiring me to stick my head out and remind you how totally irrelevant this post is.
Charles, perhaps you have confused yourself with Louis Althusser, Slog with the essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)" [http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html#s5] and the year with 1971. I do hope you sort yourself out before you strangle your wife.
I think this is interesting and I hope for more from Charles about it, perhaps in a new book or movie.
Yes, well, the thing is that we're always already interpellated into some ideology. The example Althusser gave is an example that doesn't quite get across this notion. But the same thing happened to me a year or so ago downtown and the first thing I thought was that I had been hailed...and I later blogged about it.
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