What it feels like to be a fly caught in a web: Althusser and interpellation

Let me summarize what we have discovered about ideology in general.

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:


1. The interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects;

2. their subjection to the Subject [the specular image of 'God'];

3. The mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself;

4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen -- ' So be it '.


Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the majority of cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses. They are inserted into the practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They 'recognize' the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that 'it really is true that it is so and not otherwise', and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt 'love they neighbour as thyself', etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ' Amen -- So be it '. (p 168-169).