Interpellation

The concept of interpellation has had considerable importance in analyses of consumer culture both in the academy and in the practice of marketing and advertising. This concept makes an important contribution to understanding the processes whereby people are recruited into identity positions thus bringing together the inner world of unconscious processes and external representations that occupy the public terrain of ideas, symbols, images, and myths. The concept of interpellation accords high priority to symbolic systems and representations but combines them with the operation of the psyche and psychological processes in the structuralist tradition. By offering an explanation of the mechanisms through which people are recruited into identity positions through being confronted with symbolic systems and signs, interpellation presents useful material for the design of advertisements. Cultural studies theorists are able to decode such sets of symbols, which those in advertising and the creative industries construct using the same sets of knowledge. The semiotics of symbolic systems that appeal to unconscious forces play a key role in these processes. Interpellation is all about how the mechanisms of identification work and how we come to think of ourselves as that person who has that identity. Consumers can be seen to be interpellated by the associations of a product or service that draws them in so that they think, yes, that's me; I'm that kind of person.

Interpellation derives from the work of the French social philosopher Louis Althusser who sought to provide a nonreductionist explanation for the operation of ideological processes through which people, as individuals or as members of groups, including social classes, took up identity positions and were recruited into ideologies. Althusser's earlier work had been called into question by the failure of the political events in Europe 1968 (and in particular of the French Communist Party to bring about revolutionary change), so he sought to provide an explanation that went beyond the idea of a repressive state and explored more subtle and complex modes of subjectivization.

Althusser's critique, in his work on ideological state apparatuses ([ISAs], 1984), suggested that ideologies provide the basis of the presuppositions through which people make sense of their everyday lives; ideology largely operates on people unconsciously; that is, we are unaware of the social structures that seem so taken for granted that they are common sense and seem obvious. In invoking the notion of common sense, Althusser was building on the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose engagement with everyday assumptions and the routine operation of ideologies and beliefs have also informed theories of consumption. Althusser goes on to pose questions about how ideologies as systems of mass representation or structures work on us internally. How are we recruited into these perspectives on the world that become assumed and taken for granted? Althusser's response to this question is that ideologies work through the philosophical and juridical category of the subject, which he sees as a social category, for example, a legal subject, a sexual subject, a gendered subject, and a grammatical subject. Thus, the subject of ideology is a constructed category, which is pivotal to the functioning of ideology through which concrete individuals are constituted.

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