Althusser argues that ideology 'interpellates' individuals as subjects through hailing or address (e.g., religious ideology interpellates believers). We become subjects through recognition and misrecognition in ideological systems. Literature participates in this process by positioning readers in particular subject positions relative to characters, narratives, and meanings.
From your work on ideology and hegemony, you know how dominant ideas maintain power — not primarily through force but through consent, through making the existing social order seem natural, inevitable, and just. From your work on discourse and power, you know how knowledge-systems produce the very subjects they claim to describe, creating normalized categories of person. Althusser's theory of interpellation is the mechanism that connects these two: it explains *how* ideology produces subjects, how real individuals get turned into bearers of ideological positions.
The famous scenario is Althusser's own: a police officer on the street calls out "Hey, you there!" A nearby person turns around. By turning around — by recognizing that they are the one being addressed — they become a subject of the law. The turning is not coerced; it is a spontaneous act of recognition. And that is exactly the point: interpellation works by eliciting recognition, not by imposing identity from outside. You answer the hail because you already, pre-consciously, understand yourself as the kind of person who can be addressed by authority. The subject is not pre-formed and then called; the subject is constituted by the call itself.
Althusser distinguishes Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs: police, army, prisons — which operate through force) from Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs: schools, churches, the family, media, culture — which operate through ideology). ISAs are the primary site of interpellation. The school interpellates you as a student, a future worker, a citizen with certain rights and duties. The church interpellates you as a believer, a sinner, a child of God. The family interpellates you as a son or daughter, with defined roles and expectations. Each institution hails you into a subject position, and you recognize yourself in that position — this recognition is what Althusser calls misrecognition: you take yourself to be a free individual expressing your inner self, when in fact you are occupying a position that ideology prepared for you.
Literature and film are ISAs — cultural apparatuses that interpellate readers and viewers into subject positions. A nineteenth-century novel interpellates its implied reader as educated, property-owning, capable of interiority and moral reflection. A romance novel interpellates its reader as a subject who desires a particular kind of love and fulfillment. A colonial adventure novel interpellates both colonizer and colonized into positions within an imperial ideology — positions that may feel natural to readers who have been shaped by that ideology. Reading against interpellation — asking what subject position the text is constructing for you and refusing to simply occupy it — is one of the central practices of ideological criticism.
The practical critical move is to ask: who is the implied reader of this text, and what must that reader take for granted in order for the text to work? What does the text hail you as? When you feel recognized by a text — when you think "this is exactly how it is" or "I see myself in this character" — you are experiencing the successful operation of interpellation. The recognition itself is the ideological effect, not a sign of the text's truth.
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