We Have Been Interpellated Without Any Possible Resistance

I am a person given birth to and brought up in an African country whose cultural values and traditions are different from the rest of the world. My differences with the rest of the world also stem from family, educational background as well as professional experiences. My family has a strong tradition of standing with the oppressed. In addition to the family tradition, having knowledge and skills entrenched in social and humanities assumptions such as realism and that people would always remain unpredictable constitute my sources of canvasing for doing good and discouraging people from violating existing rules for collective shared positive future.

I believe that in most cases, the majority would want to violate existing rules and norms. The fixed belief that powerful people or organisations always want to make life unbearable for the less privileged using owned and collective resources influences my ways of representing human and material reality. However, my positions may not totally represent objective truth but a product of discursive categorizations. Nevertheless, “they are always relatively stable at a specific point of time within a social/cultural situation.”

Despite the belief that I have control over my life I have been interpellated in many ways.   Althusser sees interpellation as a process through which we encounter a culture’s or ideology’s values and internalise them. Relating this to my personal life and identity discussed earlier, I would like to say that I have been interpellated in many ways. My family tradition of fighting and supporting the oppressed is an ideology passed on to me by my father, who also inherited it from his father several years ago. I have been interpellated to believe that fighting for and supporting justice are critical to ensuring equality for all and also getting God’s favour on the earth and hereafter.

Both previous and current schools as well as workplaces have interpellated me towards believing that human beings would always remain unpredictable. The schools and workplaces have equally interpellated me to accept that they cannot be effectively corrected when there are mistakes on their part using one approach because humanity is complex and not always flexible. All these are within the ideological state apparatuses of interpellation, in which I have been made subject by the “actors” who called my attention (who “hailed” me) to accept the ideologies through consent not repressive approach that aligns with apparatuses of power (e.g., government) and repressive state apparatuses [e.g., the police].

I believe that I am not alone in this “hailing” culture because everyone must have been “hailed” directly or indirectly by different “actors”. In politics, governments have “hailed” citizens using various deregulation, commercialization and privatization policies, which in my view, favour the capitalists. In other words, the “goal is to legitimize the interests” of the business elites. Business owners have equally “hailed” consumers by developing products and services that are not needed but were (consumers) forced to purchase when emotional and fear appeals were used for advertising and marketing purposes.

I would like to conclude that neoliberal consumer culture will continue to be with us because being interpellated cannot occur in one position. Therefore, it would be absurd to absolutely consider neoliberal consumer culture as bad because the material conditions of production and circulation are largely in the hands of the political and business elites which necessitate being “hailed” before consuming. It is on this basis I believe that the chance of resistance is highly lean because we have voluntarily given the elites the needed authority by not having the capacity of producing and circulating our own consumables.