Introduction to Counterinterpellation: Freedom, Discussion, and Relations of Production

• In Event: Education and Counterinterpellation: A New Look at Louis Althusser

Abstract

Educational theory is ambivalent about interpellation. On the one hand a search for “education” and “interpellation” in Google Scholar, limited to articles published in 2015, yields nearly one thousand hits, from studies on nutrition to lawyer distress to Alice in Wonderland. The term is prevalent in critical discourses on teaching, learning, and studying. On the other hand, starting from early accounts of cultural capital by Bourdieu and Passeron, to the classic ethnography by Paul Willis of “lads” making their own subjectivities, continuing through resistance and contradiction theorists like Jean Anyon, Henry Giroux, and Michael Apple, and feminist and poststructural critiques of Marxism, there is a sense that interpellation is too deterministic.
If the transition from being an individual to becoming a political subject means entering into a pre-existing set of relations of production--if someone is not, in fact, someone, until they carry society’s basic codes--whence individual agency? If society is powerful enough to substantiate people as themselves, and school is an essential apparatus for doing so, then how can educators and students alter, change, or meaningfully work against that power? This paper argues that the idea of counter-interpellation is a next step in addressing this problem of freedom in critical educational theory.
The term “counter-interpellation” was proposed first by Jacques Lecercle, a student of Louis Althusser’s, in A Marxist Philosophy of Language (2006). This landmark work initiates a linguistic turn in contemporary Marxism, building on a tradition of linguistic thinking in anti-capitalist political economy. Lecercle carves out a distinctly radical and political account of what language is and can do.
Generally speaking, counter-interpellation is the reciprocal action of individuals speaking idiosyncratically within and against the ways they are interpellated. The counter-interpellation is “an intervention in the linguistic conjuncture which alters it, however marginally” (p. 213). The concept is consistent with Lecercle’s view of language-as-struggle, a contrast to the reigning conception of language-as-instrument of communication. If relations (verhaltnisse) of production, as conceived by Karl Marx, are interactions between people, then alterations in the linguistic conjuncture might entail meaningful alterations in the wider social conjuncture.
Few educational researchers have used the term, and in limited ways. This paper will introduce educational theorists and critical pedagogues to the idea of counter-interpellation as a next step in the problem of freedom described above, with an eye towards educational practice. Building on the work of bell hooks (1988) in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black and vignettes from Frederick Taylor’s (1914) Principles of Scientific Management, the paper will conclude by suggesting classroom discussion techniques that create conditions for student to counter-interpellate, which, perhaps, can undermine the general process of recruiting individuals to become subject to existing relations of production.

Lecercle, J. J. (2006). A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Leiden: Brill.

Author

• David Backer, Cleveland State University