Last Updated 14/10/22; needs editing. Some actual content.
There's a strange implication in Althusser's concept of Interpellation that I'm still teasing out.
It stems from the ideas that "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" and that "all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects". Okay, if this is true then it means that all subjects (that is: all of us - true individuals, I get the sense, are supposed to live outside of ideology) are social constructs. This is not particularly revolutionary or interesting a thesis.
What is perhaps interesting here, that I'm still wrapping my head around, is this idea that emerges then of 'society' - that is the collective enunciation of ideology; "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" - continually ensuring its endurance and reproduction by way individuating subjects. Society, ideology, the political go hand in hand; they are that which organises groups and multiples into arrays of power; subjects, molecules are needed for this, and interpellation is the vehicle by which such organisation happens; subjects are individuated and organised.
a strange thing occurs: society//ideology, defines, constitutes, creates humanity (even 'humanity' is necessarily an ideological conception), yet it is dependent on humanity to perpetuate it. This obviously has large implications for limitations of humanity but also, interestingly to me, it is analogous to a viral form of reproduction (or maybe parasitic relationship?). Society cannot replicate itself on its own and thus requires a host to do so; we internalise and incubate our status as subject via our own interpellation and reinforce it in others by necessarily existing and interacting and interpellating others. All sounds rather dystopian.