June 13, 2018:
"Interpellation" is how this happens. "Interpellation" means hailing: "Hey Mark!" Followed by the rituals we know well: a handshake, a smile, lunch, whatever. In its most extreme and obvious form: interpolation by cop: "Hey you! Show me your papers!" Althusser defines interpellation as the mechanism through which ideologies produce individual human subjects as ideological subjects: the process through which individuals are taught to internalize ideologies and later act them out.
But it's more involved. We're all "always-already" ideological subjects. We can't not be. When an unborn child is "expected", that child's parents and the society around them immediately begin to produce that child's identity for it, through their rituals and their expectations. The child is "marked out [assigné] as a subject in and by the particular familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected'". Freud conceptualized this in the theory of sexuality, which Althusser summarizes as, "the quondam subject-to-be has to ‘find' its place, that is, ‘become' the sexual subject (boy or girl) it already is in advance." Lacan added the concept of the Mirror Stage on which Althusser leans. But Althusser adds to Freud and Lacan by insisting on the complexity — multiplicity — of the concrete ideologies which interpellate us, so that the ideological subject that results has a structure-in-dominance relationship to multiple ideologies:
"When religious ideology begins to function directly by interpolating the little child Louis as a subject, little Louis is already-subject — not yet religious-subject, but familial-subject. When legal ideology (later, let us suppose) begins to interpellate little Louis by talking to him about, not Mama and Papa now, or God and the Little Lord Jesus, but Justice, he was already a subject, familial, religious, scholastic, and so on. I shall skip the moral stage, aesthetic stage, and others. Finally, when, later, thanks to auto-heterobiographical circumstances of the type Popular Front, Spanish Civil War, Hitler, 1940, Defeat, captivity, encounter with a communist, and so on, political ideology (in its differential forms) begins to interpellate the now adult Louis as a subject, he has already long been, always-already been, a familial, religious, moral, scholastic and legal subject… and now, lo and behold, a political subject! This political subject begins, once back from captivity, to make the transition from traditional Catholic activism to advanced — semi-heretical — Catholic activism, then begins reading Marx, then joins the Communist Party, and so on. So life goes. Ideologies never stop interpolating subjects as subjects, never stop ‘recruiting' individuals who are always-already subjects. The play of ideologies is superposed, criss-crossed, contradicts itself on the same subject: the same individual always-already (several times) subject. Let him figure things out, if he can..."
Wikipedia summarizes Althusser's intent this way: "Individual subjects are presented principally as produced by social forces, rather than acting as powerful independent agents with self-produced identities." He continues the radically anti-subjective themes of his earlier work, only now he adds a theory of how ideological subjects become what they are. Not only do individuals not make history, science, or whathaveyou — these are all social products, not individual ones — but individuals ourselves are products of histories, sciences, and whathaveyous that existed before we did and shaped us before we could possibly have shaped them. The situation is "always-already". And so these nexuses of ideologies make us "go" — to work in the morning.
In my opinion, many of Althusser's formulations of these arguments are hasty, incomplete, and idealist. If we take literally the idea that ideologies hail people, then all we've done is shift the subject from humans to ideologies. Althusser's writing in these texts switches unpredictably from concepts to figures to allusions to illustrations: symptoms not just of incompleteness but of epistemological obstacles. He's trying to think something for which he does not have the concept. Yet he's on to something valuable. He wants to show that we all live inside ideology, there's no escape, there's only the partial and contradictory freedom offered by science, which can produce non-ideological knowledges, but which itself is always-already-always threatened. "So life goes."