Hey You and Only You
Louis Althusser states in his essay Ideology and State Ideological Apparatuses:
all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject…ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’
For Althusser we are constituted by this interpellation, it constitutes not only our sense of the world and our place in it but our sense of identity. Subjectivity is a construction produced through this institutional hailing. In the most general sense we are all interpellated as subjects within a specific social order. The problem of capitalism is not only the production of economic wealth but the reproduction of docile subjects that find the system natural.
In a consumer culture it is now crucial that we be addressed (and see ourselves) as consumers. Not only ads, but the entire system hails us continuously with its explicitly or implicitly stated “You the consumer.” The “You” is simultaneously addressed to all potential buyers and to me specifically. As an ad hails an individual, and in recognizing ourselves as the we (or I) being hailed, we are being constituted as ideological subjects within a social order with ancillary roles, rules and practices that seem to us natural. As an ad hails us, as it communicates with us, it is reproducing social relations and situates us within those social relations. For example the Ford ad above interpellate women, not only with femininity but with feminism. The ideological structure of interpellation in the Ford ad stresses a kind of self-determination and agency. Even though this Ford ad foregrounds a liberatory message through the women’s adventure through her opposition to traditional sex roles, its underlying meaning connotes that social relations and an individual’s self-agency are based on the consumption of a given product.
Furthermore we could use Althusser’s insight into the materiality of ideology to interpret this commercial. Ideology for Althusser is not merely an incorrect idea or false consciousness inside of people’s heads. Ideology is not only a distortion that interferes between ourselves and a clear undisturbed reality. It is, for Althusser, an essential medium for the reproduction of concrete individuals as subjects. Ideology is the means of producing forms of subjectivity itself. Ideology is not primarily a matter of ideas, it is a material structure which commands us without having to pass through consciousness at all. Althusser sees ideology as a set of material practices or rituals, such as voting, genuflecting or shopping, which are always already embedded in everyday life. Although Althusser never articulated the different registers of this materiality, one can roughly surmise these various practices and how they play out in the ad. Any ad should not be understood as a correct or incorrect message but as an element within a material ideological apparatus.
Watching the Ford ad is then one practice in a series of practices and rituals within the general material ideological apparatus of advertising and consumption. Though it is possible to see the Ford ad in terms of a distorted feminism, this does not capture how the ad constitutes the reader. It is through the hailing from the commercial – i.e. watching the ad, buying the commodity and consuming it – that a woman becomes a social subject capable of doing all sorts of things e.g. using a worker in a dry cleaners to pimp for her. However all of this is ideological because it reproduces the individual as a subject ready to take her role within the capitalist system. Feminism (which is potentially an alternative ideological force) is channeled into the commodity form and thus never threatens capitalist hegemony and in fact serves to reproduce it. Indeed, feminist discourse reappears in commodity culture and is renamed through products and made to stand for independence and self-determination. Thus a certain social role is represented, and achieved through the material practice of consumer choice.
