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156 MEDIA STUDIES

struggle in ideology to disarticulate/rearticulate the interpellative structure of
particular discourses. The term ‘interpellation’ itself is an ambiguous one and
has been subject to variable formulations. Althusser introduced it in the
‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay, as a sort of ‘loan’ from
Lacan, without making clear the status of the borrowing in relation to Lacanian
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theory. That is, Althusser did not clarify to what extent he accepted the argument
as derived from Lacan: that interpellation could be explained exclusively by
reference to the ‘primary’ psychoanalytic processes. Althusser proposed, in the
controversial second part of his essay, that ‘there is no ideology except for
concrete subjects’, adding that ideology always functions through ‘the category
of the subject’. But he gave the constitution of that category not to the
psychoanalytic level but to the functioning of ideological discourses themselves
—that is, at this stage in his argument ‘the subject’ is a discursive category: ‘at
the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only
constitutive of all ideology in so far as ideology has the function (which defines
it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’. And when, later, he
advanced the more Lacanian proposition that the ‘individuals’ hailed by
ideological discourses are always-already in ideology—‘individuals are always-
already subjects’—he still leaves somewhat ambiguous the degree of
determinacy accorded to this proposition. The unborn child already has an
‘ideological’ destination and destiny awaiting him/her: but Althusser only goes
so far as to say:
it is clear that this ideological constraint and pre-appointment, and all the
rituals of rearing and then education in the family, have some relationship
[our italics] with what Freud studied in the forms of the pre-genital and
genital ‘stages’ of sexuality…But let us leave this point, too, on one side.

Laclau is more openly agnostic than Althusser when he adopts the term
‘interpellation’. He never refers the ‘subjects’ of interpellation to the
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psychoanalytic level, and he makes no reference to the Lacanian hypothesis.
Instead, following Althusser’s lead, he locates it at the level of the discourse:
‘what constitutes the unifying principle of an ideological discourse is the
“subject” interpellated and thus constituted through this discourse’. Certainly,
Laclau cannot mean that this structure of interpellations is already pre-
constituted at the moment when the infant becomes a’subject’ in the Lacanian
sense, because the whole thrust of his argument is that these interpellations are
not given and absolute but conditional and provisional. The ‘struggle in
ideology’ takes place precisely through the articulation/disarticulation of
interpellations: ‘how are ideologies transformed? The answer is: through the
class struggle which is carried out through the production of subjects and the
articulation/ disarticulation of discourses’. The position, then, seems to be that
Pêcheux adopts part of the Lacanian argument but treats the constitution of ‘the
space of the subject’ as only one, predetermining, element in the functioning of