Excerpt from Judith Butler on Althusserian interpellation and the possibility of subversion and disobedience

"In Althusser's notion of interpellation, it is the police who initiate the call or address by which a subject becomes socially constituted.  There is the policeman, the one who not only represents the law but whose address "Hey, you!" has the effect of bringing the law to the one who is hailed.  This "one" who appears not to be in a condition of trespass prior to the call (for whom the call establishes a given practice as a trespass) is not fully a social subject, is not fully subjectivated, for he or she is not yet reprimanded.  The reprimand does not merely repress or control the subject, but forms a crucial part of the juridical and social formation of the subject.  The call is formative, if not performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject.

Althusser conjectures this "hailing" or "interpellation" as a unilateral act, as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense.  In the reprimand the subject not only receives recognition, but attains as well a certain order of social existence, in being transferred from an outer region of indifferent, questionable, or impossible being to the discursive or social domain of the subject.  But does this subjectivation take place as a direct effect of the reprimanding utterance or must the utterance wield the power to compel the fear of punishment and, from the compulsion, to produce a compliance and obedience to the law?  Are there other ways of being addressed and constituted by the law, ways of being occupied and occupying the law, that disarticulate the power of punishment from the power of recognition?   

Althusser underscores the Lacanian contribution to a structural analysis of this kind, and argues that a relation of misrecognition persists between the law and the subject it compels.  Although he refers to the possibility of "bad subjects," he does not consider the range of disobedience that such a interpellating law might produce.  The law might not only be refused, but it might also be ruptured, forced into a rearticulation that calls into question the monotheistic force of its own unilateral operation.  Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the behavioral conformity of the subject is commanded, there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it.  Here the performative, the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law.  Interpellation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying excess of any intended referent." (Butler, Bodies that Matter; 121-2)

Citation: Butler, Judith. "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge: New York (1993). 121-40.