2.19 

As one reads a narrative syntagm first out of the phantasmatic scene of birth/baptism and then across the detached "notes to an investigation" which together compose the ISA essay, one abstracts from the texts of the Althusserian corpus a peculiar pattern and one is able to trace the conversion of rhetorical resources into cognitive patterns.

   2.19 

   2.20 

There are textual indicators justifying such a reading practice.  The narrative nuggets found in the notes are not self-contained.  Althusser composes by application of an algebraic technique.  In the ISA essay, following what he calls a "reshuffle", he carefully lists which terms disappear, survive and appear (Lenin and Philosophy 159).  Later in the same essay in his treatment of the three examples of interpellation, he is reshuffling but silently and without explicitly naming terms.

   2.20 

   2.21 

Of the three examples, the first is the most complex.  Althusser will reduce the number of variables in the examples that follow.  In this first example Althusser asks readers to imagine friends fond of playing guessing games.  Someone knocks at the door.  A question is posed.  Who's there?  "Me," comes the answer.  The door is opened;  a friend has been recognized.  The door opening closes the sequence.  It confirms the recognition:

And we recognize that "it is him", or "her".  We open the door, and "it's true, it really was she who was there". (Lenin and Philosophy 161)

In this example, the interpellation (the knock), the moment of recognition and that of confirmation (opening the door) remain separate.  However, Althusser does not regard them as analytically distinct.  In his other examples these moments are fused.  For Althusser, interpellation combines the recognition by a hailing of a subject with the hailed individual's response, a recognition of being a subject.  Althusser does not consider these as different recognitions.  Schematically, an ideological apparatus functions successfully when the emission of a message is met by both the reception of a message and the emission of a new message confirming reception.  However, in arriving at his circular structure of the specular subject of ideology, Althusser elides any distinction between recognition, confirmation and interpellation.

    2.21 

   2.22 

His circular structure is dyadic.  This structure is expressed as a relation between reflected and reflection that leaves untheorized or rather unanthropomorphized the role of the reflector.  A triadic approach also understands ideological interaction to be circular but not symmetrical.  Alongside the hailer and the hailed stands the witness.  Or, in terms of the transmission schema:  emitter, receiver and confirmer.  Of course, the confirmer may assume the interrogative of interpellation ­ a who's there in reply to a knock.

   2.22 

   2.23 

Althusser implies that if an answer can take the form of a question then a response can be a call.  The premise conflates form and function.  It does invite considerations beyond the hailed/hailer dyad.  If the response to one is a call to another then social reproduction can be examined according to the workings of split address and multiple interpellation.  As a modelling system, an ISA creates an interaction that is designed to be overheard or observed.  Each hailer-hailed dyad calls out to another potential subject.  Bilateral questioning delays final confirmation of the specular dyad.  Indeed the movement towards dyad formation is highly sensitive to disruptive questions and so ideology as a language game is aimed at the control of questions.  Of course, some ideologies would construe the prolongation of bilateral questioning as worthy of imitation.  Again control of questions is the key.

   2.23 

   2.24 

Interpellation, especially in this first example, hinges upon interrogation.  The play of sensory modalities is posed as a problem in verification.  The second modality confirms the findings of the first.  Visual recognition corroborates aural recognition.  The order from hearing to sight in this example recapitulates at the local level the sweep from aural to visual that marks the global structure of the essay.  Unlike the other examples, however, an exchange of questions is central to the door knocking narrative.  The knock indicates the desire to know if any one is there.  The counter question demands to know who is asking.

   2.24 

   2.25 

The counter question as answer is a confirmation.  As question, it is also an interpellation.  It is a troubling element for Althusser.  Counter questions complicate the completion of the ritual of recognition.

   2.25 

   2.26 

In Althusser's examples, questions provoke narrative delay.  They add peripetia to the game of anagnoresis.  Thus they complicate the phenomenon of recognition.  As exchanges between subjects, all questions occupy ideological space but some shape it, some crease it, so that recognition in a particular ideology cedes to recognition between ideologies.  The specular structure favoured by Althusser collapses ideology's interpellation of a subject into its interpellation of its subject.  As a consequence, Althusser conceives of interpellation less as a type of interrogation or a form of invitation than as recognition, less the projection of an expectation than its fulfilment.

   2.26 

   2.27 

The link between closure and sight is evident in each of his examples.  The narrative of the knock achieves closure upon visual contact, more precisely face-to-face positioning once the door is opened.  The second example culminates in mutual recognition expressed by the hand shake greeting.  The third hinges on the accomplishment of the one hundred and eighty degree turn to face the source of a hailing- from-behind.  In these two as in the first example, the final response is organized around the hegemony of sight.

   2.27 

   2.28 

The articulation between closure and sight stems from the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis.  As Althusser mobilizes such concepts as the mirror stage and the Imaginary, he also imports a particular figuration of the parameters of familial ideology:

Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected.  Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the "sentiments", i.e. the forms of family ideology (paternal/maternal/conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected:  it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. (Lenin and Philosophy 164)

To set up a relation of reflection to a subject, ideology grasps a body.  Interpellation is a species of nomination aimed at recognition.  In short, ideology seizes and names.  It creates a relation of belonging (n3).   In this drama, to bestow a name is to lay a claim.  The paradigm case is the fatherly appropriation of children.

   2.28