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Rethinking Marxism: A
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Talking Back: Monstrosity,
Mundanity, and Cynicism in
Television Talk Shows
Rebecca Kukla
Published online: 07 Dec 2010.
To cite this article: Rebecca Kukla (2002) Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity,
and Cynicism in Television Talk Shows, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of
Economics, Culture & Society, 14:1, 67-96, DOI: 10.1080/089356902101242062
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Talking Back 67 RETHINKING MARXISM Volume 14, Number 1 (Spring 2002)
Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity, and
Cynicism in Television Talk Shows
Rebecca Kukla
Fertile grounds for theoretical inquiry can be found in the oddest corners. Contempo-
rary television programming provides viewers with several talk shows of the grotesque,
as I will call them, in which the aim of each episode is to put some monstrous human
phenomenon on display with the help of a host and a participating studio audience. In
this paper I will try to support the unlikely claim that these talk shows, which include
The Jerry Springer Show and Sally Jesse Raphael (among others), provide remark-
ably fruitful foci for theoretical attention. My plan is to give a reading of the ideologi-
cal structure of talk shows of the grotesque. In particular, my interest lies in a relatively
recent strand of ideological theory that has treated questions concerning the nature and
reproduction of ideology as serious ontological questions: questions that go to the heart
of our philosophical understanding of subjectivity, autonomy, and the metaphysics of
belief and other intentional attitudes. Here I take the work of Louis Althusser, Judith
Butler, and Slavoj iek as paradigmatic and seminal representatives of this type of
theorizing. My eye, in this paper, will be turned toward showing how the contempo-
rary talk show of the grotesque provides us with a case study through which we can
productively interrogate this new theoretical turn in our understanding of ideology.
After spending a substantial amount of time laying down some theoretical ground-
work, during which I take a selective and usurious tour through recent theories of
ideology, performativity, and the constitution of subjectivity, I will analyze the talk
show phenomenon by dividing it into four levels of participatory activity: those of
the host, the guests, the studio audience, and the television audience. I will argue
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68 Kukla
that each of these levels is sustained by interestingly different (and increasingly com-
plicated) ideological structures. I will try to reveal how talk shows of the grotesque,
crude as they seem, serve as complex, interesting, and effective media for constitut-
ing the contours of the identities of their participants and inducting these participants
into coherent social positions. The relationship between the talk show and the mem-
bers of its television audienceparticularly those members who do not take the show
seriouslywill prove to be of special social importance and philosophical interest. I
will end by using my analysis of this relationship to suggest a metaphysical account
and a social critique of cynicism, taken as a distinctive and currently popular (and
ultimately, I will claim, self-undermining) subjective and pragmatic stance toward
the events and spectacles making up the social world.
Ideology
When I speak of ideology, I do not intend to refer to just any old set of politi-
cally perpetrated ideas. Rather, distilling an understanding of ideology from the
writings of Marx and of various theorists who are more or less direct descendants
of Marx, I take ideologies to be systems of ideas that function to culturally inscribe
a naturalized understanding of some social phenomenon that actually has its ori-
gins in a history of interests, human actions, and contingent social conditions. In
other words, ideology masks this contingent social history, and it does so by giv-
ing the phenomenon in question the status of a natural or given facta fixed fea-
ture of our metaphysical landscape rather than a historical product subject to nor-
mative critique. Most important, ideology naturalizes the way that people or groups
of people are socially positioned as subjects of various norms and possessors of
normatively defined identities. Ideologies may either explicitly assert that some
social phenomenon is natural or originless or they may somehow deflect attention
away from the possibility of interrogating its origins, but in either case they give
the phenomenon the status of something always already in place, hence hardened
into a natural fact before it ever has the chance to be questioned. Classic Marxist
examples include ideologies that position poor people as simply lazy or stupid by
blood, or those that portray capitalist economic policies that benefit the ruling class
as codifying the universal, metaphysically fixed laws of human freedom and mo-
rality, or those that present commodities as possessing natural, intrinsic values rather
than values dictated by labor and market forces.
1
Trendier examples include ide-
ologies that root socially enforced gender traits in hormonal, sociobiological,
2
or
anatomical differences between the sexes. The science of phrenology, which sought
deterministic markers of personality in the structure of the human skull, was ideo-
1. Or, as countless jewelry marketers will tell you, diamonds are forever.
2. In fact, the very term sociobiology at least insinuates an ideological agenda, in my sense of ideo-
logical, in suggesting that the project at hand is to attempt reductions or explanations of social phe-
nomena in biological terms. Indeed, most of the paradigmatic work in sociobiology has pursued such
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Talking Back 69
logical to the core.
3
Contemporary social theorist Slavoj iek describes this ideo-
logical trope as involving a fetishistic inversion of reality (1989, 13). By oblit-
erating the question of the origin of a social phenomenon, we in effect take it out
of the hands of contingent, human-made history, and place it in the realm of the
originless natural order immune from critical interrogation.
4
For Marx (at least, according to one canonical reading), ideology was made up of
ideas and those ideas were, in keeping with the modern philosophical tradition, ethe-
real inhabitants of the inner theater of the mind, ontologically distinct from the ma-
terial world that they represented or misrepresented.
5
Marxs ruling class spread ide-
ology by feeding symbolic representations to the people who, as a result, had false
beliefsin the classical sense of conscious or ready-to-be-conscious introspectable
thoughtsabout why they had the social identity that they did. Hence, according to
the bare-bones, classical Marxist picture, if we could strip away this false conscious-
ness and reveal the real, underlying material relations that it veiled, then we would
lay bare the need for social critique and make revolution possible or even, perhaps,
necessary.
Late-twentieth-century philosophers have generally amended this Marxist under-
standing of ideology in at least two, interdependent ways. On the one hand, they have
rejected the equation of ideas with consciously entertained, nonmaterial thoughts.
Louis Althusser, whose seminal essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
(1971) radically altered contemporary ideological theory, took ideas as often built
into practices and as having a concrete life within cultural institutions, whether or
not any individuals explicitly or consciously entertained them. For instance, when I
use physical money, I practice the idea that money has intrinsic value; my commit-
ment to this idea is a transcendental condition of my coherent use of money, regard-
less of whether I have explicit thoughts about the ontology of money. Likewise, the
practice of voting requires a certain type of subject: one that is individuated through
projects. Obviously, and importantly, identifying such projects as ideological leaves quite open the
question of the scientific worth of the projects and the scientific validity of their findings. Although
my suspicion of sociobiology runs deep, the identification of sociobiology as an ideological discipline
does not imply that all its claims are false. As will become clear, it is central to my understanding of
ideology that ideologically constituted and motivated claims are often true claims, although they al-
ways include an element of misrepresentation. To call a discipline ideological is to make a claim about
its discursive structure, not about its accuracy.
3. See Hegels brilliant analysis of the ontology of phrenology in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977,
185210).
4. Thus did Antigone fail to be able to have a reflective relation to the familial traditions of her culture
for, in her view, as she put it, these laws are not for now or for yesterday, they are alive forever, and
no one knows when they were shown to us first (Sophocles 1994, lines 55861). See Hegels reading
of the myth of Antigone (Hegel 1977, 26689).
5. There are lots of reasons to think that Marx himself was neither as unsubtle nor as consistent on the
topic of the ontology of ideology as this one-sentence summary makes it sound. Since my aim is to
look at later theorists who reject such an ontological account, and since many of these theorists (in-
cluding Althusser, in particular) cite Marx as providing such an account before they go on to negate it,
I will not worry here about the ultimate fidelity of this characterization of Marxs position.
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70 Kukla
its actions and intentions, capable of representing its will, and a free and unified ori-
gin of decision and action. By voting, I embody the idea that I am such a subject, no
matter how jadedly I hold consciously to the idea that I am a mere pawn of propa-
ganda. Given that they believe that ideologies are materially manifest in practices
and institutions, these theorists have also rejected the Marxist idea that ideology is a
veil of ideas or representations covering an independent reality, and have instead as-
signed ideology a constitutive role in the production of social reality.
6
Ideology
materially constitutes social relations, and does not merely represent those relations
in a mental arena cut off from the real world. Our treatment of money as inher-
ently valuable gives it real value; our treatment of certain socioeconomic groups
as naturally inferior, institutionalized through stratified educational opportuni-
ties and the like, makes it the case that different groups possess unequal abilities;
and so forth. For both these reasons, recent theorists have rejected the Marxist idea
that all we need to do is see through ideology in order to strip it away from the
underlying reality it masks. Ideology and the fetishistic misrecognitions that make
it up are integral to the material fabric of our social world. iek summarizes: It
is not just a question of seeing things . . . as they really are, of throwing away the
distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot
reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not
simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its
very essence (1989, 28).
Althussers Theory of Interpellation
Althusser believes that subjectivity itself is constituted in and through ideology. In
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, he begins by arguing that among the
material resources that a social order must reproduce in order to maintain itself are
obedient subjects who occupy its normatively defined roles (1971, 132). This is ac-
complished through repressive state apparatuses that coerce subjects using external
force, but also through ideological state apparatuses (such as churches, schools and
families) that work by creating subjects who voluntarily act as they should. Ideologi-
cal practices, for Althusser, produce subjects who are suited by nature to obeying the
norms of the institutions that produce them, and who therefore work all by themselves.
Althusser writes that ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning, by
the category of the subject and its functioning (170). In other words, ideological
practices and institutions are transcendentally dependent upon the existence of cer-
tain types of practicing subjects. Voting, worshipping, and standing trial are all ex-
amples of practices that fairly explicitly require choosing beings who are free cen-
ters of initiative as their practitioners. Furthermore, each such practice makes structural
sense only insofar as it is practiced not just by subjects in general but by subjects
6. Makela (2000) argues that nascent strands of this line of thought can be found in Marxs own writ-
ings, particularly in his critiques of idealism.
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Talking Back 71
whose subjectivity takes a certain determinate, metaphysical form: voting requires
unified, countable subjects who can represent their will, standing trial requires sub-
jects who can be responsible for their actions, worshipping requires subjects who
can have beliefs and adopt attitudes of devotion, and so on. If it turned out that a
being who appeared to be voting or worshipping did not have the appropriate sort of
free subjectivity, we would have to conclude not just that this being only appeared to
be a subject, but also that it only appeared to be engaged in these practices. Thus, the
existence of the right kind of subjects is a precondition for the real existence of ideo-
logical practices.
But this does not yet show that subjects likewise constitutively depend upon ideo-
logical practices. Althusser argues that there are no subjects outside such practices;
this is because the contours of subjectivity and the possible forms that it can take are
given shape by the various practices within which subjectivity has a place and hence
can be disclosed. There is no such thing as intrinsic subjectivity, existing indepen-
dently of any of its manifestations in practices that make a place for the acting sub-
ject, and ideological practices just are the practices that build such a place into their
structure. To be a choosing subject is to engage in practices that require choosers,
such as voting. To be a desiring subject is to engage in practices that require subjects
of desire, such as shopping. To be a self-reflexive subject is to engage in practices
that require self-recognition, such as responding to ones name. Thus on Althussers
view, subjects and ideological practices are, as it were, made for each other: The
category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has
the function (which defines it) constituting concrete individuals as subjects (171;
emphasis in original). According to Althusser, ideological institutions perpetrate them-
selves over time by at once producing and recruiting their necessary practitioners,
through a process that he names interpellation.
I . . . suggest that ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits subjects
among the individuals . . . or transforms the individuals into subjects . . . by that very
precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imag-
ined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday . . . hailing: Hey, you there!
The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the
hail was really addressed to him, and that it was really him who was hailed (and not
someone else). (174)
We can tease out the structure of this rather remarkable constitutive moment of
conversion as follows. A subject is interpellated by being recognized by a repre-
sentative of social authority as the possessor of a particular identityfor instance,
by being named. This interpellation, or hail, has the following peculiar structure. It
presents itself as a recognition of an already given factnamely, that a specific de-
terminate subject, already bound by specific norms, is there to be hailed. But at the
same time it functions as a demand that the subject acknowledge appropriately that
she has been hailed. In being called by a name, the interpellated subject is called
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72 Kukla
upon to respond to that name. In turn, in recognizing that she really is the one being
hailed, hence that she has been called upon to respond appropriately to the hail and
its demand, she recognizes and accepts the authority of the norms defining her sub-
ject position and their binding force upon her. When my colleague calls out hello
to me in the hallway, my recognition that it is really me to whom he is speaking is
not just a matter of my recognizing the descriptive content of his claim; it is part and
parcel of my recognition that I am the one who is being called upon to respond and
uphold the norms of greeting behavior. If I obviously hear him say hello but do not
respond, then I am acting as though it was not me who was being spoken to. The
point is that my recognition of the hail, and my recognition of the normative demand
it makes on me to act so as to acknowledge the correctness of its recognition of me,
are one and the same thing. Recognizing the hail involves recognizing not just its
presence but its binding force, which is inseparable from taking it as really aimed at
meas making a real claim on me in virtue of having correctly identified me.
7
Inter-
pellation, when it succeeds in grabbing its target, can be a visceral, even an uncom-
fortable experience. When the moderator of a conference panel asks, does anyone
have any questions? or when the leader of a support group asks, who would like to
share their experiences with the group? the feeling that it is really me who ought to
respond to the hail may become a tangible weight.
Althusser claims that it is through responding to these demands and countless others
like them, and thereby recognizing the appropriateness of the recognitions that they
represent, that a subject becomes the particular, normatively articulated subject that
she is. Notice how interpellation thus relies upon misrecognition. Becoming a sub-
ject involves the repetition of a structure whereby I become bound by norms in the
proper way by being recognized and recognizing myself as already having been thus
bound. I must recognize that it is really me who is being hailed and that I must re-
spond accordingly as if I were already, independently, the subject I am recognized
as being. In so doing, I do just the kind of thing that makes it so that I am this subject
which, in turn, brings about the appropriateness of the hail and the correctness of its
identification. Both the interpellators recognition of me and my recognition that I
am being hailed mask a demand that an identification become true in the form of an
acknowledgment that it already is true. My teacher calls out my name and I stick up
my hand and say, here. I thereby recognize her as really having called on me and,
by responding, I implicate myself in the norms of classroom practice. It is through
responding properly in cases like these that I come to be bound by these norms, by
becoming embedded in institutional structures within which I have an identity as a
student and, furthermore, as this particular student. Despite Althussers rather dra-
matic crystallization of the constitutive work of interpellation in a single narrative
moment, in the quotation above, his account becomes plausible only when we no-
tice that most of the vast number of little interpellative moments that make up our
mundane negotiations of the social world are of no special political or subjective
7. The example is a modified version of Althussers (1971, 172) discussion of greetings.
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Talking Back 73
interest, and do next to no constitutive work on their own (though, as we shall see
later, not all interpellations are so harmless or so unassuming). Our identity is not
slammed together in huge pieces through bursts of constitutive misrecognition; rather,
these minor, ideologically structured moments work together slowly to solidify and
contour our normatively defined, socially embedded identities as subjects and agents,
and to help make possible our competent coping with everyday matters.
We thus see how interpellation is ideological, in my sense. It produces and solidi-
fies normatively structured social facts, and gives norms their binding force, by build-
ing in a misrecognition of these facts as already fixed and as having their origins in
the given, natural identities of subjects. For this reason, even while Althusser gives
his account of the constitution of subjects through recruitment into ideology, he
insists at the same time, with an intentional and explicit air of paradox, that indi-
viduals are always-already subjects (176). iek gives a vivid illustration of this
process of constitutive misrecognition.
Being a king is an effect of a network of social relations between a king and his
subjects, butand here is the fetishistic misrecognitionto the participants in this
social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in inverse form: they think that they
are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already, in himself,
outside of the relation to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of being a king
were a natural property of the person of a king. (iek 1989, 25)
It seems clear that, given Althussers account of the constitution of normatively
defined subjectivity through interpellation, the right to interpellate must also be ideo-
logically constituted. Althusser himself does not discuss the constitution of interpel-
lators, using for his examples only already constituted interpellating subjects whose
authority has assumed mythic proportions, such as policemen and God. But upon
reflection we can see that none of us, as private persons, has the social or metaphysi-
cal right to constitute the identity of others idiosyncratically. Rather, we interpellate
as representatives of the already given social order, with the authority that comes
from speaking in its voice. Interpellation is a discursive act with a specific performa-
tive force and, as such, its successful performance requires that it be backed by a
specific sort of authority.
8
Appropriating language from Judith Butler, we can note
that interpellative authority is always citational; that is, our authority to demand that
others conform to our recognition of them is always legitimated by our (at least im-
plicit) citation of some prior authority for which we stand (in) when we interpellate
the authority of the social order, which Althusser mythically figures as his interpel-
lating Subjects, such as God and the Law.
9
When I hail someone, the authority of my
hail and its demand devolves from the norms that bind him being already in place.
8. See Austin (1962) for the seminal discussion of performative speech acts and their necessary con-
text of authority.
9. Butler discusses the role of citation in the constitution of subjects in many works (notably Butler 1990,
1997). The role I am attributing to citation here is inspired by, but quite distinct from, the role that she
attributes to it. I come back to a more directly Butlerian appeal to citationality in the next section.
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74 Kukla
But notice that this authority relies on constitutive misrecognition just as much as
does the response to it since, in representing the authority of the social order, I am
helping to constitute that order and, with it, the authority that I am supposedly al-
ready able to represent. The cited authority is thus constituted in the act of citation.
10
Human individuals are not the only representatives of the social order that can
interpellate: all sorts of objects can have an interpellative voice, in virtue of being
constituted and encountered as authoritative, citational representatives of the nor-
mative social order. I can be interpellated by the bathroom doors in a restaurant, for
instance. I choose to go through the door marked women because I recognize that
it is really me for whom that door is intended. I am properly hailed by that door. In
going through it, I am obeying the rules that go along with being a woman. How-
ever, it is because I do things like obediently going through that door that I am prop-
erly identified as a woman. It is by being, for the most part, an obedient woman that
I succeed in being a woman at all. Or, I might fill out a survey in a magazine, which
asks questions such as, Do you worry about premature wrinkles? My recognition
that this question is really aimed at me and that I must take appropriate action consti-
tutes me as the type of being who has this concern.
In particular instances, I can refuse to respond properly to interpellation. I might
refuse to buy antiwrinkle cream, or I might use the mens room. In doing so, I know
perfectly well what I am really supposed to do. I feel the weight of the normative
claim the bathroom door makes on me, even when I transgress. In fact, there are ritu-
als defining how to be a woman transgressing the rules of bathroom doors. These
involve things like trying to enter unseen, feeling naughty, feeling perhaps even a
little bit disgusted. Isolated transgressions need not affect the basic workings of ide-
ology. These little transgressions must take place against a background of fundamental
obedience because it is only through obedience that I come to occupy a position in
which these norms in fact bind me, so that my transgressions can count as transgres-
sions. Occupying a subject position involves recognizing, through my practices, the
legitimacy of the normative demands that go with that position. Furthermore, I can
be perfectly aware that my interpellation relies upon misrecognition, and yet my
contribution to the process of reproducing ideological institutions and their subjects
will be unaffected so long as I respond appropriately at the level of action. Since
ideological logic is built into the contours of our concrete social world, our appeal to
its structuring myths will continue, for the most part, whether or not their ideologi-
cal status is made explicit.
In fact, the possibility of transgressing interpellated commands, and of failing or
refusing to recognize interpellative calls, seems to be built into the very structure of
interpellated subjectivity rather than being a threat to it. After all, were we directly
and mechanically to identify with the normative position into which we are interpel-
lated, then we would not be functioning as subjects bound by a normative position at
10. See Kukla (2002) for a detailed discussion of this logic of the retroactive constitution of
authority.
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Talking Back 75
all; we would not be the free choosers who are the necessary constitutive category of
ideology. We cannot engage in normative social practices unless we are the kind of
beings who can recognize the claims of norms and be bound by them. But we can
only do this if, metaphysically speaking, we are the kinds of beings who are capable
of disobedience and transgression since the binding force of norms (unlike the force
of gravity or other causal forces) makes sense only in the face of a possible gap be-
tween what we choose to do and what we ought to do. Hence, some form of autonomy
is a minimal transcendental condition for being the sort of being who can have a
normatively defined identity. Part of how interpellation works is by recognizing us
as already being a subject who stands at a free distance from its call and therefore
can meaningfully be obligated by it. iek argues that it is the subject who stands
behind and is distinct from its interpellations who is the product of the constitutive
misrecognitions of ideology, when they are a success: Therein rides the crucial di-
mension of the ideological effet-sujet: not in my direct identification with the sym-
bolic mandate (such direct identification is potentially psychotic, it makes me into a
depthless mechanical doll, not into a living person) but in my experience of the
kernel of my Self as something which pre-exists the process of interpellation, as
subjectivity prior to interpellation (1996, 166).
Althusser gives us a picture in which it is not only the particular inflections or
determinations of subjectivity that are produced by ideological institutions through
interpellation. On his account, subjectivity itself, in the sense of autonomous agency
bindable by normative prescriptions which it can in principle transgress, is an ideo-
logical product. iek points out that one of the distinctive features of Althussers
account of subjectivityas opposed, for instance, to Lacansis that for Althusser,
this subject who is more than just its interpellated identity is itself a crucial, or even
the crucial, product of ideology itself. For Lacan, subjectivity exists in the space
opened up by the failure of any call fully to recognize and identify a subject, and in
the subjects corresponding failure to recognize itself in and identify with this call; it
is the residue that resists being assimilated by the recognition of the Other which is
the seat of Lacanian subjectivity. But Althusser turns this ontological order of de-
pendence around on Lacan, arguing that this residue is itself a product of the suc-
cessful interpellative process.
11
We can be recognized and interpellated as autono-
mous subjects only insofar as the ritualized norms that define our subjectivity really
do bind us. To the extent, therefore, that ideological practices such as voting or stand-
ing trial recognize us as natural centers of autonomous action, who can be bound
by norms in virtue of our prior, metaphysically given free will, these practices again
misrecognize us. The free subject who predates her own interpellation serves as an
essential, fictional placeholder within social reality (Althusser 1971, 182). This fic-
tion cannot be a mere theoretical story, but must itself be lived out at the concrete
level of practice and experience in order for ideology to count as having success-
11. This helpful formulation of the distinction between Althusser and Lacan, which was drawn to my
attention by Yahya Madra, is culled from iek (1996).
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76 Kukla
fully constituted the subjects it needs. Autonomous subjects are a real part of the
necessary fabric of our social world and, in order to sustain autonomous subjectiv-
ity, our practices will continue to build in this constitutive misrecognition.
Butlers Theory of Performative Identity
Following upon Althussers work, Judith Butler has, in effect, asked what it is to
have an identity into which we are recruited via interpellation. Her answer is that we
occupy a normatively defined subject position by performing the identity defined by
the relevant norms. We can identify two senses in which Butler intends expressions
of identity to be performative, neither of which involves pretending to have an iden-
tity. The first sense is, by Butlers own description, closely akin to the sense of
performativity of interest to speech-act theorists (1993, 13). In performing our iden-
tity we in fact constitute it, and it is because our performances are responses to au-
thoritative interpellations that they count as constitutive and not as mere playacting.
12
Second, these expressions are performative in that they are public citations, and this
citationality itself has two faces. On the one hand, these performances get their pub-
lic meaning from a supposed reference to some originating personality: they are pre-
sented as performances of this personality, the way a performance may be of an origi-
nal play or musical composition. The various things I do that express my gender, for
instance, are citational performances in that they count socially as expressions of
gender in virtue of some mythical, onginary gender-character that they act out. Just
as I argued above that interpellative authority is itself citational, Butler argues that a
performance that responds to interpellation succeeds as a performance of an identity
in virtue of its implicit citation of a preexisting identity. On the other hand, the ideo-
logical character of identity shows up exactly here; there is, for Butler, no such thing
as originary gender identity, for example, except as the implied reference of these
performative expressions, so this implicit origin is just our friend the misrecognized
natural fetish of ideology. Appropriating a familiar line from Nietzsche, Butler writes,
There is no gender identity behind expressions of gender; gender is performatively
constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results (Butler 1990, 25).
What is directly cited in performances of gender are in fact other gender performances,
and these performances collectively entrench and constitute what it is to have a gen-
der identity. In a sense, all gendered behaviour is a matter of gender parody, of play-
ing at having a genderthe way we do as children when we first raid our mothers
makeup boxesbut this play is in deadly earnest much of the time, and there is no
separate, nonperformative self behind the play.
Butler concludes that the identities that are interpellated into existence (for in-
stance, my identity as a woman, as a professor, as Andr Kuklas daughter, or as a
12. Just as the performative speech act, I do, uttered during a wedding ceremony, constitutes the
marriage (rather than just being a case of playacting at getting married) only in virtue of being a re-
sponse to a question uttered by someone with the authority to many peopleto interpellate people as
subjects bindable by norms within a ritualized marriage ceremony.
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Talking Back 77
dog lover) are concretely implemented and sustained through what she calls the styl-
ized repetition of acts. These stylizations are performances that get their meaning
through their ritualized citation of past performances. Such performances are, con-
trary to the ideology that sustains them, not stylizations of some true, underlying,
less polished or more private identity. For instance, the effect of gender is produced
through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane
way in which bodily gestures, movements and styles of various kinds constitute the
illusion of an abiding gendered self (140). Butler is no ironic antirealist about iden-
tity; on the contrary, her account places identity firmly within the concrete, material
realm, at the level of mundane bodily comportment. However, she gives an account
in which identity is always based on ideological misrecognition insofar as it is con-
cretely manifest ritualized behaviors that present themselves as grounded in mythi-
cal originary, substantial features of the self, to which these rituals give stylized,
performative expression.
13
With these theories of the ideological constitution of subjectivity on the table, we
can now turn to the ideological structure and functioning of contemporary talk shows
of the grotesque. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, these shows involve
four distinct levels of participants: the host, the guests, the studio audience, and the
home television audience. I will take up each of these levels in turn.
The Host
The host is constituted by the show through traditional, if unusually spectacular
and explicit, interpellative means. The show names the host through its title, which
is invariably homonymous (so we have Jerry Springer, Phil Donohue, etc.). Each
show supposedly gets its distinct flavor and interest from the personality of the host.
Thus, the hosts responsibility is to do a good job of performing that personality for
the cameraof literally making a show of his identity. However, a sustaining myth
of the show is that this personality really does belong to the host, independent of the
show, and that the character of the show is a manifestation of this personality.
This is a neat example of interpellation because the entire production of the show,
together with everyones recognition of the hosts persona, serves as an ongoing,
large-scale interpellative hail. The staging of the show calls upon the host to behave
in accordance with her personality, and the entire social institution creates, concret-
izes, and stylizes this personality. Whether or not the host herself allows her on-air
persona to become confused with or constitutive of her private personality, the show
enforces the mythical, ritual nonseparateness of these identities. While both talk show
13. As iek puts it, Althussers process without a subject should be rephrased as a process with-
out a substance, as a process not constrained by any underlying substantial unity (1996, 128). ieks
point is that for Althusser (and, one might at least as accurately add, for Butler), the enactment of sub-
jectivity is not a deception or a fiction, but the grounding of this enactment in some substance outside
the socially and ideologically embedded acts themselves is a constitutive misrecognition.
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hosts and regular actors perform roles in staged, public arenas, for the host (unlike for
the actor), this is socially represented as a stylized performance of her own self, and a
symbolic point of the performance is to obliterate any distinction between self and tele-
vision persona.
14
In fact, we all know that this performed personality does not get its
robust determinacy from its origin in the hosts independent nature but is constituted
by the social institution of the show, which far outstrips the host as a private individual.
These are fetishized subjects sustained by the ritual repetition of stylized, citational
performances of their own personal tropes. Oprah looks caring and nurturing, Phil gets
all excited and runs around with his microphone, Jerry screams at everyone to shut up,
Judge Judy makes sarcastic quips, and so forth. Interestingly, this structure has recently
been doubled in the case of Jerry Springer, who is now starring in movies in which he
plays himself, where the self he plays is his talk show host persona.
The Guests
Like the host, the talk show guests are interpellated by the entire institution of the
show, and are called upon to make a show of their identity through explicit, styl-
ized performances. But while the host is interpellated as a unique individual, the guests
are interpellated as instances of some identity type or subject position. Accordingly,
they are not primarily hailed with their proper names, but with descriptions that they
are called upon to recognize and appropriately acknowledge as belonging to them.
15
The types that they are called upon to exemplify performatively are not your every-
day gender identities, ethnic identities, and the like, but rather, monstrous, grotesque
types, such as obese bisexual men, women who are attracted to convicted murder-
ers, secret bigamists, and the like.
In keeping with an Althusserian picture, these subjects are quite literally recruited
through direct, second-person interpellations. The host will recruit future guests at
the end of each episode by looking out at the television audience and asking, Do
you like to sleep with convicted murderers? If so, call this number. Or, a printed
message before each commercial break will ask, Are you an obese, bisexual man
and proud of it? If so, we want to hear from you! The interpellative character of
14. Of course, talk show hosts are not unique in this regard. They share this status with news anchors
and other media personalities who perform a persona, where that persona is notor at least is not
explicitlyfictional. At most, talk show hosts provide a particularly intense and pointed example of
this phenomenon of the stylized performance of the self, because their shows are explicitly devoted to
the spectacularization of their personalities; they are in this way in a slightly different position from
news anchors, and perhaps in the same position as some stand-up comics. I owe thanks to an anony-
mous referee for pointing out the need for this clarification.
15. This is nicely symbolized by the fact that these shows often make a point of telling us that the
guests, unlike the host, are using fake names for the purposes of the show. This obscuring of the guests
proper names seems pointless from the point of view of confidentiality since they are, after all, appear-
ing on national television. But it does serve to emphasize the point that as guests, their identity as in-
dividuals is less important than their identity as instances of a type.
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Talking Back 79
these calls is reinforced by the use of the second person, which is designed to pro-
duce the needed thats really me being called response. By being called onto the
show as a monstrous guest, these subjects are now called upon to stylize and unify
this feature of themselves into a performable identity that can be ritually reenacted
for the camera. The proud obese bisexuals will show up with the dress and gestures
and attitudes appropriate to proud obese bisexuals because they know that it is their
job, as guests, to display this identity.
One of the reasons the naming of these monstrous types provides a nice example
of interpellation at work is that, in virtue of their ad hoc character, we get to see these
identities called into being and ideologically inscribed as unified aspects of the self
for the first time. It is unlikely that prior to this interpellation, the people success-
fully hailed would have thought or acted as though this descriptive hail named some
specific, stable feature of their identity. When a subject has the really me response
to one of these hails, he often recognizes himself as the occupant of a particular, well-
defined subject position, and hence as possessor of a distinct personality trait, for the
first time. This really me response constitutively misrecognizes this trait as a pre-
existing feature that is being described or represented rather than being called into
existence by being named. Most of the mundane interpellations of everyday life, which
reinforce subject positions based on gender, class, and other well-entrenched catego-
ries, play such a slight, incremental role in actually constituting identity that it is hard
to see the concrete work that interpellation is doing. In these everyday cases (that is,
the kind of cases I used earlier to introduce the workings of interpellation), the ideo-
logical story according to which our interpellations in fact recognize personality types
that are given, natural kinds can be much more tempting. In the monstrous case,
however, we can watch the creation of a position for identification, and its transla-
tion into a stylized performance, unfold before our eyes.
Once on the show, the guests, like the host, are called upon to act out who they
really are. They are interpellated directly by questions from the host and the audi-
ence which call upon them to make explicit the nature of their identity. An interesting
feature of this interpellative situation is that everyone knows that the guests perfor-
mances of their personas are staged: they are openly stylized, exaggerated, streamlined,
and controlled by direction. It is impossible to sustain the idea that we are supposed to
take what we see on stage as a slice of real life when, for instance, the obese bisexual
men all show up naked except for pink leather loincloths designed to accentuate their
heft. Similarly, we cannot ignore the performative aspects of what we see when the
guests make a point of making public, for our viewing pleasure, exactly those expres-
sions of their identity that are socially defined as private, such as secret lovers and
unusual sexual preferences. Hence, the talk show stage is pointedly marked as a stage
and not as an extension of everyday space. Yet, at the same time, the mythos of the
show is that the audience is gaining an authentic understanding of this monstrous type
by watching the show. We are able to uphold this myth of authenticity in the face of
the blatantly staged nature of the guests appearances because the show presents itself
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as having directed the guests to act like who they really, already are. Since we already
know who these people really are, their authenticity does not turn on their responding
freely, but on their responding correctly. In other words, what makes the performances
authentic is not that they are spontaneous or unstaged, but that the rituals performed
on stage cite the purported real identity that is recognized as their origin and their cri-
terion of adequacy. The shows often make use of several devices that reinforce for us
the idea that there is a natural identity from which these stylized performances draw
their citational authority. For instance, many shows close with an interview with an
expert on this particular form of monstrosity, whose degrees and books lend author-
ity to the interpellation we are witnessing.
16
The job of the guests is to give responses proper to their subject position, and this
project provides much of the narrative energy of the show. Often, we can watch a
guest struggling to figure out this correct response, egged on and helped out by the
host and the audience. When she gives an incorrect response, she is mythically
positioned by the show as confused, as not sufficiently self-reflective. These incor-
rect responses, though spontaneously produced, are clearly marked as less authen-
tic. When the guest finally gives correct responses, she is taken as having spoken
freely and reflectively. Let us look at an example of such an interpellative interchange,
taken nearly verbatim from a 1998 episode of the Jerry Springer Show, whose topic
was teenage moms who abuse drugs while pregnant.
17
16. I originally wrote this paper before the airing of the Survivor television shows but, at this point, it
seems I must include some mention of it, given both its phenomenal success and its vivid exemplifica-
tion of several of the points I am making in this section. First of all, I should say that I dont find Sur-
vivor nearly so interesting a cultural phenomenon as are talk shows of the grotesque, precisely because
they invoke only two of my interpellative levels (the guests and the television audience) rather than
four. But notice: The players on Survivor are explicitly introduced as first and foremost instances of
identity types that will together make for an eclectic mix (the retired policewoman, the preppie law
student, etc.). Furthermore, at least as vividly as in talk shows, the location of the show is at one and
the same time marked as a private spacethe whole point is that the participants are stranded in a
deserted location (somehow despite the television cameras)and as a public stage, as the partici-
pants give interviews to the camera and the show is marketed as a spectacular contest designed to en-
courage the vicarious participation of the television audience. Most important, Survivor gets heavy
symbolic mileage from its appeals to the distinctively ideological notion of authenticity that I have
described here. The show claims to be different from others precisely in that we are watching real
people engaged in real-life struggles, and the outcome of the show is very much billed as having
been determined by the real identities of the participants; the publicity for the show, for instance,
makes repeated appeals to human nature taking its course and to the laying bare of the true natures
of the participants. What could be more archetypal than the desert island cut off from civilization as
the site where authentic underlying human nature will reveal itself? At the same time, it is com-
pletely explicit that participants are playing a game with preestablished rules. Even better, they are
asked to create special (tribal) identities for the purposes of the show, and a large part of the appeal
of the show (apparently) lies in watching these new, ad hoc identities solidify and become contentful
over time. The mark of authentic participation is not that participants act spontaneously or free
from interference and directionfor everyone knows explicitly that the circumstances the partici-
pants face and the activities in which they engage have been carefully arranged in advancebut rather
that their actions ritually cite the audiences expectations of what real human nature looks like when
it shows itself.
17. This transcription is close to verbatim, though I have edited it.
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Talking Back 81
JERRY: Now why do you do drugs when you know its bad for the baby?
DRUGGIE MOM: Um, I dont know, I enjoy it, its nobody elses business. [Note
that this is already an interpellated response, though the wrong oneand
a bizarre one, given that she has volunteered to appear on this show! This
appeal to privacy and individualism is sanctioned by our culture, and is a
good example of a stylized repetition demanded by ideology and generally
produced on cue rather than springing from real personal reflection. But
here, we will see that as a monster, Druggie Mom is not given the right to
avail herself of this rather universal response. ]
JERRY: Now come on, Sarah. Do you really enjoy it? Isnt it making you mis-
erable how drugs are running your life?
DRUGGIE MOM: Well, um, I guess so . . .
JERRY: So why do you do it? Doesnt your baby have the right to a better life?
[ This appeal to babies rights is an interpellative cue with great normative
weight, which leaves little social room for disagreement. Mom takes up the
cue . . .]
DRUGGIE MOM: Yes, I want my baby to have a good life. I want that just like
any mother. (Starts crying) [She has now responded to a more specific in-
terpellation, recognizing herself not just as a generically free, private sub-
ject but as a mother. But she still hasnt quite landed upon the proper, spe-
cific response that will satisfy her interpellators. ]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to say that the question here isnt whether Sarah
loves her baby; its whether she loves herself. (Wild applause) [This rea-
soning, offered by an Outspoken Black Woman, really comes out of nowhere
but, especially when followed by the approving applause, it serves as the
interpellative cue Sarah needs. ]
DRUGGIE MOM: Yes, I think the problem is I have no self-respect. If I respected
myself I wouldnt do this to my baby. (Cries hysterically) [Mom has finally
hit upon the proper trope that she is expected to employ: as a drug user and
a mom, who of course puts her baby above all else to the extent she can, she
must not respect herself. ]
JERRY: Sarah, thats a really important realization you just had. I hope that now
that you have been honest with yourself, you can recognize your problem
for what it is and get the help you need. We have experts here that will talk
to you after the show about how to get help. [Jerry now lets her know that
she has given the proper response at last. But at the same time he does so
by positioning it as the most authentic response, the one that stems from
Druggie Moms real self. He reinforces this positioning by offering the
experts who will give her self-description the institutional stamp of author-
ity it deserves. ]
Here we witness the creation of a self-understanding, where that creation man-
ages to grab hold precisely through being presented as the uncovering of an already
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given fact. We are all experts at recognizing the proper responses to interpellation
that count as the revelations of peoples real selves and, when we see this real self
revealed, we can mark it as authentic, regardless of how theatrical the circumstances
of its revelation happened to be.
The Studio Audience
The studio audience is an essential part of the institution of the talk show. Audience
members are always called upon to ask the guests questions and to express their opin-
ions about what is happening on the stage. On the surface, the studio audience is lured
by the fun of participating in the interpellation of the guests. It is not surprising that
this is alluring since, as we saw, the right to interpellate is earned along with a position
of some authority and constitutive power. But, I will argue, talk shows also turn this
interpellative situation on its head and hail the audience members so that their partici-
pation turns out to constitute their own recruitment into a subject position.
In contrast to the monstrous guests, the studio audience members function as rep-
resentatives of the everydaythat is, as examples of normal subjects who negotiate
the mundane, normatively contoured world in typical, nongrotesque, morally and
practically competent ways, and whose voices and acts derive authority from their
status as such examples.
18
Their position as possessors of normal identities gives
them the power to interpellate, but they take this position up only by being interpel-
lated into it. The questions and comments that they put forward are every bit as norm-
governed and stylized as are the actions of the guests, and we can just as clearly watch
their self-satisfaction when they give the correct response demanded by the ideo-
logical structure of the situation. With absolute regularity, the comments from the
audience take the form of socially sanctioned platitudes appropriate to the phenom-
enon on stage. The ideological entrenchment of the audience members social position
is ensured through a by now familiar trope: in terms of the mythos of the show, the
whole point of having the audience members participate is so that they may speak
their minds freely. These edifying, ritualized responses, called forth from the audiences
position as representatives of the everyday, are neatly misrecognized by the symbolic
structure of the spectacle as having their origin in the independent personalities of
the subjects giving them. It is in the very response to being called upon to perform
the role of free, uninhibited subjects expressing their real opinions that the studio
audience members are installed as normal everyday subjects. Within this broad iden-
tity shared by the audience there is some further articulation; regular characters in-
clude Druggie Moms interpellator, Outspoken Black Woman, and she is normally
joined by Old-Fashioned Housewife, Chauvinistic White Guy, Flamboyant Sexually
Active Girl, and a host of others. These various subject types are established and
18. Though doing so introduces much more theoretical baggage than I need for the purposes of this
paper, it would be not inappropriate and perhaps helpful to think of such representatives as speaking in
the voice of Heideggers Das Man, or the They.
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Talking Back 83
recognized via the differences in their representatives responses to the monstrous
phenomenon at hand, but they all share the important property of being decidedly
normal and unmonstrous. One can tell much about which identities are considered
maximally normalized, acceptable variants on Everyday Subjectivity by attending
to the character categories represented in these audiences. Through its contributions,
the studio audience edifies and enforces the normalization of the everyday.
The contributions of the studio audience are not as explicitly staged as are those of
the host and the guests but, because of the power and specificity of the ideological forces
that hail the audience, the producers of the show can stage-manage the audiences pat
comments and questions with enough confidence to plan their staging of the host/guest
interactions around them. The staging of the audiences performance is arranged only
in concert with the entire set of normalizing ideological institutions that make up every-
day life. Any clean distinction between staged performance and so-called real life be-
comes difficult here, as there is no longer an explicit gap (as there was in the case of
the loincloth-draped fat men) between how the performing subjects act during this staged
spectacle and how they would act if left to their own devices.
19
It is through being called
upon to act out what they, as individuals, really think that the members of the studio
audience make a spectacle of their normalized identities.
The interpellative process through which audience members are hailed as every-
day subjects does not occur through direct identification and self-recognition, but
through the active negation of monstrous forms of subjectivity. In recognizing one-
self as a potential audience member, one responds to being hailed as an everyday,
normal subject who can view and comment upon monstrosity from the outside. It is
the gap between the audience and the guests which is doing the interpellative work
on the audience here. The audience members perform their normalcy by responding
to the monstrous as degenerate, hard to understand, and in need of expert repair. By
identifying obese bisexuals, druggie moms, and other monstrous exaggerations and
deformations of normalcy as having unnatural bodies, desires, or emotions, the
audiences and experts use the monsters as tools for solidifying and reentrenching
the naturalization and fetishization of the everyday. The monstrous guests do not serve,
for the audience, as mirrors for self-identification, but as tools for defining the every-
day through exploring and responding to its limits. The ideological effectiveness of
the gap between the normal and the monstrous is aided by the positioning of the nor-
mal subjects as interpellators rather than mere interpellatees. Audience members are
expected busily to interpellate the guests as monstrous. To do so is to respond appro-
priately to their identification as audience members but, in doing so, they recognize
themselves as everyday subjects whose opinions have the authority of the normal
behind them. This is a powerful strategy because, on the one hand, it is alluring for
19. This phenomenon has an important historical resonance: Rousseau argued that the best way to create
free citizens was for a clever legislator to break down the distinction between theatrical performances
and real life through spectacles of the everyday such as festivals and balls (Rousseau 1960), and to use
these for the purposes of secretly arranging subjects social world so that they acted as the legislator
needed them to of their own accord (Rousseau 1987, chaps. 2.7 and 2.9).
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84 Kukla
audience members to play the authority figures in this interpellative game, and, on
the other, while audience members are engaged in a task that appears to concern only
the identities of other people, their attention is diverted from the ideological nature
of the position that they themselves are called upon to take up. Thus, institutional-
ized normalcy uses the monstrous as a conduit for its own propagation.
Althusser does not discuss such negative interpellations, which demand that we
recognize ourselves through the act of excluding a monstrous possibility. His exclu-
sive attention to the constitutive role of positive self-recognitionthe thats really
me responsehas led his critics to try to find a theoretical place for rejected and
failed identifications. For instance, Lacan and iek both argue that our failure fully
to recognize ourselves in interpellative calls is an essential feature of our subjectiv-
ity. However, while the failure to identify with an interpellated subject position with
which we were supposed to identify may indeed play a crucial role in a full picture
of the constitution of subjectivity, the response to monstrosity that we see in talk shows
provides an example of a very different type of negative identification. Here, it is in
distancing ourselves from the grotesque rather than identifying with it that we suc-
ceed in solidifying our identity with our interpellated subject position. The particu-
lar, positive shape of the gap between the monsters that we name and our own sub-
ject position plays a contentful role in recruiting us into that subject position.
Butler has a place for negative identification which is more similar to the phe-
nomenon I am describing here. She emphasizes that the construction of [social iden-
tities such as] gender operates through exclusionary means . . . through a set of fore-
closures . . . that are . . . refused the possibility of cultural articulation (1993, 8).
Following Foucault, Butler argues that any positive normative identity is formulated
and enforced through the creation of a monstrous outside whose rejection and
mystification becomes part of the ritual of identity performance, as we police and
explore the boundaries of normal identity (126). Hence Butler, unlike Althusser,
treats the thats not me response as just as capable of interpellative work as is the
thats really me response. However, I think that the structure of negative interpel-
lation in talk shows cannot be properly captured if we attend only to its elements of
exclusion, rejection, and refusal. In these shows, while the monstrous guests are treated
as unnatural outsiders in comparison with the everyday audience, they are certainly
not refused the possibility of cultural articulation; on the contrary, the whole show
consists of the guests themselves, the host, and the audience members all busily ar-
ticulating the details of these monstrous identities. What we see here is not mere
negative interpellation, which would work by simply rejecting a possibility, but rather
an instance of a favorite contemporary cultural tradition, suited to our therapeutic
agenamely, articulating the excluded at enormous length. It is no accident that many
of the comments from the audience take the form of proposed solutions for fixing
and hence normalizing the monsters in front of them. This outside, unlike Butlers,
has a positive, productive role in constructing the inside. It is not just a space de-
fined by what fails to be normal and acceptable, but a domain of contentful identities
which, while abject, still receive cultural recognition as substantive and authentic.
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Talking Back 85
The distance between normal and monstrous subjectivity is productive not just be-
cause it sets up a boundary delineating the normal, but because the specific content
of the monstrous outside and the concrete process of recognizing and censuring it
help give content and weight to the subjectivity of the normal insider.
20
Butler is interested in making naturalized, hardened identities like gender unnatu-
ral through grotesque parody. For her, parodic performances such as dressing in drag
can be part of a subversive political strategy for undermining dominant ideological
institutions.
21
While this may well be an effective strategy in some cases, what we
see in the case of talk shows is the opposite political effect; here, the performance of
the unnatural is used as a point of departure for performances of the natural. These
reinscriptions of naturalized normalcy are all the more powerful in virtue of being
performed by subjects positioned as authoritative interpellators and not as mere sub-
jects of interpellation.
The Television Audience
The last level of participation in the talk show institution is that of the television
audience. Presumably, many members of this audience participate virtually, in the
privacy of their own homes and minds, much as do the members of the studio audi-
ence. This painfully earnest segment of the population watches the show to see the
monsters, and enjoys giving the proper, normal responses along with the studio
audience to the spectacle it is viewing. But my fascination is instead with those watch-
ers (probably at least occasionally including most readers of this essay) who are too
clever to fall so straightforwardly into the ideological hands of the show. We are the
watchers who see through the workings of the show, its staged predictability, and
we hold ourselves at a cynical distance from those guests and studio audience mem-
bers who are making such a spectacle of themselves. The reason we watch is for the
laughsfor the humorously grotesque parody of real, sophisticated interactions that
the show provides. The crudeness of the interpellative processes and the gullibility
of the participants is part of what we find funny.
iek has argued that this cynical, voyeuristic stance is in fact a defining one for
our cultural moment. Most of us no longer participate nonironically in the spectacle
of our culture, but instead stand at a bemused distance and proudly define ourselves
in derisive contrast to the participating dupes. The question is, under these circum-
stances, how can ideology reproduce itself? Or in other words, how can interpella-
tion recruit us into subject positions if we laugh at the interpellative call rather than
recognizing its authority?
20. In a Hegelian mood, we might call this determinate negative interpellation rather than mere
negative interpellation.
21. For instance, see her chapter on drag in Gender Trouble (1990). On the other hand, since the pub-
lication and apparently widespread misinterpretation of Gender Trouble, Butler has carefully distanced
herself from the view that drag and related phenomena are always subversive rather than normalizing.
See, for example, her more measured discussion of drag and its social reception in the chapter entitled
Gender is Burning in Bodies That Matter (1993).
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Any answer to this question must begin with an understanding of how a cynical
watcher can be a participant in an ideological institution such as the talk show, when,
at first glance, it might seem that a watcher is one who is by definition nonpartici-
patory.
22
Notice that the idea that sitting back, watching, and having private, cynical
ideas is not itself a type of response relies on an implausible metaphysics that takes
the mind as an inner theater ontologically severed from the concrete world. If we
believe, with Althusser, that ideas are concretely embodied in practices, then we will
not be tempted by this picture of the mind, nor by the corresponding idea that watch-
ing is not itself a practice. Cynical watching is one possible, concrete response to a
phenomenon and, in doing this, we are as much participants in italbeit quieter
onesas are those jumping around and yelling in the studio. But we need to exam-
ine the ideological structure of this response if we are to see how it enables the re-
production of social reality.
iek points out that traditionally, cynicism and ironic laughter have been seen
as tools for subverting and resisting ideology. They have been important strategies
for gaining reflective distance from the dominant culture and with it the possibility
of transforming that culture. It is unrealistic to expect subjects to resist dominant
ideologies by stepping outside of them entirely and refusing to play their constitu-
tive game, so irony, sarcasm, and parody have long been means for subjects to drive
a wedge between themselves and their interpellated subject positions (iek 1989,
29).
23
Indeed, Judith Butler has written at length about how to find the possibility of
social resistance in such moments of parody and irony. However, iek argues that
this particular moment in history is special in having coopted the cynical stance it-
self. In contemporary societies, he writes, cynical distance, laughter and irony
are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seri-
ously or literally (28). In other words, ironic, cynical laughter has become the very
response that the interpellative beckonings of our culture call forth from us. In the
case of talk shows of the grotesque, this interpellation of the cynical audience is often
explicit. The Jerry Springer Show, for instance, has begun marketing itself as com-
edy, thereby explicitly calling for an audience who intends to laugh at events that
count, within the internal mythos of the show, as revelations of the private pain of
22. My thinking about the television audience as a formally necessary participant in the phenomenon
of a television show, and likewise about the structure of viewing as a constitutive activity rather than
a passive stance, has been strongly influenced by my conversations and research with Sarah Hardy.
For another discussion of the structural role of the audience in television, in the context of an analysis
of a very different type of television show, see Hardy and Kukla (1999).
23. In distinguishing between the productive cynicism of an earlier era, and the contemporary cynicism
that is called forth by and plays into the hands of ideology, iek draws upon the work of Peter Sloterdijk.
In his massive and influential Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), Sloterdijk distinguishes between the
lost cheekiness of Greek kynicism and the problematic phenomenon of contemporary cynicism. This
work is obviously relevant to my discussion here, but an in-depth examination of Sloterdijks work would
take us too far afield so I hereby merely refer the interested reader to this crucial text.
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Talking Back 87
tragic guests. Thus the broader mythos of the show, taken as a phenomenon situated
in its social context rather than internally defined, now includes the subversion of its
own internal meanings in billing its own purported earnestness as a spectacle for ironic
watchers. We inhabit an odd cultural moment in which ideology has, in a sense,
swallowed up its own outsidethe outside of the monstrous, and the outside of the
nonparticipating cynicand placed this outside within its own purview. Laughing
at the spectacle of culture, while taking it as a parody of itself, has become a deeply
normalized response rather than an intrinsically subversive one. There is nothing so
boringly everyday, these days, as contemptuous laughter at the everyday.
As cynical subjects, we continue to participate appropriately in our culture, but
we do so while consciously recognizing that our practices merely parody that which
society treats as naturalized.
24
We see the misrecognitions of ideology as masks, while
we continue to be ironically complicit in ideological practices. As iek puts it, we
are thus fetishists in practice, not in theory (31). We know that commodities have
no magical, inherent value, but only a seductive value created by marketing, and we
know that our feminine garb is a ritual adornment rather than having a basis in natu-
ral femininity, but we still carry on the relevant traditions. The problem is that in
practice, acting as if money has intrinsic value, or as if my feminine accouterments
express my natural femininity, is quite sufficient to uphold the institutions that natu-
ralize the value of money and the expression of gender. Seeing through these natu-
ralizing myths does not keep those myths from successfully structuring our concrete,
material world and the meanings and ideas that are built into it. The misrecognition
of the cynic lies in our belief that our merely parodic participation in normalized
culture is different in any way other than its superficial trappings from the stylized,
citational parodies that make up the fabric of social reality all the time, anyhow.
Cynicism may have had some potentially subversive power when its verbal and ges-
tural expression through humor and grotesque parody was itself an affront to a cul-
ture which took itself seriously, because then this humor represented a refusal to
respond properly to interpellation. The catch, however, is that the very ideological
institutions we parody now often build in the assumption that our participation will
be cynical and parodic in just this way. In a culture that expects and approves of
cynicism, our ability to see through our practices as we engage in them ceases to
24. A perfect example is a particular subculture of heterosexual women who travel within social circles
strongly dominated by gay males, those sometimes derisively known as fag hags. When their gay
male friends adopt classically feminine tastes, gestures, verbal mannerisms, or even clothing, the men
are contradicting the dominant naturalized order in an obvious way. But, interestingly, these women
often perform the very same, exaggerated feminine behaviors as do their gay male friends; here, the
women are performing the behaviors that society expects them to perform anyhow, ritualized and ex-
aggerated, and with a self-conscious parodic, cynical stance toward what they are performing. In this
case, the only distinction between them and women who are straightforwardly participating in the
entrenchment of the naturalized norms of femininity is at the level of their self-proclaimed ironic dis-
tance from their own practices.
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88 Kukla
have any practical weight.
25
Cynical ideology probably cannot undermine the sub-
versive force of all forms of parody, but it certainly has enabled a lot of parody with
no real bite. Ally McBeal is about as subversive as a partying fraternity boy decked
out in drag.
By coopting cynicism, ideology puts an immensely powerful tool at its disposal.
The mythos of cynicism is that it is our psychological distance from our practices
our ironic self-consciousnessthat places us above those practices and their ideo-
logical trappings and, in some sense, frees us from their normative grip.
26
As long as
we see through our acts, the story goes, then we have not been coopted by ideology,
unlike those poor fools shouting away in the talk show studio. But this idea that our
psychological distance is some special thing we possess that makes a difference to
who we are, above and beyond how we act, is a misrecognition involving the ideo-
logical fetishization of the inner space of the mind. According to this ideological myth,
the possession of this psychological distancewhich, in being defined in terms of
its severance from the subjects actions, is thereby practically incapacitatedis suf-
ficient to turn us into free individuals. By interpellating us as subjects with this
psychological distance, ideological institutions soothe any remaining worries we
might have about our induction into ideology. Now we can play along with our
culture, secure in the knowledge that we are doing this just for fun and actually
know better. Thus cynicism effectively removes the need for any kind of concrete
subversion by supplanting it with apparently subversive acts in the head, at the level
of private attitudes, where those attitudes are explicitly severed, through ironic dis-
tance, from the very acts that we would normally take as expressions of attitudes.
iek suggests: is not . . . hysterical distance towards interpellation, its self-
relating disavowalthe fact that I experience the innermost kernel of my being as
something which is not merely that (the materiality of rituals and appearances)
the ultimate proof of its success, that is to say, of the fact that the effect of subject
really took place? (1996, 166). The production of a subject who can take itself as
more than and distanced from the normative practices that bind it, which will at the
same time reproduce and reinforce these practices, constitutes the decisive success
of ideology. The cynical stance lets us earn this experience of being more than just
our interpellated subject positions, in virtue of our inner distance from these posi-
tions. In doing so, this stance effectively preempts the need for our being more-than-
ideology to manifest itself in any way other than in the continued practical support
of that ideology. Thus in cynicism, our very distance from ideology solidifies rather
25. For instance, sociologist Robert Thompson (2000), who claims that in the past ten years we have
entered the age of irony, reports that while gimmicky products marketed on television (such as the
Pocket Fisherman and Chia Pets) are currently enjoying relatively strong sales, about 40 percent of
these items are now bought as gag gifts.
26. There is an interesting resonance with stoicism here that would be worth exploring. See, for in-
stance, Hegels discussion of the Stoics attempt to find freedom by severing psyche from practice in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) as well as Nietzsches return to this idea in the Third Essay of On
the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967).
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Talking Back 89
than resists ideological identities and practices. From this point of view, cynicism
directly supports and helps cement the ideological production of the normal subject.
We misrecognize our mocking participation in the everyday as a form of resistance
and the allure of mockery, with its implied promise of a position of knowing superi-
ority, helps guarantee that we will in fact act as is needed in order to uphold and re-
produce the normal. Contemporary popular music, films, and television, as well as
advertising, political campaigning, and many other cultural phenomena, regularly
draw upon the aesthetics of camp self-mockery in order to reach out to their target
subjects. In this light, we can make sense of ieks claim that cynical distance is
just one . . . of many ways to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological
fantasy (1989, 33).
Now it may seem that the cynical talk show viewer is in a somewhat different
position than that of the cynical subject that I have been discussing, because this viewer
is a mere watcher rather than an active participant. How can sitting quietly at home
constitute the reentrenchment of normalizing ideology? The voyeuristic cynic does
not even engage directly in parodic behavior, but merely feels superior and distanced
as she watches cultural spectacles. I pointed out earlier that watching is a type of
response, which can be called forth by interpellation like any other, but on its own,
this fact does not explain how this voyeuristic response will succeed in concretely
entrenching normalized ideas and practices that are only being watched rather than
carried out. Such an explanation requires an appeal to the structure of the voyeuris-
tic stance, as a distinctive form of participation in institutions and practices, just as I
have recently been appealing to the structure of the cynical stance. Cynicism and
voyeurism can be combined, as I suggest they are during normal talk show viewing,
but they can also be analyzed as separate phenomena.
First of all, notice that we cannot sustain a purely voyeuristic relationship to our
culture, even if voyeurism has become our main medium of participation in cultural
performances; we must sometimes turn off the television and go interact with the
world in order to survive. It is clear that by watching performances of normalcy and
monstrosity, we learn how to tell the difference between the two and how to behave
appropriately when called upon to do so. Through watching, we learn the rituals of
normalcy, crucially including which attitudes and ideas it is appropriate to express
and how. If we are also cynical subjects, then we may take what we are learning to
be mere food for our parodies and playacting, but that in no way affects our ability to
learn the rules of normalcy through viewing. Explicit citation of popular culture is,
after all, a favorite performative trope of cynics.
I also want to push for a deeper relationship between viewing practices and the
recruitment of subjects into normal subject positions. iek argues that there is no
reason my body should be the necessary site for the expression of my beliefs. Once
we acknowledge the fact that attitudes can be built into practices and institutions rather
than always originating in the private, conscious space of an individual mind, then
we can see that my beliefs may well find their concrete expression in some material
event that does not use my body as its direct vehicle. The site of a thought or idea
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27. For example, my belief that grocery store items are affordable, but art gallery items are not, may be
my belief in virtue of my practiced position within the art world and within the world of groceries. We
need not insist that I behave as I do, and have the social position with respect to these worlds that I do, in
virtue of my having first formulated beliefs about the affordability of objects and then based my actions
upon these beliefs. In fact, we might plausibly argue that if never have any direct dealings with the world
of art galleries, and never reflect upon the affordability or unaffordability of their wares, then my very
lack of participation can, given the right context, manifest my belief that these things are unaffordable.
may in fact be some public space even when that thought, in some important sense,
belongs to me (iek 1989, 19). iek offers the example of the Tibetan prayer wheel,
which rotates prayers automatically so that, in his analysis, the monks can concretely
manifest their ongoing attitude of devotion while freeing up their internal psychic space
and their bodies so as to busy them with other, more mundane tasks (34). He intends
this example to be Pascalian in its import in that devotion is here, in the first instance,
displaced from its traditional location within the psyche and onto an external scene of
activity. But this case of devotion is more radical than that made famous by Pascal,
in two senses: first of all, the external activity, for iek, directly embodies religious
commitments, rather than serving as the catalyst for internal attitudes of devotion and
belief, and second, the external activity no longer even belongs to the fleshy body of
the believer but instead can proceed without the believers direct, ongoing involve-
ment. Another of his examples is pertinent to our topic here, and I will quote it in full.
Let us remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular television shows or
serials: canned laughter. After some supposedly funny or witty remark, you can hear
the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itselfhere we have
the exact counterpart of the chorus in classical tragedy . . . Why this laughter? The first
possible answerthat it serves to remind us when to laughis interesting enough,
because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not some spontane-
ous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only
correct answer would be that the Otherembodied in the television setis relieving
us even of our duty to laughis laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard
days stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television
screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we
had a really good time. (34)
Let me try to make this idea of externalized attitudes palatable to the potential
skeptic. In some sense, it is no less mundane than the idea that a written text can
embody the beliefs of its author. I think the reason this latter example is less likely to
bother us is that we are comfortable with a story in which these beliefs originated in
the private space of the authors mind and were expressed in an act of freedom. But
let us grant, as I have throughout, that concrete embodiments of beliefs and other
attitudes need not always be traceable to some conscious, originating thought on the
part of a free subject. And let us grant also that the way that an attitude belongs to me
may not be through my first providing such an origin, but may rather be derivative
upon the way that I am embedded within intentionally structured, meaning-bearing
practices and institutions.
27
In this case, it seems that we should be willing to extend
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Talking Back 91
the text example and admit that in general, there is no necessary connection between
my body and the expression of my beliefs, nor any necessary temporal relation be-
tween my private thoughts and the expressions of those thoughts in the world.
Given the possibility of this type of externalization of a subjects attitudes, my
suggestion is that we can understand voyeurism, as a distinct form of participation in
an event, as a means by which we displace the responsibility for acting out our atti-
tudes onto an external scene. Voyeurism enables passionate involvement with a wit-
nessed drama from a participatory perspective that appears contentless and uncom-
mitted; it is a highly interested form of involvement that allows a surface-level show
of disinterest through its apparent passivity and its physical removal from the scene
of action. The voyeurs passionate absorption in witnessed dramas, no matter how
disowned or unreflective that absorption is, seems to me to be a way of constituting
and upholding her position as a subject within these dramas, and accepting the interpel-
lative call to take up the attitudes that are played out within it.
Thus, in the case of the watcher of talk shows who is not only a voyeur but also a
cynic, we might say that the cynical watcher of talk shows can perform her occupa-
tion of a normalized subject position, complete with normal, though appropriately
ironic, attitudes, merely by watching. The fact that this is what is happening is nicely
masked by the cynical, ironic laughter that seems to distance us from what we watch
ironic laughter that supports and enforces the deflection of responsibility already built
into voyeurismbut I have already argued that this apparent distance is in fact inef-
fectual. Because the institution of the talk show specifically demands a cynical, voy-
euristic stance from us, we are responding properly to its interpellation in watching,
and hence implicitly licencing the displacement of the expression of our attitudes
into the public arena. The normal members of the studio audience have relieved
cynical voyeurs of the duty of acting out our beliefs directly. We let television em-
body for us our understandings of right and wrong, normal and abnormal.
In other words, I am arguing that bad faith, in a roughly Sartrean sense of the term,
is inherent in the stance of the cynical voyeur, in that taking up this stance involves
a refusal and dislocation of our responsibility for the material manifestations of our
attitudes. The voyeur externalizes the expressions of her attitudes, and the cynic dis-
owns these expressionshence, the cynical voyeur severs herself from them entirely.
In taking up what looks like the null position with respect to the talk show by watch-
ing, cynical voyeurs reinforce and reinscribe the everyday, the monstrous, and our
very normal cynical relation to each, without in any way claiming ownership of the
concrete social ideas in which we are participating. Meanwhile, we obligingly mark
our recognition of what is going on with cynical laughter, and we keep watching so
as to laugh more, protected by the mythology of the superior, distanced subject po-
sition that our cynicism supposedly grants us. The more we bemoan the spectaculari-
zation of culture (mocking the performative nature of impeachment proceedings,
murder trials, or whatever else), the more we feel protected from the interpellative
effects of these spectacles. But watching and recognizing the spectacles of our cul-
ture is often enough to induct us into its ideologies. And given the insistent, media-
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saturated spectacularity of the everyday, watching and recognizing are difficult ac-
tivities to avoid.
Epilogue
I do not intend to intimate, in this paper, that dominant ideologies are necessarily
evil or in need of subverting. In admitting that the fabric of concrete social reality is
ideological all the way down, we must also admit that to a large extent, being inside
ideology is just a matter of being unproblematically positioned in such a way that we
can cope sensibly with the world around us. In constituting us, ideology need not
coerce or corrupt us. In fact, the language of coercion and corruption presupposes
the very originary subject whose existence I have resisted in this paper. But certainly,
there must be some times at which we are able to resist and transcend our ideologi-
cally inscribed subject positions. It is important that I make clear that my paper is
not intended to undercut the possibility of such resistance and transcendence, for my
sympathy with Althussers insistence that the very possibility of subjective distance
from the interpellative call is itself ideologically constituted, together with my pes-
simistic assessment of cynicism, might well appear to suggest otherwise. ieks own
analysis buttresses rather than allays this concern. He claims that the anti-ideological
gesture par excellence is therefore the act [by which] . . . I fully assume the fact that
my very self-experience of a subject who was already here prior to the external pro-
cess of interpellation is a retroactive misrecognition brought about by that very process
of interpellation (1996, 166). While such a gesture may be anti-ideological, it is
hard to see how this full assumption would actually constitute any kind of practical
challenge to the ideology it theoretically penetrates.
It is not my goal in this paper to offer a developed theory of resistance; current
social philosophy is rife with theories of how to drive a subversive wedge between
ourselves and the dominant ideologies that structure social reality, and I will not
presume to contribute substantially to that theoretical literature here. However, I also
do not believe that we are doomed to quietism, nor do I think that my discussion in
this paper forces us in the direction of such a conclusion. Hence in this final section,
I will try briefly to show how we are not locked into a quietest conclusion in the face
of my analysis so far.
In order for interpellation to succeed in recruiting subjects, the interpellated sub-
ject who recognizes herself in a call must be a specific sort of being. In particular, in
order to be (mis)recognizable as a subject, an individual must in turn be capable of
recognizing herself in the hail. But the capacity for this self-recognition, whether or
not it is itself ideologically constituted, is a special sort of abilityone that is not,
for example, shared with inanimate objects, who will not be recruited into subject
positions no matter how many times they are hailed. An image, name, or description
in which I am called to recognize myself is never simply a complete mimetic copy of
me. In fact, if it were, it would make no normative demand upon me and hence would
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Talking Back 93
not function interpellatively. Rather, recognizing myself as bound by a hail always
and necessarily requires a moment of interpretation; such an interpretation may not
be deeply creative or difficult to achieve, but it always involves a substantive leap
nonetheless. Even if I simply recognize myself as an instance of a general type (for
example, when I have the thats me response to the schematic woman on the bath-
room door or to one of Jerry Springers descriptions of next weeks guests), this rec-
ognition requires that I subsume myself, in all my particularity, under a universal
category that does not and cannot capture all of me. It is a notorious logical fact
(pointed out by Kant, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, among others) that we cannot obey
mechanical rules for how to subsume particulars under general categories without
descending into infinite regress; rather, every such act of subsumptionevery case
in which I recognize myself as really called in a hailis, in at least a technical sense,
a creative act. Our capacity to recognize ourselves in interpellative hails depends upon
our possessing this creative interpretive ability. Thus, the free subject of ideology
cannot function merely as an effect of ideology. Rather, if ideology is to recruit
subjects successfully, these subjects must exercise their creative recognitional ca-
pacities. Since the subject is never simply identical to that in which she recognizes
herself, interpellation therefore always requires the nontrivial and nonmechanical par-
ticipation of the interpellated subject herself.
In her Excitable Speech (1997), Butler has argued that, while the Althusserian
hail is a performative speech act, we should not take it as having illocutionary
forcethat is, we should not collapse the distance between the hail and its consti-
tutive effect, and thereby take the hail as immediately constituting the identity of
the hailed subject.
28
Not only is the idea that we have an immediate relationship to
ideology reductive and intuitively absurd, but we saw earlier that in fact such im-
mediacy would preclude the very subjective distance which is a precondition of
ideologys successful functioning. Butler argues that our tendency to think of the
hail as illocutionary comes from our presuming sovereign authority on the part of
the interpellator. To the extent that the interpellator has full, authoritative mastery
over both the meaning and the force of her interpellating hail, this precludes room
for any gap or interpretive play between the hail and its effect. Such an illocutionary
picture is encouraged by Althusser, who characterizes the interpellating Subject
as a mythical figure with absolute and originary authority. Against Althusser, Butler
argues that actual interpellating subjects are finite beings with limited authority,
like all performative speech actors. She writes: The voice is implicated in a no-
tion of sovereign power, power figured as emanating from a subject, activated in a
voice, whose effects appear to be the magical effects of that voice. In other words,
power is understood on the model of the divine power of naming, where to utter is
28. Paradigmatic examples of illocutionary speech acts are promises, where the act of saying I prom-
ise is the act of promising itselfthere is no room here for distance between the act and its effect. See
Austin (1962) for the most famous discussion of other illocutionary and other performative speech acts.
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94 Kukla
to create the effect uttered. Human speech rarely mimics that effect (1997, 32;
final emphasis mine).
Notice that my own use of Althusser has in no way drawn upon this feature of his
account; in fact, I have stressed that the right to interpellate is itself earned, and I
have placed this right in a context where it belongs to limited humans with finite and
defeasible authority. I have argued that interpellators receive their right to interpel-
late only in virtue of citing authoritative social claims. This opens up at least two
directions in which an interpretive hail lays itself open for challenge or subversion.
First, the right to claim such citational authority is not itself sovereign; hence a hail
can be rejected, not as a misrecognition, but as an illegitimate demand. While Ideol-
ogy Itself, if it could ever directly confront us (as Althusser whimsically insinuates
that it does), might have a magical illocutionary ability to demand that I recognize
myself as bound by its hail, the actual people and things who present themselves as
ideologys representatives or emissaries have no such unchallengeable right or
ability. Second, in responding to a hail, I must, as we just saw, interpret that hail as
applying to me and as making some particular demands upon me but, because there
are no divine namers who speak in a sovereign and immediately constitutive voice,
the interpellator is not the absolute arbiter of the appropriateness of an interpretation
of her hail. The interpellating subject takes it upon herself to interpret a name or de-
scription in recognizing me with it and I, in turn, must interpret her hail in order to
respond to it but, since the interpellator is not sovereign, her interpretation is neither
definitive nor immediately constitutive. Since my interpretation of the hail cannot
be rule-bound or determined in advance, and since it requires my active participa-
tion, I always have some room for subverting, transforming, or appropriating the hails
content and force. I may give it a reading and a realization that are at odds with how
the interpellating subject herself intended her hail to apply to and make a claim on
me. Therefore, as Butler argues, in talking back to an interpellation, I take some control
over its meaning and force even as I acknowledge its binding effect. In allowing for
this creative space in our response to interpellation, I am not thereby opening up the
possibility of bootstrapping subjectivity into existence, independent of the constitu-
tive role of interpellation. I suggest instead, again following Butler, that the possibil-
ity for creative and resistant talking back to ideology is internal to the interpellative
dynamic itself.
Let me reiterate that my aim here has not been to give the details of how such
creative resistance can or should go. My point is only that the Althusserian theory
that I have drawn upon in my analysis leaves open the room for such resistance. I
have argued, following Althusser, that the subject that stands at a distance from ide-
ology is both the necessary vehicle of ideology and also a product of ideology. The
fact that this distanced subject is ideological in its genesis in no way proves that it
cannot itself play a productive and substantive role in resisting its own origins. We
can look to many other social theorists for direction on how best and most effec-
tively to marshal the subversive possibilities open to the subject who must determine
how to respond to interpellative hails. I have not argued against these possibilities.
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Talking Back 95
Rather, what I have argued is that cynicism is not a hopeful technique for establish-
ing this space for resistance. While the very nature of interpellation opens up the
possibility of creative interpretation, this possibility must be acknowledged in light
of our overwhelming tendency to interpret conservativelyto reduce citation to rep-
etition. Cynicism, I claim, is one stance that enforces such conservatism, helping to
entrench the very institutions, identities, and norms that it mocks even as it insidi-
ously presents itself as a form of resistance or progressiveness. The cynic stands at a
distance from ideology, but this very distance is of a sort that has been coopted by
that ideology. Relying on bad metaphysical assumptions and a new form of false
consciousness, not only does cynicism fail to drive a subversive wedge between the
constitutive call of ideology and its reception, but it preempts the creative interpre-
tations that might drive this wedge by allowing conservative parody to take the place
of a genuine negotiation of the possibilities for response. Cynicism is seductive;
interpellative calls from all sides beckon us to participate in its aesthetic attitude. Most
of us participate in activities where cynicism is tempting indeed, such as stealing a
few minutes to watch Jerry Springer. I urge only that we should sensitize ourselves
to the ideological underpinnings of the position of the voyeuristic cynic, and be just
as critically suspicious of cynicism as we are of earnest participation in our cultures
spectacles of monstrosity and mundanity.
I presented an earlier and shorter version of this paper at the October 1999 meeting of
the Atlantic Region Philosophers Association, at University College of Cape Breton,
Nova Scotia; and another at the Carleton University Spring Conference, Lake Opinicon,
Ontario, in May 2000. Many thanks to Madeleine Arsenault, Susan Campbell, Sarah
Hardy, Finn Makela, Richard Manning, and Jennifer Stewart for providing relevant
wisdom before and during the writing of this paper, and to Yahya Madra and another,
anonymous referee for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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