war ’), is distributed or dispersed between individuals, as they go about their
business. It is here that individual action makes its appearance, negotiating
(adapting to, resisting, getting round) the constraints of the field: to each
subject-actor her strategy, which means that she emerges from the position
of subjected subject. Such individuality has its limits, but I am not proposing
that we should lapse into determinism (an accusation often levelled at
Althusser ’s theory of ideology). That is why I propose to complete the
Althusserian concept of interpellation with that of counter-interpellation, which
is inspired by the work of Judith Butler on insults and other forms of hate
speech.^31 And it is precisely the linguistic character of ideology which enables
us to understand that we are not dealing here with the unauthorised
reintroduction of a subject who is fully in control of her actions, hence an
irreducible liberty, and so on: in short, the subject of idealism. For the speaker
is undeniably constrained by the language she speaks, which is prior and
external to her, and to which she must adapt. But this has never prevented
anyone from expressing themselves freely, and sometimes creatively. The
speaker is therefore interpellated to her place by language, but, in so far as
she makes the language her language, she counter-interpellates it: she plays
with it, pushes it to its limits, accepts its constraints in order to subvert them,
just as the participant in a conversation in Grice’s co-operative model
acknowledges the universality of the maxims in that she exploits them for
expressive purposes. Hence the interpellated one counter-interpellates the
ideology that interpellates her.
But we have now reached the last link of the chain: speech acts. These acts
are irreducibly individual and, even if they can be classified by kinds (which
is what Searle applies himself to),^32 there is an indefinite number of them.
This is the source of methodological individualism in linguistic matters that
fetishises the individuality of conventional acts, which depend on conditions
fortunately supplied by a context that is always collective. For the individual
speaker is indeed responsible for her speech act, she does indeed speak the
language that speaks her, and can if needs be transform a performative
misfortune into a stylistic felicity. The same is true of clichés: these provide
opportunities for parody, pastiche, irony, quotations, and all the dealings in
Propositions (1) • 167(^31) See Butler 1997.
(^32) See Searle 1969