"Hey, you!"

Thanks to her paternal grandparents, Helena has several new toys that talk to her.  One is a little ball with buttons and lights and a little internal motor that allows it to roll by itself, while the other is a "baby's learning laptop."  Both of them talk and flask more than I might like, but they aren't all that irritating... except for one fact.  If you don't play with them for a while, they yell at you.  The laptop asks, "Are you home?"which isn't actually that bad, but the ball sings "So much fun to learn and see, why don't you come and play with me?"  Though only an inanimate object, it demands that you pay attention to it.

As we had dinner with Joey and Sarah, Helena's American godparents, last Friday, Joey heard this story and declared, "Only six months old, and she's already being interpellated!"

Helena is probably one of the few babies around whom one can have a sensible conversation about French structuralist Marxism (though who knows; it may be that lots of babies love the subject.  I don't want to do the research to find out), but it still does require a little bit of explanation.  In his classic example of this process, the French philosopher Louis Althusser mentions a police officer who yells “Hey, you!” on the street.  When I turn to look at the officer, I recognize myself in his words and recognize his authority over me.  In the simple action of turning and looking, power molds my subjectivity and legitimates the authority of the police officer.  But if I just continue walking, pretending I didn’t hear, I look like a surly adolescent, which also, perversely, affirms the power of the police officer.  Interpellation, then, both constitutes the subject and establishes the context of power in which both the “oppressed” and “oppressor” operate.

According to Althusser, this "Hey, you!" is the way we come to see ourselves as an I, as a subject (for him, like for Foucault and many other French theorists, the subject/agent is always confused with the subjected subject, the "king's subject".)  One is subjected to a person or process as much as one is the subject of an action.  However, in almost all of the theory around the issue, it is a police officer, a person in authority, who calls your name.  In Helena's case, as Joey pointed out, it was actually an object (not an inanimate object, unfortunately, because it is capable of moving itself) that engages in the process of interpellation, which can call out to the baby "Hey, you!"

What does all of this mean for Helena as she grows up?  Not much, I hope... she also has many other flesh and blood people (authorities and not) around her.  But what about for kids who grow up immersed in technology that demands their attention?  With video games and robots and who knows what more?  Will they develop the strange dynamics of resistance, fear, and obedience that we have with police officers, except with machines?  A frightening prospect.