The teleological thing is something I perceive clearly (or believe I perceive clearly), but have trouble describing. I first encountered the idea in regards to discussions of the origin of life on Earth in a vaguely Creation vs. Evolution sense. Whenever someone says "It is amazing that, against all odds, there is life on this planet!" my response is that the statement itself is empty of meaning. Regardless of the odds, we are here, therefore we are the long shot that came through.
The statement almost takes on an implied objectivity, as if we were looking at the universe from the outside and remarking on the fact that this one, lone planet managed to create intelligent life, but it at the same time implies that there must be some fantastically wonderful about 'us,' so it's also terribly ego maniacal. Self-absorption via false objectivity is a common feature of Enlightenment thinking, specifically in the scientific method.
It's much the same as people who say "Aren't we lucky to have been born in Canada." It's a meaningless statement. If "we" were born in Azerbaijan, we might very well say the same thing about Azerbaijan. History doesn't conspire to create "us," we're the nigh accidental result of history. We are special, even unique, because of the randomness of it all, not because we are destined to be whoever we turned out to be
(Which is the exact opposite of Dr. Manhattan's realization of the miracle of human life, by the by, and also the exact opposite of the 'strong anthropic principle' that Promethea invokes, so I differ with Moore on this point, though I also acknowledge that it's somewhat of a matter of perspective.).
Zizeck uses a joke to explain the idea: "My mother is from Bristol. My father is from Birmingham. I'm from London. How fantastic that we all met!" His explanation for why 'the letter always arrives' is that once anyone reads it, it has arrived, regardless of whether, in a literal sense, it was sent to that recipient. He momentarily explains the idea in Althusserian terms, too. From this point of view, we're 'always already' interpellated because at some point *something* interpellated us. In order to even have an identity, we must have answered a hail of some kind at some point in our lives.
Jim Collins' Uncommon Cultures has a very different interpretation of interpellation that I like. He utterly dismisses the 'always already' part and describes a process by which we move through the world answering some hails, ignoring others, and even answering some in the negative, refusing identities, and thereby assuming the perceived opposite of that identity.
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:25 PM