Ownership, Interpellation and The Intervention.

Hi guys,

I’ve been thinking about our ideas from last Monday where we were discussing our relationships with objects in the world surrounding us. It got me considering materialism and how our need to own and control objects can often trespass into ‘possessing’ people on an emotional or spiritual level also.  Social institutions such as the family or marriage can often cause us to feel responsible for another person and assume them to be ‘ours’ despite the fact that they remain constantly autonomous from us. This perception is not just a spiritual one but also a legal one such as a mothers’ right to her child or even within the traditional wedding vows.

I have not had the chance to do much actual research into this idea (mostly due to the looming Marx essay) but I feel that it’s one that might be worth exploring if we plan to continue with the idea of ownership and identity.

Continuing on from this, I really enjoyed reading the last few posts from Anna and Jody outlining Althussers’s theory of ‘Interpellation’. Perhaps we could link it into the previous ideas surrounding our relationships with both objects and space in a way that detours existing social structures.

Some intervention ideas;

•         Entering the “no entry doors”, exploring and documenting what we see. This would be defying our natural instinct to obey the signs that deny us entry due to being consumers/students/members of the public/average joes. It would be a way to diffuse the relationship between people, space and objects and the sense of ownership that others may have over that private area. You could argue here that human interpellation is taken advantage of when certain people deny others access to areas such as this. However I do recognise that this could potentially get us in a little trouble for trespassing (especially in places such as train stations and offices) and on the whole I feel that we would be a group who wants to avoid that.

•            We could perhaps adjust the last idea to doing something else that we would not usually be expected to do. For instance, the one ‘label’ that we all have in common would be that we are students. As Anna pointed out in her post, Vaneigem talked about us being interpellated by stereotypes and I think we can all agree that the stereotype of a student is particularly prominent today. Websites such as Buzzfeed and Collegehumour consistently highlight, utilize and mould the student stereotype. Their websites receive over a hundred million views per month between them and it would be reasonable to suggest that websites such as these, which are specifically aimed at students, would alter the way we view ourselves and the way that the rest of society regards us also. Taking this into account, perhaps we could all individually take on a specific student stereotype that we know we fall into and actively defy it over the next few weeks (documenting our struggles on here of course.)

I actually only have two ideas here for an intervention (I’m sure I had more when I started writing this) though it seems that I began writing about one thing and ended up somewhere else entirely anyway.

Leah x