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Interprelation combines the terms interpellation, interpretation, and relation. It describes both the moment when the mother first interprets an infant’s cry (identified with the drama of the mirror stage, the “you are that”) as well as all subsequent attempts at captation through a master signifier (unary trait).

What’s important to note is that an interprelation is *not* just an interpretation. It carries with it a demand. This is the point at which all of the Other’s speech which precedes your birth is represented and, the Other hopes, internalized. If it is not successfully resisted, then the child is inducted into the world of semblants and discourse. The demand is essentially this: to speak and act as though you were X, to lie or to perform X 

The interprelation is the initial encounter with the S1. One key difference between this and Althusser’s concept of interpellation is that the interprelation is never directed at *you*. It is always directed past you toward a person who does not exist. It goes *over your head*.

Interprelation: https://imgur.com/a/JR850Qp

We designate the child as ∅, because they are left over exactly as what “does-not-count”. M is the mother, and X is someone who doesn’t exist.

From the perspective of ∅, discourse is constructed around us. Far from being “outside discourse”, we are situating ourselves at a place where this inside-outside dichotomy breaks down, the place of residue. ∅ is what remains in spite of discourse—the corpse which discourse cannot a-count for but which stubbornly persists. ∅ is a stray, a walking abortion.

∅ is fundamentally a universalist position. The stock of words is laid out around us so that we may take these words and make use of them as we see fit. There is no difference here between “my” words and yours, nor between different spheres in which different words would be “appropriate”. Spread out before us is only the totality of discourse, which resolves itself more or less into fixed meanings much as the equalization of profit rates occurs in political economy. We begin and end with the Gestalt.

The problem with discourse is that it fundamentally involves captation which is interprelation so far as the latter entails the assumption of an image. This is the basic construction of the character mask as a vessel for capital. In discourse, capital only converses with itself: you and I drop out. Discourse is the sphere in which all the internecine disputes of the capitalist class are played out, and it is therefore by its nature partial, confused and opposed to the proletariat. Discourse, the realm of the signifier, is the self-consciousness of the world market.

In the foregoing, ∅ represents the symbolic’s point of impossibility or indifference. In the machine, ∅ first comes to be for-itself. The machine is a territory without signifiers where bodies circulate. Each body is a ∅, the remainder that cannot be captured as value, a bare life or cancelled existence.

The circulation of bodies produces form. Form has both an external and an internal designation. The exteriority of form is the factory itself, the totality of processes in which a body is located. The interiority of form is the internal image of the labor process, the know-how. Inner and outer are distinguished in order that we may cancel this distinction. The two moments are inseparable: to plug into the machine is to bring together these two sides of form in a practice, a process of machine learning.

As null bodies undergo the process of machine learning, an underground world of signs is established. This is packaging, that is production. This is driving-a-forklift, that is operating-a-filler. Null bodies are interchangeable and find themselves in various positions. Signs therefore have fixed referents which one accesses by simply doing the work. Moreover, there is an identity of labor and product, of worker and machine, of worker and worker, factory and factory, factory and world: every limit is sublated in the process.

Just as much as the signifier is a “sound-image”, any word is equally a continuous stream of sensation in the mouth, a mouth-image accompanied and developed by the sound of our own speech. A spoken word is therefore the fruit as well as an ongoing process of trial and error, of active experimentation, the exploration of a mouth and the tuning of an ear. So is any activity a sensuous concatenation and calibration which becomes relatively familiar through practice. 

The signs of null bodies generally have their counterparts in the world of discourse. From the perspective of capital, production certainly exists and it is different from packaging; a certain expenditure goes to forklifts, and this should not be confused with the percentage reserved for ingredients. However, these operate in discourse as signifiers, as words on a spreadsheet which relate only to one another. The machine is inaccessible to discourse; instead, through the cultivation of an underground world and disruptive experiments on discourse, the machine opens up its own field of dis-corps: the symbolic is ransacked for signifiers which are then placed in relation to the signs already existing, which act as a system of quilting points. Dis-corps is the sublation of discourse by ∅, the construction of a metalanguage which rejects all barriers.

Because of the partial nature of discourse, it is prone to crises. The self-consciousness of capital inevitably produces factions which cannot be resolved through deliberation because they represent real differences, different material interests that are rarely if ever admitted plainly. At the same time, the underground world of signs—the consciousness of the machine—because of its universal character inevitably conflicts with discourse, locates the gaps and weak points in the latter, presses on them, and increases in confidence.

Indifference, as that which ob-jects, begins to make a difference—it produces effects in discourse. It now comes to recognize discourse as its own in a further sense, as not only a stock but also a laboratory. Each interaction at this level is both a return to and a return from discourse, an absolute recoil. Dis-corps overreaches discourse and finds itself developed in this movement taken as a whole.

Now it should be clear what the problem is with Queer: it is fundamentally a discourse. The slipperiness of the signifier Queer depends on the assumption of an image and the adoption of a master signifier in order for queer to operate. Queer intends to signify what resists discourse, but this is just to engage in discourse which emerges from the signifier itself through the pull of S1 and its demand that you “speak as if” and “behave as if”.

Queer strategically places itself between two basic meanings:
1. It has under it a real set of bodies.
2. And it claims a symbolic position of non-positionality and resistance to the status quo.

Not only does Queer shift, but in a very literal sense, it drags (1) a set of bodies with it, implicates them in itself, and demands their complicity in its discourse. This is nothing but interprelation. Queer lacks access to the dimension of dis-corps because it is captated by a hazy, ideological image of what it means to “be queer”. Simply put: there are rules to being “queer”, but we can’t articulate them. Instead, we are faced with a vague—but no less violent—demand, to which we ought to ob-ject.

Queer signifier: https://imgur.com/a/2NCW5sC

The impossibility of signifying ∅ stems from the relation between ∅ and the bar. ∅ can be described equally as the anti-signifier and as the anti-bar. It is what the bar covers up: a void in the Real. The bar demarcates the symbolic as different from the Real, and it takes the form of circuitous paths which only repeat the same tired statement in different guises: I am I. “Difference” here becomes a costume in which the most banal identities assert themselves.

We can still be more clear: to “construct” queerness requires a schema. ∅ is initially the body without schemata; it forms its schemata in the process of machine learning. This is the “interiority of form” mentioned above. ∅ bears no special relation to any specific sexual constitution, to any particularity in particular. To do so would turn it into a signifier.

In my day to day life, I am a person, a worker, a nobody. Only when we enter the doors of mystifying discourse do I suddenly become “a queer”. My story is written for me, and if it contradicts the facts—well, so much the worse for the facts! An attitude, a history, and an experience is interprelated onto me. To refuse to accommodate such a narrative immediately marks me as a problem, a failed queer, as “heteronormative”, as though I had access to something else and refused it out of—what? a sheer will to be reactionary, evil, even fascist? How I’m to arrive at this something else, nobody seems to know, and yet as a supposed-to-be queer, I am morally culpable for failing to locate it.

“Critical theory” entails its own interprelative dimension: it demands the adoption of a specifically bourgeois subjectivity in order to “count” as critical theory.For the proletariat to learn critical theory would be, at the same time, to engage in anti-critical theory, to turn critical theory on itself. This is because the process of learning is identical with a process of regrounding in a proletarian consciousness, of situating in dis-corps. Critical theory, such as it is, is anti-worker insofar as it is a discourse.

The necessity of anti-critical theory is the necessity of a world in which nobody is a critical theorist because everybody is a critical theorist no less than a poet. It is therefore summed up in the perseverant, unyielding, absolutely resolute demand that there be emus in the Zone. It does not budge: it stubbornly resists the interprelative pull and says: tell me why I should believe that. We accept no authority which does not earn our trust, certainly none which simply demands that we become bourgeois.

Finally, this is the only means by which the proletariat will reconcile itself with the world of “theory”, as well as the only way for theory to prove to us and to itself the possibility of its this-sidedness. Until it has done so, it is nothing but words, performances, cultural positions, academic offices, and—to be blunt—bullshit. Anti-critical theory is therefore, in its own way, critical theory’s saving grace, a friendly hand reaching out. If it fails to be recognized as such, then this is because of the gravitational pull of the master signifier which turns even well meaning theorists against themselves and against the proletariat. To us, queer is an act of violence, and yet in the interest of reconciliation, we engage with its ideologues in the only manner available to us—which precludes the possibility of lying, of yielding to interprelation and bourgeois ideology. We per-sist.