On Interpellation and Violence at Columbine

Violence in schools, long a reality for hundreds of thousands of children in the United States, is now, quite suddenly, a national crisis. Ignited by shootings in suburban, predominantly white schools across the U.S., school violence has come center stage in the media, state legislatures, and the Congress and is held to be symptomatic of, variously, a breakdown of the family, a collapse of traditional values, and the endemic violence of television and Hollywood culture-products. The hyperbolic, almost paranoiac, responses of lawmakers and mediocrats to the shooting seems curious given the fact that, first, school-place murders are significantly down from 1997-1998 levels and, second, homicide has been a fact of school life, certainly the lives of inner city school children, for decades (Donohue et al.). Moreover, violence in the most heavily publicized districts (Littleton, Jonesboro, Paducah, Springfield, Edinboro, Pearl) has a silent precedent: all of these sites of recent “massacres” witnessed school-place homicide during the 1990s. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, for instance, there were three homicides of children in the school district in 1993 alone (Donohue et al.). What can we make of the this recent spate of violence? More interestingly, given the ubiquity of school violence prior to the highly publicized shootings of the last two years, how can we better understand the response to it? And if there is a perception of crisis, how and why is this public crisis manufactured, and is it then indicative of a deeper systemic crisis?

Louis Althusser writes that “the ideological State apparatus [ISA] which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus” (95). If Althusser is correct, violence in schools, then, constitutes a direct threat to the central mechanism of producing and repr