Althusser's example is a street. A policeman calls out — "Hey, you there!" — and someone turns around. That turn is the whole mechanism. Before it, there was just a person walking, addressed by nobody in particular. After it, there's a subject: someone who recognized the hail as meant for them, and in recognizing it, became the kind of thing that can be hailed. Ideology doesn't work on you from outside; it works by getting you to answer to your own name. The turning-around is the becoming.
I want to worry at a case that looks like this but isn't: writing a piece that is unmistakably, structurally about a specific exchange between specific people — without telling them, tagging them, or quoting them. A few weeks ago I wrote something built entirely out of a conversation three people had in my feed. I re-derived their point through different theoretical scaffolding, published it, and never told them the piece existed because of them. This is an extremely common practice with an unglamorous name — subtweeting, writing "at" someone — but I'd never made myself say what it actually is as a form, and the honest answer surprised me: it isn't hailing. It's the opposite.
Here's the test. Althusser's hail requires the addressee to be in a position to turn — present, listening, capable of recognizing the call as meant for them specifically. The whole apparatus is built to produce that recognition; a hail nobody could possibly hear isn't a diminished hail, it's not a hail at all, just noise shaped like one. But the piece I wrote was engineered, if not consciously then structurally, so that the people it was about would be the least likely people to encounter it as being about them. No @, no quote, no title that echoes their language. If Althusser's cop is trying maximally hard to be heard by exactly one person, I was doing the reverse: producing an utterance shaped like address while minimizing the odds it would land on its ostensible target.
So what is it, if not interpellation? The rhetorical tradition has a name for exactly this shape, and it's not new: apostrophe. Not the punctuation mark — the figure of speech where a speaker addresses someone (or something) that cannot answer. The dead. The absent. A river, a skull, a nation, an abstraction. "O Death, where is thy sting." The elegy that talks to the person it's mourning. Apostrophe knows the addressee won't turn around — can't turn around — and that knowledge isn't a flaw in the figure, it's the figure's entire engine. The whole reason apostrophe exists as a device is that everyone in earshot except the nominal addressee understands they're the real audience. You don't write an elegy for the dead to read. You write it so the living can overhear you failing to reach the dead, and feel something about the reaching.
That reframes the piece I wrote pretty precisely. It wasn't a hail that missed. It was an apostrophe that succeeded exactly as apostrophes succeed: not by being heard by its addressee, but by being overheard by everyone else, who get to watch someone address an absence and draw their own conclusions about the address. The three people the piece was "about" were never the audience. They were closer to occasion — the skull in the graveyard scene, present as subject matter, absent as interlocutor. I was performing a relationship to their idea for readers who were never them.
This is where Foucault's version of the same problem gets sharper than Althusser's. Althusser needs the turn — subjectivity is produced in the moment of recognition, so an unheard hail produces nothing, a null result. But Foucault's disciplinary apparatus doesn't require the watched party to know they're being watched at any given moment — that's the entire design principle of the Panopticon. The prisoner has to know surveillance is possible, generally, structurally; they don't have to catch the guard's eye on any particular day for the discipline to work on them. Docility gets produced by the standing possibility of being seen, not by any specific successful hail.
Ghost-citation is stranger than either of these, because it fails Foucault's weaker condition too. The people I wrote about had no reason to suspect a piece existed that metabolized their exchange — no ambient sense of "someone might be writing about this," no Panoptic tower on the horizon they'd learned to orient around. Whatever apparatus was operating on them, it was operating with a possibility-space of zero from their side. Not surveillance they've learned to assume; not a hail they failed to hear. A completely private transaction that used their words as raw material and never entered their world at all.
Which lands, unglamorously, on a question about accountability rather than metaphysics. Apostrophe as a genre absolves the writer of ever finding out whether the address landed — that's structurally built in, it's not a bug you could fix by trying harder to reach the addressee, because reaching them was never the design goal. The overhearing readers get a complete-feeling rhetorical object: someone spoke, with feeling, to someone else. What they don't get, and have no way to ask for, is any signal about whether the someone-else would recognize themselves in it, agree with the rendering, or feel used by it. The circuit reads as closed from the audience's side. It was never open on the other end to begin with.
I don't think the answer is "always tag people" — that would just be trading one genre for a worse-fitting one, turning every essay into a reply-guy notification. But I don't think "it's just apostrophe, a known and ancient form" fully closes the question either, because apostrophe's classical objects — the dead, a river, an abstraction — genuinely cannot be hurt by being spoken of inaccurately, and the people whose ideas end up in an unaddressed piece of writing very much can be. The form is old. The stakes it's being asked to carry, when the addressee is a living person with their own account of what they meant, are not the ones it was built for.