The term ideology designates a system of representations that offer the subject
an imaginary, compelling, sense of reality in which crucial contradictions of
self and social order appear resolved.
Good that done lets investigate ideology further:
Ideology is less a set of explicit political ideas than a
set of pre-conscious image-concepts in which men and women see and experience,
before they think about, their place within a a given social formation, with
its specific structure of class and gender relations.
Ideology is imaginary not
because it is in any sense unreal, but because it gives the subject an image
that satisfies an unconscious need for coherence, an image that is in fact the
specular (pertaining to or having the properties of a mirror) means for constructing the subject
Contemporary Marxism understands that the subtlest and
strongest forms of ideological address are those pitched not in narrowly
political or abstractly conceptual terms, but those --including what we call
literature and art-- pitched in concrete, overdetermined
images appealing to the primary unconscious fears and desires that underpin the
subject's sense of reality and identity. It is this "reality-effect"
--the capacity of certain discursive and
dramatic practices to disturb or displace prevailing forms of social and sexual
subject-ion through an address to the unconscious-- that has prompted
recurring demands for the exclusion, and schemes for the management, of such
practices.
Of
course, ideology is always politically significant, because the lived relation
to the real in which it situates the subject provides the condition of
political thought and practical activity, and solicits the subject's free (even
if grudging) participation in a social world experienced as natural and
inevitable.
Ideologies address, fascinate, worry, and fix social subjects in
ways appropriate to the reproduction of a given social order; they present as
obvious, simple, and universal --as reality itself-- what is peculiar, complex,
and historically specific. Ideological work is always directly or indirectly
affiliated with political work, constructing a realm of experience that seems
to universalize and stabilize a social project serving particular class
interests."
"Ideology" is also a complex of distinctive practices
and social relations which are characteristic of any society and which are
inscribed in the language of that society.
"Ideology" therefore applies to all the largely unconscious
assumptions and acts by which men and women relate to their world; it is the
system of images, attitudes, feelings, myths, and gestures which are peculiar
to a society, which the members who make up that society habitually take for
granted.
All societies are held together by ideology. In any society, one of
the functions of ideology is, as far as possible, to define and limit the
linguistic and cultural practices by which members of that society function.
If, as usually happens, a society likes to think of itself as harmonious,
coherent, and consensual, then it is ideology that enables this to occur. It
tries to suggest the existing order of things is permanent, natural,
universally acknowledged, embodying truths we would all agree with -- and in so
far as it persuades us that such "truths" are not ideology. Ideology helps bind us together by giving us seemingly
coherent representations and explanations of our social practices, and in
particular by giving us the language by which we describe and thus try to
perpetuate them. Thus ideology acts as a kind of social glue, binding us all
together.
References: ((Althusser 1970, pp. 231ff Althusser 1971, pp. 162ff; Belsey 1980, pp. 55-6 (Machery and Balibar 1980, p. 53) ary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, p. 9:).
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