“materiality” of ideology

on the “materiality” of ideology, its embodiment in institutions and peoples’ everyday practices and lives A realist position is that all the ideas in the world can have no lasting political effect unless they come to inform institutions and subjects’ day-to-day lives. IE BUILDINGS INSTITUTIONS ETC 

iN THE uk THE BBC WOULD BE SUCH AN INSTITUTION OR CNN OR FOX 

OR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

ideologies are thus political discourses whose primary function is not to make correct theoretical statements about political reality but to orient subjects’ lived relations to and within this reality OF THE SAID INSTITUTION

 If a political ideology’s descriptive propositions turn out to be true (for example: “capitalism exploits the workers,” “Saddam was a dictator,” THEN ALL THE BETTER WE WERE RIGHT!

political speech is primarily about securing a lived sense of unity or community between subjects, something like what Kant called sensus communis or Rousseau the general wilL