IDEOLOGY

Louis Althusser:

“it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relations to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there” (124)

“What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (125)

all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects (129)

1. there is no practice except by and in ideology

2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects (128)

… ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by… interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ (131)

Stuart Hall:

This “subject” is not to be confused with lived historical individuals. It is the category, the position where the subject—the I of ideological statements—is constituted. (102)

…we are hailed or summoned by the ideologies which recruit us as their “authors,” their essential subject (102)

…there is no essential, unitary “I”—only the fragmentary, contradictory subject I become (109)

The aim of a theoretically-informed political practice must surely be to bring about or construct the articulation between social or economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might lead them in practice to intervene in history in a progressive way—an articulation which has to be constructed through practice precisely because it is not guaranteed by how those forces are constituted in the first place (Hall, 1985: 95)