Ideology defined…. . . . . .Ideology in action

The term 'ideology' is itself continually being redefined, contested, and explored within all areas of cultural theory. There is no incontestable definition of ideology. Put at its simplest, we can say that implicit in every culture is a 'theory of reality' which motivates its ordering of that reality into good and bad, right and wrong, them and us, and so on. For this 'theory of reality' actually to work as a structuring principle it needs to be unspoken, invisible, a property of the natural world rather than human interests. Ideology is the term used to describe the system of beliefs and practices that is produced by this theory of reality; and although ideology itself has no material form, we can see its material effects in all social and political formations, from class structure to gender relations to our idea of what constitutes an individual. The term is also used to describe the workings of language and representation within culture which enable such formations to be constructed as natural.

In wider conceptions of politics—that is, not party politics but power relations generally—the idea of the nation is enlisted in achieving and maintain hegemony. Hegemony is the process by which members of society are persuaded to acquiesce in their own subordination, to abdicate cultural leadership in favour of sets of interests which are represented as identical, but may actually be antithetical, to their own. The subordinated are persuaded by the ideologies on offer rather than the particulars of their material conditions (which might be the practical result of such ideologies). Hegemony's aim is to resist social change and maintain the status quo.

Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice (2^nd ed.; Routledge, 1993), 133, 136.

Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology--that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class.

[Italian Marxist critic Antonio] Gramsci’s most widely echoed concept is that of hegemony: that a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means, but by succeeding in making its ideological views so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression. The concept of hegemony, unlike the classical Marxist conception of ideology, implies an openness to negotiation and exchange, as well as conflict, between classes, and so refashions Marxist categories to fit modern, post-industrial society in which diverse concepts and ideas, apart from “modes of production,” play a leading role.

M.H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (10^th ed.; Wadsworth, 2012), 203-4, 207.

The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which “depend” the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he goes to church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (once it was material in the ordinary sense of the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practice, “according to the correct principles.” If he believes in Justice, he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.

From Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” NA 1501