June 11, 2018:
"Ideology" in Marx is a product of consciousness, an idea he inherited from the Enlightenment. For him, ideology consists naturally of ideas, which have a relationship to the real, where that relationship can be distorted, or inverted, or otherwise made false, in the more or less instrumental service of class interests. In his first period Althusser followed Marx in defining ideology as a system of mental representations endowed with a social function. He counterposed ideology to science as the prehistory and post history respectively of epistemological breaks, defining it in this sense as discourse without an object. Yet he simultaneously considered ideology in terms that were not so much about ideas as more directly material: a "lived" rather than theorized relation between people and the world, focused more on behavior than thought.
Althusser now rejects ideology as consciousness altogether. He argues that ideas and ideology aren't the same thing. Ideology is a type of social practice. It's what people do: their habits and customs, what Althusser calls &quit;their concrete comportment", whether self-consciously considered or, more likely, not. Indeed: the materiality of ritual, of practice, itself largely determines what people think. "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe," says Pascal. Ideology is no longer a system of ideas, but a system of social practices which produce ideas.
What does ideology do? I think you can reasonably say, it convinces people to carry on doing what they did the day before, largely by making alternatives invisible. This is my language, not Althusser's, and Althusser would probably criticize it for opening the door to the functionalist-idealist interpretation he wanted to avoid. Althusser's language is: ideology determines our "sense of what is most immediately self-evident." But I think my version is useful, so long as we qualify it by noting that people don't deliberately and consciously produce ideology on purpose. It's not actually produced by people at all, but as an effect of the structures of the modes of production articulated in a social formation, which "secrete" it. It's a necessary component of the reproduction of modes of production: part of their glue. Something like this: modes of production produce the ideologies which produce the ideologized subjects who are necessary to the continued existence of the modes of production.
Ideology is thus never-ending. "There will always be ideology, because ideology is the condition for the existence of individuals", where "individuals" means ideologized subjects — a remark which may seem unexpected when one considers the Marxist tradition.
Here's something interesting implied by Althusser's quotation from Pascal: "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe." Althusser doesn't call this out, but here it is. Change the ritual, and the ideas will change. Think about an anti-war demonstration, a picket line, a rally, a strike. These are all rituals. They're not the usual rituals. Participants over many many decades have emphasized that the experience of these events changes people's consciousness. Simply participating in the struggle, in whatever form, changes people. Before Althusser we've always called this "learning from experience" — a function of consciousness, which we've thought via the pedagogical model which is our spontaneous ideology as activists. Has Althusser taught us something new and important?