The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don't want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they're stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.

So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they're all in Hell.

kittypuppy

Ideological hegemony could be exercised by a dominant class, the bourgeoisie, not only through exerting state force but through various cultural means. Gramsci shifted ideology away from being solely a tool of the state. Ideology operated and was produced in civil society, the sphere of non-state individual and group activity. [Emphasis mine.] Here again the intellectuals surfaced as the major formulators and conductors of ideology and as non-governmental leaders wielding cultural authority. Their permeation of social life was characteristically based on the manufacturing of consent among the population at large, so that the masses would regard their own assent as spontaneous.

Finally, Althusser's fifth input was that concrete individual subjects were made to serve as carriers of ideology, thus severing the inevitability of its link with class as proclaimed by earlier Marxists. For that reason, the very notion of ideology itself depended on the ideological concept of the subject--individuals constituted by ideology as bearers of consciousness, will, and agency. In other words, 'ideology' and 'subject' were mutually defining.

If I acted as an individual who desired, say, to marry and have a fulfilling and lucrative career, I was putting my private life-purpose at the centre of my world, and others were recognizing my right to do that. But at the same time I was the product of an ideology that caused me to think of myself as a free agent whose fulfilment would be in a long-term, formalized relationship with another individual designated as a 'spouse', an in a profitable activity that would secure the means of purchasing the labour and products of others. I lived 'naturally' in such an ideology and believed that I was acting spontaneously and autonomously.

Inasmuch as [ideology] is in us, we are not fully conscious of its effects. But if we are sufficiently astute, we can acknowledge that we identify each other through ideology, as individuals possessing certain features rather than others. That is a process of mutual recognition that brings order in its wake, such as 'you are a greengrocer, I am a customer', and, underpinning that, an awareness that is not always evident: 'we are both subject to the rules of the market'. The ambiguity of the term 'subject', Althusser argued, catches the essence of ideology beautifully. It refers to the free initiative of the individual, but also the the domination of the individual by a higher authority.

For instance, being entrepreneurial, cowardly, caring--all these are particular features that our ideological imaginations deem important for one reason or another. These are all categories we apply in order to make sense of human actions. They all define the characteristics of individual subjects, thus placing them within a recognizable social network. They are all linked to practices of which we approve or disapprove, but which occur in the real world. Ultimately--and crucially--all these are permanent aspects of social life.