Camera Obscura

It is an often-taught and often-forgotten lesson that ideology is designed to promote the dignity and clear conscience of a given class at the same time that it discredits their adversaries; indeed, these two operations are one and the same, and as a cultural or intellectual object ideology may be defined as just such a reversible structure, a complex of ideas which appears either systematic or functional depending on the side from which it is approached. Thus, the feudal code of ‘honour’ discredits those classes unable to defend themselves; the Protestant work ethic holds up the idleness and conspicuous waste of the nobility to shame; the nineteenth-century notion of middle-class ‘distinction’.. separates middle classes from workers in their way of living their own body…. (fredric jameson)

Now there is a passage in Sartre’s Critique where he says that colonial racism is not, primarily, a belief system, it is the means of solidarity among the colonisers, it organises a body of people and pays off their conscience. This isn’t quite the same thing as what’s being said above, but perhaps both point in the same direction: that Ideology needs to be understood as functional and relational, or rather it is defined (and I think this is more of less what Althusser says) as that wherein the functional predominates over the ideational/ theoretical. In ideology ideas operate primarily to marshal and repel, to rationalise, denigrate, or to organise and preserve historical amnesia.

For those inhabiting the ideology, of course, it is impossible to live it this way (or at least this is what was supposed until recently) - so that for the racist or Protestant bourgeois the belief stands and is subjectivised precisely as a conviction and an idea in its own right, not as a means, a functional tool, a way of denigrating and claiming natural ascendancy over a rival class. And so, in a perfectly explicable way, might not one say their ‘consciousness’ is false? For their way of living the belief – their solemn reverence or whatever - is at odds with its genesis and function.
It is as if the belief qua belief is an imaginary thing, in which nonetheless the reigning class is invested, whilst the real work of the belief, assigned to it by history, goes on behind the actors’ backs.

Needless to say, I’m not buying this idea, just offering it to the learned and responsive community of CS readers. Nor am I wanting to flog the false consciousness horse, just to speculate about this word 'ideology'.