system of articulated doctrines than a set of images, symbols and occasionally concepts which we 'live' at an unconscious level. Viewed sociologically, it consists in a range of material practices or rituals (voting, saluting, genuflecting, and so on) which are always embedded in material institutions. Althusser inherits this notion of ideology as habitual behaviour rather than conscious thought from Gramsci; but he presses the case to a quasi-behaviourist extreme in his claim that the subject's ideas 'are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus. . . . ⁵⁰ One does not abolish conscious ness simply by a hypnotic repetition of the word 'material'. Indeed, in the wake of Althusser's work this term rapidly dwindled to the merest gesture, grossly inflated in meaning. If everything is 'material', even thought itself, then the word loses all discriminatory force. Althusser's insistence on the materiality of ideology -- the fact that it is always a matter of concrete practices and institutions -- is a valuable corrective to Georg Lukács's largely disembodied 'class consciousness'; but it also stems from a structuralist hostility to consciousness as such. It forgets that ideology is a matter of meaning, and that meaning is not material in the sense that bleeding or bellowing are. It is true that ideology is less a question of ideas than of feelings, images, gut reactions; but ideas often figure importantly within it, as is obvious enough in the 'theoretical ideologies' of Aquinas and Adam Smith.

If the term 'material' suffers undue inflation at Althusser's hands, so also does the concept of ideology itself. It becomes, in effect, identical with lived experience; but whether all lived experience can usefully be described as ideological is surely dubious. Expanded in this way, the concept threatens to lose all precise political reference. If loving God is ideological, then so, presumably, is loving Gorgonzola. One of Althusser's most controversial claims -- that ideology is 'eternal', and will exist even in Communist society -- then follows logically from this stretched sense of the word. For since there will be human subjects and lived experience under Communism, there is bound to be ideology as well. Ideology, Althusser declares, has no history -- a formulation adapted from The German Ideology, but harnessed to quite different ends. Though its contents are, of course, historically variable, its structural mechanisms remain constant. In this sense, it is analogous to the Freudian unconscious: everyone dreams differently, but the operations of the 'dream-work' remain constant from one time or place to another. It is hard to see how we could ever know that ideology is unchanging in its basic devices; but one telling piece of evidence against this claim is the fact that Althusser offers as a general theory of ideology what is arguably specific to the bourgeois epoch. The idea that

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