ideology is false, it is not pejoratively so. We need protest only when such falsehood is harnessed to the purpose of reproducing exploitative social relations. There need be no implication that in post-revolutionary society ordinary men and women will not be equipped with a theoretical understanding of the social totality; it is just that this understanding cannot be 'lived', so that ideology is essential here too. At other times, however, Althusser writes as though terms like 'true' and 'false' are quite inapplicable to ideology, since it is no kind of knowledge at all. Ideology implicates subjects; but for Althussor knowledge is a 'subjectless' process, so ideology must by definition be non-cognitive. It is a matter of experience rather than insight; and in Althusser's eyes it would be an empiricist error to believe that experience could ever give birth to knowledge. Ideology is a subjectcentred view of reality; and as far as theory is concerned, the whole perspective of subjectivity is bound to get things wrong, viewing what is in truth a centreless world from some deceptively 'centred' standpoint. But though ideology is thus false when viewed from the external vantage point of theory, it is not false 'in itself' -- for this subjective slant on the world is a matter of lived relations rather than controvertible propositions.

Another way of putting this point is to say that Althusser oscillates between a rationalist and a positivist view of ideology. For the rationalist mind, ideology signifies error, as opposed to the truth of science or reason; for the positivist, only certain sorts of statements (scientific, empirical) are verifiable, and others -- moral prescriptions, for instance -- are not even candidates for such truth/falsity judgements. Ideology is sometimes seen as wrong, and sometimes as not even propositional enough to be wrong. When Althusser relegates ideology to the false 'other' of true knowledge, he speaks like a rationalist; when he dismisses the idea that (say) moral utterances are in any sense cognitive, he writes like a positivist. A somewhat similar tension can be observed in the work of Emile Durkheim, for whose The Rules of Sociological Method ideology is simply an irrational obstruction to scientific knowledge, but whose The Elementary Fomm of Religious Life views religion as an essential set of collective representations of social solidarity.

[. . .]

Althusser's thinking about ideology is on a fairly grand scale, revolving on such 'global' concepts as the Subject and ideological state apparatuses, whereas the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is more concerned to examine the mechanisms by which ideology takes hold in everyday life. To tackle this problem, Bourdieu develops in his Outline of a Theory of Practice ( 1977) the concept of habitus, by which he means the inculcation in men and women of a set of durable dispositions

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