Before going on let me say one or two things about ideology. By ideology I do not mean some totalized common intuitive life in which everyone is immersed and which infects every brain in society. If that were the case, how did I or you ever escape from its embrace long enough to look around and put a name to it? Equally, ideology is not what has been called “false consciousness.” In the sense that all consciousness is “consciousness of” something, rather than immediate apprehension of a thing in itself, all consciousness is false. So to call ideology false consciousness is more or less to say nothing. We escape tautology by the meanings which are generated by the manifest differences constantly at play in the social world. Ideology in fact is more a kind of inherently incomplete compensation strategy for generating a consciousness of unity and sense that never actually exists. No society has a single ideology, nor a pervasive system of ideas, beliefs, and common feelings that expresses the perspective of some privileged epistemology (sometimes associated with a particular class). Society may have particularly influential ideologies, but, as Gramsci has taught us, there are always more than one at any one time.

Society, for one thing, is not a monolith. It is composed of diverse groups or collectivities which share bonds of thought and feeling of various strengths and weaknesses. In any one society these collectivities may have much in common, but they also have important and irreducible differences.