"Ideology consist of a specific objective level, of a relatively coherent ensemble of representations, values and beliefs: just as 'men', the agents within a formation, participate in an economic and political activity, they also participate in religious, moral, aesthetic and philosophical activities. Ideology concerns the world in which men live, their relations to nature, to society, to other men and to their own activity including their own economic and political activity. The status of the ideological derives from the fact that it reflects the manner in which the agents of a formation, the bearers of its structures, live their conditions of existence; i.e. it reflects their relation to these conditions as it is 'lived' by them. Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents' activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience. To this extent ideologies fix in a relatively coherent universe not only a real but also and imaginary relation: i.e. men's real relation to their conditions of existence in the form of an imaginary relation. This means that in the last analysis ideologies are related to human experience without being thereby reduced to a problematic of the subject—consciousness. This social-imaginary relation, which performs a real practical—social function, cannot be reduced to the problematic of alienation and false consciousness."
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Literary criticsPhilosophers from EnglandCatholics from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyTrotskyists
Original Language: English
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pp. 135-136
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton
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Terry Eagleton
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