I found James Gee's "Ideology and Theory: The Moral Basis of Discourse Analysis" useful and clarifying. I wondered why I had not read this piece before--and why it is not included in the anthologies of literary theory I tend to use in my graduate theory classes. Although it does not deal with literature, neither do some of the other theory selections in such anthologies--like Althusser's "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus."
This essay does a very good job explaining what Ideology is by pointing out that all ideology is based on theory. He gives us useful ways of thinking about the levels of explicit or tacit, removed or deferred theories--which he defines as a "set of generalizations about an area...in terms of which descriptions of phenomena in that area can be couched and explanations can be offered." (You can tell that I am using this post as a way to remember the salient point of his argument).
The picture of the world and the ideologies we hold about it--and their impact on our understanding of and response to the world--that arises for me from this article is of multiple, competing and conflicting, but also mutually reinforcing, overlapping ideologies, most of them not particularly coherent, rarely entirely explicit, based on the uncertain, shifting ground of either our own experiences and observations or those of others and more often on hegemonic ideologies like individualism, personal responsibility, the ideals of self-improvement, capitalism, the protestant work ethic.
Somehow I love the multiplicity and messiness of all that. I also appreciate the moral imperative that Gee articulates in this essay:
Know your ideology or rather ideologies
Know what they are based on
Know how your ideologies affect other people
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