Research Network Forum, Thomas Rickert: "Ideology is typically understood in a variety of poststructuralist/postmodernist formulations that nevertheless have a good deal in common. Key markers are the reliance on Foucault to theorize the productive aspects of power and on Althusser to understand how subjects are interpellated into ideological discourses. These theorists are utilized extensively in cultural studies-based approaches to ideology. James Berlin and Michael Vivion, for example, describe the practice of cultural studies as being a giant project of ideology critique. They write that 'both composing and interpreting texts become overt acts of discourse analysis and negotiation' (x), and cultural studies becomes a process in which English teachers are engaged in a cultural politics in which the power of students as citizens in the democratic public sphere is at stake. the aim to make them subjects rather than objects of historical change. Both teachers and students then will engage in critique, in a critical examination of the economic, social, and political conditions within which the signifying practices of culture take place. (xii) Unfortunately, this kind of pedagogical program has not proven to be all that liberating or empowering. As has been noted by several theorists, such as Laura Finke and Tim Dean, making students good critics of advertising or patriarchal institutions seems to have little overall effect on disrupting or circumventing their persuasive power. For example, we still eat our fast food, worry about how fat we might be getting, and give in to impulse buying.

One way to rethink this critical impasse, I suggest, is consider again what we might mean by the notion of ideology and how we might go about critiquing it, or even consider if the poststructuralist notion of 'critique' is still viable."