Hugging the Horse

“If power, like the Almighty himself, is omnipresent, then the word ideology ceases to single out anything in particular and becomes wholly uninformative - just as if any piece of human behaviour whatsoever, including torture, could count as an instance of compassion, the word compassion shrinks to an empty Signifier.
Faithful to this logic, Foucault and his followers effectively abandon the concept of ideology altogether, replacing it with the more capacious ‘discourse’. But this may be to relinquish too quickly a useful distinction. The force of the term ideology lies in its capacity to discriminate between those power struggles which are somehow central to a whole form of social life, and those which are not. A breakfast-time quarrel between husband and wife over who exactly allowed the toast to tum that grotesque shade of black need not he ideological; it becomes so when, for example, it begins to engage questions of sexual power, beliefs about gender roles and so on. To say that this sort of contention is ideological makes a difference, tells us something informative, as the more ‘expansionistic’ senses of the word do not. Those radicals who hold that ‘everything is ideological’ or ‘everything is political’ seem not to realize that they are in danger of cutting the ground from beneath their own feet. Such slogans may valuably challenge an excessively narrow definition of politics and ideology, one convenient for a ruling power intent on depoliticizing whole sectors of social life. But to stretch these terms to the point where they become coextensive with everything is simply to empty them of force, which is equally congenial to the ruling order. It is perfectly possible to agree with Nietzsche and Foucault that power is everywhere, while wanting for certain practical purposes to distinguish between more and less central instances of it.”

Terry Eagleton