Ideology is shaped within material institutions, not by class or economics.

Evidence

I believe it is a clear deduction from this line of argument that, though the ideological field is always, for Gramsci, articulated to different social and political positions, its shape and structure do not precisely mirror, match, or “echo” the class structure of society. Nor can they be reduced to their economic content or function. Ideas, he argues, “have a centre of formation, of irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion” (PN, 192). Nor are they “spontaneously born” in each individual brain. They are not psychologistic or moralistic in character “but structural and epistemological.” They are sustained and transformed in their materiality within the institutions of civil society and the state. Consequently, ideologies are not transformed or changed by replacing one, whole, already-formed conception of the world with another, so much as by “renovating and making critical an already existing activity.” The multiaccentual, interdiscursive character of the field of ideology is explicitly acknowledged by Gramsci when, for example, he describes how an old conception of the world is gradually displaced by another mode of thought and is internally reworked and transformed: … What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected … This makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess … what was previously secondary and subordinate … becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolve into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 129

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Gramscian conception of ideology as multiaccentual, interdiscursive, sustained in material institutions, and changed by internal renovation rather than wholesale replacement.
• XREF: The ‘multiaccertual’ and ‘interdiscursive’ field of ideology connects directly to Voloshinov’s multiaccentuality of the sign and to later Hall pieces on race as a floating signifier, which the Islamophobia readings will build on. — connects to: Class consciousness arises from being looked at by oppressors, not from material hardship. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1028; The category of the Other precedes and enables material oppression, not vice versa — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147; Women’s legal equality arose from economic shifts, not ideology or religion. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 209 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that ideologies change by renovating an already-existing activity rather than by substitution is a genuinely paradigm-level claim about how cultural/ideological struggle actually works, resisting both economistic and imposition models.