Ideology re-unifies fragmented subjects into imaginary national and popular totalities.

Evidence

The third ideological “effect” is that of imposing an imaginary unity or coherence on the units so re-presented; and thus of replacing the real unity of the first level with the “imaginary lived relations” of the third. This consists of the reconstituting of individual person-subjects into the various ideological totalities—the “community,” the “nation,” “public opinion,” “the consensus,” the “general interest,” the “popular will,” “society,” “ordinary consumers” (even Mr. Heath’s great conglomerate, the “trade union of the nation”!). At this level, unities are once again produced; but now in forms which mask and displace the level of class relations and economic contradictions and represents them as non-antagonistic totalities. This is Gramsci’s hegemonic function of consent and cohesion . — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the third of Poulantzas’s ideological effects — imaginary unity — and explicitly ties it to Gramsci’s hegemonic consent-and-cohesion function.
• XREF: The list of imaginary totalities maps directly onto the vocabulary of modern populisms and media ‘consensus’ discourse.
• QUESTION: Worth exploring: how do these imaginary totalities (‘the nation,’ ‘the consensus’) get constructed today when media fragmentation has eroded a single public sphere?