According to the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, “There is no practice except by and in an ideology” (in Barker). The practice referred to here is what we call ‘cultural practice,' the myriad ways in which we live out our lives. ‘By' an ideology here means both constituted and constructed by an ideology and also in the sense of following or practising an ideology. Further, being “in” an ideology is that mental, intellectual, emotional space where identities are created and subjectivities are generated.

Secondly, he says that “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.” This implies that there cannot be any cultural practice without any ideology to construct subjects. Now this points to an important factor: that it is the subject, the one that experiences, that also creates ideology. It is created by the subject and also for subjects. So what we learn from these two postulations is that there can be no working out of our cultural lives, or of the webs of significance and meaning making if there is no framework of ideology or a worldview.