Page 121 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

9
The ideological dimension of media
messages*

Marina Camargo Heck

Althusser defines ideology as ‘a “representation” of the imaginary relationships
1
of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. The ‘imaginary’ character of
this relation references the distorting character of ideology. According to
Poulantzas:

This social-imaginary relation, which performs a real practical-social
function, cannot be reduced to the problematic of alienation and false
consciousness.
It follows that, through its constitution, ideology is involved in the
functioning of this social-imaginary relation, and is therefore necessarily
false; its social function is not to give agents a true knowledge of the social
structure but simply to insert them as it were into their practical activities
supporting this structure. Precisely because it is determined by its
structure, at the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the
agents. 2
This ideological effect cannot be attributed to ‘false consciousness’ or a will-to-
cheat by the dominant classes, but to the necessary obscuring of social realities.
In short, our ‘spontaneous perceptions’, which take off from the distorted level
(where ‘surplus value’ is hidden) must, themselves, be distorted. There is,
therefore, a level of ‘deep structure’, which is ‘invisible’ and ‘unconscious’,
which continually structures our immediate conscious perceptions in this
distorted way. This is why, in ideological analysis, we must go to the structuring
level of messages—that is, to the level where the discourse is coded—not just to
their surface forms.
In For Marx Althusser argues:

It is customary to suggest that ideology belongs to the region of
‘consciousness’. We must not be misled by this appellation which is still
contaminated by the idealist problematic that preceded Marx. In truth,
ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’, even supposing this
term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even
when it presents itself in a reflected form (as in pre-Marxist ‘philosophy’).