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MEDIA STUDIES 111

Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases
these representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’: they are
usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures
that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’.
So ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their
world. This relation, that only appears as ‘conscious’ on condition that it is
unconscious, in the same way only seems to be simple on condition that it
is complex, that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations,
a second-degree relation. In ideology men do indeed express not the
relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they
live the relations between them and their conditions of existence: this
presupposes both a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation.
Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation between men and their
‘world’, that is the (over-determined) unity of the real relation and the
imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence. 3

Veron, commenting on the passage from Althusser quoted above, says:

if ideologies are structures in the sense structuralism uses this expression,
then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ (we can say, they are not
contents) but are sets of rules which determine an organization and the
functioning of images and concepts. 4
We can here already see the first foundation for the introduction of the notion of
code:

Ideology is a system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded
messages with this system…. This way ideology becomes autonomous in
relation to the consciousness or intention of its agents: these may be
conscious of their points of view about social forms, but not of the
semantic conditions (rules and categories of codification) which make
possible those points of view. 5

Veron illustrates his point with an analogy: he imagines that there was a
computer prepared to receive as input a certain type of message and to emit as
output a classification of each message as consistent or not with a certain
ideology. He concludes:

we shall call the ideological system not the input or the output of the
machine, but the programme according to which the computer emits and/or

*This article is an edited extract from ‘The Ideological Dimension of Media
Messages’, CCCS Stencilled Paper no. 10.