Page 109 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 99
Buscombe argues that the readings given by Fiske and Hartley are not ‘semiotic’
because they are not dependent on the idea of a set of structured relationships but
are dependent on notions of similarity of content.
Moreover, Fiske and Hartley frequently seem to treat ideology as a functional,
if mediated, reflection of reality.

The myths…cannot themselves be discrete and unorganized, for that would
negate their prime function (which is to organize meaning): they are
themselves organized into a coherence that we might call a mythology or
an ideology. This, the third order of signification reflects the broad
principles by which a culture organizes and interprets the reality with
which it has to cope. (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p. 46)

Television overall, they argue, is better than the literary traditions of the past
both at using this area of mythology or ideology and disrupting it. Television,
they suggest, performs a ‘bardic function’ operating as a mediator of language,
producing messages not ‘according to the internal demands of the text’, ‘nor of
the individual communicator’ but ‘according to the needs of the culture’.
Similarly they explain the centralized institutionalization of television as a
response to the culture’s ‘need for a common centre’ and the ‘oral’ quality of
television as a compensatory discourse for cementing the ‘non-literate’ working
class into a culture which places ‘an enormous investment in the abstract
elaborated codes of literacy’ (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p. 86). Semiology is taken
over and into this set of arguments with rather curious consequences. The systems
of signification embodied in television are handed over to a formulation quite
alien to what one would have thought were the first principles in a semiological
ABC. The meanings of television programmes are seen to be structured not in
accordance with any internal logic but in response to reality ‘out there’.
Television as an historically specific social institution which constitutes the
material base for specific discourses is reduced to the ‘needs of the culture’; and
finally and most strangely for the work of two such enthusiastic espousers of the
semiotic cause, the authors suggest that the overall form of television, with its
contradictory and ‘de-familiarizing’ effects, operates to give the audience the
‘freedom to decode as they collectively choose’ (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p.
193). Although, of course, it is perfectly possible to decode oppositionally in the
sense of reading a television text while disagreeing with and reversing its
ideological message, it is certainly not the case that the audience is free to
decode as it wishes. Oppositional readings are dependent upon an accurate
decoding in the first place. (Buscombe, 1979)
Fiske and Hartley clearly set out to avoid a crude and reductionist analysis of
the ideology of television forms, but their own position involves certain
ambiguities. The confusion between freedom to decode and freedom to read
oppositionally is echoed throughout their work. Hence while accepting that
television performs an ideological function at a general level, they are anxious to