Page 110 - Culture Society and the Media

100 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
avoid either a conspiracy theory on the part of media professionals, on the one
hand, or a view of media audiences which sees them as mindless dupes. They are
compelled therefore to assume that the ideological function is a general one in
which the material practices of the television industry have no part and that the
ideology of television is also avoidable by collective aberrant decoding on the
part of the audience. Their own readings, if somewhat erratically, stress the
ideological meanings of television programmes but they attempt to use these
readings in a pluralist theoretical framework which stresses the universal
character of the ideologies involved (ideology answers ‘cultural needs’) and
glosses over specific ideological forms. This sometimes seems to lead them into
the worst forms of the reductionism they sought to avoid. Their reading of ‘The
Sweeney’, for example, focuses on the relationship between Carter and Regan,
comparing them with their West Coast counterparts, ‘Starsky and Hutch’. At the
same time, their view of cultural needs is drawn in, and on the basis of the way in
which Regan and Carter work together with Regan dramatically privileged and in
a higher position in the police hierarchy, they suggest that The Sweeney’ tells us
that ‘in a period when real life offers us wage restraint, inflation and a fall in
living standards, there is no need for class hostility’ (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, p.
188). Although Regan and Carter are in different positions in the police
hierarchy, it seems curious to assume that the Regan and Carter relationship
represents class relationships when both men share within the series the same
class position and both articulate populist resentments against a system which
inextricably entangles class and crime, against them. It is one thing to suggest
that The Sweeney’, like ‘Starsky and Hutch’ and ‘Ironside’ operates to
personalize status relationships: quite another, to suggest that ‘The Sweeney’
‘presents a society where class divisions are overcome because both “classes”—
Regan and Carter—share the same outlook on life, methods and language’. This
kind of dubious leap tells us little about the specific ideological message of The
Sweeney’ and assumes a relationship of reflection between television and
society. The Sweeney’s mythology of defensive determination, we are told, is
peculiarly appropriate for a society in a period of recession.
Since ideologies operate in a manner generally concomitant with the needs of
the culture and since audiences are free to decode as they will in the Fiske and
Hartley formulation, there is little need to examine specific developments and
changes within ideological and televisual discourses or the relationship between
mass media texts and systems of production or the inter-connections between the
media, the state and the class system. The production of ‘readings’ becomes an
end in itself, an exercise in establishing different interpretations in a manner not
dissimilar to certain traditional forms of literary criticism, although without the
search for excellence which normally preoccupies those forms.
Marxist negotiations with and appropriations of semiology as a linguistic
paradigm have taken different directions in the sense that semiology has been
articulated with an existing and a developing theory of ideology. For Marx,
ideology constituted a specific part of his theory about the nature and internal