Page 112 - Culture Society and the Media

102 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
the use of the word ‘determines’. The term ‘determination’ can be used to
suggest rather different forms of relationship. Williams has argued that it is
possible for the term to indicate either a process ‘of setting limits and exerting
pressures’ or a quite different process in which ‘subsequent content is essentially
prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external force’, and that
Marx uses the term in the former sense (Williams, 1973, p. 4). Marx certainly
uses the language of determinism but it is worth noting that he was writing in
opposition to idealist and theological accounts of the world, in which the
language of determinism was the expected form. It is noticeable that it is in
statements that reverse received propositions that Marx uses the word
‘determines’ most forcibly as in: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being but rather their social being which determines their
consciousness’ (Marx and Engels, 1962, p. 363).
Debates within Marxism have consistently revolved around the problems
associated with economic determinism, although Williams accurately identifies
and develops the elements within Marxism which militate against a crude
determinism. Marx certainly emphasizes the necessity both for specific historical
analysis and for viewing capitalist society as a totality in which the tendencies of
the determining base are mediated at other levels. Some formulations, however,
have, in stressing the class basis of ideology, lent themselves to various forms of
reductionism:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of
mental production so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those
who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas
are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas: hence of the relationships which make the
one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (Marx and
Engels, 1970, p. 64.)

The idea of ruling-class ideology is a well-known one and has coloured a great
deal of thinking about the mass media. Traditional Marxist accounts of the media
reveal two important characteristics in the conceptualization of the media. Firstly,
ideology is conceived as ‘false consciousness’. The work of members of the
Frankfurt School, for example, gives to the mass media and the culture industry a
role of ideological dominance which destroys both bourgeois individualism and
the revolutionary potential of the working class. Secondly, the base/
superstructure model applied to the mass media generated a continuing concern
with the ownership and control of the mass media which gives the signifying
capacity of the media a second place, an essentially reflective place, within its
theorizing.