Page 113 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 103
Structuralist or semiological investigations of the media allowed a temporary,
or in some cases permanent, suspension of involvement in these problems of
determination associated with the base/superstructure metaphor. The
representation of the media within Marxism as, on the one hand, a purveyor of
ruling-class ideology and on the other hand, the inculcator of false consciousness
was, in any case, threatened by the Althusserian reformulations of a theory of
ideology. Although the Althusserian view retained the notion of determination in
the last instance by the economic, it also stressed the autonomy and materiality
of the ideological and effected a decisive break with ideological reductionism of
an economist and reflective nature. The Althusserian conceptualization of
ideology as the themes, concepts and representations through which men and
women ‘live’ in an imaginary relation, their relation to their real conditions of
existence also involved a shift away from problems of determination in favour of
articulation between the parts in a structure in the focus on the terrains,
apparatuses and practices of ideology. In this theoretical context, there have been
a number of efforts to combine and synthesize Marxist studies with a
semiological paradigm.
The project of the periodical Screen, in attempting to generate the theoretical
basis for film and television studies in the education system, has involved just
such efforts. In particular there has been continuous attention within Screen to
the dominant codes of narrative cinema, one focus of which has been the
contention that such codes are ‘realist’ and that this form of realism has to be
critically engaged with in order to understand the ideological character of the
cinema and in order to effect changes within it. Of course, the ‘window on
reality’ effect of photography, film and television has become almost a
commonplace of media research. By the early 1970s, there was a general
recognition of the inadequacies of a conceptualization of the media which
stressed its neutral and reflective role. The arguments in Screen surrounding
MacCabe’s identification of a ‘classic realist text’ had a rather different focus.
MacCabe argued that the ‘realism’ of the cinema is tied to the characteristics of a
particular type of literary production—that of the nineteenth-century realist
novel. MacCabe defined the ‘classic realist text’ as one in which there is ‘a
hierarchy among the discourses which compose the text and this hierarchy is
defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth’ (MacCabe, 1974, p. 10). The
essential features of the ‘classic realist text’ MacCabe proposed, were, firstly, its
inability to deal with the real as contradictory and secondly its positioning of the
subject in a relationship of ‘dominant specularity’. The dominant discourse in a
classic realist text effects a closure of the subordinated discourses and the reader
is placed in a position ‘from which everything becomes obvious’. This is
achieved through the effacement of the text’s signifying practice, through the
concealment of its construction. MacCabe used the notion of the ‘classic realist
text’ in an illustrative example of the analysis of Pakula’s film, Klute. The
dominant discourse in Klute, according to MacCabe, is the unfolding of the
narrative as reality revealing itself. Against this can be measured other