Page 115 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 105
and effectively realize a classic realist project. The rather general nature of the
category also raises difficulties. The idea of the classic realist text has a tendency
to conceal as much as it illuminates inasmuch as it becomes difficult to
distinguish between a nineteenth-century novel and a Hollywood movie or
between different groups of Hollywood films. At the same time, the thesis of the
‘classic realist text’ and the subsequent debate around the term, did have the
considerable merit of bringing to the forefront of discussion the formal and
ideological characteristics of film and television. It is worth remembering that
the implicit modes of pluralist mass communications research against which
Screen and MacCabe wrote conceived of the media as transparent and neutral
communicators and that early semiological inquiries focused on individual texts
and general categories of ideology. MacCabe’s argument in its suggestion that
texts embodied even in terms of their formal characteristics a political
signification moved beyond a view of the media as passive transmitters and
beyond the reading of single texts. It also undoubtedly led to an élitist concern
with avant garde texts and with texts which reflected upon themselves.
The Screen arguments around realism also involved an explicit rejection of
traditional Marxist views of the media as reflective. MacCabe makes it clear that
his own work ‘does not understand cinema to have an ideological function
determined by its representational relationship to other ideological, political and
economic struggles’ (MacCabe, 1978, p. 32). The theory of ideology which lies
behind this takes as its central conceptions the notions of discourse and the
subject. The idea of discourse focuses attention on the internal characteristics and
processes of signifying systems. Relationships between discourses are conceived
of in terms of articulation rather than determination. This use of the linguistic
paradigm would replace the operations of the base/superstructure metaphor and
in an extreme form suggest that there is a necessary non-correspondence of all
practices. A central concern of this theory of ideology has been the development
of theorizing the neglected area of the subject and subjectivity, using Lacanian
psychoanalytic concepts to indicate how subjects are constituted in language and
other discourses as a non-unified and contradictory set of positions.
The debate around realism and the analysis of realist texts moved the
conceptualization of ideology closer to a linguistic or structuralist model of
society. There are advantages here in terms of the internal coherence of the
conceptual apparatus employed and in the space provided for the concrete analysis
of particular ideological and discursive formations. However, there have also
been attempts to register the autonomy of discursive practices and signifying
systems within a Marxist framework. Policing the crisis, for example, represents
a formidably ambitious attempt to reconcile a reworking of Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony with an analysis of the signifying practices of the media in an account
of ‘a crisis in hegemony’ in post-war Britain (Hall et al., 1978). The authors
attempt to map out the shifting ideological configurations of the period,
characterizing them as culminating in a crisis in hegemony. The study is not
confined to an analysis of the ideological superstructures but involves tracing