Page 14 - Culture Society and the Media

4 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
sustained the consensus, but as the institutions which produced consensus,
“manufactured consent”’. In the main body of his essay, Hall considers those
theoretical developments which ruptured the liberal-pluralist paradigm from
within together with those ‘outside’ influences which, in founding the critical
paradigm, have contributed to this change—indeed, reversal—of perspectives. In
an impressive survey which takes in the contributions of deviance theory, the
general perspectives of structuralism as instanced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and
Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the work of Louis
Althusser, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and its subsequent elaboration in the
work of Ernesto Laclau, Hall outlines the major theoretical developments which
have successively undercut and displaced the earlier analogical thinking whereby
the media were said to mirror or reflect reality.
Throughout his analysis, Hall is careful to relate theoretical developments to
political ones. If, as he contends, the ‘critical paradigm’ has been characterized
by its ‘rediscovery’ of ideology, exiled from the heartland of American
sociology, this has been closely related to the fact that ideological struggle, once
optimistically thought to be over, has become more pronounced and visible. If
the media are no longer viewed as reflecting an achieved consensus but as being
engaged in the business of producing consent, this is due, in no small part, to the
fact that there is no longer a consensus to be reflected with the result that, as the
economy has plunged deeper and deeper into crisis, the need to produce consent
has become more imperative yet, at the same time, increasingly difficult.
In his critique of the American social science of the 1950s, Stuart Hall argues
that ‘conceptually, the media-message, as a symbolic sign-vehicle or a structured
discourse, with its own internal structuration and complexity, remained
theoretically wholly undeveloped’ within the liberal-pluralist tradition. There can
be little doubt that the centrality currently accorded such questions consitutes the
most visibly distinctive feature of contemporary media theory. In the intervening
period, the aggregate techniques of content analysis have been forced into the
background by a veritable explosion of new methods—chiefly derived from
linguistics, semiology and psychoanalysis—aimed at unlocking the structure of
media messages and analysing their effects. In ‘Messages and meanings’, Janet
Woollacott outlines some of the more important of these methods, illustrates the
uses to which they have been put and considers some of the difficulties
associated with them. In a discussion which ranges across the work of Lévi-
Strauss, Barthes and Umberto Eco, the critical project of the film journal Screen,
Colin MacCabe’s work on the ‘classic realist text’ and the use of the Gramscian
concept of hegemony in Policing the Crisis, she draws out the implications
which such developments have had for traditional Marxist formulations of the
concept of ideology. The general difficulty she points to has been that of
reconciling semiological perspectives, with their stress on signification as an
active process of the production of meaning, with ‘any theory of ideology which
conceives of the media as essentially reflecting the “real”’.