Page 295 - Culture Society and the Media

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Media, ‘reality’, signification

TONY BENNETT

THE MEDIA AS ‘DEFINERS OF SOCIAL REALITY’
In making the national press awards for 1977, James Callaghan referred to the
media as a ‘mirror held up to society’. The analogy is, of course, a hackneyed
one. The concept of the mirror with its attendant series of questions—do the media
offer a faithful reflection of reality, or do they mirror the real in a one-sided,
distorting way?—has haunted the study of the media since its inception. The
difficulty with the analogy, however, consists in the suggestion that a dividing
line can be drawn between ‘reality’ or society on the one hand and the world of
representations on the other. It implies that the media are secondary and
derivative, somehow less real than the ‘real’ they reflect, existing above society
and passively mirroring it rather than forming an active and integral part of it.
Like a mirror, it is suggested, they reflect only what is placed in front of them by
the structure of the real itself.
In truth, this difficulty is not limited to media studies. The theory of the sign
developed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern
linguistics, posits a duality between the world of signification and that of
‘reality’—a duality kept alive by Saussure’s distinction between the sign and
referent—and, correspondingly, implies that the former is in some way
subordinate to and governed by the latter (see MacCabe, 1978, chapter 4). The
world of signs can only signify the reality which is given to it; the media can
only reflect what is already there. Subalterned to the reality it mirrors, the world
of signs is granted only a shadowy, twilight existence; it ‘hovers’ above ‘reality’
as an ethereal appendage to it, deriving such substance as it has merely from what
is reflected within it.
More recent developments in the theory of language have pulled in a direction
directly contrary to this, stressing not only the independent materiality of the
signifier—the ‘fleshiness’ of the sign—but also the activity and effectivity of
signification as a process which actively constructs cognitive worlds rather than
simply passively reflecting a preexisting reality. Indeed, whereas once the
priority of signified over signifier, of ‘reality’ over signs, used to be stressed, this