Page 30 - Culture Society and the Media

20 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
television forms, taking as a basis the idea that the ideology embodied in film
and television is an important and necessary area of ideological struggle.
Structuralist studies have, however, moved beyond an Althusserian
problematic in a number of ways. First, through attempting to combine the
analysis of media-signifying practices with psychoanalysis, there has been an
attempt to theorize the relationship of texts to subjects. The subject, constituted
in language, in Lacanian terminology, is not the unified subject of the
Althusserian formulation and traditional Marxist view, but a contradictory, de-
centred subject displaced across the range of discourses in which he or she
participates. Although this is a relatively undeveloped area in Marxist studies of
the media and in Marxism generally, this line of development indicates some
crucial absences both in Marxism and in earlier structuralist studies. A second
movement within structuralism has involved a rejection of the base/
superstructure model for a focus on the articulation of autonomous discourses.
Hirst, for example, suggests that the idea of the ‘relative autonomy’ of ideology
and the linked notion of representation is inherently unstable in its juxtaposition
of ideas (the relative autonomy of the ideological and the determination of
ideology by the economic base) which are logically opposed to one another. In
this view there can be no middle ground between the autonomy of ideological
practices such as the mass media and straightforward economic determinism.

‘Political economy’

If the structuralist paradigm has directed attention at and conceived the power of
the media as ideological, there have been consistent attempts to reverse the
structuralist view of ideology in favour of a ‘political economy’ of the media.
This well-established tradition in media research, which we have already touched
on in relation to the analysis of media organizations, has heavily criticized
structuralist accounts of the media for their overconcentration on ideological
elements.

Instead of starting from a concrete analysis of economic relations and the
ways in which they structure both the processes and results of cultural
production, they start by analysing the form and content of cultural
artefacts and then working backwards to describe their economic base. The
characteristic outcome is a top-heavy analysis in which an elaborate
autonomy of cultural forms balances insecurely on a schematic account of
economic forces shaping their production. (Murdock and Golding, 1977, p.
17)

Similarly, Garnham characterizes the post-Althusserian position ‘popular within
film studies’ as ‘an evacuation of the field of historical materialism’ for
determination in the last instance by the ‘unconscious as theorized within an
essentially idealist’ problematic (Garnham, 1979, pp. 131–2)