Page 303 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 293
For years past the communists themselves have been teaching the militant
workers in all countries that ‘democracy’ was a polite name for capitalism.
To say ‘Democracy is a swindle’, then ‘Fight for Democracy!’ is not good
tactics. If, with the huge prestige of Soviet Russia behind them, they had
appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of ‘democratic
Spain’, but of ‘revolutionary Spain’, it is hard to believe that they would
not have got a response. (Orwell, 1974, p. 68)

There is, of course, no way of telling what might have happened had the
Communist Party issued such a revolutionary call or what might have happened
—both in Spain and internationally—had an alternative, say Trotskyist policy,
been pursued. Maybe total disaster. Maybe an undermining of the political
stability of France and England. But is clear that the way in which the Spanish
Civil War was lost created considerable disillusionment and, indeed, disarray
within the ranks of the European left, just as it is clear that, in terms of their
coverage of the Spanish situation, the media—capitalist and communist—did not
function as a passive mirror but, through the way in which they defined and
interpreted that situation, actively contributed to shaping the contours of the
political map of pre-war Europe.
Yet Orwell’s study also clearly exemplifies the central difficulty associated
with the proposition that the media should be viewed as definers of social reality.
For the proposition is one that keeps alive the concept of media as mirror at the
same time as it contests it. This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ Orwell wrote
of the press coverage of the Spanish Civil War, ‘because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’
(Orwell, 1974, p. 235). The definitional frameworks to which Orwell points are,
by implication, all distorting ones; they are measured as being in some way false
in relation to that ‘real real’ of ‘objective history’—a real that exists prior to and
independently of signification. But this is merely to keep alive the notion that there
may be forms of signification that are adequate in relation to the ‘real real’ they
are alleged thus to re-present, forms which are, so to speak, neuter in that they
allow the real to reveal itself ‘as it really is’. The mirror analogy, therefore, is not
so much abandoned as simply re-worked: there are mirrors and mirrors, it is
implied. Some may be partial and distorting, but the possibility of a form of
representation that does genuinely re-present or mirror the real is retained as the
standard against which the distorting effects of such ‘false mirrors’ may be
assessed. In spite of appearances, politics is thus evacuated from the world of
signs. Implicitly, signification is allowed an effectivity only in so far as it is,
simultaneously, deception. The sphere of ideology, as a sphere of struggle, is
defined not by the clash and reverberation of sign versus sign—of competing
systems of signification locked in combat—but by the simple opposition of truth
versus falsehood.