Page 308 - Culture Society and the Media

298 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
and significance of an initial ‘problem’—that is, of what is defined as a problem
by such agencies—is subject to increased magnification as the reality-defining
practices of such agencies reciprocally sustain and complement one another. In
the case of the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ incidents of 1964, this ‘amplification spiral’
worked as follows: first, the national media dramatized the confrontations that
took place at such resorts as Eastbourne and Margate; the moral crusaders and
the local press then took up the problem; the police responded by introducing
new policing measures; these led to an increase in arrests and the magistracy
responded by further dramatizing the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ in their court-room
speeches—all of which was reported in the media, thereby adding another loop
to the spiral.
In this case, the moral panic sparked into life by this circuit of amplifying
significations soon worked itself out—if only because changes in teenage
fashions deprived the initial dramaturgy of much of its signifying potency. And,
of course, one could argue that the immediate, tangible consequences of the
panic were limited in import—a localized abuse of police power, a few wrongful
arrests and a handful of unduly harsh sentences. In their Policing the Crisis (also
discussed in chapter 4 of this collection), however, Stuart Hall and his co-authors
argue that such moral panics—when viewed collectively and cumulatively—
have played a major role in so orchestrating public opinion, via the production of
a generalized law-and-order crisis, as to have recruited support for a significant
extension of the arbitrary and coercive powers at the disposal of the state.
This thesis is set within the wider context supplied by an application of
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to the contours of post-war British history.
Briefly, the authors of Policing the Crisis contend that the period since the early
1960s has witnessed the development of a deep and sustained crisis of hegemony
in this country, a crisis which has rendered the production of popular consent to
ruling-class political and economic objectives increasingly problematic and
which, thereby, has occasioned the need for the state to accumulate a reservoir of
coercive powers which might be used to exact such compliance forcibly. The end
of the post-war boom and the continued declining international competitiveness
of the British economy, it is argued, have resulted in a marked sharpening of
class conflict as an increasingly militant, unionized working class has resisted
attempts to resolve the economic crisis by capitalist means—that is, by allowing
unemployment to increase, the attempts to impose income restraints, cuts in the
social services and so on. This resistance took its most highly effective and
dramatic form in the miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–4 which, in challenging
the ability of an elected government to govern, bore clear testimony to an
attenuation of ruling-class authority.
If, at the political level, the resolution of this crisis has been sought by means
of strengthening the powers of the state—particularly in regard to the sphere of
industrial relations—Hall and his colleagues argue that support for such policies
has been recruited chiefly by the way in which the crisis has been ideologically
signified as a crisis of law and order. Whereas, in the earlier part of this period,