Page 310 - Culture Society and the Media

300 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
‘consenting’ to the view of the crisis which has won credibility in the
echelons of power, popular consciousness is also won to support the
measures of control and containment which this version of social reality
entails.’ (Policing the Crisis, pp. 220–21)

The central difficulty with this formulation consists in the secondary role it
appears to accord to the sphere of the ideological—secondary in the sense that it
is conceived as a response to an economic crisis that is pre-given to it. The effect
of this is to reproduce the antinomies—sign/world, signifier/ signified—with
which we have become familiar in relation to Orwell’s work by conceiving these
as analogous to the relationship between ideology and the economy. For such
formulations as ‘the way in which the crisis has been constructed’ suggest that it
is possible to speak first of a crisis (an economic crisis) and then of the mode of
its ideological signification. It is to suggest that a crisis may be held to exist prior
to and independently of the way in which it is ideologically signified. It would be
a mistake, however, to press this objection too strongly. The problems associated
with the residual economism to which they subscribe are ones that the authors of
Policing the Crisis are fully aware of, and the determinancy that is allocated to
the economy is, indeed, in Althusser’s famous phrase, that of the last instance
which never arrives. If the ideology of law and order is held to constitute a
specific discursive inflection of economic crisis, the role allotted to that ideology
is a far from passive one; its role in structuring the terms of political debate so as
actively to influence the forms adopted for the political regulation of that crisis is,
indeed, the very raison d’être of the book.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the book from the point of view of our
concerns here, however, has to do with the extent to which it undermines the
view that the media should be theorized as ‘definers of social reality’. For the
ideology of law and order is not primarily assessed in terms of its accuracy as
measured against some independent index of the ‘real’ extent and distribution of
crime. There is some element of this, it is true, but the preponderant emphasis is
placed upon the articulating role of this ideology, on the ways in which it pulled
together and connected, around the image of the mugger, a series of linked
ideologies concerning, inter alia, the rebelliousness of post-war youth, the
‘lawlessness’ of trade unions, race, immigration and Empire. In short, the
concern that is focused in Policing the Crisis is not that of the relationship of
ideology to ‘reality’ but that of the relationship between ideologies. The
effectivity that is attributed to the discourse of law and order is understood not in
terms of its codification of a reality presumed to be external to it but in terms of
the position it has occupied in relation to associated discourses which, conjointly
with it, are held to constitute a dimension of reality itself—fully physical and
material—and not a secondary, ontologically debased reflection or
transformation of a ‘more real’ reality.
It is perhaps necessary to add that this break is not made quite so clear or so
cleanly as it might be. In part, this is a result of the often somewhat