Page 316 - Culture Society and the Media

306 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
how to enter the domain of signification as an arena of political struggle. For the
formulation ‘media as definers of social reality’ admits of only one politics: one
in which the power of allegedly distorting systems of signification is opposed by
the truth, by a system of signification which effaces itself in allowing the real to
speak through it without hindrance or modification. The objection to this is not
merely that it is impossible. It also misconceives the political task which is not to
oppose truth to falsehood, but to take up a position in relation to dominant
systems of signification—a matter that can only be broached if the focus of
analysis shifts away from the investigation of the relationship between sign and
‘reality’ to that of the relationship between signs, the play of signification upon
signification within a structured field of ideological relationships.

REFERENCES

Aldgate, A. (1979) Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War,
London, Scolar Press.
Annan Committee (1977) Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting,
London, HMSO.
Cohen, S. and Young, J. (eds) (1973) The Manufacture of News. Deviance, Social
Problems and the Mass Media, London, Constable.
Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers,
London, MacGibbon and Kee.
Cohen, S. (ed.) (1971) Images of Deviance, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Connell, I. (1980) ‘Review of More Bad News’, Marxism Today, August.
Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Glasgow University Media Group (1976) Bad News, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Glasgow University Media Group (1980) More Bad News, London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Hall, S., Critcher, C, Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis:
Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London, Macmillan.
Hall, S., Connell, I. and Curti, L. (1976) ‘The “unity” of current affairs television’,
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, (9).
Hood, S. (1972) ‘The politics of television’, in McQuail, D. (ed.) Sociology of Mass
Communications, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
MacCabe, C. (1978) James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, London, Macmillan.
Macfarlane, A. (1970) Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Morley, D. (1980) The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, London, British Film Institute.
Orwell, G. (1974) Homage to Catalonia, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Trotsky, L. (1973) The Spanish Revolution, 1931–39, New York, Pathfinder Press.