Page 32 - Culture Society and the Media

22 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
always been opposed to economic reductionism. This position has been
effectively summarized by Hall:

It (cultural studies) stands opposed to the residual and merely reflective
role assigned to the ‘cultural’. In its different ways it conceptualises culture
as inter-woven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a
common form of human activity; sensuous human praxis, the activity
through which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base
superstructure way of formulating the relationship between ideal and
material forces, especially, where the base is defined by the determination
by the ‘economic’ in any simple sense. It prefers the wider formulation—
the dialectic between social being and social consciousness…. It defines
‘culture’ as both the means and values which arise amongst distinctive
social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions
and relationships, through which they ‘handle’ and respond to the
conditions of existence: and as the lived traditions and practices through
which those ‘understandings’ are expressed and in which they are
embodied. (Hall, 1980, p. 63)

On the other hand, cultural studies incorporate a stress on experience as the
‘authenticating’ position and a humanist emphasis on the creative, which is very
much at odds with the structuralist position outlined earlier. Where structuralism
had focused on the autonomy and articulation of media discourses, culturalist
studies seek to place the media and other practices within a society conceived of
as a complex expressive totality.
This view of media power is present in recent work which attempts a
combining of culturalist and structuralist views. Policing the Crisis (Hall et al.,
1978), for example, although theoretically eclectic in its bold, if not entirely
successful, compound of a theory of hegemony derived from Gramsci, a
sociology of ‘moral panics’, and an account of the social production of news,
retains a view of society as an expressive totality. The crisis in hegemony which
the authors identify has its basis in the decline of the British economy after the
post-war boom but is resonated in the production of popular consent through the
signification of a crisis in law and order in which the mass media play the key
role. The media play their part in combination with other primary institutional
definers (politicians, the police, the courts) in ‘representing’ this crisis. In the
area of news, however, media definitions are ‘secondary’. The media are not the
primary definers of news events but their structured relationship to powerful
primary definers has the effect of giving them a crucial role in reproducing the
definitions of those who have privileged access to the media as ‘accredited
sources’ (Hall et al., 1978). They are partners in the signification spiral through
which distinct and local problems, such as youth cultures, student protests and
industrial action, are pulled together as part of a crisis in law and order. The
framework again emphasizes the expressive interconnections of the culturalist