Page 54 - Culture Society and the Media

44 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
MARXISM: CLASS, IDEOLOGY AND THE MEDIA
The Frankfurt theorists, although remaining committed to Marxism, broached the
task of analysing the relationship between class, ideology and the media through
the conceptual prism supplied by an amalgam of the mass society critique and
the presuppositions of German philosophical idealism grafted on to the
framework of Marxist theory. More recent developments in Marxist theory have
opened up a different theoretical space within which questions pertaining to the
ideological role of the media are subject to a different formulation.
Before surveying these developments, however, some more general comments
on the concept of ideology are in order. As we have noted, Marx and Engels did
not provide any systematic exposition of this crucial concept other than that
outlined in the Introduction to The German Ideology, a work which many
Marxists have argued cannot be taken to represent Marx’s concerns during the
years of his theoretical maturity. Given this caveat, two distinct areas of concern
can be deciphered from Marx’s handling and use of the concept.
First, the concept implies something about the social determination of
signifying systems. In a much criticized passage, Marx referred to ideologies as
‘definite forms of social consciousness’ which, together with legal and political
relationships, constitute a ‘superstructure’ built upon and ‘corresponding’ to the
‘real foundation’ constituted by the relations of production (Bottomore and
Rubel, 1965, p. 67). Although the concept of ‘correspondence’ does not
necessarily imply a relationship of determination, the theoretical space opened up
by the concepts of ‘real foundation’ or ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ clearly implies
that the latter is in some way dependent on the former. Yet, as Marx argued
elsewhere, particularly in the Grundrisse, ideologies also have their relative
autonomy, their own distinctive properties, so that their dependence on the
‘base’ must be viewed as a highly complex and mediated one. This aspect of the
concept of ideology might thus be said to open up the problem regarding the
precise way in which the dependence of ideological forms upon the ‘base’ is to
be construed without depriving them of their autonomy. (It is pertinent to note,
however, that the cogency of maintaining that ideology may be regarded as being
both dependent upon and yet also autonomous in relation to the economy, has
recently been compellingly challenged. See Cutler et al, 1977.)
Second, the concept of ideology carries with it the implication of distortion.
This meaning is present in the common-sense usage of the term which is usually
applied to statements which are felt to be a motivated distortion of the truth.
Whilst there are passages in which Marx uses the term in this way, he more
typically invoked the concept to refer to the unexamined categories and
assumptions which form the unacknowledged impediments to scientific
investigation. It was in such terms that Marx sought to explain the limitations of
classical political economy as the product not of a subjective will to falsification
but of the limitations which inhere in any analysis which, implicitly, takes
bourgeois society as its point of departure and its point of return. In this usage,