Page 55 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 45
distortion is viewed not as the result of mendacity but as the effect of the action
of the dominant social relationships which, although acting on the consciousness
of individuals, do so in a way that is profoundly unconscious so far as they are
concerned. On this construction, then, ideology is a process which takes place
‘behind our backs’, producing and structuring our consciousness in ways that we
are not immediately aware of. It defines, as Althusser has put it, the form in
which men ‘live’ their relationship to the conditions of their existence, the form
in which ‘their relationship to their conditions of existence is represented to them’
(Althusser, 1971, p. 154).
In this sense, ideology comprises the sphere of representations within which
an ‘imaginary’ relationship to the conditions of existence is produced, a
relationship which embodies a ‘misrecognition’ of the real nature of those
conditions. Although susceptible to a more extended usage, Marxists have
traditionally granted the concept of ideology a privileged purchase in relation to
the ruling or dominant forms of mental representation:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force is, at the same time, its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at
its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental
production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack
the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx and Engels, 1965,
p. 61)

Ideology, in this most distinctive of senses, is thus concerned with the
transmission of systems of signification across class lines. This is conceived not
as an abstract process but as being effected, in a concrete way, via ‘the means of
mental production’ controlled by the economically dominant class. The
consciousness of those subjected to this relay of ideologies is thus distorted not
abstractly but in a way conducive to the perpetuation of existing relationships of
class domination.
Viewed in this way, the concept of ideology suggests three main areas of
concern in relation to the media. The first has to do with the nature of the social
control exerted over the media. The central question here concerns the structure
of the ownership of the media and, more generally, the ways and, of course,
extent to which ruling-class control over the operations of the media is secured.
Second, this time at the level of formal analysis, there is the question as to how,
technically, the signifying systems relayed by the media work so as to achieve
the effect of ‘misrecognition’ imputed to them. Finally, implicated in each of
these areas of concern, the media—particularly such state-owned media as the
BBC—occupy a critical position within the more general Marxist debates
concerning the way in which the economic, political and ideological levels of the
social formation should be construed as relating to one another. Needless to say,
these problems are posed not abstractly but are related to concrete problems of