Page 56 - Culture Society and the Media

46 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
political practice. Marxist inquiry into the media is motivated by the need to
furnish a knowledge of their workings that can be put to use in the production of
subversive signifying systems which might offset the effects of dominant
ideology and contribute to the formation of a revolutionary consciousness within
oppressed social groups and classes.
Unfortunately, the precise way in which such questions are addressed depends
upon the way in which the concept of ideology is interpreted and handled—a
matter on which Marxists have been by no means united. The importance of such
general conceptual considerations for the specific way in which the media are to
be interrogated can be illustrated by considering the contrasting approach to the
concept of ideology embodied in the works of Georg Lukács and Louis
Althusser.
Lukács’s approach to the question of ideology is mediated through the
framework of the so-called ‘materialist inversion’. Whereas Hegel had construed
being as the manifestation or product of consciousness, Marx argued that the
relationship between these terms should be inverted. ‘It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their being’, Marx wrote, ‘but, on the contrary, their
social being determines their consciousness’ (Bottomore and Rubel, 1965, p.
67). The question this poses is: How is this determination of consciousness by
social being effected? How are we to conceive and represent the logic of this
determination? Lukács’s contention was that the class relationships constituting
the structure of social being determine the structure of ideological forms in the
respect that they provide different conceptual vantage points which mould the
consciousness of social agents in different ways. Ideological forms, that is to say,
are regarded as the product or reflection of the ‘already-structured’
consciousness of different class-based subjects of cognition. The position that
they occupy within the structure of class relationships determines the structure
and content of men’s and women’s consciousness. The structure and content
of such ideological forms as works of art, literature and philosophy are then
explained as the manifestation or reflection of what is thus posited as the already
socially determined consciousness of the social agents to which they are
attributed. Lukács added to this the further argument that whereas the conceptual
vantage point afforded by the class position of the proletariat enabled the
proletariat to acquire a true knowledge of the workings of the capitalist system of
production, the bourgeoisie was able to attain only a partial knowledge of these
owing to the ‘false-consciousness’ necessarily engendered by its class position.
Paul Hirst has offered a useful summary of this argument:

.‘False consciousness’ is explained…by the relation of the subject to the
object. Reality (the object) determines the place of the subject within it and,
therefore, the conditions of its experience of it. Reality determines the
content of ideology; it generates false recognitions of itself by subjecting
subjects to circumstances in which their experience is distorted. Reality is