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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 47
the origin of ideology because it creates the different ‘places’, class
positions, from which subjects view it. (Hirst, 1976, p. 386)

Although the most obvious route into the problem of the social determination of
consciousness, this argument is both economist and idealist. It is economist
inasmuch as it views ideological forms as the product of a determination
operating solely in the economic sphere. Ideology is construed as the effect of
economic place. What the subject thinks and how she or he thinks it is construed
as a result of the place he or she occupies in the process of production. This is to
allow the level of ideology no specific determinancy of its own. Nor does it offer
any account of the actual mechanisms by which the consciousness of social
agents is produced; this simply ‘happens’, consciousness is somehow magically
formed as an effect of economic relationships.
Further, the position is idealist in the respect that it seeks to explain things
which have a concrete material and social existence—ideological forms as
articulated in language, written or spoken, or as embodied in visual signs—with
reference to something that is abstract and has no concrete existence: the concept
of consciousness. Vološinov admirably exposed the weakness of this conception
in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, arguing that any conception of
ideology which grants the concept of consciousness, as an attribute of the
subject, an existence prior to (either logically or temporarily) the forms in which
it is organized must be regarded as metaphysical. It explains something which has
a concrete and identifiably material existence (ideology) with reference to
something which does not, a mere abstraction (consciousness).
A Marxist theory of ideology, Vološinov argues, must start from the other
direction. It must start not with the abstract, consciousness, but with the
concrete, the structure of ideological forms themselves. Ideology must be viewed
not as the product of an evanescent consciousness but as an objective component
of the material world. For ideology, Vološinov insists, has a determinate reality.
It exists objectively as a distinctive organization of sound patterns (speech,
music) or as a codified co-ordination of light rays (print, visual images). Its
existence is thus wholly objective. It does not exist ‘within’ as an attribute of
consciousness but ‘without’ as a part of material reality, articulated on and
distributed through specifiable social relationships. Further, far from being
regarded as the product of consciousness, such ideological forms must be
regarded as the producers of consciousness inasmuch as they constitute the
distinctive ‘place’ within which the social production of consciousness is
actually organized and carried out. Ideology, Vološinov contends, is not an
attribute of consciousness. Rather, both in general and in the particular forms it
assumes, consciousness is a product of ideology. From the point of view of
language as a fully developed system (and language is the home of all ideology),
it is not the consciousness of individuals which determines the forms of language
but rather the forms of language which, pre-existing the individuals who
comprise the members of any speech community, produce the consciousness of