Page 58 - Culture Society and the Media

48 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
individuals by defining the linguistic terms within which their thought is
structured. And it does so not abstractly but concretely as a set of material signs
relayed to individuals via the concrete mediations of home, school—and the media.
Clearly, this is a very different approach to the study of ideology. Rather than
being regarded as the product of forms of consciousness whose contours are
determined elsewhere, in the economic sphere, the signifying systems which
constitute the sphere of ideology are themselves viewed as the vehicles through
which the consciousness of social agents is produced. The consequence of this is
to call into question the concerns of reflection theory, according to which
ideological forms are interrogated to reveal how their determinations are
‘reflected’ or contained within their structure, and to put in its place a concern
with the activity and effectivity of signification. The methodological import of
this has been to suggest that the ideological forms relayed by the media should
be read so as to decipher the signifying conventions by means of which they
organize and structure the consciousness of social agents. Its more general
theoretical and political significance, however, is that, escaping the economic
reductionism of Lukács’ position, it allows the signifying systems which constitute
the sphere of the ideological to be granted their own specific role and effectivity
within social life.
The work of Louis Althusser has been most influential in providing a
framework within which this specific role and effectivity of the ideological can
be theorized. To appreciate the role Althusser assigns to ideology, however, we
must make a brief detour through Marx’s Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes
between the ‘real history’ of capitalism as a system of production which is
already in existence and is thus ‘moving on its own foundations’, and the ‘history
of its formation’. Marx discusses this problem with reference to the so-called
process of ‘primitive accumulation’ whereby the preconditions for production
founded on capital, the separation of the labourer from the means of subsistence
and the concentration of the ownership of the means of production, are brought
into being. Marx’s point is that the details of the actual historical mechanisms by
which such preconditions of capitalist production are created can have no bearing
on the actual functioning of capitalism as an economic system. For, once
production is founded on a capitalist basis, it tends to reproduce the conditions
of its own possibility, its historical presuppositions, as a result of its own internal
action. The completion of every cycle of exchange between the worker and
capital increases the worker’s dependence on capital by impoverishing him or
her at the same time as it enhances the domination of capital over the worker by
augmenting its value. In this way, the social relationship of wage-labour which
forms the basis of capitalist production is reproduced as a result of the logic of
capitalist production itself irrespective of the way in which, historically, that
relationship was first founded.
This perspective of reproduction is vital to recent developments in Marxist
theory. In truth, it is not the only perspective to be found in the Grundrisse. For
Marx went on to note that, at the same time as they reproduce themselves, the