Page 60 - Culture Society and the Media

50 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
It has been partly as a result of these criticisms that more recent developments
in the Marxist theory of ideology have tended to look back beyond Althusser to
the work of Antonio Gramsci whose writings on such subjects as culture and
ideology, the role of intellectuals, and the crucial concept of hegemony afford a
more flexible, less economistic way of conceptualizing the relationship between
ideological, social, political and economic processes and relationships. Be this as
it may, the crucial role that Althusser has played in facilitating the development
of significantly new lines of approach to the study of the media should not be
underestimated. The stress that he placed on the active role of ideology, on the
part that it played in shaping the consciousness of social agents, formed the
central conduit through which developments in structuralism and semiology have
both entered into and lastingly altered Marxist approaches to the media in
placing questions concerning the politics of signification at least on a par with
the traditional Marxist concern with the analysis of patterns of media ownership
and control. It may be, as subsequent critics have argued (see Lovell, 1980), that
Althusser—or, more accurately perhaps, those following him—bent the stick too
far, resulting in a tendency towards purely formalist ‘readings’ or
‘deconstructions’ of the signifying mechanisms of media forms which paid scant
regard to the conditions of their production or to the real history of their
reception by different sections of the audience. A valid measure of Althusser’s
importance, however, is discernible in the fact that it has proved impossible for
those who have wished to raise such questions to do so without acknowledging
that his contribution has decisively altered the ways in which they need to be
posed.

REFERENCES

Adorno, T.W. (1974a) Minima Moralia, London, New Left Books.
Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and
Philosophy, and Other Essays, London, New Left Books.
Anderson, P. (1969) ‘Components of the national culture’, in Cockburn, A. and
Blackburn, R. (eds) Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, Harmondsworth,
Penguin.
Arnold, M. (1971) Culture and Anarchy, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill.
Bell, D. (1960) ‘America as a mass society: a critique’, in The End of Ideology: on the
Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, New York, Free Press.
Benjamin, W. (1970) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, London, Jonathan Cape.
Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism, London, Methuen.
Bottomore, T.B. and Rubel, M. (1965) Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Bramson, L. (1961) The Political Context of Sociology, New Jersey, Princeton University
Press.
Brecht, B. (1964) On Theatre, London, Methuen.