Page 62 - Culture Society and the Media

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The rediscovery of ‘ideology’; return of the

repressed in media studies

STUART HALL

Mass communications research has had, to put it mildly, a somewhat chequered
career. Since its inception as a specialist area of scientific inquiry and research—
roughly, the early decades of the twentieth century—we can identify at least
three distinct phases. The most dramatic break is that which occurred between
the second and third phases. This marks off the massive period of research
conducted within the sociological approaches of ‘mainstream’ American
behavioural science, beginning in the 1940s and commanding the field through
into the 1950s and 1960s, from the period of its decline and the emergence of an
alternative, ‘critical’ paradigm. This paper attempts to chart this major paradigm-
shift in broad outline and to identify some of the theoretical elements which have
been assembled in the course of the formation of the ‘critical’ approach. Two
basic points about this break should be made at this stage in the argument. First,
though the differences between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘critical’ approaches
might appear, at first sight, to be principally methodological and procedural, this
appearance is, in our view, a false one. Profound differences in theoretical
perspective and in political calculation differentiate the one from the other. These
differences first appear in relation to media analysis. But, behind this immediate
object of attention, there lie broader differences in terms of how societies or
social formations in general are to be analysed. Second, the simplest way to
characterize the shift from ‘mainstream’ to ‘critical’ perspectives is in terms of
the movement from, essentially, a behavioural to an ideological perspective.

‘DREAM COME TRUE’: PLURALISM, THE MEDIA AND
THE MYTH OF INTEGRATION
The ‘mainstream’ approach was behavioural in two senses. The central question
that concerned American media sociologists during this period was the question
of the media’s effects. These effects—it was assumed—could best be identified
and analysed in terms of the changes which the media were said to have effected
in the behaviour of individuals exposed to their influence. The approach was also
‘behavioural’ in a more methodological sense. Speculation about media effects
had to be subject to the kinds of empirical test which characterized positivistic
social science. This approach was installed as the dominant one in the flowering