Page 68 - Culture Society and the Media

58 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
DEVIANTS AND THE CONSENSUS
We can identify two kinds of breaks within this theoretical synthesis which
began to occur towards the closing years of the paradigm’s dominance, but
before it was more profoundly challenged from outside its confines. The first
may be summed up as the problematizing of the term ‘consensus’ itself. As we
suggested, the presumption of an integral and organic consensus did leave certain
empirically identifiable groups beyond the pale. Since, at first, these groups were
not conceived to be organized around conflicting structural or ideological
principles, they were defined exclusively in terms of their deviation from the
consensus. To be outside the consensus was to be, not in an alternative value-
system, but simply outside of norms as such: normless—therefore, anomic. In
mass society theory, anomic was viewed as a condition peculiarly vulnerable to
over-influence by the media. But when these deviant formations began to be
studied more closely, it became clear that they did often have alternative foci of
integration. These enclaves were then defined as ‘sub-cultural’. But the relation
of sub-cultures to the dominant culture continued to be defined culturally. That
is, sub-cultural deviation could be understood as learning or affiliating or
subscribing to a ‘definition of the situation’ different or deviant from that
institutionalized within the core value system. The career deviant in a sub-culture
had subscribed positively to, say, a definition of drug-taking which the dominant
consensus regarded as outside the rules (with the exception of alcohol and
tobacco which, unaccountably, were given a high and positive premium within
the American central value system). For a time, these different ‘definitions of the
situation’ were simply left lying side by side. Sub-cultural theorists set about
investigating the rich underlife of the deviant communities, without asking too
many questions about how they connected with the larger social system. Robert
Merton is one of the few sociologists who, from a position within the structural
functionalist or ‘anomie’ perspective, took this question seriously (Merton,
1957).
But this theoretical pluralism could not survive for long. For it soon became
clear that these differentiations between ‘deviant’ and ‘consensus’ formations
were not natural but socially defined—as the contrast between the different
attitudes towards alcohol and cannabis indicated. Moreover, they were
historically variable: sub-cultural theorists were just old enough to recall the days
of Prohibition, and could contrast them with the period when the positive
definitions of American masculinity appeared to require a steady diet of hard
liquor and king-sized filter-tips. What mattered was the power of the alcohol-
takers to define the cannabis-smokers as deviant. In short, matters of cultural and
social power—the power to define the rules of the game to which everyone was
required to ascribe—were involved in the transactions between those who were
consensus-subscribers and those who were labelled deviant. There was what
Howard Becker, one of the early ‘appreciators’ of deviance, called a ‘hierarchy of
credibility’ (Becker, 1967). Moreover, such ‘definitions’ were operational.