Page 69 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 59
Deviants were positively identified and labelled: the labelling process served to
mobilize moral censure and social sanction against them. This had—as those
who now recalled the forgotten parts of Durkheim’s programme acknowledged—
the consequence of reinforcing the internal solidarity of the moral community.
As Durkheim puts it: ‘Crime brings together upright consciences and
concentrates them’ (Durkheim, 1960, p. 102). But it also served to enforce
greater conformity to society’s ‘rules’ by punishing and stigmatizing those who
departed from them. Beyond the limit of moral censure were, of course, all those
sterner practices of legal processing and enforcement which punished, on behalf
of society, deviant infractors. The question then arose: who had the power to
define whom? And, more pertinently, in the interest of what was the disposition
of power between definers and defined secured? In what interest did the
consensus ‘work’? What particular type of special order did it sustain and
underpin?
In fact, what was at issue here was the problem of social control, and the role
of social control in the maintenance of the social order. But this was no longer
simply that form of social order expressively revealed in the spontaneous
‘agreement to agree on fundamentals’ of the vast majority: it was not simply the
‘social bond’ which was enforced. It was consent to a particular kind of social
order; a consensus around a particular form of society: integration within and
conformity to the rules of a very definite set of social, economic and political
structures. It was for these—in a direct or indirect sense—that the rules could be
said to ‘work’. Social order now looked like a rather different proposition. It
entailed the enforcement of social, political and legal discipline. It was
articulated to that which existed: to the given dispositions of class, power and
authority: to the established institutions of society. This recognition radically
problematized the whole notion of ‘consensus’.
What is more, the question could now be asked whether the consensus did
indeed spontaneously simply arise or whether it was the result of a complex
process of social construction and legitimation. A society, democratic in its
formal organization, committed at the same time by the concentration of
economic capital and political power to the massively unequal distribution of
wealth and authority, had much to gain from the continuous production of
popular consent to its existing structure, to the values which supported and
underwrote it, and to its continuity of existence. But this raised questions
concerning the social role of the media. For if the media were not simply
reflective or ‘expressive’ of an already achieved consensus, but instead tended to
reproduce those very definitions of the situation which favoured and legitimated
the existing structure of things, then what had seemed at first as merely a
reinforcing role had now to be reconceptualized in terms of the media’s role in
the process of consensus formation.
A second break, then, arose around the notion of ‘definitions of the situation’.
What this term suggested was that a pivotal element in the production of consent
was how things were defined. But this threw into doubt the reflexive role of the