Page 70 - Culture Society and the Media

60 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
media—simply showing things as they were—and it put in question the
transparent conception of language which underpinned their assumed naturalism.
For reality could no longer be viewed as simply a given set of facts: it was the
result of a particular way of constructing reality. The media defined, not merely
reproduced, ‘reality’. Definitions of reality were sustained and produced through
all those linguistic practices (in the broad sense) by means of which selective
definitions of ‘the real’ were represented. But representation is a very different
notion from that of reflection. It implies the active work of selecting and
presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of an already-
existing meaning, but the more active labour of making things mean. It was a
practice, a production, of meaning: what subsequently came to be defined as a
‘signifying practice’. The media were signifying agents. A whole new
conception of the symbolic practices through which this process of signification
was sustained intervened in the innocent garden of ‘content analysis’. The
message had now to be analysed, not in terms of its manifest ‘message’, but in
terms of its ideological structuration. Several questions then followed: how was
this ideological structuration accomplished? How was its relation to the other
parts of the social structure to be conceptualized? In the words of Bachrach and
Baratz, did it matter that the media appeared to underwrite systematically ‘a set
of predominant values, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures (“rules of the
game”) that operate systematically and consistently to the benefit of certain
persons and groups at the expense of others?’ (Bachrach and Baratz, 1970, pp.
43–4). In this move to take seriously the power of the media to signify reality
and to define what passed as ‘the real’, the so-called ‘end of ideology’ thesis was
also radically problematized.
In part, what was involved in these questions was a return of the problem of
power to the powerless universe of mainstream pluralism, but also, a shift in the
very conception of power. Pluralism, as Lukes has suggested (Lukes, 1976), did
retain a model of power, based around the notion of ‘influence’. A influenced B
to make decision X. Certainly, this was a form of power. Pluralism qualified the
persistence of this form of power by demonstrating that, because, in any decision-
making situation, the As were different, and the various decisions made did not
cohere within any single structure of domination, or favour exclusively any
single interest, therefore power itself had been relatively ‘pluralized’. The
dispersal of power plus the randomness of decisions kept the pluralist society
relatively free of an identifiable power-centre. (Various gaps in this random-
power model were unconvincingly plugged by the discreet deployment of a
theory of ‘democratic élitism’ to up-date the ‘pure’ pluralist model and make it
square more with contemporary realities). Lukes observes that this is a highly
behaviouristic and one-dimensional model of power. But the notion of power
which arose from the critique of consensus-theory, and which Bachrach and
Baratz, for example, proposed, was of a very different order: ‘Power is also
exercised when A devotes energies to creating or reinforcing social and political
values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to