Page 74 - Culture Society and the Media

64 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
kind of sense, were all merely technical issues. They abutted on the question of
the social effects of the media only in so far as bad editing or complex modes of
narration might lead to incomprehension on the viewer’s part, and thus prevent
the pre-existing meaning of an event, or the intention of the broadcaster to
communicate clearly, from passing in an uninterrupted or transparent way to the
receiver. But, from the viewpoint of signification, these were all elements or
elementary forms of a social practice. They were the means whereby particular
accounts were constructed. Signification was a social practice because, within
media institutions, a particular form of social organization had evolved which
enabled the producers (broadcasters) to employ the means of meaning production
at their disposal (the technical equipment) through a certain practical use of them
(the combination of the elements of signification identified above) in order to
produce a product (a specific meaning) (see Hall, 1975). The specificity of media
institutions therefore lay precisely in the way a social practice was organized so
as to produce a symbolic product. To construct this rather than that account
required the specific choice of certain means (selection) and their articulation
together through the practice of meaning production (combination). Structural
linguists like Saussure and Jacobson had, earlier, identified selection and
combination as two of the essential mechanisms of the general production of
meaning or sense. Some critical researchers then assumed that the description
offered above—producers, combining together in specific ways, using
determinate means, to work up raw materials into a product—justified their
describing signification as exactly similar to any other media labour process.
Certain insights were indeed to be gained from that approach. However,
signification differed from other modern labour processes precisely because the
product which the social practice produced was a discursive object. What
differentiated it, then, as a practice was precisely the articulation together of
social and symbolic elements—if the distinction will be allowed here for the
purposes of the argument. Motor cars, of course, have, in addition to their
exchange and use values, a symbolic value in our culture. But, in the process of
meaning construction, the exchange and use values depend on the symbolic
value which the message contains. The symbolic character of the practice is the
dominant element although not the only one. Critical theorists who argued that a
message could be analysed as just another kind of commodity missed this crucial
distinction (Garham, 1979; Golding and Murdock, 1979).

The politics of signification
As we have suggested, the more one accepts that how people act will depend in
part on how the situations in which they act are defined, and the less one can
assume either a natural meaning to everything or a universal consensus on what
things mean—then, the more important, socially and politically, becomes the
process by means of which certain events get recurrently signified in particular
ways. This is especially the case where events in the world are problematic (that