Page 77 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 67
which they were produced, one could show how apparently different myths (at
the surface level) belonged in fact to the same family or constellation of myths
(at the deep-structure level). If the underlying set is a limited set of elements
which can be variously combined, then the surface variants can, in their particular
sense, be infinitely varied, and spontaneously produced. The theory closely
corresponds in certain aspects to Chomsky’s theory of language, which
attempted to show how language could be both free and spontaneous, and yet
regular and ‘grammatical’. Changes in meaning, therefore, depended on the
classificatory systems involved, and the ways different elements were selected
and combined to make different meanings. Variations in the surface meaning of
a statement, however, could not in themselves resolve the question as to whether
or not it was a transformation of the same classificatory set.
This move from content to structure or from manifest meaning to the level of
code is an absolutely characteristic one in the critical approach. It entailed a
redefinition of what ideology was—or, at least, of how ideology worked. The
point is clearly put by Veron:

If ideologies are structures…then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ (we
can say, they are not contents) but are sets of rules which determine an
organization and the functioning of images and concepts…. Ideology is a
system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded messages…in
this way, ideology becomes autonomous in relation to the consciousness or
intention of its agents: these may be conscious of their points of view
about social forms but not of the semantic conditions (rules and categories
or codification) which make possible these points of view…. From this
point of view, then, an ‘ideology’ may be defined as a system of semantic
rules to generate messages…it is one of the many levels of organization of
messages, from the viewpoint of their semantic properties…(Veron, 1971,
p. 68)

Critics have argued that this approach forsakes the content of particular messages
too much for the sake of identifying their underlying structure. Also, that it omits
any consideration of how speakers themselves interpret the world—even if this is
always within the framework of those shared sets of meanings which mediate
between individual actors/speakers and the discursive formations in which they are
speaking. But, provided the thesis is not pushed too far in a structuralist direction,
it provides a fruitful way of reconceptualizing ideology. Lévi-Strauss regarded
the classificatory schemes of a culture as a set of ‘pure’, formal elements (though,
in his earlier work, he was more concerned with the social contradictions which
were articulated in myths, through the combined operations on their
generative sets). Later theorists have proposed that the ideological discourses of
a particular society function in an analogous way. The classificatory schemes of
a society, according to this view, could therefore be said to consist of ideological
elements or premises. Particular discursive formulations would, then, be