Page 78 - Culture Society and the Media

68 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
ideological, not because of the manifest bias or distortions of their surface
contents, but because they were generated out of, or were transformations based
on, a limited ideological matrix or set. Just as the myth-teller may be unaware of
the basic elements out of which his particular version of the myth is generated, so
broadcasters may not be aware of the fact that the frameworks and classifications
they were drawing on reproduced the ideological inventories of their society.
Native speakers can usually produce grammatical sentences in their native
language but only rarely can they describe the rules of syntax in use which make
their sentences orderly, intelligible to others and grammatical in form. In the same
way, statements may be unconsciously drawing on the ideological frameworks
and classifying schemes of a society and reproducing them—so that they appear
ideologically ‘grammatical’—without those making them being aware of so
doing. It was in this sense that the structuralists insisted that, though speech and
individual speech-acts may be an individual matter, the language-system
(elements, rules of combination, classificatory sets) was a social system: and
therefore that speakers were as much ‘spoken’ by their language as speaking it.
The rules of discourse functioned in such a way as to position the speaker as if he
or she were the intentional author of what was spoken. The system on which this
authorship depended remained, however, profoundly unconscious. Subsequent
theorists noticed that, although this de-centered the authorial ‘I’ making it
dependent on the language systems speaking through the subject, this left an
empty space where, in the Cartesian conception of the subject, the all-
encompassing ‘I’ had previously existed. In theories influenced by Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalysis (also drawing on LéviStrauss), this question of how the
speaker, the subject of enunciation, was positioned in language became, not simply
one of the mechanisms through which ideology was articulated, but the principal
mechanism of ideology itself (Coward and Ellis, 1977). More generally,
however, it is not difficult to see how Lévi-Strauss’s proposition—‘speakers
produce meaning, but only on the basis of conditions which are not of the speaker’s
making, and which pass through him/her into language, unconsciously’—could
be assimilated to the more classic Marxist proposition that ‘people make history,
but only in determinate conditions which are not of their making, and which pass
behind their backs’. In later developments, these theoretical homologies were
vigorously exploited, developed—and contested.

Historicizing the structures
Of course, in addition to the homologies with Lévi-Strauss’s approach, there
were also significant differences. If the inventories from which particular
significations were generated were conceived, not simply as a formal scheme of
elements and rules, but as a set of ideological elements, then the conceptions of
the ideological matrix had to be radically historicized. The ‘deep structure’ of a
statement had to be conceived as the network of elements, premises and
assumptions drawn from the longstanding and historically-elaborated discourses