Page 79 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 69
which had accreted over the years, into which the whole history of the social
formation had sedimented, and which now constituted a reservoir of themes and
premises on which, for example, broadcasters could draw for the work of
signifying new and troubling events. Gramsci, who referred, in a less formal way,
to the inventory of traditional ideas, the forms of episodic thinking which
provide us with the taken-for-granted elements of our practical knowledge, called
this inventory ‘common sense’.

What must be explained is how it happens that in all periods there coexist
many systems and currents of philosophical thought, how these currents
are born, how they are diffused, and why in the process of diffusion they
fracture along certain lines and in certain directions…it is this history
which shows how thought has been elaborated over the centuries and what
a collective effort has gone into the creation of our present method of
thought which has subsumed and absorbed all this past history, including
all its follies and mistakes. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 327)

In another context, he argued:

Every social stratum has its own ‘common sense’ and its own ‘good
sense’, which are basically the most widespread conception of life and of
men. Every philosophical current leaves behind a sedimentation of
‘common sense’: this is the document of its historical effectiveness.
Common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually
transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with
philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life…. Common sense
creates the folklore of the future, that is as a relatively rigid phase of
popular knowledge at a given place and time. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 326)

The formalist conception of the ‘cultural inventory’ suggested by structuralism
was not, in my view, available as a theoretical support for the elaboration of an
adequate conception of ideology until it had been thoroughly historicized in this
way. Only thus did the preoccupation, which Lévi-Strauss initiated, with the
universal ‘grammars’ of culture begin to yield insights into the historical
grammars which divided and classified the knowledge of particular societies into
their distinctive ideological inventories.
The structural study of myth suggested that, in addition to the ways in which
knowledge about the social world was classified and framed, there would be a
distinctive logic about the ways in which the elements in an inventory could
yield certain stories or statements about the world. It was, according to Lévi-
Strauss, the ‘logic of arrangement’ rather than the particular contents of a myth
which ‘signified’. It was at this level that the pertinent regularities and
recurrencies could best be observed. By ‘logic’ he did not, certainly, mean logic
in the philosophical sense adopted by western rationalism. Indeed, his purpose