Page 80 - Culture Society and the Media

70 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
was to demonstrate that Western rationalism was only one of the many types of
discursive arrangement possible; no different intrinsically, in terms of how it
worked, from the logic of so-called pre-scientific thinking or mythic thought.
Logic here simply meant an apparently necessary chain of implication between
statement and premise. In western logic, propositions are said to be logical if
they obey certain rules of inference and deduction. What the cultural analyst
meant by logic was simply that all ideological propositions about the social
world were similarly premised, predicated or inferenced. They entailed a
framework of linked propositions, even if they failed the test of logical deduction.
The premises had to be assumed to be true, for the propositions which depended
on them to be taken as true. This notion of ‘the entailment of propositions’, or, as
the semanticists would say, the embeddedness of statements, proved of seminal
value in the development of ideological analysis. To put the point in its extreme
form, a statement like ‘the strike of Leyland tool-makers today further weakened
Britain’s economic position’ was premised on a whole set of taken-for-granted
propositions about how the economy worked, what the national interest was, and
so on. For it to win credibility, the whole logic of capitalist production had to be
assumed to be true. Much the same could be said about any item in a
conventional news bulletin, that, without a whole range of unstated premises or
pieces of taken-for-granted knowledge about the world, each descriptive
statement would be literally unintelligible. But this ‘deep structure’ of
presuppositions, which made the statement ideologically ‘grammatical’, were
rarely made explicit and were largely unconscious, either to those who deployed
them to make sense of the world or to those who were required to make sense of
it. Indeed, the very declarative and descriptive form of the statement rendered
invisible the implied logic in which it was embedded. This gave the statement an
unchallenged obviousness, and obvious truthvalue. What were in fact
propositions about how things were, disappeared into and acquired the
substantive affirmation of merely descriptive statements: ‘facts of the case’. The
logic of their entailment being occluded, the statements seemed to work, so to
speak, by themselves. They appeared as proposition-free—natural and
spontaneous affirmations about ‘reality’.

The reality effect

In this way, the critical paradigm began to dissect the so-called ‘reality’ of
discourse. In the referential approach, language was thought to be transparent to
the truth of ‘reality itself’—merely transferring this originating meaning to the
receiver. The real world was both origin and warrant for the truth of any
statement about it. But in the conventional or constructivist theory of language,
reality came to be understood, instead, as the result or effect of how things had
been signified. It was because a statement generated a sort of ‘recognition effect’
in the receiver that it was taken or ‘read’ as a simple empirical statement. The
work of formulation which produced it secured this closing of the pragmatic