Page 81 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 71
circle of knowledge. But this recognition effect was not a recognition of the
reality behind the words, but a sort of confirmation of the obviousness, the taken-
forgrantedness of the way the discourse was organized and of the underlying
premises on which the statement in fact depended. If one regards the laws 01 a
capitalist economy as fixed and immutable, then its notions acquire a natural
inevitability. Any statement which is so embedded will thus appear to be merely
a statement about ‘how things really are’. Discourse, in short, had the effect of
sustaining certain ‘closures’, of establishing certain systems of equivalence
between what could be assumed about the world and what could be said to be true.
‘True’ means credible, or at least capable of winning credibility as a statement of
fact. New, problematic or troubling events, which breached the taken-for-granted
expectancies about how the world should be, could then be ‘explained’ by
extending to them the forms of explanation which had served ‘for all practical
purposes’, in other cases. In this sense, Althusser was subsequently to argue that
ideology, as opposed to science, moved constantly within a closed circle,
producing, not knowledge, but a recognition of the things we already knew. It
did so because it took as already established fact exactly the premises which
ought to have been put in question. Later still, this theory was to be
complemented by psychoanalytic theories of the subject which tried to
demonstrate how certain kinds of narrative exposition construct a place or
position of empirical knowledge for each subject at the centre of any discourse—
a position or point of view from which alone the discourse ‘makes sense’. It,
accordingly, defined such narrative procedures, which established an empirical-
pragmatic closure in discourse, as all belonging to the discourse of ‘realism’.
More generally, this approach suggested, discourses not only referenced
themselves in the structure of already objectivated social knowledge (the
‘already known’) but established the viewer in a complicitous relationship of
pragmatic knowledge to the ‘reality’ of the discourse itself. ‘Point of view’ is
not, of course, limited to visual texts—written texts also have their preferred
positions of knowledge. But the visual nature of the point-of-view metaphor
made it particularly appropriate to those media in which the visual discourse
appeared to be dominant. The theory was therefore most fully elaborated in
relation to film: but it applied, tout court, to television as well—the dominant
medium of social discourse and representation in our society. Much of
television’s power to signify lay in its visual and documentary character—its
inscription of itself as merely a ‘window on the world’, showing things as they
really are. Its propositions and explanations were underpinned by this grounding
of its discourse in ‘the real’—in the evidence of one’s eyes. Its discourse
therefore appeared peculiarly a naturalistic discourse of fact, statement and
description. But in the light of the theoretical argument sketched above, it would
be more appropriate to define the typical discourse of this medium not as
naturalistic but as naturalized: not grounded in nature but producing nature as a
sort of guarantee of its truth. Visual discourse is peculiarly vulnerable in this way
because the systems of visual recognition on which they depend are so widely