Page 87 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 77
elements and the possibilities of ideological struggle to articulate/disarticulate
meaning, was an insight drawn mainly from Gramsci’s work, but considerably
developed in more recent writings by theorists like Laclau (1977).
But the ‘struggle over meaning’ is not exclusively played out in the discursive
condensations to which different ideological elements are subject. There was also
the struggle over access to the very means of signification: the difference
between those accredited witnesses and spokesmen who had a privileged access,
as of right, to the world of public discourse and whose statements carried the
representativeness and authority which permitted them to establish the primary
framework or terms of an argument; as contrasted with those who had to struggle
to gain access to the world of public discourse at all; whose ‘definitions’ were
always more partial, fragmentary and delegitimated; and who, when they did
gain access, had to perform with the established terms of the problematic in play.
A simple but recurrent example of this point in current media discourse is the
setting of the terms of the debate about black immigrants to Britain as a problem
‘about numbers’. Liberal or radical spokesmen on race issues could gain all the
physical access to the media which they were able to muster. But they would be
powerfully constrained if they then had to argue within the terrain of a debate in
which ‘the numbers game’ was accepted as the privileged definition of the
problem. To enter the debate on these terms was tantamount to giving credibility
to the dominant problematic: e.g. ‘racial tension is the result of too many black
people in the country, not a problem of white racialism’. When the ‘numbers
game’ logic is in play, opposing arguments can be put as forcefully as anyone
speaking is capable of: but the terms define the ‘rationality’ of the argument, and
constrain how the discourse will ‘freely’ develop. A counter argument—that the
numbers are not too high—makes an opposite case: but inevitably, it also
reproduces the given terms of the argument. It accepts the premise that the
argument is ‘about numbers’. Opposing arguments are easy to mount. Changing
the terms of an argument is exceedingly difficult, since the dominant definition of
the problem acquires, by repetition, and by the weight and credibility of those
who propose or subscribe it, the warrant of ‘common sense’. Arguments which
hold to this definition of the problem are accounted as following ‘logically’.
Arguments which seek to change the terms of reference are read as ‘straying
from the point’. So part of the struggle is over the way the problem is
formulated: the terms of the debate, and the ‘logic’ it entails.
A similar case is the way in which the ‘problem of the welfare state’ has
come, in the era of economic recession and extreme monetarism, to be defined as
‘the problem of the scrounger’, rather than the ‘problem of the vast numbers who
could legally claim benefits, and need them, but don’t’. Each framework of
course, has real social consequences. The first lays down a base-line from which
public perceptions of the ‘black problem’ can develop—linking an old
explanation to a new aspect. The next outbreak of violence between blacks and
whites is therefore seen as a ‘numbers problem’ too—giving credence to those
who advance the political platform that ‘they should all be sent home’, or that