Page 92 - Culture Society and the Media

82 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
less adequate explanatory framework. The critical point for us is that, in any theory
which seeks to explain both the monopoly of power and the diffusion of consent,
the question of the place and role of ideology becomes absolutely pivotal. It
turned out, then, that the consensus question, in pluralist theory, was not so much
wrong as incorrectly or inadequately posed. As is often the case in theoretical
matters, a whole configuration of ideas can be revealed by taking an inadequate
premise and showing the unexamined conditions on which it rested. The ‘break’
therefore, occurred precisely at the point where theorists asked, ‘but who
produces the consensus?’ ‘In what interests does it function?’ ‘On what
conditions does it depend?’ Here, the media and other signifying institutions came
back into the question—no longer as the institutions which merely reflected and
sustained the consensus, but as the institutions which helped to produce
consensus and which manufactured consent.
This approach could also be used to demonstrate how media institutions could
be articulated to the production and reproduction of the dominant ideologies,
while at the same time being ‘free’ of direct compulsion, and ‘independent’ of
any direct attempt by the powerful to nobble them. Such institutions powerfully
secure consent precisely because their claim to be independent of the direct play
of political or economic interests, or of the state, is not wholly fictitious. The
claim is ideological, not because it is false but because it does not adequately
grasp all the conditions which make freedom and impartiality possible. It is
ideological because it offers a partial explanation as if it were a comprehensive
and adequate one—it takes the part for the whole (fetishism). Nevertheless, its
legitimacy depends on that part of the truth, which it mistakes for the whole,
being real in fact, and not merely a polite fiction.
This insight was the basis for all of that work which tried to demonstrate how
it could be true that media institutions were both, in fact, free of direct
compulsion and constraint, and yet freely articulated themselves systematically
around definitions of the situation which favoured the hegemony of the
powerful. The complexities of this demonstration cannot be entered into here and
a single argument, relating to consensus, will have to stand. We might put it this
way. Formally, the legitimacy of the continued leadership and authority of the
dominant classes in capitalist society derives from their accountability to the
opinions of the popular majority—the ‘sovereign will of the people’. In the
formal mechanisms of election and the universal franchise they are required to
submit themselves at regular intervals to the will or consensus of the majority.
One of the means by which the powerful can continue to rule with consent and
legitimacy is, therefore, if the interests of a particular class or power bloc can be
aligned with or made equivalent to the general interests of the majority. Once
this system of equivalences has been achieved, the interests of the minority and
the will of the majority can be ‘squared’ because they can both be represented as
coinciding in the consensus, on which all sides agree. The consensus is the
medium, the regulator, by means of which this necessary alignment (or
equalization) between power and consent is accomplished. But if the consensus