Page 128 - Decoding Culture

RESISTIN G THE D O M I N ANT 121

Nevertheless, by the early 1980s a broad consensus was emerging
on the utility of the Gramscian way of framing a theory of ideology,
the principal features of which can be seen in Hall's well-known
attempt to formulate these ideas in the cause of a critical approach
to media studies (Hall, 1982). I shall use this discussion as an initial
focus for my account of CCCS views on the role of ideology in cul­
ture and in cultural studies more generally.
Hall's argument - as so often in his work of this period - is
directed at our ways of understanding the role of the mass media
in modern societies. He locates the orthodox (behavioural and
effects) tradition of mass communications research in the context
of the rise to dominance in the 1950s of pluralism as the social sci­
ence model of modern industrial society. In this account, there
were social and political conflicts, certainly, but all regulated and
contained within a framework of broad consensus. The mass
media functioned as a channel of influence, both in processes of
pluralist decision making and, more generally, as an expression of
the overall consensus. As the 1960s progressed, however, doubts
of various kinds emerged from within pluralist social science about
the nature of the presumed consensus and the terms of its forma­
tion, and about the ways in which the media's 'signifying practices'
defined rather than simply reproduced or 'reflected' reality. For
Hall (others have charted it differently) this growing dissent
pointed to a common concern with the 'ideological dimension' of
social life which he understood as involving 'the winning of a uni­
versal validity and legitimacy for accounts of the world which are
partial and particular, and to the grounding of these particular
constructions in the taken-for-grantedness of "the real'" (Hall,
1982: 65). What pluralism conceived of as a kind of 'natural' con­
sent, critical frameworks were to analyse as an achievement of
ideology.
This signals the emergence of what he calls 'the critical

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