Page 121 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

IDEOLOGY

is associated in particular with Althusser (1971), for whom ideology is
the mechanism which turns individuals into subjects, but it is also
implicit in Volosinov (1973). It implies that all knowledge, whether
scientific or otherwise, is produced within language, and that language
is never a transparent medium through which truth can be observed.
Hence all language is seen as ideological, and truth as a product not as
a motivator of language. It follows from this that no specific discourse
(including Marxism itself) is exempt from ideology. Instead, there are
at any one time numbers of contending ideological discourses in play
within an overall social formation, and that what is at stake in the way
they are produced, deployed, regulated, institutionalised and resisted is
not only knowledge but also power.
However, at the level of specific ideologies, it is clear that ideology
is not a unitary medium that we inhabit like fishes in the medium of
the sea. Even within what is often called a dominant ideology there are
contending and conflicting positions – as between, say, different
educational philosophies and policies. And ideology is always
encountered in institutional forms and local circumstances which
ensure that there is never a complete fit between dominant class
interests and dominant ideology. Further, however naturalised and
successful dominant ideologies might seem, they are always in
contention with resistance to them from ‘below’, either in the form
of coherent alternatives (feminism, Marxism) or as practical accom-
modations/rejections (see subcultures).
The concept of ideology has become central in the study of the
media in particular and communication in general. It is useful in
insisting that not only is there no ‘natural’ meaning inherent in an
event or object, but also that the meanings into which events and
objects are constructed are always socially oriented – aligned with
class, gender, race or other interests. Further, ideology is not a set of
things but an active practice, either working on the changing
circumstances of social activity to reproduce familiar and regulated
senses or struggling to resist established and naturalised sense thus to
transform the means of sense-making into new, alternative or
oppositional forms, which will generate meanings aligned to different
social interests.

Further reading: Cormack (1992); Hall (1982); Hawkes (1996); Larrain (1979);
Turner (1990)

106