Rosa Luxemburg, “ Rusia 1905, el elemento espontáneo”

The struggle over media control in New Caledonia suggests that political groups were aware of the power of media discourse to bear significantly on their political objectives. The view that media discourse is an active agent in producing political and social outcomes has been most fully developed in what has come to be termed, in mass communication research, the critical paradigm. Considerable theoretical and methodological shifts have occurred within this research orientation deriving largely from the influence of contemporary French critical theory in cultural studies research in the mid to late 1980s. Perhaps one of the biggest shifts has been in the rejection of ‘ideology’ and the favouring of ‘discourse’ as the organising concept around which media critique has been engaged. Ideology’s chequered career within cultural studies is reflective of the shift from neo-Marxist cultural theory to post- structuralist and postmodern theoretical perspectives. Under this influence, the term ‘ideology’ was, as Zizek writes, ‘in considerable disrepute’ (1994: cover). However, Zizek notes that there has been a sudden revival in grappling with the question of ideology and exploring its continuing relevance within social and cultural theory and political practice. In a sense, this revival constitutes a new ‘rediscovery of ideology’, almost 20 years after Stuart Hall proclaimed the original ‘rediscovery’ in what he considered in the late 1970s to be the ashes of pluralist-behaviourist media research (Hall, 1985).

The vicissitudes of ideology

In an influential article published in 1985, Stuart Hall argued that the efficacy of critiques of the work of earlier ‘end of ideology’ theorists had led to a ‘rediscovery of ideology’. Within mass communication research, these theories had underpinned what had been termed a ‘pluralist paradigm’ which viewed the media as reflective or expressive of a broad, pre-existing societal consensus fashioned out of the

cohesive workings of democratic institutions. Hall argued that the emergence of social protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and the consistency of their marginalisation in the media, focused attention on the media’s role in forging, rather than merely reflecting, consensus accounts of the world and, in the process,

delegitimating alternative accounts as ‘deviant’. This insight infused, he argued, the critical paradigm, and attention turned to the media’s role in fashioning consensus;

in ‘winning ... a universal validity and legitimacy for accounts of the world which are partial and particular, and [in] grounding ... these particular constructions in the taken-for grantedness of “the real”’. This process was indeed, he argued, ‘the characteristic and defining mechanism of “the ideological”’ (Hall, 1985:65). Hall’s ‘rediscovery’ was, however, short-lived. By the mid-1980s, ideology had become, according to some, ‘the central problem of English Marxism since the seventies’ (Higgins, 1986:113). Ideology was therefore once again under siege, this time from theorists generally acknowledged to be working within the critical tradition. Foucault’s critique of the concept of ideology points to the main lines of criticism:

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth...The second

drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to

something of the order of the subject. Third, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection (1991:60). 1 Michèle Barrett argues that Foucault’s critique of ideology is here as elsewhere an implicit critique of Marxism (Barrett, 1991:vii). Certainly, Foucault’s concern with ideology relates to central tendencies within Marxist theory. His reference to ideology standing in opposition to the truth refers to an understanding within Marxism of ideology as a distorted view of objective reality, which is understood to be the material basis of society. Similarly, his reference to ideology occupying a secondary position relates to an economistic notion within Marxism that the superstructural realm is determined by the economic base of society almost as an after-the-event phenomenon. Within this view, change occurs through the working out of the forces of production, and ideology therefore has no efficacy of its own; it is a passive, reflective phenomenon. Finally, Foucault’s reference to ideology referring to ‘something of the order of the subject’ alludes to the relatively unproblematised notion of subjectivity within Marxist writing, the subject being

1 _{It is important to note that Foucault’s critique is of a particular form of Marxism - termed ‘orthodox’ or} ‘vulgar’ Marxism by some - which owes as much to the ossification of Marxism under the influence of Soviet dogma as to the writings of Marx himself. See for example, Milner, 1993:23-32. Larrain (1979) has convincingly demonstrated that Marx viewed the relationship of ideology to the economy as considerably more nuanced than represented under this schema.

conceived of in this work in class terms and coming to an awareness of his or her essentialised subjectivity through class struggle.2

Foucault’s summary critique neatly points to some of the major limitations of orthodox Marxist analysis for cultural studies. Many who have attempted to go beyond these limitations to develop a fuller appreciation of the dialectical relationship between the material basis of society and the realm of culture and ideology have drawn on Gramsci’s writings, and in particular his notion of ideological or cultural hegemony, to circumvent the types of problems raised by Foucault.3 _{One tendency among these theorists has been to abandon the use of} the term ‘ideology’. Barrett, for example, after exploring the development in Marxist theory of such issues as the existence of objective reality, subjectivity and

determinism, through analysing the work of Gramsci, Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe, concludes by advising against the use of ‘ideology’ as an analytical term, arguing that it is: ‘Better, perhaps, that we oblige ourselves to think with new and

2 _{Elsewhere, Foucault has written on this subject: ‘As regards Marxism, I’m not one of those who try} to elicit the effects of power at the level of ideology. Indeed I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn’t be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it. Because what troubles me with these analyses which prioritise ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical

philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize upon’ (Foucault, cited in Purvis and Hunt, 1993:488).

3 _{Such theorists include Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) and Raymond Williams (1977).} See also the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall. In particular, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds) (1982) Resistance through Rituals: Youth sub-cultures in post-war Britain. Milner (1993) has argued of Raymond Williams’s work that there is an incompatibility in Williams’ earlier work between his concern with the notion of culture as a shared phenomenon and the notion of culture as irredeemably marked by class. He says that Williams provisionally resolved this contradiction through his discovery of the work of Gramsci and, in particular, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In hegemony he considered that he had found a means to resolve the ostensible contradictions he perceived between the notion of a shared culture and that of the class basis of particular cultural forms. Williams argued: ‘“Hegemony” goes beyond “culture”...in its insistence on relating the “whole social process” to specific distributions of power and influence...Gramsci therefore introduces the necessary recognition of dominance and subordination in what has still, however, to be recognised as a whole process. It is in just this recognition of the wholeness of the process that the concept of “hegemony” goes beyond “ideology”. What is decisive is not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organised by specific dominant meanings and values...It sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living - not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole subsistence of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of “ideology”, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as “manipulation” or “indoctrination”. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of our living - our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values - constitutive and constituting - which as they are experienced as practices appear as

reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a “culture”, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived

more precise concepts rather than mobilising the dubious resonances of the old’ (1991:168). Barrett prefers to work within a Foucauldian framework which favours the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘power’ over ‘ideology’ (ibid). Richard Johnson expresses similar concern with the term, choosing instead to privilege the notions of ‘culture’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘subjectivity’, and using ‘“ideology” or better “ideological” sparingly, always adjectivally and at the end of an argument, not at the beginning!’ (1986, footnote 9:308-9).

There are, however, those who continue to wave the flag for ideology while

acknowledging its difficulties. The development of the notion of ideology which they attempt responds to some of the critiques from within post-structuralism and

postmodernism. This response has been mounted by those who adhere to what has been termed the ‘critical view of ideology’ and those who follow the ‘sociological view’. Although the epistemological bases of each of these views differs

considerably, their responses have been similar. The critical view of ideology

Foucault’s comment that ideology ‘always stands in virtual opposition to something which is supposed to count as truth’ refers to the view of ideology which has been termed the critical, negative or epistemological view (Larrain, 1979; Thompson, 1984; Purvis and Hunt, 1993; Barrett, 1991). It is argued that this is the view most closely tied to key passages in Marx’s writing. Ideology is portrayed as a necessary deception or mystification - a ‘false consciousness’ - through which a person’s understanding of social reality is distorted (Larrain, 1979:14). Barrett argues that it is also an ‘epistemological’ usage of the term in that the distorted view is presumed to be distinguishable from an accurate view which is objective knowledge or science (1991:19), a view espoused most forcefully by Althusser for whom ideology stood in opposition to science (Larrain, 1979:196).4

4 _{Barrett mocks Althusser’s claim that scientific knowledge can be gleaned from ideology through a} method which he terms ‘theoretical practice’, which Barrett describes as a pretentious way of saying sitting thinking (Barrett, 1991:36). For Althusser, Marxism, as a theoretical schema resulting from considerable theoretical practice, is accorded scientific status and socialism is considered a scientific concept. Larrain argues that Althusser considered that Marxist science has two characteristic methodological features: ‘the reduction of the phenomenon to the essence; and the consideration of that essence as a totality in which the “internal connections” of all phenomena are linked’ (Larrain, 1979:196).

The validity of claiming a rigid juxtaposition between ideology and science - which in Althusser’s conception is the juxtaposition of distorted, ideological understandings and undistorted, accurate knowledge, or, in short, truth - has been convincingly refuted, not only from within postmodernism but also from those theorists who continue to see some validity in working within the critical conceptualisation of ideology. Postmodernism refutes the existence of totalising theories and the notion of human rationality which presupposes the existence of a fixed subject. It therefore rejects the claim to truth which is itself a totalising concept grounded in the

presumption that it is attainable through reason. Faced with such challenges, many former Althusserians have moved to a more relativist or conventionalist position which acknowledges the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of attaining objective knowledge (Barrett, 1991:39-41). This move was encouraged by what has been termed the ‘linguistic turn in modern social theory’ (Purvis and Hunt, 1993:474) which, through structuralism and later post-structuralism, came to consider the means through which language and discourse not only conveyed but also

constituted social experience.5 _{Purvis and Hunt argue that most writers who claim} a place for a critical conceptualisation of ideology have moved to a position of ‘soft realism’. It is soft ‘in that it readily accepts the typical postmodernist claim that knowledge claims can never be verified and that there is no vantage point external to discourse from which truth-claims can be validated’. On the other hand, it is realist in the insistence ‘that there is a non-discursive realm that can be known even though that knowledge can never be more than fallible, always liable to be displaced by some “better” account’ (1993:476-7).

Barrett has described John B. Thompson as ‘the most sophisticated contemporary exponent of the critical theory tradition as it applies to ideology’ (Barrett, 1991, footnote 15:185). Thompson positions his work as ‘a plea for, as well as a reformulation and a defence of, a critical conception of ideology’ (Thompson,

5 _{The emphasis on language and discourse derived from a confluence of theoretical influences during} the 1950s and 1960s which came to be known of as ‘structuralism’ and which was best exemplified by the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, the revival of Sassurean semiology led most prominently during this period by Roland Barthes, Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and

Althusser’s structural Marxism (Milner, 1993:72-5). The linguistic, or more specifically discursive, turn in the social sciences was further consolidated with the rise during the late 1960s and early 1970s of a body of work designated as post-structuralist which, while acknowledging the significance of language and discourse in social being, took exception to structuralism’s claims to scientificity. Milner

distinguishes three types of post-structuralism: literary deconstruction exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida, Foucault’s middle-period writing on knowledge-power relations and semiotic reconstructions of Freudian psychoanalysis initiated by Jacques Lacan. Each form took exception to

1984:4). He argues that only the critical view of ideology is capable of addressing the issues which emerge from contemporary analyses of the functioning of language in the social world, for these point to the multifarious ways in which language

intersects with the nourishment, preservation and enrichment of power (ibid:2). It is, he argues, only the critical view of ideology which preserves the ‘connection

between the concept of ideology and the critique of domination, a connection which was certainly part (if not all) of Marx’s conception of ideology’ (ibid:76). The

centrality of this concern with domination is reflected in his definition of ideology as ‘the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of

domination’ (ibid:4).

Thompson’s claim that only the critical conception preserves the link with domination refers to the view within Marxism that ideology is essentially a ruling class phenomenon; that is, that it is the propagation of ideas which serve to sustain class inequality. Thompson recognises the capital-wage labour relationship as the fundamental axis along which ‘systematically asymmetrical relations’ are secured in capitalist societies (ibid:13). However, he also accepts the existence of other relations of domination between nation states and ethnic groupings, and in relation to gender, which are not reducible to class dimensions (ibid:130).6 _{This broader} view of relations of domination leads Thompson to argue that ‘ideology is essentially linked to the process of sustaining asymmetrical relations of power’ (ibid:4), rather than to a more dedicated Marxist definition of the sustenance of class relations. Thompson addresses the difficult epistemological issues raised by the critical view of ideology and, in particular, the underlying presumption raised by his definition of a form of meaning or signification which is non-ideological - which does not sustain asymmetrical relations of power - and which is therefore, within his own

conceptualisation, true. He draws on Habermas’s work on ideal speech situations to discuss the types of formal discursive conditions under which not only the truth but also the justice of a statement might be ascertained. He concludes that, under idealised conditions in which systematically asymmetrical relations were temporarily

the structuralist notion that meaning could be pinned down. Indeed, in the extreme Derridean case, it was argued that there was no reality outside of discourse (ibid:73-4).

6 _{Thompson comments that Giddens makes this point forcefully in A Contemporary Critique of}

Historical Materialism. (Thompson, 1984, footnote 86:319). It is also a central point made by Laclau and Mouffe whose work is considered by some as pointing to the limitations of Marxist analysis and representing perhaps the most significant rupture with Marxism (Barrett, 1991:61-80).

suspended, it might be possible to ascertain the qualities of a statement (ibid:142- 3). Thompson anticipates the postmodernist retort to his arguments, making an impassioned plea for the need to hold on to truth and justice, if only as limiting notions, by arguing that: ‘A limiting notion is not irrelevant for being a limit: it is a goal which can be approximated and which, in the process of approximation, can call our attention to certain factors at the expense of others’ (ibid:145). Thompson wants to hold on to the possibility of truth as a guard against what he perceives to be a nihilistic relativism in which political action loses its raison d’être because it can no longer be guided by a superior logic, a view sustained, he believes, by the

alternative sociological view of ideology. The sociological view of ideology

In developing his critical conception of ideology, Thompson rejects those

conceptions which he terms ‘neutral’, but which others term ‘sociological’ (Barrett, 1991) or ‘positive’ (Larrain, 1979), which conceive of ideology not as some form of mystification tied to dominant interests but as more general systems of thought, belief or symbolic practices. Thompson argues that this conception loses the link between ideology and domination: