200512501047
Culture, the Media, and the
“Ideological Effect”
BY : QHUSNUL AMALIA
ENGLISH LITERATURE B
Double relation
Culture has its roots in what Marx, in The German Ideology, called man’s “double relation”: to
nature and to other men. Men, Marx argued, intervene in nature and, with the help of certain
instruments and tools, use nature to reproduce the material conditions of their existence. But,
from a very early point in the history of human development, this intervention in nature
through labor is socially organized.Men collaborate with one another—at first, through the
collective use of simple tools, the rudimentary division of labor, and the exchange of goods—
for the more effective reproduction of their material conditions. This is the beginning of social
organization, and of human history. From this point forward, man’s relation to nature becomes
socially mediated. The reproduction of human society, in increasingly com?plex and extended
forms, and the reproduction of material existence are
fundamentally linked
The development of the distinction between different types of society, new ways of applying human skill and
knowledge to the modification of material circumstances, the forms of civil and political association, the different
types of family and the state, men’s beliefs, ideas, and theoretical constructions, and the types of social consciousness
appropriate to or “corresponding to” them. This is the basis for a materialist understanding of social development and
human history; it must also be the basis of any materialist or non-idealist definition of culture. Marx, in fact, argued
that there is no “labor” or pro?duction in general (Marx, Grundrisse)
Production always assumes specific historical forms, under determinate conditions. The types of society, social
relationship, and human culture which arise under these specific historical conditions will also assume a determinate
form. One type of production dif?fers fundamentally from another: and since each stage in the development of
material production will give rise to different forms of social cooperation, a distinct type of technical and material
production, and different kinds of political and civil organization, human history is divided, through the devel?oping
modes of production, into distinctive and historically specific stages or epochs. Once material production and its
corresponding forms of social organization reach a complex stage of development, it will require consider?able
analysis to establish precisely how the relationship between these lev?els can be conceptualized.
definite individuals
The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political
relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically and without any mystification and speculation,
the con?nection of the social and political structure with production” (Marx and En?gels, The German Ideology; our emphasis). To
this basis, or “anatomy,” Marx also relates “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness”—the sphere of “mental
production.” For Marx, the relations which govern the so?cial organization of material production are specific—“definite”—for each
phase or stage: each constitutes its own “mode.” The social and cultural su?perstructures which “correspond” to each mode of
production will, likewise, be historically specific. For Marx, each of the major modes of production in human history to date has
been based fundamentally on one type of the exploitation of the labor of some by others. Modes of production—however complex,
developed, and productive they become—are therefore founded on a root antagonistic contradiction.But this contradiction, the social
forms in which it is institutionalized, the theoretical laws which “explain” it, and the forms of “consciousness” in which the
antagonism is lived and experienced, is worked out in, again, definite and historically specific ways.
“laws and tendencies”
Most of Marx and Engels’s work was devoted to analyzing the historically determinate “laws and tendencies” governing
the capitalist mode of production: and in analyz?ing the different superstructural and ideological forms appropriate to this
stage insociety’s material development. It was consonant with their theory that this mode, and the corresponding social
forms, exhibited its own specific laws and tendencies; that these were founded on a specific type of contradic?tion,
between how labor was expended and goods produced, and the way the value of labor was expropriated; and that this
dynamic, expansive phase of material development was historically finite—destined to evolve and expand through a series
of transformations, reach the outer limits of its potential de?velopment, and be superseded by another stage in human
history—impelled, not by external force but by “inner connection”. In?deed, Marx saw each mode of production as driven
to develop, through its higher stages, precisely by the “overcoming” of the contradictions intrinsic to its lower
stages;reproducing these antagonisms on a more advanced level; and hence destined to disappear through this development
of contradictions.This analysis, worked out at the level of economic forms and processes, con?stituted the subject matter of
Capital.
The radically limiting
concept of ideology
The radically limiting concept of ideology has a decentering and displacing effect on the freely developing processes
of “human culture.” It opens up the need to “think” the radical and systematic disjunctives between the differ?ent
levels of any social formation: between the material relations of produc?tion, the social practices in which class and
other social relations are con?stituted (here Marx locates “the superstructures”—civil society, the family, the juridico-
political forms, the state), and the level of “ideological forms”ideas, meanings, conceptions, theories, beliefs, etc., and
the forms of con?sciousness which are appropriate to them.in different practices and institutions, indeed in different
social strata mental labor appears as wholly autonomous from its material and social base and is projected into an
absolute realm, “emancipating itself from the real.” But also, under the conditions of capitalist production, the means
of mental labor are expropriated by the ruling classes. Hence we come, not simply to “ideology” as a necessary level
of any capitalist social formation, but to the concept of dominant ideology—of “ruling ideas.” “The class which is the
rul?ing material force is at the same time [the] ruling intellectual force.it has control over the means of mental
production so that, generally speak?ing, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. .
. . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.” Those who
rule are “the producer[s] of ideas”; they “regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age” (The
German Ideology)
olo gy im plie s a ve ry dif f
ere nt wa y of “th ink ing” the
This is a crucial
this way of conceptualizing culture and ide
relationship between the material basis
Ide
an
olo
d
gy
the
. Al
com
thu sse
ple
r
x
an
su
d
per
his
struct
“sc ho
ure s
ol”
tha
ha
n
ve
tha t which seems
been principally reformulation.
to lie at the heart of The German in wh ich the different levels of
um ani st- his tor icis t” ma nn er
respon?sible for criticizing the “h d in su bse quent theorists which
ed and rel ate d in tha t tex t, an
social practice are conceptualiz
follow on from it. sim ply as so many reflexive
ral an d id eol og ica l for ms app ear
From this “base,” cultu ich , under conditions of capitalist
gle , un differ en tiat ed , hum an pr axi s— wh
objectivations of a sin of int ern al un ity is itself only
en ate d: its “o ne princ ip le
production, becomes reified and ali nc ret e life of a people for the
on of tak in g th e wh ole co
possible on the absolute conditi
l principle.
externalization-alienation of an internal spiritua
Now in so far as all social life, every facet of social practice, is mediated by language (conceived as a system of signs and
representations, arranged by codes and articulated through various discourses), it enters fully into ma?terial and social practice Thus,
events and relations in the “real” world do not have a single natural,necessary and unambiguous meaning which is simply projected,
through signs, into language. The same set of social relations can be differ?ently organized to have a meaning within different
linguistic and cultural systems.
Volosinov recognizes that this sphere will, in any social formation, be or?ganized into a complex ideological field of discourses,
whose purpose is to endow the social relations which are grasped as “intelligible” within that particular field as having a certain, a
“definite” kind of intelligibility:
the domain of the artistic image, the religious symbol, the scientific for?mula and the judicial ruling, etc. Each field of ideological
creativity has its own kind of orientation towards reality and each refracts reality in its own way. Each field commands its own
special function within the unity of social life. But it is their semiotic character that places all ideological phenomena under the same
general condition
Nicos Poulantzas has recently attempted to lay out the various regions into which the dominant ideologies under capitalism are
organized. He argues that, under capitalism, the juridico-political region of ideology will play a dominant role; its function being, in
part, to hide or “mask” the determinant role which the level of the economic plays in this mode of production
Three Related Concepts of
“Domination
Domination is a kind of power, and usually social power—that is, power over other people. ... A dominus is a master, and
mastery represents an extreme of social power. Masters usually have all but complete control over how their slaves will act
or over the conditions in which they act.
1.“central system of practices, meanings and values”
no mode of production and therefore no dominant society or order . . . and therefore no dominant culture in real?ity exhausts
human practice, human energy, human intention.” What then constitutes the “dominance” of these dominant meanings and
practices are the mechanisms which allow it to select, incorporate, and therefore also exclude elements in what Williams
understood as the full range of human practice (the selectivity of tradition plays a key role here).
2.“total social authority”
over those classes and the social formation as a whole. “Hegemony” is in opera?tion when the dominant class fractions not
only dominate but direct or lead: when they not only possess the power to coerce but actively organize so as to command
and win the consent of the subordinated classes to their continu?ing sway. “Hegemony” thus depends on a combination of
force and consen.
3.y, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
The third concept of domination is also closely inspired by and elaborated from Gramsci, though it is critical of the traces of
“historicism” in Gramsci’s philosophical approach to materialism. This is the thesis, signaled in an ex?ploratory manner in
Althusser’s important and influential essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” “Ideological State Apparatuses”
became known, for short, as “isas.” This introduces the key notion of reproduction which has played an extremely important
role in recent theorizing on these issues.
What Does Ideology “Do” for the
Dominant Capitalist Order?
Gramsci, following Marx, suggested that there were “two, great floors” to the superstructures—
civil society and the state. (Marx, we recall, had called them both “ideological” or “phenomenal
forms.” One way of thinking the general function of ideology, in relation to these two spheres, is
in terms of what Poulantzas calls separation and uniting. In the sphere of market relations and of
“egoistic private interest” (the sphere, preeminently, of “civil society”
the productive classes appear or are represented as :
• (a) individual economic units driven by private and egoistic interests alone, which are
• bound by the multitude of invisible contracts—the “hidden hand” of capitalist exchange
relations
function of the media
function of the media, from this point of view, is to organize, orchestrate, and bring together
that which it has selectively represented and selectively classified. Here, however fragmentary
and “plurally,” some degreeof integration and cohesion, some imaginary coherence and unities
must begin to be constructed. What has been made visible and classified begins to shake into
an acknowledged order: a complex order, to be sure, in which the direct and naked intervention
of the real unities (of class, power, ex?ploitation, and interest) are forever held somewhat at
bay through the more neutral and integrative coherence of public opinion. From this difficult
and delicate negotiatory work, the problematic areas of consensus and consent begin to emerge
Finally, what are the actual mechanisms which enable the mass media to perform this “ideological work”?
In the class democracies, the media are not, on the whole, directly commanded and organized by the state
(though, as in the case of British broadcasting, the links may be very close).We can only refer here to
some of the mechanisms, taking television here as the paradigm instance, by which the media achieve
their ideological ef?fects.The legitimation for this process of ideological construction and decon?struction
which structures the processes of encoding and decoding is under?pinned by the position of the media
apparatuses.Inevitably we have had to confine ourselves here to very broad mechanisms and processes, in
order to give some substance to the general proposition ad?vanced. This proposition can now be stated in
a simple way, against the back?ground of the theoretical and analytic framework established in the
essay.Thus we must say that the work of “ideological repro?duction” which they perform is by definition
work in which counteracting tendencies—Gramsci’s “unstable equilibria”—will constantly be manifested.
We can speak, then, only of the tendency of the media—but it is a systematic tendency, not an incidental
feature—to reproduce the ideological field of a society in such a way as to reproduce, also, its structure of
domination.
THANK YOU!:)
