The rediscovery of ‘ideology’ 69 The politics of signification ‘As we have suggested, the more one accepts that how people act will depend in part on how the situations in which they act are defined, and the Jess one can assume either a natural meaning to everything or a universal consensus on what things mean — then, the more important, socially and politically, becomes the process by means of which certain events get recurrently signified in particular ways. This is especially the case where events in the world are problematic (that is, where they are unexpected); where they break the frame of our previous expectations about the world; where powerful social interests are involved; or where there are starkly opposing or conflicting interests at play. The power involved here is an ideological power: the power to signify events in a particular way. To give an obvious example: suppose that every industrial dispute could be signified as a threat to the economic life of the country, and therefore against ‘the national interest’. Then such significations would construct or define issues of economic and industrial conflict in terms which would consistently favour current economic strategies, supporting anything which maintains the continuity of production, whilst stigmatizing anything which breaks the continuity of production, favouring the general interests of employers and shareholders who have nothing to gain from production being interrupted, lending credence to the specific policies of governments which seek to curtail the right to strike or to weaken the bargaining position and political power of the trade unions. (For purposes of the later argument, note that such significations depend on taking-for-granted what the national interest is. They are predicated on an assumption that we all live in a society where the bonds which bind labour and capital together are stronger, and more legitimate, than the grievances which divide us into labour versus capital. That is to say, part of the function of a signification of this kind is to construct a subject to which the discourse applies: e.g. to translate a discourse whose subject is ‘workers versus employers’ into a discourse whose subject is the collective ‘we, the people’). That, on the whole, industrial disputes are indeed so signified is a conclusion strongly supported by the detailed analyses subsequently provided by, for example, the Glasgow Media Group research published in Bad News (1976) and More Bad News (1980). Now, of course, an'industrial dispute has no singular, given meaning. It could, alternatively, be signified as a necessary feature of all capitalist economies, part of the inalienable right of workers to withdraw their labour, and a necessary defence of working-class living standards — the very purpose of the trade unions, for which they have had to fight a long and bitter historic struggle. So, by what means is the first set of significations recurrently preferred in the ways industrial disputes are constructed in our society? By what means are the alternative definitions which we listed excluded? And how do the media, which are supposed to be impartial, square their production of definitions of industrial conflict which systematically favour one side in such disputes, with their claims to report 7861 ‘@Bpapnoy SHOR san pue wopUOT -mIpapy ay pun Ayatoog ‘aanynD ("pa) "Te.19 “W “YOUASINH Ut, sarpmys erpous ut passordox ay Jo wuNar :,AZopoapr, Jo AraA0osiper oy, HENS70 Culture, society and the media events in a balanced and impartial manner? What emenges powerfully from this line of argument is that the power to signify is not a neutral force in society. Significations enter into controversial and conflicting social issues as a real and positive social force, affecting their. outcomes. The signification of events is part of what has to be struggled over, for it is the means by which collective social understandings are created — and thus the means by which consent for particular outcomes can be effectively mobilized. Ideology, according to this perspective, has not only become a ‘material force’, to use an old expression — real because it is ‘real’ in its effects, It has also become a site of struggle (between competing definitions) and a stake — a prize to be won — in the conduct of particular struggles. This means that ideology can no longer be seen as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic. They depend on the balance of forces in a particular historical conjuncture: on the ‘politics of signification’. Central to the question of how a particular range of privileged meanings was sustained was the question of classification and framing. Lévi-Strauss, drawing on models of transformational linguistics, suggested that signification depended, not on the intrinsic meaning of particular isolated terms, but on the organized set of interrelated elements within a discourse. Within the colour spectrum, for example, the range of colours would be subdivided in different ways in each culture. Eskimos have several words for the thing which we call ‘snow’. Latin has one word, mus, for the animal which in English is distinguished by two terms, ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’. Italian distinguishes between legno and bosco where English only speaks of a ‘wood’. But where Italian has both bosco and foresta, German only has the single term, wald. (The examples are from Eco’s essay, ‘Social life as a sign system’ (1973)). These are distinctions, not of Nature but of Culture. What matters, from the viewpoint of signification, is not the integral meaning of any single colour-term, — mauve, for example — but the system of differences between all the colours in a particular classificatory system; and where, in a particular language, the point of difference between ‘one colour and another is positioned. It was through this play of difference that a language system secured an equivalence between its internal system (signifiers) and the systems of reference (signifieds) which it employed. Language constituted meaning by punctuating the continuum of Nature into a cultural system; such equivalences or correspondences would therefore be differently marked. Thus there was no natural coincidence between a word and its referent: everything depended on the conventions of linguistic use, and on the way language intervened in Nature in order to make sense of it. We should note that at least two, rather different epistemological positions can be derived from this argument. A Kantian or neo-Kantian position would say that, therefore, nothing exists except that which exists in and for language or discourse. Another reading is that, though the world does exist outside language, we can only make sense of it through its appropriation inThe rediscovery of ‘ideology’ 7 discourse. There has been a good deal of epistemological heavy. warfare around these positions in recent years. What signified, in fact, was the positionality of particular terms within a set. Each positioning marked a pertinent difference in the classificatory scheme involved. To this Lévi-Strauss added a more structuralist point: that it is not the particular utterance of speakers which provides the object of analysis, but the classificatory system which underlies those utterances and from which they are produced, as a series of variant transformations. Thus, by moving from the surface narrative of particular myths to the generative system or structure out of which they were produced, one could show how apparently different myths (at the surface level) belonged in fact to the same family or constellation of myths (at the deep-structure level). If the under- lying set is a limited set of elements which can be variously combined, then the surface variants can, in their particular sense, be infinitely varied, and spontaneously produced. The theory closely corresponds in certain aspects to Chomsky’s theory of language, which attempted to show how language could be both free and spontaneous, and yet regular and ‘grammatical’. Changes in meaning, therefore, depended on the classificatory systems involved, and the ways different elements were selected and combined to make different meanings. Variations in the surface meaning of a statement, however, could not in themselves resolve the question as to whether or not it was a transformation of the same classificatory set. This move from content to structure or from manifest meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one in the critical approach. It entailed a redefinition of what ideology was — or, at least, of how ideology worked. The point is clearly put by Veron: If ideologies are structures ... then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ (we can say, they are not contents) but are sets of rules which determine an organization and the functioning of images and concepts... Ideology is a system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded messages ... in this way, ideology becomes autonomous in relation to the consciousness or intention of its agents: these may be conscious of their points of view about social forms but not of the semantic” conditions (rules and categories or codification) which make possible these points of view... From this point of view, then, an ‘ideology’ may be defined as a system of semantic rules to generate messages . .. it is one of the many levels of organization of messages, from the viewpoint of their semantic properties ... (Veron, 1971, p. 68) Critics have argued that this approach forsakes the content of particular messages too much for the sake of identifying their underlying structure. ‘Also, that it omits any consideration of how speakers themselves interpret the world — even if this is always within the framework of those shared sets of meanings which mediate between individual actors/speakers and the discursive formations in which they are speaking. But, provided the thesis is not pushed too far in a structuralist direction, it provides a fruitful way of reconceptualizing ideology. Lévi-Strauss regarded the classificatory schemes of a culture as a set of ‘pure’, formal elements (though, in his earlier work, he was more concerned with the social contradictions which were articulated in myths, through the combined operations on their generative72 Culture, society and the media sets). Later theorists have proposed that the ideological discourses of a particular society function in an analogous way. The classificatory schemes of a society, according to this view, could therefore be said to consist of ideological elements or premises. Particular discursive formulations would, then, be ideological, not because of the manifest bias or distortions of their surface contents, but because they were generated out of, or were transformations based on, a limited ideological matrix or set. Just as the myth-teller may be unaware of the basic elements out of which his particular version of the myth is generated, so broadcasters may not be aware of the fact that the frameworks and classifications they were drawing ‘on reproduced the ideological inventories of their society. Native speakers can usually produce grammatical sentences in their native language but only rarely can they describe the rules of syntax in use which make their sentences orderly, intelligible to others and grammatical in form. In the same way, statements may be unconsciously drawing on the ideological frameworks and classifying schemes of a society and reproducing them — $0 that they appear ideologically ‘grammatical’ — without those making them being aware of so doing. It was in this sense that the structuralists insisted that, though speech and individual speech-acts may be an individual matter, the language-system (elements, rules “of combination, classificatory sets) was a social system: and therefore that speakers were as much ‘spoken’ by their language as speaking it. The rules of discourse functioned in such a way as to position the speaker as if he or she were the intentional author of what was spoken. The system on which this authorship depended remained, however, profoundly unconscious. Subsequent theorists noticed that, although this de-centered the authorial ‘I, making it dependent on the language systems speaking through the subject, this left an empty space where, in the Cartesian conception of the subject, the all-encompassing ‘I’ had previously existed. In theories influenced by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (also drawing on Lévi- Strauss), this question of how the speaker, the subject of enunciation, was positioned in language became, not simply one of the mechanisms through which ideology was articulated, but the principal mechanism of ideology itself (Coward and Ellis, 1977). More generally, however, it is not difficult to see how Lévi-Strauss’s proposition — ‘speakers produce meaning, but only on the basis of conditions which are not of the speaker's making, and which pass through him/her into language, unconsciously’ — could be assimilated to the more classic Marxist proposition that ‘people make history, but only in determinate conditions which are not of their making, and which pass behind their backs’. In later developments, these theoretical homologies were vigorously exploited, developed — and contested.