Lecture 6.

Ideology

It is probably still true to say that ideology remains the single most important conceptual category in
cultural studies – even if it remains one of the most contested. Consequently one can understand the
antagonism between cultural studies and the political economists/sociologists we have just been
discussing. For the latter group ideology’s function is largely instrumental – to misrepresent ‘the real’
and to mask any political struggle; for cultural studies ideology is the very site of struggle. While there is
certainly some truth in the claim that cultural studies succeeds only too well in its attempt to separate
the cultural from the economic, one can see why the study of everyday life might resist the suggestion
that the analysis of economic forces provides a sufficient explanation of the workings of culture and
ideology. Nevertheless, Richard Johnson (1979b) usefully reminds us that the economistic recovery of a
base/superstructure model of society is not necessarily opposed to cultural studies’ versions of ideology;
he makes the significant distinction, however, that within cultural relations ‘the outcomes of ideology or
consciousness are not determined in the same kind of way as in economic or political relations’ (p. 234).
This argument emphasizes the importance of understanding just how ideology, culture and
consciousness are related to each other and thus how any ‘outcomes’ of their relationship might be
analysed.

This is not a simple matter, however. The category of ideology is still a major theoretical problem, within
both cultural studies and Marxist theory in general. It is now customary for cultural studies’ adoption of
Althusserian models of ideology in the 1970s to be represented as utterly deterministic, utterly
mechanical. Within many contemporary accounts, the similarities between Althusser and Gramsci are
glossed over and the differences exaggerated to legitimate the adaptation of Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony as a necessary correction to Althusserianism. However, just as Althusser’s theoretical
dominance during the 1970s produced numerous critiques and ultimate revision, the later dominance of
Gramsci has provoked debate as well (Bennett 1992; Harris 1992; Philo 1990).

Nonetheless, we can construct something of an orthodox history of cultural studies’ development of the
category of ideology, beginning with the appropriation of Althusserian theory during the 1970s and
the gradual incorporation of Gramscian theories of hegemony to resolve the culturalism/structuralism
split.
Significantly, Gramsci sees ideology as a site of particularly vigorous contestation, and the popular
culture as a source of considerable resistance to hegemonic formation. Since the late 1980s this view of
popular culture, coupled with the development of the notion of pleasure as a force that may oppose the
workings of ideology and with postmodernist theories that privilege sensation over meaning, has
encouraged something of a retreat from ideology as the all-powerful determining force it seemed to be
in the 1970s.

The Return of the Repressed

The most comprehensive attempt to formulate a cultural studies orthodoxy on ideology so far, Stuart
Hall’s ‘The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: The Return of the “Repressed” in Media Studies’ (1982). This
article knits together the major European theoretical influences on cultural studies – Saussure, Lévi-
Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Gramsci – within a history of ideology’s ‘repression’ and recovery in
media research. Hall provides, predominantly, an account of ideology within the text, treating the
function of ideology within the construction of everyday life as a secondary concern. He does,
however, distance himself from a simple structuralist appropriation of Althusser, and his adoption of a
theory of hegemony represents a significant shift away from the predominantly textualist theoretical
formation of both his own work at the time (1981) and the field of study itself.

1
 ‘The Return of the “Repressed” ’ deals specifically with the study of the media, and nominates three
distinct phases in media research from the 1920s to the present. Hall concentrates on the break
between the second and third phases; the second phase (roughly from the 1940s to the 1960s) is
dominated by the sociological approaches of ‘mainstream’ American behavioural science, while the
third phase (from the late 1960s to the present) sees the development of ‘an alternative, “critical”
paradigm’ (1982: 56). Hall charts this paradigm shift as one marked not only by differences in methods
or research procedures, but also by differences in political and theoretical orientations. The category of
ideology is the key to these differences: ‘The simplest way to characterize the shift from “mainstream”
to “critical” perspectives is in terms of the movement from, essentially, a behavioural to an ideological
perspective’ (p. 56). Within the behavioural perspective ideology was ‘repressed’; within the ‘critical’
(that is, for our purposes, cultural studies) tradition it was recovered as the central category that
connected the media to society. Hall’s article concludes by outlining the ways in which the function of
ideology is understood within this critical tradition.

The first phase of media research (from the 1920s to the 1940s) can be exemplified by the work of the
Frankfurt School. Researchers in this phase saw the media as a powerful and largely unmediated force
that had entirely negative effects on mass culture. This diagnosis was ultimately rejected, Hall suggests,
by the second phase: mainstream American mass communication research in the 1960s. This body of
work questioned the earlier assumptions of media power – most importantly, television’s potential to
produce either positive or negative effects independently. Because it employed a very simple idea of
media messages, and of social structure, American mass communication research was able to see the
media as unproblematically reflective of society. If society was composed of a plurality of different
groups, then this plurality would naturally be expressed within the media – as in other aspects of
democratic society. If all social groups had access to the media, as they presumably did in all democratic
countries, then their interests were in no danger of being ignored or suppressed. Capitalist democracies
were congratulated for becoming ‘pluralist’ societies in which all points of view contributed to the
forming of cultural values – a broadly consensual formation founded on the tolerance and incorporation
of difference.

The cultural function of ideology

This return of ideology to the agenda of media research opens the way for discussion of the cultural
function of ideological processes. Hall suggests these inquiries took place on two fronts: the first was
the territory of cultural reception, and focuses on the elaboration of ideology in language(s); the
second was the articulation of ideology into social formations, the territory of cultural production.

Hall begins with language, drawing on post-Saussurean structuralist appropriations of semiotic models
that use the language system as an analogy for all signifying structures – social practices, narratives,
myths. Saussure argues that, since meaning is not inherent in things, it has to be attributed culturally.
Further, ‘different kinds of meanings can be attributed to the same events’. Hall asks how this process of
attribution is structured: How does one meaning win credibility and acceptance while alternative
meanings are downgraded and marginalized? Two questions followed from this. First, how did a
dominant discourse warrant itself as the account, and sustain a limit, ban or proscription over
alternative or competing definitions? Second, how did the institutions which were responsible for
describing and explaining the events of the world – in modern societies the mass media, par excellence
– succeed in maintaining a preferred or delimited range of meanings in the dominant systems of
communication? How was this active work of privileging or giving preference practically accomplished?
(Hall 1982: 67–8)

2
Both questions are about the ‘politics of signification’, the ways in which the social practice of making
meanings is controlled and determined. Neither question has yet been categorically answered;
however, the attempts to provide answers have focused on the relation between ideology and
discourse, and between ideology and institutional structures.

The account Hall goes on to develop focuses on the media’s use of their power to ‘signify events in a
particular way’ (p. 69), and stresses the fact that this ideological power is always contested: ideology
becomes a site of struggle and a prize to be won, not a permanent possession of dominant groups. But
he also reminds the reader that ideology has deeper roots than the social practices of media production;
it structures the most basic systems of cultural organization. (the definition of gender as an example of
this.) Every culture has its own ‘forms of episodic thinking’ that provide its members with ‘the taken for-
granted elements’ of their ‘practical knowledge’ (p. 73). This ‘common sense’ is rarely made explicit, and
is often in fact unconscious, but it too is built upon a comprehensive foundation of ideological premises.

A feature of the ‘way things are signified’ to us is the invisibility of the process of signification itself.
Propositions about the world implied within a news report (the superiority of capitalism over other
social systems, for instance) become merely descriptive statements – ‘facts of the case’ (p. 74). The
effect of ideology in media messages is to efface itself, allowing the messages to appear as natural and
spontaneous presentations of ‘reality’. Hall talks of this phenomenon as ‘the reality effect’. Not only do
we generally understand reality as ‘a result or effect of how things had been signified’, but we also
‘recognize’ specific representations of reality as obvious. The circle closes, as this recognition effectively
validates the representation: But this recognition effect was not a recognition of the reality behind the
words, but a sort of confirmation of the obviousness, the taken-for-grantedness of the way the
discourse was organized and of the underlying premises on which the statement in fact depended. If
one regards the laws of a capitalist economy as fixed and immutable, then its notions acquire a natural
inevitability. Any statement which is so embedded will thus appear to be merely a statement about
‘how things really are’. Discourse, in short, had the effect of sustaining certain closures’, of establishing
certain systems of equivalence between what could be assumed about the world and what could be said
to be true. ‘True’ means credible, or at least capable of winning credibility as a statement of fact. New,
problematic or troubling events which breached the taken-for-granted expectancies about how the
world should be, could then be ‘explained’ by extending to them the forms of explanation which had
served ‘for all practical purposes’, in other cases. In this sense, Althusser was subsequently to argue that
ideology, as opposed to science, moved constantly within a closed circle, producing, not knowledge,
but a recognition of the things we already knew. It did so because it took as an already established fact
exactly the premises which ought to have been put in question. (Hall 1982: 75)

Hall highlights a number of concepts that follow from this ‘reality effect’. First is the idea of
naturalization – the representation of an event or a discourse such that it is legitimated by nature
rather than problematized by history. Second is the polysemy of language, which held that the same
set of signifiers could produce different meanings and thus made the effect of naturalization
something to be worked at, produced. And third is the fact that meaning, once it is seen in this
contingent way, ‘must be the result … of a social struggle’ (p. 77). Before taking up this last point, Hall
warns against collapsing the notion of ideology into that of language. They are not the same thing, and
ideology must be articulated through language. Second, he notes that the struggle over meaning is not
to be reduced to a class struggle.

Hall provides us with an example of this social struggle over meaning. In his brief account of the British
general election of 1979 he reveals the power exercised through the ‘definitions of the situation’,

3
highlighting the ideological effects of discourse while proposing that Thatcher’s electoral victory was
the profoundly material effect of a successful ideological bid to redefine the situation. He sets the scene
by noting how closely the British working class had been aligned with the Labour party and the union
movement until the prevailing definitions of this relationship were seriously challenged. The challenge
hit at the heart of a hitherto ‘natural’ alignment and replaced it with another equally ‘natural’
construction of the union movement: The theory that the working class was permanently and inevitably
attached to democratic socialism, the Labour Party and the trade unions movement, for example, could
not survive a period in which the intensity of the Thatcher campaigns preceding the General Election of
1979 made strategic and decisive inroads, precisely into major sectors of the working class. … And one
of the key turning-points in the ideological struggle was the way the revolt of the lower-paid public
service workers against inflation, in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9, was successfully signified, not
as a defence of eroded living standards and differentials, but as a callous and inhuman exercise of
overweening ‘trade-union power’, directed against the defenceless sick, aged, dying and indeed the
dead but unburied ‘members of the ordinary public’. (Hall 1982: 83)

Core readings:
Turner, G. (2003). British Cultural Studies. An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Additional readings:
Bennett, Tony (1992) ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and
Paula Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, pp. 22–37, New York: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart (1982) ‘The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: The Return of the “Repressed” in Media Studies’, in
Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott (eds) Culture, Society and the
Media, pp. 56–90, London: Methuen.
Harris, David (1992) From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on
Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.
Johnson, Richard (1979b) ‘Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture’, in John
Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory,
pp. 201–37, London: Hutchinson
Philo, Greg (1990) Seeing and Believing: The Influence of Television, London: Routledge.