Introduction

Few areas of inquiry have expanded as rapidly as the study of the media over the last twenty years. Dominated in the late 1950s by the positivist canons of American social science, the settled view of the media which then obtained has since been profoundly challenged by a series of successive theoretical influences derived, in the main, from deviance theory, linguistics, structuralism and semiology, discourse theory (especially of late) and, perhaps most critically, from the debates in and around the area of ideology that have taken place within Marxism over the same period. Not all of these influences, however, have pulled in the same direction so that, whilst many of the orthodoxies of earlier stages in the history of mass communications research have been well and truly buried (well, nearly), no clearly articulated new orthodoxy has taken their place. Whilst some options may have been closed by means of both theoretical and empirical critique, there none the less remains a sufficient diversity of contending perspectives to guarantee a lively and productive climate of debate for some time to come.

The readings collected in this section offer a series of different but related overviews of these developments and are intended to give both students and teachers a comprehensive grasp of the key controversies which currently characterize media studies.

In Theories of the media: an introduction’, James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott review the relationships between liberalpluralist and Marxist approaches to the study of the media. In doing so, they dispute the conventionally held view that the liberal-pluralist approach can be characterized as theoretically cautious and empirically hard-nosed, in contrast to the supposedly more speculative, ‘grand theoretical’ and assertive character of Marxist approaches. Both approaches, they contend, are informed by theoretical conceptions of society and of the role of the media within it, even if these conceptions are more explicitly and selfconsciously theorized in the Marxist tradition. Moreover, they argue, the empirical findings of the two traditions are not so far opposed as is usually supposed; both agree about the nature and degree of power that can be attributed to the media, albeit that they express this in different terms. Having cleared the air in relation to what has been an important source of misunderstanding in the history of media debate, Curran, Gurevitch and Woollacott go on to argue that, in recent years, the most productive controversies have been located within Marxism rather than between the Marxist and liberal-pluralist approaches, and survey the contending paradigms—the ‘structuralist’, ‘political economy’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches—which currently define the main theoretical orientations within Marxist media research.

In Theories of the media, theories of society’, Tony Bennett outlines the relationships between the more important schools of media theory and the broader concerns of the traditions of social theory on which they depend in a way that makes clear the connections between particular empirical concerns and their supporting theoretical foundations. Focusing on mass society theories, liberal-pluralism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and on more recent developments within the Marxist theory of ideology, Bennett places each of these in their political context and traces the historical connections between them. Entirely dominated, in its early phases, by mass society theory—a pessimistic philosophy which led to the development of the media being viewed apprehensively—opposing theoretical approaches have been developed, at least in part, by means of an engagement with and critique of the mass society position. Bennett thus shows how, from the 1930s through to the 1950s, the liberal-pluralist perspective was developed, in America, by means of a detailed empirical refutation of the mass society supposition that media audiences could be regarded as largely undifferentiated, passive and inert masses. Similarly, in the case of the Frankfurt School—the first Marxist attempt to engage theoretically with the media—he shows how the critique of the ‘culture industry’ contained in the writings of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse consisted of an uneasy alliance of Marxist and mass society elements. His essay concludes with a consideration of more recent developments in the Marxist theory of ideology, particularly as represented by Louis Althusser, and outlines the way in which contemporary Marxist debates about the social role and power of the media connect with the broader problems involved in the analysis of the reproduction processes of advanced capitalism.

In The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, Stuart Hall's central concern is with the diverse theoretical sources that have contributed to the formation of the ‘critical paradigm’ in media studies since the early 1960s. He prefaces this, however, with a synoptic survey of the development of media theory prior to the 1960s and, in a swingeing critique of the liberal-pluralist perspective, traces the connection between American positivist and behaviourist social science and the ideology of American pluralism in the late 1950s. To the extent that the media were viewed as reflecting an achieved consensus and, thereby, as strengthening the core value system which was alleged to hold American society together in spite of the diverse and plural groups of which it was composed, American media sociology, Hall argues, ‘underwrote “pluralism”’. By contrast, during the last ten years or so, the media have been viewed ‘no longer as the institutions which merely reflected and sustained the consensus, but as the institutions which produced consensus, “manufactured consent”’. In the main body of his essay, Hall considers those theoretical developments which ruptured the liberal-pluralist paradigm from within together with those ‘outside’ influences which, in founding the critical paradigm, have contributed to this change—indeed, reversal—of perspectives. In an impressive survey which takes in the contributions of deviance theory, the general perspectives of structuralism as instanced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the work of Louis Althusser, Gramsci's concept of hegemony and its subsequent elaboration in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Hall outlines the major theoretical developments which have successively undercut and displaced the earlier analogical thinking whereby the media were said to mirror or reflect reality.

Throughout his analysis, Hall is careful to relate theoretical developments to political ones. If, as he contends, the ‘critical paradigm’ has been characterized by its ‘rediscovery’ of ideology, exiled from the heartland of American sociology, this has been closely related to the fact that ideological struggle, once optimistically thought to be over, has become more pronounced and visible. If the media are no longer viewed as reflecting an achieved consensus but as being engaged in the business of producing consent, this is due, in no small part, to the fact that there is no longer a consensus to be reflected with the result that, as the economy has plunged deeper and deeper into crisis, the need to produce consent has become more imperative yet, at the same time, increasingly difficult.

In his critique of the American social science of the 1950s, Stuart Hall argues that ‘conceptually, the media-message, as a symbolic sign-vehicle or a structured discourse, with its own internal structuration and complexity, remained theoretically wholly undeveloped’ within the liberal-pluralist tradition. There can be little doubt that the centrality currently accorded such questions consitutes the most visibly distinctive feature of contemporary media theory. In the intervening period, the aggregate techniques of content analysis have been forced into the background by a veritable explosion of new methods—chiefly derived from linguistics, semiology and psychoanalysis—aimed at unlocking the structure of media messages and analysing their effects. In ‘Messages and meanings’, Janet Woollacott outlines some of the more important of these methods, illustrates the uses to which they have been put and considers some of the difficulties associated with them. In a discussion which ranges across the work of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Umberto Eco, the critical project of the film journal Screen, Colin MacCabe's work on the ‘classic realist text’ and the use of the Gramscian concept of hegemony in Policing the Crisis, she draws out the implications which such developments have had for traditional Marxist formulations of the concept of ideology. The general difficulty she points to has been that of reconciling semiological perspectives, with their stress on signification as an active process of the production of meaning, with ‘any theory of ideology which conceives of the media as essentially reflecting the “real”’.

Viewed collectively, the readings comprising this section offer a commanding insight into the historical development of media studies together with an informed appraisal of the connections between the new developments, debates and controversies which typify recent work in this area. Albeit necessarily more cautiously and conjecturally, they also identify the directions in which future research might be expected to develop. The overall result is a useful synoptic perspective on where media studies has been, where it is now and where it is likely to be going.