11

Media, ‘reality’, signification

TONY BENNETT

THE MEDIA AS ‘DEFINERS OF SOCIAL REALITY’

In making the national press awards for 1977, James Callaghan referred to the media as a ‘mirror held up to society’. The analogy is, of course, a hackneyed one. The concept of the mirror with its attendant series of questions—do the media offer a faithful reflection of reality, or do they mirror the real in a one-sided, distorting way?—has haunted the study of the media since its inception. The difficulty with the analogy, however, consists in the suggestion that a dividing line can be drawn between ‘reality’ or society on the one hand and the world of representations on the other. It implies that the media are secondary and derivative, somehow less real than the ‘real’ they reflect, existing above society and passively mirroring it rather than forming an active and integral part of it. Like a mirror, it is suggested, they reflect only what is placed in front of them by the structure of the real itself.

In truth, this difficulty is not limited to media studies. The theory of the sign developed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, posits a duality between the world of signification and that of ‘reality’—a duality kept alive by Saussure's distinction between the sign and referent—and, correspondingly, implies that the former is in some way subordinate to and governed by the latter (see MacCabe, 1978, chapter 4). The world of signs can only signify the reality which is given to it; the media can only reflect what is already there. Subalterned to the reality it mirrors, the world of signs is granted only a shadowy, twilight existence; it ‘hovers’ above ‘reality’ as an ethereal appendage to it, deriving such substance as it has merely from what is reflected within it.

More recent developments in the theory of language have pulled in a direction directly contrary to this, stressing not only the independent materiality of the signifier—the ‘fleshiness’ of the sign—but also the activity and effectivity of signification as a process which actively constructs cognitive worlds rather than simply passively reflecting a preexisting reality. Indeed, whereas once the priority of signified over signifier, of ‘reality’ over signs, used to be stressed, this relationship seems now often to have been reversed as the signifier is held to preexist and have priority over the signified. Sign orders world.

An apparently similar perception backgrounds the contention that the media should be viewed as ‘definers of social reality’. True, the phrase retains a certain duality, a crucial ambiguity of formulation—first there is reality, the ‘real real’, and then there are the media, its ‘definers’—which as we shall see, remains the source of important theoretical difficulties. Given this qualification, the contention is one that allow the media and the terms of signification they propose something other than a secondary, reflective role in social life. For to suggest that the media should be viewed as ‘definers of social reality’ is to suggest that what ‘events’ are ‘reported’ by the media and the way in which they are signified have a bearing on the ways in which we perceive the world and thus, if action is at all related to thought, on the ways in which we act within it. It is to affirm that the media are agencies of mediation, that in reporting events they also propose certain frameworks for the interpretation of those events, moulding or structuring our consciousness in ways that are socially and politically consequential. Viewed in these terms, the media are not apart from social reality, passively reflecting and giving back to the world its self-image; they are a part of social reality, contributing to its contours and to the logic and direction of its development via the socially articulated way in which they shape our perceptions.

My aim in this essay is to illustrate the sorts of claims that have been made within this tradition of media theory by commenting on three different levels of media practice at which the reality-defining role of the media has been approached and conceptualized. The first concerns the propaganda function of the press. It is a matter of public knowledge that each newspaper treads a certain party line and that, in seeking to recruit public support for the political philosophy it favours, seeks to ‘sell’ a particular political definition of the events it reports. This is reflected in its editorial columns, use of language and photographs, headline layouts and so on. I will thus be concerned, at this level, with media practices that deliberately report events in a manner which serves to promote particular political views in the pursuit of particular political objectives, be these implicit or explicit.

Next, I shall consider the role played by the way in which the popular press signify the activities and behaviour of various groups of ‘outsiders’; that is, groups whose behaviour is viewed as transgressing or threatening the cohesiveness of dominant social norms—drug-users, criminals, soccer hooligans, ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ and so on. My concern here will be with the part that this area of media practice has played in the development of a law and order ideology since the mid-1960s. Finally, consideration will be given to the extent to which the culture of consensus politics can be said to provide the dominant background against which the media project the events they report. Our interest here will centre chiefly on the television news and on the extent to which, although neutral in party-political terms —and obliged to be so by law—they are, in the words of the last Director General of the BBC, Sir Charles Curran, ‘biased in favour of parliamentary democracy’ (cited in Hall et al., 1976, p. 57). At this level of analysis, I shall be principally concerned not with conscious bias but with the ‘unconscious’ bias which results from the implicit, taken-for-granted assumptions of consensus politics embodied in the ideologies and working practices of professional communicators.

However, I shall also be concerned to point to some of the difficulties associated with this tradition of media theory, particularly with regard to the way in which its implicit retention of the mirror analogy impedes an adequate theorization of the politics of signification. Owing to limitations of space, however, it will be necessary to present these criticisms in programmatic form rather than as part of a fully developed critique.

POLITICS AND THE MEDIA

In his essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, Orwell wrote:

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. (Orwell, 1974, p. 233)

In order to understand Orwell's comments on the press coverage of the Civil War, it is necessary to sketch in the background to the struggle in Spain. In broad terms the political situation in Spain from 1930 to the end of the Civil War can be understood in terms of a struggle for power between three contending political forces: the bourgeois republican parties (the Republican Union, the Catalan Left, the Basque Nationalists) subscribing to a bourgeois-democratic programme of reforms; right-wing bourgeois forces of a pro-monarchy and fascist hue led by Franco; and a variety of workingclass political forces subscribing to a variety of communist, socialist and anarcho-syndicalist ideologies. During the greater part of the early 1930s, nominal power was held by a succession of administrations headed by bourgeois-republican forces. The basis upon which power was exercised, however, was an excessively fragile one, the bourgeois-republican democracy being susceptible to successive challenges from both the left and the right. The final blow came in the July of 1936 when Franco initiated a fascist uprising by calling on the army to support him in establishing an authoritarian state.

To appreciate the political logic of the Civil War, it is important to note that the resistance to Franco came from the workers who, in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Malaga armed themselves, put down the garrisons and, through a series of anti-fascist round-ups, established control over those provinces and thus forced on the bourgeois-republican forces the defence of their own republic. Furthermore, in doing so, the workers’ forces pushed the logic of events beyond the parliamentary-democratic phase by seizing control of industry, placing it on a war-time footing, and placing the fleet under the control of elected sailors’ committees. In the countryside, there was a mass seizure of the land by the peasantry; property titles, mortgages and debt records were burnt and peasants’ committees formed to organize the supply of foodstuffs to the town workers. It could be argued, then, that what was at issue in the Civil War was not merely the defence of traditional bourgeois-democratic rights and liberties, inasmuch as there existed in the republican camp a situation of ‘dual power’, of proletarian forms and institutions existing side by side with bourgeois ones.

So much for the line-up of political forces in Spain. To understand the direction and significance of the struggle for the definition of the political realities involved in the Civil War, our analysis must shift to the international level. For the events in Spain occupied a position of nodal political significance inasmuch as it clearly held implications for, and offered opportunities to, the three major political principles operative in Europe at the time—bourgeois-democratic, communist and fascist. So far as the latter were concerned, it was clear to Hitler and Mussolini that Franco's victory, especially if procured through the assistance of German and Italian arms, would offer them an important extension in the sphere of their influence and significantly alter the balance of power in Europe. They accordingly offered Franco, quite openly, military, financial and diplomatic assistance on a large scale.

The situation for France and Britain was more delicate. On the one hand, the victory of Franco was clearly not in their interests if it would give Hitler a footing in the Iberian peninsula. On the other hand, the successful pursuit of the Civil War in a revolutionary proletarian direction could hardly be expected to recruit their support either. For it, too, especially if achieved with Russian assistance, would have altered the balance of power in Europe. Equally important, it would have offered the working classes of England and France a revolutionary example which, in the appropriate circumstances, they might have wished to imitate. The western press, so Orwell alleges, accordingly pursued a combination of three strategies with regard to the definitions it imposed on events in Spain.

First, it significantly overplayed the extent of Russian involvement on the side of the republican forces, thereby suggesting that the struggle in Spain was not a struggle waged by the toiling masses for their own interests but one in which the Spanish people were being used to further the global political objectives of the USSR. This interpretation, Orwell argued, significantly limited support for the republican forces among both working-class and bourgeois-humanist forces in Britain. The fact that the more specifically proletarian aspects of republican Spain—the workers’ committees running the factories, the mass seizure of the land by the peasantry, the initially democratic structure of the army, etc.—were underplayed or simply not mentioned at all, also served to limit the development of ties of international proletarian solidarity with the Spanish working class. Time and again, in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell records his sheer disbelief, on returning from the front to France and England, at the number of not only ‘fellowtravellers’, like himself, but also working-class militants in those countries who were simply not aware of the proto-revolutionary aspects to the conflict in Spain. This was reinforced by the tendency to report the events in Spain within a ‘democracy versus fascism’ political construction at the expense of stressing the respects in which the activity of the Spanish workers had also placed revolutionary socialist objectives on the agenda. Again, Orwell is instructive here. For he records that many of the tradeunion militants and members of the liberal intelligentsia, himself included, who went to Spain to join the International Brigade believed that they were going to the defence of democracy in an abstract sense, and he notes that it was only by directly participating in the struggle in Spain that he gradually became aware of its specifically proletarian and socialist aspects.

Although with some qualifications, Anthony Aldgate's recent study of the British newsreel companies’ coverage of the Spanish Civil War confirms the general thrust of Orwell's criticisms. However, Aldgate suggests that the specific inflection of the events in Spain effected by the newsreels was determined less by any outright hostility to the republican cause than by the need to recruit support for the government's policy of non-intervention, itself dictated by Britain's commitment to the political initiatives being made at the time for disarmament in Europe. In view of these considerations, Aldgate argues, the early newsreel coverage of the Civil War tended to sympathize with neither the republican nor the insurgent forces but sought rather to draw a contrast between the miseries of war-torn Spain and the ordered, peaceful and improving quality of life in Britain in support of fostering an anti-war climate of opinion. This also partly explains why the part played in Spain by both the Soviet Union and the fascist forces of Hitler and Mussolini tended to be underplayed as part of an attempt to limit the significance of events in Spain, to present the War as a purely local dispute (this being contrary to the policy pursued within the press) and thereby—through controlling definitions in this way—to reduce the chances of the Civil War becoming the touchstone that might spark off a general European conflagration.

Given this qualification, however, the newsreels can by no means be exonerated from the charge that their coverage was biased against the republican forces, although this was effected more by omissions—but highly significant omissions—than by any explicitly biased editorial comment. Whilst the Russian assistance to the republican forces was occasionally dealt with, for example, all the major newsreel companies maintained a virtually total conspiracy of silence concerning the assistance Hitler and Mussolini rendered the insurgent forces—a conspiracy that was maintained by such tricks of the trade as simply not mentioning the fact that the planes which bombed Guernica had been supplied by the Luftwaffe (although The Times had printed this information—see Aldgate, 1979, pp. 159–60). Similarly, Aldgate records that the existence of the International Brigade was scarcely ever acknowledged and that, when it was—as in a 1937 Paramount newsreel—it was only to suggest that such Brigades consisted wholly of the unemployed, thereby suggesting that the volunteers who went to Spain did so out of necessity rather than out of principle, and that, once in Spain, they were used for road making rather than for fighting, none of which was true. Perhaps more important, however, was the way in which—quite contrary to historical record—several newsreels insinuated that it was the republican rather than the insurgent forces which were responsible for the disorder in Spain. Commenting on the contrasting ways in which the republican and insurgent forces were typically represented—the former as un-uniformed, apparently ill-disciplined and, not infrequently, engaged in church burnings (some of which were clearly stage-manged) or other acts of desecration; the latter as neat, orderly, professional and disciplined, usually associated with symbols of traditional Spain—Aldgate remarks:

All in all, despite the fact that the Nationalists constituted a rebel, Insurgent army, it takes little effort to conclude that the imagery surrounding it is that of traditional, conservative Spain, fighting to preserve its heritage. While the duly elected Republican Government is presented as maintaining an undisciplined army bent upon destruction and upheaval. (Aldgate, 1979, pp. 116–17)

To return to Orwell, his concern—and his indignation—were more particularly exercised by the role played by the Communist Party press in mediating the Spanish Civil War to the international labour movement, and this, in turn, can only be understood in terms of the opposition between Stalinist and Trotskyist policies at the time. Trotsky's prognosis of the situation in Spain was clear (see Trotsky, 1973). He recommended that the workers’ committees in the army and industry should be built on so as to create Soldiers and Workers’ Councils capable of posing a serious alternative to the Cortes (or parliament) as a form for the organization of state power. He further urged that the war should be pursued as a revolutionary war, waged both to defend and extend the socialist ground already won in the republican camp, and that such socialist gains—particularly the virtual abolition of land ownership—should be extensively publicized in a propaganda war aimed at both undercutting Franco's support among the peasantry in the territory he occupied and deepening, extending and developing the support offered Spanish workers by the international labour movement. Above all, whilst advocating that communists should co-operate with bourgeois, anarchist and socialist forces in defence of the Republic, Trotsky recommended that the communist forces in Spain should at all times retain their organizational, propagandistic and programmatic independence in order not to be politically compromised by the pursuit of collaborationist policies.

Viewed in terms of its effects, however, Trotsky's prognosis was not particularly influential in mediating the events of the Spanish Civil War to either the Spanish or the international working class. In Spain itself, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) came closest to embracing a Trotskyist position, but the links between this organization and the international Trotskyist Left Opposition were severed when André Nin led POUM into a coalition government in 1936. Internationally, of course, Trotsky's analysis of the Spanish situation was circulated only within the pages of the Bulletin of the Left Opposition. Put simply, the Trotskyist forces lacked a mass newspaper through which to make their definition and interpretation of the Spanish situation count, to make it a widespread part of working-class consciousness and thus an effective ingredient within that situation itself.

Not so the Communist Party. In accordance with the logic of socialism in one country, the policy of popular frontism was officially adopted by the Comintern in 1935. Briefly, according to the prognosis of the Comintern, revolution was no longer an objective possibility in Europe; the issue of the day was ‘democracy versus fascism’. Politically, this meant that communists should seek alliances with socialist and bourgeois-democratic opponents of fascism and that the Soviet Union should seek treaties of alliance with the western democracies, France and Britain in particular, against Hitler. This entailed that distinctively communist objectives were to be temporarily abandoned in favour of an ameliorative political stance which would facilitate the building of such alliances. Given this perspective, it was highly inconvenient that the Spanish workers took to barricades in the way they did. For whilst the Comintern would clearly have forfeited all credibility on the left had it failed to intervene in support of the Spanish workers, it would have proved impossible to forge the alliances required by the political perspective of the Popular Front had that intervention assumed too direct or revolutionary a character.

The logic of events in Spain was accordingly redrawn in accordance with Popular Front conceptions. The issue, it was said, was not socialism versus fascism but democracy versus fascism. The first task was to defend the bourgeois-democratic forms of the Republic against the insurgent forces and to consolidate this ground before going on to develop a struggle for socialism against bourgeois democracy. The strategy of the Communist Party in Spain was thus that communists should enter into formal alliance with the bourgeois-democratic forces in the Republic and, as the price of doing this, abandon the distinctively proletarian forms of organization that had been created in the republican camp in order to make sure of a solid front with the bourgeois-republican forces in defence of democracy. The disbanding of workers’ and soldiers’ committees; the return of factories and of the land to private ownership; the disarming of workers’ militias—all of these measures were initiated and implemented by administrations which included members of the Spanish Communist Party.

The Communist Party press, reflecting the Comintern's position, sought constantly to interpret the Spanish situation in terms of the logic of the Popular Front and, as Orwell noted with incredulity, accordingly excluded virtually all mention of the distinctively proletarian edge which the Spanish workers and peasants had themselves given to their struggle. It sought also to discredit Trotskyist forces in Spain by presenting the leaders of POUM as fascist agents-provocateurs bent on encouraging the Spanish proletariat to take an increasingly revolutionary stance in order to justify a direct German invasion of Spain.

Looking back, much of this seems scarcely credible. Yet it needs to be borne in mind that we have been made aware of the proletarian dimensions of the struggle in Spain only posthumously. For, at the time, there was a large degree of complicity between the ways in which the communist and the western capitalist press reported (or did not report) and interpreted events in Spain. Both, for their different reasons, were instruments of darkness. A footnote which underwrites the point is the difficulty Orwell had in obtaining a publisher for his Homage to Catalonia for it was, initially, rejected by both capitalist and left-wing publishing houses for politicalideological reasons which should require no further comment.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Orwell's study of the press coverage of the Civil War could be viewed as a model of sociological analysis. It was too impressionistic for that, lacking both methodological rigour or any sense of theoretical distance. It was, moreover, clearly partisan in the respect that Orwell does not conceal his sympathy for the Trotskyist prognosis of the political logic of the War. However, I would count this in its favour. To speak of the political role of the media is not an abstract undertaking. It can be done only through a study of the role played by the media in concrete, historically determined political conjunctures; and to study these, it is necessary to deal not only with the media but also with the political issues at stake in those conjunctures. One does so at a price, of course. For it is not possible to offer an analysis of a given political conjuncture without being drawn—as Orwell was— into the maelstrom of political debate and, thereby, of politics itself. It is, however, misplaced to imagine that one might stand aloof from this arena.

Perhaps the greatest value of Orwell's study, however, consists in the fact that it deals with events that were of a momentous, world-historical significance in relation to which—although their impact may not be quantifiable—the part played by the media was politically consequential in ways that may not seriously be doubted. In ‘Looking back on the Spanish War’, Orwell argues that, no matter what might have happened on the ideological front, the disposition of military and international forces was such that the Republic would probably have been lost anyway. But he also records that there are different ways in which a defeat may be suffered. As he wrote in Homage to Catalonia:

For years past the communists themselves have been teaching the militant workers in all countries that ‘democracy’ was a polite name for capitalism. To say ‘Democracy is a swindle’, then ‘Fight for Democracy!’ is not good tactics. If, with the huge prestige of Soviet Russia behind them, they had appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of ‘democratic Spain’, but of ‘revolutionary Spain’, it is hard to believe that they would not have got a response. (Orwell, 1974, p. 68)

There is, of course, no way of telling what might have happened had the Communist Party issued such a revolutionary call or what might have happened —both in Spain and internationally—had an alternative, say Trotskyist policy, been pursued. Maybe total disaster. Maybe an undermining of the political stability of France and England. But is clear that the way in which the Spanish Civil War was lost created considerable disillusionment and, indeed, disarray within the ranks of the European left, just as it is clear that, in terms of their coverage of the Spanish situation, the media—capitalist and communist—did not function as a passive mirror but, through the way in which they defined and interpreted that situation, actively contributed to shaping the contours of the political map of pre-war Europe.

Yet Orwell's study also clearly exemplifies the central difficulty associated with the proposition that the media should be viewed as definers of social reality. For the proposition is one that keeps alive the concept of media as mirror at the same time as it contests it. This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ Orwell wrote of the press coverage of the Spanish Civil War, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’ (Orwell, 1974, p. 235). The definitional frameworks to which Orwell points are, by implication, all distorting ones; they are measured as being in some way false in relation to that ‘real real’ of ‘objective history’—a real that exists prior to and independently of signification. But this is merely to keep alive the notion that there may be forms of signification that are adequate in relation to the ‘real real’ they are alleged thus to re-present, forms which are, so to speak, neuter in that they allow the real to reveal itself ‘as it really is’. The mirror analogy, therefore, is not so much abandoned as simply re-worked: there are mirrors and mirrors, it is implied. Some may be partial and distorting, but the possibility of a form of representation that does genuinely re-present or mirror the real is retained as the standard against which the distorting effects of such ‘false mirrors’ may be assessed. In spite of appearances, politics is thus evacuated from the world of signs. Implicitly, signification is allowed an effectivity only in so far as it is, simultaneously, deception. The sphere of ideology, as a sphere of struggle, is defined not by the clash and reverberation of sign versus sign—of competing systems of signification locked in combat—but by the simple opposition of truth versus falsehood.

THE DEVIANT IN THE MEDIA

The attribution of a reality-defining role to the media hinges on two propositions. The first is that the news is a manufactured product, not necessarily in the sense that it is contrived or invented but in the sense that it is the product of a culturally encoded and socially determined process of making which displays, in its content and form, the technical and ideological forces which bear on its construction. The second is that the power which the media derive from their reality-defining capability is attributable largely to the service they perform in making us the indirect witnesses to events of which we have no first-hand knowledge or experience.

Both of these propositions are central to the tradition of media theory concerned with the definitions the media impose on the behaviour of various groups of ‘outsiders’; that is, of those groups—drug-addicts, criminals, soccer hooligans, homosexuals—whose behaviour is viewed as transgressing dominant social norms, be these enshrined in law or in custom and convention (see Cohen and Young, 1973). Briefly, it is contended that, by casting such groups in the role of ‘folk-devils’, the media serve to strengthen our degree of commitment to dominant social norms and, thereby, to create a climate of opinion supportive of the operations of society's law-enforcement agencies and of the extension of their powers. Developments within this area of media theory, however, have been greatly indebted to the more general theoretical realignments which have characterized the recent history of the sociology of deviance in this country, particularly as represented by those associated with the National Deviancy Symposium (see Cohen, 1971).

In classical criminology, the concept of criminal behaviour was largely regarded as an unproblematic given. Criminality or any other form of deviance, that is, was viewed as a property inherent within certain types of acts themselves. Given this, the primary analytical task was held to be that of explaining such behaviour within reference to the, so it was felt, abnormal causes (social, psychological or even biological) which must be responsible for it. The contemporary focus within deviance theory, by contrast, is concerned more with the social processes within which the attribution of deviance is made. Deviance, that is, is no longer regarded as an attribute immanent within certain acts but as a label which is attached, via a series of complex social processes, to those types of behaviour which transgress either legally codified rules or normatively enshrined codes of behaviour. It is thus, it is argued, a term whose use reflects the relative power of certain social groups to impose the label—and, of course, the punitive practices of the legal and penal systems—on those whose behaviour is incompatible with the socially dominant concepts of legality and normality which are ideologically buttressed and sustained by those groups. Although this does not deny the cogency of inquiring why it is that the members of some social groups are more likely to engage in such forms of behaviour than are the members of other groups, it does entail a shift of interest away from the behaviour of the so-called deviant towards an examination of the social and cultural processes whereby the attribution of the label of deviance is made to some acts but not to others and of the functions which the nomination of such acts as deviant fulfils in relation to the wider social order.

These developments within sociology have been influenced by and, in turn, contributed to parallel developments in the field of historical scholarship. Particularly relevant here are those studies of witch persecutions—witches being the deviants par excellence of earlier, theological universes—undertaken by English and American historians (see, for example, Macfarlane, 1970). These suggest that, in periods of disorientating social, political and economic crisis, the responsibility for such crises will be projected onto vulnerable groups of ‘outsiders’ who, by virtue of their divergence from dominant social norms, are structurally well placed to serve as scapegoats. Dramatized in the form of show-trials, their behaviour serves, in a way that conforms with the Durkheimian logic of the social function of deviance, to reinforce, by negative example, the threatened power of dominant consensual norms.

Whilst it might be tempting to argue that such irrational forces play no part in modern political processes, recent experiences preclude any such sanguine conclusion. The treatment of Jews in Hitler's Germany; the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s; the persecution of communists in the McCarthy era; Powellism— all of these are contemporary instances which may be cited. Sociologists working at the meeting point of media theory and deviance theory have argued that the presentation of deviance by the media in recent years has exhibited a similar logic in producing, through their symbolization and dramatization of the behaviour of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’, drug users, soccer hooligans, political extremists and so on, a gallery of ‘folk-devils’, a modern demonology. By the devices of exaggeration and stereotyping, by wrenching such forms of behaviour from any societal context that might help to explain them, it is argued that social tensions have been signified within a semiology of law and order which has served to reinforce the strength of dominant consensual norms. Involved as the unwilling participants in a kind of modern morality play in which they serve as the negative symbols of disorder, thereby pointing to the need for society to mount a permanent patrol along its normative boundary-lines, the behaviour of such ‘deviant’ groups is so defined that they appear both to crystallize and to be responsible for the acute instability that has characterized British society since the 1960s.

It may be objected that the obvious difficulty with theories of this nature is that they are couched at such a level of abstraction as to render either their confirmation or disconfirmation difficult. Indeed, it may further be argued that there is a real difficulty in imputing any effectivity of whatever kind to the media if, as is often argued, the influence they exert on the social world is necessarily an indirect one determined by the influence they exert on the actions of individual members of the audience via their impact on their consciousness. For it is by no means easy to know how one might sift out, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, the discrete and differential impact that the media might have in influencing our view of social reality and hence our actions within it. To show that the media propose certain definitions of reality is one thing; but it cannot be inferred from this that such definitions are necessarily accepted in the sense that they are effectively taken for real and acted upon. One cannot, in other words, infer ‘audience response from the nature of the message they receive’ (Hall et al., 1976, p. 52).

This is clearly a general problem; indeed, it is perhaps the most important single outstanding theoretical difficulty in need of exploration in media sociology. Currently, far from being resolved, there are few signs that the problem has even been adequately conceptualized (a notable exception being David Morley's work on the ‘Nationwide’ audience—see Morley, 1980). So far, inquiries in this area have largely taken the form of audience research based on sampling and questionnaire techniques. Whilst clearly helpful in some areas— the impact of the media on voting behaviour, for example—it is equally clear that there are some questions, vital and important ones, which cannot be tackled in this way. For, in speaking of the impact of the media on the terms in which we see the world, we are speaking of an ideological process which, in so far as it concerns the formation of consciousness, is one which those subjected to it—you, me, all of us—tend to be unconscious of. It escapes our consciousness inasmuch as it constitutes the framework within which our consciousness is produced. This is not to say that the operations of ideology are necessarily invisible; but it is to say that their invisibility is a condition of their effectiveness. They have to be made visible. It therefore follows that the proposition that the media are influential in proposing certain ideologically derived definitions of reality is one that cannot be dependent for its validation solely upon the subjective reports of those whose consciousness is said to be produced, without their being aware of it, by this process. It is a proposition that would automatically lose its theoretical power were it to be operationalized in this way.

A further difficulty with such approaches consists in the methodological individualism they exhibit in according priority to the study of the individual and her or his consciousness over the study of groups, group formation and the institutional structure of society. Much of the more general theoretical and methodological value of recent studies concerned with media representations of deviance consists in the fact that they are not liable to this criticism. For they have addressed the question of media effects not solely or even primarily as an issue that concerns the consciousness of individual members of the audience but have sought rather to theorize the media-society connection in terms of the impact which this area of media practice has exerted on the practices of law-enforcement agencies.

Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers—a study of the local political reactions to the media sensationalization of the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ incidents of 1964—offers a useful illustration of some of the issues involved here. Cohen argues that, in the seaside resorts concerned, the local business communities, perturbed lest the sensationalism of the press reports reduced the volume of their summer trade, were anxious that the impression should be created, nationally, that, in future, such occurrences would be well under control. As a consequence, there emerged—as evidenced in public meetings, letters to the local newspapers—a number of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who further amplified the media's already exaggerated inflation of the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ problem by calling on the police and the courts to adopt new and more severe strategies in relation to it. Tear-gas, more police, national service, corporal punishment—all of these proposals were mooted and debated in the columns of the local press.

The police, not surprisingly, were not unresponsive to the manifestation of such a supportive climate of opinion at grass-roots level. Apart from cancelling weekend leave so as to increase the police presence on the streets, Cohen records that a variety of new tactics were adopted in an attempt to nip any potential trouble in the bud, by what is known, euphemistically, as preventive police work. These tactics included confining likely troublemakers to one part of the resort, usually the beach; preventing people whose appearance suggested that they might be ‘mods’ or ‘rockers’ from congregating at certain previously designated ‘trouble-spots’; the harassment of so-called potential trouble-makers by, for example, the confiscation of studded belts as dangerous weapons or by giving them ‘free lifts’ to the roads leading out of town or to the railway station (see Cohen, 1972, p. 93 for details). Inasmuch as these tactics involved an infringement of the liberty of the youths concerned prior to the actual commission of any offence, their constitutional and legal propriety was questionable. The behaviour of certain of the local magistrates, however, was perhaps even more disturbing. For, sensitized to the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ menace by the media and by the crusading activities of the local ‘moral entrepreneurs’, they seem not only to have passed unduly severe sentences on the offenders brought before them and to have used their power to remand in custody as a form of pre-trial additional punishment but, particularly in the trials which followed the incidents at Margate over the Whitsun weekend of 1964, to have used the court-rooms to further develop and elaborate the dramaturgy of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’. This was particularly true of one Dr. George Simpson, who gained a certain national fame—or notoriety— through his harangues from the bench on the subject of hooligans and the severity of the sentences he passed.

The attractiveness of Cohen's study consists in the fact that it deals with the effects of media definitions of reality not by regarding the media as isolable variables whose discrete and differential influence must be precisely measured and quantified. Rather, it places those definitions within a wider social process, seeing the media's practices as having consequences for and, in turn, being influenced by the reality defining practices of other social agencies and institutions—the police, the courts, local political and interest groupings and so on. The effect that is attributed to the joint practices of such agencies and institutions is that of the creation of an ‘amplification spiral’ whereby the scope and significance of an initial ‘problem’—that is, of what is defined as a problem by such agencies—is subject to increased magnification as the reality-defining practices of such agencies reciprocally sustain and complement one another. In the case of the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ incidents of 1964, this ‘amplification spiral’ worked as follows: first, the national media dramatized the confrontations that took place at such resorts as Eastbourne and Margate; the moral crusaders and the local press then took up the problem; the police responded by introducing new policing measures; these led to an increase in arrests and the magistracy responded by further dramatizing the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ in their court-room speeches—all of which was reported in the media, thereby adding another loop to the spiral.

In this case, the moral panic sparked into life by this circuit of amplifying significations soon worked itself out—if only because changes in teenage fashions deprived the initial dramaturgy of much of its signifying potency. And, of course, one could argue that the immediate, tangible consequences of the panic were limited in import—a localized abuse of police power, a few wrongful arrests and a handful of unduly harsh sentences. In their Policing the Crisis (also discussed in chapter 4 of this collection), however, Stuart Hall and his co-authors argue that such moral panics—when viewed collectively and cumulatively— have played a major role in so orchestrating public opinion, via the production of a generalized law-and-order crisis, as to have recruited support for a significant extension of the arbitrary and coercive powers at the disposal of the state.

This thesis is set within the wider context supplied by an application of Gramsci's concept of hegemony to the contours of post-war British history. Briefly, the authors of Policing the Crisis contend that the period since the early 1960s has witnessed the development of a deep and sustained crisis of hegemony in this country, a crisis which has rendered the production of popular consent to ruling-class political and economic objectives increasingly problematic and which, thereby, has occasioned the need for the state to accumulate a reservoir of coercive powers which might be used to exact such compliance forcibly. The end of the post-war boom and the continued declining international competitiveness of the British economy, it is argued, have resulted in a marked sharpening of class conflict as an increasingly militant, unionized working class has resisted attempts to resolve the economic crisis by capitalist means—that is, by allowing unemployment to increase, the attempts to impose income restraints, cuts in the social services and so on. This resistance took its most highly effective and dramatic form in the miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–4 which, in challenging the ability of an elected government to govern, bore clear testimony to an attenuation of ruling-class authority.

If, at the political level, the resolution of this crisis has been sought by means of strengthening the powers of the state—particularly in regard to the sphere of industrial relations—Hall and his colleagues argue that support for such policies has been recruited chiefly by the way in which the crisis has been ideologically signified as a crisis of law and order. Whereas, in the earlier part of this period, such moral panics as that exemplified by the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ scare tended to be discrete and of short duration, it is contended that, particularly during the 1970s, there has operated a ‘signification spiral’ whereby hitherto discrete and localized problems—rebellious youth cultures, student protest, industrial militancy, flying pickets, mugging—have been pulled into a seamless web of associations. Presented as manifestations of a common problem—the breakdown of respect for the authority of the law—it has thereby been suggested that they are susceptible to a common solution: an increase in the scope of the law and a strengthening of the means of its enforcement.

There is not the space here to survey the details of this study. The most that can be attempted is a brief adumbration of the more important theoretical and methodological advances that are registered within it—or at least in those parts of it which bear most directly on the study of the media—and of the problems that remain. Perhaps the most important advance consists in the contention that the signifying or reality-defining practices of the media should not be viewed in isolation. In examining the axial, coordinating signifying role accorded to the figure of the ‘mugger’ within the ideology of law and order between 1972 and 1976, Policing the Crisis stresses that this was produced not merely by the media but by and within the context of the symbiotic relationships that exist between the media and other reality-defining agencies—particularly, in this case, the courts, senior police officers and leading political spokespersons. The media did not ‘invent’ the law-and-order crisis ex nihilo. Nor were the policies they pursued the effect, in any direct or obvious sense, of the structure of media ownership. Nor was there a ruling-class conspiracy in which political leaders and media magnates colluded in manufacturing a crisis of law and order. Rather, Hall and his colleagues speak of a much more subtle process whereby the definitions of the media and the discourse of the powerful—the framing definitions supplied by prominent public figures—tend to sustain and reinforce one another owing to the close ties of dependency that exist between them, the media depending on prominent public figures as a primary source of newscopy just as the latter depend on the media for placing their diagnoses and prescriptions before a wider audience.

Although, in this way, the pitfalls of conspiracy theory are avoided, some difficulties remain. The overall thesis of the book is that the law-andorder crisis has been constituted via a specific ideological inflection of Britain's economic crisis and that the effect of this ideological inflection has been to deliver popular support for the pursuit of specific political strategies in relation to the economic crisis:

There is, of course, no simple consensus, even here, as to the nature, causes and extent of the crisis. But the overall tendency is for the way the crisis has been ideologically constructed by the dominant ideologies to win consent in the media, and thus to constitute the substantive basis in ‘reality’ to which public opinion continually refers. In this way, by ‘consenting’ to the view of the crisis which has won credibility in the echelons of power, popular consciousness is also won to support the measures of control and containment which this version of social reality entails.’ (Policing the Crisis, pp. 220–21)

The central difficulty with this formulation consists in the secondary role it appears to accord to the sphere of the ideological—secondary in the sense that it is conceived as a response to an economic crisis that is pre-given to it. The effect of this is to reproduce the antinomies—sign/world, signifier/signified—with which we have become familiar in relation to Orwell's work by conceiving these as analogous to the relationship between ideology and the economy. For such formulations as ‘the way in which the crisis has been constructed’ suggest that it is possible to speak first of a crisis (an economic crisis) and then of the mode of its ideological signification. It is to suggest that a crisis may be held to exist prior to and independently of the way in which it is ideologically signified. It would be a mistake, however, to press this objection too strongly. The problems associated with the residual economism to which they subscribe are ones that the authors of Policing the Crisis are fully aware of, and the determinancy that is allocated to the economy is, indeed, in Althusser's famous phrase, that of the last instance which never arrives. If the ideology of law and order is held to constitute a specific discursive inflection of economic crisis, the role allotted to that ideology is a far from passive one; its role in structuring the terms of political debate so as actively to influence the forms adopted for the political regulation of that crisis is, indeed, the very raison d’être of the book.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the book from the point of view of our concerns here, however, has to do with the extent to which it undermines the view that the media should be theorized as ‘definers of social reality’. For the ideology of law and order is not primarily assessed in terms of its accuracy as measured against some independent index of the ‘real’ extent and distribution of crime. There is some element of this, it is true, but the preponderant emphasis is placed upon the articulating role of this ideology, on the ways in which it pulled together and connected, around the image of the mugger, a series of linked ideologies concerning, inter alia, the rebelliousness of post-war youth, the ‘lawlessness’ of trade unions, race, immigration and Empire. In short, the concern that is focused in Policing the Crisis is not that of the relationship of ideology to ‘reality’ but that of the relationship between ideologies. The effectivity that is attributed to the discourse of law and order is understood not in terms of its codification of a reality presumed to be external to it but in terms of the position it has occupied in relation to associated discourses which, conjointly with it, are held to constitute a dimension of reality itself—fully physical and material—and not a secondary, ontologically debased reflection or transformation of a ‘more real’ reality.

It is perhaps necessary to add that this break is not made quite so clear or so cleanly as it might be. In part, this is a result of the often somewhat unsatisfactory coupling that the study seeks to effect between a wide range of extraordinarily diverse bodies of theory. Policing the Crisis is, indeed, extremely confusing in this respect and, at times, has the appearance of a huge melting-pot into which virtually every available tradition of analysis has been poured with insufficient attention being paid to the problems involved in thus combining them. This constant elision of theoretical difficulties results in the often superficial and misleading grafting of one tradition of analysis on to another in what can only be regarded as an overhasty quest for synthesis. It is thus noticeable that, although the stress that is placed on the articulating role of the ideology of law and order is ultimately derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau, the route through which this perspective is reached is supplied by previous studies of the role played by the media, construed as definers of social reality, in the orchestration of moral panics. It is in the disparity between these two perspectives and the languages appropriate to them that the central tensions of the book are located.

THE IDEOLOGY OF TELEVISION NEWS

The fourth and most important filter [Richard Hoggart has argued, speaking of the processes by which the news is constructed]—since it partly contains the others—is the cultural air we breathe, the whole ideological atmosphere of our society, which tells us that some things can be said and that other had best not be said. It is that whole and almost unconscious pressure towards implicitly affirming the status quo, towards confirming ‘the ordinary man’ in his existing attitudes, that atmosphere which comes from the morning radio news-and-chat programmes as much as from the whole pattern of reader-visual background-and-words which is the context of television news. (Glasgow University Media Group, p. X)

The level of analysis which Hoggart introduces here is concerned with the much less visible ideological pressures which, inherited by reflex from the dominant political culture and embodied in the codes and conventions of the working practices of professional journalists, give to the news—the journalistic form in which the ‘facts’ are said to be represented free from bias or comment—its distinctive ideological skew. This level is, in many senses, the most important aspect of the reality-defining practices of the media if only because its ideological underpinnings are the least visible. We expect the editorial columns of our daily newspapers to relay certain party lines and may thus interpret what they have to say with due caution, whilst most readers display a certain degree of scepticism in relation to media sensationalism. ‘The news’, by contrast, presents itself and is widely taken to be an impartial record of the key events of the day. It presents itself as ‘truth’, as raw, unprocessed reality; as the world narrating itself. Although canons of impartiality are embedded in the news format of the daily press as well as in the news bulletins of the broadcasting media, the ideological role played by the latter is probably of the greater importance—both because of the sheer scale of their impact and because their claims to neutrality are more clearly articulated, and more widely credited, than are those of newspapers. The audience for the major news bulletins of all three channels is significantly larger than the readership of any national newspaper—ITN's ‘News at Ten’ had an estimated nightly audience of between 12 and 15 millions in 1977—and, as the Annan Report confirms (para. 17.2), the amount of time devoted to news programmes has increased dramatically in recent years. The BBC's news coverage, for example, more than doubled between 1962 and 1977. Perhaps more important, as the Annan Committee again reported, an increasing percentage of the public has come to rely on television as its primary source of news and, according to surveys conducted by Professor Himmelweit, both the BBC and ITN news bulletins are widely regarded as being more trustworthy and impartial than newspapers. Finally, of course, impartiality is an official requirement placed on the broadcasting companies by the charters which govern them. Television news may therefore be taken as an extreme and limiting case: if it is possible to demonstrate the operation of ideological categories here—the acknowledged pinnacle of impartiality in the media world—similar claims made by journalists working in other media will thereby be called into question.

This is not to suggest that the broadcasting media have ever claimed to be impartial in any truly philosophical sense. As Reith said of the BBC's operations in the midst of the General Strike: ‘since the BBC was a national institution, and since the government in this crisis was acting for the people, apart from any emergency powers or clauses in our licence, the BBC was for the government in the crisis too…’ (cited in Hood, 1972, p. 415). Both the BBC and the ITV companies have the right—which was fully endorsed by the Annan Committee— to waive the constraint of impartiality in their coverage of those events and issues which are considered (by whom?) to challenge the constitution, the national interest or public order. Northern Ireland is a case in point where the media have been, so to speak, officially biased—albeit not altogether openly so in the respect that such official bias has, by now, been naturalized through systematic exclusion of any alternative perspective.

However, whilst it is possible to itemize cases of overt bias and explicit censorship, it is arguable that the ideological effectivity of the news is greatest in those areas where the operation of the particular signifying conventions which constitute the news and seem to secure its impartiality—the use of actuality footage or of live interviews, framed by the apparently impersonal and neutral narrative of the presenter, for example—conceal the operation of another, ideologically loaded set of signifying conventions. Bad News, the Glasgow University Media Group's study of the television news coverage of industrial disputes in 1975 affords a good illustration of this. For although not partial in the sense of favouring a Conservative versus a Labour Party position in relation to these issues, this study convincingly argues that the way in which such stories were actually handled—the criteria of newsworthiness that were used, the place that they occupied within the structure of the news bulletin as a whole and so on —produced a markedly anti-union inflection.

The authors suggest, for example, that, compared with the Department of Employment statistics relating to industrial stoppages in 1975, the news bulletins by no means offered a balanced or accurate picture of the history of industrial stoppages during that year. They focused disproportionately on the key mass-production industries, particularly the car industry, which occupied a key position in the drive for exports, and on those industries—notably transport and communications—where industrial disputes created a maximum of inconvenience for the general public. The result, it is alleged, was that industrial disputes were signified within a ‘unions versus the national interest/general public’ semiology of the public world, suggesting that strikers were holding the nation to ransom or hindering the decent, orderly, non-striking citizen from going about his/her daily business. This effect was reinforced by the typical placement of industrial dispute stories within the structure of the news programme. The close proximity between economic and industrial items, which is particularly clear on BBC 1, suggests that items about particular industrial situations are likely to be juxtaposed with items (usually shorter) on the general state of the economy, with a resultant strong implication of a causal connection’ (Bad News, p. 118). Clearly, the implication of such a causal relationship was to favour certain explanations of the economic difficulties of the period—those that attributed the chief blame to the unionized working class—over others—those, for example, that have attributed Britain's long-term economic difficulties to the declining international competitiveness of the economy stemming from the obsolescence of its capital stock and a persistently low rate of investment.

The Glasgow Media Group also argue that the ways in which management and union representatives were interviewed, and the ways in which such interviews were inter-cut and articulated in relation to one another within the structure of the pertinent news items—although formally impartial in the sense that they recognized that there were two sides to such disputes—tended to favour the management interpretation of such disputes. Whereas management representatives tended to be interviewed in their offices, surrounded by all the trappings of authority, reason and responsibility, union representatives were more likely to be interviewed by out-door broadcasting units against the setting of a mass meeting, or pickets at a factory gate—in other words, against a background of activity and disorder which stripped them of any semblance of power, authority or reason and, at times, of the elementary requirement of audibility. (It is worth nothing that current TUC guidelines concerning their use of the media advise union representatives to refuse to be interviewed in such circumstances.) A further effect of structuring interviews in this way, the Glasgow Media Group suggest, was that of constructing an opposition between ‘facts’ and ‘events’ homologous to that between management and unions. Whereas management representatives were usually looked to to provide the ‘facts’ against which to view the dispute, the labour side was looked to for ‘events’—for filmable happenings—with the result that, in visual terms, the source of discord was most typically seen to be the workers—in pickets, mass meetings, rallies—a discord which was projected against an orderly backcloth of ‘facts’ as established by management. Finally, the structure and content of interviews with union leaders was said to be almost a priori prejudicial to the union interpretation of disputes in the respect that such union spokesmen were usually asked to provide an explanation or justification for their union's action. In being thus provided with an opportunity to exculpate themselves, the inevitable implication was that—in striking—unions were axiomatically engaged in a culpable act.

Bad News and its successor, More Bad News (1980) are both useful and important studies, particularly in the degree of close attention they pay to the routine practices of television news. Yet there are limitations to both, particularly so far as the alternatives they envisage are concerned. The concern of Bad News, it is stated in the introduction to More Bad News, was to show how Viewers were given a misleading portrayal of industrial disputes in the UK when measured against the independent reality of events’ (p. xiii). This is to imply that the standards against which news coverage is being assessed and found wanting are those of a truthful representation of reality ‘as it really is’, reflecting a politics of the sign based on the notion of truth versus falsehood. Indeed, as Ian Connell has argued, it often seems that the demands of this alternative would be met if the statutory requirements of balance, impartiality and neutrality were scrupulously met (Connell, 1980). Connell's objection to this is not merely that this is impossible, resurrecting, as it does, the dream of forms of representation that are neutral and through which reality might be revealed as if without mediation. He also argues that to castigate the broadcasting media for their failure to be impartial in some absolute, philosophical sense misses the more essential point that they achieve their ideological effectivity precisely through their observation of the statutory requirements of balance and impartiality. (The statutory requirement, it should be noted, is merely that the media should exhibit ‘due impartiality’, taking account of ‘not just the whole range of views on an issue, but also of the weights of opinion which holds these views’—a formula which clearly justifies the media according a privileged weight to the views of those political parties which can claim popular support as evidenced by the returns of the ballot-box.)

The basis for this argument is to be found in work earlier undertaken by Ian Connell, together with Stuart Hall and Lidia Curti, on the subject of current affairs television. Hall, Connell and Curti argue that it is television's very commitment to impartiality and the fact that, within a limited sphere—notably, the political terrain constituted by the parties which define the arena of legitimate, parliamentary politics—it genuinely is impartial that secures its most significant, and least noticed, ideological effectivity. For the effect of the broadcasting agencies operating in a genuinely impartial way within such limited terms of reference (limited because of what they exclude: the perspectives of all political groups—the communist Left, ‘terrorists’—which fall outside the framework of consensus politics) is that they contribute to the reproduction of the unity of the parliamentary political system as a whole:

‘Panorama’, above all other Current Affairs programmes, routinely takes the part of the guardian of unity in this second sense. It reproduces, on the terrain of ideology, the political identification between Parliamentary system and the Nation. As a consequence, the agenda of problems and ‘prescriptions’ which such a programme handles is limited to those which have registered with, or are offered up by, the established Parliamentary parties. It is these authoritative prescriptions, alone, which are probed to discover which appears most appropriate to the task of maintaining the system. (Hall, Connell and Curti, 1977, p. 91)

It is in this way, by actually fulfilling their statutory requirements, that the media may be said to collude with the major established parties in limiting the very way in which problems are defined and the horizons within which solutions may be sought, but in a way that seems not to violate the liberaldemocratic requirement that equal space be given to contending points of view. It is a ‘double-dupe’ system, an ideological form which effects a contraction of the sphere of public debate whilst simultaneously engendering the illusion that that sphere is entirely free and open. The response that this requires, as Connell quite rightly argues, is not that the media should be required to become ‘genuinely impartial’ but rather ‘the formation and implementation of quite different editorial criteria’ (p. 32). It requires a politics in which sign is opposed to sign, and not truth to falsehood.

CONCLUSION

My primary purpose in this essay has been to summarize and illustrate some of the central areas of debate within the tradition of media theory concerned with the reality-defining role of the media. Yet I have also sought, although in a much lower key, to call into question the way in which the signifying role of the media is conceived and represented within this tradition. For, although confirming the activity and effectivity of the media as a critical area of signification, the notion that the media are somehow ontologically secondary in relation to a more primary, more basic ‘real’ is kept alive within the very terminology ‘definers of social reality’. To raise this objection is not merely a semantic quibble. The validity of positing a duality between the plane of signification and that of ‘reality’ has long since been called into question in linguistics and literary and film criticism. To suggest that media studies should be brought into line with these is not a question of theoretical fashion, of being up-to-date for the sake of it. It is rather a question of politics, a question of how to conceive the politics of the sign and how to enter the domain of signification as an arena of political struggle. For the formulation ‘media as definers of social reality’ admits of only one politics: one in which the power of allegedly distorting systems of signification is opposed by the truth, by a system of signification which effaces itself in allowing the real to speak through it without hindrance or modification. The objection to this is not merely that it is impossible. It also misconceives the political task which is not to oppose truth to falsehood, but to take up a position in relation to dominant systems of signification—a matter that can only be broached if the focus of analysis shifts away from the investigation of the relationship between sign and ‘reality’ to that of the relationship between signs, the play of signification upon signification within a structured field of ideological relationships.

REFERENCES

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