write a two-page summary (double-spaced) of the key ideas that you’ve learned this semester in the class and include a synthesis of some of the readings attached below. no title page needed  Key Ideas to talk about: Ideology, D

1. IDEOLOGY Ron Becker

Ideology refers to a way of thinking about the world that emerges from and reinforces a specific social order. The concept—a cornerstone of critical approaches to media—assumes that societies are structured by economic, cultural, and political sys- tems that separate people according to their position in those systems (e.g., by economic class, racial iden- tity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, able-bodiedness). Such systems also work to privilege certain groups at the expense of others, distributing power, resources, and status unevenly to individuals according to their positions in those groups. From this perspective, societies are struc- tured by systemic inequities and antagonistic social relations. Yet most societies, especially modern, capi- talist societies, remain relatively stable. Disadvantaged groups do challenge the status quo, but they rarely revolt in ways that overturn the systems that work against them. Why not? The concept of ideology helps explain the relative stability of societies structured by such systems of domination and provides options for thinking about the possibilities of social change.

To examine ideology, then, is to examine how the ideas, assumptions, and logics through which we make sense of reality and live in the world help jus- tify and reproduce systems like capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, or white supremacy. A dominant ideology—a web of beliefs that underpins a specific system of domination at a specific moment— works to make certain social arrangements, practices, and behaviors that promote the interests of some people over and against others’ seem neutral or uni- versal. A dominant ideology can make unequal social relations that are culturally constructed and histori- cally specific seem natural and inevitable. It can make highly politicized ways of seeing and living in the

world seem commonsensical and arguments against the established social order seem illogical or impracti- cal. When most successful, then, a dominant ideology makes the way a society operates appear inescapa- ble, even when it isn’t and makes it difficult to imagine how else our society could be organized.

The concept of ideology fuels many scholars’ interest in studying media and plays an important role in a diverse range of research agendas, including many of those you will encounter in this volume. Its most obvious impact has been to provide justification and strategies for analyzing the vast array of media texts produced by the culture industries. Critical attention to popular culture’s texts, including those widely denigrated as artless or ephemeral, is war- ranted when they are reframed as artifacts through which one can glimpse a society’s ideologies. When those texts, backed by the distribution and marketing power of media institutions, are consumed by mil- lions of people, they might not merely reflect, but also shape, reinforce, or challenge ideologies. Ideological criticism is often equated with close textual analyses that link texts’ ideas to wider systems of domination; my case study connecting family-makeover reality TV shows to the logics of neoliberalism and heter- onormativity is an example of this mode.

Ideology is not only relevant to the study of media texts, however. The people and practices involved in creating, consuming, and regulating media are also deeply influenced by ideologies, making ideological analysis relevant to many other modes of criticism such as production/industry studies, ethnography, and policy. Finally, ideological analysis has implications for every mode of media criticism. Since the concept focuses our attention on the relationship between the ways we understand reality and the dynamics of social

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power, it can always be turned back onto our own work as critics, leading us to ask how our own motiva- tions, methods, and analyses are shaped by ideologies and entangled with the dynamics of unevenly distrib- uted social power.

Intellectual History of the Concept

To offer a relatively straightforward definition of ideology as I do above is a necessary starting point but also misleading, since the concept is among the most contested in the field. The evolution of the concept has not followed a straight line or even a circuitous path. It is better to think of its history as a vast river delta with multiple converging and diverg- ing streams of development. The result is a concept that has evolved within different intellectual tradi- tions and acquired many different shades of meaning. Debates over its proper definition have been so intense because the concept serves as an entry point for understanding things that matter enormously. It lies at the nexus of fundamental philosophical, socio- logical, and moral questions involving the nature of reality and humans’ understanding of it; the origins of a person’s consciousness; the nature of social power; the possibilities for social change in complex socie- ties; and competing visions of a just society. These issues rarely have objective answers, yet the stakes involved in them are extremely high. It isn’t surpris- ing that scholars have struggled over the concept for more than 200 years.

Rather than sketch out a chronological account, I have organized this section around three points of divergence. I map out how different defini- tions of ideology have intersected with questions of determination (what factors shape a society), epistemology (what is the nature of people’s understanding of reality), and textuality (how do ideologies operate within media texts). I am less interested in adjudicating among the diverse uses of the concept than in identifying what insights the dif- ferent theories and the tensions among them offer. I also hope to avoid a reductive progress narrative that implies older, misguided definitions were super- seded by more accurate or sophisticated ones. Some debates have led to valuable reformulations, yet there are many points of divergence that remain. They per- sist less because of a failing of one theory or another and more because the issues involved are, in the end, unresolvable. Below, I provide an overview of the ter- rain by mapping two streams of thought that diverge around each topic.

A major point of divergence arises from compet- ing opinions about the role ideology plays in shaping a society. One perspective gives causal priority to economic forces and sees ideology as supplemen- tary. From this perspective, a society’s economic system—the historically specific conditions within which people pursue their most basic material needs like food, clothing, and shelter—is its defining feature; it serves as the base for everything else that happens in society and sets the conditions of human thought and existence. This historical materialist perspec- tive emerged out of efforts in the nineteenth century to understand how societies were transformed by a new kind of economy: commodity capitalism (i.e., a system where most people meet their material needs by buying products with money they earn by selling their labor to a smaller group of people who make their money by selling the fruits of the first group’s labor). Following Karl Marx, whose critique of capi- talism established the parameters within and against which most subsequent theories of ideology devel- oped, historical materialism argues that to understand modern capitalist societies we must first recognize that this economic system divides people into classes by the way they make money and creates inequal- ity by systematically channeling more resources to owners and less to workers. Secondly, we must trace how this economic system has a determining effect on other social institutions (e.g., systems of govern- ment, schools, family structures, religious institutions, the media).1 A historical materialist analysis then tries to reveal how such institutions and the ideology they circulate reflect the underlying economic base and help maintain it and the unequal class relationships it generates. Here, ideologies play a role in shaping society, but one that is secondary to the economy.

Such analyses have been questioned by scholars who argue that economic forces, while important, are not the only or sometimes even the most salient deter- mining factor. From such culturalist perspectives, a society is defined by the complex intersection of the economic with ideological systems like nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity as well as socio-cultural institutions like the fam- ily, religion, and the media. The internal dynamics of these systems and institutions also divide people into groups and channel resources to them unevenly. This tradition emerged out of the work of twentieth- century scholars like Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe who adapted Marx’s arguments to the conditions of increasingly complex and media-saturated Western capitalist societies.

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Whereas historical materialism tends to ana- lyze ideological systems as the epiphenomena of an underlying economic base (as growing out of or reinforcing rather than intersecting or conflicting with it), culturalism insists that ideological systems have their own logics and histories. It acknowledges that ideologies may (perhaps even usually) evolve over time to align with an economic system, but it also insists that such alignments are not guaranteed—that ideologies have their own internal mechanisms (e.g., the operations of language) and their own impacts on a society’s development. Thus, an economic system might evolve in response to ideological forces. From a culturalist perspective, ideologies are no less impor- tant than economic practices. In fact, some culturalist scholars insist that ideologies shouldn’t be understood as only ideas about reality but also as the material real- ity that emerges from those ideas (e.g., arguing that segregated drinking fountains and the use of them are as much a part of white supremacist ideology as ideas about racial difference).

At times, the gap between historical material- ist and culturalist perspectives seem merely to rest on subtle disagreements over which factor is more important; historical materialism, after all, acknowl- edges that ideological systems like patriarchy matter. Tensions persist, however, because of deeply held investments. Critics in the historical materialist tradi- tion give analytic priority to the economic system in which people struggle with and against each other to meet their needs for basic physical survival, because they believe it involves matters of life and death and therefore is the place where those who want to cre- ate a better society should focus their efforts. Critics in the culturalist tradition, in contrast, argue that humans don’t survive by bread alone but have other needs—the need to communicate, develop a sense of self, build community, create order in a chaotic world, find meaning in the fragility of human existence. For culturalist critics, ideologies are the systems through which people struggle with and against each other to meet these existential needs; as such, they involve matters of life and death and thus are places where those who want to create a better society should focus their efforts.

These two perspectives fuel diverging agendas in media criticism. Culturalist assumptions have legiti- mated the close analysis of media texts and focused attention on a broad range of ideologies, especially those related to race, gender, and sexuality. Given the degree of causal force they accord ideologies, cul- turalist scholars see critical engagement with media

representations as a politically valuable enterprise. Historical materialist assumptions, on the other hand, have fostered doubt about the political payoff of engaging with media texts. Scholars influenced by this perspective stress how the production and consump- tion of culture have been fully co-opted by market forces. As a result, they argue, media texts serve the economic system as commodities that channel money into the coffers of media corporations; seduc- tive appeasements that distract viewers from the exploitative nature of their working conditions; and delivery-vehicles for consumerist values that natu- ralize commodity capitalism. Given their notion of economic determination, the best way to challenge bourgeois ideology and inequality is to analyze media ownership structures and promote media production outside the market system.

A second major point of divergence in theories of ideology is rooted in a deep philosophical tension between, on the one hand, confidence that human reason can provide an objective understanding of reality and an ethical path for social progress and, on the other, a countervailing skepticism that insists that our knowledge of reality and our ethical priorities will never be complete or objective.

For the confident tradition, ideology is a way of thinking that serves the interests of a dominant social group by distorting or obscuring aspects of reality. The point of ideological critique, here, is to use reason to expose ideology’s distortions and reveal the true, exploitative nature of unequal social systems. Emerging out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project, this tradition is confident in the power of rationality.

Marxism, for example, argued that capitalist societies were defined by an underlying form of eco- nomic exploitation: the lower workers’ wages were, the higher factory owners’ profits would be. The exploitative and conflict-ridden essence of capitalism, however, could be difficult for both owners and work- ers to see, because bourgeois ideology worked to hide or distort it by framing capitalist practices in terms of ideals like freedom, individualism, and equality. Through this ideological lens, wage labor appeared to be a fair and neutral system: each “individual” worker entered the labor market on “equal” terms with the employer (i.e., he wasn’t a slave or a serf) and was “free” to negotiate the wage for which he was will- ing to trade his labor. Much of this account is not a lie exactly (ideologies rarely lie in any narrow sense of the term), but it does frame the dynamics of the labor market in specific ways and entirely ignores,

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and thus ends up hiding, core aspects of the reality of wage labor (e.g., workers’ and owners’ interests are in conflict; a worker’s “freedom” to reject a certain wage is limited by the fact that if no other job is available, she could die from starvation).

In this tradition, ideological criticism is a form of revelation. When those disadvantaged by the sys- tem understand reality and their own position in it through ideology (e.g., when the working class think of the wage labor system as acceptable or even desir- able), this tradition argues, they are living in false consciousness and don’t challenge that system. The critic’s goal is to enlighten them about reality’s underlying truth, with the hope of stirring them to take political action to create a better society. Here, the critic is part scientist (using methods of critical inquiry to access the true essence of things beneath surface- level appearances) and part prophet (leading the way to a new, moral future). In the context of media analy- sis, the critic is a passionate observer armed with penetrating insights, reading against the ideological grain of media texts, searching for hidden truths.

This confident tradition defines ideology nar- rowly and pejoratively as the “false” ideas that support a dominant class and oppressive system. In contrast, a second tradition defines ideology broadly and neutrally as an inevitable facet of human social existence. For the latter, ideology isn’t something to be overcome in order to see reality accurately, but rather the medium through which humans experi- ence reality and the means by which they define it. From this perspective, a Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology is not objective truth operating outside of ideology, but rather a competing ideology—one that reflects the experience and serves the interests of the working class. What the first tradition defines as ideology, here becomes dominant ideology and is juxtaposed against the subordinated ideologies of less powerful groups.

This broader concept of ideology emerged from various twentieth-century critiques of the Enlightenment. Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, which attempted to show how all knowl- edge is shaped by social conditions, undercut the Enlightenment principle of objectivity.2 Frankfurt School theorists, shaken by the rise of fascism and the atrocities of the Holocaust, came to see the grow- ing power of science and instrumental rationality as a threat to humanity, not the path to clear understanding and liberation.3 Psychoanalytic theories of the uncon- scious problematized the idea of the rational subject who could be brought out of false consciousness

in any straightforward sense.4 And perhaps most significantly, the linguistic theory of semiotics argued that the very language we use to think and communi- cate isn’t a neutral tool that corresponds to reality in any direct way but a biased system that defines how we understand and experience reality.5 If the confi- dent tradition rests on the belief that human reason can, with effort, come to know the objective truth of reality; the second tradition has been guided by a deep skepticism about that very assumption.

Such skepticism creates a conundrum for those critics who turn to the concept of ideology in order to challenge unjust systems. How does one do that if all knowledge of the world, including one’s own, is circumscribed by ideology—if there is no privi- leged place outside of the power dynamics of social existence from whence one can measure ideological distortion? For some, this erosion of epistemological certitude also erodes moral certitude; if our knowl- edge of the world is always socially contingent, is the same true of our definitions of justice? Critics in the skeptical tradition have responded to these thorny questions by redefining what counts as politi- cal engagement through ideological criticism. The point of ideological critique, here, is not to reveal the truth as a path to the just society, but to reveal the contingency of all knowledge (though especially of dominant ways of seeing the world) and to question the possible injustice of all ethical agendas (though especially dominant definitions of morality). Neither scientist nor prophet, the ideological media critic here serves as a freelance devil’s advocate anxious to point out the blind spots that inevitably exist in any worldview offered by a media text and in any vision of the just society.

The tension between the confident and skepti- cal traditions can run high. To advocates of the first, the latter can serve as the path to moral relativism and political nihilism and as such betray the goals of ideological analysis. To advocates of the second, the first can fail to understand that the self-evident truths a critic might use to expose dominant ideologies could very well be the source of inequity to others. This tension is both inevitable and useful. The confi- dent tradition reminds us that facts can be distorted by power, that justice matters, and that both are worth fighting for; the skeptical tradition reminds us that what we see as facts can be more complicated than we think and that our better future could be critiqued by someone else as an unjust system of domination. Even though scholars debate the existence of an objective ethical truth, in the end most agree that we

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can and must dissect how ideologies operate. While skeptical scholars may bristle at the notion of false consciousness and the implication that an unprob- lematic truth awaits to be revealed by the wise critic, in practice they acknowledge that cognitive distor- tions and logical fallacies can support inaccurate understandings of the world and that an ideology can be “false” when it recognizes only part of social reality or presents something as natural when it is not.

A third point of divergence in theories of ideol- ogy is evident in distinct approaches to the analysis of ideology in media texts. Some scholars focus on texts as delivery systems for dominant ideologies. Others focus on texts as sites where competing ideologies exist in tension and approach the consumption of texts as a process of negotiation between the viewer and a text’s ensemble of competing ideologies.

The first approach has been influenced by efforts to explain how societies remain relatively stable despite being structured by antagonism and inequalities. Nineteenth-century Marxist criticism, for example, had suggested revolution would be inevitable once the working class came to under- stand the exploitative nature of wage labor. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, capital- ism endured, leaving scholars to explain why. Their answers would often implicate the ideological power of media. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, experiencing the complacency of post- World War II U.S. consumer society, argued that the oppositional potential of the working class had been stifled by a newly ubiquitous culture industry.6 Rampant advertising-supported media instilled con- sumerist desires and destroyed people’s ability to imagine alternatives. Louis Althusser, responding to the failed French student revolts of the late 1960s, provided a structuralist theory informed by psychoa- nalysis that ascribed ideologies enormous power to determine our thoughts and desires. For Althusser, our consciousness is not simply fooled by ideology but is actually a product of it.7

At times, such work proposed a totalizing theory in which all social institutions are tightly coordinated, each playing a role in ensuring the reproduction of the wider system. Here, the highly centralized, corporate-owned, and advertiser-supported mass media industry is understood to be part of a wider socio-cultural-economic complex, delivering a nar- row range of news and entertainment that promotes ways of thinking that align with the interests of the most powerful classes (whether they be economic, racial, gendered, etc.). To use Althusser’s term, media

texts interpellate viewers—address and position us through specific frames and logics. When we buy into a sitcom’s narrative, root for a film’s hero, or agree with a news report’s framing of events, our thoughts and desires can fall in line with their ideologies and become part of the system reproducing the status quo. By identifying how dominant ideologies get encoded into media texts, the ideological critic can, by extension, understand how those ideologies are written into viewers’ subjectivities.

A second body of work defines media texts and viewers’ relationships to them in terms of contin- gency rather than certainty. Instead of functionalist visions of a rigid, static, unified social order, this sec- ond approach theorizes societies and by extension the media texts produced in them as complex amal- gams of independent parts (economic forces, social practices, ideological systems, human agents) that move in different directions and at different speeds. While some forces (e.g., commodity capitalism, patri- archy) may have great power to draw other elements into closer alignment with their priorities at cer- tain moments, complete fusion of the parts is never achieved; tensions and contradictions remain, and as a result, social change is always possible.

This approach grew from Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony—the theory that the position of a dominant class is not guaranteed, but is the result of a continual process of struggle and negotiation to win the consent of subordinate groups.8 It also grew from Raymond Williams’ historicist response to Althusser’s structuralism. Williams argued that a social order’s dominant ideology always exists alongside residual ideologies from past eras and emergent ideologies that could be the thin edge of a new social order.9 It was also influenced by Stuart Hall, who argues that ideologies should not be understood as rigid world- views to be escaped or replaced, but rather as the terrain where the ongoing process of social life and political struggle takes place, where different class factions fight to connect or articulate concepts in ways that serve their interests.10

In this approach, media texts are not analyzed as delivery mechanisms for dominant ideology but as sites of negotiation where various ideologies might co-exist. They are understood as the result of production processes that occur at the intersection of multiple forces. The economic and ideological imperatives of a capitalist industry shape the stories and information that get circulated, but so do an array of other factors (e.g., genre conventions, ideolo- gies of race in the minds of writers, ideals of creative

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freedom, technological constraints). The audiences that consume texts are also embedded in such com- plex dynamics; our identities are socially constructed by multiple ideologies, not simply determined by dominant ideology. As a result, our relationship to media texts is complicated; the goal of ideological textual criticism here is to analyze the ideologies in a text, not in order to know how audiences will be inter- pellated by it but to map the terrain in which a socially positioned viewer engages with it. What ideologies are present in the text? How does the text position or privilege them in relationship to each other?

Both the totalizing and contingent approach offer useful insights for media scholars. The first reminds us that revolutions rarely happen and that media texts can work to keep certain ideologies firmly in place. The second reminds us that meaningful social change can occur even if there isn’t a revolution and that media texts can be imbricated in those changes. The first draws our attention to the deep structures that might shape us in ways we aren’t aware of, guiding us down a path that we wrongly experience as the path we freely chose. It makes us think about how media texts we consume might sometimes determine how we think about the world. The second reminds us that even within such structures—or perhaps because of the complex intersection of multiple structures—we have a degree of agency; we may not be able to see all possible paths, but we can choose among those

we do see. It encourages us to think about how media texts can sometimes offer insights into the contra- dictory nature of the social system and of our own positions in it.

Together these approaches challenge us to think about ideologies as simultaneously rigid and flexible. Figure 1.1 lays out a sample of ideological assumptions drawn from contemporary U.S. society on a continuum from those that are most hegemonic (i.e., held by most Americans) to those that are highly contested, as well as ideologies that are so residual as to be essentially defunct. In Figure 1.2, I provide a rough diagram of an ideological formation or web of ideas linked or articulated across two dimensions to underscore that certain ideas often depend on lower-level assump- tions, and to point out that, even if certain assumptions change, others might remain firmly in place.

Despite the varied approaches that spring from these three points of divergence, there is an underly- ing core perspective all ideological criticism shares: social reality is the result, in large part, of human actions, and we should therefore strive to push it in the directions we think best. From that shared foun- dation, of course, arise intense debates over what path society should take, how difficult it is to change, and what the targets of our efforts should be. For many scholars, one useful target of ideological criti- cism is the production and consumption of a society’s media texts.

Figure 1.1 Chart of ideological assumptions

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Figure 1.2 Chart of an ideological formation

Method and Major Terminology

For media scholars, the concept of ideology serves as the basis for a way or (given the debates mapped above) ways of thinking about media and its relation- ship to society, rather than as the basis for a rigid set of methodological protocols. Scholars draw upon many of the methodological traditions covered in this volume, especially the analysis of discourse, narrative, visual style, representation, genre, inter- textuality, and ethnography. Nevertheless, there are specific approaches rooted in ideological criticism, and I highlight some of them below, using my case study as a point of reference.11 The rest of this chap- ter reveals my position in the different streams of thought I mapped above. My perspectives tilt toward culturalist, skeptical, and contingent approaches, and I urge you to identify how such biases shape the rest of this chapter.

To start, it is worth emphasizing that ideological media criticism is an act of interpretation. As such, the critic does not uncover the objective truth of a media text, but rather constructs an argument in an effort to get her audience to think about the relationship between a media text and its social reality. To do so, critics draw on two sources of expertise: our training in the kind of concepts and methods this chapter and volume provide, and our social experience as people

positioned by systems of domination. Like fish trying to understand what water is, it can be difficult to get a critical perspective on the ideologies that shape us and the media we study. Having said that, there is always some gap between our everyday experience of the world and the ideological messages we encounter. That gap is likely smaller for those who benefit from a system than those who are disadvantaged by it, but no ideology can perfectly match up to our experience of reality. I mention this to underscore that as ideo- logical critics, we are embedded in the very processes we interrogate, and our criticism is both hindered and enabled by our being so. My analysis of Supernanny and Nanny 911, for example, is shape