Television and Everyday Life

Ideology
Theories of the television audience which originate from, and are located within,
a Marxian or post- or sub-Marxian theory of ideology also tend to cast it as an
epiphenomenon of forces active elsewhere. Theories of ideology—however
else they differ—must accept as basic the capacity of a society to create and
sustain a dominating and self-interested form of culture, generating
representations and images, ideas and values, that disguise the realities of social
existence (Hall, 1977). They must also accept, though with qualification, that
the disguise is effective, in terms of both the support of the dominating groups
of society and its acceptance, equally unchallenged, by those who receive it.
Within such theories audiences are—
a priori
—dependent. Through ideology’s
capacity for legitimation, dissimulation, unification, fragmentation and
reification (Thompson, 1990, 60), audiences are incorporated, and must be so
incorporated, into an essentially ‘false’ culture.
The mass media, John Thompson argues, have not really satisfactorily been
incorporated into these theories, though one might argue with his emphasis,
since from the work of the Frankfurt School onwards, and including that of
Gramsci, Barthes, Althusser and Habermas—let alone the theorists of the
Birmingham School, the media have explicitly been seen as a central plank of
what Althusser called ‘the ideological state apparatuses’ and what the Frankfurt
School calls ‘the cultural industries’.
Thompson’s critique is based however on this acknowledgement of absence:
that the media have never been seen as central to the workings of ideology.
But it is also based on an acknowledgement that even those theories that do
address the role of the media—he principally focuses on the early work of
Jürgen Habermas—also fail to do justice to the complexity of mass

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On the audience
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communication in modern societies (Thompson, 1990, 121). This lack of justice
relates both to the absence of any recognition of the mass media as formative
of modern societies and, crucially for my own argument here, to the fact that
that they also fail to recognise the limits of ideology’s capacity to dominate
and to incorporate individuals into the social order:
It is all too easily assumed that, because individuals have been treated as
passive consumers of images and ideas, they have 
become
passive
consumers… This assumption…commits the fallacy of internalism: it
unjustifiably infers, on the basis of the production and characteristics of a