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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 shaped by my train- ing as a media scholar and by my experience as a middle-class, white, able-bodied, coupled, child- less, gay, American man with a split relationship to the romanticized ideology of the autonomous, het- erosexual, nuclear family; I grew up in the kind of stable, middle-class family the series normalize, yet as a gay man I simultaneously felt (because I legally was) excluded from it. Someone with a different social identity and historical experience might offer a differ- ent interpretation of the series.

Ideological criticism, however, is not just per- sonal reflection, but an argument aimed at convincing a reader that your interpretation provides a meaning- ful perspective on how a text reflects or shapes its

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socio-political context. Thus, the object of study isn’t a media text per se, but rather a text’s relationship to a wider ideological dynamic. The evidence you mar- shal to support your argument should reflect that. Careful textual analysis is necessary, but so too is evi- dence linking the text’s ideologies to a wider context. In my article, I provide such evidence through my choice of sources. I link Supernanny and Nanny 911 to each other and to other primary sources like an Applebee’s commercial, the gay marriage debate, and Bush’s family policies, and I use secondary sources to provide broader evidence of our historical construc- tions of the nuclear family and their relationship to economic forces. Since ideological criticism typically challenges assumptions your reader may believe to be common sense (including assumptions about the triviality of popular culture), building a persuasive argument can be challenging. Unconvinced readers may dismiss your argument as “reading too much into the text” or “making a mountain out of a mole hill.” If you were not convinced by my argument, it is worth pondering whether different evidence could persuade you.

Now to a crucial question: in what ways can a text operate ideologically? Below I describe a few of the heuristics you might use to think about media texts through the lens of ideological criticism.

A text can reproduce a myth. In ideological criti- cism, a myth is a powerful story through which a historically specific and socially constructed idea or practice is made to feel like an eternal or quasi- spiritual truth.12 According to Terry Eagleton, myth exists as a particular “register of ideology, which elevates certain meanings to numinous status.”13 Wrapped in the guise of myth, an idea or practice can seem to exist in a realm beyond the social or politi- cal life and immune to rational analysis. A myth can reduce the messy, antagonistic dynamics of social struggle and the vast diversity of human experience to a simple, powerful storyline. In these ways, a myth can legitimate an exploitative social system.

The American Dream—the optimistic narra- tive where hard work results in the happy ending of middle-class prosperity—is a powerful myth that serves the interests of American nationalism and capitalism. It edits out the brutal vagaries of market forces and the experiences of millions of people who work hard yet never get ahead. We often talk about believing in the American Dream and to question it can feel like blasphemy. As the Horatio Alger nov- els, the Cosby Show, and countless Hollywood movies suggest, myths and media have a mutually beneficial

relationship. Myths like the American Dream serve as valuable material for media producers looking for sto- ries that will resonate with audiences, and media texts can deepen viewers’ “faith” in a myth.

Although I don’t use the term, in arguing that Supernanny and Nanny 911 tap into a “romanticized ideology” of the autonomous nuclear family, I am analyzing the operation of a powerful myth that casts the heterosexual nuclear family as the natural, eter- nal foundation of society. A key goal of my argument is to counter that myth, to reveal that this concep- tion of the nuclear family is not natural or universal, but rather historically and culturally specific, and to argue that the myth serves the interests of a neolib- eral political agenda. The extent to which you resist my argument, look askance at my evidence, and think to yourself, “Yes, but the nuclear family is the natural way for people to have and raise kids,” might indicate the power of that myth.

A text can try to manage systemic tensions. As mentioned earlier, social systems are inevitably riddled with conflicts. In their effort to sustain a system of domination, ideologies try to manage or contain them. They may, for example, translate socio- economic antagonisms into personal dilemmas, dis- place political anxieties onto scapegoats, or offer imaginary resolutions to unresolvable tensions. The goal of the ideological media critic is to explain how a text that presents itself as simply about one thing, might actually be about something else.

Supernanny and Nanny 911 worked to contain the class conflicts and anxieties circulating in a climate where social support systems were being rolled back in the name of smaller government. In dealing with these families in crisis, the shows never address the fact that the neoliberal makeover of America shifts economic resources to upper-class families (through reduced tax obligations) and away from working-class families (through reduced government subsidized ser- vices). Instead, the problems these families face are unruly children. In this way, the programs translate wider socio-economic conflict into the personal plight of each family. They displace working- and middle- class fears about eroding public schools and cuts to Head Start programs onto ineffective parenting. They also provide an imaginary resolution in the guise of the nannies who magically arrive just in time like Mary Poppins. By the end of each episode, as far as the show allows us to know, the nannies’ work is suc- cessful and the crisis ends. Left unacknowledged and unresolved, of course, are the economic challenges many families face. Through such displacements

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and happy endings, these shows might work to con- tain working- and middle-class resentment over and political mobilization in response to neoliberal policies. At the very least, they don’t explicitly draw attention to them.

The act of linking Supernanny and Nanny 911 to neoliberal class conflicts exemplifies the way ideo- logical media criticism involves a creative act of interpretation (or re-articulation, to use Hall’s term)— an analytical move that demands some ability to think beyond the world of the text. That doesn’t mean it involves making things up. After all, I don’t make up the fact that the shows are about rehabilitating dys- functional families, that government policies helped construct a vision of the ideal family, or that neolib- eral advocates call for ending government programs that help economically struggling families. If the reader feels I am making things up, that suggests my evidence and argument are not up to the task of off- setting the power of neoliberal and heteronormative ideologies to hide their operations.

A text can establish narrow frames. Ideologies chan- nel the ways we think about reality down paths that serve dominant interests and limit our ability to imag- ine possibilities that would challenge those interests. One way they can do this is to establish the frames within which we understand an issue. Frames actively exclude alternative ways of thinking, but because they are often set before we encounter the topic, it can be hard to appreciate the ways they affect our thinking. Frames rationalize the paths taken and make the con- clusions reached seemed commonsensical.

Ideological media criticism exposes how texts operate in this manner. Frame analysis reveals the var- ious ways news reports can set the parameters for how readers think about a topic; by deciding which experts to quote as representatives of “both sides of a story,” journalists define the nature of a debate. If news reports didn’t quote climate change deniers, the debate would likely shift from whether man-made climate change is real to how society should respond to it. In fictional tel- evision series, many decisions about what can happen on a show are determined by the genre or the series’ founding premise; although it seems as if anything can happen on unscripted reality TV series, the producers dictate much of what takes place through the rules of the game or the establishing dynamic (not to mention later editing). On Big Brother, for example, there isn’t going to be a same-sex “showmance” if only one gay, lesbian, or bisexual houseguest is cast.

Supernanny and Nanny 911 establish very narrow frames with important ideological consequences.

The highly formulaic programs feel hermetically sealed within a problem-cause-solution logic in which out-of-control children caused by bad parent- ing call for parental re-training. When viewers are hooked by this logic, when they think, “Yes, those parents are horrible,” root for the nanny to whip them into shape, and feel satisfaction when the family gets its act together, Althusser would say they have been interpellated. Even skeptical viewers who doubt the family’s transformation might remain trapped within the series’ frames: they may doubt the success of the solution without rejecting the diagnosis of the problem or cause. The ideological critic, however, could propose a series with alternative frames—e.g., a reality series in which diverse teams of psycholo- gists, marriage counselors, and labor activists assess families’ problems. Noticing that one mother works long hours in stressful conditions to save for her children’s private school, the team may decide to organize a union to negotiate better pay and working conditions for the mother and a school-levy ballot initiative to raise money to improve the community’s public schools.

A text can shape ideologies. Media texts don’t cre- ate ideologies, as much as they tap into and channel them. In the process, media texts can shape ideolo- gies, pushing them in certain directions, helping them evolve over time. They can also bring conflicting ideologies together, creating contradictions. This hap- pens, in part, because media production is a process driven by multiple forces and media texts are com- plex constructions built from polysemous codes and conventions. Thus, for the ideological media critic, a text doesn’t reflect an ideology as much as it serves as a site where ideologies get negotiated. Understanding how media industries and texts operate (through the methods and concepts you will encounter in this volume) is an important element for the craft of ideo- logical media criticism.

Supernanny and Nanny 911 don’t simply reflect neoliberal ideology as much as they adapt it to the conditions of a prime-time network reality series. While neoliberal arguments for rolling back govern- ment programs idealize the autonomous nuclear family, the programs present images of intensely dys- functional families. Sensationalistic footage of kids swearing at their mother serves producers’ strategic needs to create drama and stand out in the crowded prime-time arena, but it also generates a contradic- tion between a neoliberal agenda that claims families don’t need help and these families that clearly do. The makeover narrative and the “magical” British nannies

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can only attempt to resolve this tension in favor of neoliberalism.

When I wrote the essay at the end of the series’ first seasons, every family featured on both shows conformed to a strikingly narrow household form— married, heterosexual parents with children. As the series progressed, however, a wider range of families was featured, including blended families and families with gay parents, separated parents, parents and chil- dren with disabilities, adopted children, and extended family members as caregivers. Although the tradi- tional able-bodied, two-parent, heterosexual family remained dominant, one could argue that the series didn’t reinforce heteronormative ideologies in exactly the same way they did at the start. Given the com- plex dynamics of series production, various factors could explain the shift. For instance, to stay on air for multiple seasons, producers may have felt the need to make tweaks to keep the program fresh. A production studies research project would be needed to test this hypothesis.

At this point, you might return to Figure 1.1 to consider how different media products relate to the ideological assumptions noted there. How, for exam- ple, do cop shows like Law & Order relate to the idea that police protect the public? How might video games like Farmville or Diner Dash shape how we think about the payoff of work? How might a film like The Avengers intersect with ideas about diversity?

A text and reality can verify each other. Ideologies don’t simply distort our understanding of the world we live in but also help to create that world. In other words, we think in ways that align with the society we construct and construct a society that aligns with the ways we think. Thus, ideologies become true—in a certain sense of the word at least. They remain false, however, when they blind us to the fact that we could construct society differently. One way to be in false consciousness, then, is to forget that things don’t have to be the way they are.

For example, it is a commonsense assertion today that children are better off being raised by two parents. Given the way we have organized society, that could be true. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s inherently true. If we organized society differently— encouraged living in multi-generational households, promoted less rigid gender norms, created universal access to quality daycare, offered extensive parental leave, strengthened public school systems—children could be as well or maybe better off with one par- ent. Neoliberal and heteronormative ideologies about the sanctity of the autonomous, heterosexual, nuclear

family keep many of us from imagining and thus build- ing such a reality.

Ideological media messages about the American family like those in Supernanny and Nanny 911 make sense—seem perfectly logical—because we live in a world where families are increasingly told to solve their problems on their own. And we live in a world where families are increasingly left to their own devices, in part, because such shows (along with many others) circulate messages that idealize the sanctity of the autonomous, heterosexual, nuclear family. Challenging the ideologies circulated by media texts, then, can be difficult because it often requires challenging reality itself (and facing the possibility of social exclusion and threats of violence that can result from doing so). It is also difficult because it requires being able to imagine alternatives—something a mutually self-verifying ide- ology and reality work to thwart. Yet the fact that many people do raise children in alternative households reminds us that people escape, resist, or negotiate dominant ideologies, and the legalization of same- sex marriage in the U.S. ten years after these series debuted demonstrates that people can change reality.

Conclusion

At its best, ideological media criticism involves par- ticipating in an ongoing conversation about how we understand the world we live in and how we can make it better. It is an important but difficult enter- prise. As a critic of contemporary media culture, both you and your audience are embedded in the very real- ity and ideological processes under scrutiny. Ideally, the craft of ideological media criticism is a practice of self-reflection about your experience in those processes—of acknowledging your social position within multiple systems of domination, of using that position as a springboard for seeing reality differently while also identifying your ideological blind spots, of developing the kind of imagination your social posi- tion might otherwise thwart.

Such self-reflection requires help—not only help from the kind of theory and tools introduced here, but also help from people positioned differently in society than you. We share our ideological interpretations of media texts (or their production and consumption) with someone to help her think about those texts and practices, the social reality they support, and her own assumptions about the world from a dif- ferent perspective. We need to be open to learning from other people’s interpretations as well. In doing ideological media criticism, John Thompson points

Ideology 21

out, “we are re-interpreting a pre-interpreted domain and thus engaging in a process which can, by its very nature, give rise to a conflict of interpretations.”14 Such conflict requires us to justify our interpretations with evidence and be humble enough to take others’ interpretations seriously, to ask how their perspec- tives might help us discover our own ideological blind spots and imagine a better world. No interpretation or political prescription for a just society is ever the final word, but always an opening for more conversation, debate, or struggle.

Returning to Figure 1.1, for example, I must note that determining the extent to which a specific ideo- logical assumption is contested isn’t a science; it is an interpretation and thus involves the critic’s subjective experience. Has the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman, for example, become defunct or not? What role has a series like House Hunters, which includes same-sex couples looking for their “forever home” alongside straight couples, played in that ideological change? Is that change a good thing? Ideological media criticism can’t offer defini- tive answers to these questions, but it can promote productive conversations.

Unfortunately, some conventions of ideologi- cal media criticism work at cross purposes with this ideal. The traditional formats of the single-authored essay and book are stubbornly monologic. Without the give-and-take of a conversation, the critic’s effort to justify an interpretation can acquire the aggres- sive conviction of a scientific proof. My own essay, I fear, suffers from this weakness. While “conversa- tion” can occur across academic publications and at conferences and even more so in the classroom, that shouldn’t keep us from developing our craft so we write in ways that open up rather than close down debate. Stuart Hall addressed a similar issue regard- ing the craft of critical theory:

I don’t want to prescribe, but I want to draw your attention to the problem of courtesy. . . . Because there is a kind of competitive way in which intel- lectuals live with their tensions in which they can only do so by climbing on the backs of those peo- ple whose positions they’re trying to contest. . . . We have a lot to learn about the manners of a genuinely dialogically critical engagement.15

Conversations rarely take place on equal footing, and the most disempowered don’t always have the luxury for a certain generosity of manners. So like Hall, I am hesitant to prescribe, but as you hone your

skills as an ideological media critic, I urge you to consider the opportunity you have to engage with others—especially those whose experiences of social life differ from yours.

I also want to identify some limits of ideological analysis. If a goal of our analyses is to help us under- stand how social systems reproduce themselves in order to intervene in the organization of social life, the concept of ideology and the analysis of media texts will get us only so far. People help reproduce the status quo for many reasons beyond the ideolo- gies through which they understand reality. Apathy, habit, the threat of violence, “the dull compulsion of economic relations,”16 and the dazzling sensations of embodied pleasures are only a few. Ideological analysis, for example, may help us understand the romanticized ideology of the family as a myth, but it doesn’t actually explain that myth’s persistent emo- tional appeal. And if we ever want proof that knowing better doesn’t always lead to people doing better, we need only look at the way most U.S. citizens, even those who believe that human activities are causing climate change, continue to engage in practices that threaten humanity’s long-term existence. Ideological analysis may be necessary, but it is also insufficient.

I want to conclude by identifying some future directions for ideological media criticism. The ever-changing dynamics of media industries have important consequences for the craft. Media critics were first drawn to the concept of ideology in the 1970s at a time when most media production was highly centralized, industrialized, nationally oriented, and driven by a mass-marketing mindset. Such con- ditions helped justify ideological analyses of mass media. Recent developments (e.g., digitization, nar- row- and microcasting, mobile media technologies, global media flows) have transformed how media texts are produced, distributed, and consumed. Such changes certainly don’t make the concept of ideology irrelevant, but they do require us to adapt to these new contexts. Given the relative fragmen- tation of cultural production and consumption, for example, critics should reassess the strengths and limitations of analyses like my case study that focus on only a few media texts. To better under- stand and perhaps intervene in the media’s role in the reproduction of social systems, we may now benefit more by using the concept of ideology to drive ethnography, production, and policy stud- ies. The growth in video games and social media makes it increasingly difficult for ideological criti- cism to sidestep questions of affect and embodied

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sensations; we need to better understand how the ways we think are entangled with the ways we feel. And the widespread use of irony in a culture that some people allege is post-feminist, post-racial, or post-national (i.e., somehow beyond those systems of domination) requires critics to engage with theories of humor as well as contemporary political theories. I urge the reader to consider how the insights and methods raised in the other chapters in this volume can help advance the craft of ideological criticism.

Notes

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978).

2. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).

3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962).

5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966).

6. Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–136.

7. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.

8. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

9. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

10. Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985), 91–114; Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Discourses in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25–46.

11. Ron Becker, “‘Help Is on the Way!’ Supernanny, Nanny 911, and the Neoliberal Politics of the Family,” in The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation, ed.

Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 175–91.

12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

13. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Longman, 1994), 189.

14. John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 22–23.

15. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 291.

16. Nicholas Garnham, “Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995), 66.