Cultural Studies and Schools: A Perspective

As we gradually move into the core of communication theories the whole discourse, we have observed, has been so far analyzed in terms of pluralist cultural dimensions both in macro [the social] and micro [the individual] aspects of life. In an almost inextricable relationship human cultural stance and its communicability are conjugally simulated about the emancipation of social and individual self toward rediscovering the society and the social. So the modernist discourse of development of ‘social’ had tried to elevate all the social indices like, national employment, national standard of living, minimize overall cost of living index, reducing poverty and unemployment in the national sector, uplift national integration and unity, and national socialism. Extensive surveys had been tried out to explore such indices toward formation of a social culture that would cater every individual. Structural semiology can define this progress as a determinate development of sign from its first order [denotivity] meaning to further meaning orders that would definitely replace the earlier meanings of that sign. If a photograph of a road in a context of a shiny horizon reflects the meaning of ‘journey to the life’ in its second order signification that would definitely mediate its audience the known traditional ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ and while identifying an ordered meaning the audience would then be rewarded doubtlessly for complying with the established social or cultural order.

But the notion of cultural studies came from the idea that such ‘signs’ and ‘sign-self’ must be liberated from its contextual determinacy and from the traditional ‘social’  that on the other hand dominates the context with a false consciousness of culture or social culture. If the capitalist class exploits the working class then may be they exploit female workers more than its male counterpart thus abusing the traditional separation of male and female empowerment or exploitation syndrome. Cultural studies thus release every sign from its traditional bondage but leave no sign unrecognized or undefined. So cultural studies not only develop communication context but giving a suitable identity justify it as an open-ended discourse. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner defines cultural studies as, ‘that project of approaching culture and society from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective...’ that rejects any binary oppositional means or parameters of communication or understanding between culture and the corresponding society. Cultural studies therefore moves into the core of a utopia like, slogan, or empowered statement, a caption, a myth [story-telling], an ordered connotation of signification [Barthes’ 1st or 2nd order of...], a traditional or social or cultural self and override them. Thus cultural studies while having rediscovered the independence of a text, at most recognize and promote the individual social praxis and justify so, the social order, instead of following it as a utopia. One of the most powerful proponents of cultural studies Raymond Williams has once stated that: the human energy of long revolution springs from the conviction that men can direct their own lives by breaking through the pressures and restrictions of older forms of society, and by discovering new common institutions [economy, polity]. However new but might be not common, institutions are being created somewhere replacing the older institutions, like feminism, dalit awareness, black awareness etc. Ioan Davis writes in this context, ‘the idea that revolution would be long depended on a sense that there were roots of a common culture that had to be nurtured to grow. It did not take into account the possibility that counter-revolutions happen overnight, and that when they happen they hack away at those roots.’

Thus the quintessence of cultural studies transcends categorically the utopian essence of commonality of culture and establishs on the other hand the multi-textual plurality and extension of ideological struggle. This extension of new left studies is as penetrative to analyzing the core of the growing complexities of life toward so called industrial development as it moves into the underlying facets of cultural identities of human being than the fancied sense of commonality.

Early Days:

However cultural studies theories had their common birthplace in Marxian studies womb though originated in different geo-social contexts, specially British cultural studies, French cultural studies and Frankfurt (German) cultural studies. Theorists had studied extensively the Marxian thought notionally having a natural transcendence, as they called, releasing it from the ‘reductionism, and economism of the base-superstructure metaphor’ [Hall, 1989]. Thus in the Marxian light of struggle for human identity, a new academic movement diaspora started based on education, literature, new theatre, race relations and science [Davis, 1996] in Britain following other schools specially Frankfurt and French cultural studies. They perpetrated a rope-balancing network between popular culture and popular style of writing and the theoretical ones. Quite naturally this movement fed quite effectively and essentially the intellectual middle class academia to make a very close to the reality of identity-struggle of human beings. But though stemmed from the core of Marxian theoretical outlook, almost all the roots cultural studies were suffered from a serious aristocratic national cultural syndrome. In between 1930s and early 1960s there were lots of new left journals emerged as very critical to the national culture and of course Communist ideologies, all of them were filled and fed by the intellectuals migrated from other European countries like Germany etc. to Great Britain. They mostly did a judgement about British culture in the light of Frankfurt critical theories, French poststructural theories, Italian Post-Gramscian Marxist theories.

In its first editorial, New Left Review, the pioneer journal of British cultural studies, wrote about not only the mere objective but the theoretical destination of cultural studies also: The labour movement is not in its insurrectionary phase: we are in our missionary phase. The Left Clubs and New Left Centres — the new left in general — must pioneer a way forward by working for socialism as the old missionaries worked:  as if consumed by fire that is capable of lighting the darker places in our society. We have to go out into the towns and cities, universities, and technical colleges, youth, clubs and Trade Union branches, and... make socialists there [New Left Review, 1960 1 (Jan-Feb): 2].

But in soon this movement was naturally dried up until the establishment of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham by Richard Hoggert along with Stuart Hall reassessed the essence of cultural studies in not only British society but for the world context. The whole new left outlook gradually was shifted to a notion where ‘culture’ is again possible and the theorists were duely appropriated by the British dominant culture and Knighthood. Thus movement in its very early stage became secondary to the state-empathy. Davis innately wrote that the ultimate problem was that cultural studies would move from being part of a social movement to being an appendix of academe, so institutionalized that it became simply a continuation of the classics and humanities traditions which had for long acted as the basis of a critique against the disciplinariness of the universities and government of traditionally older countries, just as classics had roots in the Church, Temples, Mosques and, as Davis mentioned, in the imperial civil service.

The later Narratives:

However later with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary cultural studies the stream had to change its track from all kinds of patriarchy [the British Society] in the societies, academic disciplines and conventional wisdom (Davis, 1996) of media, empowered political and state apparatus etc. Later narratives of cultural studies defined culture and cultural praxis independent of the social structure and dominant social narratives. In this course theorists made Gramsci’s notion of counter-hegemony as point of action. They concentrated mostly on three notional themes:

Aesthetics: as they talk much about judgement and distinction of ‘text’;

Representation: as they speak of power and the reading of hegemony;

Popular culture: as speaking of politics of the everyday [Davis, 1996].

With the above streams and principal cultural studies theorists like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, E.P. Thompson, and Perry Anderson, tried out the cultural studies on such a destructured base, in terms of socialization where the ‘feminist’ critique evolved independent of all sorts of male-dominated [structurally empowered] social requisites thus became known as the champion dissidents to the elites of the British culture. At this point cultural studies were very close to be affiliated by the works of French poststructuralists but initiated an alternative stream of praxis toward a plausible consequence and reaction. On the other hand at this same juncture they sharply but constructively criticized the Frankfurt cultural studies, i.e. critical theories also while alongside transcending classical Marxist economistic argument. However Stuart Hall while justifying cultural studies established this point of contention with Marxism: “the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem — not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary and prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory...The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency”.

Narrative three: The Genealogy

Not only with the classical Marxism [Communism] on the one hand, cultural studies stood also against the American media effect studies, like, dependency to the media, uses & gratifications, as these were very much quantitative in category, content oriented and largely authoritarian in nature. So in all terms, both Frankfurt and British cultural studies though were committed grossly to the core Marxist perspective but made a sufficient extension of it combating the farthest extension of social power and all empowered narratives toward restoring individuality of concepts and narratives of life.

However the genealogy of cultural studies can be identified in the works of two different schools of philosophical thought, Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, popularly known as Frankfurt cultural studies in the 1930-40s; and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, under University of Birmingham in the 1960-70s. Both schools of thought essentially emphasized the critical studies, as opposed to the traditional developmental ones, while releasing perspectives [texts] of human lives from its dominant traditional one dimensional base, as it was determinated in Marxian studies by two binary opposed elements like ‘capitalist’ and ‘working class’.

According to the Marxian analytical overview, working class people sell their labour and of course surplus labour to the capitalist and become exploited to the core. Then they will revolutionize their future and would share a better life among the class members overriding private or uneven appropriation of wealth and property. This seminal political philosophy had doubtlessly shaped the political and social lives of Europe and other parts of the world in nineteenth and twentieth century though critical theorists of Frankfurt school and British cultural studies sharply criticized such formulation of social progress and proposed a number of pluralist models.

Frankfurt Critical Narratives

Resting on Marx’s core idea of mass production, revolution and emancipation of working class, critical theorists extended their analyses in another sense-making toward mass production of cultural goods [such as, media forms and contents] that changed the course of modern lives fundamentally and became far more divergent in twentieth century. The development of industrial capitalism in twentieth century challenged traditional patterns of life and assured deeper penetration into cultural life through newer forms of entertainment, leisure and communication techniques. Max Horkheimer and Theodre Adorno, two of the foremost proponents of critical theories, termed, while in their exile in America, this phenomenon ‘the culture industry’ which according to them as exploitative in nature as Marx’s conviction toward perpetration of exploitation in mass capitalist production. At that time they closely observed the concentration of ownership in Hollywood production centre and the mass cultural productions, American Press and Broadcasting (Lorimer, 1997). They successfully identified how media were dominating to its audience when moreover fed by revenues from advertising sources having thus least responsibility to the audience and the society. ‘Whether the products were popular songs, or broadcast soap operas, they were all the same: they were mass produced according to standard formulae and were vehicles for the promotion of capitalism’ (Lorimer, 1997). Mass audience could not resist the glossy appeal of the Hollywood movie, the stardom, the easy exploitation of emotions in melodramas or gangster movies (Horkheimer, 1972). They also had a strong opinion of implausibility of any mass resistance to such mass mediated culture. Rowland Lorimer argued, ‘most generally the Frankfurt school theorists saw these developments, along with the growth of monopoly capitalism (transnational corporations distributing their products all over the world) and of the strong, centralized, modern state, as tending to increase the domination of social institutions over individual lives. The culture industry in their view, destroyed individuality, created uniformity, and conformity, and made resistance well-nigh impossible’.

During the inter-war period Frankfurt school developed this transdisciplinary research specially to cultural and communication studies along with Marxian political economy, textual research and ideological rediscoveries. So by the term ‘culture industry’ they signified the industrialization of mass-production of cultural elements and commercial imperatives [Kellner, 1989] that provided ideological legitimation of capitalist societies and homogenization of individual cultural imperatives and praxis. But in this course of theoretical derivation Frankfurt theorists, chiefly Adorno, Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, most importantly studied the commercial integration of working class into capitalist consumerist societies, sundering them from Marxist revolutionary struggle. Thus capitalist societies through technological revolution and industrialization found new strategic way-out for political and social change.

Douglas Kellner explained beautifully the genealogy the Frankfurt theoretical stance.  Victims of European Fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that Nazi used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to Fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American “popular culture” was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by the giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold values, life-styles, and institutions of “American way of life”.

However the critical theories were countered by Walter Benjamin, one of the associates of the Frankfurt school, who, in his book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1969), found rather rediscovered the progressive or positivist aspects of new technologies and mass cultural productions. He established that new growth mass media replaced older forms culture and by mass reproduction through filming, recording, photography, an “aura” of the work of art of an earlier era of originality. While working with Bertolt Brecht on production of films, radio dramas, Benjamin argued that progressive cultural movements had have the power to reassure the ‘apparatus’[media, communication] of cultural production for intended political purpose. So they believed in progressive use of film, drama etc. that could also be used for social change.

Horkheimer and Adorno on the other hand answered Benjamin’s notion in their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1948, 1972) that the system of mass cultural production [film, radio, newspapers, magazines] was ruthlessly dominated by the advertising corporations and commercial imperatives [Kellner]. This domination created a system of high consumerism creating a monolithic identity of the traditionally most divergent and dynamic working class.

Another most celebrated theorist Jurgen Habermas historicized Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry and mass production of cultural perspectives taking 18th and 19th centuries into consideration. He pointed out in his seminal work “The structural transformation of the public sphere” that the rise of bourgeois society in last two centuries as a public sphere between civil society and the state power and its transformation in the late 20th century from liberal identity to a media dominated public sphere what he has called “welfare state capitalism and mass democracy”. He basically established the domination of largest industrial corporations over the mediation and the public sphere thus justified Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of culture industry.

Theorist Douglas Kellner elaborated that ‘the culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry thus produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviours of the existing society’.

Ideology: Signification from structure to poststructural

when ideology defines a struggle...

The signification of a message is commonly argued to have polysemic explanations thus, along with, duly establish the variety of human recipient or decoder in a geo-social format. Such heterogeneity can be classified through political, economic, and obviously other various cultural identity specifications. A decoder can thus be identified in accordance with his / her class identity, mundane individual identity and also group identity [like ethnic, religious...]. The natural heterogeneity can only be defined or identified by an eternal signifier what we may call ideology. Ideology is thus a much reductionist signifier representing a vast thought-structure that encompasses any temporal aspect of human life. Noted theorist Raymond Williams (1977) defined ideology in the following three categories:

(a) System of belief of a class or group;

(b) False consciousness or ideation of the ruling class which is opposed to the scientific and pragmatic knowledge;

(c) A process which produces ideas and meaning;

Psychologists’ views tell us about ideology as a useful tool to produce transparent attitude; they feel that society determines the existence of ideology than individuality. Classical Marxian theorists on the other hand think that ‘ideology’ of the oppressed class determines a political dimension of social relationship and thus produces constructive relationship being always affiliated to any mass identity. Later in many countries including third world nations, Marxian theorists have started even recognizing the ‘ideology of individuality’ to combat the commercial outburst of ‘individualism’ along with the traditional class-driven mass political ideology. Legendary Marxian theorist EMS Namboodiripad has beautifully explained the transformation of mass ideological format taking Chinese case of transforming the classical expression of ideology “Dictatorship of Proletariat”: “…China does not call its own system a Dictatorship of Proletariat, but a People’s Democratic Dictatorship…What does this change in terminology mean? It means, first, that the dictatorial element is preserved. Secondly, it is not the Dictatorship of Proletariat but the dictatorship of the entire people against a small stratum of the former ruling class”. It is however an evident truth that class inequalities and surplus extraction of divided labour therefore are the prime sources of ideology in a society altogether.

Raymond Williams however argues that dominant class squeezing the process and means of production creates a false ‘mythic’ consciousness in the name of ideology in the working class psyche. Using this illusive structure extensively they influence people and the mass consciousness. In this course they try to get a strong hold of mass media owning these organizations to transform common mass a mere tool of corporate propaganda.

EMS Namboodiripad here has been pragmatic to the core to explain the referent of ideology in socialism and socialist systemic ideology: the socio-political set-up established in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe was called the “Dictatorship of Proletariat”. Experience with the working of that system has shown that though major achievements have been registered under it, the dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe had serious deficiencies. Marxists-Leninists throughout the world have now come to the conclusion that there is no going back to the system that existed in Soviet Union…”

Ideology and signification: 

It is already evident that in a specified social territory the appropriate signification of communication depends upon the social responsibility of cultural stance which ensures the meaning of the message. Such specification of culture determines the ideological stance of the communicator. If a dress-code signifies a specific meaning it can then also disseminate ideology of the communicator. However the concept of ideology is a staunch Marxist analytical phenomenon which has tended to have developed in socialist revolutionary movements and also in the pluralist discourse of the transformation of cultural elements. It is now important to note Fredric Jameson’s argument. ‘All class consciousness — or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes — is in its very nature utopian’.

However ideology, as commonly observed, is the procurement of a system (semantic system) of ideas by a set of people on similar contextual planes which not only prepares the base of a social structure but also sustains plausible expression by which people can interact with each other and also with the institutions. Naturally contradiction and conflict are always the necessary outcomes of ideological existence of human being as it embeds both instinctive and professional courses of struggle within a social structure where people earn the necessary footage to work with or to live in. Thus in a capitalist socio-economic format, exploitation often causes severe contradiction between different ideological codes of general people and social institutions. Ideological practice has the natural heterogeneity in various micro-social formats, like marriage, service providing institutions, charitable institutions, shopping malls, religious groups, business organizations, professional sporting institutions, and even rock bands coexistent along with the political ideology. It is being graduated to be more complicated in the contemporary information processing age also. All the facets of the social structure have common fascination to produce dominant or elitist forms of culture separately, fabricators of which often called ‘elite’ and ‘opinion leader’, as we can observe information elite, elite rock band, elite or dominant religious groups and elite members of the civil society.

American Marxists like Fredric Jameson and others from Frankfurt school have tried to place ideology in a utopian environment where ideology is basically a false consciousness and often structured by the ideas of the dominant class. In this way they have discarded any possibility of ‘ideology of masses’ or the concept of political ideology. Noted Marxist Louis Althusser has defined ideology as it “... is a system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group...ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence... we commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many world outlooks. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. believe in god, duty, justice, etc....), we admit... that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not correspond to reality. However, while admitting that they... constitute an illusion, we admit that they do not make allusion to reality, and that they need to be interpreted to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of the world (ideology = illusion / allusion)” (Althusser, 1994). 

Althusser however though has recognized the referent of beliefs as used to refer ideology the definition doesn’t still substantiate the concept of ideology as a structure which has got a structural relationship with all existing social parameters. Thus he also has discarded the “dialectical” relationships among different ideologies in a geo-social format. In reality the ideology and only the ideology controls and regulates the politics of the signification process. Thus political ideology may not proceed with the religious ideology and different religious ideologies have open, ‘not imaginary’, confrontation with each other.

Marx had shown the binary conflict that working class people have their own ideology which is opposed to the capitalist class. So the ideology substantially determines a way of life of a person, which may or may not express its alignment with other people’s lives. Thus opposed to the concept of illusion, ideology can be substantiated by its social and material outcomes, which on the other hand assure or define cultural dimensions of every living even non-living object. So we live in heterogeneous codifications of ideologies. But neo-Marxist theories didn’t correspond to any revolutionary change of existing society or social conditions and also denounced class identities of common mass to release ideology from any structural or revolutionary composition. Noted Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has dealt with the ideology as synonymous to the struggle. He however recognized unification of working class people and organized struggle for ideology to organize a revolution. Another Sociologist E. Veron defined, “...if ideologies are structures ... then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ but are sets of rules which determine an organization  and the functioning of images and concepts... Ideology is a system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded messages ... in this way, ideology becomes autonomous in relation to the consciousness or intention of its agents:  these may be conscious of their points of view about social forms not of the semantic conditions (rules and categories or codification) which make possible these points of view... then an ideology may be defined as a system of semantic rules to generate messages... it is one of the many levels of organization of messages, from the viewpoint of their semantic properties...”

As noted cultural theorist Stuart Hall has explained that in a society, contradiction between significations is an inevitable outcome complying with the natural course of ideologies in social matrices. Thus ideologies can produce structures and also an inherent dynamism on the other hand, which overrule any level of domination from any of the stagnant, age-old ideological practices and remain unaffected. Extending definitions of ideology he has made a successful critique on Marx and Louis Althusser. According to Marx, ideology works because it appears to ground itself in the mere surface appearance of things... it represents social relations as outside of history: unchangeable, inevitable and natural. Thus Stuart Hall argues, despite scientific discoveries involved in the total development European modernity in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Marx defined the whole development as ideological discourse as it recognized and reoriented social relationships and capitalist economic order as inevitable. Hall established that all kinds of social parameters of development set and derive various dimensions of regulatory consciousness [not all to be regarded as dominant] which produce the sources of ideologies. On the other side, Hall, while analyzing Althusser’s view, which “... tended to present the process as too uni-accentual, too functionally adapted to the reproduction of the dominant ideology”, has made a very useful critique, “... Indeed, it was difficult, from the base-line of this theory, to discern how anything but the dominant ideology could ever be reproduced in discourse”. Hall continues arguing, “...since signification was a practice and practice was defined as any process of transformation of a determinate raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means of production, it also followed that signification involved a determinate form of labour, a specific work...”. Thus according to Hall, meaning is not therefore determined by the structure of reality but by the process of signification being appropriately done through social practice. This is also to be noted that the meaning, then, may not be as obvious as the given structure of reality but the signification can produce another dimension of meaning also. Hall also has made a useful recognition of social struggle which always influences the signification. Thus in this way of analysis Stuart Hall has recognized the inevitability of ideological struggle as a necessity to organize a movement. He nicely argues that if a trade union has lost its ideological struggle then the dominant capitalist interest may get an easy success to curb down the movement by imposing legal and political or administrative means.

Signification, Plurality & Politics:

It is already discussed that signification leads to a cultural outcome of contemporary social practices which naturally ensures cultural heterogeneity of a geo-social periphery. So there is a natural tendency to have one cultural prophecy may emerge as dominating other cultural forms in a pluralist format. But this process, at least, in contemporary social practices can hardly leave the idea of ‘ruling class’ or ‘oppressed class’ as to be easily identified. Naturally the question of the future of organized ideological struggle is gradually getting harder to answer. This jolt, however, even problematizes the Marx’s seminal concept that “...the ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, i.e., the ruling class also rules intellectual properties. Even in the contemporary developing societies such traditional identification marks of ruling class steadily get fragmenting and the situation becomes trickier than to be identified in the above manner. EMS’s analysis on Chinese dictatorship as dictatorship of the entire people against small stratum of the ‘former ruling class’ depicts such a fragmentation of traditional identification process.

Specially in developing countries the need for industrialization accentuates some emerging cultural trends which are gradually homogenizing the mode of social practices and ideological stance by almost identical syntagmatic arrangements of signs in commercial outlets. There is no doubt about that the underlying politics of signification of these syntagms is to dominate the lookers mystifying the notion of subordinating them as consumers. Though some will definitely feel oppressed and there are still millions of people left out of this aspect of development, it is yet difficult to virtually identify people who are to be considered as oppressed. It is doubtless that people of low income group [as measured by the administration] can always be identified as oppressed; and, the slogan of ‘education for all’ is not yet achieved, but the civil society believes that people are to be paid according to the degree of some people’s education. It is then very hard to distinguish the ruling class and oppressed class in such all round plurality. Only no alternative condition exists in these developing countries probably in ‘Bustee’[slums] areas where people are really barred from getting minimum civic amenities, but this signification is also no longer valid because both public institutions and NGOs nowadays claim to have initiated several measures of developing these areas and its people. Moreover the overall awareness toward Parliamentary Democracy has transformed the cultural aspirations of poor people and even destitute to reject the validity of domination from a single-dimensional authority. As Stuart Hall argues, “that notion of domination which meant the direct imposition of one framework, by overt force or ideological compulsion, on a subordinate class, was not sophisticated enough to match the real complexities of the case”, the situation of developing countries tells us exactly this truth. If it goes now to be difficult to identify ruling class, how can we determine the signification of “hegemony”? But the unequivocal truth is that people are nowadays found severely oppressed by the rules or regulations of number of establishments which cannot be structured under a single nationalist umbrella. Actually the notion of industrialization in developing nations has been justified by two modes of signification:

The first one is that even to be oppressed a person needs first to get at least a job to survive. The second one is that while inviting foreign investment you will have to accept the farthest extent of full fledged corporate-cultural domination which is the prime responsible for fragmenting traditional social bonds and cultural continuity into many sub-cultural structures in the society. Both fiscal and monetary deficits in the developing countries [analyzed in Indian context] have reached to a point of absurdity that they even are not in a position to prepare its infrastructure for foreign investment and for which they invite foreign institutions to build up infrastructure. But they have chosen the easiest way to open up the economy and market and reformed economic structure favourable to that, without doing anything for internal economic and administrative reforms for earning revenues on its own axis. It is needles to say that this signification also has been countered by several other significations. Probably the most valid signification is that despite being able to understand the corporate-cultural domination the developing countries must organize rapid industrial development for its own survival. Moreover the growing social movements against such stream of development have not given any political or ideological alternative which the common mass can really depend upon. So who is there to represent the ruling class and is supposed to oppress the common people? It is absolutely difficult to identify.

Signification and the process of mediation:

At this juncture plurality in the developing societies are accentuated mainly by the development and concentration of media and other signifying institutions. On the other hand media reveal its most distinguishable feature of producing consensus in the society among the prevalent pluralist outcomes of socio-cultural activities. Such consensus is doubtless to be existing beyond any mass political ideology. So media whereas trying to be producing consensus, cannot be held direct responsible to hold the power and be hegemonic to its audience or the society. So far the wide spectra of the process of mediation occurring in mass communication, which sets ideological plurality in a social format, media often flow its contents beyond the ‘sovereign will of the people’ and have become powerful to claim to have people’s opinion. On the other hand Daniel Chandler argues interestingly about the mediation process of other social institutions, “our social institutions also involve processes of mediation, which ‘organize, select and focus the environment through various transformational structures.’ They tend to channel human behaviour into predictable routines...”. It is thus to be clarified analytically that all kinds social and media institutions in a society try to mediate messages comprising of their cultural codes to perpetuate its sustainability. Chandler’s critique looks very important here in this context, “we can be so familiar with the medium that we are ‘anaesthetized’ to the mediation it involves: we ‘don’t know what we’re missing’. Insofar as we are numbed to the processes involved we cannot be said to be exercising ‘choices’ in its use. In this way the means we use may modify our ends...”. specially in developing societies the concept of plurality through the process of mediation has equivocality in a cultural domain of two sides. One is the process of formulation and other is the process of decoding. Social and media institutions often formulate plurality in terms of its narrow corporate objectives with a notion to feed the mainstream views of all the sects but often found less accommodative recognizing alternative or sub-structures of a society. While in formulation of plurality, these institutions are not very keen to explore and accept all sources of ideologies which may proceed against the plurality what they try to formulate to earn best out of every bargain. On the other hand people with its individuality or different forms of smaller sub-cultural identity, accept plurality to participate in a mediated or given consensus to avoid any risk or institutional pressure while decoding the message. So they have to be quite compromising decoding a message what media disseminate to ensure consensus in its favour. Here the concept of deviant attitude cannot be sustained though plurality with all its heterogeneous properties apparently looks very kind enough to recognize or absorb any deviant attitude. So a severe institutional pressure has finally resulted to become both necessary and sufficient trends of plurality or the neo-liberal pluralism.