A central concern in critical Marxist accounts of mass culture has been the explication of the shape and operation of dominant ideologies in advanced capitalist society. Those working in this tradition have been especially concerned with the political significance of the mass media in the managing and shaping of consciousness. As a component of the culture industry, the mass media have become a focal point in the production and administration of cultural forms. The "culture industry" appropriated the production and distribution of culture using techniques of industrial production to transmit prepackaged bits and pieces of culture to increasingly passive spectators. This historical reversal from the active (communal) production of culture to a more passive (privatized) reception, along with the class control of the broadcast media by corporate capital, have made the mass media a major instrument of ideological domination. The "cornerstone of the critical Marxist theory of mass culture is its estimate of the relationship between the underlying economic and political structures of contemporary capitalism and the significance of the ideological and cultural spheres."1 Recently, critical Marxists have combined the methods of critical theory, structuralism, semiotics, and hermeneutics to decode the meanings embedded in the objects, relationships, and processes of daily life, including contemporary mass culture.2 Recent studies such as Dorfman and Mattelart's analyses of cultural imperialism in Disney comic books, the Glasgow Media Group's attempt to decode the coding of television news, Roland Barthes' semiotics of fashion, and Erving Goffman's reading of "gender advertisements" further the understanding of cultural hegemony. A growing literature maps contemporary hegemonic forms of culture and the precise ways in which tacit conventions underlying daily life shape and are shaped by these hegemonic conventions. Hegemony, writes Raymond Williams:
is... not only the articulate upper level of 'ideology' nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as 'manipulation' or 'indoctrination.' It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values - constitutive and constituting - which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.3
Williams' account stresses the dialectical quality of the concept of hegemony. On the one hand, it describes what may be termed a deep cultural grammar "a lived system of meanings and values" that structures a prevailing sense of reality, which appears then as a natural and immutable order. On the other hand, it points to a mode of class domination and a blockage of the human capacity for community and nonalienated cultural practices. Thus the study of hegemony leads in two directions: (1) towards the study of the particulars that make up a sociohistorical organization of a deep cultural grammar, the "constitutive and constituting" social logic of daily life, and (2) towards the demystification of cultural and ideological domination. These two moments in the study of hegemony are roughly equivalent to the moments of the hermeneutic task as described by Paul Ricoeur: the recollection or restoration of meaning and demystification or critique as the exercise of suspicion. Those who find the concept of hegemony useful in assessing the relationship between the packaging of cultural messages by the television industry and in the exercise of ideological control now face the task of unraveling the various dialectical moments of hegemony. The present essay approaches this task by analyzing the television series Mork & Mindy (M & M). Why use M & M as the text-analog for this task? First, because it provides an excellent text for illustrating the possibility of linking the study of hegemony to the study of the construction and reproduction of meanings through the acquisition of language and interpretive procedures of a language community. Second, the series appears to manifest characteristics of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural forms. The presence of such contradictory tendencies within the same mass culture product makes this series a vehicle for revealing the actual place of television in "register [ing] larger ideological structures and changes."4 In this article I consider how television contributes to the ongoing process of constructing a universe of ideological discourse. This is a study of how a popular television series accounts for social contradictions and manages social critique within certain ideological and institutional limits.