Student Made AS Media Revision PearlTree

NARRATIVE & STRUCTURALISM

Narrative & Narratology: stories & structuralisms on Prezi

NOTES ON S/Z BY BARTHES

Notes on Barthes SZ

What Counts as Documentary: Redux

One of the issues we need to confront in the current media ecology is the many forms of documentary (and its hybrid forms) that appear on the internet. Video and audio forms (originally from Cinema, TV, and Radio) now mingel freely with Photo-Documentary (originally a print form; photo-journalism) and written documentary forms (e.g. reportage). It is the hybridity of all these forms of documentary that is most interesting. Documentary has always hybridised with journalism (and with fiction to some extent - consider Hunter S Thompson's roman à clef 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' which is a form of documentary but one that has been strongly interpenetrated by the fictive) and online this cross-over is even stronger. The capability of the internet to blend audio, video, image and text recourses into one coherent montage has dragged documentary forms ever closer to one another and this is before we get to the really odd documentary forms present in the online world.

Adam Curtis (who I posted about here) maintains a wonderful blog at the BBC that must surely count as documentary in some fashion but which is clearly quite, quite different to the more established forms we are used to. Similarly Dr Michael Wesch has made some remarkable works about peoples' use of the internet that are worth looking at and which again must count as some form of documentary but quite which form is hard to say. In both cases it is the other concerns of the writers (documentarian and academic anthropologist respectively) that cause some of these issues of categorisation that these works present us with. Both of these documentaries are still recognisable as such however and it is the next set of online documentary forms that give us the greatest difficulties.

Let's start with Flickr. This massive repository of photographs is a 'metadocumentary' in that it is multiple sets of series of documentaries made by its participants, can be turned to documentary purposes by searching through it, and is it self a documentary of photographic practice and concerns. This makes the whole site a mixed and odd documentary form (almost) all of its own. The need to interact with the site in order to turn it into a documentary - of a personal & temporary kind - is the key characteristic of the form that Flickr is part of but exactly which form is an open question.

Which brings us to the last of our odd/new documentary forms: Google Maps & Street View. There are some specific implementations of googlemaps allowing access to information some of it of a documentary nature (especially Tate) but the important and interesting thing is streetview itself. This massive photographic record of the streets of the vast majority of the 'developed world' (an issue of post-colonialism in the digital world) is a documentary but of a most peculiar kind. As with Flickr it needs to be interacted with and interrogated by us the users in order to turn it into a documentary and as with the more obvious online documentary forms there is this mixture of image and (in this case) maps and the cartographic. However, the sheer scale of streetview and its changing nature (the images are updated from time to time) renders our use of it for documentary purposes rather limited because the effort necessary to 'documentise' it is so huge. That said it is clearly a most remarkable documentary of the quotidian.

Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the World of Tomorrow

Benjamin was very interested in culture and what it could tell us. Culture here does not mean 'high culture' (art, literature, opera, etc) but the more mundane artefacts of the quotidian; posters, prints and printing, cinema, TV, and everything that one encounters in daily life. Indeed all of the ephemeral and evanescent stuff that we could absent-mindedly throw away or forget about whether it be material or conceptual (i.e. small-talk or other conversation). Indeed Benjamin's most important work - The Arcades Project - is specifically concerned with what all of this seemingly throw away stuff could tell us about the history of Paris in the 19th century and thus about the history of the 19th century more generally.

For our purposes - the study of the media and of society more generally - this concern with culture is very useful (Benjamin's concern with culture prefigures Stuart Hall and the CCCS and is therefore an essential point of contact). Benjamin was a member of the Frankfurt School and so was also concerned with the role and function of power and domination in society. This can be most clearly seen in his critical analysis of the Haussmannization of Paris in his Paris; Capital of the Nineteenth Century. This 'renovation' (we would call it 'urban regeneration' today) of Paris in the period of the Second Empire was seen by Benjamin to be a means of controlling the urban space (the great wide boulevards that Haussman's project introduced were far harder to barricade) and of policing its people by forcing the poor from the centre into the periphery.

Benjamin's most famous essay - on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - helps us to think about and understand a lot of the issues involved in the current media landscape. Benjamin's argument in this essay is simple; the ease with which 'art' can be reproduced and disseminated is democratic.

This needs some expansion;

The ease with which 'art' (which we can take to mean cultural artefacts of any kind)

can be reproduced, either mechanically (printing, photography, photocopier, cd/dvd burner) or digitally (computer, digital photography, scanner, etc),

and disseminated, again either mechanically (post, courier, etc), institutionally (library, etc) or digitally (TV, Internet, BitTorrent, etc),

is democratic (benefits the people and breaks down the structures of domination in society).

Benjamin welcomed the very problem faced by contemporary media corporations whereby they spend a great deal of money creating a media artefact that then costs nothing to digitally reproduced & disseminate (given the existence of, and access to by the participants, the astonishing communications infrastructure we call the internet).

The current political problems around the Digital Economy Bill [here, here & here] are exactly concerned with the problems that Benjamin identified. The efforts of the Big-IP combines (the big four, the big six, the other big six, etc) to turn state power to the effort to control their property and thus defend their profits against the democratizing effect of the reproducibility of culture.

Basic Media Concepts List

BASIC CONCEPTS LIST

This list of concept areas and associated ideas is a useful checklist for any work one could be doing in Media Studies. It is just an outline intended to be used to jog your memory rather than a fully fledged plan or approach to essay writing or exam practice. However, whenever you write about Media and/or Culture you should use it as a framework for thinking and planning.

MEDIATION

Media & Medium

Mediation

REPRESENTATION

Representational Nature of the media

Stereotype

Hegemony

Realism

Reality

Modality

Reality Effect [Barthes]

Hyperreality [Baudrillard]{Post-Modernism}

Discourse of realism

IDEOLOGY

Marx

Base/Superstructure Model

'opiate of the masses'

Althusser

Ideology as 'lived experience'

Ideological State Apparatus

Interpellation

Gramsci

Hegemony

Use of representations as a means of ideological control

the 'manufacture of consent'

SEMIOTICS

Sign/Signified (referent)/Signification

Arbitrary nature of the sign

Ambiguity of the sign

Polysemy

Denotation/Connotation

Denotation is the surface meaning of the sign

Connotation is the wider world of signification that we bring to the sign

Connotive Communities: Audience groups with shared connotive standards

Myth (Barthes)

the rhetorical or propaganda use of signs

Modes of Signs

Indexical

Symbolic

Iconic

Metaphor

Metaphor

Metonym

Irony

Synecdoche

Metaphoric Communities (see Connotive Communities).

INTERTEXTUALITY

Reference to and use of texts by texts

Genre, Narrative, Metaphor

intertextuality can provide a context for signs

Characters are intertextual, film stars are intertexual

Hypertext

Dimensions of intertextuality: Horizontal, vertical

Allusion

Barthes

From Work to Text

The Death of The Author

Narrative Codes

Post-Modernism

NARRATIVE

Elements of Narrative

Setting

Narration/Narrator

Plot

Characters

Focalization

Discourse

Structuralism

Structuralism

Propp

Levi-Strauss

Todorov

'Equilibrium' & ideology

Barthes

Narrative codes

Post-Structuralism

Barthes

The Death of the Author (again)

(Derrida etc)

GENRE

Codes & Conventions

what are the rules and regulations of belonging to a particular group of texts

INSTITUTIONS

Ownership and Control

'Propaganda Model'

AUDIENCE

Theory

Encoding/Decoding

Reception Theory

ambiguity and arbitrariness of signs leads to polysemy

Encoding/Decoding

What is the Audience?

Target Audience

Intended Audience

Accidental Audience

Total Audience

"Is that really true or is it just something theory dreamt up": The Death of The Author and Student Media Analysis

One of the key problems of teaching media studies is that to many students are naive and inflexible realists and intentionalists. That is to say that their first question of any media text is 'what did the author mean?'. This is understandable but irritating. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism tend to be some of the last things that students encounter because the more basic issues, concepts and theories have to be in place before they can start grappling with the denser theoretical issues.

The Death of The Author

One of the most important realisations necessary for media (& cultural) studies is that authors and their intentions are secondary concerns (or more likely utterly unimportant). There are several reasons for this but they are best (first) summed up by Roland Barthes (Foucault's analysis of the problem would be the next step).

For Barthes (and thus for us) the problem of the author emerges out of the great insights of Structuralism. Levi-Struass, Propp, Todorov, and Barthes himself (amongst many others) showed that there were deep underlying structures in human societies and cultures that were universal; they appeared every where there were humans. These universal structures were also present in narratives; plot elements, character types, discourses, etc, are distributed across and are to be found in all societies & cultures. It follows from this that 'authors' are everywhere only re-figuring and/or re-arranging pre-existing elements rather than creating 'new' things ex nihilo.

More importantly still it follows that the theoretical insights we apply - from semiotics, structuralism, etc, - are more important than authorial intention because they concern themselves with context and reception and 'authors' do not.

Staus Symbols of Media Culture

Our media culture, the world of media that we engage with and consume, is replete with status symbols that we can either use or have used against us.  The most obvious are costly media texts (Vogue, The FT, DVD Box Sets, etc) but the volume and form of consumption and the types of media read or consumed are also indicative of social status and the great game of status competition.
Status competition is a deadly serious game and one that is impossible to avoid.  You may not seek to participate in the game of status but that does not prevent others situating you in their games and treating you (poorly or well) accordingly.  In fact it is impossible to escape being classified by others and even the act of active rejection of classification on your part in effect classifies (into those who classify and those who do not (you)) and is therefore the ultimate act of status completion; 'I do not participate in status competition' is the claim of those who consider their status in the field in question to be so far beyond the others around them as to be axiomatic.
Media status competition is a question (following Bourdieu) not just of the volume of media consumed but of the composition of that media.  The volume of media consumption will position an individual in the great game of distinction but may not necessarily always afford a high position in the hierarchy of that game.  Indeed massive and conspicuous consumption of media can be stigmatised and stigmatising rather than distinguishing.  On the level of display this conspicuous consumption of media (through really substantial multi-channel TV subscriptions [especially through dedicated film & sport subscriptions], high bandwidth broadband contracts, expensive mobile phones on expensive monthly contract terms, possession of expensive new media equipment [especially the very wide screen TV], etc) is concerned with display of access to resources (economic capital) and not with social/cultural capital.  It can therefore be used to denigrate those who enact this media-potlatch by those with surplus socio-cultural capital.  This is to say that a strategy of distinction can be mobilised by those of high socio-cultural capital against those of equal (or greater) economic capital who have less socio-cultural capital.  The very display that equates to successful distinction in one field of status competition can be a failing strategy in another.  This is very easy to imagine simply by considering the cultural position of Premiership Football.  Football does not hold a position in the high reaches of the cultural life of England but TV access to it requires just the media-potlatch under discussion; dedicated multi-channel TV equipment (not Freeview) and special (and expensive) subscriptions.
It is this antagonism between groups with different amounts of cultural capital (even if the total volume of capital is equal the unequal composition will come into play) that leads to denigration of the media (and thus cultural) choices of those people located in the lower parts of the cultural hierarchy (of the "they live in council houses but can afford satellite television..." type).  As the lower reaches of the cultural capital hierarchy are, typically, also the lower reaches of the economic capital hierarchy this competition leads to the enactment of symbolic violence against that lower capital volume part of society.  The least powerful feel the double effect of the actual violence of low economic capital (the choice of the necessary) and the symbolic violence of low socio-cultural capital; they have less and are made to suffer shame and disgrace for that lack.
As our society utilises a 'capitalist' mode of resource allocation (i.e. rationing by power of resources) it only notices persons with a certain capital volume and is uninterested in the rest of society and so those who lack and are made to suffer for that lack are not represented by our media and so suffer the final annihilation of not existing in our media society.  The absence of the poor from our media landscape is a brutal expression of the brutality of our social formation.

DISCOURSE OF REALISM

Realism is a key issue of all textual studies (whether of literature, film, media, the past, etc.) as the more realistic a text is accepted as being the more engagement we make with it. Indeed highly realistic texts will be accepted as 'true' and in that acceptance is the power of realism as an interpellating device; i.e as a mechanism for drawing the audience to the text and getting them to adopt the ideology of the text as their own. The discourse of realism involves the different conditions that each text must meet for its audience to accept it as realistic.

TYPES OF REALISM

There are many different types of realism because each text will need a different approach to the realistic. Plots involving things that do not exist (ghosts, faster-than-light-travel, talking chickens/rats/donkeys) can still be realistic as can texts that deal in non-realistic depictions (cartoons especially) because they utilize approaches to the realistic other than an appeal to contemporary experience and photographic depiction.

1. Surface naturalism - presenting the world of the text as though it were the real world being represented (avoiding anachronisms and ensuring authenticity though appropriate locations, props, costumes, accents, etc).

2. Ecphrasis - Ecphrasis is the luxuriously detailed description of something that evokes the real through the sheer mass of descriptive effort involved. This approach to the establishment of the realistic was proposed by Barthes in his The Effect of Reality. For Barthes ecphrasis was the key to both the realistic novels of the 19th century and the bourgeois ideologies they embodied and to the disciplined realistic history that emerged alongside them.

3. Conformity to experience - if a text limits itself to the representation of that which is within the experience of its audience it will be more easily accepted as real.

4. Photography - since the invention of photography and its incredible offspring moving pictures with sound photo-realism has been the starting point for establishing the realistic.

5. Psychological or emotional realism - in this approach the audience are asked to view the characters in a text and their actions as plausible and potentially real because they seem to us to be in-line with our own emotions and psychology. This form of realism is fundamentally about the believability of character.

6. Narrative realism - form of realism in which the realistic is evoked by the telling of believable stories. If narratives are not plausible, regardless of how outlandish their content, then the text will not be accepted as realistic.

7. Content realism - this form of realism concerns the 'real' record of events and the depiction of 'real' things (such as a London street) and it is this form of realism that is most often used by news and documentary texts.

8. Genre conventions of realism - each genre has its own codes and conventions of realism and audiences will use a modality judgment (i.e. a judgment on the appropriateness of the form of realism used for the genre involved) to decide if any given text is acceptably realistic based on their prior experience of the genre and of other approaches to the realistic (e.g. non-diegetic music is typically not considered anti-realistic).

DISCOURSE OF REALISM

Discourse means both language about and/or of 'x' and communication embodying ideology and so the discourse of realism is not just the negotiation between text and audience about whether or not the text is acceptable as realistic (i.e. the result of the audience's modality judgment regarding the approaches to the realistic used in the text) but also concerns the ideological power considerations regarding realism to be found in the wider society and what interest the elite may have in the realistic. Whether or not a text is considered realistic or not will not just be the result of the creators of the text stacking up enough approaches to establishing the real and then an individual deciding if that makes the text real enough or not but also of the play of social power around the text. Sufficient backing by enough resources of social power will make a text acceptably realistic regardless of its own qualities.

It must never be forgotten that which is considered realistic is the effect of social power and that creators of texts, texts, and their audiences are just a part of the ebb & flow of social power. All representations are hegemonic after all and the 'real' in this case is just a system of representations in texts not something essential and concrete even though great lengths are gone to suggest that very concrete existence.

REPRESENTATION : Hegemony

Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; a way of using representations to control other people. In many ways hegemony is the central concept of media studies. This idea is crucial to the key concepts of representation, ideology, narrative, institutions and audience so it is essential that we develop a detailed understanding of the idea.

Let us start with a definition:

Hegemony is a representational strategy of social power that aims to ensure the continued tacit or active support of the majority of the people for the rule of the minority (even though the rule of that minority – the elite – is not in the interests of the majority). This is achieved by representing all groups bar the elite as unfit or unsuitable to hold and wield legitimate power and by representing the elite as the only group capable of ensuring social peace, prosperity, justice, etc.

For example:

The ‘fearful outsider’ is the most commonly encountered representation used by the elite to control the majority and ensure that the majority continue to tacitly support the rule of the elite. Anyone or any group who can be depicted as ‘not one of us’ or ‘outside the boundaries of normal society’ (i.e. as other) is being represented as fearful so that the majority of the population will turn to the elite (who hold and wield all the power in society) for protection. Consider; ‘hoodies’, paedophiles, criminals, ‘chavs’, foreigners, immigrants, every front page of the Daily Mail, indeed any moral panic is a hegemonic success because the elite will be turned to by the people to save them from the source of the panic (see the list above).

More technically we can say that:

Hegemony is the manufacture consent through the manipulation of the common sense.

Terminology

Other – The ‘not us’ from which we derive some sense of who ‘we’ are. This ‘we’ being a common sense notion useful to the manufacture of consent and not the reality of the social group in question; use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ always establishes a ‘them’ who are not us (i.e. it sets out what is normal – us – and what is abnormal – them).

Manufacture Consent – No elite can rule through force alone and forever. A ruling group needs the consent of the majority to maintain and replicate (i.e. hand it on to their children) their rule. The consent, however, is not sought from the majority – they could decide the wrong thing after all – nor left up to them rather it is manufactured by the elite through the processes of hegemony. It is a consent that is not freely given nor is it fully informed (quite the opposite) rather it is carefully built up for us by the elite; it is a consent we give with out knowing and without option.

Common Sense – The realm of uncritical assumptions and acceptance of what is normal and abnormal as defined by the elite or as Gramsci put it:

“Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.”

Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from cultural writings. London (Lawrence & Wishart) 1985, 421

Moral Panic – A moral panic is a collective outburst against a perceived threat to the ethical underpinning of the community. Often this threat has been outsiders to the community – Jews and Roma have suffered terribly at the hands of moral panics – but anyone or group who can be seen as outsiders (on grounds of their identity or actions) can also be constructed as a threat and thus cause a moral panic.

Links

Hegemony

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/contributions/gramsci.html

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/soc2r3/gramsci/gramheg.htm

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm

http://rykalskireadsthemedia.blogspot.com/search/label/Hegemony

http://www.bisa.ac.uk/bisanews/0205/bisa0205_2.htm

Common Sense

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csme/meas/papers/coben.html

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=308

Moral Panic

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/fdevdet.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/mugging.html

http://www.mediaknowall.com/violence/moralpanicnotes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20030430.shtml

REPRESENTATION: Stereotypes

All media texts are full of representations of the exterior (you could call it 'the real') world and as whole things are themselves representations. Media texts will represent types and groups of people, places, times, opinions, ideas, concepts, events and actions to us and we have to try and work out where the representations come from and what they are doing. All such representations are mediated and are not the things themselves but media constructions made out of the idea (that is someone's or some group's idea) of the thing.

Type/Stereotype

One of the first issues to get to grips with is that of typing and stereotyping by the media. Typing is the ascription of assumed group characteristics to an individual that is assumed to be a member of the group in question. It is a very common human behaviour and we all of us do it all the time to make sense of people and groups we know little of. Stereotyping is the same activity, lumping someone into a group without knowing if they really are a member of that group, carried out with negative intent or effect. So to make assumptions about a person or group you do not know is typing but to make those assumptions with the intent or effect of denigrating, dismissing, disempowering or harming someone is stereotyping.

Stereotypes can be very hard to erase or change once someone has adopted a particular attitude. The point is that a stereotype is a habit of mind (an idea which is habitually used without critical awareness by a person) and so is a part of the person who uses the stereotype. It is common for strongly established stereotypes to become deeply rooted in the common sense of a culture and these widely held and un-critically accepted habits of mind are the most dangerous stereotypes. They are the ones most likely to be acted on and they are the ones most likely to lead to a moral panic (consider these instances – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_riots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till).

Links

Stereotypes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/special_initiatives/toolkit/stereotypes/what_are_stereotypes.cfm

http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/875.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/gendertv.html

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/page11.htm

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/stereotypethreat

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_112.asp

http://www.tolerance.org/teach/web/index.jsp

The Grammar of Media?

The media are languages just as more normal forms of language - writing and speech - are and just as those more easily recognisable modes of language are governed by rules about use - i.e. grammar - so are the media. The problem tends to be that because the media use spoken and written language as part of their communicative acts the other layers of language can be obscured by our focus on dialogue or print.
Certain parts of the grammars of media are quiet obvious - headlines prioritise, 'talking-heads' such as news presenters are (claim to be) objective narration, bold OR CAPITALISED TEXT is shouting, a film or TV close-up is 'Emphasis!', blue underlining means hypertext link - whereas other parts of these grammars are harder to grasp.
Close-ups are a good example of this as they are the indexical signs of the ideology of individualism; which Althusser showed to be such a key interpellating device. The close-up isolates the important individuals from the mass of characters in a hierarchical representational structure similar to the use of foreground versus background in perspective imagery (photography and so forth) or on the stage.
The final scene of Norma Desmond in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard is a biting commentary on this part of the grammar of cinema. Highlighting the close-up's role in the establishment of leading individuals and the way in which it is a shot reserved for the leading individuals; i.e. for leaders. Sergio Leone also criticised the ideological function of the close-up in his great cycle of westerns by ridiculing it with super tight extra close close-ups (often eyes only) and by utilising it as a tool for creating equality. In Leone's work anybody could get a close-up and this most emphatic of camera shots was not reserved for the leading individuals in the text. Indeed some of the most important sequences in Leone's work are inter-cut tight close ups. In many ways Wilder's criticism of the close up in Sunset Boulevard is far stronger than Leone's because where Leone dismissed the hierarchical function of the close-up Wilder associated it and thus the whole ideology of individualism with a deranged selfish murderous narcissism.
That which is in the seeming proximity of the foreground is granted a greater hierarchical status than those things, persons, characters in the background. That the foreground is an apparent proximity is a key point to remember. Texts are artificial deliberate constructs. Nothing occurs in them by chance (this is why we are told that Hedda Gabler inherited some pistols) and nothing is real. Leading characters and background figures are both 'paper beings' as Barthes describes them in 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative' (in Image-Music-Text at p111) so placing them in a hierarchy is a deliberate act based on the deliberate creation of a set of paper beings, paper places, and paper objects to place in this 'paper hierarchy'.
The lesson of the ideological function of the close-up is that just as more normal language is permeated with power so the languages of the media are flooded with power. It is not enough to concern ourselves with the language and grammar of media we must consider the ways in which these languages are used in relations of power and what role these grammars play in the exercise of social power. We must consider the discourse of media; the ways in which the media as language (rather than their content) enact and implement power in society.

Funk-to-Funky

Ashes to Ashes and its equally remarkable sibling Life on Mars are most remarkable for the divergent political readings they provoke. There are two main readings that will be considered here; the media studies reading and the conservative nostalgia reading.
The media studies reading of both series is rather straight forward. Sam Tyler & Alex Drake are the synecdoche of us and of our struggle to overcome the bigotry and discrimination that used to be such a powerful part of our society. Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars share a hopeful (perhaps too hopeful) view on the state of present day Britain and on the direction that British society seems to be taking. The discourse of both shows is that even though the things of the past have some good points today is a better world to be in if you are a member of a non-hegemonic group (not white, not male, not straight etc).
This tension is rather neatly displayed by the appearance of Lord Scarman as a character in the last episode of the first series of Ashes to Ashes. The camaraderie of Gene's team in the face of the 'threat' posed by Lord Scarman is a positive thing but Alex, and we, know that Scarman's way is the only way for British society to take. That the police had to stop being an instrument of racial, homophobic, and state terror in order for British society to function at all. Lord Scarman was charged with the official investigation into the Brixton riots of 1981 (or see here) and many of his conclusions regarding the role of policing in the initiation of those riots were eventually incorporated into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 and into the practices of the Metropolitan Police. Lord Scarman and his report were a good thing and Gene's failure to recognise this is a key part of his backwards facing understanding of the world.
The conservative nostalgia reading of the two series is rather more complicated. It begins with a reading of Gene Hunt as a tonic to the so called political correctness of our age. In this reading Gene is the key figure and not Sam or Alex and his 'unreconstructed' views and behaviours are read as an affirmation of the bigotry and discrimination of the past. As though Gene were the heroic leader of a movement to 'call a spade a spade' and gloss over the ethnic slur this phrase came to contain. In this reading the BBC have either been conned into broadcasting this heroic illiberalism or have finally started to see sense (neither of these seem all that likely to me).
The next phase of this reading is a form of golden-ageism (i.e. looking back to a time that was better than today) because by some quirk both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes are set at moments of Conservative Party government in Britain. Life on Mars is set during the fag-end of the Heath government and Ashes to Ashes near the beginning of the Thatcher years. In each case viewers with Conservative political inclinations are provided the opportunity to escape to a time when the horrid Labour lot who currently form the government were safely out of office. 1973 is not as effective a setting as 1981 for this golden-age version of the conservative nostalgia reading because Heath never possessed the same cult of personality or the same degree of fanatical devotion that Thatcher did and because Heath was not involved in the transformation of British society during the 1980s that tends to fly under the eponym of Thatcherism regardless of whether it had anything to do with Thatcher and her government's policies or not.
Both parts of this reading can be seen in Matthew d'Ancona's review of Ashes to Ashes in The Spectator; he is politically Conservative and The Spectator has long played a central role in right wing politics in Britain as the house magazine of the Conservative Party (three of its editors in the 20th century went on to become Conservative cabinet ministers).