Elites legitimate their power by invoking a consensus they themselves pre-structure

Evidence

In class societies which are also formal democracies, the structures of democratic representation and opinion are structures to be negotiated in the interest of power. The elites are in a powerful position to win assent in this way: (a) because they play a dominant role in crystallizing issues, (b) because they provide the material and information which support their preferred interpretations, (c) because they can rely on the disorganized state of public knowledge and feeling to provide, by inertia, a sort of tacit agreement to let the existing state of affairs continue. We are thus in the highly paradoxical situation, whereby the elites of power constantly invoke , as a legitimation for their actions, a consensus which they themselves have powerfully pre-structured. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 875

But, as we have noted, the consensus is in fact an extremely fluid and ambivalent structure, at best, in practice; the agencies of government and control, while responsible in some formal sense to the people/the electorate/public opinion/the audience, are, for that very reason, driven to treat the area of consensus as an arena in which they win consent for or assent to their actions and policies, their definitions and outlooks. In class societies which are also formal democracies, the structures of democratic representation and opinion are structures to be negotiated in the interest of power. The elites are in a powerful position to win assent in this way: (a) because they play a dominant role in crystallizing issues, (b) because they provide the material and information which support their preferred interpretations, (c) because they can rely on the disorganized state of public knowledge and feeling to provide, by inertia, a sort of tacit agreement to let the existing state of affairs continue. We are thus in the highly paradoxical situation, whereby the elites of power constantly invoke , as a legitimation for their actions, a consensus which they themselves have powerfully pre-structured. Thus the process of opinion formation and attitude crystallization is, like so many of the other processes we have been discussing, a process “structured in dominance.” … Both of television’s functions are locked into this process: those occasions when it elaborates interpretations and accounts of the world on its own behalf, and those many occasions when, via the skewed structures of access, it is obliged to reproduce and validate the status or accredited witnesses, whose views it is obliged to attend and defer to, and whose statements “in other places” (in Parliament, in conferences, in boardrooms, in the courts, etc.) it is required to transmit. The media cannot long retain their credibility with the public without giving some access to witnesses and accounts which lie outside the consensus: it would not have dared to broadcast to the nation on the eve of the Newry march without at least one interview with Kevin Boyle, the civil rights organizer. But the moment it does so, it immediately endangers itself with its critics, who attack broadcasting for unwittingly “tipping the balance of public feeling” against the political order. It opens itself to the strategies of both sides which are struggling to win a hearing for their interpretation in order to redefine the situations in which they are acting in a more favorable way. This is broadcasting’s vicious double-bind. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 875

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox of elites pre-structuring the very consensus they invoke for legitimation is among the densest ideas in the chapter.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s prior reading on institution-run reputation systems and how the powerful control the channels of validation. — connects to: Mass passivity enables a power structure whose illusion resists objective unmasking. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 163; The people’s consensus and scientific consensus are the same legitimation model — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 251; Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies what Hall means by ‘consensus’ — not a genuine shared agreement but an arena elites negotiate and pre-structure.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 875