communication studies class 12

Text (in broadest sense)

example: paintings, music, prayer, poetry, statues, pictures, hair, style

  • all (cultural) forms implying giving meaning

  • all artefacts and practices that give meaning/are meaningful

  • read cultural products and social practices as texts (textual analysis)

  • reveal oppression in texts

polysemy

  • meaning produced in contact of text and reader (different readings of text)

  • moment of consumption = meaningful production

  • meaning negotiable and constructed

  • study reception of media texts

→ production and consumption of media messages is an active and interpretative undertaking

→ encoding-decoding according to Hall = structured polysemy

cultural studies: research program (recap)

→ linguistic/cultural turn

  • elitist to popular, everyday practices, texts

  • from production over text (incl. social power relations) to consumption (decoding): signifying practices instead of uniform meanings and reception

  • attention to micropolitics of power, countering economic reductionism and emphasis on macropolitics of power

  • from a largely passive audience to an active audience

  • focus on superstructure which has its own autonomy, instead of all-determining base models

    structure but with certain freedom

  • qualitative research

  • contribution to unmask ideology and liberate oppression of subjects of repressive powers (political commitment)

  • extended view on culture: beyond high and low, toward popular culture, everyday cultural practices, ‘living culture’

  • dominant cultural hierarchy = dominant political and social-economic hierarchy

  • identification and analysis of popular culture which serves the existing order (e.g. soaps) and look for alternative aspects within popular culture (e.g. subculture)

  • qualitative research: textual analysis, reception studies, ethnographic research…

critiques

  • too textualist: media artifacts and cultural practices texts to be read rather than institutions to be analyzed

  • too focused on reception and micropolitics of power, the power of the ordinary

  • overly theoretical, jargon

  • relativist (postmodernism), infinite plasticity, obscuring instead of illuminating

  • particularistic, romanticizing and impressionistic

  • quit initial goal to reveal power structures (lost sight of initial goals)

    • legitimation of capitalism

    • conformist → political dead end?

post-approaches

poststructuralism - différance (Derrida)

  • différance: 2 parts

    1. difference between words and signs gives meaning (difference)

    2. words and signs never signify immediately and unambiguously; their meaning depends on words and signs that follow (delay of meaning → deferral)

  • no stable, nor determing structure in meaning

  • meaning is fluid and in transformation

  • production of meaning via signifying practices is dynamic and unpredictable, no fixed meaning

  • encoding understood as dictating meaning is near impossible

poststructuralism - intertextuality

  • Kristeva: intertextuality

    • horizontal relation text - reader

    • vertical relation text - other text(s)

  • Fiske: horizontal and vertical intertextuality

    • horizontal: media text relates to other media texts in terms of content/genre

    • vertical: media text relates to other texts deriving from the same source

  • meaning is not only in the text itself, but is layered and developed in relation to other texts and meanings

  • (indefinite) network of texts interpreted by authors/readers

→ dialogue between communicator and receiver → instability and fluidity of meaning

poststructuralism - foucault and discourse

  • representation: production of knowledge via discourse

  • discourse = amalgamation (action/process/result of combining/unifying) of language and practices that constructs and regulates knowledge and meaning about a topic at a certain moment in time

  • discourse

    • sets boundaries on how we can think and talk about things meaningfully

    • consists of language and practices (totality of discourse)

    • regulates bagavior and action

    • determines social agents

    • no meaning outside of discourse: discourse produces knowledge

  • discursive formation: patterns in texts and (discursive) practices in society in terms of object, style and strategy

  • discourse,r epresentation, knowledge and ‘truth’ are always context-dependent, both historically and culturally

→ anti-essentialism: words or social categories have no stable referents, nor one particular ‘essence’

→ no truth, subject or identity outside of language or discourse

→ language/discourse are unstable (Derrida) and historically contingent (Foucault)

→ discursive constructions ↔ fixed texts or media messages