Page 249 - Cultural Theory

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••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

These divisions reflect long-standing tensions between sociologies of the media,
which tend to analyse the economic determinants that produce culture, and cultural
studies approaches that build on ethnographies of media professionals to question
‘top-down’ models of ideological power. As we will see, this tension pervades studies
of popular music and this chapter will argue that an attempt to integrate the posi-
tions is long overdue.

Meaning

Roland Barthes and the critique of production

The chapter now turns to a consideration of the ways in which popular music cre-
ates meaning. Particularly influential here is the work of the French cultural critic
Roland Barthes and his attack against authorship as the privileged source of textual
meaning. His overall significance to cultural theory rests in the way he reveals how
images, sounds and texts contain codes and practices that shore up myths which
serve to render particular values (often bourgeois) as possessing a natural, universal
and eternal meaning. He argues that ‘myth has the task of giving an historical inten-
tion a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal’ (Barthes, 1957:
142). While his other target came to be the futility of the form of literary criticism
which claims that the full meaning of a text is to be found in discovering the moti-
vations of the author behind the work, an enterprise that he would subsequently
condemn through famously announcing ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes, 1977a).
This introduces the important point: the price to pay for the author’s demise is at the
light expense of the birth of the reader. While Barthes (ibid.: 148) is aware that this
does not mean a simple championing of ‘reader’s rights’, his work is useful for
demonstrating how cultural theory has shifted from a structuralist concern with the
ideological functions of texts to a post structuralist recognition that socially posi-
tioned audiences interpret texts in a multiplicity of ways that can wildly diverge from
the author’s intentions (which goes further in Jacques Derrida’s (1976) notion
of deconstruction that emphasizes the inherent instability of meaning). Simultaneously,
he introduced another feature of reading that had long been ignored in cultural and
literary criticism: pleasure.
In some respects, Barthes’s arguments echo classic sociological critiques of individ-
ualistic accounts of human life in which the creative artist is one important ideolog-
ical strand. Jeremy Tanner (2003: 67, emphasis in original) has explained how the
‘dominant idea of the artist in the modern west imagines an isolated creator, who
produces works of art as an expression of a unique individual aesthetic vision’ has
been heavily critiqued. Instead, sociologists have tended to concentrate on ‘cultures
of production’ by following Howard Becker’s (1982: x) influential examination of ‘art
worlds’, which he has defined as ‘the network of people whose cooperative activity,
organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce
the kind of artwork that the art world is noted for’. The idea that art is a form of
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