Page 12 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 11

includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and
activities (like dance and sport). Since images, sounds, objects and practices are sign systems,
which signify with the same mechanism as a language, we may refer to them as cultural texts.
However, the meanings that critics read into cultural texts are not necessarily the same
as those produced by active audiences or readers. Indeed, readers will not necessarily
share all the same meanings with each other. Critics, in other words, are simply a particu-
lar breed of reader. Further, texts, as forms of representation, are polysemic. That is, they
contain the possibility of a number of different meanings that have to be realized by
actual readers who give life to words and images. We can examine the ways in which texts
work, but we cannot simply ‘read-off’ audiences’ meaning production from textual
analysis. At the very least, meaning is produced in the interplay between text and reader.
Consequently, the moment of consumption is also a moment of meaningful production.

Subjectivity and identity
The moment of consumption marks one of the processes by which we are formed as
persons. What it is to be a person, viz. subjectivity, and how we describe ourselves to each
other, viz. identity, became central areas of concern in cultural studies during the 1990s.
In other words, cultural studies explores:

v how we come to be the kinds of people we are;

v how we are produced as subjects;
v how we identify with (or emotionally invest in) descriptions of ourselves as male
or female, black or white, young or old.
The argument, known as anti-essentialism, is that identities are not things that exist; they
have no essential or universal qualities. Rather, they are discursive constructions, the
product of discourses or regulated ways of speaking about the world. In other words,
identities are constituted, made rather than found, by representations, notably language.
Overall, some of the key concepts that constitute the discursive formation of cultural
studies are:

KEY CONCEPTS

Active audiences Politics
Anti-essentialism Polysemy
Articulation Popular culture
Cultural materialism Positionality
Culture Power

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