Page 36 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 35

to be constituted not by untranslatable and incompatible rules but as learnable skills.
Ethnography now becomes about dialogue and the attempt to reach pragmatic agree-
ments about meaning between participants in a research process.
I have discussed ethnography at greater length than I am about to devote to textual
and reception studies, for two reasons. First, ethnography raises crucial epistemologi-
cal issues that are relevant and, to a degree, generalizable to other methods. That is,
questions about realism, interpretation and representation are also applicable to tex-
tual and reception methodology. Second, the vast majority of ‘evidence’ provided in
this book comes from textual, reception or theoretical work. It thus seemed reasonable
to devote more space here to the somewhat neglected strand of ethnographic cultural
studies.

Textual approaches
Although textual work comes in many guises, including ‘literary criticism’, the three out-
standing modes of analysis in cultural studies draw from:

v semiotics;

v narrative theory;
v deconstructionism.

Texts as signs Semiotics explores how the meanings generated by texts have been
achieved through a particular arrangement of signs and cultural codes (Chapter 3).
Such analysis draws attention to the ideologies or myths of texts. For example, semi-
otic analysis illustrates the case that television news is a constructed representation
and not a mirror of reality (Chapter 10). The media’s selective and value-laden rep-
resentations are not ‘accurate’ pictures of the world. Rather, they are best understood
as the site of struggles over what counts as meaning and truth. Television may appear
to be ‘realistic’ because of its use of seamless editing and the ‘invisible’ cut. However,
such realism is constituted by a set of aesthetic conventions rather than being a reflec-
tion of the ‘real world’.

Texts as narratives Texts tell stories, whether that is Einstein’s theory of relativity,
Hall’s theory of identity, or the latest episode of The Simpsons. Consequently, narra-
tive theory plays a part in cultural studies. A narrative is an ordered sequential
account that makes claims to be a record of events. Narratives are the structured form
in which stories advance explanations for the ways of the world. Narratives offer us

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