Page 126 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

INDEPENDENCE

case B effectively conveys that ‘if Bill has a yellowVW, then he may be
in Sue’s house’.
The notion of conversational implicature provides an important
way of going beyond highly literal and strictly logical approaches to
meaning: it is a way of emphasising how the meaning of an utterance
lies not just in the words we use but in the deductions and inferences
that may be made on the basis of them. But the idea is not without its
difficulties. There is considerable debate about exactly howmany
maxims you need to define adequately the cooperative principle.
Some commentators have proposed as many as eight or more. Others
have suggested that they can all be reduced to the one maxim – ‘be
relevant’. Nor is it certain howstrong the cooperative principle is in
itself. Some speech genres – such as adversarial cross-examination in
the courtroom, the combative political interviewon television or the
full-blown marital quarrel – would seem to exhibit serious, systematic
and fundamental departures from such a principle. And yet, for the
theory of implicature to work, it is not a principle that can be applied
variably.

See also: Pragmatics, Semantics
Further reading: Grice (1975); Leech (1983); Levinson (1983)

INDEPENDENCE

A concept of scale and opposition, with no intrinsic features.
Independent film and video production, for instance, includes an
incommensurable array of different personnel and practices, each
defined contingently as independent against a specific mainstream.
Thus, Hollywood directors working outside the major studios are
independent – e.g., David Lynch. Countries outside the major film
production centres (Los Angeles and Bombay) compete in the
international film market as independents – thus the multi-million-
dollar-grossing Australian film Crocodile Dundee, second only to Top
Gun in its release year (1986) in both US and world markets, is an
independent film.
Types of independence differ. They are organised around different
mobilising discourses: community, avant-garde, agitprop (i.e. agitation
and propaganda), art, connoisseurship, free enterprise, etc. In each case
the mobilising discourse produces specific sets of practices. In one
country’s overall cultural production, independence often signals a
production or practice that works more or less self-consciously against

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