Page 155 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MEANING

MEANING

The import of any signification; the product of culture. In the context
of communication studies, meaning is the outcome of communica-
tion, and therefore is the object of study, not a given or self-evident
quantum that exists prior to analysis. Hence meaning should not be
assumed to reside in anything, be it text, utterance, programme,
activity or behaviour, even though such acts and objects may be
understood as meaningful.
Over the years the supposed location of meaning has drifted down
the producer–commodity–consumer chain.
. In pre-modern (medieval) textual theories, meaning was divine, fixed
in texts such as the Bible by God. Authorial intention was therefore
unarguable: texts meant what their rather formidable ‘producer’ said
they did. All you had to do was work out what the Author ‘meant’.
Priests – ‘authorities’ – were on hand to do this for you.
. In modern times, textual theory located meaning in the text. Texts
meant what they said. This was the heyday of modernist literary
criticism, including the NewCritics and Leavisites. You got at
meaning yourself by using the technique of ‘practical criticism’
invented by I. A. Richards, which meant ‘close critical reading’ of
the text, without reference to contextual features, including
knowing who wrote it and when, or what other critics had said
about it.
. In postmodern times, meaning was located in the audience or reader.
Given the anonymous popular sovereignty of contemporary
democracy, this was an egalitarian approach to meaning. It required
large-scale sampling and ethnographic methods to get at what a text
meant, because it meant what several million different people said it
did.

It might be wise to hang on to all three of these links in the ‘value
chain’ of meaning – they all have some influence over its production,
circulation and reproduction.
Meaning has been proposed by Marshall Sahlins (1976) as a
common ‘third term’ – added to material goods (economy) and social
relations (politics) – to unify the anthropological study of culture.
Meaning in economic and political arrangements thus becomes the
proper subject of anthropology; and meaning becomes the product of
culture.

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