Page 174 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NATURE

aspidistras, chintz curtains and all. Speeches would be written not as
staged speeches, but as if they were ‘actually happening’. Actors would
not represent their characters, but become them (this became codified
as ‘method’ acting). Of course, everyone on stage has to pretend the
audience was not there, since audiences aren’t generally to be found in
people’s living rooms. So this kind of theatre is voyeuristic from the
point of viewof the audience, a point of view known as the ‘fourth
wall’, since that is the perspective the audience uses to view the play.
Clearly naturalism was a gift for cinema, and even more for the
domesticated medium of television, where the camera and crew
replace the audience in the setting, so you don’t even have a sense of
‘being in the theatre’ to put alongside ‘being in that person’s living
room’. The ideological productivity of the naturalist conventions is
considerable, because the ‘reality’ of the objects and interaction
represented allows the representation itself to appear as innocent, self-
effacing. Our attention is devoted to looking ‘through’ the screen and
into the setting, so that any sense we might make of the drama appears
to arise directly from the scene depicted, and not from its
representation. It comes across more imperatively than something
clearly constructed or ‘handled’ according to recognised conventions.
And that, of course, is the point. Television exploits naturalism on the
set to promote the naturalisation of images/representations on the
screen.

NATURE

The material world as a whole together with its determining forces;
the inherent or essential qualities of an object which determine its
form, substance and behaviour. Because it is a multidiscursive concept
which defies attempts to give it a precise referent, the term should be
used with care in analytical work. At the very least the nature of an
object, or the material world of nature, or the word nature itself,
should not be taken as self-evident with respect to any qualities,
properties or characteristics whatsoever: these natures are the object of
study, not the premise.
Nature is often contrasted with culture; the non-human as opposed
to the human. However, this non-human nature is often taken to be
an inherent or essential quality of the human itself – as in human
nature. In such usages the concept appears ultimately to be a
secularisation of the category of God – a non-human agency which is

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