Page 19 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ACTUALITY

ACTUALITY

Professional term for film/tape footage used in news and current affairs
broadcasts that records events as they happen. Contrasted with studio
presentation (talking heads) and with archive (stock) footage.
In semiotic analysis, actuality is seen as a key device in producing
ideological closure, by anchoring the preferred reading on the
apparently unarguable ‘facts’ of the event-as-filmed. Actuality is
presented as self-evident; the production processes are rarely shown, so
that viewers are encouraged to make sense of the footage in terms of
the event, and not the way in which it is represented. However,
actuality rarely appears on the screen without an accompanying
commentary – and considerable professional skill is expended on
contextualising it for the ‘benefit’ of viewers. As Peter Sissons, a
British news presenter has put it: ‘Let’s remember that although a
picture can tell the story, only a word can put it into its historical
perspective, can caution against gullibility, can weigh the true
significance of the event’ (Independent Broadcasting, 1982). In short,
actuality is a device for naturalising meaning (it proposes the cultural as
natural).

AESTHETICS

A term deriving from the philosophical analysis of art, aesthetics refers
to insight, expressiveness and beauty in creativity. The use of the term
was popularised in the nineteenth century as a means of separating art
from craft. In this tradition, aesthetics provided a paradigm for talking
about texts as art, and art as humanising civility, not mere decoration.
The theory of aesthetics understood its practice as objective. The
properties of artworks were expressions of universal values, open to the
same interpretation by all who were free. The theory relied on the
assumption that aesthetic criteria lay within the work itself, negating
the need to consider issues of context and the means of production
(‘art for art’s sake’).
Aesthetic judgements in Marxist theory are considered a form of
ideology. Whilst this is certainly a valid point, attempts by, for
example, Marxists, feminists and queer theory to subvert aesthetic
practice have arguably continued the tradition. Attempting to replace
‘universal’ assumptions about taste with subcultural categories creates
many splinter aesthetic theories that, although speaking on behalf of

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