Page 242 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

TEXT/TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

It became possible to perform ‘textual exegesis’ on completely non-
written ‘texts’ such as movies, TV shows, news photos, magazines,
web sites, etc. Working back over the three developments noted
above, texts became formidable. In a secular era of popular sovereignty
the ‘textual’ media were held to be the bearers of significant meanings
about democracy, subjectivity, identity, ideology, fantasy, etc. There
seemed to be a philosophical warrant for taking textual evidence
seriously, not just as ‘representing’ the human condition but as getting
about as close to reality as can be got. And contemporary life is
promiscuously textual. Viewing, reading and listening suffuse everyday
activities rather than being a distinct and relatively rare special event
(such as ‘going to the theatre’). It requires a universal ‘literacy’, and the
study of ‘texts’ is one means by which citizens of media can become
self-reflexive in that context.
Once the pattern was set almost anything could be a text, or be
subjected to textual analysis, including live events and actions. Some
anthropologists have objected to this exorbitation of the text. But on
the other hand, humans cause just about everything they touch or do
to signify in one way or another, so to trace the process of meaning
creation, transmission and interpretation may well involve looking at
customs, buildings, media and bodies as well as papyrus and stone.
Textual analysis is a particularist, empirical, analytical methodology
that is central to the work of cultural and media studies. It involves
examining the formal internal features and contextual location of a text
to ascertain what readings or meanings can be obtained from it. It is not a
tool to find the correct interpretation of a text, rather it is used to
understand what interpretations are possible. Textual analysis is
interested in the cultural and political implications of representations,
not only in howmeaning is constructed. Remembering that one of the
aims of undertaking textual analysis is to understand the variety of
meanings made possible bya text, it is essential to consider the context in
which the text is received. This is not the same as context in an
ethnographic sense, where the researcher aims to understand the space
in which a person reads a text. Rather, context in textual analysis refers to
the wider world of textuality. For example, this can refer to conventions
of genre, the intertextualityof an actor, the narrative of the text, aswell as
discourses that are evoked in discussions of the subject in other media
texts. It is the interplay of meanings both inside and outside the text that
textual analysis works towards uncovering, and a way of understanding
the variety of interpretations likely to be generated by such an analysis.
See also: Aberrant decoding, Meaning, Methodology

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