Page 222 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

THEORY

extend far beyond their physical locations. The globalization of television and other
communications technologies has created an increasingly complex semiotic
environment of competing signs and meanings that has been understood by certain
writers to be postmodern. For some critics the globalization of an electronic TV 199
culture is understood as a process of cultural mixing, matching and exchange in the
production of hybridity though for others it represents a form of cultural
domination or imperialism.

Links Active audience, globalization, hegemony, identity, ideology, postmodernism, soap
opera, text

Text The everyday use of the concept of a text refers to writing in its various forms so
that books and magazines are understood to be texts. However, it is an axiom of
cultural studies that a text is anything that generates meaning through signifying
practices. That is, a text is a metaphor that invokes the constitution of meaning
through the organization of signs into representations. This includes the generation
of meaning through images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and activities (like
dance and sport). Since images, sounds, objects and practices are sign systems which
signify with the same fundamental mechanism as a language we may refer to them
as cultural texts. Hence, dress, television programmes, images, sporting events, pop
stars etc. can all be read as texts.
Texts can be analysed in terms of the arrangement of signs into sequences or
codes that generate meaning through the cultural conventions of their use within
a particular context. Textual analysis usually involves deconstructing the practices
of cultural coding to show us how the apparent transparency of meaning is an
outcome of cultural habituation. Any kind of textual analysis involves a somewhat
arbitrary drawing of boundaries for particular purposes since meaning is unstable
and cannot be confined to single words, sentences or particular texts. This is so
because meaning has no single originatory source; rather it is the outcome of
intertextuality, that is, the relationships between various sites of meaning. Here
there is no ‘outside’ of a text since other texts form the exterior of any given text.
Since texts are constitutive of their outsides so we may say with Derrida that there
is nothing outside of texts or nothing but texts. However, this does not mean that
there is no non-textual material world, rather it suggests that meaning is a product
of textual arrangements.
Texts, as forms of representation, are polysemic; that is, they contain the
possibility of a number of different meanings that have to be realized by actual
readers who give life to words and images. While we can examine the ways in
which texts work, we cannot simply ‘read-off’ audiences’ meaning production from
textual analysis. At the very least, meaning is produced in the interplay between
text and reader, that is, the hermeneutic circle.
Links Code, hermeneutics, intertextuality, polysemy, representation, semiotics, signs

Theory Theory can be understood as a form of narrative that seeks to distinguish and
account for the general features that describe, define and explain persistently