Page 51 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

convention and habituated to the extent that meaning is stabilized and naturalized.
Here the concept of code draws from the semiotic argument that the relations
between signifiers and the signified, or signs and their meanings, are arbitrary but
28 temporarily ‘fixed’ by convention.
A commonly cited illustration of this thesis concerns the organization and
regulation of colours into the cultural code of traffic lights. Colours are
classifications of gradations in the light spectrum that we name with signs such as
red, green, amber and so forth. However, there is no universal reason why the sign
‘red’ should refer to a specific colour, for the sign ‘rojo’ can designate the ‘same’
colour. Hence the relationship between sign and colour is arbitrary. Subsequently
the signs red, green and amber are organized into a sequence that generates
meaning through the cultural conventions of their usage within a particular
context. Thus, traffic lights deploy ‘red’ to signify ‘stop’ and ‘green’ to signify ‘go’.
This is the cultural code of traffic systems that temporally fixes the relationship
between colours and meanings so that signs become naturalized codes. The
apparent transparency of meaning (we ‘know’ when to stop or go) is an outcome
of cultural habituation, the effect of which is to conceal the practices of cultural
coding.
Semiotics, and subsequently cultural studies, has argued that all cultural objects
convey meaning and all cultural practices depend on meanings generated by signs.
Hence the concept of code is extended to cover all manner of cultural practices. For
example, everyday objects are commonly gender coded: washing machine (female),
drill (male), cooker (female), car (male). Here the operation of habituated cultural
codes is such that not only objects but also practices (for example, household tasks
as female) are associated with a particular gender. In that sense, naturalized codes
seek to essentialize the meanings of male and female. Critical cultural practice seeks
to undo and take apart those naturalized cultural codes to reveal the arbitrary
character of their classifications, arrangements and meanings.

Links Culture, deconstruction, meaning, myth, semiotics, signs

Commodification The process associated with capitalism by which objects, qualities
and signs are turned into commodities where a commodity is an item whose prime
purpose is sale in the market place. The study of culture has long involved a strand
of thinking critical of the commodification of culture by which the culture industry
turns people and meanings into commodities that serve its interests. Thus, in a
process that Marx called commodity fetishism, the surface appearance of goods sold
in the market place is said to obscure the origins of those commodities in an
exploitative relationship at the level of production.
The critique of commodification is often pursued by contrasting the shallowness
and manipulation of commodity culture to an authentic ‘people’s culture’ or to the
‘civilizing’ qualities of high culture. For example, Richard Hoggart offers a
sympathetic, humanist and detailed chronicle of the lived culture of the British
working class of the1950s that contrasts starkly with his acid account of the
development of ‘commercial culture’ figured by the ‘juke box boy’, the ‘American