Page 55 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Thus the model of communication proposed by Shannon and Weaver in the
1940s (Figure 1) presents the process as a linear one in which the informational
message itself is clear and can be understood unambiguously by its receiver
32 provided it is not subject to interference (noise).
The study of communication within cultural studies has taken place at the levels
of production (political economy), text (semiotics, discourse analysis) and reception
(or consumption). Although debate has raged about the relative significance of each
level, it is clear that the processes of communication and culture need to be explored
at all these levels in a multi-perspectival examination of the circuit of culture.

Links Circuit of culture, culture, encoding–decoding, meaning, polysemy, signs

Constructionism A generic name given to anti-essentialist theories that stress the
culturally and historically specific creation of meaningful categories and
phenomena. This is in contrast to theories that appeal to universal and biological
explanations for objects and events. For example, the body, which is commonly
held to be a simple biological given of nature, is understood by constructionism to
be also an outcome of the forces of culture. The functioning of ‘emotions’ for
example is said to show evidence for differential responses within divergent cultures
or social situations.
Similarly, identities are held to be discursive constructions that do not refer to an
already existent ‘thing’. That is, identity is not a universal entity but a culturally
specific discursive construction. Indeed, even sexual identity is not thought to be
a reflection of a natural state of being but rather is a matter of representation. Thus,
there can be no biological ‘sex’ that is not also cultural since there is in principle no
access to biological ‘truths’ that lie outside of cultural discourses. Sexed bodies are
always already represented as the product of regulatory discourses of sexuality.
Constructionism is grounded in the anti-representationalist account of language.
That is, language does not act as a mirror able to reflect an independent object
world but is better understood as a tool that we use to achieve our purposes.
Language ‘makes’ rather than ‘finds’ and representation does not ‘picture’ the world
but constitutes it. Here, the limits of language are said to mark the edge of our
cognitive understanding of the world, for our acculturation in and through
language is constitutive of our values, meanings and knowledge. As such, for
constructionism there are no culturally transcendental or ahistorical elements to
what it is to be a human being.
For constructionism the very notion of what it is to be a person is a cultural
variable since the resources that form the materials of personhood are the languages
and cultural practices of specific times and places. Indeed, the very concept of ‘I’ as
a self-aware object is held to be a modern Western conception that emerged out of
science and the ‘Age of Reason’. In short, we are constituted as individuals in a
social process using culturally shared materials, and meaning is formed in the joint
action of social relationships, accounting practices and conversations.
Consequently, our maps and constructs of the world are never simply matters of
individual interpretation but are inevitably a part of the wider cultural repertoire of