Page 81 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

a number of newer emotions that are a blend of the ‘basic’ emotional states
(friendliness, alarm, guilt, sullenness, delight, anxiety etc.).
While emotion certainly does have a biological and evolutionary foundation, it
58 also involves cognitive classificatory and appraisal functions that involve learned
responses. Thus, though we have a number of bodily responses (for example, the
heart is racing) that form the components of a variety of emotions, these are
organized and named by higher cognitive functions (appraisals). Thus to a set of
bodily responses we add a conscious ‘feeling’ from our working memory along with
words that not only label context-specific responses as ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘love’ etc. but
which can themselves set off further emotional responses. Indeed, discourses of
emotion organize and regulate how we should understand bodily responses in given
contexts. As such, emotions show evidence of cultural differences in terms of
expression and display. Thus writers committed to social constructionism tend to
regard emotions as culturally formed, citing as evidence the different emotional
responses found within divergent cultures or social situations
Emotion works at the permeable interface between language, that is, culture, and
the body, with causal flows taking place in either direction. That is, thinking generates
and can change biochemical emotional responses while these chemical actions can
set off a stream of thoughts. Current thinking in neuroscience suggests that all
thoughts have an affective dimension so that the concept of ‘emotion-thought’ is a
useful one. Language digs deep down into the body so that questions concerning
biochemistry are pertinent to human emotions and the cultural quest for meaning.
This is relevant to cultural studies, a discipline whose central concern is Western
culture, since many of the major problems faced by this culture involve
psychological distress rather than material deprivation (which is not to say that the
two do not often go hand in hand). These difficulties concern our relations with
others (isolation, failed marriages, aggression and violence), our sense of
meaninglessness, our addictions and our mental health. In other words,
contemporary Western culture is plagued by emotional discontents.
Links Body, constructionism, culture, discourse, evolutionary psychology

Encoding–decoding It is a foundational argument of semiotics, and subsequently of
cultural studies, that the relations between signifiers and the signified, or signs and
their meanings, though arbitrary in principle, are in practice arranged by cultural
convention so that meaning is stabilized and naturalized into codes of meaning.
Thus encoding refers in general to the process by which signs are organized into
codes, while decoding refers to the process of reception by which readers make
sense of codes and generate meaning from them. More specifically, the
encoding–decoding model of communication as developed by Stuart Hall in the late
1970s and early 1980s refers to the relationship between texts, their producers, and
their readers or audiences. In general terms, the encoding–decoding model suggests
that whatever analysis of textual meanings a critic may undertake, it is far from
certain which of the identified meanings, if any, will be activated by actual
readers/audiences/consumers.