3.1. Theoretical Perspectives
3.1.1. Cultural Studies: A Brief Introduction
3.1.1.4. Cultural Studies: Its Assumptions and Concerns
Virtually all the founding assumptions of cultural studies are Marxist. Marxism, according to Storey (1996), informs cultural studies in two fundamental ways. Firstly, to understand the meanings of culture we must analyse it in relation to the social structure and its historical contingencies (Storey 1996:3). One such starting point is,
the belief that meanings and the making of them (which together constitute culture) are indivisibly linked to the social structure and can only be explained in terms of that structure and its history (Fiske 1987:254).
The social structure is held in place by, among other forces, the meanings that culture produces. History and culture are not separate entities, since culture helps constitute the structure and shape the history (Storey 1996:3). History and texts are inscribed into each other. It is because of this constitutive nature that cultural studies emphasises the
importance of culture.
Secondly, cultural studies assumes that capitalist societies are societies divided unequally along class, gender, race, including nation, age group and religion, among other axes of difference (Fiske 1987; Kellner 1995; Storey 1996). Cultural processes, as such, intimately connect with these social relations, and society, conceived as a
hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations, is characterised by the oppression of subordinate other (Kellner 1995). These social relations are understood in terms of social power, that is, in terms of a structure of domination and subordination that is never static but is always the site of contestation and struggle. Since culture is one of the principle sites where this contestation takes place in the form of the struggle for meanings that serve the interests of the dominant classes, culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles (Fiske 1987;
Johnson 1983). In culture, we find a continual struggle over meaning, in which
subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings that bear the interest of dominant groups. This, according to Fiske (1987:256), is what makes culture ideological.
Ideology is argued to be inscribed in the cultural and social practices of society.
Ideological analysis, as Storey (1996) and Inglis (1995) outline, is a central
preoccupation of cultural studies, and a long-standing concern of this has been with the way the mass media operate ideologically to sustain and support prevailing relations of domination (Golding and Murdock 2000). Although this study is mainly an ‘analysis of discourse’ and not an ‘analysis of ideology’, there is a link between discourse and ideology, and between ideology and power (Thompson 1984:4), that cannot be ignored here. This is because even for an analysis of discourse, if a concept of ideology is totally abandoned, several aspects of media power become more difficult to explain. As
MacDonald (2003:51) has outlined,
the benefit of approaching the media through a discursive analysis remains one of exploring the varied and often subtle guises that the power/knowledge relationship adopts, but an analysis of the implications of this invites a return to ideology.
There are many competing definitions of ‘ideology’ (Thompson 1984; Storey 1996).
Thompson (1994) uses the concept of ideology to refer to the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of power. Ideology, according to Althusser (1994:123), does not represent the real world or the system of the real relations that
govern the existence of individuals, but a representation of “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. For him, ideology also has a material existence, since the ‘ideas’ or ‘representations’ which make up ideology always exist in apparatuses such as the media, and are inscribed in social practices that include language (Althusser 1994:125). He also argues that all ideology functions in ways that transform individuals into subjects; it hails or interpellates individuals as subjects (Althusser 1994:130). Within the critical paradigm of cultural studies however, Storey (1996:4) outlines how Hall’s (1982) formulation is generally accepted as the dominant definition.
“Ideology”, according to Hall (1995:88), “is a function of the discourse and of the logic of social processes, rather than an intention of the agent”. Ideological statements, though made by individuals, are a product not of individual consciousness or intention but rather, as Hall contends, pre-date individuals and form part of the determinate social formations and conditions in which individuals are born (1990:9). As Hall asserts,
ideologies are the frameworks of thinking … about the world - the ‘ideas’ which people use to figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it and what they ought to do (1996:19; emphasis in original).
Ideology, therefore, refers to those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and ‘make sense’ of some aspect of social existence.
In modern society, the media form one of the major sites where meaning is produced (Hall 1997; Bennett 1995), and this is what makes media key spheres of operation in the production, reproduction and transformation of ideologies (Hall 1990). Ideologies, as Hall (1990) further outlines, do not consist of isolated and separate concepts, but in the articulation of different elements into a distinctive set or chain of meanings. One way in which ideologies are transformed is by articulating the elements differently, thereby producing different meanings. Lewis (2005) and Sobopha (2005), for instance, outline how some South African women artists were able to articulate certain photographic elements in the representation of women and evoke different meanings altogether.
As may be evident now, cultural studies, among other things, is devoted to studying the politics of signification. As a result, it is concerned with all those practices,
institutions and systems of classification through which particular values, beliefs,
competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct are imparted to members of society. One of the systems through which values and beliefs, among other things, are imparted to the members of society is through language.
The significance of language for an understanding of culture and the construction of knowledge has risen to the top of the agenda within cultural studies for two main reasons.
Firstly, language is the privileged medium in which cultural meanings are formed and communicated, and secondly, language is the medium through which we form knowledge about ourselves and our place in the social world (Baker 2000; Fairclough 1995; Hall 1995). Cultural studies, and rightly so, has argued that language (or news) is not a neutral medium for the formation of meanings and knowledge about an independent objective world ‘existing’ outside of language. Rather, language and its use in discourse, is constitutive of those particular meanings and knowledge.
The theory of language, therefore, stresses the activity and effectivity of signification as a process that actively construct the cognitive worlds rather than simply passively reflecting a pre-existing reality (Bennett 1995:287; also see Fiske 1994:4). We can only access this reality through language by putting it into discourse, and reality has the potential to be differently constructed. This view is at the heart of the constructionist theory (Hall 2001:73). Language, including its use in news, according to Fairclough (1989:4), rests upon common-sense assumptions which are ideologically shaped by relations of power (for instance between men and women), and can contribute to the domination of some people by others.
In the production of meaning, signs can convey meanings that are consensus at the descriptive level, but may at the same time, connect to broader themes and wider meanings, at which point they enter into general beliefs, conceptual frameworks and values of society, i.e., into the wider realms of social ideology (Hall 1997).
Cultural studies, as Grossberg asserts,
is concerned with describing and intervening in the ways ‘texts’ and ‘discourses’
(i.e. cultural practices) are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the every day life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps transform the existing structures of power (1996:180).
It has been particularly concerned with analysing the structure of media texts and tracing their role in sustaining systems of domination (Golding and Murdock 2000:84). A note should be made however that a text, within cultural studies, is important as a site where cultural meanings are made accessible to us, but not as a privileged object of study itself (Turner 1992). At its most distinctive, cultural studies is aimed towards understanding the ways in which power relations are regulated, distributed, and deployed within industrial societies.
The main concerns here are matters of power and representations of and ‘for’
marginalised social groups including those of gender (see Baker 2000:5). So
theoretically, cultural studies is concerned with analysing the forms and operations of power and inequality, and integral to this is the production of knowledge (Franklin et al.
1996). This requires us to identify the operation of specific practices and of what they accomplish in specific contexts (Nelson et al. 1992). This includes such cultural practices as news texts in the Sunday Times.