Bridging previous weeks & this week

• Dominant ideology & decoding
• Polysemic responses to texts
• Hegemony as an open, fluid series of negotiations
• Texts & contexts

Culture

• Not simply the products made by particular artists
• [how the audience is located within specific cultural situations]
• [not just the culture of the media, but the culture of the audiences as well—and how the 2 come together]
• [it's not a debate between low and high culture; folk art/dance is presumed to come out of people's interests and history—whereas mass culture is produced for people but not by people]

Rather, culture (according to cultural studies) is…

• A process of negotiation between producer and consumer. All culture is a process of negotiation. It is a struggle over meaning
• [Discourse if formed by both producer and consumer, but each one is trying to gain more control of the process]
  • [culture is simply about the meaning of social experience]
  • [culture is more than class, more than race… all of these things are involved in constructing our social identity]
  • [cultural studies do more than just consume—they try to make sense of the things they are consuming—we're finding our own identity based upon the meanings and texts that are delivered to us]

Making sense of our social experience (& ourselves)

• “battling with meanings delivered to us by other classes, other groups, and struggling to make them our own”
  • [audiences are more than just consumers; they're trying to be producers as well]
  • [audiences take what is given to them and reassert meaning]

Therefore, ideology is not a static set of ideas

• Audiences are dynamic!
• [ideology is never just a set of ideas that are imposed upon the subordinate classes; rather, ideology is dynamic and audiences reproduce meanings

Culture is always ideological, but it is never imposed on us

• Through our decisions, we make decisions for how to express ourselves.
• [the way we see ourselves are relative to the things we consume. The texts we consume have meanings we want to reproduce]
• [e.g. people dressing up and going to a star trek convention are reproducing on their own—not through force]

Ideological state apparatus

• Ideology surrounds us! Ideological messages and meanings of the dominant class are produced and reproduced all around us—i.e. in the institutions we visit on a daily basis. E.g. church, school
  • [we are taught certain ways to live and behave at a certain age—they are reinforced through the agents of socialization: friends, family, work, school, etc. It's not just the media that tells us acceptable forms of behaviour, but through multiple institutions.]
    • [we get our ideologies from all these institutions and that is why they are called Ideological state apparatus's': because they reproduce ideologies]

Remember 2 weeks ago…

• Subject vs. object
  • We are not just subjected to ideology—we’re not products of our nature, we’re products of our nature
  • We’re not just products, we’re subjects of ideology—we’re always negotiating our place within these institutions. e.g. you can resist dominant ideologies
  • We subject ourselves to it…we willingly subject ourselves to all of these meanings because it’s easier not to question everything in our daily lives.
    • So by being subject to these ideological state apparatus’s, we form ourselves as subjects and make sense of the world around us

Interpellation

• The aforementioned is a process of interpellation. We’re being introduced to meanings. Likewise, the producer creates something that you would find appealing and want to be a part of
• Interpellation is when we construct a social position for someone. It’s a particular kind of activity that constructs social positions for us
  • E.g. when you’re waving our hand on the sidewalk, that action means you’re calling for a cab
  • Media construct social positions for people. They create opportunities for people to try and get you to recognize yourself as a certain type of audience.

We need to know about HEGEMONY—in order to understand dominant hegemonic readings

• Hegemony is a process of winning power by consent, not by force
• [We consent to certain types of order/rule]
• [we consent to consuming coca-cola. Culture is a process of negotiation and producers are struggling to get you to consume their point of view.
• [Dominant readings occur when we get pleasure of seeing ourselves as that type of person. We look at how a media product fashions our identity. We don't get paid to promote a product; rather we prefer to see ourselves in a certain way. We feel good to express ourselves in that way]

Dominant-preferred meanings

• Are encoded at an unconscious level. We think it’s normal for men to be shooting guns in action films. These types of things are taken for granted and encoded at a unconscious level. They are also decoded at an unconscious level

So, for dominant & negotiated readings…

• Audiences ideologically cooperate with the source material.
• At the dominant level we don’t question anything; at the negotiated level we don’t question part of it.
• We don’t want the hassle of engaging in a struggle all the time

So, decoding = matching our social experiences with the ideology of the text

• Formed by intertext relationships too
• E.g. Mr. T (the ‘I pity the fool’ guy) says
• For a text to be popular, it must resonate with multiple audiences; it must allow for a series of different negotiated readings

Heteroglossia (multiple access)

• Means being able to speak with multiple voices
  • Similar to polysemic
  • [Polysemic means there can be multiple meanings for the same audience]
  • [Heterolglossia means that different audiences can read different things into the media product]
    • [E.g. audiences can think there are gay/lesbian relationships in the show Grey's Anatomy]

Bridge to next week

• Meaning is a constant sight of struggle. Not just over texts, but also a struggle for control.
• This week we talked about perception, next week we’ll talk about how producers control that perception

Key line from Fiske:

• Reading a TV text is that moment when the discourse of the reader meet the discourses of the text
  • When we make sense of our social experiences, we’re also making sense of ourselves.
• [Fiske says that the way in which we consume has a huge impact from what we take from it. If someone was watching TV at home they would experience something different than from watching at a bar.]

Meanings and politics evaluated—not in terms of content—but how audiences make sense of them in their SOCIAL CONTEXTS

• Some texts that counter an ideology will offend those who agree with that ideology
• [if your text has a meaning that is disruptive, it WILL offend others—e.g. Madonna entered the stage of a concert on a cross—offensive to Catholicism. Essentially, Madonna would have no meaning until the audience comes and negotiates that meaning

Culture is the process of making meanings in which people actively participate

• So, how is TV (media) used by audiences? How do we participate with it?
• Cultural studies states that audiences have a rule to play.

Fiske says the audience engages with 3 different levels of “textuality”

• The primary text
  • The text produced by the cultural industry. E.g. the song, the tv show, the movie…
• The sublevel of texts
  • Different aspects of the cultural industry that relate to the primary text. E.g. a theme song of a show, a comic book of the show
  • These are all the things that include publicity/promotion for the primary text
• The level of textuality that audiences produce themselves
  • Things audience produce for themselves. Audiences often talk about these shows

The social circulation of meanings always entails struggle & contestation

As Morley reinforces: no-one is a “free-floating” social agent. We don’t just float in a world of random social meanings and social messages.

• We all exist in some social formations.

We have to pay attention to the “supertext”

• A text is never a discrete thing.
• Remember intra-text meanings? And intertext meanings too…
  • The supertext says (if you’re looking at a TV show), that you cant just look at the characters themselves. The supertext alerts us that it is a show that is also communicating to us through commercials and advertisements.
  • Supertext views these industrially. You’re not just watching a tv show, you’re being exposed to many things. Likewise, what else is on that television channel? Are you being drawn into other shows? Hence, you have to study everything about itàcontext is a complex thing.

“readers” don’t have “rights,” per se

It is necessary to consider the context of viewing as much as the object of viewing

• So, consider their social architecture
• E.g. you can watch at home, movies, bar… But it’s more than just the place. You might behave one way at home and another way in the bar.
• E.g. you can watch a tv show and discuss it while watching, but if you do that at the movie theatre you’ll probably get told to shut up
• Hence, even if it’s the exact same text, there are different experiences depending on where you watch it. It’s the same text (i.e. remains static), but the social context changes it dramatically

Key issues for Morley:

• What is the status of the actual text (i.e. primary, sublevel, third…)
• The relation of text and context depending on where it is viewed
• The need to look at an expanded “supertext”: if I watch a show with commercials and another person doesn’t, Morley says we’ll each get different experiences from it
• The impossibility of “medium specific” viewing

Politics of the living room

• Who has the power over the remote control in your household? Who determines what is going to be watched and how it will be watched?
• This makes a key difference

To review:

• Meanings of media can’t be determined by textual analysis
• Nor can they be defined by just analysis of secondary texts or inter-texts
• Nor can we just focus on audience interpretations

Rather, it all needs to be combined:

• We have to look at how audiences interpret texts,
• By situating audiences within specific social circumstances,
• By recognizing that the “text” is part of a larger series of related discourses,
• By acknowledging that the text was designed by someone, for a specific purpose
• And that audiences are always struggling to balance their own lives with the message in the texts they consume