Hartley J. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts

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necessarily part of any cultural text by drawing attention to the

verisimilitude of the characters, action, plot, etc., rather than to the

apparatus of its own narration: its rhetorical device is to pretend that

the telling is not there, there is only the tale. By familiarisation and

habituation to realist genres, readerships also contribute to the effect

by agreeing to read within the claims of the convention.

This naturalising process is often understood as ideological, since

realism in fact and fiction alike is assisted by semiotic tricks.

Understanding it as convention moves beyond a fruitless search for a

text’s proximity to the real. Rather, it draws attention to the signs and

techniques that have been employed for the reader to understand the

text as real. In film and television drama these may include the use of a

linear narrative, mode of address and technical aspects such as

continuity and editing. The conventions of genre are also understood

to inform the representation of realism. Science fiction, for example,

through the use of special effects, is able to create its own sense of the

real owing to the rules that govern the genre: it is therefore quite

normal to have ‘realistic’ portrayals of scenarios that everyone knows

are ‘really’ impossible.

Such conventions then become a sort of pact between film-makers

and their audiences. For instance, even though sound cannot travel

through space, it is standard practice to apply sound effects (whooshes,

engine noises) to spacecraft in movies – they are by general agreement

more ‘realistic’ as a result. That realism is as much ideology as

objectivity can be demonstrated by noting that its own conventions

evolve over time, and what was greeted as shockingly realistic in one

decade looks mannerist or kitsch in the next.

Realism is reliant on shared value judgements. What texts are

accepted as belonging to this category will depend on the use of those

conventions that have been accepted as realistic. These conventions are

the signifying aspect of realism.

Further reading:

Halliday (1978); Montgomery (1986)

REGULATION

Government guides and shapes the conduct of institutions, individuals,

the market and culture through regulation. Regulations are admin-

istrative rather than legislative instruments, but they are backed by

statute. The rules are intended to provide a framework that will bring

about stability and prevent disorder.

Government regulation is justified as necessary for the promotion

of the public good, in overcoming inequality and deprivation or

possible harm. It is also intended to stabilise industry and advance

particular activities. The word ‘protection’ has been used to describe

the purpose of regulation. The need for protection can be seen in rules

that uphold the consumer’s interest by means of price control or

quality control, or in regulation that guards workers from exploitation

or unsafe practices (Groenewegen, 1991). Regulatory controls within

the media determine issues of ownership, content and licensing,

shaping cultural consumption and production. Although regulation

differs from country to country, regulatory media requirements may

include: local content rules that require broadcasters to screen a

minimum number of hours of locally produced material, ratings and

classifications that prohibit certain content from being shown to

children and ownership rules to prevent a monopoly or an oligopoly

from occurring.

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As regulation often has direct or indirect consequences for the

distribution of wealth, it is seen by some as interference in the

workings of the market. Deregulation is based on the assumption

that the market alone ‘can do better’ and is advocated, in many cases,

on the grounds of regulatory failure.

One approach within cultural studies has been to interpret and

engage with the institutional frameworks that govern culture,

including regulatory frameworks and process. Bennett (1992: 397)

maintains that cultural practices should be seen as governmental, and

defined in terms of ‘the specificity of the governmental tasks and

programs in which those practices come to be inscribed’. ‘Govern-

ment’ in this context is taken to mean the action of governing,

controlling, ordering, commanding and systematising. As Rose (1999:

3) writes, it is ‘the invention, contestation, operationalisation and

transformation of more or less rationalised schemes, programmes,

techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct so as to achieve

certain ends’. In this sense, regulation is an explicit framework that

informs and influences conventions and interaction. Regulation can

be seen within a wider set of established spoken and unspoken rules,

boundaries and codes through which we are urged to curb behaviour

and negotiate communication (see also Foucault, 1977; Cunningham,

1992; Hawkins, 1993).

RHETORIC

The practice of using language to persuade or influence others and the

language that results from this practice; the formal study of oratory,

exposition, persuasion. Rhetoric was a formal branch of learning in

medieval Europe; one of the seven liberal arts or sciences, the others

being grammar, logic (dialectics), then arithmetic, geometry, astron-

omy and music. It fell into serious disrepute and did not survive the

Reformation. Rhetorical figures have survived, however, along with

certain rhetorical terms (see for example, metaphor) that have

achieved the status of ordinary language.

Since structuralism began to disclose how much of what we

know and experience is structured by the sign systems we inhabit and

encounter, there has been a noticeable revival of interest in rhetoric.

There are two good reasons for this. First, rhetoric as a branch of

learning requires us to attend to the sign system itself (whether verbal

or visual), and to concentrate on the devices and strategies that operate

in texts themselves – it offers a well-established and elaborate set of

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terms and classifications that we can use to see how sense is made, not

by reference to imponderables such as authorial intentions or ‘truth to

life’ but by reference to actual discourses.

Second, if rhetoric did not already exist it would no doubt have to

be invented, since so many of the various forms of cultural production

with which we are surrounded are by themselves highly rhetorical.

Publicity, advertising, newspapers, television, academic books, gov-

ernment statements and so on, all exploit rhetorical figures to tempt us

to see things their way. If we have available a means to unpick these

strategies we can begin to take a more critical and less intimidated

stance towards them.

Further reading: Dyer (1982: chs 1 and 8) for a modern application of rhetorical

analysis to advertising; Ong (1982: 108–112) for an account of its history

REPRESENTATION

In politics, representation means that a chosen few stand for the people

as a whole as their ‘representatives’ in Congress or parliament.

Similarly, in language, media and communication, representations are

words, pictures, sounds, sequences, stories, etc., that ‘stand for’ ideas,

emotions, facts, etc. Representations rely on existing and culturally

understood signs and images, on the learnt reciprocity of language and

various signifying or textual systems. It is through this ‘stand in’

function of the sign that we know and learn reality.

Representations are the concrete form (signifiers) taken by abstract

concepts. Some are banal or uncontroversial – for example, how rain is

represented in the movies, since real rain is both hard to see on camera

and hard to produce on cue. But some representations go to the heart

of cultural and political life – for example, gender, nation, age, class,

etc. Since representations inevitably involve a process of selection in

which certain signs are privileged over others, it matters how such

concepts are represented in news media, movies, or even in ordinary

conversation. In fact, Dyer (1993: 1) claims how ‘we are seen

determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on

how we see them [and] such seeing comes from representation’. It

should come as no surprise then that the way representations are

regulated through various media, genres and within various discourses,

has been given considerable attention.

Race and gender are examples of how analysis has sought to subvert

traditions that were seen to involve an inaccurate representation.

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Analysis of representations of race in the cinema suggested an implicit

racism could be found (see Bogle, 1989). In the case of gender,

innumerable studies have found demeaning images of women, and

some have argued that it is possible to overturn these by substituting

such negative representations with ‘positive images’ (see Artel and

Wengraf, 1990). Clearly representations articulate with cultural power,

but the demand for ‘positive images’ did not get far because of course

not everyone would agree on what counted as a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’

representation. As Lumby (1997: 4) rightly asks: ‘Is a sexist or

demeaning image something universal which anyone with the right

feminist consciousness can spot?’ Are ‘bad girls’ positive or negative

images? Seeking to redress the imbalance by producing more positive

representations of women was also futile if the underlying material

conditions went unreformed – negative images may be accurate,in

other words.

When considering media representations, rather than looking for

accuracy, it is perhaps more useful to understand the discourses that

support the image in question. Furthermore, one cannot assume that

all people read all representations in the same way. Any analysis should

be careful not to accuse an image of being patronising or demeaning,

because such a judgement speaks on behalf of a group who may not

feel the same way.

Further reading:

Lumby (1997)

SEMANTICS

The study of meaning from a linguistic perspective. Semantics aims to

analyse and explain how meanings are expressed in language. Current

inquiry seems to be organised around three important distinctions.

Sense versus reference. The meaning of a linguistic expression – a

word, for instance – can be treated in terms of its connection with

extra-linguistic reality. Thus, the meaning of the word ‘chair’ lies in its

capacity to refer outwards from the language to objects such as the one

on which you may be sitting as you read this entry. From a different

perspective, however, the meaning of a word can be considered in

terms of its relationship to other words in the language. Thus, the

meaning of the word ‘chair’ lies in its relationship with other words

such as ‘furniture’, ‘table’, ‘seat’, ‘bench’, etc. A famous example of the

distinction between sense and reference is the way in which,

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objectively, the same planet – Venus – can be referred to equally

appropriately as ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’, since it has

the capacity to shine brightly both in the morning sky and in the

evening sky. Consequently, the two expressions – ‘the morning star’

and ‘the evening star’ – have an identical referent, although the sense

of each expression is of course quite different. More attention in

semantics has been given to the area of sense relations than to that of

reference, in line with Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘the meaning of a word

is its use in the language’.

But ignoring either side of the contrast between sense and reference

tends to lead to unbalanced theories of meaning, and this can have

consequences that go beyond the domains of linguistic theory. It is

worth noting, for instance, that rival aesthetic theories can be divided

into two camps depending upon whether they tend to favour one or

the other side of the distinction between reference and sense: realist

theories favour art that appears to mirror or reflect reality in as direct a

way as possible; other more Formalist theories, however, stress the

conventionality of artistic representation and see art, and more

particularly literature, as a continual experiment with meaning (or

‘sense’). Contemporary literary theory tends to be very strong on the

conventional bases of meaning, so much so that at times it seems to

deny the possibility of any reality at all outside language. At the very

least, it insists that reality is not mediated to us directly, but is

constructed through acts of meanings, so that we have no direct access

to it outside of language. One pitfall of this position is that it can lead

to a species of idealism in which reality is spoken into existence

through language, and arguments about interpretation become

avowedly subjective, to the exclusion of culture and history as material

process.

In modern semantics sense relations have been treated in terms of

the following major relationships that words can have with each

other.

. Synonomy: expressions which can be used in identical ways are

considered synonymous, by which criterion an expression such as

to ponder is held to be synonymous with to meditate,orloutish is held

to be synonymous with uncouth.

. Antonymy: expressions which reverse the meaning of each other in

some way are considered to be antonymous. Thus, the pairs

woman/man, fast/slow, up/down, good/bad all express relations of

antonymy.

. Hyponomy: expressions may also operate in hierarchical relations of

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meaning where the meaning of one expression includes that of

another. Thus, the expression ‘dog’ is a hyponym of the expression

‘animal’, the latter being a superordinate term for a range of co-

hyponyms with dog, such as cat, monkey, giraffe, rabbit. Dog itself, of

course, is a superordinate term for another range of hyponyms such

as terrier, hound, retriever, etc.

Synonymy, antonymy and hyponomy consist, therefore, of differing kinds

of sense relations possible within the vocabulary of a language. They

provide a way of conceptualising the construction of meaning as it

goes on within the linguistic system. In this respect it is worth

emphasising that they display linguistic and not ‘real-world’ classifica-

tion. There is no reason in real world why terms for animals should be

organised in the particular types of sense relation adopted in English, as

becomes immediately apparent when comparisons in particular areas

of meaning are made between languages. According to Whorf (1956),

the Hopi tribe of North America used one word masaytaka to

designate all flying objects except birds. Thus, they actually designated

an insect, an aeroplane and an aviator by the same word, whereas

English provides quite separate lexical items.

Word meaning versus sentence meaning. Other approaches to the

meaning of words involve notions such as semantic features and

collocation. Whatever approach is adopted, however, it does not seem

possible to account for the meaning of a sentence merely by building

upwards from the individual words that make it up. Otherwise ‘Man

bites dog’ would mean the same thing as ‘Dog bites man’.

Nonetheless, it seems possible that there may be parallels between

the kind of sense relation we have described between words and those

that exist between sentences. A sense relation such as synonymy, for

instance, may be considered to hold not only between individual

words but also between whole sentences. Thus ‘Sidney sold the book

to Sheila’ may be considered to be synonymous with ‘Sheila bought

the book from Sidney’, and the same kind of relation can be claimed

between ‘The police arrested the miners’ and ‘The miners were

arrested by the police’. Other kinds of relationship that can hold

between sentences are those of entailment and presupposition. Entailment

is a relation whereby, given two sentences A and B, A semantically

entails B if under all conditions in which A is true, B is also true. Thus,

a sentence such as ‘Achilles killed Hector’ entails ‘Hector is dead’. In

such cases B follows from A as a logical consequence. If it is true that

Achilles killed Hector, then Hector must as a logical consequence be

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