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

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Analogue artforms retained a nostalgic aura of authenticity, both

artistic and legal. A ‘metaphysics of presence’ (see difference) made

artists feel better about analogue images that you could actually see in

their material form, on film, canvas or paper, unlike the entirely

virtual digital images. Although paintings were faked and photos

doctored throughout the analogue era, digital images could be

manipulated more readily than analogues, i.e. more cheaply, and

without lifetime professional skills, using commercially available

software. A consequence of this is that greater sophistication is

required of readers and users – the naive (analogue) idea that photos

depict some actually existing scene is a matter for scepticism, not least

because increasingly users have the digital means to manipulate,

improve, subvert and embellish information for themselves.

On the flip side, it is still the case that one of the triumphs of digital

art is to make the result look like analogue, so that extensive press

coverage is given to advances that allow a digitally animated movie/

games heroine to look like a real woman, or a hairy monster to look

truly hairy. This is the phenomenon that Marshall McLuhan called

‘rearviewmirrorism’, when a new medium copies the one it is

destined to supplant – for now at least, digital is copying analogue.

See also: Aesthetics

ARTICULATION

In cultural studies, articulation doesn’t carry its most familiar sense of

‘uttering clearly’. It is used in the sense you may recognise from

‘articulated truck’ – where articulation denotes the joining of two

things together. In cultural studies, what may be articulated are not

two components of a truck but large-scale social forces (especially

modes of production), in a particular configuration or formation at a

particular time, called a conjuncture, to produce the structural

determinants of any given practice, text or event. Just as an articulated

lorry has a prime mover and a trailer (where the prime mover,

although smaller and lighter, determines the movement of the trailer –

it provides motive force to the trailer), so articulation describes not

simply a combination of forces but a hierarchical relationship between

them. Forces aren’t simply joined or jointed, they are ‘structured in

dominance’.

The term derives from Marxist analysis, where it refers to the

articulation of different modes of production. The economic and

social relations of a society during a given epoch will display an

articulation of different modes of production – capitalist, feudal and

even communal, all at once – but one of these modes of production is

structured in dominance over the others or ‘overdetermines’ them and

obliges them to adapt to its needs, or integrates them into the

mechanisms of its reproduction. Hence the feudal monarchy survives

into the capitalist epoch, but is adapted to its purposes; or an industry

such as publishing retains feudal relations between author and

publisher within the overall capitalist mode of production of books;

or a social institution such as the family allows for communal modes of

production to be exploited by a capitalist economy. These are classic

articulations.

The term has been extended in use to include articulations of other

social forces. You might read, for instance, of the articulation of race

and class in an analysis of subcultural music, or of the articulation of

gender and nation in an analysis of sport.

ARTICULATION

The term peppers the writings of analysts who are not only Marxist

but who are also connected with the Birmingham Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies in Britain. Elsewhere it has been used

to account for certain problems in cultural anthropology, especially the

specific forms of, say, Asian or pre-conquest American modes of

production within a Marxist (i.e. Eurocentric and modernist)

framework of analysis.

See also: Ideological state apparatuses, Interpellation

AUDIENCES

The term audience is used to describe a large number of unidentifiable

people, usually united by their participation in media use. Given the

varying demographics of this group, not to mention variations

between nations, the concept itself is a means by which such an

unknowable group can be imagined. Naming an audience usually also

involves homogenising it, ascribing to it certain characteristics, needs,

desires and concerns. The audience is a construction motivated by the

paradigm in which it is imagined. This construction serves the

interests primarily of three ‘producer’ groups:

. media institutions

. media researchers (including critics)

. regulatory (governmental) bodies.

Audiences enable media organisations to sell advertising or to fulfil

their public and statutory obligations, whether for television, radio,

magazines or the press. It is important to know the size, quality

(demographic composition) and characteristics of audiences for this

purpose – these data relate directly to revenue. This accounts for the

continual measurement of viewers, listeners and readers. For media

institutions, the concept of audience allows the exchange of

information and entertainment to become commodified.

For media researchers, audiences may be studied as a ‘whole’ if the

purpose is to generate general sociological data, as for example in the

work of Pierre Bourdieu on taste distinctions in French culture. But

very large-scale statistical techniques nowadays are beyond the reach of

most academic researchers, and are found only among commercial

audience research and polling organisations (see Morrison, 1998). In

media and cultural studies, researchers have turned to the study of

AUDIENCES

selected groups, identities or constituencies among the overall

audience. They make such selections according to their own research

and political priorities (this is why audiences are a ‘construct’ in media

research). What is of interest is not the self-understanding of the

audience as a collective ‘knowing subject’, if such a thing could exist,

but answers to questions generated by the intellectual agenda. In

particular, media ethnography has concentrated on the way that social

variables such as class (Morley, 1980), gender (Ang, 1985), age

(Buckingham 2000), family circumstance (Morley, 1986), ethnicity

(Gillespie, 1995), etc., cause audiences to interact variously with media

texts.

For regulatory bodies, media audiences (unlike those for ‘cultural

pursuits’ such as live theatre) are normally equated with the public at

large. They are at once consumers in need of both exploitation and

protection, citizens (voters!) and ‘society’ – subject to moral, welfare

or educational policies. Regulators therefore occupy a governmental

position in relation to audiences (see power). Legislation may be

restrictive (censorship, pornography) or enabling (freedom of speech).

It may be conducted at the highest level of national policy (Rupert

Murdoch deals with prime ministers and presidents) or much lower

(an usherette enforcing age restrictions in cinemas). But in all of this,

audiences do not self-regulate in any organised way.

For all of these institutional bodies, the audience is the ‘imagined

community’ that enables the institution to operate. It is rare to see or

hear the views of the audience ‘itself ’, except in letters pages and on

talkback radio. Semiotic versions of audiences are included in

entertainment formats, where they act as a kind of guide to the

appropriate or desired response – enjoyment, laughter, applause,

euphoria. These include game show participants, studio audiences,

laughter/applause tracks on sitcoms, etc.

Notably absent from the formal process of gaining, and gaining from,

knowledge of audiences are ‘consumer’ groups – the audiences

themselves. People rarely self-identify as audiences, and are only thinly

represented directly by their own organisations, which are normally

single-issue associations devoted to, for instance, ‘cleaning up’ the

apparent propensity for sex, violence and bad language on the TV

(Hartley, 1992a: 105).

See also: Discourse, Effects, Meaning, Public

Further reading:

Ang (1996); Hartley (1992b)

AUDIENCES

AUTHOR/SHIP

A common-sense concept which accounts for meaning by ascribing

it to a creative, individual source. In such a context, an author’s

intentions govern and warrant a particular reading for texts, the

meanings of which are taken to be a form of private property,

belonging to the author (even though the text itself, in the form of a

book, may belong to the reader). Meaning is deemed to be a creation

of individual genius or experience, which is then transferred in a linear

way directly to the brain of the reader. The activity of reading is

reduced to that of a receiver, more or less finely tuned to pick up the

already fished meanings sent down the channel by the author. This

common-sense approach to authorship has its origins in medieval

religious reading, where the ‘author’ of a sacred text such as the Bible

was thought to be divine, and thus there was nothing for readers to do

but work out the authorial intentions from the clues in the text, and then

to obey them. The idea that readers might ‘make’ meanings for

themselves was, literally, blasphemy.

Authorial intentionalism has become controversial in modern,

secular textual criticism, because it takes the obvious fact that texts are

written or scripted by a human agent (or agents) and uses this fact to

underpin the highly ideological theory of meaning outlined above.

An author is not ‘one who writes’. Only some writers and writings

‘count’ for the purposes of authorship. For instance, private,

ephemeral and functional writings usually don’t count as authored:

that is, letters, diaries, shopping lists, school exercises, notes in the

margins of books, telephone messages and even ‘creative writing’ – the

things that most people actually write. In the public domain the same

applies. It would be hard to find an author for labels, advertisements,

news, posters, street and shop signs, graffiti, junk mail, technical

instructions, etc. – possibly the majority of reading matter encountered

on a day-to-day basis.

Authorship can no longer be found readily in creative and fictional

writing. Much of the fiction circulating in modern societies comes in

the form of television and movies, where the concept of authorship is

very hard to sustain, given the input of so many people in the

production process. Other creative works circulate orally and aurally –

stories, jokes, songs. These too escape the traditional definition of

authorship, even when they can be traced to an individual writer.

Authorship is a creation of literary culture and the marketplace; it is

one of the great markers of ‘high’ as opposed to ‘popular’ culture, and

AUTHOR/SHIP

it is invoked to ascribe not just meaning but value – aesthetic or moral

as well as monetary – to works and authors identified by literary

criticism (and marketing managers) as ‘significant’. Once an author’s

name has been established, then potentially any writing under that

name counts as authored – even down to shopping lists, if any were to

turn up that had been penned by, say, Shakespeare. Such are the ironies

of ‘significance’.

Authorship is, then, a social system imposed on the domain of

writing; it is not the act or trade of writing. It is a system for producing

hierarchies within that domain. Authors are the product of a social

division of labour, and authorship is an ideological notion which

functions to privilege not only certain kinds of writing and writers,

but also, more importantly, certain ways of thinking about the

meaning of texts.

The ideology of authorship locates the source of literary quality not

in aspects of writing itself – the exploitation of genre, convention,

rhetoric, intertextuality and so on – but in the bodies of writers.

Creativity, inspiration, experience, the ability to ‘express’ thought,

emotion and truth, these personal attributes are supposed to emanate

from a free-floating individual consciousness which is assumed to the

source of meaning, with writing merely a transparent medium through

which the great thoughts can flow to the reader’s equally free-floating

consciousness.

The ideology of authorship leads, for example, to the fruitless

search for ‘what Shakespeare really meant’ – an impossible quest which

leads inexorably to the imposition of authoritarian meanings on a

given work by a critic who seeks to establish one reading as the only or

true reading. In other words, any appeal to ‘the author’s intentions’ is

coercive – it seeks to impose ideological closure on a text, to minimise

its polysemic potential. It is also dishonest, imputing to the author

meanings that are necessarily the creation of the critic. ‘Intentionalist’

criticism is reduced to second-guessing an author who is conveniently

absent, often dead, so that it is impossible to verify what his or her

intentions were.

Moreover, an author’s intentions do not account for the meaning of

a text. Even if the author can be interrogated, as, for example, in an

interview, what results from this process is not a direct account of his

or her intentions, but merely another text. Authors always work within

the domain of writing, which is an autonomous domain with its own

history, modes of production, genres, conventions and established

practices. Writers are to a large extent at the mercy of the discursive

resources available to them, and creativity comes not from abstract

AUTHOR/SHIP

‘genius’ but from an ability to exploit these resources. Once written, a

text takes on a life of its own, and what it means depends on the

conditions of its circulation and the uses to which it is put in different

places and times. Its meanings are always plural, and always exceed

what the writer thought was going on, intentionally or otherwise.

However, so established has the concept of authorship become that

it has achieved a kind of hegemony. It seems to represent a

pathological desire for an ultimate origin, a god who will finally limit

the infinite potentiality of meaning.

The desire for a singular origin for meaning has proved strong

enough to infiltrate areas of culture hitherto regarded as too lowbrow

to warrant authors, especially cinema, where the ‘auteur’ approach

seeks to account for certain films by conferring author-status on their

director. Naturally, auteur directors are credited with ‘significance’,

which may be traced across a number of films, and their ‘genius’ is seen

as an individual ‘vision’.

However, the source of meaning in cinema is notoriously hard to

pin down, which is to say that there is no single source, even at the

point of production, let alone once a film is released into the cultural

sphere at large. Auteur theory fixes upon just one person to represent

the creative input of the whole cast and crew – often hundreds of

people working on and off for months or even years, all of whom may

change with the director’s next project. In the history of cinema it has

never been clear who, of all these people, should be treated authorially

– the screenwriter has never enjoyed this status, but it has been

conferred not only on directors but also on stars and, more recently,

even on producers.

It seems in cinema, as in literature itself, that authorship is more a

way of organising marketing strategies and conferring value on

intellectual property than a way of accounting for meaning.

The general reader or viewer approaches authors not as persons at

all but textually; either solely by engagement with a text, or

additionally by knowledge gained intertextually about the author.

The author is ‘implied’ in the writing itself. Hence, for readers,

authors are not persons but an ensemble of rhetorical and narrative

ploys, dedicated to hooking and drawing them into the writing.

Throughout any discursive text or fictional story there are devices

which ‘guide’ the reader as to its preferred reading and direction. Such

devices may also be more intrusive or coercive – an authorial

introduction telling readers how to read what follows, or a cover blurb

which seeks to sell the writing on the basis of the author’s name,

institutional clout or biographical credibility.

AUTHOR/SHIP