Communication Yearbook 14

James A. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135152437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Communication Yearbook 14, originally published in 1991 delves into research concerned with: audiences - their effect on the mass media and how the mass media effect them; the quality of mass media performance and public opinion; the study of contemporary media from an organization studies approach; the implications of propoganda; the pressure of public opinion; and media agenda setting, among other issues. Commentaries provide refreshing viewpoints to each chapter, enhancing each chapter with complementary, or sometimes competing perspectives. Once again Anderson has brough together an internationally distinguished team of contributors who have created a forum for discussing cutting-edge topics in the field.

Section 1

Media Studies: Audiences, Industries, and Assessment

1 When Is Meaning? Communication Theory, Pragmatism, and Mass Media Reception

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

University of Copenhagen

This chapter offers an outline of a social semiotics of mass communication and defines meaning simultaneously as a social and as a discursive phenomenon. The argument draws its concepts of signs, discursive differences, and interpretive communities from the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce in order to move beyond the essentialistic notions of meaning that characterize much previous communication theory, both in the social sciences and in cultural studies. Mass-mediated signs give rise not to a transmission of entities of meaning, but to specific processes of reception that are performed by the audience acting as cultural agents or interpretive communities. As audiences engage in socially specific practices of reception, mass media come to function as institutions-to-think-with. Empirical research has served to question notions of mass media as a relatively autonomous cultural forum in which polysemic messages lend themselves to diverse audience uses and pleasures. The polysemy of audience discourses, indeed, suggests the prevalence of contradictory forms of consciousness that tend to reproduce a dominant construction of social reality. Critical social theory in a pragmatic mode, emphasizing the interested and future-oriented character of scientific analysis, can help to indicate how and to what extent audiences may make a social difference.

THROUGH reference to the category of reception, mass communication studies of the 1980s began to reexamine some fundamental issues con- cerning the nature and origins of meaning in human communication. Whereas audiences have been the object of continuous and substantial study since the beginnings of the field, current work implies a reconceptualization of mass communication processes as everyday practices producing and circulating meaning in society, particularly emphasizing the constitutive role of audiences as interpretive agents. The attention given to the decoding and social uses of media content has been apparent both in empirical research on audience responses and in cultural studies about media discourses. Further, it has entailed a dialogue across the critical-empirical, qualitative-quantitative boundaries of the field (Jensen, 1987; Jensen & Rosengren, in press; Schröder, 1987). The turn toward reception is, perhaps, most distinctively articulated in the recent tradition of qualitative empirical audience studies (Ang, 1985; Jensen, 1986; Katz & Liebes, 1984; Lindlof, 1987; Lull, 1988b; Morley, 1980, 1986; Radway, 1984), which have accumulated evidence that mass media audiences make their own sense of media content in complex and unexpected ways. Audiences may, to a significant degree, modify or oppose the specific meanings that appear to be proffered by mass media, and may, furthermore, appropriate those meanings for alternative ends as they engage in a questioning and reconstruction of social reality.

Behind this reconceptualization lies the as yet undeveloped assumption that meaning is simultaneously a social and a discursive phenomenon. On the one hand, meaning may be defined as the outcome of an interest-driven, situated act of interpretation performed by a social agent. This definition locates meaning in the real world of people, power, and pleasures. On the other hand, meaning traditionally is associated with particular vehicles – texts or other discursive forms. Discourse theory may be said to suggest that subjects and social realities are primarily functions of the operations of discourse, so that, for analytical purposes, media audiences should also be conceptualized as discourses or, perhaps, discursive strategies of interpretation. It is this duality of the concept of meaning that may, in part, account for the major ambiguities and conflicts over how to approach communication, both theoretically and methodologically, that have emerged in some recent attempts to take stock of reception analysis (for instance, see Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 5, no. 3, 1988; and Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1988). (The reader may also wish to see Jensen, 1986, Chapter 10, which offers a model of discourses and further serves to introduce the focus of my argument.)

Levels of Discourse

While recognizing the distinction between media discourses, such as television programs, and various types of audience discourses, such as decodings of or conversations about television, empirical reception studies have challenged the assumption that media discourses are somehow primary and that they narrowly constrain the meanings voiced in audience discourses. Instead, both forms of discourse can be said to represent moments or manifestations of the wider category of social meaning production. Even if studies have shifted the relative empirical emphasis toward the audience, the perspective has been one of audience-cum-content analysis, incorporating the discourses of empirical media users, which have often been absent in critical and cultural studies, as well as the structures of content, which, at least in the sense of culturally coded discourses, fall outside the scope of most social scientific research. Thus reception analysis seeks to account for mass media as social resources of meaning that may lend a sense of purpose to political, cultural, and other practices.

How to study the multiple discourses of mass communication with reference to an analytical level of discourse where evidence can be categorized and reflected upon is perhaps the main point of contention in recent debates. According to Lull (1988a), one of the foremost tasks for audience research is to develop metadiscourses, in the sense of systematic descriptive procedures that specify research designs, forms of evidence, and bases of inference. His underlying concern is with the social aspect of meaning, with people who engage a material and political reality through cultural forms of understanding that, significantly, are accessible for scientific analysis. In the next procedural step, the evidence may be assigned explanatory value from the perspective of a particular theoretical discourse, which is the third discursive level of reception analysis. In the words of Anderson and Meyer (1988), “It is method that generates the facts that become evidence within theory” (p. 292).

In contrast, some cultural theorists suggest that the above approach tends to reify particular conceptions of media, recipients, and discourses (Allor, 1988; Grossberg, 1988). They want to shift the focus of the debate to a further, fourth level of epistemological discourse. From this perspective, a continuous process of self-reflection may come into play regarding the precise status of audience discourses and media discourses, the interrelations among multiple discourses, as well as the analytical stance of the researcher who also works in and through discourses. Emphasizing the discursive aspect of meaning, such an enterprise would aim constantly to deconstruct and reconstruct the subject positions within discourse from which media might be said to make sense, either for “audiences” or for “researchers.”

However, whereas the level of epistemological discourse represents an important feedback mechanism in a discourse-based approach to reception analysis, analysts who insist on staying within the epistemological loop jeopardize their claim to a discursive position from which they might address mass communication as an aspect of social reality. For example, Grossberg’s (1988) advance reservations about the validity of Radway’s (1988) proposal to study the cultural practices of a single heterogeneous community to move beyond predefined notions of popular cultural forms, historical subjects, and their modes of engagement are indicative of an epistemological anxiety before the social aspects of discourse. By definition, studies of mass communication and other meaning production require researchers to take discursive positions in their analytical metadiscourse as well as in theoretical discourse. An interesting intervention in the debates has been made by Hartley (1988), who notes that one implicit aim of reception analysis is, and must be, to “persuade audiences to take up, unproblematically or otherwise, those positions that our critical analysis suggests are better than others” (p. 238). Because the activity of reception has major implications for issues of power and cultural identity, a theory of mass media reception would have to explain how the discourses of audiences, as well as of analysts, might make a concrete difference in the social construction of reality.

To sum up, the argument of this essay will focus on the level of theoretical discourse, while assuming that any specific theoretical perspective must be checked and balanced against other levels of discourse. In particular, I suggest that the framework of pragmatism and semiotics, as originally outlined by Charles Sanders Peirce, can help to integrate the social and discursive aspects of reception analysis.¹ Semiotics may, in fact, be contrasted with Saussurean semiology, the applications of which to mass media and popular culture have often neglected or misconstrued the reception aspect because of a particular philosophical legacy. Building on the Peircean framework, I characterize reception as a socially situated, semiotic practice through reference to the concept of interpretive communities. Finally, I introduce findings from empirical reception analysis in order to reinterpret the notion of polysemy, with implications for the analysis of mass media as social institutions and for the political conclusions that may be drawn from work with mass media audiences.

Where is Meaning?

A Cartesian Legacy

Like history, theory tends to repeat itself. Communication theory, in its quest for the foundations or origins of meaning, has reiterated the quest for some incorrigible foundation of knowledge that has preoccupied professional philosophy since Descartes (Rorty, 1979). Descartes, having hypostatized the distinction between the knowing subject and its objects in reality, committed philosophy to the project of reestablishing a symmetry between the subjective and objective realms as a foundation of human enterprise. Central to the Cartesian project was, of course, the definition of the subjective and objective poles of the universe. At the center of the modern mental universe emerged the solitary, but perspicacious, individual, just as in the areas of economic enterprise and political activity the individual presumably now reigned supreme (Lowe, 1982). The knowing subject was seen to have, potentially, the powers of introspection and self-awareness. Similarly, the objects of knowledge were seen to have positive existence. The crucial link between the realms – the correlate of external reality in human experience – was defined, following Locke, as the data of sense perception. Accordingly, eyesight entered philosophical discourse as the major metaphor for the activity of knowing. By pointing to sense data as objective correlates of individuals’ subjective knowledge, early modern philosophy arrived at a spatial and essentialist conception of reality and was thus able to address the question, Where is reality?

By analogy, the first few decades of communication theory have addressed the question, Where is meaning? Whereas Cartesian philosophy searched for means of gaining access to and representing aspects of reality, communication theory seeks to identify the means by which one mind is able to represent its own understanding (representation) of reality in a form that is understandable or meaningful to another mind. The question of meaning, admittedly, has received a variety of answers (McQuail & Windahl, 1981), but a common feature of several classic theories is the transmission metaphor, assuming that meaning is an essence of message content that can be located in spatial terms. In Lasswell’s (1948/1966) formulation of “Who/Says What/In Which Channel/To Whom/With What Effect?” (p. 178), the “what” of communication is conceived of as a message entity that maintains a rather simple presence in the world and links two minds with reference to a shared reality. Reception is said to involve a selection of certain building blocks of meaning, so that any communicant who “performs a relay function can be examined in relation to input and output” (p. 186).

Other classic communication theories approach the question – Where is meaning? – in a way that is reminiscent specifically of twentieth-century philosophy. As part of the general shift toward a philosophy based in the analysis of language (Hartnack, 1965; Wittgenstein, 1958), the procedures of knowing came to be seen as dependent upon formal and later natural languages, and philosophy may be said to have retreated to a position that observes reality from within language. Similarly, some communication theories focus their analysis on the manifest vehicles of meaning. The mathematical theory of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), for one, suggests that meaning resides in the signal of communication. This theory attempts to dissolve the question by reducing meaning to information or stimuli. While recognizing the semantic and pragmatic aspects of communication, the vocabulary of the book defines also the recipients in technical terms when arguing that a general theory of communication “will surely have to take into account not only the capacity of the channel but also (even the words are right!) the capacity of the audience” (p. 27). Whether or not these are the right words is precisely the issue. By assigning meaning and information to distinct categories of reality and by assuming the hegemony of technical reality, the mathematical model begs the question and ultimately fails to consider the reference of communication to some social reality and its reception by interpretive agents.

A similar delimitation of meaning has been made within semiology, and it has provided the framework for much research on the reception of media discourses. From a semiological perspective, meaning may be said to reside in structures of discourse.

Discourses of Semiology

By distinguishing between the code of communication and the channel, or contact, Jakobson’s (1960/1981) model makes the important point that meaning production is dependent upon culturally specific forms of encoding and decoding. A transmission via cable radio of, say, a symbolist poem by Baudelaire activates numerous codes of linguistic and cultural form even though the vehicle may be a digital signal. However, while Jakobson refers to the addresser and addressee who communicate through a message with reference to a context, he proposes to stay within the bounds of the language code, examining linguistic structures that may underscore a particular element of the model and hence a particular function of communication, for example, an expression of emotion, a command, or a poetic use of language. Indeed, the elements of Jakobson’s model have no status outside of language; reality and recipients are conceived of as linguistic traces. Jakobson wants to refrain from addressing “the question of relations between the word and the world” (p. 19).

While Saussure (1916/1959), like Jakobson, originally emphasized an immanent analysis of linguistic structures, some later semiological research, especially from a critical perspective, has developed the argument that the use of particular structures of media discourse may be a sufficient condition for an i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Section 1: Media Studies: Audiences, Industries, and Assessment
• Section 2: Public Opinion and Public Influence
• Section 3: Interpersonal Influence: Confrontation and Argumentation
• Section 4: Leadership and Relationships
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor
• About the Authors