Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis

A Dialogue on Language and Identity

Chris Barker,Dariusz Galasinski

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781446223291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This novel and important book brings together insights from cultural studies and critical discourse analysis to examine the fruitful links between the two. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis shows that critical discourse analysis is able to provide the analytic context, skills and tools by which we can study how language constructs, constitutes and shapes the social world and demonstrates in detail how the methodological approach of critical discourse analysis can enhance cultural studies. In a richly argued discussion, the authors show how marrying the methodology of critical discourse analysis with cultural studies enlarges our understanding of gender and ethnicity.

1

Language, Culture, Discourse

Cultural studies has for sometime been a constituent part of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences with writers arguing that language is the central means and medium by which we understand the world and construct culture. Indeed, the contemporary emphasis given to language within cultural studies is itself a part of a wider ‘cultural turn’ that is constituted in two ways. First, culture is explored through its own specific mechanisms and logic without reduction to any other phenomenon (e.g. the mode of production). Second, facets of a social formation that had previously been considered to be quite separate from culture can themselves be understood as cultural. For example, ‘economic forces’ are cultural because they involve a set of meaningful practices, including the social relations of production and consumption, along with questions of design and marketing. Thus, to put meaning at the heart of human activity is also to place the examination of culture at the top of the agenda of the humanities and social sciences. As Du Gay et al. argue, ‘rather than being seen as merely reflective of other processes – economic or political – culture is now regarded as being as constitutive of the social world as economic or political processes’ (du Gay et al., 1997: 4).

It is a core case of cultural studies that language does not mirror an independent object world but constructs and constitutes it. Culture is said to ‘work like a language’ and identities, which were the central category of cultural studies in the 1990s, are held to be social and discursive constructions (see Barker, 2000). Though cultural studies has convincingly argued the philosophic case for the significance of language and has produced a large body of textual analysis, it is rarely able to show how, in a small-scale technical sense, the discursive construction of cultural forms is actually achieved. Here, we will argue, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is able to provide the understanding, skills and tools by which we can demonstrate the place of language in the construction, constitution and regulation of the social world. That is, CDA is a methodological approach that can add to and enrich cultural studies. Consequently, we hope to forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue between two fields of inquiry that have for sometime been interested in similar areas of study.

About this book

This book is constructed as a productive dialogue between cultural studies and CDA, bringing together the insights and analytical capabilities of these two domains. In doing so, we hold that an analytical strength of our book derives from the analysis of the utterances of speaking subjects.

In this chapter we set out the philosophy of language which has informed cultural studies before suggesting that critical discourse analysis is a necessary addition to it. Chapter 2 investigates the implications of the ‘linguistic turn’ for the self and cultural politics while Chapter 3 explores the tools which CDA brings to the investigation of culture and cultural politics. Having established the theoretical and practical advantages of a dialogue between cultural studies and CDA, Chapters 4 and 5 offer case studies, of gender and ethnicity respectively, to illustrate the gains that the alliance we propose can bring. In the final chapter (6) we explore the intersections in the production of masculinity and ethnicity through a fusion of cultural studies and CDA.

This opening chapter serves a dual purpose. It acts as an introduction to theories of language for the ‘new’ reader and as a ‘position’ chapter for an audience familiar with the philosophy of language. The chapter will review the core arguments that cultural studies has taken up from Saussure, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault and in doing so state our own position.

First, we will outline the central argument of cultural studies: that language is relational in character; that signs have no direct referents in an independent object world but generate meaning through their relationships to other signs organized into syntagmatically and paradigmatically structured codes. From this, it is argued that all cultural forms can be analysed ‘like a language’ (Barthes, 1967, 1972).

Second, we forward the argument adopted by a good many cultural studies writers (following Derrida, 1976) that the binary relations between signs proposed by structural linguistics are not stable, rather, meaning is unstable and slides down the infinite play of signifiers. That is, differance – difference and deferral. Nevertheless, we argue, though meaning is formally undecided, in social practice it is regulated and temporarily stabilized into pragmatic narratives or discourses. Discourses, which after Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980) refer to language and practice, are regulated ways of speaking about a topic which delimit the sayable and unsayable.

Third, we take Wittgenstein (1953) as a mediating figure between the Derridean notion of differance and the Foucauldian concept of discourse. Like Derrida, Wittgenstein argues that meaning is relational, formed within language games. However, he also suggests that meaning is stabilized and regulated in use, embedded as it is in pragmatic narratives. Using the metaphor of the ‘tool’, we are directed to the diverse functions words play in human life. To see language as a tool is to suggest that we do things with language so that, in the context of social usage, meanings can be temporarily stabilized for practical purposes. As Rorty (1991a) argues, we have a variety of languages because we have a variety of purposes. Indeed, we suggest that Rorty’s blending of Wittgenstein and Davidson is useful to cultural studies in helping us to regard language as a series of marks and noises used by human animals to achieve their goals. Knowledge is not a matter of getting an accurate picture of reality, but of learning how to contend with the world in the pursuit of our various purposes.

Wittgenstein was, of course, a key influence on the formation of discourse analysis and it is CDA, we suggest, that can show us the detail of how the social world is constructed and regulated. CDA augments cultural studies by showing us the technical linguistic building bricks of social construction.

Culture and language

As Raymond Williams (1983) observed, the concept of culture is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. Indeed, it is best not to pursue the question ‘what is culture?’ but rather to ask about how we talk about culture and for what purposes. Culture has been variously described as ‘cultivation’, as ‘a whole way of life’, as ‘like a language’, as ‘power’ and as a ‘tool’ etc. That is, the abstraction ‘culture’ covers a variety of ways of looking at human conduct and can be used for a range of purposes.

Williams understood culture as constituted by the meanings and practices of ordinary men and women. For him, culture is lived experience; the texts, practices and meanings of all people as they conduct their lives within the totality of ‘a whole way of life’. Williams insisted that culture be understood through ‘the analysis of all forms of signification . . . within the actual means and conditions of their production’ (Williams, 1981: 64–65). In so far as contemporary cultural studies has a distinguishing ‘take’ on ‘culture’ it is one which stresses the intersection of language, meaning and power. Culture is said to be centrally concerned with questions of shared meanings so that

To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in broadly similar ways. (Hall, 1997: 2)

The shared meanings of culture are not ‘out there’ waiting for us to grasp them. Rather, they are the product of signifying practices, most notably those of language. Language constitutes material objects and social practices as meaningful and intelligible, it structures which meanings can or cannot be deployed under determinate circumstances by speaking subjects. To understand culture is to explore how meaning is produced symbolically through the signifying practices of language within material and institutional contexts. Indeed, the currently ascendant strand of cultural studies holds the field to be centrally concerned with culture as the signifying practices of representation (see Hall, 1997).

Signs, texts and codes: structuralism in cultural studies

The breach between Williams’ concern with meaning produced by active human agents and an understanding of culture centred on signifying systems, cultural texts and the ‘systems of relations’ of language marks the shift in cultural studies from ‘culturalism’ to ‘structuralism’ (Hall, 1992a). Structuralism is anti-humanist in its de-centring of human agents from the heart of inquiry. For structuralism, signifying practices generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person. Structuralism is largely synchronic in approach analysing the structures of relations in a snap shot of a particular moment. In this, structuralism is also asserting the specificity of culture, and its irreducibility to any other phenomenon, taking culture to be analogous to, or structured like, a language.

It is noteworthy that structuralism is more concerned with the structures of language which allow linguistic performance to be possible than actual performance in its infinite variations. Crucially, in Saussure (1960) and Levi-Strauss (see Leach, 1974) – both critical figures in the development of structuralism – meaning is generated through the rules and conventions which organize language (langue) rather than the specific uses and utterances which individuals deploy in everyday life (parole).

For Saussure, signs, which are constituted by signifiers (medium) and signifieds (meaning), do not generate sense by virtue of reference to entities in an independent object world, rather, they create significance through reference to each other. Meaning is a social convention generated by signifying practices that organize the relations between signs. This involves a process of selection and combination of signs along the syntagmatic (linear – e.g. a sentence) and paradigmatic (a field of signs – e.g. synonyms) axes.

The relationship between signifiers and signified is said by structuralism not to be held in any fixed eternal relationship. Rather, their arrangement is arbitrary, suggesting that meaning is culturally and historically specific. The relations between signifiers and signifieds are organized (and maintained) through social conventions into cultural codes. Signs become naturalized codes and the transparency of meaning we give to words and sequences of signs are an outcome of a cultural habituation that conceals from us the practices of cultural coding. Thus, the cultural code of traffic systems temporally fixes the relationship between colours and meanings into a code so that ‘red’ signifies ‘stop’ and ‘green’ signifies ‘go’.

Signs of popular culture

Structuralism extends its reach from ‘words’ to the language of cultural signs in general. Barthes in particular became an influential figure within cultural studies through his expansion of the structuralist account of language to include the practices of popular culture which, read as texts, are not to be grasped in terms of the utterances or interpretations of specific human beings but as a set of signifying practices. It is in this sense that all cultural practices become open to semiotic analysis. While everyday usage of the word ‘text’ refers to writing, it has become an axiom of cultural studies that a text is any phenomenon that generates meaning through signifying practices. Hence, dress, television programmes, advertising images, sporting events, pop stars, etc. can all be read as texts.

In his early work, Barthes (1967, 1972) spoke of two systems of signification; denotation and connotation. Denotation was said to be the descriptive and literal level of meaning generated by signs and shared by virtually all members of a culture. Thus, ‘man’ denotes the concept of a male member of the human species. At the level of connotation, meanings are generated by connecting signifiers to wider cultural codes of meaning. Thus, ‘man’ may connote toughness, hardness and rationality, or violence and injustice according to the sub-codes or lexicans at work. Further, the sign ‘member’ may now multiply up to carry the expressive value of the penis being the central symbol of masculinity coded as sexual performance.

Connotations which have become naturalized as hegemonic, that is, accepted as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ are described by Barthes as myths. These act as conceptual maps of meaning through which to make sense of the world and turn cultural constructions into pre-given universal truths. For example, just as red signifies ‘stop’ within one cultural code, so ‘biceps’ signifies a male with connotations of strength within a popular code of masculinity. The myth of masculinity suggests that men are strong physically and mentally with the latter marked by emotional stoicism. Myths work by naturalizing culturally contingent codes into unchallengeable commonsense. ‘Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal’ (Barthes, 1972: 155).

Reading signs

What Hall (1992a) calls the ‘moment of structuralism’ in cultural studies was important because, in giving us the language of signs and codes, it laid the foundations for a stream of analyses of popular cultural documents, artifacts and practices all treated as texts. That which Williams called ‘lived experience’ is now held to be textual. The consequences of this were that while Paul Willis (1977;1978), under the influence of Williams, was exploring the lives of young men ethnographically, Hebdige (1979) turned to semiotics to explore the meaning of youth cultures, and Punk in particular, through the textual category of style.

Punk semiotics

For Hebdige, style is a signifying practice achieved through the transformation of the signs of commodities through the process of bricolage. Bricolage involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. It is a process of re-signification by which cultural signs with established meanings are reorganized into new codes of meaning.

Punk, Hebdige said, was a dramatization of British economic and social decline and an expression of anger and frustration. Punk style was an especially dislocated, self-aware and ironic mode of signification. As bricolage signifying noise and chaos at every level, Punk style was held to be ordered and meaningful, a ‘revolting style’ which created an ensemble of the perverse and abnormal; safety pins, bin liners, dyed hair, painted faces, graffitied shirts and the iconography of sexual fetishism (leather bondage gear, fishnet stockings etc.). Through disordered dancing, cacophonous sound, desecrating lyrics, offensive language and anarchic graphics punk ‘did more than upset the wardrobe. It undermined every relevant discourse’ (Hebdige, 1979: 108).

The influence of structuralism also lay behind a number of investigations of popular cultural texts including news (Brunsdon and Morley, 1978; Hartley, 1982) and Soap opera Dyer et al. (1981). Noteworthy was Williamson’s (1978) pioneering exploration of advertising in which semiotics is deployed to address their formal qualities. She pointed to the way in which objects in advertisements are signifiers of meaning that we decode in the context of known cultural systems, associating products in adverts with other cultural ‘goods’. While an image of a particular product may denote only beer or perfume it is made to connote ‘male fun’ or ‘female sexuality’ so that advertising creates a world of differences between products and lifestyles which we ‘buy into’. For Williamson, such advertising is ideological in that its images of consumption obscure economic inequality that is generated at the level of production.

Talking to people

In response to Hebdige’s work on youth culture, Cohen (1980) expressed the core concern ‘that these lives, selves and identities do not always coincide with what they are supposed to stand for’ (Cohen, 1980: xviii). The problem is one of relating an analyst’s structural interpretations to the meanings held by knowing subjects. Cohen suggests that not only are the semiotic inspired interpretations of youth culture offered by Hebdige and others disputable, but that young people are made to ‘carry too much’. At heart is the criticism that such analysis fails to engage with members’ accounts of subcultural involvement (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995). This point is of course core to Paul Willis’s longstanding commitment to ethnography as the means to ‘represent the subjective meanings, feelings and cultures of others’ (Willis, 1980: 91).

The active audience

Structuralist-inspired textual analysis assumed that meaning lay in the text. Critics challenged this view on grounds that texts are unable to police the meanings created by readers/audiences. Texts are said to be polysemic, that is, they embody the potential for a number of different meanings to be constructed from them. Cultural understanding of texts cannot remain with the text but must concern itself with the processes involved in the realization of meaning by readers (Gadamer, 1976; Hall, 1981; Iser, 1978). Consequently, cultural studies spawned a range of audience and consumption studies that repeatedly held audiences and consumers to be active creators of meaning and not the cultural dopes of textual positioning.

Morley (1980) led the way with his study of the audience for the news magazine Nationwide, where he argued that class provided the basis for resistant and oppositional readings of a textually embedded ideology. He was closely followed by Hobson (1982) and Ang’s (1985) examinations of the female audiences for the soap operas Crossroads and Dallas respectively. These wome...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Language, Culture, Discourse
• 2 Language, Identity and Cultural Politics
• 3 Tools for Discourse Analysis
• 4 The Name of the Father: Performing Masculine Identities
• 5 The Language of Ethnicity: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Polish?
• 6 Intersections
• References
• Index