12 Culture and Textuality
Dr. Debamitra Kar
In this chapter you are going to learn the following topics:
- What is a text and what is meant by textuality
- Some theoretical perspectives to understand the different models of language
- What is meant by constructing culture as a language, or culture as a sign
- Problems of reading culture only as a text
- Availability of any alternative model
Words are ready made and express themselves: They do not express me. Francis Ponge If language expresses, it does not so in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests…the fundamental will of those who speak it. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (Foucault, 1970)
Take a close look at the above two statements. In our everyday lives we think that words express certain things or ideas. These two statements would suggest otherwise. The first one suggests that words have a special power in generating meaning. They are somewhat beyond our control. The second statement proposes that words speak of the ‘will’ of those who are speaking them. You may think that these two concepts are contradictory. Take a closer look at the word ‘fundamental’. Are the individuals conscious of their ‘fundamental’ will? Or do they speak without being aware of the fact that the words are saying more than what they want to divulge? If we stretch this argument a bit further, we encounter a greater problem. Does our spoken language reveal our cultural position or social status even when we are not conscious of it? If the answer is a ‘yes’, then we must understand that speeches, which is a part of a language must have some kind of signs or codes through which they can communicate separately. These underlying structures and codes speak in unison with the greater structures and codes of the society. Not only the verbal language, or the speech, but every other aspect of our daily life like our choice of clothes, food-habit, choice of entertainment, our reaction to cinema, theatre, songs, advertisements, rockstars, news, or to a particular cityscape, our shopping preferences, that is to say pretty much everything that we do or say, betray more about us than we give them credit of doing. Thus, just as you analyse a novel or a poem by some underlying structure, similarly all these activities can also be analysed through some different structures. Therefore, all these activities and things that make our ‘culture’ can be seen as a text.
1. What is a text?
The word ‘text’ in its modern connotation became fashionable after structuralism influenced the Western metaphysics. Previously, any written document was seen as a ‘work’ that was written by an ‘author’. But today, the word ‘work’ is substituted by ‘text’ and ‘author’ by ‘writer’. Scholars like Roland Barthes have gone to the extent of declaring the author dead.
This sudden disappearance of the author and the subsequent change in vocabulary definitely speaks of a paradigmatic change that occurs in our reception and understanding of the world around us. This can be best understood when we compare and contrast the word-pairs like work/text and author/writer (scriptor).
The ‘work’ is an expression of the author’s design and meaning, it is what the author wants to say. The author nourishes his work, gives it a form and shape and existence. The analogy which Roland Barthes uses in this context is that of a father and child. The author exists ‘before’ the text, he thinks, suffers, and lives for it.
The text is a system of linguistic and literary convention. It is a depersonalized literary product. The writer here is an intermediary. Unlike the ‘author-god’ he cannot restrict the meaning to a single one but he has to depend on several factors like: the nature of the language with which he writes, the various other hegemonic powers of the society that produce meaning and finally the whims of the reader who reads it. Thus the text becomes a ‘multi-dimensional space’. But while reading the text we are unaware of the play of all these multiple meanings and we naturalize these linguistic and literary conventions.
Extending the concept of the author to a scriptor/writer and the work to a text, we come to realise that the operation of the text would be a bit different than that of the work. A text is interplay of signs that would be able to communicate a meaning among the individuals of a community who share these signs. Thus anything that communicates through signs can be seen as a text ranging from literary works to advertisements, food habit, dress, traffic signals, landscapes, cityscapes, and so on. Culture, which defines the ‘whole way of life’ can also thus be read as a text.
Textuality is the coherence or connectivity that characterises texts. It gives kind of a matrix on which the text can function and derive its meaning. It decides the placement of the sign and the subject’s interpretation of the sign in a given particular context. This is what is known as the textuality of the text.
In this context it would be helpful to know the concept of intertextuality. The term was first used by Julia Kristeva in her essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (written in 1966). Intertextuality, in Kristeva, means ‘a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another’. ‘The literary text is no longer viewed as a unique and autonomous entity but as a product of a host of pre-existing codes, discourses and previous texts’ (Allen 82). Thus every word in a text would have to be read not only in relation to what exists within the text (or what is ‘inside the text’) but also to other terms that relate to a host of cultural discourses (or what is ‘outside the text’). Thus, intertextuality changes not only our way of reading a text but also the very process by which the meaning is made.
In the following section we shall look at the major theories that contribute to the growth of the concept of text and their impact on Cultural Studies.
2. Some useful theories and their impact on Cultural Studies
Structuralism
Structuralism refers to the theoretical perspective, which influenced many disciplines like social anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and sociology. It originated in early 1900s in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and influenced the field of linguistics for a long time. However, it resurfaced in France in 1950s and 1960s. Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology and semiotic analysis of cultural phenomenon, Michel Foucault’s work on history of ideas, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism are some of the seminal works which shaped and formed the argument of structuralism in the second phase. Like many other theories, the impact of structuralism was holistic in nature and hence it could change the course and nature of study of all the disciplines that it touched.
The basic tenet of structuralism says that there is an underlying structure behind the apparently fluctuating and changing social reality. The model of this structure is Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics.
According to Saussure, there is a direct connection between the word and what we believe the word represents. Saussure rejects the idea that language is not a mere heap of words that are accumulated over a period of time. Thus he denied the long tradition of studying the language as a historical development happening in different language communities for ages. He argued that language has a set of rules that governs its course. He differentiated between three words: language —the universal phenomenon of language, langue—a particular language system, and parole—language in use, specific speech acts. Thus language must be understood as synchronic, i.e., something that exists at one point of time in contrast to diachronic, i.e., something that develops over a period of time.
The next theory that Saussure puts forth is that a word is not mere symbol which correspond to referents or things, but is a sign that is made up of two parts: a mark, either written or spoken, called a signifier, and a concept or that what is thought when the mark is made, called a signified. His model is popularly represented as:
It follows then that the elements of language acquire meaning not as a result of some connection between words and things, but only as parts of a system of relations. Saussure also pointed out certain aspects of the sign system. First of all, the relation between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. For example, by using the letters arranged as and pronounced as T-R-E-E we conceive of a particular image like . However, the same image can be conceived by a Hindi speaking person with the signifier B-R-I-K-S-H-A. Thus, the sound or physical arrangement of letters in T-RE-E or B-R-I-K-S-H-A (i.e., signifiers) is not determining the thought-image that is evoked by either of them. It also does not matter how one writes the signifier, it can be written as TREE, Tree, TrEE, or tree, it can be written in black or white or any other colour but it would mean the same to a particular individual.
The second point that is raised by Saussure is that the value of a sign is understood by its difference from the other signs. Value of anything is determined by two principles: first it must be compared with a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for which the value is to be determined, for example one ten-rupee note may be exchanged for a loaf of bread; secondly, it must be compared to similar things, for example, a ten-rupee note is different from a hundred-rupee note or one-dollar bill. Extending the idea we may say that the value of a sign is relational and differential. A tree is a tree for it is not a sapling, just as the ten-rupee note is different from a hundred-rupee note or the loaf of bread. Saussure writes: ‘In language there are only differences… differences without positive terms.’ (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics).
2.1.2 What we learn from structuralism:
- Meaning is generated through the rules and conventions that organise language (langue) rather than the specific uses and utterances which individuals deploy in their everyday lives (parole). That means, when we speak, we unwittingly follow a structure that lies hidden inside our speech. For instance, you won’t say: ‘a dress bought I’ for the meaning of the sentence will only be understood when the words are arranged according to the conventions of English language, i.e., subject-verb-object, therefore, ‘I bought a dress’ makes sense. It is not mandatory that all language community would follow this subject-verb-object arrangement.
- Meaning is a social convention. It depends on the signifying practices that organise the relation between signs. This involves the process of selection and combination of signs along the syntagmatic (linear, e.g., sentence) and paradigmatic (a field of signs, e.g., synonyms) axes. Take a look at the previous sentence. All the words used in the sentence function as signs performing some specific grammatical function. A verb works differently from a subject/agent, which again is different from an object. Again, a dress is different than frock or a pair of jeans though they all mean apparel/clothes.
- These underlying structures are categories of the mind and we organise the world around us according to these terms.
How structuralism influences culturalstudies:
Language constructs the very nature of our perception of reality. Thus literary/visual/musical texts are structured like language. They perform according to some grammar. Structuralism also speaks about the representation of meaning by the functioning of the signs in a relational system. Similarly, one particular cultural sign can also be related to another sign. They may operate in pairs—binary oppositions. Binaries play a significant role in our identity formation. For example, one is a woman (not a man), vegetarian (not a non-vegetarian), Brahmin (not a non-Brahmin), north Indian (not a south-Indian), with leftist (not rightist) political leanings, and so on. In these binaries, the significance of one term is determined by the other term (‘man’ can only be determined with reference to a ‘woman’ and so on), that is to say that they are positioned within a relationship. ‘Meaning is thus a combination of the two—the grammar of the text and the grammar of the cultural context’.
2.2 Roland Barthes and the concept of Myths
Roland Barthes furthered the concept of signs to myths, which is based on our identification of ‘duplicity or doubleness’ of such signs. In a collection of 50 odd essays called Mythologies, published in 1957, he showed that literature is a highly ideological system which included all the bourgeois myths of French daily life like wrestling, soap powder, detergent, wine, and so on. These myths are projected as natural recurrences but there is a deep structure of language which ideologically and historically determines the nature of these signs. Thismeans that things that we accept without much thought, something as this-goes-without- saying (Barthes uses the term doxa, current opinion) is actually controlled and petrified by conventional wisdom that have a deadly effect on the individual. In the last essay of this collection, titled ‘Myth Today’, Barthes defined myth as ‘a speech chosen by history’; he also presented the semiological system—that is, the structural and ideological dimension of myths. Let us take a look at what he says.
As Saussure says, sign is a relation that we draw between the signifier and signified. Their relationship can be presented as this:
Barthes shows that language studied by Saussure is thus a first-order system: it involves a signifier, signified and their combination/relation/equivalence, a sign. Mythology takes this sign and turns it into a signifier for a new signified or concept. Barthes says: ‘myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it. It is a second-order semiological system’ (quoted in Allen 43). To put it more simply, myths work on existing signs of the first system and turn them into a signifier in a new system. A graphic representation perhaps would be a bit more helpful:
For example, the word ‘car’ is a sign for a vehicle. This is the first-order sign system. But a particular brand of car can be projected as a signifier for a particular class, one’s adventurous nature, love for travel, or one’s love for one’s family. In this second-order sign system the car becomes a sign for the statement of one’s attitude towards life, his economic ability and of course, his status symbol. The sign ‘car’ is now translated to a myth.
There are two more terms that we should know of, first is signification which is the process by which the first order meaning is turned into a second order meaning. The second term is metalanguage. The myth is a metalanguage: a second order language which acts on a first- order language, a language which generates meaning out of already existing meaning. However, the first-order meaning is not altogether forgotten. While buying a car we would choose a model that is suitable to our budget, or the quality of the model. But it would not stop us from looking at a particular brand of car and thinking that had we got more money we could have bought it. This is the problem of the signifier of the myth, it always points both ways. Barthes puts it quite succinctly when he says that myths are like alibi. They always say: ‘I am not where you think I am; I am where you think I am not’ (quoted in Allen 45).
Poststructuralism
This interdisciplinary movement began in France during the 1960s and spread rapidly to other countries. The chief aim of the poststructuralists was to examine the radical analytical possibilities inherent in Saussure’s theory of language. The problem pointed out by the poststructuralists was primarily the fixity of the signifier-signified relationship that structuralism propounded. Though Saussure said that the bond between the signifier and signified is unmotivated, arbitrary, and though there is no natural connection between the sound image and the concept, it is nevertheless fixed within an individual system of language.
Saussure also defined language as a pure system of values. To quote him: ‘A value-so long as it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations, as happens with economics (the value of a plot of ground, for instance, is related to its productivity)-can to some extent be traced in time.’ The poststructuralists raise doubts against both this concept of fixity and values. They suggest that Saussure was relating the value of the sign with some fixed notions which are perceived as ‘natural’ by the society. They critique these social assumptions. To put it a bit differently, signifier and signified are as arbitrary in their relationship as the sign and the thing to which it refers. The sign is not a unit of two fused parts governed by a binary principle, or the signifier and the signified are not the two sides of the same coin as Saussure says, but are two operational layers which momentarily touch and out of this accidental intersection a meaning is created which is unstable and temporary. Hence, meaning is not something transcendental or fixed but valid only in a particular historical instance, in a specific social context. Take the example of a dictionary. It is regarded as the ultimate referent for here the word is related to a particular meaning. However, while looking up for a particular word we may find several definitions of one word. Each of these definitions is of course a signifier and asks us to connect it to another set of signifier or signified. Thus, looking for a fixed meaning we are led to more words and more meanings, and the trail is never complete. The meaning that finally emerges is not a single or fixed one but a matrix of complex relationships of signifiers and signifieds. By placing the signifier in the context of language, the language-users problematize meaning in their attempts to create it. Meaning is never assured but it is merely sought as it is deferred.
Deconstruction
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) furthered the concept of poststructuralism by propounding the theory of deconstruction. The word deconstruction comes from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) concept of Destruktion, by which he proposed to slacken off the old tradition of ontology (the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being)—through an exposure of its internal development. Derrida used the term to suggest a new kind of reading of the Western metaphysics that would force us to rethink the common practices of meaning making, knowledge acquisition and understanding of the life around us. Derrida has been suspicious of the idea that a fundamental ‘grammar’ underpins culture, language and the human mind. In his early works he argued that human sciences, like natural sciences are dependent on some transcendental truths. These truths are give birth to the idea of a fixed centre, like for instance, an Origin, a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Essence, a God, a Presence. These words seem to guarantee a culmination of all meanings. The truths operate through fixed process, i.e., logocentrism, (the importance of logic in Western Metaphysics) and are contained in a system of binaries. For example look at the following sentence:
Men grow beard. Women do not have beard. I have a beard. Therefore, I am a man.
See how the personal identity is based on a series of logical statements and the opposition between two ideas contained in the words ‘men’ and ‘women’. Derrida extended such operations of the language to the field of philosophy by which he pointed out the politics of the language in works of writers like, Plato, Nietzsche and Marx.
Derrida believes that construction of such truths denies the natural operations of the language. They give birth to a centre. Deconstruction would involve a way of reading that would be concerned with decentering i.e., unmasking the problematic nature of all centres. However, the decentring is a political practice. The prevailing centre can very soon be decentred but that does not mean that it should give rise to another alternative centre in its stead. The phase of reversal may subvert the present hierarchy with a fresh one. This would continue the binaries. Derrida wants us to look at all the centres with equal amount of suspicion and wariness.
Take a look at the following picture:
If you have a system of triangles like the above one, you would immediately notice that this is a configuration of many triangles. None of these triangles are prioritized, or marginalized, but rather each triangle emerges out of a previous configuration and merges into a future configuration. This play of configuration goes on endlessly. There is not central configuration that tries to freeze the play of the system. Convey this idea to your understanding of deconstruction. According to Derrida all the texts, if deconstructed would operate in the same way. Not only language, but human thought also that is constructed like language would also follow the same pattern. We should always attempt to see the free play in our language and texts—otherwise, we shall be confining the possibility of meanings to a certain fixity or institutionalism or totalitarianism.
Cultural Studies after Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
| Structuralist cultural studies | Poststructuralist cultural studies |
| Language system | Language as diffuse |
| Signifier/signified | Slippery signifier/matrix of signifiers |
| Way of life | Meaning-making |
| Class structures | Cultural communities |
| Institutional and fixed power | Power as personal relationships |
| Ideology and hegemony | Everything as representation |
| Structural resistance | Power at the level of the body |
| Democratic socialism | Democratic multiculturalism |
| Media institutions | Media-making |
Source: Lewis 119
The above chart would show you how Poststructuralism has influenced and altered Cultural Studies. Poststructuralism has challenged the relation between the sign and the concept that it represents. Let us go back to the previous example. When someone says that she is a woman (and not a man), she is actually having some already pre-conceived notions/ideas about the signs of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Poststructuralism questions these preconceived notions and shows how they circumscribe and control our interpretation of reality. For instance, ‘masculinity’ is always associated with power, a physical stature, confidence, adventurousness, daring; one does not associate culinary skills (except of course, when one is a celebrity chef) or dancing-singing skills with masculinity. These ideas are repeated and recycled in everything that you see, read, know, ranging from your text books, advertisements, news reports, cinema, popular music, government policies, to the T-shirt graffiti—so much so that you start to believe them as real and true. Such essentialist notions can be challenged if you can deconstruct the signs and understand the workings of the discourses.
The problems of the ‘linguistic turn’ in Cultural Studies
You have so far learnt how to read culture as a text. You have also learnt how the text is made up of language and the language is constituted by signs, codes and discourses. Such an analysis of culture has dominated Cultural Studies for a long time. Study of culture has often been seen as almost interchangeable with the study of language—that is breaking it into sign, signifiers, signifieds, and signification systems. For the students of Cultural Studies this practice of looking at culture ‘working like a language’ is extremely important. However, there are a few important drawbacks that should be borne in the mind:
- Cultural Studies have concentrated only on literary texts and the analyses of their languages.
- An over-emphasis on structuralist and poststructuralist models of language leads to the reification of language as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’. Language is dissociated from the speakers and the audience, and becomes an independent entity that has its own meaning and operational procedures that cannot be controlled by human will. We tend to forget that language is also ‘a noise and mark’ that individuals make in order to express themselves.
- Structure of the language is over-emphasized at the expense of actual usage of language by real-life people in everyday situation. There is another aspect to this aspect to this problem. Cultural studies at times emphasize on the usage of the language of the people but it reads such use of language only as a counter-hegemonic practice or as a resistance towards cultural homogenization. But this is not the case all the time. For common people may use language to negotiate power in their own way.
- By separating signification from other practices, habits and routines, a theoretical gap emerges between the signification and meaning. We tend to emphasize only on the linguistic aspect of the practices but the practices itself carry much significance.
Reification: the act of transforming human properties, relations, and actions into properties, relations, actions of man-produced things which have become independent of man and govern his life. Also the act of transforming the human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world.
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, P 463
- If we want to emphasize systemicity, interdependence, discipline and need for structural change, then the language of codes, discourse and subject position is our tool.
- If we want to stress ethics, actions, change, uniqueness, we need to explore he utterances of persons in social contexts.
Example 1:
- Such reading of the food culture, where we are speaking about the codes and signs that imply a structure of the society, culture here is best understood when it is read like a language-text.
In 2002, The Guardian conducted a competition of SMS poems. This particular poem received a special prize for most creative use of SMS shorthand. Read the poem:
a txt msg pom his is r Bunsen brnr bl% his hair lyk fe filings w/ac/dc going thru.
I sit by him in kemistry, It split my @toms Wen he ) @ me.
- Look how the SMS language can break the signs, codes and structures inherent in our language-system. You do it every day without thinking that you are actively participating in a dialogue with the social norms (codified in the usual signs of words) and redrawing the power-structure. Moreover, the meaning of this language is not restricted to any class or group but is dependent on some technical knowledge. Such individual appropriation of the power of language can be seen as the second way of looking at culture where the individual is placed before the structure of language and is endowed with the ability to question the discursive use of language
Once you have realised the problems of reading culture only as a text it is now important to see what other reading methods can be taken up for a more holistic view of culture.
- Cultural studies must benefit from the studies of living, speaking subjects, which means conducting an ethnographic study. Such study in Cultural Studies has been concerned with ‘qualitative explorations of values and meanings associated with every act of life of the individuals which would disclose their position on cultures, life-worlds and identities’ (Barker). We have already learnt from poststructuralism that the real is a representation and how the politics of representation creates the centre and the margin and how the common people react and negotiate with the consequences of such power division.
- The agency and importance of the audience as producers of meaning must be acknowledged. People do not simply accept ‘official’ textual meaning or simply resist hegemonic practices of languages. Meaning cannot be simply injected into our minds (hypodermic model); the audience play an active role in decoding meaning.
- For example, cultural study can help us to see how people negotiate their identity. Identity is thought to be universal and timeless core, an essence of the self that is expressed as representations that we can relate to and also expect others to realise. What is now required is to understand identity as something constructed by individual use of language that reflect the
- Subject’s acculturalization, values, knowledge, and so on. Language here is used ‘as a tool which we use to achieve our purposes’ (Rorty). Language ‘makes’ rather than ‘finds’; the identity is rather a process of ‘becoming’ than something essential. It is something temporary and unstable.
- Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA represents one such way of analysing the language-based data. It is interested in real-life data which has not been edited. It addresses issues like the position of the subject—that is, knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of ‘place’ from where one speaks, and to whom one speaks. The language-users are not simply individuals but these individuals are members of a particular community. When such a research method is adopted in Cultural Studies, it is possible (i) to uncover the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in our social life, (ii) to avoid the easy binary divisions in understanding reality and (iii) to appreciate the ideological positions for those who are involved in the research work. Thus it would help one to realise the language-politics embedded not only in social practices but also in the very process of interpreting the world around us.
Summary
- A text is different from a ‘work’. It means interplay of signs. Textuality is the matrix on which the text operates.
- Anything can be a text. It need not be literary as such.
- The word ‘text’ implies a language model. Language is a sign-system.
- A sign has two components: signifier and signified.
- The idea of the presence of an inherent structure in language is denied by poststructuralist.
- Culture also operates like language, that is, like a sign-system. It reveals a deeper structure of the social values and interpretation of reality.
- However, only studying culture as a language has some drawbacks: it takes us away from the actual speakers and listeners of language.
- An alternative research model is required to address the issue. The importance of the subjects and the audience, and the practical uses of language should be taken into account to understand the power-structure of the society and how we negotiate that every day.
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Reference
- Allen, Graham. Roland Barthes. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
- Barker, Chris and Dariusz Galasinki. Cultural studies and Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 2001.
- Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Vintage, 2000.
- During, Simon (ed). The Cultural Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
- Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies. London and New Delhi: Sage, 2008.
- Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva, 2008. http://www.moma.org/collection http://www.lacma.org/search/node/rene%20magritte
- Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu