Language
Issues of language are central to culture and thus to cultural studies.
Language is important to an understanding of culture for two central and related
reasons: first, language is the privileged medium in which cultural meanings are formed and communicated; and second, language is the primary means and
medium through which we form knowledge about ourselves and the social world.
Language forms the network by which we classify the world and make it
meaningful, that is, cultural.
Following the influence of structuralism within cultural studies, the
investigation of culture has often been regarded as virtually interchangeable with
the exploration of meaning produced symbolically through signifying systems that
work ‘like a language’. To hold that culture works ‘like a language’ is to argue that
all meaningful representations are assembled and generate meaning with essentially
the same mechanisms as a language. That is, the selection and organization of signs
into texts which are constituted through a form of grammar.
An essentialist or referential understanding of language argues that signs have
stable meanings that derive from their enduring referents in the real. In that way,
words refer to the essence of an object or category which they are said to reflect.
Thus the metaphor of the mirror is to the fore in this conception of language.
However, for the anti-essentialist (anti-representationalism) view of language that
informs cultural studies, language is a system of differential signs that generate
meaning through phonetic and conceptual difference. That is to say, meaning is
relational and unstable rather than referential and fixed. Here meaning derives from
the use of signs so that language is better understood with the metaphor of the tool
rather than that of the mirror.
For cultural studies, language is not a neutral medium for the formation and
transfer of values, meanings and forms of knowledge that exist independently
beyond its boundaries. Rather, language is constitutive of those very values,
meanings and knowledges. That is, language gives meaning to material objects and
social practices that are brought into view and made intelligible to us in terms
which language delimits.
Within those philosophies of language that have been deployed by cultural
studies there is a division between those who think there is something called ‘a
language’ that has a structure and those who do not. In the former camp lies
Saussure and structuralism (semiotics) which has been concerned with the ‘systems
of relations’ of the underlying structure of sign systems and the grammar that
makes meaning possible. Meaning production is held to be the effect of the ‘deep
structures’ of language that are manifested in specific cultural phenomena or
human speakers but which are not the outcome of the intentions of actors per se.
However, thinkers in the latter camp see the concept of ‘language’ as itself a tool
or metaphor for understanding the marks and noises that human beings deploy to
achieve their purposes but which does not itself have any underlying structure or
‘existence’. Thus, Derrida undermines the notion of the stable structures of
language. Meaning, it is argued, cannot be confined to single words, sentences or
particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts, that is,
intertextuality. For Derrida, meaning can never be ‘fixed’, rather words carry
multiple meanings including the echoes or traces of meanings from related words
in different contexts.
(Adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)
Issues of language are central to culture and thus to cultural studies.
Language is important to an understanding of culture for two central and related
reasons: first, language is the privileged medium in which cultural meanings are formed and communicated; and second, language is the primary means and
medium through which we form knowledge about ourselves and the social world.
Language forms the network by which we classify the world and make it
meaningful, that is, cultural.
Following the influence of structuralism within cultural studies, the
investigation of culture has often been regarded as virtually interchangeable with
the exploration of meaning produced symbolically through signifying systems that
work ‘like a language’. To hold that culture works ‘like a language’ is to argue that
all meaningful representations are assembled and generate meaning with essentially
the same mechanisms as a language. That is, the selection and organization of signs
into texts which are constituted through a form of grammar.
An essentialist or referential understanding of language argues that signs have
stable meanings that derive from their enduring referents in the real. In that way,
words refer to the essence of an object or category which they are said to reflect.
Thus the metaphor of the mirror is to the fore in this conception of language.
However, for the anti-essentialist (anti-representationalism) view of language that
informs cultural studies, language is a system of differential signs that generate
meaning through phonetic and conceptual difference. That is to say, meaning is
relational and unstable rather than referential and fixed. Here meaning derives from
the use of signs so that language is better understood with the metaphor of the tool
rather than that of the mirror.
For cultural studies, language is not a neutral medium for the formation and
transfer of values, meanings and forms of knowledge that exist independently
beyond its boundaries. Rather, language is constitutive of those very values,
meanings and knowledges. That is, language gives meaning to material objects and
social practices that are brought into view and made intelligible to us in terms
which language delimits.
Within those philosophies of language that have been deployed by cultural
studies there is a division between those who think there is something called ‘a
language’ that has a structure and those who do not. In the former camp lies
Saussure and structuralism (semiotics) which has been concerned with the ‘systems
of relations’ of the underlying structure of sign systems and the grammar that
makes meaning possible. Meaning production is held to be the effect of the ‘deep
structures’ of language that are manifested in specific cultural phenomena or
human speakers but which are not the outcome of the intentions of actors per se.
However, thinkers in the latter camp see the concept of ‘language’ as itself a tool
or metaphor for understanding the marks and noises that human beings deploy to
achieve their purposes but which does not itself have any underlying structure or
‘existence’. Thus, Derrida undermines the notion of the stable structures of
language. Meaning, it is argued, cannot be confined to single words, sentences or
particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts, that is,
intertextuality. For Derrida, meaning can never be ‘fixed’, rather words carry
multiple meanings including the echoes or traces of meanings from related words
in different contexts.
(Adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)
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