Hall, Stuart
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (an extract of about four minutes; the English auto-captions are slightly garbled in places)
Core ideas
Hall explains that cultural and media studies are not about denouncing the "distortions" the media impose on a meaning whose truth we could find independently of them, but about understanding how meanings enter into events themselves and help constitute them: this is why culture becomes a "primary" force, not a secondary element. Culture is the way in which we make sense of things or give them meaning. We do not all make sense of things in the same way, but if we shared no concepts we could not make sense of the world together or build a social world. Cultures consist of "maps of meaning," frameworks of intelligibility that allow us to interpret a world that exists but is ambiguous as to its meaning until we have made sense of it. Privileging representation as the giving of meaning therefore places culture at the centre: it is not just the values we happen to be born into, but what makes the world intelligible.
He then takes classification as one of the principal ways of giving meaning (chairs are like stools because you sit on them, and both differ from tables, although you can also sit on tables): without some notion of what belongs with what and what differs, we would have no conceptual map. The capacity to use and classify concepts is biological, he says, but the particular classifications we use are not printed in anyone's genes: they are learned, though not necessarily through formal instruction, and to become a cultured subject rather than "a blob of genetic material" is to internalize the shared maps of meaning of one's culture. Our concepts are themselves a system of representation, letting us hold absent objects in mind and think about things that are not "out there" in a simple sense (our fantasy life is full of things real to us), which dissolves the simple idea that concepts are mirror images of the world.
Finally he stresses that the production of meaning is a practice ("signifying practices," a kind of symbolic work) that must be carried out to give meaning to things and communicate it, and that media studies concentrate on the effects and products of these practices, widely circulated by the media, while reminding us that the media are not the only way meaning circulates (conversation being the first). When complicated institutional and technological systems replace face-to-face exchange, the circulation of meaning becomes very widespread, and it immediately raises the question of power: who has the power, through which channels, to circulate which meanings to whom. Power, he concludes, can never be bracketed out from the question of representation.
Excerpts
“Cultures consist of the maps of meaning, the frameworks of intelligibility, the things which allow us to make sense of a world which exists but is ambiguous as to its meaning until we've made sense of it.”
“The production of meaning is not something that just happens because the world is already fixed out in its meanings which don't change. [...] There is a kind of symbolic work, an activity, a practice which has to go on in giving meaning to things and in communicating that meaning to someone else.”
“The question of the circulation of meaning almost immediately involves the question of power: who has the power, in what channels, to circulate which meanings to whom. [...] The issue of power can never be bracketed out from the question of representation.”