Sample Exam question:
Media &Cultural Studies
Semester 5 Prof. Ms Belgaid
Analyze the following quotation:
‘‘The investigation of culture has often been regarded as virtually interchangeable with the
exploration of the processes of representation. While culture is not just a matter of
representations but also of practices and spatial arrangements, it can nevertheless be argued
that it is the process of representation that makes practices meaningful and significant to us.
Since representations are not innocent reflections of the real but are cultural constructions,
they could be otherwise than they appear to us.’’
Answer:
Culture as a term has two meanings. Its established sense and use result from its usage
within various discourses. It stems, originally, from a purely agricultural root: culture as
cultivation of the soil, of plants, culture as tillage. By extension, it encompasses the culture
of creatures from oysters to bacteria. Cultivation such as this implies not just growth but
also deliberate tending of natural stock to transform it into a desired cultivator– a strain
with selected, refined or improved characteristics.
The second meaning of culture was established, especially by Matthew Arnold (the
British critic of 18th century) and his followers, as the pursuit not of material but of
spiritual perfection via the knowledge and practice of ‘great’ literature, ‘fine’ art and
‘serious’ music. Since the goal was perfection, not just understanding, and spiritual, not
material, culture was seen as the training of ‘discrimination’ and ‘appreciation’ based on
‘responsiveness’ to ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’. The cultural
critics strove then to prescribe and establish a canon of what exactly could be counted as
the ‘best’. But such critics also tended to see themselves as an embattled community
struggling against the material civilisation and scientific technology to preserve the
‘sweetness and light’ of culture and the greedy spirit of mass society and the Industrial
revolution that dominated the period. Such advocators of this concept of culture-as a high
state of perfection have been influential in offering an ideology to highly placed elites in
government, administrative, intellectual and even broadcasting circles within which their
sectional interests can be represented as general interests of the populace.
Indeed, one of the important cultural critic who suggested pertinent definitions of the
term culture is Raymond Williams in his book The Long Revolution (1965). He lucidly
defines culture as ‘‘a particular way of life’’ shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material
objects and territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic set of people, things, conceptions
and places that influence social interaction. Culture is simply a context. Williams favours
rather the social definition of culture regulated within social structure. Closely related to
the concept of culture is the issue of identity and representation.
The concept of identity is an important category within cultural studies especially
during the 1990s. It attests cultural portrait of persons with which we emotionally identify.
Identity here is a slippery concept and remains basically a cultural construction because
the discursive resources that shape the material for identity formation are cultural in
character. Thus, we are constituted as individuals through social interactions without
which we would not be persons. Indeed, the very notion of what it is to be a person is a
cultural question (for example, individualism is a marker of specifically modern societies)
and without language the very concept of identity would be unintelligible to us. Identities
are then understood to be discursive practices that enacts or produces. For example, sexual
differences between men and women are socially constructed. Ethnic identity means more
than living as and being accepted by others in that culture; it means having authenticated
bloodlines showing a certain ethnic descent, consequential upon which may be various
entitlements and rights, from land to welfare, or as some have suggested, by DNA testing.
Identity is not a universal concept. But what about representation? In language, media
and communication, representations are words, pictures, sounds, sequences, stories, etc.,
that ‘stand for’ ideas, emotions, and facts. Representations rely on existing and culturally
understood signs and images, on the learnt reciprocity of language and various signifying
or textual systems. It is through this ‘stand in’ function of the sign that we know and learn
reality. Some representations go to the heart of cultural and political life – for example,
gender, nation, age, class, etc. Since representations inevitably involve a process of
selection in which certain signs are privileged over others, it matters how such concepts
are represented in news media, movies, or even in ordinary conversation. Analysis of
representations of race, for example, in the cinema suggests an implicit racism that could
be found. In the case of gender, demeaning images of women for some could be
overturned by substituting such negative representations with ‘positive images’. Clearly
representations articulate with cultural power and are misrepresentations. When
considering media representations, as another instance of misrepresentation, rather than
looking for accuracy, it is perhaps more useful to understand the discourses that support
the image in question. Furthermore, one cannot assume that all people read all
representations in the same way. A representation is never innocent but it is used to make
sense and to render the interests of a dominant ‘bloc’ into an apparently natural and
unarguable general interest.
Finally, one can say that representation is closely related with questions of power
through the process of selection and organization that must inevitably be a part of the
formation of representations. The power of representation lies in its enabling some kinds
of knowledge to exist while excluding other ways of seeing.
