Navigating through the world of media

The world of media is exhilarating, and yet it is often so close to our faces that we don’t have a chance to look at it critically. That’s what this guide will try to cover in general lines, adding to what we built on our nextbook.

Cultural analysis as a philosophical practice

The beginnings of cultural analysis as an academic practice are directly tied to important changes to the western world. The air of war and the advent of newer economic ideas, among other factors, brought a renewed look at how culture is done, and how culture should be studied and understood. One of the figures we studied was Walter Benjamin (Wiki), an essential figure in the beginning of the modern study of culture. Benjamin’s life and work, brief and vast each, talks about culture in light of a changing economic landscape. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (full text), Benjamin looks at how works of art, facing new modes of production, have seen their usage and position displaced. What does that mean exactly? Think of the difference between a religious image used in a church and the picture of a religious image in a modern art museum.

Art, changing art

Traditional ways of looking at art become obsolete due to the changing panorama of art itself. Art, influenced by new technologies, but also new ideas, evolves with our own understanding of culture. This leads us to both broader questions about the nature of culture, and more narrow questions about the construction of cultural objects. In what follows, we will explore a couple of those questions in the same vein we explored them in our class.

Culture, information and change

We have two areas of questioning here. First, the broad question about the nature of culture. Second, the narrow question about how cultural objects are constructed. Let’s take up the second topic first. Let’s talk about the word media. Or rather, about the singular of media, medium. Backtracking our usage of the language we commonly assign to the way we obtain cultural objects allows us to think more specifically about what it means for something to be a cultural object by itself, and what a medium might be. There are multiple ways to understand the concept, and it seems common nowadays to talk about media as a thing we consume in a metaphorical sense, such as movies or videogames. Theories of media, however, pay attention to more than just how we call the things that we consume for entertainment and communication! One important figure we studied in our class was Marshall McLuhan (Wiki). In his Understanding Media (comments and review on link, Jstor access requires) we observe media not simply as platforms where we access contents, but rather as new technologies that change how we interact with people and the world. McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message”, is a good way to think of how a given medium works, particularly when that medium conveys some kind of information.

McLuhan, both entertaining and interesting, explains his views here himself:

The medium is the massage message insofar as focusing solely on content does not give us the full story of what we are dealing with in the case of cultural objects. Form and content create a whole, a unity that brings us more information than simple statements about things.

For instance, when you think of a novel you like, when you tell other people about it, you may usually start with the plot, but it’s hard to convey the full experience of the novel by appealing solely to the story that takes place. The experience of reading a novel is more complex than reading what happens. And this is the same for every cultural object, it seems.

The semiotics of culture

Another way to look at culture we studied took us to a different realm: The understanding of culture as a system of significations. We took the work of Juri Lotman (Wiki) as a starting point for analyzing cultural dynamics and the development of study objects within the study of culture as a signification-building environment.

Lotman’s work proposes a very interesting way to look at culture in terms of texts, following their composition, location and movement across the different areas of culture. In fact, his work is essential for understanding some of the things we want to understand!

In On the Semiosphere, Lotman guides us through his theory of how culture–and what is meaningful within it–is systematically organized, with some specific delimitations that we can use to understand the dynamics of signification. The semiosphere, you may recall, is roughly divided in a center, a periphery, a boundary and the extra-semiotic space beyond the organization of culture. The center is the least dynamic, most established area of culture, where we find the canonical expressions of language, behavior, the arts, and so on. The further away we get from the center, the more we enter the periphery a place where cultural expressions all start changing, becoming less and less like what lies at the center depending on how far away we are from it. Think of rural dialects, artistic expressions that border in vandalism, etc. What contains the semiosphere is its boundary. The boundary also translates what lies beyond the semiosphere, such as other cultures or nature. It turns what lies outside into something comprehensible on the inside.

Lotman, as the pivotal figure in the so-called Tartu Moscow School of Semiotics, normally used literary texts as a way to exemplify his ideas on culture. You can see more information on the Tartu Moscow School of Semiotics here:

Semiotic analysis of texts

Another concept we have to keep in mind is that of a text, also in the vein of Lotmanian semiotics. Texts are units of analysis that appear in our theories. We study texts as combinations of signs. Texts are a way to describe cultural objects in general. We don’t need to think of texts as written texts, but rather, as a useful shorthand to describe signifying elements in culture. The thought process is: Things that have meaning, present that meaning through signs. Things that are meaningful are composed of multiple signs.

In other words, this part of the methodology allows us to look at different kinds of cultural objects looking for their meaningful aspects, irrespective of what the object is made to be like. We can look at literature, visual art, ways of speaking, and so on. In fact, take a look at the following piece:

Looking at the work of art depicted here, what we have is, indeed, a text. It may seem like a strange text, but it is a text we can make sense of in a number of ways. We don’t want to focus solely on what it means, we want to make sense of the text applying the notions we have already learned. We can think of how this text is located within a certain semiosphere. We can think of it in terms of medium. We can also try to make sense of the meanings in it and their relation to one another. For this, we want to jump to the work of Algirdas Greimas (Wiki). Greimas, a Lithuanian semiotician who spent the majority of his career in France, developed a theoretical framework for understanding the coherence of meanings within a particular text. This we call a Semiotic Square. The idea of the semiotic square is, roughly, to find relations of significance between what appears in a text, what doesn’t, and what is related to both what appears and what doesn’t appear. We can look at individual elements in the text, relate them to their contradiction and absence, and analyze the specific meanings as they are built in our description. If we have violence as one of the concepts in our semantic field, we can look at not-violence as its contradiction; kindness as the contrary term to violence, and not-kindness as the contradiction to kindness. Having access to these two concepts (violence and kindness) allows us to look at their contradictions (not-) and implications (not-violence is an implication of kindness). We can see how these concepts play out in the text we just saw, finding whether there are instances of violence and kindness within the relations of the parts in the visual representation we saw. This gives us a syntactic/semantic paired description of the object that can uncover specific meanings and actual signifying relations in the text we are analyzing.

Narrativity and beyond

There are many elements in the construction of texts that we covered. An important aspect was narrativity. In this quick guide/refresher, we’ve gone quickly through some of the main topics we covered during our class. However, partly inspired by Lotman’s own treatment of cultural objects, we can pay attention to narrativity as a special feature of some cultural objects that can be analyzed more profoundly. One of the sources we used was Tzvetan Todorov’s Structural Analysis of Narrative (requires access). Since we also focused on internal coherence, we asked philosophical questions about the nature of fiction and fictional entities. Ruth Ronen’s Are Fictional Worlds Possible? (requires access) was an interesting text for us to read and test our philosophical assumptions about the contents of narrative media.

Though there is so much to explore, this guide is a quick way to review what we saw throughout the semester, refresh the contents we explored and perhaps even ask new questions about the nature of media and its analysis, about what is necessary for us to actually present a useful analysis of media of all sorts.

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