Skip to main content

Thoughts on Thoughts

 On page 125, Slack writes: “While working with a still- recognizable model of transmission, Hall’s encoding/decoding challenges the simple assertion of intrinsic identity by insisting that the components of the process (sender, receiver, message, meaning, etc.) are themselves articulations, without essential meanings or identities. This move compels a rethinking of the process of communication not as correspond but as articulation.” Which I, and I think a lot of comm scholars, would agree. This plays an important role in understanding communication but, importantly and especially, in emphasizing the many directions of power and/or influence that can exist within that articulated moment. In a word, an awareness of connection both to an individual and systems. I suppose my question is: shouldn’t more people have this knowledge? How do we share this beyond the academy? Why is Communication in undergrad always focused on public speaking/public relations/marketing etc rather than such consequential theorizing? 

In line with this, I want to discuss more the postmodernist take on the collapse/implosion of all meaning. It’s an argument I have been thinking about a lot and I think Hall adds more nuance to it. He argues that representation/meaning is not at an end, but rather the process of encoding has multiplied to create a plurality of codes. So, meaning does exist but, then I wonder, doesn’t it simultaneously not exist? What if we identify a different meaning than what should be read? I know this is pretty standard “communication does not equal the transmission model and often we read different meanings than what someone wanted to share” argument. Grossberg, too, points to the multiple/intersecting/assemblage ways of language (and reality). I am not arguing meanings should not be multiplied (indeed they are), but I guess I am wondering how this argument works under systems of power. In particular, I’m thinking about the ways multiple meanings exist but, often, it is hegemonic understanding that is written upon them. What does realities mean when only one reality is believed?  How do we get out of this trap? (If it is a real trap, or only one I made up in my mind).


Finally, last Q I have! On page 143 of the interview Hall shares: “This is a cultural transformation. It is not something totally new. It is not something which has a straight, unbroken line of continuity from the past. It is a transformation through a reorganization of the elements of a cultural practice, elements which do not in themselves have any necessary political connotations…” I am wondering the implications of this statement on current activist movements that are fighting/advocating for a new system/order: do we need to transform rather than build anew? When does transform just become reform, and how do we mark the difference? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2/2 Discussion Questions

Althusser makes a point that ISAs operate as "unified" under the ruling ideology. To what extent are certain ISAs unified if they are "the site of class struggle" playing out, holding the potential for "ruptures" (to use Hall's phrase) with dominant ideologies? Here, I am thinking about the University of Iowa's COVID policies and how its rules are practiced and applied in many different ways throughout campus, as administrative burdens and scale make it difficult to oversee large numbers of employees. More generally, as junior scholars, grad students, and/or individuals doing cultural studies work, does it make more sense for us to do deep and nuanced readings of theorists such as Marx and Althusser in our work, or to cite others who have expanded these traditions over the years?
Post a Comment
Read more

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more