Hel,lo my name's Tom and welcome back to my channel where I talk a little bit about
theatre, a little bit about being a PhD student and a little bit about those two
things lashed together. Today, another episode of What The Theory? and we're
building on some of those ideas that I looked at in my last What The Theory?
video around semiotics to look at the concept of cultural texts. As always, if
you've got any further questions or any ideas for other videos I could make,
please do drop them in the comments down below
I'm always really keen that these are kind of the start of a conversation rather than the
end of one and also to be really responsive to what people want to see
videos about. But, here we go with today's video on cultural texts.
So, in the last episode of What The Theory?, we looked at semiotics and the process
through which words, symbols and images come to take on meaning. If you haven't
watched that video I perhaps suggest going back and watching that one first
as we're going to kind of carry on from where we left off there. I will link
it up in whichever corner those go in, and then pop on back to watch this one.
When we were looking at semiotics, we were zooming right in and focusing on what
individual words or symbols might mean and how they come to mean that thing. But,
unless you're a linguist or a symbolist or a character in a Dan Brown
book, then individual words and symbols might not be that interesting to you.
When they do perhaps come more interesting to those of us in the wider
humanities is when they get knitted together into broader things which we
call cultural texts. The term text is thrown around quite a lot in academia but,
quite often, I find that when we come to talk to people outside of the humanities
around what text is, our use of it can seem a little bit odd. In colloquial terms,
text tends to mean a group of letters grouped up into words and sentences and
paragraphs either on paper or on a screen. However, when we use it in
cultural studies and in humanities and in academia more generally, we use it to
describe all kinds of things from books to films to adverts to even sometimes
cities and people. Now, the reason that we describe all these very different things
as texts is something that I think, depending on how your brain works, will
either slot into place quite quickly or perhaps take a little bit longer to get
your head around. But, today, I'm going to try and explain why we use this word
"text" and what it means to describe so many different, diverse things. So, to
begin to understand what a cultural text is, I want to start from that very colloquial
definition of groups of letters and words on paper. Because our broad
understanding of what a cultural text is does have its roots in literary studies.
Up until just after the middle of the 20th century, pieces of literature were
more often referred to as "works" or "works of literature". Now the term work was
incredibly loaded and much time was spent deciding which bits of literature
might be a literary work and which didn't deserve that title. And there's a
particularly interesting discussion about this in Terry Eagleton's
Literary Theory: An Introduction in which he looks at the notion of how the
context surrounding a bit of literature helps us to decide whether we might
perceive it to be a literary work or to not be so. Again, there was a book
published recently which played with this idea which took the words of Vine
creators and presented them in the format that you'd usually find a
contemporary poetry collection. Furthermore, when analyzing works,
scholars assumed there to be a definite, concrete meaning of that work of
literature. A piece of literature meant whatever the author intended it to mean
and any other interpretation of that was deemed strictly wrong. So, when during the
1960's and 1970's scholars wanted to move past this notion of the literary
work, they decided that the old term was too laden with old prejudices and old
ideas and that a new approach to pieces of literature required a new terminology.
And, thus, the text was born. Although not the first to come up with the term, it
was Roland Barthes who most influentially laid out the difference between a work
and text in his essay From Work to Text which I will link in the description
down below. Barthes actually lists seven points of differentiation between a work
and a text but I'm just going to draw on a few of the key ones here. So, a text is
not the book, it's not the format through which the ideas within are communicated to
us but those ideas themselves. And, as such, when we're analyzing or approaching
texts, we're less interested in the form in which it's presented to us and the
context in which it's framed. Furthermore, a text has no definite
meaning, in fact it contains multiple and potentially infinite different meanings.
Using the terms from my previous video, Barthes suggested that a work was
everything from the signifier to the signified while a text was everything
that happens after that that process of the work coming into contact with a
reader. And, therefore, different readers would have different interpretations of
the same piece of literature. Finally, for today, there was to be no
attempt to draw a big black line around what was considered a text and what
wasn't, any piece of writing could be approached as a text. The idea was to
throw off those old prejudices of what was included in the Canon or the
Tradition and what wasn't and suggest that we can analyse any piece of writing
through the same critical methods. With this idea that formal context is less
important, we might begin to see how the idea of the text began to expand beyond
just literature; if we're going to approach JK Rowling with the same outset
as we approach Shakespeare then why not start to look at pieces of culture
that communicate things through methods other than words? Because, as we discussed
in my last video, the methods through which we communicate tend to be quite
similar no matter what form they take, whether they're words on paper, whether
they're images or whether they're physical movement. So, taking this a step
further, why shouldn't we approach other forms of communication through the same
critical frameworks that we apply to literary texts. Talking about texts
rather than works, then, allows us to open up our concept of what might be a
worthwhile object of study. In short, it democratises theory, it allows us to take
the same approach to an episode of The Simpsons that we might to a work of
Proust. The scholar Richard Rorty describes any theorist who thinks a text
to only be a piece of literature to be a "weak textualist" and there's this idea
that's increasingly evolving that a text is absolutely anything through which
there is communication involved and therefore almost any phenomenon on earth
could be described as a text because it is something that is communicated and
can be "read" by a "reader". Today, however, let's stick with what we might call
cultural texts, those things like performances or films or books or pieces
of visual art or pieces of sculpture which aim to communicate cultural ideas
through some kind of artistic form. And I'd like to close with some thoughts
about why this idea of the cultural text might be incredibly useful in
cultural studies and in the humanities as a whole. First off, it allows the
incredibly powerful tools that theory gifts us to be applied to much wider
culture. For a long time, the ideas that are bound up in theory were held hostage
by literature. By expanding the notion of what a text is, we can use those same
critical techniques to approach everything from television adverts to
billboards to pieces of pop culture that we might use to apply to Shakespeare. All
of these things will have ideologies and power dynamics bound up within them and
so it's great that we can use these same tools to analyse pieces of culture
wherever they appear. Secondly, it takes away any regard of the intention of the
author. This does a couple of things. It takes away that notion that the author
is some kind of deity who has gifted us this great bit of art, but it also allows
us to not have to be bound up in whatever the assumed intention of the
author was. If you went to a gallery and saw an extremely abstract piece of art
which you couldn't understand, it'd be very very hard for the artist who
created it to convince you that in actual fact you definitely did
understand it. And, in the same way, it would be wrong to consider the author's
intentional meaning to be the meaning that everyone who comes into contact
with that text takes away from it. Finally, the concept of the text
unleashes a piece of culture from its temporal specificity, it suggests that it
can change meaning over time as society changes and shifts and across different
societies across the globe. And it is in this regard a text is only brought into
being when it comes into contact with its readers and therefore, depending on
who those readers are and the other bits of culture that surround it, this will
have an effect on what that piece of text comes to mean. The concept of the
text, therefore, allows us to free the ideas communicated through a piece of
culture from the physical form which they take in their communication and, as such,
it allows us to set aside the deification of the individual or
individuals who created that piece of work and, rather than focus on the
process that led to the creation of that piece of culture,
focus instead on the effect that it has. Thank you very much for watching this
episode of What The Theory?. For those of you who have been kind enough to
subscribe to my channel, I recently reached a thousand subscribers which was
really lovely, so thank you very much for doing so, it makes this kind of feel very
worthwhile and helps me to know that it is useful to some people. I'm gonna put
some extra reading and some sources down in the description below as I quite
often usually do and but, until next time, have a great holidays!