Some miscellaneous notes on qualitative media analysis

Turner (1990):

The roots of CS:

Willis, Williams, etc., and literary criticism
Marxism: class & ideology

Althusser: Repressive versus ideological state apparatus (RSA, ISA): control the ISA and you won’t need the RSA.
Gramsci: A new view of power: many groups have power in a system, and ideology is battled over in “different terrains” or “sites of struggle,” “spheres” (e.g., media, education)
“In the last instance”: Many Marxists, though not focusing as much on class, but on other ideologies such as race and sex/gender, still feel that “in the last instance,” the economic sphere (e.g., “division of labor” in some feminist theories) will still be at the crux of the issue. The “spheres” are “relatively autonomous” [but “in the last instance…”]

Structuralism (Leavis; Lévi-Strauss): Same structures throughout society
The linguistic turn: Saussure: role of lang in determining reality
Langue & parole (p. 15)

Semiotics and signification

Semiology: the study of signs, “signifying practices” (p. 17)
Sign = signified + signifier
Barthes: sign systems built together to create “myth”—connotative shift (meaning shifting from sign [system] to sign [system] within an image; 2^nd-order sign systems (using an entire sign, such as flag representing democracy, etc., being the signifier, with stars & stripes or red, white and blue representing the flag).
Barthes: sign systems work to legitimize, support, propagate (or resist!) status-quo ideologies (the political objectives of sign systems)
Thus, the end of CS: to understand power relations negotiated, battled over, “produced and reproduced” in texts (p. 23), with a text being any place (fashion, merchandise, traditional media texts) where signs are stitched together to make meaning.

Towards PM (but without saying the name):

Lacan (post-Freud psychoanalyist): our psyche is a sign systemà subjectivities: texts (and others) “place” our subjectivity within different systems. PMs will go on to say that these subjectivities are contradictory, leading to a fragmentary notion of self.
Discourse (pp. 32-33): “Socially produced groups of ideas or ways of thinking that can be tracked in individual texts or groups of texts, but that also demand to be located within wider historical and social structures of relations.” PMs will go on to say that at any point in time, but especially within contemporary, multivocal culture (where power grows more and more diffuse within the system), that there are not single “discourses” that “articulate” a given notion with an particular set of ideas (e.g., the ideology of “beauty” in American culture), but that there are multiple, competing ideologies that battle for prevalence in different spheres. Taking PM to its ultimate conclusion, there is no “truth” about a specific image or concept (e.g., “Support” and “our troops”), but merely ideas set in different discourses.
Intertextuality: Meaning moving from text to text (PM: In a non-linear and unpredictable fashion)
Polysemy: Texts are open to multiple (but not infinite) readings. Some have argued (not in Turner) that there are three primary readings:

Dominant/preferred: The meaning intended by the author of the text (drinking Pepsi will make you have lots of friends)
Oppositional: The reader opposes the ideologies within the text: “I don’t like the notion of friendship portrayed and I disagree with the linking of friendship to market products of any sort.”
Negotiated: The reader agrees with a portion of the text, typically accepting some core ideology, but rejecting the way it is played out: “I can see that friendship does involve happy times, laughing and doing things together, and I even think that eating and drinking together can be a central activity around which friendships can develop. But I reject the notion that any particular product is necessary for the relationship between alimentary consumption and friendship development to be present.

Text versus audience: Finally, we see a split among (what some call British versus American) CS researchers. Some (trad. British) focus more on meanings within the text, with the researcher being the informed and trained critic, opening up meanings in the text for the reader; others (trad. American) focus more on the active audience bringing meanings (some of them oppositional) to the text, often using “reception studies” of different sorts.

Connor, 1997: Postmodernist Culture:

Whew! Time will not allow me to type all notes I would give on the two chapters in Connor, but here are some brief terms and ideas from Chapters 6 and 7!

PM as “transgressive” (i.e., playing against traditional boundaries, notions, limits)
“play of the signifier” (signifiers can move around without the firm relationship to the signified formerly believed to be in force)
Genre: blurred
Pastiche, bricolage: Often images don’t line up in linear fashion, but are presented in the same space (and often in contradictory ways). Text reader leaves with a general impression rather than a linear story (as exemplified in some but not all music videos)
Multiplication of styles, genre, discourses: Connor argues that even if a single music video or TV program is not inherently PM, the very multiplicity of texts available, often with the interruption of one text (TV show) by others (commercial—or, in the case of MTV, the regular flow of commercials interrupted by an occasional music video) makes it PM.
“A constant re-creation of the unstable self” (p. 185)—see notes above on fragmented self.
Pleasure as a theme in PM: History of this focus: 1) modernist movement privileged reason/logic over pleasure/spirit/emotion, etc. PM rejects modernism as failed (see Roseanau, 1992) in making any social change. Returns to living for today, embracing and promoting pleasure; 2) many of founding writers of PM (e.g., Derridá, Foucault) were denied some of the pleasures they sought by the culture of their day.
A “good” and a “bad” PM
The flattening, blurring, flow without beat or distinctions, in a text.
2 contributions of PM (p. 190)

Closes gap…
Cultural subversion

Question: How is TV PM?

Fragmentation
Interruption
Hyperreal
Simulation-ecstasy, obscenity

PM film: contradiction (in styles, in content)
Polysemy

Berger, 2005: (Media Analysis Techniques): Semiotics

Signs and their (“arbitrary, unmotivated, unnatural) relationship between signified and signifier (p. 8)
Signs: anything that can lie (Eco): The hyperreal
Connotation and denotation
Synchronic (i.e., “without time”—an analysis of the structure of ideology/ies in a text without reference to a time analysis) versus diachronic (i.e., “through time”—the meaningful succession of signs within a text, such as a sign system that gains increasing meaning or development throughout a movie)
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis: Syntagmatic: By some, the syntagm seems to be similar to a sign system or (larger) a code. The sign system would be a set of signs within a text that relate to a particular set of ideas. The code would be the set of similar ideas that are connected within the culture at large (// langue and parole, // practices and performances in Lindlof & Taylor). Berger later (p. 30) defines codes as “highly complex patterns of associations that all members of a given society and culture learn.” [Note: I’m still working out the exact meaning of “code” as it seems to differ among authors—be patient with me.] In Berger, however, the syntagm is a chain of meaning that flows diachronically through a text. Indeed, it becomes difficult to tell the difference b/t syntagmatic and diachronic. Here Berger notes, for example, Propp’s functions by which a traditional fairy tell or story progresses. [In a similar way, we could, by analyzing the genre of “coming of age” stories about youth, determine the typical functions relevant in most such texts and demonstrate how these are present—or not—in a given text, such as Thirteen]. Paradigmatic analysis might look at a single sign as it is used or developed throughout a text (such as the color red in Sixth Sense or the use of clocks and birds in Harry Potter 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban). Many of our class analyses (e.g., the aspects of physical beauty as these relate to masculinity and femininity, and these, in turn, to relations between the sexes) are paradigmatic in nature.
Intertextuality
Metaphor and metonymy