On this page, I'll be giving an overview of what I take cultural studies and communication studies to be about. It will be based on my own experience of cultural studies. I'll also be considering where I think cultural studies is now (though that's something I'm less sure about). Judging by the number of hits generated by any search on 'cultural studies', there's masses of you out there who share my fascination and maybe also my bewilderment about the current state and future direction of cultural studies.

What I'd like to do in this space is

• explain why I'm both interested and puzzled
• ask a few questions about cultural studies
• stimulate (I hope) a few people to e-mail me about some of the questions

It's not supposed to be some show of intellectual pyrotechnics, partly because I couldn't manage that even if I tried, but also because I'd like it to be accessible to antyone with a passing interest. I really would be interested to learn of other people's attitudes to Cultural Studies - if you'd like to jump straight to the feedback form and let me have some of your thoughts, go ahead:

So here goes....

Too many years ago when I was at university, as a student of French literature I was quite familiar with the works of Barthes and vaguely acquainted with Bataille, Althusser, Derrida and others who have entered the Cultural Studies canon. I was also, in the dilettante-ish manner which characterized my university education, quite intrigued by linguistics, which had a high profile mainly through the works of Chomsky at the time, though also through Wittgenstein, Austin and the general 'linguistic turn' of twentieth century philosophy. Through this I got to know Saussure. However, it wasn't until long after leaving university that I began to study the whole complex area of communication at all seriously.

Transmission models

When I first began to study the subject, I came to it through some of the earlier American models such as the Shannon-Weaver model or the Lasswell Formula. They seemed pretty straightforward, so straightforward in fact that I sometimes wondered whether it was worth the trouble of making their categories explicit in a model. But I must say that, although they didn't seem to add much to, say, Aristotle's Rhetoric, it did seem to me that the elements they defined in the communication process were convenient, providing both a terminology and a set of discrete areas to investigate in the communication process.

Berlo

After that, I came across a number of other theorists in the same vein. At the back of my mind somewhere was a nagging uncertainty about what they seemed to be saying with such certainty and clarity. One of the most interesting of the American theorists I came across was David Berlo, whose SMCR model introduced a variety of factors at Communicator and Receiver 'ends' of the process. Berlo, writing in the 1960s, goes a long way towards addressing the deficiency of much communication research still in the 1990s.

Jensen's criticism (right) points up the essential difference, I think, between the 'American' tradition of communication science and the 'European' tradition of semiotic enquiry:

communication theorists generally focus more on the study of message-making as a process, whereas semioticians center their attention more on what a message means and on how it creates meaning

Danesi (1994) in Colon (1995)

I'm not entirely sure that I accept Danesi's distinction, but it was certainly this central question of how a message creates meaning, and how we determine what is a legitimate meaning for a message, which preoccupied me and which I did not seem to find answered by the American research. The likely reason for that failure of the American theorists was precisely as Jensen suggests: the assumption that we all share the same reality. There is plenty of evidence that we do not. Psychological experiments have clearly demonstrated that perception is not simply 'reception', but an active process of making sense of what we receive, and that that process is heavily influenced by our cultural background and our personal experience. (For example Gregory's 'carpentered world'). There is evidence also from numerous linguists that that cultural background is to a very large extent a function of the codes we use. For example Sapir:

.. the real world is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Sapir (1956)

or Whorf:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

Whorf (1956)

The implications of this were considered in so far as they affected the perceptions of totally different language groups. On the whole, though, the extent to which Sapir's and Whorf's observations might apply equally to cultural groupings within a single linguistic community were overlooked in American communication research. And it was precisely that omission which nagged at me. As a linguist having lived abroad, I was keenly aware that different language communities experience the world differently. But what I missed was any attempt to answer the question of whose language I am speaking when I speak my native tongue, whose language is speaking me. It's not purely fortuitous that I can read Chaucer's English of the south-east of England without too much difficulty, but find the language of Sir Gawain, though written during Chaucer's time, alien and difficult. Chaucer's English is likely to have become the English language for the same reason that English is now an international lingua franca, i.e. not because it is somehow more expressive or easier to learn than other languages, but simply because it is the language spoken by those who hold the military and economic power to impose their language, therefore their world, according to Sapir and Whorf, on others.