ABSTRACT
We explain why and how we use the term ‘text’, and especially how it is used in cultural studies. Cultural studies researchers accept that media texts have effects; they aim to show readers how the meanings of the texts are controlled by the dominant class, to maintain its authority. First, we examine Duchamp’s innovative method of overriding the dominant rules of acceptable art by presenting a urinal (signed and dated) to an art gallery. Second, we see how structuralists like Barthes and Foucault pull apart the structure of texts to reveal their ‘real’ meanings. For Barthes, a toy is not a toy, a film is not a film—they are instruments of the bourgeoisie. For Foucault, the assumptions forming a society’s ‘knowledge’, especially its definitions of deviancy and treatment of deviants, are actually hidden ‘discourses of power’ (language) through which individuals make sense of the world but lose their autonomy. Third, we have a go at deciphering Derrida’s deconstructionist texts: the meaning of words or texts depends on the context of other words and texts; the context continually changes, so meanings are endlessly deferred, leading to endless semiosis. While letness has a Derridean freedom, affordances provide reality checks.
