Chapter 5

Sage Research Methods
Doing Research in Cultural Studies
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Author: Paula Saukko

Pub. Date: 2011
Product: Sage Research Methods
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781849209021
Methods: Qualitative interviewing, Doing research, Ethnography
Keywords: ideology, street children, cultural studies, films, film, social context, racism, attitudes, violence,
popular culture, agendas, signifier
Disciplines: Anthropology, Communication and Media Studies, Marketing, Sociology
Access Date: May 19, 2024
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Online ISBN: 9781849209021
© 2011 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

Sage Sage Research Methods
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com
Reading Ideology
Main questions
• What are the possibilities and problems embedded in classical structuralist methods, such
as semiotics and narrative analysis, which analyze the ‘ideology’ embedded in cultural texts?
• How do notions of intertextuality and contextuality enrich structuralist analyses of texts?
• How do postmodern or ironic texts complicate ideological analysis? What are the insights
and blind spots of both postmodern texts and postmodern forms of textual analysis?
• Just like texts, methods for analyzing texts are ‘ideological’, in the sense that they are invest-
ed in particular historical, social and political agendas. How can one explore the ideological
nature of modes of textual analysis itself?
The trademark of cultural studies, both in its classic and contemporary forms, has been the analysis of texts
or discourses, to the point that the paradigm has been accused of a tendency to reduce all social phenomena
into texts (Ferguson and Golding, 1997). One could say, however, that the specific feature of cultural studies’
approach to texts is that, rather than examining their formal or aesthetic features, the paradigm investigates
the way in which cultural texts emerge from, and play a role in, the changing historical, political, and social
context. Thus, what characterizes cultural studies’ approach to culture is not ‘textualism’ but ‘contextualism’
(Grossberg, 1997).
The interest in texts within the social context is umbilically connected with an interest in power. Originally,
the interest in power articulated cultural studies’ attempt to reformulate the Marxist notion of ‘ideology’, which
interpreted culture largely in terms of dominant ideology that distorts reality in a way that serves the inter-
ests of the powerful. While cultural studies continues to examine the relationship between culture and social
domination, it understands cultural texts, such as popular culture products, not to be mere loci of domination.
Rather, it views them as a site of contestation over meaning, where different groups compete to set forth their
understandings of the state of the affairs in the world. In order to make sense of ‘how’ the world was made
to mean, early cultural studies resorted to structuralist methods of analyzing texts, such as semiotics and
narrative analysis. Even if the boom of analysis of ideology and the use of structuralist methods in cultural
studies was in the 1970s, these approaches continue to be widely used, and they also underpin many of the
later approaches. For this reason, the first half of this chapter is devoted to discussing ideology, narrative and

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semiotics, using analyses of the classical, yet still blockbusting, James Bond films as an example.
However, not only texts but also forms of textual analysis are political and historical. To illustrate this, in the
latter half of the chapter I will critically reflect on contemporary ‘postmodern’ texts as well as postmodern
forms of textual analysis. Rather than making claims about reality ‘out there’, postmodern texts refer to other
media texts, making often ironic and critical statements about the mediated nature of our reality. Postmodern
modes of textual analysis usually revel in this critically self-reflexive interest in mediation that characterizes
postmodern texts. Through analyses of some recent advertisements that mock documentary photographs on
the South and the cult-movie Natural Born Killers, I will address some of the possibilities, problems and poli-
tics embedded in postmodern modes of producing and interpreting texts that characterize our times.
My overall intention in this chapter is to underline the need to, and outline ways to, examine any given text as
well as any form of textual analysis against the historical and political context. If one is to unravel the complex
historical and political agendas and struggles embedded in texts and interpretation, one needs to analyze
them from several different perspectives that flesh out their diverse commitments and blind spots. Illustrating
how this type of multi-perspectival textual analysis works, is the task this chapter sets out to fulfil.
Signification and power
Cultural studies’ specific approach to texts is partly explained by the fact that the Birmingham-period research
on subcultures and popular culture coincided and became part of the golden age of the French semiotic
movement, spearheaded by Saussure (1960) and then Barthes (1972) as well as the Italian Eco (1979[1965]).
These structuralist theorists investigated linguistic structures, such as basic units and recurring tropes, that
were understood to be universal or apply to all natural languages or, at least, to specific genres of texts. One
of these universal units that semiotics delineated is the sign, constituting of the signifier (or ‘sign vehicle’ e.g.
‘white’) and signified (or mental image e.g. ‘purity’). What was crucial, from a cultural studies point of view,
was that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was understood to be arbitrary, a matter of
convention or, as cultural studies would underline, a matter of politics. Furthermore, the stitching between a
particular signifier and signified was understood to be open for negotiation or signs were understood to be
polysemic or multiaccentual, to borrow Volosinov's term (Volosinov, 1973). Thus, signs could be interpreted
differently in different contexts and by different groups (whiteness could have both positive and negative as-
sociations, depending on the situation).

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What interested cultural studies was the politics embedded in the process of forging a connection between a
signifier and a signified. The paradigm coined this process as ‘struggle over meaning’, seeing it as an arena
where different social groups competed to make the world mean. The most famous example of such struggles
is the Civil Rights Movement's slogan ‘Black is beautiful’, which aimed to reverse the negative associations
of blackness (ugly, inferior, etc.) (Hall, 1982). A later example of a similar phenomenon is the use of the term
‘nigga’ in rap-music, which renders a previously derogatory meaning into a sign of tough pride and threat,
turning the racist notion of vice into a new virtue as well as a reminder of a racist past and present (it can,
however, be debated to what extent this machismo subverts, and to what extent affirms, the original racist
sign).
In broader theoretical terms, the semiotic theory and method helped cultural studies in its reformulation of the
classical Marxist notion of dominant ideology, which was often interpreted in terms of dominant or bourgeoisie
ideas, which ‘becloud’ people's understanding of social reality and inequality. Even if cultural studies would
not deny inequality, it wanted to acknowledge the complex nature of culture and ideology that, rather than
being a uniform strait-jacket imposed on people, constituted a shifting, contested terrain.
Texts and contexts
Meanings of Bond
Many of the early cultural studies, as well as semiotic literature, analyzed the way in which meaning is consti-
tuted in popular texts and images, such as photographs, films and popular culture. Perhaps the most famous
one of these analyses is Barthes’ discussion of the colonialist myth articulated by the Paris Match cover of a
black soldier saluting the French flag (Barthes, 1972). However, to illustrate the structuralist framework, I will
take a closer look at Eco's (1979[1965]) analysis of Ian Fleming's famous spy-novels on James Bond, which
were later turned into a series of blockbuster movies. I have chosen to focus on Eco's analysis, because
it was later complemented, as well as challenged, by the cultural studies scholars, Bennett and Woollacott
(1987), providing a useful illustration of the difference between structuralism and cultural studies.
Making an ironic reference to the first novel, Casino Royale, where Bond's colleague comments that he
should not become human as he is such a ‘wonderful machine’, Eco notes that, in his novels, Fleming himself

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has built a system that works predictably like a machine (Eco, 1979: 46). Using structuralist methods, Eco
outlines this machine-like or mechanic formula that fuels Bond-stories:
A.
M moves and gives a task to Bond
B.
Villain moves and appears to Bond (perhaps in vicarious forms)
C.
Bond moves and gives a first check to Villain or Villain gives first check to Bond
D.
Woman moves and shows herself to Bond
E.
Bond takes Woman (possesses her or begins her seduction)
F.
Villain captures Bond (with or without Woman, or at different moments)
G.
Villain tortures Bond (with or without Woman)
H.
Bond beats Villain (kills him, or kills his representative or helps at their killing)
I.
Bond, convalescing, enjoys Woman, whom he then loses (Eco, 1979: 156)
Eco's construction of the skeletal-plot, which he argues repeats in each Bond novel, is based on Propp's
analysis of the morphology of the folktale, with its primordial Hero, who gets a Task, goes through various
trials and torments fighting the Villain, and, finally, completes the task and gets his Reward (Propp, 1968).
This recurring plot, Eco argues, is underlaced or stitched together by a series of binaries (M/Bond; Bond/
Woman; Bond/ Villain; Free World/Soviet Union; Great Britain/Non-Anglo-Saxon-Countries) (Lévi-Strauss,
1970). Eco's analysis illustrates how one can use structuralist tools, such as Proppian narrative-analysis and
Lévi-Straussian notion of binaries, to break a cultural product into basic units, thereby exposing its underlying
structure as well as the often dichotomous value-principles that suture it.
Eco's main goal is to uncover the formula underneath a mass-market novel. He acknowledges that Bond
novels can be deemed racist (since the Villains are, by and large, non-Anglo-Saxons), anti-communist, and

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to buttress primordial notions of women as caught up between perversion and purity, finally succumbing to
seduction and ending in death (161). However, rather than seeing Bond stories as a reactionary political con-
spiracy, Eco argues that the reactionary nature of the novels is not so much constituted by their content than
their form. Fleming's tactic of using archetypes to construct a successful novel reproduces the Manichean
formula, which views the world in black and white terms as made up of good and evil forces in conflict (162).
The greatest strength and weakness of Eco's analysis, and many others done along similar lines, is its clean-
cut nature, which makes all elements of Bond novels fall into prescribed categories that ‘make sense’. As
such, the analysis illuminates certain key features of Bond that help to unravel aspects of its politics or ideol-
ogy. Still, even if the neatness of Eco's analysis appeals to logic, it is also irritatingly predictable, in the same
way as the many student works that I have read, which keep finding that images of women in popular culture
fall into the primordial categories of Mother and Whore. While it is true that these archetypes saturate popular
culture, focusing solely on them often renders the analysis sterile or not particularly illuminative, since it tends
to miss the small shifts and variations, historical details and contexts, which often account for much of the
appeal of these stories.
In fact, Eco makes an interesting comment that Fleming's Bond stories abandon ‘psychological motivations’
and apply a ‘structural’ or ‘formalistic’ strategy (146). However, this poses the chicken or the egg question of
whether it is Fleming who introduces formulas into his Bond stories or whether it is Eco, who reads them into
the novels. Structuralism as an enterprise was decidedly objectivist in that it presumed the scientist and the
texts (s)he studied to be separate and saw its project to discern, in an unbiased fashion, the ‘patterns’ that
repeat in the material. However, any methodological approach not merely represents its objects of study but
also, in part, constitutes them. Thus, the formulaic nature of the structuralist approach easily reinforces the
machine-like and Manichean mode of thought it aims to expose and criticize.
Bond and beyond
From what I would deem to be more of a cultural studies interpretation, Bennett and Woollacott (1987) have
read the Bond-phenomenon somewhat differently. They argue against Eco, noting that he does not sufficient-
ly take into account the intertextuality of Bond, that is, the way it can only be understood in relation to the
wider cultural and social panorama, consisting of other texts. What this intertextuality underlines is that Bond

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looks different when examined from different perspectives or in relation to different texts and contexts. What
Bennett and Woollacott argue is that, in the British context, Bond novels should be read against the early
twentieth century ‘imperialist spy-thriller’, which concerned the exploits of an English gentleman and an ama-
teur spy, who warded off a threat to Britain represented by a foreign villain, usually associated with anarchism
or socialism (83). Even if there are similarities between the imperialist spy-thriller and Bond novels, there are
also significant differences, which highlight the ideological specificity and complexity of Bond-phenomena,
which Eco does not wholly capture.
For example, in the imperialist novel the spy is upper leisure-class and thwarts off foreign ‘syndicates’ that dis-
turb life in London clubs and England's country houses. On the contrary, Bond is a middle-class professional,
who takes orders from M, who (before the introduction of Judi Dench as M in the most recent films) represents
the old England and its old-boy-networks and often ends up in tension with Bond. Bond's lifestyle, predicated
on liberal attitudes towards sex and gambling and docking of martinis, is also decidedly cosmopolitan and
modern. Thus, instead of simply reproducing inherited ideologies, Bond novels rework them, imagining an
English hero in new terms of professionalism and competitive individualism (113).
Furthermore, the Bond ‘girl’ is also a departure from the imperialist novel, which did not feature women in
prominent roles. The girl provides Bond with an enigma (usually lodged in some dark secret of her past),
which he needs to solve, and action, in that he needs to put her (as well as the ‘foreign’ villains) back in
her place. Yet, the Bond girl is not archetypically feminine, often acting violently and beguilingly, she is more
‘equal’ to Bond, and their relationship is not predicated on the codes of chivalry and romance, but mostly sex
or, to borrow Bennett and Woollacott, their relation is one of ‘pure cock and cunt’ (123). As such, the Bond girl
is a kind of male fantasy version of the sexually liberated, independent woman, whose only restriction is that
she should submit to the phallus (118).
This rereading does not make Bond novels and films ‘progressive’; on many basic levels they remain deeply
racist, sexist, narrowly nationalist, anti-welfare, and anti-communist. However, read against the mid-century
British class- and gender-structures, and their cultural manifestations, it becomes apparent that Bond novels
not only reproduce, but also twist, them, giving the archetypical Englishness a decidedly modern flair. This,
argue Bennett and Woollacott, accounts for the popularity of the Bond-phenomenon, because in order to ap-
peal to a wide audience, it has to connect with some popular and critical sentiments (4), even if this does not
make the phenomenon a harbinger of radicalism.

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This sensitivity to complexity and the intertextual and social context enables a more nuanced and better
grounded analysis of a popular text than the formalistic semiotics or narrative analysis. Analyzing texts or
discourses from multiple points of view, in order to tease out the social contradictions and contestations em-
bedded in it is one of the trademarks of cultural studies. Besides Bond, it has shed light on, for instance, how
Thatcherism turned the traditional Labour and Tory imaginary upside down (Hall, 1988). At a time of an acute
economic crisis and unemployment, Thatcherism managed to present itself as on the side of ‘the little people’
and against the ‘Trade Union barons’, by appealing to the lower middle-class and ‘respectable’ working-class
values of self-reliance and self-discipline, encapsulated in her slogan: ‘you can't spend what you haven't got’
(Hall, 1988: 71). Thatcherism can be analyzed in terms of the dichotomies between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ that it
constitutes, such respectable people versus Trade Union barons, welfare scroungers, and tinpot dictators (in
reference to the Falklands War). Yet, the most important feature of Thatcherism (or Reaganism), argues Hall,
is how it managed to articulate everyone into ‘Us’ by tickling a number of social nerves, which can only be
analyzed by paying keen attention to the nuances of historical, political and social context.
The methodological lesson learnt from this is that the structuralist toolkit of methods, such as semiotics and
narrative analysis, is good in highlighting certain key elements in cultural texts. However, because of its for-
malistic and logical nature it may end up imprinting this formalism into the products it studies. More than 30
years after the landmark works of Barthes and Eco, semiotics remains the bread and butter of almost any
book on methods in cultural and communication studies, sometimes outlined as if a bag of tricks, useful to
crack the code of culture (e.g. Berger, 2000). However, if we are to make sense of the political underpinnings
and implications of the way in which the world is made to mean, or the signifier and signified stitched together,
we need to pay careful attention to the historical, social, emotional and so on economies at play in any given
social moment and place. If we do that, we may begin to see the fussier side of the cultural and social world,
which does not fall so neatly into dichotomies and plots, but where there are twists, tweaks and blurrings that
may reflect and change meaning and history in quite consequential ways. Being sensitive to nuances and
ambiguities is also necessary if we are to reach beyond the Manichean machinery that splices the world into
heroes and villains and mothers and whores, and begins to push beyond straightforward judgements and to
see, and learn from, the grey areas in popular phenomena, such as Thatcherism and James Bonds.

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Postmodern texts and analysis
James Bond and Thatcherism, as social and cultural phenomena, can be argued to be predicated on ‘modern’
cultural and social logic. Both discourses split the world rather neatly into ‘us’ (respectable English) and ‘them’
(tinpot dictators, Russian spies or, as of late, Russian mafia). Even if they both are, on occasion, hyperbolic,
they both seem to make claims about what the reality ‘is like’. However, contemporary media products and
discourses increasingly obey a ‘postmodern’ logic. Following Baudrillard (1983), they can be characterized
by a ‘floating signifier’, which no longer refers to a signified but to other signifiers, such as media texts. Thus,
for example, the cult-movie Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) can be argued not to be, first and foremost, about
gangster violence (which it ‘depicts’) but about media-violence, referring not to, lets say, any criminal neigh-
bourhoods or people but to a vast archive of previous gangster, horror, and other classic and obscure movies
(Polan, 2000).
To illustrate both how to analyze postmodern texts as well as to outline a postmodern way of analyzing texts,
I will examine a few images in a recent issue of a rave-magazine The Ministry. Before I move on to the im-
ages, however, a few words on the magazine and rave-culture are in order. The British version of rave or
techno-culture appeals to a predominantly white youth of varied class-backgrounds, and it has been argued
to be decidedly postmodern or ‘artificial’ in that it does not have ‘organic’ roots in any particular community
or culture. Rather, rave-culture has its origins in a mass market package-holiday (raves are argued to have
originated from dance-parties in the Mediterranean resort-town of Ibiza), and it is characterized by a music
created by dj's, who mix elements of already existing music and computer-generated sounds, and the easy
use of the controversial, ‘clean’, mind-altering drug Ecstasy (Melechi, 1993; Redhead, 1993). This somewhat
extravagant artificiality and superficiality has been alternately eulogized and condemned as the epitome of
millennial abandon, hedonism, commercialism, and anti-establishment counterculture. The Ministry magazine
belongs to the more straightforwardly commercially oriented end of the rave-scene, being one of the many
commercial spin-offs of a London based dance-club, The Ministry of Sound (Collin, 1998). It is a thick glossy
magazine with many flashy ads, fashions spreads, reviews of records, and articles, which often take a liberal
attitude to some controversial topic, such as cocaine (February 2000) or hard-core pornography (November
2001).
The image that I will analyze depicts a group of Thai street children, who seem to be between 2 and 7 years of
age. When one first takes a look at it, it reads like a news photograph, having all the iconic features of a docu-

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mentary image of ‘The Third World’: the children are bare-foot, wearing torn, dirty clothes, and set against an
ambiguous backdrop of corrugated metal with graffiti. ‘Hat Patong Road, Phuket’, reads the copy in ‘Thai'ish’
letters. Some of the children just stand, staring at the camera, others are making martial arts and other ‘street
pose’ type gestures. Looking at the image more closely, one can see that next to each child a small copy
gives the brand names, such as Gap, Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Blue Marlin, and prices of the
caps the children are wearing (Ministry, February 2000: 072—3). The picture is part of a special issue on the
then newly released movie The Beach, which is used as a starting point for a series of small articles and a
fashion spread on Thailand, which was becoming popular among ravers, searching for new holiday venues
besides the traditional Ibiza. Most of the images in the special issue follow the traditional Orientalist tradition
of revelling in the exoticism and eroticism of the ‘East’ (Said, 1995[1978]), featuring young people and models
against deep blue ‘tropical’ sky and sea. The picture of the street children forms part of a small set of ‘mock
realist’ pictures, which also includes photographs on Thai elders and a group of young Thai boxers.
As discussed earlier, any given text can be analyzed in relation to different social texts and sensibilities in
order to unravel its contradictory politics. Still, not only the content of texts but also the forms of texts as well
as forms of textual analysis are political. If one is to unravel the diverse and multilayered politics embedded in
any given text one needs to examine it both in relation to different social agendas and using different method-
ological approaches. In order to illustrate how this type of multiperspectival analysis works and how it helps
to tease out the many political agendas within a given text, I will in the following analyze the image of the Thai
children first from a semiotic point of view and second using a postmodern interpretative strategy.
Reading the meanings of ‘street’
Interpreted semiotically, one can look at the ad on the children in terms of forging an association with the caps
(the signifier or brand) and the children and what they stand for, namely being street-wise or having ‘street
credibility’ (signified) (see Goldman, 1992; Bignell, 1997). This interpretation is supported by a small separate
text-ad, featuring one of the labels and referring to the image of the children that reads:
Tapping into the new vogue for things Cuban, Blue Marlin have just made hats for the Cuban national
team while in spring, they are launching an international series with old team logos from around the
world. Seeking some street individuality? They got it. {Ministry, February 2000: 061)
Read this way, the ad blends into a tidal wave of popular culture and products — ranging from interior design

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magazines and labels, such as Benetton, to various ‘well-being’ therapies and toiletries — which are infatu-
ated with ‘difference’. As Hall has noted, whereas the old Fordist, Thatcherite project embodied a highly de-
fensive nationalism, such as Bond fighting Russian spies, the new global Post Fordism revels in difference,
trying to ‘live with, overcome, sublate, get hold of, and incorporate’ it (Hall, 1997:33; also Kaplan, 1995; Lury,
1996; Ahmed, 2000; Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2001).
The specificity of the image of street children is that it does not evoke the usual associations between differ-
ence, naturalism and exotic beauty. Rather, it appeals to a tougher or more ‘cool’ notion of difference. Just
like with the Bond texts, this fascination with street-cool becomes intelligible against the background of other
social texts and sensibilities. There are (at least) two sensibilities that this ‘streetwise’ image articulates. First,
it can be seen as part of the long-term Western Orientalist tradition, which is fascinated with difference, want-
ing to appropriate or consume it. In this sense, the particular appeal of images of marginality and ‘the street’ is
that it allows white, Western middle-class youth to experience some of the thrillingly embodied intensity asso-
ciated with the ‘toughness’ of ghetto life, of being on the edge, in danger, or close to death (Sernhede, 2000).
As has been pointed out by hooks (1992; also Kaur and Hutnyk, 1999) this fascination does not so much aim
to open up to different people and places but mainly serves to refashion the self. It becomes a practice of
‘eating the other’, rendering difference merely a hot spice to spark up ‘the dull dish of Western culture’, or as
Ministry instructs: ‘mix in a little of that Goa spirituality, add a dash of Ibiza sun, garnish with the contents of
Shaun Ryder's medicine cabinet and serve on a beach’ (Ministry, February 2000: 029).
However, the second interpretation of the image is that it signals an affinity with the ‘street-cool’ of black
dance music, such as hip hop, expressing both a bid to expropriate it as well as to belong, of being a part of
a wider youthful, multicultural partying and radicalism, with all its contradictory romanticism of things ‘street’
and ‘black’. This partying also becomes intelligible in opposition to the Thatcherite respectable, little-England
mentality, against which ‘rough’ images of difference, threatening street-poses, references to the traditional
enemies of the Western mindset, such as Thai ghettos and Castro's Cuba, and use of recreational drugs is
intended as an offensive.
Depending on the angle from which one looks at the picture, it seems rather different, appearing as if contin-
uing an old racist tradition or questioning a certain rigid and racist nationalism. The methodological point this
underlines is twofold. First, any text or image has multiple interpretations, looking different when examined in
relation to different texts or social sensibilities. The task of analysis is not to decide which of these interpreta-

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tions is most ‘correct’ but the goal is to explore some of the possible interpretations in order to flesh out the
complex politics of the text. It can be added that one can never exhaust all the meanings of a text. Rather
than a cause of concern, this should be interpreted as an incitement to try and look at any given text from
different angles. However, it also invites us to be less arrogant, in the sense of acknowledging that we can
never arrive at a ‘complete’ interpretation of a text, but our reading will always remain socially located and
circumscribed and blind to other meanings and politics.
The second thing that the few interpretations of the image underline is that just like the ‘content’ of the image
looks different from different angles, so does the ‘form’ of the image. Eco's analysis implies that particular
textual forms, such as polarized plotlines, are intrinsically ‘reactionary’. The image of the street children does
not juxtapose good and evil, but plays with, and thereby obscures, what is deemed evil or, at least, a prob-
lem. This evasion of ‘Manicheanism’, however, does not make the image radical, as this kind of ‘playing with’
dangerous difference has become the norm in much contemporary culture with all its associated possibilities
and problems as discussed above. What this emphasizes is that the ‘ideological’ nature of form is also dif-
ferent in different social contexts. Thus, less polarized and more nuanced and ambivalent interpretation may
be laudable in many contexts (one is immediately reminded of the aftermath of ‘September 11’). However, in
other contexts, such as in relation to the image of the street children, it may also breed ‘cool’ indifference, and
in still others it may end up politically and ethically untenable, such as when taking a stance on Guatemalan
genocide, as discussed in Chapter 3.
Postmodern readings
Reading the image of the street children semiotically usefully unearths some of its political contradictions.
However, the image can also be read from another methodological perspective as a classic postmodern text.
The reason it catches our attention is because it brings into mind countless news photographs on street chil-
dren, which seems out of place in a leisure-centred glossy magazine. Thus, in classical postmodern fashion
the image does not only, or even primarily, refer to a ‘reality’ out there (‘the street’) but to other signifiers (news
photographs of street children) (Baudrillard, 1983).
This two-layered nature of the image makes it both similar to, and different from, other ‘new wave’ ads, such
as the famous Benetton image of a bird amidst an oil spill. While both the Benetton ad and the ad with the

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children refer to previous documentary photographs on ‘catastrophe’, the image of the street children is differ-
ent in that it does not want to sell the caps through associating them with a concern for Third World children,
that is, it is not selling the brands, trying to associate them with a ‘global conscience’, the way Benetton mar-
kets itself (Giroux, 1994b; Lury, 2001). On the contrary, the picture's power to address, irritate and surprise
the reader derives from the fact that it frustrates or interrupts expectations that we generally have of docu-
mentary images of street children, which evoke empathy, pity and notions of the South as desolate. In this
sense, it can be argued to interrupt the ideology embedded in the prototypical, condescendingly empathetic,
yet appalled, Western documentary gaze on the South.
In fact, the same technique of disruption is used in other images in the magazine, such as a photograph of
an old, barefoot Columbian woman crouched to pick coca-leaves, which accompanies a reportage on the in-
creasing use of cocaine in clubs. The picture is identical to the countless photographs on drug-plantations
in the South, associated with foreignness, danger and poverty. The text accompanying the image, however,
shortcircuits these associations: ‘Harvesting coca plants in Columbia. Bit like your gran's backyard, isn't it?’ By
rerouting the image to something banally homely (grandmother's backyard and notions of traditional English
gardening that it immediately brings into mind) the picture mocks the expectations of danger and foreignness.
Read through postmodernity, the striking feature of these images is their analytical reflexivity. The pho-
tographs have been carefully selected: the iconic images of street children and drug-plantations dot our news-
papers and news forecasts day and night in and day and night out. These everyday images that all carry a
strong aura of global catastrophe, concern and danger are part of the ubiquitous (tele)visual apparatus that
creates the contemporary universal ‘real’. As Doane (1990) has argued, focusing on melodramatic images of
catastrophe, particularly on graphic details of dead, dying or otherwise suffering, such as poor and wretched,
and in particular children's bodies, the global televisual asserts its ‘realness’. By inviting strong feelings, these
images invite the reader to ‘feel and feel’ and, thereby, feel in touch with the real, so that Baudrillard has de-
fined images of Southern despair as the West's ‘hallucinogen and aphrodisiac’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 71; Clough,
1997: 97).
Thus, the radical aspect of the images in The Ministry magazine is that they break the spell of this obsession
with the ‘real’. By offering a classically coded documentary image of the South to the reader, only to mock it,
they make us conscientious of the coded and political nature of these traditional realist images. By refusing
the reality-effect, the pictures break away with two classical Western tropes on the South, which view it as

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either a threatening subject or an object of our charity. By rendering the coca-harvesting woman a gardening
granny, the image deviates the associations of Third World drug-fields, danger, threat and anarchy (Camp-
bell and Reeves, 1994). The same way, the picture of the street children with the caps does not invite either
empathy or fear, thereby disrupting any pious concern for children from the South, which allow the Western
subject to construct him/herself as a charitable person, with its accompanying condescending sentimentality.
Ungrounded images
However, even if the postmodern reading of the pictures exposes how they challenge mainstream ideologies
about the South, this textual strategy as well as interpretation has its problems. Thus, just as the ‘content’ of
texts can be read from multiple perspectives and in relation to different politics, the ‘form’ of texts and textual
analysis can be interpreted in different ways to tease out their contradictions.
Postmodern images, which work by self-reflexively challenging other images and texts, not to ‘reality’, have
been criticized for leading to what Lury (2001) has called ‘cultural essentialism’. This means that they disem-
bed or unground culture, erasing historical links between people, products, places and practices (183). Thus,
the image of street children may mock the conventions of Western documentary gaze on the South, but, at
the same time, it erases the issues of global inequality and urban poverty from the agenda. The coolness and
irony the image communicates refer back to the West's own imagery. This constitutes an instance of double-
consumption, where the West first consumes catastrophic images of the South and then consumes the South
again in the form of an ironic reference to its own imagery. By the time we get to the caps ad, the issue of
poverty has become a style.
In this respect, the image of the coca-picker is slightly more interesting. The image forms a part of a reportage
on cocaine, which discusses its health risks and users’ experiences. A small by-text discusses the ‘origins’ of
coca, comparing the prices the growers get to street prices, referring to Columbian paramilitary rule, the in-
effective nature of US counternarcotics policy and favourably mentioning the more orderly rule of leftist guer-
rillas in some of the cocaine growing areas (Naylor, 2001: 034). In a small way, these ‘facts’ could be said
to establish a connection between cocaine use in British ‘club-land’ and cocaine growing in Latin America.
Thus, together with the image, the text also challenges the counterproductive tendency to ‘victimize’ people,
such as coca-growers, which does little to improve the position of dispossessed groups, serving to criminalize

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them and to justify police and military action (Campbell and Reeves, 1994). However, even if the footnote on
growers does touch on some of the social and global dimensions of cocaine-commerce, it mainly works as
a piece of information or ‘revolutionary’ curiosity on the origins of the product within the context of a several
pages long report from the consumer's point of view.
To further illustrate, with a different example, the politics of this postmodern ‘ungrounding’ I will look at a class-
discussion that I once was a part of on the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994). The film is
a postmodern classic and a road-movie about a couple, Mickey and Mallory, who go on a serial-killing spree
in the US West, become popular media heroes, end up imprisoned, and, finally, escape amidst a prison-riot
sparked by the occasion of a ‘real-crime’ TV-show (American Maniacs) coming to do an ‘in-depth’ interview
on Mickey. What makes this film postmodern is that its relatively graphic and bloody depiction of violence
has a dream-like or ‘movie-like’ nature. It blends flash-backs to Mickey and Mallory's pasts of incest and child
abuse and cartoon sequences into an almost obsessive analysis of the multilayered, mediated nature of vi-
olence. The fixation on media or cameras is exemplified by a scene, where Mickey, desperately looking for
anti-venom for a rattlesnake bite, shoots a pharmacist, who had been watching news on Mickey and Mallory
on television. After the shooting, Mickey, viewed through the eyes of a security camera, glances at the tele-
vision screen, sees the report on himself with security-camera footage on the open television and bursts into
laughter. Appropriately, the film ends with Mickey shooting Wayne Gayle, the reporter for the real crime show.
Soon after the release of the film, we read it for a doctoral class on interpretative ethnography, and most of us
embraced it as a postmodern irony of the violently mediated nature of contemporary American society. Our
enthusiasm was, however, interrupted by an African-American student, Shirley, who said that she thought the
film was awful. ‘That's not the way killers really are’, she stated. ‘Real killers feel guilty’, she added. Shirley's
commentary provoked the entire class to attack her for reading the film too ‘literally’. The discussion dead-
locked. The majority of us argued that the film should be read as a parody of media violence and not as a
depiction on killing. Shirley continued to be offended by the film and our reading and argued that she knew
the issue better, because she ‘knew’ killers. Later, the instructor of the course, Norman Denzin, published a
piece (Denzin, 1999) contrasting the interpretations of Natural Born Killers by his stepson Allan and his Lati-
no/a students Manuel and Gloria. Allan embraced the movie, much like we did, as a parody of violence. On
the contrary, Manuel and Gloria refused to go to see the movie, as it did not tell about their people and they
had seen enough violence already.

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What these different interpretations tell is not, whether we or Shirley were right or wrong about the film, or
whether the film is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Rather, the episode underlines the fact that just as the politics of texts
become intelligible against the wider social and political context, so does the political nature of interpretation
become evident against the social and political situation and location. Thus, ours, and the predominant acad-
emic interpretation of a text, such as Natural Born Killers, through postmodernity is related to a specific white,
Western, college-educated ‘media-savvyness’ and the fact that our only relationship to ‘killing’ is through tele-
vision (by this I do not want to imply that other groups could not interpret the film this way). Shirley's ‘literal’
and moral reading of the film is mixed with her religious background and testifies for her anger with the fact
that the film does not address the moral issue of killing, which affects Black Americans in extravagantly dispro-
portionate numbers. I would read Manuel and Gloria's rejection of the film as not ‘theirs’ in terms of revealing
how Natural Born Killers is partly predicated on the same ‘insular’ media logic, which obsessively reproduces
itself, that it aims to expose and criticize. In this respect it works in a similar fashion as the advertisement on
Thai children, which mocked Western media-images of street-children, yet erased the issue of Third World
poverty off the agenda altogether.
Finally, the methodological point I want to make through this discussion is that any reading of a text, including
an academic reading, is as ‘political’, or embedded in a particular social context and location and their agen-
das, as any of the texts we analyze. Therefore, textual analysis should not only focus on unravelling the poli-
tics encoded into the texts but should also pay attention to the politics embedded in the decoding or interpret-
ing texts.
Between contexts and texts
This last point brings one to a conundrum in audience studies, already touched upon in Chapter 2, which illus-
trates a key methodological issue in any textual analysis. A frequent issue of concern in audience-research
is how to distinguish between the scholar's reading of a particular media text and the audience's reading of
the same text. The answer that positivist audience-studies have given to this quandary is that what makes
the scholar's reading of a text more informed is the use of scientific method of analysis. Thus, Radway (1984)
presumed that her reading of the plot-formula with the ‘sensitive hero’ in romance novels revealed the ‘deep’
structure of the novels, which accounted for their appeal for the ‘Smithton’ women, even if they were unaware

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of it. This presumption creates two orders of interpretation: first there is the scientific, objective and disembod-
ied reading of the scholar, and second there are the socially located readings of audiences that reflect their
social positions, such as their gender, class and race backgrounds and political orientations.
As Ang (1996) has noted, Radway's reading of romances is, however, by no means innocent. It is heavily
predicated on her rationalistic feminist framework and its notion of ‘good’ or emancipatory and ‘bad’ or disem-
powering aspects of romances, which belittles the titillating nature of romancing. The same way, our reading
of Natural Born Killers was heavily invested in our postmodern paradigmatic orientation and our social po-
sition, bent on disqualifying alternative interpretations and positions, such as Shirley's literal and moralistic
reading. Thus, despite our critical attitude towards ‘truth’, we did not want to accept an alternative interpre-
tation of the film but, in a definite bid for power, defined Shirley's view as ‘wrong’ or inferior in relation to our
superior, sophisticated analysis.
Recently, both textual analysis and audience studies have begun to pay attention, not only to interpreting
the politics embedded in the content (or its reading by audiences), but also to the politics embedded in our
understanding of what texts and interpretations are all about (Alasuutari, 1999). This position acknowledges
that the theories and methods, such as the formulaic nature of semiotics or the postmodern infatuation with
mediation we use to analyze texts are as ‘ideological’, or invested in social, political and historical agendas,
as the texts themselves. The repercussions of this acknowledgement in practical methodological terms are
threefold. First, if we are to comprehend the political nature of any given interpretation we need to look at texts
through several interpretative or methodological frameworks, such as semiotics and post-modernity. Second,
one needs to critically reflect on one's own perspective in terms of submitting it to a similar political and social
scrutiny as one would submit any text. This means being self-reflexive about our tendency to prefer certain
textual or interpretative strategies and define others, such as romancing or reading texts ‘literally’, as inferior.
Third, the politics of any text as well as its interpretation can only be understood in relation to the historical,
political context and its contradictions, which may reveal, for example, that the academic fascination with me-
diation may reflect a privileged culturalist class-position, far removed from the ‘reality’ of gruesome violence
and poverty.
In the end, the task of new generation analyses of ideology boils back down to the old goal of cultural studies
to examine the nexus between texts, power and social context. The novelty that methodological ‘new times’
has brought to this classical enterprise is that scholars are increasingly aware of the way in which their texts
and methods do not exist outside of this political landscape and its struggles for power but are an integral part

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of it.
Conclusions
The emergence of cultural studies as a paradigm coincided, and was fuelled, by the French structuralist
movement. Thus, since early on, one of the standard features of empirical research in cultural studies has
been structuralist textual analysis that examines tropes and patterns in texts. However, since early on cultural
studies has emphasized that textual analysis needs to be context sensitive, and that purely formal analysis
does little to help us understand the politics of a particular cultural product. This is illustrated by the way in
which Bennett and Woollacott came up with a much richer interpretation of the contradictions and appeal of
James Bond against the British historical, social and political background than Eco, who used formalistic plot-
analysis.
However, contemporary media-texts are often qualitatively different from ‘modern’ cultural products, such as
James Bond. Many contemporary media products are characterized by a postmodern logic that no longer
refers to a ‘reality’ out there, but, in a circular fashion, refers to other media texts. Postmodern media texts
often give the impression of being self-reflexively critical of media images. However, read carefully, and in re-
lation to contemporary social context, postmodern texts often harbour many contradictory agendas. However,
the postmodern awareness of the mediated nature of all knowledge has drawn attention to the fact that our
methods of analyzing texts are not any less political than the texts we are analyzing. This can be illustrated
by the way in which Eco's analysis of Bond reproduces the dichotomous logic he criticizes, and how my class
attacked a ‘literal’ interpretation of Natural Born Killers, which did not conform to our postmodern sensibility.
The lesson to be learnt from the fact that not only texts, but also our readings of texts, are political is that we
should try to read any given text from several perspectives, using different approaches. At the same time, we
should humbly admit that we can never completely understand a text, because all our readings are socially
situated. Rather than try to undo bias in our readings, we should aim to become more self-reflexive about the
social commitments and roots of our interpretations and use this awareness to tease out the contradictory
politics of texts and their interpretations.

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Exercise 5
• Take a media text, such as a film or a magazine article. Choose an interpretative framework, such
as semiotics, narrative-analysis or postmodern analysis of mediation, and analyze the text through it.
What kind(s) of politics does the text support?
• Further analyze the text in relation to other social texts and social sensibilities. What different kinds
of social or political regimes does the text support?
• Does the text appear to support different or more complicated politics when examined from the inter-
textual/social perspective than when analyzed through one method?
• Show the media example to other people, such as fellow students or your own students, for interpre-
tation. Is their interpretation different from or similar to yours? What do the differences of interpreta-
tion teach you about the social and political commitments of your reading?
https://doi.org/10.4135/9781849209021

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Sage Research Methods

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Author: Paula Saukko

© 2011 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Signification and power

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Texts and contexts

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Bond and beyond

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Postmodern texts and analysis

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Reading the meanings of ‘street’

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Between contexts and texts

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

Doing Research in Cultural Studies

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