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196

technologies exacerbate temporal relationships un-

der the guise of having access to the time of another

in highly gendered ways, such as the history of the

telemothering or domestic technologies in the home

that promise free time but increase the time of work

(Schwartz- Cowan 1983). There are also portable media

that lead to a need for more phone chargers in transit

spaces, which then reorient labor to maintain and ser-

vice power outlets rather than people (see Gregg 2015b).

At the risk of repetition, shared across the temporal dif-

ferential is the expectation that one must recalibrate.

Temporality for media studies means tracing this out

and complicating the grand order of time that comes

with the consumer packaging of our latest high- tech

gear. It also allows for the opportunity to retrace our

steps and locate how other media forms already theo-

rized and taken account of might in fact have more tem-

poral threads worth pulling out.

65 Text Jonathan Gray

A text is a unit of meaning for interpretation and

understanding. As such, most things are (or could be

treated as) texts. Within media studies, a text could be

a TV program, film, video game, website, book, song,

podcast, newspaper article, tweet, or app. Texts matter

because they are bearers of communication and movers

of meaning. Texts can inspire and delight, or disgust

and disappoint, but more importantly they intervene

in the world and into culture, introducing new ideas,

or variously attacking or reinforcing old ones. Textual

analysis has long been a primary mode of “doing”

media studies, as scholars seek to ascertain what a text

means, how it means (what techniques are used to

convey meaning), and what its themes, messages, and

explicit and implicit assumptions aim to accomplish.

All of this is simple and reasonably unobjectionable.

Where texts and textual analysis become tricky is in

their connections to the outside world. While they are

treated as a discrete unit of meaning, texts are never truly

discrete, because meaning is always contextual, relative,

and situated in a particular place and time. The chal-

lenge of working with media texts lies in tracking how

context works, and hence in how they connect, to each

other, to the outside world, to their producers, and to

their audiences.

During the early days of textual studies, from the

Victorian era to the late twentieth century, English lit-

erature, art history, and then film studies regularly took

the text’s existence and discreteness for granted, and

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:09:29.

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t e x t J O n a t h a n G r a y 197

instead asked questions about how texts such as nov-

els, poems, paintings, sculptures, and films work. It is

from these three fields that media studies draws much

of its apparatus for answering similar questions of me-

dia texts. At times, little work will be required to ascer-

tain a text’s dominant meaning, as it may announce it

clearly, even ham- handedly. But many meanings are

subtle: what might a director or cinematographer be

hoping to suggest by shooting a film with a limited

color palette, for instance, or how might any other ele-

ment of a text— its sounds and music, costumes, edit-

ing, duration, etc.— convey a meaning? Even when we

are faced with a script, lyrics, or writing, texts are not

always so straightforward, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) fa-

mously observed of what he called the “dialogism” of

the novel, wherein characters represent various world-

views and beliefs, which then clash with each other in

the narrative, requiring the reader to listen through the

dialogue to ascertain a message, meanings, or themes.

Indeed, though media studies draws from these other

fields’ techniques of analysis, it has rarely developed its

own rigorous forms of textual analysis, at times adopt-

ing a more haphazard nonmethod of analysis. As much

as media studies— as I will note— moved beyond simply

the questions of how a text means, it has sometimes

done so at the expense of having an actual method for

working out textual meaning.

Instead, one of media studies’ first key interests in

the text lay in what audiences do with it. Stuart Hall’s

canonical encoding/decoding model (1973/1980) notes

that every text has two determinate moments wherein

meaning is created, the moment when its creators “en-

code” meaning into it and the moment when audiences

“decode” meaning out of it. Hall saw these as equally

important moments, but many readers have focused

more on the decoding part of his equation, considering

the text as written, and regarding acts of interpretation

as the more fascinating “moment.” What was called

“textual theory” in literary studies was asking similar

questions of reception in the 1970s and 1980s. Most in-

famously, Stanley Fish (1980) insisted that the text was

always empty until filled with meaning by its reader, but

many others wrote, often with excited poetic flourish,

of an “open text.” Roland Barthes (1977, 162– 63) offered

an image of text and audience collaborating to create

meaning as a musician riffs off a piece of sheet music.

Wolfgang Iser (1978, 57) wrote of readers approach-

ing texts as stargazers approach the night sky, seeing

specific points, but needing to connect them in their

minds. Michel de Certeau (1984) likened our journeys

through a text to strolls through a city, insisting that

specific buildings and structures are in place, but that

we can choose our own paths, resulting in differing ex-

periences of the text. Others wrote of intertextuality, as

will be discussed later. Meanwhile, Hall (1973/1980) saw

each text as having “preferred meanings” as well as the

potential for any given audience to perform a preferred,

oppositional, or negotiated reading. Moreover, Hall saw

the communal audience as key to this process, hypoth-

esizing that different identity markers such as class, gen-

der, and race would lead to different readings of texts.

The text, therefore, was seen as unable to complete itself

or to contain its own meanings; audiences would fin-

ish it, edit it, or reproduce it. It’s worth pausing on this

conclusion briefly, to underline its iconoclasm in refus-

ing that any text— whether a poem or a legal doctrine, a

sitcom or a holy text— could ever have an unequivocal,

immutable meaning.

But there are other ways in which texts are messy

entities. If decoding introduces an element of chaos,

as Hall contends, so too does encoding. When Bakhtin

wrote of the dialogic novel, he saw characters as disagree-

ing with each other, but most media also have multiple

authors, so we should expect a broader, more complex

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t e x t J O n a t h a n G r a y198

level of dialogism wherein messages and meanings

conflict because the people creating the text have not

reached perfect consensus on what the text should

mean. Most texts have someone entrusted with direct-

ing traffic, and with bringing all these artistic visions

together amid many other commercial pressures, pro-

duction rituals and routines, and so forth, but they will

have various levels of success or failure in doing so. En-

coding will always involve extra “noise” too, as social

differences and societal ideologies impact the process of

creating meaning, however unintentionally.

More profoundly, texts are messy because we can

never truly work out where their borders lie. The linguist

Valentin Volosinov (1973) broke with the tendency to

consider the singular utterance as the object of analysis,

to argue that meaning exists only ever within a given

context. The “same” sentence can take on a wide variety

of meanings depending upon context as well as listen-

ers’ varying histories with that sentence and the words

in it. If this is true of sentences, it is even more the case

for the texts that we analyze in media studies. Texts

may mean one thing at a specific place and time, and

another in a different place and time. Good, rigorous

textual analysis, therefore, should always be sensitive to

the geography and to the temporal setting of the text.

Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment

of placing the same still of an actor’s face alongside vari-

ous other images resulted in viewers claiming to see nu-

ances and subtle shifts in the acting, which led to famed

Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and others’ realiza-

tion of the power of juxtaposition, namely that mean-

ing is constructed in part based on what something is

next to. “What something is next to” can be interpreted

on many levels, however.

Television networks, for instance, have long regarded

scheduling as something of an art, realizing that some

shows’ meanings and success rely upon their neighbors

in the schedule. Raymond Williams (1974) discussed

“flow” as a central attribute of television, noting that

the ads in a commercial break insert themselves into the

flow of meaning, changing our experience of a text (as

anyone who has watched a show later on DVD without

commercial interruption knows) or perhaps even chal-

lenging our notion of what the text is— is it the indi-

vidual show, or the night’s viewing? Juxtaposition and

flow matter across all media, whether via the practice

of planning double features at cinemas, via a playlist of

music, or via online ads designed to appear next to spe-

cific content. But by no means is flow always planned.

Texts and their constituent elements bump into each

other all the time, producing meanings via juxtaposi-

tion that sometimes were intended, sometimes not. A

given video game may introduce one to a specific image,

for example, which then takes on unexpected meaning

when it appears in another text. This is “intertextual-

ity,” but following Bakhtin and Volosinov’s lead, all tex-

tuality is in truth intertextuality. We know any unit of

meaning— whether a letter, a word, an image, a sound, a

character, or a genre— only as something we’ve encoun-

tered in other contexts before. Planned and unplanned

juxtapositions produce a cacophony of meanings, all

rich with resonances of their past meanings.

Intertextual processes produce other forms of texts as

well. Star images and genres are both (inter)textual ma-

trices and may at times matter more to us than a given

text. When I see Ian McKellen appear alongside Patrick

Stewart, for instance, I am aware contextually of their

real- life friendship, but also of their conflicted relation-

ship as Magneto and Professor X respectively in the early

X- Men films. Intertextually I am also aware of their past

roles, most prominently as Gandalf and Captain Jean-

Luc Picard respectively, but also of McKellen as an ag-

ing Nazi in Apt Pupil, or as troubled gay director James

Whale in Gods and Monsters, and of Stewart as Claudius

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t e x t J O n a t h a n G r a y 199

in Hamlet, or as a profane, juvenile version of himself

on Extras. All of these past images come to a head as I

watch them, creating a dance of meaning between the

past and the present, ensuring that the text at hand is

also heavily laden with other texts and their meanings.

Another viewer in turn may have other intertextual his-

tories with these two, thereby seeing and feeling other

resonances.

“What something is next to” also entails real space,

not just space on a schedule or playlist. When we con-

sider where to watch an anticipated film, or when we get

excited at the prospect of watching a beloved band play

a particular venue, we show an awareness of how place

affects the text. Different sociopolitical contexts mat-

ter, too: what may appear to be a remarkably mundane,

unobjectionable website or television program in one

country may be targeted by censors in another coun-

try. Texts that once mattered, and that were politically

charged, may now appear peculiarly irrelevant, their

context lost. As Volosinov and Bakhtin noted, noth-

ing appears out of a vacuum, without history, with-

out meanings already attached to it, existing as “pure”

meaning; everything is said at a particular time, for a

particular reason, contributing to a particular discus-

sion or debate. As such, the proper study of a text re-

quires a sensitivity to history and geography. Thus, for

instance, if we want to understand South Park, it helps to

know what it is mocking, and where it fits in the life of

the sitcom, of animation, of satire using children, and

of American television more generally, but we should

also consider its varying meanings in different countries

and over time.

Texts may also draw other elements into their orbits,

requiring us to redraw the boundaries of that text. What

are called “paratexts” (see Genette 1997; Gray 2010) are

especially important in a mediated era in which promo-

tional budgets regularly eclipse the budgets spent on

“the thing itself.” By the time we even experience “the

thing itself,” we have likely seen ads that serve as early

portals to framing expectations, and merchandise that

similarly structures a sense of what the text is actually

about; we may have read reviews that point us toward

some readings and away from others; and then after

experiencing “the thing itself,” podcasts, DVD bonus

tracks, other merchandise, and more may further tog-

gle our understanding and appreciation of the text. In

such cases, these paratexts have become part of the text,

as active at creating meaning as is the supposed thing

itself. Given that our world is suffused with more texts

than we could ever consume, and since promotional

culture is constantly encouraging us to consume new

texts, we are always being given “taste tests” of texts

through their paratexts. With each taste test comes the

construction of meaning, the construction of a text, such

that even if we decide not to consume “the thing itself,”

we may already have a sense of what it is, what it’s do-

ing, what it means. If paratexts were perfectly synched

with their accompanying texts, their presence would be

irrelevant to textual analysis, but paratexts will regularly

amplify some meanings, bury others, and they may edit

or transform textual meaning in the process. They med-

dle with texts, in short, and in doing so they become

vital elements to be considered in the process of textual

analysis.

Precisely because paratexts can change meanings,

they are a site of contestation, as well as reminders that

no text is ever finished. Texts don’t exist: they only

become. As such, paratexts such as interviews or liner

notes can be where musicians tell us what they were try-

ing to communicate with a particular song, or where

they tell us of what they wanted to do instead. Paratexts

such as fan film, fan art, or fan fiction can be where fans

announce readings to other fans, sometimes in direct

contradiction to the statements/paratexts of producers.

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Paratexts can be used to retrofit a text for a different au-

dience, and/or for a different time and place (as with

new book covers, ads, or other promotional materials),

and they can thereby respond to context. In short, para-

texts are where the battle over meaning regularly occurs.

What is called “close reading,” a process whereby pa-

ratexts, context, and intertext are ignored, is still, unfor-

tunately, all too common a mode of analysis in media

studies. But it is a radically troubling mode for any ver-

sion of media studies that hopes to situate texts as social,

cultural actors. A text is a unit of meaning, but a unit

whose borders fluctuate, whose very being is predicated

on context, intertext, and paratext, and whose meaning

depends on them. A true textual analysis would keep all

of these processes in mind.

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