The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication
Klaus Bruhn Jensen
Social semiotics has been around now for some time as a way of
analyzing the way in which signification, meanings, and actions are
configured within social contexts. From a social semiotic perspective,
contexts are constituted by the communicative processes taking place
in them, so that semiosis--the process of signification in all its
complexity--becomes the main focus of research. Klaus Jensen's book
is an attempt to lay the foundations for a methodologically rigorous
social semiotics of the mass media. From Jensen's perspective, what's
important in mass media research is not so much the meaning of
media texts, nor the institutional conditions under which the media
operate, but "the social and cultural practices that constitute [the]
production, transmission, and reception [of media discourses]" (p. 38).
Ultimately, what Jensen has in mind is research driven by a
"minimalist concept of the politics of communication. The key issue
may not be how to ensure the right to engage in dialogue, but how to
develop the procedures for endingdialogue and transforming it into
other forms of social action" (p. 180). From this position, what counts
is not so much how mass media communication takes place, but how it
gets transformed into social action.
In order to gain some sort of analytical purchase on this issue, Jensen
turns to Peirce's semiotics as his base, and carefully works through a
range of theoretical arguments in support of a social semiotics which
emphasizes the pragmatic character of semiosis in different contexts
of mass media reception. In the first three chapters, Jensen develops
Peirce's semiotic model in terms of the familiar triad (sign /object
/interpretant) leading to ceaseless semiosis as the condition of all
communicative process. Jensen's aim is to replace the dualism of the
Western
Logos
tradition
(mind
/
body;
form
/content;
signifier/signified) with a pragmatic realism which takes as its object
the way in which meaning and social action are inextricably
intertwined. Through the key concept of reflexivity borrowed from
Giddens, Jensen is able to redraft Peirce's model so that it incorporates
ceaseless semiosis into the institutional and structured contexts of
everyday life, leading to a study of the "reception" of mass media
content by audiences.
The use of Peirce helps legitimate the essentially scientific nature of
Jensen's project which seeks knowledge of the "empirical audience":
"there would appear to be no way around the empirical audience.... If
mass communication research is to contribute a critique of media in
the interest of their audiences, it must develop methodologies that
engage audiences in the process of reflexivity about the social
purposes of the mass media" (p. 95). The Social Semiotics of Mass
Communication proposes a qualitative research program as an
alternative to quantitative research into mass media. Jensen rejects
the reduction of social semiosis to essential types, roles, and functions
found in quantitative research, and instead opts for a "thick"
description of the polysemy of discourses in contexts of media
reception (chap. 8). He develops a discourse analysis which "seeks to
establish the meaning of linguistic features in their discursive context,
giving priority to measures of contextual meaning over measures of
recurrence" (p. 99). This places Jensen's work firmly in opposition to
research which attempts to gain objective knowledge of audiences,
based on representativeness and generalizability of data. The
advantage of this qualitative approach is that it provides descriptive
insight into the concrete processes of discursive practices as they are
likely to transform into social action in any given context, which
accords with Jensen's desire to develop a political dimension to
reception studies.
In his rejection of both quantitative research and text-based
interpretation of media discourse, Jensen aligns himself with the
television audience ethnography of Morley, Silverstone, Lull, Radway,
and others during the 1980s which sought to define the classed and
gendered basis for television audienceship. However, Jensen avoids
the fundamental weakness of this cultural studies approach--its lack of
methodological reflexivity in analyzing data--by proposing that data be
analyzed as a discursive construct, and not as a direct representation
of audience subjectivity. This "linguistic turn" is a promising move,
foreshadowed in many critiques of television audience ethnography,
but yet to be delivered in any empirical studies. Unfortunately Jensen
also fails to deliver any extended research into audiences. His only
attempts in this book are less than satisfying; there are some
interviews with groups of academics and university workers, and a
rather curious case of misreading by an elderly woman which provides
insight into one of the many theoretical conundrums raised by Jensen.
None of these excursions into the audience's domain really satisfies
the standards of methodological and theoretical rigour which is
obtained everywhere else in his book.
But I should not insist that Jensen's book be something that it was not
designed to be. Jensen is not "doing" media research, but attempting
to clear the ground for such work to take place. I have found some of
his ideas insightful and challenging. For instance, Peirce's notion of
abductive reasoning is developed by Jensen in interesting ways which
might just prove useful for the discursive analysis of research data. In
qualitative research based on interviews and focus groups, the
problem faced by audience researchers is: what status does the data
have with respect to the experience to which the information given by
the research participants attests? Abduction is the commonsensical
way in which people reconstitute the logic of events out of any
information at hand. It might well prove useful to analyze the
processes of abduction which take place within a research setting,
thereby seeking to find the ways in which research participants as well
as researchers "recontextualize" themselves as audience members.
This kind of reflexive analysis is already done by ethnomethodology,
and it is surprising that Jensen has ignored this line of sociological
research.
Overall, The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication is a challenging
attempt to provide a theoretical basis for qualitative research into
mass media audiences. There are, however, some difficulties with
Jensen's approach. I found his syncretic treatment of issues, theories,
and concepts a little too fragmenting and contradictory in places. It
was difficult to see how some of the many theoretical positions Jensen
manages to cram into his book, including Rorty, Habermas, Giddens,
Thom, Eco, and Wittgenstein to name a few, are in any way
compatible. For instance, Jensen uses cognitive psychology at one
point to underwrite discourse analysis of research data (chap. 10).
However, the project of cognitive psychology is to find a biological
basis for the categories of meaning found in social use, thereby
repressing the linguistic and discursive elements of its own
undertaking. As Jensen himself has argued, discourse analysis of the
contexts of reception would need to avoid abstracting data into various
essentialized categories; otherwise, it risks universalizing reception
into a series of predictable behaviours and attitudes, thereby losing
sight of the transformational processes within contexts of
communication. Another problem concerns the undeveloped
relationship between the systematicity of semiosis--its intertextual
connectedness to all possible signs--and social action. After
considerable discussion of semiotic difference in Chapter 10, for
instance, it is still not clear how Jensen gets beyond the study of sign
systems in themselves (semiotics) to a study of the systematicity of
signification as social action (social semiotics).
Nevertheless, Jensen's book offers a number of valuable theoretical
and methodological tools for anyone wanting to develop ethnographic
and qualitative research into media audiences, providing many useful
ways forward, as well as many insights into the philosophical
underpinnings of communication research as it relates to the media in
social context.