The Role of the Audiences in Culture

Introduction

In an examination of the role of audiences in culture, several key terms must first be established. The definition of 'culture' discussed in this research is 'culture as a particular way of life' and 'as signifying practices' (Williams, 1983). 'Active participants' refers to people who can 'freely and consciously exercise decision-making capacities' when it comes to their interpretation of culture and cultural products (Kirchberg, 2007). Structuralism, is defined as a way of understanding how 'all texts ... and all signifying practices can be analysed for their underlying structures' (Phillips, 2013). I will first examine structuralism in relation to popular culture.

Structuralism and its Strengths

Saussure, "father" of Structuralism, created the concept of 'signs', 'signifiers' and 'signified'. The combination of signifiers and signified produces signs with which we associate meaning and derive understanding (Saussure and Bally et al., 1974). This relationship in any given language is created through cultural agreement. The marking of differences, or introduction of binary opposites (eg. day and night), enables us to make sense of human behaviour. The provision of a basic structure for understanding helps people to comprehend society, i.e. popular culture, with rules and structures which we can rely upon to derive meaning (Storey, 2009).

These structures include the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis, where meaning is accumulated on the former and is continual, while meaning is altered on the latter. Langue, a system of language organized by rules and conventions, and parole, an individual utterance or individual use of language (Saussure and Bally et al., 1974), helps us to communicate meaning because we understand ...

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...imit the agency of individuals in their experiences, the formation of structures are a result of human agency in the first place, so as to simplify certain processes in order for people to focus on the things that matter more to them. Structures, arbitrary in nature, change over time depending on social influences and the people's needs; therefore it cannot be said that either has an overwhelming grip on the other. Rather, the relationship is mutually effective in the evolution of popular culture across time and space. Although structuralism has issues of credibility due to its arbitrary nature, it must be said that without structuralism we are unable to create general consensus of meaning to begin with. Therefore, albeit flawed, we must accept and actively reconstruct the notions of structuralism in order to develop a better approach to the construction of meaning.